Making Sense - Sam Harris - #421 — “More From Sam”： Political Violence, Iran, Deportations, Protests, & Rapid Fire Questions

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

00:00:11.740 hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing

00:00:15.720 the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

00:00:20.060 Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore

00:00:26.240 it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're

00:00:30.200 doing here, please consider becoming one.

00:00:36.320 Hey Sam, how you doing?

00:00:37.840 Good. How's it going?

00:00:38.980 It's going well. Did you have a nice Father's Day?

00:00:41.120 I did. You?

00:00:42.620 We don't really do anything. I don't even know how to celebrate.

00:00:45.940 You don't observe?

00:00:46.880 We don't observe. I feel like every day is Father's Day in my house.

00:00:49.980 I got one card. I've got two daughters, one card. So that was sweet.

00:00:54.300 That's better than I got. All right.

00:00:56.240 But let me set this series up. All right. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode

00:00:59.120 of More From Sam. As a reminder, the goal of this series is to get more from Sam on current events

00:01:03.960 more often, and also to share a more fun side of Sam. Sam, you have a fun side. Plenty of heavy

00:01:09.440 shit to discuss, but in this series, we're allowed to have fun doing it. The tone is faster paced, 0.98

00:01:13.560 which includes interruptions because they create more energy. I'm here to surface Sam's ideas,

00:01:18.500 so don't get caught up on what you think my actual positions might be. It doesn't matter.

00:01:22.360 Sure. Everybody loves a spicy Sam, so I'm going to do what I can to get more of that.

00:01:27.240 And lastly, this series is not meant to be. Thank you. It's not meant to be a replacement

00:01:31.320 for anything. It's simply in addition to what Sam is already doing. Also, Sam has some tour

00:01:36.480 dates coming up this fall that have already been announced. New York and Boston in October

00:01:40.900 are nearly sold out. I think there are about a hundred tickets last I checked in each of those

00:01:46.140 cities. And Seattle, and nice job, Sam. Well done. Thanks to all those in New York and Boston

00:01:50.900 who have quickly bought tickets. And Seattle and San Jose in September are each a little over

00:01:54.560 50% sold as well. So if you want tickets to any of those shows, you can head over to samharris.org.

00:02:01.360 Also, we're about to announce Chicago. So that's coming this week in order to get, yeah,

00:02:07.880 it should be fun. In order to get access to the pre-sale, you must be a paid subscriber to the

00:02:12.840 podcast, and then there'll be a general on sale shortly thereafter. Anyway, all this info can be

00:02:17.480 found on the website. And if you're on the mailing list, be on the lookout for something coming very

00:02:21.380 soon. Sam, are there any quick thoughts on these shows you can share with us? Something the audience

00:02:26.480 should... Just that I'm looking forward to them. I'm going to write a talk. And so the first hour will

00:02:33.440 not be extemporaneous. I mean, maybe I'll say something. There'll be some marginalia as I work

00:02:40.020 from what I've prepared. But no, I'm actually going into this wanting to put my thoughts in order.

00:02:46.020 And I love the excuse to be able to do that. So it feels almost like I have to write a short book

00:02:52.380 between now and then. But I will do that, and I'll come prepared to tell people what I'm thinking

00:02:57.120 about. That'll be fun. And then the second half, we'll do an episode of more from Sam,

00:03:01.380 this kind of vibe where we can incorporate some of the current events. I mean, I think what I want to

00:03:06.180 do is I want to field the questions in advance that we know are most pressing, especially things

00:03:11.640 that I have said or fail to say that the audience finds most galling. So we'll get the hardest

00:03:19.460 questions. And one, I'll probably anticipate some of those in my talk, but we'll store them up for

00:03:26.680 each event and deal with them in the second hour or two. Well, we'll do that. That's what we do for

00:03:32.240 every episode here. So that shouldn't be too hard. All right. So there's no shortage of things to

00:03:35.960 cover on this episode. So let's get into it. I want to start with the political violence that

00:03:40.180 took place this past weekend in Minneapolis, where a state representative and her husband

00:03:43.500 were murdered in their home. And a state senator and his wife were shot multiple times at their house

00:03:47.840 and have thankfully survived. You got Trump, Josh Shapiro, two employees at the Israeli embassy,

00:03:53.200 and you could throw in the United Healthcare CEO as well. What's going on with the explosion of

00:03:57.740 political violence? And is this a new norm we should come to expect? Well, I mean, it's obviously

00:04:02.580 awful. It's also mimetic. We know that people find this kind of, the kind of notoriety that shooters

00:04:11.720 get somewhat contagious, right? So, you know, we've had episodes like this before in our past. I mean,

00:04:18.000 not for a very long time, but obviously the late sixties was a time where we were sort of in free

00:04:24.360 fall with respect to assassinations. I mean, it's awful. I think, you know, the thing that is,

00:04:30.340 I mean, the only governor we have on and apart from catching people and we're providing great

00:04:35.380 security so as to make it effectively impossible is to shun any political rhetoric that directly

00:04:43.820 inspires this kind of behavior. And unfortunately, both sides, not both sides equally, but both sides

00:04:49.900 have had various points tipped over into, you know, ways of speaking about their political opponents

00:04:54.760 that have been totally irresponsible. And I would put Trump at the top of this list of people who

00:05:00.800 has been... Who's got the timer? How long did it take to bring Trump up there?

00:05:04.700 Well, I mean, it's just, yeah, but it's just the fact that here's somebody who has normalized

00:05:10.180 political violence in several respects. I mean, his response to January 6th was a great act of

00:05:17.320 normalization. You get, you have people who are literally stabbing cops in the face with flagpoles 0.91

00:05:22.040 and they've been exonerated as American heroes. Yeah. All of that is part of what has pushed us

00:05:28.020 to this moment, I think. So. Well, I mean, I don't, do you think we have to doge our, the way that we

00:05:33.280 treat these people instead of letting them become celebrities so quickly? Can't we just find these

00:05:37.400 people that commit these heinous acts and disappear them very quickly? We try to do that. I mean,

00:05:41.960 sometimes better than others, but we did that effectively with, at least to my eye, we did

00:05:47.340 that with the shooter for, who tried to kill Trump. I mean, as evidenced by the fact that I can't even

00:05:53.520 remember his name. Yeah. Well, I think he was just killed right there on the spot. I think that's

00:05:56.980 what happened. Yeah. But like, we haven't talked about him. He's not a, he's not a martyr to any

00:06:02.040 cause. In fact, we don't even, you know, I don't happen to know much about what his cause was. I mean,

00:06:06.600 how much was mental illness and how much was an actual ideological motivation. We've been,

00:06:12.840 we've been better in recent years about doing that, whether it's political violence or just

00:06:17.620 violence. I mean, the Vegas shooter who still killed more people than any shooter in American

00:06:24.420 history. Again, I've forgotten his name. I once knew it, but he, that was memory holes within like

00:06:29.760 72 hours of the occurrence. So I think we're, we're getting better at it, but the way we are talking

00:06:36.340 about our politics, I think is just, it's not reminiscent of any recent period in American

00:06:43.160 history. I mean, we just, we're so uncivil. I mean, this is of a piece with a U.S. Senator being,

00:06:50.020 you know, wrestled to the ground and handcuffed at a press conference for Kristi Noem, right? And the

00:06:55.060 fact that his Republican colleagues in the Senate didn't immediately, or Congress didn't immediately

00:07:00.400 condemn that. In fact, some of them lined up on the other side and castigated him for some

00:07:05.700 impropriety that they thought warranted his manhandling there. The thing that we're not

00:07:10.920 recognizing is that civility is, is the last stop before violence, right? I mean, the civility is not

00:07:18.140 just a nice to have, it's really a must have when you're talking about discussing politically

00:07:23.340 polarizing issues. Yeah. Well, I want to get to Alex Padilla and a little bit of that later,

00:07:27.360 because I do think what he did, you know, perhaps had some impact on changing the course of events

00:07:34.480 there. It seems that that's been, that's been walked back, but we'll, we'll get back to that in

00:07:38.180 a bit where the, the ice, uh, rates have been, have been, uh, walked back because of the idea that

00:07:44.280 apparently it's impacting the farming industry and the hotel industries, the hospitality industry.

00:07:48.720 I wonder what those phone calls were like. Well, no shit. I mean, what a dummy, like how obvious was 0.99

00:07:53.340 that for him to say, um, yeah, but how, but also how dysfunctional is it that really what, what

00:07:59.260 accomplished this change in policy undoubtedly were a bunch of rich friends of the president 0.90

00:08:05.420 calling and saying, listen, you're fucking up my hotel business. This, uh, it said nothing to do

00:08:10.400 with the humanity of it. Yeah. It said nothing to do with the, with wisdom or pragmatism or ethics or

00:08:17.900 anything. It's just pure patronage. I mean, this is, this is what is turning us into a banana

00:08:23.060 Republic. What Trump has done is he's put himself at the bottleneck of everything and he's using both

00:08:29.540 domestic and foreign policy to dole out favors and to friends and punish enemies. I mean, the thing

00:08:36.100 that is so despicable about the Republicans now is that no one objects to this. That's what was

00:08:41.380 amazing to see in the falling out with Elon. Well, you know, you have all these people who,

00:08:46.100 many of whom are welcoming Elon back into the fold. I mean, just a desperate to, to patch up

00:08:51.660 this marriage and yet they're not acknowledging how corrosive it is to have a president who

00:08:59.780 immediately goes to, if Elon supports any Democrats, there'll be extraordinary consequences,

00:09:06.560 right? He's threatening him with, with what a judicial investigation or loss of contracts. He's,

00:09:15.100 he's using the levers of government power to say that his former friend shouldn't fund political

00:09:22.900 opposition in this country. And everyone on the Republican side accepts that as somehow normal.

00:09:28.400 This is, you know, authoritarian is, is the generic term for it. I mean, this is not

00:09:33.760 remotely normal in American politics. No, no, no. Well, you know, you talked about,

00:09:39.120 while we're talking about Musk in your recent Substack piece, you torched him. And this is something you

00:09:43.760 and I were talking about earlier, that Musk has admitted that he went overboard with something

00:09:49.240 that resembled, I guess, an apology on Twitter. But what he's saying here really matters. I mean,

00:09:54.720 we shouldn't be quick to forget what he's basically saying. He's saying that he's either

00:09:58.760 someone who has no morals, who just was happy to work with Trump, who was a rapist, a child rapist, 1.00

00:10:04.900 and he was just fine because, well, he had shared interests. Or he completely made up an insane lie 1.00

00:10:10.700 about his friend, you know, someone who he loved as much as any man could love another.

00:10:15.000 So either way, and the reason why I think it matters is because, according to your latest

00:10:18.700 podcast, I think, was it Daniel or I think it was the last name, you just spoke to about AI.

00:10:23.820 One of these guys could very soon become the leader of the most powerful AI army in the world.

00:10:31.140 And, you know, we should care about the character of these individuals.

00:10:35.580 Yeah. I don't know how we got here, but we seem to have, at least half of our society

00:10:38.760 seems to think that we, the personal integrity of the most powerful people in our society doesn't

00:10:45.980 matter, right? It's just like, it doesn't matter. Like, you can have the most self-interested,

00:10:51.900 unethical people you can find, give them basically all the power human beings can have,

00:10:58.500 and you can just expect everything to work fine. Now, it would be great to have systems,

00:11:04.620 to have laws and institutions that were totally impervious to bad actors. I mean, that would be

00:11:10.800 the dream. It's an unrealistic one. Clearly, we don't have anything like that currently in the U.S.

00:11:17.280 government. So it matters whether psychologically normal, at a minimum, psychologically normal people

00:11:23.500 are in charge, right? And we just don't have that. We have narcissists and liars and confabulators

00:11:29.760 and, and in certain cases, I think mentally unstable people.

00:11:35.100 But I think a lot of times when you talk like that, people think you exaggerate, but right here,

00:11:39.220 right here, we saw Elon Musk and we, we know...

00:11:42.720 Well, even on the president's account, he's gone, he went crazy, right? So he's unstable. I mean,

00:11:47.240 I think most people will admit that at a minimum, he's unstable.

00:11:51.160 But like, these are the two worst options.

00:11:52.720 But yes, those two interpretations of Elon's character. One, he was happy to collaborate

00:11:58.940 with a person he knew to be a child rapist or an enabler of child rape. Or two, he was willing 0.99

00:12:04.020 to claim that a person who is his favorite person on earth 10 minutes ago was a child rapist the

00:12:10.160 moment their interests were no longer aligned. You pick your favorite interpretation of his

00:12:14.760 character there because that exhausts the possibilities.

00:12:17.780 But why is that being talked about more?

00:12:19.500 Because again, right of center, nobody cares about a person's character. They, they'll care

00:12:25.840 about, they care about Hunter Biden's character, apparently, right? They care about whether Joe

00:12:30.900 Biden's inner circle knew that he wasn't compos mentis and were letting, letting the country,

00:12:37.580 you know, have a somewhat vacant presidency or presidency by committee, right? That strikes them

00:12:42.720 as just adjacent to evil. But nothing on their own side matters, including, I mean, they were

00:12:50.820 completely unfaceted. The people who thought Elon was this absolutely impeccable omnibus genius,

00:12:57.160 when he alleged that, you know, mark my words, Trump is a, is a child rapist. In so many words, 1.00

00:13:04.000 he alleged that he doubled down on that tweet, said, you know, just flag this tweet, flag this post,

00:13:09.100 come back to this post, mark this post, however he put it, you know, the truth will come out,

00:13:12.820 right? He's claiming to have certain knowledge of Trump's criminal culpability, right? All these

00:13:20.300 people who were, who were up to that moment thought Elon could do no wrong. What did they think? Did

00:13:25.760 they, did any of them care? And these are also people, the irony is that these are also people

00:13:31.520 who are disproportionately fixated on the problem of pedophilia. You know, half of them think there's a

00:13:37.740 pedophile cult running the world. They certainly don't think Epstein killed himself. They think

00:13:42.300 lots of powerful people were, are culpable for an immense coverup there. And to hear that Elon knows

00:13:50.580 and promises you that you will know soon, if you just watch this space, you soon will know 0.99

00:13:56.500 that Trump is one of these sinister rapists or enablers of rapists. How many of them cared? 0.97

00:14:03.860 Where were the, the Jack Posobiec and the Charlie Kirks and the other grifters and confabulists,

00:14:10.460 the Pizzagate dummies, the Mike Cernovich, where were they? Like, how did, how did they not jump

00:14:15.460 into that space one way or the other? Either, either Elon is lying and he's pure evil. He's

00:14:20.620 smearing the president with the worst aspersion that can be summoned to a human mind, or you trust Elon 0.99

00:14:28.480 because God damn, he knows everything. And he's been on the inside and he's has all the data. 0.98

00:14:32.740 And you, you sort of know anyway, that Trump is like this, you know, he was friends with Epstein

00:14:37.980 for many, many years. You know, he celebrated Epstein's sexual conquests and even named the

00:14:43.800 fact that he likes his ladies young. He said that some people say that he likes beautiful women even

00:14:48.560 more than I do. And he likes, he sure likes them young, right? That's, that's practically verbatim,

00:14:52.480 right? You know that the, that, that in his sixties, probably he was storming the dressing

00:14:58.180 rooms of teenage girls at the Miss America pageant. You know that he's just right on the

00:15:03.140 edge of doing this anyway, all by himself, right? And yet who cared, right? This is, I mean,

00:15:09.780 it's not even hypocrisy. It's just a complete vacancy of a moral sensibility right of center now.

00:15:17.960 Well, they, and they rightly care about lawlessness too. Except for when it's January 6th.

00:15:22.820 Only on one side. Yeah, yeah.

00:15:24.080 Right. Yeah. So.

00:15:25.920 But I mean, but that, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, one can imagine it's going to

00:15:29.920 normalize at some point. I think part of it is the characters we have in play. You know,

00:15:34.660 I just, I don't, I don't know that you can get a delusional cult under somebody like J.D. Vance,

00:15:40.180 but I'm sure the Republicans will give it a good hard try.

00:15:43.420 All right. Switching gears. Let's talk about Israel and Iran. Any early thoughts on that?

00:15:49.220 Well, it's not going to surprise you that I think that they are fighting our war in some respect. I

00:15:54.120 mean, they're fighting their own war too, because a nuclear armed Iran is definitely an existential 0.97

00:15:59.040 concern for them. And if you doubt that, you just haven't been paying attention to what Iran has said

00:16:04.160 for the last 20 plus years. I mean, the Iranian regime is explicitly a theocratic death cult. I mean, 0.88

00:16:12.160 this is a jihadist regime of the Shiite variety that has had as its special focus for years and

00:16:19.360 years, the eradication of Israel. And so this is not a metaphor for anything. This is, once we get 0.86

00:16:26.020 a bomb, we're going to turn Israel into glass, right? And I think the Israelis are, have to take 1.00

00:16:33.200 that threat at face value. I mean, Phil, I think the lesson that the world should learn is that if you

00:16:37.700 are going to be explicit in your genocidal aspirations, your neighbors, whoever you're

00:16:43.420 targeting with your, with this, with these malicious hopes, your neighbors are justified in 0.99

00:16:50.340 coming across your border and killing the principal bad actors. I mean, words matter, right? And so if 0.98

00:16:56.960 you're bluffing, you know, it's on you to, to not do that again, right? It's just, so I think it's

00:17:02.640 completely warranted. I think, I mean, this is a commercial for what we should have done years

00:17:07.240 ago, we being the United States. And you think the Iranians would use a nuke, no doubt about it, 1.00

00:17:11.880 if they got it? Yeah. I mean, one, if they didn't use a nuke, if they just had them, I think they would

00:17:19.960 do all the awful things they've been doing anyway. I mean, what's amazing is how deterred we,

00:17:26.200 the Americans. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

00:17:32.140 samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense

00:17:37.420 podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can

00:17:43.840 subscribe now at samharris.org.

00:17:56.200 Thank you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - June 17, 2025

#421 — “More From Sam”： Political Violence, Iran, Deportations, Protests, & Rapid Fire Questions

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript