Making Sense - Sam Harris - #445 — More From Sam： Marjorie Taylor Greene, Billionaires, Thanksgiving Political Debates, & 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

00:00:11.780 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

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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 1.00

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 1.00

00:02:12.820 is a religion of peace. I don't know what her position was, but it seemed like she yelled it 0.99

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 0.75

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 0.68

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 0.98

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 0.99

00:09:39.400 and go fuck yourself. And he could have had the integrity of that epiphany, but no, he's back, 1.00

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 0.63

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. 0.53

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 1.00

00:10:45.440 functioning in a space where none of that matters, right? He's cultivated an audience that is not 1.00

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

00:11:13.500 those audiences.

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.

00:12:11.020 Multiple times.

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,

00:12:51.900 great audience.

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

00:14:25.000 when it's X. Right.

00:14:26.160 That's the matter for you.

00:14:27.060 From each direction, yeah.

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

00:14:49.780 lotteries?

00:14:50.800 We don't craft such a society.

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

00:14:59.080 not won the lotteries?

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

00:15:19.200 people in our society.

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 0.96

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 1.00

00:16:47.660 suggests that someone should be free to live out their dysfunction on the sidewalk. Whatever services 0.99

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 0.99

00:17:36.760 this, this being all of the infrastructure that has made it possible for there to be a Silicon Valley 0.99

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.

00:18:38.560 you

Making Sense - Sam Harris - November 26, 2025

#445 — More From Sam： Marjorie Taylor Greene, Billionaires, Thanksgiving Political Debates, & Rapid Fire Questions

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