Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 21, 2026


#489 — More From Sam： A Fabulist at Cambridge, the Strait of Hormuz, AOC in 2028, and More


Episode Stats


Length

23 minutes

Words per minute

175.79

Word count

4,122

Sentence count

188


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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00:00:25.180 Welcome back to another episode of More From Sam.
00:00:28.260 Hello, Sam.
00:00:29.200 Hey, good to see you.
00:00:30.780 Good to see you as well.
00:00:32.080 We are not taping in front of a live audience again because we weren't certain we were going
00:00:35.800 to be able to tape today.
00:00:36.820 And who knows, maybe this will become the new normal again.
00:00:39.840 All right, you ready to jump in?
00:00:41.440 Yeah, let's jump in.
00:00:42.680 Jason Erday was found dead at the age of 41.
00:00:45.940 And for those who don't know who he is, he was a Cambridge professor and fast rising
00:00:49.900 media star until his world collapsed over the summer.
00:00:52.820 In July, there were credible plagiarism accusations that expanded into journalists questioning
00:00:57.880 his biographical claims, which were incredible. He claimed to have run 600 miles in six days,
00:01:03.600 which is something only the most elite ultra runners have done. Cambridge opened an investigation
00:01:08.820 on August 5th and Airday resigned the same day. His autobiography, which many think contained
00:01:14.420 bold falsehoods, was then published August 11th. Days later, he was found dead. What do you make
00:01:20.640 of all this? Well, apparently I saw, not being on social media, I don't think I saw just how big a
00:01:26.160 story this was. Apparently this was just wall to wall. And in the UK, this was just completely
00:01:31.780 dominated the news cycle. And even before he died, I mean, it was the coverage, I think we could
00:01:37.860 imagine precipitated his suicide. The onus is really on Cambridge and the other institutional
00:01:46.580 actors who covered for him. I think the BBC and other journalists probably played an ignominious
00:01:54.080 role in this because they attacked his unmasking as a plagiarist and a fabulist as a symptom of
00:02:00.960 racism right now it didn't help that the philosopher at cambridge or a former fellow
00:02:06.760 at cambridge who's a philosopher has as his um hobby horse you know something like race realism
00:02:13.520 right he's he spends a lot of time thinking about intelligence differences between groups and i mean
00:02:18.140 so so the optics of that weren't great and i understandably distracting but it doesn't mean
00:02:24.040 he was wrong about this case at all, it doesn't mean that this case was ever plausible, right?
00:02:30.020 I mean, the fact that Cambridge believed this guy's claims about himself, I mean, it just
00:02:35.840 seems impossible. I mean, he claimed to have not spoken a word until age 11, to not be able to read
00:02:41.700 and write until age 18. Then he got a PhD in one of these fake woke disciplines, you know, some
00:02:48.640 backwater of sociology that's all about racial grievance. I mean, intellectually, this whole
00:02:54.800 area of every university is almost total bullshit. So there really needs to be a house cleaning
00:03:00.660 there. But the fact that he was promoted as some kind of prodigy, given how crazy his
00:03:10.280 self-representation was, is a sign of just how cultic and confused the left and left-leaning
00:03:18.500 institutions have become i mean it's just it's a sign of the cancer having spread everywhere why
00:03:24.360 would cambridge do this why would they not investigate why would they just take him at
00:03:27.560 face value would they do this with anyone else or is there something special they you can imagine
00:03:33.240 they wouldn't do it with a jew right i mean it's just this is all anti-racism this is iver max
00:03:38.740 kendi and you know the the the genius that became fully formed in the brains of everyone left of
00:03:45.060 center post George Floyd, right? This is putting the BLM black square not only in your bio but in
00:03:51.460 your brain. It's a cult. It's always been a cult. I mean, it's been obvious for about a decade now
00:03:58.920 that this is what we're witnessing is the ramifications of a moral panic around race
00:04:04.040 and social justice that got engineered on the left. And in large measure, it gave us Trump and
00:04:10.340 Trumpism, in my view. I mean, I think it's just as culpable for the derangement of the right as
00:04:15.780 the derangement of the right is. It's intolerable, and if we don't get our heads clear of its new
00:04:22.300 variant, this far-left socialist-slash-communist alliance with Islamism, we're going to go for
00:04:30.300 another round of right-wing ascendancy in America and elsewhere. So, I mean, to speak about Arday
00:04:38.080 himself. I don't, I don't know whether he was just genuinely crazy or just a, you know, a con
00:04:43.780 artist. I mean, I can't really put much emphasis on the artist part of that. I mean, again, these
00:04:49.040 lies should not have been believable by anyone, but I mean, he might've had genuine mental illness.
00:04:53.920 I don't know. So he's some kind of George Santos character or some, it means it's a totally bizarre
00:04:59.800 story, but again, whatever his sins as a person or his, his deficits as a person, again, I don't
00:05:07.400 know. And the onus is totally on Cambridge and everyone who believed this. It's just incredible.
00:05:13.460 But are you putting the onus on Cambridge because they just didn't ask questions or because they
00:05:16.900 used him to propel him to the top so that they could tell a nice story about a guy like this?
00:05:23.000 They're an institution that has become totally corrupt in its desperation to believe
00:05:27.440 that somebody who checks all the identitarian boxes is some kind of woke superhero, right?
00:05:37.060 So these are claims that would not have been believed about anyone else. I mean, just none of this passes the laugh test. It's just, again, you're in the presence of a lunatic who's making these claims about himself, right?
00:05:51.680 I mean, he might as well have said that he used to be able to fly, but gave it up because
00:05:55.760 he got bored, right?
00:05:56.780 I mean, it's just, it's madness.
00:05:58.940 So I don't know what to make of the fact that they believed all this, but then when they
00:06:04.360 double down and triple down and castigate anyone who doubts this stuff as a racist,
00:06:10.480 motivated by bad motives, but by definition, how else could you, you know, what other reason
00:06:15.400 could you possibly have for doubting the gifts of this man with dreadlocks?
00:06:19.480 You know, I mean, it's, it's, um, the social justice hysteria around race that has occurred
00:06:25.480 in the last decade has been almost totally dishonest.
00:06:29.500 Almost, I mean, this is the Jussie Smollettification of everything, right?
00:06:35.000 And Cambridge and the BBC and the New York Times and all the, all these, all of our most
00:06:39.740 trusted institutions are the main participants in it.
00:06:44.040 They've been activated and baffled by the far left willingly.
00:06:51.400 And it's this, again, the spell, I'm convinced that the spell is in the process of breaking.
00:06:56.440 I don't think we're anywhere near peak woke, but this recent variant of it with the DSA among Democrats and the obvious confusion there, to take the American context, really has me worried about the next two years in our politics.
00:07:13.960 And maybe when the Gulf states said they wouldn't send their students or whatever it was to
00:07:18.260 universities, or maybe they meant the woke left too. These are also the problems. And I also want
00:07:22.760 to touch on the failure of institutions. I want to talk to you about Fauci in a minute, but
00:07:26.340 first I want to move to shortly after the Iran memorandum of understanding was signed, you said,
00:07:32.180 I don't think the details much matter because I don't think it's real. I don't think it's going
00:07:36.380 to last. Now I've checked with the judges and they're not going to give you any points for
00:07:39.980 calling this one. But a few weeks later, we're right back here where we started. Trump is now
00:07:44.380 saying the strait will become U.S. territory. And he's backed up that claim with a photo of
00:07:49.860 the location encircled by his magic Sharpie. Any new thoughts or is this just the same
00:07:55.300 disaster with new details? Yeah. I mean, so I don't think I deserve much credit for
00:08:00.440 calling bullshit on the MOU. I mean, it was just obvious. So too is this obvious. I mean,
00:08:06.280 we don't have a good way out of this war. There's certainly no way for Trump to declare victory
00:08:14.000 credibly and move on, which is obviously what he wants to do. But there's just certain things
00:08:21.320 are objectively true. Iran has more, despite all the people we've killed, all the leadership we've
00:08:27.280 killed, Iran has more power today than it did before the war. We've demonstrated that it can
00:08:33.760 have a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz and we can't do much about it. It can attack our allies
00:08:39.620 in the region and our own bases in the region. And we're now, we've run out of the interceptors
00:08:46.540 and other weapons we need to defend all that. We're virtually run out. So we've advertised
00:08:51.860 our weakness and Iranian strength over the course of this war in a way that is impossible for anyone
00:08:59.720 to ignore despite what Trump says about it. So that's where we are. I mean, this is just
00:09:06.460 total incompetence as far as I can tell. I mean, it's just, it's not to say that the initial,
00:09:10.940 you know, bombing run with Israel wasn't a display of massive military competence. I think it
00:09:16.860 probably was. And I guess at that point might've been plausible to think that the regime might
00:09:22.720 fall. But the fact that we were so low on the weapons we need to fight a longer war, uh, the
00:09:29.880 fact that a war with China is, it seems more or less unthinkable given how a war with Iran has
00:09:36.700 played out. I mean, all of this is, is, is, I mean, we might've known about, known this about
00:09:41.540 ourselves. Uh, one would have, would have hoped we would have known this about ourselves and not
00:09:45.200 have just been completely surprised on all counts here, but, but the world didn't know it about us
00:09:49.520 And, uh, the world has, you know, Iran has called our bluff and now the world sees that
00:09:54.420 in many respects, we are a paper tiger.
00:09:56.420 And in addition to all of that, Trump has alienated all of our allies, taught them all
00:10:00.960 that we can't be relied upon.
00:10:02.900 Our military weakness aside, we have a moral weakness, which is that we, we've become completely
00:10:09.480 transactional and, um, open-minded to, uh, collaborating with genuine enemies.
00:10:15.200 And we now have Trump appraising Kim Jong-un and denigrating South Korea in the last week,
00:10:21.540 just in a way that, you know, completely bewildering and pointless inversion of our actual alliance.
00:10:28.680 None of this is four-dimensional chess.
00:10:31.080 This is just a know-nothing and moral lunatic in charge of our quickly waning superpower.
00:10:40.680 I mean, he's done more to reduce our power and influence in the world than I think anyone could have imagined. I mean, short of just blowing up our own cities in self-inflicted harm, he's torched our reputation in every respect.
00:10:59.020 I mean, again, our allies are finding ways to hedge against our, you know, failures of
00:11:05.780 competence and loyalty hour by hour now.
00:11:09.200 And it's just not like the world is now learning to work around us and to figure out how to
00:11:15.400 fill the void that's being left by the leadership role we once had.
00:11:20.860 Yeah.
00:11:21.520 And I'm also seeing a parallel between healthcare and military that we're great at acute, not
00:11:26.400 very good at chronic.
00:11:27.200 Like, well, but I mean, acute, one would have thought this would have been acute too.
00:11:32.280 I mean, this is not, again, Iran is nobody's idea of a state actor that should confound
00:11:40.540 us when we're using something close to 100% of our resources to execute regime change.
00:11:47.480 I mean, the fact that we're entangled in something that we can't get out of and can't seem to
00:11:54.220 win. I mean, this, you know, I think this is, I put it down to surely some, someone in the Pentagon
00:12:01.040 knew exactly how this was likely to play out. But in terms of the people who made the decisions,
00:12:06.540 I think that they've probably just been continually surprised based on their not having
00:12:10.980 actually had the conversations or read the briefs or done the war games. Or, I mean, yeah,
00:12:16.240 I think it's totally possible that Trump was surprised that the Iranians seized the Strait
00:12:21.800 of Hormuz in the first place, which is something we knew they would do for decades. So you don't
00:12:26.020 think staying at a Holiday Inn Express the night before qualifies you for this? Speaking of this,
00:12:31.700 I want to talk just quickly, get your thoughts on the credible Iranian assassination threat
00:12:36.480 against Trump, where they thought his plane may be shot down by a missile. So he boarded Air Force
00:12:42.240 One and secretly moved to a military jet. The early reports had him being smuggled out through
00:12:46.400 a food cart and not a food truck and of course the internet was not allowing uh that to go on
00:12:52.840 any any thought about that and you just imagine trump getting out to a food cart i think i missed
00:12:57.460 most of the comedy uh there so so the final story is he he actually was on air force one or he was
00:13:03.100 on air force one he boarded it then they smuggled him out to a food truck but early reports was that
00:13:08.040 he was smuggled out to a food cart oh so he was smuggled off but he but but the journalists were
00:13:12.460 left on the plane yeah everyone and he took off as planned but you know i i saw a bunch of flight
00:13:17.500 attendants um saying excuse me uh no that's not physically possible yeah but yeah he did that was
00:13:24.260 that's what i uh that's the story that i'm more well i honestly didn't follow the details that
00:13:29.700 closely i think there's there has to be something ethically interesting about a president who's um
00:13:35.500 pretending to be on air force one as a d as a decoy and the air force one is in fact
00:13:42.060 filled with journalists and other aides whose risk of death now has gone way, way up.
00:13:49.520 He was probably hoping it got shot down.
00:13:51.080 Yeah. I mean, they're incurring all the risk that was deemed intolerable for a president to take. So
00:13:56.420 I think that's strange on some level. I'm not quite sure what he should have done,
00:14:01.860 but I could imagine that leaving a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who worked at CNN who had to
00:14:07.560 take that ride. So yeah. Unbelievable. You guys, you're going to be fine. Don't worry about it.
00:14:13.520 I'll be over here. Just don't tell anybody. Yeah. It'd be Chateaubriand. You're going to enjoy it
00:14:18.180 and get some wine. Wow. All right. I want to move on to Dr. Fauci. This situation is complicated.
00:14:25.200 I want to know what you think he did. What did he get wrong? And what are people getting wrong
00:14:29.720 about him or tease this out however you want? Well, it's sort of all things are true here in
00:14:37.380 this situation. I mean, he seems to have done many things wrong. He seems to have not been
00:14:42.720 entirely candid. The contents of his journal, much of it is embarrassing. I've just seen the
00:14:50.540 clips of it. I haven't read it myself, but I think it's wrong for his personal journals to
00:14:55.880 be leaked in this way. I mean, I don't think nobody should really be judged on the contents
00:15:00.940 of what they were writing to themselves, thinking it was going to be private. So I think it's
00:15:04.580 probably cynical and damaging to our culture to be leaking them this way. But nonetheless,
00:15:12.460 it reveals something about the man and his level of narcissism and star fuckery and just how
00:15:20.340 blown around he was by proximity to celebrity. I mean, that's all embarrassing. It seems that
00:15:26.380 he was not, he had, you know, thought in some cases, thought one thing and said another
00:15:29.900 publicly about COVID or about its origins or about the effectiveness of vaccines or whatever.
00:15:35.200 And so that's not a good look. Insofar as he was part of the campaign to demonize any speculation
00:15:41.480 about the origins of the virus being from a lab versus a wet market as racist, that I think is,
00:15:48.380 as I've said since the beginning, that was just odious and dishonest and just so obviously
00:15:53.560 counterproductive and also incoherent. And I've said this many times, but I just don't see how
00:15:58.400 you think, how really anyone can think that a lab leak, an allegation of a lab leak for a country
00:16:04.980 like China is more invidious politically than an allegation of a wet market leak, right? I mean,
00:16:12.540 lab leaks occur everywhere in the UK, in the US. I mean, this is like, this is, we understand that
00:16:18.660 lab leaking is a problem. Having a wet market where you have pangolins on top of raccoon dogs
00:16:24.960 on top of bats posing a perpetual risk to our species this is just the stupidest fucking
00:16:31.200 practice practically that can be named and the fact that the chinese can't figure out how to
00:16:36.720 stop doing this because they have such an appetite for eating these loathsome creatures that if
00:16:42.120 anything culturally if anything is culturally disparaging pointing you know just circulating
00:16:47.000 pictures of chinese people eating bats and raccoon dogs that's worse than a lab leak right so so the
00:16:53.240 the zoonotic origin thing that the idea that there's some is somehow benign and that you had
00:16:57.200 that a president who was walking around talking about the kung flu is being a racist for specular
00:17:02.180 speculating about lab leak i mean i would love to have heard trump talk about wet markets and
00:17:08.020 their details you know i mean that would you want to look at you know uh jingoistic comedy i mean
00:17:13.980 that's that's a much richer source of it so these are just stupid people you know following some
00:17:21.560 again, some other kind of woke laser pointer that, you know, caught their attention. And
00:17:28.440 the fact that it distorted the public communication of science and, you know, our efforts to understand
00:17:35.220 the origins of COVID is just deeply embarrassing. So I don't know how much Fauci contributed to
00:17:42.220 that. Certainly some. I don't know. I think the other shoe hasn't dropped yet with respect to
00:17:48.380 our involvement as a country and his involvement as a person in gain-of-function research and
00:17:53.580 specifically at Wuhan or elsewhere, and whether he was ever disingenuous about all of that. I mean,
00:18:00.280 going back years, I remember Rand Paul's interrogation of him and Fauci's kind of
00:18:06.800 rabbinical hair-splitting of the phrase gain-of-function, and that always struck me as
00:18:11.920 suspicious, right? I mean, so I worried about him as a communicator of science in that moment,
00:18:19.280 and that was years ago. But on the other hand, he's also someone who has spent decades in the
00:18:26.660 public service and I think did an immense amount of good during the AIDS epidemic. I mean, it's
00:18:32.840 just the fact that his life is being summarized in this way, in the middle of the dynamics of
00:18:41.360 you know what it really is a kind of witch hunt again that's not to say there's no truth to any
00:18:45.880 of it right i mean there's probably things for which he's culpable but the whole thing is a mess
00:18:50.620 i mean it's sort of so it's all all sides to this have a point i think but a lot of people were
00:18:56.000 punished for even uh challenging him and you know you got to trust the science and um you were
00:19:01.780 thrown off for even suggesting it may be a uh a lab leak that you'd be thrown off socials i didn't
00:19:07.680 I haven't followed what his role was in enforcing all that.
00:19:11.780 I remember Francis Collins, there's some emails that got leaked from him on this subject.
00:19:17.180 He certainly allowed it.
00:19:18.100 He didn't say, wait a second, we shouldn't be doing that.
00:19:20.560 Yeah, I mean, none of that's good because it was always plausible.
00:19:24.060 So first of all, there are a lot of people speaking now as though we know for sure it
00:19:28.440 was a lab leak.
00:19:29.560 I don't think that's true either.
00:19:30.980 I think that scientifically the jury is still out on this.
00:19:34.320 and you can find virologists who have a coherent case to make still for the wet market origins of
00:19:43.420 the virus. Again, wet markets are so awful and so stupid and it's an international scandal that
00:19:50.420 they exist, right? So like this, this is a problem too. It's not like, oh, we just got
00:19:55.300 unlucky with the wet market and, you know, so no harm, no foul China. No, like both are bad.
00:20:00.820 Has anyone ever put together a list of wet markets and labs doing gain-of-function in the same city to find out how common this is? I mean, with the fact that there's a lab in Wuhan, how many other—
00:20:15.260 There are different things to emphasize in the story. I mean, I still think it is true to say
00:20:19.940 that the first cases, the epicenter around the first logged cases is the wet market. It's not
00:20:28.020 the lab. It's not some other part of Wuhan. I think that is still true. Again, I haven't,
00:20:33.320 this is all in the rear view mirror for me. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this
00:20:36.860 of late, but last I looked, you know, someone in the audience can correct me if I'm wrong,
00:20:41.140 but last I looked, it is still an open question of where COVID came from. But the crucial thing
00:20:48.380 is that it was always plausible that it came from a lab. It was always worth worrying about.
00:20:54.080 Lab leaks are something we perpetually have to worry about. Gain-of-function research was always
00:21:00.140 worth, in my view, avoiding. I mean, just like the case for it has never made sense to me. And
00:21:06.700 again, I'm sure there's a steel man version of the case that could make it seem something other
00:21:14.200 than overtly suicidal to engage this practice, but it's just, it's so easy to see how this goes
00:21:20.600 wrong, especially with our history of lab leaks from labs that are more secure than that one was
00:21:27.300 or is. Yeah. I know people aren't institutions, but it's incredible how a few bad people can
00:21:35.100 really um tarnished an institution i mean make it very difficult for people to trust these
00:21:40.020 institutions oh yeah you know yeah but again but but to just say that fauci was a bad guy
00:21:46.640 or is a bad guy um i mean i just don't think that captures the picture accurately again i don't know
00:21:53.960 i i do i don't know what he what is the worst thing for which he's culpable i don't know what
00:21:59.660 that thing is. If there's actual dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan that we were
00:22:06.580 funding and he knows about it and covered it up, okay, then that's a very big deal. I haven't heard
00:22:12.580 that shoe drop yet. But yeah, I just think there's no question that there are the dynamics of a witch
00:22:20.400 hunt around this too, right? Like an innocent guy, these optics could be visited upon someone
00:22:28.400 who's basically totally innocent, you know, apart from, you know, having kept a journal where he was
00:22:34.140 blown away by being, you know, called by Dionne Warwick or whoever it was, right?
00:22:39.280 Yeah, Barbra Streisand, right? So, yeah, what I worry about in situations like this are,
00:22:45.260 you know, conditions where totally normal actors, you know, with the best of intentions can be made
00:22:52.060 to seem like monsters based on just a dishonest process. And that's, and that's happened on the
00:22:59.020 left a lot, as we know, under the regime of wokeness. And it's certainly capable of happening
00:23:05.140 on the right, whether it's happening to some degree in Fauci's case, I don't know.
00:23:09.400 Wait, I'm getting this in from the producers that his funding mostly came from Epstein.
00:23:14.040 You want to, I'm kidding. Okay, let's move on.
00:23:16.400 I think it's possible at this point.
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