Lex Fridman Podcast #365 - #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, his second time on the podcast. As I said two years ago, when I first met and spoke with Sam, he's one of the most influential pioneering thinkers of our time. As the host of the Making Sense podcast, creator of the Waking Up app, and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up. In this conversation, besides our mutual fascination with AI and free will, we do also go deep into controversial, challenging topics of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, January sixth vaccines, lab leak, Kanye West, and several key figures at the center of public discourse, including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. Both of whom have been friends of Sam and have become friends of mine. Somehow, in an amazing life trajectory that I do not deserve in any way, and in fact, believe is probably a figment of my imagination. And if it's all right, please allow me to say a few words about this personal aspect of the conversation of discussing Joe Elon and others. What's been weighing heavy on my heart since the beginning of the pandemic now three years ago is that many people I look to for wisdom in public discourse stop talking to each other as often with respect, humility, and love when the world needed those kinds of conversations the most. My hope is that they start talking again, they start being friends again, they start noticing the humanity that connects them that is much deeper than the disagreements that divide them. So let me take this moment to say with humility and honesty why I look up to and am inspired by Joe Elon and Sam. I think Joe Rogan is important to the world as a voice of compassion and curiosity and open mindedness to ideas both radical and mainstream, sometimes with humor, sometimes with brutal honesty, always pushing for more kindness in the world. I think Elon Musk is important to the world as an engineer, leader, entrepreneur, and human being who takes on the hardest problems that face humanity and refuses to accept the constraints of conventional thinking that made the solutions to these problems seem impossible. I think Sam Harris is important to the world as a fearless voice who fights for the pursuit of truth against growing forces of echo chambers and audience capture, taking unpopular perspectives and defending them with rigor and resilience. I both celebrate and criticize all three privately, and they criticize me usually more effectively, from which I always learn a lot and always appreciate. Most importantly, there is respect and love for each other as human beings—the very thing that I think the world needs most now in a time of division and chaos. I will continue to try to mend divisions, to try to understand, not to ride, to turn the other cheek if needed, to return hate with love. Sometimes people criticize me for being naive, cheesy, simplistic—all of that. I know, I agree, but I really am speaking from the heart, and I am trying. This world is too fucking beautiful not to try, in whatever way I know how. I love you all, and now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for AI powered note taking and team collaboration. Indeed for hiring great teams and Masterclass for online learning. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfreeman dot com slash hiring. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Notion, a note taking and team collaboration tool. My favorite note taking and team collaboration tool, and they have a new feature, Notion AI, that I've been using and loving, and this thing is probably the best. Implementation of a system that uses a language model to generate text because it integrates across the entirety of your note taking process and it adds just a giant number of small and big features that help you out that save a lot of time but also make everything more fun and creatively sort of inject ideas into your workflow. 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Your contentment and happiness, enjoyment, fulfillment, and a source of meaning than the team that you take on the hard challenges of life with, of work with. So you should use the best tools for the job of hiring and you should take hiring very, very, very seriously. Don't overspend on hiring. Visit indeed dot com slash lex to start hiring now. That's indeed dot com slash lex terms and conditions apply. This show is also brought to you by Masterclass. One hundred and eighty dollars a year gets you an all access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. One of the people I just recently talked to is Chris Voss. He is a former FBI hostage negotiator, brilliant guy off the mic. I really enjoy talking to him. There is kindness, camaraderie, thoughtfulness, humor, wit, also certain sort of cultural density and complexity hailing from New York or whatever that rich sexy accent is from is just really fun to listen to him. To listen to him discuss what he's really good at—that was true on the podcast—and that is very much true in his Masterclass. Well, he really systematically breaks down his ideas of what it takes to negotiate with terrorists, negotiate with hostage takers, negotiate with bank robbers. But I think the most important thing is negotiate in everyday life to negotiate in business relationships. All of that—it's just a really brilliant, concise, clear, actionable advice that he gives, and that's true for almost. Every single Masterclass they have, and you get access to all of them. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get fifteen percent off an annual membership at masterclass dot com slash lex. This is the Lex Freeman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here is Sam Harris. What is more effective at making a net positive impact on the world, empathy or reason? It depends on what you mean by empathy. There are two—at least two kinds of empathy. There is the the cognitive form, which is you know I would argue even a species of reason. It's it's just understanding another person's point of view. You know you understand why they're suffering or why they're happy or what you know we just you have a theory of mind. About another human being that is is accurate, and so you can you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively. And then there is another layer entirely not incompatible with that but just distinct which is what people often mean by empathy. Which is more a kind of emotional contagion, right? Like you feel depressed and I begin to feel depressed along with you because you know it's just it's contagious, right? I you know we're so close and I am so concerned about you and your problems become my problems and it bleeds through. Right now, I think both of those capacities are very important, but the emotional contagion piece. And this is not really my thesis. This is something I have more or less learned from from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy. The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions. Oh boy, and I'll go. So I'll give you the the clear example of this, which is. We find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with, far more compelling than data. Right, so if I tell you you know this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well, right? You know this is some somebody's daughter. You see the parents distraught on television, you hear her cries from the bottom of the well, the whole country stops. I mean, this there was an example of this about twenty twenty five years ago I think where it was just wall to wall on CNN. This is just the perfect use of CNN. It was you know seventy two hours or whatever it was of continuous coverage of just extracting this girl from a well. So we effortlessly pay attention to that we care about it we will donate money toward it I mean it's just it marshals one hundred percent of our compassion and altruistic impulse. Whereas if you hear that there is a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intended to go to and the numbers don't make a dent and the and we find. The story boring, right? We'll change the channel in the face of a genocide, right? It doesn't matter. So and it literally perversely, it could be five hundred thousand little girls have fallen down wells in that country and we still don't care, right? So it's. You know many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology, and so the empathy plays an unhelpful role there. So ultimately, I think. When we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and what's worth valuing and how we should protect those values, I think reason is the better tool. But it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either. Well, there is a lot of tangent to go on there, but briefly to mention you've recently talked about effective altruism on your podcast. I think you mentioned some interesting statement. I am going to horribly misquote you, but. That you'd rather live in a world like it doesn't really make sense, but you'd rather live in a world where you care about maybe your daughter and son more than a hundred people that live across the world, something like this. Like where the calculus is not always perfect, but somehow it makes sense to live in a world where it's irrational in this way. And yet, empathetic in the way you've been discussing. Right, I am not sure what the right answer is there or even whether there is one right answer. There could be multiple, you know peaks on on this part of the moral landscape, but so the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama, right? You know or really any exponent of. Of you know classic Buddhism would say that sort of the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers, right? So that you would the you know the mind of the Buddha would be truly dispassionate. You would love and care about all people equally, and by that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing or at least you know failure of of to fully actualize compassion in the limit or you know enlightened wisdom in the limit. To care more or even and much more about your kids than the kids of other people or and to prioritize your your energy in that way right so you spend all this time trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy and. You'll attend to their minutest concerns and however superficial, and and again, there is a genocide raging in Sudan or wherever, and it takes up less than one percent of your bandwidth. I am not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there. I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest. Ethically, might be optimal because we will all be doing that and we all be doing that in a circumstance where we have certain norms and and laws and and other structures. That force us to be dispassionate where that matters, right? So like when I go to when my daughter gets sick and I have to take her to to a hospital. You know I really want her to get attention, right? And I am worried about her more than I am worried about everyone else in the lobby. But the truth is, I actually don't want a totally corrupt hospital. I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby because she's my daughter and I have you know bribed the guy at the door or whatever you know or the guy's a fan of my podcast or whatever the thing is. You don't want starkly corrupt unfair situations, and when you when you sort of get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, you know individually and and and societally. A bunch of those variables change and they change for the worse, understandably. But yeah, when things are when everyone's corrupt and it's you are in a state of of collective emergency, you know you've got a lifeboat problem. You are scrambling to get into the lifeboat. Yeah, then then fairness and norms and and the you know the other vestiges of civilization. Begin to get stripped off. We can't reason from those emergencies to normal life. I mean, in normal life, we want justice, we want fairness, we want we're all better off for it, even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on the people we know—the people who are friends, the people who are family, people we we we have good reason to care about. We still by default want a system that protects the the interests of strangers too, and and we know that generally speaking, just in game of theoretic terms, we're all going to tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt one. One of the failure modes of empathy is. Our susceptibility to anecdotal data—just a good story will get us to not think clearly. But what about empathy in the context of just discussing ideas with other people? And then there is a large number of people like in this country. You know, red and blue half the population believes certain things on immigration or on the response to the pandemic or any kind of controversial issue, even if if the election was fairly executed. Having an empathy for their worldview, trying to understand where they're coming from—not just in the explicit statement of their idea but the entirety of like the roots from which their idea stems—that kind of empathy while you are discussing ideas, what is in your pursuit of truth, having empathy for the. Perspective of a large number of other people versus raw mathematical reason. I think it's important, but I just it only takes you so far, right? It doesn't it doesn't get you to truth, right? It's not truth is not a. It's not decided by you know democratic principles and certain people believe things for understandable reasons, but those reasons are nonetheless bad reasons, right? They don't scale, they don't generalize—they're not reasons anyone should adopt for themselves or or respect, you know, epistemologically. And yet, their their circumstance is understandable and it's something you can care about, right? And so yeah, like I mean, just take I think there is many examples of this you might be thinking of, but. I mean one one that comes to mind is I've been super critical of Trump obviously and I've been super critical of certain people for endorsing him or not criticizing him when he. Really made it, you know, painfully obvious who he was. You know, if there had been any doubt initially, there was no doubt when we have a sitting president who's not not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power, right? So. I am I am critical of all of that, and yet the fact that many millions of Americans didn't see what was wrong with Trump or bought into the didn't see through his con, right? I mean they bought into the idea that he was a brilliant businessman who might just be able to change things because he's so unconventional and so you know his heart is in the right place. You know he's really a man of the people, even though he's a you know gold plated everything in his life. Um. They bought the myth somehow, of you know, largely because they had seen him on television for almost a decade and a half, pretending to be this genius businessman who could get things done. It's understandable to me that many very frustrated people who have not had their hopes and dreams actualized, who have been the victims of globalism and and many other you know current trends. It's understandable that they would be confused and and and not see the liability of electing a grossly incompetent, morbidly narcissistic person into the into the presidency. So I don't, so which is to say that I don't blame. There are many, many millions of people who I don't necessarily blame for the Trump phenomenon, but I can nonetheless bemoan the phenomenon as as indicative of you know very bad. State of affairs in our society, right? So it's it's two levels to it. I mean, one is I think you have to call a spade a spade when you are talking about how things actually work and what things are are likely to happen or not. But then you can recognize that people are have very different life experiences and and. Yeah, I mean I think empathy and you know probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, right? Like really, you know, to really wish people well, you know, and to really wish you know strangers well effortlessly, wish them well, and to realize that you. There is no opposition between, in the at bottom, there is no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness because. Why is selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness? I mean, you know, which do you want to live in a society where you have everything, but most other people have nothing, or do you want to live in a society where you are surrounded by happy, creative, self actualized people who are having their hopes and dreams realized? I think it's obvious that the second society is much better. However much you can guard your good luck. But what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe? For example, the the pushback, the other perspective on this because you said bought the myth of Trump as the great businessman. There could be a lot of people that are supporters of Trump who could say that Sam Harris bought the myth that we have this government of the people by the people that actually represents the people as opposed to a bunch of elites who are running a giant bureaucracy that is corrupt that is feeding themselves and they're actually not representing the people and then here is this chaos agent Trump who speaks off the top of his head. Yeah, he's flawed in all this number of ways. He's a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure, and he's actually creating the kind of chaos that's going to shake up this bureaucracy, shake up the elites that are so uncomfortable because they don't want the world to know about the game they got running on everybody else. So that's yeah, that's a kind of perspective that they would take and say yeah, yeah, there is these flaws that Trump has, but this is necessary. I agree with the first part. So I haven't bought the myth that it's you know a truly representative democracy in the way that we would you might idealize. And you know, on some level, I mean this is a different conversation, but on some level, I am not even sure how much I think it should be right. Like I am not sure. We want in the end everyone's opinion given equal weight about you know just what we should do about anything, and I include myself in that. I mean there are many topics around which I don't deserve to have a strong opinion because I don't know what I am talking about right or what I would be talking about if I had a strong opinion. So, um, and I think we'll probably get to that to some of those topics because I've declined to have certain conversations on my podcast just because I think I am the wrong person to have that conversation right. And and it's and I think it's important to see those. Bright lines in in one's life and in in the moment politically and ethically. So yeah, I think, um, so leave aside the the viability of democracy. I am under no illusions. That all of our institutions are you know worth preserving precisely as they have been up until the moment this great orange wrecking ball came swinging through our lives. But I just it was a very bad bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent and worse than incompetent. Genuinely malevolent in his selfishness, right? I think and this is something we know based on literally decades of him being in the public eye, right? He's not as he's not a public servant in any normal sense of that term. And he couldn't possibly give an honest or sane answer to the question the question you asked me about empathy and reason and and like how should we you know what should guide us. I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and and psychological tools, right? And this this is I can feel compassion for him as a human being because I think having those things is incredibly important and genuinely loving other people is incredibly important and and knowing what all that's about is is is that's really the good stuff in life and I. I um I think he's missing a lot of that, but I think we we don't want to promote people to to the highest positions of power in our society who are far outliers in. In pathological terms, right? We want them to be far outliers in in if if in the best case in wisdom and compassion and some of the things you've some of the topics you brought up. I mean we want someone to be deeply informed. We want someone to be unusually curious, unusually alert to how they may be wrong or getting things wrong consequently. He's none of those things, and in so far as we're going to get normal mediocrities in that role, which I think you know is often the best we could expect. Let's get normal mediocrities in that role, not you know once in a generation. Narcissists and frauds. I mean it's like the, we just take honesty as a single variable, right? I think you want yes, it's possible that. Most politicians lie at least some of the time. I don't think that's a good thing. I think people should be you know generally honest, even to a fault. Yes, there are certain circumstances where lying I think is necessary. It's kind of on a continuum of self defense and and violence. So it's like if you are going to you know if the Nazis come to your door and ask you if you've got Anne Frank in the attic, I think it's okay to lie to them. But you know Trump, there is I arguably there is never been a person in that anyone could name in human history who's lied with with that kind of velocity. I mean it's just it was he was a just a blizzard of lies, great and small you know to to. Pointless and and to and effective, but it's just it it says something. Fairly alarming about our society that a person of that character got promoted, and so yes, I have compassion and concern for for half of the society who didn't see it that way, and that's going to sound elitist and and. And smug or something for anyone who's who's on that side listening to me, but it's genuine. I mean I understand that like like I barely have the I am like one of the luckiest people in the world and I barely have the bandwidth to pay attention to half the things I should pay attention to in order to have an opinion about half the things we're going to talk about right. So how much less bandwidth that somebody who's working two jobs or you know a single mom who's who's you know raising you know multiple kids you know even a single kid. It's just it's unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to to really track this stuff and so then they jump on social media and they they see they get inundated by misinformation and. They see what their favorite influencer just said, and now they're worried about vaccines and they're it's just it's we're living in an environment where our our the information space has become so corrupted. And we've built machines to to further corrupt it. You know, I mean, we've built a business model for the internet that further corrupts it. So it is just it's chaos in informational terms, and I don't fault people for being confused and impatient and at the at their wit's end. And yes, Trump was a an enormous fuck you to the establishment, and that's that was understandable for many reasons. To me, Sam Harris, the great Sam Harris, is somebody I've looked up to for a long time as a beacon of voice of reason. And there is this meme on the internet, and I would love you to steal man the case for it and against that Trump broke Sam Harris's brain. That there is something is disproportionately to the actual impact that Trump had on our society. He had an impact on the on the ability of balanced, calm, rational minds to see the world clearly to think clearly. You being one of the beacons of that is there is there a degree to which he broke your brain. Well, otherwise known as Trump derangement syndrome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Medical condition. Yeah, I think Trump derangement syndrome is is a very clever meme because it it just throws the the problem back on the person who's criticizing Trump. But in truth, the true. Trump derangement syndrome was not to have seen how dangerous and divisive it would be to promote someone like Trump to that position of power and to not and in the in the final moment not to see how. Untenable it was to still support someone who you know a sitting president who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean that was if if if that wasn't a bright line for you, you have been deranged by something because that was. You know the that was one minute to midnight for our democracy as as far as I am concerned, and I think it really was but for. The the integrity of a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and and real emergency you know after January 6. I mean if if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify the election right. If it literally you can count on two hands the number of people who held things together at that moment. And so it was so it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we we didn't succumb to some you know real truly uncharted. Catastrophe with our democracy. So the fact that that didn't happen is not a sign that those of us who were worried that it was. So close to happening, were exaggerating the problem. I mean it's like you know you almost got run over by a car, but you didn't, and so you know the fact that you are adrenalized and you are thinking you know boy that was dangerous. I probably shouldn't you know wander in the middle of the street with my eyes closed. You weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem right. And came very close to something truly terrible, so I think that's where we were, and I think we shouldn't do that again. Right, so the fact that he's he's still he's coming back around as potentially a viable candidate, you know I am not spending much time thinking about it frankly because it's you know I am waiting for the moment where it it requires some thought. I mean it did. It took up I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to the topic. It wasn't that I mean it wasn't that many in the end you know against the the number of podcasts I I devoted other topics but. There are people who look at Trump and just find him funny, entertaining, not especially threatening. It's like not a you know it's just it's just good fun to see somebody who's like who's just not taking anything seriously and it's just just putting a you know a stick in the wheel of of business as usual. Again and again and again and again, um. And they don't really see anything much at stake, right? It doesn't really matter if we don't support NATO. Doesn't really matter if he says he trusts Putin more than our intelligence services. I mean none of this it doesn't matter if he's on the one hand saying that he loves. The leader of North Korea and on the other threatening threatens to to you know bomb them back to the Stone Age right on Twitter. It's all it all can be taken in the spirit of kind of reality television. It's like this is just this is the part of the movie that's just fun to watch right and. I understand that I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time, but there is a deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, right? That we're just not taking things seriously, and this is it's a problem I've had with several other people we might name who just who just appear to me to be. Goofing around at scale and they lack a kind of moral seriousness. I mean they're touching big problems where lives hang in the balance, but they're just fucking around. And I think there are really important problems that we have to get our head straight around. And we need you know it's not to say that that institutions don't become corrupt. I think they do, and I think and I am quite worried that. You know both about the the loss of trust in our institutions and the the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right? That they have become less trustworthy. I you know they've become infected by. You know political ideologies that are not truth tracking. I mean I worry about all of that, um, but I just think the we need institutions. We need to rebuild them. We need we need experts who are real experts. We need to value expertise over. You know amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking and just you know and bullshit. The kind of amateur speculation we're doing on this very podcast. I am usually alert to the moments where I am just guessing or where I actually feel like I am talking from within my wheelhouse and I try to telegraph that a fair amount with people. Um. So yeah, I mean, but it's it's not it's different. Like I mean, you can invite someone onto your podcast who's an expert about something that you are you are not an expert about, and then you you in the process of getting more informed yourself. Your your audience is getting more informed. You are asking smart questions, and you might be pushing back at the margins. But you know that when push comes to shove on that topic, you really don't have a basis to have a strong opinion. And if you were going to form a a a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you, it's going to be by deference to some other expert who you've brought in or who you've heard about or whose work you've you've read or whatever. But there is a paradox to. How we value authority in science that most people don't understand, and I think we should at some point unravel that because it's it's the basis for a lot of public confusion and and frankly, there is a basis for a lot of you know criticism I've received on these topics where it's you know people think that I am a. You know I I am against free speech or I am an establishment shill or it's it's like I just think I am a credentialedist. I just think people with PhDs from Ivy League universities should you know run everything. It's not true, but there is a ton of there is a lot to cut through to get to daylight there because people are very confused about how we value authority in the service of rationality generally. You've talked about it, but it's just interesting the intensity of feeling you have. You've you've had this famous phrase about Hunter Biden and children in the basement. Can you just revisit this case? So let me let me give another perspective on the situation of January 6th and Trump in general. It's possible that January 6th and things of that nature revealed that our democracy is actually pretty fragile. And that Trump is not a malevolent, an ultra competent malevolent figure, but is simply a jokester. And he just by creating the chaos revealed that it's all pretty fragile because you are a student in history and there is a lot of people like Vladimir Lenin, Hitler who are exceptionally competent at controlling power. At being executives and taking that power, controlling the generals, controlling all the figures involved, and certainly not tweeting but working in the shadows behind the scenes to gain power, and they did so extremely competently and that is how they were able to gain power. The the pushback with Trump, he was doing none of that. He was creating, he's very good at creating drama, sometimes for humor's sake, sometimes for drama's sake, and simply revealed that our democracy is fragile. And so he's not this once in a generation horrible figure. Once in a generation narcissist. No, I don't think he's he's a a truly scary, sinister, you know Putin like or you know Hitler much less Hitler like figure not at all. I mean he's not ideological. He doesn't care about anything beyond himself. So it's not um. No, no, he's much less scary than any really scary you know totalitarian, right? I mean and he's he's more brave new world than nineteen eighty four. This is what you know Eric Weinstein never stops badgering me about, but you know he's still wrong, Eric. Um, you know I I can you know my analogy for Trump was that he's an evil Chauncey Gardner. I don't know if you remember the the the book or the film being there with with Peter Sellers. Um, but you know Peter Sellers is this gardener who really doesn't know anything, um, but he gets recognized as this wise man and he gets promoted to immense power in Washington because he's speaking. In these kind of in in semblance of wisdom, he's got these very simple aphorisms, or what seem to be aphorisms. He's just talking all he cares about his garden, and he's just talking about his garden all the time. But you know he'll say something, but yeah you know in the spring you know the new shoots will will bloom, and people read into that some kind of genius you know insight politically. And so he gets promoted and so that's that's the joke of the film. For me, Trump has always been someone like an evil Chauncey Gardner. He's he's it's not to say he's totally yes he has a certain kind of genius. He's got a genius for creating a spectacle around himself, right? He's got a genius for getting the the eye of the media always coming back to him. Um, but it it's only it's a kind of it's a kind of you know self promotion that only works if you actually are truly shameless and don't care about having a reputation for anything that that that I or you would want to have a reputation for right. It's like it's pure the pure pornography of attention right, and he just wants more of it. Um, I think the truly depressing and genuinely scary thing was that we have a country that at least half of the country, given how. Broken our society is in many ways, we have a country that didn't see anything wrong with that bringing someone who's who obviously doesn't know what he should know to be president. And who's obviously not a good person, right? Obviously doesn't care about people, can't even pretend to care about people really, right in a credible way. Um. And so I mean this if there's a silver lining to this, it it's it's along the lines you just sketched, it shows us how vulnerable our system is to a truly brilliant and sinister figure, right? I mean like I think we are. Um, we really dodged a bullet. Yeah, someone far more competent and conniving and ideological could have exploited our system. In a way that Trump didn't, and and that's yeah so if if we plug those holes eventually, um that would be a good thing and he would have done a good thing for our society right. I mean one of the things we realized. And I think nobody knew. I mean I certainly didn't know it and I didn't hear anyone talk about it. Is how much our system relies on norms rather than laws. Civility almost. Yeah, it's just like it's it's quite possible that he never did anything illegal, you know truly truly illegal. I maybe I think he probably did a few illegal things, but like illegal such that he really should be thrown in jail for it, you know. Um, at least that remains to be seen. So all of the chaos, all of the you know all of the diminishment of our stature in the world, all of the just the opportunity costs of spending years focused on nonsense. Um, all of that was just norm violations. All that was just that was just all a matter of not saying the thing you should say, but that doesn't mean they're insignificant, right? It's not that it's like it's not illegal for a sitting president to say. No, I'm not going to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Right, we'll wait and see whether I win. If I win, it it