Lex Fridman: recommendation

Transcript context

…It’s not our business to change the Russian government. And anybody who thinks it’s a good idea to do regime change in Russia, which has more nuclear weapons than we do, is I think irresponsible. And Vladimir Putin himself has had… We will not live in a world without Russia and it was clear when he said that, that he was talking about himself and he has his hand on a button that could bring Armageddon to the entire planet. So why are we messing with this? It’s not our job to change that regime, and we should be making friends with the Russians. We shouldn’t be treating him as an enemy. Now we’ve pushed him into the camp with China. That’s not a good thing for our country. And by the way, what we’re doing now does not appear to be weakening Putin at all. The following is a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, candidate for the President of the United States, running as a Democrat. Robert is an activist, lawyer and author who has challenged some of the world’s most powerful corporations seeking to hold them accountable for the harm they may cause. I love science and engineering. These two pursuits are, to me the most beautiful and powerful in the history of human civilization. Science is our journey, our fight for uncovering the laws of nature and leveraging them to understand the universe and to lessen the amount of suffering in the world. Some of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met, including most of my good friends, are scientists and engineers. Again, I love science, but science cannot flourish without epistemic humility, without debate, both in the pages of academic journals and in the public square, in good faith, long form conversations. Agree or disagree, I believe Robert’s voice should be part of the debate. To call him a conspiracy theorist and arrogantly dismiss everything he says without addressing it diminishes the public’s trust in the scientific process. At the same time, dogmatic skepticism of all scientific output on controversial topics like the pandemic is equally, if not more dishonest and destructive. I recommend that people read and listen to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, his arguments and his ideas. But I also recommend, as I say in this conversation, that people read and listen to Vincent Racaniello from This Week in Virology, Dan Wilson from Debunk The Funk, and the Twitter and books of Paul Offit, Eric Topol, and others who are outspoken in their disagreement with Robert. It is disagreement, not conformity that bends the long arc of humanity toward truth and wisdom. In this process of disagreement, everybody has a lesson to teach you, but we must have the humility to hear it and to learn from it. This is The Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s the 4th of July, Independence Day. So simple question, simple, big question. What do you love about this country, the United States of America? I would say there’s so many things that I love about the country, the landscapes and the waterways and the people, et cetera. But on the higher level, people argue about whether we’re an exemplary nation, and that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the neocons, the actions, the neocons in recent decades who have turned that phrase into a justification for forcing people to adopt American systems or values at the barrel of a gun. But my father and uncle used it in a very different way, and they were very proud of it. I grew up very proud of this country because we were the exemplary nation in the sense that we were an example of democracy all over the world. When we first launched our democracy in 1780, we were the only democracy on earth. And there was Civil war, by 1865, there were six democracies. Today there’s probably 190, and all of them in one way or another are modeled on the American experience. And it’s extraordinary because our first serious and sustained contact with the European culture and continent was in 1608 when John Winthrop came over with his Puritans in the sloop Arbella and Winthrop gave this famous speech where he said, “This is going to be a city on a hill. This is going to be an example for all the other nations in the world.” And he warned his fellow Puritans. They were sitting at this great expanse of land and he said, “We can’t be seduced by the lure of real estate or by the carnal opportunities of this land. We have to take this country as a gift from God and then turn it into an example for the rest of the world of God’s love, of God’s will and wisdom.” And 200 years later, 250 years later, a different generation, they’re mainly [inaudible 00:05:59], are people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love of particularly religious cosmologies. The Framers of the Constitution believe that we were creating something that would be replicated around the world, and that it was an example in democracy. There would be this kind of wisdom from the collective that… And the word wisdom means a knowledge of God’s will, and that somehow God would speak through the collective in a way that he or she could not speak through totalitarian regimes. And I think that that’s something that even though Winthrop was a white man and a Protestant, that every immigrant group who came after them adopted that belief. And I know my family, when my family came over, all of my grandparents came over in 1848 during the potato famine, and they saw this country as unique in history is something that was part of a broader spiritual mission. And so I’d say that from a 30,000-foot level, I grew up so proud of this country and believing that it was the greatest country in the world, and for those reasons.…

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