Making Sense with Sam Harris - #430 — “More From Sam”: Trump, Gavin Newsom, Class War, DOGE, & Rapid Fire Questions

Episode Date: August 22, 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 Trump and his attempts at peace deals, Gavin Newsom as the potential 2028 Democratic nominee, rising class tensions and the ethical responsibilities of the ultra-wealthy, DOGE, & 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 we'll 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. Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam.

Hi, Sam. How are you? Good to see you. Here's me, more of me. Yeah, there's a reminder. The goal of this series is to get more from Sam more often and since we've been getting a lot more of you lately, Sam. We haven't had an episode for a while. Along with subscriber input, I may issue my own positions, exaggerated versions of my

positions, or play devil's advocate, and jump between them. seamlessly and because I'm here in service of Sam, your ideas. I may also abandon any position I authentically hold if I think I can get more from you. Thank you again to all our subscribers for submitting your questions and comments. If you'd like to submit topics for a future episode, you'll need to become a subscriber, and you can do that at samharris.org. And one more announcement quickly, Sam currently has five shows on sales, Seattle, San Jose, New York, Boston, and Chicago. I think Boston is sold out. There might be a few remaining tickets in New York, and you can find all the details and ticket links at sam harris dot org okay onto our first topic is it fair to say that what concerns

you most about trump is what's yet to come what happens to our country after trump what happens to our democracy going forward uh no no i'm i'm concerned about what's already happened i think our democracy has eroded to an impressive degree that that's a few people right of center seem prepared to acknowledge i think when you have senators and congress people not voting their conscience in the aftermath of January 6th, because they're afraid they might be killed or their families might be killed, something has gone wrong with our democracy, right? That's a very new spot on the map, and it's quite close to tyranny, frankly. So, and that's years ago, right?

That's where we're coming from there. I'm more wondering if you're concerned that it's going to get worse from here, meaning what Trump is doing now and where we are now, are you not more concerned with what does the future look like? Yeah. If the future gets worse, that's obviously a bad thing, and I'm worried about that. But really, all of my criticism of Trump is based on what has already happened. None of it is hypothetical. I mean, yes, I have on the hypothetical side of the ledger, I have all these things I'm worried about, right? Because we don't know what challenges we're going to face society going forward, but we know having a greedy, incompetent, self-dealing ignoramus in charge

is not optimal. We're putting him in a room with Putin, right, to try to negotiate the end of a war in Europe. He's one of the last people I could think who's qualified to do that. I mean, first, he's showing every sign of being easily manipulated by Putin, and by default, he's anchored to Putin's view of the history of that war, right? He's taught me he literally spouts old Kremlin talking points in how he describes the, the war in Ukraine. He sounds like a guy who's really thinking about what a great real estate deal he might do in Moscow when this whole thing is over, right? I mean, that's, if that's what was the only thing going on in his brain, if you could have some South Park episode that showed the, you know, the, the condo deal he was really worried

about, you know, invading his entire frontal cortex, that would explain it. But he pretends he's strong, but he's the most easily manipulated president we've ever had. And he, again, he's anchored, his bias is on the side of, in this case, the dictator, who launched a war of aggression into Europe. Well, speaking of that, Hillary Clinton said she'd nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize if he helped broker an end of the war without capitulating to Putin. Would you? Well, that final phrase is crucial, right, without capitulating to Putin.

Of course. Let's see how that goes. Right, but if he did, would you support nominating him for Nobel Peace Prize? I mean, yeah, but who cares? I mean, the Nobel Peace Prize has been so devalued. I mean, Obama got it before he did anything, right? It's a farce. Arafat got it, right? Well, what we know about Arafat's contributions to peace in the Middle East, I mean, nobody should care about the Nobel Peace Prize. He gets a Peace Prize for refraining from killing anyone.

That was the bar there. You've often mentioned that when Trump is out, we're going to need to rewrite the laws and change everything in order to keep this from happening again, right? You know what I'm talking about where you'll say, like, on a go-forward basis, let's shore up the norms and make rules that avoid the loopholes from being exploited? Yeah, I have no hope we're going to actually do that. But yes, I think we, one of the things we realize is that we have norms that are shoring up our democracy in places where we really should have laws. I mean, because we have the fact that we don't have laws and we only have norms

testifies to the assumption that people aren't going to traduce those norms, you know, for corrupt or, you know, otherwise self-serving reasons. But Trump has broken all that, all that kind of invisible structure. So we need real structure that makes it illegal to do certain things. You shouldn't be able to launch a cryptocurrency that is just a mechanism by which you can take bribes from the entire world and enrich yourself to the tune of billions of dollars and use U.S. foreign policy and tariff policy so as to do that better, right? Like, there's no, apparently there's, you know, remains to be seen. I guess maybe, maybe one of these court cases is explicitly on that point, but it remains to be seen whether any of that stuff is illegal.

Right. The problem I see with having to rewrite the laws is that anytime you enter into any sort of agreement with somebody, a contract is only as good as the people that are involved. There's a lot of good faith. It's required. Well, no, that's not true. A real contract that's enforceable by law has at the end of it when you don't live up to your end of it, people with guns showing up at your house and sticking those guns in your face. Of course, I understand that. I'm saying that generally speaking, when you enter a new agreement with somebody, if you're going to make a deal with somebody, there's a spirit that you're trying to pay attention to. The idea, what I'm getting at is that the history of the success of our country has come from

the respect, the relationship between the founding documents and its exact. and now we're being forced to rewrite everything to protect sort of ourselves against an enemy within. And that's sort of not really the point. The point is if you have to enter an agreement with somebody and you have to... No, it's become the point. No, and this was something that the founding father is, I think it was, I think it's Madison somewhere, uh, anticipated this explicitly. Like, well, you can't have an evil person in the role of the chief executive and expect this system to work, right? I mean, this is, I forget how it was put, but there's some lines to that effect, it should be foreseeable. I mean, we're capable of being so confused and so at odds with

one another that the creative and not boring demagogue can win 51% of the vote. Okay, so now we know that about ourselves. And the rest of the world knows it, too. All right. I'm going to change topics on you. Yeah. Unless you have anything else to add there about Trump. Well, I just say, this is just, you now need to price in all of the damage that has been done to our reputation. I mean, Even if we get rid of Trump and we don't elect the opportunist J.D. Vance in 2028 and we get some sane and ethical president, Republican or Democrat, and we try to reset the world's expectations, it's very hard to see how we do that. And we have announced to the world that we potentially stand for nothing other than the whims of the next guy or gal we put in office.

Right. Right. Well, I did like to take that you in and Applebaum discussed, which AD Vance, the idea that he's sort of like tofu or he sort of takes on the flavor of whatever room he's in at any given time. That was interesting. All right, let's move to Newsom. I know we debated this a few months ago, but I'm going to say it again. Gavin Newsom is going to be the Democratic candidate for 2028. Any updated thoughts there? No. I'm just, I will wait and say, I mean, I just can't imagine that's a winning ticket. I'm not disputing the guy's talent. and charisma in certain contexts, but I just think it's too much baggage to sell to 49 other states. Yeah, I mean, but what else, what worse could we hear about Newsom at this point?

Well, we can't, but we know that 49 other states and their inhabitants more or less despise him, right? I mean, I haven't seen national polling, but I'd be willing to bet that, forget about him as a person and his, his, his clintonian indiscretions. It's just the bad PR baggage that California as a state has for the rest of the country. I mean, I think a lot of that PR is misinformation at this point, but it's fairly indelible, right? People think California is virtually a failed state. It's like the number four economy on earth at this point, and it subsidizes all the dysfunction of the 49 other states, but the other state think California sucks. Yeah, I think Gavin makes that case really well, and I think he'll have to stand behind some of it.

That's no match for the Vox Pop interview with the homeless addict in downtown L.A. or downtown San Francisco who says, yeah, it's so great here. They gave me a lawn chair and all the fentanyl I can take. And it's awesome, right? California. Go, California. Yeah. Yeah, again, I think we're going to need somebody who is as shameless as he is. And he's really a great communicator. He's got a lot of talents. Again, I'm not a fan of his, but I can just see what he's doing. And whoever's working with him behind the scenes and advising him or if it's him, I just don't see that anyone else is playing that level of Trump politics from the left, you know, that style.

But again, who is he going to convince, right? I mean, it's just you have to picture people who voted for Trump, now voting for Newsom. And that... Only one or two percent. Yeah, but... I think he's handsome enough and communicates well, and he'll be able to put out enough good content that he persuades him.

Anyway, we don't have to get stuck on this. I'm just, I'm planning my flag. Talk me in a year about that. I may have another thought. I want to come back to your hobby horse for a second, discuss wealth inequality and make two entry points for you. As Scott Galloway has publicly stated a number of times, and I know you share this belief,

if you hit your number, 50 million, 100 million, 250, whatever it is, and then you don't start enjoying it by spending it on friends and family and being charitable and helping others, then you're really missing out in the greatest joy of having wealth, right? The second part is rich people should be most invested in keeping the pitchforks from the gates. They have won the lottery.

So maybe stop building compounds and invest in communities. Thoughts? Yeah, well, take it from the top down. I mean, the ultra-rich people who don't think they have a stake in the common good and who think they can just jet off to New Zealand if things ever get really tough here, I mean, that's one, it's just patently delusional. I was like, I mean, if you're gaming out those end-of-the-world scenarios, you know, You have to think of who you have, who's going to protect you and who you're going to, it's just

your pilot on your private plane is not going to leave without his family to go to New Zealand when the world ends, right? So you need to take the pilot's family. And what about your bodyguard's family and who's going to protect you from your bodyguards when your bodyguards understand that you really have no power now? You're just a guy who, who bought this compound in New Zealand. It's a ridiculous endgame to think that you can privately ensure your survival when the shit really hits the fan, right? So you have as much a stake in civilization not failing as anyone else, as anyone who doesn't have nearly the resources you have. You should have more of a stake. We have more of a stake, yeah, because life is,

is or should be so good, right? And like, you won the game, right? Like, you should be nothing but dessert at this point. So the fact that they don't see that and they're wasting any time rather than shoring up civil society and improving the government in all kinds of ways that we should improve it, they're engaged in this private effort, like this concierge prepping for the apocalypse. That just seems crazy and just a frank misappropriation of their moral capital and say nothing of their actual capital. But yeah, I mean, in addition to that, they should be much more generous in trying to build a functional society wherein other people are happy and secure, right? I mean, they have a stake in other people seeing their dreams

realized, right? I mean, do you want to be surrounded by desperate, angry, envious people, or do you want to be surrounded by people who are basically happy and thriving? And the answer is so obvious at any level of wealth. It's so obvious. Now, what's really corrupt here is that we all have a sense, an understandable sense, that our tax dollars are often wasted, right? They're spent on things that we wouldn't approve of if we could kind of line item veto some of these expenditures. We all have this some version of a Doge idiot in our head. Now, some of that is probably totally unrealistic and irrational, right? I mean, I'm sure one of the lessons of Doge is that there's far less fraud and waste in government than anyone suspected, right? I mean, they went in

there just guns blazing looking for fraud, and they found like $15 worth, and then they just started cutting good projects to the bone and alienating every person who's working for the government, and many of whom are quite talented and could be working in the private sector and are taking a significant pay cut to serve the country. I'm not saying I don't think there's waste in government, and I'm not saying that I don't think we could spend our tax dollars more wisely. But what we need is a judicious and transparent and nonpartisan and sane look at all that, not some dummy on ketamine with a chainsaw and bad sunglasses. You can't privatize everything. It's the government that's going to fight our wars. It's the government that's going to

tell us what the hell to do when the next pandemic happens. It's the government that needs to make sure the food supply and the drugs supply. 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. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.