Speaker unverified: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah, this is like several chapters ago. But in the interest of camaraderie, what do you admire most about Sam Harris? Oh, that’s not a hard question. If you go back, if you listen to that debate on my show at Vox, I intro that debate by saying, “Look, I disagree with Harris on like this specific conversation he had with Charles Murray about race and IQ. But he’s good on meditation, he’s good on psychedelics, he’s good on consciousness, he’s good…” I don’t know if I said AI back then though, but I think he’s good on AI. I always felt in that without going into the way back machine, that Sam really thought like he really somehow got where I was wrong. And I thought I offered like a lot of like tries for deescalation and he did me weirdly the favor of publishing our whole email correspondence. And I think if you read that you can see that I was not angling for a fight here. What I admired about him since, I think the thing that he’s been good on is he’s been very independent. So Sam at that time, there was sort of the emergence around then of this thing that people then called the intellectual dark web. And it was like Sam and the Weinstein brothers and Ben Shapiro, and I forget who was part of it. And as a bunch of those people I think, it kind of split up over time, but Harris has done a good job not falling into conspiracy as the Weinstein brothers did. Not letting his anger at the left blind him to the failures of the right. He’s a guy, I guess both for better and for worse as we all are. But he is perfectly willing to stand alone in a crowd. Like I haven’t listened to that much of his stuff lately, but my sense is he’s been like quite clear-eyed from my perspective on Donald Trump. So my view is not that Sam Harris is in general a bad actor, it just isn’t. Yeah, he’s been like difficult to categorize and fearless about it, meaning like he deliberately resists audience capture.…

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