The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Sam Harris on Israel, Radical Islam, Trump, Taking Ecstasy, and more.

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

A special Comedy Cellar Live From The Table one-on-one interview with Sam Harris.

Don't be nervous, Sam. I'm kidding. I'm nervous. Mr. Sam Harris, who's probably at the point of not needing an introduction, but he's a famous podcaster, a neuroscientist, an author, and I think one of the great thinkers there are right now. So welcome, Mr. Sam Harris. Well, thank you, Noam. Great to see you. Great to see you. So look, let's just get into it. I don't want to keep you forever. You've come out with, and I haven't actually checked in the last few weeks, but you came out with a few very, very forceful defenses of Israel, the action in Gaza, and just a general worldview which paints Israel as a force for good in a way against a kind of a civilizational battle against radical Islam. Do you feel as strongly about it now as you did at the outset of the war?

Yeah, I do. You know, my position on Israel and anti-Semitism and related topics is somewhat difficult to summarize. I mean, it can sound somewhat paradoxical. I mean, for instance, my position against organized religion and religious identities is such that I'm uncomfortable in simply asserting that the world needs a Jewish state. um certainly jewish uh you know if you as construed uh in religious terms rather than than ethnic terms um but given the the genocidal anti-semitism of so much of the world historically i think that's all the justification one needs to to figure out how to to the Jews a state that represents real safety and sovereignty, right? So it's, you know, I mean, if there has to be a state organized around a religion, I think a Jewish state should be the last one. Obviously, I'm not a fan of Christian states and Muslim states either.

So anyway, that's a mouthful, and that doesn't sound like straightforward support of Israel, except for the fact that I view Israel's struggle against Hamas as a kind of canary in the coal mine example for a much larger civilizational struggle that you referred to, is the fight for open societies and liberal tolerant societies everywhere in defense of a very real assault on their core values. And this assault is coming from one religion above all, and that religion is Islam. And there really needs to be a civil war within the Muslim world for the soul of Islam. If Islam is really a religion of peace that's getting hijacked by extremists, well, then Muslims everywhere need to unite against their extremists. And if they can't figure that out, well, then we've got a much larger problem with Islam. So it remains to be demonstrated that Islam is compatible with modernity. I certainly hope it is.

There's around two billion Muslims on earth, and certainly many, many millions of them want to live in the modern world and don't want to live like medieval barbarians. But many of their co-religionists are, in fact, barbarians. And Hamas is a group that is not even the most barbaric jihadist group on offer. I mean, that distinction would go to the Islamic State. But given what happened on October 7th, we should have no illusions about what they are capable of and what they aspire to do. And so in its current conflict with Hamas, yes, I support Israel 100 percent, and I think there is no outcome here that's acceptable apart from an unconditional defeat of Hamas. Let me ask you a couple of questions and then get to the war. Just because I always find it interesting, I've heard you say this before.

I don't – I mean I know that Judaism is a religion, but I don't define my attachment to Judaism or my feeling of being Jewish, nor did my father or most of the Jews I grew up with as anything other than an ethnic identification, which is verifiable genetically. And by every measure that any ethnic identification can be measured, I think it qualifies, no? Yeah, and that's what's confusing about Judaism as an identity to discuss in a context like this, because obviously there are religious Jews who believe that the creator of the universe gave them a specific piece of land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. And their evidence for that is in the Bible. And their attachment to that land is framed very much in religious and even prophetic terms. I mean, their Jews were waiting for the Messiah to return and all of that. And so that's...

But these were not the ideas of early Zionists. They were not, that was not there. That's true. Sorry, I didn't say that. That's true. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, and it's more confusing still that Zionism historically has not been an explicitly religious imperative.

So, yeah, the thing that is most confusing is that you can find examples of religious Jews who are, you know, seemingly as fanatical as Islamists and, you know, even jihadists in their own context. I mean, the religion is different, the principles are different, the calls for violence are slightly different. But you can find your crackpot Jew in the Holy Land, you stick a microphone in front of his face, and he can sound like he's a member of some Jewish equivalent of Hamas, right? And the uneducated consumer of that media in the West can then consider that evidence that there really is no distinction between the fanaticism on the Islamic side, or the Palestinian side in this case, and the fanaticism on the Israeli and Jewish side. And that's just not true.

Yeah, but I'm noticing a lot of that gets spun up now, and there are even, you know, there are gradations of this. There are Jews now who are calling for the resettlement of Gaza, you know, and calling rather explicitly Gaza, you know, and calling rather explicitly for, you know, something like ethnic cleansing to get the Palestinians out of Gaza so that place can be turned into a proper part of Israeli civilization. And, you know, it's anybody's guess whether a two-state solution is at all a viable project at this point i somehow don't see it and so i don't know what the alternatives to that are but there's it's obvious that it's quite inflammatory to have jews at this moment calling for

ethnic cleansing in gaza given you know all the the assurances that that's actually not any sane person's motive. Again, all of this is only really a problem because the Israelis have never had a partner in peace, really, in the Palestinian people. It's easy to say that Hamas doesn't represent the Palestinians in general, and I'm sure that is true, at least in part. But obviously there's no bright line between Hamas and the kinds of attitude towards Jews that brought Hamas into power among the Palestinians. it's a complicated picture, but the very simple framing, which I think is nonetheless true, is that we have a problem, we being Western civilized people who want to live in open societies and tolerate all manner of human difference, have a problem trying to integrate the religious triumphalism and fanaticism and frank lunacy of jihadists. And, you know, jihadists in a certain number are simply intolerable to us. And again, this is not just non-Muslims.

This should be true of all Muslims who want to live sane lives in the 21st century. Jihadism is just a deal breaker, and we have to figure out how to act on that premise in 100 countries. Let me ask you how you respond to this. I grew up knowing hundreds of Muslim Arabic people. And if I had not been aware of what went on in the rest of the world, I would have found it impossible to believe that what we know is going on there in terms of jihad and radical Islam was true. I know hundreds of Muslim people. None of them are like that.

You know, none of them would approve of that. And yet it is true. How do you explain that? How do you explain that? Well, it's just, you know, making friends with people in any community is not a valid way of doing real, you know, opinion research at a population level. It doesn't matter how many people you know or have met or have, you know, befriended. You just, there are lots of problems there, you know, in extrapolating from those encounters with, you know, the populations in whole societies, right? So, first of all, the people who would become your friend in the Muslim community are a self-selecting group, right?

They're people in the Muslim community. Maybe because they also work with me. There was a certain randomness to the way they—I came upon them, and they may not be frank with me, but somehow there seems to be less jihadism in the American Muslim community. I believe that's true. Yeah, that's true. That's a kind of a happy accident of just how people got here. I think Western Europe has a bigger problem. know, it is hard to really plumb the depths of people's beliefs and what those beliefs entail, given the right conditions, right? It would have been hard, I think, to have made friends in, you know, throughout Europe

in the late 19th century, early 20th century, and have detected in the smiles and cultural attitudes of ordinary people a propensity for genocidal violence against the Jews. But of course, the Third Reich managed to unmask that propensity, not just in German citizens, but throughout Europe. I mean, it's quite, you know, if you read the history of the Holocaust, the assumption that it was accomplished, you know, largely, you know, or almost entirely as a result of sort of the industrial killing apparatus, you know, typified by a place result of sort of the industrial killing apparatus, you know, typified by a place like Auschwitz, and that only a few people really had to

get this diabolical machinery moving and a genocide was accomplished. That's really not true. I mean, the level of collaboration throughout not just German society, but in every country they invaded or even almost invaded, you know, in the countries that were given an ultimatum, countries that were given the slightest nudge in the direction of genocide. They found, you know, all too willing executioners, to use Goldhagen's phrase, throughout Europe, you know, in Romania and Ukraine and Croatia and Latvia and Lithuania. And I mean, it's just, it was incredible what happened. And I think it would have been certainly true to say that many of the Jews who were annihilated by their neighbors had considered those neighbors friends up until the moment that the genocide got rolling. So it's just, at this point in history, you know, the lesson I would draw from that is

not that in every, you know, person there's a boundless propensity for evil, but that when you have a group of people or a wider culture that speaks casually of genocide and its aspiration to commit it, we should take them seriously, right? We should never assume that people are bluffing when they say they want to eradicate a whole population. And of course, you know, the charter, the original charter of Hamas, it was explicitly genocidal. The talk about Jews throughout the Muslim world, frankly, has been has been genocidal for for quite a long time. The Palestinians teach, effectively, they teach a genocidal hatred of Jews to children in schools, right? Many of these schools are UN-funded, right? There's just a ghastly culture here of religiously inspired hatred that we have to figure out how to perform an exorcism on,

right? I mean, there's just no way that this can be maintained and we can expect to arrive at anything like a lasting peace for, you know, in the Middle East. So, yeah, I mean, it's just, we have to take these possibilities seriously because now we know in the aftermath of several genocides that people are quite capable of it. Now, when you say an exorcism, people are going to hear war, you know, violence. We're not going to persuade them or say a prayer. What kind of exorcism can there be other than just time working its own magic, burning out somehow? Yeah, no, I do think there's a role for war because I think jihadism has to lose, right? I mean, you know, this is why a call for a ceasefire at this point in Gaza strikes me as so wrongheaded.

I mean, first, we have to admit how catastrophic the consequences of this war have been in Gaza. I mean, it's just horrific. And it's entirely the fault of Hamas. I mean, Hamas is using a civilian population as human shields, quite consciously, quite deliberately. I mean, this is just a tactic of war that is unconscionable. And for Israel to have been deterred by that is synonymous with their own suicide, effectively. with Hamas on their border in the aftermath of October 7th. So I think jihadism as a project throughout the Muslim world has to be revealed to be a dead end. The religious triumphalism, the expectation of ultimate victory here on the part of the most fanatical Muslims on earth has to be embarrassed again and again and again. And humiliation is actually the proper goal, right? I mean, the idea that there's some kind of compromise, some kind of face-saving compromise to make with these people. Again, the most fanatical religious people in the Muslim world, the people who take the principles of martyrdom all too seriously, the people who think blasphemy and apostasy is a killing offense.

There can be no compromise with these attitudes. This is a war. They have declared war on us. They declare war on us every day. They articulate their vision of life. I mean, when they say things like, we love death more than the infidels love life, or we love death more than the Jews love life, or we love death more than the Americans love life, we have to take them at their word, right? some some number of these people obviously need to be martyred.

Right. I mean, there's just there is no the moment they have the power to kill Jews and apostates and infidels. That's what they intend to do. Right. So the war is already on, you know, whatever happens in Gaza. Uh, and I think, yeah, the, the, the idea that we are going to make some kind of a rational terrestrial concession with these people, that's going to mollify them, um, is, it's just a masochistic fantasy. And it's belied by the fact that they, they clearly articulate their plans to themselves and to us, given every opportunity. I mean, every ceasefire is, in their view, just an opportunity to regather strength so as to further prosecute their war against the West, against the Jews, against the great Satan, etc. This has to come to an end, and the majority of the world's Muslims have to help bring it to an end, right? I mean, this is—and there's some signs that the various regimes with whom, you know,

Israel is hoping to broker a lasting peace, I mean, you know, even the Saudis who have done so much to export jihadism to the rest of the world, you know, when you look at the regime itself, they seem to be at the end of their patience for this kind of, you know, theocratic craziness. And that remains to be seen whether they in fact are. But yeah, I just, there is no possibility of compromise with this subset of the Muslim world, just as there was no compromise with, you know, real Nazism, you know, I mean, there was no compromise with Hitler and any notion that there was, you know, was profoundly dangerous as we later saw.

All right. Let's touch on for a minute some of the difficult details. You know, I think you're, you, I intuit that you feel the same way as I do about what I'm about to say. I don't rely on my side of an argument to expose the flaws in the argument or to expose the exaggerations or the things that turn out not to be true. So I listen carefully to people like Max Blumenthal. Oh, that's where you lost me. Well, no.

You lost me on Max Blumenthal. Well, no, I probably won't. People I abhor. Because if Israel is exaggerating how many baby heads or if there were baby heads or the details of the sexual assaults. He's the one who's going to put his mind to it to find them out. And I don't want to be ever guilty of dismissing him. And then quite often some detail turns out to be true. And then he benefits too much from the fact that we dismissed him as opposed to saying,

yeah, both sides always overreach. Both sides might always exaggerate or jump to a conclusion because they're hot blooded. So I'm going to listen to what you say. Oh, you know what, Max, you were right about that, but everything else. So I take that stuff seriously. I dismiss most of it from time to time. He's onto something, right? Not in good faith, but he's on to something. So on this issue of, for instance, delivering aid in a proper way to Gaza, how do you see that? Do you feel Israel has done everything in good faith? Well, you know, I don't consider myself well-informed enough about the specifics of aid and, you know, what has happened and not happened there, what was possible and not possible. I mean, generally speaking, I think the following is true, that

Israel is now being forced to fight a defensive and really existential war under more scrutiny than any Western power has ever had to endure when fighting a war of any kind. Right. So this is like the most watched war in human history. And it's watched with a tremendous amount of bias to the disadvantage of Israel, right? So Israel is executing a kind of high wire act. And again, they're fighting people who are using a civilian population as human shields, right? What they're fighting is worse than an ordinary guerrilla war. I mean, every guerrilla war has some part of this characteristic, which is, you know, the combatants, you know, hide within a civilian population, and they don't wear proper uniforms, and they don't, you know, fight in formations that are discernible, etc. But Hamas's use of these tactics is altogether obscene and designed to maximize civilian casualties.

And this is not just Hamas. This is what jihadists routinely do in their own population. Israel is having to fight under conditions that are quite different from anything the U.S. or the U.K. or France or any of our Western allies ever had to face. And, I mean, just the deck is just stacked against it. Everything is spun to its disadvantage. I mean, just the fact that there are more UN resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, right? I mean, that's the environment in which Israel is having to fight this war. We're talking about an environment wherein immediately after October 7th, before Israel had done anything, the world was already blaming Israel and, you know, castigating it for even

considering defending itself, you know, while the bodies of families were still smoldering, right? I mean, it's just—it's a completely insane situation, and the fact that so many millions of people can't discern the moral high ground here is – makes it very difficult for Israel not to commit acts that are viewed as needlessly destructive, right? Because the whole effort to defend itself is viewed as a war crime by so many millions of people, right? So that's the context. I think within that context, Israel has almost certainly taken greater pains to mitigate the avoidable loss of civilian life than we or our allies have ever had, ever did in situations that were not quite analogous, right? I mean, when we went into Iraq to kill the Islamic State, we weren't fighting an existential war for the defense of American civilization, you know, at least at that point.

And nobody was watching to the same degree. And it's just—I mean, to say nothing of the protests that were never going to happen and never did happen over what Assad did to 300,000 or so Muslims in Syria, right? I mean, where were the protests there? Where were the, you know, what was the tsunami of videos on social media? It just didn't happen. So people really seem to care when non-Muslims kill Muslims, and they really, really care when Jews kill Muslims, right? That's the thing that is just, you know, PR plutonium in this world. And I just think those, you know, those variables are things we need to ignore, right? I'm not, you know, I'm not saying that Israel hasn't committed any war crimes. I'm

certainly not in a position to know whether or not they have. I can only assume they have, right? I mean, this is a war after all, right? I'm sure, you know, it's, you know, are there examples of Israeli soldiers desecrating the dead bodies of civilians or taking trophies? Or have there been mass rapes of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers? I haven't heard of anything like that. But if we did hear of something like that happening, you know, that would be awful. And Israel is precisely the type of society that would abhor that and prosecute the perpetrators, right? I mean, that's the difference, right? The concept of a war crime is still viable in Israel, and people are taking

pains to guard against it. But that doesn't mean there aren't going to be examples of terrible behavior in time of war, because I would expect that. I just think that Israel is being held to a standard that no other society has ever been held to. And, you know, as to how well they're functioning by that standard, you know, that will be for history to judge. Yeah, I agree. I mean, they have every incentive to do this as cleanly as possible because the only threat to them is not military. It's the result of some sort of bad public relations, bad fat. This is what is bringing people—that's what will upend them. Just one last question about Israel. I've heard the argument, and I actually thought about it. I have my own answer to it,

which is what happened in Gaza was a little unique because it was a total example of Israel asleep at the switch. They kind of left the door unlocked and Hamas came through it. And to prevent something like that again in the future, no matter how much Hamas swears they want to do it, if they were just a little bit more attentive going forward, it might not happen again or worry about it for another 50 years. So why go through all this killing, all this horrible repercussions to innocent people when they could probably react to it and be sure they were not threatened with it again simply by redoubling their efforts to be careful? Yeah, I don't – I mean, realistically, I don't know how confident anyone could ever be in that strategy of just a reboot to the status quo. We're just going to watch the fence a little more closely than we were on October 7th. Honestly, I don't know how Israel is ultimately viable given the status quo. I don't see how Israel can endure with Hamas or with Hezbollah in the north or with Iran ultimately.

Honestly, I don't know how we avoid a larger war here, really, ultimately. I mean, I think it's just a matter of time before Israel's at war with Hezbollah and that Israel and probably the United States are at war with Iran. I mean, I just think jihadists have to lose across the board. I mean, I just think this isists have to lose across the board. I mean, I just think this is, again, this is true in contexts that have nothing to do with Israel or even the West, right? I think Boko Haram in Nigeria has to lose, right? And we'll also just figure out how to engineer that defeat as quickly as possible. I mean, they're using children as suicide bombers, again, in a conflict that has nothing to do with us, right?

These people are absolute savages, and they're making the possibility of the most basic human happiness unthinkable for reasons that have nothing to do with necessity and everything to do with just the utter religious bamboozlement of a whole generation. You know, people say you can't bomb ideas. Well, actually, you can bomb ideas, right? I mean, we have to figure out how to discredit the ideas, too. But there's just no question that certain people have to be militarily defeated, right? And the rest of a society needs to see the example of that. They have to understand that the whole project was misconceived.

I think the analogy to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan is a good one. It's misleading. We've seen that it's misleading with respect to the prospects of nation building. The lesson we drew from the aftermath of World War II is that we could defeat a psychopathic enemy and magically reboot their society with the best of intentions and find in that society a new collaborator and, you know, some of our closest friends, right?

So, you know, Germany and Japan are great allies of the United States and the UK now and have been for as long as we've been alive. That's amazing given the level of hostility and the clear evil that was present in those societies that culminated in World War II. Again, they're really not two sides of the story. I mean, in many cases, there are two sides of a conflict. But when you're looking at those conflicts, no. I mean, clearly Germany and Japan were in the wrong in how they behaved. And the benevolence of our intentions, our ultimate intentions with respect to those societies were revealed in how we helped rebuild them, right? I mean, we were, you know, we could have just

gone into Germany and started raping and killing everyone in sight if that's what we were about, right? So the lesson I would draw from that is not that it's going to be easy to go into a society like, you know, Syria or Iran or anywhere else and rebuild it along those lines, because we've witnessed in Afghanistan and Iraq just how forlorn that project is for reasons that I do think are still somewhat difficult to understand, but have a lot to do with religious factionalism. But the lesson I think we should draw is that there is no alternative, really, to unconditional surrender, right? There's a real defeat, a defeat whose moral implications and political implications are truly indelible, right? And one can't lie about what actually happened there,

lie to oneself about what actually happened there. And we need to demonstrate that with respect to jihadism everywhere jihadism seeks to flourish. I agree with you about a larger war kind of being inevitable because prior to this, and I was looking it up online, there were many articles about Hamas doesn't want an all-out war. Iran doesn't want an all-out war. And there was a kind of reliance on an equation of a psychological equation of deterrence. They would never, I know the worst case scenario, but they would never do that because they know what we would do to them. Right. And now we know either because they can't calculate what we would do to them or because they don't care what we would do to them, that they will do it.

And now all of a sudden, now all of a sudden, the rockets in the north have to be viewed differently. What if they push the button and they're all unleashed at the same time? What I worry about is, forget about an atom bomb, just a dirty bomb, just some enriched uranium. Can we really count on it that they can't smuggle that into Gaza? And can we any longer say, no, the Gazans would never bring a dirty bomb into Israel because they know what we would do to them? No, I think we know they would do it. So we can't live, Israel can't live with that threat anymore. And another issue, of course, is what the communication of weakness and how that will be interpreted throughout the world and in bold and enemies. But I think the first part is really,

it's a tough thing to accept. But Israel can't live with the worst case scenarios anymore that it thought it could, because the equation has shown to be false. It's failed. Deterrence won't stop it. Yeah. Well, a doctrine of martyrdom changes everything. You know, these people are not deterrable along the normal, you know, game theoretic rational lines because death is not a problem. And it's really not a problem. And it's really important that we take these people at their word. It's really, it's always been hard for me, and I'm sure I speak for millions of people, to really accept and internalize that it's really not a problem for them. You think it's just bluster or whatever it is, but nobody wants to die. But you seem to be able to understand that, no, they're not just saying it, it's real.

It's very hard for me to understand it. Yeah, I mean, this is something I've been dealing with since September 11, 2001, just the incredulity of ordinary secular people. When you talk about the sincerity of the, you know, the psychological and spiritual confession one hears on the part of jihadists. Again, there are many versions of it, but, you know, one phrase is, we love death more than the infidels love life, right? That's not bluster, right? It's not. And what's amazing to me, and it's amazed me for now a quarter of a century, is that even a suicide bombing on the part of someone who had lots of reasons to live, right? Not a desperately depressed person, but somebody who had other

opportunities in life. And you can read their backstory, and they had a wife, and they had a family, and they had economic prospects. And nonetheless, they decided that the fulfillment of their whole life project was best accomplished by strapping on some explosives and blowing themselves up on a bus or, you know, flying a plane into a building or whatever it was. What's always amazed me is that that rhetorical flourish, like, you know, here, you want to see how much I believe what I just said? Watch this. Bam. Isn't enough for secular liberal types who just can't get their minds around the fact that someone really believes in paradise in this world. But millions of people really believe in paradise. And it's a profoundly dehumanizing

set of beliefs that leads them to this particular notion of martyrdom and the kinds of sacrifices that it's rational to make and would be irrational not to make if you really believe these things. I mean, martyrdom is the only direct way to go straight to paradise, bypassing the day of judgment. It's the only guaranteed way to save yourself. I mean, it's the ultimate career opportunity if you believe these things. And so we have to make this belief system look as unseemly and pointlessly destructive and bound to lose as it, you know, can be made to seem in this world. And we need to figure out other ways to bracket it and undermine it, you know, theologically. And that work, that's for the Muslim scholars to do. I mean, unfortunately, the tools they have at their

disposal are perilously thin because, you know, the doctrine is pretty damn clear, you know, in the texts. And so good luck with that, guys. But in the meantime, we need to kill jihadists. I mean, I see absolutely no alternative to that. And so the idea that Israel should suffer their company in perpetuity, just trying to figure out how to build a taller fence. I just don't see how that works. Again, as you point out, given the increasing spread of destructive technology, I mean, it's just—it's getting easier for small numbers of people to destroy the lives of much larger numbers of people. It's not getting harder, right? And defense, unfortunately, the asymmetry here is, I think, always going to be present,

which is it's easier to break things than to fix them. It's easier to play offense than defense. And yeah, you know, I mean, the one thing you can put some store in is not the humanity of jihadists, but their powerful attachment to religious symbols. So, for instance, I would be very surprised if a jihadist group was willing to do anything that might harm the Al-Aqsa Mosque, right? Like, that would be really counterproductive. They're not going to target the mosque. They're not going to blow it up. They're not going to cover it with radiation and make it, you know it uninhabitable for 10,000 years.

So I think you're very safe if you're close to the mosque on some level. Those are the kinds of verities that you can put some stock in because things like mosques are things that these people really care about, far more than they care about the lives of their children. You know, I just – we're going to get off of it, but to add to this pessimistic picture, it just occurs to me, you know, you can compare it to Nazism, but Nazism was not a supernatural belief. It was a practical ideology that proved itself a failure, so people could walk away from it relatively easily, right, as opposed to Islam or this radical Islam, which comes with a supernatural stamp of approval.

And any sort of failure is not proof of its failure, right? It's just tribulations along the way. So how do you convince somebody? Up to a point. So Nazism really was a kind of mysticism of race, in a sense. I mean, it was more religious than people give it credit for. I mean, people often describe religious than people give it credit for. I mean, people often describe the Nazis as atheists, but no, I mean, they were, you know, the quasi-Christian fanatics

in many respects, and they were also just kind of, you know, conspiracy-addled lunatics and meth addicts. And I mean, they were just, they were not a rational group of people, and they created a new kind of religion around notions of blood and soil and, you know, pollutions of race and etc. And so, you know, it was a weird cultic phenomenon, not otherworldly in any kind of normal religious sense, but still not quite rational and somewhat mystical and weird. So, yeah, but I take your point. I think it is harder to walk away from the core tenets of Islam. I think they have to be recontextualized. I think, you know, at a minimum, all of the people who could be prone to becoming Islamists and jihadists need to be convinced that, well, if Islam is ultimately going to triumph, it's probably no time soon.

And it's quite rational in the meantime, in the intervening centuries, to live like peaceful, sane individuals who are enjoying orderly lives in peace with their neighbors, you know, in the meantime. And maybe it's all going to be about claiming the world for the one true God ultimately, but it's not rational for any present generation to spend most of their time fixated on that when life is getting better and better for everyone. You know, life is now so good, let's say, you know, in 10 years or a hundred that no one's impatient for paradise. Right. And no one's, and, and the people who are really committed to just throwing over everything in favor of, you know, a new caliphate, they begin to look, you know, they, they, to look—they're immediately recognized as the deranged

cultists and malcontents and weirdos that they are, and they're either forced to reform or somebody, some of their co-religionists deal with them, right? It's just, what do you do? There has to be some process. I don't know, it has to be. Maybe there doesn't have to be. But it seems reasonable that there would be some process analogous to what happened to Christianity since the 14th

century, which can truly mitigate the fanaticism that we see in the Muslim world, right? I mean, what's so damaging now is that, you know, even mainstream Muslims, Muslims who have no real connection to jihadism, they, they can be counted upon to take the side of Muslims in any conflict with non-Muslims, no matter how sociopathic the behavior of the Muslims, right? That formula has to break down, right? I mean, what we need are two billion Muslims who will get out of their own identity politics and recognize that they have a stake in a pluralistic world wherein

your identity doesn't trump your moral sanity, right? And if you have, you know, I can tell you that as a Jew, I can tell you if there was a group of fanatical Jews who were the equivalent of Hamas or the equivalent of the Islamic State, I would condemn them as fully as I've ever condemned Hamas or the Islamic State, right? I mean, there'd be no part of me, my identity as a Jew, where I'd say, oh, you know, well, I got to sort of take the Jewish side in that crazy, you know, in the suicidal atrocities that I just saw committed, you know. No, it's just like, identity politics is poison, right? And religious identities are poison. I mean, they prevent sane thinking in moral terms, reliably prevent it. But to come back to your question, there has to be some process where we're not routinely dealing with the Christians of the 14th century anymore, right? I mean, Christianity suffered a, you know, repeated centuries of collision with modernity and scientific reasoning and secular politics and,

you know, capitalism and, you know, pluralistic democracies. And it just got beaten into submission in most respects. Now, it's not to say you can't find totally crazy Christians who want to kill homosexuals, etc., but you tend to find them in sub-Saharan Africa, right? You're not mostly finding them in the West. I mean, yes, there are pockets, there are fanatical Christian cults, but again, they're just fanatical cults that no one has to really worry about much, and certainly not by comparison with what you had to routinely worry about in the 14th century. I fear that the process might be the discredited one, which was the idea actually more so, in my opinion,

than weapons of mass destruction behind the war in Iraq, which is bring in an open society with free speech and rule of law and prosperity. And that would be the antidote to this sort of thing, as it seems to be the antidote when Muslim people come to America. And their intensity, which seems to fade away within the atmosphere of a free and open society, which was our aim. It's discredited. I don't think we'll be trying that again anytime soon. But I wonder if that's really not the only thing that might have a chance of working. Anyway, let's talk about identity politics.

Sure. So one of my—now, you tell me if this is wrong. I think you've devoted your life the last 15 years against the scourge of identity politics more than any other issue that's motivated you. The only other issue I've seen you that bent out of shape about has been Trump. But here's the rub. And I was just for the record, I was I was very much against Trump, not really for the reasons of his character and lying, which I know matter to you a great deal, not that they don't matter to me, but mostly because I felt he was unhinged and erratic and couldn't act in his own self-interest. And if we had a crisis, this was not the kind of guy we want in charge of it. And we sort of saw that during COVID.

I would put that under character. I mean, I think that's one of the character traits that most worry me. Yes. Yeah, that particular character. And COVID, we almost saw this disaster, although I was even a little bit wrong. I think in the end, his mismanagement of COVID didn't matter nearly as much as I thought it was going to. But I wouldn't want Trump handling Ukraine and Israel at the same time in Malibu. It was just, I can't imagine. However, in retrospect,

I think that that Supreme Court decision, which ended racial preferences in university admissions, both legally and in the atmosphere, have cut off the blood supply to identity politics, which will now begin to wither and die, to mix an analogy. And the counterfactual would have been a democratically, a left-wing Supreme Court, which would have taken these cases and guaranteed identity politics for the next 50 years. So in retrospect, would you be willing to entertain the idea that it wasn't worth the risk prospectively, but retroactively, it's a tougher call? Yeah, well, I share your satisfaction that identity politics has been curtailed in some ways. Your defeat really is just what's happened optically after October 7th.

I mean, those hearings before Congress with the university presidents. I mean, I just think the whole DEI regime is crumbling and, you know, barring, but, you know, here the irony comes swinging back. Barring the reelection of Trump will crumble. If we get Trump again in November, I think the pendulum of sanity now swings back out into full identitarian moral panic on the left. And we'll deal with it. Not legally sanctioned anymore. Not legally sanctioned anymore. We're not going to see any more COVID and suggesting give it only to black people or disaster relief only for people of color. And that's that's done. Right. But I do think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's all helpful, but I worry that we will just see, you know, more accusation, you know, accusations of racism, et cetera, everywhere, all the time.

As long as Trump is his president. Right. and all of the derangement that brings. But short of Trump being reelected, I do—yeah, I'm hopeful that we have witnessed peak woke and that the pendulum is swinging back and that we will have—you know, ultimately, we will have more normal institutions and more normal politics and more normal media. And we'll, you know, we'll look back on everything that happened on the left as a kind of moral panic, right, over the last decade. Because I think it was, right, over the last decade, because I think it was, right? I mean, just to remind people, I mean, we have—because we've all been grown kind of numb to the shrieking of the present, but for the last decade or so, left of center

in our politics and in all of our institutions, I mean, the most elite institutions, academia, science, Hollywood, the media, everyone has been acting like not only have we made no progress on issues of race in particular, but this is one of the most dire moments in our history. Like this is, you know, like this is the emergency is at 11, you know, right now. We're living in an intolerably racist society. After all the obvious gains that have been made and after a DEI regime that was instantiated such that it was true to say that in almost any high-status job or school or any other perch one could seek in our society, it would be a positive advantage to be black, not a disadvantage, right? I mean, looking at applicants of similar qualifications, right, you would absolutely want to be black applying for that job at, you know, the Carnegie Foundation or that place at, you know, Harvard Medical School or wherever. I mean, it's just been a malignant fantasy to suggest otherwise for years, right? But, you know, I mean, it's just been a malignant fantasy to suggest otherwise for years, right?

But, you know, I do think that, you know, DEI has gone too far. I mean, I share the—I understand and I share the moral and political impulse to redress the obvious wrongs of the past somehow, right? And the obvious wrongs of the past have a, you know, are still with us, right, in some basic sense. I mean, just in economic terms, I mean, just look at the disparities in wealth between white and black families on average in this country, right? Surely racism and racist policies account for that disparity to some degree. But the question is, what to do about that now? What do we we do going forward to create a truly, you know, just society? And it can't be, and I think for a long time it has been obvious that it can't be, to institute a whole set of racist policies aimed in the other direction, right? Where we're now racist against Asians or, you know, white people, or it's just, it's obscene, right? It's understandable that we've made these mistakes, but it is, when you look at the details, obscene and obviously unfair and obviously

counterproductive and worse still, and this is truly ironic, conducive to producing more racism, right? I mean, the nightmare scenario is really that, you know, you go to a hospital with some emergency, and the doctor walks in, and he or she is black, and your first thought is, I'm now in the presence of a doctor or a surgeon who is less qualified than most because I happen to know that the standards of admission to medical school and the standards of promotion through the apparatus of a hospital have been systematically reduced for African-Americans for years and years, for as long as this person could have possibly been educated.

That is fucking awful to have to think about, right? So that's racism, but given the nature of the policies, unfortunately, those are completely rational thoughts, right? And the opposite thought is also rational. If you see an Asian come through the door, you think, you know, okay, this is a person who has been held to unfairly high standards in admission to their undergraduate college, into admission to medical school. We know what Harvard did to the Asians. We know that Asians had to have, you know, score 400 points higher on the SAT to have, to be at parity with black applicants. Okay. This guy or gal is a superstar because, and I can know that by just looking at

the color of their skin, right? That is awful, right? We do not want to live in that world. And so we have to figure out—so I think we're pulling back from the brink there. And what sort of policies we implement so as to give everyone every opportunity they can make good use of. And we try to mitigate, you know, some of the inequities that are obvious at the starting line. I mean, I think a lot of these interventions have to happen as early as possible. They can't happen at the medical school level. They have to happen in preschool, right? But yes, we know the punchline politically. We want to live in a world where the color of a person's skin or their ethnic background or their religious identity or their height or their, you know, the color of their hair or the color of their eyes. None of this matters. Right. We're already there with respect to hair color and eye color. Right. Those are not politically salient or morally salient variables. We want everything to be like hair color and eye color. And the question is, how do we get there? The first thing we do to get there is we steamroll over and otherwise embarrass all

the imbeciles who think that that goal is now illegitimate and that we want to enshrine identitarian difference for all time, right? We want to make the most of our racial difference for all time. These people exist. Some of them write for The New York Times. They're all morons, right? And we should not listen to them. Well, let me say, Seb, you made a career.

You said before, though, this is purely rational. And that's really everything you've gotten in hot water for and been called names and racist. And Ben Affleck is probably still huffing and puffing from that Bill Maher opinion. But what they do is that you try to and I heard you with Ezra Klein, who, you know, exasperated me. You're making difficult points, which are but which they are rational points. And then they attack you personally in a way, which I just think is unbecoming for, for so many of these people who are smart. That's just a little comment. So I listen to the prerequisite. I think you'll agree

for a just society or for the society we want to see will be pretty easy. I don't know how to get there. Is that at the sixth grade level, you see no drastic differences in the reading and math scores across races. At that point, everything else will take care of itself. Everything will work out. And if you can't, if you see kids, and we know there's states with like 30 districts where not a single kid can pass a grade level test. What do you expect the outcome to be? So when they're adults, we're going to start complaining that they didn't get the jobs and start putting them, but it's, it's, it's absurd, right? All right.

Where do you, where do you fall on the TikTok issue? I'm going to wrap it up. Yeah, well, I have never, the truth is I've never experienced TikTok directly. I mean, I guess I've seen TikTok videos exported to YouTube, but I've never had the app on my phone. You know, rumor has it that the algorithm is amazingly effective and addictive. Oh, it is. My kids certainly. Yeah, it's almost certainly being gamed by the CCP so as to derange us.

I mean, you know, again, this is just I've just consumed these rumors from somewhere. But, you know, apparently in China, TikTok will just just spread one, you know, engineering video or otherwise educational video after the other to to his population and you know in the u.s you're just you're basically getting brain damage we were entertaining ourselves to death and then you get a little fondness for hamas thrown in there along with the dance videos um i mean i just think it's i view it as a um i think the notion of reciprocity kind of cuts through the morass here. The fact that we can't market similar products in China should resolve it. It's like we shouldn't let China sell anything to us that they won't let us sell to them on some level. I mean I think that could be a way to just – Sell like Trump. Yeah. I mean so I. And I think that, that would, that could be a way to, to just, um,

sound like Trump. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, so I just, I think that's, we have to deal with China in, in some way. And, you know, I, we have, you know, Trump has not, has not been wrong altogether about China. I mean, China has made it a habit to enshrine certain unjustifiable asymmetries between our societies. I mean, they steal our intellectual property, just, you know, just it seems to be there for the taking, and they just, they knock, they pirate everything that they want. I don't know why we should have ever tolerated that, but it's just— I mean, the thing that—I mean, this actually has implications for our relationship to Islam as well. There are many societies that have survived based on certain happy accidents. I mean, for instance, there are so many Muslim states that are wealthy simply because they've been able to pull their wealth out of the ground. I mean, there's kind of the oil curse.

They have not had to be responsive to their populations demographically, and most importantly, they haven't had to produce anything of value that the rest of the world wants and will pay for. They don't have any intellectual property apart from a single book cobbled together in the seventh century. And that they haven't they haven't been forced to experience how untenable all that is in at this moment in history. Right. Because they again, in the case of the Gulf states, they've been able to pull money out of the ground. In the case of China, it's been, you know, we you know, we thought we were going to nudge it toward democracy by simply playing nice with it economically for so many decades and then helping to lift it out of poverty, which obviously we did. And in that sense, it's a success story, but it's not a success story. It did not become politically moderate the way we expected. So, yeah, you know, the fact that we they offer cheap labor and pirate everything else is, you know, that ultimately that is going to be an untenable strategy to going forward, right?

We're going to onshore a lot of what we, you know, COVID taught us that we want to onshore more than we had. The labor is probably going to, if it's not currently cheaper, it might be ultimately cheaper in Mexico or elsewhere. Yeah, I mean, you know, unless China can produce stuff that the world really wants based on their own creativity, certain countries just sitting on top of vast oil wealth for a time. We need to live in a world where all of our incentives are aligned and you really, you get rewarded to the degree that you play well with others and produce value in their lives. And where that breaks down and where people are able to game the system differently, I think well-intentioned people need to become more alert to those systems of bad incentives

and figure out how to correct for them. And we should be slow to reward obvious bad actors simply because it may be pragmatic in the near term to do that. Right. And we've, we've obviously played a very, um, dangerous and at times very cynical game while you're collaborating with, you know, with, you know, with people who are clearly bad on the world stage, but because we thought it was a necessity,

we, we, we did that. I mean, I, you know, I, I agree with everything you said.

I'm, I'm, I'm so reflexively first amendment and anti, um, you know, regulating, uh, what a private company does,

but I have to admit, it scares the shit out of me that there's this pipeline from China into my daughter's brain, especially now at a time when there's a kind of psychological war against a fragile, fragile Jewish psyche pressure of it all affects her. And to know that a foreign country has this pipeline to her brain and they're using it for geostrategic reasons is not okay with me. I don't know. Just the fact that it's aimed at children, we usually allow much more regulation, much more heavy-handedness when it comes to protecting children as opposed to adults. And this squarely is aimed at children, which is, I think, enough of a rationale to at least overcome a lot of the First Amendment things. All right. Can I get time for one more? Yeah, go for it. Yeah. Hallucinogenics. I heard you speak about hallucinogenics and you had me tempted

to try hallucinogenics. I never tried them, but there are two things. My father, who was a very perceptive guy, was, you know, in his thirties during the sixties, had said to me once when I was young, anybody he ever knew who took LSD, in some way, he felt they changed in some way, not necessarily for the worst, but just I should hope so. Right. Well, permanently.

And then I saw a study just a couple of weeks ago going around Twitter. I don't know if it's reliable. Now, you would you would know that there's some evidence of actual plasticity going on that after certain hallucinogenic drugs, the brain actually stays different in some way. And, um, all this scares the shit out of me. And I'm wondering,

um, in a weird way, like the VAERS database, you know, Tucker Carlson, God forbid to compare to Tucker Carlson was telling people to make decisions based on self-reporting of people taking drugs, whether or not your personal positive experience with these things is enough for me to go on

in trying them. Well, you know, I don't think my experience is necessarily enough that, you know, there is a fair amount of research at this point that suggests that in controlled and benign conditions, there's a lot of promise for these drugs in the normal case. I mean, there are people who I think shouldn't take psychedelics, and there are certainly conditions in which I don't think anyone should take psychedelics. And I mean, the truth is, for the novice psychon an experience you regret having had on MDMA is very, very low. There's some contraindications with it as a drug. Physiologically, it's not as benign as LSD or psilocybin. I mean, LSD and psilocybin, while they run a much greater risk of producing a scary experience, just physically, pharmacologically, they are truly benign drugs. MDMA, in most cases, is, I think, safe to take a certain number of times.

But, you know, there's definitely some story of its neurotoxicity, which I think I can't totally dismiss. And, you know, there's also some questions, you know, if you're buying it on the street, you know, are you really getting what you think you're getting and all of that? But have you ever taken MDMA? I did one time and I had a, I had a very pleasant experience with it, but I was also a little scary for, it was the only time I'd ever experienced a drug, marijuana,

alcohol, where I realized if something comes my way right now that I have to deal with, I will not be able to like overcome it. Like, like, and, and that I felt very vulnerable in that way.

And I haven't taken it since, but it was, it was awesome. Yeah. So, I mean, again, there's some questions as to whether or not what you got is,

is MDMA or pure MDMA. And right. So, so like the sourcing is an issue, but like, you know, if you could get, if you could overcome that hurdle,

I, you know, in the right context, I think it's, um, you know, there's a lot of spiritual ethical growth that is possible in, on the basis of that experience, because it's, it's just, um, you know, it's not necessarily representative of everything you want out of, you know, your conscious life, but it is, it's, um, from a kind of a meditative point of view, it is kind of like rocket fuel. I mean, it really like, like if you, if you have framed by the right thoughts and the right intentions, you know, put in your, you know, if, if, if someone were going to contemplate, you know, how much they love, uh, other people, how grateful they are to

just be alive and to have a family and to, I mean, just, just, you point your thoughts in that direction on MDMA, what you get is a, you know, a, a 20 megaton burst of, of, of love and, and gratitude that is, it's well worth having, it's well worth experiencing, right? And it does, it does leave a residue and, you know, it's a residue you can then work with, right? It's something, there's something to do on that basis. You can say, you can definitely have the same kinds of experience with LSD and psilocybin, but they, they are so distorting of perception and, you know, ideation in so many other ways, you know, for good or for ill, that one's trajectory is far less predictable, right? Like, so, you know, if,

I mean, in some ways they're more powerful than MDMA. I mean, there's much more of a kind of a self-transcending possibility with them, but there's also just more, it's more of a spin of the roulette wheel where you just can't fully control the experience you're going to have. So, you know, I'm never eager to push someone to take any drug. You made it sound really good, Sam. Yeah, I know, I know. But, you know, there are caveats, but, you know, with MDMA, I really, I do feel like, you know, for most people, most of the time, you know, certainly, unless they have some kind of contraindication, like, I don't know what it would be, probably high blood pressure or something, you know, cardiac. I just think, you know, it can be

truly a rewarding experience for most people. Before you go, I do have one other question. I'm sorry. I've been asking for years. Abortion. Now, I read today or I heard today something you said about abortion, which very could have constructed, if they were honest, some opinion which said that in a certain early period of time, any objection to this is religious, and we have a rule against religious laws.

I don't know what that early period of time is, but I think at some, empirically, at some early period of weeks, it's clear that only religious people have a problem with it, and therefore I'd be comfortable, but that only religious people have a problem with it. And therefore, I'd be comfortable. But that wasn't really the argument that was made. But science in some way has always been the enemy of Roe versus Wade. Trimesters are some sort of approximation for something we believe is going on. But at some point, there will be some physiological testable event that we can say, when this happens, we're going to protect this as a human life. And before it happens, we're not. And, of course, pills will always be like they're like the pharmaceutical clothes hanger abortions, right?

They'll always be able to. But it turns out it up a matter of law. As a neuroscientist, where would be the scientific, if you had perfect knowledge of what's going on inside a fetus's, inside a fetus, a brain or whatever, where would you draw a line to protect the fetus as a life? Yeah, well, it's a hard question, and it's not a question we necessarily will ever be able to answer in practice, right? I mean, in principle, maybe we can answer it, but it may always seem arbitrary where we draw the line, in the same way that it seems arbitrary where we draw the line for other things. Like, I mean, the fact, you know, why do we let kids have driver's licenses at 16, right?

Like, it's just, it's an arbitrary cutoff. We're judging most 15-year-olds. I'll give you a better one. We let babies, we have diaper commercials with naked babies running around. And at some point, wait a second, that's pornography. Nobody can, and so pornography. Right, right. And both sides are correct.

They're not the same thing. So you draw a line. Right. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry. So it might always seem arbitrary. It might always be arbitrary. But the arbitrary line will hopefully map to something more or less intelligible. I mean, so I think any understanding of human development, you know, in utero that suggested that there was some

point of demarcation where a fetus could experience pain, right, and, you know, the conscious experience of pain, well, then that would be, you know, a moment where we would have a, you know, an ethical obligation to prevent, you know, the experience of being painfully murdered, right? I mean, like, that's just, that would be bad if we knew we were, you know, killing a fetus in a, in a, some way that just amounted to being, you know, you know, you're essentially, you're drawing,

drawing and quartering an infant, right? I mean, it's just ghastly, right? And the notion of anesthetizing a fetus to kill it is, is gruesome, right? Yeah, yeah. So all of that, you know, it's understandable that all of that would make us uncomfortable And the notion of anesthetizing a fetus to kill it is gruesome, right? Yeah. Yeah. So all of that, you know, it's understandable that all of that would make us uncomfortable and probably should make us uncomfortable. But once we push further back, you know, on the timeline and we get to an organism that is not even discernibly human apart from looking at its chromosomes,

right? I mean, like there was this one gag that some pro-choice person played on a talk show, I think I remember, I might have this somewhat garbled, but I think they were on a talk show with a pro-life person, and they held up a picture of a fetus, you know, at whatever stage, but it was, you know, obviously did not look like a entirely like a human baby at this point, and he said, you know, like he sort of invited, he baited the pro-life person. The pro-life person said, all I can tell you is that, you know, like he sort of invited that he, he, he baited the, the pro-life person, the pro-life person said, all I can tell you is that, you know, I know that that is a, you know, that is a child of God or whatever. And the, and the pro pro-choice person said, well, that that's, you know, that's interesting because this is a picture of a, of a baby dolphin, right? You know, it's like, like there's no, at a certain. There's there. Our concern really isn't rationally targeting the possible human suffering of a human being. Right. And it's not enough to say that this is a potential human being or this would be a human being if it only persisted under the right conditions. Because,

again, you know, this is a point I've made that, you know, with genetic engineering, every cell in the human body that has a nucleus is a potential human being. I mean, if you scratch your nose, you are culling the lives of thousands of potential human beings, because we could just, you know, these are just as viable given the right manipulations. These cells are just as viable as a fertilized ovum, right? So it can't be, the right answer can't be at the moment of conception, this single cell uh inherits all of the the the ethical gravitas of a fully intact human being who uh you would be a moral monster to to mistreat or kill right it's just it just can't it just can't be the case and to assert dogmatically that it simply is the case is a religious precept. Right. And so so where we draw the line between we're not worried about single cells in a Petri dish and infanticide, that's that's difficult. And it might always it might always seem arbitrary.

Well, you may be making a case then for the democratic process to decide, you know, but I would say at the point where it feels pain, I don't want to see women go to jail for long periods of time. It's kind of like drugs, like you don't actually want to put people in jail for taking drugs. But I'm sympathetic to making them illegal in certain cases because you just don't want to encourage people to do it. There's no good answer to that. Anytime I see somebody in jail for having done drugs, I say, this is crazy. Can't put somebody in jail for taking drugs. But how about legalizing heroin?

No, I don't want to do that either. So I don't know how you penalize it, but, you know, well. Well, I think technology might change things. It's like, you know, before there were seatbelts, nobody wore them because they didn't exist. But once there are seatbelts, you know, you and you're a parent and you don't strap your kid in and your kid goes flying through a windshield, you know, you're unconscionably negligent, right? And it's just that moral judgment is only made the possible subjectivity of a fetus, how easy it becomes to. How, you know, whether whether a fetus at a certain stage is viable, I mean, that has changed so much. I mean, like the fetuses, you know, earlier and earlier are actually viable,

viable, right? So the line of viability changes. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, obviously you're on firm. If you have a, if you become pregnant and you don't want the child, there is a, a completely blameless path open to you, which is to, to, uh, deliver the child and, and give it to a family that wants it. You know, adoption is a, is a, is a great answer to that. And, um, you know, we could make that whole process much more attractive and easier for people somehow, you know, and, um, but yeah, like every other question in life, religious dogmatism doesn't really help here. It doesn't, it doesn't illuminate anything. It just ends the conversation.

I suspect it's going to settle into a, a status, uh, whatever it, status quo that is, I suspect it will settle into a reality which is far less upsetting than what people are worried about. I think the red states are not going to, they might make noises about it in the beginning, but they don't want their kids being forced to have children. It's kind of like they said, let's repeal Obamacare, repeal Obamacare. And then when they had the chance to repeal Obamacare, they actually didn't

go through with it. Kansas voted to keep abortion. Ireland voted to allow abortion. I kind of think it's going to be a right. I know you don't agree, but I'm not really worried that it's going to be a right. I know you don't agree, but I, I'm not really worried that it's going to be terrible. Well, I'm, I'm not worried that it will be terrible for, um, people who have access to, to sufficient resources. Right. So I think it's, it's more terrible for the poor and the desperate, you know, as, as for everything invariably is. But I mean, this is a case where it really is just, you know, it penalizes the people who can't, you know, can't easily go to another state to get a necessary abortion.

If that's what in fact they, they want to do. I just kind of, kind of feel like between the mail order and I don't know, I, I, for some people it will, but Roe versus Wade was such like you're, you know, as you always say, rationally, it couldn't hold up. It made no sense. And you just can't expect that

to hold. If this is something we really care about, we'll figure out how to legislate it. Yeah. I think that Roe v wade was always vulnerable you know i think there's a tremendous amount of hypocrisy and peer pressure on the part of the people who claim they don't want anybody to be able to get an abortion at conception let's see how it all uh pans out you saw there was an article yesterday, which we had an all-time record of

abortions last year. So it has, I'll email it to you afterwards. So, you know, I don't know what that means, but it hasn't been a crash in a number of abortions. All right, Sam Harris, I'm not going to keep you any longer. Actually, I want to ask you one question the comedy world, do you think the pendulum of wokeness is swinging back in that part of culture? I mean, how is it for comedians these days to function on stage and off. I think it absolutely has swung back. It's swung back in reality. It's also swung back in the kind of corporate America coming to the realization that there wasn't really anything to be afraid of in the beginning. That it was kind of like the Wizard of Oz. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, for instance, when Spotify didn't do anything, when it turned out that Joe Rogan had said the N-word, and even worse, compared, made a joke about black people in

Planet of the Apes. You know, life went on. There's all sorts of, Netflix stood by Dave Chappelle, and this kind of exposed what was really going on further. I'll just give you a related, um, you know, how much abuse I took when I let Louis CK back on stage and, you know, horrible emails and threats and had employees wearing a comedy solo t-shirt spit on, on the subway. I mean, this was, this was what the righteous people thought was appropriate. But more recently, I wrote a piece defending Yasha Monk on some charges that were made against him. And it was read by tens of thousands of people.

I did not get one single critical email of anybody accusing me of being an apologist or I'm trying not to go into the details as provoke anybody, but it was striking how different the atmosphere was to take a unwoke position now, as it was just a few years ago. I don't know what your experience is. Yeah. Well, my experience is powerfully constrained by the fact that I'm no longer on social media. So I don't see anything of that sort. And it's just it's an amazing it's amazing to just neither know nor care about what's happening. Oh, and also Shane Gillis, Andrew Schultz, these people. I don't know if you saw Shane Gillis' recent special.

No, I didn't. I just saw his return to SNL. Yeah. He says the R word on SNL and makes fun of his Down syndrome family. This is the same SNL that fired him for an Asian accent a few years ago. Yeah, yeah. It's different. Well, that's good to hear.

Yeah. Keep it up over there. You're fighting the good fight on the funny side of the battlefield. As are you, and you really have. I mean, I know this is not for the show, but I re-listened to that interview that Ezra Klein did with you

years ago already. Sorry for that. That's painful. I haven't heard that in years. Don't listen to it. Yeah. And just the bad faith and the way he was trying to back you into corners that would make you look bad rather than allow you to, in a good faith way, lay out the rational arguments. It was just— I was screaming. It is reprehensible. And you go through this on issue after issue, as I'm sure you are now

in your strident, not strident, ardent defense of Israel here. And as, as Brett Stevens said the other day, I heard him say that you're a national treasure. I was moved by him saying that, Sam, because very few people have that kind of courage. People are cowed. I don't know how you were born that way, what motivates you, but, you know, it's very important. It's very important. Well, thank you. It's an honor to speak with you about all these issues, and thank you for what you're doing as well. The courageous stands you've taken on a variety of topics have not gone

unnoticed, so keep that up. All right, Sam. Thank you very, very much. When you're in New York, please drop by, and you'll get there from time to time. Yeah. All right.