Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 06, 2025


#433 — How Did We Get Here？


Episode Stats

Length

21 minutes

Words per Minute

206.09085

Word Count

4,516

Sentence Count

231


Summary


Transcript

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
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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
00:00:30.220 doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Dan Carlin. Dan, how the hell are you?
00:00:39.580 Good, man. How are you? Long time no hear from. Yeah, it's been too long. It's been years,
00:00:44.740 years upon years, I think. Yeah, a lot of water under the bridge. I didn't look back, but it seems
00:00:49.480 like we were probably talking in a different era. Yeah, different reality. Yeah, for sure.
00:00:54.300 So let me just introduce you for those few people who might not recognize you. You're one of the
00:01:02.540 first podcasters. You really are the OG podcaster, and many of us believe the best who has ever
00:01:10.040 lived thus far. I mean, you have several- Disarming at the start, right there, Sam.
00:01:17.000 Yeah, I usually- Disarming tactic. Anyone who's heard this podcast knows I don't tend to butter up my
00:01:23.120 guest with a ton of praise, but honestly, you have several series of the Hardcore History Podcast
00:01:29.240 that are just true masterpieces. And that is not an exaggeration. It's not a word I use very often. So
00:01:36.700 congratulations, and thanks for taking the time to do this podcast.
00:01:40.200 It's, first of all, very kind of you. And I feel like those of us, including yourself,
00:01:44.700 who've been doing this for a lot of years, it's a fraternity that's grown by leaps and bounds in the
00:01:50.360 last 20% of its history or something. Yeah.
00:01:53.900 Yeah. There's something like 4.6 million podcasts, I'm told now. I'm not sure I believe that, but
00:01:58.940 that's- I can remember when no one knew what it was, and it was a 45-minute conversation at a
00:02:04.460 cocktail party when people say, what do you do for a living? And you'd walk away after 45 minutes,
00:02:09.080 and they still wouldn't know.
00:02:10.280 Can you imagine starting a podcast now? I mean, how would that work?
00:02:14.000 I don't even know, unless you came in bringing your own sort of notoriety or popularity or
00:02:20.720 audience with you, I don't know how you would grow from nothing. I mean, I know it happens,
00:02:26.260 and there's still people, but I don't know how I'd do it if you had to try to stand out in such a
00:02:29.980 crowded field now. Yeah. Yeah. And you have resisted the slide into video. The ordeal of doing this
00:02:36.640 setup for the last 20 minutes has convinced you that that is the right decision, no doubt.
00:02:40.620 It's empathy, Sam. I have empathy for my audience, and they don't need to see this. They hear it.
00:02:46.660 That's hard enough for some of them, especially with my loudness and softness of variability. So
00:02:52.200 we're doing as much to the audience as I think they deserve right now.
00:02:55.920 So now you release episodes on a, to call it a trickle is probably an exaggeration of your output
00:03:03.940 at this point. I mean, you are clearly a perfectionist, and you just, I mean, I recall
00:03:10.240 waiting with the rest of your fans for the next installment of one of your hardcore history
00:03:16.680 episodes, and it was like, you know, a six-month wait. And essentially, you're producing audiobooks
00:03:21.920 without acknowledging that level of work. Give me your philosophy around that. I mean,
00:03:27.660 that's just, it's so counter to what everyone else in podcasting feels they need to do to succeed.
00:03:33.820 Well, it sort of depends on the nature of the content. And in our case, we figured it out slowly.
00:03:39.360 I mean, it was a, it was something we sort of came to the understanding over time that you're
00:03:44.860 dealing with something that's sort of evergreen. And when you have something that's evergreen
00:03:48.760 instead of topical, you've got two audiences for this stuff. You've got the audience that's waiting
00:03:53.680 with bated breath for the next episode. And then you've got the people that aren't maybe even born
00:03:58.360 yet that are going to hear it down the road. It's very, it's very analogous to a book, right?
00:04:02.360 So you can put out a book and you might serialize it in a magazine. And then each month is probably
00:04:07.480 dating us now, but then each month the listenership is eagerly awaiting the next installment in the
00:04:12.240 magazine. But you're also writing for an audience that isn't going to find you for a long time.
00:04:16.180 And, and it sort of a light bulb went on over our heads a while back where we realized that
00:04:21.140 audience doesn't care how long it took you to make the production. They just care that it's good.
00:04:26.220 I was talking to a friend of mine who's a showrunner the other day, and I was going over that same
00:04:30.180 dilemma you said, where, you know, trick trickle of releasing new content. And he said,
00:04:34.120 you're making absolutely the right choice because he said, if you screw it up and do something that's
00:04:38.080 not that good, he goes, the people that are waiting with bated breath will just go,
00:04:41.400 oh, that sucked and move on. Whereas the people down the road who've never found it,
00:04:45.480 that's the real audience you need to be working for. And so once you have the luxury of not having
00:04:50.860 to produce content that quickly, you know, a lot of, a lot of people just need to get it out because
00:04:55.300 they have an audience waiting and they need the ads or whatever it is. We're in a position right now
00:04:59.140 where we can just focus on quality and figure that if you do that and it's good enough, everything else would have
00:05:04.120 takes care of itself down the road. Yeah. Yeah. And you're touring now, I noticed. I forget what
00:05:10.820 your next cities are, but presumably everyone can find your schedule on your website. What do you do
00:05:16.800 at those events? How do you structure those events? You know, I kind of got talked into that because
00:05:20.800 I wasn't sure what the attraction was. But, you know, my agents and whatnot were establishing that
00:05:28.520 there was a demand out there on the part of promoters and whatnot. So we did some test shows last year.
00:05:33.280 I've done like book tours and stuff like that. We did some test shows. They went really well.
00:05:37.360 And, uh, and so we thought about adding four or six shows a year when possible, when it doesn't,
00:05:41.880 you know, decrease our already voluminous, uh, voluminous release schedule. But otherwise, yeah,
00:05:47.460 just say it's, it's sort of a lark. I think, I think the audience enjoys it and I enjoy seeing
00:05:51.300 them, but it's never going to be a huge part of what we do probably. But do, do you write a talk
00:05:56.500 for that event?
00:05:57.500 Oh, I see what you're saying. Well, you know, I'd like to, I think maybe, maybe that provides
00:06:01.760 a more predictable product for an audience showing up because part of the attraction now
00:06:06.360 is we don't know what's going to happen. I go on there with some, usually with some friend
00:06:09.840 or a, or a colleague or something. And then we start talking in front of the audience and
00:06:13.800 then we'll take audience questions. And every single time we've done it, it's been completely
00:06:17.480 different. So maybe there's some predictability if you have a show per se, but this isn't really
00:06:22.260 a show. It's just sort of a, of a talk. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually touring for the first time
00:06:26.980 in six years, starting next week. And I'm really enjoying it. I haven't started yet. This is,
00:06:31.240 this is the, uh, I'm enjoying preparing for it. I've, I'm writing a talk and, um, thought I was
00:06:37.560 going to divide the event into talk and then discussion. But I, in writing the talk, I found
00:06:43.120 that I have so much to get off my chest that I'm just going to talk the whole time and then,
00:06:47.360 and walk off stage. I'm going to, I'm going to feel like two hours.
00:06:50.320 They're happy at the end, right? That's all we care about.
00:06:52.760 But no, I'm looking forward to it. It feels like in real life moments are more and more precious.
00:06:58.040 I mean, we've, we've just migrated our lives to this digital swamp, which I'm sure we're going to
00:07:03.460 talk about. And, uh, you know, the one thing you can't fake, the one thing you, you, you really
00:07:08.740 have to make tangible sacrifices for is to be present with people. And, uh, so it seems like
00:07:14.280 it's a good thing to do and it's been too long. So.
00:07:16.400 I think there's a pendulum aspect to it too. I think as, as we move into an era where it's
00:07:21.480 harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not. And a lot of the content out there is
00:07:25.860 artificially or computer generated. I think human beings start to seek authenticity. You know,
00:07:31.920 when the pendulum swings so far in the other direction, all of a sudden, maybe old time
00:07:35.980 theater comes back and you want to see people spitting on stage and unexpected lights falling
00:07:40.620 from the ceiling and audio and, you know, actors having to improv, maybe this, this creates a,
00:07:45.740 a thirst for authenticity, you know?
00:07:48.340 Yeah. All right. Well, um, let's get into it first before we get in, before I drag you,
00:07:53.260 uh, into the, uh, morass here, remind people of your own politics. I mean, how have you, you see,
00:07:59.320 you've, uh, apart from hardcore history, you've had your common sense podcast for years where you've
00:08:05.300 commented on topical issues and, and, uh, war, you know, frankly worried about the state of
00:08:10.280 American politics for quite a bit longer than, than many have worried about it. Uh, and we're
00:08:15.260 going to get into some of your concerns, but remind people of just how you frame your own
00:08:19.460 politics for your audience. Well, I mean, a politics, a political party of one, right? A religion of one.
00:08:25.660 I mean, I, I, I really, I think, you know, looking, when you look back on your life, as you get older,
00:08:30.280 as we are, you notice things that didn't really make sense when you were younger, that seemed
00:08:36.140 more clear to you. And one of those things for me is being a radio talk show host, uh, who didn't
00:08:42.220 fit in the daytime. I mean, I used to call me the Martian in the day part, right? I mean, there'd be
00:08:46.740 some conservative AM host before me and some conservative AM host after me. And the advantage
00:08:52.160 now looking back on it that I see was I fought with that audience all the time. I mean, they didn't
00:08:56.780 like me all that much a lot of the time. And, and I found that I learned things from them that I
00:09:02.120 didn't know as a kid from Los Angeles, you know, growing up when I did. And at the same time,
00:09:06.640 began to understand their arguments and concerns a little bit more. And then also at the same time
00:09:11.540 learned that I don't need to preach to a choir, right? I, there was not going to be any sort of
00:09:16.900 audience for me anyway. So it was all about learning how to live with people who disagreed with you
00:09:21.960 fundamentally about a lot of things. And so now when you, you know, convert that from AM radio,
00:09:26.820 commercial radio into something like podcasting with common sense, I was primed to not have an
00:09:32.560 audience that, that saw things my way. And if you listen to the, um, imaging, you know, I would write
00:09:37.360 the liners for the big voice guy. And a long time ago, I learned that when you have faults, as many as
00:09:42.420 I have, you try to make lemons into lemonade and you have the big voice announcer sort of turn
00:09:47.260 all of your problems and downsides and weaknesses into selling points. Right. And so being this guy
00:09:54.640 that wasn't a Democrat or Republican that didn't agree with the way things were, um, we turn those
00:09:59.000 from weaknesses into strengths through the branding and the marketing. What, and what was weird, Sam,
00:10:03.920 is that when I started in the 1990s, there literally was nobody on my side, but then somehow
00:10:08.860 we just caught a wave accidentally in the zeitgeist. Right. And so for a little while,
00:10:13.940 it almost seemed like there was a new generation coming up that was more in tune with the way I
00:10:18.660 thought. And it was all false hope because we fell right off the cliff later, but, uh,
00:10:23.300 into a worse situation than before. But for a long time, me doing AM radio with an audience that
00:10:28.040 didn't like me very much turned out to be a, a pretty good breeding ground I found in a way that
00:10:32.660 I didn't realize at the time. Hmm. So how is America doing, Dan? How, what's your general sense of the
00:10:39.820 last, I guess, a lot, but we're going to talk a fair amount about the Trump 2.0 moments of the
00:10:45.160 last seven months. Uh, but you can take a, you know, a larger bite of it than that. It's been
00:10:49.740 a few years since we've spoken. What's your sense of, uh, the state of our country?
00:10:54.920 Well, I think where I differ from a lot of people and, and, and this is to be expected, I guess,
00:10:58.980 given my proclivities, but, but I look at this in a much sort of zoom out longer term lens. I mean,
00:11:04.400 many of the things that we look at as relatively recent political developments, 10 years, 12 years,
00:11:09.540 whatever you want to say, look to me like decades of, of dominoes tumbling to get us to where we are
00:11:16.480 now. Like one of the things that I'll get slammed for by some people is that they'll say that I blame
00:11:21.380 both sides for things. You know, I'm a both sides or ism kind of guy, but when you've got problems
00:11:26.840 that I assert are decades and decades and decades in the making, it's not only one part of the
00:11:31.700 political system that's involved in it by its very nature. Right. And so when you ask how I see it,
00:11:37.100 I see it in a much more longer term sense. A lot of what's going on now to me seems like
00:11:42.120 the end result of a bunch of things we did warn about and talk about forever, along with a lot
00:11:46.900 of other people, the growth in executive power and authority, the Swiss cheesing over the eras of
00:11:52.420 the constitution, the weakening of the guardrails and all these sorts of things until you eventually
00:11:58.080 get somebody who isn't bound by protocol, which by the end of the 20th century was really the only
00:12:04.700 thing holding back some president who didn't want to be bound by protocol, if that makes sense.
00:12:09.300 Yeah. That was the, um, the shock of the first Trump administration from my point of view that
00:12:14.740 we discovered that in the place of laws, what we really had backstopping the protocol is, uh, norms
00:12:24.060 that people decided not to violate. And Trump certainly discovered that you could violate them
00:12:29.740 with impunity. And the second time around, we're getting more of that more or less as expected.
00:12:35.620 All right. So let's take the larger sweep before we focus on the last seven months.
00:12:39.460 What have been your concerns going back decades about the, what some have called the, the imperial
00:12:46.580 powers of the presidency?
00:12:48.840 Well, I mean, first of all, let me just say, I feel like the error, you know, if you're looking on the
00:12:52.760 bright side, or if you're looking for silver linings, I feel like the error that we're living
00:12:56.160 through now has helped me better understand errors in the past. I mean, um, there tends to be,
00:13:02.100 you know, the times change and, and, and you never dip your, your toe into the same river water
00:13:07.880 twice, but you can dip your toe into the same river. And I feel like what we're seeing now
00:13:12.320 helps me better understand other eras in history where you were going, what were they thinking? Or how
00:13:17.240 do people behave? Because I think we sort of devolve toward the mean when we get into large groups of
00:13:22.380 people in similar kinds of structures. And I feel like watching what's happening to us now unfolding,
00:13:29.600 I understand the thirties better, the forties better. Uh, you know, I feel like, and that's
00:13:34.340 something that when you live longer, you just inherently understand history better because
00:13:37.880 you've lived through more of it. Right. So when you talk about our, our problems here, it's a
00:13:43.500 combination in my opinion of systemic and then the people, right? Because you couldn't get away with a
00:13:48.400 lot of the stuff that's being done now. If the American population were, for example, the same
00:13:53.160 people they were 40 years ago, uh, it's almost like the old frog in the hot water trope. I mean,
00:13:58.320 we were at a different level of, of water heat back then, and we wouldn't have put up with it.
00:14:02.780 What's so shocking to me as I watched the, the zeitgeist and the country unfold the way it is,
00:14:08.180 is how many people are either good with it, things that we never would have put up with a long time
00:14:13.200 ago or the unquantifiable ability we human beings have to tell ourselves we're not seeing what's
00:14:21.600 really happening. That to me is also, I find it instructive. Like I'm learning about humanity by
00:14:26.780 our ability to fool ourselves into not seeing what we think we're seeing. Like we smell brimstone.
00:14:32.100 We don't want to smell brimstone. So we pretend we're not smelling brimstone. And that's not really
00:14:36.200 an answer to your question, but, but I think we're in an end game here where there's some Rubicon
00:14:40.740 moments happening. That doesn't mean they're going to happen, but this is the most dangerous
00:14:45.040 I've felt the country has been in, in my lifetime. And the very things that I feel is, are threatening
00:14:51.380 it are the very things we talked about forever. I mean, these are all things I've been discussing
00:14:55.140 these things since long before I was on the radio, listening to the dead Kennedys in 1980
00:14:59.800 talking about these things, right? Yeah. So, well, I must say it is cold comfort that, uh, you might be
00:15:06.440 getting a better handle on the Weimar Republic or the fall of Rome, uh, living through the current
00:15:11.340 instance, right? I mean, we like looking for silver lining. These are the pleasures of a historian
00:15:15.120 or an amateur historian. That's right. And, um, yeah, I mean, I, I agree with you. I, I view those,
00:15:22.040 uh, points in history differently now. And, um, I want to get to the psychology and sociology of it all,
00:15:28.360 because I, I think you and I are similarly mystified as to how something like half the
00:15:34.960 country can see what's happening so differently. But, um, before we're there, just again,
00:15:41.040 generically, what are the concerns about presidential power that predate the Trump administration from
00:15:48.900 your point of view? I mean, do you take something like the executive order, which is being used with
00:15:52.980 such abandon now, uh, or, you know, the emergency powers, right? The ability to declare more or less
00:15:58.700 anything in emergency and then do whatever he wants. Yeah. This obviously precedes Trump. What's
00:16:06.740 your view of, of the history that has led up to this moment? Well, it goes back to the founding,
00:16:11.540 right? It predates the constitution, the articles of confederation. We're still having these questions
00:16:15.400 about the power of the executive and whether or not we need a King and how much the other branches
00:16:20.900 of government should be involved in, in being able to checkmate what a powerful executive wants to do.
00:16:26.100 I mean, Madison versus Marbury, these are all, I mean, when you study American history, this is the
00:16:30.460 basic one-on-one level stuff, right? I mean, so nothing's new in that regard. The difference is
00:16:36.300 though, when you read, and I'm a huge fan of the founding documents, when you read things like the
00:16:39.980 Federalist Papers and you realize the guys writing this are like 23, 24 years old, it's shocking,
00:16:45.400 right? But when you read what they're talking about, they're talking about all these questions,
00:16:49.760 like what the role of a chief executive could be. What do you do if the chief executive is not a
00:16:54.940 wise person? What other elements in the country are there to play off against that, right? And what
00:16:59.980 do you do if somebody goes rogue? You can find in our past presidencies, lots of examples of people
00:17:06.340 pushing the presidential envelope. You mentioned earlier the term, the imperial presidency. Well,
00:17:11.800 that dates back from a book from the early seventies that Arthur Schlesinger wrote. And he's writing
00:17:15.840 about the presidency from his era, right? The Nixonian presidency, right? Which we, when I grew
00:17:21.040 up, that was considered to be sort of the, the, the went too far president. And we're going to learn
00:17:25.740 from that, right? But the powers of the presidency now, 40 years later are infinitely stronger than
00:17:33.280 they were when we were worried about an imperial president in the early 1970s. The fact that we don't
00:17:38.820 talk more about that is indicative as to the problems. I mean, if you're not going to have a
00:17:44.220 conversation about what's wrong systemically with the system, well, you're certainly not going to
00:17:48.440 identify the problems and you're going to have even less public support towards fixing them.
00:17:52.340 So when you say, what was the common sense show about? We had a few pillars and one of the pillars
00:17:55.840 was partisanism and hyper-partisanism and what that was going to do to us and, and how the system
00:18:00.960 is incentivized. I mean, you know, there's a lot of money in dividing Americans from each other,
00:18:05.820 but also the idea of, of, of the checks and balances in our country and how those things have been
00:18:10.640 diminishing over time. And that eventually you're going to run into somebody who takes advantage of
00:18:15.060 that. Can you imagine a candidate for the presidency in 2028, say, picking as a central
00:18:22.600 plank of his or her platform, curtailing the powers of the presidency? It's counter, it's
00:18:28.740 counterintuitive, isn't it? It's, it's part of the problem. It's part of why we haven't had it.
00:18:32.120 So for example, let's say you had a Democrat run and say, well, we never have to have,
00:18:35.540 this can't happen again. So you elect me, I'm going to return power from the executive branch to the
00:18:40.500 courts and to the Congress and we'll fix this imbalance, right? Something we used to talk about
00:18:44.720 all the time. Well, the people that raised money for that candidate, the people that elected that
00:18:49.500 candidate, they're going to accuse that candidate of surrendering to the other side of behaving
00:18:54.200 in a unilateral disarmament, right? The other side pushes the envelope and then we give up.
00:18:59.120 In other words, all of the carrots and sticks in our system are designed to run with any
00:19:05.500 constitutional imbalances caused by the previous party and the previous occupant of the White House.
00:19:09.940 So you're right. It's absolutely counterintuitive to think about somebody gaining power with all
00:19:14.460 that that requires and then turning around and giving it away because that's what the system needs.
00:19:19.600 Yeah. I mean, it would be, I guess I could be an audience of one here, but it would be a very
00:19:23.800 attractive thing to run on from my point of view because I, you know, obviously I have many concerns
00:19:29.440 about what Trump is doing and intends to do, but I have similar concerns. If anyone too far to the left
00:19:37.740 took instruction from his example and we had a president AOC or someone like that, uh, who just
00:19:44.280 decided to declare a state of emergency left, right, and center and issue executive orders like we've
00:19:50.060 been seeing.
00:19:50.840 So it's political hypocrisy, isn't it? Right. If the other side did it, what would you, what would
00:19:54.340 people be saying? And you had mentioned executive orders earlier. I throw signing statements in with
00:19:58.920 those too. If you look at the way those things used to be used, so people will say something like,
00:20:04.000 well, you know, they've been using executive orders and signing statements forever. Yes, but not for
00:20:07.980 the same thing. Right. So for example, when George W. Bush started issuing signing statements to bills
00:20:13.640 that he disagreed with, but he wanted to pass for political reasons, what he essentially did was say,
00:20:19.100 I'm signing this bill, the signing statement would say, I'm signing this bill, but I'm not being bound
00:20:23.800 by anything that I feel later interferes with the, you know, actual powers of the presidency. In other
00:20:28.160 words, it was like putting an asterisk next to your signature. And you can say something like,
00:20:32.460 well, past presidents use signing statements and they absolutely did, but they didn't use them like
00:20:36.200 that. Right. So it's a little bit like executive orders. Now we don't use them the way we used to.
00:20:41.760 And when they used to be rare, it was one thing. So one of the things I'll hear Trump supporters say
00:20:46.060 is that Donald Trump isn't doing anything that other presidents haven't done, but let me make a
00:20:51.620 distinction. So let's say you take the most constitutionally extreme thing that Bill Clinton ever
00:20:56.700 did and add it to the most constitutionally extreme thing. Ronald Reagan ever did, et cetera,
00:21:01.040 et cetera, et cetera. And then you get a president in the future who does all those things. Right.
00:21:05.120 In other words, I'm not doing anything Ronald Reagan didn't do or Bill Clinton, but I am doing
00:21:09.240 what both of them did. In other words, there's a quantity has a quality all its own standard there
00:21:14.540 also. So the current president is doing things that have been done before, but not by one president.
00:21:21.400 So, I mean, we are, we are changing the nature of things that way.
00:21:25.680 Yeah. I mean, he's also doing things, I mean, in defense of our mutual incredulity at this point
00:21:31.540 about the mental states of our neighbors, he's also doing things that no president.
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