Making Sense with Sam Harris - #421 — “More From Sam”: Political Violence, Iran, Deportations, Protests, & Rapid Fire Questions

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

In this latest episode of the “More From Sam” series, Sam hopped back on with his manager and business partner, Jaron Lowenstein, to talk about current events and answer some of the questions you all submitted on Substack. They discuss the assassination of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and the recent uptick in political violence, Elon’s comments about Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, Iran, deportations, the LA protests, Sam’s recent appearance on Jordan Peterson’s podcast, and rapid fire questions. Produced by Griffin Katz  

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

doing here, please consider becoming one. Hey, Sam, how you doing? Good. How's it going? Going well. Did you have a nice Father's Day? I did. You? We don't really do anything. I don't even know how to celebrate. You don't observe? We don't observe. I feel like every day is Father's Day. Uh, I did you? Uh, we don't really do anything. It's, uh, I don't even know how to celebrate. You don't observe? We don't observe.

I feel like every day is Father's Day in my house. I got one card. I've got two daughters, one card. So that was, uh, it was sweet. That's better than I got. All right. Well, let me set the series up. All right.

Hi everybody. And welcome to another episode of more from Sam as a reminder, the goal of the series is to get more from Sam on current events more often, and also to share a more fun side of Sam. Sam, you have a fun side. Plenty of heavy shit to discuss, but in this series, we're allowed to have fun doing it. The tone is faster paced, which includes interruptions because they create more energy. I'm here to surface Sam's ideas, so don't get caught up on what you think my actual positions might be. It doesn't matter. Everybody loves a spicy Sam, so I'm going to do what I can to get more of that. And lastly, this series is not meant to be, thank you.

It's not meant to be a replacement for anything. It's simply in addition to what Sam is already doing. Also, Sam has some tour dates coming up this fall that have already been announced. New York and Boston in October are nearly sold out. I think there are about a hundred tickets last I checked in each of those cities. And Seattle and nice job, Sam, well done. Thanks to all those in New York and Boston

who have quickly bought tickets. And Seattle and San Jose in September are each a little over 50% sold as well. So if you want tickets to any of those shows, you can head over to samharis.org. Also, we're about to announce Chicago. So that's coming this week in order to get, yeah, it should be fun.

In order to get access to the presale, you must be a paid subscriber to the podcast. And then there'll be a general on sale shortly thereafter. Anyway, all this info can be found on the website. And if you're on the mailing list, you're on the lookout for something coming very soon. Sam, are there any quick thoughts on these shows you can share

with us? Something the audience should... Just that I'm looking forward to them. I'm going to write a talk and so the first hour will not be extemporaneous. I mean, maybe I'll say something. There'll be some marginalia as I work from what I've prepared, but I know I'm actually going into this wanting to put my thoughts in order and I love the excuse to be able to do that. So it feels almost like I have to write a short book between now and then, but I will do that and I'll come prepared to tell people what I'm thinking about. That'll be fun.

And then the second half we'll do an episode of More From Sam, this kind of vibe where we can incorporate some of the current events. I mean, I think what I want to do is I want to field the questions in advance that we know are most pressing, especially things that I have said or failed to say that the audience finds most galling. So I just will get the hardest questions and one, I'll probably anticipate some of those in my talk, but we'll store them up for each event and deal with them in the second hour or two. Well, we'll do that.

That's what we do for every episode here, so that shouldn't be too hard. All right, so there's no shortage of things to cover on this episode, so let's get into it. I wanna start with the political violence that took place this past weekend in Minneapolis, where a state representative and her husband were murdered in their home,

and a state senator and his wife were shot multiple times at their house and have thankfully survived. You got Trump, Josh Shapiro, two employees at the Israeli embassy and you could throw in the UnitedHealthcare CEO as well. What's going on with the explosion of political violence and is this a new norm we should come to expect? Well, I mean, it's obviously awful. It's also mimetic.

We know that people find this kind of, the kind of notoriety that shooters get is somewhat contagious, right? So, you know, we've had episodes like this before in our past. I mean, not for a very long time, but obviously the late 60s was a time where we were sort of in freefall with respect to assassinations.

I mean, it's awful. I think the thing that is, I mean, the only governor we have on and apart from catching people and we're providing great security so as to make it effectively impossible is to shun any political rhetoric that directly inspires this kind of behavior. And unfortunately, both sides, not both sides equally, but both sides have at various points tipped over into ways of speaking about their political opponents

that have been totally irresponsible. And I would put Trump at the top of this list of people who has been- Who's got the time, or how long did it take to bring Trump up there? Well, I mean, it's just, yeah,. Who's got the time or how long did it take to bring Trump up there? Well, I mean, it's just, yeah, but it's just, just the fact that here's somebody who has normalized political violence in several respects. I mean, his response to January 6th was a great act of normalization. You get, you have people who are literally stabbing cops in the face with

flagpoles and they've been exonerated as American heroes. Yeah. All of that is part of what has pushed us to this moment, I think. Well, I mean, do you think we have to doge our, the way that we treat these people instead of letting them become celebrities so quickly? Can't we just find these people

that commit these heinous acts and disappear them very quickly? We try to do that. I mean, sometimes better than others, but we did that effectively with, at least to my eye, we did that with the shooter who tried to kill Trump as evidenced by the fact that I can't even remember his name. Yeah, well, I think he was just killed

right there on the spot. I think that's what happened. Yeah, but like we haven't talked about him. He's not a martyr to any cause. In fact, I don't happen to know much about what his cause was, how much was mental illness and how much was an actual ideological motivation.

We've been better in recent years about doing that, whether it's political violence or just violence. I mean, the Vegas shooter who still killed more people than any shooter in American history. Again, I've forgotten his name, I once knew it, but that was memory hold within like 72 hours of the occurrence. So I think we're getting better at it,

but the way we are talking about our politics, I think is just, it's not reminiscent of any recent period in American history. I mean, we're so uncivil. I mean, this is of a piece with a U.S. senator being wrestled to the ground and handcuffed at a press conference for Kristi Noem, right? And the fact that his Republican colleagues in the Senate didn't immediately, or Congress didn't immediately condemn that. In fact, some of them lined up on the other side and castigated him for some impropriety that they thought warranted his manhandling there. The thing

that we're not recognizing is that civility is the last stop before violence, right? I mean, the civility is not just a nice to have, it's really a must have when you're talking about discussing politically polarizing issues. Yeah. Well, I want to get to Alex Padilla and a little bit of that later because I do think what he did, you know, perhaps had some impact on changing the course of events there. It seems that that's been, that's been walked back, but we'll, we'll get back to that in a bit. Or the, the ice raids have been, have been walked back because of the idea that apparently it's impacting the farming industry and the hotel industry.

I wonder what those phone calls were like. Well, no shit. I mean, what a dummy. How obvious was that for him to say? Yeah, but also how dysfunctional is it that really what accomplished this change in policy undoubtedly were a bunch of rich friends of the president calling and saying, listen, you're fucking up my hotel business. This-

This has nothing to do with the humanity of it. Yeah, it's nothing to do with wisdom or pragmatism or ethics or anything. It's just pure patronage. I mean, this is what is turning us into a banana republic. What Trump has done is he's put himself at the bottleneck of everything, and he's using both domestic and foreign policy

to dole out favors to friends and punish enemies. I mean, the thing that is so despicable about the Republicans now is that no one objects to this. That's what was amazing to see in the falling out with Elon. You have all these people who, many of whom are welcoming Elon back into the fold, I mean, just desperate to patch up this marriage. And yet they're not acknowledging how corrosive it is

to have a president who immediately goes to, if Elon supports any Democrats, there'll be extraordinary consequences. He's threatening him with a judicial investigation or a loss of contracts. He's using the levers of government power to say that his former friend shouldn't fund political opposition in this country. And everyone on the Republican side accepts that as somehow normal. This is, you know, authoritarian is the generic term for it.

I mean, this is not remotely normal in American politics. No, no, no. Well, you know, you talked about, while we're talking about Musk in your recent subsack piece, you torched him, and this is something you and I were talking about earlier, that Musk has admitted that he went overboard with something that resembled, I guess, an apology on Twitter. But what he's saying here really matters.

I mean, we shouldn't be quick to forget what he's basically saying. He's saying that he's either someone who has no morals, who just was happy to work with Trump, who was a rapist, a child rapist and he was just fine because well he had shared interests or he completely made up an insane lie about his friend, you know, someone who he loved as much as any man could love another. So either way and the reason why I think it matters is because according to your latest podcast, I think it was Daniel or I think it was the last name, you just spoke to about AI. One of these guys could very soon become the leader of the most powerful AI army in the world.

And we should care about the character of these individuals. Yeah, I don't know how we got here, but we seem to have, at least half of our society seems to think that we, the personal integrity of the most powerful people in our society doesn't matter. You can have the most self-interested, unethical people you can find, give them basically all the power human beings can have, and you can just expect everything to work fine. Now, it would be great to have systems, to have laws and institutions

that were totally impervious to bad actors. I mean, that would be the dream. It's an unrealistic one. Clearly, we don't have anything like that currently in the US government. So it matters whether psychologically normal, at a minimum, psychologically normal people are in charge, right?

And we just don't have that we have narcissists and liars and Confabulators and and in certain cases, I think mentally Unstable people but I think a lot of times when you talk like that people think you exaggerate but right here right here We saw Elon Musk and we we know well even on the president's account the president's account, he went crazy, right? So he's unstable. I mean, I think most people will admit that at a minimum he's unstable.

But like these are the two worst options. But yes, those two interpretations of Elon's character. One, he was happy to collaborate with a person he knew to be a child rapist or an enabler of child rape. Or two, he was willing to claim that a person who is his favorite person on earth 10 minutes ago was a child rapist the moment their interests were no longer aligned.

You pick your favorite interpretation of his character there, because that exhausts the possibilities. But why isn't that being talked about more? Because again, right of center, nobody cares about a person's character. They care about Hunter Biden's character, apparently, right of center, nobody cares about a person's character. They care about Hunter Biden's character, apparently, right? They care about whether Joe Biden's inner circle

knew that he wasn't complus mentis and were letting the country have a somewhat vacant presidency or presidency by committee, right? That strikes them as just adjacent to evil, but nothing on their own side matters, including, I mean, they were completely unfaithful. The people who thought Elon was this absolutely impeccable omnibus genius, when he alleged that, you know, mark my words, Trump is a child rapist.

So many words, he alleged that he He doubled down on that tweet, said, you know, just flag this tweet, flag this post, come back to this post, mark this post, however he put it. You know, the truth will come out, right? He's claiming to have certain knowledge of Trump's criminal culpability, right? All these people who were up to that moment thought Elon could do no wrong.

What did they think? Did any of them care? And these are also people, the irony is that these are also people who are disproportionately fixated on the problem of pedophilia. Half of them think there's a pedophile cult running the world. They certainly don't think Epstein killed himself. They think lots of powerful people are culpable for an immense coverup there.

And to hear that Elon knows and promises you that you will know soon, if you just watch this space, you soon will know that Trump is one of these sinister rapists or enablers of rapists. How many of them cared? Where were the Jack Pesovics and the Charlie Kirk's and the other grifters and confabulists, the pizza gate dummies, the Mike Snerdovich?

Where were they? Like, how did they not jump into that space? One way or the other, either Elon is lying and he's pure evil. He's smearing the president with the worst aspersion that can be summoned to a human mind. Or you trust Elon because God damn, he knows everything and he's been on the inside and

he has all the data. And you sort of know anyway that Trump is like this. You know he was friends with Epstein for many, many years. You know he celebrated Epstein's sexual conquests and even named the fact that he likes his ladies young. He said that some people fact that he likes his ladies young. Some people say that he likes beautiful women even more than I do and he sure likes them young. Right? That's practically verbatim. Right? You know that in his 60s, probably, he was storming the dressing rooms of teenage girls at the Miss America Pageant. You know that he's just right on the edge of doing this anyway all by himself, right?

And yet who cared, right? This is, I mean, it's not even hypocrisy. It's just a complete vacancy of a moral sensibility, right of center now. Well, and they rightly care about lawlessness too. Oh yeah. Except for when it's January 6th. Only on one side, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah. But I mean, but that, I don't know. as two except for one side. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. So, but I mean, but that, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, one can imagine it's going to normalize at some point. I think part of it is the characters we have in play. You know, I just, I don't, I don't know that you can get a delusional cult under somebody like JD Vance, but I'm sure the Republicans will give it a good hard drive. All right. Switching gears. Let's talk about Israel and Iran. Any early thoughts on that?

Well, it's not going to surprise you that I think that they are fighting our war in some respect. I mean, they're fighting their own war too, because a nuclear-armed Iran is definitely an existential concern for them. And if you doubt that, you just haven't been paying attention to what Iran has said for the last 20 plus years. I mean, the Iranian regime is explicitly a theocratic death cult. I mean, this is a jihadist regime of the Shiite variety that has had as its special focus for years and years, the eradication of Israel. This is not a metaphor for anything. Once we get a bomb, we're going to turn Israel into glass. I think the Israelis have to take that threat at face value. I think the lesson that the world should learn is that if you are going to be explicit in your genocidal aspirations, your neighbors, whoever you're targeting with these malicious hopes,

your neighbors are justified in coming across your border and killing the principal bad actors. Words matter, right? And so if you're bluffing, it's on you to not do that again, right? It's just, so I think it's completely warranted. I think this is a commercial for what we should have done years ago, we being the United States.

And you think the Iranians would use a nuke? No doubt about it if they got it. Yeah. I mean, one, if they didn't use a nuke, if they just had them, I think they would do all the awful things they've been doing anyway. I mean, what's amazing is how deterred we, the Americans, have been. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast.

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