Making Sense with Sam Harris - #424 — "More From Sam": Nazi Grok, ICE, Epstein, Social Media, Rapid Fire Questions

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

In this latest episode of the “More From Sam” series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events and answer some of the questions you all submitted on Substack. They discuss Nazi Grok, immigration, ICE raids, Jeffrey Epstein, how to stay focused in the age of distraction, 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. Okay, welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Hi, Sam. Hey, good to see you. Good to see you too. As a reminder, the goal of this series is to get more from Sam on current events more often and to provide access to a more casual version of Sam. Along with subscriber input- As far as that's possible, there's a caveat there, but let's do that. I am here to do my best. Along with subscriber input, I may share my own positions, exaggerated versions of my positions or play devil's advocate and shift between them seamlessly. But because we're here for Sam's ideas,

none of that's your matter. And thank you again to our subscribers for submitting your questions and comments. If you'd like to submit comments for a future episode, you'll need to become a subscriber and you can do that at samherrace.org. And the account you create there will also unlock a free account at Substack and you can submit your questions on Sam's Substack page for future episodes. And while you're at samharris.org you can find all of Sam's upcoming tour dates. There are currently five shows on sale New York, Austin, Seattle, San Jose, and Chicago. And as I said in the last episode, I think we'll be adding some more shows in the future.

So if you have any suggestions for where Sam should go next, please submit those on SubSac as well. And we'll consider those. As a reminder, Sam will be delivering a prepared talk for the first part of the show. And then the second segment, he and I will sit down and do a live episode of More From Sam, one of these things.

And just to add one more thing, if you wanna see Sam on tour, this is probably the time to do it. I'm not saying a hundred percent that Sam will never tour again. What are you predicting death or infirmity? What's going on? I'm predicting, I would not bet on you touring again in the future. It has taken me six years to convince you.

An unwillingness to tour? There's just no reason to do it other than to go and see your fans or have them give them a chance to see you. So it's taken me a long time to, I really, if I get to get any credit here, I've been, I've been trying to get you to go out for a long time and we're going to do it. And I don't know how successful I'll be beyond this tour. So if you want to, if you want to have a fun night out and see Sam live, this is your chance to do that. Okay, let's get to our first topic. Grok goes Nazi.

Are you surprised by this, Sam? Is anyone surprised by Nazi AI over at Grok? Grok is trained on the vomitorium that is X. It was Twitter, presumably has access to everything that has ever been said on Twitter. And now, all the outpouring of neo-Nazi fanboy sentiment that we've witnessed on X, you know, that is its asymmetric advantage that it's basically got its little corner of, you know, in-cell 4chan Elon stans to listen to.

I mean, obviously they've since put some kind of governor on it. So it's now apologizing for having recommended a second Holocaust and called itself Mecca Hitler, I think, and Giga Chad. I mean, it's not surprising. I mean, maybe they can get the kinks worked out, but this is a problem with AI generally. But I think it's a special concern about Grok. It's going to mirror back to us what we have put into it. It's learning based on the data it has access to. The only thing worse than this would be 4chan launching its own AI, which I guess is conceivable.

Who wants to plow $100 billion into that? But now we have the Department of Defense apparently wanting to pay for this work product. And that was, I think, a $200 million contract that was just announced. I guess, I don't know, can Nazi AI help the Department of Defense? Well, I guess it remains to be seen. Okay. I want to move on to another topic. I want to get your current thoughts on ICE, immigration, Stephen Miller, and anything related to that topic. immigration, Stephen Miller, and anything related to that topic? The immigration spectacle has really been just appalling. I'm sure it's happening in other places I haven't been paying attention to, but in California, it's just obviously meant to be ruthless and cruel

and disorienting and provocative. It's very hard to see it any other way. I mean, bending over backwards to be charitable to the administration, you can see the legitimacy in so far as we have these laws, people are here, either they're either here illegally or not. If they're here illegally,

the federal government is entitled to enforce these laws. And in certain circumstances, it's reasonable to expect that the locals are not going to be so compliant, and therefore they need to come in with some sort of show of force to at least be saved and keep their agents and everyone else safe. So again, I'm bending over backwards to be charitable here. But so if you're going to connect all those dots and say, okay, it's not so anomalous to have the federal government enforcing federal law and doing it in a way of, it's going to cut through any opposition. And I really have nothing to say in defense of protesters who are going to throw chunks

of concrete at cops' heads and try to kill them. That's just obviously illegal and dangerous and those people need to be prosecuted. So the fact that we're here with the federal government trying to enforce real laws against people who are really here illegally is not on its face insane or unethical, except the way they're doing it, it seems designed to produce the reaction

that they then want to quell with yet more force. And it's considered a win for, you know, kind of authoritarian approach to dealing with, with so-called sanctuary cities or leftist, you know, local politics. Even if you agreed you wanted all these people out of the country, there has to be a more judicious, orderly way to do it. There's no reason to surprise a car wash

with 20 ICE agents, guns drawn, and say, everyone get down on the floor. And then, in your rush to grab people who are here illegally, who you've just profiled based on their ethnicity, you're grabbing actual citizens and sending them off to detention centers too, right? And citizens who are telling you that they have papers and you're not listening to them, right? I mean, it's just, that's been the spectacle and it's creating so much fear in the community and so much disorder.

I mean, I know people who are citizens who are sending their kids to private schools in Los Angeles whose families are afraid to leave the house. It's like this is not, this is hitting everybody at every level. This is not just hitting people who are here illegally. But my real position is most of the people who are here illegally have been drawn here based on an economic, a tacit economic arrangement that we made with them a generation ago to work in industries where Americans don't wanna work.

Where are all these American patriots who wanna work at car washes and pick strawberries? They don't exist. And so we have an economy built on this labor. There's dysfunction associated with that, obviously, but it's also an arrangement that everyone has consciously made. And now you have people here who are adding to the economy, really doing nothing but add to the economy, adding to the economy disproportionately, insofar as they don't, they pay into Social Security and they never take the benefits out.

And many of them have kids here who are citizens, right? So it's just the real, the appropriate response to all of this was to close the border and to not let anyone in who we don't want in. Fine. I was always, I was always in support of that, but then create some path to legitimacy here, you know, whether it's citizenship or, you know, some appropriate legal work status and to do it in an orderly way. And in the course of doing that, find all the people who are actually criminals, who nobody wants here and deport those people.

Everyone was for that, but this is a kind of a jackbooted and obviously cruel approach to implementing a policy that is too extreme by half. And it was completely unnecessary. What do you make of Tom Homan's explanation for some of the force that was needed that they had wanted to get local governments

to be supportive or cooperate and they didn't. And the reason why these guys come in with masks is because they have been doxed and he doesn't wanna see that happen to them. It's all an ugly scene, but he has a lot of explanations, some of which make sense for why they're doing what they're doing. I mean, obviously nabbing the wrong people. I don't know if you saw, but I wanted to get your thoughts on this given I know your position on profiling, but a judge had recently ordered the Trump administration to stop immigration arrests without probable cause in Southern California. Now, the judge said that DHS must develop guidance for officers to determine reasonable

suspicion outside of the apparent race or ethnicity of a person, the language they speak or their accent, presence at a particular location such as a bus stop, or the type of work one does. Obviously if you're looking for those that you think may be here illegally, why would you not start with the obvious places? Why would you try to make those that are looking for them pretend that they don't know where they might be, even if they nab the wrong people. And then one more thing to throw at you is, when the guns come in, why is there resistance?

I don't understand that. And again, if they're not, if it doesn't say ICE and they don't make it clear who they are, I guess you could assume you're being attacked by 20 armed, crazy gunmen. But even then, I don't think you stand a chance. So why the resistance? Why not just go through the, and again, it's easier for me to say,

because I'm not profiled, they're not gonna grab me anytime soon. But if they do show up and you understand the mission, there's a lot of sense that Tom Homan is making in the defense of his agents, which also one thing he says is, if you don't like the law, we're just here to enforce it, talk to your congressman and get that changed.

So I threw a lot at you. You're talking about his appearance, I think it was on the New York Times Daily podcast. Yeah, about a month ago, yeah. Or less through. Yeah, no, he made a lot of sense. But again, not entirely so. I've already conceded many of the points he was making.

I mean, yes, well, let's talk about profiling, because that's sort of the new piece here. Profiling is this loaded term, which I think derails the conversation. People just assume it's unacceptable ethically in principle. I've never seen that. I mean, what you're talking about when you're profiling someone is using all the information,

all the statistically relevant information you have at your disposal to figure out whether someone's worth paying attention to, right? Now, the downside of it is obvious. You wind up targeting people who are just similar to that sort of person, who are, I also fit the profile, or you can. And that is, we have decided, I think, understandably, that that is, you know, we have decided,

I think, understandably that that is so undesirable socially in so many circumstances, that we should be very slow to do it. But when the stakes are very high, when you're talking about terrorism, or you're talking about solving murders, right? I think the notion of profiling shouldn't be in anybody's head, right?

Or if you're talking about personally avoiding crime oneself, you know, if you're a woman getting into an elevator alone and, you know, some guy gets on the elevator who makes you uncomfortable, right? You shouldn't be worrying about whether you're profiling him because you're, you know, the hair has stood up on the back of your neck, right?

You should get off the fucking elevator if you're scared. Right? So, I mean, that's, you have to use all the, when you get exactly one chance to make a mistake, you have to use all the information available to you. And, you know, the profiles wouldn't be useful if they weren't useful, right? It's just, we know a lot about the statistics of crime and with respect to specific crimes.

I mean, let's make this dumb and inoffensive for people, it is totally appropriate to profile men for most violent crimes and to profile, you can talk about the crime of rape, right? You know, 99 times out of 100 or, you know, 999 times out of 1,000, you're not looking for a woman perpetrator of a rape, right? It's just not a thing. Let's leave the trans issue aside.

So we all profile and the cops profile, whether they can admit they're doing it or not. And we want them to accept when they're enforcing laws that we don't think they should be enforcing, right? I mean, this, and that's the problem here. They're enforcing a law, I will grant. They're looking for people who are here illegally, but I think we have a wider discussion

that we need to have about whether we want them doing this in the first place. And half the country has said, yes, we do, without having thought it through too much. I mean, again, without, we're talking about people here in many cases who have been here for more than a generation, who've done nothing but productive work that we have wanted them to do

and that very few Americans, if any, want to do. And they have kids and grandkids here, right? And so the most egregious spectacle, I think it was at a Home Depot, was of some guy getting really manhandled by the cops, I mean, I think it was at a home depot, was of some guy getting really manhandled by the cops, I mean, I think actually punched, I mean, not just brought down hard and restrained, but I think he actually got punched in the face. I don't know what he was doing to resist arrest, but he had three sons, I think, in the military.

I think three sons, maybe all of whom were, you know, served this nation as Marines. I think that was the actual fact. This is not the guy you wanna be dragging to some detention center and throwing out of the country. Just, it's so clearly not. And so, and I just feel like even the people who wanna be hard on illegal immigration haven't thought this through.

Yeah, I mean, obviously your point there, I mean, this father of three Marines is awful. But again, why the resisting arrest if that happened? And I understand it's an uncomfortable situation, but I still just don't understand the argument when the cops come or the ICE shows up with the guns that the reaction is resisting arrest or throwing cinder blocks at heads or doing any of that instead of just saying, look, I'm- Leave the cinder blocks aside.

I mean, so obviously there's no defensive that, but the resisting arrest piece becomes more and more plausible the more we have to concede that we have a breakdown in the rule of law and in particular, the principle of due process, right? If someone starts to arrest me and I have absolutely no faith that I'm not gonna wind up in a fucking gulag

in El Salvador, right? With no recourse to a lawyer and with a president who says, I can't get him back, he's not covered by American law. That is the total unraveling of the social contract. So then it's totally plausible to me that someone would say, this is now a life and death struggle with, again, and the other pieces, you've got law enforcement, so-called law enforcement, who are not showing up like law enforcement. They're wearing masks, right? Now, I understand that there's the issue

of doxing, and I get that the mask is perhaps, if not inappropriate, a foreseeable response to that. But these guys are not behaving like law enforcement. They're not showing up with badges. They're showing up like they're expecting to encounter gunfire, right? Which is not at all plausible. I mean, this is like, we're talking about a car wash. And they're showing up like this is a house

where they have somebody barricaded in who's claiming he's gonna shoot his kids, his wife, and himself if someone comes through the front door. Again, I think it's being done this way to terrorize a community, right? That's how you would do it if you were trying to terrorize a community. The way they should do it is somebody with a clipboard

should show up at the car wash without any guys with guns and just inform the owner of the car wash. Listen, you've got, how many employees do you have here? We're concerned that you might have some who are here illegally. We're going to show up in 45 minutes and we want everyone to demonstrate their legal status and if they can't, we're going to show up tomorrow and make sure they can. And anyone who's here illegally is going to go be put through some process where they have to see a judge

and blah, blah, blah. But it's not going to be throwing people to the floor, whether they're legal or not, and putting guns in their faces. Yeah, and you don't think the element of surprise is helpful, I mean, if that happens, it might scatter. But there's no emergency here.

Like this is the thing, people are acting like the house is on fire and we have to get these people out, otherwise we're all gonna die, right? This is not, I mean, first of all, for most of these people, we shouldn't be getting them out in the first place. But for people, so yes, if there's a real criminal, right?

If there's a real member of MS-13 and we have his address, right? And we're worried that he's gonna be armed. Okay, use all of this movie magic police procedure and get in there, you kick in the door and guns drawn, et cetera, fine. But that's not what is happening in most of these cases. The clock is not ticking, right?

There's no crime you're solving at the car wash. There's no emergency. So turn down the temperature. And the fact that they're not doing that, the fact that they're doing nothing but turn it up suggests to me that they have a different agenda. And when you listen to Stephen Miller talk about immigrants, you understand what that agenda is.

He hates immigrants. He's a racist asshole. There's just no, like he's not even hiding it. And he's the genius behind our policy. Not to tip my hand, but damn Sam, that was good. That's exactly what I wanted. Good. I mean, I wanted to hear you explain the difference

between why resisting arrest, why, you know, if somebody pulls somebody over. But the difference here, I agree with you, is that we have a president who's saying, I can't bring them back. And so that does explain why people say I'm innocent, but innocent people have been taken. So anyway, thanks for that.

It's good when you get angry. Not good for the app, but good for the podcast. By the way, I'm gonna talk about the app in a little bit coming up, but I wanna talk now, wanna move to another topic and talk about Jeffrey Epstein. What a mess. I have some thoughts that I wanna hear you react to, but first I wanna hear if you have anything

that jumps off quickly. Well, so we spoke about this already. I think we thought that Jeffrey Epstein problem was gonna go away, or at least I was talking about it before I realized just how concerned the MAGA faithful are about this thing. I mean, it really is kind of splitting the MAGA cult in a way that is, I can't pretend not to be taking some pleasure in. As you know, I'm pretty allergic to conspiracy theories.

I think they're often explained by just people connecting the dots in ways that are totally on principle, just adding up anomalies that don't all point in the same direction, but they just point toward anomalies. And then they just think that there's super geniuses conspiring perfectly and never getting caught behind the scenes in a way that never actually pans out in real life. This is not to say that there aren't ever conspiracies. It's just that they never take the form of the most popular conspiracy theories and they're often found out, right?

We know about them. It's just, you know, obviously we don't know about the ones we don't know about, but there's so much wrong with the style of thinking that delivers us most conspiracy theories. In Epstein's case, there's no question he was a super creep, right? I mean, we just know too much about his behavior to know that he was mistreating underage girls and that was awful. And the failure of justice in his case left a lot of those victims without the satisfaction of seeing a guy actually get what he deserved.

But once he was in jail, his motive to commit suicide is all too obvious, right? Just he should have been on suicide watch. I think he was supposed to have been on suicide watch for a reason, right? I mean, here you have a billionaire who's sleeping with thousands of underage girls whom he desires for whatever reason, but living in every other way in ways

that ordinary billionaires or near billionaires live. And now he's gonna be sent to prison for probably the rest of his life and be treated by his fellow prisoners like a pedophile or be put in a solitary confinement for the rest of his life. So if anyone is liable to see the pointlessness of living another day on this earth

and what wants to hang himself, it's gonna be Jeffrey Epstein alone in his cell. So none of that surprised me. The one thing I will give to the conspiracists who desperately want all the files to be released is that the Trump administration now is not behaving like an administration that has nothing to hide on this point.

And the person who has something to hide almost certainly is Trump, right? I mean, there's no way Pam Bondi or Cash Patel are protecting anyone other than Trump in saying, trust us, there's nothing to see here, please go away, we don't wanna talk about this, right? Two things, the only person they could be protecting is Trump, really?

They wouldn't be motivated to protect anyone else. And two, they are not talking like you would talk if there was nothing to hide. You could be much more verbose than they are being if there's really nothing to hide. And their ineptitude in messaging around this, Trump's ineptitude and their ineptitude is strange, right? Yeah, it's a failure to manage the information here. I see that. I completely agree. But when you say Trump's hiding something, what do you imagine he's hiding? That he's fucking other women and it's embarrassing or that he's fucking underage women? He's all over the Epstein files in ways. I mean, I have no reason to believe that he has a taste for 14 year old girls, but he

has, I'm sure he has a taste for 18 year old girls, right? And he's, we know he's a total pig. I mean, he's trailing what 20, something like 29 rape or sexual abuse allegations. You know, he's the, he's president president grabbed them by the pussy, right? So how is Trump gonna behave alone on an island with Jeffrey Epstein and a bunch of girls? Who knows, right? So I think Trump is quite likely to be embarrassed

by a full reading of the Epstein file. He's pretending to have had nothing to do with him. We know he was friends with him for many years, right? I mean, at one point, I think Epstein claimed that he was Trump's best friend, and I don't have any reason to believe he was exaggerating at that point. No, these guys go way back. Like, there's a lot of time between these guys that needs to be accounted for or could be accounted, and might be accounted for in those files. Now, I don't think the MAGA cult that wants to see these files wants to see them because they think it's gonna destroy Trump.

But I think the plausible interpretation of the administration's behavior is the reason to shut the lid on this is because Trump is in the crosshairs. Again, I have no reason to believe he's screwing 14 year olds, but his association with Jeffrey Epstein is very unlikely to have been benign. Yeah, I'll grant you that. I'm sure there's some embarrassment there. I just don't believe that, I believe that the majority, if not all of all the names that we keep hearing mentioned

are not having sex with underage girls. I guarantee you that Pam Bondi isn't all clammed up because Trump has told her, you have to protect Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. And so just make this thing go away, right? That's not what's happening. The chance of that is absolutely zero. And so, Elon is almost certainly right about this.

I mean, let's remind everyone that Elon, everyone's second favorite person over in MAGA until 15 minutes ago, Elon just came out and said, the reason why this isn't out is because Trump is gonna be embarrassed. And he said it less decorously than that. So I'm sure that's probably true. Yeah.

No, again, I know that there's embarrassing stuff in there. I just don't think it's what people think exists. And I don't even know what in there means. These guys are both super creeps. The one advantage that Trump has, the one thing that's slightly exculpatory is that as far as I know, there's no, and actually there's not, it's not that there's no evidence. There's very little evidence that his super creepiness was focused on underage girls, except at the Miss America team beauty pageant, where he

invaded the dressing room of underage girls as a, I think, 50 year old man. So put that in the balance. Yeah. It still strikes me as, you know, creepy uncle guy. There's a huge difference between a guy taking a peek at those girls. And listen, you can be as charitable as you want. I'm saying, I'm just saying that the fact that they, these guys logged lots of hours, so I saw Jeffrey Epstein exactly once at the Ted conference.

I went to a lunch and Jeffrey Epstein was at that lunch. And I was introduced to him. And my spidey sense went off within two seconds of meeting him that I never wanted to be in this guy's presence again right now. To continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.