Sam Harris on Silicon Valley’s Slide into Techno-Authoritarianism

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Sam Harris on Silicon Valley’s Slide into Techno-Authoritarianism"
On with Kara Swisher (Vox Media) | December 15, 2025

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Overview

Theme:
Kara Swisher and neuroscientist/podcaster Sam Harris dive into the political and cultural transformation of Silicon Valley, focusing on its increasing alignment with authoritarian—and explicitly pro-Trump—politics. They probe the motivations, psychological dynamics, and societal consequences of tech billionaires’ power, the mainstreaming of conspiracy thinking, the dangers of AI-driven inequality, and the chilling silence of influential voices in tech.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining “Techno-Authoritarianism” and Shifting Friendships

• Kara Swisher remarks on the changing political climate in tech, noting figures like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration as a visual signal of their rightward drift.
  • [00:20] “It was visual proof of the political shift to the far right that has been taking place at the highest levels of Silicon Valley...”
• Sam Harris: Claims he hasn’t shifted, but those around him have—many former friends now display and enable authoritarian tendencies.
  • [05:32] “For me, it really is a story of finding friends with immense public platforms, you know, doing a lot of harm and finding it impossible not to comment on that harm…”
• Harris prefers the term “authoritarianism” over “fascism” due to its specificity and less rhetorical baggage.
  • [06:08] “I think it's much easier to say something like authoritarianism, or tyranny or something more generic... they've unmasked their inner authoritarian.”

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2. Silicon Valley’s “Authoritarian Streak” and Corporate Expediency

• Both discuss how tech founders have always craved control (e.g., Zuckerberg’s company structure), but the willingness to support outright authoritarian politics for expediency is new, or at least newly blatant.
  • Swisher: [07:11] “They often structured their companies in ways that they had full control... and so I understood why they were that way. But what would be the word now?”
• Elon Musk as Example:
  • Harris details Musk’s shift from product-centered drama to global influence, reckless behavior, and enabling of hate and conspiracism (including direct references to Nazi salutes and hiring racists).
  • [08:21] “...He's just out of touch ethically with the harm he's causing... He's behaved like a total maniac...”
  • Harris: [12:00] “...everyone who is maintaining cordial relationships with him and them in that orbit are, in my view, participating in this evil.”

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3. Roots of the Political Shift: Backlash or True Belief?

• Libertarian Roots vs. Reactionary Shift:
  • Historically, Valley founders idolized innovator-entrepreneurs and individualism.
  • Harris argues that backlash against “woke” left politics pushed many rightward, a move he finds disproportionate to perceived excesses on the left.
  • [12:48] “I do think the backlash against the Far left is sincere because I feel it myself...”
• Swisher pushes back on proportionality:
  • [14:51] “...how do these tech leaders go from feeling frustrated about MeToo, cancel culture... to supporting someone who tried to overturn a Democratic election?”
• Harris: Many couldn’t “keep both grotesque objects in view”—extremes on left and right—but succumbed to the “correction” offered by Trumpism.
  • [15:15] “Everyone who was super sensitized to what was happening on the far left grew more and more acquiescent toward what seemed like the only viable corrective coming from Trump and Trumpism.”

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4. Hypocrisy, Double Standards, and Loss of Moral Sanity

• Swisher points to the transactional, expedient nature of billionaire support for Trump.
  • [17:35] “It seems like pure shareholder expediency to me. That’s it.”
• Harris concurs: Tech billionaires “bent the knee” out of “failure of courage,” more than genuine ideological affinity.
  • [18:08] “Maybe if having...billions of dollars personally isn't sufficient to cause you to grow a spine... every billionaire who bent the knee... really has something to apologize for.”
• Harris decries selective outrage and tribalism, noting that the same people who obsess over Hunter Biden’s laptop ignore the Trump family’s overt corruption.
  • [16:35] “It’s just...these people are not coherent. Right. They’re tribal.”

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5. Religious/Spiritual Rhetoric and Tech

• Musk and Thiel have both invoked religious frames:
  • Musk calls himself a “cultural Christian;” Thiel labels tech regulation as “ushering in the Antichrist.”
• [19:45] Swisher: “Elon Musk used to question the idea of God. Now he claims he's a cultural Christian...”
• Harris: Many tech elites are working through “existential crises,” influenced by psychedelics, spirituality, or fears of “Western collapse.”
  • [20:18] “Everyone is sort of working out their existential crisis in various ways...”

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6. The Rise of Conspiracism and Decay of Rational Dialogue

• Harris and Swisher bemoan the algorithmic spread of conspiracies and misinformation, exacerbated by personalities like Joe Rogan and Candace Owens.
  • [34:32] Harris: “It's just the contrarian take on some world event is endlessly interesting ... and when it gets weaponized on social media ... you get just the utter derangement of our politics.”
• Harris identifies cognitive needs for “closure”—people finding comfort in certain, simple stories, especially if they’re outside the mainstream narrative.
  • [36:37] “What conspiracy thinking offers you ... is this kind of race to cognitive closure, which is very entertaining. It's also very empowering for the disempowered.”

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7. Accountability and the Silence of Silicon Valley

• Kim Scott’s Question (Radical Candor): [47:59]
  • “It seems like affluence and courage have become negatively correlated. The wealthy believe they have too much to lose... Why do you think more people are not speaking out? And how should we be speaking out?”
• Harris’s answer:
  • “It's often a story of incentives. I mean, so I think there is something perverse around the incentives of running a public company and imagining that your fiduciary duty to shareholders is the kind of a master value that covers every other conceivable sin ... And again, some of These guys have $100 billion or more. Right.... this is what we needed. We needed someone like Jeff Bezos or Marc Benioff... to say, listen, this is America. I'm not bending the knee to this maniac.”
  • [51:45]

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8. AI, Inequality, and Looming Crisis

• Harris warns that AI will force a reckoning with inequality: the rich will have to reckon with masses newly out of work—“the pitchforks are coming.”
  • [43:53] “If jobs, especially white collar ... jobs evaporate preferentially ... the pitchforks are coming, whether they're carried by people who used to be plumbers or people who used to be software developers.”
• Swisher underscores the “race against China” rhetoric that stymies meaningful regulation.
  • [56:08] “It also doesn't happen because of the perceived race that is existential against China in particular.”

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9. Possible Paths Forward & Hopeful Notes

• Harris floats the potential of widespread “epistemological bankruptcy”—so much AI-faked content and disinformation that society returns to traditional gatekeepers for truth.
  • [58:54] “We might get to a point where ... you don't believe the video of Putin unless you see it coming from the New York Times or Getty Images...”
• Calls for both cultural and institutional reform:
  • Real tech regulation (preferably federal, not state-level patchwork)
  • Cultural capacity for apology, truth, “reconciliation commissions”
  • Emphasizes personal and collective reassessment of relationship to social media (Harris notes deleting his Twitter account as a “life hack”)
  • [60:19] “It's always humbling to confess that that's like the greatest life hack I've found in the last decade or more...”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

(Timestamps in MM:SS format)

• On the shifting Valley ethos:
  • [07:45] Harris: "With Elon Musk...he's just out of touch ethically with the harm he's causing..."
• On tribal politics:
  • [16:35] Harris: “It’s just... these people are not coherent. Right. They're tribal.”
• On failed courage:
  • [18:08] Harris: “Having many billions of dollars isn’t sufficient to cause you to grow a spine... every billionaire who bent the knee has something to apologize for.”
• On disinformation and conspiracy:
  • [36:37] Harris: “What conspiracy thinking offers you... is this kind of race to cognitive closure... it's empowering for the disempowered.”
• On incentives and silence:
  • [51:45] Harris: “...there’s something perverse around the incentives of running a public company... people imagine their fiduciary duty to shareholders covers every other conceivable sin.”
• On AI-driven inequality:
  • [43:53] Harris: “The pitchforks are coming, whether they're carried by people who used to be plumbers or people who used to be software developers.”
• On cultural shift:
  • [58:54] Harris: “We might get to a point where ... you don't believe the video of Putin unless you see it coming from the New York Times…”

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Defining techno-authoritarianism & friendship changes: [05:32–07:11]
• Elon Musk’s behavior & Valley hypocrisy: [08:21–12:00]
• Backlash to leftism & move to Trump: [12:48–16:15]
• Corporate expediency among billionaires: [17:35–19:45]
• Spirituality, Thiel, religion in tech: [19:45–23:57]
• Rise of disinformation & cognitive closure: [34:14–38:47]
• Kim Scott’s expert question & Sam’s answer on public silence: [47:59–51:45]
• AI, inequality, regulatory inaction: [43:12–44:29], [53:37–56:36]
• Cultural renewal, the physics of apology: [58:38–65:45]

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Tone & Language

The conversation strikes a blend of piercing critique, personal reflection, and occasionally dark humor (“you're just pushing off the day where you have to armor plate everything”). Harris is candid, sometimes acerbic, but occasionally expresses hope for renewal (“I haven’t ruled out the possibility that cultural change could surprise us and be sweeping”).

Swisher’s rapport with Harris is open and occasionally confrontational, probing—“What would you say if [Elon Musk] called to apologize?”—but balanced by mutual respect and shared dismay at the current situation.

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Conclusion

Swisher and Harris present a nuanced, sometimes bleak, but ultimately action-oriented diagnosis of Silicon Valley’s slide into authoritarianism. They urge prominent figures to show courage, call out failings, and advocate for both institutional reform and a reinvigorated public sphere aware of the dangers of unchecked tech power and algorithmic cynicism. Hope, they conclude, may lie in renewed social consciousness, meaningful regulation, and the re-embrace of collective truth.

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Transcript

[Sam Harris]

In Elon's world, there is no need to explain the shift, this change of heart. Right. So he is now going back to a man who, he told us all, is, if not a pedophile himself, culpable for the rape and molestation of underage girls. Right. And somehow that's fine now.

[Kara Swisher]

Just kidding, folks. Hi, everyone. From New York magazine and the Vox Media podcast network. This is on with Kara Swisher. And I'm Kara Swisher. As we look back on 2025, one of the year's most memorable images was of all the tech billionaires at President Donald Trump's inauguration. They were there. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Tim Cook mingling with the Trump family, his future cabinet members, and other stars of the MAGA universe. It was visual proof of the political shift to the far right that has been taking place at the highest levels of Silicon Valley and in tech more broadly over the last year. These same men have benefited a lot from Trump's authoritarian style politics, insofar that he's let them do pretty much whatever they want, which is exactly how they like it. But amid rising fears that we're now in an AI bubble, there's a growing realization that those benefits may come at a huge cost to Americans sooner than people thought. I wanted to talk to Sam Harris about Silicon Valley's shift towards authoritarian politics. Sam is a neuroscientist and the host of the Making Sense podcast, and he's been talking a lot lately about the power these tech billionaires have and the ways they're hollowing out democracy. I was really struck by how out there Sam was on this. He was very close to most of the tech moguls. We disagreed on a lot of things, including his thoughts on Islam. And we've had some difficult conversations over the years, but I was really struck by, I would say, courage on his behalf because he was saying things no one else is besides myself and some other journalists. And it came at a cost to him that was probably pretty high. And he sort of is very articulately expressing what a lot of people in tech feel and are too cowardly to say, and he is not. So let's get into my conversation with Sam. Our expert question today comes from Kim Scott. She's the author of the book Radical Candor and a former executive at Google and Apple. So don't go anywhere.

[Sam Harris]

Foreign.

[Kara Swisher]

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[Sam Harris]

It is over.

[Kara Swisher]

Sam, thanks for coming on on.

[Sam Harris]

Happy to be here. Great to see you Kara.

[Kara Swisher]

Good to see you after a while. I don't remember the last time we talked was many years ago, but things have changed, as they say. And when it comes to Silicon Valley's shift towards authoritarian politics, the word we're hearing a lot these days is techno fascism. I want you to talk a little bit about your journey because at the beginning of your you were like the toast of these people. Like they loved talking to you and pointing you out to me and stuff like that. And much like Yuval Harari, that has changed. Right? Right. I think you've all wrote a pretty critical book of where tech was going and you yourself have changed in the way you think about it. Maybe that's not quite right, but I'd love to know how you define the word techno fascism and if you think it's the right word to describe this moment.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. So to start with the personal, I don't think I've changed. My views are more or less exactly as they were, at least on the relevant topics that I think we're going to touch. Um, no, I just noticed a bunch of people change around me and several of these key people were friends. So, you know, for me, I don't think this is so much the case for Yuval, but for me, it really is a story of finding friends with immense public platforms, you know, doing a lot of harm and find it impossible not to comment on that harm. And really that. That just spelling the end of the friendship.

[Kara Swisher]

Right.

[Sam Harris]

But I think there's. There's a problem. I mean, I occasionally use the word fascist myself, but I think there's a problem in using the term. 1. It's just so triggering for anyone right of center who thinks that the analogy to what was happening in Weimar Germany is just false on many levels, and on certain points it is false. So fascism is just a historically contingent movement, which is. I mean, I think it's much easier to say something like authoritarianism, you know, or tyranny or something more generic. So I think these, I think a lot of these guys have, for whatever reason, unmasked their inner authoritarian. And they're, they're, they're not so fond of, of real democratic institutions at the moment, and they're, they're fond of oligarchy and kleptocracy and authoritarian puncture of most of what has kept our system as healthy as it's been for as long as we can remember. And I mean, sorry, international alliances are unwinding as a result of this, et cetera.

[Kara Swisher]

You haven't changed. That is absolutely true. But one of the things, and I feel like I had a very similar purge, although I did see elements of it, right. They were irritated by the press. They often structured their companies in ways that they had full control, whether it's Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. But they always wanted complete control of their businesses, which I suppose I didn't mind. Right. It made a lot of sense back then because a lot of people got run over by VCs or whatever, the stock market. And so I understood why they were that way. But what would be the word you. Is techno authoritarianism or, or is there a word?

[Sam Harris]

Well, it sort of depends on which person and, and phenomenon we're talking about. Because I think there are certain flavors of the unraveling here. I mean, on one level, I mean, if you're talking about somebody like Elon Musk, so much of it is just trolling and a kind of solipsistic nihilism. Right? I mean, he's just. He's just out of touch ethically with the harm he's causing. I think that's, that's, for me, that's the only way I can explain.

[Kara Swisher]

Not new, because he used to. Remember, he used to sort of attack anyone who had any normal criticism for Teslas, for example, when it was just a product. But go ahead.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, I mean, I. So I miss that. Like, I was, you know, I was really just his friend. I really never saw him in his mode as being a boss. So for me, in speaking about specific people where the relationships are now no longer friendly, I don't know if it's a story of I didn't know who they were in the first place or they changed. Right. So either accounts for the data at the moment. But just take Elon in his brief career as Doge Master of the United States. You know, the person I knew seemed to have been incapable of behaving the way I saw this person behave. I mean, if you're the richest person on earth tasked with making decisions that are suddenly going to harm some of the poorest people on Earth, if you're, you know, cutting 20,000 workers in healthcare workers in Uganda overnight and you're immiserating hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who are relying on medical aid for tuberculosis or malaria treatment or H, many of whom are kids under the age of five. Right. If you're doing all that work, then you have all these other jobs and you're the busiest man on earth, are you going to spend your days and nights shitposting on X and celebrating your destruction of the greatest source of aid to the developing world, usaid, as feeding it into the wood chipper and calling all the people whose lives and careers you're upending over there as criminals. I just, I mean, he's behaved like a total maniac. And, you know, then. Then discovers that, you know, one of the, the engineers he's hired to do this owner's work is a committed racist. And rather than just fire that person, he. He does a poll on X to see whether he should fire him and then discovers that 80% of his fans actually have a soft spot for racism and then jumps out in front of a crowd and does what looks Like a Nazi salute, not once, but twice. And then when there's the predictable controversy in association with that, rather than apologize like a sane human being and prove that his heart is actually in the right place, he makes Nazi jokes on X and just trolls everyone who. I mean, and so there's this spirit of a kind of adolescent amorality. I mean, just, I mean, forget about immorality. I mean, I think some people are genuinely sinister and happily create harms, but many people are just detached from the ethical implications of what they do. And in a person like Elon Musk, when what you do is literally affecting the lives of countries at war and the lives of millions, I mean, this is a monstrous evil for which he and his drifting friends are culpable. And everyone who is maintaining cordial relationships with him and them in that orbit are, in my view, participating in this evil. Right? I mean, there should have been. I mean, right of center. It is such a fever swamp of conspiracism and delusion. Elon's reputation is well intact. But Bill Gates is thought of as a dangerous pedophile who was probably putting chips in us in the COVID vaccines to somehow track us. Meanwhile, Gates, I don't know, Bill, he could be an odd person. Leave that aside. There's no question he has held in his philanthropic work through the Gates Foundation. He and his former wife have to save more lives than anyone in living memory. And it's the opposite of what Elon and his friends did in Sub Saharan Africa under Doge. And yet right of center, up is down and down is up. Ethically, no one cares about those distinctions, right?

[Kara Swisher]

Absolutely. Because they're so removed from that. But let's talk about how we got here. Silicon Valley's always had a libertarian streak, or I call it libertarian light, but especially with founders and executives. And the core is the idolatry of innovators, really, and individual entrepreneurs who take risks and get rewarded. Let's talk about that shift, because this new embrace of authoritarianism and right wing politics, is it so different from the past? Or what are the roots of the new shift from your perspective? Because you've watched this, you've been closer to them than I have. I've covered them. I'm not their friends. I wouldn't call none of them friends. You've explained the shift towards authoritarianism as a backlash of left wing moral panic or wokeness, and that's certainly present when they talk about it. So draw a line for us as you see it.

[Sam Harris]

Well, I do think the backlash against the Far left is sincere because I feel it myself. Right. I mean, what happened on the left in Democratic politics created a kind of super stimulus politically and ethically, whereas it just got so crazy or was perceived to be so crazy by everyone. I mean, even people I consider myself left of center. I don't even consider myself in the center, but on every other relevant issue. But when you have someone like Kamala Harris running for president against the most odious opponent we've seen in living memory, I mean, somebody who has done his best to shatter our society with lies and tried to steal an election, all the while claiming it was being stolen against him, and engineered a, you know, something like an insurrection, if not attempted coup. The fact that we had a Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, who couldn't disavow her former support for taxpayer funded gender reassignment surgeries for incarcerated illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense. Right. I mean, it's just, I mean, that was so, that kind of thing is so crazy making it's such a, such a unnecessary own goal on the left. I mean, yeah, of course I think people with gender dysphoria should be, have political equality, etc. But I mean, there was just something, the capture of the, of, of Democratic politics by the, the far left activist class where everything was a series of blasphemy tests around identity politics, whether it was the trans issue or Black Lives Matter, it was, I do view. So someone like Elon, I mean, when Elon said, you know, he's going to go to war against the Woke mind virus, and he just confessed that he was totally radicalized by the experience of, you know, in his mind, losing a son into a transgender cult, I think that is actually sincere. I don't think there's an ulterior motive behind that. I think that was perhaps not.

[Kara Swisher]

Perhaps not. But I mean, I think Covid had a bit to do with it. But, you know, Trump couldn't admit, for example, he lost the election, he couldn't disavow his racist supporters. But each of these tech leaders, I get that it's irritating, but how, how do these tech leaders go from feeling frustrated about the MeToo movement, cancel culture, the Gaza campus protests and the accusations of racial bias to supporting someone who tried to overturn a Democratic. It seems a bit of a reaction.

[Sam Harris]

Well, so I, what I can't explain is why someone in the center, as many of these people were claimed to be, couldn't keep both grotesque objects in view simultaneously on the far left and on the far right and in Trumpistan and keep Some sense of proportion. Right. I mean, so I feel everything that Elon presumably felt about the far left, certainly virtually everything. And yet I always saw the danger of Trump and Trumpism as being far more grave to our, you know, the functioning of our society. Right. So I think you have to respond to both. But it is, I just, I did notice this pendulum swing that everyone who was super sensitized to what was happening on the far left grew more and more acquiescent toward what seemed like the only viable corrective coming from Trump and Trumpism. Right.

[Kara Swisher]

And it was, it also, it was, you know, talking about censorship and then they ban books. The extra step. Right. Talking about issues with trans people or possibilities of having a disagreement over sports, for example, and then going to banning them completely and removing rights. One does not equal the other in any way.

[Sam Harris]

No. I mean, there's no making sense of the failures of coherence among these new, freshly minted fans of Trump and Trumpism. So, I mean, if you pretended to care about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop because of all the corruption it might have indicated coming from the Biden family, how can you not care about what the Trump family is doing this very hour that. That outshines the worst of what could have possibly happened under Biden's watch by a factor of a thousand. Right. I mean, it's just, you know, just the Trump family's adventures in cryptocurrency alone. You know, the meme coin. I mean, that should have. There's absolutely nothing ever alleged against Biden that holds a candle to that. And yet you seeing the same people who are tearing their hair out over Hunter Biden's laptop and its suppression by the mainstream media, or discussion of its suppression by the mainstream media, it's just these people are not coherent. Right. They're tribal.

[Kara Swisher]

I have an explanation. Let's have a hypothetical. Let's say the Biden administration and Democrats had champion all the same woke causes like racial equality and more open immigration policy, trans rights, but they cut taxes and took a hands off approach to regulating tech and crypto and AI. Do you think we'd still see that shift to the right? Because yes, there are true believers. The MAGA cause, no question. But it's shocking to see someone like Sam Altman or Jensen Huang or Tim Cook embrace what is based and it seems like pure shareholder expediency to me. That's it.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. Well, once you draw the circle wide enough to include a visibly nervous Tim Cook delivering some crappy solid gold apple merch to the President. I think then you're just talking about political expediency and the thought that they have some fiduciary responsibility, running a public company to do whatever it takes to raise their share price in the presence of a very vindictive, very kind of patronage pushing president. You know, and, and that's, I think that's, that's despicable. I mean, I think it's just an obvious failure of courage on, on all of their parts. Maybe if having a, you know, many billions of dollars personally isn't sufficient to cause you to grow a spine, I don't know, you know, I don't know what it would take. So, you know, every billionaire who bent the knee to this guy, I think really has something to apologize for in the end. But I think it's explained in those cases is by not some newfound respect for Trump as some kind of business genius, but just recognizing that, okay, the country's being run by a personality cult and at the center of that cult is a man whose oxygen really is flattery. Right? And the only way to get anything done now for at least three plus more years is to pay obeisance to the guy and make him seem, make him feel like a genius in your presence because you're fawning all over him right now.

[Kara Swisher]

There's also a spiritual component. I mean, you've written about issues around religion quite a bit to this embrace of authoritarian politics. Elon Musk used to question the idea of God. Now he claims he's a cultural Christian. There's also Peter Thiel, he gave a series of lectures where he warned that critics of technology and AI were ushering in an arrival of, of the Antichrist and the destruction of the U.S. what do you hear? Where the tech leads. Invoke religion and spirituality, especially as it relates to tech, like Thiel does. Now, Thiel, he had religious feelings, but rest of them, not so much.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, well, so everyone is sort of working out their existential crisis in various ways. So a lot of these guys have gone to Burning man for years and done psychedelics for years. And, you know, the frame you put around all that conceptually is somewhat dependent on just, you know, the books you've read and the conversations you've had or haven't had and what, and the ideas you found persuasive. The place where it touches politics in a way that is at least intelligible to me. And some of these concerns I share, as you know, is that I do think there is a zero sum contest between open societies generally I mean, even beyond the West. But I mean, to talk about, it's usually framed as Western culture, but it's beyond that and Islamic fundamentalism the world over, you know, so it's. I mean, we really do have a tension there, which I've spent a lot of time, you know, whinging about. And I think the last time we had a podcast, I whinged about that for the full hour. Yeah, but. And to some degree, you know, various characters in this space can probably share that same hobby horse. They look at the fact that in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, you know, you can literally get a crowd of, you know, several hundred thousand people out onto the streets of London seemingly in support of Hamas or effectively in support of Hamas, or at least not disposed to view Hamas as a terrorist organization, et cetera, and then that somehow that moral confusion spreads to the finest campuses in our own country. Right. So we have Columbia, Harvard, et cetera. And then you have Harvard, the presidents of three of those finest colleges brought before Congress, and they can't seem to figure out how to say that support for genocide is against their terms of service. And yes, there's a lot of fine print on all of those moments. And, you know, I'm happy to go down any of those rabbit holes if you want to, but the general picture here is one of people left of center being ruled by identity politics and white guilt and a criticism of. Of. Of the west that runs so deep, sort of in the vein of Noam Chomsky, such that America is blamed for everything. The west is blamed for everything. It's all colonialism and racism and slavery and awfulness, and we have nothing to be proud of. And there's a lot that makes sense of that. There's also many half truths and lies weaving through all of that discourse. And at the end of the day, it's just not a healthy way to run our politics.

[Kara Swisher]

Sure. But we talked about the excesses of the left, which were obvious, and that is certainly a rabbit hole. My point is to say tech regulation could usher in the Antichrist and the destruction of a country that is.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah. No, I mean, on his face seems crazy to me, but what I'm just trying to do is draw some point of contact between statements of that kind that seem extreme and cultic and weird and proto fascist to some set of concerns that I consider rational. Right. So, like. So, Peter, if I were sitting across. I don't know Peter very well. I mean, I know him, but I think we would both agree that, you know, that that Western Europe has a problem of assimilation with its Muslim community that we're happy to not have here in America and we don't want in America. Right. So, so the figure. So in some sense we would both agree with the project of let's not let America resemble Belgium with respect to this variable. Too much.

[Kara Swisher]

Sure. But how does it get to anyone who wants Trek regulation as the Antichrist?

[Sam Harris]

That's us way down.

[Kara Swisher]

I don't even understand it. I just, I think part of me thinks it's cynical.

[Sam Harris]

Well, well, I think, I think so. I mean, if you imagine jumping from the critique of dei. Right. So what DEI was in their view is just a, a, the nullification of anything like meritocracy. We're not going to care about getting the best man or woman for the job. We're just going to care about checking quotas because we're so guilty about our racist past. And so that from a kind of their pure entrepreneurial frame, looks like just a race toward mediocrity and failure. And they don't, you know, so they don't want to be forced to do that. They don't want to.

[Kara Swisher]

I get it. It's the extreme nature. And also, by the way, it's a meritocracy, not a meritocracy. It often is Friends of Friends and Friends of Peter and now it's Friends of Trump. Like, oh, yeah, because they've gotten, you know, triggered by a obnoxious college student who's kind of allowed to do that on some level when they're younger. But, you know, and it's a sort of a bad faith definition of DEI because excesses are different than, wow, this seems funny that only white guys can win. Like, this seems unique. Unless they're better. Right, but what.

[Sam Harris]

Well, I mean, what you have in the Trump administration is DEI for conspiracists and loons and grifters and, and sycophants. Right. I mean, this is not. If you care about meritocracy, then you should care that we have the least qualified, you know, high level state servants we've ever had. I mean, it's just incredible. I mean, there's a few exceptions there, but it's incredible to see who's making these decisions. We've got people who are used to doing condo deals trying to figure out the fate of nations.

[Kara Swisher]

Right, right, exactly. So that would be Mr. Witkoff, the venture capitalist. Marc Andreessen did an interview with the New York Times back in January where he explained. Explained his shift from Democratic voter to Trump supporter. In 2024, although he wasn't very Democrat, I didn't even know his politics, I'll be honest with you. And one thing that comes through in the interview is his core belief that tech companies are run by good people doing good things that make the world a better place. Now, there's plenty of evidence not that way. So the spread of election disinformation, deep fakes, loss of privacy, lack of safety, increasing polarization, loneliness epidemic. I've been speaking to parents who allege their children died from suicide by the encouragement of chatbots. Very compelling and depressing situation. So this shift to maga, does it have to do with pure ego? I feel like I was a little too mean to Andreessen, and suddenly he's like, he's. He's the good guy, and he couldn't even imagine that some of these things are problematic. It seems like their feelings are hurt a lot by the general public seeing them as bad guys. And so they blame Democrats, who mostly were handing glove with them for a very long time, by the way.

[Sam Harris]

Well, there is an asymmetry here, which I've noticed among people who are public figures to one or another degree, who got crosswise with the left and got vilified by people whose politics they really shared across the board. I mean, people who support gay rights and gender equality and everything, just everything on the list. Legalization of drugs, et cetera. But I mean, what you found is just the kind of the narcissism of the small difference on the left to a degree that no one had ever really experienced before. And you would just be defenestrated the moment you got slightly out of step with the. With, you know, what. Whatever, you know, shibboleth was then being uttered. And. And then they got love, you know, simultaneously love bombed by everyone right of center. You know, so you have the. I mean, every. I mean, it's not just. Just maga, but it's just everyone right of center will. Will accept your. Your pilgrim's progress, right word without any judgment. I mean, you're just like, you're absolved of all your sins. And no matter how much you criticized these guys in the past, the moment you see the light about how awful wokeness is, they embrace you with open arms. And so to some degree, I feel like we've witnessed this very weird sociological experiment where lots of people with fairly prominent platforms just got inducted into a kind of culture because their families were treating them terribly. And it just felt better right of center complaining about the left and how crazy it was and when you think.

[Kara Swisher]

About that, it is a lot of it's hurt feelings. It honestly feels like it in a lot of ways. I'll make the argument that they may have gotten defense traded, but there was a net right there. They didn't get that hurt. They got to come back. They're richer than ever. It's not. It's not. It's feelings they had a lot of feels about and whether people like them or not.

[Sam Harris]

Yeah, well, I mean, the most interesting thing from my point of view is, is the, the, the total lack of moral sanity and integrity displayed by everyone involved here. Because, I mean, many of these guys were out of the closet hating Trump the first time around and for, for all the plausible reasons. I mean, even J.D. vance said that Trump is either, you know, an asshole of the first order or America's Hitler. Right. And yet no one ever has to give a rational accounting of have changed. I mean, after January 6th, some of the guys on the all in podcast, I think it was Chamath most vocally in the aftermath of January 6th. Yeah, I think he said that Trump should be in jail for the rest of his life. So how these guys went from there to where they are now has never been explained. And they feel no burden to explain it because they have cultivated audiences that simply don't care about these kinds of incoherencies.

[Kara Swisher]

Now we're doing this now. Yeah, it's really quite interesting. We'll be back in a minute. Support for on with Kara Swisher comes from Indeed. Right now, there's a talented person out in the world who can help take your business to the next level. But finding that person doesn't need to be a grind. Just use Indeed sponsored Jobs. It boosts your job posting to reach quality candidates so you can connect with the exact people you want faster. And it makes a big difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed are 90% more likely to report a hire than non sponsored jobs because you reach a bigger pool of quality candidates. Join the 1.6 million companies that sponsor their jobs with Indeed so you can spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, and more results with Indeed sponsored Jobs. And listeners to the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves. @ Indeed.com on go to Indeed.com on right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com on terms and conditions apply. Hiring do it the right way with Indeed. Support for this show comes from Quince. Every now and then you find a gift so good you almost always want to keep it for yourself. This holiday season Quince has cold weather essentials that might tempt you to do exactly that. Quint is offering $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that look and feel like designer pieces, silk tops and skirts for any season, and must have down outerwear built to take on the cold, not to mention beautifully tailored Italian wool coats that are soft to the touch and crafted to last for years. As always, Quints is able to offer quality that rivals high end brands without the high end markup. I've gotten a lot of Quints stuff myself over the years, including a really comfortable down cape which I look fantastic in. Obviously soft pants and a wide variety of things that are really warm that I can layer on a vest, things like that. I really enjoy the stuff I wear from Quince and I wear it every day and it's really good because it's not very costly. You can find gifts so good you want to keep them with Quint. You can go to quint.comcara for free shipping on your orders and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quinc.comkara to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.comcara. Support for this show comes from Deleteme. Deleteme makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. Delete Me does all the hard work of wiping you and your family's personal information from data broker websites. How does it work? You sign up and provide Deleteme with exactly what information you want deleted and their experts take it from there. And it's not just a one time thing. DeleteMe can constantly monitor remove personal information you don't want on the Internet. Throughout the year. I've gotten to use Deleteme and I find it really easy to use. They have a simple dashboard that's easy to navigate and understand. I'm a privacy nut and I am always surprised by how much of my information information is out there, much of it inaccurate, which is also just as bad. I get updates all the time and I act on them and I really like having the ability to use it. I've used a lot of these services and most of them I find confounding. This is super easy and very simple to use and that's what's important. You can take control of your data and keep your private Life Private by signing up for Deleteme now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your delete me plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com Cara and you see the promo code CARA at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com Cara and enter code Cara at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com Cara code Kara. Let's move on to where the shift towards authoritarianism in tech leaves everyday people. In an interview with the Atlantics, David Frum, you said we are in a Tower of Babel moment. That informational guardrails are gone and in their place is a kind of quote, new release of anti establishment conspiracy theorizing. Expand on that. As a neuroscientist, why do we struggle to sort through the glut of information online and distinguish the good from the.

[Sam Harris]

Bad? Well, I think what we're finding, I mean, we sort of always knew this, but in the presence of the Internet and social media, it's just become excruciatingly obvious is that some percentage of us really have a taste for conspiracy thinking. And, you know, so it's not that we just believe one of.

[Kara Swisher]

Them. Not a new.

[Sam Harris]

Thing. No, it's not new at all. I mean, it's, you know, obviously it was with, you know, JFK and before, but you find that it's just this kind of characterological trait that you love one of these anti establishment narratives and you seem to love all of them. And someone like Joe Rogan is one of the poster boys for this style of thinking. Right? It's just the contrarian take on some world event is endlessly interesting and it doesn't have to. And the search for anomalies in the standard interpretation is endlessly interesting. And what you get there, I mean, certainly when it gets weaponized on social media is you get just the utter derangement of our politics. And it happens on both the left and the right, but it certainly happens more on the right and traditionally it's been more on the right. So you get Candace Owens who within minutes of Charlie Kirk's assassination was cooking up some alternate theory about what happened there. And it has, you know, she has an audience of millions who want to hear about this, right? And, you know, and so I don't know how, if you have ever followed how crazy she's gotten, but I mean, it's, you know, it's, she and Alex Jones are, you know, one upping each other into some sort of, you know, Mystical state of confusion. So everyone is captured by the algorithm. And it's a very perverse and weird algorithm as you go right of center. And it's one that's being consciously gamed by Russian bots and troll farms. I mean, it's just like we've built this digital infrastructure and invited our enemies to weaponize it against us, and we've monetized their efforts to drive us crazy in some kind of.

[Kara Swisher]

Psyop. Tell me, as I said, as a neurosurgeon, why does that work? The inability to distinguish the good from the bed? Is it the glut of information? Is this how it's delivered? What is different here? Because there's always. There was always a jfk. Alligators in the toilet, whatever causes.

[Sam Harris]

Cancer. There's a range. I mean, a lot of people don't fall into this bin. But many of us are very uncomfortable without cognitive closure. I mean, just admitting that we don't know why something happened or we just have some probabilistic sense of. I feel like Maybe it's a 50% chance it was this or a 50% chance it was that, and I'm okay with that. There's this desperation in many people to feel certainty on whatever point they're entertaining. And what conspiracy thinking offers you. I mean, it offers many things, but it offers this kind of race to cognitive closure, which is very entertaining. It's also very empowering for the disempowered. I mean, if you're somebody who doesn't feel like you're at the center of the action or you're, you know, the world is the way you want it. It's very tempting to become part of a conversation that puts you this, you know, this person on the fringe who no one's listening to, at the center of the truth. Right. You have the true epistemology. Right. And so it's a kind of. I mean, it's a kind of pornography of doubt, in my view, and a kind of religion that gets spun up around achieving cognitive closure based on not especially rational.

[Kara Swisher]

Thinking. Right. So one of the most striking examples that supports the idea that we're in a tower of bevel moment is the ascension of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. A longtime vaccine skeptic. I just spent the day at University of Pennsylvania, and they're all going to flee the United States. All these amazing scientists, you know, in MRNA and other things, by the.

[Sam Harris]

Way.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. 20 years ago, the U.S. was on the verge of halting the spread of measles. Now, thanks to the spread of Vaccine misinformation outbreaks are getting worse. There's a big one in the wake of Thanksgiving. Two children died of measles this year. I think there was zero for many, many years. And when the Biden administration pushed platforms to deal with COVID and election misinformation, they got accused of censoring conservative voices. So what's the solution? Are we just going to continue to. To go into this pornography of information or. And being.

[Sam Harris]

Misinformed? Yeah, well, you know, barring some real consequence that gets everyone's attention, I think we are. I mean, you know, some kind of economic or epidemiological or environmental catastrophe that is just unignorable. I mean, when you look at Covid, Covid was almost the worst case scenario because it was. It was bad enough so that our seemingly rational response to it at every stage along the way was seriously disrupting of society. But it wasn't so bad that you couldn't have a wide diversity of opinion about what was rational to do. And you have a lot of people who could just say, well, this is just a cold and I don't care about it. And that was. While that wasn't strictly rational, lots of people got away with living that way. And they can now say, see, this was all much ado about nothing. And you had a lot of liberals trying to, in their own authoritarian way, trying to control my life, and I'm going to have none of it. And so I feel like we probably learned many of the wrong lessons from COVID It wasn't killer.

[Kara Swisher]

Enough. It didn't kill us.

[Sam Harris]

Enough. Yeah. And so, yeah, you could imagine. And it also, it killed old people preferentially and not kids preferentially. And so, I mean, next time around, we might be in the presence of a virus that. That's killing kids. Right. And that, that will provoke a very different response, I think, or one would.

[Kara Swisher]

Imagine. Right, but what about. What. Well, that's what measles are, by the way. What would you say? This is not widespread. It's just a small group of people. But what about January 6th? Why wasn't that enough? It was one of the most witnessed live events, live stream on tv. It was appalling to watch, didn't.

[Sam Harris]

Work. But you could. I mean, then you're Tucker Carlson and you can show the weird footage of cops just, you know, obviously scared cops just letting in a mob because they, they knew they were not in a position to resist the mob. And so it looked like just kind of the friendly opening the door to, you know, and Some kind of collaboration with the crowd. And so what was this? A false flag operation? And then you get this discourse of this counter narrative, which is obviously.

[Kara Swisher]

Crazy.

[Sam Harris]

Right. But again, what is so corrosive here is that now we have a culture, or, you know, or at least parts of culture that doesn't care about hypocrisy and lies on any level. Right. So, like, so Tucker. Tucker suffered no rebuke from his own audience when it was revealed that for years he had been pretending to like Donald Trump, and yet behind closed doors, he was texting that he thought Trump was a demonic force and he couldn't wait to be rid of.

[Kara Swisher]

Him. Yeah, same thing with Dan Bongino just recently. I was paid.

[Sam Harris]

To. Right. So, I mean, I just, you know, perhaps you feel the same way. I cannot imagine, imagine having an audience that would stay with me should it be revealed that I was. That I was that duplicitous. Right. I mean, like just. Just perpetrating a fraud on them for years, just pretending to think one thing and thinking the other.

[Kara Swisher]

Thing. You don't have a mother who loves Fox News. Then it works. It's. Cognitively, it.

[Sam Harris]

Works. Yeah. I mean, that's a culture that doesn't care about the truth even, you know, and doesn't care about being lied to, even by the people they are putting their trust in. You know, in Trump, we have somebody who lies with a velocity that we have never witnessed in public life. And yet his fans, it's not like his fans don't think he lies. They know he lies. They just simply don't care about.

[Kara Swisher]

Them. Don't care. Right, right. And speaking of which, it's the reason dictators like Russia's Vladimir Putin love the idea of politicizing truth. No one knows what to believe. So people often end up going along with the narrative pushed by those in power in this, the power to influence opinion is concentrated in the hand of a few billionaires outside the government, in tech, and in this case, people like Musk, they're mainstreaming fringe ideas like the Great Replacement Theory and vaccine skepticism or whatever. I just spoke to journalist Jacob Silverman, who wrote the book about Silicon Valley's radicalization called Gilded Rage. He said it's. Get that. Get it. He said it's disturbing that we're still not really having a conversation with the lack of accountability that these leaders, these tech leaders face for their behavior. But. But that said, the polls are showing the public, the wider public, is deeply distrustful of these people, both on the left and the right. So Is that conversation gaining traction from your perspective? It feels like, it feels like.

[Sam Harris]

I mean, AI, if anything, like the dreams of AI are realized. Leaving aside the existential concerns around the misalignment of AI with our well being, but just if AI succeeds and basically cancels the need for most human labor, we're going to have a reckoning with wealth inequality that we just simply can't avoid any longer. Right. So it's been coming for as long as we've been alive, really. But AI, I think is going to force the issue in a way that will be.

[Kara Swisher]

Undeniable. Yes. Which people feel in their bones. Right. You can feel people feel it, even if it is.

[Sam Harris]

Overwrought. And also, I mean, just if jobs, especially white collar, you know, higher cognition, higher status jobs evaporate preferentially in the face of this tech, I just think, yeah, they'll be, you know, the pitchforks are coming, whether they're carried by people who were, you know, used to be plumbers or people who used to be software developers. I just think in success, we're going to have to figure out how to have a far more equitable society than we.

[Kara Swisher]

Have. Yeah, I've always told them that. I'm like, you're just pushing off the day where you have to armor plate.

[Sam Harris]

Everything.

[Kara Swisher]

Yeah. We'll be back in a minute. Let's be honest. Are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown or one we never wanted in the first place. But still we stick it out and we give reasons, like, what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place and maybe the most common one. Isn't everyone kind of miserable at work? But there's a difference between reasons for staying and excuses for not leaving. It's time to get unstuck. It's time for Strawberry Me. They match you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you actually want to be. Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, create a plan, build your confidence, and keeps you accountable along the way. So don't leave your career to chance. Take action and own your future with a professional coach in your corner. Go to Strawberry Me Unstuck to claim a special offer. That's Strawberry Me.

[Sam Harris]

Unstuck. Support for this show comes from Amazon ads. Every business owner has been there. You put a significant amount of money into an ad. Buy and then wonder did those ads actually have an effect? Luckily, there's Omnichannel metrics from Amazon Ads Omnichannel Metrics helps advertisers understand how Amazon ads campaigns drive sales both on and beyond Amazon. While campaigns are still mid flight, OCM measures performance across streaming tv, video, audio and display, helping you understand what's driving results across the full funnel. Using Amazon Shopper Panel data plus third party signals, you'll be able to see beyond Amazon product sales units sold and roas. Whether customers buy on Amazon or at a brick and mortar store, you'll understand the full impact of your campaigns. Measure comprehensive sales impact to better understand purchase behavior and drive greater efficiency, effectiveness and roi. Tired of guessing where your ads are actually driving sales? Capture the full impact of your media spend with Amazon ads. Omnichannel Metrics. Head to advertising.Amazon.com to learn more. That's advertising.Amazon.com. Every startup, no matter how brilliant the tech or how committed the founders, will eventually face an unthinkable obstacle. Whether they choose to pivot or to double down is often the difference between success and failure. Like did you know that autonomous drone delivery company Zipline originally produced a robotic toy? Or that Bolt went from an Estonian transportation company to one of the largest rideshare in and food delivery platforms in the world? That's what Crucible Moments is all about. Hosted by Sequoia Capital's Roloff Botha, Crucible Moments deep dives into the make or break moments that set the course for some of the most important tech companies of our time. With interviews from some of the key players that made these companies a success. This season, you'll hear stories from the founders of Bolt, Zipline, Supercell, and many more. Subscribe to Crucible Moments today. You can [e-mail] or wherever you get your.

[Kara Swisher]

Podcasts. Every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. Hi Sam, I'm Kim Scott. I'm the author of the book Radical Candor. From where I sit here in Silicon Valley, it seems like affluence and courage have become negatively correlated. Here, the wealthy believe they have too much to lose if they speak out. What is so alarming to me now isn't that an authoritarian president and a small cadre of right wing tech execs want to take over. What is truly surprising to me is that the same people who once believed in the power of technology to strengthen our society and our democracy have gone ominously quiet. Fear is a tyrant's best Weapon. The people in Silicon Valley who have made fortunes still have a platform and a voice. Now is the time to use them and to stand together in solidarity. Our silence will not protect us. Why do you think more people are not speaking out? And how should we be speaking out? That's a great.

[Sam Harris]

Question. Yeah, well, so, I mean, you know, we're watching the ruination of so much that we care about, right? I mean, just, I mean, if you look at the stature of our country on the world stage, right, and what our country represents to our allies and former allies and to countries that aspire, can only aspire to be democracies, right? I mean, we used to stand for quite a lot. I mean, it's not that we don't have things to apologize for. We have a checkered passed. I mean, it's been 250 years, but on our best days, we really could be credibly be said to care about whether you killed or jailed your journalists or rigged your elections or imprisoned your political dissidents. And now, as a country, we seem to only care about whether you give our president and his rapacious family a hotel deal in your capital city, right? I mean, or whether you buy their, whether you enrich them directly by buying millions of dollars worth of, or billions of dollars worth of their cryptocurrency. Right? I mean, that's where it's an extortion racket that we're running on the world stage at the.

[Kara Swisher]

Moment. Why aren't people saying things? I mean, both of us are smaller than all those people from a financial point of view. And I have an independent company. You have your own independent. We've, you know, we sort of carved out these podcasts, little islands or whatever that seem immune at this point. But why haven't others spoken up? What is your sense? They're terrified. They call me. I get a lot of attag. Good job. Good for you. I was like, yeah. And you, you know, please step.

[Sam Harris]

Up. Well, I mean, so, I mean, it's often a story of incentives. I mean, so I think there is something perverse around the incentives of running a public company and imagining that your fiduciary duty to shareholders is the kind of a master value that covers every other conceivable sin, right? So you can literally shake hands with the next Hitler, because that is what the market, your future in the market, will require. I'm not saying Trump is Hitler, but you get my point. It's just a failure mode of capitalism that we have to correct for. And every one of these Guys who we know thinks Trump is an imposter. Really? I mean, even as a businessman. An imposter, Right. None of these guys think Trump was even a major real estate developer when he was a.

[Kara Swisher]

Realtor. I hear from a lot what a.

[Sam Harris]

Mourn. So they're pretending to lionize him. And again, some of These guys have $100 billion or more. Right. You know, or, you know, I mean, 10 billion should be enough to inoculate you against these fears of being personally ruined by pissing off the President of the United States in our country. Right. I mean, so this is what we needed. We needed someone like Jeff Bezos or Marc Benioff or, you know, any of these guys to say, listen, this is America. I'm not bending the knee to this maniac. I run a very important public company. If he seeks to damage it, everyone, you know, everyone in the press is gonna notice that, and we're gonna talk about it, and we're gonna ruin the political party that put him in power, because this is not the kind of country we live in. Right. You know, and where. Where was that guy or gal who's run. Who's. Who's running a public company who's a nerd against personal harm because they, you know, this is still America and they're as wealthy as they could ever need to be. I mean, it's. It's crazy making that we don't have dozens of examples of.

[Kara Swisher]

That. I would agree. So let's get some solutions to finish up right now. Some of the biggest proponents of tech regulation are coming from within MAGA. Interesting. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unveiled the Citizens Bill of Rights for AI. Steve Bannon has said AI is likely the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has also expressed fears about the expansion of AI with no guardrails. I don't agree with them on most things, and they always end up showing their actual ingredients very quickly. But is that a growing civil war within the populace and tech CEOs? Do you see that playing out? And you imagine a scenario where populists actually win and regulate the tech.

[Sam Harris]

Companies? Yeah. Well, I can imagine if it became, you know, politically dominant, then it would be dominant. I mean, I don't know what the limit is of. The limit of influence is from the oligarchs at this moment. I mean, they don't get everything they want because in some sense they're not aligned. I mean, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk can't get precisely what they want. If they're competing in the race to space. Right. Someone is going to get Trump's favor or.

[Kara Swisher]

Not. Same thing with these media.

[Sam Harris]

Mergers. Yeah, exactly. The media merger with Netflix now. So it's not everyone's not aligned, but yeah, I can imagine that it will take something like a minor catastrophe to get everyone's attention. If we do something with AI that is sufficiently destabilizing to our economy, if someone unleashes something that makes the NASDAQ go dark for a week. Right. And no one can figure out, you know, how much money they have. Yeah, right. I just think that's something has to wake us.

[Kara Swisher]

Up. Yeah, I was just called a non patriot by one of them and I was like, oh, but you're selling chips to China. Okay, got it. Like, I'm not sure what to say. The Trump administration is sticking by these tech oligarchs. So with the help of AI czar David Sachs. I'm not a fan. Trump has promised to sign an executive order soon to bar states from passing their own AI regulations. Something the tech elites really want, but a lot of people really don't. The do whatever you want approach to the tech sector is what got us here in the first place, as you just.

[Sam Harris]

Noted. On a point like that, I would just say that there is a version of that that makes sense to me. I mean, I don't think we want 50 different sets of regulations around this kind of.

[Kara Swisher]

Technology. I.

[Sam Harris]

Agree. But what it really demands is a sane set of regulations coming from.

[Kara Swisher]

The federal government, which hasn't ever happened. You know, by the way, the tech leaders hated the Biden administration's push to regulate them. Andreessen called Biden's efforts to regulate crypto a quote, a terror campaign. Little much. Mark, what would that entail? Because they in the. I mean, I write the annual story. Once again, we don't have tech regulation of any sort. Even the most minor. The previous administration didn't get it right. This administration is letting all hell break loose. A federal system would obviously be best in AI, for example, but it doesn't happen because of the power of the people holding the purse.

[Sam Harris]

Springs. Well, it also doesn't happen because of the perceived race that is existential against China in particular. Again, it might take some terrible outcome that is, you know, that doesn't kill us all to get us to collaborate with our enemies on this particular point and regulate in a way that's.

[Kara Swisher]

Sane. What would be that sound policy, would you say, for example? The first.

[Sam Harris]

One. Well, so, I mean, there are really two levels of the problem. There's the malicious use of this technology by bad actors and perhaps the inadvertent bad outcomes of just the way people can use it. But there's the deeper problem that many people worry about, which is just the existential risk posed by so called unaligned AI. Right. That we could build something that is super intelligent and becomes actually self improving and that this technology can fundamentally get away from us. Right. And what's truly alarming is that all the people, at least in the States, who are building this tech, I mean, people like Sam Altman, it's not like they think that those existential concerns are irrational. No. In fact, when you ask them, they put the probability of existential collapse at something like 20%. You know, they're not saying it's, you know, one in a billion, so don't worry about it. They're saying, no, no, this is a completely sane set of concerns. I'm not quite sure how we're going to avoid it. We hope as we, you know, walk these final yards into the end zone, we'll figure it out. But none of them think that. I mean, they all acknowledge that they're playing a game of Russian roulette and that there's at least one bullet in the cylinder and we're just, you know, we're pulling the trigger because we have to. Right? We economically have to. We're in a race against.

[Kara Swisher]

China. I called it the Xi or me argument with Mark Zuckerberg when I was interviewing him and I was like, I don't like you either, but does it require some kind of true populist revolt that's centered on class based politics, which Scott talks about, even if it has an anti capitalist undercurrent in many ways, Although I would argue this Trump administration is socialist at this point, given all the things they're doing, what's needed for American democracy to thrive, if not populism, how do you envision citizens wresting power back from authoritarians and tech.

[Sam Harris]

Oligarchs? Well, I don't know. I haven't ruled out the possibility that cultural change could surprise us and be sweeping. I mean, for instance, I think that as AI, you know, as the AI sloppification of everything.

[Kara Swisher]

Continues. Fair.

[Sam Harris]

Point. We might get to a point where many people, maybe even most people, declare some kind of, you know, epistemological bankruptcy with respect to the Internet or with respect to social media. And it's like if you're looking at a video and your first thought is now always, is this even Real or this sucks. Right? And that. That just gets locked in, Right? It's like, okay, this looks like Vladimir Putin declaring World War iii, but who knows if it's even real, Right? Strangely, this could force a return, a new return to sort of traditional gatekeeping. Right. But we might wake up in a world where all of a sudden, you don't believe the video of Putin unless you see it coming from the New York Times or Getty Images or, like, some official gatekeeper. And this could make social media far less captivating for people. I mean, one could hope that would.

[Kara Swisher]

Happen. Yeah, there was an idea to mark the real stuff, not demark. Not mark the fake stuff, which is kind of interesting to think about.

[Sam Harris]

But. Yeah, but I mean, now there's kind of an arms race between, you know, detecting fakes and producing fakes, and maybe there's an asymmetry there where it's always going to be easier to produce them than to detect them. You know, I don't know, but I just think, you know, to some degree, we all have to kind of personally work this out with respect to social media. As you know, I deleted my Twitter account about three years.

[Kara Swisher]

Ago. I didn't delete it because I thought he'd do something shitty with my account. I just left it.

[Sam Harris]

There. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, it's. It's always humbling to. To confess that that's like the greatest life hack I've found in the last decade or more. I mean, it was just. Just in terms of improving my life. It's just absolutely enormous. And I think, you know, it's possible that many more people will have a similar epiphany, because there is something toxic about our engagement with these tools. I mean, leaving AI aside and is capture of our economy just having our lives fragmented in this way by this digital bride, I mean, we're just. So much of your sense of what the world is and what you are in the world has been uploaded into this space, which, I mean, honestly, I mean, again, there are exceptions here, but it is. It's easy to say Twitter isn't real life if you're me, because I've taken steps to immunize myself against the pain of it all, but it really isn't real life if you're me. I mean, it's like, it is so amazing how much it doesn't matter what happens on X. You know, even if it's Elon Musk attacking you by name and you're trending. He likes to do that day. Yeah. You know, it really doesn't matter. And so, you know, many people may begin to yearn for a life in the real world, reading real books and having real conversations face to face. And that might be a kind of spiritual awakening for our whole culture. I mean, we might use these tools differently in the.

[Kara Swisher]

Future. You do see, younger people, both my older sons are just don't. What? What are you talking about? You know, they don't care. They use YouTube to watch TV. That's how I would put it. I don't think they use it to be influenced. I think they just like tv. That's their version of television, which I watched quite a bit. So this has been a relatively gloomy conversation, but really interesting. But you say you're hopeful we're in a, quote, emperor's new clothes situation where the truth is obvious, but just going unacknowledged by most people. So what needs to happen to start for the kid to point to the emperor and say, ah, you're.

[Sam Harris]

Naked. Yeah, well, the kid is certainly pointing. I mean, he's always pointing. But I mean, maybe as simple as just it no longer being Trump at the center of Trumpism. Right. Like when you ask yourself, can JD Vance or any.

[Kara Swisher]

Other. I want to look at that.

[Sam Harris]

Guy, plausible candidate, you know, inherit the mantle of the culture? And it certainly seems plausible that the answer to that is no. That's just for a variety of reasons. The kayfabe of the professional wrestling vibe is not going to be sustainable. And we might suddenly be confronted by a whole culture right of center that pretends never to have been as morally confused as they now are. Lots of people who come shuffling back into normalcy, pretending that they never got caught up into the. In the denialism and the cultishness and the weirdness that is Trumpism. That's totally possible. The personnel suddenly care about, you know, for alliances with our Democratic partners in Europe, and they're no longer fans of Putin and they don't remember that anyone ever was a fan of Putin in the Republican Party. I mean, it's just. It's all that possible, you.

[Kara Swisher]

Know? Yeah. I don't know what happened. What, did I drink last.

[Sam Harris]

Night? No, no, I didn't. I wasn't at that conference. And.

[Kara Swisher]

No. Yeah, yeah. And what are you going to say to them? I mean, oddly enough, Rachel Maddow said the same thing. We're going to have to let them. This is their last chance and they need to start to shift or.

[Sam Harris]

Opportunity. We might need something like a truth and reconciliation commission at some level. I mean, you Know, for someone. Again, for someone like Elon who's acted like such a maniac, I don't know how you get back into normalcy without some kind of mea culpa. I mean, it's like, what were you thinking during Doge? Yeah, that's not happening when you were little. I mean, like, you know, what were you thinking when you were bringing back neo Nazis and conspiracists with great fanfare onto X, at a moment when we were watching a global eruption of anti Semitism, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the Holocaust, and just. And meanwhile, you know, all in the name of free speech, absolutism, but also then just kicking off journalists who you didn't happen to like, and complying with the demands of authoritarians the world over, suppressing the speech of political dissidents in countries like Turkey. Right? I mean, just like, who the hell did you become and how can you pretend to now be.

[Kara Swisher]

Normal? Look, you're asking for a Scrooge moment. He wakes up Christmas morning and says, boy, buy me the.

[Sam Harris]

Turkey. There'll have to be many Scrooge.

[Kara Swisher]

Moments. Right, but what would you say if he called you and said, I am so sorry. I can't believe I attacked you? And he does attack you. He attacks me much less than you. I wouldn't even know if he's been attacking me, honestly. But I was the face of evil, I.

[Sam Harris]

Think. Yeah, but are you pure evil? The last thing he said about me on Twitter was that I am pure.

[Kara Swisher]

Evil. That's his.

[Sam Harris]

Favorite. So I have that over.

[Kara Swisher]

You. I think I'm Art of.

[Sam Harris]

Evil. I don't.

[Kara Swisher]

Remember.

[Sam Harris]

Whatever. You have a heart filled with hate. If I.

[Kara Swisher]

Hate. Heart filled with hate. That's right. I'm sorry. That's correct. What would you say he called you and said, okay, I'm really sorry. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to have reconciliation and.

[Sam Harris]

Truth. So that's an interesting question about essentially the physics of apology, right? Like, what constitutes an acceptable apology? And for me, it really. It requires that the person sketch some rational path from where they were to where they say they now are. Right? So it's like, how is it that you were. Yeah, like, how is it that you think better of the things you did? And how are you now the person who views those things the way I view them? And so I'm willing to. I mean, apology and forgiveness. I mean, this is some of the best. This is the best software we've got, right? I mean, like, the capacity to forgive Someone. I mean, it's absolutely indispensable, not just, you know, psychologically, but civilizationally. And we celebrate, you know, people being. Having changes of heart and being forgiven at the deepest level. I mean, but even just like a rapist or a murderer, I mean, someone. Literally, you can get someone coming out of prison who really did commit the murders for which they were sent to prison. And now, whether in a Christian context or just a secular context, we acknowledge that people can apologize and be different people. But there has to be some intelligible path from there to here. And in the absence of that, it just seems like. It just seems like a bad faith maneuver. And so I have no idea how I would respond unless I was in the.

[Kara Swisher]

Situation. Yeah, I probably wouldn't let him.

[Sam Harris]

Back. But it's not gonna.

[Kara Swisher]

Happen. I'm good for banishing it. I know it's not gonna.

[Sam Harris]

Happen. I'm certainly not waiting for.

[Kara Swisher]

It. Certain people banish it. I say banish it. Without an e. Banish it. You are banished. I don't think that's the worst thing society's ever done for certain people, but we'll.

[Sam Harris]

See. Life is too short.

[Kara Swisher]

Kara. I understand that, but it's not that short, let me just say. Anyway, I.

[Sam Harris]

Really. It's just long enough for it to.

[Kara Swisher]

Matter. Yeah, it's long enough. Just long enough. Anyway, I really appreciated Sam. What an interesting. And we can whinge about things we disagree with later, but this was really smart and I appreciate your thoughts on.

[Sam Harris]

It. Always happy to do.

[Kara Swisher]

It. Today's show was produced by Christian Castor Wisel, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kalyn Lynn Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following this show, you know the emperor has no clothes and yuck when I think about it. If not, you're drowning in conspiracy porn. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for on with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to all on with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with.