When we lift the hood on what has happened in the second Trump term, all of the people who have collaborated in what is effectively a kind of kleptocratic distortion of American policy on every level. And there are billionaires wrapped up in this, too. I mean, you know, the cryptocurrency of it all, the thing that has enriched the Trump family more than anything. I mean, there are some very big names adjacent to all of this. I mean, are laws being broken? If they're not, we don't have the right laws.
Welcome to Stay Tuned. I'm Preet Bharara. My guest this week is Sam Harris, who has a lot of hats. He's a neuroscientist, a philosopher, a five-time New York Times best-selling author, and the host of the Making Sense podcast. We talk about a lot of stuff: politics, philosophy, government, morality. That's coming up. Stay tuned.
Sam Harris, welcome back to the show. How are you?
I'm good. Great to see you, Preet. It's been a while.
It's been a while, and I'm just trying to figure out if things are the same, if they've gotten better, if they've gotten worse. I don't want to talk about politics just yet.
Something that's been on my mind, I know is on your mind, and one of the things that you're known for is your commitment to and dedication to and concern about good faith debate and discussion. Right? Is that a fair statement?
That's why, you know, one of the reasons you have a podcast, it's one of the reasons I have a podcast. So, before we talk about how political debate unfolds, because that's a subspecies of overall conversation and debate. There are discussions on college campuses, there are discussions in people's homes, there are discussions at Thanksgiving, cable television, podcasts, you name it. You hear this all the time, and I heard it 20 years ago and 30 years ago also, that the quality of dialogue has gone down.
Is that true or do we just reinvent a reason to be concerned and critical and annoyed every few years?
No, well, I think both things are also true. I mean, those aren't mutually exclusive, but I do think it has gone down and for some obvious reasons. I mean, I think the information siloing born of social media has, you know, in the fragmentation of culture as a result of that, that has proceeded apace for the last 20-some-odd years. I think people are reading less and what they read is shorter and less carefully argued. I mean, I think much of what people are consuming is, if not AI slop entirely, it's the slopification born of hot takes and, you know, frankly, podcast conversations such as this. Although, you know, I think you and I are...
Hopefully we're going to be okay.
Yeah, we're not going to be displaying the most egregious sins of the format here, but so many podcasts are just a matter of the host and the guest bloviating without much care to observe anything like academic or journalistic or intellectual norms, right? They're just, I mean, we have so many podcasts that are run by comedians and, you know, entertainers and also just unserious people, and so the appetite for contrarianism and conspiracy thinking has been supercharged, you know, during COVID and beyond, as one big cultural change. And so there's very little respect for institutions and institutional narratives and gatekeeping and expertise, and so that unwinding has had an effect. The effect that Joe Rogan's podcast has had has been, I mean, there's been many things, but it has been politically disastrous, I think. I just think it's not just what's happened on his podcast, but the instruction that every other independent broadcaster on Earth has taken from his example. I think it's been terrible. You would think that people would have a base level of credulousness about things that they hear.
And in both regards, with respect to people that folks think they shouldn't agree with, someone from a different party, they don't believe anything that comes out of the mouths of the people who are on the other side of the fence, which I sort of get that. But you couple that with simultaneously taking as gospel everything said by the folks on their own side of the fence. That's true with Joe Rogan. That I don't really understand. Do you have a theory about that?
Well, it is, you know, it is a form of tribalism. It's a form of confirmation bias. I mean, there are certain sources that you, you know, prejudge as friendly, or, you know, through cruel experience, you know, you realize that, you know, certain sources are kind of weaponized against you, and you just are not disposed to take them seriously. Yeah, so much of this you can date to COVID and what it did to our society. I mean, both the fact of the pandemic and the reaction to it, and the overreaction to it, and the counter-reaction to it. And, you know, what it's like when you see a story that you're close to, many of us have the experience of seeing the bias and, you know, frank idiocy of even the best, you know, organs of journalism like the New York Times on full display, right? I mean, as recently as today, I'm reading an article in the New York Times and I see them predisposed to get many things wrong because they're tendentious to various, you know, left-leaning shibboleths, you know, on a topic that I know very closely, right? So that's, you know, all of that stuff is infuriating, frankly, and if you don't have enough of a foothold in the norms of, you know, proper critical thought, it's easy to see how someone who bills himself as really just an entertainer, as someone just having fun on his podcast with friends, mainly, doesn't have a responsibility to keep bending over backwards to give the usual gatekeepers and the usual authorities a fresh hearing, right? And so, yeah, I mean, there are many people who just think that you shouldn't believe anything in the New York Times, but you should believe what some, you know, fairly crazed person thinks about vaccines, you know, in the same breath as he tells you that he was denied a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work. They're listening to crazy people, and but some of these crazy people are running parts of our government now. I mean, this is again, so there's been a great unraveling.
Since you mentioned COVID, do you have a view on how Dr. Fauci has been described, how he's been treated, and how he's been received and thought of, and how do you think of him?
Well, there are a few layers to this onion. I mean, so the first thing I would say is that in defense of all the people who are outraged at how the government handled everything, there are kernels of truth to that outrage. And one kernel is that the immediate branding of any speculation about the origins of this virus being not a wet market, but a lab leak, as racist, right? That kind of vilification of people who were just thinking, just following some obvious chains of thought at the time, that was terrible and terribly counterproductive, right? I mean, it had nothing to do with racism. I mean, just step back for a second and ask yourself, how is a lab leak more politically invidious, i.e., racist, than a wet market outbreak, right? I mean, if anything, I would say the fact that the Chinese can't figure out how to stop eating bats and pangolins and raccoon dogs, that is more, quote, racist to observe about their culture than their propensity to have a lab leak out of a level two or level three lab, which happens to more or less everyone, right? So, I mean, the racism charge was always idiotic. It was always going to produce rage in anyone it was directed at. And so that's true. And Fauci was part of that. And his leaked journals, though I don't think they should have been leaked, I think that's awful, are obviously embarrassing. I mean, the contents there, I mean, his level of... So, yeah, I don't support the leaking of private journals in this way. I mean, I think many people would be embarrassed by that process. But what is on display is also as objectively embarrassing as almost anything in a public health official. I mean, he was just blown around by his fame in a way that it's just hard to defend. You know, and as to whether or not he was doing anything to cover, you know, the improprieties of himself or his friends in trying to quash any investigation of a lab leak, I mean, I think that remains to be seen, but I do think he's also the focus of a witch hunt. And the attacks on him and the glee with which many people are expecting an 85-year-old man to spend the rest of his days in prison, I mean, like all of this is just a kind of moral panic and a burning of a witch, which I think is, again, it's a sign of the times we're living in.
So, you raise something else that is sort of part of this whole discussion about good faith debate and the lack of it, and where people go directionally with their complaints and what outcomes they want. And this one is near and dear to my heart. It's criminal prosecution. And I don't know if it's the case 50 years ago that people were so quick to say if you disagreed with somebody, or you thought someone violated a, quote-unquote, norm, or someone was on the other side of the fence, or someone committed an ethical violation, or someone told an untruth in some context other than when they're like, doesn't matter what it is. If they're not in your tribe, lock them up. And there's lots of things that are morally blameworthy. I dare say that I've committed a number of them. I'm sure you have. You know, there's not a human who hasn't. But if you're in the other tribe, the call to imprison you, I feel, comes much more quickly than it ever did before. And that's even true on the left sometimes, too.
Let me volley this back to you with a similar question, but I'm wondering, I mean, there are some significant asymmetries here, right? So, it's like if you were someone who claimed to care about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop or about the impropriety of him having a, you know, a sinecure at the, you know, Ukrainian oil company for which he was clearly not qualified, and what that might say about corruption in the Biden family and the coming Biden presidency. Okay, well, it's fine to care about all of that, I guess, but then how can you not care about a president who has already enriched himself billions of dollars by trading away our, you know, tariff policies and our foreign policy.
But it's the scale of the thing that is so different. And, you know, Nancy Pelosi's stock trades are one thing. What Trump and company are doing now is orders of magnitude worse, even if you were going to take the least charitable view of the Pelosi case. So, my question to you is, given, I mean, given if there are not laws against what Trump and family are doing now, I mean, in cryptocurrency scams or creating an insider trading mechanism, you know, selling early access to his Truth Social posts for $100,000 a month so that you can bet on their implications in the market. I mean, one, aren't there laws against that, and why wouldn't somebody be going to prison once the Democrats have enough power to actually investigate things? But two, my concern is that once the Democrats are in a position to investigate these sorts of things, it's all going to be spun as just more lawfare, more cynicism, more tribalism, and attention to details of scale and to the egregiousness of some of these offenses will go completely out the window, and we will just be swinging back and forth between these misuses of American justice where one is actually a proper use. I mean, if this kind of financial behavior and self-dealing can't be investigated, I don't know what can be.
Well, so number one, I think it will be. I think the House will be in the hands of the Democrats. The Justice Department is not. And you have my erstwhile friend Todd Blanche and former colleague saying words to the effect of, you know, neither he will say nor should any Attorney General say that they're independent from the White House, which is astonishing. But when you ask a question like that, and a lot of people do on a going-forward basis, there's some history here. And Donald Trump has been investigated multiple times, again and again and again, both by state jurisdictions, state DAs, by federal prosecutors, a number of them, by a state attorney general, by Congress multiple times. He has been sued. He has lost. So, you know, there is a mechanism for doing this. It does not always succeed because there are problems of proof, or there are problems of, you know, who's directing the investigation and who's not. And I think the things that you're talking about are ripe for investigation and will be investigated, not by the Justice Department over the next two and a half years, but at some point they will. Now, the other paradox here is, you know, I come from a law enforcement background, and so if someone committed a crime or there's sufficient predicate to investigate a crime, then you do that. And you walk away if there's not enough evidence or it's not in the interest of justice. And otherwise, no matter what the hue and cry is, you go forward. The problem is when you investigate and/or prosecute or decline to prosecute someone like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or anyone else who has a political following, and in some cases a subset of a political following that is sort of blindly following, sometimes politically the best thing that can happen to them is to get investigated or to get indicted. You know, I haven't looked at the charts myself, but multiple people have said, and I should go look at it myself, that Donald Trump was deader than dead as a political prospect after he lost the election in 2020. And if you look at the graphs, his popularity began to rise again when he was indicted by the Manhattan DA. And the other thing that happens is the sort of drowning in information, and not just information, but drowning in conspiracy theories and drowning in lies and drowning in controversies. Donald Trump, even though the publicity he was getting was largely negative, right? You had the prosecution in Manhattan, you had the prosecution in Georgia, you had the two special counsel prosecutions. He was taking up all the air. Right? So, even if somebody else on his side, on the Republican side, had a message, and even if the information about Donald Trump was bad, it was all about Donald Trump, going to prove, you know, that old saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity. I don't know if that's true or not. You combine that with J.D. Vance's recent pronouncement that if Watergate happened today, it would be a 12-hour story. And can you imagine how ridiculous it is that that little thing called Watergate toppled a presidency. How do you react to all of that stuff?
Well, I think he's probably right about that, which is, but it's, you know, I would draw the opposite lesson, I think, there. I mean, that is a sign of just how deep a hole we are in politically and culturally, right? It's not that it should have been a 12-hour story. It's that it would be now a 12-hour story given how much noise and how little signal there is in our information landscape, given...
But is there always that noise, or does Donald Trump strategically, tactically, instinctively create that noise? I mean, was there that much noise when Biden was president? I don't think so.
There've been kind of Trump-like reverberations, you know, that crossed, you know, the four years where he wasn't president. I mean, we continue to unravel, and there is a left-wing version of kind of the Trumpist noise machine. But I mean, for Trump specifically, I mean, this is kind of, I think, a kind of unpopular opinion of him, but this is the framing I have always had of him, and I think I still have it. I think a lot of his success and, you know, his ascendancy and his invulnerability to scandal has less to do with him being some kind of political genius and more to do with the situation in which he has found himself, right? So, I view him as a... the analogy that has worked for me is that he's kind of an evil version of the Chauncey Gardiner character from the Jerzy Kosinski book and the film Being There. So, you know this, if people remember, Peter Sellers played this character who is just kind of alone in the house, and all he is is the gardener, and he gets thrust into a situation where he can be... everything he says can be mistaken for political wisdom, but he's really an imbecile, right? And he never ceases to be an imbecile, but he's in a context in which everything he does begins to look profound and has a profound effect on the people around him. There's something like that going on with Trump, right? So, ask yourself now, is Trump being a genius when he contradicts himself 15 times over the course of 30 minutes on topics of enormous importance like what's going on in our current war with Iran, right? He'll claim that the Iranians are, you know, just peace-loving people just like ourselves who want the best for their country, and then he'll turn around and say they're scum. He'll say he's going to annihilate them, but then he'll say that the war's already been won and the Straits of Hormuz are wide open, and he lurches back and forth. It is just a word salad, right? Now, that is not, I would say, calculated to confound the audience, and no, it's just he has found himself in the presence of an electorate where tens of millions of people simply do not care about what is real, right? They don't... it's not like... so an ordinary con man has to lie so as to be believed, right? He has to be aware of the logical expectations of his audience, and the con is to shade the truth or to lie outright in such a way that the puzzle piece has to fit, right? Or seem to fit, so that everyone doesn't call on the whole enterprise. Where the situation Trump is in is he's got enough people, you know, something like 30% of Americans, maybe 40% of Americans, who simply don't care if the puzzle piece fits, right? They're just not tracking the truth. They're signaling to themselves in some kind of extended loyalty test that they will eat everything that comes out of his mouth, you know, lie, insult, hallucination. And they'll give him money. I mean, then he'll print another, you know, fake gold coin. And it doesn't matter what that gold coin says. I mean, he could mint a coinage that says, 'You're all a bunch of dumb cucks. Come and get it.' And he would sell millions of dollars of those coins. Right? So that's the situation he's in, and given that he's got tens of millions of people who will never be dislodged from that cult, that he looks like some kind of political genius.
Would you describe him as a demagogue?
And so demagogues never have a majority, I don't think. It's unlikely that they have majorities because there are thinking, intelligent, rational people in any given population, particularly one that's a democracy, that may be under threat of becoming something less than or different from a democracy. And Donald Trump seems to have figured out, again, instinctively, because I don't think he gives deep thought to anything. He doesn't have a manifesto at home. He has instinct in his head that you don't need to have 51% of the people. You don't need to have 60% of the people. And if your particular appeal is to that subset of any population who is more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and is more likely to not be attached to democracy. I mean, Anne Applebaum has this statistic that I think about all the time, and I was looking back at one of her books over the weekend, that I think there are social scientists who believe that even in Western liberal democracies there is like a latent subset of, I don't know, they claim 20, 25, 30% who are like, yeah, look, if we have to have some autocracy but we get the outcomes we want, then we're okay. And he figured that out. I mean, like even now with his very low poll rating, he's basically alienated all the people who have some skepticism about him, even if they voted for him. And the only people that are left are the ones who don't, and if that's of a sufficient number to win the Electoral College, then that's all you need. Does that mean the system is messed up?
And then I guess my question is, on the pie chart of blameworthiness about our being in this predicament, how much of that pie chart is filled with Trump? And how much of that pie chart is filled with Trump supporters?
Well, I would point to the others part of the pie, which I think is, I would say at least half of it, which is the miscalculation and frank idiocy and confusion of the left. Right? I blame the left in large measure for the fact that there's a President Trump in the first place.
Let's go through that. Give us...
Yeah, I mean, so there's many examples that can crystallize this problem, but I mean, you know, I'll take you back to the time when Kamala Harris couldn't figure out, over the course of her campaign, could not figure out how to disavow her prior support for taxpayer-funded gender reassignment surgery to incarcerated illegal immigrants, right? I mean, so like that was an interview question that she quite noticeably fumbled. That was an attack ad, you know, 'she's for they/them, he's for you,' that I think got 30% of Trump's spend, you know, in the last weeks of that campaign.
See, but what's interesting is many people will agree with you. But then already, it seems to me that the spotlighting that issue says there's an uneven playing field because Trump has said any one of a number of things...
...that are batshit crazy like that, except we're having a conversation about how Kamala Harris was to blame and is at fault for having one of those.
Yeah, so it's completely different physics. You know, as you move right of center, everything is upside down. Yeah, there's no question. So, you know, Al Franken got defenestrated for that arguably tasteless photo that he took. But at the same moment, you know, we had Judge Roy Moore getting the Republican wagons circled around him for having, you know, groomed a, what, a 15-year-old or something, you know, as a 30-year-old man. I mean, there's just no comparison.
So the Senate candidate in Maine, had that person been a Republican, probably would still be in the race.
Yeah, but I think it's probably a good thing he's not in the race. So, what's the solution here?
Well, except that it's not just... I mean, look at what's happening now. We have a, I would say, a genuinely sinister marriage, you know, left of center, between the DSA, you know, now an avowedly communist organization. I mean, you go to their website and look at what they're for, right? They're for the abolition of everything: the presidency, the Senate, capitalism, even private property, right? I mean, this is their platform. And there's a marriage...
What Americans believe that?
Oh, well, it's got to be infinitesimal, but still there's no... you still have mainstream Democrats trying to figure out what to say about this and terrified to get on the wrong side of these fanatics, right? And you have Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of your fair city, who is thought to be the most charismatic and most influential Democrat in sight now. You have a fair number of Trojan horse DSA candidates now getting elected or getting poised to get elected. They're glad-handing people like Hasan, this streamer, who is a proper moral lunatic and someone who really should be... I mean, he's our version of Nick Fuentes, right? So you have Democrats who can't figure out what to do with their version of Nick Fuentes. Mainstream Democrats. So there's a level of confusion here, and it's all getting wrapped up in this global explosion of anti-Semitism post-October 7th, and an alliance with Islamism and Muslim Brotherhood confected forces that predates this moment going back many, many decades, but it has achieved some kind of apotheosis post-October 7th. So now you have the mayor of New York talking about Israel every other sentence as though that made any sense at all morally or politically, right? So the scale of confusion and the scale of consequence, I think, becomes something like equivalent once you wrap all of that up. I mean, that is the other side of the pie, and I'm very worried that the Democrats in advance of the 2028 presidential election are getting ready to commit something like suicide if they can't get their heads screwed on straight here, because here is the one thing I'm very confident of: in a forced choice between fascism on the one hand, I think Anne Applebaum's point here is instructive, and communism, or I can't figure out how to disavow communism on the other hand, will choose fascism. I don't think there's any question of that, right? So Zohran Mamdani is a disaster for... if he's still as prominent as he is now, and you have characters like El-Sayed who are arguably worse coming out of the woodwork, and that is the complexion of the Democratic Party in 2028, I think we get J.D. Vance, we get Donald Trump Jr., we get some weird... we'll get the MyPillow guy over that.
If you had to pick one quality, one virtue, or its opposite, one vice, is it an unfair question, that you would identify as causing more of our problems and more of our disunity and more of our polarization and more of our bad choices than any other? What might it be? Is it ignorance? Is it tribalism? Is it loneliness? Is it lack of attention? Is it lead in the paint still? Like, what would it be?
Well, so at the group level, I would say it's... I mean, there are really two wings to this awful bird. I would say it's tribalism and dogmatism. You know, I mean, tribalism, our groupishness, our in-group bias, and the reflexiveness with which we feel solidarity for our in-group and contempt for the out-group, and the way in which we filter information along those lines. But also dogmatism, the disposition to believe things, cherished things, on bad evidence or no evidence or despite mountains of contrary evidence. And nowhere do we get that more reliably wrong than under the aegis of religion. I think it's, when you're talking about groups of people, I think those are our most consequential sins. When you're talking about just individuals and how they navigate their day-to-day lives, I think lying is the worst thing we do most of the time and the worst thing we tolerate in others. I mean, the fact that lying isn't essentially fatal to one's political ambitions and being caught in a lie, I think that's a real problem.
It used to be. It used to be.
I think we need to figure out how to get back to a time when lying really mattered, and, you know, now it's just expected of everybody, and now it's, you don't even... it's just obviously Trump has brought a kind of 20-megaton change of landscape and expectation on that front. But I do think that's, you know, it is just the most reliably corrupting and deranging thing we do, and that others do in our presence, and it just destroys culture. I mean, it destroys politics. I mean, when the consequences are appropriate, it destroys relationships, it destroys reputations, it destroys... I mean, it's just the thing, once you stop doing it, it's the thing that simplifies your life like no other thing. It's like a kind of superpower not to lie, to understand that you're not going to lie to people.
