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- [00:08]
Tim Miller
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I just couldn't be more delighted to be here today with the host of the Making Sense podcast, a neuroscientist and author. His books include the End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. It's Sam Harris. Sam, welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.
- [00:24]
Sam Harris
Thank you, Tim. Great to meet you, man.
- [00:27]
Tim Miller
It's good to meet you too. I had so many people recommend to me the Reckoning, which I guess you put on your substack, and as a podcast, it was an analysis of the election and what happened, why Kamala Harris lost. You've been a longtime anti Trumper, like those of us at the Bulwark, and so I want to get into kind of the Dem autopsy stuff, but if I think it might be more useful to sort of back up the lens a little bit, because I think you might have a different perspective than some of us who are more in the political space about how we got here. So if that works for you, we'll just back up a little bit first.
- [00:59]
Sam Harris
Sure, yeah.
- [01:00]
Tim Miller
I say that because so in my world, I came from, you know, Republican politics and, you know, like many of us at the Bulwark and like the Republican establishment types that all let us down and failed us, essentially did this reluctant, ish, submission to Trump over the course of years, you know, some quicker, some slower, but, you know, there was like a hope that maybe things could go. Go back to normal. But like, there's another category of people that's become ascended in Trump world that's closer to your space than mine. It's these kind of tech, public intellectual types, you know, the anti woke crowd, and they've had like an enthusiastic conversion towards Trump. And so I kind of want to start with them. And like, what attracts these smart men, mostly men, to this deeply unimpressive resentment monster?
- [01:55]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, it's a good question. So let's linger on this phrase public intellectual, because, sure, yeah, many.
- [02:02]
Tim Miller
I mean, I'm thinking of like Andreessen and Weinstein.
- [02:06]
Sam Harris
I know who you got. Yeah, I mean, we can name names if we want to, but I mean, some of these guys are friends. Some of these guys are former friends. Some of these guys are now proper enemies. And I'm happy to talk about all of them. But the phrase public intellectual is one that I will speak happily and without scare quotes because I think we need public intellectuals. I'm not. I don't think that's an embarrassing label and I aspire to earn it. But I think it's important to notice about a lot of these guys is that though they are smart, they are not intellectuals, right? They're not attempting to have anything like a truly honest and comprehensive worldview that they can defend from all sides and that they'll revise in real time in front of you when you push back on some squirrely part of it in a way that proper academics and journalists and real public intellectuals will.
- [03:02]
Unknown
Right.
- [03:02]
Sam Harris
I mean, I guess I'm describing something like an ideal. You just cannot say that someone like Elon Musk is an intellectual, right? He's obviously very smart, he's obviously a talented engineer, but when you prod him and get his take on world events or on the future of humanity, you get like 15 lines of boilerplate that he hasn't revised in the last decade and a half about us having to be a multiplanetary species and blah, blah, blah. And with a lot of these guys, you have people whose formative experience intellectually was their first encounter with Ayn Rand and science fiction. And then they, I'm sure many of them read, but they read quite idiosyncratically. They're self taught in basically everything other than in some cases computer science and maybe in Elon's case, engineering. Even there, I think he's largely self taught. And a lot of these guys show all the scars of being autodidacts. And I'm not advocating for mere credentialism. I'm not saying you need a PhD in the thing you talk about and you can only talk about that thing. I mean, obviously I don't observe those boundaries intellectually myself, but some of us have internalized the standards of academic and journalistic integrity in a way that others haven't.
- [04:27]
Unknown
Right?
- [04:27]
Sam Harris
And these guys have been outside cats. I mean, there are probably a few exceptions here, but when you're talking about somebody like Elon, talking about somebody who never internalized anything as a standard of ethical or intellectual integrity, apart from what just got hammered into him as his advent during his adventures in tech. And now, and in his case, perhaps more conspicuously than any other, we're seeing the total derangement of a personality based on social media addiction. I mean, that is in fact what you see with Elon. He is a Twitter addict, so much so that he felt he needed to buy the platform. And now he has this free speech evangelist gloss on what he's up to, but really what he's up to is snorting ketamine and tweeting at all hours of the day and night.
- [05:19]
Unknown
Right.
- [05:19]
Sam Harris
And this is his influence on our politics.
- [05:22]
Tim Miller
Seems like there's a lot of ketamine in the White House. I keep hearing about ketamine.
- [05:25]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I'm sure one hopes he's mitigated it of late. I mean, his behavior on Twitter is obviously palpably, visibly deranged.
- [05:36]
Unknown
Right.
- [05:36]
Sam Harris
I mean, he signal boosts Pizzagate lunatics knowing who they are. He knows who they are because I and others have told him who they are. He thinks he's doing a service to humanity by boosting to 200 million followers obvious lies and conspiracy theories and making some of the most odious online trolls even more famous, meanwhile just declaring war on actually normal people who for whatever reason, he's gotten on the wrong side of.
- [06:08]
Tim Miller
Yeah. So I guess then the question that I have about that, it's just hard for me to wrap my head around is, is it simply contrarianism to the dominant culture? Is it. There was an opportunity like that. Trump is in some ways, you know, a vessel that you can just grab onto and gain influence with in a way that like you couldn't with a more traditional politician just because. And there had to be something like it's not just Elon. Right. Like there is. And some of these guys, like David Sachs, I guess, was always, always been a Republican, but most of these people.
- [06:42]
Sam Harris
But he's another one, he's like a self taught expert on the Ukraine. Right. And he either knowingly or unknowingly is recycling Kremlin talking points. He'll never put himself across the table from someone like Ann Applebaum or Timothy Snyder or anyone who knows anything about Ukraine. And it's just not honest.
- [07:02]
Tim Miller
That's what I mean, though he's a certain category. But many of these people were, for Obama, were part of this technocratic moment in Silicon Valley when these social media companies were being created, were culturally liberal. What radicalized so many of them? What is underneath the red pill in your view?
- [07:23]
Sam Harris
Well, in many cases, what radicalized them has effectively radicalized me and many other people in the sense that we all noticed the obvious moral errors being committed on the far left and the mad work they were doing in capturing our institutions.
- [07:42]
Unknown
Right.
- [07:42]
Sam Harris
So one of the asymmetries you have between left and right, which anyone left of center who has their head screwed on straight should find galling, is that the far fringe of the left has immense cultural influence, whereas the far fringe of the right really doesn't. I mean, you can say what you want about the proximity of neo Nazis and real anti Semites to power in Trumpistan. I mean, there is some of that. You've got people like Candace Owens, I.
- [08:13]
Tim Miller
Might say didn't over doesn't. I think that the door is still open and doesn't for now we'll see what happens in Trump 2.0.
- [08:21]
Sam Harris
But yes, and I'm certainly worried about that. I'm worried about people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and the fact that they sit atop a powder keg of antisemitic and, and anti Democratic derangement. And obviously Trump has, in a somewhat sinister way, I don't know how calculated it is, but he's done his work not to alienate that far fringe because I think he has thought he needs them on some level. So, you know, stand back and stand by is not exactly what you want your president to be saying to the proud boys. But that notwithstanding, what you have on the left are proper lunatics successfully bullying our most elite institutions.
- [09:04]
Unknown
Right.
- [09:04]
Sam Harris
You have the people who glue themselves to priceless works of art in museums. You have the trans women or women brigade. You have the defund the police people. These are the kinds of convictions that really should not have survived contact with 10 minutes of pragmatic political analysis. But, but in the Democratic Party and in liberal institutions, we have witnessed the full capture. I mean, there's a new orthodoxy that has reigned at places like Harvard and the New York Times and the Mayo Clinic. And you go as elite as you want left of center. And everyone has been cowed into silence on questions of in particular things like trans activism and identitarian racial politics. So you have someone like Ibram X Kendi, who by my lights, is a pure pornographer of racial grievance. To say he's in good standing left of center is an understatement. I mean, he is lionized at the Aspen Ideas Festival and everywhere else and brought in to deprogram Fortune 500 companies of their racism. And it's just an odious grift and it has torpedoed the chances of Democrats for years. Now on my account, I'm in good company here. It is among the many reasons why Donald Trump is president again, or will.
- [10:29]
Tim Miller
Be just one more on this point because I guess pointing out that your critique of these left institutions and the far left activists is in line with the critique that undergirds Elon's pivot to the lunacy that he's pushing now. But you didn't go full whole hog, right? It's one thing to be like, I'm annoyed by the people that are taping themselves to priceless works of art or that are making people who are obviously one gender put their pronouns in their bio or who are just unnecessarily having racially segregated meetings at schools. And so, like, there's a lot of lunacy on the far left, but, like, I understand why that makes people upset with the Democrats, but that isn't really what, like, Joe Biden was doing in the administration. Right. And the lunatics are literally running the asylum on the right. So while I can understand the cultural critique of the left, like, you've managed, I think, to ride this balance between I have this cultural critique of the far left without meaning, I need to throw in with the newsmax crowd. Those guys all failed that balance. How do you assess that?
- [11:42]
Sam Harris
Well, it does come back to the intellectual integrity I described at the outset and the failures of it. I'm enough of a creature of the institutions to have internalized certain standards of scrupulousness journalistically, academically, scientifically. I have a PhD in neuroscience and a background in philosophy before that. And if nothing else, that has drummed into me certain standards of intellectual embarrassment that I don't want to touch. And you have to be able to keep more than one grotesque object in view at a time. Right. So to be convinced that the left has lost its way, as many of us are, need not make you blind to the fact that Trump and Trumpism poses a real threat to our democracy.
- [12:37]
Unknown
Right.
- [12:37]
Sam Harris
I mean, Trump is a demagogue. He's the most prolific liar we've ever seen.
- [12:43]
Tim Miller
And even if you don't actually think that, even if actually you don't believe that and you think Trump leaves in 2028. Like, again, I just think about these smart people, people like Chamath and Marc Andreessen and, like, people in this tech world and then the intellectual dark web world. Like, even if you don't actually believe the worst.
- [13:00]
Sam Harris
Well, just to be clear, I don't believe the worst.
- [13:02]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Okay. So, right. He's a moron. Yeah. Like, he's a bigot and a moron. You know what I mean? Like, throwing in with him even if you don't think he's a threat to democracy, is kind of crazy.
- [13:12]
Sam Harris
Well, no, what I would point out is our democracy has already been damaged.
- [13:16]
Unknown
Right.
- [13:17]
Sam Harris
So I'm wasting no time worrying that he might not leave in 2028. I'm just worried about what's already happened that half of our society doesn't care about. I mean, we already have reelected a man to the presidency who last time around wouldn't admit he had lost an election and in fact lied continuously about having won it, knowing that those lies were a continuous provocation to violence in our society. And he clearly tried to steal the 2020 election, all while telling us that it was being stolen from him.
- [13:49]
Unknown
Right.
- [13:50]
Sam Harris
So we've, we've allowed this kind of misbehavior and we haven't penalized it. And now we've rewarded it with a second presidential term. And just look at what it's done to our politics. We know that there were Republican congressmen and women who would have voted to convict him and to impeach and convict him, but for the fact that they were worried that the MAGA cult would come for them and their families.
- [14:14]
Unknown
Right.
- [14:15]
Sam Harris
We know this from Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. This is the kinds of things that Republicans will divulge behind closed doors. They're afraid of their own base.
- [14:23]
Tim Miller
Anthony Gonzalez said it. Yeah. From Ohio. He said.
- [14:26]
Sam Harris
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's. But so that's. That's already horrifying. That's already something that is unraveling our democracy. I mean, the Republican Party is a personality cult now. It's not a normal political party. I think that's already a moral injury to our society that we should be upset about.
- [14:44]
Unknown
Right.
- [14:45]
Sam Harris
And that we certainly shouldn't have doubled down on it. And so the fact that you have people like David Sachs at all who don't care about any of that, again, I think there's an amorality at best that accounts for their behavior and their support of Trump that is really worth criticizing. On some level. They might be low information voters. They might be taken in by some of the misinformation that has been spread on the right.
- [15:10]
Tim Miller
They're not low information voters, you would think.
- [15:13]
Sam Harris
But one thing that I don't think we can discount is just how fully people are siloed now into information bubbles where they just click on the thing that they find tasty on X. And between that siloing and a natural aptitude for confirmation bias, they probably go for months without seeing some credible, disconfirming instance of their cherished opinion. And more and more, many of us are living that way, apart from those of us who feel some kind of personal and professional responsibility to go against that tide. But it's getting harder and harder to do. I mean, I deleted my Twitter account two years ago, which, I mean, honestly, I'm still embarrassed at what a life hack that proved to be. My engagement with Twitter was just not healthy. And I was a minor User of it compared to somebody like Elon. 90% of what's wrong with Elon I think can be ascribed to his Twitter addiction.
- [16:17]
Tim Miller
I need to do some self reflection on this point. I want to maybe get to that at the end, but I just want to follow up one more before we get to the reckoning side of this with like what explains these guys? Because again, it's just like Trump is so plainly stupid and so plainly erratic and like even if you don't believe any of the fascist stuff, none of these people would put Trump in charge of any of their venture capitalist businesses or the principal of their kids school or any of that like on its face. And yet they throw in with him. So there is the radicalization element. I've been. The far left has made me so upset that I'm going to throw in with the enemy. What about the financial side of it? Is he just a vessel for. They know that he won't regulate AI and crypto and Elon's various companies will now be the ones that are not tariffed. What about just the straight old fashioned financial grift? Might that explain some of it?
- [17:15]
Sam Harris
I think that explains the behavior of some people, but no one that I actually know comes to mind on that list. I mean I can well imagine that's true of some people who I don't know.
- [17:25]
Tim Miller
But for somebody like Andreessen or any of the crypto people.
- [17:30]
Sam Harris
Well, I mean I think Andreessen is just. Yes, I think he's focused on regulation and he didn't like the hostility toward crypto that the Biden administration seemed to show. Yeah. So perhaps there's some of that. But with somebody like Elon, he talked about this publicly and I really have no doubt, I take his words at face value. I mean the trans issue with his own son now daughter, where he felt like a school brainwashed his kid with.
- [17:59]
Tim Miller
This woke mind virus.
- [18:01]
Sam Harris
Yeah, basically. Yeah, the woke mind virus. And the southern border, you know, the insanity of the southern border, which, you.
- [18:08]
Tim Miller
Know, I can't be made to think that they care about the southern border. Regular people who live in Arizona might care about the southern border, but I cannot be made to think that Silicon Valley billionaires or public intellectuals or rioters for the free press actually care about the southern border. I can't.
- [18:23]
Sam Harris
I care about it and I believe that they would.
- [18:25]
Tim Miller
You do?
- [18:26]
Sam Harris
Oh yeah. I just, it just, it seems insane to not know who's coming into the.
- [18:31]
Tim Miller
Like enough to be for Trump or to even consider being for Trump.
- [18:34]
Sam Harris
No, but that's the thing, if you're not paying attention to how despicable Trump is and Trumpism is and how antithetical it is to any kind of sane political culture in our democracy, if that's not something that you're tracking, you know, and you just think you're taking him seriously, but not literally, right? You know, if you've bought that line, right, that he's just a, if you're, if you're just entertained by him and not repelled by him. If you think, I mean, the truth is the guy is genuinely entertaining. He can be genuinely funny. So he's, he brings the, the optics of celebrity to every political moment that almost no one else does. And if you're taken in by all that, like, I have, I have two very close friends who voted for Trump despite the fact that I've tried to perform an exorcism. Exorcism on them for, you know, now.
- [19:29]
Tim Miller
Would they put their kids in a school where Trump is the principal? Listen, that's, I guess that's a key question because it's like, are they fooled by him enough that they would actually trust him in real life? Or is it.
- [19:40]
Sam Harris
There are many, many reasonably smart people who are not tracking the details we're tracking, who haven't taken any kind of inventory of his lives, who think it's all harmless good fun. When he exaggerates how many stories he has in Trump Tower, et cetera, when he has an apartment that's 15,000 square feet and he says it's 30,000 square feet, that's just a kind of a charming affectation. And they don't track how that level of dishonesty contaminates everything in his world, right? So they just think it's entertaining. I mean, one thing that happened is that Mark Burnett successfully marketed this man to all of America for 12 years, 12 long years on the Apprentice as a business genius, whereas he is, in fact, a business fraud. And now, ironically, he is a real billionaire, at least on paper, because of how successfully he's grifted his cult like following and put himself atop a meme stock of a fake business. But still, most people think, okay, this guy is a legitimate business genius who, who's super practical and is just going to get things done. He just wants to disrupt things, just as we do in Silicon Valley, right? He's just a disruptor. He doesn't have time for the norms and usual guardrails of politics as usual. But we don't want that. We don't want a government that spends $10,000 to buy a toilet seat, and you're going to bring Elon and Vivek in there to clean house. And it's going to be wonderful. If you're not tracking how morally insane it is to elect someone to the presidency who trusts Putin more than our intelligence services and will say so on television, all you see is the possible upside of the bull in the China shop.
- [21:31]
Tim Miller
So this takes us to the reckoning. The things that you argue that Dems should be thinking about as far as reflecting on how they got to a place where this man could be elected again twice. There are some elements what you said that I really agree with, and others I just. I guess I want to hash out because I'm not as sure about. But why don't you give a shorter version for people that haven't listened to it, of what you think the core failings of the left were that were revealed in the election?
- [21:57]
Sam Harris
Well, some of it has come tumbling out already, I think.
- [22:01]
Tim Miller
Which elements of what has come tumbling out already do you feel like are most relevant to the electoral defeat?
- [22:06]
Sam Harris
I do think that trans activism, if nothing else, I mean, there are other variables here. I mean, you can certainly say that Kamala Harris loss was overdetermined. I mean, the incumbents everywhere lost globally. There was inflation, there was immigration. I mean, there were all these issues, any one of which, or any two of which, had they changed, might have given us a different result. But what trans activism has done to the Democratic Party is truly a sight to behold. And most Democrats, at least in my experience, are unaware of how much brand damage has been done to us. And they were unaware, and many are still unaware of the ads that Trump was running to great effect. I mean, in some markets, he was spending over a third of his ad spend on an ad that went something like, she's for they them, he's for you.
- [23:00]
Unknown
Right.
- [23:00]
Sam Harris
And explicitly invoking her apparent Support back in 2020 for transgender reassignment surgeries, for incarcerated illegal immigrants at taxpayer expense.
- [23:13]
Unknown
Right.
- [23:14]
Sam Harris
So, like that policy, the fact that she couldn't sister soldier that policy and express in the current campaign how her thinking has changed on that point, a point which really is like Onion article level comedy in our current politics.
- [23:31]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [23:31]
Sam Harris
I mean, it's insane to think that that's how we should be spending, but she couldn't disavow it. All she said, as you probably remember in one of those interviews, is, I will follow the law, I will follow the law. And she kept repeating this phrase, I will follow the law, without offering A single sane syllable on the issue of gender dysphoria and trans activism and the way in which it has bent almost everything left of center in our politics in a way that's unacknowledged. I mean, even like Latinx, right? Latinx is this insane rebranding of immigrants from Latin America that only 3% of them have any affinity for. Right. 97% of Latinos don't want this new label. This came out of a trans activist lab somewhere, probably on the Berkeley campus. Harris lost a majority of Hispanic men in this election, and in some counties, a majority of men and women. And Latinx had something to do with it. We need a hard reset on this issue in Democratic politics, among others.
- [24:40]
Tim Miller
So here's the element that I agree with. And you went on about this a little bit more, so I'll paraphrase you. The elements of putting identity politics first and being so responsive to it, being so responsive to Trump's offenses against it. You talked about how the Puerto Rican garbage, joke, whatever, everybody freaks out about it. Clearly nobody cares about that. Clearly Hispanic people broadly don't care. Maybe small pockets of people in Puerto Rican communities cared, but they're overwhelmed by the. Those who.
- [25:09]
Sam Harris
Who.
- [25:09]
Tim Miller
Who did not care. And centering identity politics. I believe you use the phrase identity politics is, Is dead. And I agree with that. The thing that I struggle with in listening to that answer is it's just obviously Kamala Harris should not have been for sex changes, transitions for prisoners or undocumented immigrants. Like, and that's silly. And, and the whole Latinx thing was obviously silly, but, like, she didn't use Latinx. Joe Biden didn't. She didn't campaign on trans issues, really. She campaigned on economic issues. She didn't really engage in the fight on that issue. It's an issue. It doesn't affect that many people, necessarily. Not as many as, like, might be affected by limits on reproductive rights or other things that Donald Trump might do. It's like unbalanced. Like, how does that explain, you know what I mean?
- [26:01]
Sam Harris
Because she didn't disavow it. I mean, it's not enough to no longer commit the sin that everyone has you on videotape committing four years ago. You have to give some account of how you've changed, why you've changed, how it makes sense that you've changed and for that change to be credible. What she was successfully cast as was a kind of woke Manchurian Candidate who wouldn't say anything sensible on these issues and who you could reasonably fear that Once she got into office, she would rule like a blue haired activist maniac because she's been programmed that way. And again, she will not say anything to disavow those orthodoxies. Right in the span of 500 words, she could have performed an exorcism on all of that. She could have said, listen, you know, I've been vice president for nearly four years. I have learned a lot. Back in 2020, there was a pendulum swinging the Democratic Party that deranged a lot of things. And I was caught up in that. And I just have to tell you that now I've come to understand that the trans issue is way more complex than certainly I understood at the time. There are real cases of gender dysphoria for which it's totally appropriate to have compassion. And we should do everything we can to protect people in those situations and make them comfortable in their bodies and make them comfortable in society. And how to do that best is still an open conversation. But there's also this on the other side. There's a real problem with social contagion, especially among teenage girls and tween girls. And I am no more comfortable with a epidemic of double mastectomies among 16 year olds in our country than any critics of my former politics might be. And so we need to have a searching conversation about how best to respond to that. And laws in Western Europe have already begun to change around these issues, and medical recommendations have begun to change. And our own medical organizations are now having to play catch up with all of that, and they're being slow to do it. And as president, I will look into all of that. That would have been completely sane. It would have taken all the stink off of it. And if it offended some activist maniacs, we should no longer care.
- [28:09]
Unknown
Right?
- [28:09]
Sam Harris
That's the rebuild that the Democratic Party needs to accomplish. And Harris should have attempted to accomplish it in her campaign. Now it might have been impossible. She only had 100 days and she would have had a lot of woke maniacs attacking her as a result. But she lost. So anything would have been worth a roll of the dice. In hindsight, I don't care about whether.
- [28:31]
Tim Miller
Woke maniacs would have yelled at her. Sure, I think what you just said probably would have helped. I do wonder if the problem isn't bigger though, if it isn't a cultural and an information environment problem like she did stand on a debate stage with him. She stood next to him.
- [28:45]
Sam Harris
She did great.
- [28:46]
Tim Miller
She dominated him. She sounded more normal, she sounded more mainstream. He had plenty of chances to deliver These attacks to make her seem like a woke far left liberal. He was unable to do so. And it did nothing. It did nothing. It didn't break through. Is that because the information environment that people are in, and going back to your old expertise, the systems in our brains have been broken to such a degree that her giving an answer such as that would only have reached the same people she already reached, which are college educated people that are open to hearing that nuanced conversation.
- [29:22]
Sam Harris
It's possible. But honestly, I do feel like some of the people we've been talking about who've been radicalized, who've gone all in for Trump despite how noxious a person he is, some of those people, many of those people, perhaps not all of those people, but still many, have enough of a intact moral operating system that they might have been successfully caught by a Democrat making sane noises on this topic. The thing that radicalized Elon is that every time this issue came up, specifically the issue of gender dysphoria and trans policy, what he got was just hammered by the. The orthodoxy which is any demural on this point. Any hesitation to affirm the gender identity of your child at the earliest possible opportunity is not only a sign of bad parenting, it's bigotry. Right? And you're culpable as you're some kind of demon to not see that wisdom and compassion is only pointing in one direction. And that's toward the instantaneous medicalization of this new self concept on the part of your child who's not old enough to drive a car. Right, that's the orthodoxy again. And it's coming from not just activists, it's coming from the New York times up until 15 minutes ago. It's coming from Harvard. That's intolerable. It's insane. And it's intolerable. Right, because it's patently insane. And so if we had some Democratic politicians who had been willing to stand in the breach, and if a Kamala Harris had been one of them and had the courage to say, enough with this insanity, the reality is somewhere more in the middle of our political discourse here. It's not over with the bigots, right? We're not bigoted against people with gender dysphoria. We want them to be happy in our society. We want them to have political equality. But no, watching biological men punch women in the face in MMA contests or anywhere else is not a solution to their problems.
- [31:40]
Unknown
Right?
- [31:40]
Sam Harris
That's clearly an aberration. And the fact that no one, literally no one in the Democratic Party who cared about their political future, had the courage to say anything sensible on that topic until the 11th hour or even beyond it. And Kamala Harris just kept mum like she had been. The way she conducted herself in those interviews, it was like someone came to her before the cameras were rolling and said, listen, you're going to be asked about transgender issues. You're going to be asked about the southern border. You're going to be asked about all of these things that you don't want to talk about. Under no circumstances can you admit that you've changed your mind.
- [32:19]
Unknown
Right?
- [32:20]
Sam Harris
Whatever you do, you're going to pivot. You can talk about Trump, you can change the subject, you can close your eyes, you can, you can storm off the set, you can do anything you want, but under no circumstances can you admit that your thinking has changed at all on any of these topics. Okay? And then let's go. Cameras rolling. And that's what she did. It's like she, like she thought someone was going to bring her children's heads in a Birkin bag at the end of the interview if she, if she broke this rule, right? And she was so tongue tied and incapable of saying anything sensible for even for the span of a single sentence that understandably, anyone right of center looked at that and said, okay, I don't know what's going on there, but she's not being honest about what she believes. If you give this woman power, she is going to be a puppet pulled every which way by the activist class and the Democratic Party. The only way to have removed that concern would have been to have gone head on against it and to have been articulate on these topics. To have, to have spoken without fear at length. Right? To go. To have gone on Joe Rogan's podcast and to have said, joe, I'll talk about anything you want. I got four hours. What do you want to talk about?
- [33:29]
Unknown
Right.
- [33:30]
Sam Harris
The reason why she didn't do that is because everyone understood. I'm not giving inside information, I'm just imagining what it was. Almost certainly so everyone understood that it would very likely be a disaster. It's not that she can't speak in English. I'm sure she is perfectly articulate when she is actually just speaking her thoughts. But because she, from a campaign point of view, felt that she had to play at all moments some kind of four dimensional chess with a half a dozen woke talking points and third rails, it becomes an impossible rhetorical exercise.
- [34:08]
Unknown
Right?
- [34:08]
Sam Harris
Joe would say, okay, what's going. What do you think about trans issues? Give me that. You were for gender reassignment surgery for illegal aliens in prison, a taxpayer expense. Why are you no longer for that? If you're no longer for that? It would have been impossible. She needs to be able to talk about these things without fear. And the Democratic Party is this jerry rigged Rube Goldberg device of death, which is just rigged to cancel the reputation of anyone who touches the wrong gear or lever, and we have to tear it down to the studs. It's just like there actually has to be a purge of the activist class in Democratic politics, otherwise no one we put forward will be electable.
- [34:53]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, some of that is maybe a little overstated for me. Certainly having a candidate who could speak about it off the cuff and speak about it deftly. And I had my issues. I was on the other side back when Obama was around. But Obama could have handled these things like this, like, where you're just dealing in the nuance, dealing in the gray, and upsetting sometimes people on his left flank. He did. I know that that's not his reputation on Fox, but he did that from time to time. Not in the sister soulja sense, but in more of, like, the analytical sense. I do wonder how you just needed.
- [35:21]
Sam Harris
An actual sister soldier moment. It needed a reset. Because of how crazy things actually got four years ago and because of how they could be successfully spun, however crazy or not they are now, you can be successfully typecast in the echo chamber of social media such that only just an articulate disavowal of these things could stand a chance of breaking through. And still that's no guarantee of breaking through.
- [35:49]
Tim Miller
So if Sam was a Democratic senator right now, how would your House member. How would you talk about the Nancy Mason, Mike Johnson, not letting Sarah McBride use the women's restroom in the Capitol? How would you talk about that?
- [36:01]
Sam Harris
Honestly, I haven't really tracked the details of that, so I'm just taking your statement at face value. Yeah.
- [36:06]
Tim Miller
Mike Johnson put out a statement today saying that the transgender woman who is now a representative from Delaware, Sarah McBride, cannot use the. The women's restrooms at the Capitol.
- [36:16]
Unknown
Right, Right.
- [36:17]
Sam Harris
So, yeah. So I don't know how exactly how it was expressed, and if it's. If it was. If it conveyed any bigotry that we'd want to push back on. But if it's just the reality that, you know, most female congress people, senators and congresswomen, don't want to share a bathroom with a trans woman, if that's just the reality in that building, well.
- [36:43]
Tim Miller
That can't be the reality. I mean, all the Democratic congresswomen wouldn't mind it. I have to imagine a handful of the Republican ones wouldn't. I mean, this feels performative. We're banning this woman from the bathroom. Like one adult. What are they scared of? But she's going to jump out and say boo behind Nancy Mace or Marjorie Taylor Greene or whoever. I mean, who cares?
- [37:04]
Sam Harris
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. I mean, I think it is probably performative, but one fix is just to create a gender neutral bathroom, you know, or a locker room or whatever. Whatever's needed there.
- [37:14]
Unknown
Right.
- [37:14]
Sam Harris
So you just do that and you don't make.
- [37:17]
Tim Miller
But the Republicans aren't going to do that.
- [37:18]
Sam Harris
But the Democrats can do that. I mean, it's just like this is just not a. The problem is that there really is in certain places a zero sum contest between women's rights and transgenders. Women's rights.
- [37:35]
Tim Miller
I think this isn't one of those.
- [37:36]
Sam Harris
No, no, but like as long as.
- [37:37]
Tim Miller
Adults grown ups going into a bathroom with stalls. This is not one of those. Zero.
- [37:41]
Sam Harris
Social. No, but. No, but the locker room is a more difficult case.
- [37:45]
Unknown
Right?
- [37:46]
Sam Harris
The locker room at a gym you've got people walking around naked. And if you have women who say, listen, I do not want to be walking around naked with a person whether, however, he or she identifies who's got male equipment.
- [37:59]
Unknown
Right.
- [37:59]
Sam Harris
I just don't want that in my locker room.
- [38:01]
Tim Miller
I got to tell you, Sam, there's a lot of people with male equipment that I don't want to see. When I'm in the men's locker room and I'm a gay man, there's a lot of people with males equipment I'd rather not see. There's a lot of guys with the, with the hair dryer blowing their balls. I'd rather not see that. That's just life, though.
- [38:17]
Sam Harris
There are crimes against humanity in every locker room. There's no question.
- [38:20]
Tim Miller
Yeah, but does the government need to get involved in that though?
- [38:22]
Sam Harris
As long as there are women who don't want this change, then you have to figure out some way to reconcile those competing demands.
- [38:30]
Unknown
Right.
- [38:31]
Sam Harris
And so one way to do it is architecturally where you just create another bathroom.
- [38:36]
Unknown
Right.
- [38:36]
Sam Harris
And that's in Congress. I would imagine they could manage that the way most restaurants and other places manage it. The idea that this is that only a transphobic asshole could demur on any of these points. That's the thing that has to be exercised.
- [38:58]
Unknown
I agree.
- [38:58]
Tim Miller
This is the tough part though. They are being transphobic assholes.
- [39:01]
Sam Harris
In certain cases, no doubt.
- [39:02]
Tim Miller
Right. And so it's tough to find the balance.
- [39:03]
Sam Harris
It's the same thing with race. I mean, we have have the same problem with racial politics, too. It's like, I mean, Black Lives Matter was clearly a highly corrupt operation and a grift, and it inflamed racial tension in areas where there need be none. Right. I mean, or where there was effectively none that found racists where no racists existed.
- [39:27]
Unknown
Right.
- [39:27]
Sam Harris
It was a classic case of activist overreach. But that doesn't negate the fact that there are real racists in our society that need to be condemned for their racism. So you have to be able to keep both of these objects in view.
- [39:40]
Tim Miller
This is kind of relates to one other thing I wanted to talk to you about that is sort of related to this. Like, how do you deal with these assholes? Because it is bad faith on the other side. And then here's one example of the race issue. We have seen this attack assault on dei, and you and I both, like, there are plenty of fucking DEI pamphlets that I think are absurd, and DEI policies, I think are absurd. That said, like, there's this whole conversation around how we should be going back to a pure meritocracy, and that is what we need in society, and DEI is preventing that. And we're getting these black people and gay people and women into jobs that they did not deserve, and they're. They're lady pilots now, and that's putting us at risk. And we just need to go back to the meritocracy. And the people that are making this argument want Dr. Oz to be in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. And it's preposterous on its face. Like, their argument is ridiculous. It is the least meritocratic cabinet in the history of the republic that will be confirmed next year. Like, it will be a bunch of clowns and grifters. Why is it only the incumbent on the Democrats to always be the ones that are responsible and have to be consistent in the argumentation, you know?
- [40:54]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, that's a very deep and troubling question there. I mean, this asymmetry between the two sides politically with respect to so many things. I mean, in particular, with respect to what is required to maintain your reputation and good standing.
- [41:13]
Tim Miller
Right?
- [41:14]
Sam Harris
So you can just. The New York Times makes a single factual error and it's. It's the topic of grave embarrassment, and people will unsubscribe and they'll get castigated by everyone. Right of center is fake news, but obviously there's just no pretense of journalistic integrity at all, as you go sufficiently right of center, whether it's Fox News or Breitbart or OWN or Epoch Times or any of these other outlets. Right? So it's asymmetric warfare in a dozen different dimensions. And yes, you know, you have in Trump's capital now, it's effectively, it's affirmative action for kooks and grifters.
- [41:51]
Unknown
Right.
- [41:52]
Sam Harris
It's just.
- [41:52]
Tim Miller
And have any of the people that supposedly care about the meritocracy or that are anti woke, have you heard a single one of them criticize this cabinet?
- [42:00]
Sam Harris
No, no, it's again, it's always hypocrisy as a concept doesn't quite cover it because these people have no standards to which they're even pretending to hold themselves. Right? They're just, they're holding the other side to its standards. And it's just, you know, pure nihilism and cynicism on their own side.
- [42:21]
Unknown
Right?
- [42:21]
Sam Harris
I mean, so literally, these are people who. For whom Alex Jones is still in good standing. And Trump is effectively an Alex Jones level liar.
- [42:31]
Unknown
Right?
- [42:32]
Sam Harris
I mean, he is somebody, he's a pure fabulist about everything, high and low, when it matters, when it doesn't matter, when it serves his purpose, when it doesn't. It's just, you know, he's a neurological case study with respect to this one variable of truth telling or bullshitting or lying by turns. And nobody cares.
- [42:52]
Unknown
Right?
- [42:53]
Sam Harris
But they do care if someone left of center lies, it gets caught in a lie that's every bit as embarrassing as it ever was because they're being held to a very different standard. Yes, this asymmetry is something, I don't know how you interact with it successfully politically. I mean, it's just. I mean, the thing I pointed out in that podcast, the Reckoning, which I found so frustrating when dealing with Trump supporters, is that, I mean, they elected a man, happily, unselfconsciously elected a man to the presidency again, who they knew would not have accepted the results of the election had he lost. Right. They fully expected Harris to concede within 24 hours. They would have been totally outraged had she not done that.
- [43:42]
Tim Miller
There were people complaining the next morning.
- [43:44]
Sam Harris
Yeah, but they knew that Trump was not going to concede. They knew it. There's literally, I would say there's no one who was supporting Trump at any level from Elon on down, who thought that if he had lost, he would have conceded the next day or probably any day thereafter, and they were okay. With that. Now, that is already, in my view, a complete erosion of a good citizen's relationship to our democracy. But it's just a level of hypocrisy and a double standard that I think should, on its face, at a minimum, should be ethically problematic to any morally intact person who's operating that way. Right. I mean, someone like David Sachs should understand that this is a moral failing to have supported someone who he knew would not have accepted a legitimate loss in a free and fair election and not have accepted it to the point where it actually would have been a provocation to violence in our society. That was the thing that was so alarming about how election night unfolded, from my point of view, is that there was this moment when Harris still could have won. Everyone was reacting to her kind of pricing in her loss already. The New York Times was reporting that her chance of winning at that point was 11%. The needle was showing 89% for Trump at that point. But the blue wall states had not fallen yet.
- [45:08]
Unknown
Right.
- [45:08]
Sam Harris
And she still could have technically won and obviously an 11% chance of something happening that turns up all the time. Right. So it was still possible. But the truth is it would not have been safe for her to have won a free and fair election at that point, given how many lies had been spread about election fraud. Given the posture of the Republican side of our society, we really were risking something like civil war. I mean, maybe that's too grand a framing, but we were certainly under the threat of real political violence in response to her winning at that point because it would have been perceived as, and spun as a completely fraudulent theft of the election on the part of the Democrats.
- [45:58]
Tim Miller
What worries you most right now, looking out, could be Trump related or not, but just kind of assess the short term landscape. What are the most proximate concerns you have?
- [46:09]
Sam Harris
Well, we've sort of been circling around that issue for this whole conversation. I worry about our inability to have a fact based conversation across political lines now that converges on a shared set of goals and values and policies and just a basic understanding of reality and how to operate within it. We're so shattered in our politics and in just our engagement with information that. Yeah, I mean, I just feel like we can't be trusted to respond to anything a pandemic, be the threats of nuclear war coming from our enemies, an acknowledgment of who our enemies actually are in the world. If something like 9, 11 happened today, what would we do in the immediate aftermath? I mean, you'd literally have people Like Alex Jones now almost at a cabinet level, perhaps even at a cabinet level in our government, telling us what they think happened, you know, and it would be at the level of, you know, Sandy Hook. You know, they were just crisis actors. The no kids were killed.
- [47:18]
Tim Miller
Yeah, yeah.
- [47:18]
Sam Harris
It's just part of this is organic. Part of it's just a result of the bad incentives and, you know, diabolical business model of social media. But. But part of it is just that we have built the tools that bad actors can consciously weaponize against us. And yeah, I mean, we've just all been enrolled into this massive psychological experiment to which no one actually consented, and it's just not going well. And I think social media is at the bottom of it. I think X is at the bottom of that. I mean, it's basically 4chan now, and it's 4channing.
- [47:51]
Tim Miller
Okay, so to this point, give me your pushback, because my pushback on this is I've stayed on X part because of my addiction. That's not as bad as Elon's, but is real. And something I'm reflecting on. But I refuse to go into a liberal bubble social media. I was on threads for one week. It was unbearable. I like if this podcast conversation we just had, if any sentence of it was put onto threads, you would be overwhelmed with people like, shaking their finger at you and telling you how wrong you're like it was. It's not a useful place for conversation across ideological lines either. So what? Do nothing? Don't go to any of the social media feeds, is the answer.
- [48:30]
Sam Harris
Well, that is my answer. I mean, honestly, I'm free to say what I say in a podcast like this in large measure because I don't care what is said about me as a result. And one of the ways of my enforcing that insouciance is to just not read those comments.
- [48:50]
Unknown
Right?
- [48:50]
Sam Harris
I mean, I just. I'm not on X to see myself endlessly disparaged by morons. And, you know, I heard the other day I was trending on X because Elon had attacked me, right? So I've been off for two years and the guy still attacks me by name on the platform. So what am I to do about that? The best thing I can do is withdraw my attention from it. Now, it's not that I never go on because to see breaking news, I do. I occasionally just go on to actually just see something unfold which is best seen on X now. And I think it's a problem that is best seen there. I think there should be an alternative for breaking news that is not ruled by the richest man in the world who's been deranged by the tools. So if insofar as we need that for breaking news, I think we should build a credible alternative and saying people should move there. But that aside, I just think our engagement with those tools is corrupting us. I think it's corrupted journalism. I think journalism long ago started writing toward Twitter in a way that was not healthy. And people got blown around by pseudo problems that only really existed online, but they got blown around enough such that they became real problems that we then had to deal with. It's like Twitter isn't real life until it is. And if you pay enough attention to it, if the New York Times basically outsources its journalistic conscience to the next thing the mob does on Twitter, then all of a sudden, real journalism is at stake and the worldviews of everyone who only reads the New York Times suddenly fall into play. So I do think we have to recognize that how we pay attention to the world and how we talk about things and the kinds of things we prioritize and what constitutes a successful cancellation of a person, and what do sane people have to worry about? All of these things, these are dials that we actually have within reach that we can tune consciously, right? And if we're not tuning them consciously, they're being tuned for us by the dynamics of the systems that we're blithely interacting with. And I recommend to anyone who has a public facing life and a reputation, digital and otherwise, that they care about, to seize the reins of this machine consciously and decide how they want to live moment to moment? I mean, do you actually want your day segmented by a hundred moments where you have checked what has happened to the thing you said on X, Right? I mean, is that. Is that really how you want to spend your time? Is that. Is that the time course by which you feel like you want to have to respond to the thing that happened in the world or the thing that was said about you? I mean, the moment I. The moment I stepped off Twitter, I realized that I now no longer had a. Had a mechanism by which to respond instantaneously to something in the news or to something that was said about me, And I could take enough time to think about what I actually wanted to say. And then the question is, is it going to survive long enough for me to say something about it on my next podcast, which I might not be doing for five days? And most things don't survive the five day test, right? 99% of what you thought you had to say falls away over the course of five days. And I view that as a feature, not a bug. I just think that is a sanity check of a sort that had been removed for me by my engagement with these platforms and which I put back in place. And it's been all to the good from my point of view.
- [52:34]
Tim Miller
It's good and something to think about and did take me to what my last question was going to be for you. Anyway, in that Reckoning podcast at the end, you said you want to dedicate less of your brain power to Donald Trump, this moron. I don't think you said moron, but you implied it. So when you're making that choice with your time, give us some recommendations. What is something healthy I can do with my brain over the next four years? Since we're stuck with this guy, I will obviously have to care about him for this job, but I'd like some Sam Harris recommendations of books, podcasts, thoughts, exercises, whatever. Open ended question. How could I better spend my time?
- [53:13]
Sam Harris
Well, you and I have very different job descriptions. So it's going to be harder for you because for me, for sure, it's. It's clear that almost every moment I spend thinking about politics, talking about politics, is best thought of as an opportunity cost. For me, it's like this. This is, it's a sign of a pathology in our culture that I have to spend as much time on politics as I do, right? And if things were going better, I would spend very little time on politics. And so obviously that can't be said of somebody who's a political writer or a political podcaster.
- [53:49]
Tim Miller
But still, you know, balance in all things. You know, there are certain ways that we could be productive. You could give listeners of this, you know, some thoughts for ways they could better spend their time.
- [54:00]
Sam Harris
I mean, the big thing for me, one reset for me, is to wait to react to something that actually happens as opposed to something that might happen like. So, for instance, with these recent cabinet appointments, you know, Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. Et cetera, I mean, obviously those are appalling prospects to have in any presidential cabinet, but they're not there yet, right? So I've commented briefly on them, but I'm not going to get a B in my bonnet until it's actually there, right? And then I can talk about, okay, well, what does it actually mean to have Tulsi Gabbard be running Intelligence for the United States in the year 2024 or 2025. Yeah, I will be happy to talk about that when it's a fair accompli, but I'm not going to waste hours in advance reacting to it to get out of the hypothetical, I think will save a fair amount of bandwidth because again, much of what Trump says he's going to do is not going to be done. And so it is with all the other egregious things he says he's committed to. Let's see what he does with respect to Ukraine or with respect to deportations or anything else.
- [55:12]
Unknown
Right.
- [55:12]
Sam Harris
I mean, I just, I. I will react when that. When it's imperative to react, but not before.
- [55:17]
Tim Miller
It's a healthier balance, probably for you. I don't know. I don't know if that's how that's that helpful for me, but we'll think about it. I'm in, like, I don't know, I should read a book or something in addition to hypothesizing about the tariffs. But I'm working on that.
- [55:33]
Sam Harris
I have the freedom to do that to. I mean, I can do a podcast on physics and not think about politics for that week.
- [55:40]
Tim Miller
Well, I'll listen to your physics podcast and not your politics podcast. That'll be my change. I will not listen to Making Sense when you have on people who I already know what they think about politics and only listen to your other ones. Well, I appreciate it very much, Sam Harris. The podcast is making Sense, and let's continue this conversation when you have the mental bandwidth for Donald Trump.
- [56:01]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, good luck over there.
- [56:02]
Tim Miller
I will say rather talks in.
- [56:04]
Sam Harris
Nice to talk to you, Tim.
- [56:05]
Tim Miller
All right, everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow with one of your faves. See y'all then. Peace.
- [56:13]
Unknown
14 John be too weak to work one sales diamond for what their words down on Paine Street Disappointment son Don't be home too late Try to get right by it sun don't wait till the break of day. Cause you know our time friends Time fades away? You know our time fades away all day Presidents look out windows all night Centuries watch the moon go all are waiting till the time is right Time don't be home today Try to get back by it sign don't wait till Afraid of day Cause you know our time fades away Time fades away, you know our time fades away.
- [57:56]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.