Making Sense - Sam Harris - #381 — Delusions, Right and Left

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

00:00:11.640 you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be

00:00:15.580 hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making

00:00:19.840 Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our

00:00:24.960 scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one.

00:00:28.340 We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support

00:00:32.860 of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

00:00:44.720 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. The tractor beam of politics is continuing

00:00:52.240 to exert its pull on everything. I actually watched less of the Democratic National Convention

00:00:59.900 than the Republican one, though I saw enough to be encouraged. I'm happy with Harris's apparent

00:01:08.160 pivot to the center. Whether she can credibly maintain that under questioning by journalists

00:01:15.500 remains to be seen. I'm hopeful that she can. But I think the debates will probably matter a lot.

00:01:24.360 At least they present the possibility of being decisive. I think a lot can happen there, for good or for

00:01:31.300 ill. But one point I would make, this is a point I have made to some of my friends who will be voting

00:01:39.100 for Trump. You might be surprised that I have friends who will be voting for Trump, but I actually have

00:01:45.800 some close ones. The moves that are generally used to discount the crazier things he says he will do

00:01:54.600 can be used even more plausibly to discount the crazy things that Kamala Harris has said, right? I mean,

00:02:03.560 if you can not take Trump literally, or even seriously, when he says that he's going to round up 20 million

00:02:11.460 undocumented workers, that is, fruit pickers and restaurant workers and nannies and millions of

00:02:18.980 people who are doing indispensable work in our economy, he's going to round them all up in, what,

00:02:26.180 concentration camps, using the military, and deport them? Just linger over the details here for a

00:02:34.240 moment and realize that millions of these people, quite literally millions of these people, have

00:02:41.020 children who are themselves American citizens, right? If you can discount this phantasmagorically

00:02:51.560 unethical and counterproductive fantasy of a policy as just political pandering and pablum messaging to

00:03:02.160 his fanatical base, and perhaps you can. Well, then why can't you discount Harris's ridiculous and 0.93

00:03:10.000 obviously unworkable idea of imposing a wealth tax? Does anyone think she's going to do that? I don't. 0.97

00:03:17.460 But it's interesting, the bar for political integrity and honesty moves as you move left of

00:03:24.780 center. If she actually knows she can't do such a thing, it's absolutely outrageous for her to make 0.99

00:03:31.420 such a campaign promise. But right of center, nobody cares. Everyone apparently takes what Trump claims

00:03:39.980 he will do with a grain of salt. Anyway, Vice President Harris will not be able to avoid hard questions

00:03:46.840 forever. Certainly some will come up in the debate if she declines to hold a press conference or do 0.98

00:03:53.000 long-form interviews before then. And I am reasonably hopeful that she will find the center of our

00:04:00.800 politics and stake her claim there. More to come on politics and even in today's conversation. Today I'm

00:04:08.920 speaking with Stephen Bunnell, otherwise known as Destiny. Stephen is a YouTuber and political streamer.

00:04:15.740 His background is a little different from most of the people I've had on this podcast.

00:04:20.480 But his commentary on politics and culture has made him almost ubiquitous online, where he stirs up

00:04:27.820 controversy on both the right and the left. He grew up in a conservative Catholic household and now

00:04:33.360 spends much of his time arguing against American conservatism and Trumpism in particular. He's debated some

00:04:42.020 of the same people I've debated on a variety of topics. And he's debated people who I wouldn't be inclined

00:04:47.960 to talk to. People like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. One of the things we discuss today is how he thinks about

00:04:55.200 engaging such a wide range of characters. We talk about allegations of Trump derangement syndrome, why Trump's

00:05:03.200 norm violations don't matter to so many people, people's misadventures on the information landscape, social media and the

00:05:10.820 problem of being too online. Our differences of emphasis when thinking about conflict in the Middle East,

00:05:17.100 the difference between the far left and the far right in American politics, the lack of sane conservative

00:05:23.000 policies to counterbalance the craziness of the left, whether the pendulum of sanity is swinging back on the

00:05:30.520 left, the ethics and politics of giving public apologies, the maintenance of private friendships or their failure

00:05:39.120 and public disagreements and other topics. Anyway, it was a fun conversation. And now I bring you Stephen Bonnell.

00:05:53.720 I am here with Stephen Bonnell. Stephen, thanks for joining me.

00:05:57.480 Hey, thanks for having me, Sam.

00:05:58.460 You are otherwise known as Destiny. Perhaps we should start there. Are you in the process of

00:06:02.980 retiring Destiny or are you just bouncing between both names?

00:06:08.080 My background when I first started streaming forever ago was in professional gaming for StarCraft 2.

00:06:13.120 So I kind of went through the trouble of getting all the branding for Destiny, like the YouTube channel,

00:06:16.800 the Instagram and everything else. So it feels very difficult to give up. Really, it's nice to just

00:06:21.820 have that name. So I go by, people call me Stephen in real life and you can find my stuff online as

00:06:25.980 Destiny. So I'm okay with it.

00:06:27.420 Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you've been very active in a part of online culture that I have had

00:06:33.480 very little to do with. I mean, as you say, you got your start in gaming, but then you have become

00:06:40.340 quite prominent online debating people around mostly politics, but I think you've covered a wide range

00:06:48.360 of topics. How did that start for you?

00:06:51.220 My mom is from Cuba. She came over when she was six. So I grew up in a very conservative household.

00:06:57.820 And my parents have always had very strong conservative opinions. And then going through

00:07:01.700 grade school and high school, I guess I have like the debater archetype. I don't know if that's

00:07:05.620 genetic or just, I got it from my mom environmentally. So I've always been kind of like an argumentative,

00:07:10.740 disagreeable person who's been politically interested. When I first got into streaming video

00:07:15.240 games in 20, I think like end of 2010, early 2011, the focus was video games, but we also spoke a lot

00:07:21.720 about, you know, just like pop culture, philosophy, science, politics, whatever. And then in 2016,

00:07:26.340 I picked it up as a much more significant part of what I did online.

00:07:30.100 And you and I debated at least a few of the same people. I've debated Jordan Peterson several times.

00:07:35.800 You did that at least once. I think you've also spoken to Ben Shapiro. I'm not sure how we've

00:07:42.220 overlapped with other people, but I think you've spoken to people who I would avoid. I'm wondering

00:07:47.620 how you make these decisions. I saw that you spoke to Nick Fuentes, who's, I think, an avowed

00:07:53.640 white supremacist, if not actual Nazi. Recently, you spoke to Candace Owens. Is there anyone you

00:07:59.480 regret engaging?

00:08:02.280 I'll take that in two parts. So for the first one, one of my strengths is that I'm willing to talk to

00:08:08.160 almost anybody. So it gives me very big reach into a lot of different types of communities because I'm

00:08:12.540 willing to go into different shows and I can have a good time with a large variety of people and

00:08:16.740 different types of characters, but I can still provide pushback against a large variety of different

00:08:20.320 types of characters. So it's a balancing act of how aggressive do I want to be versus how long do

00:08:25.860 I want my legs to be? How far do I want my reach, I guess, to extend into other communities? The only

00:08:30.620 times I'm disappointed or I regret engaging with people is if I feel like the other person got more

00:08:36.500 out of it than I feel like I did. So for instance, if I were to platform a very small, very radical

00:08:41.460 person and then not give adequate pushback and I feel like he bested me in a conversation that I could

00:08:46.200 have been more prepared for or if I'm, yeah, like I just don't, I don't, I want to, I don't want to

00:08:51.060 promote bad ideas and like bring them to everybody's attention and then, you know, have a bad showing

00:08:55.660 against it. But if there's like, you know, really popular talking points and a lot of people believe

00:08:59.080 the thing, I think it's worth discussing and I'll have those people on to fight with them. Yeah.

00:09:02.740 And then the second part was if I regret, yeah, over the past year, I regretted everything. Um,

00:09:07.540 God, let's talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a constant balancing act between,

00:09:13.040 yeah, like I said, like how, how gentle do I want to be versus how aggressive do I want to be?

00:09:16.660 I would say, uh, around the last year I'd been making a more, I go back and forth between these

00:09:22.340 very empathetic approaches to debate versus like these very aggressive approaches. And so the past

00:09:26.580 year I've been more empathetic and I've gotten conversations with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro

00:09:30.920 and Candace Owens. And I, I worry sometimes that I play this role in like, oh, well, look, I debated

00:09:36.040 destiny and we got along and it was fine. And it's like, well, we kind of debated, but I was being very,

00:09:40.440 very, very gentle because I'm trying not to make you so mad that you'll never talk to me again,

00:09:43.420 or that you won't have the conversation. So then when I look back at the role I played in that,

00:09:46.660 and then I see now when I take more aggressive positions on things that I feel strongly about,

00:09:49.760 they're like, well, I can't talk to destiny. That guy's crazy. Candace Owens wouldn't let me in her 0.97

00:09:53.540 space a week ago because she said I was a sexual deviant while she was speaking with, um, with Andrew

00:09:58.020 Tate and Dan Blitzerian. I'm like, what? So now I'm like, okay, so you're in good company or you're,

00:10:02.960 you're worse than that good company. Yeah. I mean, you know, I've watched part of your

00:10:07.240 conversation with Candace and, um, I mean, now perhaps she has transformed into her current

00:10:14.920 monstrous shape since you debated her. I haven't really followed her timeline very closely.

00:10:21.360 This is one of the consequences of having gotten off social media. There's, there are things I

00:10:25.300 don't follow, which seem, I mean, they seem very big online, I'm sure. But, you know, Candace Owens

00:10:30.000 becoming a proper anti-Semite was, um, something I think I had on my bingo card, uh, some years ago. And, um, 0.51

00:10:36.760 you know, so I, I was unsurprised, but I'm not quite sure when she, she fully pulled the mask off,

00:10:42.480 if it was ever properly on. You don't think the semi-friendly, even somewhat adversarial

00:10:49.760 conversation with her just has the net effect of kind of laundering her reputation with your audience

00:10:57.620 and, and doing more harm than good? With my audience, absolutely not. With the other audiences,

00:11:03.620 that's what is so hard to determine. Like I said, I don't like the idea that Candace can say like,

00:11:08.740 oh, well, you know, I had a debate with Destiny or I had a conversation with Steven and it's like,

00:11:12.220 not really. I like, that was a very gentle, if you watch the conversation, I think in around 10

00:11:16.360 minutes, I realized that even then I'm pushing back too much and she's about to like, yeah,

00:11:20.040 rage out and leave. And I'm like, okay, well, we got to be more gentle. So that irritates me.

00:11:24.520 My audience is never becoming just because I put out so much content. I stream so much. I put out so many

00:11:28.720 videos and I have so many conversations. They're not going to hear somebody like that and instantly be

00:11:32.120 captivated and become whatever neo-Nazi Blexit combo of weird stuff she is now. But for,

00:11:39.160 for audiences in the middle, it's, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say. It's good to provide some

00:11:44.140 pushback. Like it legitimizes me in that I can talk to a lot of different people. It legitimizes me in

00:11:49.480 the eyes of her audience. Like, oh, well this, you know, Steven's a reasonable guy that you can have

00:11:52.560 conversations with. But then it also plays kind of a dirty role that everybody's been complicit in over

00:11:57.760 the past several years of like making some of these ideas seem a lot more reasonable and sane

00:12:01.920 than they actually are. And I've spent the past few months or the past month or so after the

00:12:06.480 assassination attempt, yeah, saying, okay, hold on. No, let's back up. This is a lot of this stuff is

00:12:11.120 insane. And I think we need to go back to calling this insane. Is there anyone whose name I would

00:12:15.360 recognize who you've decided not to talk to because you just viewed them as too dishonest or unethical?

00:12:21.540 I'll still talk to anybody, but the conversations are just going to be a lot more aggressive.

00:12:26.340 I'm not going to have a conversation with Jordan Peterson while he just kind of like meanders through

00:12:29.480 the point that 20% excess deaths in Europe are all caused by the vaccine. That's not going to happen

00:12:34.080 next time. Like, okay, well, we're going to sit here. We're going to fixate on this point now.

00:12:36.860 Or when I asked Ben Shapiro, like, don't you guys think you grade Trump on a curve? And he's like,

00:12:41.020 yeah, you know, we do. I'm like, okay, well, that can't stand, right? Yeah. I just won't let those

00:12:45.120 things flow by anymore. Yeah. So what have you regretted in the last year? What has been the

00:12:50.700 controversy or the chaos? For some reason, I never understood that, like the media is,

00:12:57.180 I always hear the media is left-wing dominated. The media is dominated by the left. And I hear that 0.95

00:13:00.780 and I look online and I see kind of the crazy left. And then I look at like CNN and MSNBC and I'm like,

00:13:04.780 okay, maybe they are. But somehow, even in left-wing spaces, the conservatives have such a good

00:13:10.900 rain on controlling the discourse. And I'm so upset that I allowed myself to be

00:13:17.040 kind of brainwashed by the Trump derangement syndrome insult where I'm like, okay, I got to

00:13:21.340 be really fair. I got to be really careful when I cover Trump because I don't want to sound deranged.

00:13:25.100 I don't want to sound unhinged. And, you know, and I'm sitting here trying to think like, okay, well,

00:13:29.100 when Trump said this absolutely crazy thing, you know, when January 6th happens, like it was just this

00:13:34.100 and that and that. And then meanwhile, the conservatives are like, so here's the 57th picture of Hunter

00:13:38.060 Biden's dick that we're showing in Congress. And we know, by the way, that him and Joe Biden, 0.99

00:13:41.920 you know, unilaterally dictated world policy to get rid of this prosecutor in Burisma. And it's like,

00:13:46.560 oh my God, the uneven playing field, the assassination attempt, I think completely broke

00:13:50.800 me when I saw how indignant conservatives are with like, you guys are calling us Nazis and look what

00:13:54.840 happens. And then I'm like replaying in my mind, all the Paul Pelosi comments. And I'm like, no,

00:13:59.300 this is insane. I'm sorry. You guys completely bought the farm on this. This is crazy.

00:14:03.460 What do you attribute this skewing to? I mean, let's take the

00:14:07.480 case of a, an intelligent person who is not allergic to Trump in the way that we are. I mean,

00:14:16.300 how it's, I mean, I happen to know some of these people. I even have a few good friends who,

00:14:21.400 you know, I would consider, I mean, this is something I say to their face. I mean,

00:14:25.060 I consider them low information voters. I mean, they're simply not disposed to pay attention to all

00:14:29.440 of the thousands of norm violations and other indiscretions that Trump is trailing, right? So

00:14:34.920 they're, they have a little bit in their head. They have a lot of what I would consider misinformation

00:14:40.120 from the right that more or less exonerates Trump on, on all counts. The phrase, the Russia collusion

00:14:47.280 hoax does an inordinate amount of work in their brains. And they've essentially just averted their

00:14:53.520 eyes from the whole problem. And they come away with a feeling that more or less all of the, you know,

00:14:59.880 the kind of reaction that you and I have had to Trump is totally overblown. I mean, it is, you know,

00:15:06.300 it is Trump derangement syndrome. It is just, we don't like the guy's personality and we couldn't get

00:15:11.360 over that. But when you look at policies, he's super normal and not even especially conservative.

00:15:18.120 And, you know, much of his criticism of the powers that be and the, and the, the way things were done

00:15:24.420 in Washington for as long as anyone can remember. Many, many of those criticisms are valid. There is 0.83

00:15:29.240 a kind of deep state sclerosis that needs to be reamed out. They don't spend much time thinking

00:15:35.620 about the actual ideologues in his orbit, you know, people like Steve Bannon and what he might say on his 0.99

00:15:41.060 dumb podcast. And they just see a very clear trade-off between Trump who is calling bullshit on 0.99

00:15:48.380 obvious bullshit like woke-ism and the moral panic on the left that has racialized everything and 0.99

00:15:56.560 made it seem like trans bathrooms is the greatest human rights concern of our time, et cetera. And 0.99

00:16:03.420 they're truly allergic to all the stuff that's happened on the left. And so they're,

00:16:06.980 they're willing to support Trump warts and all. How would you perform psychic surgery on this person?

00:16:14.100 There. So first we have to be really clear. Are we talking about the audience or are we talking

00:16:19.200 about like the larger content creators? I call them content creators. You might call them pundits

00:16:23.280 or commentators.

00:16:24.140 Yeah. I mean, I guess any, anything you would want to say to or about such a person so as to have an

00:16:29.080 effect upon anyone in the audience like him or her.

00:16:33.400 I think there are several really large things at play. I think one of the larger there, yeah,

00:16:39.460 there, there are several large topics at play. One of the larger ones that is hard to talk about

00:16:44.100 is, um, I had a viewer that emailed me this with this idea and I love this idea and I stole it.

00:16:49.160 He calls it magic boxes that if you were to go back into the past and you were to hold an abacus,

00:16:56.120 okay, it's very obvious what the function of an abacus is and you can't hide any conspiracies inside

00:17:01.000 of it. There are no secret cameras. There is no government listening device. Nobody's stealing

00:17:05.040 your, it's just, you just see what it is and you operate it, you know, as you do. Uh, nowadays with a

00:17:09.660 phone, you don't really know everything that's going on inside of the phone. So if somebody were

00:17:15.120 to say something like, I think my phone is always recording me. Well, to even begin to have that

00:17:20.560 conversation, it's like, okay, well, do we understand, you know, how telemetry works,

00:17:24.880 how data is sent, what kind of connection is needed, what kind of permissions are needed,

00:17:27.960 like the difference between like the operating system versus an application, but like there's so

00:17:31.820 much you have to go through that in life today, we basically operate so many of these magical boxes

00:17:37.480 where are on the operating level and the user level, things are so abstracted away from what's

00:17:42.020 actually happening that it's allowed people to insert so much craziness that can't be easily

00:17:48.040 fact-checked by anything. And I find that this is especially true when you look at the, my obsession

00:17:53.900 lately has been, I'm trying to compile like a convincing argument relating to the January 6th stuff.

00:17:57.820 So this is where my brain is kind of existing, but you might look at something like Donald Trump

00:18:02.320 making a phone call to the, not to Raffensperger, but below him and an election fraud investigator

00:18:07.920 in Georgia. If you have the prerequisite background to understand civics and the role of the president

00:18:14.040 and a campaign and the role of a state election investigator, all of that, just that phone call

00:18:19.040 in and of itself is so unfathomably inappropriate. It is such a horrible call. But in order to even

00:18:24.920 begin to understand why you have to explain so much. And I'll be honest, even I didn't really

00:18:30.860 understand, like when you say that like, well, there's electors and you know, the people don't

00:18:34.600 elect the president, the electors, I don't even really know what that meant until like two years

00:18:37.760 ago. And most people just, yeah, I don't even, well, I know this because polling did it. Most

00:18:41.900 people don't even know three branches of government, right? So how can you even begin to explain,

00:18:46.140 you know, the type of egregious norm violations that are happening when people don't know the norms,

00:18:50.060 the systems that have the norm, people just don't have the understanding to even be able to grapple

00:18:53.820 with, you know, why would it be bad for this guy to make a phone call? But that people immediately

00:18:58.660 understand like cutting children's penises off to make them trans or whatever other crazy, 0.99

00:19:03.280 you know, like far left conspiracy stuff the conservatives like to obsess over. Like that's 1.00

00:19:07.680 immediately understandable. So yeah, that's, that's one huge thing that you have to get over is you just

00:19:12.300 need like a decent foundation of knowledge to even understand why some of the things are norm breaking.

00:19:17.160 Yeah. Let's focus on January 6th. What would you say to someone who thinks that January 6th was

00:19:23.360 basically a non-event. I mean, it certainly wasn't an insurrection. It was a, you know,

00:19:29.760 there was some sort of misbehavior on one side of the building and on the other side of the building,

00:19:34.220 you know, courtesy of Tucker Carlson and others. We have, you know, we have footage of the cops just

00:19:39.440 letting people in. And so it wasn't violent. Yeah. I guess if you look at the, some of the footage,

00:19:45.680 it was super violent, but some of the people don't even look at that footage and they just see the

00:19:49.720 people getting let in and then wandering around in what seemed to be a kind of a low stress

00:19:54.680 environment. Right. And so that seems strange. And then there are rumors that there were,

00:19:59.880 you know, FBI plants in the crowd. And maybe this whole thing was a kind of false flag thing that

00:20:06.860 I heard a rumor that Pelosi didn't get enough cops there when she could have, et cetera, et cetera. 1.00

00:20:11.760 So, and Trump did say from the dais, you know, that you should all be peaceful in some form.

00:20:17.860 And so they, all of this, just this impressionistic tour of, you know, half-truths gives people a

00:20:24.220 sense that, all right, that whatever happened over there, it was ugly and I wouldn't have voted for

00:20:29.540 it, but it's not really, it's, it wasn't really Trump's responsibility. And it was just a mob that,

00:20:36.420 that misbehaved and American democracy wasn't at stake. How would you untangle that?

00:20:42.740 I mean, it's kind of going back to what you said about, it sounds so bad to say,

00:20:47.720 but like low information voters for stuff like this, I think like two or three weeks ago,

00:20:51.860 I did a little focus group because I've compiled so much information about this. And I got six

00:20:55.940 pretty decently big YouTubers together. And I like went through like seven hours of information and

00:21:00.640 asked them like, Hey, what's the most surprising thing to you? Or what didn't you know? Or what do you

00:21:04.280 care about? Or what don't you care about? And, um, for a lot of it, it was just like so much

00:21:08.540 information that people don't know. So one of the things that I was told after talking to these

00:21:13.760 people so long is one thing they said is I didn't realize the timelines at the Capitol.

00:21:17.640 So for instance, people will say, Donald Trump tweeted, stay peaceful. And that should be good.

00:21:21.840 Right. But when you actually look at everything that was happening in the day of and the context,

00:21:26.540 and it's like, Oh, that tweet was sent like 20 minutes after the Capitol, then broke it into like

00:21:30.860 an hour and a half after the Capitol grounds had been penetrated. When you start to see the tweets

00:21:35.200 in context of like an actual timeline stuff takes on a far more insidious shape than when you just

00:21:41.320 say, Oh, well, you know, he tweeted up, be peaceful. And, you know, who knows at what time or what part

00:21:45.560 of the day having more facts, I think, and contextualizing things in a more appropriate

00:21:50.260 way. Nobody knew anything about the elector plot, uh, you know, like the seven fake slates of

00:21:54.240 electors and none of this is like conspiratorial. Like all the information is out there, all the,

00:21:57.800 you can see the fake slates that they all signed with their signatures. There's a YouTube video

00:22:01.340 of them trying to go to the Capitol in Michigan to enter the plot inside to have Clark replace

00:22:07.260 Rosen when Rosen and Donahue are arguing with Trump about sending out a fake letter to the

00:22:11.180 States about voter fraud. That was a really big one. A lot of people will say this. This

00:22:15.220 is the stupidest thing I've ever heard about. People say like, we don't know if Trump knew 1.00

00:22:17.940 he was lying about voter fraud. How could you ever prove what's in somebody's mind? And it's

00:22:21.320 like, well, let me introduce you to the entire criminal justice system of the United States,

00:22:24.180 because in order to convict on crimes, you have to know what the mens re is. That's the most 0.84

00:22:27.940 important part of convicting on a crime. But for Trump, there are so many examples of somebody

00:22:31.560 saying, Hey, by the way, this isn't true. And then like two days later, Trump will say

00:22:35.560 the exact same claim over and over and over and over and over again. He does this like so many

00:22:38.960 times and having that clearly laid out where people can say, you know what? I think Trump

00:22:43.580 actually just was lying. And I think he knew the whole time, but it's a big information dump and

00:22:48.340 you have to find a way to present the information in like a compelling and an interesting and like an

00:22:52.820 emotional way. And then how close we were. Oh, there's two other things. How close we were on the

00:22:57.340 six to everything failing. If Pence had flipped, if there was more violence, like there are a couple

00:23:02.260 of things. Pence is the big part that didn't flip that could have. That's one thing. And then the,

00:23:06.680 um, the second thing was, um, I didn't realize this until I was really late into my research.

00:23:10.600 Oh my God, the best video that you could ever watch on January 6th is Infowars. If you really want to

00:23:18.480 know the day of what people felt like and what was going on when they watched that, it's so funny

00:23:24.000 because when conservatives talk about it now, they memory hole it, right? Oh, it was just some

00:23:27.300 people wandering around. Who cares? Watching the conservative coverage and the tweets the day of,

00:23:32.160 I saw, you know, like Ashley Babbitt might be the first victim of the second revolution.

00:23:36.760 Uh, there was that meme video of the woman who got, uh, sprayed with mace or whatever. And she's like,

00:23:41.200 what? We're storming the Capitol, dude. It's a revolution. You know, constantly referring to the

00:23:45.480 rioters as patriots saying that they've taken the Capitol. We've overtaken it. We've got it. We've

00:23:49.980 captured this back, you know, for the people. It's so obvious what everybody's saying and what's

00:23:54.180 going on. And then as soon as Babbitt gets shot, the national guard shows up, the rhetoric starts

00:23:57.800 to change a bit. There are so many funny quotes. There's even like quotes from some of these guys

00:24:01.140 on, um, I think Owen Schroyer might've been one where people are saying things like,

00:24:05.040 these are patriots. This isn't BLM or Antifa. You could tell these are patriots. And then like the

00:24:08.700 next day it was all Antifa. We don't know who any of these people were. It's like, yeah.

00:24:12.560 Yeah. I think the simplest cut at this for me, and I'm always surprised that it doesn't work on

00:24:17.440 everybody. And there's just endless examples of it not working. I mean, it hasn't worked on half

00:24:21.440 the country, but it really can come out in a very short paragraph, which is just that what we had

00:24:27.640 was a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, months in

00:24:33.200 advance of the election. And this was back in, in March or so, I think that the question was first

00:24:37.780 put to him and he clearly declined to abide by the results of an election unless he won that election.

00:24:43.740 And while the election was being run, he was clearly preparing the ground to call it fraudulent.

00:24:51.740 And he then lied endlessly about having had the election stolen from him. I mean, the irony is that

00:24:57.860 he's in the process of attempting to steal an election while claiming that it has been stolen from

00:25:02.360 him. And in the end, we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power, right? So like that, just that

00:25:07.860 single desecration of the foundational norm of our democracy. I mean, it seems to me that we don't

00:25:14.560 have the laws that we actually should have in place to punish a president who does this, right?

00:25:19.680 To have a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer of power and then do what he can to ensure

00:25:26.920 that we don't have one. It seems to me that jail should await such a person and we don't actually

00:25:32.560 have the laws to accomplish that. I mean, I fully disagree on that last point. We had Section 3 of

00:25:37.780 the 14th Amendment, which was very clearly meant to prevent a person like this at the very least

00:25:41.000 from holding future office. And we do have criminal charges against him, but the Supreme Court is

00:25:44.600 protecting him from those. It's incredible. But the fact that having that in the 14th Amendment

00:25:50.440 is as ineffectual as it is in practice. In any case, so it just, why do you think so many people,

00:25:59.160 I mean, you know, fully half the nation, one can, I guess, discount all the people who really aren't

00:26:05.300 informed about this, but there are all too many people who know exactly what I just alleged to be

00:26:12.480 true, which is that he didn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and we didn't have one.

00:26:17.300 Why doesn't that matter, do you think? Well, for some people, this is why I'm saying

00:26:21.340 there's different issues that affect different players or people in different ways and they all

00:26:28.760 have different motivations for why they believe what they do. So for the average voter or listener,

00:26:32.800 I would say a lot of these people just don't have all the information and they are susceptible to all

00:26:36.220 the ordinary follies of man that me and I imagine you, everybody is susceptible to. We hear things we

00:26:40.880 want to hear. We tend to seek information. We want to, you know, find a firm, our biases and all this.

00:26:45.080 This is just kind of what everybody is falling prey to, to some extent and to some level in your

00:26:49.860 life. For the content creators, there are far more interesting questions to ask there,

00:26:54.080 but it depends on the person. It depends on the issue. One thing I would say when it comes to

00:26:57.600 foreign stuff that I've been asking questions about, but it's hard to dig into it. I really wonder

00:27:02.860 how much foreign pushing there is on some figures to just have positions that wholesale align with like

00:27:10.080 Russian foreign policy just like completely 100%. You're 100% alignment. You couldn't be a better

00:27:14.920 spokesperson when talking about like, it's the same talking points for the Ukrainian war, right? Oh,

00:27:20.360 they're sending men off to die. You know, there's no reason for this. Everybody in the East, you know,

00:27:24.580 it was a civil war the whole time and Ukrainian bio labs and Nazis and, you know, the United, now 0.97

00:27:29.000 they're starting war in Russia with an invasion. It's like the exact same talking points coming from

00:27:33.400 like Western people. I'm like, why? That's the thing I wonder. A second thing is, unfortunately,

00:27:38.140 if you brand yourself as a person of a certain political persuasion, you kind of have to stick

00:27:44.060 with it. Like, could you imagine, you know, talking to Ben Shapiro, could you imagine if Ben came out

00:27:48.880 and was like, you know what? I kind of don't like Donald Trump, if for no other reason, just because

00:27:52.240 morally he's an atrocious human being. He was sort of there in the beginning. I mean, you know,

00:27:56.360 I haven't really followed what Ben has done of late, but in the beginning, he was someone who

00:28:02.800 would make the right concessions to basic sanity and ethics around Trump. I mean, he would,

00:28:09.880 obviously, he was obviously much more concerned about what was happening on the left, but he

00:28:14.580 thought January 6th was- An insurrection, he said the day after. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just a shattering

00:28:18.740 of norms of a sort that we would agree with. But I don't know why he's not essentially a Mitt Romney

00:28:26.200 or a Liz Cheney, or there are obviously Republicans who have discovered their, the line past which

00:28:31.900 they would not be dragged, and they agree with us about Trump. So I don't understand what's happened

00:28:37.940 to people who are kind of splitting the baby there. And I mean, I guess it's, you know, audience capture

00:28:42.920 on some level, or it would be the ruination of their business. I mean, seeing the breakup between

00:28:48.220 Ben and Candace was somewhat instructive insofar as I did see it. I mean, I think I missed 95% of it,

00:28:53.980 again, because I'm not online, but I saw enough to know, you know, what Ben has been getting from

00:29:00.100 his audience and just how much, so much of his audience doesn't love the Jews. Yeah, I mean,

00:29:05.500 what do you think is happening there? Is it just economics?

00:29:09.120 Yeah, it's just, it's like you said, like, well, in the beginning, it seems like they're on board with

00:29:12.920 being more critical. But then as time goes on, and the party coalesces around Trump, and Trump is

00:29:17.700 absolutely a cult of personality, and he engenders like cultish, you know, obsession and adoration,

00:29:23.600 there is no room for disagreement. So one, on a numbers level, that's just factual, like Donald

00:29:28.720 Trump enjoys very wide and very deep support from conservative voters. So the media is going to

00:29:34.540 reflect that as well. You can see this in the Dominion lawsuit versus Fox, by the way, that the

00:29:38.800 deposition, the exhibits that they had in their pretrial stuff was fascinating. There are so many slides

00:29:43.040 of people at Fox News saying, this is a lie, we know this is a lie, but my God, we're losing,

00:29:48.540 you know, 30% of our viewership to Newsmax and OAN. So I guess we're going to have to tell the lie

00:29:53.500 to keep our viewers. Like, it's so clear, like they won that case. Well, they didn't win it. Fox

00:29:57.320 settled right before trial because they knew they were going to lose that case. One of the largest

00:30:00.600 settlements, I believe, in corporate history for public settlements for defamation. And yeah,

00:30:05.460 you see that. And also, that's not an accident. It's not just a result of numbers. It's also

00:30:09.760 incredibly intentional by Donald Trump. He always reminds people. He did it the day of his speech

00:30:15.240 on the ellipse on January 6th. You know, he says, I help these people get elected. Not going to do

00:30:19.200 it anymore. I help these people in their elections and they don't remember that. When he was talking

00:30:22.460 to Raffensperger, he said, I was such a schmuck for helping this Kent loser, Kemp, get elected. 1.00

00:30:26.800 What a loser I was for doing that. And he, you know, he did it in Georgia. He didn't want to campaign 0.99

00:30:30.780 or help those people because Raffensperger and Kemp wouldn't play ball with helping him steal the

00:30:34.660 election in Georgia. Trump does this very intentionally. He wouldn't go on Fox News. Man, after they called

00:30:38.860 Arizona, he was so mad and he stopped calling into their shows and he was, you know, retweeting and

00:30:42.780 reposting OAN more. So if you don't play ball with him, he will try to destroy you by not working with

00:30:48.120 you anymore and by constantly degrading you. And the followers and the fans, you know, they pick up

00:30:52.500 on that and they act accordingly. So it's hard when you've got a business like, man, am I going to cover

00:30:56.380 Trump honestly and have my entire business go bankrupt? Because no conservative is going to watch

00:30:59.800 me and nobody on the left, no offense, is turning into Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire. Or do you play ball?

00:31:03.840 But doesn't it still strike you as fundamentally astonishing that Trump has been able to succeed

00:31:10.180 the way he has? That there was that kind of audience that was willing to become a cult of

00:31:16.180 personality around such a, on some levels, just such an unimpressive person. I mean, he is just

00:31:23.260 so obviously a fraud, right? I mean, he really is a game show host who pretended to be a great

00:31:29.180 businessman and he's a Mark Burnett confection, right? And I mean, it's not that he has no

00:31:35.480 talents. I mean, he's, he's entertaining, right? He can be funny, but I mean, he's just,

00:31:39.640 he's barely competent at that really when you, I mean, it's not like you have an entertainer of

00:31:46.780 the talent of somebody like Jamie Fox deciding to be a demagogue, right? I mean, it's just,

00:31:51.820 he's just basically entertaining. And I do think that the fact that so many people find him funny

00:31:58.140 counts for an enormous amount of his political success. I mean, just whatever the happens at

00:32:03.600 a debate to be able to say, you know, only Rosie O'Donnell or whatever other his other laugh lines

00:32:08.960 were, that's just guarantees your victory at that stage in the primary, given the nature of our

00:32:14.240 politics. But it does, I mean, I've always thought of him as a kind of evil Chauncey Gardner. And I

00:32:20.480 think this probably undersells his gifts such as they are, but I've just thought of him as somebody

00:32:25.760 who, for whatever reason, he found himself in a political and social context in America in the,

00:32:33.160 you know, early 21st century where our appetite for junk food for the mind had just reached its

00:32:40.900 peak. And we're a reality TV culture. We're a social media culture. We care about fame,

00:32:48.380 perhaps more than anything. And you drop this shameless narcissist into this context and he 0.97

00:32:57.420 manages to function by a different reputational physics. I mean, he manages to seem more authentic 0.79

00:33:03.920 than anyone else just by being a shameless con man. In my imagination, the reasons for his success

00:33:11.440 have much more to do with the environment than with the person, but perhaps I'm selling him short.

00:33:16.640 No, I mean, I agree. Trump is, there is no level of media criticism that was too harsh on how clueless

00:33:23.780 he is around some things. I watched him doing something. He was talking to the United Nations

00:33:27.800 and somebody asked him about, I think it was the UN, I think it was a UN thing. And somebody asked

00:33:31.220 him about Western liberalism. Have you seen this clip?

00:33:34.400 No.

00:33:34.840 They ask him about, what do you think about people saying that this, we might be seeing the fall of

00:33:39.000 Western style liberalism. And he starts going off on like LA and San Francisco. And I'm thinking in my

00:33:45.080 mind, oh my God, he doesn't even know what Western, he doesn't know what that means. He doesn't know

00:33:48.520 what liberalism is. He just heard Western liberalism and he thinks, he's thinking like

00:33:52.100 West Coast liberals. And this guy, this is like a world of politics.

00:33:54.920 This was true in spaces where you would think it would have really mattered. I mean, when he,

00:33:59.380 you know, early on when he was trying to prove that he was a good Christian and the evangelicals

00:34:05.260 were just coming around to support him. And he was asked, you know, point blank, what are your

00:34:09.340 favorite books of the Bible? And it was just absolutely obvious that he couldn't name a

00:34:14.460 single book of the Bible. And yet that all passed, even for evangelicals. I mean, I was actually at a

00:34:20.520 conference around the time and I ran into Ralph Reed and I said, Ralph, you know, what the fuck? 0.99

00:34:26.200 You know, this guy couldn't actually name a book in the Bible. It wasn't that he didn't, 0.99

00:34:32.080 I think his line was something like, oh, I wouldn't want to say it because I wouldn't want to offend

00:34:36.420 anybody, right? Like they're all so good and everyone has their favorite. And I just said,

00:34:40.460 Ralph, you know that he was lying. You know that he's the least Christian person you guys have ever

00:34:46.140 gotten behind. And the dodge was, as you might expect, well, you know, I'm not going to say

00:34:50.760 it was in another person's heart and it's not for me to judge, it's for God to judge and blah, blah,

00:34:55.100 blah. But you would think somehow that would have sunk another candidate in Christian eyes and on

00:35:01.980 every other front. I mean, just the word salad he produces where he contradicts himself pointlessly

00:35:09.360 and it all works because nobody cares. But the mystery is, why does nobody care?

00:35:14.960 I think one thing that helps a lot is that we have this horrible and wonderful thing called the

00:35:21.600 internet. A lot of people start with a very bad, I would say the vast majority of people on the planet

00:35:26.740 have bad epistemic practice, which is fine. I mean, who cares generally? Most people,

00:35:30.600 it doesn't matter. How do you evaluate what's true or not true? What's your theory of truth or

00:35:34.640 what is it? Like no one cares. You don't need this for most of your life. But I think one of the big

00:35:38.400 issues that we have is because so many things fundamentally, you have to know a thing to know

00:35:43.480 if it will serve your end or if it will be bad for you. So for instance, if I'm on a balcony with

00:35:46.820 somebody, I say I can fly and that person's like, really? And then I jump and I fall and I die.

00:35:50.920 It's very immediately obvious. Okay, well, that's a really bad idea. I'm not going to believe that guy.

00:35:54.920 You can't really selectively pick and choose the things you want to believe when you're grounded,

00:35:58.980 when there aren't magic boxes around you, when you're just in the world.

00:36:02.000 But nowadays with the internet, it is so easy to handcraft whatever narrative you want.

00:36:08.160 And even when you don't think it's that big of a deal, it is a big deal. People get mad at me

00:36:11.680 sometimes when I'm kind of like, I'll pedantically correct lies and people are like, why? Who cares?

00:36:15.220 It's not that big of a deal. It's like, okay, well, if you tell 10 little lies, it makes it really

00:36:18.000 easy to sell a big lie. And people have this bad assumption for humans that our brains are designed

00:36:24.660 as these like, ontologically, we have like these epistemically grounded truth-seeking machines

00:36:30.000 that are just trying to figure out what's true at any point in time. And people have no idea

00:36:33.820 how much subjectivity, how much normativity is involved in all of the truth-seeking that we do.

00:36:40.220 So then when you go onto the internet, you're thinking, okay, well, I'm a true brain. I'll get

00:36:43.540 all my media. We'll see what's going on. You don't realize that you were engaged in basically drug

00:36:47.560 abuse. You're finding stuff that just makes you feel good regardless of the detriment it has to your

00:36:52.020 epistemic, your psychological, your emotional wellbeing. A really funny example of this,

00:36:56.660 I correct this every time I see some people say this and people think it's a small deal,

00:36:59.920 but I don't. I think these are all really big deals. Donald Trump, the assassination attempt,

00:37:04.020 after the guy missed and Donald Trump's ear got shot, Donald Trump came up immediately and he gave

00:37:07.720 that, let's fight, you know, the power. Yeah, let's go. It was not immediate. It was like a minute

00:37:11.960 long. There's like a thing of him like looking for his shoes, like watch the full clip. And people will

00:37:15.820 be like, well, what? So you don't think he was brave? Well, he might've been brave. You want to say

00:37:18.160 that? Fine. But why lie about him coming up immediately? And I had a guy challenge me on this and he went,

00:37:22.020 over my thing. I was like, Jesse's lying. Let's look at this video. And the guy shows an edited

00:37:25.540 video. And I'm like, bro, my video is like two minutes long. Your video is like a minute, 47

00:37:30.080 seconds. And it ends a full minute after my, like you're clearly watching an edited thing. If the

00:37:34.740 truth is good enough, why do you have to exaggerate? So I think people don't realize how easy it is to

00:37:38.960 selectively like edit and clip things and how insanely crazy you can sell a particular factoid,

00:37:45.900 something so far from the truth, just based on the collection of clips or things that you've gathered to

00:37:49.860 show somebody. Yeah. Well, I think we've both been the subject of clips that have been widely

00:37:56.000 misperceived. Do you ever worry that you are too online? Perhaps that is a category that doesn't even

00:38:02.980 exist for you. But I wonder about just what your engagement with social media in particular, but I

00:38:09.220 guess just all your time spent online, I wonder what that feels like and if there's any course

00:38:16.880 correction in your life that you've thought about. Because I just have to say, I mean, every time I

00:38:20.920 say it, it's now painfully boring. But the astonishment and even embarrassment associated

00:38:26.120 with it is undiminished. I mean, when I deleted my Twitter account, my life changed radically. And

00:38:32.960 in ways that I guess I could have anticipated, but it was like just getting off a drug, right? It was

00:38:39.040 just like I had just managed to completely fuck myself over in how I was engaging with this. I 0.99

00:38:46.000 mean, it was this illusion. I mean, in part, it was worse than an illusion. It was a half-truth,

00:38:50.680 right? So it's very hard to debunk a half-truth because you're always in touch with the half

00:38:55.200 that's true. But the sense was that I was just getting information, you know, in the most timely

00:39:01.480 possible way about what was going on in areas of the world I care about. And to some degree,

00:39:07.920 that's true, obviously. I mean, Twitter's X has been the best place for that when there's

00:39:13.020 breaking news. But what you're also getting is this funhouse mirror in which even people you know

00:39:19.680 are appearing increasingly grotesque. And, you know, you have become one of the grotesques,

00:39:25.540 at least for them. I mean, you can't even quite control how you're appearing for them, despite,

00:39:30.720 you know, you have control over what you put out. And the clipification of everything and the

00:39:35.460 reaction or non-reaction or what gets read into your silence and just all of that, it becomes—it's

00:39:42.060 just an insane psychological experiment that we've all been enrolled in. And I don't think it's going

00:39:46.920 well. And I don't think it's going well at scale for culture. And it certainly wasn't going well

00:39:52.140 for me personally. So I'm just wondering how you think about this in your own life and I guess just

00:39:57.580 how you think about social media as a cultural phenomenon at this point.

00:40:01.020 Yeah. So narrowly speaking, just for me on a personal level, as animated as I am and as

00:40:06.300 much as I do care about these issues, when I'm tweeting, I'm tweeting. And when I'm being

00:40:09.880 unhinged online, I'm being unhinged online. But I don't take that with me to sleep. I always tell

00:40:14.880 people, especially young people, if I'm talking at like colleges or for whatever, when I get invited

00:40:18.520 to do speeches to students, if your engagement with politics is making you miserable, you have to

00:40:23.920 stop. If you're legitimately like, if you want to get a little bit wound up while you're there,

00:40:27.900 that's fine. But if you find that for hours afterwards, you're just like left with this

00:40:32.300 disgusting, horrible feeling, or it's like having a significant impact on other parts of your life,

00:40:36.400 emotionally, psychologically, then yeah, you have to disengage because you can't. I mean,

00:40:41.460 like it's in a way, it's kind of like that. Don't set yourself on fire to keep others around you warm.

00:40:46.540 If you're destroying yourself, even if you think you're going to do good or something by contributing

00:40:50.760 online, you're not going to be able to by destroying yourself so much. So on a personal level,

00:40:54.580 I do enjoy my life. I like fighting with people on Twitter. I like arguing with people. That's just

00:40:58.160 the kind of person I grew up as. It's fun for me. But if I found that it was like, God,

00:41:01.440 this is making me miserable, then I would just, I don't, I just don't engage with stuff that would

00:41:04.580 make me feel that way. I also have a very, very compelling reason to on a, on a broader sense.

00:41:09.560 Just to drill down on that. So you don't find, or you don't suspect that it's giving you a distorted

00:41:15.900 sense of humanity. I felt that the world was more populated with psychopaths than it in fact is,

00:41:23.340 right? Like I, like I knew, cause I could see that I was seeing the worst of even people who I

00:41:27.420 actually know. And I know they wouldn't be that bad if I were sitting across the table from them,

00:41:32.060 but online and, you know, when pointed at their own audiences, they had the, you know, it's like

00:41:38.880 their, their ethical IQ got cut in half, right? And their basic decency just evaporated. And so I just

00:41:46.280 felt like I was getting a, an inaccurate picture of just how unscrupulous most people are because

00:41:53.260 they're, they're functioning in a, an environment that is just turning normal people into psychopaths,

00:42:00.000 but they're, you know, functionally psychopaths online, but offline, they would still be normal

00:42:04.500 people if I was just engaging them in that space.

00:42:06.940 So that's what I'm not sure about. So, um, I, yeah, this is exactly what I'm going to hit

00:42:10.120 on, on the, on the wider sense. I remember in like 2016, there was this, people used to say like,

00:42:14.960 bro, like Twitter's not the real world. And I think they were kind of right for the most part.

00:42:18.380 Um, there was a lot of political discourse online, but people online were, as you said, 0.98

00:42:22.160 you know, they're kind of crazy. I think that as time has gone on, I don't think that we've

00:42:26.600 moved towards realizing that people online are crazy. I think that the online world has become

00:42:30.980 like reverse integrated into our reality, right? I mean, one, that's just a natural physical

00:42:35.920 consequence of being closer physically to the internet. Cause now we all have a phone in our

00:42:39.000 pockets that gets us onto the internet at every single point in time. Everything is connected and

00:42:43.100 wired through the internet news stations that talk to you on the radio or that you watch on TV or

00:42:48.200 like, you know, Oh, let's see what's going on. Showing the Twitter feeds and all the presidents

00:42:51.380 and all the candidates and everybody is active on all of these social media things. So

00:42:54.480 for all the craziness that exists online, it feels like we're moving more toward like

00:42:58.800 online is becoming more reality driven in a very unfortunate way. Like everybody in the country

00:43:05.400 is expected to have, you know, a 100% decided opinion on like Leah Thomas and, and this,

00:43:09.900 and the Iman, the Khalifa, whatever the boxer, the Olympic trans boxer, like everybody has to,

00:43:14.060 if you work in a warehouse in Kansas, you need to have a strong opinion on whether or not

00:43:17.560 the IBA was corrected in releasing the disqualification information for these two

00:43:21.480 by just like, why, who cares about this? So I agree that it creates like this. Well,

00:43:28.060 it's like that. Oh man, there's this really dumb horror comic or whatever in Korean or Japanese or 1.00

00:43:33.340 something where there's like holes in walls that people put their bodies into and they come out 0.95

00:43:37.220 like grotesquely disfigured on the other side. That's what social media I think is, is people look

00:43:41.960 at it as like, well, it's just an online thing, but when you participate in it enough,

00:43:44.880 it will change you. Every action you take is, is, is affecting your, your ultimate character

00:43:49.220 at some way, size, shape, or form. And yeah, if you partake in these psychopathic environments,

00:43:52.760 you act like it, it will, you know, imprint itself on you in a reverse manner. So I think that's what's

00:43:57.600 happening, unfortunately. Yeah. But you don't feel like it's happening to you. I mean, you're not,

00:44:02.440 you're not worried that it's bending you in your ethics or in your engagement with people based on

00:44:08.800 just how much time you're spending in that space. I mean, I try my best not to let it.

00:44:13.200 But unfortunately, this is a part of the conversation where every single thing I say

00:44:16.100 is a huge red flag because all of the things around like truth and objectivity and centrality

00:44:20.820 and all this are, are like aesthetics that people wear and then wield in the most bad faith manner

00:44:24.880 possible. But I truly do being politically independent. Um, I really do try to, um, I have

00:44:31.680 like little things that I do to keep in check, like where my biases are and how I'm viewing people

00:44:36.540 and am I being fair or not? And they're like questions I ask myself and ways that I approach my

00:44:40.340 community where I'm like, how do I make sure I'm not getting super audience captured or I'm not

00:44:43.120 having a super distorted view of this particular thing? It usually involves a lot of reading and

00:44:46.640 research on topics. It usually involves like actual discrete methods. Like, can I argue both

00:44:50.540 sides of an issue compellingly? If I were to ask myself a question, what would it take to change

00:44:54.100 my mind from this? Can I give a quick answer or do I, am I actually like getting ideologically

00:44:57.780 captured? Uh, you know, would I be comfortable fighting with this particular part? Like there are

00:45:00.980 questions I ask myself to try to keep steady the course there, but I'm a unique case in that

00:45:05.060 because I'm so not politically part of a big group. I do support the Democrats a lot,

00:45:09.380 but I'm not politically part of those communities. I have more independence there because if I give

00:45:13.900 a take, I'm not going to have to, you know, all of a sudden disavow half my party or have a whole

00:45:18.340 bunch of fights with people who thought they were my friend, who thought we were on the same page

00:45:21.080 politically. Yeah. I think we're in more or less the same orbit politically, as far as I understand

00:45:28.100 the types of views you've argued for. Perhaps, you know, I mean, what do you think we disagree

00:45:34.260 about, if anything? What do we disagree about? Depends on how many, I think probably one of the

00:45:39.620 big disagreements that people wanted me to fight on a lot, or that my fans would bring this up,

00:45:43.360 is the centrality of religion and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That was a big one.

00:45:49.220 Yeah. Well, maybe, maybe let's, uh, let's fight about that. Let me have it. What, what's,

00:45:53.940 what am I wrong about on that front? I feel like when I hear you talk about it, I feel like,

00:45:57.800 uh, Islam is a very big centerpiece to that conflict. I feel like, um, if you look at the 1.00

00:46:03.440 originations of the conflict, if you go, if you take the stretch of time from, say, like 1880 to

00:46:08.300 1967... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

00:46:13.920 samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense

00:46:19.220 podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't

00:46:24.420 afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast

00:46:29.460 is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 26, 2024

#381 — Delusions, Right and Left

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript