#498 — More From Sam: Bond Villains, Useful Idiots, Firing Squads, and More

In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events. They discuss Alex Gibney's documentary on Elon Musk, Dara Horn's insights into antisemitism, the Democrats' Hasan Piker problem, Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, the Pentagon's plan to livestream a military execution, Trump's $5,000 voter promise, tech leaders' capitulation to Trump, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe http://samharris.org/subscribe.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Okay, welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Hey, Sam, how are you?

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Hey, good to see you.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Good to see you, too. We have a lot to discuss today, so let's get on to our first topic. I enjoyed your recent conversation with Alex Gibney about his new documentary on Elon Musk that comes out Friday, October 19th, nationwide. I think it comes on HBO at first quarter next year. I think that's right. And I haven't had a chance to see the film yet, but suppose we had known 20 years ago exactly who Elon was, an immense talent, a force of nature, but also a bully who doesn't do well with regulation. You can throw in a liar, etc., but he just doesn't, he doesn't function by the rules of society. Should we have crafted a lane for him? Like, could we have said as a country, this guy is different. We recognize that. We're going to back him on a different set of standards. He'll get rich, but we'll all participate. Like, might that have allowed him to do great

• 1:12Speaker 01

  things for the world without becoming a villain to so many? And I know you understand the framing. Like, is there a way that we could have acknowledged he's a once in a lifetime, once in a generation talent and treated him in some way that would have maximized what he did for society and minimized the downside?

• 1:26Speaker 02

  Well, we sort of did that without minimizing the downside. I mean, he had all the lanes he needed to succeed. He's, he had billions of dollars of government grants and subsidies. And I mean, it's just, I mean, I think it's, I think it was $30 billion, something like that, like 20 billion for SpaceX and 10 billion for Tesla, money directly from the government. He didn't need any. He succeeded in all kinds of ways. I mean, that's really not disputable. I mean, nobody blocked him, right? It's just, there are specific things he was allowed to do, some of which there may be no obvious remedy for. I mean, like, I'm not quite sure what you do when someone buys Twitter and then turns it into

• 2:07Speaker 02

  a megaphone for white supremacists and, and moral lunatics. He's free to do that.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  I think that came with it. I think that came with it. I think, obviously, I believe he was trying to, in his own mind, at least, to protect free speech that came with that as well.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I mean, that part is pretty clearly bullshit. But still, it's like, should a person be able to buy, if someone has amassed extraordinary wealth through legal means, right, building electric cars, launching rockets, etc., should they be able to buy a publicly traded social media platform that already has some hundreds of millions of users, take it private, and tune the algorithm to show their own posts preferentially, and then signal boost antisemites and neo-Nazis that they just happen to like? I think so. I don't think we can pass a law against that. Right? So it's not like, I don't know what, what the remedy is, except for just marketplace recognizing that he's behaving

• 3:06Speaker 02

  like a sociopath and penalizing him for it, right? For people caring Tesla owners and people who would, who would have contracts with his various companies caring not to be in business with somebody who's literally aiding and abetting an explosion of white supremacist bullshit in our society. Right? So, I mean, on some level, you have to rely on people, consumers, to have good taste and ethical scruples. And if you can't rely on that, which I think we probably can't, your culture is pretty well fucked. Right? So that's where we are. It's like, I don't know what we would have done. He had the lane he's needed to succeed. It would be more than, more than that. He had, I mean, massive government support.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he spent a lot of time having to, I think one of the claims in the film was that he did some battery replacement gimmick to get money, and he's had to continually lie about full self-driving that he's trying to develop. Which, by the way, that claim that Alex said in the interview with you, that Tesla's claim that full self-driving is eight times safer is actually inaccurate, blew my mind. I think everyone I talk to who drives a Tesla is like, at least anecdotally, feels that that is a, a real claim, that it really does work.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm waiting to hear somebody push back on that. I haven't, I haven't looked, but let me know if that happens. As I said in the podcast, I wasn't sure what was true there. And I, and I do imagine that at some point, if not now, if not six months ago, full self-driving on Tesla is going to be better than, than a person driving. I'm really not questioning the progress curve there. It's just that he's, at every stage along the way, exaggerated the progress and in certain cases lied about it and consciously perpetrated fraud. I mean, that painted black video anecdote is just evil. I mean, there's no question. You're going to get people killed playing games like that. And just, I mean,

• 4:56Speaker 02

  he's pretending his, his car can do things it can't do, and people are relying on it to do those things at, you know, while going 70 miles an hour on the highway.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's my point. My point is, had we acknowledged who he was and said, you don't have to lie about this. Just tell us that some people are still, if he could come out and say, look, some people are going to die.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  He doesn't have to lie about anything. He didn't have to lie about full self-driving. He could have just represented the actual progress, its actual capabilities, how you can safely use it, every increment of progress from there on. And also, he could have made the ethical case, which he did, which is that there's a moral illusion lurking at the center of this whole situation, which we have to be alert to and not be taken in by. And I mean, he actually, Gibney lets him express it in his own words in this podcast, is, I'm sorry, in the film. Elon says at some point that even when we've, we've rung 90% of the fatalities out of driving, because the, the robots are that much better, people

• 5:58Speaker 02

  are still going to sue over the remaining 10% of fatalities. Right? And that's, that's an illusion. It's understandable. But do we want to reduce driving fatalities by 90% or don't we? Right? And that's a totally valid point. It's something that he could have always talked about. No one forced this guy to become a Bond villain.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Right. You're saying, so, right, he could have just been honest about the progress and not used lies. I mean, they're actual lies. I mean, I remember when I first bought my Tesla in 2017, they told me, I bought it in August, they said, by December, for sure, full self-driving would be available. But it sounds like he didn't have to lie to use the stock market to raise money or to inflate the stock.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  No, I mean, it's, you know, lying is not, it should do brand damage whenever it's discovered. And the question is, you know, why doesn't it, or doesn't it effectively in this case? I don't know. I mean, I honestly don't know. There's, there's something very Trumpian about the whole phenomenon at this point. I mean, like, Trump has cultivated an audience that does not care whether he's consistent with himself in any way. And Elon has done something similar.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, we don't need to spend more time on this one. We can move on. Speaking of podcasts, guests, I really enjoyed your recent episode with Dara Horn as well. I know that many people, including myself, have always wondered where antisemitism comes from and why Jews have to have security at their places of worship or, or schools. I've always understood it in a visceral way, but I never had a way to explain it. And I think she was the first person to put into words what I felt, backed with real wisdom and, and history. Did you come away from that conversation or from reading her book with anything new as well?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, first of all, I have to emphasize again, her book is, is really great, and we did not exhaust its contents at all. So anyone who got a lot from that podcast is still going to get a ton from her book. I mean, she just goes into the history. And she's a very good writer, too. So it's just a great book. I came away with, I don't think she or anyone truly explains the origin of antisemitism or the degree to which it's just perennial. I mean, just the fact that in contexts that, where it should be impossible to really fixate on, on the Jews as a priority, it nonetheless happens. I mean, for me, it's, I think the religious underpinnings of it explain it

• 8:20Speaker 02

  more than anything else. I mean, in most times and places that we're talking about, most people are pretty religious to one or another degree. I mean, I guess, I guess we can leave communist Russia, the Soviet Union aside for this. I mean, it has its own explanation there, but, which Dara goes into. But, yeah, I mean, just the fact that for 2,000 years, the Jews, remaining Jews, have had to repudiate Christianity and Islam, and they're basically always surrounded by Christians and Muslims. That explains the durability of it, if not the, and also kind of the origin of it, as much as anything for me. I mean, the Jews just don't accept other people's religious convictions at

• 9:00Speaker 02

  all, even among, you know, polytheists, let's say, in a Roman context. They're continually calling bullshit on everybody's, everybody else's faith claims, right? So that's just a, a structure that is going to engineer tribal hatred, I think.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  But her emphasis on it being not really a hatred at bottom, but a, a false view of how the world works. That is a conspiracy theory, or in the shortest form, in her case, a lie. I think that's very useful. That's a very useful framing. I mean, when you hear what antisemites think is really happening in the world, it, it's almost always a story of unjustified Jewish power working behind the scenes. Right? And, and that's, um, yeah, I mean, it is a, in many cases, a completely hallucinated claim about the way the world is working.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Well, the Jews are to blame for, I think Douglas Murray said this, I'm sure others have, no matter, you know, whether they're city folk, or they're country folk, or they're rich, or they're poor, or they're, you know, they have this job, or they don't have this job, no matter what it is.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  They're capitalists, they're communists.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're hated no matter where they are.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  There is, uh, other framing is that the Jews, for whatever reason, and from whatever angle, are undermining the thing you most care about. If you most care about capitalism, well, then they're communists. If you most care about communism, well, then they're capitalists. But that the fact that it's endlessly shape shifting like that, and admits of no disconfirmation, it's just, it is pretty unique. It's not, not an ordinary form of bigotry.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Well, and do you think if more people understood what she's talking about, that could, uh, be useful or helpful? Are you more optimistic that more of this information could do anything for us? Or, or do you think that, um, this has been here forever, it's going to be here forever?

• 10:47Speaker 02

  I can't say I'm optimistic. I mean, I, I think she sounds more optimistic than, than I feel. I, I'm optimistic that when put, so for me, talking about antisemitism, as you know, is something that I have really been dragged kicking and screaming to. I mean, I, I, prior to October 7th, I really thought it was more or less a non-issue. You know, I didn't think it had disappeared, but I just, in open societies, and certainly in America, it was, despite the fact that Jews always top the FBI's list of, you know, hate crime victims, I mean, for every year after nine 11 in America, people don't really understand this, they think that Muslims have been subjected to this great groundswell of, of bigotry in America.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  That is almost total bullshit, but, or if it isn't bullshit, let's say, at whatever level you find the bigotry against Muslims intolerable, recognize that for every year after nine 11, Jews have been victimized five to 10x more than that. Right? And I didn't care about it until October 7th, because prior to October 7th, it still seemed like a rounding error on a rounding error of problems that should really concern us in society. Again, it's not to say it didn't exist and wasn't galling, but, you know, once a decade, something truly awful, like, you know, the Tree of Life synagogue massacre would happen.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Well, wasn't it more October 8th that was the problem for you than October 7th? I mean, October 7th, obviously terrible, but.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, the response to October 7th. I mean, that, that proved that, okay, we, we're on a powder keg of Jew hate that I didn't quite understand was there. Um, it's, it's obviously has gotten leveraged and weaponized and elaborated by this red, green alliance, this alliance between the far left and Islamism worldwide. And the machinery to prosecute that alliance was in place and has been, you know, that, that's been built fairly patiently over decades, you know, well-funded by states like Qatar and, and Iran, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, so I was, I was, like many, many people are blindsided by the, the

• 12:49Speaker 02

  level of the antisemitism and also the level of moral blindness around just how perverse this alliance is. I mean, you, I mean, in the, in the most SNL-like case, you know, the queers chanting for Palestine, right? I mean, that's just, you know, it's hard to understand that level of moral confusion. I mean, just, it shouldn't be possible, but it's not only possible, you can, it's guaranteed to exist in our most elite universities. Back to the question of whether I'm optimistic, I, I think I'm optimistic that we're, we're not suicidal, and a certain degree of Islamist lunacy is going to be indigestible even by the left ultimately. Certainly by, by the mainstream left that currently can't figure out how not to talk

• 13:33Speaker 02

  to Hasan Piker, or can't imagine that there's anything wrong with Abdul El-Sayed or Zohran Mamdani. Again, I'm not, I'm not saying that those guys are jihadists, but they're at best useful idiots who are giving cover for genuine Islamism in America. Right? I mean, they're genuine theocrats trying to undermine liberal values in America, and um, they belong to organizations that people are mystified by, like the Council of American Islamic Relations. Mainstream journalists imagine this is the ACLU for Muslims. It is not the ACLU for Muslims. It is a none-too-stealthy, theocratic organization staffed by religious bullies, right? Who have direct ties to Hamas front groups and to the Muslim Brotherhood.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  I mean, this is just a, this is an odious political movement that, um, you know, Democrats, as, as readily as Republicans should recognize, is antithetical to American values. It's not to say it should be illegal, you know, it shouldn't be illegal to, to be a neo-Nazi either in America. Right? I mean, it's, we, we have, because of the, the First Amendment, we have to have a, um, an uncomfortable and even disconcerting level of tolerance for bad ideas. But the idea that we have mainstream Democratic politicians who feel like they have to lock arms with these guys and, and these organizations, it's bad. And it's, it is the thing that will give us fascism in America.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  That, you know, this is, I, I, I hit this point a lot, but if you want a fascist in 2028 or thereafter, yeah, by all means, let the DSA into the tent and get confused about a, you know, Islamo-communist alliance being somehow a good version of left-wing populism. See how that works out. It's, it will, it will deliver us the furthest right-wing swamp creature you can imagine into the Oval Office.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Since you always get pushed back for criticizing AOC and Mamdani, maybe you could clarify what bothers you about, uh, Abdul El-Sayed?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  It's always dangerous to wrap all these people up in one sentence, because they're not all the same. I mean, AOC is not even entirely similar to herself at this point, right? She's somebody who's trailing this awful debris of far-left wokeness and, and moral idiocy, and yet she sums up her previous utterances with the phrase now, um, what was it, woke 1.0 was, was whack or something, or woke 1.0 was crazy, or?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Woke 1 was crazy, yeah.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  Okay, great. Does, how does that square with all the idiotic things you said, right? From defund the police on down. There's no question she's been a useful idiot. Is she no longer a useful idiot? I don't know. Right? It'd be nice to see her really reboot her hard drive and, and talk serious sense about what's wrong with the far left. You know, disavow the, the DSA in clear terms and for the right reasons, to say something useful about Hasan Piker. Um, I can't even believe we have to talk about this guy. He's, he's doing irreparable, one hopes irreparable damage to the Democratic Party, because.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  No one legitimate on the right would sit down with Nick Fuentes.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Well, that's barely true. It's not quite true. I mean, the only thing J.D. Vance would say against Nick Fuentes is stop talking about my wife. There is a real asymmetry here, which is that there's, there's no mainstream right-of-center institution that would take Nick Fuentes or Andrew Tate seriously as the future of politics on the right. You know, I mean, like, so you're not going to have the Wall Street Journal do multiple profiles and, you know, glad-handing podcasts with either of those guys. But the New York Times did it with Hasan Piker. Right? So that's, that's a real asymmetry, which is, I think, not a good sign at all that we're, we're ready for, for 2028.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  While we're on AOC, I just want to go back to our conversation from a previous episode where we discussed her, and you received some pushback from the making sense community around the bartender aspect of your criticism. Uh, is there anything to clarify there?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Well, I, I wasn't commenting on, and honestly, not even tracking all of her achievements in Congress, right? So I'm not, I'm not, so, here's what I was not saying. I was not saying that AOC is, is stupid, or that she's not a, she couldn't be a quick study as a politician, or that she hasn't done substantial things once in Congress. I was more talking about her origin story. I mean, we did, they, they, they found a, a telegenic inexperienced person and kind of cooked her up in a, in a political, you know, lab and realized, again, this is not, this is not necessarily a mistake, it's not a political mistake. I mean, she got elected, and, and there's a reason why we're talking about her, right? She's, but they, what they found is that what you need at this moment in American politics

• 18:17Speaker 02

  is someone who really can crush short-form video, you know, shot with an iPhone. That's not where we want to be as a country. Right? Like, that, that shouldn't be the criterion to become President of the United States. Somebody who can just, you know, make you laugh or, or create a vibe in 30 seconds on TikTok. That's going to select against many people who you would want in the Oval Office, and it's going to promote total lunatics who you don't want to get near power, uh, and yet you're going to give them. I mean, again, the fact that any Democrat feels the need to talk to, or think about, or figure out how to navigate around Hasan Piker is insanity. Right? We should not know this guy's name.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  He's, he is a Twitch streamer, you know, and that should be the end of it. Right? I mean, it's like, okay, but, I mean, there, there are people in this category, some of whom are even more substantial, like, you know, the, the Paul brothers, right? I mean, how much time are we going to talk about Logan Paul in the next election cycle? Right? I mean, is he going to be President of the United States? Is that the country we're living in? I mean, that, that's where American culture seems to be headed, if we can't figure out how these information tools, you know, that is our smartphones, are deranging our sense of what is real and worth paying attention to.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Okay, but if that's where the culture is headed, and it's important to find somebody who's telegenic and charismatic and smart, and you say, okay, this is the right person, let's find somebody who's got the right criteria, the right ideas, but who's also fits that mold, why would we not want to use the tools that are in front of us and say, okay, it shouldn't be this way, but it is this way, and maybe she goes on to be, uh, through this, this pathway, she goes on to be a phenomenal president?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Well, so again, I'm not focused on AOC here. AOC may be in the process of changing into a different sort of person. Right? I mean, again, if, if that's hard to do, given what she's trailing, but, and it's something that, you know, Kamala Harris couldn't effectively do within 100 days of the presidential campaign, so, but it's possible to do. I mean, I, you know, people can wake up from, you know, the, the spell that was, uh, worked on them in their twenties and in their thirties, and even in their forties by whatever, you A tractor on the cultural landscape caught them and they can disavow their prior beliefs. Right. And if they do that credibly, that's fine. I mean, I'm, I'm willing to believe that

• 20:41Speaker 02

  a person has recognized that they were wrong about something. And if they can tell us why, well, then the fact that they were wrong ever need not be held against them. Right? In fact, they win points in my book if they can, if they can really disavow something idiotic in their past and give a clear case as to how they got there and how they got out. I mean, that's in most cases, that's, that whole character arc is a positive, not a negative. But it remains to be seen whether she'll do that. Hasan Piker is not AOC, right? Hasan Piker is an utterly despicable human being. He's demonstrated that, right? I mean, he's, he's just a callous asshole, right? Who talks about, you know, the mass

• 21:23Speaker 02

  starvation of people, you know, for example, in the, you know, the great leap forward in China as just a non-issue. It's like, oh, this is the, you know, he's just going to break some eggs to make an omelet, right? I mean, he's, he's a fan of Mao, right? I mean, it's like, you read any book about Mao, and he's also a fan of Lenin, right? You read any book about Lenin, just to discover what this colossal asshole is a fan of, right? Like, we should not be, again, he is our Nick Fuentes. There's no reason to talk about this guy as being consequential in politics. It doesn't matter how big his audience is, right? You have to find some other route to his audience than through an alliance with him, because you're, you're making an alliance with some species of evil, right? I mean,

• 22:05Speaker 02

  the fact that it's, it's a telegenic evil shouldn't matter, right? And that's, I'd say, again, it's totally mystifying to me that people can't see this at a glance. I mean, certain people are not worth talking to. They're not worth factoring in as, you know, in your calculations about who you have to keep in the tent, et cetera. And, you know, people like, you know, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, you know, right of center, Hassan Piker, left of center, are those sorts of people.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to get to Mondani in a second, but first I just want to go back to El Said and just get, hear what bothers you about him, if you can provide any detail there.