TRIGGERnometry - Sam Harris Returns to TRIGGERnometry

00:00:00.000 I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for having brought the hostages back.

00:00:05.760 There was no Democrat who was going to do it.

00:00:07.640 If you are concerned about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop,

00:00:10.800 it still doesn't compare to what Trump is doing right now out in the open.

00:00:16.180 You know, the real Trump derangement syndrome, in my view,

00:00:18.780 is to think that the president's character doesn't matter.

00:00:23.320 We are doing massive brand damage to our country.

00:00:27.140 Very prominent people, from the president and Elon on down,

00:00:32.580 treated it like the first shot fired in the Civil War.

00:00:35.720 This was a highly asymmetric moment of political hysteria.

00:00:39.900 It was their George Floyd moment, again, yes, without the riots.

00:00:43.940 Well, it's quite a big deal, Sam.

00:00:46.300 Before we had a vaccine, Republicans and Democrats died at the same rate.

00:00:50.280 Once we had a vaccine, Republicans died more than Democrats.

00:00:53.700 Rogan is implicated in all of this.

00:00:55.460 Joe was a super spreader of those ideas.

00:00:59.680 Quick reminder.

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00:01:40.300 Sam Harris, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:41.960 Thank you.

00:01:42.400 It's good to see you guys.

00:01:43.260 It's good to see you guys.

00:01:44.060 It's been a couple of years, right?

00:01:45.480 It's been a couple of years.

00:01:46.820 Last time we saw it was with Eric.

00:01:48.720 So that was a kind of different conversation.

00:01:50.700 And of course, there was the time before that.

00:01:52.380 Now, I wouldn't bring it up, actually, but I saw you had a bit on your YouTube channel

00:01:56.620 in which you addressed the whole Hunter Biden laptop thing that happened on our show recently.

00:02:02.060 So I have to bring it up because of that.

00:02:03.820 Okay.

00:02:04.260 Coming back to this thing, you make these comments, you know, they kind of blew up.

00:02:10.600 I never noticed anything.

00:02:12.280 So sorry if that caused a headache, but you've caused me a headache in case you've forgotten.

00:02:19.160 So how do you reflect on what happened?

00:02:21.680 Well, it's just, in many respects, it's like a massive misunderstanding.

00:02:28.840 You know, people are living and dying by clips these days, and no one can, you know, no one

00:02:34.060 apparently can take the time to view the clip in context.

00:02:37.520 So I would think that a significant percentage of your audience, and certainly a significant

00:02:42.120 percentage of people right of center, simply don't understand what I was saying on your

00:02:48.240 podcast.

00:02:50.620 And in their defense, the truth is I was speaking somewhat less carefully and clearly than I'm

00:02:57.400 capable of.

00:02:58.360 So, but I think in context, it was clear what I was saying.

00:03:03.160 My position really hasn't changed on the matter.

00:03:05.540 I mean, I think, I mean, if you care about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop because it

00:03:12.560 suggested some level of possible corruption for Joe Biden, you know, as president or as

00:03:19.100 vice president at the time.

00:03:21.480 So, I mean, if you are concerned about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop because it suggested

00:03:26.460 there's some level of corruption coming from Biden himself, well, then you should be concerned

00:03:32.740 about the level of corruption that we know to be true of Trump and his family, right?

00:03:38.840 And we've known this for years.

00:03:41.080 I mean, we've known it for, honestly, it precedes his entry into politics.

00:03:45.460 So all I was saying, what I was saying in that context is that I would be willing to bet

00:03:48.960 that there's virtually nothing on that laptop that rises to the level of what I already know

00:03:53.200 to be true of Trump and his family.

00:03:56.240 I think I said, I compared to, you know, it was like, you know, comparing a firefly to

00:03:59.700 the sun or something.

00:04:00.480 It's like, I know how the comparison is going to come out without even seeing what's on this

00:04:04.960 laptop.

00:04:06.100 And it was also a scandal involving Hunter Biden, and it wasn't even clear that it reached

00:04:10.500 to Joe Biden.

00:04:11.220 And I'm still not sure there's anything on that laptop that I care about.

00:04:14.620 I certainly haven't heard anything that was, you know, dispositive with respect to Biden's

00:04:20.440 corruption, apart from this, you know, somewhat ambiguous phrase, 10% for the big guy.

00:04:25.220 But read into that as a, you know, as sinister a practice as you want.

00:04:31.680 It still doesn't compare to what Trump is doing right now out in the open.

00:04:36.700 I mean, his adventures in cryptocurrency, he and his family's, I mean, it's, it is, if

00:04:45.640 he would, if that were the only thing we knew about him as president, it should be the scandal

00:04:50.080 that no one stops talking about.

00:04:52.080 I mean, it's just, it's the most corrupt thing imaginable.

00:04:56.060 Sam, can I just pause you there?

00:04:57.200 Because there are people who are going to be listening to this who have maybe heard of

00:05:00.620 it loosely, or maybe haven't just followed this story at all.

00:05:03.400 So could you just expand upon that and explain to the listener what, or the viewer, why it's

00:05:08.120 so egregious?

00:05:09.500 Okay.

00:05:10.000 So right before he was sworn in, I think the day before he was sworn in, they launched their

00:05:17.320 meme coin, which is just a pure mechanism by which people can give Trump and his family

00:05:24.580 money directly in a way that is unaccountable.

00:05:28.260 And it just invites, it's just, it's a pure mechanism for corruption and bribery, right?

00:05:32.820 Anyone on, any grifter or, or foreign agent or anyone can decide, okay, I'm just going

00:05:39.880 to funnel money to the Trumps and tell them about it and buy my way into their favor.

00:05:46.740 And Trump is so transactional and he's done this so many times.

00:05:49.960 Again, so it's, so much of it's out in the open.

00:05:52.020 I mean, none of this is a conspiracy theory.

00:05:54.080 This is just all proudly celebrated.

00:05:55.960 I mean, he, he had dinner with the people who had given him the most money for, through

00:06:00.100 this, this mechanism.

00:06:01.720 And it's not the only mechanism.

00:06:03.060 It's World Liberty Financial and their deal with Binance.

00:06:06.160 And, you know, we give, we decide whether or not to give the UAE our access to our most

00:06:13.420 advanced AI chips.

00:06:16.120 And we decide to do that despite the fact that they do joint military exercises with the

00:06:21.020 Chinese, who we don't want to get our most advanced AI chips. 1.00

00:06:27.380 And immediately $2 billion go from the UAE into the Trump-Witkov family business to, you

00:06:35.360 know, to shore up Binance, you know, with a World Liberty crypto coin.

00:06:39.620 And there's just endless examples of this.

00:06:44.220 This is corruption.

00:06:45.480 This is, it makes sense in a transactional way, purely in monetary terms, obviously.

00:06:54.760 But then there are other things like, you know, Trump imposes a 50% tariff on India because

00:07:02.380 Narendra Modi declined to nominate him for the Peace Prize.

00:07:05.920 Right.

00:07:06.820 So he's using the levers of U.S. power to, as a kind of extortion racket with dozens

00:07:15.860 of countries at this point.

00:07:17.040 I mean, he, you know, he slaps a 46% tariff on Vietnam.

00:07:20.920 What does Vietnam do to get that remediated? 0.73

00:07:23.380 Well, they greenlight a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family.

00:07:27.660 Right.

00:07:27.960 So this is, this is pure corruption.

00:07:31.240 And it's, what's, what's amazing is he's using the power of the presidency to monetize

00:07:37.680 the office in this way.

00:07:38.440 He's using U.S. trade policy and foreign policy to extract concessions that were down to the

00:07:44.520 advantage of him and his family and their friends.

00:07:48.040 There's nothing in Biden's universe that rises to that level, whatever is in Biden's universe.

00:07:53.760 I mean, there's, you know, there's, I'm no fan of Joe Biden's presidency.

00:07:56.880 Um, I could talk, like we could fill this whole podcast with what was wrong with that.

00:08:02.040 But if you pretend to care about corruption in government, you should, there is only one

00:08:08.460 elephant in the room and that is Trump.

00:08:10.580 The thing is, Sam, with the Hunter Biden thing, I think that it, for many people, it wasn't

00:08:16.400 actually about corruption at all.

00:08:18.340 What it was about was the coverup.

00:08:21.940 What it was about was the fact that the news story about his laptop couldn't be shared.

00:08:26.880 Well, we, we disagree about the, the, both the, the, we don't really disagree about the

00:08:32.740 optics of the coverup, but we disagree about the mechanics of it.

00:08:35.660 I mean, I think a lot of this was good faith fumbling around a story that couldn't be

00:08:41.400 characterized quickly enough.

00:08:44.160 And given what had happened previously, given that we know that Jim Comey's reopening of

00:08:49.220 the email, the Hillary Clinton email non-story was decisive in her losing that election.

00:08:55.160 I mean, we could just see that her poll numbers go down by the hour at the moment he, he started

00:08:59.460 talking about it.

00:09:00.920 Um, and that was like 10 days before the election.

00:09:03.140 And we know this time around, Rudy Giuliani held onto this bombshell as an October, October

00:09:08.720 surprise and released it strategically close to the election.

00:09:12.320 I think there were two weeks left in the election.

00:09:13.940 And knowing that if the, that there was simply enough time for the Democrats and the mainstream

00:09:20.900 media to have a spaz attack and not get to ground truth on this laptop, um, that again,

00:09:28.380 from my point of view, this is what I said in your, in that original podcast.

00:09:31.300 Uh, uh, uh, I don't think it made it to that, uh, nefarious clip, but, um, for me at the

00:09:38.700 time, and it still is a genuine coin toss, journalistic judgment about what to do with

00:09:44.460 this story two weeks before the election.

00:09:46.400 Journalistic judgment.

00:09:47.020 Yes.

00:09:47.380 But this wasn't journalistic judgment.

00:09:48.800 Okay.

00:09:48.980 So this was big tech judgment.

00:09:50.780 Well, no.

00:09:51.180 So there was, there was Twitter knocking the New York post off for whatever, 48 hours or

00:09:56.460 24 hours.

00:09:57.180 And preventing the story from being shared.

00:09:58.720 Right.

00:09:59.300 That I think almost certainly is a mistake.

00:10:02.840 However, you look at it.

00:10:03.800 And, and I, I believe I said that at the time.

00:10:06.160 I mean, I, I thought there were gradations of this is what Twitter did is what the New

00:10:09.840 York times did or didn't do, et cetera.

00:10:12.360 Um, but I think it was, I mean, for instance, all those, those four, uh, former, uh, intelligence

00:10:19.140 officials who signed that open letter saying this looks like Russian disinformation.

00:10:23.380 I don't think those guys were lying.

00:10:25.040 I think those guys were genuinely thought this is completely crazy.

00:10:28.000 We got Rudy Giuliani with a, with a laptop he got from some computer store and it's got,

00:10:33.580 it's got everything.

00:10:34.500 It's got the, the, the, the, the, the smoking ruins of Hunter Biden's reputation.

00:10:38.800 Um, this certainly looks sketchy.

00:10:41.600 I don't think those guys volunteered to have their reputations destroyed, uh, in plain view

00:10:47.760 of everyone, just, just to eke out an advantage for Hillary Clinton. 1.00

00:10:52.380 Um, why not?

00:10:53.280 Well, it's just, who does that?

00:10:55.080 Who, who says, I listen, I'm going to, I'm going to take my reputation for discernment

00:10:58.420 as an intelligent, the former head of the CIA or the NSA or what, or both.

00:11:02.980 I'm going to, I, again, I don't remember the signatories to that letter specifically, but,

00:11:07.180 um, I mean, who's going to, you're, it's just not in there.

00:11:12.100 It's not in their interests.

00:11:12.980 It's not likely to be decisive.

00:11:15.360 It's not, it's just, and it's so obviously looked kooky, right?

00:11:19.700 It looked, it, it looked completely, I mean, this does not look like a normal way you would

00:11:24.300 discover the smoking laptop from hell.

00:11:28.160 Um, and again, it was, there was simply not to, to have simply played connect the dots

00:11:35.840 journalistically and, and even from Twitter's point of view, just slavishly, just propagating

00:11:43.400 this information or misinformation to the ends of the earth at that moment with the clock

00:11:47.380 ticking.

00:11:48.140 Given what had happened in the previous election, journalistically, it could have, could have

00:11:53.500 seemed totally irresponsible.

00:11:54.760 I mean, in, in hindsight, Jim Comey's re-airing of that fake email scandal was totally irresponsible.

00:12:01.640 It's why we had President Trump in the first place.

00:12:03.760 He could, he couldn't have known that at the time, perhaps, but in retrospect, it would

00:12:07.720 have been better had he not done that.

00:12:09.960 So I, I got, I have to think, again, I'm not, I'm not close.

00:12:14.380 I mean, the other thing that was weird about that interview is it's people took what I was

00:12:17.440 saying as some, somehow insider knowledge that there was this vast conspiracy to

00:12:24.720 keep, you know, of journalists and academics and scientists and media figures to keep,

00:12:29.860 that we all met in a star chamber somewhere to keep Trump from getting reelected.

00:12:34.180 I mean, if there, if that happened, I wasn't privy to it.

00:12:37.120 Right.

00:12:37.220 So that's not what I was saying.

00:12:38.520 What I was, what I was saying in a, in a, I mean, there were a few places there where,

00:12:43.600 because I went back and watched it because I needed to, once this thing was detonating in

00:12:47.240 my life and I could see that how radioactive it was being perceived to be, I had to see what

00:12:51.460 I'd actually said in context.

00:12:52.420 And there was at least one moment where I got interrupted and didn't complete a sentence.

00:12:58.080 And so like my half sentence and the thrust of what I was saying before that made it seem

00:13:02.920 like I was making a more extreme statement than I was in fact making.

00:13:06.900 So, um, but my views are unchanged from that hour.

00:13:11.180 So, I mean, I'm happy to talk about anything.

00:13:13.460 The, um.

00:13:14.520 If you were interrupted, it was almost certainly been me.

00:13:17.380 Yeah.

00:13:17.480 I apologize.

00:13:18.880 But let me just recap, just very quickly summarize what you're saying.

00:13:23.040 So what you're saying is basically a number of things.

00:13:25.480 Number one, uh, journalistically in terms of publishing the story, you call it a coin

00:13:30.380 toss.

00:13:31.020 It looked kind of kooky.

00:13:32.520 Therefore, is this a reasonable thing to publish with two weeks to go before an election

00:13:37.240 before you can properly check it, et cetera.

00:13:39.580 Number one.

00:13:40.340 Number two, you didn't agree with social media companies preventing the story from being

00:13:44.840 published or shared.

00:13:45.780 Right.

00:13:46.120 Right.

00:13:46.960 And you feel that if we're talking about the corruption element of it, no matter what

00:13:52.360 you were trying to say with an outrageous example is no matter how corrupt Hunter Biden

00:13:58.160 turns out to have been, that will not be as bad as the Trump corruption.

00:14:01.880 Is that a fair summary?

00:14:02.880 Yeah.

00:14:03.080 Well, especially because again, we're talking about Hunter Biden.

00:14:05.600 I don't care about Hunter Biden.

00:14:06.760 Well, Hunter Biden did get a lot of money from a Ukrainian company in which he was employed 0.99

00:14:11.000 as some sort of expert while knowing jack shit. 0.98

00:14:12.240 Hold that up against what any of the Trumps have done in the last hour. 0.97

00:14:15.840 So, I mean, it's just, there's just no, and they were, it was clear they were already these

00:14:20.960 people, right?

00:14:21.640 From the first time around and from, you know, years previous.

00:14:25.100 There's just no, I mean, the magic of Trump is that because he, I mean, the one thing you

00:14:33.120 can say about him that is, sounds like praise, but in fact isn't, is that he's not a hypocrite, 0.79

00:14:42.300 right?

00:14:42.500 He's not a hypocrite because he's not pretending to be a good person, right? 0.69

00:14:46.660 He's not pretending to follow any of the norms by which hypocrisy would normally be measured, 0.74

00:14:52.940 right?

00:14:53.140 And so, and what's, what's the reason why this is a kind of superpower is that there's

00:14:57.480 nothing more galling, at least at this, you know, at this moment in our politics than 0.88

00:15:04.000 hypocrisy, especially left-wing hypocrisy. 0.91

00:15:06.900 So the moment you can find that, you know, a Democrat didn't floss his teeth when he said 0.98

00:15:13.400 he did, right?

00:15:15.020 All of a sudden that's a 20 megaton scandal.

00:15:17.660 Trump can just, you know, basically like he's like the Dan Bilzerian of, of politics,

00:15:24.160 right?

00:15:24.280 Like there's no, like there's no pretense of being ethical or monogamous or like, so I'm

00:15:29.740 going to just show you how I, I live like a maniac and you're not going to be able to

00:15:34.820 measure any specific indiscretion because not, you know, I don't view, you know, any of them

00:15:39.580 as indiscretions and they're not going to be, it all then functions by a different

00:15:44.960 reputational physics.

00:15:46.140 So you find him to have done something that's 10 times worse than the thing you say you care

00:15:50.480 about in, you know, on the other side of the aisle.

00:15:54.340 And for some reason it, it doesn't register, right?

00:15:58.800 So there's, he's created a, um, a political culture right of center where the very concept

00:16:05.820 of corruption doesn't even exist anymore.

00:16:07.660 The very concept of, of a conflict of interest or self-dealing, it's just that it's completely

00:16:13.300 evaporated.

00:16:14.080 So let's set, so this is one of the things I really, I'm keen to discuss with you.

00:16:18.780 Let's move on from, you know, the first podcast and what happened and just talk about President

00:16:23.040 Trump as a president, right?

00:16:25.680 Because, uh, I hear this a lot, you know, we posted that you were coming on the show,

00:16:31.620 people message you, you know, and they say, well, look, I love Sam, right?

00:16:35.260 And I think his, his reaction to Trump as a person clouds his view of Trump as a politician,

00:16:45.360 right?

00:16:46.420 Well, I, I, I can demonstrate that that's not, not so, but, but what's upstream of that is

00:16:52.380 a, is a pretty important piece of confusion because the, you know, the real Trump derangement

00:16:56.900 syndrome in my view is to think that the president's character doesn't matter, right? 0.95

00:17:03.800 He's the most distractible, venal, corrupt, self-dealing, narcissistic, uh, self-absorbed, 0.99

00:17:10.900 petty person to ever occupy the office. 0.99

00:17:13.860 And that doesn't matter, right?

00:17:16.580 Now, the reason why his character matters is because he's got three more years in office.

00:17:21.180 We have no idea what, what kinds of challenges we're going to face as a country, but we know

00:17:26.600 that all of his decisions are downstream of who he is, of the kind of thinker he is, of

00:17:32.380 how he engages with information, of what he knows and doesn't know, what he cares to know

00:17:36.600 and doesn't care to know, right?

00:17:38.460 So what does he know about Putin?

00:17:39.720 What does he know about the Middle East?

00:17:41.320 What does he know about, um, China?

00:17:45.080 What is he, what is going to modify his judgment about what he should do?

00:17:48.980 I mean, if, you know, if, how would we have bombed Iran if the mullahs had been smart enough 1.00

00:17:54.980 to offer him a golf course deal in Iran?

00:17:57.100 I actually don't know.

00:17:57.980 I think it's a, you know, even bet that our policy with respect to Iran could have been

00:18:02.700 different had there been massive financial opportunity for the Trumps in Iran, right?

00:18:06.600 He might've, he might've had a, uh, a Gulf Arab, you know, autocrat vibe, you know, an

00:18:11.860 MBS vibe with the mullahs in Iran.

00:18:13.980 He could have seen the wisdom of that.

00:18:15.040 Certainly if it's a big enough deal, I wouldn't have put that.

00:18:17.280 Hold on, Sam.

00:18:17.960 But isn't that a little bit unfair in the, you're judging somebody not on the things

00:18:22.480 they actually did, but I'm just telling you why you need to care about who he is as a

00:18:27.240 person.

00:18:27.840 Okay.

00:18:28.220 I understand.

00:18:28.980 And look, I think a person's character really matters.

00:18:31.740 I do.

00:18:32.460 But I also think you, when you're evaluating a president, you have to look at deliverables.

00:18:37.700 What are the deliverables?

00:18:39.040 There's probably a lot to criticize and I'm sure you've got them, lots of them, but getting

00:18:43.580 the hostages back from Gaza.

00:18:46.180 Yeah.

00:18:46.460 Well, so let's, let me just, just deal with that because that's on everybody's mind and

00:18:51.820 let, and square this statement.

00:18:53.960 Let me give you a list and then you address them all.

00:18:55.800 Is that, is that okay?

00:18:56.800 Well, I mean, this one's worth just hitting off the T because I think he deserves a Nobel

00:19:02.660 Peace Prize for having brought the hostages back, right?

00:19:05.440 I mean, that, I think that's, I have no problem saying that, right?

00:19:09.560 So square that with accusations of Trump derangement syndrome for, I mean, I, I, I can readily

00:19:17.460 admit that that was a massive achievement, whatever happens next.

00:19:21.000 I mean, there's not going to be peace in the Middle East as a result of this ceasefire.

00:19:23.940 So I'm not, I'm very skeptical and pessimistic about the outcome, but just that peace, getting

00:19:29.920 the, all the living hostages back was massive.

00:19:33.440 There was no Democrat who was going to do it.

00:19:35.260 President Kamala Harris wasn't going to do it. 1.00

00:19:37.400 Biden wouldn't have done it.

00:19:39.140 Many of his weaknesses as a president, as a person translated in that specific area into

00:19:46.680 strengths, right?

00:19:47.580 His unpredictability, his, his, his unprincipledness, his, his, the fact that he, he could just throw

00:19:55.960 over the chessboard and walk away for another year, right?

00:19:58.580 I mean, I think he got more out of Netanyahu and more out of all the parties to that negotiation

00:20:04.000 than a more principled, more methodical, more process oriented expert on, on geopolitics

00:20:12.560 would have very likely.

00:20:13.780 So that's what, that's one area where sort of the, the madman theory of politics, I think

00:20:19.400 worked for him.

00:20:20.720 Okay.

00:20:21.000 And that's to the good that does not compensate for all the other damage he's done to our

00:20:25.380 country.

00:20:25.820 Okay.

00:20:26.220 Fair.

00:20:26.500 And I want to hear both of these, right?

00:20:28.240 But I want to put some more to you that I would say are positive things, right?

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00:22:02.560 trigonometry.

00:22:04.500 I can give you criticism as well.

00:22:06.300 I mean, look, I was hopeful that he would do on Ukraine something more positive than he

00:22:12.300 has done.

00:22:12.720 I think Steve Witkoff hasn't done very well, put it gently and diplomatically.

00:22:17.320 We haven't had any progress so far.

00:22:19.780 I hope that changes, as you know.

00:22:21.080 But maybe, you know, if the Middle East is tick, that's no tick.

00:22:26.980 What about dealing with illegal immigration, right? 0.71

00:22:29.700 The way it's being done, we can have a discussion about, but he's literally the first leader

00:22:35.540 of a Western country to deal with illegal immigration.

00:22:37.400 We can have a huge discussion about that.

00:22:39.900 I mean, so the fact that the Democrats treated any concern about the border as a symptom of

00:22:46.560 racism and thought that it just wasn't a problem to have untold numbers of people just streaming

00:22:51.860 across the border for years at a time.

00:22:54.960 That was just a colossal own goal that is just, in my view, politically inexplicable.

00:23:00.460 I mean, it's just politically suicidal, right?

00:23:02.040 It's just that's, among other reasons, that is the reason why Trump got elected.

00:23:06.160 But, I mean, it's just, it's, I still don't understand it. 1.00

00:23:11.060 It's stupid. 1.00

00:23:12.440 It's unethical. 1.00

00:23:13.380 It serves no real sane purpose, right?

00:23:16.260 I mean, even if you want the same numbers of people in the country because you really

00:23:20.500 think we just have to have an immigration forward policy, there's no argument for not

00:23:26.660 knowing who's coming into the country.

00:23:28.540 You should want the people in the country who you want in the country, right? 0.98

00:23:31.240 And you should be able to screen out terrorists and et cetera.

00:23:34.380 So, yeah, I mean, it is true that the Biden administration tried to pass a bill that would

00:23:43.380 have done something and then Trump cynically got the Republicans to block it, right?

00:23:48.000 So there was a Trump delayed progress on that point so that he could use it as an issue in

00:23:52.460 the campaign.

00:23:54.440 And that was, you know, a cynical bit of politics.

00:23:56.780 But still, the Democrats were totally out to lunch on that issue for years at a stretch.

00:24:05.880 Unforgivable.

00:24:06.940 Politically unforgivable, right?

00:24:08.820 And so it is with all the other woke derangement in the Democratic Party.

00:24:12.740 I mean, the irony here is that there's virtually nothing that any super red-pilled MAGA head

00:24:21.540 who sees no, for whom there's no daylight between them and Trump, there's nothing they can say

00:24:26.800 about the far left of the Democratic Party that I don't agree with and haven't said myself

00:24:32.660 on my podcast, right?

00:24:33.500 So it's not like my animus toward Trump is based on some sort of progressive blindness

00:24:38.320 about, you know, the ethical primacy of DEI or anything else that he's steamrolling over.

00:24:48.300 Um, but I'll remind you that we didn't used to live in a country where masked men who won't 1.00

00:24:57.240 identify themselves steal peaceful people off the sidewalk and disappear them and occasionally

00:25:02.560 disappear them to foreign countries, right?

00:25:04.900 I mean, that's not America and that's happening, right? 0.86

00:25:09.900 That's totally unacceptable.

00:25:11.280 I mean, it's, it's Orwellian and insane and it's, and it's insane that anyone has acclimated

00:25:18.420 to it and it's insane that we've got this, we've got, uh, uh, attorney general, attorney general

00:25:24.320 who won't answer questions, but when brought before Congress and she just, you know, just 0.59

00:25:28.020 is messaging to an audience of one and to her social media feed, she's just insulting senators. 1.00

00:25:33.280 Um, we, I mean, it's just, it's the, the optics of all of this are so hunger games and bizarre,

00:25:45.280 right?

00:25:46.280 I mean, we, we've, we've, we've got a, a, a white house that messages on social media, like

00:25:52.280 it's like the, the accounts being run by, by 18 year old, uh, trolls that just spend half

00:25:57.280 their time on 4chan and then half their time on the, on the official White House X feed,

00:26:02.280 right? 0.99

00:26:03.280 We've got a president who's, who forwards AI videos of him shitting on his fellow Americans, 0.99

00:26:09.280 right? 0.97

00:26:10.280 And half of our country imagines this is some kind of progress in political communication,

00:26:16.280 right?

00:26:17.280 I mean, this is, this is a, I mean, the official, I don't know if you've seen this, but the official

00:26:21.280 White House page on the, that talks about the, the, uh, rebuilding of the, the East wing

00:26:26.280 of, you know, the, the, the ballroom.

00:26:29.280 Um, it's got, it has become a troll account where it does, it kind of gives the history

00:26:34.280 of, you know, construction at the White House, but then, then intersperses that with like

00:26:40.280 Hunter Biden bringing cocaine into the White House with the, with the shot of him in the 0.97

00:26:44.280 bathtub with a cigarette and, and, uh, you know, Bill Clinton getting a blow job from 0.99

00:26:49.280 Monica Lewinsky. 1.00

00:26:50.280 I mean, it's just, it's, this is the official White House communication to the world, right?

00:26:55.280 This is not, we're, I mean, I get that it's entertaining, right?

00:26:59.280 But if there's no difference between the Babylon Bee and the official White House website, we've

00:27:04.280 got a problem and we are doing massive brand damage to our country.

00:27:10.280 Uh, that's, that's, that's what I care about.

00:27:13.280 I care about what's durable here, you know, in, in terms of when Trump goes away and let's

00:27:19.280 say there's a, a sane Democrat or Republican next time around in 2028, but at the moment,

00:27:25.280 I don't see much hope of that.

00:27:27.280 Um, what, what bells can't be unrung in any kind of near term timeframe?

00:27:35.280 You know, what, what damage has been done that we can't immediately apologize for sufficiently

00:27:40.280 such that it's, um, we, we have a, a proper reset.

00:27:44.280 And I think a lot of damage has already been done.

00:27:46.280 That's hard to recover from.

00:27:47.280 And we've, we've announced to the world at a minimum.

00:27:50.280 We've announced that we'll look at what Trump has done with the tariff policy, just tariffing

00:27:55.280 every member of our species.

00:27:57.280 Um, and again, based on whims and, and imaginary political imperatives that, um, only exist

00:28:08.280 in his brain.

00:28:09.280 And then in the brains of the people who pretend to understand what he's doing, because he's

00:28:13.280 created a personality cult around him where no one is going to, you know, everyone is Baghdad 0.99

00:28:17.280 Bob and no one is going to tell the, the, the boy King that he's lost his marbles.

00:28:22.280 Um, but, uh, he's, he's basically ignoring all of our treaties and our, and our ally and

00:28:32.280 our alliances, um, in a way that has announced to the entire world that basically our country

00:28:39.280 is in any four year period.

00:28:42.280 It cannot be counted on to honor anything that has been agreed to before that, that,

00:28:49.280 that, that clock starts.

00:28:50.280 Right.

00:28:51.280 So with a new president, we can just completely reinvent ourselves and tear up everything.

00:28:55.280 You know, every trade agreement, every expectation of an alliance.

00:28:59.280 Are we going to, you know, if, if, uh, Poland gets invaded by Russia, do we even care about

00:29:05.280 NATO anymore?

00:29:06.280 Probably not.

00:29:07.280 Right.

00:29:08.280 Actually though, Sam, you're making like really good points that make perfect sense,

00:29:12.280 but I'm going, but the flip side of all of those structures that he's disrupting was,

00:29:17.280 well, he's actually got Europeans to pay for their membership of NATO.

00:29:21.280 Yeah.

00:29:22.280 That's, that's a good outcome.

00:29:23.280 Right.

00:29:24.280 He's actually, look, masked men dragging people off.

00:29:26.280 There was another way to do that, but apart from destroying a reputation.

00:29:28.280 But no one was.

00:29:29.280 But isn't this exactly the problem?

00:29:30.280 No one was.

00:29:31.280 No.

00:29:32.280 There, surely there was a way to make the case that our European allies weren't paying

00:29:39.280 their fair share short of destroying our reputation for being the world's lone superpower.

00:29:45.280 Okay.

00:29:46.280 But was Kamala Harris going to do it? 1.00

00:29:48.280 Was Kamala Harris-

00:29:49.280 Probably not.

00:29:50.280 Probably not.

00:29:51.280 Was Kamala Harris going to close the border? 0.90

00:29:52.280 I think we both agree she wouldn't.

00:29:53.280 Was Kamala- 0.71

00:29:54.280 No, that, that, that I don't, I, cause I think they were trying to do that cause I saw

00:29:57.280 that it was a disaster.

00:29:58.280 Come on.

00:29:59.280 No, no.

00:30:00.280 I think they, I think they, I mean, everyone could see this was a disaster. 0.87

00:30:03.280 I mean, you get fucking Elon Musk at the, at the border with his own iPhone showing a 0.92

00:30:08.280 zombie movie of people streaming across the border. 0.96

00:30:12.280 It was, it was an, it was a, a four alarm fire.

00:30:16.280 Was it four alarm fire?

00:30:17.280 I don't know how, what's it, what's the most number of alarms?

00:30:19.280 Five alarm fire.

00:30:20.280 Um, everyone could see that they were going to, I, I think they were going to get a handle

00:30:25.280 on that, but still it's unforgivable that they waited as long as they did.

00:30:30.280 I mean-

00:30:31.280 But this is why I disagree with you.

00:30:32.280 They waited as long as they did because they are ideologically pro open borders.

00:30:37.280 Like-

00:30:38.280 Not the mainstream democratic party.

00:30:39.280 Like the, like the rest of the Western world.

00:30:41.280 All the left of center parties, they talk a good game, but they don't actually take action

00:30:46.280 to close the border.

00:30:47.280 Not least because it looks ugly and it's very unpleasant, right?

00:30:50.280 And so-

00:30:51.280 Well, I don't see why it need to look ugly and be-

00:30:53.280 How do you deport millions of people without it looking- 0.53

00:30:55.280 Well, no, so deporting millions of people is separate from closing the border.

00:30:58.280 So I don't think we should be deporting millions of people.

00:31:00.280 I think we should close the border and then deport all the criminals, right?

00:31:04.280 But, but then you don't need this chaotic process.

00:31:07.280 You don't need to say, uh, if you happen to be in a Home Depot, uh, and look Latino, we

00:31:14.280 might just bring you to the ground, four guys who, again, will not identify themselves, 0.95

00:31:19.280 uh, are gonna, you know, break your arms and bring you to the ground.

00:31:23.280 And, uh, when we find out that you're a father of three and all three of your sons have served 0.99

00:31:28.280 in the Marines, we still don't fucking care, right? 0.98

00:31:31.280 I mean, that's awful. 0.99

00:31:33.280 I mean, it's just absolutely awful.

00:31:36.280 It's, it's a, it's disgraceful.

00:31:37.280 It's totally unethical.

00:31:38.280 And this is not the country, I'm, I'm amazed if, I would be amazed if it were in fact true

00:31:45.280 that 50% of Americans want to live in a country that treats people that way, whatever their

00:31:52.280 immigration status.

00:31:53.280 I mean, it's just not right.

00:31:55.280 And, um, and yet we, there's no, there's no question we could close the border without

00:32:04.280 doing that, right?

00:32:05.280 I mean, this is the thing is if you close the border and, and really you have control over

00:32:10.280 who's coming into the country, I mean, that's, that's the first piece.

00:32:13.280 If you accomplish that, you then don't have to make the experience being inside the border

00:32:20.280 that's terrifying so as to send a message to the rest of the world, not to come, right?

00:32:25.280 You don't have to lock people, separate people from their kids or lock people in cages or,

00:32:30.280 or disappear people to foreign gulags or any of that stuff because you've closed the border,

00:32:35.280 right?

00:32:36.280 So this is why Tom Holman's argument that, you know, you have to send a message by beating 0.99

00:32:40.280 the shit out of people. 0.97

00:32:41.280 Um, otherwise people are going to keep coming. 0.98

00:32:43.280 It doesn't matter if you've closed the border, right? 0.99

00:32:45.280 So close the fucking border, right? 0.97

00:32:47.280 If anyone could have done that without mistreating people inside our country, then it's a separate 1.00

00:32:54.280 question.

00:32:55.280 What do you want to do inside this country in a city like Los Angeles?

00:32:58.280 I mean, we've got vast amount of productive work being accomplished right now by people

00:33:05.280 who we know are here illegally.

00:33:07.280 Most of the people who are in this town illegally are doing work we deem necessary and most Americans 1.00

00:33:14.280 don't want to do it right now.

00:33:17.280 Um, what should we do with that?

00:33:20.280 I think, I think we should, you know, again, this is not, I'm sure there are corner conditions

00:33:25.280 that we might want to debate, but generally speaking, if someone's been here for years

00:33:31.280 and I mean, again, the details here matter.

00:33:33.280 A lot of these people have kids who are citizens, right?

00:33:37.280 So we're talking about, you know, people who have been here for years have an illegal immigration

00:33:42.280 status, but they've got kids, young kids who are American citizens and still these people

00:33:48.280 are at risk or being deported.

00:33:53.280 Um, in 90% of those cases, what I'm just guessing 90, but maybe it's 99.9% of those cases, you've

00:34:04.280 got people who are here doing productive work that we want done.

00:34:07.280 We have whole industries predicated on that work being done, agriculture, the service industry,

00:34:12.280 restaurants, et cetera.

00:34:14.280 Um, Americans are not lining up.

00:34:18.280 We've got 4% unemployment.

00:34:20.280 And America, the 4% who are unemployed are not lining up to do those jobs, to be landscapers

00:34:25.280 and, and dishwashers, um, et cetera.

00:34:30.280 There should be some rational process of keeping these people here and getting their immigration 1.00

00:34:35.280 status sorted out, right?

00:34:36.280 So call that amnesty, whatever you want to call it.

00:34:39.280 Um, but by all means, if somebody is here and he's got, you know, four DUIs and, uh, you

00:34:47.280 know, was in prison for, for raping somebody, et cetera, get that person out immediately

00:34:52.280 on the first plane.

00:34:53.280 I mean, like there's, there's zero controversy around whether or not to deport criminals who

00:34:59.280 are here illegally.

00:35:00.280 None of this has to be inflammatory and divisive.

00:35:04.280 The thing is, Stephen Miller and Donald Trump clearly want this to be inflammatory and divisive.

00:35:12.280 They, they, there's a political advantage, or at least they perceive a political advantage

00:35:19.280 in making it so, right?

00:35:20.280 And what I do think they want is, and have wanted are, you know, protests against this

00:35:27.280 that, to get out of hand, where they can point to a city like Los Angeles and say,

00:35:32.280 look, okay, look at these, you know, blue haired maniacs who have been raised, you know,

00:35:38.280 to, to believe that, uh, there should be open borders and they're throwing chunks of concrete 0.86

00:35:42.280 at the cops.

00:35:43.280 Uh, we have to use a heavy hand to respond.

00:35:47.280 And I mean, so those, and those demonstrations got out of hand slightly.

00:35:50.280 This certainly wasn't as bad as it could have been.

00:35:52.280 But, um, yeah, I mean, I think, I think fear is that Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke

00:36:00.280 the Insurrection Act are rational, right?

00:36:03.280 Because he, he's just the sort of guy to do it, right?

00:36:06.280 It's not, and, and that will be, I mean, there's several bright lines, but that will certainly

00:36:10.280 be one bright line where we will have lost something, uh, and it could be very hard to

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00:37:44.280 Francis, sorry, I know this has gone on for a long time with just me talking, but this is

00:37:49.280 like a meme, me talking too much.

00:37:51.280 But there's one other bit of this I want to explore with you before Francis takes over,

00:37:55.280 which is the one thing, look, I'm not American.

00:37:59.280 Francis is not American.

00:38:00.280 We love this country.

00:38:01.280 We have so many great American friends.

00:38:03.280 The one thing that does really give me pause is this conversation that I don't understand

00:38:10.280 about a third term.

00:38:12.280 Steve Bannon was pushing this idea a long time ago, and as we sat down to record this,

00:38:17.280 President Trump was asked about this.

00:38:20.280 He sort of gave a bit of a non-answer.

00:38:22.280 He did say he wouldn't run as vice president, the sort of Russian Putin Medvedev switcheroo

00:38:27.280 that they did way back when.

00:38:29.280 But that, like, that's, that to me is the one bit of...

00:38:36.280 The one out of a thousand things that caught your attention?

00:38:40.280 I mean, like, the fact that he's even, after January 6th, the fact that we're even having

00:38:44.280 this conversation is insanity.

00:38:46.280 I'm trying to make my point in a way that is easier to access for people who may not agree with you.

00:38:51.280 Okay?

00:38:52.280 I'm trying to take some of the edge of Sam Harris.

00:38:53.280 Well, you know your audience.

00:38:54.280 All right.

00:38:55.280 I know...

00:38:56.280 I'll take all the help I can get.

00:38:58.280 Well, what I'm saying is, all of these other things, for example, take the corruption stuff, right? 0.99

00:39:03.280 A lot of people are just going to go, I don't give a shit. 0.99

00:39:05.280 I care about... 0.98

00:39:06.280 He's sorted the hostages.

00:39:08.280 He's dealing with immigration.

00:39:10.280 Sam Harris doesn't like the way he's dealing with it, but at least he's dealing with it in some way.

00:39:13.280 He's got nature to pay their way.

00:39:15.280 Okay.

00:39:16.280 I could give you other examples, right?

00:39:18.280 Repatriating manufacturing back to the rest, whatever.

00:39:21.280 But the one bit that I think a reasonable person, including after January 6th, would have to look at and be worried about is...

00:39:31.280 Why?

00:39:32.280 If he's the right guy for the job, why wouldn't we want him for a third term?

00:39:35.280 Because you have a constitution.

00:39:37.280 Yeah, but...

00:39:38.280 And an unwillingness to follow the constitution is an indicator of some serious problems, wouldn't you say?

00:39:43.280 Well, I would say.

00:39:44.280 But he views the constitution like most rich people view the tax code, where you're just looking for loopholes.

00:39:50.280 If there's a loophole, then why not use it, right?

00:39:54.280 And some constitutional scholars think there are several significant loopholes in the constitution that could allow for tyranny.

00:40:02.280 I mean, that are...

00:40:05.280 The framers didn't anticipate...

00:40:07.280 You know, in some cases, they did anticipate, and they basically just said that there's no perfect way to deal with a sufficiently unethical president, right?

00:40:17.280 But one could argue that they didn't anticipate anything like Trump and the full capture of the Republican Party into something like a personality cult.

00:40:28.280 What they clearly didn't anticipate is that the separation of powers is broken down because Congress doesn't care to be its own power anymore,

00:40:37.280 because the Republicans are just wanting to ratify whatever lies and indiscretions the executive branch throws up.

00:40:45.280 So, you know, Congress has been neutered, right?

00:40:49.280 Congress owns tariff policy, right?

00:40:51.280 Congress should be setting the tariffs.

00:40:54.280 Probably these tariffs might...

00:40:56.280 Again, I'm not a lawyer, but it remains to be seen.

00:40:59.280 I mean, there's now hundreds of cases in front of the courts.

00:41:03.280 Much of what Trump has done already might be ruled illegal.

00:41:06.280 But Congress is sitting on its hands for patently political reasons.

00:41:12.280 I mean, every Republican who has any hope of maintaining a political career at this point knows that they can't cross the MAGA base.

00:41:23.280 Some actually fear for their lives in crossing the MAGA base, and we know this, again, when we look at the people who said they would have impeached Trump after January 6th

00:41:33.280 and didn't because they were afraid for their lives, and that's already a lurch toward tyranny in this country.

00:41:39.280 I mean, that is an unraveling of democratic norms that we can't afford to let unravel.

00:41:44.280 And the Constitution is no complete bulwark against any of that.

00:41:48.280 We know this.

00:41:49.280 The greatest lesson we've learned from now two experiments with Trumpism is that in the place of laws, we have norms.

00:42:02.280 We have norms in many, many places.

00:42:04.280 Where you thought we were shored up against chaos and the unraveling of democracy by law, we really weren't.

00:42:11.280 It was just no one, everyone before Trump had the decency not to do that thing because it would look so terrible, right?

00:42:20.280 I mean, no one thought that you could, I mean, we've got an emoluments clause, but it turns out that whatever Trump does,

00:42:29.280 Trump can't be prosecuted for any crime while president and he can just launch a Bitcoin into the ether and literally earn billions of dollars over months.

00:42:44.280 And I mean, I can still dimly remember a time when it was being debated whether or not members of Congress could go to functions, whether they had to declare the price of the food they were being served if it was a seated meal.

00:43:05.280 I mean, it was like past hors d'oeuvres could pass, but a seated meal was an emolument that invited real scrutiny around corruption and undue influence on our legislators by pharmaceutical companies or whoever.

00:43:24.280 You can now transact business directly with the Trump family from any place on earth.

00:43:31.280 Sam, come back to my question.

00:43:33.280 Yeah.

00:43:34.280 My question is, are you concerned that President Trump will not relinquish power?

00:43:39.280 Ironically, I'm less concerned about that than anything I've talked about.

00:43:45.280 I mean, the truth is I'm not, if you've listened to everything I've said, I believe none of it is hypothetical, right?

00:43:55.280 I'm complaining about stuff that's already happened.

00:43:58.280 I'm complaining about the brand damage that's already been done to my country.

00:44:02.280 Sure, but I'm asking you a different question.

00:44:04.280 I think the chance that he's going to run for a third term effectively, that we will actually be faced with this eventuality, is very, very low.

00:44:14.280 Okay.

00:44:15.280 And I'm not, again, there are people who are better informed about the mechanics of all this.

00:44:19.280 And, you know, unfortunately, one of those people is Steve Bannon.

00:44:22.280 So, yeah, I'm not saying I know something that Steve Bannon doesn't know about how all this works, because I certainly don't.

00:44:29.280 But I just have to think that our system, that we've maintained enough guardrails in, you know, our, just the basics of federalism and the fact that this all has to be run at the state level, you know, the elections at the state level.

00:44:46.280 I have to think that we are going to be sufficiently allergic to that, that it's not going to happen.

00:44:52.280 Moving forward, the Charlie Kirk assassination was obviously something that left an imprint in all of our minds.

00:44:58.280 It was profoundly shocking.

00:44:59.280 Terrible.

00:45:00.280 You made some very interesting comments criticizing the Wrights and the Wrights' response to the Charlie Kirk assassination.

00:45:08.280 So why don't we just go through it?

00:45:10.280 You say what you thought, and then let's get into it.

00:45:14.280 Sure.

00:45:15.280 Well, I was just starting my tour.

00:45:17.280 Actually, I think I was doing my first event the day he was assassinated.

00:45:22.280 So I just had, like many people, I mean, there are many people in our orbit who were doing live events.

00:45:27.280 And I think Ben Shapiro was in a similar situation where it's like, you know, it's like the world stopped.

00:45:34.280 And, you know, Live Nation got on the phone with everyone who they were working with and said, hey, listen, if you don't want to go out on stage, you know, just let us know.

00:45:41.280 But so it's just, and I said a few things about it, you know, at those live events that I was doing that week.

00:45:51.280 I mean, it was a terrible thing.

00:45:55.280 It was terrible on every level.

00:45:56.280 It was terrible just as a murder of a young father.

00:46:00.280 It was terrible that his family was there.

00:46:02.280 I mean, it was just awful.

00:46:04.280 It's additionally terrible because a political assassination is genuinely dangerous because we are so combustible as a society.

00:46:18.280 And the fact that we're this combustible, a lot of the onus goes to, I mean, it goes to both sides.

00:46:24.280 But I would put most of the onus, as will not surprise you, on the president and his cult, right?

00:46:30.280 And I would say that the response to the assassination was highly asymmetrical in ways that don't make Trump and Trumpism look good.

00:46:42.280 I mean, I thought, I mean, so for instance, all the people right of center were watching those awful videos of Gen Z maniacs celebrate Kirk's murder. 1.00

00:46:52.280 And obviously all those people are dangerous morons on some level. 1.00

00:46:57.280 And many of them, you know, just obviously mentally ill, too. 1.00

00:47:00.280 I mean, these are not the cream of the crop of the woke intelligentsia. 0.94

00:47:08.280 You know, just the sheer number of facial piercings you saw in those videos could have told you something.

00:47:13.280 But what you didn't have left of center were prominent people with big platforms.

00:47:24.280 You know, prominent media figures or, you know, to say nothing, political figures like, you know, from Obama on down, say anything but this was horrible and we should never let it come to this in American politics, right?

00:47:39.280 Like this is, there's no party left of center, real party for political assassination.

00:47:45.280 And yet right of center, very prominent people from the president and Elon on down treated it like the first shot fired in the Civil War.

00:47:57.280 Totally irresponsible, totally dishonest.

00:48:00.280 I mean, these people were arsonists pretending to be firefighters.

00:48:04.280 Elon jumped on X within minutes before, I think before Kirk was declared dead, certainly before his killer was caught and said, the left is the party of murder, right?

00:48:19.280 And then I think some hours later he said, if they won't leave us in peace, there's nothing to do but fight or die, right?

00:48:25.280 I mean, for 225 million people, right?

00:48:28.280 So to have the richest guy in the world on the most politically important social media platform in the world say this sort of thing is just, it's, I mean, it's beyond reckless.

00:48:43.280 I mean, it's just sociopathic.

00:48:44.280 It's just, he is, he is just flinging matches into a landscape that has been just soaked in gasoline.

00:48:52.280 And the soaking has been done mostly by Trump and Trumpism and just what, you know, the grifters right of center like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.

00:49:05.280 I mean, you know, and I know you have your differences with those guys and perhaps we'll get into it.

00:49:09.280 We have a lot of differences with those guys.

00:49:13.280 Yeah, yeah.

00:49:14.280 I mean, it's interesting how the landscape is fracturing right of center.

00:49:17.280 And I, you know, I think it would be good to talk about all of that because it's, I think it's more fractured than you guys think it is.

00:49:24.280 And I think the, you know, there are more casualties than just Tucker and Candace there or at least should be.

00:49:32.280 Um, but it's, there was, this was a highly asymmetric moment of political hysteria, right?

00:49:43.280 So left of center, you had genuine lunatics who represent no one celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk.

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00:51:36.280 Let's just pause out there.

00:51:37.280 Isn't there an argument to be made, Sam, that the rhetoric of the left, calling everyone fascists and Nazis, when quite patently they're neither fascist.

00:51:46.280 Look, you can have your criticisms about Charlie Kirk's politics, but let's be honest, he was a right wing conservative, a Christian conservative.

00:51:55.280 He's not a fascist. He's not a Nazi.

00:51:57.280 Yet that accusation had been made time and time again, not only against Kirk, but also people of that particular branch of politics.

00:52:04.280 Doesn't that incentivize these type of murders, these type of violence, this type of violence?

00:52:09.280 Well, it's more complicated than that.

00:52:11.280 So, Trump is not Hitler.

00:52:16.280 I've never said he was.

00:52:17.280 We're not living in Weimar Germany now in America.

00:52:21.280 But he is a genuine, wannabe authoritarian, doing many authoritarian things and damaging our democracy with both hands every chance he gets, right?

00:52:35.280 So, I don't know, and we're just taught, you're now asking me what I think about the prospect of him running for a third term in just overt defiance of the 22nd Amendment, right?

00:52:46.280 That's, it's not fascism. I mean, fascism is the wrong term, right?

00:52:52.280 It's just got too much, you know, culturally specific and historically specific baggage attached to it.

00:52:59.280 But authoritarian is the right term, and aspiring tyrant is the right term. 0.78

00:53:05.280 And he's just not, the truth is, he's not effective enough. He's not ideological enough.

00:53:10.280 He doesn't care about enough big things to worry me that much, right?

00:53:14.280 I mean, if he were a, I mean, this is a point I've made to the consternation and confusion of many audiences.

00:53:22.280 But the irony is, if he were a better person, he'd be a more dangerous person, right?

00:53:26.280 If he were a smarter person, a more committed person, I mean, if he could possibly commit to something beyond himself, right?

00:53:33.280 And, you know, he'd be more dangerous, right?

00:53:41.280 If he were less distractible, et cetera.

00:53:43.280 So I don't view him as a Hitler figure, but I do, everyone who's calling him an authoritarian,

00:53:47.280 which sounds a lot like fascist, and, you know, you just, you turn up the dial on authoritarianism,

00:53:52.280 there's no important difference between what you're talking about and fascism.

00:53:55.280 Then you're just talking about, like, the clothing and whether the Catholic Church was ever in the mix and et cetera.

00:54:01.280 So, he's not as bad as Putin, right?

00:54:05.280 But he's, if we give him a chance to have as much power as he wants, where does he stop, right?

00:54:14.280 He certainly doesn't, he would run for a third term.

00:54:17.280 If we discovered that the 22nd Amendment just didn't apply, and there's just a, you know,

00:54:23.280 just an open fairway between him and the Green, of course he's going to run for a third term.

00:54:28.280 It's like, he doesn't care about the spirit of the Constitution,

00:54:33.280 where it's clearly meant that you should not, it's not that you can't be elected twice, you can't be president twice.

00:54:41.280 So, I take your point about Trump, but let's come back because they don't only say it about Trump.

00:54:46.280 Okay, I didn't, so I didn't answer your question.

00:54:48.280 Yes.

00:54:49.280 Yes, certain terms are inflammatory and imprecise, but the concern, the, it's, it's a, it's a much grayer area than you're making it out to be.

00:54:58.280 And, I mean, many people could, would say that what I've just said in the hour so far about Trump is just a very, a species of that very, you know, irresponsibility of you, of, of condemning him to the point where, okay, any sane person is going to look at this and say, okay, we have an, we have a political emergency.

00:55:19.280 And, you know, anything, you know, anything is warranted in resistance to this, right?

00:55:25.280 I'm certainly, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying we have a political emergency, right?

00:55:30.280 And we need our institutions to function, to, to contain the damage.

00:55:37.280 But do you not think that it's really important when you criticize your, you criticize your political enemies.

00:55:44.280 It's important to be honest.

00:55:45.280 But it's also important to be accurate.

00:55:47.280 In the same way that you can think somebody is a terrible person and their politics are awful, it doesn't make them a pedophile, for instance.

00:55:53.280 Yeah.

00:55:54.280 And this kind of escalatory language, I personally think is highly dangerous.

00:55:59.280 And when you live in a country like America, where you have access to guns, and there's so many people with mental illnesses, I mean, that's dangerous. 0.84

00:56:06.280 But nobody uses more inflammatory language less responsibly than Trump and his enablers, right? 0.79

00:56:12.280 I mean, you know, so again, Elon jumped on X and basically said, our political opponents are murderers. 0.95

00:56:21.280 The left is the party of murder.

00:56:23.280 There is no party of murder in America, right?

00:56:26.280 Trump, in his address to the nation immediately after Kurt's death, effectively said in so many words, not just that these Gen Z maniacs on TikTok were, you know, responsible for his death.

00:56:45.280 He effectively said that his mainstream political opponents were culpable for murder, right?

00:56:52.280 Which is just not true. 0.99

00:56:54.280 Again, everyone from Obama on down said, this is fucking horrible, right? 0.94

00:56:58.280 We have to pull back from the brink here. 0.98

00:57:00.280 This is not acceptable on any level.

00:57:02.280 And then you had people bending over backwards to sane wash Kirk's actual politics. 0.96

00:57:07.280 Ezra Klein jumps on his opinion column at the New York Times that says Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way, for which he got no end of shit, left of center. 0.92

00:57:22.280 Everyone was being sensitive. 0.97

00:57:25.280 Everyone with any real platform was being sensitive.

00:57:28.280 And what you had right of center were just, with the important exception of Kirk's wife during her eulogy, right, who struck a very different note.

00:57:42.280 I mean, Stephen Miller's eulogy was madness.

00:57:46.280 It was, it was fascistic madness.

00:57:49.280 I mean, this is right, I mean, like, Stephen Miller is a character, apart from the fact that he's Jewish, he's a character right out of Weimar, right? 0.80

00:57:57.280 I mean, he's a lunatic in how he messages into this combustible environment.

00:58:02.280 I mean, do you remember, did you watch his speech? 0.98

00:58:05.280 I didn't watch his speech.

00:58:06.280 Okay, you should watch his speech.

00:58:07.280 It was the most insanely vituperative, just...

00:58:12.280 What does vituperative mean?

00:58:13.280 Just expressive of pure hatred for everyone left of center.

00:58:18.280 I mean, just you people are nothing. 1.00

00:58:20.280 We will destroy you. 1.00

00:58:23.280 You have awakened a dragon. 1.00

00:58:25.280 You have no idea what you...

00:58:26.280 And the, not so much from him, but from other people on the dais that day, there was just this volcanic expression

00:58:36.280 of Christian nationalist kind of just, I mean, it's just pure moral confusion and political hysteria from my point of view.

00:58:48.280 I mean, it was, it was their George Floyd moment.

00:58:50.280 Again, yes, without the riots and obviously...

00:58:52.280 Well, that's quite a big deal, Sam.

00:58:54.280 No, no...

00:58:55.280 But this is what I was going to bring up.

00:58:56.280 It's a superficial deal.

00:58:57.280 Hold on a second.

00:58:58.280 No, no.

00:58:59.280 Hold on.

00:59:00.280 It's a big deal, but it's not...

00:59:01.280 No, no.

00:59:02.280 It's impossible to have the President of the United States come before the country and say, basically, half of mainstream America is a terrorist organization.

00:59:15.280 Like, that was the...

00:59:16.280 Those are not his words.

00:59:18.280 That was the subtext of everything he said in that address to the nation.

00:59:22.280 It was completely of a piece with Elon's tweets, right?

00:59:25.280 Let me...

00:59:26.280 The George Floyd thing, I think you're going way too far, Sam, and here's why.

00:59:31.280 There's no daylight between us about the George Floyd riots.

00:59:34.280 I know.

00:59:35.280 I mean, we view it in precisely the same way.

00:59:36.280 I just view Trump differently.

00:59:38.280 Hold on.

00:59:39.280 What I'm saying is something else. 0.99

00:59:41.280 We agree that burning down cities and taking over districts in America and burning police stations and killing a lot of black people and these moronic chants of defund the police, which led to more black people being killed in their communities in the inner cities. 0.99

00:59:56.280 All of that's crazy, right? 0.99

00:59:57.280 And wrong.

00:59:58.280 Well, what I noticed, and I'm just telling you what I noticed, right, is when Charlie Kirk was murdered in this way, which I thought was horrific.

01:00:05.280 And I think we do know, as far as I can tell, that it was politically motivated.

01:00:10.280 And I would argue, you may disagree, but for me, the word Nazi and fascist has a very unique dimension to it, which is we have been trained as a culture to view these people as a specific threat to the democratic order, to minorities.

01:00:28.280 When we think of a Nazi, we think of someone who's going to take over the country, destroy democracy, and murder millions of people. 0.64

01:00:36.280 Yeah. 0.97

01:00:37.280 That's what a Nazi is.

01:00:38.280 So, what happened was…

01:00:39.280 I do think they're…

01:00:41.280 Hold on.

01:00:42.280 Let me finish my point.

01:00:43.280 Yeah.

01:00:44.280 What happened was a lot of people on the right, and even people like you, and even people like us who are not even on the right, have been called those terms by some people, in your case for being critical of Islam, in our case for questioning the insanity of the left, etc., right?

01:01:00.280 In my view, that is putting a target on people's back.

01:01:04.280 But the other point is, when Charlie Kirk was murdered, it was horrific for anyone really watching it and what happened.

01:01:13.280 Did you worry for one second that there's going to be streets burning in America?

01:01:18.280 Did you worry that police stations were going to be burning down?

01:01:21.280 Did you worry about any of that?

01:01:22.280 Because I didn't.

01:01:23.280 No.

01:01:24.280 But again, the reason why it's an unfair… it's a valid point, but it doesn't… it's not as significant as you're making it out to seem.

01:01:33.280 So, it's a piece with a point that many people made during the elections, right, when businesses in Beverly Hills are boarding up their windows, right, in anticipation of political chaos, should the election go one way or the other.

01:01:50.280 Many people right of center pointed out, okay, that people are boarding up those windows not because they think Trumpists are going to start looting William Sonoma should Trump lose, right?

01:02:03.280 There was just one side that was being worried about in those moments.

01:02:07.280 And it was indecent on some level not to notice that, right?

01:02:10.280 Same point.

01:02:11.280 Same point.

01:02:12.280 Same point.

01:02:13.280 It's just so that… yes.

01:02:14.280 It is true that the left and especially the black community expresses itself in that way when the unhappiness gets dialed up to 11. 0.99

01:02:26.280 What I worry about on the right is a much greater concern, ultimately, and it's hardcore political violence, like, you know, Timothy McVeigh-style, you know, truck bomb violence, and real militias, really committed and trained people who have been training for years, some of whom are Nazis, right?

01:02:52.320 I mean, they're not German Nazis, but they're neo-Nazis. There's much more of that on the right. When you look at just the fringes of gun culture, and again, this all predates this moment.

01:03:04.380 We could have had this conversation 10 years ago. There's much more, the powder keg of real political violence and civil unrest in this country that is consequential, that's not just looting and burning, but like, you know, it's your AR-15s that you've been polishing for years and training on for years, and you've got 10,000 rounds of ammunition already stored for this purpose.

01:03:28.880 Those people are right of center, right? And that's getting...

01:03:33.360 Is it not telling that you had to go back to Timothy McVeigh? I mean, that's what, the 1996?

01:03:38.120 No, there are other, that's just the big one. There are other examples of, I mean, even just in this recent cycle, and this is the thing that was so dishonest about Trump's address to the nation.

01:03:48.000 He talked about political violence and political assassination as though it was well-established that it was only a left-wing thing, but even with Kirk's assassination, it still, in recent memory, has been more of a right-wing thing.

01:04:01.040 There's just simply more incidents of right-wing political violence, including assassination or attempted assassination, and then there's just ambiguous ones, which is, frankly, a crazy person who's not ideological and represents nobody.

01:04:12.360 But, no, I mean, it's like the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer was a punchline right of center.

01:04:22.720 Literally, Kirk himself used it as a punchline. Elon himself has used it as a punchline. Trump himself has used it as a punchline.

01:04:31.220 It's literally been a laugh line for all three of them.

01:04:34.620 This guy was almost killed with a hammer by a guy who is somewhat ideological, also probably crazy, but certainly right of center, who was planning to torture Nancy Pelosi, should she be home, right?

01:04:51.300 This was not funny.

01:04:52.480 And, again, that level of callousness and recklessness and cruelty that you're worried about, in using a term like Nazi indiscriminately, so much, there's been a fire hose of that on the right, right? 0.99

01:05:07.680 Yes, there are people on the left who are dangerous idiots, I will be the first to admit, but it is different when it's coming from the Oval Office. 0.99

01:05:14.800 It's different when it's coming from people, it's like, for every one of those people who, you know, the Gen Z maniacs who made a video celebrating Kirk's death, there's an equivalent lunatic on the right who's much closer to power, right? 1.00

01:05:32.080 Like, people who've got, like, Laura Loomer's phone number in their phone are crazy and dangerous, right?

01:05:38.700 Like, this is not, there's a fever swamp as you move right of center, and again, we'll talk about Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes, like, as you begin to move rightward and toward the weird, right, and you get into QAnon and you start glad-handing all the anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists,

01:05:59.320 it gets very, very weird, very, very dark, and very, very well-armed in a way that isn't mirrored on the left, and that's an important difference.

01:06:08.780 I'm not worried about, yes, who's going to, who's going to, you know, if you tell me that Louis Vuitton is being looted in Beverly Hills, I'm pretty sure I know who's doing it.

01:06:18.900 I'm not as worried about that.

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01:07:33.900 Sam, and just for the people watching, and you said that this was a George Floyd moment for the right, you weren't saying that Charlie Kirk and George Floyd are equivalent in who they were as people.

01:07:46.860 No, thank you.

01:07:47.500 Thank you for connecting that.

01:07:48.760 Yeah.

01:07:49.060 That would be helpful.

01:07:49.960 Apologies for the people who are already typing.

01:07:51.860 Yeah, because you know how people like to then, and then, I don't need to explain that to you.

01:07:56.540 It was a George Floyd moment in the sense that the level of emotionality and lack of caution and lack of honesty around the messaging was equivalent.

01:08:11.680 Right now, it's not, again, coming from different people and different levels with different implications, but yeah, I mean, what I saw at Kirk's memorial, some of it was fine and some of it was actually beautiful and inspiring.

01:08:27.520 And some of it was just a patent explosion of Christian nationalism and, you know, an appeal to theocracy, right? 0.75

01:08:42.620 And again, a kind of, I mean, Elon's tweet was all this in crystal form.

01:08:54.120 To say that the left is the party of murder, right, which is going to be interpreted as not just the fringe of the fringe of the fringe, you know, in some trans cult somewhere who happened to have guns. 0.56

01:09:10.360 No, the left is synonymous in that statement with effectively the Democratic Party, right?

01:09:16.040 I mean, just the mainstream political opponents of Trump.

01:09:19.980 It's totally irresponsible, right?

01:09:24.800 And that is, that's a level of demonization.

01:09:27.060 I mean, what we have to, I mean, to take this from the kind of the highest level, I mean, like this comment is true now and it'll be true 50 years from now.

01:09:39.720 What we have to surmount here to live sanely are two things, tribalism and dogmatism.

01:09:48.280 I mean, like tribalism and dogmatism are the generic, you know, software flaws in our politics, in our culture, and in our, you know, personal psychology, you know, social psychology that makes solving all of these collective problems impossible.

01:10:08.440 I mean, and it just, the antithesis of both of those things is intellectual honesty.

01:10:14.260 I mean, one of the reasons why I criticize religion so much is that religion is the only area of culture where tribalism and dogmatism get this new gloss and they seem like virtues.

01:10:27.560 They can, they can, they can be, they can be made to pass as virtues, moral virtues, you know, moral necessities, intellectual virtues.

01:10:36.020 We call, we call the dogmatism of religion faith, right?

01:10:39.960 When you don't have good reasons for what you believe and you're immune to the good reasons of others that are, that are countering your beliefs.

01:10:45.880 And there are certain conversations you refuse to have because you've got these cherished beliefs that you want to guard from all streams of evidence or argument, right?

01:10:53.360 We call that faith, but no, that's just dogmatism, right?

01:10:55.940 In fact, the word dogmatism is like, it's a, you know, it's a Catholic term, it's a Latin term, dogma is a good, good word in Catholicism, right?

01:11:04.280 I mean, it's not, it's not pejorative, but in the political space, you know, tribalism and dogmatism, what's wrong with identity politics?

01:11:13.580 What's wrong with the woke mob and cancel culture and all the blasphemy tests left of center and all that, that it is the tribalism and dogmatism of all of that. 0.54

01:11:23.540 And insofar as it's mirrored on the right, it's the same problem.

01:11:27.380 It just has different nouns and verbs associated with it.

01:11:30.480 Well, look, I'm glad actually that we're talking about the right because one of the things that we've been talking about on the show more and more is seeing the right and who have always marketed them themselves as a, you know, party of, shall we say, facts and logic, even though that's a hack term.

01:11:46.700 And then you look at the way some of them are going and there doesn't seem to be a lot of facts and even less logic.

01:11:52.660 Right.

01:11:53.500 So how are you guys dealing with that?

01:11:55.680 I mean, you, you have, um,

01:11:57.440 I'm one of the people who came up with the concept of the woke, right?

01:12:00.480 Right.

01:12:01.180 And, uh, everyone who has worked right is really happy that I've come up with it.

01:12:05.180 They're delighted.

01:12:05.780 They're delighted.

01:12:06.420 They love it.

01:12:06.900 They're so great.

01:12:07.560 Well, they think, they think it's a, a species, you know, you, you're joking or they just think it's...

01:12:11.500 I'm being sarcastic.

01:12:12.480 No, they hate it because it's accurate. 0.98

01:12:14.220 Okay.

01:12:14.540 So I thought, I thought you were saying that they thought it was not accurate.

01:12:16.740 I get the sense from the way you asked the question that you're, you sort of, you are with the people who think we are on the right.

01:12:23.640 No, no, no.

01:12:24.260 I've been tracking how you've been navigating this, but I think it's just important to acknowledge and to acknowledge to your audience that there is a, there's something to navigate here.

01:12:37.220 I mean, I think you and I have a different relationship to this ecosystem.

01:12:42.420 So it's, um, it's, it's a different challenge, but, um...

01:12:47.560 You know, the way we think about it is very simple.

01:12:50.080 It's, it's that, I always forget his full title, Lord, the former foreign secretary of the British foreign secretary.

01:12:57.060 What's his name?

01:12:57.560 Lord Palmerston?

01:12:58.540 Palmer?

01:12:58.920 Oh, yeah.

01:12:59.360 Lord Palmerston.

01:13:00.140 Lord Palmerston.

01:13:00.660 And he said, we have no permanent alliances, we have permanent interests, and it's to them that we are allegiance.

01:13:06.920 And that's, that's, we are coming at it from the perspective of what is true.

01:13:10.740 But what about friendships?

01:13:12.860 Actual friendships?

01:13:13.780 I'm capable of being friends with whom I disagree.

01:13:15.940 I disagreed with what you said on our podcast three years ago.

01:13:18.660 I'm, I consider you...

01:13:19.900 Well, what is, I got, I don't want to relitigate all of that, perhaps, but what did you disagree with?

01:13:25.840 Oh, let's not, let's not bother with that.

01:13:27.740 We've, we've done a whole 45 minutes on it.

01:13:29.640 But I don't think I heard your disagreement apart.

01:13:33.220 Yeah, I can't, I can't be bothered.

01:13:34.540 We've dealt with it.

01:13:35.380 It's only happened three years ago.

01:13:36.560 What's the point?

01:13:37.220 Okay.

01:13:37.540 What I'm saying is, there are, of course, exceptions to this, but I'm capable of being friends with,

01:13:43.800 I was never friends with the people who are going tonto right now.

01:13:47.740 Right.

01:13:48.200 Because I always knew they were going to be crazy, and I never made friends with them in the first place.

01:13:53.180 You see what I'm saying?

01:13:54.040 Yeah.

01:13:54.320 Well, I just think the crater that is, we're talking about, is bigger than I think you think it is, and some of your friends are in it.

01:14:02.860 Tell me more.

01:14:04.140 So, I mean, Rogan is implicated in all of this in a way that, that, I mean, and Rogan, I've considered Rogan a friend for years.

01:14:11.360 But, you know, but, like, we're sort of out of touch now, and I think, yeah, I think there's probably a reason for that.

01:14:18.960 I mean, he's like, rather, specifically, like, you know, he has not answered my texts.

01:14:23.180 I tried to give him some, knowing that I was going to have to comment publicly about some of the interviews he's done,

01:14:31.600 and, you know, I think how irresponsible he's been with his platform.

01:14:38.040 You know, I reached out to him by text, and he hasn't, you know, responded to those texts.

01:14:41.660 So, perhaps my texts got lost in the mail, but usually he's pretty good on his text.

01:14:45.020 So, and I'm not sure, honestly, I'm conflicted around the ethics of all of this.

01:14:52.320 I mean, like, I feel, I feel terrible talking about Joe, and yet he's got the biggest platform on planet Earth, or nearly so.

01:15:02.880 And I think he's done an immense amount of harm to our national conversation, our political conversation.

01:15:09.740 So, like, I couldn't have done, like, you guys were just on his podcast.

01:15:13.000 I watched that.

01:15:13.980 I couldn't have had the conversation you had with him there because I would have had to have said this.

01:15:18.780 And, you know, presumably he wouldn't have liked it, and there's a lot to talk about.

01:15:25.620 I thought, you know, I thought his, the interview he had with Trump was incredibly consequential and incredibly irresponsible, right?

01:15:37.120 I mean, it was, he didn't ask a single difficult question of Trump and just help midwife his lies.

01:15:42.860 I mean, among which was the, you know, the 2020 election was stolen lie, right?

01:15:48.580 I mean, like, that's a shattering lie for a former president to have told in our society and to have half the society believe it.

01:15:57.000 It's a perpetual invitation to violence.

01:15:59.500 It gave us the violence of January 6th.

01:16:01.780 Things could have been a lot worse, et cetera.

01:16:05.480 If you have the biggest platform on Earth, you can't just have the kind of conversation that Joe did, had with Trump,

01:16:12.900 and then opened the door to everyone else to have their version of that irresponsible conversation.

01:16:18.180 So, I mean, many people think that this was the, the 2024 was the podcast election.

01:16:22.860 I agree it was the podcast election, but what it was was many people following Joe's lead

01:16:27.300 in being completely irresponsible with how they use their platform.

01:16:30.740 And, and, and to be specific there, I'm not saying you shouldn't talk to certain people.

01:16:39.280 Joe can talk to anyone he wants to, right?

01:16:41.900 I mean, I think there are certain people you probably shouldn't talk to, but there are certain

01:16:45.380 people that if you're going to talk to them, you, given that you have a big platform and

01:16:51.380 literally tens of millions of people in Joe's case, you have a responsibility to do more than

01:16:57.380 just establish good vibes with them and make them seem normal, especially if they're not normal.

01:17:03.900 And especially if they're, they're trafficking in lies and half-truths that are going to delude

01:17:10.720 a significant percentage of your audience and that are deluding you as the host because you 1.00

01:17:14.220 haven't done your fucking homework. 0.99

01:17:16.360 And so, I mean, his conversation with Daryl Cooper, completely irresponsible, right? 1.00

01:17:20.940 I mean, we're living in a age of, I mean, Daryl Cooper is a fake historian who's trafficking

01:17:25.200 in David, trafficking in David Irving's lies about the Holocaust, right?

01:17:29.780 He bounces from Tucker's podcast to Joe's podcast.

01:17:33.500 You know, on those two podcasts alone, he gets a larger audience, perhaps than any real

01:17:38.260 historian ever has had in the history of history, right?

01:17:43.320 I mean, it has to be over 50 million people who saw those two interviews combined.

01:17:49.260 His Rogan episode didn't do very well.

01:17:51.380 Between Joe and Tucker.

01:17:52.700 Look, you've got to separate Tucker from Joe.

01:17:54.780 It's a completely different conversation.

01:17:56.800 It's not a completely different conversation.

01:17:59.180 In fact, you could, so you could argue that Joe's was worse because Joe's happened after

01:18:04.860 Tucker.

01:18:05.580 There was a mess to clean up, which Joe, rather than clean up that mess, he basically, with

01:18:13.520 his imprimatur as the host who knew everything about Daryl Cooper, who had listened, who'd done

01:18:20.320 all the homework and listened to 30 hours of Cooper's podcast on the matter, he could sign

01:18:26.440 off, he could sign a blank check morally assuring his audience that Cooper's a good guy, not

01:18:32.480 an anti-Semite.

01:18:33.340 All of this is good faith, and that the thing he just had said on Tucker, there's nothing

01:18:38.440 wrong with it.

01:18:39.060 It's all just a tempest in a teapot, and people are lying, besmirching him.

01:18:43.800 It's just, you know, libtard hysterics who are having a bad reaction to the truth getting 1.00

01:18:54.260 out on some level.

01:18:55.380 And he's done it with RFK Jr., he's done it with all kinds of maniacs, right? 0.98

01:18:58.660 I mean, I mean, these are people who are, in many cases, liars. 1.00

01:19:03.980 Some of them are probably mentally ill, right? 0.99

01:19:06.160 Some of them just have character defects where they just love to touch, find me a third rail 1.00

01:19:10.340 and I'm going to touch it.

01:19:12.080 No matter how combustible our society is, no matter how little I know, I'm just going

01:19:16.600 to keep touching the button to see what goes off.

01:19:19.420 Dave Smith, again, another, like, Dave Smith is not a morally sane voice about the war in

01:19:30.800 Gaza, right?

01:19:31.900 Now, he's, and he is the person he is because of what Joe has made him, right?

01:19:36.740 And that debate with Douglas, you know, I've commented with Douglas about, you know, what

01:19:41.700 I thought went wrong there, but all of this has created immense harm in our culture, right?

01:19:49.400 We're all in the business of building culture.

01:19:52.640 Culture is the operating system of our society, right?

01:19:55.300 Like, everything we care about is a matter of culture, working better and better, or worse

01:20:04.000 and worse, right?

01:20:04.700 Like, whether we can solve any of the collective action problems we need to solve, whether we

01:20:08.520 can, whether this, whether our species survives is entirely a story, apart from an asteroid

01:20:14.860 impact, it's entirely a story of whether we can sort our culture out enough.

01:20:19.400 So as not to annihilate ourselves.

01:20:22.000 And you literally have people doubting whether the Holocaust was even a thing in the context

01:20:30.380 of the greatest explosion of anti-Semitism we have seen in our lifetime.

01:20:34.440 In the middle of a very clear clash between aspiring Islamist theocracy globally and the West and Israel 0.65

01:20:46.880 being the tip of the spear of all of that, massive moral confusion being spread in our society

01:20:53.080 around that, quite consequentially so.

01:20:55.100 Joe, and Joe is doing as much as anybody to spread that confusion.

01:21:01.340 And he doesn't know it.

01:21:02.240 I mean, I think Joe is a good guy.

01:21:04.060 I don't think he wants to harm anybody.

01:21:05.880 I would not say the same about Tucker Carlson.

01:21:08.080 I mean, I think they're completely different types of people.

01:21:11.080 But there, I mean, it's a disaster what has happened on Joe's podcast, politically and culturally.

01:21:23.060 He's done thousands of podcasts.

01:21:25.120 Thousands of them are great, right?

01:21:27.900 But his approach to this, he's taken absolutely no responsibility as a journalist or as an intellectual

01:21:38.280 or as a historian or as a scientist because he doesn't view himself as a journalist

01:21:43.080 or an intellectual or historian as a scientist. 0.96

01:21:45.300 He's a comic, and he's just shooting the shit with people, and he's just exploring his interests. 0.96

01:21:49.760 And great, it's Joe Rogan University, but he's doing, he has to recognize that he's doing more than that. 0.99

01:21:58.660 He's doing more than that just by virtue of having the audience that he has.

01:22:03.700 But he's also doing more than that because he has this taste for conspiracy theories.

01:22:09.000 He's got this taste for contrarian and anti-establishment views and the debunking of the elites, right?

01:22:16.020 He's bought into that side, like the scales are not just balanced in a truly open-minded

01:22:23.020 and kind of intellectually disinterested way.

01:22:27.240 No, no, he's got an appetite for the false flag operation, right?

01:22:34.180 Like if there's something, if the non-standard view can be spun at all, he wants to hear about it.

01:22:40.380 And that acts like a bug light for maniacs, right?

01:22:43.780 I mean, then you just get these, there's an endless number of people who seem to have the right credentials,

01:22:51.580 and many people who don't obviously have the right credentials, like Dave Smith,

01:22:55.080 but you can get an endless number of people with PhDs or MDs or whatever the requisite degree is,

01:23:02.780 who are crazy, right?

01:23:05.340 Or just terrible people, right?

01:23:08.640 When you have a platform like Joe has, you have a responsibility to not just lay yourself open 0.99

01:23:16.600 and your audience open to a fire hose of bullshit and half-truths and lies unfiltered. 0.62

01:23:27.460 Chances are, if you're a trigonometry fan, you understand the importance of free speech and privacy. 0.98

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01:24:30.600 Okay, but isn't there also a way that you could say, look, you know, some of these ideas are going to be bullshit. 0.99

01:24:37.540 Some of you are half-truths. 0.96

01:24:38.500 Some are going to be highly controversial, which in a few years' time you look at in the cold light of day and was like, well, it was unpleasant, but it was true.

01:24:47.640 Okay, wait a minute.

01:24:49.380 Like COVID?

01:24:50.040 Something about COVID, for example?

01:24:52.180 Okay, but at the time I called that correctly.

01:24:54.900 Yeah, but Sam, no, no.

01:24:55.680 Everybody, I mean, that was so easy to see as an instance of left-wing, politically correct overreach, right?

01:25:07.220 Like calling the lab leak hypothesis racist at the time. 0.98

01:25:11.800 I mean, the very hour, the first instant of this happening, every sane person who's not indoctrinated into wokeism at that moment saw, okay, that's bullshit.

01:25:21.860 I don't think you're remembering this correctly, with all due respect. 0.78

01:25:25.240 I remember, and just telling you our perspective as people who make videos on YouTube, right, that we were having conversations about, are we allowed to have this particular discussion about COVID or masks or vaccines or whatever?

01:25:39.000 Okay, that's a bigger conversation.

01:25:40.500 And the Wuhan thing, because if you'd said that that was the case at the time you were not allowed to say it, YouTube would literally nuke your YouTube channel, right?

01:25:49.840 So when Joe pushed back on it, which I am grateful to him for doing on that thing, he was leading the way in challenging some of this public health nonsense, right?

01:26:00.500 So, yes, if you want me to say that some conspiracy theories are true, yes, conspiracy theory, Alex Jones is going to get it right some of the time.

01:26:10.420 That doesn't vindicate Alex Jones. 0.55

01:26:12.780 Alex Jones is a madman who has created tremendous harm, full stop. 0.86

01:26:18.780 It doesn't matter how long the list of things is that he was right about. 0.97

01:26:23.800 I mean, he's just, he's going to be, he is endorsing every crazy conspiracy allegation.

01:26:33.780 Some are going to be, at some point, you're going to say, oh, yeah, this thing that seemed totally implausible and even irresponsible to entertain, turns out that was right.

01:26:46.780 The CIA did do that.

01:26:47.840 But it's also on a more prosaic level, like school closures.

01:26:52.020 We had Boris Johnson, our former prime minister, who actually said the school closures that went on in the UK were wrong and it damaged a whole generation of children.

01:27:03.560 And maybe if there'd been more people to push back on that, we could have actually dealt with it.

01:27:08.380 You can count on one hand, so the postmortem on COVID, I mean, I guarantee you that the postmortem on COVID that passes for truth in Joe's world is not true.

01:27:21.800 Like, I mean, on Joe's account, COVID was just a cold. 0.96

01:27:26.960 The vaccines were fucking dangerous, right, and may have killed a lot of people. 0.97

01:27:31.160 In Brett Weinstein's world, the vaccines killed millions of people, right? 0.99

01:27:34.620 And et cetera, right?

01:27:39.640 So all of that's upside down, right?

01:27:42.220 Yes, there were some very clear moments where the mainstream political messaging, public health messaging, was disastrously bad and or dishonest.

01:27:58.440 And that was super consequential.

01:28:01.540 And there were things were kept closed for much longer than they should have been.

01:28:07.120 We were not nearly as flexible as we should have been in just understanding this was a moving object.

01:28:13.040 And with each new variant, things were changing.

01:28:15.920 And that the science is catching up to the problem.

01:28:18.040 And there's lots of scientific uncertainty at every stage along the way. 0.99

01:28:20.740 And there are people covering their ass. 0.99

01:28:23.460 And it's not a plandemic, right? 0.99

01:28:26.040 No.

01:28:26.520 But it's just whatever.

01:28:29.320 Again, if you just add up the indiscretions of people covering their ass and people not knowing what they're talking about and it being a moving target and us doing lots of stuff for the first time that's really difficult.

01:28:39.880 And lots of people also dying and there being a real risk of the health care system collapsing, it explains 99% of how badly we handled it.

01:28:50.240 But the lessons being drawn from how badly we handled it in many, many cases are the wrong lessons.

01:28:57.660 I mean, we're just we're living in a land of hallucinations right of center around what should have been learned from COVID.

01:29:04.900 I mean, again, COVID was a dress rehearsal for something quite a bit worse that we we fucked up the dress rehearsal.

01:29:15.260 And we and I mean, I hope someone's learned actionable lessons that can be implemented in real time next time.

01:29:21.980 But what what I fear has happened is that as a culture, we're actually less prepared for a worse pandemic because of how badly we learn the lessons of of our failure.

01:29:35.480 Well, no, I agree with you.

01:29:37.040 And I think there is no doubt that COVID broke a lot of brains.

01:29:40.380 And by the way, I can't speak for Joe, obviously, but I suspect if you speak to him, he'll feel that you went crazy over COVID.

01:29:46.580 Yeah, 100 percent. He has no idea. But but one of us is right. Right.

01:29:51.060 He's again, he's you could both be wrong.

01:29:53.800 No, no. OK, I guarantee I guarantee you that there is a consensus understanding around what happened during COVID that is not in Joe's brain or in the brain of most of his audience.

01:30:09.720 And it's it's in broad strokes, the best understanding we have.

01:30:15.920 It's not it's not to say that we know down to the last person who died of COVID, but within an order within well within an order of magnitude, we know what happened.

01:30:25.640 Right. And that's not what Joe is saying about COVID.

01:30:29.160 Let me make the point I was going to make, which is more about why COVID affected a lot of people the way that it did and, you know, broke people's brains as a strong statement.

01:30:38.640 I use it because I do feel that happened. There was and I'm not talking about Joe specifically.

01:30:43.800 I just mean that that a lot of people felt this way, not felt this way.

01:30:47.160 A lot of people ended up being much more conspiratorial coming out than they came in.

01:30:52.300 Right. Because we had this thing called public health and we had this other thing called science, scientific truth.

01:30:58.440 Right. And we went so far. And these two things are intention, because if you're trying to communicate new ones, complicated, ultimately unverifiable scientific theories or hypotheses to a public with an average IQ who are in panic and fear, scared for their lives.

01:31:19.540 Right. And they're being fed all kinds of crazy stuff in the media.

01:31:24.000 You have to take the scientific truth. And you have to. This is best case scenario.

01:31:28.360 This is why people being corrupt without Fauci having funded the lab in China, all of this other stuff. Right.

01:31:33.380 Just in a perfect world. And you have to condense that complex scientific truth into public health messaging.

01:31:41.100 Yeah. And which is a political process.

01:31:43.620 And that process ended up going so far over to public health.

01:31:49.500 And then you add on top of other things that happened, cover ups of certain things that we now know to be true or as best we can, like where COVID came from, etc.

01:31:58.560 That a lot of people went, well, this thing you told me in the interest of public health was actually just you lying.

01:32:05.480 Right. Because it turned out not to be true.

01:32:07.760 Well, but in many of those cases, it was not just people lying.

01:32:12.720 I know. I know. But if you're being bombarded with messages and told you're a terrible person for not believing them, and you then discover that those messages were actually false.

01:32:22.580 Right.

01:32:22.960 Most people are going to say, I have been lied to.

01:32:25.780 Yeah.

01:32:26.100 Right. And so we've ended up in a very conspiratorial world, partly, I think, because of what happened during COVID.

01:32:31.760 And by the way, if you lock people in their homes for two years, some of them are going to loop it. You know what I mean?

01:32:35.440 Yeah, yeah. But part of the burden that our public health authorities couldn't effectively shoulder was that they were messaging into a polluted information landscape that was poised to be this conspiratorial and this distrustful of authority.

01:32:56.020 And in large measure, independent media is culpable for that. 0.97

01:33:01.240 I mean, it's the Candace Owens of the world and the Joes of the world who were calling bullshit where things were actually bullshit and calling bullshit on absolutely standard science. 1.00

01:33:15.320 And I mean, the people who Joe had on his podcast again and again, Brett Weinstein and all the other ivermectin cultists, that was genuinely harmful. 0.95

01:33:31.040 Right. It's not that they were wrong about everything, but they were wrong about most things.

01:33:34.880 And it was dangerous.

01:33:35.880 But what about the vaccine when you have people coming out going, if you take the vaccine, you're not going to be able to pass it on?

01:33:42.940 There was a moment that, OK, before we had a vaccine, Republicans and Democrats died at the same rate.

01:33:49.180 Once we had a vaccine, Republicans died more than Democrats.

01:33:53.240 That's true.

01:33:53.980 That's bizarre.

01:33:55.660 It shouldn't be that way.

01:33:56.720 Mm-hmm.

01:33:56.960 That's message.

01:33:59.700 That's political consequence of political.

01:34:02.060 Yeah, that's yeah, that's political messaging.

01:34:04.260 Obesity or age.

01:34:05.440 Yeah, as far as I know, as far as I know, they tend to be older.

01:34:07.940 Yeah, yeah.

01:34:08.600 But it was not factoring.

01:34:10.660 I believe that's just purely a matter of vaccine hesitancy.

01:34:14.960 So your claim is just so that I understand what you're saying is Republic right of center.

01:34:19.440 People got anti-vax messaging, didn't take the vaccine and all other things being equal died at a higher rate.

01:34:25.120 Right.

01:34:25.380 That's your.

01:34:25.780 Yes.

01:34:26.340 Right.

01:34:26.540 Yeah.

01:34:28.200 And honestly, Joe was a super spreader of those ideas.

01:34:33.500 Right.

01:34:33.600 So the last I looked, I mean, I haven't looked at these data for some months, but, you know, within the last.

01:34:41.180 I think I did a podcast a couple of months ago and.

01:34:45.980 The authority who I had on at the time, Mark Lipsitch, I believe, signed off on these numbers.

01:34:54.160 I mean, do you do you have these numbers?

01:34:57.120 I mean, how many people in the United States do you think died from COVID?

01:35:00.860 How many do you think were saved by the vaccine?

01:35:03.920 How many do you think died who shouldn't have died based on vaccine hesitancy?

01:35:07.960 I don't know.

01:35:08.460 I don't think there's any way of knowing, if I'm going to be honest with you, Sam.

01:35:12.000 Well, no, there's a way of, there's not a way of knowing exactly, but there's a way of knowing, you can triangulate on these numbers based on excess deaths and just reported deaths.

01:35:23.440 And I mean, the epidemiology of this is not mysticism.

01:35:28.180 I mean, there's a there's a scientific understanding of just how people die and how many people are likely to die in any given society, in any given moment.

01:35:38.340 We're not off by a factor of 10.

01:35:40.760 Right.

01:35:41.140 Let's say we're off by 20 percent, but we're not.

01:35:43.760 This is not like we think X and it's really, you know, one tenth of X.

01:35:48.800 Right.

01:35:53.080 Something like 1.2 million Americans died from COVID.

01:35:58.660 Right.

01:35:59.380 Now, from or with?

01:36:02.180 From COVID is the reason they died.

01:36:04.160 OK.

01:36:04.580 Right.

01:36:04.880 Not that they got hit by a bus and they also had COVID.

01:36:07.440 OK.

01:36:10.260 Now, that's not the bubonic plague in the 14th century, but it's also not a cold.

01:36:17.700 Right.

01:36:18.180 It's most of those people were old.

01:36:20.220 Most of those people are not fit young men who didn't want to take the vaccine because they heard about the heightened risk of myocarditis.

01:36:27.020 Right.

01:36:27.140 I mean, there was all kinds of wrinkles there.

01:36:29.480 It mattered, you know, how old you were in addition to being obese, et cetera.

01:36:33.760 But this this was a real health challenge before we got the vaccines.

01:36:40.160 Now, how many people do we think died because of vaccine hesitancy who wouldn't have died had everyone who could have gotten the vaccine gotten vaccinated?

01:36:49.700 That number is around 300,000 right now.

01:36:54.620 That's a lot of people.

01:36:55.980 Again, most of those people are almost certainly old.

01:36:58.500 You know, they're not four year olds.

01:37:00.060 I mean, there's like a thousand kids or something like a thousand kids died from COVID.

01:37:04.080 But 300,000 people used to be a lot of people.

01:37:11.300 Now, it's like a huge number.

01:37:13.340 Yeah, but so so what did it mean to have the world's largest podcast basically endlessly messaging against the vaccine? 0.99

01:37:25.380 I mean, Joe can say he's not anti-vax, but the primary message around the COVID vaccine and COVID itself coming from his podcast and coming from the so-called experts he had on was that the vaccines are fucking dangerous, man.

01:37:38.720 The vaccines, again, Brett Weinstein told us that the vaccine is likely to kill something like 17 million people, right?

01:37:47.280 I saw a credible estimate of something like 17 million deaths globally from this technology.

01:37:55.080 So 17 million deaths from the COVID vax?

01:37:58.500 Well, when you know, when you scale up to billions, it's not hard to reach a number like that with a technology this dangerous.

01:38:06.200 Zero evidence of anything like that happening.

01:38:09.460 That is a complete hallucination.

01:38:12.960 So it was a problem that some of the biggest podcasts in the world.

01:38:18.080 I mean, it's not just Joe, but Joe's was certainly among the biggest.

01:38:22.180 Joe's had an appetite for this contrarian take on everything such that.

01:38:28.940 Just let's just let's let's just take a mic in front of RFK Jr.

01:38:33.660 I mean, he might be president.

01:38:35.280 RFK, tell us what you think.

01:38:37.420 Right.

01:38:37.980 It's he is a confabulation machine.

01:38:41.520 Right.

01:38:41.820 He it's not.

01:38:43.280 It's some of its lines, some of its delusion, some of its.

01:38:46.740 I don't know what is wrong with the person.

01:38:49.240 But I get I get your point, Simon.

01:38:50.960 I think you make it like, look, in terms of let me tell you what we said on trigonometry about this.

01:38:56.500 It's relevant to the point I'm going to make.

01:38:58.460 We said I said specifically, I don't remember.

01:39:01.780 Francis can speak for himself.

01:39:04.480 If I were elderly or overweight, I'd definitely take the vaccine.

01:39:10.000 And given that I've had COVID twice, I probably have a lot of natural immunity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:39:15.800 And I kind of left it there.

01:39:18.160 And it's ultimately up to you.

01:39:19.840 Speak to your doctor.

01:39:20.700 The most important thing is that you take professional advice on this.

01:39:24.160 That's what we always said.

01:39:25.080 Right.

01:39:25.220 And if you've got comorbidity.

01:39:26.880 Yeah.

01:39:27.380 But if I were 75 years old and morbidly obese, I'd be taking the vaccine.

01:39:33.720 That's what we said repeatedly.

01:39:34.820 Right.

01:39:36.000 I mean, just to give you a point of reference, that's my view of it as well.

01:39:40.880 Like I haven't been vaccinated in years.

01:39:42.760 I wasn't finished on this relevant, right?

01:39:44.860 But what I also said is government tyranny that we experienced in relation to the pandemic was an outrage.

01:39:53.320 Was an outrage.

01:39:54.540 Well, at what point was it an outrage?

01:39:56.940 Not in the first one.

01:39:57.580 Second lockdown.

01:39:58.480 Second lockdown onwards.

01:40:00.040 Okay.

01:40:00.420 In our country.

01:40:01.520 So in our country, we basically, we locked down the first time.

01:40:03.880 Then it became very, very clear that lockdowns don't actually work, right?

01:40:07.340 And do a lot of harm. 0.99

01:40:09.460 And we kept locking down and we kept wearing these fucking masks that don't work and all 1.00

01:40:13.440 this other nonsense. 1.00

01:40:14.400 Complete garbage. 1.00

01:40:15.600 Right. 1.00

01:40:16.140 While being told, no, no, the virus didn't come from a lab in China.

01:40:20.000 No, no, Fauci is the best guy ever.

01:40:22.160 All of this other stuff.

01:40:22.660 I get it.

01:40:23.280 I mean, I was, yeah.

01:40:25.240 Okay.

01:40:25.920 So that being the case, the question, a lot of people will agree with what you're saying.

01:40:31.080 A lot of people would disagree with what you're saying.

01:40:32.540 But the question for me is, what do you think should be the case?

01:40:37.280 Because my view is people are free and they can listen to information and they can make

01:40:43.720 their own decisions.

01:40:44.420 They can listen to trigonometry and go, Constantine and Francis think you should probably speak to

01:40:49.080 your doctor.

01:40:49.840 They can listen to Joe and get whatever perspective they get from that.

01:40:53.360 And they can make their own decision.

01:40:55.520 That sounds quite dangerous, but I worry that whatever it is that is the opposite of that,

01:41:02.540 is also really dangerous, where you are now deciding that, oh, it's a pandemic, therefore

01:41:07.860 these people shouldn't, oh, I don't know what it is that you think should have happened,

01:41:12.160 other than perhaps calling on Joe to, as you said, take more responsibility.

01:41:16.420 But what else should happen in relation to this?

01:41:18.620 What's the answer?

01:41:19.400 Well, it depends on how bad the disease is.

01:41:23.500 So what should have happened during COVID?

01:41:25.220 Well, we should have acknowledged that we are catching up to reality, right?

01:41:31.140 Like we didn't understand how it was spreading.

01:41:33.660 I mean, there was that period where we thought it was spreading based on contact with packages.

01:41:38.780 We're all wiping down packages, you know, the fomite transmission, right?

01:41:42.240 It took a while to even acknowledge that it was airborne.

01:41:47.500 And therefore, it took a while to acknowledge that lockdowns would be less effective and maybe

01:41:53.140 even totally ineffective, it took a while to understand that it wasn't that bad for kids

01:42:02.320 and was pretty damn bad for the elderly.

01:42:07.900 Many diseases are the opposite of that, or at least that they hit kids and the elderly kind of equally.

01:42:12.980 I think the Spanish flu actually targeted the young more than the elderly.

01:42:17.160 Yeah, yeah.

01:42:17.480 So if this had been, if, you know, the bodies of elementary school children had been stacking up like cordwood,

01:42:24.820 we would have had a very different risk tolerance.

01:42:28.300 And we would have been right to have a very different risk tolerance.

01:42:31.120 The lockdown would have been far more like China, however ineffectual that would have been. 0.98

01:42:37.000 And it remains to be seen what we should do given the specifics as we come to understand them.

01:42:48.020 And we, at every point along the way, we should have figured out how to message

01:42:52.640 around scientific uncertainty better than we did.

01:42:56.560 But the problem, again, is we're messaging into a space that is super conspiratorial, hyper-partisan,

01:43:06.980 where people are using any expression of uncertainty as a means to discredit the authority, right?

01:43:16.940 Like, so, I mean, this is the asymmetric warfare that has always been true.

01:43:21.000 Whenever a scientist gets on, I mean, it used to be CNN, not so much anymore because nobody's watching,

01:43:27.560 but, you know, you've got six minutes on CNN as a scientist to talk about climate change or anything.

01:43:34.340 The moment you begin to calibrate your statement with the completely normal degree of scientific caution

01:43:43.120 and uncertainty and humility appropriate to a scientific presentation among scientists

01:43:48.520 to the general public sounds like, oh, this guy, you know, you could drive a truck through all the holes

01:43:54.160 in this guy's account, right?

01:43:56.060 Like, even he says he's not sure, right?

01:43:59.260 So why am I going to take the vaccine, right?

01:44:01.160 So, I mean, we're, in some, the political imperative of public health messaging has to deal with the fact

01:44:11.880 that on some level you are, you're, it's very easy to see how a feeling of paternalism creeps in

01:44:21.880 because you're worried about people taking the nuanced truth the wrong way, right?

01:44:29.980 And that invites, again, this temptation should never be taken, but it invites the prospect of a noble lie

01:44:39.700 or a noble half-truth, right?

01:44:42.200 Which, again, is a disaster, but it's easy to see how people get lured in that direction

01:44:47.240 because they're talking to Candace Owens, right?

01:44:50.380 I mean, on some level, like, when you look at what Candace herself was doing on Twitter around COVID,

01:44:57.380 it was madness.

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01:45:30.840 So, I was watching a documentary on flat earthers, and at the end of it, they interviewed this scientist from NASA,

01:45:38.500 and they said, oh, you must find this funny, and blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:45:41.860 And she went, well, no, because what that tells me is that scientists aren't doing their jobs.

01:45:46.620 If we allow, if we, not if we allow, but if conspiracies like Flat Earth is allowed to propagate and people are talking about it,

01:45:57.020 it's because we're not doing our jobs.

01:45:59.580 We are flawed in our communication.

01:46:01.840 Would you not say that is also an issue as well?

01:46:04.080 That the scientists aren't actually communicating effectively.

01:46:09.100 Absolutely.

01:46:10.060 But there's a, I mean, it's worth acknowledging how difficult a task it is when they're talking to people who have been raised.

01:46:23.820 I mean, there are many different kind of orbits of ignorance here, but I mean, there's a very clear kind of religious anti-science orbit

01:46:33.940 where it's just, you know, this is, their worldview is anchored to something else other than empirical science, right?

01:46:42.520 And so it's, there's a massive amount of distrust of science, just as science, coming from, you know, functionally half of our society. 0.98

01:46:53.780 I mean, probably more like 35% of America is devout in precisely this way, where it's like evolution is just bullshit, right? 0.89

01:47:04.260 Like this, we did not, you know, my great, great, great grandma was not a monkey, and I'm not going to be told otherwise, right? 0.84

01:47:09.420 But that's, that's where the, the understanding of, of the relevant science stops.

01:47:16.880 And so, and then, and then there's lots of, and kind of anti-science cultishness around specifically things like vaccines.

01:47:26.340 I mean, it was a perfect storm, you know, a pandemic is a kind of perfect storm because it, it taps into subcult,

01:47:38.740 I mean, specifically the anti-vax subculture got weaponized during COVID in a way that was, you know,

01:47:45.980 that it might've been waiting for, but it was, it wasn't quite effective.

01:47:49.020 It was a little bit, I mean, it was just as effective, bizarrely effective and hysterical

01:47:58.560 and destabilizing as the weaponization that we've seen around Gaza against Israel.

01:48:04.500 It was like, how did, Israel got attacked on October 7th by absolute barbarians, unambiguously so. 0.96

01:48:12.640 I mean, the moral high ground could not be more clear.

01:48:15.220 The very people who were raped and killed and tortured and kidnapped were the peaceniks in Israel, right? 1.00

01:48:23.660 Not the, you know, not the ultra-orthodox religious maniacs on the Jewish side or the settlers or anything. 0.87

01:48:30.220 I mean, just the very people who are, you know, you would think would do the most PR damage

01:48:37.260 to the Hamas' side of the story, and yet magically this, they've managed to weaponize the, 0.81

01:48:46.520 the information landscape in such a way that, I mean, wherever it wasn't already destroyed

01:48:54.400 by the, the ambient level of anti-Semitism that exists in the world,

01:48:58.480 Israel's reputation has been completely destroyed over the war in Gaza,

01:49:02.240 just by having lost an information war.

01:49:06.020 They also haven't helped themselves, Sam.

01:49:07.980 No, they haven't even tried.

01:49:09.420 No, they haven't.

01:49:11.220 Number one.

01:49:12.020 And number two, you have people like Smotric and Ben Gavir who've been in the cabinet

01:49:16.640 going around and saying things that are quite frankly, just beyond the pale as well.

01:49:20.820 Yeah, but there's just, I mean, there's just two of them.

01:49:22.580 Yeah.

01:49:22.740 There's only two anyone can name.

01:49:24.240 Yeah.

01:49:24.440 And yeah, but that when you hold that up against the reality of religious fanaticism

01:49:30.900 on the other side, it's just, we're not talking about a similar world.

01:49:34.520 Well, I'm glad we're moving on to that issue because you mentioned earlier

01:49:39.760 that you don't think the ceasefire is likely to lead to peace in the Middle East.

01:49:51.480 Why?

01:49:51.960 Well, I just think it's too deep a problem.

01:49:56.040 I mean, I think, I mean, one, Hamas is, you know, agreeing to a ceasefire as far as they

01:50:05.080 are. 0.83

01:50:05.340 I mean, now they're killing their fellow Palestinians. 1.00

01:50:07.320 And strangely, there's not much complaint about that coming from Hollywood or, you know,

01:50:11.960 any of the ceasefire people left of center who ostensibly are worried about Palestinians.

01:50:18.200 But, I mean, they would agree to a ceasefire so as to regroup, to live, to fight another

01:50:26.940 day, right?

01:50:27.540 I mean, they're not people who are going to be happily shopping in whatever mall that the

01:50:33.420 Kushners and the Trumps and the Woodcoffs build in Gaza City in a few short years should all 1.00

01:50:38.460 this work out.

01:50:39.080 I mean, they're a death cult, right?

01:50:43.840 They're real jihadists who really want things. 0.84

01:50:47.200 They're not transactional.

01:50:48.420 They're not hoping to be, secretly hoping to just be wealthy or just be, I mean, I'm sure

01:50:53.940 there's some peripheral cynical people who might be like that.

01:51:00.120 But the true believers are true believers, and they're in a religious war, not just with 0.93

01:51:05.540 Israel, but with everyone who's not Muslim, right? 0.99

01:51:11.420 And even Muslims as well. 0.91

01:51:12.720 Even Muslims who they consider to be apostates.

01:51:15.960 And so when viewed from, I mean, this whole peace process is not credible from the point

01:51:25.280 of view of real jihadists, right?

01:51:27.120 Like the people who are representing the other Arab interests, I mean, the crown prince of

01:51:37.640 wherever is just another apostate who would be condemned by Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State

01:51:44.360 or Al-Shabaab or any other organization, including Hamas.

01:51:49.840 I'm not saying all jihadists are the same, but they're the same in this regard, and they 0.95

01:51:55.640 really are committed to a longer-term project of winning a religious war.

01:52:03.320 But that's why the original Trump plan, it imposed dismantlement and disarmament of Hamas

01:52:09.820 as part of its terms.

01:52:11.040 Now, that hasn't transpired, but basically everyone in the region other than Iran and

01:52:15.920 Hamas agrees that Hamas cannot be allowed to remain in power in Gaza.

01:52:21.400 So the question is, can you get beyond that?

01:52:23.600 If you listen to our discussion with Joe, I made this point, which was about the Kushner 0.53

01:52:28.240 plan, as I understand it, is to try and get the moderate Arabs to work with Israel in opposition

01:52:34.600 to Iran.

01:52:35.380 You have to get rid of Hamas for that to happen, and then you get them all trading together, 1.00

01:52:40.300 and then they hold hands and say, Kumbaya.

01:52:42.160 Yeah, but again, you're talking about the wealthy monarchs of the region who have the so-called

01:52:56.580 Arab street to worry about. 1.00

01:52:58.280 And the Arab street in, you know, all the scores of countries, I mean, there's 50-plus Muslim

01:53:05.960 majority countries, not all Arab, is highly radicalized.

01:53:12.240 It's not as radicalized as the Palestinians. 0.54

01:53:14.080 I mean, the Palestinians are, I mean, Hamas is still popular among the Palestinians, especially

01:53:18.360 in the West Bank.

01:53:19.080 I think it's true to say that they would win an election in the West Bank today.

01:53:23.060 Also, as well, Sam, we need to take into account that the first thing that they did when Israel 0.93

01:53:29.280 stopped bombing Gaza was it then went out and shot people it regarded as traitors, kneecapped

01:53:35.240 them, tortured them, all the rest of them.

01:53:36.880 You can't be certain that the opinion polls reflect people's genuine sentiment.

01:53:40.420 Yeah, but you can be certain of the level of religious fanaticism in the area.

01:53:45.120 What people care about, I mean, they care about above all, like the top of the list would

01:53:51.660 be any desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

01:53:57.320 Like, that's, there's no number of kids you can kill that matters more than that.

01:54:02.000 And that's bizarre.

01:54:05.160 I mean, that's insane.

01:54:06.220 That's morally upside down to have a culture that is framing their core moral concerns around

01:54:16.200 religious fiction, right?

01:54:20.120 I mean, that's, I mean, there are many cultures like that, but the Islamic culture is the world

01:54:26.460 over has the worst version of that, right?

01:54:28.860 I mean, it's again, like you and I could say something, the three of us could say something

01:54:31.880 on this podcast sufficiently provocative or do something like burn a Quran that could literally

01:54:39.280 cause embassies to burn tomorrow in a dozen countries.

01:54:43.280 I mean, it's like, that's the world we're living in.

01:54:46.780 The Muslim community, the world over is uniquely combustible based on the significance of religious 1.00

01:54:55.860 symbols. 0.59

01:54:56.620 And they're not uniquely combustible.

01:54:58.200 I mean, they don't, we've seen protest after protest over cartoon, things like cartoons

01:55:05.680 and the naming of a teddy bear.

01:55:06.940 We have not seen protests, certainly not sizable ones, over what an outrage it is that groups

01:55:20.640 like Hamas or Hezbollah or Al-Shabaab or Al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba or Boko Haram or any of these

01:55:27.920 jihadists and Islamist groups over the fact that they have committed atrocities against

01:55:34.080 now practically countless innocent people, most of whom are Muslim, right? 0.99

01:55:41.520 Like where are the, how can you, how can you not have a hundred thousand people turning up

01:55:46.960 in the streets of London to protest the Islamic state at its height? 1.00

01:55:53.300 Where were those protests?

01:55:54.560 Where were all the Muslims who are desperate to, to, to disavow jihadism in the face of the

01:56:02.040 Islamic state?

01:56:02.460 I mean, what you had is you had people dropping out of medical school in London, people dropping

01:56:08.760 out of the London School of Economics to go join the Islamic state to take Yezidi women 1.00

01:56:14.220 as sex slaves and then bragging about it on Twitter, right? 0.97

01:56:19.080 And where were the protests? 0.97

01:56:20.580 No, the protests were over the Danish cartoons, right?

01:56:24.560 What's your point, Sam?

01:56:25.380 What they care, what the center of gravity for far too much of this community, this community

01:56:33.180 of two billion people in the world over, is around religious pride and humiliation. 0.91

01:56:42.580 Religious symbolism is not around the real consequential body count of, you know, violence and peacemaking, right? 0.97

01:56:56.920 It's not, it's, it's not about, most of the world and certainly most of the Muslim world doesn't care when Muslims kill other Muslims. 0.97

01:57:06.500 They care when Jews do it, most of the world doesn't care when Muslims kill Christians, right? 1.00

01:57:13.740 I mean, it's strange, I mean, this is something I'm genuinely surprised about and confused about. 0.95

01:57:18.680 I'm not quite sure why fundamentalist Christians aren't more agitated around the murder of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa by Muslims. 1.00

01:57:29.240 I mean, right now, the Islamic State is cutting the heads off of Christians in Nigeria and maybe also Uganda, but it's definitely Nigeria. 0.79

01:57:43.340 It's like, you would think that would be a pretty big deal. 0.99

01:57:50.480 It's not, it's, no, it's the most inflammatory thing on earth is Jews killing Muslims in the Holy Land.

01:58:00.400 So, I mean, we need, I mean, yes, we desperately need a war of ideas, if not an actual civil war within the Muslim world in scores of countries to nullify the cancer of jihadism. 0.98

01:58:21.320 I mean, Islam plus jihadism is going to prove totally unworkable for open societies everywhere in the future. 1.00

01:58:32.040 There's no, there's no way of assimilating jihadists.

01:58:35.380 It's not, I mean, what you're experiencing in the UK right now is what it's like to have 6% of your society be Muslim 0.99

01:58:41.960 and some percentage of those Muslims to want to live under Sharia law

01:58:46.860 and some percentage of those Muslims to happily create, you know, so-called grooming gangs 0.99

01:58:55.340 because it's in line with their view of how you think about infidel young girls. 0.89

01:59:03.460 And you're trying to absorb all that and you've got Tommy Robinson out there complaining.

01:59:13.760 The Muslim community has to figure out how to purge itself of this level of religious fanaticism

01:59:20.580 and these specific commitments around things like, you know, punishing apostasy and blasphemy

01:59:30.660 and, you know, in the fullness of time, maybe they'll do that under pressure, maybe they'll do that,

01:59:41.040 but they're not tending to do it organically.

01:59:44.780 Well, this is where the Saudi and the UAE are interesting, right? 0.99

01:59:48.740 Because they are trying to do this.

01:59:50.520 They're trying to replace Islamism with a more moderate version plus economic growth. 0.98

02:00:01.580 So the young men in particular have things to do and a purpose in life and a family to feed

02:00:07.300 and all this other stuff and are not drawn towards these sorts of ideologies.

02:00:12.760 I mean, you seem skeptical about that.

02:00:14.220 Yeah, because I think these religious commitments are sincere for many, many millions of people.

02:00:22.640 And also, it's just for everyone.

02:00:25.380 I mean, wealth is not enough on some level.

02:00:27.260 I mean, this is a...

02:00:31.900 I mean, many people think they need religion.

02:00:34.680 I mean, you're certainly aware of this and you're talking about this more.

02:00:37.980 And I mean, you and I view this differently.

02:00:44.520 I think the burden is on us to understand that the real depths of human flourishing

02:00:52.660 need to be talked about in ways that are non-sectarian.

02:00:56.720 I mean, the truth is non-sectarian. 0.87

02:00:58.160 The truth is not Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish. 0.86

02:01:01.520 So that's true of physics and it's also true of the mind, right?

02:01:04.120 Whatever is possible for us mentally and emotionally and socially and whatever happens after death

02:01:11.360 and whatever is...

02:01:12.360 It's like to believe otherwise is to believe that one isolated community 2,000 years ago

02:01:17.540 that had no access to science or even scientific values, much less scientific tools,

02:01:26.020 got it perfectly right and everyone else got it wrong, right?

02:01:29.700 So one of these revealed texts is true, despite the fact that none of them seem to recognize

02:01:35.460 that slavery was a problem morally, among other things.

02:01:38.940 They know nothing about DNA or electricity or information science or the real scale of the cosmos

02:01:45.320 or how disease spreads or anything, but they can tell you how to sacrifice a goat.

02:01:49.500 And they've got some good wisdom in there too, but they don't have a monopoly on that

02:01:53.940 because the Greeks had that and the Buddhists had that and the golden rule exists in many different contexts

02:02:02.180 and even monkeys seem to intuit some basic version of it when you treat them unfairly

02:02:07.640 or reward one with a cucumber and another with a grape, they tend to not like that.

02:02:11.620 Whatever's true about us spiritually and ethically is deeper than culture

02:02:21.580 and it's certainly deeper than any ancient culture, right?

02:02:24.560 And the fact that the world was partitioned by language barriers and geographical barriers

02:02:28.880 for thousands of years and everyone came up with different books is an artifact

02:02:34.140 that we have to recognize as an artifact.

02:02:37.080 And it's specious, it's spurious, it's not the actual foundation of our moral knowledge

02:02:44.760 or anything else.

02:02:46.420 And when you go into the Bible and read it and purport to find wisdom there,

02:02:52.260 even if you're a fundamentalist, fundamentalists are picking and choosing the stuff they think is wise

02:02:58.220 and the stuff they think is better left ignored.

02:03:02.120 And they're doing that on the basis of a larger cultural conversation that is secular

02:03:05.600 and that has moved on.

02:03:07.180 So it's like the fact that you're still not trying to figure out whether you should kill somebody

02:03:12.660 for working on the Sabbath if you're Jewish and reading the Pentateuch 0.70

02:03:17.500 or whether you really need to hunt witches in your community for the crime of witchcraft,

02:03:27.460 right?

02:03:27.520 But the fact that you can ignore all that and just take the so-called good stuff,

02:03:30.900 again, that's an editing procedure that is, the gold standard of that is your own moral intuitions

02:03:37.300 that have been tuned up by your engagement with the 21st century,

02:03:40.980 your inevitable engagement with the 21st century and a wider secular culture, right?

02:03:45.340 So none of these religions have a monopoly on anything other than their own sectarian ignorance 1.00

02:03:50.580 and tribalism and dogmatism.

02:03:52.760 And all of that is best disavowed and we can have a real conversation about what is truly

02:04:01.720 trans-cultural and deeper than the artifacts of whatever, you know, grandma had in her bag

02:04:08.940 before we knew anything about biology or the human brain or et cetera.

02:04:14.960 But most of the world doesn't see it that way.

02:04:20.300 Most of the world is mightily attached to whatever they got at mother's knee about the unique sanctity

02:04:26.900 of a specific book and what happens after death.

02:04:29.340 And they've organized their lives around it.

02:04:32.500 And in the case of Islam, you're talking about a much wider culture that has been insulated from

02:04:42.600 modernity to a remarkable degree and has not had the same kinds of collisions with rationality

02:04:50.660 or science or secular politics.

02:04:56.120 And so on some level, it's like we're dealing with the Christians of the 14th century in many, 0.94

02:05:00.740 many places and even on the streets of London.

02:05:05.020 Sam, it's been an absolute pleasure as always having you on the show.

02:05:08.300 But the final question is always the same.

02:05:11.780 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

02:05:15.640 Before Sam answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you head to

02:05:19.320 triggerpod.co.uk where he will answer your questions.

02:05:23.860 Precedential nominees for 2028.

02:05:25.860 Who would you like them to be and who do you think will actually be chosen?

02:05:30.160 I'm very curious to know who his top three nonfiction authors would be.

02:05:34.720 What do you think about the idea that new atheism might have paved the way for wokeism?

02:05:41.160 I think we're not talking about solving coordination problems that by definition are global in scale.

02:05:53.940 So much of what we've talked about so far represents a massive opportunity cost around the problems

02:06:01.040 that really are huge that we can't even think about solving.

02:06:03.900 It's like we haven't talked about AI, right?

02:06:06.060 So AI is a global phenomenon now.

02:06:09.480 It's going to impose whatever global risks it imposes on us

02:06:14.060 to get out of this arms race condition 0.93

02:06:18.880 and develop this technology sanely in a way that's going to be compatible with our flourishing

02:06:29.520 or even our survival is going to require cooperation

02:06:34.040 that we just can't figure out how to even begin to engineer, right?

02:06:38.700 I mean, how do we get the entire world on the same page

02:06:45.020 around what is safe and ethical around AI?

02:06:49.900 And so many other problems.

02:06:51.420 I mean, the next pandemic is another coordination problem.

02:06:55.560 But coordination problems are specifically interesting

02:07:01.940 because we can fail to solve them even when everyone wants the same thing, right?

02:07:07.600 Like it's not just people having different interests

02:07:10.540 or seeing trade-offs differently.

02:07:13.800 We can all fail together

02:07:16.100 because we simply haven't figured out how to move collectively

02:07:21.340 even when everyone could be incentivized to do that

02:07:25.220 and everyone has the same basic interests.

02:07:28.100 There you go.

02:07:28.700 An uplifting message from Sam Harris to finish on.

02:07:30.920 All right, head on over to Substack

02:07:32.600 where we ask Sam your questions.

02:08:01.020 Thank you.

02:08:04.580 All right.

02:08:07.160 Thank you.

02:08:07.940 Thank you.

02:08:08.680 Thank you.

02:08:11.620 Thank you.

02:08:14.920 Thank you.

02:08:18.920 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - November 21, 2025

Sam Harris Returns to TRIGGERnometry

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