MTracey podcast - "Today's News," March 27, 2026: Sam Harris bashes Michael Tracey, Cuba regime change rally, "Worst Podcaster" March Madness continues

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

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All right, welcome to today's news, which is definitely not a pedophile reporter, private petal party. And I'm Matt Taeebee. Absolutely not. Matt and I would never be debased enough to gather together and have a private peto party. So definitely not over the internet. Shut up with those vile insinuations out there on the internet. Speaking of which, and of course we are. We're all about just reporting the news.

That's it. Nothing more. That's right. That's right. We're not, we're just delivering the facts. It's just, uh, isn't that a line that that's from diehard too, right? Just the facts, ma'am, but it was a fax. Is that quote from diehard? I don't even know. I don't think I've ever even seen that. I don't know. People are going to be shocked at that, but it's a, it's a spoof of the old one at them 12 thing. Long term. All right. Uh, okay, so we are going to get to the March Madness tournament, but we have a brief. or maybe not so brief diversion because Michael came up in a podcast that was about podcast. This whole thing is very meta.

We're not going to be talking about a podcast about podcasts, on a podcast. Right. Now, I've told this, I told this story before with Walter, but I knew a very famous chef in New York, one of whose customers, regular customers, was the famous Russian poet Joe Brodsky, who was a Nobel Prize winning poet. And he would only eat things that were inside of other things. So he had, whatever it was, it had to be like a taco or a burrito or something. And then he was continually asking for things inside other things inside other things. So that's what this is.

This is a podcast about podcast. I mean, I'll stuff anything in my. my fat face so there we go all right so uh sam harris was on coleman's podcast right that's how this went it wasn't the other way yeah call yeah Coleman hughes has a podcast that Sam harris was a guest on after i had been a guest on Coleman hugh's podcast like a month ago right right okay so uh your name came up uh more than once in in both an insulting and an amusing way so let's get let's get into it uh can we see the clip it's also possible that you know more and more we're i think tyler cowen made this point

somewhere that we are becoming less of illiterate culture and more of a oral culture not not meaning that people can't read obviously people can read but most people are just not reading the news anymore they're not um reading the newspaper they're there they're uh and that actually changed is how you interact with information. It makes charisma more important and logic less important, I think. So pause. So, I mean, I think, I mean, the point that Coleman is sort of introducing here, I think is a legitimate point.

Totally. Not that I would necessarily would have brought myself in to complete the point that he's now introducing, but the idea of this mass transformation into an almost entirely oral culture. is one that I think we need to theorize a lot better, and not that it doesn't have precursors with television becoming ubiquitous and so forth in past decades, but there's something particular to the ubiquity of podcast now and internet culture as a means by which people consume their information

about the news and so forth that has a particular, maybe worrisome features that we should be a bit more mindful of. But then somehow I get shoehorned into this. So just briefly to add into that, years ago when I first started doing stuff on, like, digital censorship, one of the first people I talked to was a former Facebook executive who had done research into the addictive properties of social media interaction and talked about how everything from the feel of the waffle pattern on the back of your phone holder, like all that triggers things in your brain. but social media activity is so addictive that it becomes difficult to read because people feel a yearning to get back to the thing while they're reading. They have a difficult time getting lost in the pages in the way that people used to.

I don't know about you, but I feel that myself and it's kind of disturbing because, you know, there are times what I would like to just be able to sit and read a lengthy book for an uninterrupted hour or something. And I have to kind of ward off that little tingle of a sensation that I should be checking something that gives me instantaneous digital gratification. And you have to almost make a mental plan to do it now. Whereas in the past, it would have been more second nature.

Now, as an abuser of drugs, I can tell you that you kick the internet in the same way that you kick other addictive things. Like once you get past a certain, threshold like 24 hours or so you can reading is just as natural as it always was uh but it is difficult in the initial uh withdrawal period for me like a physical book just because it produces a different sensation but yeah it's almost more difficult to do than reading something even at length on the computer or on some digital absolutely absolutely there's a million reasons why that true. That's true too. But anyway, he's making

a good point. These documents get made. If someone is taking the time to write an article for the Atlantic that has been deeply researched, that's one sort of way to produce

propositional claims. That's of course, like pause for a second, sorry. I mean, of course, of course the Atlantic is like the pinnacle of an estimable publication that Sam Harris just presumptively trust as an authoritative source. Like that's just 100% foreseeable.

Yeah. It's literary, accurate, deep, all those things. Jeffrey Goldberg. Yeah. And edited by Jeffrey Goldberg. So, wow. If somebody's just shooting the shit on a podcast, and even, you know, even, you know, the two of us talking now is, is looser than, then, than a written document.

But, you know, Dave Smith over on Joe Rogan's podcast, I mean, that's just, it's, it's just tennis without the net, right? And so someone who's just speculating, so just, just creating a vibe with words, just saying maybe, maybe it's like this, right, in front of 20 million people. Pause for a second. Okay. So this might be a little bit tedious because we have to go through like a nine plus minutes of this, but I just want to prepare people for Sam Harris doing precisely what Exactly. Derides here with, you know, tennis without a net. It's actually a pretty decent metaphor, possibly.

But he then, he then, I like to look better, but whatever. Okay. Yeah, but he then specula, he then does this aimless speculation toward the end about what the Epstein story might really be about. That I guess he couldn't do if he was producing an essay for the Atlantic, you know, which he holds in such high regard. So, like, we're going to come full circle at the end of this clip where, he does the exact thing that he's bemoaning is so commonplace now in the modern media ecosystem. Yeah, exactly. If that's your news diet, right, you're going to be reliably misinformed.

Yeah. All of these concerns are why I had Michael Tracy on my podcast recently to talk about Epstein and related conspiracies because on his substack, he's been doing the hard work of. I can hear Harris. is sphincter tightening at that moment. A dimension of your name. Couldn't you hear? I wasn't tuned to the noises, his body parts might be making. So you're more perceptive than me, Matt.

Okay. All right. Let's go. Getting down everything we know is a fact and distinguishing that from just conjecture and vibes. And when you pair out everything that isn't a confirmed fact and keep it to what we actually know and do the work and track down the footnotes of the footnotes, of the footnotes. It becomes much more, in my view, a story of one man's depravity than a story of,

a story that really should interest the public. Pause, pause, pause, pause, pause, pause. Okay, so I'm just going to interject briefly. I mean, we could get derailed on so many threads of this, but I don't agree that this is a story that should not interest the public inherently. Like I've always said I don't even begrudge people for being supremely interested as I am. I would almost have to be disavowing myself. But I take an interest in it from, you know, a pretty radically different angle than most people.

Just in terms of how just like the makings of a modern moral panic and that's hysteria, obviously Epstein did consort with an astonishing array of different prominent people. So that's inherently going to draw people's interest. If you could just pull up a random photo of him hanging out with Michael Jackson or something. you know, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, whatever, Peter Thiel, Noam Chomsky, Steve Bannon, et cetera. Like, it's not at all inexplicable why this is something that generates a lot of interest. I just think that the premises underlying what is generating the interest need to be much more properly, journalistically examined. So maybe I'm making a little bit of an orthogonal point there,

but that wouldn't be the way that I would introduce the subject. No, but what he's saying, and I don't, he's saying something that, I would almost agree with. So, but normally, like if a journalist, in a non-manic period, when you were looking, if you're looking at something like Jeffrey Epstein, you have to take in, you have to start with the premise that anything is possible, right? Like he could be, you know, a Mossade agent, he could be a CIA agent. This could be a trafficking ring. It could be 90 different. You have to do like Kevin Garnett when they won the NBA championship. Anything is possible.

Anything is possible. All journalists are doing that in unison. Right, exactly. No, no, but in seriousness, you do have to allow for like lots of different possibilities at the beginning. And one of them has to be, he had a, you know, a private, horrific parapheria that while also being an extremely voluble garrulous con man,

and, you know, political schmoozer. Like, it's possible that those things are separate, right? Well, it's also possible that the actual severity of his actual conduct has been wildly exaggerated through this consortium of profit-seeking lawyers and credulous media coverage and so forth. That's also another possibility that doesn't seem to be entertained very much, but I'll just leave that there. Yeah, no, but he's, I'm saying, what I'm saying is that Coleman is doing, he's, he's, he's done the correct thing, I think. I don't know if it's exactly. He's directionally sort of on target. Right. Like, this is possible, right? So, okay. At least how I feel about it. How do you feel about that story?

Well, I don't think I've looked into it as deeply as, uh, how do you have, pause, pause, deeply as Tracy has. How do you feel about Jeffrey Epstein? I should start every conversation I ever have in my life that way. Can we rewind to the moment where it throws to his face? Have you ever seen an unhappier look? Hang on a second. Okay. I'm going to go, like next time I go to 7-Eleven,

I'm going to ask the cashier, how do you feel about Jeffrey? Watch the face, though. This is great. It's at least how I feel about it. How do you feel about that story? Well, I don't think I've looked into it as deeply as you have, certainly not as deeply as Tracy has. I've seen... Okay, keep going. I've read and seen some of what he's produced.

I worry a little bit about him and his focus on this. I mean, again, I don't... This is slightly unfair to say and is slightly ad hominem, but I feel like my spidey sense is going off a little bit around, you know, his his deep dive down this particular rabbit hole. Pause. His spidey sense. I mean, can we get a little bit more clarity if you're going to just impugn everything that I've done on this subject as like presumptively non-credible or suspicious in some way?

Like what is spidey sense mean? Like I would think his spidey sense. What he means by that is would not be invited to an Atlantic party. Right. possibly i i think maybe he just has these sort of vague associations in his mind based on the snippets of things he might have seen for me over the years about this ulterior agenda i have like i probably i think he probably uh assumes that i am taking money from israel no no i'm sorry i didn't mean to disclose that that would adhere me to him probably oh right yes i'm sorry that

He's pro-Israel. Yeah, that right. Yes. He's pro-Israel, but yet anti-Trump. So he's in this sort of idiosyncratic quote, Lane, if we want to talk about lanes, right? I think he probably assumes that I'm doing this just as a partisan defense of Trump. I think that's probably what is most causing him to be so instinctively suspicious. That's pretty weird.

So, obviously not a voluble reader. of your work. I think he's still probably stuck in like first Trump administration. Like he's still in the 2016 vortex where like, you know, I'm anti-ante-Trump. Right. Or like I'm one of these like renegade

quote unquote progressives or something who lost the plot and I'm just now like ideologically committed to exonerating Donald Trump for everything. I think that probably is what he's referring to but I'm not 100% sure. Yeah. But, like, Spidey Sense is kind of a thing. Like, I think you can have a bad feeling about stories.

But I'm not sure I would go on air and say, yeah, I don't really know why I'm saying this person is not credible, but I'm just going to say that. No, Spitey sense can be a thing, but it's got to be based on something that's like tied to reality. Right. And if we hear him expound on why it is that his spitey sense was tingled, we then learn that it's all predicated on like a, you're just a slew of fallacies. Right. And misperceptions and like the same kind of speculative dot connecting that he's ostensibly decrying. Right. Yeah. Let's roll on.

On my podcast to have that conversation. Sorry. Pause. is I like just I wouldn't have them on my podcast. So it's like it's like high school or something. Like not that I'm looking for a podcast invite. I really not. Like I don't go out seeking that at all. But like of course that's how like he sort of categorizes who he sees as serious.

Right. And who he sees as not like you wouldn't invite him to your lunch table or now for like middle age adults. You wouldn't invite them on the podcast. Right. Right. Yes. About all that. I just, I think I do share his sense, and I think your sense that there's a bit of a moral panic around this,

but I also at this point think we should just see all the evidence, right? I mean, normally I wouldn't be in favor of just airing, you know, unvetted emails and pictures and documents, you know, online to millions of people. Pause, pause, pause. to just let the public make it. So this is one of the first revelations as him, as to him just not even doing the basics of understanding what my position is that he gets this spidey sense about, right? Because I've been saying,

I've been saying for months that I'm in favor of maximum disclosure of everything. Look, if we're going to be getting Epstein files in some form, let's just get everything and let the chips fall where they may. There will be some negative downsides in terms of wrong ones. besmirching various people. But my point has always been that if these files are on route anyway, let's actually have maximum disclosure. But that's been thwarted, I've been pointing out, by this little cohort of profit-seeking

lawyers representing alleged victims who have behind the scenes been lobbying in like kind of histrionic, hysterical fashion for the most sweeping possible redactions to, to be imposed on the files. This is what they've been demanding in federal court in the Southern District of New York, even as they've simultaneously bet out in public, sloganeering around release the Epstein files, right?

And then they work in tandem with Massey and Kana in the composition of that Epstein Files Transparency Act legislation to include these massive gaping exceptions. Carvouts for transparency. And then sure enough, like when the files start to be released by the DOJ, pursuant to that law and we get page after page of like just full block black redactions

people automatically assume okay this must be about but must be about protecting some purpose traitor right even though it's pretty clear what the vast vast vast majority of it is really about which is protecting any quote identifying material related to certain victims at the direction of these lawyers who are also simultaneously continuing to litigate potentially hugely largely lucrative class action settlements with giant multinational financial institutions such as Bank of America, which actually they just sent a notice to the judge in New York is they've reached a settlement for as of last week or the week before. So that's my point. And like he could have maybe done two minutes of Googling to learn that. I mean, I just had a column about this in the Wall Street

Journal, which I would assume he would find at least approximately reputable. But he doesn't know, like he didn't do even that bare minimum before opining on how intrinsically unreliable i i am and that is why he's not ready to co-sign any my take on this right what what it will but given how we got here given the level of betrayal of the by our institutions and the level of distrust in our institutions now now well-earned distress i i think that the the um the only remedy is sunlight. So I would be in favor of just revealing everything as an unredacted as way as possible.

Because he's seeming to contrast, he's seeming to contrast his view that there should be sunlight or there should be full disclosure with his presumption that I take some kind of antithetical view to that, which is just totally wrong. And in fact, he probably, I would assume, would be kind of more presumptively in favor of redactions than I'm. I am on the basis of supposedly protecting victims. There's also a political reason why the people want this process to be slower, but whatever. Let, we can keep going. And I think the suspicion that, you know, the Trump administration has something to hide is probably warranted at this point because these, these guys are inveterate liars on, on every, on every other point, right? they're just, this is the, again, this is the most dishonest group of people we've ever assembled in a government. So there's no reason to trust anything that comes out of Trump's mouth or Jady Vance's mouth or Pan Bonney's mouth.

I'm sorry. Can I pause on that one first? Yeah, go ahead. Finn, why didn't the stuff come out in the four years previously? Is that not an issue? I don't know. Well, I mean, in part because Joe Biden had no known. association with Jeffrey Epstein. So it wouldn't have been something that Republicans could try to tie to the president. That's true, I guess, but if they thought there was something on Donald Trump in those files back then, they certainly could have done it back then. I guess my point is

nothing about my quote, take of any of this has ever been reliant on this idea that we just have to trust Donald Trump or J.D. Vance or Cash Patel or anybody. I don't. I don't. I I've been actually lambasting them. Cash Patel in particular in Bongino, his former sidekick, for having gone out on the podcast circuit during the Biden administration, making all these outlandish claims that got the right-wing social media base revved up in anticipation for some kind of dramatic, you know, revelation of Epstein files that would implicate all the left liberal democratic bogeymen, right?

Oh, that's right. That's why they didn't want to, right. Okay. So, yeah. So, but again, it seems like he's setting up a contrast with what he assumes my position to be, which is that I'm just going based on just like a witless trust of the current of the Trump administration, which is just like laughable. So again, again, he just doesn't bother to, he didn't bother to learn the basics of my view before castigating it as something that all serious people with a capital S should, you know, discount. serious clenched people let's listen further but they did these are again this is just to call them liars doesn't even quite get at what's what it's like to to hear the message on any topic

it's not that they sometimes lie or lie when they see when they need to they lie always and everywhere and even when it doesn't serve their interest right it's just it's like they're malfunctioning robots on some level i mean it's just it's just It's like the mindacity knob got turned to 11, and it just got stuck there. I have no idea what these people, you know, why they even lie the way they lie. But that's all, it's all to say that, yeah, let's see what's in the files. So, so Sam Harris, I'll just, I'll acknowledge, and maybe this reflects poorly on me. I'm not sure.

But I've read a lot of Sam Harris's books, you know, going back to when I was a little bit more interested in like quote-up-quote new atheism not that it was like a huge feature of my identity but I was sort of interested in in the ideological phenomenon you know and and and he also so he wrote a book called the end of faith that I read years ago and he's I've read a bunch of this other books some of which I think are actually I don't know it's been a while so maybe I shouldn't just retroactively say that they're good but there was one sort of small book that he wrote I think was called online there was a little mini treatise on sort of like the inherent insidiousness of lying and why like everybody should strive not to lie ever in any context because it kind of corrods your moral bearings or something

like that. So I don't even necessarily disagree with his hostility toward lying as such. I think he's just like making out this caricature of the Trump administration as these like all-time inveterate liars, which maybe he could make an argument for. But again, I just sort of present that I'm sort of like being presumed to be somebody who would contest his claims that like a lot of lying is going on with the current administration, which, you know, I don't really. Yeah. I'm also not loving the standard of evidence that we presume that there's something incriminating in these documents because they lie about everything. I mean, there is stuff that people just take a face of. meaning allegations against Trump, allegations against all kinds of people, that they seem authoritative or they seem credible because they appear in this FBI documentation with the stern typeface and the letterhead and whatever.

And so, I mean, there are allegations that I guess if Trump had a choice, he would prefer not to be, you know, rocking across social media, even if they're totally phony. Yes, no, that's true, but that doesn't mean, I mean, that's not how we do evidence, right? we don't we don't say right this person has characteristic x therefore uh this document is going to contain why like that that we haven't seen you know uh so right yeah that that that's not that doesn't work either but let's keep listening i'm off two minds about that because you know when i saw someone like like larry summer's emails coming out with what he was you know just talking about actually strangely i had the woman he was talking about as a guest on my podcast a couple of years ago by coincidence.

But he's basically just asking for advice about how to pursue this younger woman who is, you know, in her 20s and like, and like, do we need all up? Fact check. Okay. We have to go after Coleman here because, you know, we do. The woman who Larry Summers was strategizing about how to best pursue was actually a

tenured professor of economics in her 30s. just for the record. I didn't know that. I knew she was a professor. I didn't know if she was in her 30s, though. Were even another layer beyond anything that could be remotely pedophilic. Okay. Gotcha.

Interesting. Be releasing and embarrassing and at the height of basically a witch hunt of these people, people that are not even within miles of being accused of a crime. I mean, that seems like a big price to pay for, releasing files that I doubt will actually ever satisfy the crazies. Yeah, no, I totally agree that it's this is not a, it's not fair and it's not good. I just think, I'm just wondering what the path back to normalcy is, right? And to release pages where every word has been blacked out and to, you know, to expose everything about Bill Clinton

and nothing about Donald Trump. Pause, pause, pause, pause. There's not a single document that he could identify from these files that exposes everything about Bill Clinton, quote, unquote, but not Donald Trump. There is plenty of the most incendiary possible material that you could imagine having to do with Donald Trump. Okay. And even some of these crank claims that some mentally ill person sent into the FBI

where it's some fantasy that they constructed that includes both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. where you don't see just Donald Trump arbitrarily blocked, redacted. I mean, there could be a file here and there. Who knows? I mean, it was a very sort of disorganized redaction process, like maybe some Republican partisan thought to themselves. Let's just like black out of Trump here or there.

But that's not impossible. But everything that I've seen doesn't reflect that at all. It's not how we can play the game at this moment. So I wouldn't know what to do. If I could walk back in time, I would say a more judicious process is what is the right one. But given that we're here, I mean, you know, I'm, you know, I showed up in those files, right? And some of that communication, you know, I think was misunderstood by some people. I mean, I found it just frankly funny, how I was in there.

But, um, pause, pause, pause. And then there's some other person. I didn't even know he was in the files. I did. I was asked. I mean, I didn't know either. but I was on some other podcast and I was asked about it. I mean, they're unremarkable email exchanges.

I don't even remember the exact context, but it was something that like you'd never would have given a second thought to. But I think it's, but it's just funny how blasé he is about people having their reputations and careers destroyed just by virtue of some, you know, insignificant communication that they had with Jeffrey Epstein when he himself,