The Crisis of Truth in American Politics — with Sam Harris

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast, joins Scott Galloway to discuss the rise of conspiracy thinking, the role of the media, and how identity politics is shaping American politics. They also talk about ICE and law enforcement, Trumpism, antisemitism, Iran and Islamism, masculinity, and why it’s becoming harder for people to agree on basic facts. Follow Sam, @samharrisorg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:29Speaker 03

  Episode 379. 379 is the country code for Radicant City. 1979, McDonald's introduced the Happy Meal. True story, The Exorcist is actually having a sequel. Instead of a priest trying to get the devil out of a little girl, it's about trying to get a priest out of a little boy. Okay, that's not that good. I've used that one before. Asking churchgoers for money is like Epstein asking for bail money. Was that better? Actually, none of this is true. The Catholic Church just announced a new position on homosexuality. What is that new position? Only if it's under 12.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Welcome to the 379th episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? I'm back in action. It's a busy first week, traveling from New York to Miami, then back to... Let's talk about me. Let's talk about me. I was in Australia. I did that bridge climb thing, had dinner at the Sydney Opera House. Very cheesy, very touristy, and I absolutely loved it. I've turned into that tourist where I'm now climbing bridges and going to have dinner in the Opera House. By the way, Opera House, initially commissioned in 1959. It took 13 years. It was supposed to cost 7 million. It ended up costing 110 million. And in order to pay for it, they introduced the Australian Lottery. Who would have thought it? I think we'd all live in Australia if it wasn't so goddamn far. Oh, my gosh.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Great people, great food. I went to Lizard Island, which just reminded me a lot of the Bahamas. Very nice, but in my opinion, a brand that's a bit overrated. But what an incredible people, country. I just had such a wonderful time. My boys, I got this great picture of my boys on the bridge and oh, it's just, I just had such a nice time. Stop by Singapore. If you haven't been there, just imagine if Nordstrom's was a city, but the good Nordstrom's, back in the like 80s and 90s Nordstrom's. Imagine it was a city. That's Singapore. Had just an incredible time. Then went back to LA and worked on Netflix, which is Latin for had plastic surgery. As is the reason my camera is over. I asked my surgeon that I just wanted to look natural, but unfortunately I look naturally surprised all of the fucking time right now.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  And I wanted to look like, I don't know, a better version or a refreshed version of myself. Instead, I look like a distant cousin that just looks kind of scared all the time. That's why my camera's off. My nose looks like a minivan from the 80s. I'm pretty sure if I fell asleep, there'd be squatters in there by the time I woke up. Anyways, I'll do a reveal sometime next week, but I thought it was going to be really minor elective surgery and I have been on opiates. Is this the opiates being? Is this the opiates being? And also, folks, what hole am I trying to fill here? I have people who love me unconditionally. I'm economically secure. I actually feel pretty attractive. I have got a lot of confidence from my looks.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I am rich, so I assume people think I'm good looking. So what the fuck is going on here? And I need an intervention. You know what I was doing last night? I was looking at Ferraris online. Seriously, what the fuck is going on here? I'm about two years into a midlife crisis that I think is going to end in about 40 years. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. Anyways, longer conversation. But in today's episode, we have just the right person to talk to about it. A guy who's become a friend, is no joke a role model of mine because he's courageous, unfiltered, and also just wicked smart. Wicked smart. Of course, I'm talking about the inimitable Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher,

• 5:13Speaker 03

  bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast. We discussed with Sam masculinity in the Democratic Party, the rise of conspiracy and trolling. Oh, my God. I'm just such an enormous fan of Sam. I think he is so good. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Sam Harris.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Sam, where does this podcast find you?

• 5:43Speaker 04

  Los Angeles.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  There you go. With that, let's segue to ICE. What's your reaction to what's happening around ICE, specifically with the shooting? And what kind of damage? Or do you think it's doing damage? Or maybe if it's helping Trump and MAGA as a whole?

• 5:59Speaker 04

  A little backstory here. I've spent a lot of time focusing on, on the public misperception of police violence, right? The people just, in my experience, don't know how to watch these videos and they, the stuff that they often think is outrageous really isn't so when you think of the cop's eye view of the world. So my bias here, if anything, is to be very charitable to law enforcement because I just, you know, I've trained a lot with firearms. I've trained a lot with, you know, been trained by law enforcement at various levels. And I just, I, you know, it's very natural for me to see their perspective on, on these kinds of encounters.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  I'm interested, the simple fact that, you know, when, when someone is, is being approached by a cop and, you know, who's maybe, you know, intending to arrest them or not, just approaching them, just approaching their car. The moment their hands disappear, you know, in a country like America where there's your 400 million guns, you know, that that becomes a, a, an evolving emergency, right? I mean, your, your, your hands are everything, right? So, and so people have no sense of this, right? So they do, they immediately, you know, duck down and reach for something or like, and they just, they don't realize they're putting themselves in danger. So that said, the video that we all saw of the, um, this encounter in, in Minneapolis

• 7:22Speaker 04

  and the subsequent killing of Renee Good struck me as just a crystal clear instance of a, a terrible cop, you know, terribly trained, doing something quite unjustifiable, leading to the death of a, an innocent civilian, right? I mean, just, it was, I think, I think any effort to defend it, I, I just, I have not seen even a slightly credible one. Even if you were going to defend the first shot, the, the subsequent two are just clearly a, an attempt to ensure that she's dead after the, the, the cop is just objectively out of harms way.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  I mean, it's just not, but that, you know, so all of that's alarming and, and awful. But the worst part was the administration's response to it. I mean, just right out of the gate, they started lying in the most, I mean, it, it's not even, you can't even call it lying on some level because this is the, this is a type of lying that doesn't, it makes no pretense of being believable or, I mean, that like, if you, if you were going to lie in a way that, that was meant to deceive, you'd make some contact with the, the evidence. But here we're just, you know, they, they just seem to think that they can bludgeon us with lies, you know? And that's, that's what's happening.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  I mean, just literally every word out of the mouth of the president, the vice president, Kristi Noem, uh, they just, it's, it's just all been, you know, a- To encourage a kind of mass hallucination and the fact that so many people seem willing to participate in that hallucination right of center is frankly fairly scary.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  What do you make of, so what has struck me in addition to your, where you highlighted the administration's response is how the media has responded. And I can almost tell you how the media responds based on the logo. It just seems like there's a total lack of all critical thinking. Specifically, I was especially triggered by Fox who led with, you know, lesbian activist, you know, as if to say our audience clearly would hold her more culpable if she, we highlighted that she sleeps with someone of the same sex. That somehow that might in some way justify or make her seem less or more deserving of this kind of treatment. Any thoughts on how the media has handled it and how people are absorbing

• 9:55Speaker 03

  it? I've seen a GoFundMe for the officer that includes large donations from fairly public figures.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I'm not even sure why that would be necessary at this point because it sounds like the administration has said nothing but exculpatory things about him. And it's, I can't imagine any kind of prosecution is in the offing. I'm inclined to bend over backwards to be charitable to law enforcement in these situations. But from what we can tell about the vetting and frenzied recruitment of ICE, it's just clearly they're, they're putting guns in the hands of people who are spectacularly unqualified to be wielding

• 10:43Speaker 04

  them. And they're putting them in situations where they kind of have a philosophy of, it's not even law enforcement, right? It's just some kind of public intimidation.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Again, it's just, it's just not, this is not a normal police work that we're, we're seeing. And I think these kinds of errors, you know, I'm not, you know, be charitable with respect to the intentions of the, of the cop in this case, but I mean, it's, it's obviously an error to have shot this person and killed her, right? It's just not, and, and again, the, what, what isn't an error, what, what can't plausibly be thought to be an error is, is the, the ongoing response to this from the, the government and from highly partisan media to describe her behavior as clearly terroristic, right?

• 11:37Speaker 04

  I mean, she's a terrorist who was trying to mow down cops. I mean, not even just the one cop. It, it sounded like what to hear described from, from on high, it was, it was multiple cops. The cops were just trying to get their, their, their car out of the snow. And here came this maniac terrorist activist who was clearly weaponized by some enemy within, right? There's some, some Antifa cult that has funded all of this, right? Probably George Soros is at the back of it. And turn these, these drones loose on our, our innocent ICE officers. And she just tried to, you know, this is one of the, the car attacks that we see from jihadists, right? This is, this is what you expect to see when hearing it described.

• 12:21Speaker 04

  And then you turn on the video and you, and, and, and one of these videos was shot by the officer himself, right? I mean, he was, you might've asked why he was walking around her car, filming her with his own cellphone. I mean, that was bizarre behavior. And then, you know, then drew with his other hand and shot her through the windshield, shot her twice more once he, she was clearly past him. But from all of that video, you see a, an apparently benign person who's, who's, yes, doing something probably illegal for which maybe she should have been arrested. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's fine. She's blocking traffic. She doesn't have a right to do that with her car, but.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  The way she handled her car and the contradictory demands she was getting from the ICE agents, there was just no sign of her trying to kill anyone with her car. And again, even if, even if you were going to make the worst interpretation of her initial movements where she's, let's say she's trying to run over that ICE agent from two feet away, you know, albeit slowly, his subsequent shots are unjustified, right? He shot her through the windshield of her car, he's to the side of her car, which is moving at like two miles an hour, she's already been shot in the face and he shoots her twice

• 13:40Speaker 04

  more. That part is an execution, right? So it's just, and how we have a government now who will double and triple down on obvious lies. I mean, there's just no burden to correct the record, there's no, there's nothing careful, you know, it's all partisan bile, you know, and it's so, it's, everything is political, right? Like we have, we're just now in the presence of non-adults where like it's just, it's a, it's a, you know, Stephen Miller-ish vibe that has spread everywhere where you're, you just start demonizing your critics and

• 14:25Speaker 04

  making no contact with facts and then wait for the news cycle to move on to the next outrage, which will predictably appear within 24 hours, given what's happening with this administration.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, the recruitment strategy for, for these agents is, is telling, it feels as if it's very primal, you know, there's an invade, this is an exact quote from the recruiting materials, "There is an invasion, we're in a war and we need you to fight." And then the language of protection, invasion and insurgency, you know, it can feel, it can feel masculine and therefore emotionally powerful. Any thoughts on this sort of, on this ideology and what it's doing to our society and if there is a mainstream politics anymore?

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's hard to know where the mainstream is. We have just fragmented so totally with respect to how we consume information. But what's so disconcerting about this current event is that the information is so clear and you can be reasonably sure that everyone is seeing the same videos, right? There was this initial moment where there was a video shot from another angle, which seemed to make it a little less clear what was happening. But I mean, this is not even a situation where we're so within our echo chambers that we're not making contact with the same data. In this case, I think we clearly are.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  But the commentary on that data is so hyper partisan and then the echo chambers take over. I mean, I don't know. This is really not the blue dress, yellow dress moment where you can understand how people are seeing it so differently. I really, I honestly can't understand how anyone can honestly believe the descriptions that have come from the government. So I mean, this is an unusually extreme version of the shattering of our culture based on rival interpretations of facts. And that's what I think has caused people to kind of spin out so fully on it. I just, yeah, I'm worried.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  We have an administration who tends to frame everything in terms of there being an enemy within, that it's only decent and sane to be kind of filled with hate and fear with respect to some significant subset of your own population. There's not even a pretense of appealing to all of America with any initiative. It's just, it's intrinsically divisive, everything. It's just us against them and them is half of America and it's the institutions and it's the media. It's just, it's been going on, obviously, for about a decade with Trump and Trumpism,

• 17:19Speaker 04

  but it's getting more and more excruciating to live with its consequences.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  What do you make of the spread of all the kind of conspiracy thinking, both on the left and the right? What need do you think it's fulfilling?

• 17:33Speaker 04

  Well, I think there's more of it on the right. It is everywhere. This is a kind of a generic. Software flaw, we appear to be suffering, but right of center, the appetite for conspiracy thinking is has just, I mean, it's just grown like a cancer. And the strangest case of it, which was, which I mean, was, I think, impossible to anticipate. It was so extreme was in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. You had Candace Owens, you know, who's become the sort of kind of supernatural grifting

• 18:12Speaker 04

  force, alleged that he had been assassinated by, you know, some combination of the French Foreign Legion and the Mossad and Turning Point itself, right? Turning Point, she was culpable for, if not initiating the assassination. They were busy covering it up for some, you know, I don't think I've heard what, how they're incentivized to do this, but on her account, they're, they're covering up the murder. So they have a hand in it. And so she's been saying these things to, to great effect on the right, to millions and millions of people. She has a huge fan base, apparently, on the right. Some of the other leading lights of independent media right of center, Tucker Carlson and

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Megyn Kelly especially, have not wanted to condemn this lunacy, right? This is she, they, they want to preserve the space for her to say that, of course, this, you know, to, it's her within, well within her free speech rights to make these allegations. But the amazing thing is that when Tucker and Candace showed up at the Turning Point AmeriFest conference, where the, you know, the 30,000 true believers are going to show up in person, you know, to buy, but to buy a ticket for the privilege of being in the room where history is made, to, again, in the aftermath of the, the murder of their founder and now, you know, patron saint, it turned out that when some people on the

• 19:36Speaker 04

  stage, like Ben Shapiro condemned Candace and, and her enablers as, as being more or less, more or less the, the death knell of the, of the Republican Party and conservatism in America. Half the audience, it seemed, really wanted to hear more about the conspiracy. Right? So you have you, you can tell members of Turning Point that they have had a hand in murdering their founder, and half of them want to hear more about that. Right? I mean, that's how masochistic and insane this style of thinking is. And yeah, it's just, I mean, it's a deeply unprincipled way of trying to make sense of anomalies

• 20:19Speaker 04

  in the world, right? I mean, any situation you can point to admits of, of, you know, highly unparsimonious, reckless, you know, cognitively bizarre interpretations, right? You can just, you can just look for anomalies. You can ask the question, well, why, you know, why was, you know, I think as Candace does, I mean, she asks questions like, well, why, why did the Egyptian air force have a plane in, you know, this city on this day, right? Or so it's just, you just look, just look for something weird and then begin to pull on that thread. Doesn't matter that it's, it makes no connection to all the other threads

• 21:01Speaker 04

  you're pulling on. It's just, this is just some bright shiny object that you can, you can spin up into some weird implication. It's a character trait that certain people have. I mean, I am fairly allergic to it, but it's not to say that no one ever conspires or that no conspiracy theories ever turn out to be true. But so often, it's so obviously unlikely because the incentives aren't aligned. You can't get hundreds, much less thousands of people to be equivalently incentivized to act like psychopaths and conceal the evidence of everyone else's wrongdoing until the end of time, because the incentives are just not aligned that way. And people have guilty consciences and people get at cross purposes with their previous

• 21:46Speaker 04

  collaborators and people want to be famous or they have a change of heart. And someone winds up on 60, 60 Minutes spilling the beans about the thing that they conspired to do. But no, with these, so many of these conspiracies.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  What people imagine is just utter competence, just perfect psychopathy married to perfect competence and, you know, information concealment and the perfect alignment of incentives and, and a perfect ability to fake a far more plausible stream of evidence that, that people get in hand, right? So it doesn't matter that we've arrested the guy who, who, you know, quite obviously killed Kirk and that he had, you know, had the relevant communications about that on his phone and that his family turned him in and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it's just, it's, um, I don't know, it's a species of brain damage that, that something like a half, you know, the third to a half of our society seems to be suffering.

• 22:45Speaker 04

  And, and it's a, it's a cultural problem at bottom, I'm sure, but we have to get over it.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 23:00Scott Galloway?

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• 26:20Speaker 03

  I'd like to pivot to what I think is probably the most relative to its implications and importance for women and globally in the Middle East. What feels like proportionally undercovered, and that is Iran. I'd be very curious to get your thoughts on Iran and how the West and different groups in the media are responding to it.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  Well, it is undercovered, suspiciously so. I think that could be changing as we speak today, but up until this moment, I mean, up until this very hour, it's really been a fairly telling silence from the mainstream media. I think it's, the reason why it's undercovered is probably twofold. One is the instability there seems to be a feather in Trump's cap with respect to foreign policy. I mean, you can only imagine that our support of Israel and our joining in the bombing of Iran has been the proximate cause of this.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  And if that winds up being a good thing, that, you know, it seems inconvenient for many of Trump's detractors. I mean, it's not inconvenient for me. I mean, I obviously despise Trump and Trumpism and, you know, 95% of what he's been about as president, but I can readily admit that some things he's done have been good. And one of the things is to be fairly uncompromising with respect to defending open societies and Israel against this specific species of enemy, which is, you know, the global jihadism and the culture that supports it.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  And, you know, the variant in Iran that has been, you know, a genuine tyranny for, you know, nearly as long as you and I have been alive, since 1979, is something that we have always, we should have always supported the uprisings against. I think it's scandalous how mealy-mouthed Obama and Biden were on that front. I mean, the Iranians have been showing a lot of courage, especially Iranian women, periodically to try to fight for their political equality.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Going back many years and under, you know, democratic governments, we have really been shamefully silent. And that probably leads to the second reason why is it's not, you know, obviously, Trump isn't the explanation for why Obama and Biden couldn't have supported Iran more or the Iranian people more. And there it's this lingering moral confusion left of center around Islam and Islamism and jihadism and not wanting to draw too clear a line against the the problem of theocracy there, right? I mean, Islamic theocracy

• 29:30Speaker 04

  is a deal breaker for the West and for open societies. It's this is crystal clear, right? And it's and I mean, now we have the spectacle of the UAE announcing, I don't know if you saw this, but the UAE recently announced that they will no longer support their own students studying abroad in the UK for fear that those students will be radicalized on British campuses by the Muslim Brotherhood, right? That's how bad this is, right? That's how blind we have been to the infiltration of our own institutions by this ideology. We have to get our heads screwed on straight around this. And Trump, for all of his flaws,

• 30:12Speaker 04

  and for all of the flaws of the people around him, I mean, they're truly awful people around him, who, you know, just psychopaths and grifters and know nothings and incompetence. The general shape of their their corruption and their self stealing and their unprofessionalism still leans in the direction of sanity on this point, right? There's just not much tolerance for Jihadism and Islamism coming out of, out of, you know, both within the, in the West and coming from societies like Iran. And so I think Trump is a very uncertain ally for everyone, including Israel, given

• 30:56Speaker 04

  his aptitude for, for corruption and, and just, just, you know, pure self-interest and just his distractibility. But, you know, thus far, he's been better than, than, um, uh, many people could have hoped and certainly than, than many, than really any Democrat would have been expected to be, at least at this moment. I mean, I, I hold out hope that it'll be a different story in 2028, but I do think Trump has been better on this issue than we would have any right to, to have expected Kamala Harris to have been. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I take, it caused me a fair amount of pain to, to, to admit that, but I just think it's true.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Are you familiar with Alaka Le Bon?

• 31:41Speaker 04

  Uh, no, no.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  She's a really impressive, she's an author or just a commentator, but I saw some content on hers and it kind of reminded me of you. And she has something she calls the moral color code. And it's not about the, the oppression of people or how severe or widespread the oppression or the horror is. It's about the color of the skin of the oppressor that mandates or deems the reaction from the West and progressive media. And she uses Iran as an example that the left goes into moral paralysis when the oppressor is brown. And that if you look at what's happening in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, you know, on and on and

• 32:26Speaker 03

  on versus it, that inspires a muted reaction versus, uh, an oppressor that's conflated with being rich and white, specifically Israel, that they're just entirely different reactions. And I thought of you, any thoughts?

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now, if one thing can be said for certain on this front is that the world doesn't much care, I mean, the, the West and the liberal West doesn't much care when Muslims kill other Muslims, really in, in any number. I mean, there are instances where you can point to hundreds of thousands of dead in Syria and Yemen and Sudan, but the world really cares when Westerners do it and the world especially cares when Jews do it. Right? I mean, that's, that's the thing that just, um, You know, lit up our information landscape after, after the war in Gaza started, or in fact, before it started, the merely the prospect of Israel retaliating against

• 33:22Speaker 04

  the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, right? But we had people supporting Hamas before Israel had made a move in, in response. It's just, you know, everything is upside down here. I mean, we're, you know, something like two thirds of countries have an origin story that is similar to Israel's in the sense that, you know, mapmakers just simply drew lines on paper without much regard for the lives of the people living within those frontiers. You know, their, their, their countries, you know, formed the same year as Israel, like Pakistan, who have similar origin stories. But only Israel has to defend its right to exist, right? But only Israel has to continually litigate this. And the

• 34:06Speaker 04

  United Nations has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined, right? I mean, and these countries include places like, like Yemen and Sudan and, and Syria, you know, countries that have perpetrated actual genocides, right? So none of this makes any sense. This is just, you know, the, the only interpretation that makes sense of it is antisemitism in some form, based on some rationale that is, you know, goes unexpressed. So, yeah, I mean, this, this issue has pretty much destroyed the moral intuitions of the left. And, you know, it, it's not only a problem for Israel or for, for Jews. I mean, this just gets mapped on to our, our domestic politics. I mean, we're living in a country

• 34:49Speaker 04

  where, you know, when you find, when you hear that some act of violence occurred on a subway car, say, and, you know, someone was killed, you know, someone, someone, there were many innocent bystanders and someone was, was killed. You can describe it as exhaustively as you like. I mean, you can tell, you can tell people exactly what happened, how it escalated, whether there were weapons involved, how many, who was the attacker and who was a, you know, how, and how the, how he behaved moments before and after, et cetera. You can describe everything about it, you know, every morally and legally salient detail, but. Something like half of our society won't know quite how they feel about what you've

• 35:31Speaker 04

  just described until you tell them the skin colors of the people involved, right? You know, was the attacker white or black? And was the victim white or black? That's just obscene, right? This is just a flaw in our moral and social psychology, and we have to figure out how to get over it. And unfortunately, left of center, I mean, in democratic politics, you still have this misapprehension of that identity politics is somehow worth preserving, right? That we have to keep trumpeting the primacy of identity and insinuate race and racial

• 36:11Speaker 04

  concerns and, you know, other identitarian concerns into, you know, into every instance. And it's, if we can't get over that left of center, you know, fairly immediately, I just, I think, you know, I think 2028 is, is going to be a story of President Vance or his, you know, or whoever's adjacent to him in the Republican Party. And, um, yeah, that's, that's fairly scary.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  So you feel it? And I'll, I'll give you an example. I also want to acknowledge that I probably had a lot of, well, I know I had a lot of advantage because of my identity through the 90s, raising money and e-commerce and, you know, it would just didn't hurt to be a white guy with a shaved, white heterosexual guy with a shaved head, raising money in Silicon Valley relative to other groups. I have really sensed lately, and I'm pretty sure that you must sense this, with my book talking about an aspirational code for masculinity or the struggles that men face, I've come to the conclusion I'm the wrong messenger. Because a white dude of my age talking about men in any means that is sympathetic towards

• 37:26Speaker 03

  them is just, just evokes a gag reflex from the left. It just, and I'd like to think, or I'm hoping it's not my arguments, I thought, I think it is some of it's my identity, and I've come to the conclusion that it, I'm just maybe the wrong messenger. Do you feel like your identity gets in the way of your message?

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Oh, it certainly does. It doesn't get in the way of my stating it, but it gets in the way of the audience hearing it, there's no question. And that's, again, that's a- A real cultural flaw at this point. I mean, it is in large measure what has given us Trump and Trumpism. I blame the left as much as I blame the right for Trump and Trumpism. I mean, you know, I can speak endlessly on either topic, but there's something more galling about the left's culpability here because it's so unnecessary. It's such a spectacular own goal, right? I mean, it should be so easy for us to champion our values of

• 38:27Speaker 04

  political equality and to fight for them and to resist bigotry of every form, you know, whether it's racism or misogyny or transphobia or whatever it is, right? We can resist all of these things while remaining sane and intellectually honest, right? And it's just, but the Democratic Party has been so captured by its activists, which is probably 8% of Democrats at best. The pandering to the loudest and most hysterical of the far left has to stop. And, you know, I hope it's, I hope we reach the high watermark somewhere

• 39:09Speaker 04

  around 2024, but you know, we'll know as we get closer to the midterms, I expect.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  I want to pivot. The example you used of Britain of basically, it's interesting that the UAE and several Gulf nations are much more freaked out, wary, concerned about radical Islam than many, many Western governments. If you got a call from, I don't know, name your Senate Intelligence Committee or Congressional Caucus, whatever, and they said, Sam, we see this as a real threat. What do you think in terms of specific policy recommendations would you make to address the threat?

• 39:50Speaker 04

  It's a tiny number of committed jihadists, but if you're going to talk about the wider culture of support for jihadism, the wider culture of people who think that really it is incumbent upon any God-fearing Muslim to wage war against the infidel, at least in some way, at some point, or to support those who do, and that infidels and apostates and Jews are fit only for the fires of hell, and that we really want to follow Muhammad's example and have a very muscular attitude towards spreading the one true faith to the ends of the earth, that's a much larger footprint. We need an honest conversation about this.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  What we need to provoke is a kind of renaissance/reformation/civil war, depending on the context, within the Muslim world against jihadism and against a 7th-century attitude toward theocracy. And we're just nowhere near being able to do that, especially on the left. I mean, on the right, you have people who are willing to speak honestly about the threat, but they are Christian nationalists and fascists, right? I mean, they are their own problem with respect to demagoguery and dogmatism and even aspiring theocracy, right? I mean,

• 41:16Speaker 04

  so that's obviously unhelpful. But it's just true, as David Frum has now famously said, that if liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will. And we need a left that understands that open societies are vulnerable to what Karl Popper called "the paradox of tolerance", which is that the tolerance of open societies can be used against them to subvert them from within. And Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood are very clear-eyed about this. I mean, they have, for now, generations, been working to subvert open societies from within by the very levers that...

• 42:03Speaker 04

  We, you know, we want to protect, you know, free speech and tolerance of diversity. Right. And, and, and they've managed to frame any criticism of dangerous ideas within Islam as bigotry. So even, even if you're fighting for the, the, the equal rights of women and girls in a, in a country like Tehran, where, you know, women are being, being imprisoned or even killed for just showing their hair, this, this notion of Islamophobia, it manages to frame those concerns, those genuine, you know, civil rights and humanitarian concerns as a form of bigotry. Right. And it's not a form of bigotry. I mean, criticizing Islam as a system of ideas is not, is no more a form of bigotry than criticizing communism

• 42:45Speaker 04

  as a system of ideas. And it's not at all, you know, analogous to antisemitism as we, you know, if we could easily, I could easily describe to you, but it's, it's mistaken for bigotry against a people based on indelible characteristics like race and ethnicity. And it simply isn't, right? Islam is a system of ideas that now exists in at least 100 countries. And it is, it has some attitudes toward things like the rights of women and free speech and, you know, the freedom to change your faith that are deeply anachronistic and, and dangerous. And we have to, we have to be honestly, honestly criticizing these ideas.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  Okay. So you get a call from the Chair of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Tom Cotton, and the Vice Chair, Senator Mark Warner. And they say, Sam, we hear you. Whether it's 20 million or 60 million, what do we do? What specific policies do you think that you would recommend to the, the Select Committee that they consider implementing?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  Well, we should empower genuine secularists and apostates, you know, ex-Muslims wherever we can. I mean, there's no one more articulate on this topic than ex-Muslims, I mean, people from these various cultures, right, about whom the identity politics game cannot be played, right. So half the people listening to us right now are beginning to whinge about, you know, two white guys talking about this and this is just Islamophobia, right. So what you really need for this conversation to run through, if it can, in left of center circles, is to have, you know, an ex-Muslim from, you know, the Arab world, or from, you know, Pakistan, or some relevant place, who speaks the language, who knows what is being

• 44:38Speaker 04

  said, you know, behind closed doors, not in English, who knows exactly how deep antisemitism and misogyny and other, you know, noxious variables run within the teachings of Islam, who can't be, you know, who can't be snowed on these topics. And you need to empower those people. You need to empower, and then you need to find the genuine liberals and genuine secularists within the Muslim world, and that is very, very hard. It's not that they don't exist, but it's difficult, right. I mean, all the definitions of terms change when you get into these cultures, right. And to talk about fundamentalism is not the

• 45:17Speaker 04

  same as talking about fundamentalism in a Christian context in America. And so it's, we need to provoke, again, a kind of renaissance and reformation, and when push comes to shove, a civil war in places where jihadism and Islamism are very, very threatening. And that's, unfortunately, that's increasingly in places in the West. And we go to sleep on this issue. It just takes the next terrorist atrocity to wake us up for a time, you know, the next Charlie Hebdo massacre, or, you know, Badaklan attack, you know, in a country like France, then all of a sudden, we take this issue seriously. But

• 46:01Speaker 04

  You know, that, that, all of that has a certain half-life and we go to sleep again. Generally speaking, we need to recognize that we don't want more Islamists and jihadists in our societies. Right? That has immigration implications. That has immigration implications that are uncomfortably,

• 46:18Speaker 04

  that have uncomfortable echoes of the kinds of bigoted and crazy things someone like Stephen Miller will say, right? So, you know, so when Stephen Miller or Donald Trump will say like, we want, we don't want any more Muslims from shithole countries, right? Right? There's a kernel of truth in that, right? You have to cut through the bigotry and, you know, you know, moral insanity that those guys just radiate from their pores, but there is a kernel of truth. We don't want any more, you know, true believers who have no intention of assimilating in the West, in our open societies, right? And people do come here with no intention of assimilating.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  That's just a fact. It's, it's, it's, it's not even a secret. It's, it's, I mean, you can just read the documents that are, you know, that, you know, have, you know, Muslim Brotherhood signatures on them attesting to this, right? So it's, and, and then we have our own internal organizations like the Council of American Islamic Relations that, that left of center get treated by journalists like they're the Muslim version of the ACLU or the NAACP, but they're actually stealth Islamist organizations that have direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, right? So it's, and, and you have, you have the fact that a country like Qatar, country, the country of Qatar is the largest funder, the largest foreign funder of American universities at this point.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's genuinely sinister, right? This is not, there's nothing benign about that. And left of center, people are reliably confused on this, on this subject. And it's, um, the confusion is not going to age well. But crucially, Muslims who really want to live in open societies and want to support secular values that make that possible will be the first people to recognize the danger of certain of their co-religionists. Right? And, and it's the fear that they won't that needs to be examined, right? I mean, like, we, we have this fear on the left that if you, if you speak too honestly about what's really in the holy books. And talk about how dysfunctional all that is.

• 48:26Speaker 04

  You're going to alienate all the good Muslims, right? Well, if that's the problem, then we've already, then we have a much bigger problem than, than, you know, even I'm willing to admit, right? No, no, the good Muslims, the good, the sane ones, the ones who want to live the way we want to live, right? In tolerant, open societies are not going to be alienated by an honest discussion of the doctrines around apostasy and blasphemy and homosexuality and jihad that really exist within the tradition and which really have to be kind of theologically recontextualized and disavowed and sidelined politically in our societies.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  And if, if, if that's not on the menu for most Muslims, then we have, you know, then it's going to be a very, very dark future, right? And, and I mean, and that's not the future I expect, but that's the future that people seem to fear when they, when they want to castigate someone like me as an Islamophobe for the things I just said.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  We'll be right back.

• 49:39Speaker 00

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• 51:48Speaker 03

  We're back with more from Sam Harris.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  So you've been very generous with your time. And as we wrap up here, and there's no way to make this altitude change elegantly, but whenever we get together, one of the things I enjoy the most is talking about our Kids.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Talk about erectile dysfunction.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  That's just a given at our age. But I'm just curious, any observations or thoughts you want to share about raising teenagers and your observations around having teenagers?

• 52:14Speaker 04

  I do think that they're, they can be more sophisticated than we might expect in navigating this space because, I mean, it's evolving so fast and they're digital natives in a way that we're not.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm humbled by how much control we don't have. I mean, the research seems to suggest that, that, you know, any pretension that you're going to really impart your...

• 52:43Speaker 04

  View of the world and your interest to your kids beyond just giving them your genes, you know, and their kind of native, native interests and aptitudes is fairly forlorn. I mean, it's just not, it's just not what the research shows. I mean, the research shows that for basically anything of interest psychologically and as a matter of character, you know, it's like 50% genetic and 50% environmental, but the environment is not your parenting, right? It's, it's, so, you know, it matters who their friends are, it matters, you know, what school they go to to some degree, it matters, it matters the culture that gets in, but

• 53:28Speaker 04

  we have very little control over that, I've noticed, right? Like you pick, you pick a nice, like in the most privileged case, you get your, you struggle to get your kid into a private school that you hope is going to be good, but really you have no control over what that looks like and you, you know, you have no control over the teachers they wind up getting and there are many disappointments to be had on that front and surprises. And you can't pick their friends and their friends turn out to be, you know, good or bad depending and it really is a, it's just a great spin of the lottery wheel, right? It's just, it's just the roulette wheel, it's just not a, control is not obvious, but good intentions can be, right?

• 54:12Speaker 04

  I mean, like we really, we really live with the character of our intentions here. I mean, that's what colors your mind with respect to your moment to moment engagement with other people. And if you, if you love your kids and you want them to thrive and you delight in their, their, you know, creativity and, you know, you're going to have an experience of parenting, which is beautiful despite the fact that you really don't have a lot of control over the world or their lives in the world.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  If you can think of them, give me one or two things that your wife and your daughters think of you. That is in stark contrast to what people think about you publicly.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Oh, well, I mean, I can be the silly dad in a way that would be, I would be unrecognizable to my audience if, you know, yeah, the home videos of me with the cats or with my daughters, I think, would would show a face of me that would fairly astonish my audience. Those videos are never getting out, but, but, yeah, they exist. But, I mean, that, I mean, I, there is something I do, as you can tell from the hour we've already spent, I can get into a zone where, because of the topic and because of, you know, my thoughts on it, I'm, you know, I'm in, I'm in an orbit where it doesn't allow for many of the other

• 55:32Speaker 04

  sides of my personality to come through, or at least, you know, you know, for whatever reason, you know, I don't allow it, or it just doesn't happen. And I remember being quite amazed that the first time my wife, Annika, came on my podcast, I forget what episode it was, I mean, it was, it was not an early episode, it might have been like episode 100 or something, or maybe 80, was the first time that my audience had ever heard me laugh. And, you know, it was like, it was like some kind of religious revelation. I mean, like, the response to it was just insane. So, anyway, I mean, that's, yeah, I'm a, I'm a peculiar podcaster, I guess, but I think a reasonably fun dad, and my,

• 56:17Speaker 04

  my girls could probably attest to that.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast, and also the Silly Dad. Sam, I always enjoy these conversations and appreciate your time. I know how in demand you are. Really, again, thanks so much for your continued good work.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, always, always happy to talk to you.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our associate producer is Laura Genere. Kami Reek is our social producer. Jubero's is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Pod from Prof G Media.

• 57:01Speaker 02

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• 57:31Speaker 06

  I'm Glenn Washington, host of Snap Judgment from KQED. Every week, Snap drops you inside someone's biggest decision. The kind of decision you can only make once. With everything on the line, what do you believe? What do you want? And what would you risk to get it? Find out. Tap to listen now to Snap Judgment from KQED on Spotify.