#445 — More From Sam： Marjorie Taylor Greene, Billionaires, Thanksgiving Political Debates, & Rapid Fire Questions
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
187.51338
Summary
On this week's episode of the Making Sense Podcast, Sam sits down with comedian and friend of the show, Sam Harris, to discuss the cancellation of his upcoming show in Portland, Oregon, as well as the controversy surrounding the heckler who heckled him at a recent show.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
00:00:11.780
hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing
00:00:15.740
the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
00:00:20.100
Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore
00:00:26.260
it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're
00:00:30.240
doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, welcome back to another episode of More
00:00:38.260
from Sam, Thanksgiving edition, which really doesn't mean anything. It just means happy
00:00:42.600
Thanksgiving to everybody. And if you're not in the U.S., it just means a happy third week
00:00:47.580
of November. Hi, Sam. How are you? Good, good. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you. It was
00:00:52.420
great seeing you in Chicago last week. I have to say that was by far my favorite show of
00:00:56.180
yours thus far. Yeah, that was fun. It was a great venue, and we had some friends there.
00:01:02.040
It was really a blast. Yeah, it felt like it's about 20% different than the one you started
00:01:07.100
with in Chicago. Yeah, yeah. I keep revising it as things come into the news and drop out,
00:01:13.340
so yeah. Yeah, it's getting a little tighter as you go, too, so it's enjoyable to watch that
00:01:18.120
go. I'm starting to know what I think, apparently. Yeah. Well, you had your first heckler, too,
00:01:23.800
which was... Honestly, that is... It's possible that's the second heckler ever. I mean, it's the
00:01:30.300
first legit heckler. I had something close to that before, but this is a person who actually
00:01:34.960
had to be escorted out, you know. I don't think... Do you know? I don't think I... I did not know until
00:01:39.820
yesterday what her position was. Do you think you know? Well, clearly, she didn't like something I
00:01:46.040
said about Islam. I'm not quite sure why or how far that ran, but that was the point of contention.
00:01:53.140
That's when she shrieked bullshit. I happened to be on that topic, so... Okay, but I was guessing
00:01:58.320
the wrong side. She was actually more to the right. No. No, no. Yes. No, no. No, no. One is very hard to
00:02:06.920
get to the right of me on this particular point. Well, she yelled out bullshit when you said that Islam
00:02:12.820
is a religion of peace. I don't know what her position was, but it seemed like she yelled it
00:02:16.500
right at that. Okay, so... But pretty clearly, I was calling bullshit on that concept, right? So...
00:02:21.780
And I think that was unmistakable, the line I was taking. There's no way she was to the right of me.
00:02:26.280
Okay. So, I originally thought that... I mean, being there, I thought that was the position,
00:02:31.060
but then I was informed yesterday that no, I'd gotten it wrong. Either way, we had great security
00:02:36.560
there, so they had her removed immediately. But for anyone else who would like to see you perform
00:02:41.600
live and not yell anything out, we have nine shows coming up for 2026. Just quickly, it's Los Angeles,
00:02:47.180
Dallas, Austin, Portland, Vancouver, Palm Beach, Toronto, DC, and New York City again. Any words
00:02:53.020
for the people of Portland, Sam? What is happening in Portland? Yeah, it's interesting to... I mean,
00:02:59.540
you put these tickets on sale in multiple cities, and there's just a radical difference in specific
00:03:06.940
cities. I mean, it's like New York sells out in, I don't know, a day, or virtually sells out in a day.
00:03:13.100
I mean, literally like two hours, we're in 80% sold or something. And, you know, Portland, it remains
00:03:19.080
to be seen whether that's actually going to work, right? I don't know what I did to Portland, but
00:03:23.420
the people are not coming out. And you just never really know what's going to happen when you put
00:03:28.240
tickets on sale. I mean, usually it's not a disappointment, but occasionally there's a city
00:03:32.180
where something has not gone well for, you know, with me in that audience. So, yeah, if you don't
00:03:39.940
come out, we will cancel Portland, and we will not lie about why we canceled it. We will say that we
00:03:46.380
didn't sell enough tickets in Portland, if that's what happens. Right. Every other act will say something
00:03:50.420
like, due to unforeseen circumstances, ours is due to unforeseen circumstances. Yeah, the force majeure here
00:03:55.060
is the people in Portland didn't buy enough tickets. So we'll see what happens. All right, Portland,
00:04:00.080
you've been warned, get your friends, buy tickets, or you may not see Sam. All right,
00:04:04.640
on to our first topic. I want to talk about, I've seen many different reactions to Marjorie Taylor
00:04:09.460
Green, her apology for the role she's played in divisive politics. And I wanted to get your
00:04:14.660
reaction. Well, honestly, I didn't see her apology. It was an apology video that she made.
00:04:20.140
She was talking to Dana Bash, and it was, she was pretty apologetic about, you know, she acknowledged
00:04:24.840
that she had played a role. Dana had called her out. Yeah, I mean, that's always nice to hear. I mean,
00:04:28.980
she's been so crazy that I just don't know how rehabilitated she could conceivably be. I mean,
00:04:35.720
she was out there with Jewish space lasers and QAnon, and it's hard to exaggerate. It's actually
00:04:41.900
impossible to exaggerate how crazy she's been. So, I mean, she was right in the Candace Owens orbit
00:04:46.960
with just, everything's a conspiracy, and there's nothing so bizarre that she didn't have a taste for
00:04:53.420
it, at least. So, yeah, I mean, if she's had a reboot of her brain and is thinking rational
00:05:01.060
thoughts and has now gotten out of politics for the moment because it's become so toxic for her,
00:05:08.380
having gotten, you know, out of stride with Trump, I mean, that's kind of interesting. But I just,
00:05:13.640
I have no confidence that people change that fundamentally, especially not in a short news
00:05:20.280
cycle. So, I think we're going to get some more crazy from her. I just think that'd be very
00:05:25.340
surprising if we don't. Well, it reminded me when I was watching her, she seemed entirely normal in
00:05:29.860
that clip for six minutes. And it reminded me of when I watched Matt Gaetz. I don't know if you
00:05:33.960
remember seeing him on Club Random with Bill Maher. He seemed entirely normal, too. What do you make of
00:05:40.260
this? These people present as crazy, but when they're in, they can find moments of sanity. Is it a show?
00:05:46.920
Yeah, I think there are people who are, I mean, this is a, yeah, this is a huge problem. It extends
00:05:52.740
obviously beyond these people. I mean, to many, many people in politics and public life at the
00:05:57.400
moment where you have very talented performers on some level who, if I had to summarize the
00:06:04.740
character defect, it's that they have no principles or they have a serious software flaw,
00:06:12.500
which is, in many cases, just kind of a ravenous appetite for the contrarian take on everything,
00:06:22.420
which then summates as, you know, just one conspiracy theory after another is entertained
00:06:27.660
and halfway believed or fully embraced, and there's no limit to it. So, I mean, that's what we're seeing
00:06:33.300
a lot of. But there are a bunch of people out there who I think are probably diagnosable as
00:06:38.480
psychopaths. I mean, I think they just have no real empathy for people, and they're manipulators,
00:06:45.640
and they're charismatic, and they're good at what they do, and they're unhindered by any kind of
00:06:51.940
moral compunction while doing it. I mean, Trump is certainly this type of character. I mean,
00:06:57.960
you know, he cannot be embarrassed by being caught in a lie or being shown to have contradicted
00:07:04.540
himself. I mean, all he can do, I mean, I guess he can become enraged by some bad press, but I mean,
00:07:11.280
there's no conscience there that ever gets appealed to, right? I mean, there's no, none of these people
00:07:15.840
ever apologize. They don't correct errors. They don't acknowledge fault. They don't think better
00:07:21.900
of anything. I mean, there's just not, they just keep pivoting. I mean, even if they change views or
00:07:26.740
change policies or change direction, they pivot, but it's unacknowledged, and they have absolutely no,
00:07:33.000
I mean, take Elon in this case, right? Elon has now sidled up to Trump like a beggar once again,
00:07:40.740
right? He went to the MBS dinner and took whatever crumbs from the table he could be given. I mean,
00:07:47.800
it's just a completely pathetic picture, but why is it so pathetic? Because here's somebody who went to
00:07:54.880
war with Trump, calling him a pedophile, effectively, in so many words, basically saying,
00:07:59.540
this man is criminally culpable for his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein. That's why,
00:08:05.180
you know, these files haven't come out and they're going to come out and destroy him,
00:08:08.400
right? Basically, this is, he took as hard a swing as possible at the character of the president.
00:08:14.780
He's offered absolutely no rational accounting of how his opinion of Trump has changed, and yet now he's
00:08:21.740
back just begging him for attention and favor, clearly he doesn't feel, he hasn't made sick by
00:08:29.800
this process, right? He doesn't, he doesn't even see that it's done anything to his reputation,
00:08:34.700
right? He's just operating. Honestly, I just don't know what you have to have in place or have to be
00:08:41.000
missing, you know, cognitively and emotionally to be able to perform like that. But it's,
00:08:46.540
it's unimaginable to me that like, if I were going to suddenly change my tune on Trump and not have to
00:08:52.760
acknowledge why, right? Just start praising Trump and wanting to be his friend. And I mean, just
00:08:57.780
imagine that, imagine that in front of my audience, just like, okay, like I'm all, I'm all full MAGA
00:09:01.820
now. Trump is the greatest president we've had, but there's nothing to account for, right? I mean,
00:09:07.240
it's just like, I don't know how these people become these type of people, but just look at the people
00:09:13.760
who've accomplished these kinds of, you know, pivots. I mean, Elon's is the most egregious that
00:09:18.520
of late that I can, I mean, it's just, it's impossible to, it's impossible to even interpret
00:09:23.700
because why would he have to do this, right? He's, he's the richest man on earth. His businesses are
00:09:29.860
going fine or they're doing whatever they're doing. He doesn't need Trump for, he can just keep doing
00:09:34.920
his thing. He could have stayed with Trump as a pedophile and this is the, this bill is an abomination
00:09:39.400
and go fuck yourself. And he could have had the integrity of that epiphany, but no, he's back,
00:09:45.740
you know, just being a sycophant mode. Why? Right. And how, I mean, the why is, the why is
00:09:52.180
inscrutable. The how is impossible for me to understand. Well, Elon strikes me as somebody
00:09:56.680
who's probably more or less the same on stage and off stage. Whereas Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor
00:10:01.340
Green and even Trump, it feels like the costume comes off, they get off stage and they're a different
00:10:06.120
person. Like it's a show. And I think there's something different about that.
00:10:09.960
Well, we know all these people are liars, right? I mean, so Elon is a, he seems to be a compulsive
00:10:15.340
liar to me at this point. So he can't be the same on stage and off stage because he's lying a lot.
00:10:20.380
We know Tucker Carlson is, has been lying about his views. I mean, that, that, that was one product
00:10:25.900
of the Dominion lawsuit that his private texts were leaked. And we know that he had been, you know,
00:10:31.240
wishing for Trump to disappear for quite some time and calling him a demonic force and said he
00:10:35.620
couldn't wait to be rid of him, et cetera. We knew he, we know he didn't believe in the, the 2020
00:10:39.840
election was stolen and he'd been pushing all that. So he's a hypocrite and a liar, but he's
00:10:45.440
functioning in a space where none of that matters, right? He's cultivated an audience that is not
00:10:50.660
disposed to keep score in any way. They're just onto the next thing, right? You know, just the next
00:10:56.600
bright, shiny object of conspiracism or, or innuendo or, or, you know, smearing of political
00:11:03.340
opponents or whatever it is, but they know they, these people understand their audiences
00:11:08.300
and they understand how little they need to do to maintain their reputation in front of
00:11:14.780
Right. I want to switch gears. I think it was about two days after your most recent, um,
00:11:19.460
episode on Trigonometry podcast that I noticed you getting slammed online. And by the time I
00:11:24.540
noticed it was sort of slammed online. Is that, uh, yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is what I was
00:11:30.500
going to say is I feel like, because I didn't know about it in real time, that it never really
00:11:35.080
happened. And I want to know, is this what it's like to be off social media these days?
00:11:38.960
Oh yeah. I mean, it's, I don't know about it unless it's, um, been sent to me by, by you or,
00:11:44.980
or somebody else who noticed it, but yeah, no, it's amazing. It doesn't even, yeah. Like if you,
00:11:49.400
if you weren't paying attention, there's not that many, I can count on one hand or maybe three fingers
00:11:54.340
of one hand, the people who will send me stuff that happens on X or a Reddit or yeah. And just
00:12:00.400
this, in this case it was Elon, uh, slamming me on X. And so you would think that would matter if,
00:12:06.220
if being slammed on X matters, you'd think Elon doing it would matter.
00:12:11.600
It doesn't. It's amazing. I mean, again, I, I, I'm reluctant to make too much of this, uh,
00:12:16.720
all the while celebrating it because I realized there are people with certain kinds of careers
00:12:21.900
or jobs where being slammed by, you know, someone even much, much less of a platform than Elon's on,
00:12:28.060
on X might matter to them. Right. I mean, I think you, you know, it's, it's very easy for me to say
00:12:33.060
Twitter is in real life, but I think for many people it might still be, but man, it just doesn't
00:12:38.920
exist for me. It's just, it's just amazing how much it doesn't exist.
00:12:42.920
Well, you, you, you're very lucky to have a great group of subscribers and supporters that
00:12:46.980
are supporting you, paying you to be this voice in the world. And so you do have a,
00:12:52.880
Yeah. But I mean, even like at this point, it's just like, even if, uh, my audience were very
00:12:58.720
different, it's still hard to see how it would matter. I mean, it's a, um, yeah, I mean, I guess
00:13:04.280
the way it matters is if something gets ginned up against you and your employer can still get,
00:13:10.960
you know, worried about the backlash on social media and then you can get fired. I mean, I think
00:13:15.940
that is probably still happening in some media space. I think it probably has to happen still
00:13:21.520
more from the left than from the right, but it's just amazing not to have my mind polluted by any
00:13:27.900
of it. I mean, I can still remember what it was like to feel like I had to respond. I mean,
00:13:35.060
obviously on X when I was on Twitter, when I was on Twitter, but on the podcast and I would just get
00:13:42.060
these cycles of kind of needless controversy that was all, I mean, it took me years to realize that
00:13:47.740
for me at least none of it would exist, but for my engagement on Twitter. I mean, I just wouldn't,
00:13:53.180
you know, the Ezra Klein thing, that was all Twitter. Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm not really
00:13:56.960
given to regret very much, but if I regret anything, I regret it taking me that long to realize that I
00:14:03.280
had invited this sort of river of digital sludge into my life and then spent an immense amount of
00:14:10.700
time trying to figure out how to keep my life clean, not realizing that, you know, I could just
00:14:17.040
turn off the tap and yeah, it took years, but here we are.
00:14:20.820
You're one of the rare few that was getting canceled when it was Twitter and not canceled
00:14:27.900
Yeah. Never, never go back on. Everyone listening to this podcast has won some number of lotteries,
00:14:33.880
whether it's with their health, family, financial, or in many other arenas. And given your belief
00:14:38.840
around the myth of the self-made man, why do you think we struggle so much to craft a society that
00:14:44.520
takes care of the versions of ourselves that could have just as easily not won some of these
00:14:53.100
We don't. Why is it so hard? Why are we not able to put ourselves in the positions of having
00:14:59.680
I'm going to praise the audience if they can understand that question. But basically you're
00:15:02.860
saying that many of us have won the lottery and we don't recognize just how much luck is involved
00:15:08.700
in us having what we have, even our talents that we've made the most of, and we're not nearly as
00:15:14.420
compassionate as we should be given the role that luck is playing in the unequal success of
00:15:20.780
That's right. Thank you for restating that question for me. Yeah.
00:15:24.160
Okay. So yeah, so it's a question about compassion and irrational understanding of just how unfair
00:15:29.300
life is. Yeah. I don't think we're, I mean, just look at, I mean, take the problem of homelessness,
00:15:34.520
right? I mean, we all find it galling and we find that, you know, if you're living in a major city
00:15:39.260
in America, our complete failure to, to respond to this problem in a sane way. And I mean, it's
00:15:46.080
obviously, it's a very difficult problem to solve, but the thing you, you know, drug abuse aside,
00:15:50.960
when you just look at the component of mental illness here and you see, you know, you're walking
00:15:55.460
on the sidewalk and you see someone who's obviously been living on the streets forever, you know,
00:16:00.320
ranting to invisible enemies. I mean, how you can't feel in your bones, the role that luck has
00:16:08.940
played in differentiating you from this person, right? I mean, the fact that you don't have the brain
00:16:14.520
chemistry that has pitched you into that hellscape, it's pure luck. I mean, no, literally no one can
00:16:22.120
take credit for not being floridly schizophrenic. The only sane response is compassion on some level.
00:16:30.080
Yes. Yes. Fear is also understandable. Annoyance that we haven't figured out how to keep people
00:16:37.300
suffering this kind of mental illness off the, off the front steps of the restaurant we're trying
00:16:43.600
to walk into. I mean, it's just like, obviously that's not this, it's idiot compassion that
00:16:47.660
suggests that someone should be free to live out their dysfunction on the sidewalk. Whatever services
00:16:53.120
exist should be given to these people and they should be given to them someplace where they can
00:16:57.800
actually receive them. So I'm not saying that anything like the status quo of just tolerating
00:17:04.160
this is compassion, but compassion really is the only sane response to this. I mean, just there,
00:17:09.860
but for the grace of the great roulette wheel of the galaxy go all of us. And it's, uh, yeah, I mean,
00:17:17.880
I just, I, the PA, again, this, Elon's another example of just somebody who, whose ethics seems
00:17:24.960
entirely framed by utterances. Like I wasn't given anything. I did everything myself. And when you
00:17:32.580
think of the shit that president Obama got, when he said in Silicon Valley, you know, you didn't build
00:17:36.760
this, this being all of the infrastructure that has made it possible for there to be a Silicon Valley
00:17:42.160
in America is the ethical intuitions of, uh, of adolescence to not acknowledge the role of luck
00:17:49.480
and the, and the gratitude for all that has been built before you arrived on the scene, right? And
00:17:55.440
all the investment that was required to create a canvas for you to work on. Anyone who's not
00:18:01.840
kind of vividly aware of that is just lost ethically, I think. Yeah. I just, I mean, going back to
00:18:08.560
a question that wasn't, uh, correct. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,
00:18:16.340
you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length
00:18:21.940
episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on
00:18:27.800
listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.