Dave Smith and Rob Bernstein dismantle Sam Harris's recent viral video, exposing his dangerous reliance on elite authority and absurd hypotheticals suggesting society should have tolerated no skepticism if the pandemic killed more children. They critique Harris for framing reality as a "missed opportunity" where elites were right by luck rather than evidence, highlighting his history of defending torture and war while accusing him of promoting an anti-scientific faith in intellectuals over empirical data. Ultimately, the hosts argue that Harris's comments reveal a demented mindset that ignores valid concerns about vaccine injuries and policy failures, reducing complex public health debates to magical thinking about what could have happened instead of what actually did. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Too Big00:15:03
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
What's up?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Rob Bernstein, the king of the caulks, the fire.
COVID, Jesus.
I'm a little bit under the weather, but I'm going to power through it for you guys for this show.
Thank you for watching.
How are you doing today, Rob?
Dude, I'm excited for St. Louis.
I haven't left my apartment since the end of year thing.
So, you know, we'll be good.
Really, my primary focus in life is, you know, like I want to, you know, take care of my kids and love my wife.
I want to, you know, but above all of that is I want to get you out of your apartment.
That's always been my primary focus.
And that's what we're going to do this weekend.
St. Louis, funnybone, there are still a few tickets available.
So go grab them right now if you're in the St. Louis area.
This weekend, me and Robbie the Fire will be out there doing a bunch of stand-up shows and a live part of the problem podcast as well.
The following week, we'll be out in Maryland, Perryville.
Is that right?
Perryville, Maryland.
We'll be out there.
ComicdaveSmith.com.
You can get all the ticket links there, plus a whole bunch of shows in the future.
Me and Rob are hitting the road hard in 2023.
All right.
Rob, I know you're aware of this.
I bet everyone listening to the show is aware of this.
The COVID era broke a lot of people.
It's a really sad thing.
And much like when we a few episodes ago, we were talking about people noticing that the vaccine was not all it's cracked up to be, and maybe even possibly that there's some negative side effects from the vaccine.
And there's this tendency, somewhat understandable, for people who were warning about all this stuff to feel a little bit of satisfaction when it turns out that they were right.
You know, look, if you were telling everybody for a long time, hey, this is really dangerous, and then it turns out that you're right, it's understandable to feel like, thank you.
That's what I was saying.
However, you really shouldn't feel good about that if that's the case, because a lot of innocent people are getting hurt.
And at the same time, it's, I think, somewhat tempting to feel like mocking and laughing at people who were broken by COVID and the insanity of the last few years.
And that's okay.
No, all right, fine.
I'm saying you shouldn't do that.
I'm going to do that a bit probably here.
But, you know, at the same time, I do want to just say at the outset, it is, it is just sad.
I bet, I bet you know people personally who got really fucked up by the COVID shit.
I do.
I know a lot of them.
And I bet almost everyone listening knows.
You know, it was, I think in some ways through COVID, it was easier if you knew like all of this was bullshit.
Because if you knew all of it was bullshit, you could at least go like, yes, this is happening, you know, even if you personally were in a bad situation, if you were a non-essential employee or you had to, you got fired from your job because you wouldn't take the vax or your whatever the situation was, you know, your kids' school got shut down or something like that.
If you knew it was all bullshit, you could at least be like, this is fucking happening to me.
This is wrong and whatever, you know?
But if you believed in it, if you bought into it, then you were what, in a state where you were like, thank God they're taking everything from me.
Let me listen to my wise, you know, political overlords.
I'm so scared of a floating microscopic, you know, abstraction that I need to work.
That is really not good for your mental health.
And we all know people who were broken during this time.
One of the people who was broken was Sam Harris.
Sam Harris, I don't know how much you know about Sam Harris, Rob.
You debated him back in the day.
No, That is different, Sam.
That was different.
You're thinking Sam Cedar.
I did not debate Sam Harris.
They're both named Sam.
And now that you mention it, they kind of look alike.
But no, I did not debate him.
But Sam Harris.
Neurologist, intellectual or something.
Yes.
He is a neuroscientist.
And he is, despite the evidence that we're about to show you, a very smart person.
I read one of his books.
I read a book.
It was called Waking Up, I believe.
I think he wrote it in like 2013 or something like that.
And it was a book about what he's an expert in.
It was a book about neurology.
It was really, really interesting.
Really good book.
It was all about like how the brain works and stuff.
And like how you've, and I've, you know, I don't remember.
It was, you know, fucking a decade ago that I read it, but I remember that I thought the book was really good, really interesting.
And he was one of the new atheists, along with Christopher Hitchens and some other people.
And he was just a guy who, you know, I think I always thought he was wrong about a lot of shit.
He was really bad on like war and stuff like that.
But he was a guy who would, you know, was smart.
He has really been broken over the last few years.
And look, I think that wokeism in general broke a lot of people.
COVID really broke a lot of people.
Take a look at, say, Howard Stern.
You know, say the person he used to be and compare that to the person he is now.
It's somewhat remarkable.
But Sam Harris has really just been COVID and Trump and the whole thing, he has just become a shell of himself.
And he's now had several kind of viral moments that have just been to a level.
I've always thought Sam Harris was one of the bad guys, but mostly because he was always defended like the war in Iraq and torture and stuff like this.
But even I have found myself pitying him for how bad these takes are, some of them.
I don't know if you remember, Rob, we played on this show.
Oh, in fact, I think it was an episode that I had a guest on.
So I don't know if we talked about it together.
I think it was when I had Pete Kinonas on last time, but where we played on the show the video of him talking about even if Hunter Biden had dead bodies in his basement, it still wouldn't be a story.
It still wouldn't be as bad as Trump.
He actually said if he had the dead bodies of children in his basement, he still wouldn't think it, he would still want it to be suppressed.
You know, it's just like when you find yourself saying things like that, you might ask yourself, like, hmm, have I become possessed by ideology?
You know, like, am I no longer thinking critically or rationally or morally if I go, oh, yeah, I'd be okay with covering up the murder of children for my political reasons.
Like, yeah, okay.
Maybe that's, maybe that's bad.
Anyway, he's got, he's got a new video out.
So did you, have you ever like, have you watched any Sam Harris shit previously to the last couple of years or anything?
Do you know much about him?
I had come across him before, but I don't know that I had any strong opinions or relationship with the guy.
Yeah, big atheist guy.
That was like his kind of rise to fame.
And then he ended up like defending kind of the warfare state a bunch.
Those were kind of his things.
But I would argue, probably somewhat related.
But anyway, all right, let's play.
This is the clip that's going viral.
Sam Harris's latest humiliation.
Let's respond to it.
Take it back to COVID for a second.
In one way, and we got very lucky that COVID wasn't worse than it was, right?
You know, it could have been much, much worse.
It could have been 10 times as deadly or, you know, 50 times as deadly.
And we would have lived through, or many of us wouldn't have lived through something truly awful.
But had COVID been worse, you know, just enough worse to really get our attention, to really be undeniable, we would have had a different political conversation around it.
There wouldn't have been the same kind of vaccine skepticism.
Brett Weinstein would not have been releasing 80 straight podcasts on the dangers of the vaccine if a few variables were changed.
I mean, just think that leave COVID exactly as it is, but just make it preferentially dangerous children rather than to old people, right?
Just flip that around, the variable of age.
If kids were dying by the hundreds of thousands from COVID at a rate of whatever it was, you know, 1% say.
But it was pretty much all kids, we would have had a very different experience, right?
And the patience, there would have been no fucking patience for vaccines.
All right.
So let's pause it right here.
What a, it's, what a weird way.
Imagine being so like locked in to your weird, like to a failed ideology, to a failed argument to start going like, well, look, if you just flip a few of these variables, like basically, if the situation wasn't what it is, but was a completely different situation, well then things totally would have been different.
I mean, yeah, that's true.
If, if instead of the situation that we are in, we were in a different situation.
You know, look, if let's say Saddam Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction and was planning on detonating them on, you know, American soil very soon.
Well, all you anti-war guys would have looked pretty stupid.
Yeah, you're right.
But that wasn't the case.
And kids were, in fact, very safe from COVID.
But there's also something that he starts off with right here that's like, it's actually, to me, shocking.
Just because, you know, there's a lot of people, and this is binary thinking persists on all sides of these issues, but there's binary thinking on even the people who are shitting on him who are going, what an idiot this guy is.
But the truth is, and actually this makes it quite a bit more interesting.
Sam Harris is not an idiot.
He's a very, very bright guy.
He's a neuroscientist.
He's not an idiot.
He's very, very smart, which almost like lets you know that intelligence actually isn't even the most important thing that's going on in these, in this space here.
But what he's starting off by saying right now is actually, you know, really, it's disturbing and incredibly revealing that he's, you know, Sam Harris's whole thing for a long time.
And a lot of these guys, the new atheist types, their whole thing is that they hate religion because it's not based on rationality.
It's based on faith, which as they will tell you is the antithesis of rationality, right?
I mean, what is faith?
Faith is belief in something with the absence of evidence, right?
Like, so you believe something even though there isn't evidence for it.
If you have evidence for something, you don't have to have faith that it exists.
You have a logical argument for why you think it exists.
Faith inherently means that you don't have that evidence, but you believe anyway, you know, I have faith.
And so that's their whole argument.
And we must get rid of religion because it's irrational.
And then we'll allow for rationality to come in.
Like this has been the entire new atheist argument that Sam Harris has built his entire career off of.
But listen to what he's saying right away in this.
He's going, look, let's say it was killing kids.
The way it's killing old people, COVID was killing kids.
Then we wouldn't tolerate this conversation about vaccine skepticism.
But what if the vaccine still didn't work?
What if the vaccine wasn't going to stop kids from dying?
Like hypothetically, let's say COVID was killing kids, but the vaccine didn't help.
Maybe let's say hypothetically, there was even evidence that after a year of being double vaccinated, those kids were more likely to die from COVID than they were without it.
Then wouldn't it make sense for Weinstein to be doing a bunch of podcasts about that?
And here's the thing.
Sam Harris is probably right.
He's probably right that if kids were dying left and right, we wouldn't tolerate anyone asking asking questions because we get, but that's not a good reason.
That's not the reason would be because we were so emotional and terrified that we wouldn't even have a conversation about whether the vaccines are helping or not.
And yet that's what he's pushing.
It's already just within a few, like less than a minute.
It's crazy the path that he's going down here.
And it's also an admission that COVID was none of these things.
It's almost in his viewpoint, a missed opportunity because what we're supposed to have is intellectual elites that make decisions for everybody.
And so when we have missed opportunities where things that we were saying were going to be a global pandemic are not as deadly as we said that they were going to be, then people might realize, oh, I guess maybe we don't need these elites to make decisions for us because sometimes they're wrong.
Elites Making Mistakes00:15:42
Yeah.
Yeah.
Man, we're so unlucky that this thing wasn't killing kids.
Yeah, it's to him.
To him, it's not about also, it's like, if the vaccine didn't work and you were going to die from the virus anyways, it might not have been a good idea to take it.
But to him, it's like, it's not about that kids didn't have to die or whether or not the vaccine was good or whether or not you had honest information.
It's a missed opportunity that more people didn't die, that everyone was scared into listening to the elites.
There was a missed opportunity here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Let's keep playing.
We'll, and we'll get into more of this stuff.
There would have been no fucking patience for vaccine skepticism, right?
And we, everyone would have recognized that this is not my body, my choice.
This is, you're not going to kill my kids with your, with your ignorance, right?
And you change one other variable.
What if the vaccines actually really did block transmission much better than they in fact did?
Right.
And there was a moment where it was only rational to.
Let's just pause it for a second.
It's just like, you can't make this up.
This is what they're reduced to.
So he says first, before he says change one other variable, he goes, man, if kids were dying, there would have been none of this my body, my choice thing.
It would have been obvious.
You don't have the right to kill my fucking kids.
It's like, but what if the argument was that this won't stop you from killing your kids?
No, I understand.
He's again, he's probably right, but because we would have been irrational in that situation.
I might have been too.
I'm not even like saying I'm above that.
Man, if kids are in danger, like, I don't know.
If COVID was killing kids the way COVID is killing old, sick people, I would probably be living like Howard Stern is living.
I mean, not in as nice of a house, but I would literally be like in the middle of fucking nowhere on a fucking, you know, not that different than where I am now, but I would have been in the fucking, in the middle of the country on the top of a mountain, living with no one coming over to my house, just doing shows online, not going out and doing stand-up shows, like being crazy.
I don't know.
If I thought my kid's life was a chance, maybe I would have fallen for all the vaccine propaganda.
I don't know.
I could, I could imagine if my kids, if I thought my kid's life was at risk being driven that crazy by it, you know, maybe.
That it's a, it's a much different fear to think your kids might be at risk of dying than to think like, you know, your great grandma might be.
It's just different.
But his point is like that we would have felt this way, but he's still not making the case that it would have been rational to feel that way.
And then he goes, now change one other variable.
The vaccine actually works from stopping transmission.
You're like, okay, well, that's a pretty big variable to change.
Yeah.
Then in that case, maybe you'd have an argument.
But if you don't have that, then you have nothing.
Then you just have pure irrationality.
Like, what are you saying?
How do you hear these words coming out of your mouth and not go, oh, wait a minute, this is, I'm really giving away the game.
What if the skies opened up and God told us to listen to Fauci because he's actually correct and he single-handedly handed him the vaccine that certainly didn't come from a lab and it was out of nature because he messed up with the bats, but he was going to make it up to us by giving us the vaccines.
What if that happened?
By the way, if we're playing what ifs.
But you know what?
That's such a great little response, Rob, because I didn't even think of that, Rob, but that is fucking great.
But it's a great response to him because he's such a hardcore atheist.
You go, you know what?
What if there were fuck, there was fire falling from the sky and like one out of every five people were dying?
We simply would not tolerate these atheists telling us that this wasn't the avengeful God coming down to take us.
And now here, change one more variable, one more little variable.
The skies opened up and God told us that he exists.
Now, now how are you looking, atheists?
Yeah, that would change things a lot, right?
Right.
But that's not the case.
So, okay.
I don't know.
Again, it's just these things.
Like, I was thinking this the other episode when we were taking on Neil DeGrasse Tyson, where it's just like, I just try to go to be fair.
I go, like, I just can't imagine us ever using this argument against someone.
Like, let's say, like, I believe in God.
You, you're a dirty atheist Jew, but I believe in God.
And I'm just saying, if I was ever arguing with someone, which I wouldn't care to do, I mean, I'm not going to argue with an atheist that God exists or something like that.
But if I was, I just could never imagine using that argument.
Like, if I used that argument, I think all of you, I think, Rob, you would go, Dave, come on, man.
You can't.
I go, okay, well, just imagine this.
Change a couple variables, the skies open up and God tells you he exists.
I think you'd be like well, yeah then I wouldn't be an atheist either if that was the case.
But I don't know.
Like what does that prove?
To say he's essentially saying, but what if we were right about everything?
What if the vaccine was ultra deadly?
And what if the?
I mean, what if the virus was ultra deadly and the vaccine cured it?
Well then you would have been right, but you were wrong about everything.
So why not listen to the other scientists that came forward with information?
Why censor them?
And then why, after the fact, go well we well, we're still the right people and we still need to be empowered.
Why?
Why would that be the end result?
Well, he's kind of he's.
He almost seems to be arguing that it's like basically, we were right um, but it's only just by a chance of a stroke of luck that you know the um, like the death numbers weren't that bad and the vaccine wasn't that good.
So it's not so obvious that we're right.
But if only these numbers had been a little bit more off, then it would be obvious that we were right.
Except, the problem with that is that you have you're, it's not clear that you're right at all.
You weren't right about any of this.
And and when you, if you don't change those variables and keep the variables the way they actually are, then it's like, oh no, Weinstein was completely right and you're wrong about everything.
Yeah, he's trying to paint a picture that um, it's by a stroke of luck that other people got this right and we shouldn't think that those are intelligent individuals, nor should we trust them on future issues.
The uh, elite are the elite for a reason.
There's a reason why they give guidance and they just got unlucky with this guidance.
The problem with that argument is that you had very smart individuals.
You had the people what was the Brownstone Institute, who put out the Great Barrington Declaration, but those were some of like the elites from universities who were criticizing lockdowns in the Covet regime and they were just censored.
So it's not it.
There were plenty of, like high intellectual individuals who got this right.
There was plenty of opportunity to have discussion.
You know what I mean.
It's like it's not just luck.
It's not like people like me even were looking at this and just took the opposite side and just got lucky.
We looked at the information and said, hey, you guys are locking us down without reason or basis and this doesn't make any sense, and you censored the information.
Yeah look and and, and i'll say I think that probably um I, you know, i'm sure for both of us that our pre-existing biases, you know, played a role in it.
Like there's no question that I came into Covid and a lot of my um uh, you know, a lot of my bias would have been toward, you know, believing in liberty and being opposed to government tyranny and being uh, believing that the corporate press are a bunch of blood-soaked liars.
You know what I mean and like all of that, and so it Easier for me to believe that.
It just happens to be the case that liberty is the correct policy and politicians are full of shit and the corporate press are a bunch of liars.
So like it worked out well for me.
I just think I had the correct preconceptions about this, but that that is like true.
And, you know, I don't know.
It's, it's it's certainly like made it easier for me to take the position that I took.
And I think for a lot of other people who were like believed in kind of the kind of technocratic scientific class, this was like they were more predisposed to feel that way, you know?
And so, but if you're just looking at things objectively, what you would do is say, okay, I have my bias, you have your bias, but let's look at the actual facts.
You wouldn't go, then you can just imagine a situation where all of the facts are different from what the facts actually are.
And wow, the other side doesn't look too good now.
You know, yes, you're right.
If kids were dying left and right from fucking COVID and the vaccine actually worked to prevent kids from dying from COVID, well, then in that case, we should all take the vaccine.
And guess what?
Wouldn't it be the government to force it upon us because the market forces would have worked where we're like, ah, shit, my kid's dying and this technology works.
We weren't just going, hey, technology doesn't work.
We were looking at the information and going, it doesn't make sense to lock down and that technology doesn't work.
It made sense to shut down and the technology worked.
We would have been looking at that information.
Our systems were actually pretty good for looking at information and making accurate recommendations based on the data at the time.
It wasn't luck.
I mean, look, think about it like this.
Like, you know, right, like there are, you think about there's like infections and just for one example, right?
There's like, say, bacterial infections that can kill you and can kill babies and little kids, right?
And whenever you hear a story, you ever hear a story about like a crazy religious group where they like won't let their kids get antibiotics or something like that?
And they like, well, like, and you're like, oh my God, that's the most insane shit I've ever heard in my life because it's so rare.
And so like, it's so, you're like, that never, you can't even imagine it.
Now, there's there, there have has not been some major government propaganda push to get people to give their kids antibiotics if they have a bacterial infection, you know?
Really, it's just that it works.
An infection can fucking kill you and these antibiotics will cure that infection.
So you don't need any of that.
And it's so rare that if you ever hear about a story where someone won't give their kid that, you're like, what the fuck is going on?
That's insane.
Like this is that no one does that.
And in general, if anyone, you know, their kid has like a fucking bad infection, they go, oh, well, please give me the antibiotics.
By the way, there's a shortage of antibiotics for children these days.
It's pretty scary.
Anyway, all right, let's keep playing.
And then there was a moment where it was only rational to expect them to block transmission.
Turns out they don't do it nearly as much as we would hope at this point.
They shorten the window by which, you know, during which transmission is possible.
If they're even doing that now, I don't know.
But let's say the vaccines really did block transmission, but then nothing else was, you know, all of the other Michigas about how untested they are and how dangerous they might be and the spike protein and blah, blah, blah.
Leave all that in place.
Just give me a little more transmission blockage and give me kids being preferentially killed or injured by this disease.
The observation of much of what was said, much of what was said about Covet at the time at which it was said.
You know the the the, the conspiracy thinking, the platforming of people who were obviously unwell and unbalanced professionally and mentally around around vaccines uh, and their skepticism.
The patience for that would have been non-existent right, so pause it for a second.
So it's interesting that Sam Harris brings up being uh mentally unwell and is, of course, uh playing on children dying and I to be.
It's just hard.
It would have been nice if kids died so that he could have been right.
That's the trade-off that he would like, but I, I was gonna mention that it.
It's hard to not point out that his last super viral moment was him literally saying that he wouldn't care if Hunter Biden had the dead bodies of children in his basement.
Just saying this guy really likes being right, i'll trade anything for it.
Yeah he, he's actually anyway.
Um, but this is such an absurd game he goes so even that.
Just give me, give me kids dying and blocking the transmissibility of of the virus, you know, and you can even keep all that other.
It's like dude.
Yes yes, if kids were dying and the vaccine would stop those kids from dying.
Absurd Vaccine Arguments00:05:43
But let's even say the worst case scenario of what we think is true now about the vaccines.
Let's say, let's say even the worst case, let's say even worse than you believe Rob, or I believe the side effects of the vaccine are.
Whatever we think the side effects of the vaccine might be and me and you both have been quite uh upfront that we don't exactly know, we don't exactly know how bad this is going to be but let's say it was worse by a uh uh, by five times than whatever you think the vaccine is going to be.
It's five times worse than that.
People are going to stop start dropping left and right over this.
But it would have stopped a ton of kids from dying, hundreds of thousands of kids from dying.
I think we'd both go yeah, we should take the vaccine.
You know, if that's the case, then I don't know.
It's a little bit of a question mark about what this is going to be, but we know that this is going to stop a ton of kids from dying.
Let's take the vaccine.
I, i'd take it, i'd tell you to take it, i'd tell everyone listening to take it, because it's going to save all these kids lives.
We know that for sure.
And this is still a little bit of a question mark.
Even our question mark times five right, but that's what does that prove?
Like who would have said, like I don't know, but it's like if I were to like uh um, what was it called bloodletting, when they used to just like poke holes in you and let you bleed out to try to write leeches right, something like that?
And you were like and, and you're like about to do leeches like oh rob, you can't put leeches on you, this doesn't cure you of a, of a flu.
Like what are you doing?
And then you went, okay well, give me this, it does cure you of the flu.
Well okay, in that case then yeah, I guess, maybe I don't know, but who's he who even talks like this?
This is just, it's just so absurd.
So yeah, I I guess maybe, if you change those factors that don't really exist around, Sam Harris, maybe I would give it to you.
And why is it that so many mentally unwell people were able to get this right, so many mentally unwell people who uh, had good academic credentials that the system then censored?
Uh, why were they all?
Maybe, I don't know, maybe we got to hire more mentally unwell people.
Maybe we've overlooked the mentally unwell and perhaps if we put them into more important positions uh, they'd make correct decisions.
Who knew yeah, and and and, all these mentally unwell conspiracy theorists who we wouldn't have platformed, you know, whenever any of them were platformed, I don't know, I guess they're talking about like me you, I mean, like I I, I don't know.
I mean uh, i'm sure that that's not who he has in mind exactly.
He's thinking like you know uh Mccullough, or uh, what's a Malone?
Or like, you know Berenson, or like uh Weinstein, or guys like this um, but you know, Rogan had me on and I was talking about all this stuff on on his podcast too, and so so maybe these people, like us um, wouldn't have been platformed, these conspiracy theorists who are mentally unwell.
But you know what?
None of us ever went on any of these platforms and said okay well, just imagine a hypothetical where everything's different than it is now.
Imagine now, give me this vaccine.
Drop dead immediately.
Well like, look man.
I mean imagine um uh, just just give me a few things.
Okay, just give me um that no one dies from covid and uh, everyone dies.
Who takes the vaccine?
Wouldn't it be pretty obvious then that we shouldn't take the vaccine?
Like, can you what?
Like yes okay, but how would imagine that was any of our arguments when we, like went on these things?
Well, just imagine covet couldn't kill you and the vaccine always killed you.
Just a couple things, just two factors.
Change those two variables and now take a look at it and tell me what you say you'd be like.
Wouldn't it be obvious that we should tell everyone not to take the vaccine and don't worry about getting covid?
Like well yeah, I mean, who would disagree with that?
But you can't just change the reality and then say see, now i'm right.
The truth is that all of those people, like Alex Berenson and and Malone and Uh Mcculla, and all of these people, they went on and made arguments based off what actually is happening and what's actually going on and for the most part, they were proven right.
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Let's keep playing.
Contingent Facts Explained00:13:36
In some sense, we got unlucky at how benign this was and how mysterious is.
Just pause it.
Pause it for a second.
Man, if you ever catch yourself saying that, there should be some moments in life, like some moments in this world of making arguments and political commentary or whatever you would call this, where there should be certain things that if you catch yourself saying, you should have to.
This shouldn't be enforced by a government or anything like that.
It should just be a natural law where you are immediately like teleported out of the moment you are in where you're podcasting and put in a room in your basement with a chair facing the wall and told, you need to sit here for five hours and look at yourself like there's nothing in the room except you, a chair and a mirror.
And you need to look at yourself in the mirror and think about what you just said and really reflect on that.
Just really reflect on what you just said.
In some ways, we're unlucky that kids weren't dropping dead left and right.
Because we missed out on an opportunity for me to be right.
For me to be right.
Because I could have been right.
Ben Stiller's worst character yet.
Yeah, right.
Right.
You know, in some other ways, we're actually lucky that kids weren't dropping dead left and right.
Some people might even think that was better than the kids dying.
Like, what a holy shit.
It's almost like this guy is like rambling to like his therapist or something like that.
Like you're like, this is why I prefaced at the beginning, going, I almost like, it made me feel bad for him.
Like halfway through, you're like, stop, dude.
Like, I never liked you.
I always thought you were one of the bad guys.
But as you hear, as I hear you saying this out loud, you're like, stop saying this.
No one should say this.
You have to, you're too smart.
Stop.
Think about this.
This is ridiculous.
Imagine ever holding on to any view to the point where you are going, man, you know, in a lot of ways, it would have been better if more children died.
Like, imagine, you know, like if I was ever saying, I don't know, I'm trying to think of the example of where it's like, like, imagine if only more kids had died in the war in Iraq so that people would have been more outraged by it or something like that.
I just couldn't even imagine ever getting there.
But like, I couldn't imagine ever saying, man, if only, you know, some politician I don't like would go murder some kids.
And then we'd have a great opportunity to show how bad he is.
Jesus, if you are ever rooting for in any way, even part of you is rooting for the death of more children so that because in a lot of ways that would be better.
Reset, rethink about everything you've ever believed in your life and what the point of your career is.
That should be a rule.
All right, let's keep playing.
Yet, theme, because you could run the argument.
Well, did he die from COVID or with COVID?
He was 80 years old, right?
We, you know, that was a situation we were in.
I'm saying that there, there, there are changes in the real world that could have happened and could yet happen that would be, would have been immensely clarifying, right?
And there just would have been no, there would have been no less the just I'm just asking questions routine would have not gotten anyone anywhere worth going, right?
And that's again immensely clarifying and showcasing that the global elite should be listened to.
That to him is the agenda.
It's not about like the whole, oh, we're just asking questions.
Wait, so you're so against other scientists asking questions, even when it then turns out that they were right.
Like that's these people's perspective of honest conversations is they don't want to debate.
They don't want to get the information out there.
They just, it's like what last week, the type, what's his name?
The science guy.
I'm bad with Neil Neil deGrasse.
Yeah, Neil deGrasse.
It was the same thing.
It's like, no, the system they want is that there are overlords and they get to speak truth.
And then we get to go, oh, wonderful intellectual.
Thank you for speaking this truth.
I love the doctrine that you put before me.
And no matter how harmful it is to us, no matter how little empirical evidence it is that they're right, we're supposed to actually take these people as being our gods.
That's why they don't want us to believe in gods is that they can serve that role instead.
And we should not have ration.
We shouldn't ask questions.
There should be no scientific process.
We should be taking their word as gospel instead.
That to him is the higher value.
This thing he's saying with the I'm just asking questions thing.
It's like there are some people who do this, you know, like who hide behind I'm just asking questions.
That's been a thing that many people on all sides of different issues have done where they'll go like, you know, you know, like you could imagine someone on a, I don't know, I'm trying to think of an example, but you could imagine someone on like a huge platform being like, you know, is the world flat or is it round?
I'm just asking questions.
And you're kind of like, yeah, but you're, you're presenting something as if it's a question that really isn't a question.
You know what I mean?
Like where it's like, and people kind of hide behind that.
But for him to say like, oh, if all of these things were different, essentially going if all of the authorities were right about COVID, rather than being dead wrong at every turn, we wouldn't have tolerated these people saying, oh, I'm only asking questions.
But the truth is with everything, with all of the policies involved throughout COVID, people were asking really legitimate questions and everything should have been questioned far more than it was.
People were asking questions like, are lockdowns really the best measure?
You know, does this vaccine really work?
Does it really prevent people from getting COVID?
Is it true that you won't die from COVID if you get the vaccine?
Is it true that there's no negative side effects from the vaccine?
Those were all really excellent questions.
And to demonize the people who asked those questions in favor of the people who said these questions are off limits is the most anti-scientific, the most anti-rationality position you could take.
In fact, one could even argue it's a position of religious faith for the great atheist here.
Let's keep playing.
Part of what we're talking about here, with respect to Trump and with respect to COVID, are just contingent facts of these unique situations, which had they been a little bit different, we wouldn't have fragmented in the same way.
You dial up the risk of COVID, you know, or if COVID just had been, you know, just made you physically ugly, right?
Like if COVID was monkeypox, right?
And you had pusc jewels on your face, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
That's, that's different than the hypothetical experience we all had of, do I, is it a cold?
Is it a flu?
Is it COVID?
Who knows?
You know, like we just, I'm not saying I wish for those things because those are pictures of a worse, you know, worse suffering for people, but had those things been in place, I just don't think we would have witnessed the same kind of shattering of our society around this particular variable.
And again, so I pivot back to the possibility that if we could get a more normal Republican candidate who was not a, you know, not at the center of a personality cult built on misinformation, you know, that there could be a swing back to something more recognizable that doesn't seem like a social emergency.
But I grant you that I do feel like we are in the presence of a social emergency.
It's just the question is.
What the fuck is he talking about?
Every politician's a fucking liar.
They're all built on liars.
What the fuck is what social emergency are you talking about?
He's just the liar you don't like for because I guess he doesn't represent, I don't know, I don't even know what the thing is that you're looking for that he doesn't have.
Well, it's funny.
There's something about saying like he's going, okay, there was this big social fracturing, I think was the term he used over COVID.
And that's true.
I mean, I think it's been building for a long time before COVID, but certainly there was a big fracturing over COVID.
And his take on it is to say like, well, I mean, look, if just like the variables were different and those variables being different basically means if my side was right.
Like if COVID was way more deadly than it was, and if the vaccine was way better than it was, and if COVID gave you gross, you know, monkeypox things all over your face.
And they're like, yeah, okay.
Yes.
I mean, there's a scenario in the same way, like I was saying before, if you were saying, well, there's a fracturing over the war in Iraq back in 2003, 2004, something like that.
And you were like, well, you know, if it just turned out that there were these weapons and he was working with al-Qaeda and Saddam did 9-11 and he was about to nuke Kansas, then there wouldn't have been this fracturing.
Everyone would have agreed with my side.
You're like, oh, yeah, that's true.
But also, given the actual facts of the situation, all the people who were arguing all this bullshit could have just agreed with the other side.
And that also would have not had the fracturing, you know?
So, all right.
But the reality is that kids don't die from COVID and the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission.
And you know what I mean?
Like, so, okay, given the actual facts, maybe the other side shouldn't have fractured off.
But then there's just this, it's unbelievable, like this desire.
And this is something we've seen over the last, say, six years or so.
This desire of a lot of people, they tend to be elitist people who are doing very well under the, you know, under the current system, who really just want to lay all the blame at the feet of Donald Trump.
That's what's going on.
If we just didn't have Trump and we just had a more normal Republican in there, then there wouldn't have been all of these problems.
The issue that they have here is that like the Republican nominees for president and the Republican presidents before Trump were the most normal Republicans, you know, George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney and all of them.
And it still resulted in this, right?
So the fact is that it's not about Trump at all.
And in fact, Trump was not even good on this issue.
Trump wasn't even from Sam Harris's perspective bad on this issue.
Trump supported the lockdowns.
Yeah.
Even into the summer, Donald Trump, I shared this tweet recently.
You'd have to look through my Twitter to find it, but Donald Trump was praising the lockdowns and blasting Sweden for not locking down.
You know, like he was, he was praising.
He still to this day is praising the vaccines and trying to take credit for them.
It's just not true that like Trump was the reason why this was like a controversial issue or there was this fracturing around COVID.
It's not true at all.
The reason why there was this fracturing is because all of these things that you're saying, well, change this variable, change that variable, give me this, give me that, and then it's a different situation.
None of that's true.
What is true are the current variables and the current situation.
And in that world, in the world of reality, you guys were wrong about everything.
That's why.
It's not because of Trump.
Like, it's, it's just like, it's such a ridiculous, like, it's this intense desire that they have to say that like this whole thing works without this one guy.
And if he just wasn't there, then we wouldn't have any of these problems.
But the reality is that he's not the cause of these problems.
He is a result of them and not a particularly great result.
But, you know, he's, he's a symptom of the problem.
And from my perspective, symptoms aren't great.
But you remove one symptom and you haven't done anything to fix the underlying issue.
So I don't know what else to say.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
How much more is left of this video?
I think a couple seconds.
Let's see what else.
Is there anything else in there?
Okay.
Let's see what.
Let's see if he gives one more.
Could something other than talking about it be the process by which we overcome it?
Something other than talking about it.
Well, I agree with you that.
Yeah.
All right.
So, yeah, no, nothing really in those last 10 seconds.
I don't know.
Pretty incredible.
How do you sum up what Sam Harris said throughout all of that?
If things had been completely different than they were, then people would have a completely different feeling about it than they have.
I suppose he's right.
In a fictional reality, we could have gotten everything right.
Yeah.
Man, it really is a bonkers approach because I think the core argument is he wants to paint a picture that the people that criticized the approach got lucky on this one.
And that's dangerous because these are demented individuals that shouldn't be trusted or listened to.
Right.
But what actual evidence do you have of that?
Right.
Right.
No, I think that's that's right.
I think that is really the takeaway from all of this is that he's saying, look, I mean, essentially all of the establishment forces saying like the CDC and, you know, Fauci and the WHO and, you know, all they, they were all essentially right.
You know, they were right about everything.
And it just happened by the stroke of luck that COVID ended up being not as deadly as it could have been.
And the vaccine ended up being not as good as it could have been.
And so now these dummies who said COVID wasn't going to be that bad or the vaccine wasn't going to be that good, they look good.
But man, if only if COVID had just been a little bit more deadly and the vaccine had just been a little bit better, think about how stupid they'd look.
So it is exactly what you're saying.
He's like, man, they just got lucky.
And he's going in a lot of ways, it'd be better if they weren't so lucky because then they would have realized, oh, yeah, all you science people really know what's going on.
The issue is that if lockdowns actually worked, and if COVID was actually so bad, and if the vaccines actually worked at stopping transmission, then yeah, of course.
A lot of the people who were opposing all of that stuff wouldn't have felt that way.
And look, hardcore libertarians like us probably would have still been like, look, I don't believe in like these like authoritarian policies, but we, we also probably would have been like, you don't even need them because people are going to do this shit anyway.
And so like, what's who cares?
Um, but yeah, again, I mean, I don't even know.
Should it even have to be explained what the flaw in that argument is?
Is that you can't say, like if you, you know, if you were to go, hey, people get in car crashes, and that's why I think you have, you know, you have to wear this special magical hat so that you don't get in a car crash.
And there were a bunch of people who were like, this hat does not stop you from getting in a car crash at all.
This is ridiculous.
There's no such thing as magic.
And then you go, well, okay, but like, look, just imagine 10 times as many people were dying in car crashes and this magical hat actually did stop you from getting in car crashes.
See, then we wouldn't tolerate these idiots saying this.
And it's like, well, okay, but a lot of those people who are saying that probably wouldn't have been saying that if that was the situation.
And I, I'm, I'm sure that like, uh, Brett Weinstein or someone like that, for example, wouldn't have been saying the stuff he was saying if kids were dying and the vaccine prevented transmission.
You know, I'd be saying completely different things probably if that was the case.
So that doesn't prove anything.
You have to actually argue with what the reality is.
And the reality is that those people, those, those people asking questions, the conspiracy theorists who were being platformed, raised a lot of really good points.
A lot of very, very good points.
Right.
I don't know.
Any other thoughts on Sam Harris here?
Not much.
I think we covered it.
All right.
Yeah, I think we did cover it.
All right.
You know what?
We're just going to wrap on that.
And that'll be the podcast for today.
Sam Harris humiliates himself once again.
Unfortunate.
I did like that book, Waking Up.
I don't remember.
It was like 10 years ago that I read it, but I really did like that book.
All right.
I hope he gets better.
I hope everyone who's been ruined by COVID gets better.
Seriously.
I know a couple examples personally.
I know people who are like, I mean, I'm not like close with them, but like I know people who like didn't leave their apartment for like over a year over COVID.
It broke a lot of people, man.
It's a really sad thing.
Maybe we could like baptize them or something.
Maybe we can come up with some sort of a ceremony to release them from Fauci's evil spell.
I feel like you remember, do you ever watch I Am Legend, the movie?
Yeah.
You remember at the end when he's Will Smith is trapped in the glass like cage thing and they're all and he had just figured out the cure.
Right.
And he's like trying to yell at these zombies.
He's like, I can save you.
Like I can fix you.
I just kind of feel that way with them.
Like they're like, you could just, you could just not believe in this.
Here's, I can fix you.
You could go back to being you again.
You could be cool.
Like Howard Stern, you could be cool again.
You don't have to do this.
But they're in their zombie world.
They don't want to listen to any of that.
Committed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a, what a, what an awful thing to commit to, you know?
And you, you called it, uh, but it, it's been very interesting over the last week on Twitter to see at least what seems to be a real change in the narrative of people waking up to the idea that not only the vaccine's not working, but it might have been a mistake to roll them out as quickly as they did.
Yeah.
And I, so not to overplay the card that there's definitive evidence of vaccine injuries, but the coverage is definitely coming to grips with the fact that excess death is up.
The vaccines aren't working particularly well.
There was a Reuters article about people over the age of 65 getting strokes.
There's been a lot of articles addressing why is it that so many people think that the vaccines might be harmful.
It just seems like the wheel has turned from full containment of safe and effective.
If you're not getting this vaccine, you're an idiot.
You're a conspiracy theorist.
You're not doing your part for society to seemingly most doctors no longer recommending it and the storyline breaking out of, hey, maybe this isn't working all that well.
Yeah.
Well, look, I mean, safe and effective.
It's like both of those are just really being torn apart.
And it's horrible.
It's nothing we should be happy about.
It's just awful.
You know, there's, I, I talk a lot on this show about how we end up being right about a lot of the shit that we talk about.
And there's things we've been wrong about for sure.
There's definitely things I've been wrong about that I've thought were going to happen.
Or usually it was like a prediction, like, I think this will end up happening.
And then I was like, oh, I was wrong about that.
That didn't end up happening.
But a lot of times there's things that we're right about that I genuinely wish we weren't.
And there's a lot of things that, you know, we're going like, hey, this policy is going to be a disaster.
And it'd be nice if we were wrong about that.
I don't want it to be a disaster.
But man, safe and effective.
It's looking more and more like it's neither of those things.
And that sucks.
That really does suck for a whole lot of people, including a lot of people that we both really care about.
So that's no one's, no one's happy about that.
It's, it's a really awful thing.
And I don't know.
I try to like imagine because like I was saying before, I do, just like you do and just like everybody, I have my kind of preconceptions and my biases and all of this, just like anyone else.
And I don't know if it just led you into believing something that turned out to be a fucking disaster, how hard it is to accept that and not just, you know, dig your heels in to that position.
That sucks.
But man, there's just something, I think, so much more psychologically damaging about the belief that, you know, we have to be terrified of this germ that really just fucks you over.
Like, think about it.
Like, look, even if COVID was the worst thing ever, let's give Sam Harris all of his like, you know, well, just change these factors.
Like, let's say for me, like I said, if it was, if there was like a really strong chance that my kids could die from COVID, I don't know what I would do, but I would, I would probably literally like be on like a house, you know, like I would, I would not see anyone.
I would do anything I could probably.
And I would think about it every single day and be like completely paranoid.
But you could still admit we're like, that's an awful way to live life.
You're not supposed to live life.
Being a germaphobe is not like what you want to be in life.
But hey, if there was a germ that could kill my kids, I'd live like a germaphobe.
Okay.
But still, you'd go, shit, that's bad for you.
That's like, you're not supposed to live that way.
But that's not the case.
And other people were living as if that was the case.
That's, that's a really bad thing.
And it's really bad for people's mental health.
And so it's interesting that at one point in there, you know, Sam Harris projects, well, there's these people who are mentally not well as he goes off on this thing where he's thinking, oh, wouldn't it be a little bit better if a lot of kids were dying in some ways at least.
Fucking creepy.
Living Like a Germaphobe00:01:02
All right.
That's our episode for today.
Go check us out.
Come see us live in St. Louis this weekend at the funny bone, comicdave smith.com.
We got the ticket links up there.
And then Perryville, Maryland, one nighter the following Saturday, the last Saturday of January, me and Robbie the Fire.
Burnstein, the stand-up show, and a live part of the problem podcast.
We're getting a lot of live podcasts coming soon.
So it's going to be a lot of fun.
Looking forward to all that.
And then a bunch of stuff coming up.
We'll be on the road in February, March, April, May, June, July, and fucking a whole bunch of stuff.
And go check out the end of the year thing.
All the information is still relevant.
It's about trans stuff.
It's about the end of COVID.
So just go click on it.
I don't even care if you watch it.
Just make me feel good.
Just go click.
Robbie the Fire.
All one word.
Just go over it.
I'll tell you, it's really funny.
So go watch it.
You might as well watch it.
Just click.
Like, if you've already clicked, you might as well watch it.