Making Sense - Sam Harris - #423 — “More From Sam”： Democracy, Populism, Wealth Inequality, News-Induced Anxiety, & 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

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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. Hi everybody, and welcome to another episode

00:00:38.820 of More From Sam. Sam, how's it going? Good, good. How are you doing? I am good. I'm good. We had

00:00:45.240 dinner last night, but I still have to ask you how you're doing. Yeah, yeah. Well, things could

00:00:48.660 have changed in the meantime. That's true. That's true. As a reminder to all, the goal of this series

00:00:53.520 is to get more from Sam on current events more often. I'm here to surface Sam's ideas,

00:00:58.540 and we'll be doing so, as always, with the input of subscribers, questions, and comments.

00:01:02.960 Thank you guys for taking the time to share those with us. And lastly, this series is not meant to

00:01:07.540 be a replacement for anything. It's simply in addition to what Sam is already doing. So if you

00:01:11.860 don't enjoy it, don't worry. It's fine. One more thing before we get started, some updates on Sam's

00:01:17.360 upcoming tour. There are currently five shows on sale at the moment. New York, Boston, Seattle,

00:01:22.640 San Jose, and Chicago. I believe all those shows still have some tickets still available,

00:01:28.180 although in some markets, I think that number is pretty low. So if you want to see the show,

00:01:32.440 you can head over to Ticketmaster, search Sam Harris, or you can find the dates listed

00:01:36.820 at samharris.org. Also, it seems likely that we're going to be adding some dates in the future.

00:01:42.080 So be on the lookout for those. I'm thinking maybe LA, maybe Texas somewhere. I don't know. If you have

00:01:47.700 any suggestions, please make those suggestions and we'll consider those. As a reminder,

00:01:52.160 Sam will be delivering a prepared talk for the first part, and then he and I will sit down and

00:01:55.660 do a version of this, more from Sam in the second segment. While Sam will offer some disturbing

00:02:00.140 insights, it will also be hopeful. Is that right, Sam? I hope so. A lot can happen between now and

00:02:07.280 then. Yeah, well, it's a night out. So regardless of the topics, it's important that you all enjoy

00:02:11.440 yourselves too. So we'll do our best to make sure that happens. Okay, let's get to our first topic.

00:02:15.960 And with a little fun, did you see the latest on Epstein? The DOJ and FBI have concluded that

00:02:21.320 Epstein had no client list. Oh, yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Pam Bondi said she had the list

00:02:26.780 on her desk, I think, and now she says there is no list. So you reconcile, you MAGA people reconcile

00:02:32.740 those irreconcilable notions. I mean, does anyone care? Do they care that they're lied to now about

00:02:38.640 something that was their dearly held bright, shiny object for so many years? I mean, they've got to be

00:02:44.700 lying one way or the other, right? There's just no way that both these claims can be true.

00:02:49.160 I mean, this was a big one. I mean, a lot of people were electing Trump, right? Just that we

00:02:53.420 couldn't wait to open up that Christmas present. Well, yeah, we want to know about the UFOs. We

00:02:58.680 want to know about JFK. We want to know about, I forget what else was on that list, but certainly

00:03:03.580 Epstein was at the top of that list. Speaking of the UFO, didn't we see something that the Pentagon

00:03:09.060 did? I mean, that was pretty crazy. That was crazy. It sounded like it was a hazing ritual

00:03:13.260 among Pentagon employees. That's pretty fucked up. That went on for like decades. 1.00

00:03:17.980 Yeah. That misfired badly. Yeah. Not good. But it's an easier explanation than that we're

00:03:23.560 actually being visited by extraterrestrials and they're abducting us and performing amateur

00:03:29.480 proctology on people in the middle of the country. And yet the cameras, well, it's that line that they

00:03:34.980 say, well, the cameras continue to improve. The sightings are always still at one megapixel.

00:03:40.140 It's always a, you know, it looks like a Frisbee covered with tinfoil thrown in the air.

00:03:45.580 Yeah. No one seems to be able to capture it. Yeah. Okay. Let's get to a, we just, we just

00:03:50.460 celebrated July 4th. And for all our flaws, we really are an amazing country. And one of the

00:03:55.160 enduring paradoxes of democracy is that it extends rights and protections, even to those who would

00:04:00.340 use them to undermine it. We see this in various forms, Islamists who leverage free speech and open

00:04:05.540 borders to advance illiberal aims and elements on the right that manipulate loopholes and procedural

00:04:10.980 gray zones to violate ethical standards and concentrate power. The central challenge is how

00:04:16.140 to defend democracy against those who would hollow it out from within without compromising the liberal

00:04:21.240 principles that define it. How do we build safeguards robust enough to protect democracy yet

00:04:27.120 restrained enough not to destroy it in the process?

00:04:29.540 Well, that really is the $64 trillion question at this point. I mean, we have, we have this

00:04:36.040 tension in open societies. I prefer the framing of open society more than democracy. I mean,

00:04:43.440 I think it's, you know, in the Venn diagram of political and social institutions, those overlap

00:04:48.600 significantly. But I think Popper's notion of an open society is the more important one to defend

00:04:54.360 here. And it's a society in which the institutions allow for error correction because, I mean, the

00:05:03.560 institutions, both governmental and non-governmental, allow for error correction because things like

00:05:07.600 free speech and pluralistic tolerance are enshrined as into law and into norms, right? So you can talk

00:05:14.960 about more or less anything. You can argue over more or less anything. It's not a theocracy. It's not an

00:05:20.700 authoritarian dictatorship. It's not a much less a totalitarian one. It's not some, you know, tribal

00:05:26.880 fiefdom in Afghanistan, right? It's just, it's a society we know and love and have imperfectly 1.00

00:05:35.080 built for ourselves here in the West. But the open societies are perpetually under threat by people

00:05:42.440 who would use the principles of tolerance to undermine tolerance. And one of the most glaring examples of

00:05:49.140 this in recent times is the kind of the stealth and none-too-stealthy Islamist campaigning everywhere, 0.96

00:05:55.360 which is basically trying to smuggle in theocracy into Western communities. And the liberals, you know,

00:06:03.180 the Eriswa liberals, the left wing of every left-wing party, has been successfully gulled by this or has

00:06:11.500 just not been actually deceived, but just, you know, for other reasons decided to make common cause with

00:06:16.580 Islamists. And so, and, you know, this has been supercharged by the war in Gaza of late and the nascent or 0.89

00:06:25.640 endemic anti-Semitism on the left and in the Muslim community. So, yeah, it's, what to do about it is, there's no

00:06:35.160 easy answer to that. I mean, we can't tip over into xenophobia and bigotry. We have to focus on dangerous ideas

00:06:42.660 rather than specific classes of people. But, you know, in broad strokes, you can, it's certainly tempting

00:06:50.520 to notice that specific classes of people have more than their share of dangerous ideas, right? So when

00:06:57.160 you have a regime like, you know, the second Trump administration or some of the right-wing parties in

00:07:03.900 Western Europe wanting to filter by Muslims or immigrants from specific countries, Muslim-majority

00:07:11.620 countries, it's easy to see why that's tempting. I don't agree with any of that, but the underlying

00:07:17.640 concern is something I'm also very much worried about, which is the spread of Islamism and jihadism 1.00

00:07:23.960 in the West.

00:07:24.860 So if you don't agree with that, how do you solve that problem? So if you don't, if you can't say,

00:07:29.620 okay, we're going to try to keep anybody out of the country who's going to use democracy or-

00:07:35.960 Well, we should do that.

00:07:37.040 Right. So how do you do that?

00:07:38.380 We should vet people. We just shouldn't say, we're going to keep everyone from Somalia out

00:07:43.080 of the country or everyone from Eritrea or Saudi Arabia, or just pick your country.

00:07:47.640 But how do you find out if somebody is more religious or less religious? So you say,

00:07:50.340 well, take people from every country.

00:07:51.520 I mean, there has to be some process of vetting. I mean, we have to screen people. We have to

00:07:56.320 talk to people. We have to do online research about people. I mean, they have to have references.

00:08:01.700 There's, you know, I'm not into the weeds on what the process actually is, but clearly there's some

00:08:05.980 process that's possible whereby we could raise the probability of successfully catching jihadists

00:08:13.120 and Islamists who are trying to immigrate. And we just, we have to acknowledge that we want to do

00:08:18.320 that. I mean, just as we wouldn't want to import Nazis into our society, we should not be eager to 0.98

00:08:24.460 import Islamists and jihadists into our society. 1.00

00:08:27.520 Right. So where do you draw the line with, and I'm blanking on his name, from Colombia,

00:08:31.340 who was tossed out and then brought back, you know, where do you draw the line with someone like him?

00:08:35.240 Khalil, I think his name was.

00:08:36.940 That's right. Mahmoud Khalil. Yeah.

00:08:38.560 Yeah. Well, I think we should acknowledge it's different once someone has been admitted

00:08:43.380 and been given a green card, right? Then there's a different burden of proof and there's got to be

00:08:48.780 a different procedure, right? So it's better to keep people out rather than let them in and figure out 0.98

00:08:53.360 how to respond to the fact that they're in now legally. But yeah, I mean, if someone is sufficiently

00:08:58.180 despicable, I think we should be able to rescind their green card and kick them out of the country. 1.00

00:09:03.160 I mean, it's not the same thing as, you're not a citizen if you have a green card. And, you know,

00:09:07.760 ultimately we have to figure out what to do with citizens who go bonkers and believe these things,

00:09:11.980 right? I mean, this is, you know, that's under the rubric of free speech and freedom of religion,

00:09:16.760 but we have a problem with potentially homegrown jihadists.

00:09:21.840 This is a problem that's easy to forget about given all the other problems in the world. But the moment

00:09:25.440 we have another terrorist attack in the society of any scale, all of a sudden we're going to realize

00:09:30.020 this problem never went away. It's a bigger problem in Western Europe than it is in America,

00:09:35.120 but it's a problem here too. Again, we have to, we have to err on the side of tolerating

00:09:41.560 the expression of any ideas, right? I just don't, I don't think we should be kicking people out

00:09:47.260 for saying despicable things, but the moment they do more than merely talk about them,

00:09:53.520 the moment they're planning to do something, the moment they're obstructing, physically obstructing

00:09:58.360 life on a university campus, you know, keeping Jews out of certain buildings or bullying them 0.72

00:10:03.560 physically, right? Spitting in people's faces who are trying to attend lectures. All, you know, 0.96

00:10:08.360 all those kinds of things have happened on college campuses. All of that's illegal, right? All of

00:10:12.180 that should get you kicked out of, I mean, it should get you prosecuted, but it should also

00:10:15.140 get you, it's all assault, but it should also get you kicked out of school, right? These people

00:10:19.840 shouldn't be, you know, winning awards for social activism. They should be kicked out of these Ivy 0.90

00:10:25.820 League universities for behaving badly. Topic, the new ecosystem of independent media personalities

00:10:32.320 seems really no different from what we're seeing in politics. Mamdani, for example,

00:10:37.120 is basically an influencer, just happens to be running for mayor. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is

00:10:42.200 interviewing the president of Iran. The gatekeepers are gone, and in many ways, maybe we're better off

00:10:47.480 for it, but in what ways are we worse? And why do you think it feels like only populists are able to

00:10:53.880 gain traction now? Well, so populism is a few things, but at its core, it's a rejection of elites

00:11:04.540 and elite institutions, right? It's an expression of resentment and revulsion against

00:11:10.200 the gatekeepers. So it almost has built into its DNA an abdication of the kinds of standards and

00:11:18.620 notions of responsibility that those gatekeepers and institutions imperfectly embodied, right? You

00:11:24.920 have just lots of people out there with iPhones pretending to be journalists, and, you know, one of

00:11:30.460 them is effectively Tucker Carlson, right? Like, he's got more than an iPhone, but basically he has the

00:11:36.540 principles of somebody just wielding an iPhone with impunity and with no reputation for

00:11:44.120 professionalism or integrity to protect. So, and, you know, you could add a lot of people to that list, but

00:11:50.100 so all of these sort of outdoor cats who are now gaining audiences of tens of millions of people

00:11:56.880 are, I mean, it's entertaining, right? They're in the entertainment business, right? A lot of these

00:12:02.180 people are very good at what they do. I mean, I think Tucker is extremely good at what he does.

00:12:06.360 So is Candace Owens, right? I mean, these are people who have charisma and they're very facile

00:12:12.420 demagogues and confabulators and conspiracists. And again, they're not, they don't feel the friction

00:12:18.600 of personal integrity, or at least it's not apparent to me that they ever have. So they can

00:12:25.020 just lie and spin, and there's no burden of not being a hypocrite. I mean, that's not a fate to be 0.97

00:12:31.220 avoided because it's not a fate that is even acknowledged when you don't have any principles. 0.96

00:12:36.060 So they're just kind of freewheeling bullshitters who can keep tacking left and right and up and down 0.90

00:12:42.120 as their whims strike. And then this is also Trump is an animal of this kind. 0.99

00:12:48.600 There's no burden of coherence. There's no burden of paying attention to what really happened in the 0.54

00:12:53.420 world or the risks of spreading certain lies. I mean, so it's entertainment, you know, and on some

00:13:00.100 level, we're entertaining ourselves toward the precipice.

00:13:04.040 Yeah. I mean, if everyone is rejecting the system and everyone becomes outdoor cats, at some point,

00:13:10.840 there's nobody left in the building. And when you map that onto the political sector and you see

00:13:15.360 someone like a Mondani who is falling in the footsteps of an AOC or a Bernie, and on the

00:13:21.060 right, you have, as you said, Trump, it just seems like these are the only people that can get traction

00:13:25.440 here. And so is this what the future looks like for everyone? Is that everyone is rejecting the

00:13:30.900 system and saying, hey, I'm not with those guys. And at some point, it's sort of every man for

00:13:35.860 themselves.

00:13:36.900 Well, clearly we need institutions, and we have institutions, and they're still functioning.

00:13:41.720 It's just on the government side, and certainly in Trump's second administration, they're being

00:13:47.060 increasingly populated by loyalists and cranks and loons and grifters and incompetents, right?

00:13:53.220 I mean, so the kinds of people who are running the Justice Department or the FBI or HHS, I mean,

00:13:59.040 these are not the sober experts who you would want, even if you agreed that you had to purge all the

00:14:06.360 old experts who gave us a bad response to COVID or a bad response to foreign policy or anything

00:14:11.720 else, right? Even if you think literally everyone in the Biden administration was corrupt and

00:14:17.700 incompetent and you needed a new crop of people, you still want sober experts who are not grifting 0.91

00:14:25.420 lunatics, right? Who have their own, you know, have dollar signs in the self-branded logo of their 0.78

00:14:32.540 name and who are just creatures who came from the tabloids and now have responsibility for

00:14:39.740 law and order in our society. So it's, we need institutions that we can trust, and the question

00:14:47.180 is what will make them trustworthy again? And some, I think, are trustworthy most of the time,

00:14:51.840 even though they've been, their reputations have been badly damaged by just the backlash against

00:14:57.400 them and their own failures in recent years. And I think it's very easy to exaggerate how bad

00:15:02.980 the New York Times is or Harvard University is or the government is, right? I mean, I just think it's,

00:15:09.280 I think a lot of that's been exaggerated, but I, you know, I understand everyone's frustration with

00:15:13.900 institutions in the last few years. And we have, we have a degree of transparency coupled with a degree

00:15:19.760 of misinformation that is, has created a kind of perfect storm of, of reputational damage for

00:15:26.320 the gatekeepers and, and the, the experts, right? So like half of, you know, half of the stuff,

00:15:32.040 speaking very broadly, half of the stuff is true and embarrassing and worth correcting. The other half

00:15:37.040 is, you know, Alex Jones style confabulation and lies, but both halves are in most people's brains,

00:15:44.600 or at least right of center in America now. Um, and the left of center has its own problems, but

00:15:49.760 what, what just problems with institutions. I mean, I want to, I'm, I'm going to try again to get you

00:15:53.220 to talk about Momdani. I mean, if you're growing up in America today where the deck feels more stacked

00:15:58.020 than ever, you know, where's your incentive to defend capitalism? You know, what do you say to the

00:16:02.840 people in New York city that say, fuck you, you know, it hasn't worked for me, regardless of how bad 1.00

00:16:09.700 socialism has been proven to be disastrous in the past, capitalism isn't working. So we'll just try 0.99

00:16:15.120 something else or bring everyone else down. So, you know, is Momdani is, is, are we going to see

00:16:20.780 more of this in the future, more of these types? Well, I, I have been arguing for a very long time.

00:16:27.380 I mean, maybe close to two decades that we have a real and growing problem with wealth inequality

00:16:32.020 in this country. And obviously Momdani is responding to that. I mean, you know, it's hard

00:16:38.120 to find a locus of, of wealth inequality more obvious than, than New York city. But the idea

00:16:45.360 that state owned grocery stores is a sane response to that, or that we're going to get rid of

00:16:51.660 billionaires or what the other crazy Marxist things he's proposed, those aren't serious proposals.

00:16:58.540 I mean, capitalism is the best we've got. What we don't want to add to capitalism is a, um,

00:17:04.380 an oligarchic winner-take-all regressive tax code and just obvious, you know, crony capitalism and

00:17:12.240 corruption, right? Where it's, where everyone is just ransacking the place and we have something

00:17:17.420 like a kleptocracy. We want the best version of capitalism we can achieve. And we, and that requires

00:17:24.320 compassion. It requires a commitment to the common good. It requires not, you know, malignantly

00:17:30.200 selfish people running the government who are trading stocks based on insider information and

00:17:37.000 creating, you know, favorite deals for their, their friends. I mean, it's just, we, there's,

00:17:41.320 we have a layer of corruption on top of capitalism, which is giving capitalism a bad name.

00:17:45.880 Right. But we keep saying we, well, we have to address that. We have to fix it. And if anything,

00:17:49.500 it's moving in the opposite direction, especially with this latest term. And so it does give rise to a

00:17:53.920 mom, Donnie type who is incredibly likable, uh, you know, gregarious, he's out there, you know,

00:17:59.920 with the bullhorn and he's really whipping everyone into a frenzy. And you look at the faces and they,

00:18:04.800 they really seem like there's some relief out there, but he's obviously selling a system that's

00:18:08.680 not going to work. Yeah. Well, he's going to, he's going to freeze rents in New York city. Is that,

00:18:12.400 does that sound like a good plan to anyone who knows anything about what rent control does to

00:18:17.000 the economy of the city? Yeah, of course. But a lot of them are just saying, okay,

00:18:20.440 but whatever you keep saying about capitalism, you know, I've studied, it sounds great. It does

00:18:25.000 sound better. Uh, you know, I've, I've read the book, Sam, but you keep talking about fixing

00:18:29.180 capitalism for me. It's not working. And now we've got a president who's, you know, offering his

00:18:33.020 friends, all the deals and, you know, the insider stock trading and whatever else that you're,

00:18:37.000 you're claiming it's getting, it's going the wrong direction. That's awful. But people are also just

00:18:42.220 confused. This is another optical illusion, right? I mean, people don't recognize that even

00:18:47.140 the barely middle-class people in our society today live much better than the wealthiest people

00:18:53.960 on earth, you know, some years ago, right? It's just, you know. If you'd like to continue listening

00:18:59.820 to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access

00:19:05.720 to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies

00:19:11.800 entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 08, 2025

#423 — “More From Sam”： Democracy, Populism, Wealth Inequality, News-Induced Anxiety, & Rapid Fire Questions

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