#409 — ＂More From Sam＂： Religion, Deportations, Douglas Murray vs. Rogan, & Bill Maher's Dinner with Trump
Summary
Jaron and Sam discuss Douglas Murray's appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast last week, Bill Mars' review of Trump's White House dinner with the president, and the Trump administration's handling of deportations and more.
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm answering some more questions
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that were submitted by subscribers on my Substack page, and discussing some current events. Once
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again, the voice you're hearing on the other end is that of my manager and business partner,
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Jaron Lowenstein. We're hoping to continue this series of episodes. So if you're a subscriber
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to the podcast, you can submit topics over on Substack. And if you're not a subscriber,
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you can become one at samharris.org slash subscribe.
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Okay, Sam, we have a lot to get into today. And obviously I want to get your thoughts on
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Douglas Murray, our buddy, who appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast last week. Feels like it was a
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month ago. I want to also ask you about the financial luminaries who have praised the handling
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of Trump's tariffs. We'll get into that as well.
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The art of the deal. Bill Ackman, the art of the deal.
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The art of the deal. We will also discuss our friend Bill Mars. We're going to get into all
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that, Sam. I could just tell you're ready to go. We're going to discuss our friend Bill
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Mars' review of his White House dinner with Trump. Hold, hold. And discuss deportations and more.
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But before we get into that, I want to get your reactions on some of the questions we got over
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at your Substack page. These aren't the exact questions, but I put them together to represent
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Here we go. Scott Galloway has been vocal about his concerns for the well-being of young men.
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Jonathan Haidt, vocal about his concerns for the well-being of teenagers, predominantly girls.
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Obviously, social media plays a huge role in this. But do you think the erosion of religion plays
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a role here as well? And what are you doing to protect your daughters from social media?
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And how are you providing a sense of community for them that is lost without religion?
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Well, we've kept them off social media. They're exposed to the internet, obviously,
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and they watch a lot of YouTube. And so they're getting fed by the algorithm. So I mean, there's
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only so much control you can exert there. I think our oldest didn't get a smartphone until she was
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in seventh grade. And that was really just kind of born of a necessity to get in touch with her.
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And she also would have been the last kid without a smartphone at that point. I think we'll hold that
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same policy for our youngest. But they don't have any public-facing social media experience. Even
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our 16-year-old now doesn't. I think that's true. I think she has some private thing with her friends,
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right? I think they use Snapchat, which is not now. Now I'm going to sound like a boomer.
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I'm not quite a boomer. But I think it was Snapchat, at least for a while, and those videos disappear.
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But again, it's all within nothing public-facing, or at least not to my knowledge. I could be one of
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those parents who's being carefully deceived, and it could get ugly out there. But the intention was
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to keep it from them as long as possible, and also to educate them in how bewildering and soul-crushing
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it can be to have your self-worth anchored to the feedback you get in those channels. And so they're
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aware of the social problem, and they have not yet been, again, to my knowledge, personally exposed to
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any of it. And they've seen some friends have crazy experiences, some friends with public-facing
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YouTube channels, et cetera, that just look like brain damage for the whole family. So there's that.
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So I think it's, you know, I definitely take Jonathan Haidt's instruction here to the degree
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that we can. We don't have a school, unfortunately, that will ban phones or demand that phones stay in
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lockers for the whole day, though I think we've, some parents have tried to make it that. I think
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that's Jonathan's recommendation. As far as religion and its absence being consequential for
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a generation, I'm not so sure how to parse all that. I mean, obviously, the trend towards secularization
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in America has been pretty strong in the last 20 years, and the trend toward atheism, too,
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has been pretty strong. I mean, the Pew data on that suggests that, you know, the secularists and
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the atheists have been winning, notwithstanding the claims that there's been a pendulum swing back,
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a la Jordan Peterson and others making those noises. And I mean, I do think, frankly, that
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secular culture needs some things that it doesn't have, right? We don't have a sense of the sacred
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that is not embarrassing or, you know, just got a new age and its own version of irrational. So
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the piecemeal efforts people have been using to be spiritual but not religious often don't make a
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ton of sense. And as you know, over at Waking Up, we're trying to present what we think does make
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sense. I think, you know, I think you want a contemplative life, you want community, you want
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strong ethical instruction, you want all those things that people have traditionally associated with
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religion. And secular culture doesn't really offer institutions and off-the-shelf versions of that
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that you can readily point to. And I think many of us are just kind of cobbling that together,
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you know, ourselves, and it's a work in progress.
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Yeah. I mean, I've found it to be a big void of my life, having grown up religious and having a
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great sense of community. I no longer wanted the thou shall nots and the religious aspects,
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but I sorely still today miss community. I've since been able to make it up in a number of ways
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with, you know, guy groups and other projects, but I felt for a long time that I was, I had
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wandered out into the desert alone. And I have long since wished there was some version that's not
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dorky of a community that could come together around a set of ideas. And you're right, maybe Waking Up
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will be one of those places that'll establish that one day. Well, speaking of that.
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Yeah. I mean, people have, you know, meditation groups and book clubs and, you know, we've launched,
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as you know, the digital version of community and people are doing some of that stuff out there in
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real life. So, you know, I certainly encourage that. But again, speaking much more widely for
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the culture, it's clear that being really into sports or, you know, into entertainment or, you know,
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guys groups or whatever it is, it's not the same thing as having an amazing building,
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you know, in the center of town that everyone goes to on Sunday. And it's been that way for a
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century, right? And that's just not the same thing. Yeah. And maybe this is related to your
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meditation practice, but how do you stay balanced with all the stuff that creeps into your life from
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the podcast, the political bullshit and whatnot? And really, before you answer this, I think what
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many are looking for is a way to stay sane today while surrounded by many people in their lives with
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whom they disagree? Well, I, you know, I tend to pay attention to what I'm doing with my mind. And
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if I'm feeling unhappy or irritable or something, you know, a mindfulness alarm tends to go off. And
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if it doesn't go off, if I'm in the presence of Anika, my wife, her alarm will go off and she'll say,
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you know, what the fuck is wrong with you? And that'll get my attention. So, yeah, I mean, I just,
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you know, I, this is just the universal solvent for unhappiness may pay attention to what you're
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doing with your attention and notice the consequences. Yeah. Well, I know that's the
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sort of the normal prescription, but what about today with how divided we are and many, many people,
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including myself, having people in my family that wildly disagree about politics and both sides seem
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to be concerned about the other. How do you come together? I've, I've found a way to find joy in that,
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but how, how have you found that? I mean, not to out you, but your two best friends are MAGA or MAGA
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adjacent. And so how have you been able to succeed? I watch you navigate that beautifully. How do you
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advise for maybe others? Maybe you can share how you're able to do that so well? Well, I think you'd
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have to keep your priorities straight. I mean, there are certain relationships that, you know,
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you are not going to sacrifice to the, um, the gods of politics and political disagreement,
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right? So you just, you just know going in that you, you have to figure out how to navigate this.
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Other relationships, frankly, I'm happy to sacrifice. You know, this is what I've run into.
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We've, we've seen that. Yeah. I mean, we've run, this is what I've run into with people who
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have public facing platforms. Some of them have much bigger platforms than I do. And I think they're
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doing immense harm in the world. Right. So I'm in those cases, it's a different ethical responsibility,
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right? That when the conversation breaks down there, it matters not just for the relationship,
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but for my sense of, again, kind of a civic responsibility, right? So I mean, I think Elon
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has completely lost his way. I think he's behaving like a psychopath. He used to be a friend. He's a
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friend no longer because he's behaving like a psychopath, not merely interpersonally with me.
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I mean, that, that might be a survivable event if it could be talked about, but at scale, you know,
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I mean, he's doing more harm than almost anyone on planet earth to our culture is. I mean, I would
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certainly defend that thesis to anyone who might be rolling their eyes or throwing their brow when
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they hear me say it like that. I just think it's absolutely awful what he's doing. He's in second
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place to Trump and sometimes not even in second place. Right. But personally, you know, I have,
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you know, some very close friends who voted for Trump. The thing I don't really get in those
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collisions when we do talk about politics is a real case on the other side. And I've spoken about
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this. I bash these guys, not in name, but in fact, on several podcasts, because they're my canaries in
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the coal mine or they're my lab rats who I keep returning to. And I keep noticing things about the
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ordinary Trump supporter at this moment in, in Trump's despicable career, which is that they don't
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have a lot to say in defense of Trump and Trumpism and what they do say. And what other people say,
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certainly in the media, I mean, it's not, I'm not now not talking about friends, but just the kinds of
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people who step forward to defend Trump tends to be dishonest or delusional. Right. I mean, you know,
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the, the 4D chess people. Right. Right. So anyway, we'll talk about that, but like the case to be
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made for Trump at the moment is, um, most often made by simply averting one's eyes and saying,
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you don't want to talk about politics and let's wait and see what happens. Right. That's basically
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the holding pattern. Right. Well, aside from that, so basically you just figured out how to prioritize
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your relationships over politics when it, when it matters. And you say, look, I love you guys.
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We're going to stop short here and we'll pick it up and talk about something else.
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Yeah. And I'm confident that when something sufficiently salient comes around, I mean,
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there's actually been cases of this already where something that's truly indefensible, that
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is not also not debatable. Right. And there's that Venn diagram is a little hard to, it's a little hard
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to clarify for people, but because the, the, the number of things that I think Trump has done or said
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and done that are totally indefensible and totally disqualifying in a president, uh, many of them,
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it seems I, although I don't really see it this way, it seems many are open to alternate
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interpretations. So, you know, who knows if it was really that way, there's another way of seeing it,
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blah, blah, blah. January 6th was just a demonstration that got out of hand. I mean,
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didn't you see the footage of the cops actually letting the, letting them in the building? What
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was that about? Maybe it was a false flag operation. Uh, thank you, Tucker Carlson. When you find
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the stuff that's really not debatable and also indefensible, then I, I'm confident that, you know,
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that the people we're talking about will, will see those situations as I do. Right. Well, we'll see
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what that line is. I know you've asked a number of times, what's it going to take? You know, how far
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does one have to go before they, uh, have regret their decision? I'm confident we will get there at
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this rate. We're going to get there probably in a week. Yeah. When we all move out and do a, uh,
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shelter together. Yeah. I don't know what country will have us at this point. So. All right. Moving
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on to this, just as a question that you said, I think it was the most popular question presented
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to you after you wrote your book lying, but I'm just going to reframe it here because I saw a lot
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of these comments coming in. So I find it annoying that my kids believe in Santa or the tooth fairy,
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but what's the big deal with people lying to their kids about stuff like that? Isn't it good to
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engage in fantasy play? What's wrong with lying to your kids about Santa? Well, first, the surprising
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thing is I, and I really didn't anticipate this until I wrote the book and published it and it just
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came back at me. I never anticipated it is that I heard from many, many people who remember what it
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was like to discover that their parents had lied to them about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, most often
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Santa Claus. And they considered it a moral injury. They were just horrified to discover that an
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elaborate lie could be told like that. And they wondered what other lies had been told in the
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family. And in fact, also I heard from fundamentalist Christians who I think I have this right, would say
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that their family never lied about Santa because they didn't want, they didn't want any suspicion
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generated that they could be lying about Jesus, right? Like that, there was cross-talk between the
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real religious beliefs there and the fun fake ones. Anyway, so I heard from people that I didn't even
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know existed who actually had been traumatized by discovering such an elaborate lie in the household.
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But yeah, you know, my ethics around lying were established clearly enough, early enough, so long
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before we had kids that it was just clear we weren't going to lie to them about Santa or the tooth fairy or
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anything else. And I would just point out, nobody is tempted to lie about Halloween or, you know,
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Middle Earth or Harry Potter or anything else that's super fun for kids to fantasize about.
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And, you know, you could suspect that it might be a little more fun if you lied about those things,
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if you said, you know, Frankenstein was real or vampires are real or Dumbledore is real. But I mean,
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that's just not, we're not tempted to do that and there's no problem. And so I can assure you
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Christmas is a ton of fun for kids if you never lie to them about it.
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Right. Yeah. I mean, I think more, I think people more use the lie of Santa today for the invisible
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babysitter for the, you get a month or two to hang that over your kids' heads to get them to behave
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But they behave just fine if you tell them there are real consequences, even Christmas-shaped
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consequences to, you know, their misbehavior. I mean, you could say, listen, if you really want that
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stuff for Christmas, you know, stop doing that. And it would be the same message, right? I just
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think it's, it does introduce a, perhaps a weird social experiment in the school. If your kid is
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the only kid who knows the truth about Santa and they're surrounded by dummies who believe, but
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flip it around and ask yourself, do you want your kid to be the last kid in second grade or whatever
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grade it is to believe in Santa and to be teased by their friends? You don't want that, right? So at what
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point do you want them to be disabused of this fiction? So you want them to be the last boy or
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girl standing because that's embarrassing. So why not be the first, right? Or the second?
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I like it. I think it's great. Anybody who has more questions, please come over to the Substack
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page and you can ask and we'll try to answer those for next time. But all right, it's time to get back
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to our friend Douglas Murray, who by the way, will be on the podcast with you later this week,
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promoting his book called Democracies and Death Cults. And I'm sure you'll be discussing his
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appearance on the Rogan podcast, which was incredible. So we don't have to go crazy here,
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but I certainly want to hear your reactions and see if you have anything to say, which I know you do.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, the most incredible thing for me was the, the result of it, right? I mean,
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Douglas was great. You know, I, I think I might disagree with a couple of things he said and,
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and I think I might've taken a slightly different line in that conversation, but
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in many respects, he was much better than I would have been in having that conversation too. So there's
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just, I thought he was spectacular. And yet it was obvious from the beginning that the conversation
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was going to fail as an intervention because of who Joe and Dave are, because of the audiences
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they've cultivated. If you look at the response, I mean, I, I, I haven't done this in recent days,
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but in the immediate aftermath, I think when the, when it had some hundreds of thousands of views
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on, on YouTube, I looked at the comments and, you know, at that time, maybe things have changed.
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I can't imagine, but it was a hundred percent. I mean, not even 99%, a hundred percent against
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Douglas, right? Douglas was just a pompous asshole, just arguing from authority. There's no value in
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what he said. I can't believe Joe even had him on. Dave Smith's a genius, right? I mean,
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that was the center of narrative gravity there. Obviously all of that is completely delusional
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and symptomatic of the problem that we have in our culture and the problem that, that Joe has
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created for himself over there with his immense audience, right? I mean, Joe has cultivated that
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audience. Joe is in some sense, a part of his audience, right? He's, um, you know, his reaction
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to Douglas in the moment, when Douglas was trying to perform an intervention on him, pointing out the
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obvious fact that he has played footsie with, uh, some very dangerous conspiracy theories.
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Um, he has had people like Daryl Cooper on the podcast and not had the searching conversation
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that was ethically necessary in the aftermath of Daryl Cooper's appearance on Tucker Carlson.
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He didn't, you know, he can use the phrase sunlight is the best disinfectant and perhaps it is,
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but he brought none of it to that conversation. And he brings none of it to any conversation
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where he hasn't done his homework in advance. So as to detect the lies and the delusions of his
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guests, right? He didn't do it with Trump. He doesn't do it with people like RFK Jr. I mean,
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he just said he, which ironically, he did it here with Douglas, who's a, who's an expert. So he brought
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on a non-expert to counterbalance him. Listen, if you get across the table from Joe and you don't have
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your facts straight about MMA, or you're going to say something bad about marijuana, he's going to crush
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you, right? He'll crush you in five seconds and he will never let up until you start making sense.
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And if you don't, the conversation's over, right? I mean, maybe he'll change the subject politely,
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but you know, you're never coming back and he will make no secret of the fact that he thinks
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you're a moron, right? He doesn't do that when Daryl Cooper, the podcast host and amateur historian who
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he really admires gets on there and starts spouting David Irving's fake Holocaust history
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because he doesn't know that he's doing that, right? He hasn't prepared himself to do that. And
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he doesn't see the liability of talking to a entirely self-taught, you know, enthusiast of
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taboo history and not being prepared to push back against it. Again, it's easy to see the source of the
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confusion because there's this basic assumption that there can be nothing wrong in having, quote,
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good faith, good-natured conversation with somebody and just getting their view of the world, right?
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What could be wrong with that? And I mean, Lex Friedman, while he has a slightly different
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approach, I mean, I criticized Lex in the last podcast too, he was very annoyed to be wrapped up
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in the same sentence with Joe. And perhaps that was to some degree unfair because my gripe with Lex
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is slightly different. I mean, it's not that Lex does no preparation. I mean, he obviously does.
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And I think he tweeted, he got on Twitter and read me the riot act and said he does more preparation
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than 99% of journalists. I mean, we might doubt that, but it's just that what he doesn't do with
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all that preparation is actually effectively push back against people who really need to hit a brick
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wall at that point of the conversation. He platforms people he shouldn't platform. You know,
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Kanye West is the example I really publicly whinged about.
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But even when he pushes back, even if he pushes back with words and you ask questions,
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if this was the podcast election, what that really meant was over time, a few hours, you humanize
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somebody. And if the vibes are good, even if you're pushing back and you're hanging out,
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sitting across from one another, the energy is going to be such that the audience is led to believe
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that this can't be too bad of a person, no matter what you say. And so there's some responsibility
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there that even if you're going to have journalistic integrity and say, you know, push back wherever
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is necessary, it's really hard when you're smiling and giggling in between questions and there's nice
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moments to be had. Even if you say, look, let's just agree that this was a bad idea. And I think
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you lied on that one or whatever. They're going to find something two minutes later because it's just
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to hang. And those hangs are effective in, uh, sane washing or humanizing people.
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Yeah. You really can't have it both ways. I mean, many of these podcasters celebrated the 2024
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election as the podcast election, but that, that was really just to claim that these podcasts had been
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instrumental in changing public opinion, right? I mean, they, in getting Trump elected, people saw
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his humanity. They saw he's a real guy who can just hang and who can talk about anything. He's not
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afraid, but, but Kamala Harris is afraid to go on Rogan's podcast. And that was scored against her
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pretty heavily, right? She's just got canned talking points and she's so terrified to touch
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all the third rails, you know, set up by the woke intelligentsia that, you know, she's going to be
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tongue-tied on, on any topic that would otherwise humanize her. Uh, she can't even risk turning on the
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microphone with someone like Joe. To say it was the podcast election is to say that those conversations
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mattered, right? And they did matter. I totally agree. It was the podcast election. And so it mattered
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that none of these guys, not Joe, not even Lex, though he actually did try a little bit in his
00:22:41.580
interview with Trump, not Andrew Schultz, not the all-in guys, not Theo Vaughn, right? No one did what
00:22:48.980
any sane and responsible journalist would have done, would have had to have done in one of those
00:22:54.620
encounters, which is to push back against Trump's odious, divisive, dangerous lies, right? Which are
00:23:04.380
well-established. This is not my opinion. This is not a topic about which there can be a credible
00:23:10.300
difference of opinion. The man has lied about everything under the sun and there's a, just a
00:23:16.080
clear track record. And to take the most consequential, the big lie that he won the 2020 election,
00:23:22.260
right? That it was stolen from him. That Joe Biden was a fraudulent president because he stole the
00:23:28.280
election. That was a dangerous lie that he still hangs over our society like a sword of Damocles,
00:23:34.300
right? It's still a provocation to political violence. And one of the most depressing things
00:23:39.660
about the election night in 2024 was not that Trump won. I mean, that was depressing from my point
00:23:46.380
of view. But the genuinely scary thing, and I've said this at least at one point on a podcast,
00:23:51.640
is that there was a moment in the evening where Kamala Harris still could have won, right? The
00:23:57.320
so-called blue wall states hadn't fallen yet, right? I think at that point, the New York Times
00:24:03.200
was giving her an 11% chance of winning. So it was still, it was in the realm of possibility for her to
00:24:08.260
win. And many of us recognized at that point that given all the lying, given that even the, you know,
00:24:13.920
Elon Musk at that point was lying about voting irregularities and fraud, obvious fraud,
00:24:18.280
in Pennsylvania, I think. It would have been dangerous for her to have won at that point.
00:24:23.360
It was not safe for her to have won a free and fair election at that moment, given the messaging,
00:24:29.160
right? We, you know, we would have had an explosion of political violence coming from the right. I'm
00:24:33.780
absolutely convinced of it because of what Trump had done for four years, the way he had lied about
00:24:39.500
the lack of integrity of our electoral system. Joe Rogan, the all-in guys, Lex Friedman should have
00:24:47.460
pushed really hard on that point. That was the only responsible thing to do. They did nothing like
00:24:53.880
that. So it was the podcast election. What they did is they gave him a dozen hours, practically, of
00:24:59.840
free media exposure to tens of millions of people, wherein they, they worked very hard to
00:25:06.780
midwife a, the most humanizing conversation possible. They, they just created a good hang with
00:25:12.720
the guy, uh, and made him look like the celebrity that he is. I mean, we can get to Bill Maher in a
00:25:18.340
second, but I mean, it's the fact that he's a good hang is not relevant given his track record, given
00:25:24.860
what we already know he has done to our politics and any journalist. I mean, this is why it's so
00:25:30.300
dangerous and, and, and irresponsible. The fact that the biggest media platforms in the world right now
00:25:37.460
are providing an illusion of long form journalism without any of the, the sanity sparing principles
00:25:47.240
of real journalism. Yeah. Well, I don't want to get back to Bill yet. I want to, I do want to get to
00:25:52.160
him, but what I, what I do want to talk about is maybe while we're here on the podcast, if you can
00:25:57.320
just sharpen up or, or help clarify some of the confusion around freedom of speech versus
00:26:01.360
responsibility and what you are really wanting these platforms to do. And then next, if you can
00:26:07.340
talk about maybe some confusion around expertise, I do have some more questions there, but why don't
00:26:12.160
you start with that? Yeah. Well, I mean, so the, obviously probably the most misunderstood piece
00:26:17.300
of misinformation about me is, um, that, uh, I'm in some sense against free speech, right? I mean,
00:26:24.240
that, you know, that's been endlessly spun against me on X. I mean, this is what Elon tends to amplify
00:26:29.420
about me. It's totally false. Let me just unpick this here. So there are many liberals,
00:26:37.340
democracies that seek to regulate speech much more than America does. The UK, much of Western
00:26:45.440
Europe, Canada, New Zealand, all of them have more aggressive approaches to what is called hate
00:26:52.480
speech than we do. I mean, I'm open to argument on this point, but I think all, everything I've seen
00:26:57.380
there seems terribly misguided. I think for instance, laws against Holocaust denial in Western
00:27:02.660
Europe, they can send someone to jail for denying the Holocaust. Right. I think that is totally
00:27:07.060
counterproductive and unethical on people's doors in UK for social media posts. Oh yeah. I mean,
00:27:12.560
then there's completely insane instances of, you know, someone will tweet, you know, men are men
00:27:17.140
and women are women, and they'll get a visit from the police and in London. Right. I mean, it's just,
00:27:21.760
I don't even know how to think about that. I mean, I hear these, these specific cases and they sound
00:27:26.260
like, you know, episodes of black mirror. So all of this is to say that I think we're incredibly
00:27:30.980
lucky in America to have the first amendment and to have a nearly absolute right to free speech.
00:27:37.060
That is something that I would not want to lose. And yet it has almost no relevance to the debates
00:27:43.920
we're having about so-called free speech on platforms like X or, you know, platforming people
00:27:50.740
on podcasts, right? My criticism of Joe Rogan, all of that is unrelated to this question of how,
00:27:57.540
around the primacy of the first amendment and how good it is that we have it in America.
00:28:02.060
All the first amendment covers is one's political freedom to think out loud, right? The government
00:28:09.420
cannot jail you or otherwise make your life miserable for thinking out loud on almost any topic
00:28:16.660
in almost any way, in almost any context, right? Now there are some exceptions to this and, you know,
00:28:21.400
consult your local constitutional lawyer for those. But generally speaking, you know, and I think it's
00:28:27.500
even false to say that you can't shout fire in a movie theater, right? I mean, it's like there's
00:28:32.400
wide latitude. That said, all these people who claim to be free speech absolutists are delusional,
00:28:40.540
right? I mean, or lying. I mean, you know, Elon is the antithesis of it. He often calls himself a
00:28:45.600
free speech absolutist. He's nothing of the kind, right? I mean, he throws people off X who he doesn't like,
00:28:51.140
you know, journalists and otherwise. He preferentially boosts his content and de-boosts other content.
00:28:57.180
He slavishly follows the rules set down to him by authoritarian regimes the world over and
00:29:01.660
silences political dissent in places like Turkey, right? One would call him a hypocrite, but that
00:29:07.780
would be to suggest that he has principles he's struggling to live by. It's just, it's a free-for-all
00:29:13.720
over there and free speech absolutism has nothing to do with it. What he has done is he's brought back,
00:29:19.000
you know, with great fanfare, certain anti-Semites and white supremacists, and, you know, you can
00:29:24.740
judge- I want to get back to, I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to get back to what the
00:29:27.920
difference is when you're saying you don't like that Rogue and other people are platforming. People
00:29:31.460
are confused. They're saying- Oh, so I'm getting there. So the point is everyone is in the curation
00:29:39.360
business, even 4chan, right? That digital sewer has a moderation policy, right? I mean, it's just,
00:29:46.600
there's, there isn't literally, there's no place you can go that is a business or anything like a
00:29:52.480
business that doesn't have a moderation policy that isn't in the, isn't faced with the ongoing
00:29:58.580
decision-making process of who to platform or, and who not to platform. What ideas are worth
00:30:04.900
amplifying? What ideas are worth avoiding, right? Literally even 4chan is in that business and that's,
00:30:12.240
to say nothing of X or in Facebook. And so it is with every podcast host. Every, you know,
00:30:18.020
Joe Rogan has done thousands of podcasts. He'll do thousands more, presumably. Let's say he does 10,000
00:30:24.100
over the course of his life. He still has to decide who to platform, right? Who's worth talking to and
00:30:29.720
who isn't. And those decisions can be made responsibly or not. And I'm really not saying
00:30:37.560
that he shouldn't talk to anyone he wants to talk to. That's not my point. I mean, there are people,
00:30:42.840
you know, there are people who I think shouldn't be platformed because you, what, you know, Joe would
00:30:48.160
be doing would be plucking them out of obscurity, right? And suddenly making them famous. And that
00:30:53.060
would be a bad thing. But, you know, that aside, he should talk to anyone he wants to talk to.
00:30:58.860
I'm saying that there are certain people it is irresponsible to talk to unless you do your
00:31:04.420
homework, unless you can provide the sunlight you imagine is going to be a great disinfectant.
00:31:09.880
It's not a good thing for you or your reputation or the world to talk to those people, because what
00:31:15.620
you're doing is you're just giving them access to your highly impressionable audience who, you know,
00:31:21.800
if you're not in a position to know when Daryl Cooper is recycling David Irving, you can be assured
00:31:27.060
that most of your audience isn't either, right? And it's bad, certainly at this moment where
00:31:33.280
we're seeing antisemitism explode the world over. It is bad to be recycling David Irving and not
00:31:39.820
knowing it. And that's what Daryl Cooper is doing. I mean, maybe, you know, I'm reasonably sure Daryl
00:31:45.540
has read Irving directly and knows when he's using him as a talking point. But, you know, even there,
00:31:51.740
maybe Daryl doesn't entirely know what he's up to.
00:31:55.400
Well, maybe Rogan's thinking, look, I got people like Dave Smith on the podcast. I don't remember if
00:32:00.920
Weinstein was on or others that, for example, during the pandemic seemed to have break away,
00:32:05.280
breaking away from the institutions of the norms and almost acted as whistleblowers or people that
00:32:10.160
were reporting information that may or may not have been included in whatever the diet was that we
00:32:16.800
were getting. And many people found it helpful. Many people found that some of the things that
00:32:22.600
they were saying were being left out. And we were getting utterly confused by the mainstream media.
00:32:28.440
And so here comes Joe thinking, let me find these voices and put them on my platform and do my part.
00:32:35.540
Yeah. So and many of the voices he platformed were not worth listening to. And I think it's still true
00:32:42.780
to say that the best estimates are that something like 300,000 people in America died unnecessarily
00:32:48.780
due to vaccine hesitancy, which is to say that if everyone took the vaccine who could have taken the
00:32:53.540
vaccine, 300,000 people would be alive today who aren't, right? So that's a bad outcome. I think
00:32:59.660
all the people who were not so worried about COVID, but extremely worried about the mRNA vaccines had a
00:33:06.160
hand in creating that environment, right? And that was a bad thing. Yes, the establishment embarrassed
00:33:12.220
itself on many points during COVID. I think that the lessons that people are drawing from that are being
00:33:18.640
highly exaggerated. But nonetheless, it's true. Certain of those moments were obvious
00:33:24.960
at the outset. And certainly it became obvious months and even years later, right? I mean, the
00:33:31.060
calling the lab leak hypothesis racist was obviously an error and an embarrassing one
00:33:39.580
within seconds of, you know, the first person who spoke those words, right? I don't know who that was,
00:33:45.800
but, you know, you became widely vilified on the left if you thought that, you know, the Wuhan Institute
00:33:51.480
of Virology had anything to do with the origin of COVID. As I pointed out at the time and have pointed
00:33:56.780
out many times since, that was somehow, that was inscrutable because it does seem politically worse
00:34:03.160
and even borderline racist to allege that the origin of the virus is the wet market, right? Where, because
00:34:10.560
these Chinese people can't figure out how to stop eating bats and pangolins and raccoon dogs. I mean,
00:34:16.300
which is more politically invidious, that or that they could have had a lab leak, which is a fate that
00:34:22.500
every biosafety lab in the world fears, and understandably so. So the allegation of racism
00:34:29.300
was idiotic. It was always obvious. Even I, who am castigated by people in Joe's audience for having
00:34:36.520
overreacted to COVID was on the same page around the lab leak. Honestly, the errors that were made
00:34:43.300
were, are so distorted in the funhouse mirror of, you know, contrarian takes over in Joe's world
00:34:51.500
and certainly in RFK's world that it's, it's very hard to grant them many of the points they want to
00:34:57.160
make. But the general point stands is that the, the institutions and certainly mainstream journalists,
00:35:02.520
scientists, uh, scientists, scientific journals embarrass themselves. And, but I can count on
00:35:08.400
one hand the, the major instances of that. And I can't, I'm not even sure I can think of one that
00:35:14.480
was medically important, right? Stigmatizing ivermectin, I don't think was medically, I still
00:35:19.720
don't think was medically important. Is that, is ivermectin still, is that important to take now? And
00:35:24.340
as a prophylactic against COVID was Brett Weinstein on, on firm ground doing 150 podcasts in a row on that
00:35:30.620
topic, I doubt it. We know that if you, uh, create a map of people who, you know, doubted the, uh,
00:35:38.360
safety of the vaccine and, and thought ivermectin was a prophylactic, we know that deaths from COVID
00:35:43.220
went up in those, those neighborhoods, not down. Right. I mean, that's just, yeah. All right.
00:35:48.120
I brought this subject up, but I'm a, I think I'm going to kill myself if I have to, we've talked
00:35:53.140
about COVID any longer. So let's move on to this. I, what I want to hear is your thoughts.
00:35:56.800
But the point is they're drawing the wrong lesson from their, you know, that we were, we were right
00:36:00.940
about COVID song and dance that they, they keep doing and have been doing for years. One, it's not
00:36:06.560
true in some very important respects. Two, where it is true, they're drawing the wrong lesson. They're
00:36:11.960
drawing, the lesson they're drawing is that expertise is not really a thing, right? And yet they can't
00:36:18.640
apply that claim in many places in their, in their lives, certainly, you know, where they care about
00:36:23.780
things. Uh, they know that expertise is a thing. Well, this is what I want you to get into the
00:36:28.060
expertise part. The thing is, is that, okay, you've said it's okay to be an autodidact. You can read
00:36:32.240
lots of books. You can be very smart. And, and Dave Smith is a very smart guy, obviously, but I want
00:36:37.760
to hear your thoughts. I've heard you say that eventually these people have to be verified by
00:36:42.360
real experts and, and talk to me about how these non-experts can play a role, uh, or how they need to
00:36:48.600
sort of synthesize it within the system so that, um, they can have their ideas, uh, checked or
00:36:55.760
verified. So you just asked the question, how do we ever know that anything is true, right? I mean,
00:37:01.380
so take this, the prototypical case, the, you know, the, the extreme case in my view, but it's the kind
00:37:06.540
of case that people want to celebrate. You have Alex Jones, who, while commenting about everything
00:37:12.560
under the sun, occasionally says something that's true, right? And it says it early, right? He's the first
00:37:18.240
to claim that whatever, something in the water is, you know, turning frogs gay or whatever,
00:37:24.420
whatever, whatever his goofy claim was that gets lots of laughs over there, but the, um, he'll say
00:37:30.140
something and he's not, he's a non-expert. He's certainly not a biologist. How do we find out
00:37:36.460
what is actually true about frog behavior or frog biology? Well, then you need the real frog specialists
00:37:42.920
in there to figure that out, right? You still need the experts. Even if the experts are wrong,
00:37:47.000
even if you have a cabal of experts in, you know, journals on frog biology who, uh, think it's
00:37:52.960
a homophobic to allege that frogs are gay and they've been, they've been actively suppressing
00:37:57.420
that knowledge for years, right? The, the only way to, to actually figure it out is yet more honest
00:38:03.460
biology around frogs. And so it is with the safety of MRNA vaccines or the real dynamics by which, uh,
00:38:11.780
disease spreads or, you know, the risk of H5N1 becoming, you know, human to human transmissible,
00:38:17.740
you need the real scientists doing the real work who are really competent to do it. And so the role
00:38:23.400
of an RFK junior or a, a non-expert, I'm not saying is non-existent. It's possible for someone to
00:38:30.100
get busy, you know, Googling or spend a lot of time with chat GPT and come up with a question
00:38:36.120
that provokes a real investigation of something that has been ignored, uh, even for political,
00:38:41.840
you know, political reasons, but you still need experts to fly. You need real pilots to fly the
00:38:47.540
plane. And that's true across the board. And so it is with, uh, you know, even a discipline like
00:38:54.000
history, right? At the end of the day, you need people who are adequate to tell you what really
00:39:00.580
happened in the past because they can go into the archives and, you know, read the papers in the
00:39:04.780
original languages and, uh, or, you know, journalistically they can, they know what
00:39:09.260
Vladimir Putin says in Russian, right? Not just what gets translated to English, right? I mean,
00:39:14.380
so it's just, there's, it matters to have real, we need real experts. We need real journalists. We
00:39:19.460
need people who are not just winging it. And everyone knows this. Joe knows this. Dave Smith knows this.
00:39:27.000
Uh, and so one thing that was so frustrating about their collision with Douglas was that
00:39:30.660
Douglas was making this point, uh, though he made it in a way that, that understandably they
00:39:35.240
proved allergic to, I mean, he, you know, when he, when he embarrassed Dave Smith by saying,
00:39:40.500
have you ever been to the region? Have you ever been to Ukraine? Have you ever been to Gaza?
00:39:45.100
And the answer was no, you know, from Douglas's point of view as a journalist and as a
00:39:51.600
I didn't think Dave Smith, I didn't, I didn't get that he was embarrassed by that.
00:39:55.180
Right. And you could argue that, you know, it was actually a false move from Douglas's point of
00:39:59.640
view. I mean, I think it's, I understand that Douglas is a war correspondent, feels the need
00:40:03.960
to actually, you know, talk to the troops and that's a journalistic responsibility. That's fine.
00:40:09.640
And I think, and he, and he did reveal that Dave was delusional in his, in the picture he had formed
00:40:15.860
in his mind about what life was like in Gaza, calling it a concentration camp, calling it an open
00:40:20.760
air prison, imagining that the blockade was so complete that there was, you know, nothing of,
00:40:30.120
I think none of that's helpful to have been there, but it's not required.
00:40:32.640
Yeah. So, so Douglas was saying, have you ever been there? Right. Do you even know what you're
00:40:35.380
talking about? And he, it's clear that he didn't, he just was taking these words at face value,
00:40:40.280
blockade and open air prison and concentration camp. And so there, I mean, I thought Douglas's
00:40:45.220
point landed, but, you know, Dave is right to say that you can think and, and, and even talk
00:40:51.260
publicly about the ethics of a war without ever having been to the country, right? You can read
00:40:55.820
the right books, you can read the right articles, you know, provided you're actually getting real
00:40:59.640
information. You can know enough to know what you think about who started the war and, you know,
00:41:05.540
what the response should be, et cetera. But the problem is with Dave and Joe there, Dave is not an
00:41:11.980
expert in any of these things. He's a standup comedian, right? He's self-taught in all of,
00:41:16.740
on all these topics. And he admits that. And yet he's content to play an expert on, on TV,
00:41:25.000
right? And on the largest podcasts on planet earth, right? He's, he'll talk to 50 million people
00:41:30.420
about how there's a genocide in Gaza, right? Or how Putin was pushed by NATO overreach to, as a
00:41:38.720
rational actor to invade Ukraine. And, uh, the onus is, uh, to a considerable degree on us for
00:41:46.360
having failed, you know, diplomatically there. He can make these claims as stridently as he wants.
00:41:52.740
Uh, he can go on, you know, Piers Morgan and debate people as though he were an expert,
00:41:56.980
but at the end of the day, he can pull the ripcord and say, listen, if I get anything wrong,
00:42:01.220
I'm just, I'm not an expert, right? So he suffers no reputational penalty, at least in his world,
00:42:06.280
for being wrong the way a real expert would. And yet he can hit the ball as hard as he wants
00:42:11.700
and do that for as long as he wants in every other context. And that's what it's like for him to play
00:42:17.280
tennis without the net, right? There really is no net there. He's the, it can't possibly go wrong for
00:42:22.680
him on his terms. And yet by his account and by the account of his audience, and certainly in Joe's
00:42:28.780
mind, he's hitting the ball as hard as anyone. He's hard, as hard as the pros, right? He's returning
00:42:34.400
serve perfectly. And yet they're not noticing that there's no net. And for, yet for Douglas,
00:42:41.240
there is a net, right? And when the ball goes into it and he loses a point, it really matters
00:42:46.300
for him, right? Because he has, he is an expert on the topics he's addressing. And the onus really
00:42:51.820
is on him to get his facts straight and not to pretend to know things he doesn't know. And if he
00:42:56.980
winds up dignifying a source as legitimate that turns out to be, you know, fake, that's a real
00:43:04.040
problem. But with all these self-taught entertainers, you know, and even someone like
00:43:09.220
Daryl Cooper is in that bucket, they never pay a penalty for this. I mean, Daryl Cooper is trafficking
00:43:14.900
in profoundly misleading misinformation about the Holocaust and about the behavior of the Nazis and
00:43:21.620
their motives, right? About the, you know, about, about Hitler, what he was thinking and why he was
00:43:26.560
doing certain things. And he's creating the kind of engine of antisemitism. And again, it's being
00:43:32.560
celebrated at the highest level. You know, Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan, you know, both are treating
00:43:37.840
him like really the best popular historian we have at this moment. I mean, that was an explicit claim
00:43:44.120
by Tucker and Joe, you know, you know, I think Joe would say it's him and Dan Carlin, right? And so,
00:43:51.200
and I should, you know, I should say, I'm not throwing any shade on Dan. I think Dan, you know,
00:43:55.160
at least to my eye has been incredibly responsible in how he's, as an amateur historian, has popularized
00:44:01.040
history. I think Dan's fantastic. I think Dan will, you know, has criticized Daryl for what he's done
00:44:08.240
here. And Daryl, you know, Daryl should look into the mirror of his own audience. I mean, Daryl just
00:44:13.240
published, to my eye, a fairly bizarre essay on Substack, admitting that his audience was just
00:44:19.980
chock full of anti-Semites now, just bursting with anti-Semites. And then he was kind of
00:44:24.820
differentiating among the anti-Semites, the ones he felt he could still talk to and the ones he just
00:44:30.380
didn't want in his audience, right? Like there's the smart anti-Semites and the dumb anti-Semites,
00:44:35.500
right? And he's deciding to split the baby that way. It's an odious project and it's completely
00:44:42.180
irresponsible. He is not being nearly as clear as he should be to be ethical in disavowing anti-Semitism
00:44:52.200
and in disavowing the conspiracy thinking that is getting weaponized so as to seem to make
00:44:57.820
anti-Semitism a sane political project. And so he's part of the Candace Owens problem. He's part of the
00:45:03.720
Dan Bilzerian problem. And it matters that all of these people are sort of in good standing with Joe
00:45:10.440
and Dave. I mean, if you saw Dave and Joe talk about Candace Owens and her recent adventures
00:45:15.860
on the microphone, that was, um, talking about the third rail stuff. Absolutely contemptible
00:45:21.640
how they framed what she's doing, right? I mean, they, you know, perhaps we could,
00:45:26.880
could drop the clip in here. There's been any of the shows on cable news. It's, it's phenomenal.
00:45:32.480
It's, it's like they created a monster with her when they, when they fired her from the daily wire,
00:45:36.780
they created a monster. Yeah, they sure did. She can't be stopped. Yeah. Oh no, no, no. There's no
00:45:41.540
stopping Candace Owens at this point. Because she's hitting all the fucking third rails that no one
00:45:45.540
wants to touch. They found it nothing but a source of comedy and real just, you know, celebration.
00:45:51.680
Like there's independent media. It was an independent media win to see how Candace was unstoppable,
00:45:57.620
right? Candace, you know, the daily wire tried to, you know, what one could say the quiet part out
00:46:02.060
loud, you know, the Jews over the daily wire tried to silence her, but, uh, they couldn't because
00:46:07.260
she's so charismatic and she just, she's so fearless. She's so courageous. She's touching all
00:46:12.700
the third rails and it's awesome. But what are those third rails, right? Joe, Dave, what are those
00:46:18.860
third rails? You know what they are because you've heard her do her shtick. The third rails are that the
00:46:25.060
Jews, you know, for ages have been killing Christians for, at Passover, quite literally the blood libel.
00:46:31.100
The newest third rail that I learned from her is that the, that Israel is responsible for 9-11.
00:46:37.080
We missed the trail of breadcrumbs that led directly to the Mossad there. She's dusting off
00:46:42.260
that thesis and, and that's, that's what she's telling millions of people now. Again, in a context
00:46:47.300
in the aftermath of October 7th, where we're witnessing the greatest explosion of antisemitism
00:46:53.180
in several generations. Yeah. Well, you're going to have a lot more to talk to Douglas about later this
00:46:59.940
week. I'm sure you're going to get into this, uh, a lot with him, but I want to, I want to jump over
00:47:04.460
to our, uh, financial luminaries. As I said, at the top of this, when Trump's tariffs were tanking, uh,
00:47:10.300
the market, we saw many in the right say, just slow down a little bit, give it a second. You have to
00:47:14.140
have patience. And then when he pulled them back, everybody praised him. And Bill Ackman, uh, went as far
00:47:20.040
to say it was brilliantly executed. Now, obviously Bill's very bright, but what am I not seeing here
00:47:25.760
that he's seeing? What's, what's going on? It just seems to me like this is sort of the Kim Jong-un
00:47:29.900
behavior where everyone's clapping as he gets a hole in one on every hole. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
00:47:36.120
so, you know, so there, again, I'm not an economist and this matters, right? It's like,
00:47:40.820
it's like the responsible thing for me to do on this topic of tariffs and the implications of, um,
00:47:47.660
Trump's policy is to acknowledge what most economists believe. And in this case,
00:47:54.860
it's incredibly easy because I, it's by my count, there are only three economists on planet earth
00:48:00.780
that support this tariff policy. And two of them are Peter Navarro. It's, I don't know if you've
00:48:06.520
heard of the scandal, but yeah, yeah. And Ron Varro. Yeah. I mean, it's just, he invented his source on
00:48:11.820
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