Making Sense with Sam Harris - #498 — More From Sam: Bond Villains, Useful Idiots, Firing Squads, and More

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events. They discuss Alex Gibney's documentary on Elon Musk, Dara Horn's insights into antisemitism, the Democrats' Hasan Piker problem, Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani, the Pentagon's plan to livestream a military execution, Trump's $5,000 voter promise, tech leaders' capitulation to Trump, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.  

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please consider subscribing today. Okay, welcome back to another episode of more from Sam. Hey, Sam, how are you? Hey, good to see you. Good to see you, too. We have a lot to discuss today, so let's get on to our first topic. I enjoyed a recent conversation with Alex Gibney about his new documentary on Elon Musk that comes out Friday, October 19th nationwide. I think he comes on HBO at first quarter next year.

I think that's right. And I haven't had a chance to see the film yet, but suppose we had known 20 years ago exactly who Elon was, an immense talent, a force of nature, but also a bully who doesn't do well with regulation. You can throw on a liar, et cetera, but he just doesn't, he doesn't function by the rules of society. should we have crafted a lane for him? Like, could we have said as a country, this guy is different. We recognize that we're going to back him on a different set of standards. He'll get rich, but we'll all participate. Like, might that have allowed him to do great things for the world without becoming a villain to so many? And I know you understand the framing. Like, is there a way that we could have acknowledged he's a once in a lifetime, once in generation talent, and treated him in some way that

would have maximized what he did for society and minimized the downside? Well, we sort of did that without minimizing the downside. I mean, he had all the lanes he needed to succeed. He's he had billions of dollars of government grants and subsidies. And I mean, it's just, I mean, I think it's, I think it was $30 billion or something like that, like $20 billion for SpaceX and $10 billion for Tesla. I mean, money directly from the government. He didn't need anything. He succeeded in all kinds of ways. I mean, that's really not disputable. I mean, nobody blocked him, right? It's just there are specific things he was allowed to do, some of which there may be no obvious remedy for. I mean, like, I'm not quite sure what you do when someone buys Twitter and then turns it into a megaphone

for white supremacists and moral lunatics. He's free to do that. I think that came with it. I think that came with it. I think obviously he, I believe he was trying to, in his own mind, at least, to protect free speech that came with that as well. Okay, well, I mean, that part is pretty clearly bullshit. But still, it's like, should a person be able to buy, if someone has amassed extraordinary wealth through legal means, right, building electric cars, launching rockets, et cetera, should they be able to buy a publicly traded social media platform that already has some hundreds of millions of users, take it private and tune the algorithm to show their own posts preferentially, and then signal boosts anti-Semites and neo-Nazis that they just happen to like?

I think so. I don't think we can pass a law against that. Right. So it's not like, I don't know what, what the remedy is except for just, um, marketplace recognizing that he's behaving like a sociopath and penalizing him for it, right? For people carrying Tesla owners and people who would, who would have contracts with his various companies, caring not to be in business with somebody who's literally aiding and abetting an explosion of, of white supremacist bullshit in our, society, right? So, I mean, on some level, you have to rely on people, consumers, to have good taste and ethical scruples. And if you can't rely on that, which I think we probably can't, your culture is pretty well fucked, right? So that's where we are. It's like, I don't know what we would have done. He had the lane he's needed to succeed, even more than, more than that. He had, I mean, massive government support. Yeah, but he spent a lot of time having to, I think one of the claims in the film was that he did some battery replacement gimmick to get money, and he's had to continually lie about full self-driving that he's trying to develop, which by the way, that claim

that Alex said in the interview with you, that Tesla's claim that full self-driving is eight-times safer is actually inaccurate, blew my mind. I think everyone I talked to who drives a Tesla is like, at least anecdotally feels that that is a real claim, that it really does work. Yeah, I'm waiting to hear somebody push back on that. I haven't looked. but let me know if that happens. As I said in the podcast, I wasn't sure what was true there. And I do imagine that at some point, if not now, if not six months ago, full self-driving on Tesla is going to be better than a person driving.

I'm really not questioning the progress curve there. It's just that he's at every stage along the way, exaggerated the progress, and in certain cases lied about it and consciously perpetrated fraud. I mean, that painted black video anecdote, it's just evil. I mean, there's no question. You're going to get people killed playing games like that. And just, I mean, he's pretending his car can do things. It can't do.

And people are relying on it to do those things at, you know, while going 70 miles an hour on the highway. Yeah, but that's my point. My point is had we acknowledged who he was and said, you don't have to lie about this. Just tell us that some people are still, if he could come out and say, well, some people are going to die. He doesn't have to lie about anything. He didn't have to lie about full self-driving. He could have just represented the actual progress, its actual capabilities, how you can safely use it, every increment of progress from there on.

And also, he could have made the ethical case, which he did, which is that there's a moral illusion working at the center of this whole situation, which we have to be alert to and not be taken in by. And I mean, he actually gives me, lets him express it in his own words in this podcast. I'm sorry, in the film, Elon says at some point that even when we've run 90% of the fatalities out of driving, because the robots are that much better, people are still going to sue over the remaining 10% of fatalities. Right. And that's an allusion.

It's understandable. But do we want to reduce driving fatalities by 90% or don't we? And that's a totally valid point. It's something that he could have always talked about that no one forced this guy to become a bond villain. Right. You're saying, so he could have just been honest about the progress and not used lies. I mean, they're actual lies. I mean, I remember when I first bought my Tesla in 2017, they told me I bought it in August. They said by December, for sure, full self-driving would be available. But it sounds like he didn't have to lie to use the stock market to raise money or to inflate the

stock. No, I mean, it's, you know, lying is not, it should do brand damage whenever it's discovered. And the question is, you know, why doesn't it, or doesn't it effectively in this case? I don't know. I mean, I honestly don't know. There's something very Trumpian about the whole phenomenon at this point. I mean, like, Trump has cultivated in an audience that does not care whether he's consistent with himself in any way. And Elon has done something similar. Yeah. Okay, we don't need to spend more time on this one. We can move on. Speaking of podcast, guests, I really enjoyed your recent episode with Darrah Horn as well. I know that many people, including myself, I've always wondered where anti-Semitism come from and why Jews have to have security at their places of worship or schools.

I've always understood it in a visceral way, but I never had a way to explain it. And I think she was the first person to put into words, what I felt backed with real wisdom and history. Did you come away from that conversation or from reading her book with anything new as well? Yeah, well, first of all, I have to emphasize again, her book is really great. And we did not exhaust its contents at all. Anyone who got a lot from that podcast is still going to get a ton from her book. I mean, she just goes into the history, and she's a very good writer, too. So it's just a great book. I came away with, I don't think she or anyone truly explains the origin of anti-semitism or the degree to which it's just perennial.

I mean, just the fact that in context that it should be impossible to really fixate on the Jews as a priority, it nonetheless happened. I mean, for me, I think the religious underpinnings of it explain it more than anything else. I mean, in most times and places that we're talking about, most people are pretty religious to one or another degree. I mean, I guess we can leave communist Russia, the Soviet Union aside for this. I mean, it has its own explanation there, but which Darrow goes into. But just the fact that for 2,000 years, the Jews remaining Jews have had to repudiate Christianity and his Islam, and they're basically always surrounded by Christians and Muslims, that explains the durability of it, if not the, and also kind of the origin of it as much as anything for me.

I mean, the Jews just don't accept other people's religious convictions at all, even among, you know, polytheists, we'll say in a Roman context. They're continually calling bullshit on everybody else's faith claims, right? So that's just a structure that is going to engineer tribal hatred. I think. But her emphasis on it being not really a hatred at bottom, but a false view of how the world works. That is a conspiracy theory or in the shortest form, in her case, a lie. I think that's very useful. That's a very useful framing. I mean, when you hear what anti-Semites think is really happening in the world, It's almost always a story of unjustified Jewish power working behind the scenes, right?

And that's, yeah, I mean, it is a, in many cases, a completely hallucinated claim about the way the world is working. Well, the Jews are to blame for, I think Douglas Murray said this. I'm sure others have, no matter, you know, whether they're city folk or their country folk or they're rich or they're poor, are they have this job or they don't have this job. They're capitalists or communists. They're hated no matter where they are. Dara's other framing is that the Jews, for whatever reason and from whatever angle, are undermining the thing you most care about. If you most care about capitalism, well, then they're communists.

If you most care about communism, well, then they're capitalists. But the fact that it's endlessly shape-shifting like that and admits of no disconformation, it's just, it is pretty unique. It's not an ordinary form of bigotry. Well, do you think if more people understood what she's talking about, that could be useful or helpful? Are you more optimistic that more of this information could do anything for us? Or do you think that this has been here forever, it's going to be here forever?

I can't say I'm optimistic. I think she sounds more optimistic than I feel. I'm optimistic that when put, so for me, talking about anti-Semitism, as you know, is something that I have really been dragged kicking and screaming to. I mean, prior to October 7th, I really thought it was more or less a non-issue. You know, I didn't think it had disappeared, but I just, in open societies, and certainly in America, it was, despite the fact that Jews always top the FBI's list of, you know, hate crime victims, I mean, for every year after 9-11 in America, people don't really understand this. They think that Muslims have been subjected to this great groundswell of bigotry in America. That is almost total bullshit, but, or if it isn't bullshit, let's say, at whatever level you find the bigotry against Muslims intolerable, recognize it for every year after 9-11, Jews have been victimized five to 10x more than that, right? And I didn't care about it until October 7th, because prior to October 7th,

it still seemed like a rounding error on a rounding error of problems that should really concern us in society. Again, it's not to say it didn't exist and wasn't galling, but, you know, once a decade, something truly awful, like, you know, the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, would happen. Wasn't it more October 8th that was the problem for you than October 7th? I mean, October 7th, obviously terrible. Yeah, the response to October 7th.

I mean, that proved that, okay, we're on a powder keg of Jew hate that I didn't quite understand was there. It obviously has gotten leveraged and weaponized and elaborated by this red-green alliance, this alliance between the far left and Islamism worldwide. And the machinery to prosecute that alliance,

was in place and has been, you know, that's been built fairly patiently over decades, you know, well funded by states like Qatar and Iran, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, so I was, like many, many people, blindsided by the level of the anti-Semitism and also the level of moral blindness around just how perverse this alliance is. I mean, in the most S&L-like case, you know, the queers chanting for Palestine, right? I mean, it's just, you know, it's hard to understand that level of moral confusion. I mean, just it shouldn't be possible, but it's not only possible.

It's guaranteed to exist in our most elite universities. Back to the question of whether I'm optimistic. I think I'm optimistic that we're not suicidal, and a certain degree of Islamist lunacy is going to be indigestible even by the left, ultimately. Certainly by the mainstream left that currently can't figure out how not. to talk to Hassan Piker or can't imagine that there's anything wrong with Abdul El-Said or Zorn Mamdani. Again, I'm not saying that those guys are jihadists, but they're at best useful idiots who are giving cover for genuine Islamism in America, right? I mean, they're genuine theocrats trying to undermine liberal values in America, and they belong to organizations that people are

mystified by, like the Council of American Islamic Relations. Mainstream journalists imagine And this is the ACLU for Muslims. It is not the ACLU for Muslims. It is a none too stealthy, theocratic organization staffed by religious bullies, right, who have direct ties to Hamas front groups and to the Muslim Brotherhood. I mean, this is just an odious political movement that, you know, Democrats as readily as Republicans should recognize is antithetical to American values. It's not to say it should be illegal, you know.

it shouldn't be illegal to be a neo-Nazi either in America. It says we have, because of the First Amendment, we have to have an uncomfortable and even disconcerting level of tolerance for bad ideas. But the idea that we have mainstream democratic politicians who feel like they have to lock arms with these guys and these organizations, it's bad. And it's, it is the thing that will give us fascism in America. that, you know, this is, I hit this point a lot. But if you want a fascist in 2028 or thereafter, yeah, by all means, let the DSA into the tent and get confused about a, you know, Islamo communist alliance being somehow a good version of left-wing populism.

See how that works out. It will deliver us the furthest right-wing swamp creature you can imagine into the Oval Office. Since you always get pushed back for criticizing AOC and Maldani, maybe you could clarify what bothers you about Abdullah-Sayed. It's always dangerous to wrap all these people up in one sentence because they're not all the same. AOC is not even entirely similar to herself at this point, right? She's somebody who's trailing this awful debris of far-left wokeery and moral idiocy. And yet she sums up her previous utterances with the phrase now, what was it, woke 1.0 was whack or something? hook 1.0 was crazy or woke one was crazy yeah okay great just how does that square with all the

idiotic things you said right from defund the police on down there's no question she's been a useful idiot is she no longer a useful idiot i don't know right it'd be nice to see her really reboot her hard drive and and talk serious sense about what's wrong with the far left you know to disavow the the DSA in clear terms and for the right reasons to say something useful about Hassan Piker. I can't even believe we have to talk about this guy. He's doing irreparable, one hopes, irreparable damage to the Democratic Party because- No one legitimate on the right would sit down with Nick Fuentes. Well, that's barely true. It's not quite true. I mean, the only thing J.D. Vance would say against Nick Puentes is,

stop talking about my wife. There's a real asymmetry here, which is that there's no mainstream right of center institution that would take Nick Fuentes or Andrew Tate seriously as the future of politics on the right. You know, I mean, like, so you're not going to have the Wall Street Journal do multiple profiles and, you know, glad-handed podcasts with either of those guys. But the New York Times did it with Hassan Piker, right? So that's, that's a real asymmetry, which is, I think, not a good sign at all that we're ready for, for 2028. While we're on AOC, I just want to go back to our conversation from a previous episode where we discussed her and you received some pushback from the Making Sense community around the bartender aspect of your criticism. Is there anything to clarify there?

Well, I wasn't commenting on and honestly not even tracking all of her achievements in Congress. So here's what I was not saying. I was not saying that AOC is stupid or that she couldn't be a quick study as a politician or that she hasn't done. substantial things once in Congress. I was more talking about her origin story. I mean, they found a telegenic, inexperienced person and kind of cooked her up in a political lab and realize, again, this is not necessarily a mistake. It's not a political mistake. I mean, she got elected, and there's a reason why we're talking about her, right? She's, but what they found is that what you need at this moment in American politics is someone who really can,

crush short form video, you know, shot with an iPhone. That's not where we want to be as a country, right? Like that, that shouldn't be the criterion to become president of the United States, somebody who can just, you know, make you laugh or create a vibe in 30 seconds on TikTok. That's going to select against many people who you would want in the Oval Office, and it's going to promote total lunatics who you don't want to get near power, and yet you're going to give them, again, the fact that any Democrat feels the need to talk to or think about or figure out how to navigate around Hassan Piker is insanity, right? We should not know this guy's name. He is a Twitch streamer, you know, and that should be the end of it, right? I mean, it's like,

okay, but I mean, there are people, there are other people in this category who are some of whom are even more substantial, like, you know, the Paul brothers, right? I mean, how much time we're going to talk about Logan Paul in the next election cycle, right? Is he going to be president of the United States? Is that the country we're living in? I mean, that's where American culture seems to be headed if we can't figure out how these information tools, you know, that is our smartphones, are deranging our sense of what is real and worth paying attention to.

Okay, but if that's where the culture is headed and it's important to find somebody who's telegenic and charismatic and smart, and you say, okay, this is the right person, let's find somebody who's got the right criteria, the right idea. is, but who also fits that mold, why would we not want to use the tools that are in front of us and say, okay, it shouldn't be this way, but it is this way. And maybe she goes on to be, through this pathway, she goes on to be a phenomenal president. Well, so again, I'm not to focus on AOC here. AOC may be in the process of changing into a different sort of person, right? Again, if it's hard to do, given what she's trailing, but, and it's something that, you know, Kamala Harris couldn't effectively do within a hundred days of the presidential campaign. So, but it's possible to do. I mean, I, you know, people can wake up from, you know, the, the spell that was worked on them in their 20s and in their 30s and even in their 40s by whatever, you know, a tractor on the cultural landscape caught them. And, and they, um, they can disavow their prior beliefs, right? And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and. And, and, and, and, and,

If they do that credibly, that's fine. I mean, I'm willing to believe that a person has recognized that they were wrong about something. And if they can tell us why, well, then the fact that they were wrong ever need not be held against them, right? In fact, they win points in my book if they can, if they can really disavow something idiotic in their past and give a clear case as to how they got there and how they got out. I mean, that's, in most cases, that's, that whole character arc is a positive, not a negative. But it remains as we've seen whether she'll do that. Hassan Piker is not AOC, right? Hassan Piker is an utterly despicable human being.

He's demonstrated that, right? I mean, he's just a callous asshole, right, who talks about, you know, the mass starvation of people, you know, for example, in the, you know, the Great Leap Forward in China as just a non-issue. It's like, oh, this is the, you know, he's got to break some eggs to make an omelet, right? I mean, he's a fan of Mao, right? I mean, it's like you read any book about Mao, and he's also a fan of Lenin, right? You read any book about Lenin just to discover what this colossal asshole is a fan of, right? Like, we should not be to, again, he is our Nick Fuentes. There's no reason to talk about this guy as being consequential in politics.

It doesn't matter how big his audience is, right? You have to find some other route to his audience than through, alliance with him because you're you're making an alliance with some species of evil, right? I mean, the fact that it's a telegenic evil, it shouldn't matter, right? And that's, I'd say, again, it's totally mystifying to me that people can't see this at a glance. I mean, certain people are not worth talking to. They're not worth factoring in as you know, in your calculations about who you have to keep in the tent, et cetera. And, you know, people like, you know, Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, you know, right of center or Hassan Pikes.

or left of center, are those sorts of people. Yeah. I want to get to Mondani a second, but first I just want to go back to El Saeed and just hear what bothers you about him, if you can provide any detail there. Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharis.org.

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