Sam Harris: Our Democracy Is Already Unraveling

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Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I just couldn't be more delighted to be here today with the host of the Making Sense podcast, a neuroscientist and author.

Speaker 3 His books include The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. It's Sam Harris.
Sam, welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Tim. Great to meet you.

Speaker 3 Man, it's good to meet you, too. I had so many people recommend to me The Reckoning, which I guess you put on your sub stack.

Speaker 3 And as a podcast, it was an analysis of the election and what happened, why Kamala Harris lost. You've been a longtime anti-Trumper, like those of us at the bulwark.

Speaker 3 And so I want to get into kind of the damn autopsy stuff, but if I think it might be more useful to sort of back up the lens a little bit, because I think you might have a different perspective than some of us who are more in the political space about how we got here.

Speaker 3 So if that works for you, we'll just back up a little bit first. Sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I say that because, so in my world, I came from, you know, Republican politics and, you know, like many of us at the bulwark. And

Speaker 3 like the Republican establishment types that all let us down and failed us essentially did this reluctant-ish submission to Trump over the course of years, you know, some quicker, some slower.

Speaker 3 But, you know, there was like a hope that maybe things could go back to normal.

Speaker 3 But like, there's another category of people that's become ascended in Trump world that's closer to your space than mine.

Speaker 3 It's these kind of tech public intellectual types, you know, the anti-woke crowd. And they've had like an enthusiastic conversion towards Trump.

Speaker 3 And so I kind of want to start with them and like what attracts these smart men, mostly men, to this deeply unimpressive resentment monster?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, it's a good question.
So let's linger on this phrase public intellectual because

Speaker 3 I'm thinking of like Andreessen and Weinstein. I know who you got.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, we can name names if we want to, but

Speaker 1 I mean, some of these guys are friends. Some of these guys are former friends.
Some of these guys are now proper enemies. And I'm happy to talk about all of them.

Speaker 1 But the phrase public intellectual is one that I will speak happily and without scare quotes because I think we need public intellectuals.

Speaker 1 I don't think that's an embarrassing label, and I aspire to earn it. But I think it's important to notice about a lot of these guys is that though they are smart, they are not intellectuals, right?

Speaker 1 They're not attempting to have anything like a truly honest and comprehensive worldview that they can defend from all sides and that they'll revise in real time in front of you when you push back on some squirrely part of it in a way that proper academics and journalists and real public intellectuals will, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, I guess I'm describing something like an ideal. You just cannot say that someone like Elon Musk is an intellectual, right? He's obviously very smart.
He's obviously a talented engineer.

Speaker 1 But when you prod him and get his take on world events or on the future of humanity, you get like 15 lines of boilerplate that he hasn't revised in the last decade and a half about us having to be a multi-planetary species and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 And with a lot of these guys, you have people

Speaker 1 whose formative experience intellectually was their first encounter with Ayn Rand and science fiction. And then they, I'm sure many of them read, but they read

Speaker 1 quite idiosyncratically. They're self-taught in basically everything other than, in some cases, computer science and

Speaker 1 maybe, in Elon's case, engineering. And even there, I think he's largely self-taught.
And a lot of these guys show all the scars of being autodidacts. And

Speaker 1 I'm not advocating for mere credentialism. I'm not saying you need a PhD in the thing you talk about and you can only talk about that thing.

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously, I don't observe those boundaries intellectually myself.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 some of us have internalized the standards of academic and journalistic integrity in a way that others haven't, right? And these guys have been outside cats.

Speaker 1 I mean, there are probably a few exceptions here, but when you're talking about somebody like Elon, you're talking about somebody who never internalized anything as a standard of ethical or intellectual integrity apart from what just got hammered into him

Speaker 1 during his adventures in tech.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, now, and in his case, perhaps more

Speaker 1 conspicuously than any other, we're seeing the total derangement of a personality based on social media addiction. I mean, that is, in fact, what you see with Elon.

Speaker 1 He is a Twitter addict, so much so that he felt he needed to buy the platform. And now he has this, you know, free speech evangelist gloss on what he's up to.

Speaker 1 But really what he's up to is snorting ketamine and tweeting at all hours of the day and night, right? And this is his influence on our politics.

Speaker 3 Seems like there's a lot of ketamine in the White House. I keep hearing about ketamine.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
I'm sure. I mean, one hopes he's mitigated it of of late.
I mean, his behavior on Twitter is obviously, palpably, visibly deranged, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, he signal boosts Pizzagate lunatics, knowing who they are. He knows who they are because I and others have told him who they are.

Speaker 1 You know, he thinks he's doing a service to humanity by boosting to 200 million followers obvious lies and conspiracy theories and making some of the most odious online trolls even more famous, meanwhile, just declaring war on actually normal people who, for whatever reason, he's gotten on the wrong side of.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so I guess then the question that I have about that, it's just hard for me to wrap my head around: is it simply contrarianism to the dominant culture?

Speaker 3 Is it there was an opportunity, like that Trump is, in some ways, you know, a vessel that you can just grab onto and gain influence with in a way that like you couldn't with a more traditional politician.

Speaker 3 Just because, and there had to be something, like it's not just Elon, right?

Speaker 3 Like there is, and some of these guys like David Sachs, I guess, was always, always been a Republican, but most of these people.

Speaker 1 But he's another one. He's like a self-taught expert on the Ukraine, right? Yeah.
And he either knowingly or unknowingly is recycling Kremlin talking points.

Speaker 1 He'll never put himself across the table from someone like Ann Applebaum or Timothy Snyder or anyone who knows anything about Ukraine. And it's just not honest.

Speaker 3 That's what I mean, though. He's a certain category.
But many of these people were for Obama, we're part of this technocratic moment in Silicon Valley when

Speaker 3 these social media companies were being created, were culturally liberal.

Speaker 3 What radicalized so many of them? What is underneath the red pill, in your view?

Speaker 1 Well, in many cases, what radicalized them has effectively radicalized me and many other people in the sense that we all noticed the obvious moral errors being committed on the far left and the mad work they were doing in capturing our institutions, right?

Speaker 1 So one of the asymmetries you have between left and right, which anyone left of center who has their head screwed on straight should find galling, is that the far fringe of the left has immense cultural influence, whereas the far fringe of right really doesn't.

Speaker 1 I mean, you can say what you want about the proximity of neo-Nazis and real anti-Semites to power

Speaker 1 in Trumpistan. I mean, there is some of that.
You've got people like Candace Owens.

Speaker 3 I might say did ent over doesn't. I think that the door is still open on doesn't for now.

Speaker 3 We'll see what happens in Trump 2.0.

Speaker 1 But yes, and I'm certainly worried about that.

Speaker 1 I'm worried about people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the fact that they sit atop a powder keg of anti-Semitic and anti-democratic derangement.

Speaker 1 And obviously, Trump has, in a somewhat sinister way, I don't know how calculated it is, but he's done his work not to alienate that far fringe because I think he has thought he needs them on some level.

Speaker 1 So, you know, stand back and stand by is not exactly what you want your president to be saying to the proud boys.

Speaker 1 But that notwithstanding, what you have on the left are proper lunatics successfully bullying our most elite institutions, right?

Speaker 1 You have the people who glue themselves to priceless works of art in museums. You have the trans women or women brigade.
You have the defund the police people.

Speaker 1 These are the kinds of convictions that really should not have survived contact with 10 minutes of pragmatic political analysis.

Speaker 1 But in the Democratic Party and in liberal institutions, we have witnessed the full capture.

Speaker 1 I mean, just there's a new orthodoxy that has reigned at places like Harvard and the New York Times and the Mayo Clinic. And just you go as elite as you want left of center.

Speaker 1 And everyone has been cowed into silence on questions of, you know, in particular, things like trans activism and, you know, identitarian racial politics.

Speaker 1 So you have someone like Iber Mex Kendi, who by my lights is a pure pornographer of racial grievance. To say he's in good standing left of center is an understatement.

Speaker 1 I I mean, he is lionized at the Aspen Ideas Festival and everywhere else and brought in to deprogram Fortune 500 companies of their racism. And

Speaker 1 it's

Speaker 1 just an odious grift, and it has

Speaker 1 torpedoed the chances of Democrats for years now. And

Speaker 1 on my account, I'm in good company here. It is among the many reasons why

Speaker 1 Donald Trump is president again or will be. be.

Speaker 3 Aaron Ross Powell, just one more on this point, because

Speaker 3 I guess pointing out that your critique of these left institutions and the far left activists is in line with the critique that undergirds Elon's pivot to the lunacy that he's pushing now. But

Speaker 3 you didn't go full whole hog, right?

Speaker 3 Like it's one thing to be like, I'm annoyed by the people that are

Speaker 3 taping themselves to priceless works of art or that are making people who are obviously one gender put their pronouns in their bio or who are like just unnecessarily, you know, having racially segregated meetings at schools.

Speaker 3 And so like

Speaker 3 there's a lot of lunacy on the far left. But like, I understand why that makes people upset with the Democrats, but that isn't really what like Joe Biden was doing in the administration, right?

Speaker 3 And the lunatics are literally running the asylum on the right.

Speaker 3 So while I can understand the cultural critique of the left, like you've managed, I think, to ride this balance between I have this cultural critique of the far left without meaning I need to throw in with the Newsmax crowd.

Speaker 3 Those guys all failed that balance. Like, how do you assess that?

Speaker 1 Well, it does come back to the intellectual integrity I

Speaker 1 described at the outset and the failures of it. I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm enough of a creature of the institutions to have internalized certain standards of scrupulousness, you know, journalistically, academically, scientifically.

Speaker 1 I mean, you know, I have a PhD in neuroscience and a background in philosophy before that. And,

Speaker 1 you know, if nothing else, that has drummed into me

Speaker 1 certain standards of intellectual embarrassment that I don't want to touch. And you have to be able to keep more than one grotesque object in view at a time, right?

Speaker 1 So to be convinced that the left has lost its way, as many of us are, need not make you blind to the fact that Trump and Trumpism poses a real threat to our democracy, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, Trump is a demagogue.

Speaker 1 He's the most prolific liar we've ever seen.

Speaker 3 And even if you don't actually think that, even if actually you don't believe that and you think Trump leaves in 2028, like again, looking, I just think about these smart people, people like Chamath and Mark Andreessen and people in this tech world and in the intellectual dark web world, like even if you don't actually believe the worst, you know.

Speaker 1 Well, just to be clear, I don't believe the worst. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 So, right.

Speaker 3 He's a moron. Yeah, like he's a bigot and a moron.
Like, you know what I mean? Like, throwing in with him, even if you don't think he's a threat to democracy, is kind of crazy.

Speaker 1 Well, no, what I would point out is our democracy has already been damaged, right? So I'm wasting no time worrying that he might not leave in 2028.

Speaker 1 I'm just worried about what's already happened that half of our society doesn't care about.

Speaker 1 I mean, we already have re-elected a man to the presidency who last time around wouldn't admit he had lost an election and in fact lied continuously about having won it, knowing that those lies were a continuous provocation to violence in our society.

Speaker 1 And he clearly tried to steal the 2020 election all while telling us that it was being stolen from him, right?

Speaker 1 So we've allowed this kind of misbehavior and we haven't penalized it and now we've rewarded it with a second presidential term. And just look at what it's done to our politics.

Speaker 1 We know that there were Republican congressmen and women who would have voted to convict him and to impeach and convict him, but for the fact that they were worried that the MAGA cult would come for them and their families.

Speaker 1 And we know this from Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. This is the kinds of things that Republicans will divulge behind closed doors.
They're afraid of their own base.

Speaker 3 Anthony Gonzalez said it. Yeah, from Ohio.
He said it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's already horrifying. That's already something that is unraveling our democracy.
I mean, the Republican Party is a personality cult now. It's not a normal political party.

Speaker 1 I think that's already a moral injury to our society that we should be upset about, right? And that we certainly shouldn't have doubled down on it.

Speaker 1 And so the fact that you have people like David Sachs et al.

Speaker 1 who don't care about any of that. Again, I think there's an amorality at best that accounts for their behavior and their support of Trump that

Speaker 1 is really worth criticizing. On some level, they might be low-information voters.
They might be taken in by some of the misinformation that has been spread on the right.

Speaker 3 They're not low-information voters.

Speaker 1 You would think, but one thing that I don't think we can discount is just how

Speaker 1 fully people are siloed now into information bubbles where they just click on the thing that they find tasty on X. And between that siloing and

Speaker 1 aptitude for confirmation bias, they probably go for months without seeing some credible, disconfirming instance of their cherished opinion.

Speaker 1 And more and more, many of us are living that way, you know, apart from those of us who feel some kind of personal and professional responsibility to

Speaker 1 go against that tide. And it's, it's, it's, but it's getting harder and harder to do.

Speaker 1 I mean, I deleted my Twitter account two years ago, which I mean, honestly, I'm still embarrassed at what a life hack that proved to be.

Speaker 1 My engagement with Twitter was just not healthy, and I was a minor user of it compared to somebody like Elon. 90% of what's wrong with Elon, I think, can be ascribed to his Twitter addiction.

Speaker 3 I need to do some self-reflection on this point. I want to maybe get to that at the end, but I just want to develop one more before we get to the reckoning side of this with

Speaker 3 like what explains these guys submit. Because again, it's just like Trump is so plainly stupid and so plainly erratic.

Speaker 3 Like, even if you don't believe any of the fascist stuff, none of these people would put Trump in charge of any of their venture capitalist businesses or the principal of their kids' school or any of that.

Speaker 3 Like, on its face. And yet, they throw in with him.
So, there is the radicalization element. I've been, the far left has made me so upset that

Speaker 3 I'm going to throw in with the enemy. What about the financial side of it?

Speaker 3 Like, is he just a vessel for they know that he won't regulate AI and crypto and Elon's various companies will now be the ones that are not tariffed?

Speaker 3 What about just the straight old-fashioned financial grift?

Speaker 3 Might that explain some of it?

Speaker 1 I think that explains the behavior of some people, but no one that I actually know comes to mind on that list.

Speaker 1 I can well imagine that's true of some people who I don't know, but for somebody like Andreessen

Speaker 3 or any of the crypto people?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, I think Andreessen is

Speaker 1 just, yes, I think he's focused on regulation and he didn't like the hostility toward crypto that the Biden administration seemed to show. Yeah, so perhaps there's some of that.

Speaker 1 But with somebody like Elon, he talked about this publicly. And I really have no doubt.
I take his words at face value.

Speaker 1 I mean, the trans issue with his own son, now daughter, where he felt like a school brainwashed his kid with this

Speaker 3 woke mind virus.

Speaker 1 Basically, yeah, the woke mind virus. And

Speaker 1 the southern border, you know, the insanity of the southern border, which you know.

Speaker 3 I can't be made to think that they care about the southern border.

Speaker 3 Regular people who live in Arizona might care about the southern border, but I cannot be made to think that Silicon Valley billionaires or public intellectuals or writers for the free press actually care about the southern border.

Speaker 3 I can't.

Speaker 1 I care about it, and I believe that they would. You do? Oh, yeah.
I just, it just seems insane to not know who's coming into the enough to be for Trump or to even consider being for Trump?

Speaker 1 That's the thing. If you're not paying attention to how despicable Trump is and

Speaker 1 Trumpism is and how

Speaker 1 antithetical it is to any kind of sane political culture in our democracy, if that's not something that you're tracking, you know, and you just think you're you're taking him seriously but not literally, right?

Speaker 1 You know, if you've you've bought that line, right?

Speaker 1 That he's just a, if you're, if you're just entertained by him and not repelled by him, if you think, I mean, the truth is the guy is genuinely entertaining. He can be genuinely funny.

Speaker 1 So he brings the optics of celebrity to every political moment that almost no one else does.

Speaker 1 And if you're taken in by all that, like I have, I have two very close friends who voted for Trump, despite the fact that I've tried to perform an

Speaker 1 exorcism on them for, you know, now

Speaker 3 would they put their kids in a school where Trump is the principal?

Speaker 1 Listen.

Speaker 3 Like, that's, I guess, that's a key question because it's like, are they fooled by him enough that they would actually trust him in real life?

Speaker 1 Therefore,

Speaker 1 there are many, many reasonably smart people

Speaker 1 who are not tracking the details we're tracking, who haven't taken any kind of inventory of his lies, who think it's all harmless, good fun when he exaggerates how many stories he has in Trump Tower, et cetera, when he has an apartment that's 15,000 square feet and he says it's 30,000 square feet.

Speaker 1 That's just

Speaker 1 a kind of a charming affectation.

Speaker 1 And they don't track how that level of dishonesty contaminates everything in his world, right? So

Speaker 1 they just think it's entertaining.

Speaker 1 One thing that happened is that Mark Burnett successfully marketed this man to all of America for 12 years, 12 long years on The Apprentice as a business genius, right?

Speaker 1 Whereas he is, in fact, a business fraud.

Speaker 1 And now, ironically, he is a real billionaire, at least on paper, because of how successfully he's grifted his cult-like following and put himself atop a meme stock of a fake business.

Speaker 1 But still, most people think, okay, this guy is a legitimate business genius who's super practical. and is just going to get things done.

Speaker 1 He just wants to disrupt things, just as we do in Silicon Valley, right? He's just a disruptor. He doesn't have time for the norms and usual guardrails of

Speaker 1 politics as usual. But we don't want that.
We don't want a government that spends $10,000 to buy a toilet seat.

Speaker 1 And you're going to bring Elon and Vivek in there to clean house, and it's going to be wonderful. If you're not tracking how

Speaker 1 morally insane it is to elect someone to the presidency who trusts Putin more than our intelligence services and will say so on television, all you see is the possible upside of the bull in the china shop.

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Speaker 3 So this takes us to the

Speaker 3 reckoning, the things that you argue that Dems should be thinking about as far as reflecting on how they got to a place where this man could be elected again twice.

Speaker 3 There are some elements what you said that I really agree with, and others I guess I want to hash out because I'm not as sure about.

Speaker 3 But why don't you give a shorter version for people that haven't listened to it of what you think the core failings of the left were that were revealed in the election?

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus: Well, some of it has come tumbling out already. I think.

Speaker 3 Which elements of what has come tumbling out already do you feel like are most relevant to the electoral defeat?

Speaker 1 I do think that trans activism,

Speaker 1 if nothing else, I mean, there are other variables here. I mean, you can certainly say that Kamala Harris's loss was overdetermined.
I mean, the incumbents everywhere lost globally.

Speaker 1 There was inflation. There was immigration.
I mean, there are all these issues, any one of which or any two of which, had they changed, it might have given us a different result.

Speaker 1 But what trans activism has done to the Democratic Party is truly a sight to behold. And most Democrats

Speaker 1 at least in my experience, are unaware of

Speaker 1 how much brand damage has been done to us. And they were unaware, and many are still unaware, of the ads that Trump was running to great effect.

Speaker 1 I mean, in some markets, he was spending over a third of

Speaker 1 his ad spend on an ad that went something like, you know, she's for they, them, he's for you, right?

Speaker 1 And explicitly invoking her apparent support back in 2020 for transgender reassignment surgeries for incarcerated illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense, right?

Speaker 1 So like that policy, the fact that she couldn't sister soldier that policy and express in the current campaign how her thinking has changed on that point, a point which really is like onion article level comedy in our current politics, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's insane to think that that's how we should be spending our money. But she couldn't disavow it.
All she said, as you probably remember in one of those interviews, is, I will follow the law.

Speaker 1 I will follow the law. And she kept repeating this phrase, I will follow the law,

Speaker 1 without offering a single sane syllable on the issue of gender dysphoria and trans activism and the way in which it has bent almost everything left of center in our politics in a way that's unacknowledged.

Speaker 1 I mean, even like Latinx, right? Latinx is this insane rebranding of

Speaker 1 immigrants from Latin America that only 3% of them have any affinity for, right? And 97% of Latinos don't want this new label.

Speaker 1 This came out of a trans activist lab somewhere, probably on the Berkeley campus. Harris lost a majority of Hispanic men in this election, and in some counties, a majority of men and women.

Speaker 1 And Latinx had something to do with it. We need a hard reset.
on this issue in democratic politics, among others.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, Jr.: So here's the element that I agree with. And you went on about this a little bit more.
so I'll paraphrase you.

Speaker 3 The elements in putting identity politics first and being so responsive to it, being

Speaker 3 so responsive to Trump's offenses against it. You know, you talked about how the Puerto Rican garbage joke, whatever, everybody freaks out about it.
Clearly, nobody cares about that.

Speaker 3 Clearly, Hispanic people broadly don't care. Maybe small pockets of people in Puerto Rican communities cared, but they were overwhelmed by those who did not care.

Speaker 3 And centering identity politics, I believe you use the phrase identity politics is is dead and i agree with that the thing that i struggle with in listening to that answer is it's just

Speaker 3 obviously kamala hair should not have been for sex changes transitions for prisoners or undocumented immigrants like and that's silly and and the whole latinx thing was obviously silly but like She didn't use Latinx.

Speaker 3 Joe Biden didn't. She didn't campaign on trans issues, really.
She campaigned on economic issues. She didn't really engage in the fight on that issue.

Speaker 3 It's an issue that doesn't affect that many people, necessarily not as many as might be affected by limits on reproductive rights or other things that Donald Trump might do.

Speaker 3 So on balance, how does that explain it? You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Because she didn't disavow it. I mean, it's not enough to no longer commit the sin that everyone has you on videotape committing four years ago.

Speaker 1 You have to give some account of how you've changed, why you've changed, how it makes sense that you've you've changed, and for that change to be credible.

Speaker 1 What she was successfully cast as was a kind of woke Manchurian candidate who wouldn't say anything sensible on these issues and who you could reasonably fear that once she got into office, she would rule like a blue-haired activist maniac because she's been programmed that way.

Speaker 1 And again, she will not say anything to disavow. those orthodoxies, right? In the span of 500 words, she could have performed an exorcism on all of that.
She could have said, listen,

Speaker 1 I've been vice president for nearly four years. I have learned a lot.
Back in 2020, there was a pendulum swaying the Democratic Party that deranged a lot of things, and I was caught up in that.

Speaker 1 And I just have to tell you that now I've come to understand that the trans issue is way more complex than

Speaker 1 certainly I understood at the time.

Speaker 1 There are real cases of gender dysphoria for which it's totally appropriate to have compassion, and we should do everything we can to protect people in those situations and make them comfortable in their bodies and make them comfortable in society.

Speaker 1 And how to do that best is still an open conversation. But there's also this, on the other side, there's a real problem with social contagion, especially among teenage girls and tween girls.

Speaker 1 And I am no more comfortable with an epidemic of double mastectomies among 16-year-olds in our country than any of any critics of my former politics might be.

Speaker 1 And so we need to have a searching conversation about how best to respond to that. And laws

Speaker 1 in Western Europe have already begun to change around these issues. And medical recommendations have begun to change.

Speaker 1 And our own medical organizations are now having to play catch up with all of that. And they're being slow to do it.
And as president, I will look into all of that.

Speaker 1 That would have been completely sane. It would have taken all the stink off of it.
And if it offended some activist maniacs, we should no longer care.

Speaker 1 That's the rebuild that the Democratic Party needs to accomplish. And Harris should have attempted to accomplish it in her campaign.
Now, it might have been impossible.

Speaker 1 She only had 100 days, and she would have had a lot of woke maniacs attacking her as a result. But, you know, she lost.
So

Speaker 1 anything would have been worth a roll of the dice in hindsight.

Speaker 3 I don't care about whether woke maniacs would have yelled at her. Sure.
I think what you just said probably would have helped. I do wonder if the problem isn't bigger, though.

Speaker 3 Isn't it a cultural and an information environment problem? Like, she did stand on a debate stage with him. She stood next to him.
She did great. She dominated him.
She sounded more normal.

Speaker 3 She sounded more mainstream. He had plenty of chances to deliver these attacks to make her seem like a woke far-left liberal.
He was unable to do so, and it did nothing. It did nothing.

Speaker 1 It didn't break through.

Speaker 3 Is that because the information environment that people are in, and going back to

Speaker 3 your old expertise, the systems in our brains have been broken to such a degree that her giving an answer such as that would only have reached the same people she already reached, which are college-educated people that are open to hearing that kind of nuanced conversation.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, it's possible, but honestly, I do feel like some of the people we've been talking about who've been radicalized, who've gone all in for Trump, despite how

Speaker 1 noxious a person he is.

Speaker 1 Some of those people, many of those people, perhaps not all of those people, but still many,

Speaker 1 have enough of an intact

Speaker 1 moral operating system that they might have been successfully caught by a Democrat making sane noises on this topic. I mean, the thing that radicalized Elon is that

Speaker 1 every time this issue came up, specifically the issue of gender dysphoria and

Speaker 1 trans policy, what he got was just hammered by the orthodoxy, which is any demurral on this point, any hesitation to affirm the gender identity of your child at the earliest possible opportunity is not only a sign of bad parenting, it's bigotry, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you're culpable as you're some kind of demon to not see the wisdom and compassion is only pointing in one direction, and that's toward

Speaker 1 the instantaneous medicalization of this new self-concept on the part of your child who's not old enough to drive a car, right?

Speaker 1 That's the orthodoxy, again, and it's coming from not just activists, it's coming from the New York Times up until 15 minutes ago. It's coming from Harvard.
That's intolerable.

Speaker 1 It's insane, and it's intolerable, right? Because it's patently insane.

Speaker 1 And so if we had some Democratic politicians who had been willing to stand in the breach, and if I Kamala Harris had been one of them and had the courage to say enough with this insanity, the reality is somewhere more in the middle of our political discourse here.

Speaker 1 It's not over with the bigots, right? We're not bigoted against people with gender dysphoria. We want them to be happy in our society.
We want them to have political equality.

Speaker 1 But no, watching biological men punch women in the face in MMA contests or anywhere else is not a solution. to their problems, right? That's clearly an aberration.

Speaker 1 And the fact that no one, literally no one in the Democratic Party who cared about their political future had the courage to say anything sensible on that topic until the 11th hour or even beyond it.

Speaker 1 And Kamala Harris just kept mum like she had been.

Speaker 1 The way she conducted herselves in those interviews, it was like someone came to her before the cameras were rolling and said, listen, you're going to be asked about transgender issues.

Speaker 1 You're going to be asked about the southern border. You're going to be asked about all of these things that you don't want to to talk about.

Speaker 1 Under no circumstances can you admit that you've changed your mind, right?

Speaker 1 Whatever you do, you're going to pivot, you can talk about Trump, you can change the subject, you can close your eyes, you can storm off the set, you can do anything you want, but under no circumstances can you admit that your thinking has changed at all on any of these topics.

Speaker 1 Okay, and then let's go, cameras rolling. And that's what she did.

Speaker 1 It's like she like she thought someone was going to bring her children's heads in a Birkenbag at the end of the interview if she broke this rule, right?

Speaker 1 And she was so tongue-tied and incapable of saying anything sensible for even for the span of a single sentence that understandably anyone right of center looked at that and said, okay, I don't know what's going on there, but she's not being honest about what she believes.

Speaker 1 If you give this woman power, she is going to be a puppet pulled every which way by the activist class in the Democratic Party.

Speaker 1 The only way to have removed that concern would have been to have gone head-on against it and to have been articulate on these topics,

Speaker 1 to have spoken without fear at length, right? To have gone on Joe Rogan's podcast and to have said, Joe, I'll talk about anything you want. I got four hours.
What do you want to talk about?

Speaker 1 The reason why she didn't do that is because everyone understood. I'm not giving inside information.
I'm just imagining what it was almost certainly so.

Speaker 1 Everyone understood that it would very likely be a disaster. It's not that she can't speak in English.
I'm sure she is perfectly articulate when she is actually just speaking her thoughts.

Speaker 1 But because she, from a campaign point of view, felt that she had to play at all moments some kind of four-dimensional chess with half a dozen woke talking points and

Speaker 1 third rails, it becomes an impossible rhetorical exercise, right? Joe would say, okay, what's going on? What do you think about trans issues? Give me that.

Speaker 1 You were for gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens in prison at taxpayer expense why are you no longer for that if you're no longer for that it would have been impossible she needs to be able to talk about these things without fear and the democratic party is a this jerry-rigged uh rube goldberg device of death which is just you know rigged to cancel the reputation of anyone who touches the wrong gear or lever and we have to tear it down to the studs I mean, it's just like this is, there actually has to be a purge of the activist class in Democratic politics.

Speaker 1 Otherwise, no one we put forward will be electable.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, some of that is maybe a little overstated for me.
Certainly having a candidate who could speak about it off the cuff and speak about it definitely.

Speaker 3 And I had my issues with, I was on the other side back when Obama was around, but Obama could have handled these things like this, like where you're just dealing in the nuance, dealing in the gray, and upsetting sometimes people on his left flank.

Speaker 3 He did, I know that that's not his reputation on Fox, but he did that from time to time, not in like the sister soldier sense, but in more of like the analytical sense. I do wonder how you.

Speaker 1 He just needed an actual sister soldier moment.

Speaker 1 It needed a

Speaker 1 reset because of how crazy things actually got four years ago and because of how they could be successfully spun.

Speaker 1 However crazy or not they are now, you can be successfully typecast in the echo chamber of social media such that only just an articulate disavowal of these things could stand a chance of breaking through.

Speaker 1 And still, that's no guarantee of breaking through.

Speaker 3 So, if Sam was a Democratic senator right now, how would you, or House member, how would you talk about the Nancy Mason Mike Johnson not letting Sarah McBride use the women's restroom in the Capitol?

Speaker 1 How would you talk about that? Honestly, I haven't really tracked the details of that. So, I'm just taking your statement at face value.

Speaker 3 Mike Johnson put out a statement today saying that the transgender woman who is now a representative from Delaware, Sarah McBride, cannot use the women's restrooms at the Capitol.

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 1 So I don't know how

Speaker 1 exactly how it was expressed and

Speaker 1 if it conveyed any bigotry that

Speaker 1 we'd want to push back on, but if it's just the reality that

Speaker 1 most female Congress

Speaker 1 people, the senators and Congresswomen

Speaker 1 don't want to share a bathroom with a trans woman, if that's just the reality in that building.

Speaker 3 Well, that can't be the reality. I mean, all all the Democratic congresswomen wouldn't mind it.
I have to imagine a handful of the Republican ones wouldn't. I mean, this feels performative.

Speaker 3 We're banning this woman from the bathroom. Like, one adult, what are they scared of? What? She's going to jump out and say boo behind Nancy Mace or Marjorie Taylor Greene or whoever.

Speaker 3 I mean, who cares?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I mean,

Speaker 1 I think it is probably performative, but one fix is just to create a gender-neutral bathroom

Speaker 1 or a locker room or whatever's needed there, right? So you just do that, and you don't make it.

Speaker 1 But the Democrats can do that. I mean, it's just like, this is just not a

Speaker 1 the problem is that there really is

Speaker 1 in certain places a zero-sum contest between women's rights and transgenders women's rights.

Speaker 3 But this isn't one of those. No, no, but like as long as adults, grown-ups going into a bathroom with stalls, this is not one of those zero-sum contests.

Speaker 1 No, but no, but no, but the locker room is a more difficult case, right? The locker room at a gym, you've got people walking around naked.

Speaker 1 And if you have women who say, listen, I do not want to be walking around naked with a person,

Speaker 1 however he or she identifies who's got male equipment, right? I just don't want that in my locker room.

Speaker 3 I got to tell you, Sam, there's a lot of people with male equipment that I don't want to see when I'm in the men's locker room and I'm a gay man.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of people with males equipment I'd rather not see. There's a lot of guys with the hair dryer blowing their wheels.
I'd rather not see them.

Speaker 3 That's just life.

Speaker 1 There are crimes against humanity in every locker room. There's no question.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Does the government need to get involved in that, though?

Speaker 1 As long as there are women who don't want this

Speaker 1 change, then you have to figure out some way to reconcile those competing demands. Right.
And so one way to do it is architecturally where you just create another bathroom. Right.

Speaker 1 And that's in Congress. I would imagine they could manage that the way most restaurants and other places manage it.

Speaker 1 The idea that this is

Speaker 1 that only

Speaker 1 a transphobic asshole could demur on any of these points, that's the thing that has to be exercised. I agree.

Speaker 3 This is the tough part, though. They are being transphobic assholes in certain cases, right? And so it's tough to find the balance.

Speaker 1 It's the same thing with race. I mean, we have the same problem with racial politics, too.

Speaker 1 It's like, I mean, Black Lives Matter was clearly a highly corrupt operation and and a grift, and it inflamed racial tension in areas where there need to be none, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, or where there was effectively none. It found racists where no racists existed, right?

Speaker 1 It was a classic case of activist overreach, but that doesn't negate the fact that there are real racists in our society that need to be condemned for their racism, right?

Speaker 1 So you have to be able to keep both of these objects in view.

Speaker 3 This is kind of relates to one other thing I wanted to talk to you about that is sort of related to this. It's like, how do do you deal with these assholes? Because it is bad faith on the other side.

Speaker 3 And then here's one example of the race issue. We have seen this attack, assault on DEI.

Speaker 3 And you and I both like, there are plenty of fucking DEI pamphlets that I think are absurd and DEI policies I think are absurd. That said,

Speaker 3 like there's this whole conversation around how we should be going back to a pure meritocracy. And that is what we need in society.
And DEI is preventing that.

Speaker 3 And we're getting these black people and gay people and women into jobs that they did not deserve. And they're lady pilots now.
And that's putting us at risk.

Speaker 3 And we just need to go back to the meritocracy. And the people that are making this argument want Dr.
Oz to be in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. I mean, it's preposterous on its face.

Speaker 3 Like, their argument is ridiculous. It is the least meritocratic cabinet.

Speaker 3 in the history of the republic that will be confirmed next year. Like it will be a bunch of clowns and grifters.

Speaker 3 Why is it only incumbent on the Democrats to always be the ones that are responsible and have to be consistent in the argumentation? You know?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, that's a very deep and troubling question there.
I mean, this asymmetry between

Speaker 1 the two sides politically with respect to so many things. I mean, in particular, with respect to what is required to maintain your reputation and good standing, right?

Speaker 1 So you can see the New York Times makes a single factual error, and it's a topic of grave embarrassment, and people will unsubscribe, and they'll get castigated by everyone right of center as fake news.

Speaker 1 But obviously, there's just no pretense of journalistic integrity at all as you go sufficiently right of center, whether it's Fox News or Breitbart or Own or Epoch Times or any of these other outlets.

Speaker 1 So it's asymmetric warfare in a dozen different dimensions. And yes, you know, you have

Speaker 1 in Trump's cabinet now, it's effectively it's affirmative action for kooks and grifters, right?

Speaker 3 It's just have any of the people that supposedly care about the meritocracy or that are anti-woke, have you heard a single one of them criticize this cabinet?

Speaker 1 No, no.

Speaker 1 Again, it's always

Speaker 1 hypocrisy as a concept doesn't quite cover it because these people have no standards to which they're even pretending to hold themselves, right?

Speaker 1 They're just holding the other side to its standards uh and it's a it's just you know pure nihilism and cynicism on their own side right i mean it's literally these are people who for whom alex jones is still in good standing and trump is effectively an alex jones level liar right i mean he he is somebody he's a pure fabulist about everything high and low, when it matters, when it doesn't matter, when it serves his purpose, when it doesn't.

Speaker 1 It's just, you know, he's a neurological case study with respect to this one variable of truth-telling or bullshitting or lying by turns. And

Speaker 1 nobody cares, right? But they do care if someone left of center lies, it gets caught in a lie, that's every bit as embarrassing as it ever was because they're being held to a very different standard.

Speaker 1 Yes, this asymmetry is something I don't know how you

Speaker 1 how you interact with it successfully politically. I mean, it's just

Speaker 1 I mean, the thing I pointed out in that podcast, the reckoning, which I found so frustrating when dealing with Trump supporters, is that, I mean, they elected a man, you know, happily, unselfconsciously, elected a man to the presidency again

Speaker 1 who they knew would not have accepted the results of the election had he lost, right? They fully expected Harris to concede within 24 hours.

Speaker 1 They would have been totally outraged had she not done that.

Speaker 3 There were people complaining the next morning.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but they knew that Trump was not going to concede. They knew it.

Speaker 1 There's literally, I would say there's no one who was supporting Trump at any level from Elon on down who thought that if he had lost, he would have conceded the next day or probably any day thereafter.

Speaker 1 And they were okay with that. Now, that is already,

Speaker 1 in my view, a complete erosion of a good citizen's relationship to our democracy, right?

Speaker 1 But it's just a level of hypocrisy and a double standard that I think should, on its face, at a minimum, should be ethically problematic to any morally intact person who's operating that way.

Speaker 1 I mean, someone like David Sachs should understand that this is a moral failing to have supported someone who he knew would not have accepted a legitimate loss in a free and fair election and not have accepted it to the point where

Speaker 1 It actually would have been a provocation to violence in our society.

Speaker 1 I mean, that was the thing that was so alarming about how election night unfolded from my point of view is that there was this moment when Harris still could have won.

Speaker 1 I mean, everyone was reacting to her, you know, kind of pricing in her loss already. The New York Times was reporting that her chance of winning at that point was 11%.

Speaker 1 You know, the needle was showing 89% for Trump at that point. But the blue wall states had not.
fallen yet, right? And she still could have technically won.

Speaker 1 And obviously, an 11% chance of something happening is

Speaker 1 that turns up all the time, right?

Speaker 1 So it was still possible.

Speaker 1 But the truth is, it would not have been safe for her to have won a free and fair election at that point, given how many lies had been spread about election fraud, given how, given the posture of the Republican side of our society, We really were risking something like civil war.

Speaker 1 I mean, maybe that's too grand a framing, but we were certainly under the threat of real political violence in response to her winning at that point, because it would have been perceived as and spun as a completely fraudulent theft of the election on the part of the Democrats.

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Speaker 1 What worries you most right now?

Speaker 3 Looking out, could be Trump-related or not, but to kind of assess the short-term landscape.

Speaker 3 What are the most proximate concerns you have?

Speaker 1 Well, we've sort of been circling around that issue for this whole conversation.

Speaker 1 I worry about our inability to have a fact-based conversation across political lines now that converges on a shared set of goals and values and policies and just a basic understanding of reality and how to operate within it.

Speaker 1 We're so shattered in our politics and in just our engagement with information that

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I just feel like we can't be trusted to respond to anything, a pandemic, the threats of nuclear war coming from our enemies, an acknowledgement of who our enemies actually are in the world.

Speaker 1 If something like 9-11 happened today, what would we do in the immediate aftermath?

Speaker 1 I mean, you'd literally have people like Alex Jones now almost at a cabinet level, perhaps even at a cabinet level in our government, telling us what they think happened, you know, and it would be at the level of, you know,

Speaker 1 Sandy Hook. You know, they were just crisis actors, the no kids were killed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just part of this is organic. Part of it's just a result of the bad incentives and, you know, diabolical business model of social media.

Speaker 1 But part of it is, it's just that we have built the tools that bad actors can consciously weaponize against us.

Speaker 1 And yeah, I mean, we've just all been enrolled into this massive psychological experiment to which no one actually consented, and it's just not going well.

Speaker 1 And I think social media is at the bottom of it. I think X is at the bottom of that.
I mean, it's basically 4chan now, and it's 4channing.

Speaker 3 Okay, so to this point, give me your pushback because my pushback on this is I've stayed on X, part because of my addiction that's not as bad as Elon's, but is real and something I'm reflecting on.

Speaker 3 But I refuse to go into a liberal bubble. Social media, I was on threads for one week.
It was unbearable.

Speaker 3 If this podcast conversation we just had, if any sentence of it was put onto threads, you would be overwhelmed with people like shaking their finger at you and telling you how wrong you are.

Speaker 3 Like it was not a useful

Speaker 3 place for conversation across ideological lines either.

Speaker 3 So what? Do nothing. Don't go to any of the social media feeds is the answer.

Speaker 1 Well, that is my answer. I mean, honestly, like, you know, I'm free to say what I say in a podcast like this in large measure.
because I don't care what is said about me as a result. Right.

Speaker 1 And one of, and one of the ways of my enforcing that insucience is to just not read those comments.

Speaker 1 I'm not on X to see myself endlessly disparaged by morons. And I heard the other day I was trending on X because Elon had attacked me.

Speaker 1 So I've been off for two years and the guy still attacks me by name on the platform.

Speaker 1 What am I to do about that? The best thing I can do is withdraw my attention from it. Now, it's not that I never go on to see breaking news.
I do.

Speaker 1 I occasionally just go on to actually just see something unfold, which is best seen on X. Now, and I think it's a problem that is best seen there.

Speaker 1 I think there should be an alternative for breaking news that is not ruled by the richest man in the world who's been deranged by the tools. So insofar as we need that for breaking news, I think

Speaker 1 we should build a credible alternative and sane people should move there.

Speaker 1 But that aside, I just think

Speaker 1 our engagement with those tools is

Speaker 1 corrupting us. I think it's corrupted journalism.
I think journalism long ago started writing toward Twitter in a way that was not healthy.

Speaker 1 And people got blown around by pseudo-problems that only really existed online, but they got blown around enough such that they became real problems that we then had to deal with. It's like it's...

Speaker 1 Twitter isn't real life until it is.

Speaker 1 And if you pay enough attention to it, if the New York Times basically outsources its journalistic conscience to the next thing the mob does on Twitter, then all of a sudden real journalism is at stake and the world views of everyone who only reads the New York Times suddenly fall into play.

Speaker 1 So I do think we have to recognize that we're

Speaker 1 how we pay attention to the world and how we talk about things and the kinds of things we prioritize and what constitutes a successful cancellation of a person and

Speaker 1 what do sane people have to worry about. All of these things are these are dials that we actually have within reach that we can tune consciously, right?

Speaker 1 And if we're not tuning them consciously, they're being tuned for us by the dynamics of the systems that we're blithely interacting with. And

Speaker 1 I recommend to anyone who has a

Speaker 1 public-facing life and a reputation, digital and otherwise, that they care about, to seize the reins of this machine consciously and decide

Speaker 1 how they want to live moment to moment. I mean, do you actually want your day segmented

Speaker 1 by a hundred moments where you have checked what has happened to the thing you said on X, right? I mean, is that really how you want to spend your time?

Speaker 1 Is that the time course by which you feel like you want to have to respond to the thing that happened in the world or the thing that was said about you? I I mean,

Speaker 1 the moment I stepped off Twitter, I realized that I now no longer had a mechanism by which to respond instantaneously to something in the news or to something that was said about me.

Speaker 1 And I could take enough time to think about what I actually wanted to say.

Speaker 1 And then the question is, is it going to survive long enough for me to say something about it on my next podcast, which I might not be doing for five days?

Speaker 1 And most things don't survive the five-day test, right? 99% of what you thought you had to say falls away over the course of five days. And I view that as a feature, not a bug.

Speaker 1 I just think that is a sanity check of a sort that had been removed for me by my engagement with these platforms and which I put back in place. And it's been all to the good from my point of view.

Speaker 3 It's good and something to think about. And did take me to what my last question was going to be for you anyway.

Speaker 3 In that reckoning podcast at the end, you said you want to dedicate less of your brain power to Donald Trump, this moron. I don't think you said moron, but you implied it.

Speaker 3 So, when you're making that choice with your time,

Speaker 3 give us some recommendations.

Speaker 3 What is something healthy I can do with my brain over the next four years since we're stuck with this guy?

Speaker 3 I will obviously have to care about him for this job, but I'd like some Sam Harris recommendations of books, podcasts, thoughts, exercises, whatever. Open, open-ended question.

Speaker 3 How could I better spend my time?

Speaker 1 Well, so I mean, you and and I have very different job descriptions, so it's going to be harder for you because for me,

Speaker 1 it's clear that almost every moment I spend thinking about politics, talking about politics, is best thought of as an opportunity cost for me.

Speaker 1 It's like this is, it's a sign of a pathology in our culture that I have to spend as much time on politics as I do, right? And if things were going better, I would spend very little time on politics.

Speaker 1 And so obviously that can't be said of somebody who's a political writer or a political podcaster.

Speaker 3 But still, you know, balance in all things. You know, there are certain ways that we could be productive.

Speaker 3 You could give listeners of this, you know, some thoughts for ways they could better spend their time.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean, the big thing for me, one

Speaker 1 reset for me is

Speaker 1 to wait to react to something that actually happens as opposed to something that might happen.

Speaker 1 Like, so, for instance, with these recent cabinet appointments, you know, Matt Gates and Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr., et cetera.

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously, those are appalling prospects to have in any presidential cabinet, but they're not there yet, right? So

Speaker 1 I've commented briefly on them, but I'm not going to get a bee in my bonnet until it's actually there, right?

Speaker 1 And then I can talk about, okay, well, what does it actually mean to have Tulsi Gabbard be running intelligence for the United States in the year 2024 or 2025?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I will be happy to talk about that when it's affaire compli, but I'm not going to waste hours in advance reacting to it.

Speaker 1 To get out of the hypothetical, I think will save a fair amount of bandwidth. Because again, much of what Trump says he's going to do is not going to be done.

Speaker 1 And so it is with all the other egregious things he says he's committed to.

Speaker 1 Let's see what he does with respect to Ukraine or with respect to deportations or anything else.

Speaker 1 I will react when it's imperative to react, but not before.

Speaker 3 It's a healthier balance, probably, for you. I don't know.
I don't know if that's that helpful for me, but we'll think about it.

Speaker 3 I'm in like, I don't know, I should read a book or something

Speaker 3 in addition to hypothesizing about the tariffs, but I'm working on that.

Speaker 1 I have the freedom to do that.

Speaker 1 I mean, I can do a podcast on physics and not think about politics for that week.

Speaker 3 Well, I'll listen to your physics podcast and not your politics podcast. That'll be my change.

Speaker 3 You know, I will not listen to making sense when you have on people who I already know what they think about politics and only listen to your other ones. Well, I appreciate it very much, Sam Harris.

Speaker 3 The podcast is making sense. And, you know, let's continue this conversation when you have the mental bandwidth for Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, good luck over there. All right.

Speaker 3 We'll see you, brother. Talk soon.

Speaker 1 Nice to talk to you, Tim.

Speaker 3 All right, everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow with one of your faves. See y'all then.
Peace.

Speaker 3 John Green's too weak to work.

Speaker 3 One sells diamonds for what they're worth

Speaker 3 down on Payne Street, disappointment birth.

Speaker 3 Some don't be home too late.

Speaker 3 Try to get right

Speaker 3 by it.

Speaker 3 Some don't wait till the break of day.

Speaker 3 Cause you know how time fades,

Speaker 3 time fades away.

Speaker 3 You know how time fades away.

Speaker 3 All day, presidents look out windows.

Speaker 3 All night, sentries, watch the moon blow.

Speaker 3 All I waiting

Speaker 3 till the time is right,

Speaker 3 some don't be home today.

Speaker 3 Try to get back by

Speaker 3 some don't wait till the break of day.

Speaker 3 Cause you know our time freights.

Speaker 3 Time fades away. You know our time fades away.

Speaker 3 The Bullwork Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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