The Megyn Kelly Show - Sam Harris on Political Tribalism, Cultural Divisions and Finding Inner Peace | Ep. 37

Episode Date: December 14, 2020

Megyn Kelly is joined by Sam Harris, author and host of the "Making Sense" podcast, to talk about political tribalism, race and racial essentialism, the woke left and victimhood, Trump and Biden and our political moment, Cancel Culture, finding inner peace and the value of meditation, social media and much more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, we've got Sam Harris. This guy is a philosopher. He's an author. He is host of the Making Sense podcast. And I would say more than anybody else, he is the name that has been suggested to me as a potential guest on the program. And I've listened to Sam in the past, but I was fascinated to see what is it about him that has made him so very popular with the people who listen to this podcast. And now I get it. Now I get it. He's a liberal, but he's not woke. And the way he talks about the woke is incredibly eloquent and thoughtful and smart. And he's one of those guys that just makes you feel like, oh, why couldn't I put it that way? Super smart, very big, big, big brained guy. But he's very thoughtful. He's pensive. He's, I think you'll find him illuminating on how a, you could quiet your own mind and be in Richard after you quiet it, um, may require you being quiet for two months

in a row, but we'll talk about that later. Um, but I think we had a good spirited exchange on things like Trump and, uh, his fans and, um, sort of the media and their coverage of politicians and their quote lies. Anyway, we'll get to Sam in one second. But first, I want to talk to you about Jan Marini skincare. You guys, this is a beautiful line of products. I myself tried them and number one, they don't smell, which I like. I don't like a lot of odors in my products. Number two, they idiot proof it for you. They tell you in the regimen, this one goes out in the morning. This one goes on the evening. This one you can put on both.

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or purchase directly from the website. Plus, they've got some great holiday offerings available and always with just two-day free shipping. Transform your skin with Jan Marini. And now Sam Harris. Really excited to talk to you and also a little nervous because I've been watching a lot of your interviews and listening to your podcasts and you seem like an intellectual giant and I'm feeling ill-equipped to talk to you. Well, listen, I want to put you at your ease because, first of all, I think you and I agree about many things, and I'm a fan of yours. I'm happy to talk to you about anything, and where we disagree, I think it'll be fun. So let's just go.

Good. Okay, I feel a little better. I like to start where I can with news of the day. And you've been so smart and easy to listen to on the topic of wokeness and the religion of wokeness. And just today we saw a school in Virginia, an elementary school, announcing that it is dropping part of its name, Thomas Jefferson. Quote, due to the pain his legacy can cause. Not even actually is causing, but can cause black students, despite an overwhelming majority of the parents saying, we don't want this. We are not in favor of this at all, but it's happening. And then here in New York, it was announced not long ago that at one one of these sort of expensive private schools, it's actually happening at more than one, parents must now outline their commitment to anti-racism when applying, and they have to attend anti-racist training before they can even get into the school.

The anti-racist label is a rhetorical trick. So does all of this concern you? I know you've got daughters and you're concerned about wokeness in general, but I think in the schools it's especially pernicious. Yeah, well, it does. At first, I think we should just bracket all the heresy we're about to download with an acknowledgement that racism is real and it's a problem and it's been an excruciating problem throughout our history, right? So it's not mysterious, this kind of moral panic we're seeing around the issue of racism now. I mean, we know what the past was like. The problem is that people seem to, one, not want to acknowledge

the progress we've made, right? So there's something deranging about acting like this is 1964, right? Given all that's happened in the last 50 years. You know, we had a two-term black president and that counts for absolutely nothing. We have a generation that's acting like, you know, being on the three-yard line with respect to racism is a moment of moral emergency. So I'm not saying that racism is gone. I'm not saying that there are no ways in which there may be policies that disadvantage people in various groups. And we want to untangle all that and, and, and respond to all that. But, uh, we have made enormous progress

and there are just not that many racists out there, right. Who want racist outcomes, you know, starkly unequal and unfair outcomes for people. Uh, to not acknowledge that is deranging. And so now we have a kind of an activist cohort in our society. It's not clear just what percentage of American society it is, but it doesn't have to be all that big to completely derail our conversation about these issues. And yeah, so now, you know, defenestrating Thomas Jefferson or anyone else from our history whose obviously record on race was, was imperfect, uh, to say the least, but still you can't, you can't discount the fact that this is one of the most important people in American history and, uh, still the person who made, you know, an outsized contribution to creating our country. Um it's, yeah, this particular activism makes no sense. And yeah, it's deeply concerning that we, you know, these are educators. These are people who will be teaching children almost without fail at this point to view the world through the lens of race in a way that

arguably was appropriate 50 years ago, but really isn't appropriate now. It's in fact, totally dysfunctional now. I mean, some of the critics have said, this is David Duke's dream realized where everything really is about skin color. It's immutable. It's not overcomable. It makes all the difference in character and how well you can do in society. You know, the differences are innate and should dominate anyone's perception of another just upon first meeting them.

And that's where we're going. And I know you've said, I thought you made an interesting statement because you're not big on false claims of victimhood. And you were saying they can diminish the social stature of any group, including one that really has been victimized. And so constantly, as you say, you know, we're on the three yard line with race, constantly pretending that we're not, that we're already, we're still all the way down the playing field can actually set a group back. I mean, it can actually, it's setting back race relations and black people as a group. Yeah, because it's dishonest, right? It's just, it's not, and it also, it just violates the basic principle that will get us into the end zone. I mean,

let's just acknowledge what the goal is here. The goal is to wake up in a world where these superficial differences between people, the skin color, has absolutely no moral or political significance, right? That was certainly MLK's dream, and it should be ours, right? And activists on this issue and a host of other issues as well are acting like these differences between people are indelible, morally important, politically essential to recognize at every turn, and that any disparity we see in our society, you know, if we inventory our Fortune 500 companies and our various professions, and we find that there's not a perfect representation of the general population in all of those places, right? If exactly 50% of cardiologists are not women, if exactly 13 to 14% of people in the C-suite at Apple aren't black, right? The only explanation for this is bigotry,

right? Now that is just, there are many things wrong with that, but first is that it is almost certainly untrue, right? I mean, at minimum, you would need real evidence to make that allegation. And there's so many other explanations that promote themselves here. And so the dishonesty of it is toxic, not to mention the fact that seeing yourself as a victim perpetually and locating your social power, your status in victimhood, which is really the algorithm that is running here, it's intrinsically divisive, right? I mean, if your politics is based on the politics of identity rather than looking for solutions that benefit everybody, looking for systems that are intrinsically fair, right? You can't possibly converge with other people because all you're doing is ramifying your differences. So you're viewing everything as zero sum in principle. And it's regressive.

And again, it doesn't acknowledge any of the progress we've made or the principles by which we've made that progress. One of the problems we're having is the complete stifling of conversation on this and the messaging to white people and often white men that you just can't speak. If you're white, you shouldn't speak on the issue of race. If you're a man, you shouldn't speak on the issue of sexism. If you're cis, meaning you identify with the, your biological sex that you were born with, um, you shouldn't speak on the issue of transgender and so on. And it's a really effective way of silencing people in those groups because you're told if you even try to speak out about it, nevermind, speak out critically, if you dare say anything critical of it, you've offended just by opening your mouth, you've offended. And I know this summer when we were in the midst of the BLM protests and defund the

police cries and all that, you were very outspoken in a very, very powerful podcast that I've listened to a few times. And you made a point up front about saying it was a conscious choice not to put on a black scholar, an intellectual, to talk to you and to make these points for you, with you, across from you, because you want to disabuse people of this perception that the color of one's skin matters for a discussion on race or that, you know, your gender has to determine whether you can speak up on trans or et cetera. I thought that was really brave. And I think more of us need to say that. Yeah. I mean, you know, my, obviously my bravery is, is to some degree founded on the fact that I've taken prudent steps to not be cancelable.

Right. So in the end, it's, it's not all that much bravery to, to be honest, uh, because I just have, I have, I knew what I wanted to be able to do. And I've, I've taken steps to ensure that I, I, uh, run a fairly low risk of, of, uh, suffering some, you know, fatal error, you know, bit, you know, career wise, uh, for doing it. So, and I mean, as you know, you've had adventures in, in cancellation and it's, you know, I mean, you're an example I've actually spoken about. I mean, someone at the absolute top of media, uh, saying one thing and being hurled from the ramparts for it. Um, and, you know, and I would, I would say, you know, it was a,

a malicious framing of, of what you said. Um, and I mean, perhaps we can, we can, I don't know if you want to talk about that, but I think the underlying problem here is that people want to hold people to the least charitable interpretation of what they've said or done at every turn. And they're really not concerned to know what was actually intended, what was actually going on in their minds or what or what? What their their real aims are right? So you if you can discover that someone has said something that can possibly be construed as racist or sexist or Transphobic or whatever it is well, then that possible construal is the thing that you you will amplify as an as an activist or even as a journalist now and The goal is just complete obliteration of a person's reputation and an obvious aim to make them unhirable.

And so, yeah, I saw the writing on the wall there, and I have kind of created a platform for myself where I can say more or less anything I want. you know, everyone, but in particular, young black men, uh, you are, you're on, you, you know, you have to be on the back foot, uh, to, to even think you should be saying something, especially at a moment as fraught as immediate aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Um, but the truth is the color of a person's skin has absolutely no relevance to a conversation about the actual statistics of police violence and crime and violence in our society. And it's bizarre and dysfunctional to think it does have relevance there. And, um, you know, we, we have, uh, on that particular point, we're, we are suffering a kind of public hysteria around this topic. I'm not saying that there isn't too much police violence. I'm not saying that many of our cops are poorly trained and we should be hiring, you know, better recruits and training them better. And, and, you know, far from defunding

the police, we should, we should give them more funds to recruit better people and to train them better. But the flip side of that is the cops have the hardest job in the world, practically. I mean, they're thrust into situations that the public don't understand how to interpret. We're in a country where there are 400 million guns on the streets. This is not like policing in Japan, where you can assume when the guy turns around and races to the front seat of his car, he's not going to pull out a handgun. In fact, you have to assume that he will in this case, right? So cops are in all these situations where they have to make split second decisions about what someone's doing with their hands. And it's, um, you know, yes, they kill a thousand people every year, but they don't

kill people, uh, in a way that suggests that there's an epidemic of racist violence perpetrated by racist cops in our society. They're just, that's not what the data show. And yet to say that in the aftermath of George Floyd, yeah, I think it was rightly perceived as risky. And many people would have been fired for recording a podcast like that. But happily, I have taken pains to be unfireable. The whole stifling of conversation around COVID first and the riots over the summer, Black Lives Matter, the gender stuff. This is really what made me want to get back out there, just get in front of a microphone again. Because the more you tell me I can't say something, the more I want to say it. And I've always been that way.

I don't you know, my executive producer, Tom Lowell, used to say to me at Fox, MK, you like to go to the place that hurts. And it was true. And it wasn't, you know, gratuitous. It was because when no one wants to talk about a thing, to me, it becomes ever more important to talk about the thing. There's nothing wrong with talking about the thing. And we've gone completely crazy on this, where just talking is a fireable fence, just a fireable

offense. Just talking about something can get you fired. It's it isn't right. And it scares me that so many people have, forgive the term, bent the knee on that. They they don't talk anymore. They're afraid. Yeah. Yeah. the knee on that. They don't talk anymore. They're afraid. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is a

great inoculation against this comes in certain areas of academia, although I got to imagine those are closing down a little bit now. But, you know, having a background in philosophy, you know, in a philosophy seminar, just as thought experiments, you can talk about anything, right? Because you're looking, you're probing for the foundations of ethics, right? You're trying to figure out what makes something wrong. You know, if in fact things can truly be wrong in this world, as I think they can. In a philosophy seminar, you might say, well, you know, why can't, what is the difference between abortion and infanticide? And why can't people kill their children if they don't want them anymore, right?

If they do it within 15 minutes of birth, right? If abortion is legal. I mean, so these are the kinds of things, sentences you would speak in a room filled with people searching to understand ethics. And yet now one would fear that somebody would just take that quote out of context and say, look at this maniac. He doesn't understand why you can't kill babies, right? And we need to be able to speak without being paranoid. Uh, and we need our, we need our actual intentions to matter. I mean, it's, it's, it's not that hard to figure out if somebody

is actually racist and racist in a way that, that should matter, right. Or actually sexist, you know, sexist in a way that should matter. And people don't tend to conceal this stuff, right? And, and it's, and people should be held accountable for what they really are trying to do to the world, right? So it's the fact that a, a bad joke or, or something that can be misunderstood or an honest question of confusion can get spun into a career-ending reputation-canceling offense. Maybe that was always possible in some way, but it does seem genuinely new in the way that it achieves scale based on our new technology. I mean, just social media has leveraged this into something that's deeply unhealthy for us as a society. And we have

to find some way to pull back. Well, I know you've said all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is successful conversations. That's and we're on the brink. But it made me think because, you know, having been in media for a long time, I do wonder whether these conversations are working, the ones that we were having before the complete shutdown of all of them, and even the ones that we're starting to have now, you know, there have been studies that say people don't want to hear opposing ideas. They really, they try to avoid listening to them.

That's why we have Fox News and CNN and MSNBC on the other side. People go there for confirmation bias and just to feel good about themselves. It's like hearing the sweet nothings about how right you are. And I really wonder whether we've leaned so far into that feel good about themselves. It's like hearing the sweet nothings about how right you are. And I really wonder whether we've leaned so far into that, that conversation's over. It's canceled. Conversation's canceled. Yeah. I do think conversation is the only tool we have to

ensure that 8 billion of us can collaborate in an open-ended way? Is the human project truly open-ended? Is it possible that we're going to get through this century and into the next million years of conscious life that is directly descended from who we are now, you know, whether we will be recognizably human at that point is certainly an open question. But, you know, is this project doomed? And is it doomed in the near term? Or are we going to thrive in some truly open-ended way. I think conversation is really the whole story that will decide which future we land in here, because it is the only thing that allows us to modify the behavior of perfect strangers without violence, right? We have a choice between conversation and violence in all its forms, coercion, right? So, you know, laws are also

a form of violence in the end. If we pass a law against you doing or saying certain things, well, what happens when you break that law? People show up to your house with guns and, uh, you know, if you do the wrong thing with your hands, you might get shot. Right. So it's, it's, um, we have, we have our ability to persuade one another based on common principles of reasoning and, and appeal to facts that can be mutually appreciated, uh we have force. And we should be very slow to make an appeal to force for obvious reasons. So we have to get better at speaking to one another about difficult issues. And we appear to be getting worse at it. And we appear to have crafted an information ecosystem in the media and social media now that has all of the signs of being a psychological experiment

to which no one consented, whose purpose is to see how crazy it can make us. We're now in mutually canceling and irreconcilable echo chambers, and there are many of them. And just to look at what's happening now currently in our politics around the election and what has been happening for years under Trump, we're seeing a fragmentation of media and social media. And in the case of social media, we've built platforms that have been maliciously gamed, where the echo chamber effect can be accentuated by the very business model. So it really is something that we have to get straight. And I think the prospect of us just maintaining this particular course where we're this fragmented, where it's, where it's this difficult to talk about the most important things that face us, you know, you know, a pandemic, right. We can't even figure out how to talk to one another about what we should do in the face of a pandemic,

right? And trust in our institutions has eroded, right? And for obvious reasons, but for reasons that we have to figure out how to nullify, right? So just one, I'm going to take something that will be, I would imagine, dear to the hearts of many of your listeners, the hypocrisy of public health officials, right, where they castigate people protesting lockdown as being, you know, murderously irresponsible for having gone out in public without masks or gone out in large groups at all to express their political opinions. You know, the way that flipped when the protests were for Black Lives Matter, and you have the same public health officials, in many cases by the, I think by the thousands signing open letters in support of these protests,

which, you know, from an epidemiological perspective were just as crazy, in fact, probably far crazier than any of the protests that were happening in protest over lockdown. Yeah, it harms the stature of our most important organs of information in a pandemic, right? If science is going to be that politicized, it's easy to see how trust breaks down. More with Sam in just one second. But first, let's talk Bloomsie Box. Are you still struggling with what to buy your mom or your family member, your long lost friend for the holidays? here is a great idea. You can send flowers from Bloomsie Box. Your loved one is going to light up when they get your flowers, and they're going to show them to all their friends because they're spectacular and they're

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out. Whether you're going to send a single holiday arrangement or a subscription for someone special to receive flowers every month, you got to go with Bloomsie Box. And I got you a special discount. Go to bloomsiebox.com and enter MK to get 15% off and free when it fails, than something like Breitbart or Fox News or any organ of, I would say, pseudo-news on the right. And that asymmetry is something that we have to figure out how to correct because it's shattering our society. I'm just curious, do you think CNN and MSNBC are in the New York Times camp? No, I think they're worse. I think they're obviously worse most of the time. MSNBC is obviously worse.

CNN is often worse. And it's, yeah, I mean, I find them both more or less unwatchable now. I mean, I never watched MSNBC, frankly. But I think we have to be honest about why this is, because I, so I'm sure, you know, my opinion of Trump. Um, but I think, I think Trump really is as, um, I mean, I think it is true to say that he is the most dishonest and corrupt person who has appeared in public life in our country in our lifetime. I think that is a fact about him. This is not, I don't think that's just my opinion.

I don't think it's, I don't think this is really debatable. I mean, I think it's like saying he's got a vaguely orange hue to his skin or fairly colorful hair. I mean, these are facts about him that you can observe based on being able to observe him for now decades, right? I'm not talking just about the last four years. I think he is not a normal politician, he's not a normal politician. He's not a normal person in this specific regard and his, his level of dishonesty and

his level of, of selfishness and his, the malignancy of his self concern. Right. And everything gets sucked into that, that kind of moral black hole around him maybe and he attracts people into his orbit who will put up with that right you know people who are for their own reasons are willing to who don't view that as the the the moral and political abomination that it actually is. And the media has had to figure out how to respond to this. And, you know, I would be the first to say that they've done a terrible job. And it has been deranging for them, right?

Because when they see that he's, you know, he functions by a very different physics, reputationally, he's managed to dissect out a kind of personality cult within our society. Now I got to stop you. I got a couple thoughts. I would suggest to you that one of the reasons you don't see Hillary Clinton as in the running for most dishonest, corrupt politician ever is because in part, the way the media didn't cover that. They run cover for their favorite Democrats, like we saw with the Hunter Biden story, which has now come out as confirmed. The FBI has been looking into him, reportedly looking into foreign dealings, possible money laundering, a story that Twitter and Facebook and the other media outlets wouldn't even touch. We were told it was untrue. We were told it was a smear. It was an October surprise, not based in fact. Well, guess what? That's not true. And Hillary Clinton at the time, she wasn't the most beloved Democratic

candidate, but once it was her versus Trump, they were all in on protecting her stories about the Clinton foundation. She lied every two minutes, but we didn't have a lie ticker going on her because the media wasn't interested in doing that. Cheryl Atkinson was just on talking about that, about this reporter who was telling her, we calculated out how many times Trump lies. And this is the number of lies per minute. And she said, how many for Hillary? This is when they were running against each other. And I said, oh, we didn't have the time or the staff to do that. Well, it might be interesting. She doesn't have an adult relationship with the truth either. I don't argue that Trump is truthful, not for one second.

And I understand he may be in a special category. But he may not be as far ahead of people like Hillary as you think. No, I would definitely dispute that. Well, first off, I'll say you're not going to find much of a defense of Hillary Clinton or the Clintons as a couple in me. I mean, I just, you know, I completely get

why people were allergic to her and her candidacy. And it was a lesser of two evils, you know, choice from my point of view, but it was much lesser of two evils you know choice from my point of view but it was it was much lesser for for a host of reasons not just to this this difference in in dishonesty and and you know perverse incentives and all the stuff we we recognize in in many if not most politicians we have a

sense of the general shape of that right and i you know i i get that if you scratch the surface on most of the people in power and then certainly most of the people who seek office, it's a self-selecting group and there are people who are in this game for the wrong reasons and many of the incentives are perverse. It's not glamorous. It's hard to be idealistic about many of these people. And I would say the Clintons were especially cynical. And yes, there's a lot of dishonesty that you can find in their backstories. But it's just, it's, you know, Trump is orders of magnitude worse. He's done literally hundreds of things, any one of which would have destroyed the political

prospects of any other normal politician. Well, that's true. But what I'm saying to you is that when you say we have a sense of what these politicians were and how far down the dishonesty lane they were, I'm just positing to you that you their bias has always been there. And I do think it's worthwhile for people to stop and ask themselves how they've been manipulated, how their perception of a politician like Hillary or Barack Obama was manipulated by a by the glowing coverage they received in general from outlets like The New York Times. And to your second point that you were making earlier about when I asked you about CNN and MSNBC, they don't get a pass for, you know, well, they're nuts, but he drove them to it. Well, too bad. That doesn't, you know,

some of us had a very difficult time with Trump and some of us were not huge fans of his for personal reasons. Right. But you can get past that if you're a strong person and you're an ethical person, you understand what the job of a journalist is, which is not to make it about yourself. And what we saw here with with CNN and MSNBC was not a couple of journalists fell, you know, like Jim Acosta, who used to be a straight news guy. He fell. He just went totally partisan, got the derangement syndrome, couldn't be relied upon for truth anymore. They all went down. All of them. I would like it was shocking to me to see somebody like Anderson Cooper sacrifice his credibility because of what appeared to be his inability to see Trump in any way that approached fair.

So I don't, you know, I felt like you may have been sort of trying to explain their surrender to their nonstop attacks on him by, well, he drove them to it. They drove themselves to it. I would just say that the asymmetry here really is difficult to navigate. So, I mean, for instance, just to take the Hillary Clinton coverage, I think the media is rightly concerned that they got Trump elected, right? I mean, first of all, they gave Trump something, some insane ratio of coverage. And there's something like 20 times the amount of coverage that they gave. I can't remember if that was, that was for Clinton or for Bernie Sanders, but there's some, there's some comparison between the amount of airtime Trump got, you know, in 2016. It was the other GOP candidates in the primary.

Okay. So, so it's just, they did that, right. And they, they have good reason to worry whether that was counterproductive given what they wanted to happen in the election. Uh, and also it's, I think it's fairly well established at this point that the, the Comey, uh, you know, reactivation of, of the email, uh, investigation, whatever it was, 11 days before the election in 2016, the coverage of that and the scrupulosity of that moment, both from the FBI side and from the press's side, like, oh, yeah, we really got to talk about this now from yet another 24-hour news cycle when there's only 10 days left. Let's talk about Hillary Clinton's emails. They rightly think that that probably cost her the election right now.

Obviously, there are many other things that, you know, cost her the election. She was a terrible candidate and she didn't go to Wisconsin. Yeah. I mean, you might. Yeah. You could say that her unelection was was overdetermined. But when the people who were tracking the polls in those last days of the campaign just saw the direct effect, or at least now claim to have seen the direct effect of that coverage. So it's given that history. Yeah. What do you do with a Hunter Biden story? Right. It's a hard problem.

You know, because it's not clear. It isn't hard. You're so much more forgiving of these people than I am. First of all, it was very obvious that they were giving Trump too much free airtime. Even to me, I was a person responsible for putting points on the board when it came to ratings during the Trump rise, the GOP primary, and thereafter. And this is in my book, but we had many a meeting, my executive producer, my team, and I did about the need to stop, to pull ourselves away from the crack cocaine. You know, like Trump was amazing television. Every time you put him on television, the ratings soared, but it wasn't fair because Scott Walker was terrible television and incredibly boring to watch.

I like him. I like him just for the record. But he is not a dynamic television personality. And it was totally unfair what we were doing. So even though we wanted to crack cocaine, we didn't snort it. Right. We made a conscious decision to try to get ratings the old fashioned way, which was interesting debate and reporting the news in an entertaining way. But not not putting our thumb on the scale. They did it intentionally. They knew what they were doing. Jeff Zucker knew what he was doing. Noah Oppenheim knew what he was doing on the today show, allowing Trump to phone in to do phoners as a presidential candidate when nobody else would

have been afforded that. Right. Um, they did it for ratings. They sold their souls out for numbers, Joe and Mika too. They kissed Trump's ass when he was running. Why? Because their numbers would soar on a show that was not doing well. So I don't forgive them one bit of that. In other words, I don't allow them to use that to justify their overcompensation and trying to ruin him every moment of his presidency. They made their bed and they needed to lie in it. And the Hunter Biden story was very clearly legitimate. He had never denied it. There was an FBI subpoena that was verifiable. There were third party witnesses who had come forward to say, I participated in this and let me tell you about it, whose credibility was not assailable. They just didn't want to do it. They didn't want to do

anything that could hurt Biden. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I understand it. I've always made an effort to be fair in my criticism of Trump because I do think intellectual honesty is the master value here. And I think, I think you, if you think he's racist, well then, you know, argue on, based on real evidence that he's racist and not pseudo evidence. Right. And I, and I think it's, you know, and this is true for anything else you might want to allege about him. Um, but I, I think that, you know, the worst problem with him beyond anything else that he's done or tried to do is the way in which our trust in our institutions and a style of speaking and thinking about institutions has just fully eroded. It seems that half the country thinks we don't need institutions anymore. not fully, but to some extent, right? Because take, take Comey in the FBI. I defended Jim Comey. I thought he was a man of honor. Um, the whole story of Robert Mueller and Comey and, you know, having each other's backs and protecting each other and whatever the ethical, uh, quandaries they faced and rose above. I defended him and now I see him as a partisan hack. I really do. I've

completely changed on him. I defended the FBI. I know a lot of these FBI agents. I tend to defer to law enforcement. I have law enforcement with my family. And I think a lot of women are deferential to law enforcement for reasons having to do with nonstop crimes being played on the evening news as we were growing up. But that's just my armchair theory. Anyway, then I saw the Peter Strzok emails and the other emails coming out from the FBI and how partisan they were and how determined they were to bring down Trump. And I thought, maybe I have been too deferential. Maybe Trump kicking these tires is not such a bad thing. Maybe we have been too trusting in these institutions. And of course, we've discussed media and how people were trusting media in a way they shouldn't have been. I agree it's gone too far. I don't think you throw out the baby with the bathwater, right? I think we're sort of now at the point where we trust no one, and we've become conspiratorial, and things are getting weird. There's becoming like a cult-like love for Trump that were in which he looks deified, that's concerning. And therefore his offhanded need to attack every institution

that says something bad about him or does something he doesn't like or person, you know, governor Kemp of Georgia, who's his fan is it isn't healthy. I see all of that. But how do you ascribe, you know, how do you deal with those revelations of dishonesty versus maintaining a country in which we do have to trust institutions and move forward? Well, I just think you have to put them in their proper perspective, right? So again, you drill down on anything and you start reading people's private emails or emails they thought were going to be private. You start reading their texts. Yes, there's no question you're going to find things that are embarrassing and are all too human. And that's totally understandable.

I mean, these things weren't intended for public consumption, right? So, you know, a hack of the DNC or, you know, subpoenaing people's text messages when you're investigating, you know, anyone, attorneys or members of the FBI, you'll find evidence of bias and all of that, right? But no one's surprised by that. What people should be surprised by is to take one institution in particular, the election, and all the systems that support it.

We should be surprised that we have a sitting president who, in the run-up to the election, would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost. And then on election night with millions of votes still coming in, claimed to have won, right. And demanded that the voting be stopped, right. Whether the ballots, you know, the ballot counting stopped. Um, that just, just that, if you just make a little documentary about that moment and what it says about where we've come and the divergent reactions to that in our society, right? The fact that we had something like half of the society that simply didn't care this was happening, or they had some construal of it where this is not only benign, this is good, right? He's disrupting everything now. Now he's disrupting

our expectations about the peaceful transfer of power and the integrity of our elections, right? He's calling a fraud on an election that is in process, you know, where we haven't seen any evidence of fraud yet, right? He called the election he won in 2016 fraudulent. And this should be the lens through which we look at everything that has happened subsequently in the last month and a half or so, right? It's not that if you don't go looking for fraud, you'll never find it. Of course, there's going to be some ambient level of election fraud. There will be crazy behavior. And if you put yourself in a position to just look for crazy behavior, you will find it. But the question is, can you find it at a scale that reveals this election

to be completely fraudulent? You know, there's no evidence for that at the moment. No, I get it. I get it. But I have to say, I think that I look at the media who's that's, that's how we're learning about the substance of these election fraud claims, right? We trust, we need to trust them to tell us what has he filed? What is the court saying? Does he have the proof? It's, it's the same as those doctors who justified the BLM protests coming out now telling us to stay inside and not go shoulder to shoulder. We're looking at them saying, I don't believe you anymore. You already sacrificed your credibility. I don't know who to believe. But when when confused with who to believe, people do revert to tribalism. They go to the person who's wearing their team jersey. And I think that's why a lot of these Republicans who have lost all trust in media are believing Trump, even though I've said on this show many times, I don't think any of his claims are robust. There's been a couple, the last one he filed in the state of Georgia that challenged the failure to match up the signatures and how many votes were thrown out versus in prior elections. And it went down this year, even though the vote was five times higher by mail, blah, blah, blah. You could make an argument on a couple of them, right? So we're trying to give him his due without losing touch with reality. But I completely understand why people that it's gone. Their, their trust in the, in the information deliverers is gone. And just for the record, the FBI thing was not just the Peter struck emails, but as you know, an FBI agent

pleaded guilty for doctoring a subpoena. They got subpoenas in the, in the case against Trump from the FISA court by using the, the, um, the dossier, which had been discredited and they knew it wasn't true. Like there were a lot of things that were exposed. Why? Because Trump fought back and he made outlandish claims at the time that weren't true in defending himself, but he wasn't guilty. That was the truth at the end of the day. And, and same thing with impeachment. There's just been so many overreaches in order to destroy him that in essence, they've endowed him with the credibility to come out and challenge anything. I don't excuse Trump for throwing wild claims around. I'm just in the way you're trying to explain the media's distorted minefield when it comes to Trump. I'm trying to explain why he

now has this ultimate credibility with all these folks, because the other side is just it's collapsed. The information deliverers have collapsed and it matters. Yeah, well, it does matter. It hasn't completely collapsed. And I think people need to be sensitive to the difference between plausible interpretations of events and completely unprincipled, conspiratorial, tinfoil hat, crazy interpretation of events. And there are reasons why we have this category of conspiracy theories that doesn't subsume all of our thinking about everything all the time. There's a reason why there's a stigma associated with conspiracy thinking, because it reliably manufactures errors, right? It rests on not acknowledging the power of incentives, right?

And so to take the case of the election fraud conspiracy, right? Now, again, I'm not saying there isn't some level of fraud, but there are many reasons to think that whatever level of fraud there is, it almost certainly happens on both sides in the election. Right. And it's there's not a lot of incentive for individuals to commit fraud. And there doesn't seem to be the apparatus to allow us to really commit it at scale across multiple states. And that's a good thing. I mean, obviously, we want an election system that we can be confident in and that is designed in a way to engage, if for no other reason than to restore confidence in our election system. But the reality is, is that all of this is happening in a context where many of the people in power, right, the governors, the secretaries of state, the legislators, the election officials, the judges who have to hear these cases, many of them are lifelong Republicans, right? Many of them surely voted for Trump in this election. And so you have to, you're arguing to be really conspiratorial about this. You're arguing that these people are somehow incentivized to risk going to prison in order to help Joe Biden. Back to Sam in one second.

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consider trying Truthfinder. What you may find may astound you. This might be the most important web search that you ever do. So do it. Go to truthfinder.com slash Kelly right away to start searching and be prepared for what you find. Again, that's truthfinder.com slash Kelly. Okay, we're going to get back to Sam in a second. But first, we want to bring you this feature we call Sound Up, where we talk about some of the soundbites making the news or that we think are interesting and want to share with you. And today, we are going to talk about Hunter Biden. Remember old Hunter Biden? If not, you could be excused since it was a story that was totally buried by the mainstream media, CNN, Politico. Others reported last week that Joe Biden's son is being investigated by the

FBI, his taxes, his dealing with China, money laundering, and more. We don't know how deep this goes, but it doesn't sound good. The story has a lot of the same hallmarks as the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden in October. Remember that? It was a big scoop. It was about what was on the Hunter Biden laptop. That story, however, which was published before the election, was suppressed, totally censored by Twitter, Facebook, and other social outlets. Basically, no one wanted to go with this. It wasn't just social. It was print magazines and print newspapers and television. Nobody wanted to touch this thing. They decided it was not to be discussed. And they said it was because it was unreliable.

But the truth is more likely that it was bad for Joe Biden. Anything bad for Joe Biden has to be suppressed, according to the media. So how did the media treat the story at that time prior to the election? Listen to some MSNBC highlights. Watch for President Trump to go after former Vice President Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and unverified emails about his business dealings, a story that many intelligence experts say has all the hallmarks of a foreign interference campaign. When there is a New York Post article that is false,

it's much better for Twitter to let people read the New York Post article and sit there and laugh at the hokey story of a computer repairman looking at a computer going, this sure does look suspicious to me. I'm going to call Rudy Giuliani. Like, let that out, okay? Because people will read this story and then they'll go, this is really one of the stupidest October surprises I've ever seen before. What did he have? X-ray vision?

Oh, my God. Why? Why? When they're trying to portray a dumb person, do they always put on a Southern accent? It's so irritating, honestly. And then they're like me, an elite. Oh, wait. I love being an elite. Yes, I am. I am. Screw everybody else. Anyway, so that was Morning Joe. Here's Christiane Amanpour at CNN, who seems to forget the role of a journalist. As you know perfectly well, I'm a journalist and a reporter and I follow the facts. And there has never been any issues in terms of corruption. Now, let me ask you this.

Yesterday, the FBI. Wait, wait, wait. The FBI. How do you know that? I'm talking about reporting and any evidence. I'm talking to you now. Okay, I would love if you guys would start doing that digging and start doing that verification. No, we're not going to do your work for you. I want to ask you a question. There's no reports, so we can't report on it why were there no reports again oh because it was buried by people like you who just decided without investigating it that it was untrue well

guess what the fbi's been investigating it and frankly it looks like they've been investigating it for a long long time because in order to get the subpoena to get that hunter biden laptop from the legally blind guy who was repairing it. Remember, Hunter left his laptop there and he never went back. And finally, the FBI came in and got it. That was back in December of 19, December of 19. So for the FBI to have gotten that, it suggested that they had an open investigation on Hunter Biden. That's how the FBI can't just like randomly throw out subpoenas. Back in December of 19, which they would have known had they bothered to look at it at all, at all. But no, it was the New York Post. That's a Rupert Murdoch publication. So this has got to be a lie. And, you know, Jack at Twitter, who's got some far left guy deciding what

gets censored, spoke out and said, no, we're not going to do it. And so the media lemmings followed. And now it turns out it's a very big story. And if it were a Republican, they'd be treating it like it were white hot. So now, fear not. Now they're on it. They got Politico. You got CNN. They are on it now that Joe Biden appears to be headed to the White House. Not surprising. Back to Sam. I've been thinking about it when it comes to race and we've been talking about it on the show when it comes to gender and and the reason the gender thing is important is because because the the scientific world has collapsed too right like science is done and you're not allowed to say

that there are only two genders and there's only two biological sexes and you're not allowed to question whether it might not be healthy to put a girl who's suddenly at age 14 for the first time says she might actually be a boy on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones or allow her to get, quote, top surgery before she's even reached her 18th birthday because that's not allowed. So you go to a scientist. You go to a psychiatrist to check out whether that's true for your daughter. And the standard of care is for him to just affirm, yes, you're trans, you're trans, you're trans. These are the standards of care. It drives me insane. And I know you're a neuroscientist. We had Debra Sell on the program talking about how she left the field. She's now a journalist covering that field because she didn't think she could say what was scientifically true. I feel like people feel they need to fight back.

You know, if Biden gets in there, we're going to see the return and the emboldened nature of all of this. No one's going to shut them down. You've got people like you, Sam, who speak honestly about the dicey issues. You're obviously a Democrat, a liberal, but you speak honestly about those issues. But so few people do that people are getting hurt now. In the scientific field, they're getting hurt. What do you make of that? Yeah, well, a few things here. One is scientists are just people, right? And not everything they do is science. So you have scientists who express their opinions on many topics, as I have here on many topics. And it's not, you know, there's no guarantee that

what they're saying is, you know, scientifically defensible or convergent with what they would say when they have to put their, their scientist hat on. And yes, I, I would agree with you that it is very costly to the reputation of science and any specific institution, scientific journals, when they express opinions that are at minimum highly debatable in terms of their, you know, ethical integrity and, and, and connection to science. And, um, and they, it's, it's wrapped up in the mantle of, you know, this is now a scientific opinion, right? So that's, that's a problem. Um, and there, you know, there are many issues, you know, some of which you just raised where they're just, they're, they're fraught issues for a reason. It's, it's hard to know what to do about certain things. I mean, you take the transgender issue, right? I have no doubt that transgenderism is a real phenomenon, right? It's not just made up. It's not just a product of culture. It's not just a social contagion, but is there a degree of social contagion riding on top of a real

phenomenon that we have to worry about? I mean, specifically with the issue you mentioned, I think you're probably referencing Abigail Schreier's book there and just among girls transitioning to being boys or wanting to, yeah, that has to be discussable, right? And as her efforts to get her side of this discussion out have shown, it's very hard to discuss, right? There are people who want to cancel her over this. And somebody like J.K JK Rowling, you know, gets, uh, you know, at least attempted, there's an attempted cancellation of her, um, based on something absolutely benign. She said about, you know, the trade-offs between women's rights and trans

rights. And there were, there are trade-offs there. And it's just, there are, there are moments that are hard to navigate based on, uh, appeals to, you know, the primacy of identity, uh, around those issues. And, um, you know, when she was objecting to the corruption of language where we can't talk about women anymore, we have to talk about, about people who menstruate. Um, you know, it, it is in fact true to say that if she were not this, you know, billion dollar colossus of a writer, she probably would have had her career ruined over the absolutely anodyne thing she said about trans issues there. I mean, there's no evidence at all that she's remotely bigoted against trans people. So, yeah, it's a, the stuff is hard to talk about. And the only thing we can appeal to really, if this is going to work, is a good faith engagement with facts

and arguments and let the best arguments and the most searching, honest engagement with facts win. I heard John McWhorter on your show saying he believes these sort of wokesters are in good faith, that they think they're doing good. They're going to help you understand how racist you are, how transphobic you are. But he also said they're not persuadable. The only answer is to fight them. Do you agree with that? Yeah. Well, I think fight, by which he meant in most cases, ignore them, go around them, no longer give them any power. But I have to think that more people are persuadable in the fullness of time. We're not dealing with a different species of person. In all of these camps, we have recognizably human people who have been persuaded of certain dogmas or certain bad ideas, and they're not disposed to run the newest operating system that would debug these ideas, right? And so we have to just keep advertising the importance of getting a firmware upgrade here. And it's true on both sides. It's true on the far left. It's true

on the right or whatever you want to call Trumpistan. It's not clear how that relates to conservatism now. But to come back to a point you made earlier, I hold out hope for it being easier to deal with the wokeness and the hysteria on the left under Biden than under Trump, because Trump was such a, a super stimulus. You know, he was such a, such a confirmation of the worst fears or an apparent confirmation of the worst fears of the left.

I mean, because again, much of what is, has been alleged against him on those particular points, you know, with respect to race in particular, I think is not true, right? I mean, I happen to think, you know, I happen to believe Trump is a racist, but I don't think he's a white supremacist. And I don't think he has, you know, I think he has been unfairly tarred with, you know, the good people on both sides or the fine people on both sides hoax. You go back to that

press conference and yes, he did condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis, clearly. My hope, certainly, and if I had to bet money on it, I would say it's going to get easier under Biden to recognize how dysfunctional wokeness is politically and ethically, because they won't have Trump to point to, or they probably won't have Trump to point to if he doesn't emerge in some other- So far, it doesn't look like it's going that way. I mean, so far, it does not look like it's going that way. You've got critical race theories coming back, thanks to what Biden says will be his first executive order, the mandated sessions at the federal government amongst its workers and its contractors.

They're already saying that they're going to try to undo the restoration of due process rights for men who get accused on college campuses of sexual assault. Those are not good signs. Not at all. You know, it's just, it's not, it'll just be very easy to do. Now, you know, maybe this wave is just now cresting, you know, maybe there is a bizarre effect here where when the problems get smaller and smaller, the people who are most focused on these problems get more and more agitated and more and act more and more like things have never been worse. Right. It's just, it's on some level, this is the, the narcissism of small differences, right? I mean, just, if you're not singing from precisely their hymn book, you know, on, on any of these woke issues, well, then you're a Nazi, right? And we're talking about things like whether you can compliment someone on their hair, right? Is that a racist microaggression, right? We're not talking about people getting lynched. We're not talking about people having to function under the rule of race-based laws, right? We're talking about

off-color jokes. Someone gets into an elevator at an academic conference, and when they ask, what floor? He says, women's linger know, offered up a dad joke from the 1950s. That's, that's where we are. And it's, it's eminently criticizable, right? And there's so many people, I mean, you know, to mention some of the black intellectuals who I, I didn't invite on that podcast. There's so many great people like John McWhorter and Glenn Lowry and Thomas Chatterton Williams and Coleman Hughes. And, you know, many of you, I know you, many of whom I know you've spoken with and Camille Foster and Chloe Valdory. And I mean, there's just there are people who it shouldn't matter that the people I just mentioned are black, but it does matter, right? They really have an enormous responsibility and they are shouldering it to hear it from people like us, right? If you're white and obviously privileged, you have all the privilege marks that could be ascribed against anyone in our society at this point.

You, by definition, don't get it and can't talk about it. But there are many people who really can talk about it and for whom they really are a kind of kryptonite. And it's not an accident that no one really wants to debate them. I mean, the people are not lining up to debate Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter about race issues or Shelby Steele. Or Coleman Hughes. Coleman Hughes, who's been out there saying, hey, Ibram X.

Kendi, just let's talk about your book. I don't believe in it. I think you've made mistakes. You've been sloppy. Let's talk about it. And he won't debate Coleman Hughes, a 24-year-old guy who's done his homework because he's afraid. But to your point earlier, they can't assail Glenn Lowry and Coleman and certainly Thomas Sowell in the way that they could come after you or me, but they won't hear from

them. Number one, they get called Uncle Toms. Number two, they do not get invitations to appear on shows. No one's interested in putting them out there to say how they feel. And I'll just give you one other small example. It's a stupid story, but I am in the Bethlehem Central Hall of Fame. Perhaps you didn't know that, Sam. No, I did not know that. Now I'm intimidated. I was inducted years ago. It's not Stanford, but it happened.

And there's a push by some kids there to get me booted out. Why? Did I say because I said something controversial about race? No, because I retweeted two black men, two prominent black men who criticized the constant focus on race in this country. One was Jason Whitlock of OutKick, right? Formerly ESPN, a journalist who's super smart. He's coming on the show. I love Jason Whitlock. He's been brilliant on these issues and really brave and has been called an Uncle Tom by everybody. And one, Leonidas Johnson, who's got his own podcast. So now it's to the point where even retweeting these, you know, black men with heterodox views of this race dogma is problematic, right? That's potentially cancelable, whatever they'll, they'll do what they're going to do. But I think it's, no one wants to hear from them. Why isn't Coleman Hughes a household name? If he were saying the stuff the left wants to hear, he would be. Yeah. Well, it's a problem. I'll grant you that. It's been a problem for a long time on

some adjacent issues. I mean, this is what happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who I think you probably know. Yeah, she's my friend and she was on the show recently. Yeah. Who, I mean, she's a dear friend of mine and, you know, so, you know, when she was, you know, speaking critically about the treatment of women under Islam and you'd think she would have standing to do this, having, you know, come out of Somalia and, and suffered, you know, all of the, the, um, uh, uh, the collateral damage of that experience that you might expect. And then, uh, literally recapitulating the entire enlightenment project in her own life and becoming a, a, uh, member of parliament in Holland. And then, you know, being, uh, you know, hunted by jihadists and theocrats and, and,

you know, essentially becoming the next Salman Rushdie, uh, the, uh, the left didn't want to hear from her, right? I mean, she's, she was much, a much better candidate for, for taking a position in a, a left-wing think tank than a right-wing one, but only the AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, would give her a perch when she really needed one. While I don't agree with everything that comes out of that organization, I will never cease to be grateful to them for doing that. And so she had this experience that many people have had, where when you begin making sense on one of these issues, in her case, the problem of Islamist it becomes radioactive enough on the left that you have a, it's a very, it's a disorienting social experience. What shows up in your inbox is utterly disparaging and crazy and bad faith attacks from the left.

And on the right, you kind of get love bombed by a cult, right? And you just, you meet, you know, really friendly people who, who don't agree with much or of the rest of what you may believe. Right. And so, you know, people on the right, when they, when they hear me criticize Islam and its connection to jihadism and terrorism, you know, following very much the line that Ayaan would follow here, people on the right are so happy to have someone, you know, left of center making sense on this issue that it really is just a completely congenial meeting of the minds, despite all of the other things I believe and will argue for that they find just odious. And then you're like, surprise, surprise. Surprise! Surprise! And that's all the time we have. Yeah, exactly. But the truth is the worst, the most dishonest, the most hostile, the most gaslighting, the most insufferable attacks tend to come from the left, right?

And it's now there's an asymmetry here or kind of an optical illusion, perhaps, because I'm not, you know, I'm not dealing with the far right. I'm not talking to neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. Right. So obviously what they would have to say to me would be, you know, just as despicable and dishonest, I'm not even sure, given how crazy the far left has been. And Aion experienced this, and so many people have experienced this. And what many people have suffered, I would say, I have certainly resisted this, I think, successfully, but not everyone has. There's kind of a tractor beam effect where when you're getting nothing but disingenuous, nausea-inducing craziness on the left, and the right is showing itself willing to just bury the hatchet again and again and again, and we can agree to disagree about all these other things, but, you know, we're nice guys over here. You see people get pulled into getting captured by a new audience. And, you know, I'm not going to name names here, but we have mutual friends who I think just now can't really make a lot of sense when talking about Trump and the election, say, because they have been captured by a right-wing audience that really treated them well, you know, when the left treated them just despicably. And it's a kind of social and psychological experiment. And it's, you know, I think it's something to be on guard for, not for political reasons, but just for reasons of making sense on these issues.

I like what you're saying. I feel like this is illuminating. This is illuminating because I know on the subject of religion, you're not a subscriber. I know you don't like the term atheist because you don't need to be called that just because you don't happen to subscribe to religiosity in any form, but it's really a rejection of dogma. You're a rejecter of dogma, and I actually do like that. I feel like I too am a rejecter of dogma, though I am, I don't think I can say a practicing Catholic, but I'm Catholic. I do believe in God. I don't believe in every story in the Bible. I'm trying to raise my kids Catholic, but I don't really subscribe to the dogmatic religious thinking. I kind of take what I want from it and use it to reinforce moral and ethical principles I believe in. I use God to threaten them, which works brilliantly. And that's sort

of where I am. But I politically am very reticent to sign on for anybody's dogmatic thinking. And I think that's an advantage to me as a journalist. But that's why I'm a registered independent. Why should I sign on to some party and their platform that I'm invariably going to have many disagreements with? Nobody out there has got exactly my ideological outlook. And why would I just put on their team jersey? I'm talking about as a citizen now. I just say like, I'm going to support you. I think it's, I'm always surprised when someone says they agree with everything on the Republican platform or everything on the Democratic platform. It's like, all of it? Did you look at it? Did you think about it for yourself? How did you get to that place? And so I will confess that when I see, I mean, I can't even

deal with the far left. I'm so over them. I really don't want anything to do with them. I have shut down my willingness to converse with them. I don't think they're honest brokers. I don't think they're coming at it in good faith. That's what I want to say about it. The left, I feel differently about. Liberals, I feel differently about. And I think Republicans, my experiences with them have been largely positive. And so I understand what you're saying, the temptation to put on the jersey, but I haven't. I, and I, I won't, it's just not the way I'm built. And I'm, I'm more skeptical of these groups and parties, uh, than I am loyal to them. And it's one of the reasons why I'm like a little concerned about, as we were, as I was saying

before, the deification of Trump, like I understand defending him and giving him a fair shake. And, and I understand just thinking he's awesome, right? Like I get those people. But what I see happening right now at some of these rallies where people are like, I will do whatever my president tells me to do. I will do what Donald Trump, he sacrificed everything for me. I would die for him. I would die for him. People are saying that. And I don't totally understand how they got there or where that means we're going. Yeah, well, this is where it crosses over into something like a political religion or a kind of pseudo spiritual awakening, right? It's just kind of a mass movement. And it's happened on the left.

And I would argue that what's happened around BLM has that character as well. It's not even trying to get in touch with facts. It feels too good to be right about this particular thing. You've achieved escape velocity somehow from the normal constraints of public discourse, and you're just soaring above the earth. And that's happened in Trumpistan. It's very strange. I mean, it's worth looking at the literature on cults to understand it. I mean, it's functioning by the same dynamics. I mean,

the difference between a cult and a religion is really just in numbers of subscribers, from my view. I mean, once you get a billion subscribers, well, then it's simply indecent to call it a cult. I mean, that's a pejorative term. Here you're talking about most of the people in any given society. But if there's only 15 people in a house with a lot of burning candles and they've got pictures on the mantle that no one can recognize, well, then that's a cult. And what the hell are you people up to? And what are you teaching your kids and all the rest? But if you really want to have an honest conversation about the way the world is and how we should all live together within it so as to stand a chance of maximizing human well-being or escaping the worst possible outcomes that are in fact possible, well, then you need to appeal to something deeper and something universalizable, right? Something that isn't born of the mere accidents of birth or geography or, you know, what religion your parents happen to have or, you know, what politics they happen to have. And we know many people inherit their politics very much like a religion, right? You tend to just be following the line of your parents. And it is, yeah, it's weird. I mean, to come back to the point you made about platforms, it's weird that if you know

someone's position on gun control, you know, you stand a good chance of knowing their position on climate change, right? Or on a dozen other things that should be unrelated. And so it's a sign that people aren't thinking these problems through based on first principles. They're joining a team. They're joining a religion. They're part of a social experiment on some level. It feels good to be part of a team.

It's tribalism. I mean, we have, we're deeply tribal and we, you know, we're apes in that regard. And we're trying to leave the monkey behind here. And again, all we have is conversation by which to do it. Now, I want to pick up on something you said about going forward in life and being focused on what matters and who we are as human beings. You're deep into meditation. You've studied it for years. You've practiced it for years. You've read all the books. You've spoken with all the gurus. But the thing that stood out to me and just reading up about this piece of your life was, um, you, I read, this is a quote from you. I've gone into silence for a week and meditated

18 hours a day just to see what can be revealed through disciplined use of attention, through introspection, and to see how it can inform the study of the mind. And then you didn't say anything more after that. And as somebody who doesn't meditate, I was wondering, could you like short form it for those of us who didn't do that? That seems like an important thing to know. Well, yes, I've spoken a lot about meditation. I wrote a book, it appears in several of my books, but I wrote a book on the topic called Waking Up. And I have an app by that title where I and other

people teach various techniques of meditation and talk about its, its connection to understanding the mind scientifically and, and, and just living an examined life altogether. I mean, just, just kind of rebooting the, the ancient philosophical project of, of developing a philosophy of life that actually matters, right. That actually changes one's moment to moment engagement with the world and aligning one's ethics and one's emotional life and really trying to live a life that you don't regret in the end. You don't regret at the end of any given day or a given hour, but you don't regret at the end of your life. What would it

mean to do that and how can we do that? So that's really the center of gravity of my interest at this point. But yeah, with respect to sitting silent retreats, yeah, I did a lot of that mostly in my 20s. I spent about two years on silent meditation retreats. And the longest one was three months. And I did a couple of those and then several one-month and two-month retreats. And then, yes. You can't talk at all? No. Well, on some retreats, you have an interview with a teacher every other day for about 10 minutes. So they just need to check in on you and guide your practice and make sure you're not losing your mind as some small percentage of people do under those conditions, as you might imagine. But basically it is silence and you're not even making eye contact

with people. I mean, you really are kind of locked down if you have no perspective on the nature of of mind uh prior to concepts prior to your your thinking incessantly about everything prior to the conversation you're having with yourself uh you are a mere hostage of that conversation and it's an it's an amazingly distorted conversation. I mean, you'll tell yourself the same thing 10 times in a row and never get bored, right? If someone walked into the room and spoke the same sentence to you over and over again, one, you'd think they were crazy. And two, you would get out of the room, right? You'd say, this is not worth my time. But when you look at the kinds of things you will tell yourself,

and every hour on the hour, every minute on the minute, right, when you're perseverating on something, when you're really caught by something, it is a psychotic dream, really. I mean mean the difference between you and a psychotic in that case is is that you have the good sense to keep your mouth shut and the psychotic is verbalizing everything you know out on the sidewalk but that's basically the difference right you know we if you could just imagine your thoughts broadcast on a loudspeaker every moment of the day for all to hear you know we'd all sound crazy under those conditions. And meditation is a technique for recognizing the mechanics of all

that and relinquishing it, you know, if only for moments at a time. And as you get better at it, you can, you know, get off the train for longer. And what you discover when you do that is that the mind is the basis for all the well-being you have ever experienced in your life. You know, it really is, there's an intrinsic quality to consciousness, you know, before anything changes, you know, in the very midst of any ordinary experience, you know, before you, you know, before the pain in your knee goes away. I mean, even in the midst midst of any ordinary experience, you know, before you, you know, before the pain in your knee goes away, I mean, even in the midst of an unpleasant experience, there is, there is a real freedom, right? A real, a real sense of, of, you know, compassion for yourself and for others

and, and just a radical openness, right? And I mean, this is something that many people experience first, you know, taking one or another psychedelic, right? And this is what happened to me, you know, when I was 18, I took MDMA. I had to look that up. That's ecstasy, yes? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, and ecstasy, you know, since it became very popularized as a club drug and people took it in comparatively frivolous

ways. It's not to say they didn't have a lot of fun in the process, but originally it was designed and taken by people very much with the intention of discovering something about the nature of their minds. And that was really the framing I had when I took it. And yeah, I discovered that it was possible to be much less of an asshole than I was tending to be, right? I mean, it was possible to be deeply at peace with myself and the world and, uh, and to be happy, right? Like really, really happy down to my toes. And then I'm using the H word and then, and then, and then you,

you know, then you lose that and then you become interested in why, right? Like what is, what is it about how I'm using my attention that reliably produces something less than the deepest peace and satisfaction and love and connection that I've ever experienced? Right? How am I failing to actualize that day after day? And that's when a practice like meditation becomes relevant to people. Can you get yourself there? Can you get yourself to the ecstasy version of yourself through meditation? It's the primary goal of certain types of meditation. In a Buddhist context, there's a meditation called metta, which is the Pali word for loving kindness. And in that practice, you are trying to create a specific state of mind, very much like what many people have experienced on ecstasy, which is unconditional love, for of a better word. But I mean, it really is that it's, it's, you recognize that love is a, a state of being that you can fall into more and more

deeply. And it really just, it's not, it's not transactional. It's not like you, you love someone because, you know, you, because of your history with them, because of all the good things they did for you, because of how much fun you have in their presence. No, you can actually recognize that you really want other people to be happy. You really want them to be free of suffering and the depth of that wanting the depth of that commitment to the well-being of other people even people you've never met right even people who are your enemies who are working hard to make themselves your enemies right you you you can stand back from your kind of the you your your reactivity and your kind of the, the personal aspect of those collisions and recognize that on some basic level, everyone is suffering. Everyone is going to lose everything they love in this world. You know, everyone is, is we're all in this astonishing circumstance together.

And what you want even for the bad people is an end to suffering you want people to be happy and and that is the that wanting is a state of mind that you can focus on and so metta practice is is the, is the practice of amplifying that intention and emotion to the point where, yeah, it, it just obliterates everything else in your mind for the time that you're doing that practice. So you just, you just feel a depth of love for everyone, you know, for, for no reason other than the fact that that's, that's what you feel for them, right? You actually just, because no matter how bad they are, and it's, I mean, this may sound, you know,

bizarre or its own, in its own way, pathological to people, but I mean, just take, you know, take one of the worst people who's ever lived, right? And so there are many people on this list. You know, I wouldn't put Trump on this list. It might surprise some people, but you take- I was going to ask you whether you've meditated on him. Yeah. I mean, so he's harder than most people to feel compassion for, for reasons that are interesting. But you take someone like- Let's go with Hitler. Yeah. My favorite for this use case is Uday Hussein, right? So one of Saddam Hussein's sons, you know, his worst son, right?

So this, I mean, he is just the prototypical evil person, right? He's no question. He was a psychopath. And this was a guy who, when he was driving through Baghdad with his bodyguards and he would see a wedding in progress, They would descend on the wedding, and he would rape the bride. And in certain cases, he killed the bride. I mean, he did this more than one case, right? It's just the most despicable human being you can imagine, right? So how could you feel love or compassion for Uday Hussain? Well, just look at his lifeline as a whole, right? Just roll back the clock on him

and think of him as the four-year-old Uday Hussein, right? So how do you feel about the four-year-old, right? I mean, he may have been a psychotic kid too. I don't know. He may have been a scary little boy. I wouldn't doubt it, But he was, above all, that we couldn't capture him. But it is appropriate to feel compassion for the four-year-old boy who became Uday Hussein. I mean, that is an unlucky life through no fault of his own. He didn't pick his genes. He didn't pick his parents. He didn't pick,

he didn't decide to be born into a war-torn, honor-based society that would amplify all of his flaws, right? And so you can feel compassion for that boy. And then the question is, at what point is it illegitimate to feel compassion for

him, right? When he's five, when he's six, when he's seven, when he's eight, like when does he cross over into no longer being an appropriate target for your well-intentioned wish that he just be happy, that he just overcome suffering. And you can get there. I mean, you can really get there with the worst people. But that actually is not the center of the bullseye, as far as I'm concerned, for meditation in general. I mean, in general, meditation is not about producing specific states of mind, like loving kindness. It's about recognizing that ordinary consciousness, just the consciousness that is hearing my words right now, the consciousness that's allowing the two of us to have a conversation, is already free of self. Sam Harris, living an examined life. I love that. That's inspirational to me. It does.

And see where that goes and see how it makes you feel and get really honest about the answers to both of those things. That I think I can do. Today's episode was brought to you in part by Jan Marini Skin Research. Dramatic results. Dermatologists recommend it. Get your award-winning skincare system now at janmarini.com. I want to tell everybody that next show, which is on Wednesday, is going to be with two people who are spectacular. Andy McCarthy of National Review, who is the one lawyer who's been super smart on all the Trump legal challenges, really fair to the president too, unlike most. And Selena Zito,

who I've corresponded with a bunch online, but I've never actually met her. And she's somebody who I love her voice and I love the angles she pursues on stories. She's one of those folks who gets flyover country and isn't disdainful of it. So I think those are two great people to talk to. Well, it'll be, you know, our first show after the electoral college meets and votes today and we'll get their take on where we are and what's going to happen, you know, between now and January 20th. Sound counsel and thoughts from two smart, likable people. That's the kind of show I love. If you don't want to miss it, go over there and subscribe. Make sure sure you're a subscriber that helps that that lets me come right into your inbox in the morning the top of your phone saying hey don't forget me today come listen to me talk to Selena um and then of course you've got to download and you've got to rate five stars and more than anything send me a

review will you it's been fun to read them people make make me laugh. Some people swear. Some people ramble on. Some people write weird sexual things. Don't do that. But I do like hearing from you. And any guest ideas are good too. A lot of new names that I hadn't even heard of. I sent my team to go Google and find and call in some circumstances. So anyway, it's been a pleasure. And to be continued after we have results

from the Electoral College. Talk to you Wednesday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.