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00:00:24.260Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam.
00:00:26.700Once again, we're taping this live in front of subscribers.
00:00:29.300I'll be asking Sam many of the questions that you subscribers have submitted.
00:00:33.380We'll be fielding reactions in real time so that Sam can address those.
00:00:37.300Before we get to our first topic, I just want to quickly mention that Sam has shows in Toronto,
00:00:41.340which is sold out next week, DC and New York City.
00:00:44.080There are still tickets for DC and New York.
00:00:46.500And then the following week on May 20th and 21st, you'll be in Dallas and Austin.
00:00:51.420Also, you have some great podcast guests coming up in the next month or so.
00:00:54.820Michael Pollan will be released next week.
00:00:56.720Susan Cain, Alain DeBaton, who's just like an incredible human, or seems to me I haven't met
00:01:01.960him, Vinod Khosla, Noah Smith, Jonathan Swan, and others. Okay, I want to get to our first topic.
00:01:08.440Actually, this is also a bit of an announcement, but since we're going to discuss it, I think it
00:01:12.340counts. We have launched a new community, and for those who haven't heard about it yet, why don't
00:01:17.020you tell us what your intentions are with it? Yeah, this is really, I guess, I mean, in my mind,
00:01:22.540something like a replacement for reddit not no offense to all the redditors out there but
00:01:27.440i just think we need a situation where there's less noise and more signal and and more civility
00:01:33.220and so um we've created something here which we're it's going to be web-based for the first
00:01:38.220month but there's an app in development and um anyone who subscribe now or subscribes before
00:01:45.820june 1st will have access to the community for free i mean it comes with the subscription but
00:01:51.440after June 1st, we're breaking them apart, I believe, should this thing work. We're going to
00:01:56.700go on a month-to-month basis. If the whole thing catches fire, we're going to yank it and realize
00:02:01.980that social media of any sort is impossible. But we're going to take a stab at building a community
00:02:06.380that is not selecting for any of the usual variables of engagement and weirdness and
00:02:12.400division, but just actually a place where you want to have a conversation with people.
00:02:16.060Right. I think the goal for this community, for it to work, it should feel like we've just widened our friend circles. And so some of the experiences we have in WhatsApp or the communication we have in Slack, you should feel that comfortable. And everyone there will be using their real names. So that's also going to change things.
00:02:32.840That's one innovation, which hopefully will mean something. Yeah. So it's an experiment. I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be fun.
00:02:40.020Me too. You've had some great conversations this past month,
00:02:43.440Rahm Emanuel, Francis Fukuyama, Ben Shapiro, Lloyd Blankvein, and others. I'm curious if
00:02:47.400you have any post-mortem thoughts on any of those, especially something you may have enjoyed or wish
00:02:52.700you'd have done differently. I think I got some criticism for the Shapiro conversation that it
00:02:59.560wasn't as much of a debate as some people wanted, or I didn't hold his feet to the fire on Trump's
00:03:06.020record as much as I could have. I think that's probably true. Actually, yeah, Rabbi David Wolpe
00:03:11.020wrote a very nice email on that topic, criticizing me for not having pointed out some specifics about
00:03:17.860how much damage Trump has done to our standing. At one point, Ben compared the president, really
00:03:24.780any president, to a plumber. He's not looking to him for inspiration. He just needs to unblock
00:03:30.060the toilet. And I sort of let him get away with that facile analogy. It's just not true. He's not
00:03:35.580a plumber. He's somebody whose character affects everything. I think I said something about,
00:03:40.440you know, the effect on culture and our politics, but he's also affected our standing in the world
00:03:45.180by alienating all of our allies and giving comfort to many of our actual enemies. So,
00:03:52.160I mean, the thing I found with Ben, which was interesting, I guess I could have anticipated
00:03:55.660it, is that he's such a, calling him a single issue voter is probably not fair, but he's like,
00:04:00.200he was like a two issue voter. You know, it was Israel and the Jews being one issue and, you know,
00:04:05.580wokeness being another and wokeness in large part is a problem for how it affects that first issue.
00:04:11.140And if you think that it enforced choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, if you think
00:04:16.280Kamala Harris is likely to be sufficiently bad on those two issues, there's really nothing Trump
00:04:21.600can do that you're going to regret unless it crosses the line into something so awful that
00:04:26.260it's worse than your worst imaginings about what Kamala Harris was going to be like on those two
00:04:30.740issues. So every time I pushed him on what was wrong with Trump and Trumpism, he more or less
00:04:36.380agreed. And yet he said explicitly or implicitly that none of that's as bad. I mean, Trump grifting
00:04:42.740billions of dollars for his family and friends is awful, corrupt, embarrassing, et cetera,
00:04:47.940but still not as bad as what Kamala Harris could have done or would have done on those two issues.
00:04:55.000And it's a counterfactual. I can't really, really adjudicate. No one can. I mean, I disagree with him, obviously. And I think I weight those issues differently than he does. But, you know, it's not really, there's not really much to debate there. He just, he hasn't seen the thing that Trump has done that is sufficiently awful for him to feel any regret over his choice. So that's where we kind of left it.
00:05:16.080Yeah. I thought that email he wrote would have been great for new community. So hopefully he'll join us over there.
00:05:22.180Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm hoping for.
00:05:24.020Yeah. One thing Ben Shapiro mentioned that felt right to me was the line about the sleight of hand that seems to be happening around anti-Semitism where all the Jews and anti-Semites know exactly what's going on, but it feels as though everyone else isn't seeing that.0.76
00:05:38.200Yeah, I mean, again, I think that's a good way to describe what's happening. I think we'll get to people like Mamdani and Hassan Piker, and that's part of the problem there. People just don't see what's happening there. But I don't view it as so much a matter of Jews and anti-Semites. I view it as a matter of Islamism and the values of open societies, right?
00:06:00.580So it's like, that's what I'm tracking.
00:06:02.460I mean, I'm also tracking antisemitism, unfortunately now, but antisemitism was not something I
00:06:08.800was been focused on for the last quarter century.
00:06:11.800Islamism is so, and it overlaps with the problem of antisemitism, but they're not quite the
00:06:26.640He seems like somebody who would make for a great politician, the right kind that you'd want. He's just a great communicator and a great thinker. Speaking of politicians, this is just my intuition, but about Rahm, I know he's looking at perhaps running for president, but my sense is I don't think he thinks he has the best shot at winning, but I think that's probably one of the best platforms for him to influence others with his ideas.
00:06:51.660And I think, you know, if the Democrats win in 2028, he'll, he'll use that as an opportunity
00:06:56.020to play a big role in the next administration.
00:09:38.160I do mean it. I think it's a rhetorical move because it frustrates a lot of people. I've also said I'm a harm reduction voter. I'm a lesser evil voter. And therefore, I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time because I'm looking at the situation as as as a paramilitary organization that has like a political party as well.
00:09:56.480Politburo as well, that is entirely comprised, not as an alien force, but of orphaned children0.83
00:10:03.160that have, you know, had their parents killed by an apartheid state that has been dominating
00:10:08.560the lives of Palestinians for 80 years at this point. And they've done a genocide at this point
00:10:16.260as well. But like it started off with the Nakba and has only evolved as technology has gotten0.88
00:10:22.400better, to become more heinous. And Gaza is this hermetically sealed area that many people0.94
00:10:29.620correctly point to as the world's largest open air prison before October 7. So my perspective on
00:10:36.980this has always been that I think that Hamas's tactics, which I oppose at times, right, or it's
00:10:45.860like internal governance issues are, are secondary to this conversation because they're, it's, it's
00:10:54.080like, uh, placing a lot of emphasis on the Nat Turner, uh, rebellion or, or, uh, instead of
00:11:00.640talking about the, the much larger, much more consequential, much, uh, bigger harm that, you0.98
00:11:06.600know, chattel slavery was, uh, to, to black people, to like sell black people and to, to rape them.0.97
00:11:12.580and uh okay i think i think i got enough of this clip right that's the end of it anyway yeah yeah0.94
00:11:17.600so i didn't see that podcast and i don't know how favreau dealt with that you know vomitous confusion
00:11:23.900but the fact that he was talking to the guy in the first place makes me worry that again the
00:11:28.860democrats are lost here right so if you want president jd vance or tucker carlson or i guess
00:11:37.200in the best case marco rubio well then by all means you know signal boost hassan piker for the
00:11:42.200next two years but it's a disaster yeah so i don't know i you know it's very hard for me to know
00:11:47.840what's going on in the democratic party really i mean we have 77 of democrats who think that israel
00:11:54.040committed genocide in gaza those are hassan piker's people 77 is a big number that attests
00:12:00.740to some serious moral and political confusion on that issue alone i mean i can for anyone who's
00:12:07.040confused about that. I mean, the word genocide means something. It meant something yesterday
00:12:11.880or the day before that. It means the effort to eradicate a people in whole or in part as such,0.99
00:12:18.840right? It's like, you know, the Nazis killed Jews, tried to kill every last Jew they could0.97
00:12:23.200get their hands on because they were Jews. The Hutus tried to kill all the Tutsis with machetes0.99
00:12:28.520over the course of 100 days in 1994. Those are genocides, and we need that word. If we're going0.99
00:12:33.640to redefine genocide to mean, you know, simply a war we don't like or a war that has too much
00:12:39.280collateral damage, well, then we're just going to need to invent a new word to signify actual
00:12:44.420genocides, which are, again, efforts to eradicate people simply because they belong to a specific
00:12:50.600group. And by that measure, Hamas is explicitly and has always been a genocidal organization.0.67
00:12:57.800This group of paramilitary fighters who are exclusively orphans whose, what, internal0.67
00:13:03.980procedures Hassan Piker can quibble with, but they have a polypuro.1.00
00:13:08.460I mean, this guy is such a colossal moron.0.99
00:13:10.860It's a genocidal organization that aspires to genocide directly in his charter.1.00
00:13:15.160And since October 7th has said it would repeat October 7th again and again and again ad