Making Sense - Sam Harris - #459 — More From Sam： Corruption, Immigration, The End of White-Collar Work, and More

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. Welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Hey Sam,

00:00:39.160 it was nice seeing you a few minutes ago and seeing you again here. A long time no see. Yeah, we just

00:00:43.880 did a Substack Live. I thought that was really good. Yeah, yeah. It actually kind of surprised me that

00:00:48.660 Live still feels like something different, right? I mean, obviously the experience of looking at a 0.85

00:00:53.880 camera and talking is identical, but just the knowledge that is live and that you can't take

00:00:58.320 any of your words back is somehow thrilling or gets your attention. So I like it. We didn't give

00:01:05.120 subscribers much heads up at all. We will do that in the future, but we just had thought of it at the

00:01:10.420 last minute. And anyone who would like to join us for one of those in the future, you can become a

00:01:15.660 subscriber and join us over there. We will give you more time. And I thought it was really cool that

00:01:21.060 we were able to take some questions from the audience and do that in real time. It's a different

00:01:25.400 experience being live than recording, but we'll do more of those and we'll see where we can learn and

00:01:30.800 figure out how to improve those. Yeah, it was fun. And I think we can record them. I don't know,

00:01:36.660 like in this case, I think it was just if you were in the room, you were in the room, you know,

00:01:40.960 which is frankly kind of nice, you know, to treat it like a live event as opposed to yet another

00:01:46.120 podcast, you know, piece of content that we're just going to record and put out there. So,

00:01:50.540 you know, I think we should give people a heads up so that they can, they can be there if they want

00:01:54.380 to be. All right. So I woke up this morning thinking about your conversation with Sarah

00:01:57.640 Longwell and Tim Miller from the Bulwark, that media empire they have, and just thinking why it

00:02:03.380 was so well-received by your audience. And I don't even know what their positions are on most issues,

00:02:07.540 but I'm sure they're more conservative than yours. They're conservatives, correct?

00:02:11.240 You know, I don't even know where there's daylight between us and interviews. I mean,

00:02:14.960 yes, they, they, you would expect there to be differences because they're both

00:02:18.420 formerly Republicans, right? So they, they're coming from the other side. They're both gay. 0.99

00:02:22.920 So that, I mean, I don't know how conservative they could be socially, but- 0.83

00:02:27.220 My point is it doesn't even matter. It seems like it didn't even matter anymore.

00:02:30.380 There was such a sense of relief hearing you guys speak together. It's almost like

00:02:33.440 we never really cared about some of those other differences. And we've realized that now we just

00:02:38.460 care about decency, decorum, sanity, having somebody on the other side, just see,

00:02:43.500 at least see everything the same way that you see things.

00:02:46.320 Yeah, yeah. And also they're, they're much closer to the political history there. I mean,

00:02:52.340 they're just, obviously having spent all their time right of center, they see how Trump and

00:02:57.920 Trumpism bent everything into this awful shape. And they, you know, they have relationships,

00:03:03.560 many more relationships than, than I had. They got distorted by these changes. So yeah,

00:03:09.720 it's great to talk to them. I'm just a huge fan of both those guys and they're just very fun.

00:03:13.200 And they're so trustworthy and likable. They just feel like, you know, listening to the three of

00:03:18.420 you talk, it just felt like, you know, three of my friends were getting together and I'm certain

00:03:22.720 the audience felt the same way that there was this FOMO. Like I just, I wish I could have been in there

00:03:26.740 with you guys. I saw a comment on YouTube and thought this was a nice note from them. It says,

00:03:31.400 as a progressive, I probably don't agree on many policy issues with Sarah and Tim,

00:03:34.840 but I've come to trust them to tell it straight over almost anyone else, including most of the

00:03:39.560 progressive podcasters I listened to. So I don't know. I mean, I'm, it just seems that everybody

00:03:44.180 liked hearing you guys speak. I can't help my mind thinking that there, you know, perhaps this,

00:03:49.540 we should make this a quarterly podcast crossover event where, you know, it appears on, on both

00:03:55.000 podcasts. I think the audiences would enjoy it. And then even putting a, maybe a few live dates

00:04:00.220 together, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I definitely think people would like to see

00:04:03.920 the three of you guys. I think they're touring. I think they're touring right now. They're going

00:04:07.560 to Minneapolis to do a live event there. I think I noticed, yeah. So people should check them. I

00:04:13.240 mean, they're taking their podcast on the road to some degree. So. Oh, I am certain they are a lot

00:04:18.140 of fun to hang out with. So good for them. According to the Wall Street Journal, President Donald

00:04:23.320 Trump's cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial, it sounds so official, sold a $500 million

00:04:29.520 stake to a member of the Emirati royal family shortly before his inauguration last January.

00:04:33.840 Months later, the Trump administration agreed to supply the UAE with highly coveted American-made

00:04:38.640 AI chips. Now, we've talked about this before. Is there anything to add with this

00:04:42.620 latest information? No, it's just as tawdry and as dangerous and as self-serving and as corrupt as 0.89

00:04:49.520 anyone could have imagined, right? I mean, the crucial detail here is that we're giving chips,

00:04:54.460 our most advanced chips, to the UAE that does military exercises with China. And these are chips that

00:04:59.160 precisely the chips we don't want China to have. And we're not, we're relaxing those security concerns

00:05:04.320 because Trump and his family managed to get hundreds of millions, arguably billions in the

00:05:11.160 transaction. You know, so what's wrong with that? You know, if you pretended to care that Hunter Biden

00:05:15.440 got some money, you know, serving on a board in Ukraine that he was not qualified to serve on

00:05:20.760 because of his, the name association with Joe Biden, and you thought maybe even Joe Biden in the worst

00:05:26.400 case scenario got some of that money and you're looking at those, those emails. And when they say

00:05:30.860 10% to the big guy, you thought, oh, that's a smoking gun. How awful. Let's just destroy this guy's

00:05:36.460 presidency and burn everything down because of how corrupt and unseemly this is. You're that person 1.00

00:05:41.900 who cares about the integrity of our politics to that fine degree. Hunter Biden and his grifting are

00:05:49.100 intolerable. And yet now magically he's some, you know, look, go look in the mirror, see how much

00:05:54.000 you care about a president who's managed to extract billions of dollars over the course of months by

00:06:00.140 materially undermining the, the leadership role and military preparedness and actual safety of our

00:06:08.440 country on the world stage. Right. I mean, it's just, just like everything, our alliances have eroded

00:06:13.340 all of these tariffs, you know, whether you believe that he's earned a 1 billion or 4 billion,

00:06:19.080 depending on whose estimate you trust at this point, you know, he has just sold out our country

00:06:23.580 every which way he could. So as to profit and to have his family and friends profit.

00:06:29.080 I know we keep talking about AI, but it seems like the timelines keep moving up daily. I want you to

00:06:33.600 watch this clip from the CEO of Microsoft AI in a recent interview with the Financial Times. Let's play

00:06:38.960 that clip for Sam. You talk about superintelligence. Most of your rivals talk about AGI, artificial

00:06:46.760 general intelligence. Explain the difference between AGI and superintelligence. I prefer the

00:06:53.420 definition that focuses first on what would it take to build a system that could achieve most of the

00:07:00.500 tasks that a regular professional in a workplace goes about on a daily basis. Think of it as a

00:07:05.840 professional grade AGI. How close are we? I think that we're going to have a human level performance

00:07:11.440 on most, if not all, professional tasks. So white collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer, 0.88

00:07:18.640 either being, you know, a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person.

00:07:23.940 Most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months. And we can see

00:07:31.960 this in software engineering. Many software engineers report that they are now using AI-assisted coding

00:07:37.840 for the vast majority of their code production, which means that their role has shifted now to this

00:07:43.480 meta function of debugging, scrutinizing, of doing the strategic stuff like architecting, of, you know,

00:07:51.780 et cetera, et cetera, putting things into production. So it's a quite different relationship to the

00:07:55.940 technology. And that's happened in the last six months.

00:07:57.680 What do you make of that?

00:07:59.320 Well, so I know Mustafa a little bit, a very nice guy. And obviously he's, he's very close to this work.

00:08:04.420 I mean, he, he came from DeepMind. He was one of the founders of DeepMind and moved over to, to Microsoft.

00:08:11.380 So I, I think his prognostications are probably as credible as anybody's at this point. You know,

00:08:17.700 it's pretty alarming when you, when you think of the, the societal implications of you, if in a year

00:08:22.920 we have, um, the complete cancellation of the need for human cognition of the white collar type, 0.85

00:08:31.800 you know, I mean, that's, that's, I don't know how many people that is, but it's a lot of people.

00:08:35.540 And it's basically, um, certainly most of the high status jobs, right? I mean, the, one of the, um,

00:08:41.700 ironies and surprises here is that the robots are coming for the lawyers and doctors and software

00:08:48.600 engineers before they're coming for the janitors and massage therapists and nurses and plumbers. 0.92

00:08:54.960 And so if you went to college and incurred $200,000 in debt, and that degree enabled you to get to the

00:09:03.220 rung on the ladder with it, where you're currently standing, it's very likely that part of the ladder

00:09:09.040 is, um, in the process of disappearing, right? And the entire ladder, I mean, Mustafa is saying that

00:09:16.040 the ladder itself is, is, uh, evaporating. So what, what he's saying now is in principle already true

00:09:23.540 of the bottom rung. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to

00:09:29.960 subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making

00:09:35.820 Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can

00:09:42.480 subscribe now at samharris.org.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - February 13, 2026

#459 — More From Sam： Corruption, Immigration, The End of White-Collar Work, and More

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