What Keeps Sam Harris Up At Night

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Conversations with Coleman
Episode: What Keeps Sam Harris Up At Night
Date: March 23, 2026
Host: Coleman Hughes
Guest: Sam Harris

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Overview

In this engaging and unfiltered episode, Coleman Hughes sits down with public intellectual Sam Harris to discuss major geopolitical events, the proliferation of conspiracy theories, rising antisemitism, the impact of social media, the challenges of declining birth rates, and the prospects of future political leaders. Their conversation weaves together philosophical analysis, firsthand observations, and candid reflections, focusing on the perils of the current age—from the Iran War to threats posed by conspiracy thinking and societal decline.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The War in Iran: Ethical Evaluation and Leadership Concerns

Timestamps: 02:29 – 11:57

• Harris's Position:

  • Harris asserts that opposing the Iranian regime was ethically justified long before current events, highlighting Iran's record of human rights abuses and terror sponsorship.
  • He critiques the current execution of the war, not for its aims, but for the incompetence and corruption of its American leadership:
    • “We are being led by some of the most incompetent and corrupt and amoral people who have ever been in public life in America…moral lunatics in the second Trump administration.” (Sam Harris, 08:10)
  • Harris draws a sharp distinction between the Iranian people—who he argues are mostly opposed to the regime—and the theocratic “death cult” ruling the country.
  • The dangers of waiting for provocation before acting were dissected; Harris and Hughes agree that waiting for Iran to make the “final sprint to the bomb” is dangerously naïve.

• Quotes:

  • “Jihadism plus nuclear weapons is always a deal breaker.” (Sam, 07:20)
  • “You can't deter suicide bombers, and suicide bombers with nuclear weapons are totally unacceptable.” (Sam, 12:55)

2. The Israel Debate and Antisemitism on the Left and Right

Timestamps: 16:24 – 33:10

• Israel’s Place in the World:

  • Hughes describes Israel as a “good place worth preserving,” likening its situation to the difference between South and North Korea.
  • Harris elaborates on the asymmetric scrutiny Israel faces, calling the anti-Israel narrative a product of “a deluge of misinformation and disinformation...and the level of deception is extraordinary.” (Sam, 18:01–24:01)

• Antisemitism & Anti-Zionism:

  • Harris differentiates between logical anti-Zionism and practical antisemitism, arguing that the disproportionate scrutiny of Israel betrays an underlying antisemitic bias.
  • He notes the unique requirement for Israel to “justify its existence,” which isn’t demanded of other nations with contentious origins:
    • “Only Israel is constantly put into question, right? And it has to justify its existence when its neighbors are actually trying to murder its inhabitants.” (Sam, 28:24)
  • Hughes expresses skepticism about moral panics around “antisemitism,” recounting his own experience with anti-Israel activism at Columbia.

• Antisemitism on the Right:

  • Hughes and Harris discuss the recent and unexpected upsurge in antisemitism among right-wing influencers, particularly in the wake of major events (e.g., Charlie Kirk’s assassination).
  • Harris links right-wing antisemitism to a pervasive appetite for conspiracy theories, asserting:
    • “Antisemitism is like the UR conspiracy theory...almost everything winds up coming back to the Jews at some point if you are a conspiracist.” (Sam, 34:17)

3. The Rise of Conspiracy Thinking

Timestamps: 33:10 – 43:19

• Media Dynamics:

  • Harris highlights how podcasts and alternative media have turbocharged conspiratorial thinking, emphasizing the difference between rigorously edited journalism and the looseness of unscripted podcasts:
    • “Dave Smith over on Joe Rogan's podcast, I mean, it's just tennis without the net. And so someone who's just speculating...in front of 20 million people—if that's your news diet...you're going to be reliably misinformed.” (Sam, 37:51)
  • Both lament how “vibe-based” narratives and confident speculation reach millions, fueling distrust.

• Epstein & Information Transparency:

  • The pair discuss the Jeffrey Epstein case as a nexus for public conspiracy, debating the merits and dangers of fully unsealing files and the public’s insatiable desire for scandal.
  • Harris calls for “radical transparency,” given the institutional mistrust, but also worries about the collateral damage to privacy and dignity:
    • “Given the level of betrayal by our institutions...the only remedy is sunlight.” (Sam, 41:12)

4. Social Media and Mental Health

Timestamps: 46:54 – 51:17

• Personal Impact:

  • Harris advocates for reducing or banning social media for youth, citing his own experience of deleting Twitter as “the greatest life hack I’ve discovered in the last quarter century.” (Sam, 48:07)
  • Both agree that the harms to teenagers, particularly girls, are acute and likely “an emergency for teens,” referencing Jonathan Haidt’s research.

• Parenting and Caution:

  • Harris shares a personal note that he and his wife have carefully restricted their children’s access, warning of social media as an “unhappy influence” on young minds.

5. Democracy, Monarchy, and Foreign Policy

Timestamps: 51:38 – 55:28

• Rethinking Democracy:
  • Harris, agreeing with the perspective of a former jihadist interviewed by another podcast, claims democracy is not intrinsically good; some societies require “benevolent dictatorship” before they can sustain democracy.
  • He references Middle Eastern monarchies as more stable and conducive to secularization than attempts at imposed democracy.

6. Declining Birth Rates and Future Societal Challenges

Timestamps: 55:28 – 58:01

• The Problem:
  • Harris admits declining birthrates might be an “emerging problem,” though he hasn't devoted as much thought to it, speculating that robotics and technology may be necessary to “rescue” aging societies.

7. Sam Harris’s Focus on Catastrophic Risks

Timestamps: 58:01 – 65:51

• Not “1% Risks”:

  • Harris rebuts Hughes’s claim that he dwells on long-tail risks, arguing instead that threats like jihadism, pandemics, and AI are, in his estimation, practically guaranteed in the long run.
    • “Just give me 30 years, both of these things are going to happen.” (Sam, 59:05)

• AI and Risk Perception:

  • He references historic nuclear risk debates (Manhattan Project) and compares them to alignment fears in AI, arguing that even small risks of catastrophic failure are unacceptable when stakes are existential.
    • “If during the Manhattan Project, you had asked the assembled scientists, what's the chance that your Trinity test is going to ruin everything...And they still detonated the bomb at Alamogordo, just rolling the dice with the future. That would have been astonishing and astonishingly irresponsible. And yet that's where we seem to be with AI...” (Sam, 63:04)

8. Gavin Newsom and Democratic Prospects

Timestamps: 65:51 – 68:31

• Skepticism about Newsom:
  • Harris warns that bringing a “California liberal” to the national stage in 2028 would be a miscalculation for Democrats, as the state’s problems and left-leaning politics are a major liability in the eyes of much of America.
    • “The albatross of California hung around [Newsom’s] neck and its reputation, real and imagined, in the other 49 states is not good.” (Sam, 66:40)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“We are being led by some of the most incompetent and corrupt and amoral people who have ever been in public life in America...moral lunatics in the second Trump administration.”
— Sam Harris (08:10)

“Jihadism plus nuclear weapons is always a deal breaker.”
— Sam Harris (07:20)

“Antisemitism is like the UR conspiracy theory...almost everything winds up coming back to the Jews at some point if you are a conspiracist.”
— Sam Harris (34:17)

“Deleting my Twitter account...it's the greatest life hack I've discovered in the last quarter century.”
— Sam Harris (48:07)

“Only Israel is constantly put into question...and it has to justify its existence when its neighbors are actually trying to murder its inhabitants.”
— Sam Harris (28:24)

“Just give me 30 years, both of these things [jihadism and pandemics] are going to happen.”
— Sam Harris (59:05)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:29 – 11:57: Iran War—ethical considerations, regime versus people, danger of waiting for nuclear provocation.
• 16:24 – 24:01: How to defend Israel, misinformation and the double standard.
• 24:01 – 33:10: Antisemitism and anti-Zionism, distinguishing criticism from hate, far-right conspiracies.
• 33:10 – 43:19: The spread of conspiracy theories, Joe Rogan’s influence, Epstein case, radical transparency vs privacy.
• 46:54 – 51:17: Social media’s impact on mental health, policy proposals, and personal experience.
• 51:38 – 55:28: The limits of democracy and the virtues of alternative governance in unstable states.
• 55:28 – 58:01: Declining birth rates—how serious is the threat?
• 58:01 – 65:51: Harris on catastrophic risks (jihadism, pandemics, AI) and failure to prioritize them.
• 65:51 – 68:31: The risks of a “California” Democrat (Gavin Newsom) as a national candidate.

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Final Thoughts

This expansive conversation between Coleman Hughes and Sam Harris offers listeners a rapid-fire yet deeply considered tour through some of the most urgent dangers and dilemmas of contemporary politics and culture. Harris’s lucid, sometimes alarming, analyses—infused with a mix of skepticism, ethical rigor, and candor—make for a provocative listen. From Iran to AI, the episode’s tone is intellectually sharp, skeptical of tribal narratives, and unwaveringly concerned with the dangers of groupthink and institutional decay.

Transcript

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[Coleman Hughes]

another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Sam Harris.

[Podcast Narrator/Ad Reader]

Sam is a neuroscientist, philosopher, public intellectual, and host of the Making Sense podcast.

[Coleman Hughes]

In this episode, we talk about Sam's

[Podcast Narrator/Ad Reader]

views on the war in Iran.

[Coleman Hughes]

We talk about antisemitism on the far left and the far right. We talk about the spread of conspiracy thinking on the right. We talk about the effects of social media on mental health. We talk about Sam's views on birth rate decline. We talk about the presidential prospects of

[Podcast Narrator/Ad Reader]

Gavin Newsom and much more.

[Coleman Hughes]

So without further ado, Sam Harris.

[Podcast Narrator/Ad Reader]

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[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, Sam Harris, thanks for coming back on my show.

[Sam Harris]

Hey, good to see you Coleman. Been a while.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, a lot to talk about. I've been listening to your recent podcast, in particular your Ask Me Anything podcast that you've been doing with Jaron to get a sense of what you've been thinking about. And first thing I want to talk about you talk with you about is the war in Iran. I've been doing a few podcasts about it here. Hosted a debate that turned into not really a debate between Neil Ferguson and Richard Haas. I'm curious, I know you have mixed feelings about it because the project you feel is worthy, but the people carrying it out you feel are incompetent. So tell me how you're thinking about the war in Iran right now.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, well, so I guess start with the. The first claim that the project is worthy. That's not a claim that specifically checks all the boxes that I think many listeners would want checked in order to agree with the claim. So am I claiming that I know that Iran posed so called imminent threat to America? No, I'm not claiming that. When I say this is a worthy project, I'm saying this was worthy. At any point in the last 47 years, we've been at odds with Iran, and Iran has been at odds with the human rights of its own people. And it has been a terror state and it has exported terrorism to the world and it has killed Americans in various contexts, from our misguided, you might think, war in Iraq to the 1983 bombing in Beirut and other terrorist atrocities the world over. It's funded Hezbollah. This has been a bad actor for nearly as long as I've been alive. And importantly, it has been a source of utter misery for all the Iranians who don't want to live under theocracy, which I am convinced is a majority. So certainly if you talk to anyone in the diaspora, you will hear to a man and woman that it is a majority, and they will make that claim of the people who are still living in Iran. So whether it's 20% of the Iranians who support the regime or 10% or. I was speaking to a Persian last night who thought that those figures were vastly inflated and he thought it was more like 1%, something like a million people of the 90 million Iranians that could be brought into the streets on any given day to claim that they would support the regime because they are in fact proper Shiite religious fanatics who really do support the regime and are willing to die for it. Okay, so there's a million of those people who I'm not talking about in Iran, say. But Iran, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, where we perhaps learn the wrong lessons from our meddling in the Middle east, is a society that I think is. The majority of its inhabitants, I think are truly sick of theocracy. They're far more sophisticated and educated and aspiring to live secular lives than the people of Afghanistan, certainly, and I would say even the people of Iraq. So I think it's. I don't think we can at any point, I don't think we could have concluded from how awful our meddling in Afghanistan and Iraq turned out to be. And again, even those two cases are different, that meddling in Iran was doomed to failure. So that's why it's a worthy project, ethically and perhaps strategically, and especially when you add in the fact that Iran was on the cusp of producing nuclear weapons and we've obviously been negotiating them back from the brink for many, many years. I'd never imagined those negotiations could have taken place in good faith on the Iranian side. I was never supportive of Obama's efforts or Biden's efforts to negotiate all that. I just think jihadism plus nuclear weapons is always a deal breaker, and this was and is a proper jihadist regime, which is to say that the people running Iran really are a death cult of the sort that we see in other groups like Hamas or Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Granted, there are differences among those groups, but they're united in their sincere belief in martyrdom and paradise and in this cosmic war they're fighting against infidels and apostates and Jews and blasphemers, et cetera. So I think we're at war with jihadists at all times and everywhere, at least potentially. And I think we should disrupt jihadist projects wherever we can. So that's the reason why I would, at least generically be in favor of regime change in Iran. Again, it didn't have to happen this month. I'm not. I don't know why it happened when it did. But I also share the misgivings of many people, the misgivings that many people have about this war, not because I think it's ethically or politically or otherwise illegitimate to have intruded into this country, but because we are being led by some of the most incompetent and corrupt and amoral people who have ever been in public life in America. Now, so these are just cartoon characters and grifters and social media stars and moral lunatics in the second Trump administration. They inspire no confidence whatsoever from Trump on down. And whenever they start talking about why we're in Iran and why we're doing what we're doing on this front and more or less every other they. What you get is just a tissue of self contradiction and malapropism and confusion, Right? And occasionally something that sounds rational, and then you can Seize on that and say, okay, that's the real reason we're doing what we're doing. And then that just gets obviated the next moment by the next dumb thing. Trump says. So we're in bad hands. And that doesn't mean this project will fail. I mean, again, I will not, I certainly hope it succeeds. I hope there really is a regime change and the Iranian people get the society they deserve. And if that comes about, I'll certainly praise Trump for having accomplished that. But I think it's totally reasonably worried that we are going to turn this into some sort of ghastly failure and perhaps failed state. I mean, that's possible and that's certainly worth worrying about.

[Coleman Hughes]

I think a lot of people are focused on a point you mentioned in passing, which is that we don't really understand the timing of this decision. There's an intuition that war should be triggered by something that could have rationally that makes this moment especially rational, like, say, Iran, hypothetically, if they tried to attack the US mainland, that would make sense as a trigger to a war or any number of other things. Whereas this, the timing seem, seems random. But I think, you know, if you zoom out and you know, I, I share your, like, broadly consequentialist philosophy. I'm a big fan of your book the Moral Landscape. And you know, if you think from a consequentialist perspective about war in general, the fact that there's no, you know, it might not make sense to wait for an event to trigger a war with Iran, especially when you think about the nuclear end of it. So I, I debated Dave Smith a few months ago, for instance. Dave Smith and, and a lot of

[Sam Harris]

people, that's yeoman's work. That's

[Coleman Hughes]

a lot of people.

[Sam Harris]

I admire you for agreeing to do that under whatever conditions and that's, you know.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. But you know, a lot of people in his orbit and I think a lot of well intentioned people who, who follow him and others like Glenn Greenwald and stuff, they, they believe that it's not rational to go to war with Iran until Iran is sprinting towards the bomb. In other words, that we, you know, the iaea, basically the entire responsible world agrees, unlike, like, which makes it unlike Iraq, obviously there were lots of suspicion and false confidence when it came to Saddam's nuclear program. There is actually earned confidence when it comes to Iran's nuclear program. They've admitted they've enriched uranium to 60%. And there's no other reason why you do that other than to create a bomb. But there's still this sense that we've got to wait till they actually send the signal to make the final 10 yard. I don't know. This is a very powerful intuition for people. I don't share it. I think it would be ridiculous to wait until that point.

[Sam Harris]

I mean, we're under no obligation to give jihadists the benefit of the doubt ever, because there is no doubt as to their ultimate aims. I mean, Iran is ruled by, again, I'm not talking about the Iranian people. I'm talking about the, the Islamic Republic, the regime of jihadists ruling the country. They're ruled by a death cult that has the explicit project of genocide with respect to Israel. And if they could only accomplish it, genocide with respect to America. I mean, death to Israel. Death to America. What they've been chanting these slogans, they've been chanting for, again, nearly 50 years. Let us take these people at their word, right? I mean, all you have to know is how they fought their war against Iraq to know how crazy this regime is. I mean, they sent children by the tens of thousands across minefields to clear with keys around their necks. That would grant them access to paradise, to clear the mines and to get ground up under Iraqi tanks, right? I mean, this has nothing to do with Israel or Jews or anyone else. In principle. This has to do with an utterly pernicious and yet heartfelt belief system about the, the moral structure of this universe. I'm talking about the true believers here. I'm not talking about people who would pay lip service to things they don't believe. I'm talking about a quorum of people who are quite ready to die. And this makes a total mockery of any notion of deterrence, nuclear or otherwise. You can't deter suicide bombers, and suicide bombers with nuclear weapons are totally unacceptable. I mean, we can't get to a position where we're wondering whether or not jihadists are weeks away from acquiring bombs that then we can't locate, Right? And again, this is not, I'll grant you, and I'll grant critics of everything I've just said that are narrowly framed, our interests are not identical to Israel's. Iran really is an existential threat for Israel. When Iran says that they're going to annihilate the Jewish state and they're on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon to do that, you connect those dots. The people in Tel Aviv are right to worry that they may all die in a sea of fire. That is just, in fact, the situation they're in. That's not the situation most Americans are in, it's true that Iran could perpetrate an act of nuclear terrorism against us. Right. They could smuggle a, you know, Hiroshima sized device at some point into the States and blow it up in the, in a major city. I mean, that's totally conceivable and that would be awful and be the worst thing we've ever experienced. It would be much worse than 9, 11 or anything else that has deranged us for decades at a stretch. So it's worth preventing at almost any cost. But it's not existential. So there is a difference between Israel and America here. But generally speaking, I think all open societies, not just Western societies, just all liberal open societies have to be united against this possibility, which is in fact an inevitability if we don't do something about it, that a jihadist regime will acquire nuclear weapons. It's just we cannot let ourselves stumble into that situation. And above all, I think the Muslim world needs to understand that we can't let this come to pass. And I think many Muslim countries probably do, whether they'll express it or not. They do agree with this point that have, that, you know, Iran having the bomb is different from Israel or any other country having the bomb because of jihadism.

[Podcast Narrator/Ad Reader]

Yeah.

[Coleman Hughes]

I'm sometimes asked by people, including by Jews, why I have defended Israel. And you know, the answer I give, and I really believe this, is that it's, it's, it's important to protect the good places in the world. Like we, if we go back, some of us don't have to go back very far in our family trees to find poor struggling people leaving desperate places that are hopeless and coming basically to the west, basically to America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, a few other countries that have sort of figured out a formula for human well being, that that is the best one we have thus far discovered. And I think we have an obligation to protect those places. And I consider Israel such a place and to minimize the influence of ideologies like communism and Islamism that have reliably produced pretty terrible societies to live in. To me it's that simple. Although, you know, I, with so much propaganda going around, it's actually hard to convince a skeptic that Israel is one of those places that like the difference between Israel and Iran is akin to the difference between North Korea and South Korea. Or I should say South Korea and North Korea.

[Sam Harris]

Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

How do you convince a skeptic that Israel is the kind of place that is worth defending relative to its enemies?

[Sam Harris]

Well, in many cases, I don't know that you can. I mean, is there anything you can say to Dave Smith to get his head screwed on straight? I don't think so at this point. I mean, it's not. An unawareness of facts is unlikely to be his problem. There's something else going on there. I don't know what that is. So I think it's worth admitting that in many cases it's a hopeless project. In other cases, the first thing to point out is that people have been the victim of really, a kind of a psyop, right? I mean, there's just been a deluge of misinformation and disinformation and half truths and lies and exaggerations, and it's all aimed in one direction. And the asymmetry of it, I mean, just. I guess it could be anticipated just by dint of numbers. I mean, there's only 15 million Jews on earth and there are 2 billion Muslims. So what do you expect TikTok to look like in the aftermath of October 7th? But I think it's more than that, right? There's also antisemitism that has been engineered and weaponized in ways that we could talk about. There's also whatever the algorithms have done or been led to do for whatever reason, but the bias is extraordinary and the level of deception is extraordinary, right? So we have people walking around with facts in their heads that are not facts, right? There are people who think that Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza and they think they're using the word genocide correctly, Right? So they think the Israelis are in fact, the new Nazis, Right? So that something in Gaza is akin to what happened in a death camp like Treblinka, Right? I mean, that's what they think is real. They think there was a famine in Gaza. They think that the Israelis stopped food shipments to such a degree that, yeah, you got people dying of starvation in Gaza. They believe they've seen pictures of this, Right. They've seen pictures from the Syrian civil war that they thought were depicted suffering and death in Gaza, right? So I'm not saying there hasn't been tremendous suffering and death in Gaza, but if, in fact it is true that the IDF faced a challenge, an urban warfare challenge of a sort that no society has ever faced, and they met that challenge at least as scrupulously, if not more scrupulously than we ever fought jihadists in anything like an analogous urban warfare setting in any of our wars, Right? If in fact they. I mean, of course collateral damage is going to happen. And of Course, even some isolated war crimes will happen. I would expect both of those things to happen in any war. But if it is in fact true that the IDF has been better behaved, or at least as well behaved as Americans or Brits or any other Western power has been in anything like an analogous situation, admitting that there really has been no analogous situation, again, we're talking about a society that used its own civilians as human shields and. And kept hundreds of hostages in tunnels. If all that's true, then what are we talking about here? What is this double standard that's being applied to Israel? Right. And to get out of the identity politics of it all and to dissect out the seemingly relevant variable of Judaism and the Jewish state, which is in fact not relevant at all, from my point of view, I would just say that if an analogous thing had happened in Western Europe, I mean, if Denmark had a similar atrocity perpetrated against it. Right. If some jihadist death cult had murdered 1200 Danes and taken 250 hostage. Right. Everything I've said in the aftermath of October 7th, I would have said modulo the changes to applying to Denmark. Right. Just the Danes should have done exactly what the IDF did. That's the standard I judge all of this by. There's no special concern about Israel because it's a Jewish state. From my point of view, I'm talking about open societies and their enemies. And the worst enemies of open societies in our lifetime are jihadists. They're not the only enemies, but I think they're the worst. And Israel really is that because of where. Where it is. It is the tip of the spear for this conflict. And that's why we should be a loyal ally of this country. I mean, what's in our. How is it in the American interest to support Israel? It's in the interest of every open society to win a civilizational war against jihadism. Right. That full stop. That explains everything from my point of view. It's not that there's not more that we could talk about, but that's enough. And anyone who's fundamentally critical of everything that's happened here, who on October 8 was chanting in support of the Palestinian cause before Israel had done anything in response, all of those people are at best confused about this morally and politically. And at worst, many of them simply support jihadists.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, I want to talk about antisemitism in America. This is a topic where I've had two directly contradictory impulses. One is the impulse to resist moral panics about bigotry in general, as you know, most of the writing and speaking I've done related to the moral panic about white supremacy and racism and the, the myth that the cops were, it was open season on unarmed black people and all the bad policies, including terrible policy, terrible policies for black people that people endorsed as a result of this very compelling myth, this very emotionally compelling myth. And so I, I think I've developed a very finely tuned sense that, you know, if someone's being accused of racism, you should take a deep breath and actually see if that's what they're doing or if, you know, as you know, you've been accused of being a racist for saying some of the things that I've said and some of the things that actually a lot of black people would agree with. And so I'm very sensitive to this happening with the charge of anti Semitism as well. If someone is criticizing Israel, saying, oh, I'm an anti Zionist, Israel's an apartheid state. I've been listening to Dave Smith and Glenn Greenwald and it seems like what's going on over there is really messed up. And it sort of reminds me of South Africa and the Palestinians are being oppressed. Well, I'm not going to jump to call that person an anti Semite necessarily, unless I hear them saying nasty things about Jews qua Jews. And this is also influenced, I think, by that. I was recently on one of the worst campuses in terms of deranged hatred of Israel, Columbia University. And this is obviously I graduated in 20, 26 years ago now, but it was equally bad then as it is now. It's just that there was no major war to bring it to the surface. But every year there was an anti Zionist protest that had like a hundred, over a hundred people. The anti Zionist, they would knock on all of our dorm rooms, go and go door to door, handing us misinformation about Israel. And then there was like 10 Jewish kids from the pro Israel group, like sort of meekly like trying to counter protest and they're outnumbered 10 to 1. And you know, but in all the things I would hear people say casually about Israel, I would never hear those same kids say something nasty about Jews, you know?

[Sam Harris]

Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

And so my sense was that there, and I, I've, I've heard you say this as well on, on one of your recent podcasts is that for them, the way they arrive at their obsession with hating Israel is because they view Jews as a special case of white people. And they're really at root, what they hate is whiteness and Western values. And so that's not quite the same as an anti black bigot who actually just has a disgust reaction when he or she thinks or sees black, thinks about or sees black people. So all that is context for the question how do you distinguish anti Zionism from anti Semitism? And to what extent do you think there should be a big focus on fighting anti Semitism given that it is a real thing?

[Sam Harris]

Well, I would admit that there you can logically differentiate anti Semitism from anti Zionism. I think that those are, those are distinct, at least in principle. But in practice I think most people who are anti Zionist are in fact anti Semitic. And I think that the unique focus, the special focus on Israel as a country that has a problem in justifying its right to exist. The only way I can explain that is at some level antisemitism, globally speaking. I don't know how else to explain the focus on Israel at this point. I mean, there's something like 195 countries on Earth. I think about two thirds of them were formed, their boundaries were formed by, you know, map makers just drawing those boundaries on a map without much regard for the lives of the people living within those boundaries. Which is to say that there's just, you know, something like two thirds of existing countries have a similar origin story to Israel's. Right? It's just there's a mess on the ground and you know, in the aftermath of wars, people just divided up the map. Only Israel is constantly put into question, right? And it has to justify its existence when its neighbors are actually trying to murder its inhabitants. Right? It's like it's not a normal situation. I mean, they're threatened, they continually are attacked and they win wars. And then the world demands that they give back the strategically valuable land they got after they won those wars. Defensive wars, purely defensive wars. I don't know where else this has happened in human history. I mean, it should strike us as astonishing that the UN and the Human Rights Commission have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined. And those countries include countries that have perpetrated actual genocides. I mean, we're talking about countries like Sudan and Syria and Yemen and Iran and North Korea. I mean, just like the worst actors on the. You add them all together and they have not had enough opprobrium heaped on them to equal what Israel has attracted on the world stage. So how do you explain that? I don't have an explanation beyond some weird fixation on the country because of its character as the Jewish state. And yes, you can be an Anti Zionist, you can be fundamentally critical of this whole project. You could think the Jews don't need a state, don't deserve a state, don't require a state. They can just live wherever they live, you know, like the Roma do. Or I mean like there's some, there to be some way to do a tightrope, tightrope walk through all that and still come out not saying anything bad against the Jews as Jews. But practically speaking, most people who are really concerned about the existence of Israel, I think are probably also anti Semitic.

[Coleman Hughes]

I've been genuinely surprised by the degree to which anti Semitic obsession has flowered on the far right. I genuinely wouldn't have predicted it two or three years ago, and maybe it's a failure of me updating my model of right wing psychology, but it's like I was genuinely surprised, for instance, that when Charlie Kirk was killed that very same day, you see viral tweets instantly blaming Israel that couldn't possibly have had evidence because it had just happened, right? From like total, like just people on the Internet. Right. And that Candace Owens and yeah, but then that would, that, that would filter even to people who I had some degree of respect for. Like, like, like Megyn Kelly would be just asking, asking questions about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and, and that almost uniquely Ben Shapiro would be like the last major conservative broadcaster to just not entertain any of this bs, especially when it seemed obvious pretty immediately after that he was killed by someone who probably had left wing views and, and hated him for what he perceived as like right wing bigotry. Seems like a lot of the right is just driving right past very simple explanations for phenomena and going straight to, to, to anti Semitism Again, the Iran war is another, another example.

[Podcast Narrator/Ad Reader]

President Trump has said he believes Iran

[Coleman Hughes]

tried to kill him. Now, put aside the, where, where the state of the evidence actually is on those claims right now, I think it's kind of murky. I wouldn't have trouble believing it, but I don't think it's like a rock solid capital F fact yet. But Trump has said he believes that we know how famously vindictive he is. Right. That that itself would be a parsimonious explanation for his aggressive, aggressive posture towards Iran. But people drive right past that on, on, you know, on the freeway and

[Sam Harris]

go right to the stop where Bibi's controlling him, saying that we should do something against Iran since, I think 1980. He's an old guy and he remembers 1979, right. He remembers Jimmy Carter, pathetically speaking, from the Oval Office, helplessly talking about our hostage crisis day after day after day. And just on some level, what a national humiliation that was. So from his point of view, we should have kicked the shit out of Iran a long time ago. I mean, I can only imagine that's his default. I think he spoke out against Obama's nuclear deal from the very beginning. I think it's. I mean, the anti Semitism problem on the right is not surprising. I mean, this is. Anti Semitism has always been a problem right of center. And William F. Buckley and other gatekeepers on the right have kept it at bay for many decades. And now that we live in some sort of Hunger Games like dystopia online, all the guardrails are gone. And now we're just seeing what people think and believe and want to talk about. But in addition to that, we're seeing an appetite for conspiracism, conspiracy theories that seems unslakable right of center. I mean, there's some conspiracy thinking left of center too, but on the right, it's just, it is one of the most pervasive features of the culture. And antisemitism is like the, the UR conspiracy theory. Right. It is one of the most well subscribed strands of virtually any conspiratorial style of accounting for world events. It's just the most obvious attractor on that landscape. So almost everything winds up coming back to the Jews at some point if you are a conspiracist. Not always, but so often that it's just. Again, this is unsurprising, but what is surprising is just how many seemingly normal people have so much time for conspiracy thinking. Just the independent media space has been an engine of conspiracies. I mean, look at Joe Rogan's podcast alone. It's been like a. It's brought conspiracism back into the public conversation on almost every point in a way that it's almost impossible to exaggerate. And that's just one podcast. But then you add to that the truly crazy permutations that come from people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and it's just what, it's what the right is doing now with its, with its collective mind, and it's not gonna. That doesn't go well for the Jews.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, I think there's just, it's just a feature of human psychology that we prefer the structure of conspiracy theories to the, the way that problems actually play out. So if you open up any Hollywood screenwriting book, it's basically going to tell you that you should write a conspiracy plot and then have a hero unco. And that's not something Hollywood invented. That's something Hollywood discovered. Discovered that stories which have that structure do better. And I think people look for stories of that structure in the news. And it's also possible that more and more, I think Tyler Cowen made this point somewhere that we are becoming less of a literate culture and more of a oral culture. Not. Not meaning that people can't read. Obviously people can read, but most people are just not reading the news anymore. They're not reading the newspaper. They're. They're. And that actually changes how you interact with information. Yeah, it makes. It makes charisma more important and logic less important, I think. And I think. I don't think anyone's immune from this,

[Sam Harris]

the way you produce this content. I mean, think about how these documents get made. If someone is taking the time to write an article for the Atlantic that has been deeply researched, that's one sort of way to produce propositional claims of knowledge about the world. If somebody's just shooting the shit on a podcast, even the two of us talking now is looser than a written document. But Dave Smith over on Joe Rogan's podcast, I mean, it's just tennis without the net. Right. And so someone who's just speculating, so just creating a vibe with words, just saying, maybe it's like this right in front of 20 million people. If that's your new. If that's your news diet. Right. You're going to be reliably misinformed.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. All of these concerns are why I had Michael Tracy on my podcast recently to talk about Epstein and related conspiracies. Because on his substack, he's been doing the hard work of writing down everything we know as a fact and distinguishing that from just conjecture and vibes. And when you pair out everything that isn't a confirmed fact and keep it to what we actually know and do the work and track down the footnotes of the footnotes of the footnotes, it becomes much more, in my view, a story of one man's depravity than a story of a story that really should interest the. The public. That's at least how I feel about it. How do you feel about that story?

[Sam Harris]

Well, I don't think I've looked into it as deeply as you have, certainly not as deeply as Tracy has. I've read and seen some of what he's produced. I worry a little bit about him and his focus on this. Again, this is slightly unfair to say, and it's slightly ad hominem, but I feel like my spidey sense is going off a little bit around his deep dive down this particular rabbit hole. There's a reason why I haven't invited him on my podcast to have that conversation. But again, I could be wrong about all that. I do share his sense and I think your sense that there's a bit of a moral panic around this. But I also at this point think we should just see all the evidence. I mean, normally I wouldn't be in favor of just airing unvetted emails and pictures and documents online to millions of people to just let the public make of it what it will. But given how we got here, given the level of betrayal by our institutions and the level of distrust in our institutions now, well earned distrust, I think that the, the only remedy is sunlight. So I would be in favor of just revealing everything in as unredacted a way as possible. And I think the suspicion that the Trump administration has something to hide is probably warranted at this point because these guys are inveterate liars on every, on every other point. Right. They're just, this is the, again, this is the most dishonest group of people we've ever assembled in a government. So there's no reason to trust anything that comes out of Trump's mouth or J.D. vanta's mouth or Pam Bondi's mouth or Cash. But I mean, these are, again, this is just to call them liars doesn't even quite get at what it's like to hear them message on any topic. And it's not that they sometimes lie or lie when they need to. They lie always and everywhere and even when it doesn't serve their interests. Right. It's just, it's like they're malfunctioning robots on some level. I mean, it's just like the mendacity knob got turned to 11 and it just got stuck there. I have no idea what these people, why they even lie the way they lie. But that's all, it's all to say that, yeah, let's see what's in the files.

[Coleman Hughes]

And maybe I'm of two minds about that because, you know, when I saw someone like, like Larry Summers emails coming out with where he was, you know, he's talking about. Actually, strangely, I had the woman he was talking about as a guest on my podcast a couple years ago by coincidence. But he's basically just asking for advice about how to pursue this younger woman who is, you know, in her 20s and.

[Sam Harris]

Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

And like, do we need all. Should the government be releasing and embarrassing and in. In at the height of basically a witch hunt of these people, people that are not even. Not even within miles of being accused of a crime. I mean, that. That seems like a big price to pay for releasing files that I doubt will actually ever satisfy the crazies.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, no, I totally agree that this is not a. It's not fair and it's not good. I just think. I'm just wondering what the path back to normalcy is, right? And to release pages where every word has been blacked out and to expose everything about Bill Clinton and nothing about Donald Trump. I mean, clearly this is not how we can play the game at this moment. So I wouldn't know what to do. If I could walk back in time, I would say a more judicious process is the right one. But given that we're here, I mean, I showed up in those files, right? And some of that communication, I think, was misunderstood by some people. I mean, I found it just frankly funny how I was in there and then there's some other person named Sam Harris in there too. There's a woman named Sam Harris in there who I think was buying Epstein shoes. And so people thought I was buying Epstein's shoes. And that was funny. In any case, it's just. It's not good that we're here. It's not good that we have a culture that is as defined as it is by conspiracy loons. I mean, this is like the pizza gateification of our entire society, right? Most of the people who have contributed to this discourse are people we should never consult again on any topic. I mean. I mean, how is Cash Patel running the FBI? How is he even a person whose name I know. It's madness, right? Jack Posobiek. Why is this a guy who's right of center of influence in any way? I mean, this guy gave us Pizzagate. This is just not. And yet this is Alex Jones's world and we're just living in it. And yet you have to figure out how to get. Find a path back to the adults in the room, identifying them, promoting them, getting them to be in charge once again. And I don't know how to do that on this particular case given the level of mistrust. But apart from attempting to slake the thirst of all the crazies who think that this is the biggest story of the decade, right? So let's just open all the files and see what's there. I do worry that Pacey, Michael Tracy, that there Might be more there that should be prosecuted. And that is worth being shocked by. Right? I mean, it could be that

[Coleman Hughes]

the

[Sam Harris]

word trafficking here means more than Epstein and Maxwell were just trafficking to Epstein and maybe Prince Andrew and maybe one or two other people. Maybe there are a lot of people who should go to jail. I don't actually know. I mean, it remains to be seen. But it's possible that there are a lot of guys who had sex with girls they knew to be underage on Epstein's island. Or it's possible that he was the only person who ever did anything like that. And even his crimes have been exaggerated. I just don't know what's true.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, let's shift topic a little bit. I'm curious what you think. And Jonathan Haidt, you know, does a lot of work on this about age, restricting social media, banning various parts of social media. What, what do you have like a strong position on that topic and, and on the wider question of what social media is doing to mental health and well being?

[Sam Harris]

Well, I at this point see no reason to doubt that it's a problem more or less of the shape and depth that Haidt claims. Right. I think social media is, has done something. I mean it's, it's done many things, but most of them were bad to our culture in the last, you know, 15 some odd years. I mean, I can say, you know, I can speak personally about the effects of deleting my Twitter account and that was, you know, I'm always embarrassed to say this, but it's the greatest life hack I've discovered in the last quarter century. Right. It's just unbelievable improvement in my day to day, well being by deleting my Twitter account. Now granted, I'm not a general case. I was a public facing person who had a fairly large following on Twitter and I'm a controversial public figure who is getting a lot of hate from both the left and the right. And so it's probably not a surprise that when I pull the plug on all that and then just live my life in the real world, there's a lot of relief to be found. But it is more than that. It's just even when social media was a source of apparent pleasure and I was using it to my advantage, the fragmentation of my life, I mean, just the checking of it, you know, just, just the dopaminergic, you know, invitation, hour by hour, you know, if, whether I did, whether I checked it 10 times or 20 times or 100 times, if things were really happening in retrospect, I think virtually all of that time was misspent. Right. And. And the effect on my other moments in life was, on balance, negative. So this is obviously my use case is completely different from a teenager's. A teenage girl on Instagram has a different set of problems on social media than I ever had. But I think, on balance, a lot of that has to be bad. And so I do think that height is probably right about this being a kind of emergency for teens. And, you know, Annika and I have kept our daughters off social media in any kind of public facing way until the last minute. And, you know, I think our oldest daughter has accounts that are, you know, private with her friends. But still, I mean, our kind of rolling out the leash on all that has been careful because we are just sensitive to the prospects of this just being a really unhappy influence on a young mind. Right. I mean, to suddenly, to feel that your personhood in some important sense exists online and has to be managed there. And I mean, it's inevitable to some degree, but to. We should allow our kids to migrate their lives onto that digital landscape. Very. I mean, it should be. This process should be very carefully thought out and circumspect because the way it can go wrong is just so obvious.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, I was listening to a podcast a couple months ago. It was Haviv Rete Gore's podcast where he was interviewing a former Al Qaeda spy. This was as a. I don't know if you caught this. He was an Al Qaeda member who flipped. It was really good podcast.

[Sam Harris]

Haviv is great. I'm a huge Haviv fan.

[Coleman Hughes]

He's the man. But. But this guy was making the argument that we. I'm translating it into my own conceptual terms that we kind of overly fetishize democracy in the west because it's worked very well for us. But if you look at the Middle east, all of the places, virtually all the places that are sort of stable and going in the direction broadly of our values are the monarchies, not the democracies. The democracies generally turn out to be failed states or civil conflicts or Islamist states. And I thought that was a provocative, but I think very interesting argument. Where do you actually place democracy as a political system in your set of priorities for encouraging other countries in terms of our foreign policy?

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. I don't think democracy itself is an intrinsic good. So, yeah, I think I would take instruction from that former jihadist on this point. I mean, it's totally plausible to me that there are societies that are not ready for democracy and that some kind of benevolent dictatorship is. It might be the path to democracy for them. But what you need is you need cultural change sufficient for most people to want to live in a way that makes democracy viable and a path to human flourishing. So if you're just going to just give everyone the right to vote because voting is some kind of sacred right that supersedes all others, well, you might run that experiment once in a society that will vote in the theocrats and then it's over. So there's nothing to be recommended about that project. So I do think you want people who are ready for something like secularism and something like liberalism right before you can be confident that whether it's a democracy or anything else is going to matter. What's the majority going to want to do? Are they just going to want to stifle the free speech of everyone, including themselves? Are they going to want to hang people for blasphemy? I mean, it's just if the majority is sufficiently crazy, well then it almost doesn't matter, right? Then you want some authoritarian, albeit a benevolent one to say, no, no, sorry, we're not going to hang people for blasphemy. You don't get a vote on that. And so I would agree that just empirically what we're seeing in the Middle east is that these closed societies, these authoritarian, really even despotic societies like Saudi and the UAE are the ones that are both reining in their religious fanatics to a degree at this moment and taking obvious steps toward some version of secularism and integration with modernity. And the so called Arab street, when left to its own devices, seems to want to kill people like Salman Rushdie. Right? It's just, I mean, if you can get the mob together and ask it what it wants, it's not going to sound like what they want in Marin county or. Any other place that many left of center secularists would find recognizable.

[Coleman Hughes]

How worried are you about declining birth rates all around the world? Obviously this is a much talked about phenomenon. We are below replacement level, meaning, you know, left to our own devices, our population is shrinking everywhere from America to basically every country in Europe, basically everywhere in the developed world outside of Israel, which has a real culture of having big families and feeling a sort of responsibility to bring bring about a new generation everywhere except Israel. Basically we're shrinking and this creates economic problems first of all. But how do you think this is a problem? If so, how big a problem is it and how should we think about mitigating it?

[Sam Harris]

Well, I can well imagine It's a problem. It's not a problem I've thought much about. I mean, this is certainly an argument for at least hoping for robots that we can rely on in our old age to care for us. Right? I mean, this is, if the human experiment is at bottom a kind of Ponzi scheme that requires more and more people always at the bottom, you know, in the limit, it obviously doesn't, it can't work. Right. I mean, we can't just, we can't get to, I think the carrying capacity of the Earth, or at least the last time I heard anyone estimate what the carrying capacity of the Earth was, was something like 40 billion people, right? So we can't get to 60 billion people, presumably just because, you know, everyone on Social Security needs, you know, 2.1 people beneath them to take care of them, right? So technology is going to have to come to our rescue on some level or there, there's going to have to be some path to population decline that is more benign than others, Right? I mean, obviously having it get cut in half in a generation is, has got to be dystopian. But I don't know what, I don't know what is to be hoped for here. I mean, in the limit, the arithmetic just doesn't work out. Right. Or we have to fly away to other planets. Right. So I just have to think that ultimately technology is going to come to our rescue here.

[Coleman Hughes]

I think I'm trying to. If I put together my, my model of Sam Harris based on having followed you for a long time on many different topics from Islam to AI to, you know, to any number of issues, it seems like you, more than other public intellectuals and authors I follow, focus the, the 1% chance that something will go very wrong and that you allocate like a much larger percentage of your, your intellectual energy towards preventing. Oh, pandemics would be another example to, to the worst case scenario, to preparing for the worst case scenario than most people who do this, this kind of work. Do you think that's accurate as a perception? And do you think that, does that come from a philosophical concern or is it personality?

[Sam Harris]

I guess I would dispute the allegation because just take jihadism, say, I don't think it's a 1% chance that things are going to go very wrong there. I think there's 100% chance that things have already gone wrong and they will keep going wrong until we get a handle on it. I mean, it's just a guaranteed, it's guaranteed to be a problem and it's an asymmetric problem. Right. So it's just so easy to do something sufficiently terrible that it deranges a society for a year. 5, 10. Right. A bunch of guys with box cutters got us to spend trillions of dollars fighting wars. You might think those wars were misbegotten, and at least one of them probably was, but still, it's like the asymmetry, the amount of leverage you get for being a suicidal maniac supported by lots of people who are just fans of suicidal maniacs. It's just so extraordinary that this is not a 1% problem. This is a 100% problem. So it is with pandemics. Just if we wait around long enough, we're going to have another pandemic that's worse than Covid. I would put the chances of that at 100%. Right. So. And much worse than Covid. So. And to say nothing of engineered pandemics, if we just democratize the ability to engineer pandemic, you know, pandemically plausible viruses, I think the chance that some death cult is going to do that, whether it's a jihadist one or it's one like Om Shinrikio or some other group of crazies, I think the chances of that happening are close to 100%. Right. So these are not tail risks. These are just. You take any on a generational timeline, just give me 30 years, both of these things are going to happen. Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

So let me just underscore that because I remember I told this story on Joe Rogan years ago, but I haven't told it in a while, that when Covid first started and people were debating about whether it was lab leak or not, many people emphasize, well, they did this research in Wuhan in a BSL3 lab. And that's like a really. The security of that lab is super tight. I instinctively didn't believe that because my then girlfriend, now fiance, had been working in a BSL3 lab in Colombia, and she wanted to show it to me one time, like, show me the research she was doing. So I just walked in. I don't think I washed my hands. I don't think I had a mask on, which is just like, on paper, something is what it is, but it's only ever as secure as the people working in it, in which case was me.

[Sam Harris]

And I was talking about intentional, you know, weaponizing of lethal agents. But. But yeah, the inadvertent spread is also, again, given enough time, I think on the order of 100% likely to occur. So, I mean, the BSL4 Labs leak. Right. So it's, It's. This is just an enduring problem worth worrying about. And when you look at what we spend our time and attention and resources on, I mean, there's just not. They're not apportioned in any rational way commensurate with these risks. Right. I just think we should be much more focused on. I mean, there are even tail risks that I think we should be more focused on. And I think with AI too, it's just. Is the alignment problem a 1% risk? I don't know. But the people who are doing the work are rarely estimating it to be that low. Right. It's like when you ask Sam Altman what are the chances that AI ruins everything, I think he once gave an answer of like 20%. Right. So it's not. Maybe he's down to 1% now, but no one's lower than 1%. Right. And if. If during the Manhattan Project, if you had asked the assembled scientists, what's the chance that your Trinity test is going to ruin everything, just ignite the atmosphere and all the nitrogen in the atmosphere and cancel life on Earth? They were debating the possibility of that. They put it in, I think, at the end, one in some millions. But they did several rounds of calculation to assure themselves that there's no significant risk there. But what if at the end of all that calculation they had said, yeah, we think it's probably a 1% risk or a 10% risk? Or what if you had Edward Teller saying It was a 20% risk and you had one outlier like the analogous person to Yann LeCun saying that there's no risk, but everyone else couldn't drive it even into single digits for the most part. And they still detonated the bomb at Alamogordo, just rolling the dice with the future. That would have been astonishing and astonishingly irresponsible. And yet that's where we seem to be with AI on the account of the people who are closest to this to. To advancing the technology. So it's. Again, I don't know what the real. I don't know what it is rational to believe about the alignment problem. I don't know if it is a 1% risk or a 90% risk, really, but I don't. So, yeah, I guess I'm disputing that. The things that have captured my attention here are really the kind of tiny tail risks. I think they're. Yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time whinging about Trump, Right. And the. And the prospects of Having him for a second term, and now we're, whatever, 14 months into a second term, what was the risk that he was going to do massive harm to the integrity of our society and its standing on the world stage? If I had estimated 100%, I don't think I would have been wrong. Right. So it wasn't a 1% risk. All those hours spent worrying about Trump and his incompetence and his corruption and his aptitude for alienating our allies and giving comfort to our enemies, that seems to be how it's been playing out. And so it's, I mean, I don't know what probability I would have put out, put it at, but it would have been, would have been very high.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, final question. You're a longtime resident of California, and Gavin Newsom seems, based on prediction markets, to be the best hope for the Democrats in 2028. What do you make of him as a politician and a candidate and his record in California?

[Sam Harris]

Well, I certainly hope it doesn't come to pass that we're running Newsom in 2028. Leaving aside his qualities as a person or a politician. I mean, it's just, just take a, you know, any liberal coming out of California or anyone who's had to, to, to have a political life in California and had to pander to the leftist interests that you had to pander to in order to succeed as a politician in California. So whatever your, whatever leftist pieties you're, you're trailing in your, in your wake to accomplish that, that candidate is going to have a hard time selling him or herself to the other 49 states. I think, in 2028. I just think the albatross of California hung around his neck and its reputation, real and imagined, in the other 49 states is not good. Right. So I just think the oppo research and the negative ads sort of cut, cut themselves. Right. You just show a lot of footage of homeless encampments and, you know, fentanyl addled addicts on the sidewalk in San Francisco and elsewhere, and fires, you know, burning down half of Los Angeles. And just California is a much better place to live than its critics imagine. But it's so easy to straw man the state and there's so many real problems that politically speaking, it just doesn't seem pragmatic to put forward a Californian. And in addition to that, I think Newsom has some other strikes against him. He's also very talented in other ways and very telegenic, and he looks the part. And I think he, I would imagine in a debate against J.D. vance, I think he probably would do well. Right. But again, I do think the reputation of California for the rest of the country is an albatross that we just shouldn't voluntarily put around our necks as Democrats.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, Sam Harris, until next time. Thanks for coming on.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. Good to see you, Coleman.