#423 — "More From Sam": Democracy, Populism, Wealth Inequality, News-Induced Anxiety, & Rapid Fire Questions

In this latest episode of the "More From Sam" series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events and answer some of the questions you all submitted on Substack. They discuss Epstein's "client list," how to safeguard democracy, populism, wealth inequality, the allure of socialism, how to manage feeling overwhelmed by current events, and rapid fire questions. Produced by Griffin Katz

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

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of More From Sam. Sam, how's it going?

• 0:42Sam Harris?

  Good. Good. How are you doing?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I am good. I'm good. We had dinner last night, but I still have to ask you how you're doing.

• 0:47Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, things could have changed in the meantime.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  That's true. That's true. As a reminder to all, the goal of this series is to get more from Sam on current events more often. I'm here to surface Sam's ideas, and we'll be doing so, as always, with the input of subscribers, questions, and comments. Thank you, guys, for taking the time to share those with us. And lastly, this series is not meant to be a replacement for anything. It's simply, in addition to what Sam is already doing, so if you don't enjoy it, don't worry. It's fine. One more thing before we get started, some updates on Sam's upcoming tour. There are currently five shows on sale at the moment: New York, Austin, Seattle, San Jose, and Chicago. I believe all those shows still have some tickets still available, although in some markets, I think that number is pretty low. So if you want to see the show, you can head over to Ticketmaster,

• 1:34Speaker 01

  search Sam Harris, or you can find the dates listed at samharris.org. Also, it seems likely that we're going to be adding some dates in the future, so be on the lookout for those. I'm thinking, maybe LA, maybe Texas somewhere. I don't know. If you have any suggestions, please make those suggestions, and we'll consider those. As a reminder, Sam will be delivering a prepared talk for the first part, and then he and I will sit down and do a version of this, More From Sam, in the second segment, while Sam will offer some disturbing insights. It will also be hopeful. Is that right, Sam?

• 2:03Sam Harris?

  I hope so. Again, a lot can happen between now and then.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's a night out, so regardless of the topics, it's important that you all enjoy yourselves, too, so we'll do our best to make sure that happens. Okay, let's get to our first topic, and with a little fun, did you see the latest on Epstein? The DOJ and FBI have concluded that Epstein had no client list.

• 2:23Sam Harris?

  Oh, yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Pam Bondi said she had the list on her desk, I think. And now she says there is no list. So you reconcile, you MAGA people reconcile those irreconcilable notions. I mean, it's, does anyone care? Do they care that they're lied to now about something that was their dearly held bright, shiny object for so many years? And they gotta be lying one way or the other, right? There's just no way that both these claims can be true. So.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  I mean, this was, this was a big one. I mean, a lot of people were electing Trump, right? Just that we couldn't wait to open up that, that Christmas present.

• 2:56Sam Harris?

  Well, yeah, we want to know about the UFOs. We want to know about JFK. We want to know about what I forget what else was on that list, but certainly Epstein was at the top of that list. And.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Speaking of the UFO, didn't we see something that the Pentagon did? I mean, that was pretty crazy.

• 3:11Sam Harris?

  That was crazy. It was, it sounded like it was a hazing ritual among Pentagon employees.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  That's pretty fucked up. That went on for like decades.

• 3:17Sam Harris?

  Yeah, that misfired badly.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, not good.

• 3:20Sam Harris?

  But it's, it's an easier explanation than that we're actually being visited by extraterrestrials. And they're, you know, abducting us and performing amateur proctology on people in the middle of the country.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  And yet the cameras, while they've, it's that line that they say, well, the cameras continue to improve. The sightings are always still at one megapixel.

• 3:40Sam Harris?

  It's always a, you know, it looks like a frisbee colored with, covered with tinfoil thrown in the air. Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. No one seems to be able to capture it. Yeah. Okay. Let's get to a, we just, we just celebrated July 4th. And for all our flaws, we really are an amazing country. And one of the enduring paradoxes of democracy is that it extends rights and protections even to those who would use them to undermine it. We see this in various forms, Islamists who leverage free speech and open borders to advance illiberal aims and elements on the right that manipulate loopholes and procedural gray zones to violate ethical standards and concentrate power. The central challenge is how to defend democracy against those who would hollow it out from within without compromising the liberal principles that define it. How do we build safeguards robust enough to protect democracy, yet restrained enough not to destroy it in the process?

• 4:30Sam Harris?

  Well, that really is the. $64 trillion question at this point. I mean, we have, we have this tension in open societies. And I prefer the framing of open society more than democracy. I mean, I think it's, you know, in the Venn diagram of political and social institutions, those overlap significantly. But I think Popper's notion of an open society is the more important one to defend here. And it's a society in which the institutions allow for error correction. Because, I mean, the institutions, both governmental and non-governmental, allow for error correction because things like free speech and pluralistic tolerance are enshrined as into law and into norms.

• 5:13Sam Harris?

  Right? So you can talk about more or less anything. You can argue over more or less anything. It's not a theocracy. It's not an authoritarian dictatorship. It's not a, much less a totalitarian one. It's not some, you know, tribal fiefdom in Afghanistan, right? It's just, it's a society we know and love and have been perfectly built for ourselves here in the West. But the open societies are perpetually under threat by people who would use the principles of tolerance to undermine tolerance. And one of the most glaring examples of this in recent times is the kind of the stealth and none too stealthy Islamist campaigning everywhere, which is basically trying to smuggle in

• 5:58Sam Harris?

  theocracy into Western communities. And the liberals, you know, the Ayerswold liberals, the left wing of every left wing party has been successfully gullied by this or has just not been actually deceived, but just, you know, for other reasons, decided to make common cause with, with Islamists. And so, and, you know, this has been supercharged by the war in Gaza of late and the nascent or endemic antisemitism on the left and in the Muslim community. So, yeah, it's, what to do about it is, there's no easy answer to that. I mean, we can't tip over into xenophobia and bigotry.

• 6:40Sam Harris?

  We have to focus on dangerous ideas rather than, than specific classes of people.

• 6:46Sam Harris?

  But, you know, in broad strokes, you can, it's certainly tempting to notice that specific classes of people have more than their share of dangerous ideas, right? So when, when you have a regime like, you know, the second Trump administration, or some of the right wing parties in Western Europe, wanting to filter by Muslims, or immigrants from specific countries, Muslim majority countries, it's easy to see why that's tempting. I don't agree with any of that, but the underlying concern is something I, I'm also very much worried about, which is the spread of Islamism and jihadism in the West.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So if you don't agree with that, what, how do you solve that problem? So if you don't, if you can't say, okay, we're going to try to keep anybody out of the country who's going to use democracy, or

• 7:35Sam Harris?

  Well, we should do that.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Right, so how do you do that?

• 7:38Sam Harris?

  We should vet people. We, we just shouldn't say, we're going to keep everyone from Somalia out of the country, or everyone from Eritrea, or Saudi Arabia, or just pick your country.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  But how do you find out if somebody's more religious or less religious? So you say, but take people from every country?

• 7:51Sam Harris?

  I mean, you, there has to be some process of vetting. I mean, we have to screen people, we have to talk to people, we have to do online research about people. I mean, they, they have to have references. There's, you know, I'm not into the weeds on what the process actually is, but clearly there's some process that's possible whereby we could raise the probability of successfully catching jihadists and Islamists who are trying to, to immigrate. And we just, we have to acknowledge that we want to do that. And we would, just as we wouldn't want to import Nazis into our society, we should not be eager to import Islamists and jihadists into our society.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Right, so where do you draw the line with, and I'm blanking on his name, from Columbia, who was tossed out and then brought back, you know, where do you draw the line with someone like him?

• 8:35Sam Harris?

  Khalil, I think his name was?

• 8:36Speaker 01

  That's right. Mahmoud Khalil, yeah.

• 8:38Sam Harris?

  Yeah. Well, I think we should acknowledge that it's different once someone has been admitted and been given a green card, right? Then we, then there's a different burden of proof, and there's a, there's got to be a different procedure, right? It's better to keep people out rather than let them in and then figure out how to respond to the fact that they're in now legally. But yeah, I mean, if someone is sufficiently despicable, I think we should be able to rescind their green card and kick them out of the country. I mean, it's not the same thing as you're not a citizen if you have a green card. And, um, you know, ultimately, we have to figure out what to do with citizens who go bonkers and believe these things, right? I mean, this is, you know, that's under the, the rubric of free speech and freedom of religion, but we have a problem with potentially homegrown jihadists.

• 9:22Sam Harris?

  This is a problem that's easy to forget about, given all the other problems in the world, but the moment we have another terrorist attack in the society of any scale, all of a sudden, we're going to realize this problem never went away. It's a bigger problem in Western Europe than it is in America, but it's a problem here, too. Again, we have to, we have to err on the side of tolerating the expression of any ideas, right? I just don't, I don't think we should be kicking people out for saying despicable things, but the moment they do more than merely talk about them, the moment they're planning to do something, the moment they're obstructing, physically obstructing life on a university campus, you know, keeping Jews out of certain buildings or bullying them physically, right?

• 10:05Sam Harris?

  Spitting in people's faces who are trying to attend lectures, all, you know, all those kinds of things have happened on college campuses. All of that's illegal, right? All of that should get you kicked out of, I mean, it should get you prosecuted, but it should also get you, it's all assault, but it should also get you kicked out of school, right? You should, these people shouldn't be, you know, winning awards for social activism. They should be kicked out of these Ivy League universities for behaving badly.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Topic, the new ecosystem of independent media personalities seems really no different from what we're seeing in politics. Mamdani, for example, is basically an influencer, just happens to be running for mayor. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is interviewing the president of Iran. The gatekeepers are gone and in many ways, maybe we're better off for it, but in what ways are we worse? And why do you think it feels like only populists are able to gain traction now?

• 10:55Sam Harris?

  Well, so populism is a few things, but at its core, it's a rejection of elites and elite institutions. Right. It's an expression of resentment and revulsion against the gatekeepers. So it almost has built into its DNA an abdication of the kinds of standards and notions of responsibility that those gatekeepers and institutions imperfectly embodied. Right. You have just lots of people out there with iPhones pretending to be journalists. And, you know, one of them is effectively Tucker Carlson, right? Like, he's got a, he's got more than an iPhone.

• 11:35Sam Harris?

  But basically, he has the principles of somebody just wielding an iPhone with impunity and with no reputation for professionalism or integrity to protect. So, and, you know, you could add a lot of people to that list. But so all of these sort of outdoor cats who are now gaining audiences of tens of millions of people are, I mean, it's entertaining, right? They're in the, they're in the entertainment business, right? A lot of these people are very good at what they do. I mean, I think Tucker is extremely good at what he does. So is Candace Owens, right? These are people who have charisma and they're very facile demagogues and confabulators and conspiracists. And again, they're not, they don't feel the friction of personal integrity.

• 12:20Sam Harris?

  Or at least it's not apparent to me that they, they ever have. So they can just lie and spin and there's no burden of, of not being a hypocrite. I mean, that's not a fate to be avoided because it's not a fate that is even acknowledged when you don't have any principles. So they're just kind of freewheeling bullshitters who can keep tacking left and right and up and down as their whims strike. And then this is also, also Trump is an animal of this kind. There's no burden of coherence. There's no burden of paying attention to what really happened in the world or, or, or the risks of spreading certain lies. I mean, they, this is, so it's entertainment, you know? And on some level, we're entertaining ourselves toward the precipice.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if everyone is rejecting the system and everyone becomes outdoor cats, at some point, there's nobody left in the building. And when you, when you map that onto the political sector and you see someone like a Mondani, who is falling in the footsteps of an AOC or a Bernie and on the right, you have, as you said, Trump. It just seems like these are the only people that can get traction here. And so is this what the future looks like for everyone? Is that everyone is rejecting the system and saying, I'm not, I'm not with those guys. And at some point, everybody is sort of every man for themselves.

• 13:36Sam Harris?

  Well, clearly we need institutions and we have institutions and they're, they're still functioning. It's just on the government side, and certainly in Trump's second administration, they're being increasingly populated by loyalists and cranks and loons and grifters and incompetents. Right. I mean, so these, the kinds of people who are running the Justice Department or the FBI or HHS, I mean, these are not the sober experts who you would want. Even if you agreed that you had to purge all the old experts who gave us a, you know, a bad response to COVID or, you know, a bad response to foreign policy or anything else. Right. Even if you think literally everyone in, in the Biden administration was corrupt and incompetent and you needed a new crop of people,

• 14:20Sam Harris?

  you still want sober experts who are not grifting lunatics. Right. You know, who have their own, you know, have dollar signs in the low, in the self branded logo of their name and who are just creatures who came from the tabloids and now have responsibility for law and order in our society. So it's, we need institutions that we can trust. And the question is, what will make them trustworthy again? And some I think are, are trustworthy most of the time, even though they've been, their, their reputations have been badly damaged by just the backlash against them and their own failures in recent years. And I think it's very easy to exaggerate how bad the New York Times is

• 15:04Sam Harris?

  or Harvard University is or the government is. Right. I just think it's, I think a lot of that's been exaggerated. But I, you know, I, I understand everyone's frustration with institutions in the last few years. And we have, we have a degree of transparency coupled with a degree of misinformation that is, has created a kind of perfect storm of, of reputational damage for the gatekeepers and, and the, the experts. Right. So like half of, you know, half of the stuff, speaking very broadly, half of the stuff is true and embarrassing and worth correcting. The other half is, you know, Alex Jones style confabulation.

• 15:41Sam Harris?

  And lies, but both halves are in most people's brains, or at least right of center in America now. And the left of center has his own problems, but.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Well, just problems with institutions. I mean, I'm going to try again to get you to talk about M'Nani. I mean, if you're growing up in America today where the deck feels more stacked than ever, where's your incentive to defend capitalism? What do you say to the people in New York City that say, fuck you, it hasn't worked for me? Regardless of how bad socialism has been proven to be disastrous in the past, capitalism isn't working, so we'll just try something else or bring everyone else down. So is M'Nani, are we going to see more of this in the future, more of these types?

• 16:23Sam Harris?

  Well, I have been arguing for a very long time, I mean, maybe close to two decades, that we have a real and growing problem with wealth inequality in this country. And obviously, M'Nani is responding to that. I mean, it's hard to find a locus of wealth inequality more obvious than New York City. But the idea that state-owned grocery stores is a sane response to that, or that we're going to get rid of billionaires, or the other crazy Marxist things he's proposed, those aren't serious proposals. I mean, capitalism is the best we've got. What we don't want to add to capitalism is an oligarchic winner-take-all,

• 17:07Sam Harris?

  regressive tax code, and just obvious crony capitalism and corruption, where everyone is just ransacking the place and we have something like a kleptocracy. We want the best version of capitalism we can achieve, and that requires compassion, it requires a commitment to the common good, it requires not malignantly selfish people running the government, who are trading stocks based on insider information and creating favored deals for their friends. I mean, it's just, we have a layer of corruption on top of capitalism, which is giving capitalism a bad name.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Right, but we keep saying, we have to address that, we have to fix it. And if anything, it's moving in the opposite direction, especially with this latest term. And so it does give rise to a Mom Donnie type who is incredibly likeable. You know, gregarious, he's out there with the bullhorn and he's really whipping everyone into a frenzy. And you look at the faces and they really seem like there's some relief out there. But he's obviously selling a system that's not going to work.

• 18:09Sam Harris?

  Yeah, well, he's going to freeze rents in New York City. Does that sound like a good plan to anyone who knows anything about what rent control does to the economy of a city?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, but a lot of them are just saying, okay, but whatever you keep saying about capitalism, you know, I've studied it, sounds great, it does sound better. You know, I've read the book, Sam, but you keep talking about fixing capitalism for me. It's not working and now we got a president who's, you know, offering his friends all the deals and, you know, the insider stock trading and whatever else that you're claiming. It's going in the wrong direction.

• 18:39Sam Harris?

  That's awful, but people are also just confused. This is another optical illusion, right? People don't recognize that even the barely middle-class people in our society today live much better than the wealthiest people on earth, you know, some years ago.

• 18:58Sam Harris?

  If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.