Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, during the COVID stuff, man, I mean he was interviewing Dr. McCullough. And who’s the other one? Malone, Dr. Malone. And had Bobby Kennedy, all these people. Like at this time when it was so … And he’s had it with me before too, talking about Ukraine and Israel at the times when it’s really white-hot, you know what I mean? And there’s this huge penalty on not going along with the regimes’ talking points. It’s really hard to overstate it. I mean, there used to be nothing like this. It used to be that if CNN and Fox News agreed, well, then that was it. That was the line now. And now we got the biggest show in the country will actually allow the other perspective on and allow people to challenge the regime. I think it’s been historic. I think also there are shows, there are people, that just are constantly conspiracy theorists, which is fine also, but I sometimes feel that those lack genuineness, because they put themselves in a bin. Or everything, you question everything to a point where, I don’t know, I feel like you’re not getting closer to the truth when you question everything. There is something that some people in the conspiracy world do, which is they speak about something with certainty when they’re really not certain about I., and it’s fine to ask questions and it’s fine to speculate about things, but you also have to … It is true in general in life, you got to be really careful about presuming your conclusion and then working backward from there. And then sometimes when you have one … It’s a matter of being sloppy verse not being sloppy. I remember for a long time, back in the day in 9/11 truth movement, one of the huge smoking guns that they would point to was that in the ’90s there was this one document, I’m blanking on the title of it, but it was from PNAC, the Project for a New American Century, and this was the think tank or one of the think tanks of the neoconservatives. All the big neoconservatives were involved in PNAC, from Dick Cheney, to Rumsfeld, to Richard Perle, David Wurmser, all the big neocons. And there was this one document where they basically … they were like, their Project for the New American Century was how we’re going to have hegemony for another 100 years. Now that we won the 20th century. How are we going to win the 21st century? And they were like, “Okay, well here’s what we want to do. We want to start multiple wars in the Middle East and we want to go …” Like all the plans that they had. NATO expansion in Europe was a big part of it too. And then there was one line where they said, “It’s going to be tough to work up popular support for these multiple wars we want to fight in the Middle East, short of another Pearl Harbor style event.” And the 9/11 truthers would point to this and go, “See, clearly they did it. They did 9/11. They even say in their own words here that they want another Pearl Harbor event so they can do this.” And it’s like, well, look, that doesn’t actually prove anything. I mean, it might just be the case that they were like, “Oh, we wouldn’t get this without a Pearl …” And then when 9/11 happened, they went, “Hey, we got our Pearl Harbor style event.” And even if you like that story of 9/11 was an inside job, because it’s kind of sexy and exciting and like, “Oh my God, what a crazy world we’re living in if that’s true.” And I’m not even saying it’s not true. I’m just saying, if you’re not sloppy and you’re scrupulous, you go, “That’s not really evidence.” It sounds like evidence, it’s evidence-sy, but it’s not actually a piece of evidence because that doesn’t in any way demonstrate that they actually were in on the thing.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.