Transcript: Sam Harris on Hunter Biden Controversy – TRIGGERnometry Podcast

He’s using U.S. trade policy and foreign policy to extract concessions that redound to the advantage of him and his family and their friends.

There’s nothing in Biden’s universe that rises to that level. Whatever is in Biden’s universe, I mean, I’m no fan of Joe Biden’s presidency. I could talk—we could fill this whole podcast with what was wrong with that. But if you pretend to care about corruption in government, there is only one elephant in the room, and that is Trump.

The Cover-Up vs. The Corruption

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The thing is, Sam, with the Hunter Biden thing, I think that for many people it wasn’t actually about corruption at all. What it was about was the cover-up. What it was about was the fact that the news story about his laptop couldn’t be shared.

SAM HARRIS: Well, we disagree about both the—we don’t really disagree about the optics of the cover-up, but we disagree about the mechanics of it.

I mean, I think a lot of this was good faith fumbling around a story that couldn’t be characterized quickly enough. And given what had happened previously, given that we know that Jim Comey’s reopening of the email—the Hillary Clinton email non-story—was decisive in her losing that election. You could just see her poll numbers go down by the hour at the moment he started talking about it. And that was like 10 days before the election.

And we know this time around, Rudy Giuliani held onto this bombshell as an October surprise and released it strategically close to the election. I think there were two weeks left in the election, knowing that there was simply not enough time for the Democrats and the mainstream media to have a spaz attack and not get to ground truth on this laptop.

That again, from my point of view, this is what I said in that original podcast. I don’t think it made it to that nefarious clip. But for me at the time, and it still is, a genuine coin toss journalistic judgment about what to do with this story two weeks before the election.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Judgment, yes, but this wasn’t journalistic judgment. This was big tech judgment, big tech censorship.

SAM HARRIS: There was Twitter knocking the New York Post off for whatever, 48 hours or—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 24 hours and preventing the story from being shared.

The Intelligence Officials’ Letter

SAM HARRIS: Right. That I think almost certainly is a mistake, however you look at it. And I believe I said that at the time. I mean, there were gradations of this. There’s what Twitter did versus what the New York Times did or didn’t do, et cetera.

But I think it was—I mean, for instance, all those former intelligence officials who signed that open letter saying this looks like Russian disinformation. I don’t think those guys were lying. I think those guys genuinely thought, “This is completely crazy. We got Rudy Giuliani with a laptop he got from some computer store and it’s got everything. It’s got the smoking ruins of Hunter Biden’s reputation.” This certainly looks sketchy.

I don’t think those guys volunteered to have their reputations destroyed in plain view of everyone just to eke out an advantage for Hillary Clinton.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why not?

SAM HARRIS: Well, just who does that? Who says, “Listen, I’m going to take my reputation for discernment as an intelligence former head of the CIA or the NSA or both. I’m going to—” Again, I don’t remember the signatories to that letter specifically, but I mean, who’s going to—it’s just not in their interest. It’s not likely to be decisive.

And it so obviously looked kooky, right? It looked completely—I mean, this does not look like a normal way you would discover the smoking laptop from hell. And again, there was simply not—to have simply played connect the dots journalistically and even from Twitter’s point of view, just lavishly propagating this information or misinformation to the ends of the earth at that moment, with the clock ticking, given what had happened in the previous election journalistically, it could have seemed totally irresponsible.

I mean, in hindsight, Jim Comey’s re-airing of that fake email scandal was totally irresponsible. It’s why we had President Trump in the first place. He couldn’t have known that at the time, perhaps, but in retrospect, it would have been better had he not done that.

So I have to think, again, I’m not—the other thing that was weird about that interview: people took what I was saying as somehow insider knowledge that there was this vast conspiracy of journalists and academics and scientists and media figures to keep—that we all met in a star chamber somewhere to keep Trump from getting reelected.

I mean, if that happened, I wasn’t privy to it. Right. So that’s not what I was saying. What I was saying in a—I mean, there were a few places there where, because I went back and watched it because I needed to once this thing was detonating in my life and I could see how radioactive it was being perceived—I had to see what I’d actually said in context.

And there was at least one moment where I got interrupted and didn’t complete a sentence. And so my half sentence and the thrust of what I was saying before that made it seem like I was making a more extreme statement than I was in fact making.

So, but my views are unchanged from that hour. So, I mean, I’m happy to talk about anything.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you were interrupted, it would almost certainly have been me. I apologize.

SAM HARRIS: It was.

Summarizing the Position

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But let me just recap it. Just very quickly summarize what you’re saying. So what you’re saying is basically a number of things.

Number one, journalistically, in terms of publishing the story, you call it a coin toss. It looked kind of kooky. Therefore, is this a reasonable thing to publish with two weeks to go before an election, before you can properly check it, et cetera, number one.

Number two, you didn’t agree with social media companies preventing the story from being published or shared. Right.

And you feel that if we’re talking about the corruption element of it, what you were trying to say with an outrageous example is no matter how corrupt Hunter Biden turns out to have been, that will not be as bad as the Trump corruption. Is that a fair summary?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, well, especially because, again, we’re talking about Hunter Biden. I don’t care about Hunter Biden.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, Hunter Biden did get a lot of money from a Ukrainian company in which he was employed, some sort of—

Trump’s Lack of Hypocrisy as a Political Superpower

SAM HARRIS: Expert, while knowing that up against what any of the Trumps have done in the last hour. So, I mean, there’s just no end. They were, it was clear they were already these people right from the first time around and from years previous. There’s just no, I mean, the magic of Trump is that because he, I mean, the one thing you can say about him that sounds like praise, but in fact isn’t, is that he’s not a hypocrite. Right?

He’s not a hypocrite because he’s not pretending to be a good person. Right. He’s not pretending to follow any of the norms by which hypocrisy would normally be measured. Right. So, and the reason why this is a kind of superpower is that there’s nothing more galling, at least at this moment in our politics than hypocrisy, especially left wing hypocrisy.

So the moment you can find that a Democrat didn’t floss his teeth when he said he did, right, all of a sudden that’s a 20 megaton scandal. Trump can just, basically like, he’s like the Dan Bilzerian of politics, right? Like, there’s no pretense of being ethical or monogamous or like, so I’m going to just show you how I live like a maniac.

And you’re not going to be able to measure any specific indiscretion because I don’t view any of them as indiscretions and they’re not going to be. It all then functions by a different reputational physics. So you find him to have done something that’s 10 times worse than the thing you say you care about on the other side of the aisle and for some reason doesn’t register, right?

So he’s created a political culture right of center where the very concept of corruption doesn’t even exist anymore. The very concept of a conflict of interest or self dealing, it’s just that it’s completely evaporated.

Evaluating Trump as President vs. Person

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So let’s set. So this is one of the things I really am keen to discuss with you. Let’s move on from the first podcast and what happened and just talk about President Trump as a president. Right? Because I hear this a lot. We posted that you were coming on the show. People message you and they say, well, look, I love Sam, right? And I think his reaction to Trump as a person clouds his view of Trump as a politician. Right.

SAM HARRIS: Well, I can demonstrate that that’s not so. But what’s upstream of that is a pretty important piece of confusion because the real Trump derangement syndrome, in my view, is to think that the President’s character doesn’t matter. Right?

He’s the most distractible, venal, corrupt, self dealing, narcissistic, self absorbed, petty person to ever occupy the office. And that doesn’t matter right now. The reason why his character matters is because he’s got three more years in office. We have no idea what kinds of challenges we’re going to face as a country, but we know that all of his decisions are downstream of who he is, about the kind of thinker he is, of how he engages with information, of what he knows and doesn’t know, what he cares to know and doesn’t care to know. Right?

So what does he know about Putin? What does he know about the Middle East? What does he know about China? What is going to modify his judgment about what he should do? I mean, would we have bombed Iran if the mullahs had been smart enough to offer him a golf course deal in Iran? I actually don’t know.

I think it’s, you know, even bet that our policy with respect to Iran could have been different had there been massive financial opportunity for the Trumps in Iran. Right? He might have. He might have had a Gulf Arab, you know, autocrat vibe, you know, an MBS vibe with the mullahs in Iran. He could have seen the wisdom of that. Certainly, if it’s a big enough deal, I wouldn’t have put that past him.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But isn’t that a little bit unfair in the. You’re judging somebody not on the things they actually did. But no, I won’t.

SAM HARRIS: I’m just telling you why you need to care about who he is as a person.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, I understand. And look, I think a person’s character really matters. I do. But I also think when you’re evaluating a president, you have to look at deliverables. What are the deliverables? There’s probably a lot to criticize and I’m sure you’ve got them, lots of them. But getting the hostages back from Gaza.

The Gaza Hostage Deal: A Nobel Prize-Worthy Achievement?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, let me just deal with that, because that’s on everybody’s mind. And square this statement, let me give.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You a list and then you address them all. Is that okay?

SAM HARRIS: Well, I mean, this one’s worth just hitting off the tee because I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for having brought the hostages back. Right. I mean, I think that’s. I have no problem saying that. Right. So square that with accusations of Trump Derangement Syndrome. I mean, I can readily admit that that was a massive achievement.

Whatever happens next, I mean, there’s not going to be peace in the Middle East as a result of this ceasefire. So I’m not, I’m very skeptical and pessimistic about the outcome. But just that peace getting all the living hostages back was massive. There was no Democrat who was going to do it. President Kamala Harris wasn’t going to do it. Biden wouldn’t have done it.

Many of his weaknesses as a president, as a person, translated in that specific area into strengths. Right? His unpredictability, his unprincipledness, the fact that he could just throw over the chessboard and walk away for another year. I think he got more out of Netanyahu and more out of all the parties to that negotiation than a more principled, more methodical, more process oriented expert on geopolitics would have. Very likely.

So that’s one area where sort of the madman theory of politics, right, I think, worked for him.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

SAM HARRIS: And that’s to the good. That does not compensate for all the other damage he’s done to our country.

Trump’s Record on Ukraine and Immigration

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, fair. And I want to hear both of these. Right. But I want to put some more to you that I would say are positive things. Right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I can give you criticism as well. I mean, look, I was hopeful that he would do on Ukraine something more positive than he has done. I think Steve Witkoff hasn’t done very well. Put it gently and diplomatically. We haven’t had any progress so far. I hope that changes as you know. But maybe, you know, if the Middle East is tick, that’s no tick. What about dealing with illegal immigration?

SAM HARRIS: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The way it’s being done, we can have a discussion about. But he’s literally the first president, first leader of a western country to deal with illegal immigration.

The Border Crisis and Democratic Failures

SAM HARRIS: We can have a huge discussion about that. I mean, so, okay, let’s. So the fact that the Democrats treated any concern about the border as a symptom of racism and thought that it just wasn’t a problem to have untold numbers of people just streaming across the border for years at a time, that was just a colossal own goal. That is just in my view, politically inexplicable. It’s just politically suicidal. Right. It’s just that’s among other reasons. That is the reason why Trump got elected.

But I mean, it’s just, it’s. I still don’t understand it. It’s stupid, it’s unethical, it serves no real sane purpose. Right? I mean, even if you want the same numbers of people in the country because you really think we just have to have an immigration forward policy, there’s no argument for not knowing who’s coming into the country. You should want the people in the country who you want in the country. Right? And you should be able to screen out terrorists and et cetera.

So yeah, I mean, it is true that the Biden administration tried to pass a bill that would have done something and then Trump cynically got the Republicans to block it. Right. So there was a Trump delayed progress on that point so that he could use it as an issue in the campaign. And that was a cynical bit of politics. But still the Democrats were totally out to lunch on that issue for years at a stretch. Unforgivable. Politically unforgivable. Right.

And so it is with all the other woke derangement in the Democratic Party. I mean, the irony here is that there’s virtually nothing that any super red pilled MAGA head who sees no, for whom there’s no daylight between them and Trump. There’s nothing they can say about the far left of the Democratic Party that I don’t agree with and haven’t said myself on my podcast. Right. So it’s not like my animus toward Trump is based on some sort of progressive blindness about, you know, the ethical primacy of DEI or anything else that he’s steamrolling over.

Authoritarian Tactics and White House Trolling

But I’ll remind you that we didn’t used to live in a country where masked men who won’t identify themselves steal peaceful people off the sidewalk and disappear them and occasionally disappear them to foreign countries, right? I mean that’s not America and that’s happening, right? That’s totally unacceptable. I mean it’s Orwellian and insane and it’s insane that anyone has acclimated to it.

And it’s insane that we’ve got this, we’ve got attorney general who won’t answer questions but when brought before Congress and she just, you know, just is messaging to an audience of one and to her social media feed. She’s just insulting senators. I mean, it’s just, it’s. The optics of all of this are so Hunger Games and bizarre, right?

We’ve got a White House that messages on social media like, it’s like the account’s being run by 18 year old trolls that just spend half their time on 4chan and half their time on the official White House. We got a president who forwards AI videos of him on his fellow Americans, right. And half of our country imagines this is some kind of progress in political communication, right? I mean this is, this is a, I mean the official, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but the official White House page that talks about the rebuilding of the east wing of, you know, the ballroom, it’s got, it has become a troll account where it does kind of gives the history of construction at the White House, but then intersperses that with, like Hunter Biden bringing cocaine into the White House with a shot of him in the bathtub with a cigarette and, and, you know, Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky.

I mean, it’s just, it’s, this is official White House communication to the world, right? This is not, we’re, I mean, I get that it’s entertaining, right? But if there’s no difference between the Babylon Bee and the official White House website, we’ve got a problem.

Long-Term Damage to America’s Reputation

And we are doing massive brand damage to our country. That’s what I care about. What I care about what’s durable here, you know, in terms of when Trump goes away. And let’s say there’s a sane Democrat or Republican next time around in 2028. But at the moment, I don’t see much hope of that. What bells can’t be unrung in any kind of near term time frame. What damage has been done that we can’t immediately apologize for sufficiently such that we have a proper reset? And I think a lot of damage has already been done. That’s hard to recover from.

And we’ve announced to the world, at a minimum, we’ve announced to the world. Look at what Trump has done with the tariff policy. Just tariffing every member of our species. And again, based on whims and imaginary political imperatives that only exist in his brain and then in the brains of the people who pretend to understand what he’s doing because he’s created a personality cult around him where no one is going to, you know, everyone is Baghdad Bob. And no one is going to tell the boy king that he’s lost his marbles.

But he’s basically ignoring all of our treaties and our ally and our alliances in a way that has announced to the entire world that basically our country is, in any four year period, it cannot be counted on to honor anything that has been agreed to before that clock starts. Right? So with a new president, we can just completely reinvent ourselves and tear up everything, every trade agreement, every expectation of an alliance. Are we going to, if Poland gets invaded by Russia, do we even care about NATO anymore? Probably not.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: See, this is the issue though, Sam. You’re making really good points that make perfect sense, but I’m going. But the flip side of all of those structures that he’s disrupting was, well, he’s actually got Europeans to pay for their membership of NATO.

SAM HARRIS: That’s a good outcome, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: He’s actually masked men dragging people.

SAM HARRIS: There was another way to do that. But no one was destroying our reputation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But isn’t this exactly the problem? No one was. No one was.

SAM HARRIS: Surely there was a way to make the case that our European allies weren’t paying their fair share short of destroying our reputation for being the world’s lone superpower.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, but was Kamala Harris going to do it? Was Kamala Harris.

SAM HARRIS: Probably not.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Probably not. Was Kamala Harris going to close the border? I think we both agree she wouldn’t.

Would Democrats Have Acted on the Border?

SAM HARRIS: Was Kamala Harris. I don’t. Because I think they were trying to do that because I saw that it was a disaster. No, no, I think they, I think they. I mean, everyone could see this was a disaster. I mean, you get Elon Musk at the border with his own iPhone showing a zombie movie of people streaming across the border. It was a four alarm fire. Was it four alarm fire? I don’t know what’s. It was the most number of alarms. Five alarm fire.

Everyone could see that they were going to. I think they were going to get a handle on that. But still it’s unforgivable that they waited as long as they did.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But this is why I disagree with you. They waited as long as they did because they are ideologically pro open borders.

SAM HARRIS: Not the mainstream Democratic party like the.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Rest of the western world. All the left of center parties, they talk a good game, but they don’t actually take action to close the border. Not least because it looks ugly and it’s very unpleasant. Right.

SAM HARRIS: Well, I don’t see why it need to look ugly and be.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How do you deport millions of people without illegal.

A Rational Immigration Policy

SAM HARRIS: Well, no. So deporting millions of people is separate from closing the border. So I don’t think we should be deporting millions of people. I think we should close the border and then deport all the criminals. Right, but then you don’t need this chaotic process. You don’t need to say, if you happen to be in a Home Depot and look Latino, we might just bring you to the ground. Four guys who again will not identify themselves are going to break your arms and bring you to the ground. And when we find out that you’re a father of three and all three of your sons have served in the Marines, we still don’t care. Right.

I mean, that’s awful. I mean it’s just absolutely awful. It’s disgraceful. It’s totally unethical. And this is not the country. I’m amazed if I would be amazed if it were in fact true that 50% of Americans want to live in a country that treats people that way, whatever their immigration status. I mean, it’s just not right.

And yet there’s no question we could close the border without doing that. This is the thing. If you close the border and really you have control over who’s coming into the country, that’s the first piece. If you accomplish that, you then don’t have to make the experience being inside the border terrifying so as to send a message to the rest of the world not to come. Right. You don’t have to lock people, separate people from their kids or lock people in cages or disappear people, foreign gulags, or any of that stuff, because you’ve closed the border. Right.

So this is why Tom Holman’s argument that, you know, you have to send a message by beating the f* out of people. Otherwise people are going to keep coming. It doesn’t matter if you’ve closed the border. Right. So close the border. Right. Anyone could have done that without mistreating people inside our country.

Then it’s a separate question. What do you want to do inside this country in a city like Los Angeles? I mean, we’ve got vast amount of productive work being accomplished right now by people who we know are here illegally. Most of the people who are in this town illegally are doing work we deem necessary, and most Americans don’t want to do it right now, what should we do with that?

I think we should. Again, this is not. I’m sure there are corner conditions that we might want to debate, but generally speaking, if someone’s been here for years, and I mean, again, the details here matter. A lot of these people have kids who are citizens, right? So we’re talking about people who have been here for years, have an illegal immigration status, but they’ve got young kids who are American citizens, and still these people are at risk or being deported.

In 90% of those cases, I’m just guessing 90, maybe it’s 99.9% of those cases. You’ve got people who are here doing productive work that we want done. We have whole industries predicated on that work being done. Agriculture, the service industry, restaurants, et cetera. Americans are not lining up. We’ve got 4% unemployment. The 4% who are unemployed are not lining up to do those jobs, to be landscapers and dishwashers, et cetera.

There should be some rational process of keeping these people here and getting their immigration status sorted out. Right? So call that amnesty, whatever you want to call it. But by all means, if somebody’s here who’s got four DUIs and was in prison for raping somebody, et cetera, get that person out immediately on the first plane. There’s zero controversy around whether or not to deport criminals who are here illegally. None of this has to be inflammatory and divisive.

The Political Calculus of Chaos

The thing is, Stephen Miller and Donald Trump clearly want this to be inflammatory and divisive. There’s a political advantage, or at least they perceive a political advantage in making it so. Right. And what I do think they want is, and have wanted are, you know, protests against this that get out of hand where they can point to a city like Los Angeles and say, look, okay, look at these, you know, blue haired maniacs who have been raised, you know, to believe that there should be open borders and they’re throwing chunks of concrete at the cops, we have to use a heavy hand to respond.

And I mean, so those, and those demonstrations got out of hand slightly. This certainly wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But yeah, I mean, I think, I think fear is that Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection act are rational. Right? Because he’s just the sort of guy to do it. Right. It’s not. And that will be, I mean, there’s several bright lines, but that will certainly be one bright line where we will have lost something and it could be very hard to get it back.

The Third Term Question

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Francis, sorry, I know this has gone on for a long time with just me talking, but this is like a meme. Me talking too much. But there’s one other bit of this I want to explore with you before Francis takes over, which is the one thing. Look, I’m not American. Francis is not American. We love this country. We have so many great American friends.

The one thing that does really give me pause is this conversation that I don’t understand about a third term. Steve Bannon was pushing this idea a long time ago. And as we sat down to record this, President Trump was asked about this. He sort of gave a bit of a non-answer. He did say he wouldn’t run as vice president. The sort of Russian Putin-Medvedev switcheroo that they did way back when. But that, like, that’s—that to me is the one bit.

SAM HARRIS: Of the one out of a thousand things that caught your attention. I mean, like the fact that he’s—even after January 6th, the fact that we’re even having this conversation is insanity.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m trying to make my point in a way that is easier to access for people who may not agree with you.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay. I’m trying to take some of the—

SAM HARRIS: You know your audience.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All right, I know.

SAM HARRIS: I’ll take all the help I can get.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, what I’m saying is all of these other things, for example, take the corruption stuff, right? A lot of people are just going to go, “I don’t give a shit. I care about—he sorted the hostages. He’s dealing with immigration. Sam Harris doesn’t like the way he’s dealing with it, but at least he’s dealing with it in some way. He’s got nature to pay that way.” I could give you other examples, right? Repatriating manufacturing back to the US. Whatever.

But the one bit that I think a reasonable person, including after January 6th, would have to look at and be worried about is why, if he’s the—

SAM HARRIS: Right guy for the job, why wouldn’t we want him for a third term?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because you have a Constitution.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And an unwillingness to follow the Constitution is an indicator of some serious problems, wouldn’t you say?

Constitutional Loopholes and Democratic Norms

SAM HARRIS: Well, I would say, but he views the Constitution like most rich people view the tax code where you’re just looking for loopholes. If there’s a loophole, then why not use it? Right. And some constitutional scholars think there’s several significant loopholes in the Constitution that could allow for tyranny. I mean, that are the framers didn’t anticipate.

In some cases, they did anticipate, and they basically just said that there’s no perfect way to deal with a sufficiently unethical president. Right. But one could argue that they didn’t anticipate anything like Trump and the full capture of the Republican Party into something like a personality cult.

I mean, what they clearly didn’t anticipate is that the separation of powers is broken down because Congress doesn’t care to be its own power anymore, because the Republicans are just wanting to ratify whatever lies and indiscretions the executive branch throws up. So, Congress has been neutered. Right. Congress owns tariff policy. Right. Congress should be setting the tariffs.

These tariffs might—I mean, again, I’m not a lawyer, but it remains to be seen. I mean, there’s now hundreds of cases in front of the courts. Much of what Trump has done already might be ruled illegal, but Congress is sitting on its hands for patently political reasons.

I mean, every Republican who has any hope of maintaining a political career at this point knows that they can’t cross the MAGA base. Some actually fear for their lives in crossing the MAGA base. And we know this again when we look at the people who said they would have impeached Trump after January 6th and didn’t because they were afraid for their lives.

And that’s already a lurch toward tyranny in this country. I mean, that is an unraveling of democratic norms that we can’t afford to let unravel. And the Constitution is no complete bulwark against any of that. We know this.

The greatest lesson we’ve learned from now two experiments with Trumpism is that in the place of laws, we have norms in many, many places where you thought we were shored up against chaos and the unraveling of democracy by law, we really weren’t. It was just no one—everyone before Trump had the decency not to do that thing because it would look so terrible. Right?

I mean, no one thought that you could—I mean, we got an emoluments clause, but it turns out that whatever Trump does, I mean, Trump can’t be prosecuted for any crime while president, and he can just launch a bitcoin into the ether and literally earn billions of dollars over months.

And I can still dimly remember a time when it was being debated whether or not members of Congress could go to functions, whether they had to declare the price of the food they were being served, if it was a seated meal, and it was like past hors d’oeuvres could pass. But a seated meal was an emolument that invited real scrutiny around corruption and undue influence on our legislators, by pharmaceutical companies or whoever.

You can now transact business directly with the Trump family, who from any place on earth.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sam, come back to my question. My question is, are you concerned that President Trump will not relinquish power?

SAM HARRIS: Ironically, I’m less concerned about that than anything I’ve talked about, but the truth is, I’m not. If you listen to everything I’ve said, I believe none of it is hypothetical. Right. I’m talking, I’m complaining about stuff that’s already happened. I’m complaining about the brand damage that’s already been done to my country.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sure. But I’m asking you a different question.

SAM HARRIS: I think the chance that he’s going to run for a third term, effectively, that will actually be faced with this, this eventuality is very, very low. And I’m not—again, there are people who are better informed about the mechanics of all this. And, unfortunately, one of those people is Steve Bannon.

So, yeah, I’m not saying I know something that Steve Bannon doesn’t know about how all this works, because I certainly don’t. But I just have to think that our system, that we’ve maintained enough guardrails in our—just the basics of federalism and the fact that this all has to be run at the state level, the elections at the state level, I have to think that we are going to be sufficiently allergic to that that it’s not going to happen.

The Charlie Kirk Assassination

FRANCIS FOSTER: Moving forward, the Charlie Kirk assassination was obviously something that left an imprint in all of our minds. It was profoundly shocking. You made some very interesting comments criticizing the rights and the right’s response to the Charlie Kirk assassination. So why don’t we just go through it? You say what you thought and then let’s get into it.

SAM HARRIS: Sure. Well, I was just starting my tour, actually. I think I was doing my first event the day he was assassinated. So I just had like, many people. There are many people in our orbit who were doing live events. And I think Ben Shapiro was in a similar situation where it’s like, the world stopped and you’re like, well, Live Nation got on the phone with everyone who they were working with and said, “Listen, if you don’t want to go, go out on stage, just let us know.”

But so it’s just—and I said a few things about it, at those live events that I was doing that week. I mean, it was just a terrible thing. It was terrible on every level. It was terrible just as a murder of a young father, it’s terrible that his family was there. I mean, it’s just awful.

It’s additionally terrible because a political assassination is genuinely dangerous because we are so combustible as a society. And the fact that we’re this combustible—a lot of the onus goes to—I mean, it goes to both sides. But I would put most of the onus, as will not surprise you, on the president and his culture.

And I would say that the response to the assassination was highly asymmetrical in ways that don’t make Trump and Trumpism look good. I mean, I thought so. For instance, all the people right of center were watching those awful videos of Gen Z maniacs celebrate Kirk’s murder.

And obviously all those people are dangerous morons on some level, and many of them, just obviously mentally ill, too. I mean, these are not—it was not the cream of the crop of the woke intelligentsia. The sheer number of facial piercings you saw in those videos could have told you something.

But what you didn’t have left of center were prominent people with big platforms, prominent media figures, or, say nothing of political figures like, from Obama on down say anything. But this was horrible. And we should never let—never let it come to this in American politics, right? Like, this is a—there’s no party left of center, real party for political assassination.

And yet right of center, very prominent people from the president and Elon on down, treated it like the first shot fired in the Civil War. Totally irresponsible, totally dishonest. I mean, these people were arsonists pretending to be firefighters.

Elon jumped on X within minutes before, I think before Kirk was declared dead, certainly before his killer was caught, and said, “The left is the party of murder,” right? And then I think some hours later, he said, “If they won’t leave us in peace, there’s nothing to do but fight or die,” right? I mean, 225 million people, right?

So to have the richest guy in the world on the most politically important social media platform in the world say this sort of thing is just—it’s beyond reckless. I mean, it’s just sociopathic. It’s just—he is just flinging matches into a landscape that has been just soaked in gasoline.

And the soaking has been done mostly by Trump and Trumpism and just what’s, the grifters right of center like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. I mean, and I know you have your differences with those guys and perhaps we’ll get into it.

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting what’s kind of how the landscape is fracturing right of center. And I think it would be good to talk about all of that because I think it’s more fractured than you guys think it is. I think the, there are more casualties than just Tucker and Candace there, or at least should be.

But it’s—there was—this was a highly asymmetric moment of political hysteria. Right. So left of center, you had genuine lunatics who represent no one celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk.

The Rhetoric of Political Violence

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Let’s just pause that there. Isn’t there an argument to be made, Sam, that the rhetoric of the left calling everyone fascists and Nazis when quite patently they’re neither fascist? Look, you can have your criticisms about Charlie Kirk’s politics, but let’s be honest. He was a right wing conservative, Christian conservative. He’s not a fascist, he’s not a Nazi.

Yet that accusation had been made time and time again not only against Kirk, but also people of that particular branch of politics. Doesn’t that incentivize these type of murders, these type of violence, this type of violence?

Trump as Authoritarian vs. Fascist

SAM HARRIS: Well, it’s more complicated than that because Trump is not Hitler. I’ve never said he was. We’re not living in Weimar Germany now, in America. But he is a genuine authoritarian, want to be authoritarian, doing many authoritarian things and damaging our democracy with both hands every chance he gets.

And we’re just taught. You’re now asking me what I think about the prospect of him running for a third term in just overt defiance of the 22nd Amendment. It’s not fascism. The fascism is the wrong term. It’s just got too much culturally specific and historically specific baggage attached to it. But authoritarian is the right term, and aspiring tyrant is the right term, and he’s just not.

The truth is he’s not effective enough. He’s not ideological enough. He doesn’t care about enough big things to worry me that much. I mean, this is a point I’ve made to the consternation and confusion of many audiences. But the irony is, if he were a better person, he’d be a more dangerous person. If he were a smarter person, a more committed person. I mean, if he could possibly commit to something beyond himself. He’d be more dangerous. If he were less distractible, et cetera.

So I don’t view him as a Hitler figure, but I do. Everyone who’s calling him an authoritarian, which sounds a lot like fascist. And you just, you turn up the dial on authoritarianism. There’s no important difference between what you’re talking about in fascism, then. You’re just talking about the clothing and whether the Catholic Church was ever in the mix and et cetera.

So he’s not as bad as Putin. But if we give him a chance to have as much power as he wants, where does he stop? He certainly doesn’t. He would run for a third term if we discovered that the 22nd amendment just didn’t apply and there’s just an open fairway between him and the Green. Of course he’s going to run for a third term. It’s like the spit. He doesn’t care about the spirit of the Constitution, which where it’s clearly meant that you should not. It’s not that you can’t be elected twice, you can’t be president twice.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So I take your point about Trump, but let’s come back, because they don’t.

The Gray Area of Inflammatory Language

SAM HARRIS: Okay, so I didn’t answer your question. Yes, certain terms are inflammatory and imprecise, but the concern, it’s a much grayer area than you’re making it out to be. And I mean, many people would say that what I’ve just said in the hour so far about Trump is a species of that very irresponsibility of condemning him to the point where, okay, any sane person is going to look at this and say, okay, we have a political emergency and anything is warranted in resistance to this.

Certainly, I’m not saying that, but I’m saying we have a political emergency. And we need our institutions to function to contain the damage.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But do you not think that it’s really important when you criticize your political enemies?

SAM HARRIS: It’s important to be honest, but it’s.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Also important to be accurate in the same way that you can think somebody’s a terrible person and their politics are awful. It doesn’t make them a pedophile, for instance.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And this kind of escalatory language, I personally think is highly dangerous. And when you live in a country like America where you have access to guns and there’s so many people with mental illnesses, I mean, but nobody uses.

Trump’s Inflammatory Rhetoric

SAM HARRIS: More inflammatory language less responsibly than Trump and his enablers. I mean, again, Elon jumped on X and basically said, our political opponents are murderers. The left is the party of murder is no party of murder in America.

Trump, in his address to the nation immediately after Kirk’s death, effectively said, in so many words, not just that these Gen Z maniacs on TikTok were responsible for his death, he effectively said that his mainstream political opponents were culpable for murder. Which is just not true.

Again, everyone from Obama on down said, this is horrible. Let’s, we have to pull back from the brink here. This is not acceptable on any level. And then you had people bending over backwards to sanewash Kirk’s actual politics. Ezra Klein jumps on his opinion column at the New York Times, says, Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way, for which he got no end of shit, left or center.

Everyone was being sensitive. Everyone with any real platform was being sensitive. And what you had right of center were just, with the important exception of Kirk’s wife, during her eulogy, who struck a very different note. I mean, Stephen Miller’s eulogy was madness. It was fascistic madness.

I mean, this is, apart from the fact that he’s Jewish, he’s a character right out of Weimar. I mean, he’s a lunatic in how he messages into this combustible environment. I mean, do you remember. Did you watch his speech?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I didn’t watch his speech.

SAM HARRIS: Okay. You should watch his speech. It was the most insanely vituperative. Just.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What does vituperative mean?

SAM HARRIS: Just expressive of pure hatred for everyone left of center. I mean, just, you people are nothing. We will destroy you. You have awakened a dragon. You have no idea what you.

And the, not so much from him, but from other people on the dais that day, there was just this volcanic panic, expression of Christian nationalist kind of just. I mean, it’s just pure moral confusion and political hysteria. From my point of view. I mean, it was their George Floyd moment again. Yes. Without the riots and obviously.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s quite a big deal, Sam.

SAM HARRIS: No, but this is what I was going to say. It’s a superficial deal.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Hold on a second. Hold on.

SAM HARRIS: It’s a big deal, but it’s not. No, no. It is a bigger deal. To have the President of the United States come before the country and say basically half of mainstream America is a terrorist organization. That was the subtext of everything he said in that address to the nation. It was completely of a piece with Elon’s tweets.

Comparing Political Responses

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Let me. Let me. The George Floyd thing. I think you’re going way too far, Sam. And here’s why.

SAM HARRIS: There’s no daylight between us about the George Floyd riots. I mean, we view it in precisely the same way. I just view Trump differently.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Hold on. What I’m saying is something else. We agree that burning down cities and taking over districts in America and burning police stations and killing a lot of black people and these moronic chants of defund the police, which led to more black people being killed in their communities and in the cities, all of that’s crazy, right? And wrong.

But what I noticed, and I’m just telling you what I noticed, is when Charlie Kirk was murdered in this way, which I thought was horrific. And I think we do know, as far as I can tell, that it was politically motivated. And I would argue, you may disagree, but for me, the word Nazi and fascist has a very unique dimension to it, which is we have been trained as a culture to view these people as a specific threat to the democratic order, to minorities.

When we think of a Nazi, we think of someone who’s going to take over the country, destroy democracy and murder millions of people. That’s what a Nazi is. So what happened was.

SAM HARRIS: I do think they’re.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Let me finish my point. What happened was a lot of people on the right and even people like you and even people like us who are not even on the right have been called those terms by some people, in your case for being critical of Islam, in our case, for questioning the insanity of the left, et cetera.

In my view, that is putting a target on people’s back. But the other point is when Charlie Kirk was murdered, it was horrific for anyone really watching it. And what happened? Did you worry for one second that there’s going to be streets burning in America? Did you worry that police stations were going to be burning down? Did you worry about any of that? Because I didn’t.

The Real Threat of Political Violence

SAM HARRIS: No. But again, the reason why, it’s an unfair. It’s a valid point, but it doesn’t. It’s not as significant as you’re making it out to seem. So the piece with a point that many people made during the elections, when businesses and Beverly Hills are boarding up their windows in anticipation of political chaos, should the election go one way or the other.

Many people right of center pointed out, okay, the people are boarding up those windows not because they think Trumpists are going to start looting William Sonoma, should Trump lose. There was one side that was being worried about in those moments, and it was indecent on some level not to notice that. Same point.

So, yes, it is true that the left and especially the black community express itself in that way when the unhappiness gets dialed up to 11. What I worry about on the right is of much greater concern, ultimately. And it’s hardcore political violence like Timothy McVeigh style, truck bomb violence.

And real militias really committed and trained people who have been training for years, some of whom are Nazis. I mean, they’re not German Nazis, but they’re neo Nazis. There’s much more of that on the right when you look at just the fringes of gun culture. And again, this all predates this moment. We could have had this conversation 10 years ago.

There’s much more. The powder keg of real political violence and civil unrest in this country that is consequential. It’s not just looting and burning, but it’s your AR-15s that you’ve been polishing for years and training on for years. And you’ve got 10,000 rounds of ammunition already stored for this purpose. Those people are right of center. And is it not telling that you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Have to go back to Timothy McVeigh? I mean, that’s what, the 1990s.

The Reality of Political Violence

SAM HARRIS: Well, no, there are. No, there’s no, there are other. That’s just the big one. There are other examples of. I mean, even just in this recent cycle. And this is the thing that was so dishonest about Trump’s address to the nation. He talked about political violence and political assassination as though it was well established that it was only a left wing thing.

But even with Kirk’s assassination, it still in recent memory has been more of a right wing thing. There’s simply more incidents of right wing political violence, including assassination or attempted assassination. And then there’s just ambiguous ones, which is frankly a crazy person who’s not ideological and represents nobody.

But no, I mean, it’s like the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer was a punchline right of center, literally. Kirk himself used it as a punchline. Elon himself has used it as a punchline. Trump himself has used it as a punchline. It’s literally been a laugh line for all three of them.

This guy was almost killed with a hammer by a guy who is somewhat ideological, also probably crazy, but certainly right of center who was planning to torture Nancy Pelosi, should she be home. This was not funny.

And again, that level of callousness and recklessness and cruelty that you’re worried about in using a term like Nazi indiscriminately so much. There’s been a fire hose of that on the right. Yes, there are people on the left who are dangerous idiots, I will be the first to admit. But it is different when it’s coming from the Oval Office. It’s different when it’s coming from people.

It’s like for every one of those people who the Gen Z maniacs who made a video celebrating Kirk’s death, there’s an equivalent lunatic on the right who’s much closer to power. Like people who’ve got like Laura Loomer’s phone number in their phone are crazy and dangerous.

This is not. There’s a fever swamp as you move right of center. And again, we’ll talk about Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes as you begin to move rightward and toward the weird. And you get into QAnon and you get and you start glad handing all the anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. It gets very, very weird. Very, very dark and very, very well armed in a way that isn’t mirrored on the left.

And that’s an important difference. I’m not worried about. Yes, who’s going to? Who’s going to. If you tell me that Louis Vuitton is being looted in Beverly Hills, I’m pretty sure I know who’s doing it. I’m not as worried about that.

Clarifying the George Floyd Comparison

FRANCIS FOSTER: Sam. And just for the people watching. And you said that this was a George Floyd moment for the right. You weren’t saying that Charlie Kirk and George Floyd are equivalent in who they were as people?

SAM HARRIS: No. Thank you. Thank you for connecting that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, that would be helpful.

SAM HARRIS: Apologies for the people who are already typing.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, because you know how people like to then and then. I don’t need to explain that it.

The Problem of Tribalism and Dogmatism

SAM HARRIS: Was a George Floyd moment in the sense that the level of emotionality and lack of caution and lack of honesty around the messaging was equivalent. Now it’s not. Again, coming from different people and different levels with different implications.

But yeah, I mean what I saw at Kirk’s memorial. Some of it was fine, and some of it was actually beautiful and inspiring, and some of it was just a patent explosion of Christian nationalism and, you know, an appeal to theocracy.

And again, a kind of a. I mean, Elon’s tweet was all of this crystal form to say that the left is the party of murder. Which is going to be interpreted as not just the fringe of the fringe of the fringe, you know, in some trans cult somewhere who happen to have guns. No, the left is synonymous in that statement with, effectively, the Democratic Party.

I mean, just the mainstream political opponents of Trump is totally irresponsible. And that is, that’s a level of demonization. I mean, what we have to. To take this from the kind of the highest level, I mean, like this comment is true now, and it’ll be true 50 years from now.

What we have to surmount here to live sanely are two things. Tribalism and dogmatism. I mean, like tribalism and dogmatism are the generic software flaws in our politics, in our culture, and in our personal psychology and social psychology that make solving all of these collective problems impossible.

And the antithesis of both of those things is intellectual honesty. I mean, one of the reasons why I criticize religion so much is that religion’s the only area of culture where tribalism and dogmatism get this new gloss. And they seem like virtues. They can be made to pass as virtues. Moral virtues, moral necessities, intellectual virtues.

We call the dogmatism of religion faith. When you don’t have good reasons for what you believe and you’re immune to the good reasons of others that are countering your beliefs, and there are certain conversations you refuse to have because you’ve got these cherished beliefs that you want to guard from all streams of evidence or argument, we call that faith. But no, that’s just dogmatism.

In fact, the word dogmatism, it’s a Catholic term, it’s a Latin term. Dogma is a good word in Catholicism. It’s not pejorative. But in the political space, you know, tribalism and dogma, what’s wrong with identity politics? What’s wrong with the woke mob and cancel culture and all the blasphemy tests left of center and all that. It is the tribalism and dogmatism of all of that.

And insofar as it’s mirrored on the right, it’s the same problem. It just has different nouns and verbs associated with it.

The Right’s Departure from Facts and Logic

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, look, I’m glad, actually, that we’re talking about the right because one of the things that we’ve been talking about on the show more and more is seeing the rights and who have always marketed themselves as a, you know, party of, shall we say, facts and logic, even though that’s a hack term. And then you look at the way some of them are going, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of facts and even less logic.

SAM HARRIS: So how are you guys dealing with that? I mean, you have.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m one of the people that came up with the concept of the woke.

SAM HARRIS: Right, right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And everyone who has worked. Right. Is really happy that I’ve come up with it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: They’re delighted.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: They’re delighted. They love it. They’re so great.

SAM HARRIS: They think it’s a specious. Are you joking? Or they just think it’s.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m being sarcastic. No, they hate it because it’s accurate.

SAM HARRIS: Okay, so I thought. I thought you were saying that they thought it was not accurate.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I get the sense from the way you ask the question that you’re. You sort of. You are with the people who think we are on the right.

SAM HARRIS: No, no, no. I’ve been tracking how you’ve been navigating this, but I think it’s just important to acknowledge and to acknowledge to your audience that there is a. There’s something to navigate here. I think you and I have a different relationship to this ecosystem, so it’s a different challenge.

Navigating Alliances and Friendships

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But, you know, the way we think about it is very simple. It’s that I always forget his full title. Lord, the former Foreign Secretary of the British Foreign Secretary. What’s his name? Lord Palmerston. Palmer.

SAM HARRIS: Oh, yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Lord Palmerston.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Lord Palmerston. He said, “We have no permanent alliances, we have permanent interests, and it’s to them that we owe allegiance.” And that’s. That’s. We are coming at it from the perspective of what is true.

SAM HARRIS: But what about friendships, actual friendships?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m capable of being friends with whom I disagree. I disagreed with what you said on our podcast three years ago. I’m. I consider you.

SAM HARRIS: Well, what is that? I don’t want to relitigate all of that. Perhaps, but what did you disagree with?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, let’s not. Let’s not bother with that. We’ve done the whole 45 minutes on.

SAM HARRIS: It, but I don’t think I heard your disagreement.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I can’t be bothered. We’ve dealt with it. Something happened three years ago. What’s the point? What I’m saying is there are, of course, exceptions to this, but I’m capable of being friends with. I was never friends with the people who are going tonto right now.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because I always knew they were going to be crazy, and I never made friends with them in the first place. You see what I’m saying?

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Well, I just think the crater that is we’re talking about is bigger than I think you think it is, and some of your friends are in it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Tell me more.

The Joe Rogan Problem

SAM HARRIS: So, I mean, Rogan is implicated in all of this in a way that, I mean, Rogan. I’ve considered Rogan a friend for years, but, you know, we’re sort of out of touch now, and I think there’s probably a reason for that. I mean, he’s specifically, like, you know, he has not answered my texts.

I tried to give him some, knowing that I was going to have to comment publicly about some of the interviews he’s done. And, you know, I think how irresponsible he’s been with his platform. You know, I reached out to him by text, and he hasn’t responded to those texts. Perhaps my text got lost in the mail. But usually he’s pretty good on his text, so.

And I’m not sure, honestly, I’m conflicted around the ethics of all of this. I mean, I feel terrible talking about Joe, and yet he’s got the biggest platform on planet Earth, or nearly so. And I think he’s done an immense amount of harm to our national conversation, our political conversation.

So, like, I couldn’t have done, like, you guys were just on his podcast. I watched that. I couldn’t have had the conversation you had with him there because I would have had to have said this. And, you know, presumably he wouldn’t have liked it. And there’s a lot to talk about.

I thought, you know, I thought his interview he had with Trump was incredibly consequential and incredibly irresponsible. Right. I mean, it was. He didn’t ask a single difficult question of Trump and just help midwife his lies. I mean, among which was the, you know, the 2020 election was stolen lie. Right?

I mean, like, that’s a shattering lie for a former president to have told in our society and to have half the society believe it. It’s a perpetual invitation to violence. It gave us the violence of January 6th. Things could have been a lot worse, et cetera.

If you have the biggest platform on Earth, you can’t just have the kind of conversation that Joe did had with Trump and then open the door to everyone else to have their version of that irresponsible conversation. So many people think that this was the 2024 was the podcast election. I agree it was the podcast election.

But what it was was many people following Joe’s lead in being completely irresponsible with how they use their platform. And to be specific there, I’m not saying you shouldn’t talk to certain people. Joe can talk to anyone he wants to. Right? I mean, I think there are certain people you probably shouldn’t talk to, but there are certain people that if you’re going to talk to them, you, given that you have a big platform, literally tens of millions of people, in Joe’s case, you have a responsibility to do more than just establish good vibes with them and make them seem normal, especially if they’re not normal, and especially if they’re trafficking in lies and half truths that are going to delude a significant percentage of your audience, and then they’re deluding you as the host because you haven’t done your homework.

The Darrell Cooper Controversy

And so, I mean, his conversation with Darrell Cooper, completely irresponsible, right? I mean, we’re living in an age of. I mean, Darrell Cooper is a fake historian who’s trafficking in David Irving’s lies about the Holocaust, right? He bounces from Tucker’s podcast to Joe’s podcast. On those two podcasts alone, he gets a larger audience, perhaps than any real historian ever has had in the history of history. Right? I mean, it has to be over 50 million people who saw those two interviews combined.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: His Rogan episode didn’t do very well.

SAM HARRIS: Between Joe and Tucker.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Look, you got to separate Tucker from Joe. It’s a completely different conversation.

SAM HARRIS: It’s not a completely different conversation. In fact, you could argue that Joe’s was worse because Joe’s happened after Tucker. There was a mess to clean up, which Joe, rather than clean up that mess, he basically, with his imprimatur as the host who knew everything about Darrell Cooper, who had listened, who had done all the homework and listened to 30 hours of Cooper’s podcast on the matter, he could sign off.

He could sign a blank check, morally assuring his audience that Cooper’s a good guy, not an anti-Semite. All of this is good faith. And that the thing he just had said on Tucker, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s all just a tempest and a teapot, and people are lying, besmirching him. And it’s just, you know, libtard hysterics who are having a bad reaction to the truth getting out on some level.

And he’s done it with RFK Jr. He’s done it with all kinds of maniacs. Right? I mean, these are people who are, in many cases, liars. Some of them are probably mentally ill. Right. Some of them just have character defects where they just love to touch. Find me a third rail and I’m going to touch it. No matter how combustible our society is, no matter how little I know, I’m just going to keep touching the button to see what goes off.

Dave Smith, again, Dave Smith is not a morally sane voice about the war in Gaza. Right. And he is the person he is because of what Joe has made him. And that debate with Douglas. I’ve commented with Douglas about what I thought went wrong there.

The Cultural Impact

But all of this has created immense harm in our culture. We’re all in the business of building culture. Culture is the operating system of our society. Everything we care about is a matter of culture working better and better or worse and worse. Whether we can solve any of the collective action problems we need to solve, whether we can, whether this, whether our species survives is entirely a story apart from an asteroid impact.

It’s entirely a story of whether we can sort our culture out enough so as not to annihilate ourselves. And you literally have people doubting whether the Holocaust was even a thing in the context of the greatest explosion of anti-Semitism we have seen in our lifetime, in the middle of a very clear clash between aspiring Islamist theocracy globally and the west, and Israel being the tip of the spear of all of that massive moral confusion being spread in our society around that quite consequentially so.

And Joe is doing as much as anybody to spread that confusion. And he doesn’t know it. I mean, I think Joe is a good guy. I don’t think he wants to harm anybody. I would not say the same about Tucker Carlson. I think they’re completely different types of people.

But I mean, it’s a disaster what has happened on Joe’s podcast, politically and culturally. He’s on thousands of podcasts. Thousands of them are great. Right? But there are. But he. His approach to this. He’s taken absolutely no responsibility as a journalist or as an intellectual or as a historian or as a scientist, because he doesn’t view himself as a journalist or an intellectual or historian. As a scientist, he’s a comic and he’s just shooting the sh*t with people and he’s just exploring his interests.

And great, it’s Joe Rogan University. But he has to recognize that he’s doing more than that. He’s doing more than that just by virtue of having the audience that he has. But he’s also doing more than that because he has this taste for conspiracy theories. He’s got this taste for contrarian and anti-establishment views and the debunking of the elites. Right?

He’s bought into that side. The scales are not just balanced in a truly open-minded and kind of intellectually disinterested way. No, no, he’s got an appetite for the false flag operation. Right? Like if something, if the non-standard view can be spun at all, he wants to hear about it.

And that acts like a bug light for maniacs. Then you just, you just get these. There’s an endless number of people who seem to have the right credentials and many people who don’t obviously have the right credentials like Dave Smith. But you can get an endless number of people with PhDs or MDs or whatever the requisite degree is who are crazy. Right? Or just terrible people. Right?

When you have a platform like Joe has, you have a responsibility to not just lay yourself open and your audience open to a fire hose of bullsh*t and half truths and lies unfiltered.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Okay, but isn’t there also a way that you could say, look, you know, some of these ideas are going to be bull, some of you have truth, some are going to be highly controversial. Which in a few years time you look at in the cold light of day and was like, well, it was unpleasant, but it was true.

SAM HARRIS: Okay, wait, wait a minute, Joe, stop.

FRANCIS FOSTER: About COVID for example.

The COVID Example

SAM HARRIS: Okay, but at the time I called that correct? Yeah, but Simon, everybody, I mean, that was so easy to see as an instance of left-wing, politically correct overreach. Right? Like calling the lab leak hypothesis racist at the time. I mean, the very hour, the first instant of this happening, every sane person who’s not indoctrinated into Wokeism at that moment saw, okay, that’s bullsh*t.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t think you’re remembering this correctly. With all due respect. I remember. And just telling you our perspectives. People who make videos on YouTube. Right. That we were having conversations about. Are we allowed to have this particular discussion about COVID or masks or vaccines or whatever?

SAM HARRIS: Hold on, that’s a bigger conversation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And the Wuhan thing, because if you’d said that that was the case at the time, you were not allowed to say it. YouTube would literally nuke your YouTube channel. Right. So when Joe pushed back on it, which I am grateful to him for doing on that thing, he was leading the way in challenging some of this public health nonsense.

SAM HARRIS: So, yes, if you want me to say that some conspiracy theories are true. Yes, conspiracy theory. Alex Jones is going to get it right some of the time. That doesn’t vindicate Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a madman who has created tremendous harm, full stop. It doesn’t matter how long the list of things is that he was right about.

I mean, he’s just, he’s going to be. He’s. He is endorsing every crazy conspiracy allegation. Some are going to be. Some at some point you’re going to say, oh, yeah, this thing that seemed totally implausible and even irresponsible to entertain. Turns out that was right. The CIA did do that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But it’s also on a more prosaic level, like school closures. We had Boris Johnson, our former prime minister, who actually said the school closures that went on in the UK were wrong and it damaged a whole generation of children. And maybe if there’d been more people to push back on that we could have actually dealt with.

SAM HARRIS: You can count on one hand. So the postmortem on COVID, I guarantee you that the postmortem on COVID that passes for truth in Joe’s world is not true. On Joe’s account, COVID was just a cold. The vaccines were dangerous. Right. And may have killed a lot of people. In Brett Weinstein’s world, the vaccines killed millions of people. Right. And et cetera. Right. So all of that’s upside down. Right?

Yes. There were some very clear moments where the mainstream political messaging, public health messaging.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Was.

Lessons From COVID

SAM HARRIS: Disastrously bad and or dishonest, and that was super consequential. And things were kept closed for much longer than they should have been. We were not nearly as flexible as we should have been in just understanding this was a moving object. And with each new variant, things were changing and that the science is catching up to the problem.

And there’s lots of scientific uncertainty at every stage along the way, and there are people covering their a, and it’s not a plandemic. Right. But it’s just whatever. Again, if you just add up the indiscretions of people covering their a and people not knowing what they’re talking about and it being a moving target and us doing lots of stuff for the first time, that’s really difficult.

And lots of people also dying and there being a real risk of the healthcare system collapsing. It explains 99% of how badly we handle it. But the lessons being drawn from how badly we handle it in many, many cases are the wrong lessons.

I mean, we’re just. We’re living in a land of hallucinations right of center around what should have been learned from COVID. I mean, again, COVID was a dress rehearsal for something quite a bit worse that we f*ed up the dress rehearsal, and we. And I mean, I hope someone’s learned actionable lessons that can be implemented in real time next time.

But what I fear has happened is that as a culture, we’re actually less prepared for a worse pandemic because of how badly we learn the lessons of our failure here in COVID.

COVID’s Impact on Public Discourse

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, I agree with you, and I think there is no doubt that COVID broke a lot of brains. And by the way, I can’t speak for Joe, obviously, but I suspect if you speak to him, he’ll feel that you went crazy over COVID.

SAM HARRIS: If I speak to you 100%, he has no idea. But one of us is right. He’s, again, he’s…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You could both be wrong.

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, no.

SAM HARRIS: Okay. I guarantee you that there is a consensus understanding around what happened during COVID that is not in Joe’s brain or in the brain of most of his audience. And it’s, in broad strokes, the best understanding we have. It’s not to say that we know down to the last person who died of COVID, but well within an order of magnitude, we know what happened. And that’s not what Joe is saying about COVID. Let me make the point.

The Tension Between Public Health and Scientific Truth

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I was going to make, which is more about why COVID affected a lot of people the way that it did and broke people’s brains. As a strong statement, I use it because I do feel that happened. A lot of people ended up being much more conspiratorial coming out than they came in. Because we had this thing called public health and we had this other thing called science, scientific truth.

And we went so far. And these two things are in tension. Because if you’re trying to communicate nuanced, complicated, ultimately unverifiable scientific theories or hypotheses to a public with an average IQ who are in panic and fear, scared for their lives, they’re being fed all kinds of crazy stuff in the media, you have to take the scientific truth and you have to… This is best case scenario. This is without Fauci having funded the lab in China, all of this other stuff. Just in a perfect world. And you have to condense that complex scientific truth into public health messaging.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Which is a political process.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that process ended up going so far over to public health. And then you add, on top of other things that happened, cover ups of certain things that we now know to be true, or as best we can, like where COVID came from, that a lot of people went, “Well, this thing you told me in the interest of public health was actually just you lying.” Because it turned out not to be true.

SAM HARRIS: Well, and in many of those cases, it was not just people lying.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I know, I know. But if you’re being bombarded with messages and told you’re a terrible person for not believing them, and you then discover that those messages were actually false, most people are going to say, “I have been lied to.” And so we’ve ended up in a very conspiratorial world, partly, I think, because of what happened during COVID. And by the way, you lock people in their homes for two years, some of them are going to go loopy, you know what I mean?

The Role of Independent Media

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But part of the burden that our public health authorities couldn’t effectively shoulder was that they were messaging into a polluted information landscape that was poised to be this conspiratorial and this distrustful of authority. And in large measure, independent media is culpable for that.

I mean, it’s the Candace Owens of the world and the Joes of the world who were calling bull where things were actually bull and calling bull on absolutely standard science. And I mean, the people who Joe had on his podcast again and again, Brett Weinstein and all the other ivermectin cultists, that was genuinely harmful. It’s not that they were wrong about everything, but they were wrong about most things and it was dangerous.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But what about the vaccine? When you have people coming out going, “If you take the vaccine, you’re not going to be able to pass it on.”

SAM HARRIS: There was a moment that, okay, before we had a vaccine, Republicans and Democrats died at the same rate. Once we had a vaccine, Republicans died more than Democrats. That’s true. That’s bizarre. Shouldn’t be that way. That’s political consequence of political messaging.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Obesity, age, all of that, as far as Republicans tend to be older, but it was not factoring in.

SAM HARRIS: I believe that’s just purely a matter of vaccine hesitancy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So your claim is, just so that I understand what you’re saying, is right of center people got anti-vax messaging, didn’t take the vaccine, and all other things being equal, died at a higher rate. That’s your claim?

SAM HARRIS: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s your claim?

The Numbers Behind COVID Deaths

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. And honestly, Joe was a super spreader of those ideas. So the last I looked, I mean, I haven’t looked at these data for some months, but within the last… I think I did a podcast a couple of months ago, and the authority who I had on at the time, Mark Lipsitch, I believe, signed off on these numbers.

I mean, do you have these numbers? How many people in the United States do you think died from COVID? How many you think were saved by the vaccine? How many you think died who shouldn’t have died based on vaccine hesitancy?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know.

SAM HARRIS: Right. Okay.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I don’t think there’s any way of knowing, if I’m going to be honest with you, Sam.

SAM HARRIS: Well, no, there’s not a way of knowing exactly, but there’s a way of knowing. You can triangulate on these numbers in many ways. Based on excess deaths and just reported deaths, and I mean, the epidemiology of this is not mysticism. There’s a scientific understanding of just how people die and how many people are likely to die in any given society in any given moment. We’re not off by a factor of 10. Let’s say we’re off by 20%, but we’re not… This is not like we think X and it’s really 1/10 of X.

Something like 1.2 million Americans died from COVID. COVID is the reason they died. Not that they got hit by a bus and they also had COVID.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Okay.

SAM HARRIS: Now that’s not the bubonic plague in the 14th century. But it’s also not a cold. Most of those people were old. Most of those people are not fit young men who didn’t want to take the vaccine because they heard about the heightened risk of myocarditis. I mean, there was all kinds of wrinkles there. It mattered how old you were in addition to being obese. But this was a real health challenge before we got the vaccines.

Now, how many people do we think died because of vaccine hesitancy? Who wouldn’t have died had everyone who could have gotten the vaccine gotten vaccinated? That number’s around 300,000. That’s a lot of people. Again, most of those people are almost certainly old. They’re not four year olds. I mean, it’s like 1,000 kids or something. Like a thousand kids died from COVID. But 300,000 people, it used to be a lot of people.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s a huge number.

The Influence of Major Podcasts

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but so what did it mean to have the world’s largest podcast basically endlessly messaging against the vaccine? I mean, Joe can say he’s not anti-vax, but the primary message around the COVID vaccine and COVID itself coming from his podcast and coming from the so-called experts he had on, was that the vaccines are dangerous.

Again, Brett Weinstein told us that the vaccine is likely to kill something like 17 million people. I saw a credible estimate of something like 17 million deaths globally from this technology.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So 17 million deaths from the COVID vaccine.

SAM HARRIS: Well, when you scale up to billions, it’s not hard to reach a number like that with a technology that’s dangerous. Zero evidence of anything like that happening. That is a complete hallucination.

So it was a problem that some of the biggest podcasts in the world, I mean, it’s not just Joe, but Joe’s was certainly among the biggest, had an appetite for this contrarian take on everything such that just… Let’s just stick a mic in front of RFK Jr. I mean, he might be president. “RFK, tell us what you think.” He is a confabulation machine. It’s not… Some of it’s lying, some of it’s delusion, some of it’s… I don’t know what is wrong with the person, but I get…

Balancing Information and Personal Freedom

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Your point, Sam, and I think you make it… Look, in terms of… Let me tell you what we said on Trigonometry about this, and it’s relevant to the point I’m going to make. We said… I said specifically, I don’t remember. Francis can speak for himself. If I were elderly or overweight, I’d definitely take the vaccine. And given that I’ve had COVID twice, I probably have a lot of natural immunity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I kind of left it there. And it’s ultimately up to you. Speak to your doctor. Most important thing is that you take professional advice on this. That’s what we always said.

SAM HARRIS: Right.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And if you’ve got comorbidity.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, but if I were 75 years old and morbidly obese, I’d be taking the vaccine. That’s what we said repeatedly.

SAM HARRIS: I mean, just to give you a point of reference, that’s my view of it as well. I haven’t been vaccinated in years.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I wasn’t finished. And that’s relevant. But what I also said is government tyranny that we experienced in relation to the pandemic was an outrage. An outrage.

SAM HARRIS: Well, at what point was it an outrage?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Not in the first lockdown, second lockdown onwards in our country. So in our country, we basically… We locked down the first time. Then it became very, very clear that lockdowns don’t actually work. And do a lot of harm. And we kept locking down and we kept wearing these f*ing masks that don’t work and all this other nonsense, complete garbage, while being told, “No, no, the virus didn’t come from a lab in China. No, no, Fauci is the best guy ever.”

SAM HARRIS: All of the same, I get it. I mean, it’s… I was…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, okay. So that being the case, the question… A lot of people will agree with what you’re saying, a lot of people would disagree with what you’re saying. But the question for me is, what do you think should be the case? Because my view is people are free and they can listen to information and they can make their own decisions.

They can listen to Trigonometry and go, “Constantine and Francis think you should probably speak to a doctor.” They can listen to Joe and get whatever perspective they get from that, and they can make their own decision. That sounds quite dangerous, but I worry that whatever it is that is the opposite of that is also really dangerous.

Where you are now deciding that, “Oh, it’s a pandemic, therefore these people shouldn’t…” I don’t know what it is that you think should have happened, other than perhaps calling on Joe to take more responsibility? Well, what else should happen in relation to this? What’s the answer?

Understanding the Disease in Real Time

SAM HARRIS: Well, it depends on how bad the disease is. And so what should have happened during COVID? Well, we should have acknowledged that we are catching up to reality. Like, we didn’t understand how it was spreading. I mean, there was that period where we thought it was spreading based on contact with packages. We’re all wiping down packages, fomite transmission.

It took a while to even acknowledge that it was airborne, and therefore it took a while to acknowledge that lockdowns would be less effective and maybe even totally ineffective. It took a while to understand that it wasn’t that bad for kids and was pretty damn bad for the elderly. Many diseases are the opposite of that, or at least that they hit kids and the elderly kind of equally.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I think the Spanish flu actually targeted the young more than it did the elderly.

The Challenge of Public Health Messaging

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. Yeah. So if this had been, if, you know, the bodies of elementary school children had been stacking up like cord, we would have had a very different risk tolerance and we would have been right to have a very different risk tolerance. The lockdown would have been far more like China. However ineffectual that would have been, it remains to be seen what we should do, given the specifics as we come to understand them.

And we, at every point along the way, we should have figured out how to message around scientific uncertainty better than we did. But the problem, again, is we’re messaging into a space that is super conspiratorial, hyper partisan, where people are using any expression of uncertainty as a means to discredit the authority. Right. This is the asymmetric warfare that has always been true whenever a scientist gets on. It used to be CNN, not so much anymore because nobody’s watching.

But you got six minutes on CNN as a scientist to talk about climate change or anything. The moment you begin to calibrate your statement with the completely normal degree of scientific caution and uncertainty and humility appropriate to a scientific presentation among scientists to the general public, sounds like, “Oh, this guy, he could drive a truck through all the holes in this guy’s account.” Right? “Even he says he’s not sure,” right? “So why am I going to take the vaccine?” Right?

So, I mean, we’re, the political imperative of public health messaging has to deal with the fact that on some level you are, it’s very easy to see how a feeling of paternalism creeps in because you’re worried about people taking the nuanced truths the wrong way. Right? And that invites again, this temptation should never be taken, but it invites the prospect of a noble lie or a noble half truth, which again is a disaster. But it’s easy to see how people get lured in that direction because they’re talking to Candace Owens, right? I mean, on some level, when you look at what Candace herself was doing on Twitter around Covid, it was madness.

Scientists and Communication Failures

FRANCIS FOSTER: So I was watching a documentary on flat Earthers and at the end of it they interviewed this scientist from NASA and they said, “You must find this funny and blah blah, blah.” And she went, “Well, no, because what that tells me is that scientists aren’t doing their jobs. If we allow, if we, not if we allow, but if conspiracies like flat earth is allowed to propagate and people are talking about it, it’s because we’re not doing our jobs, we are flawed in our communication.” Would you not say that is also an issue as well, that the scientists aren’t actually communicating effectively?

SAM HARRIS: Absolutely. But there’s a, I mean, it’s worth acknowledging how difficult a task it is when they’re talking to people who have been raised. I mean, there are many different kind of orbits of ignorance here, but I mean, there’s a very clear kind of religious anti-science orbit where it’s just, you know, this is, their worldview is anchored to something else other than empirical science. Right.

And so it’s, there’s a massive amount of distrust of science just as science coming from, you know, functionally half of our society, I mean, probably more like 35% of America is devout in precisely this way where it’s like evolution is just bullsh*t, right? Like this. We did not, you know, my great, great, great grandma was not a monkey and I’m not going to be told otherwise. Right. That’s where the understanding of the relevant science stops.

And then there’s lots of anti-science cultishness around, specifically things like vaccines. I mean, it was a perfect storm. A pandemic is a kind of perfect storm, because it taps into subculture, specifically the anti-vax subculture got weaponized during COVID in a way that was, you know, it might have been waiting for, but it was quite effective.

It’s a little bit, I mean, it was just as effective, bizarrely effective and hysterical and destabilizing as the weaponization that we’ve seen around Gaza against Israel. It’s like how Israel got attacked on October 7th by absolute barbarians, unambiguously so. I mean, the moral high ground could not be more clear. The very people who were raped and killed and tortured and kidnapped were the peaceniks in Israel. Right? Not the, you know, not the ultra orthodox religious maniacs on the Jewish side or the settlers or any.

Just the very people who are, you would think, would do the most PR damage to the Hamas side of the story. And yet magically, they managed to weaponize the information landscape in such a way that wherever it wasn’t already destroyed by the ambient level of anti-Semitism that exists in the world, Israel’s reputation has been completely destroyed over the war in Gaza just by having lost an information war.

FRANCIS FOSTER: They also haven’t helped themselves.

SAM HARRIS: No. They haven’t even tried.

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, they haven’t, number one. And number two, you have people like Smotrich and Ben Gvir, who’ll be in the cabinet, going around and saying things that are, quite frankly, just beyond the pale as well.

SAM HARRIS: But there’s just, I mean, there’s just two of them. There’s only two anyone can name. Yeah, and, yeah, but that, when you hold that up against the reality of religious fanaticism on the other side, it’s just, we’re not talking about.

The Middle East Ceasefire and Peace Prospects

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I’m glad we’re moving on to that issue because you mentioned earlier that you don’t think the ceasefire is likely to lead to peace in the Middle East. Why?

SAM HARRIS: I just think it’s too deep a problem. I think one, Hamas is agreeing to a ceasefire insofar as far as they are. I mean, now they’re killing their fellow Palestinians. And strangely, there’s not much complaint about that coming from Hollywood or any of the ceasefire people left of center who ostensibly are worried about Palestinians, but I mean, they would agree to a ceasefire so as to regroup, to live to fight another day. Right.

I mean, they’re not people who are going to be happily shopping in whatever mall that the Kushners and the Trumps and the Witkoffs build in Gaza City in a few short years. Should all this work out? I mean, they’re a death cult. Right. They’re real jihadists who really want things. They’re not transactional. They’re not hoping to be secretly hoping to just be wealthy or just be. I mean, I’m sure there’s some peripheral cynical people who might be like that, but the true believers are true believers and they’re in a religious war, not just with Israel, but with everyone who’s not Muslim. Right.

And even Muslims as well, even Muslims who they consider to be apostates. And so when viewed from, I mean, this whole peace process is not credible from the point of view of real jihadists. Right. The people who are representing the other Arab interests. I mean, the crown prince of wherever is just another apostate who would be condemned by Al Qaeda or the Islamic State or Al Shabaab or any other organization, including Hamas. I’m not saying all jihadists are the same, but they’re the same in this regard. And they really are committed to a longer term project of winning a religious war.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But that’s why the original Trump plan, it imposed dismantlement and disarmament of Hamas as part of its terms. Now, that hasn’t transpired, but basically everyone in the region other than Iran and Hamas agrees that Hamas cannot be allowed to remain in power in Gaza. So the question is, can you get beyond that?

If you listen to our discussion with Joe, I made this point, which was about the Kushner plan, as I understand it, is to try and get the moderate Arabs to work with Israel in opposition to Iran. You have to get rid of Hamas for that to happen. And then you get them all trading together and then they hold hands and say Kumbaya.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, but again, you’re talking about the wealthy monarchs of the region who have this, the so-called Arab street to worry about. And the Arab street in, you know, all the scores of countries, I mean there’s 50 plus Muslim majority countries, not all Arab is highly radicalized. It’s not as radicalized as the Palestinians. I mean, the Palestinians are, I mean, Hamas is still popular among the Palestinians, especially in the West Bank. I think it’s true to say that they would win an election in the West Bank today as well.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Sam, we need to take into account that the first thing that they did when Israel stopped bombing Gaza was it then went out and shot people it regarded as traitors. Kneecapped them, tortured them, all the rest of them.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You can’t be certain that the opinion polls reflect people’s gender.

Religious Fanaticism and the Muslim World

SAM HARRIS: Yeah. But you can be certain of the level of religious fanaticism in the area. What people care about. I mean, they care about above all, the top of the list would be any desecration of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. There’s no number of kids you can kill that matters more than that. And that’s bizarre. I mean, that’s insane. That’s morally upside down. To have a culture that is framing their core moral concerns around religious fiction. Right?

I mean, there are many cultures like that, but Islamic culture is the world over has the worst version of that. Right? I mean, again, you and I could say something. The three of us could say something on this podcast sufficiently provocative or do something like burn a Koran that could literally cause embassies to burn tomorrow in a dozen countries. That’s the world we’re living in.

The Muslim community the world over is uniquely combustible based on the significance of religious symbols, and they’re not uniquely combustible. We’ve seen protest after protest over cartoon things like cartoons and the naming of a teddy bear. We have not seen protests, certainly not sizable ones, over what an outrage it is that groups like Hamas or Hezbollah or Al Shabaab or Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba or Boko Haram or any of these jihadists and Islamist groups over the fact that they have committed atrocities against now practically countless innocent people, most of whom are Muslim. Right.

Where the pro, how can you not have 100,000 people turning up in the streets of London to protest the Islamic State at its height? Where were those protests? Where were all the Muslims who were desperate to disavow jihadism in the face of the Islamic State? What you had is you had people dropping out of medical school in London, people dropping out of the London School of Economics to go join the Islamic State to take Yazidi women as sex slaves, and then bragging about it on Twitter. Right? And where were the protests? No, the protests were over the Danish cartoons. Right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What’s your point, Sam?

SAM HARRIS: What they care, what the center of gravity for far too much of this community, this community of 2 billion people in the world over is around religious pride and humiliation. Religious symbolism is not around the real consequential body count of, you know, violence. And it’s, and peacemaking, right? It’s not, it’s not about most of the world.

And certainly most of the Muslim world doesn’t care when Muslims kill other Muslims. They care when Jews do it. Most of, most of the world doesn’t care when Muslims kill Christians. Right? It’s strange I mean, this is something I’m genuinely surprised about and confused about. But I’m not quite sure why fundamentalist Christians aren’t more agitated around the murder of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa by Muslims. I mean, right now the Islamic State is cutting the heads off of Christians in…

FRANCIS FOSTER: Nigeria.

SAM HARRIS: Nigeria and maybe also Uganda, but it’s definitely Nigeria. It’s like you would think that would be a pretty big deal. It’s not, it’s, no, it’s, the most inflammatory thing on earth is Jews killing Muslims in the Holy Land.

So I mean, we need, yes, we desperately need a war of ideas, if not an actual civil war within the Muslim world in scores of countries to nullify the cancer of jihadism. I mean, Islam plus jihadism is going to prove totally unworkable for open societies everywhere in the future. There’s no way of assimilating jihadists.

I mean, what you’re experiencing in the UK right now is what it’s like to have 6% of your society be Muslim and some percentage of those Muslims to want to live under Sharia law and some percentage of those Muslims to happily create, you know, so-called grooming gangs. Because in line with their view of how you think about infidel young girls and you’re trying to absorb all that and you got Tommy Robinson out there complaining.

The Muslim community has to figure out how to purge itself of this level of religious fanaticism and these specific commitments around things like punishing apostasy and blasphemy and, and I, you know, in the fullness of time, maybe they’ll do that under pressure, maybe they’ll do that, but they’re not tending to do it organically.

The Challenge of Religious Reform

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this is where the Saudi and the UAE are interesting, right? Because they are trying to do this. They’re trying to replace Islamism with a more moderate version plus economic growth. So the young men in particular have things to do and a purpose in life and a family to feed and all this other stuff and are not drawn towards these sorts of ideologies. But you seem skeptical about that.

SAM HARRIS: Yeah, because I think these religious commitments are sincere for many, many millions of people and also for everyone. Wealth is not enough on some level. I mean, many people think they need religion. I mean you’re certainly aware of this and you’re talking about this more. And I mean you and I view this differently.

I think the burden is on us to understand that the real depths of human flourishing need to be talked about in ways that are non-sectarian. I mean the truth is non-sectarian. The truth is not Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish. That’s true of physics and it’s also true of the mind. Right?

Whatever’s possible for us mentally and emotionally and socially and whatever happens after death, it’s like to believe otherwise is to believe that one isolated community 2,000 years ago that had no access to science or even scientific values, much less scientific tools, got it perfectly right and everyone else got it wrong. So one of these revealed texts is true, despite the fact that none of them seem to recognize that slavery was a problem morally, among other things.

They know nothing about DNA or electricity or information science or the real scale of the cosmos or how disease spreads or anything. But they can tell you how to sacrifice a goat. And they’ve got some good wisdom in there too. But they don’t have a monopoly on that because the Greeks had that and the Buddhists had that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And.

SAM HARRIS: The Golden Rule exists in many different contexts. And even monkeys seem to intuit some basic version of it. When you treat them unfairly or you reward one with a cucumber and another with a grape, they tend to not like that.

Whatever is true about us spiritually and ethically is deeper than culture, and it’s certainly deeper than any ancient culture, right? And the fact that the world was partitioned by language barriers and geographical barriers for thousands of years and everyone came up with different books is an artifact that we have to recognize as an artifact.

And it’s specious, it’s spurious, it’s not the actual foundation of our moral knowledge or anything else. And when you go into the Bible and read it and purport to find wisdom there, even if you’re a fundamentalist, fundamentalists are picking and choosing the stuff that they think is wise and stuff they think is better left ignored. And they’re doing that on the basis of a larger cultural conversation that is secular and that has moved on.

So the fact that you’re still not trying to figure out whether you should kill somebody for working on the Sabbath if you’re Jewish and reading the Pentateuch, or whether you really need to hunt witches in your community for the crime of witchcraft, the fact that you can ignore all that and just take the so-called good stuff, again, that’s an editing procedure.

That is the gold standard of that is your own moral intuitions that have been tuned up by your engagement with the 21st century, your inevitable engagement with the 21st century and a wider secular culture. So none of these religions have a monopoly on anything other than their own sectarian ignorance and tribalism and dogmatism.

And all of that is best disavowed and we can have a real conversation about what is truly trans-cultural and deeper than the artifacts of whatever, you know, grandma had in her bag before we knew anything about biology or the human brain.

But most of the world doesn’t see it that way. Most of the world is mightily attached to whatever they got at mother’s knee about the unique sanctity of a specific book and what happens after death, and they’ve organized their lives around it.

And in the case of Islam, you’re talking about a much wider culture that has been insulated from modernity to a remarkable degree and has not had the same kinds of collisions with rationality or science or secular politics. And so on some level, it’s like we’re dealing with the Christians of the 14th century in many, many places and even on the streets of London.

Global Coordination Problems

FRANCIS FOSTER: Sam, it’s been an absolute pleasure as always having you on the show. The final question is always the same. What’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we really should be?

SAM HARRIS: I think we’re not talking about solving coordination problems that by definition are global in scale. I mean, so much of what we’ve talked about so far represents a massive opportunity cost around the problems that really are huge that we can’t even think about solving.

It’s like we haven’t talked about AI, right? So AI is a global phenomenon now. It’s going to impose whatever global risks it imposes on us to get out of this arms race condition and develop this technology sanely in a way that’s going to be compatible with our flourishing or even our survival is going to require cooperation that we just can’t figure out how to even begin to engineer. Right?

I mean, how do we get the entire world on the same page around what is safe and ethical around AI and so many other problems? I mean, the next pandemic is another coordination problem that we’re just so… But coordination problems are specifically interesting because we can fail to solve them even when everyone wants the same thing, right?

It’s not just people having different interests or seeing trade-offs differently. We can all fail together because we simply haven’t figured out how to move collectively, even when everyone could be incentivized to do that and everyone has the same basic interest.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There you go. An uplifting message from Sam Harris to finish on. All right, head on over to Substack, where we ask Sam your question. Are you encouraged that a critical mass of the best new media platforms, including Trigonometry, is evolving beyond commentary into high quality interview journalism and the kind of genuine shoe leather reporting traditional media seems unable or unwilling to deliver?

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