How Not To Ruin The Dinner Party: A Conversation with Sam Harris

We have a public health emergency ... There's the intentional spreading of lies about vaccines, and people are dying as a result. And new variants of the virus are being continually spun up in the population that is unvaccinated. And it's just a matter of time before one of these variants begins to blow through the vaccines. So, people who are not vaccinated are not just problems for themselves, they're problems for everyone else, too.

Bret [Weinstein] is acting like the vaccine is more dangerous than COVID, than getting COVID without having the immunity conferred by the vaccine, and we just know that's not the case ... We have something like 100 million people, at least, who have gotten coronavirus without the benefit of a vaccine, and 600,000 of those people died. And then we have something like 100 million people or more who have gotten the vaccine. How many people have died due to getting the vaccine? I'm not sure anyone has, but it's certainly not 600,000.

Watching this black man [George Floyd] who's already cuffed and immobilized and, therefore, no threat to anyone, watching him asphyxiated by the knee of a sadistic white Derek Chauvin... The whole country, the whole world saw that. Now, I would argue that this is a mass delusion ... I saw the same video and was just as appalled by it as any other morally sane person was, but the video itself offered absolutely no evidence of racism, zero. And I can show you an analogous video where the same thing happens to a white guy.

The [COVID-19] pandemic should have inspired us to spend a lot more time thinking about pandemics—both natural and manufactured ... If anything is especially depressing out of our experience during COVID... We're really bad at this. This was a dress rehearsal for something quite a bit worse, and we failed it just categorically. The only success here is how quickly we produced these vaccines that Brett Weinstein doesn't want to take.

If police are going to be looking to stop the most violent crimes, as they should, they are going to be meeting far many more black people—a disproportionate number of black people—than Asians in attempting to do that ... And if they're effective, they will be stopping the murders of, disproportionately, black people because [they're] the overwhelming number of victims of black crime. White people tend to kill white people; black people tend to kill black people.

About a thousand Americans are killed by cops each year. The vast majority of those people killed by cops were violently resisting arrest, usually with firearms.

You're going to be exposed to the coronavirus with a vaccine or without a vaccine ... Eventually, you're going to be exposed to the coronavirus if you're living anything like a normal life. So, the question is: Do you want to be vaccinated before that happens?

You just have to extend a principle of charity and maintain intellectual rigor, even when you're dealing with your enemies, even when you're dealing with people who you think are truly irredeemable.

The fringe on the left has fully captured our institutions. It's captured academia, it's captured the media, it's captured tech, it's captured Hollywood.

I've never seen video of white suspects being mistreated by cops, and there are more of them ... There are more white people killed by cops every year than black people.

You want to update your view of the world as quickly as the facts and the logic of a good argument demand.

My appetite for debate, certainly formal debate, has gone way down because it's not intellectually honest really; it's more of a performance. The parties show up knowing they're not going to change their minds. So, it's not really an effort to persuade the person you're speaking with.

What is clear is that white supremacy and real racism, ideological racism, is not influencing the culture and mainstream institutions to any significant degree.

Los Angeles erupted in riots, right? How many people rioting in Los Angeles would know that 2019 had been the year of literally the lowest use of force in the history of the LAPD. The LAPD had never been better in minimizing their use of force against anyone.

There is a real problem of inequality that we have to solve, and we cannot live in a world where we have a few trillionaires and 40% unemployment and people living in tents in our wealthiest cities.