Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Do you have any friends who have become a little too obsessed with certain dangerous ideas and have had their brains twitified or onlineified who are starting to do their own research about secret things like vaccine side effects

or how the climate hoax is being perpetrated by the left or lockdowns were actually a way of

getting us all used to the barbarity of authoritarianism so that the United Nations can swoop

in and enslave us all. It may not be that extreme.

It may just be people who've meanded a little off the path of what you might regard as being

sanity. I have many such people, mainly in my professional life, not my personal life, thankfully.

And I wanted to understand more about this phenomenon, about what's going on.

When I spoke with Sam Harris a few weeks ago, the vast bulk of the reaction that that

podcast got online was arguments about the intellectual dark web and whether or not people like

Marjid Nawaz and Eric Weinstein and Brett Weinstein and

Dave Rubin and Sam Harris and Douglas Murray and a bunch of other names, whether these cultural

commentators who are regarded as being part of these sort of alternative media ecosystem,

a combination of scientists, critics, commentators, podcasters,

whether these people were always doomed to be tinfoil hat wearing conspiracists,

or whether, to varying degrees one or another, they sort of just

meanded in different ways off the path and why a disproportionate number of them had done so.

And some people are very angry at Sam forever having quote unquote platform to these people

as if like platforming is a thing. I get frustrated by that term. You know,

it's possible for me to platform or not platform people on my radio show on the Australian

Broadcasting Corporation because that's the public broadcaster and it has a certain imprimatur on it.

But on my own podcast, on my own gig, I mean, I can talk to whoever I want to. It's not really

like platforming them. It just depends on whether or not you ask them the right questions.

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