The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Crisis of Truth in American Politics — with Sam Harris

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast, joins Scott Galloway to discuss the rise of conspiracy thinking, the role of the media, and how identity politics is shaping American politics. They also talk about ICE and law enforcement, Trumpism, antisemitism, Iran and Islamism, masculinity, and why it’s becoming harder for people to agree on basic facts. Follow Sam, @samharrisorg. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O-D-COM. Episode 379. 379 is the country code for Radican City. In 1979, McDonald's introduced the Happy Mail, true story, the Exorcist. is actually having a sequel instead of a priest trying to get the devil out of a little girl. It's about trying to get a priest out of a little boy. Okay, that's not that good. I've used that one before.

Asking churchgoers for money is like Epstein asking for bail money. Was that better? Actually, none of this is true. The Catholic Church just announced a new position on homosexuality. What is that new position? Only if it's under 12. Welcome to the 379th episode of the Prop G-Pod. happening. I'm back in action. It's a busy first week traveling from New York to Miami.

Then back to, let's talk about me. Let's talk about me. I was in Australia. I did that bridge climb thing, had dinner at the Sydney Opera House. Very cheesy, very touristy, and I absolutely loved it. I've turned into that tourist where I'm now climbing bridges and going to have dinner in the Opera House. By the way, Opera House initially commissioned in 1959. It took 13 years. It was supposed to cost $7 million. It ended up causing $110 million. And in order to pay for it, they introduced the Australian lottery. Who would have thought it? I think we'd all live in Australia if it wasn't so goddamn far.

Oh, my gosh. Great people, great food. I went to Lizard Island, which just reminded me a lot of the Bahamas. Very nice, but in my opinion, a brand of it's a bit overrated. But what an incredible people country. I just had such a wonderful time. My boys, got this great picture of my boys on the bridge. I just had such a nice time. Stop by Singapore. If you haven't been there, just imagine if Nordstroms was a city. But the good Nordstroms, back in the 80s and 90s Nordstrom. Imagine it was a city. That's Singapore had just an incredible time. Then went back to L.A. and worked on Netflix, which is Latin for had plastic surgery, as is the reason my camera is over. I asked my surgeon that I just wanted to look natural, but unfortunately I looked naturally surprised all of the fucking time right now. And, uh,

I wanted to look like, I don't know, a better version or a refreshed version of myself. Instead, I look like a distant cousin that just looks kind of scared all the time. That's why my camera's off. My nose looks like a minivan from the 80s. I'm pretty sure if I fell asleep, there'd be squatters in there by the time I woke up. Anyways, I'll do a reveal sometime next week, but I thought it was going to be really minor elective surgery, and I have been on opiates. Is this the opiate speaking?

Is this the opiates being? And also, folks, what hole am I trying to fill here? I have people who love me unconditionally. I'm economically secure. I actually feel pretty attractive. I had a lot of confidence from my looks. I'm rich, so I assume people think I'm good looking. So what the fuck is going on here? And so I need an intervention. You know what I was doing last night? I was looking at Ferraris online. Seriously, what the fuck is going on here? I'm about two. years into a midlife crisis that I think is going to end in about 40 years. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. Anyways, longer conversation. But in today's episode, we have just the right person to talk to about it. A guy who's become a friend is no joke, a role model of mine because he's courageous, unfiltered, and also just wicked smart, Wicked, smart. Of course, I'm talking about the inimitable Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast. We discussed with Sam, masculinity in the Democratic Party, the rise of conspiracy and trolling. Oh, my God. I'm just such an enormous fan of Sam. I think he is so good. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Sam Harris. Sam, where does this podcast find you? Los Angeles.

There you go. With that, let's segue to ICE. What's your reaction to what's happening around ICE, specifically with the shooting, and what kind of damage? Or do you think it's doing damage, or maybe if it's helping Trump and MAGA as a whole? A little backstory here. I've spent a lot of time focusing on the public misperception of police violence, right? that people just, in my experience, don't know how to watch these videos, and the stuff that they, you know, often think is outrageous really isn't so when you think of the cop's eye view of the world.

So my bias here, if anything, is to be very charitable to law enforcement because I just, you know, I've trained a lot with firearms. I've trained a lot with, you know, you've been trained by law enforcement at various levels. And I just, I, you know, it's very natural for me to see their perspective on on these kinds of encounters. I mean, just the simple fact that, you know, when someone is being approached by a cop and, you know, who's may be, you know, intending to arrest them or not just approaching them, just approaching their car, the moment their hands disappear, you know, in a country like America where there's your 400 million guns, you know, that becomes an evolving emergency, right?

I mean, your hands are everything, right? So people have no sense of this, right? So they immediately, you know, duck down and reach for something, and they don't realize they're putting themselves in danger. So that said, the video that we all saw of this encounter in Minneapolis and the subsequent killing of Renee Good struck me as just a crystal clear instance of a terrible cop, you know, terribly trained doing something quite unjustifiable leading to the death of an innocent civilian. I mean, just it was, I think any effort to defend it, I just, I have not seen even a slightly credible one.

Even if you were going to defend the first shot, the subsequent two are just clearly an attempt to ensure that you, She's dead after the cop is just objectively out of harm's way. I mean, it's just not, but that, you know, so all of that's alarming and awful, but the worst part was the administration's response to it. I mean, just right out of the gate, they started lying in the most, I mean, it's not even, you can't even call it lying on some level, because this is the, this is a type of lying that doesn't, it makes no pretense of being believable.

Or, I mean, like, if you, if you were going to lie in a way that was meant to deceive, you'd make some contact with the evidence. But here, we're just, you know, they just seem to think that they can bludgeon us with lies. And that's what's happening. I mean, just literally every word out of the mouth of the president, the vice president, Christy Noem. I mean, it's just, it's just all been, you know, a, to encourage a kind of

ass hallucination, and the fact that so many people seem willing to participate in that hallucination right of center is, frankly, fairly scary. What do you make of, what has struck me, in addition to your, where you highlighted, the administration's response, is how the media has responded. And I can almost tell you how the media responds based on the logo. It just seems like there's a total lack of all critical thinking. Specifically, I was especially triggered by Fox who led with, you know, lesbian activist, you know, as if to say our audience clearly would hold her more culpable if we highlighted that she sleeps with someone of the same sex, that somehow that might in some way justify or make her seem less or more deserving of this kind

of treatment. Any thoughts on how the media's handle it and how people are absorbing it? I've seen a go-fund me for the officer that includes large donations from fairly public figures. Yeah, well, I'm not even sure why that would be necessary at this point because it sounds like the administration has said nothing but exculpatory things about him. And so I can't imagine any kind of prosecution is in the offing. I'm inclined to bend over backwards to be charitable to law enforcement in these situations. But from what we can tell about the vetting and frenzied recruitment of, it's just clearly they're putting

guns in the hands of people who are spectacularly unqualified to be wielding them and they're putting them in situations with a philosophy of, it's not even law enforcement, right? It's just some kind of public intimidation. Again, it's just not,

it's not a normal police work that we're seeing. And I think these kinds of errors, you know, be charitable with respect to the intentions of the cop in this case. But, I mean, it's obviously an error to have shot this person and killed her, right? It's just not. And again, what isn't an error or what can't plausibly be thought to be an error is the ongoing response to this from the government and from highly partisan media. to describe her behavior as clearly terroristic, right? I mean, she's a terrorist who was trying to mow down cops.

I mean, not even just the one cop. It sounded like to hear it described from on high. It was multiple cops. The cops were just trying to get their car out of the snow, and here came this maniac, terrorist, activist, who was clearly weaponized by some enemy within, right? There's some Antifa cult that has funded all of this, right? Probably George Soros is at the back of it and turn these drones loose on our innocent ICE officers.

And she just tried to, you know, this is one of the car attacks that we see from jihadists, right? This is what you expect to see hearing it described. And then you turn on the video and one of these videos was shot by the officer himself, right? You might have asked why he was walking around her car filming her with his own cell phone. I mean, that was bizarre behavior. And then, you know, then drew with his other hand and shot her through the windshield, shot her twice more once she was clearly past him. But from all of that video, you see an apparently benign person who's, who's, yes, doing something probably illegal for which maybe she should have been arrested.

Yeah, I mean, that's fine. She's blocking traffic. She doesn't have a right to do that with her car. But the way she handled her car and the contradictory demands she was getting from the ICE agents, there was just no sign of her trying to kill anyone with her car. And, again, even if you were going to make the worst interpretation of her initial movements, where she's, let's see she's trying to run over that ice agent from two feet away. you know, albeit slowly, his subsequent shots are unjustified, right?

He shot her through the windshield of her car. He's to the side of her car, which is moving at like two miles an hour. She's already been shot in the face and he shoots her twice more. That part is an execution, right? So it's just, and how we have a government now who will double and triple down on obvious lies. I mean, there's just no burden to correct the record. There's no, there's nothing careful, you know, it's all partisan, uh, bile, you know, and it's so it's, everything is political, right? Like, like, we have, we're just now in the presence of non-adults where, like, it's just, it's a, it's a, you know, Stephen Miller-ish vibe that has spread everywhere, where you're, you just start, uh, demonizing your critics.

and making no contact with facts, and then wait for the news cycle to move on to the next outrage, which will predictably appear within 24 hours, given what's happening with this administration. Yeah, the recruitment strategy for these agents is telling. It feels as if it's very primal. You know, there's an invade, this is an exact quote from the recruiting materials.

There is an invasion. We're in a war, and we need you to fight. and then the language of protection, invasion, and insurgency, you know, it can feel, it can feel masculine and therefore emotionally powerful. Any thoughts on this sort of,

on this ideology and what it's doing to our society and if there is a mainstream politics anymore? Yeah, it's hard to know where the mainstream is. I mean, we have just fragmented. So totally,

with respect to how we consume information. I mean, but what's so disconcerting about this current event is that the information is so clear and you can be reasonably sure that everyone is seeing the same videos, right? And it's not, there was this initial moment where there was a video shot from another angle, which seemed to make it a little less clear what was happening. But I mean, this is not even a situation where we're, you know, so within our echo chambers that we're not making contact with the same data.

In this case, I think we clearly are, but the commentary on that data is so hyper-partisan, and then the echo chambers take over. And I don't know, so this is really not the blue-dress, yellow-dress moment where you can understand how people are seeing it so differently. I honestly can't understand how anyone can honestly believe the descriptions that have come from the government.

So, I mean, this is an unusually extreme version of the shattering of our culture based on rival interpretations of facts. And that's what I think has caused people to kind of spin out so fully on it. I just, yeah, I'm worried we have an administration who tends to frame everything in terms of there being an enemy within, that it's, it's only decent and sane to be kind of filled with hate and fear with respect to some significant subset of your own population. There's no, not even a pretense of appealing to all of America with any initiative. It's just, it's intrinsically divisive, everything.

It's just us against them and them is half of America and it's the institutions and it's the media. It's just, I mean, it's been going on obviously since, you know, for about a decade with Trump. and Trumpism, but it's getting more and more excruciating to live with its consequences. What do you make of the spread of all the kind of conspiracy thinking, both on the left and the right? What need do you think it's fulfilling? Well, I think there's more of it on the right. It is everywhere. This is a kind of a generic software flaw. We appear to be suffering. But right of center, the appetite for conspiracy thinking has just, I mean, it's just grown like a cancer.

And the strangest case of it, which was, which I mean, was, I think impossible to anticipate it was so extreme. Was in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, you had Candace Owens, you know, who's become this sort of kind of supernatural grifting force alleged that he had been assassinated. by, you know, some combination of the French Foreign Legion and the Mossad and turning point itself, right? Turning point, she was culpable for, if not, initiating the assassination. They were busy covering it up for some, you know, I don't think I've heard how they're incentivized to do this, but on her account, they're covering up the murder. So they have a hand in it.

And so she's been saying these things to great effect on the right, to millions and millions of people. She has a huge fan base, apparently on the right. Some of the other leading lights of independent media right of center, Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly especially, have not wanted to condemn this lunacy, right? This is she, they want to preserve the space for her to say that, of course, this, you know, to, it's well within her free speech rights to make these allegations. But the amazing thing is that when Tucker and Candace showed up at the Turning Point America Fest conference where the, you know, the 30,000 true believers are going to show up in person, you know, but to buy a ticket for the privilege of being in the room where history is made to, again, in the aftermath of the murder of their founder and now, you know, patron saint, it turned out that when some people on the stage, like Ben Shapiro condemned Candice and her enablers as as being more less the death knell of the of the Republican Party and conservatism in America,

half the audience, it seemed, really wanted to hear more about the conspiracy, right? So you can tell members of Turning Point that they have had a hand in murdering their founder, and half of them want to hear more about that, right? I mean, that's how masochistic and insane this style of thinking is. And, yeah, it's just, I mean,

it's a deeply unprincipled way of trying to make sense of anomalies in the world. I mean, any situation you can point to admits of, you know, highly unparsimonious, reckless, you know, cognitively bizarre interpretations, right? You can just look for anomalies. You can ask the question, well, why, you know, why was, you know, I think as Candace, does. I mean, she asked questions like, well, why did the Egyptian Air Force have a plane in, you know, this city on this day, right? Or so it's just say, just look, just look for something weird and then begin to pull on that thread. It doesn't matter that it's, it makes no connection

to all the other threads you're pulling on. It's just, let's, this is just some bright, shiny object that you can, you can spin up into some weird implication. It's a character trait that certain people have. I mean, I am fairly allergic to it, but it's not to say that no one ever conspires or that no conspiracy theories ever turn out to be true, but so often it's so obviously unlikely because the incentives aren't aligned. You can't get hundreds, much less thousands of people to be equivalently incentivized to act like psychopaths and conceal the evidence of everyone else's wrongdoing until the end of time, because the incentives are. just not aligned that way, and people have guilty consciences, and people get at cross-purposes

with their previous collaborators, and people want to be famous, or they have a change of heart, and someone winds up on 60 minutes, spilling the beans about the thing that they conspired to do. But no, with these, so many of these conspiracies, what people imagine is just utter competence, just perfect psychopathy, married to perfect competence, and, you know, information, concealing, and the perfect alignment of incentives and a perfect ability to fake a far more plausible stream of evidence that people get in hand, right? So it doesn't matter that we've arrested the guy who, who, you know, quite obviously killed Kirk and that he had, you know, had the relevant communications about that on his phone and that

his family turned him in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it's just, I don't know, it's a species of brain damage. that something like a half, you know, the third to a half of our society seems to be suffering. And it's a cultural problem at bottom, I'm sure, but we have to get over it. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

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Terms and conditions apply. I'd like to pivot to what I think is probably the most relative to its implications and importance for women and globally in the Middle East. What feels like proportionally undercovered, and that is Iran, I'd be very curious to get your thoughts in Iran and how the West and different groups and the media are responding to it. Well, it is undercovered, suspiciously so. I think that could be changing. as we speak today, but up until this moment, I mean, up until this very hour, it's really been a fairly telling silence from the mainstream media. I think it's, the reason why it's undercovered is probably twofold. One is the instability there seems to be a feather in Trump's cap with respect to foreign policy. I mean, you can only imagine that our support of Israel and our

joining in the bombing of Iran has been the proximate cause of this. And if that winds up being a good thing, that, you know, it seems inconvenient for many of Trump's detractors. I mean, it's not inconvenient for me. I mean, I obviously despise Trump and Trumpism and, you know, 95% of what he's been about as president, but I can readily admit that some things he's done have been good. And one of the things is to be fairly uncompromising with respect to defending open societies and Israel against this specific species of enemy, which is, you know, the global jihadism and the culture that supports it. And, you know, the variant in Iran that has been, you know, a genuine tyranny for, you know, nearly as long as you and I have been alive since 1979 is something

that we have always, we should have always supported the uprisings against. I think it's scandalous how Mealy-mouthed Obama and Biden were on that front. I mean, the Iranians have been showing a lot of courage, especially Iranian women, periodically, to try to fight for their political equality, going back many years. And under, you know, democratic governments, we have really been shamefully silent. And that probably leads to the second reason why is not, you know, obviously Trump isn't the explanation for why Obama and Biden couldn't have supported Iran more, or the Iranian people more. And there it's this lingering moral confusion left of center around

Islam and Islamism and jihadism and not wanting to draw too clear a line against the problem of of theocracy there, right? I mean, you know, Islamic theocracy is a deal breaker for the West and for open societies.

It's, this is crystal clear, right? And it's, and I mean, now we have the, the spectacle of the UAE, announcing, I don't know if you saw this, but the UAE recently announced that they will no longer support their own students studying abroad in the UK for fear that those students will be radicalized on British campuses by the Muslim Brotherhood, right? That's how bad this is, right? That's how blind we have been to the infiltration of our own institutions by this ideology. We have to get our head screwed on straight around this, and Trump, for all of his

flaws, and for all of the flaws of the people around him, I mean, they're truly awful people around him, you know, just psychopaths and grifters and know-nobstance, the general shape of their corruption and their self-stealing and their unprofessionalism still leans in the direction of sanity on this point, right? There's just not much. tolerance for jihadism and Islamism coming out of, you know, both within the West and coming from societies like Iran. And so I think Trump is a very uncertain ally for everyone, including Israel, given his aptitude for corruption and just, you know, pure self-interest and just his distractibility. But, you know, thus far, he's been better than many people,

could have hoped, and certainly than many, than really any Democrat would have been expected to be, at least at this moment. I mean, I behold, I hope that it'll be a different story in 2028. But I do think Trump has been better on this issue than we would have any right to, have expected Kamala Harris to have been. And, yeah, it caused me a fair amount of pain to admit that, but I just think it's true. Are you familiar with Alica Laban? No, no. She's a really impressive, she's an author or just a commentator, but I saw some content on hers, and it kind of reminded me of you,

and she has something she calls the moral color code. And it's not about the oppression of people or how severe or widespread the oppression or the horror is. It's about the color of the skin of the oppressor that mandates or deems the reaction from the West and progressive media. And chooses Iran as an example that the left goes into moral paralysis when the oppressor is brown. And that if you look at what's happening in Iran, Iraq, Sudan, on and on and on, versus that inspires a muted reaction versus an oppressor that's conflated with being rich and white, specifically Israel, that they're just entirely different reactions. And I thought of you, any thoughts? Yeah, and I mean, if one thing can be said for certain on this front is that the world doesn't much care. I mean, the West and the liberal West doesn't much care when Muslims kill other Muslims, really in any number. I mean, there are instances where you can point to hundreds of thousands of dead in Syria and Yemen and Sudan. But the world really cares when Westerners do it and the world especially cares when Jews do it. Right. I mean, that's the thing that, that's the thing that. just lit up our information landscape after the war in Gaza started, or in fact before it started,

merely the prospect of Israel retaliating against the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, right? But we had people supporting Hamas before Israel had made a move in response. It's just, you know, everything is upside down here. I mean, you know, something like two-thirds of countries have an origin story that is similar to Israel. in the sense that, you know, mapmakers just simply drew lines on paper without much regard for the lives of the people living within those frontiers. You know, their countries, you know, form the same year as Israel, like Pakistan, who have similar origin stories. But only Israel has to defend its right to exist, right? But only Israel has to continually litigate this.

And the United Nations has passed more resolutions against Israel than all other countries. combined, right? I mean, these countries include places like Yemen and Sudan and Syria, you know, countries that have perpetrated actual genocides, right? So none of this makes any sense. This is just, you know, the only interpretation that makes sense of it is anti-Semitism in some form, based on some rationale that is, you know, goes un-expressed. So, yeah, I mean, this issue has pretty much destroyed the moral intuitions of the left. And it's not only a problem for Israel or for Jews. I mean, this just gets mapped on to our domestic politics.

We're living in a country where, you know, when you hear that some act of violence occurred on a subway car, say, and, you know, someone was killed, you know, someone, there were many innocent bystanders and someone was killed, you can describe it as exhaustively as you like. I mean, you can tell people exactly what happened, how it escalated, whether there were weapons involved, how many, who was the attacker, and who was a, you know,

how he behaved moments before and after, etc. You can describe everything about it, you know, every morally and legally salient detail, but something like half of our society won't know quite how they feel about what you've just described until you tell them the skin colors of the people involved, right? You know, was the attacker white or black? It was the victim, white, or black?

That's just obscene, right? This is just a flaw in our moral and social psychology, and we have to figure out how to get over it, and unfortunately left of center, I mean, in democratic politics, you still have this misapprehension of that identity politics is somehow worth preserving, right? That we have to keep trumpeting the primacy of identity

and insinuate race and racial concerns and other identitarian concerns into every instance. And it's, if we can't get over that, left of center, you know, fairly immediately, I just, I think, you know, I think 2028 is, it's going to be a story of President Vance or his, you know, or whoever's adjacent to him in the Republican Party. And yeah, that's fairly scary. So you feel it, and I'll give you an example. I also want to acknowledge that I probably

had a lot of, well, I know I had a lot of advantage because of my identity through the 90s raising money and e-commerce and, you know, it just didn't hurt to be a, a white guy with a white heterosexual guy with a shaved head, raising money in Silicon Valley, relative to other groups. I have really sensed lately, and I'm pretty sure that you must sense this, with my book talking about an aspirational code for masculinity or the struggles of men face, I've come to the conclusion I'm the wrong messenger because a wide dude of my age talking about men in any means that is sympathetic towards them is just just evokes a gag. reflex from the left. It just, and I'd like to think, or I'm hoping it's not my arguments. I think it is

some of it's my identity, and I've come to the conclusion that it, I'm just maybe the wrong messenger. Do you feel like your identity gets in the way of your message? Oh, it certainly does. It doesn't get in the way of my stating it, but it gets in the way of the audience hearing it. There's no question. And that's, again, that's a real cultural flaw at this point. I mean, it is, in large, measure what has given us Trump and Trumpism. I blame the left as much as I blame the right for Trump and Trumpism. I mean, you know, I can speak endlessly on either topic, but there's something more galling about the left's culpability here because it's so unnecessary. It's such a spectacular own goal, right? I mean, it should be so easy for us to champion our values of political

equality and to fight for them and to resist bigotry of every form, you know, whether it's racism or misogyny or transphobia or whatever it is, right? We can resist all of these things while remaining sane and intellectually honest, right? And it's just, but the Democratic Party has been so captured by its activists, which is probably 8% of Democrats at best. The pandering to the to the loudest and most hysterical of the far left has to stop. And, you know, I hope it's, I hope we, we reached the high watermark somewhere around 2024, but, you know, we'll know as we get closer to the midterms, I expect. I want to pivot. The example of use of Britain, basically, it's interesting that the

UAE and several Gulf nations are much more freaked out, wary, concerned about, radical Islam than many, many Western governments. If you got a call from, I don't know, name your Senate Intelligence Committee or Congressional Congressional Caucus, whatever they said, Sam, we see this as a real threat. What do you think in terms of specific policy recommendations would you make to address the threat? Maybe it's a tiny number of committed jihadists, but if you're going to talk about the wider culture of support for jihadism, the wider culture of people who think that really it is incumbent upon, you know, any God-fearing Muslim to wage war against the infidel, at least in some way at some point, or to support those who do, and that, you know, infidels

and apostates and Jews are, you know, fit only for the fires of hell, and that we really want to, you know, follow Muhammad's example and have to have. of a very muscular attitude towards spreading the one true faith to the ends of the earth, that's a much larger footprint. We just, we need an honest conversation about this. What we need to provoke is a, a kind of renaissance slash reformation slash civil war, depending on the context, within the Muslim world against jihadism and against, against, you know, a seventh century attitude toward theocracy. And we're just nowhere near being able to do that, especially on the left. I mean, on the right, you have people who are willing to speak honestly about the threat,

but they are, you know, Christian nationalists, you know, and fascists, right? I mean, they are their own problem, you know, with respect to demagoguery and dogmatism and even aspiring theocracy, right? I mean, so that's obviously unhelpful. But it's, it's just, just true, as David From has now famously said, that, you know, if liberals won't enforce borders, fascists will. And we need a left that understands that open societies are vulnerable to what Karl Popper called the paradox of tolerance, which is that the tolerance of open societies can be used against them to subvert them from within. And Islamists, you know, and Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood are very clear-eyed about this. I mean, they have, they have, for

for now generations been working to subvert open societies from within by the very levers that we want to protect, you know, free speech and tolerance of diversity,

right? And they've managed to frame any criticism of dangerous ideas within Islam as bigotry. So even if you're fighting for the equal rights of women and girls in a country like Tehran, where, you know, women are being

imprisoned or even killed for just showing their hair, this notion of Islamophobia, it manages to frame those concerns, those genuine, you know, civil rights and humanitarian concerns as a form of bigotry, right? And it's not a form of bigotry.

I mean, criticizing Islam as a system of ideas is no more a form of bigotry than criticizing communism as a system of ideas. And it's not at all, you know, analogous to anti-Semitism, as we, you know, if we could easily, I could easily describe to you, but it's mistaken for bigotry against a people based on indelible characteristics like race and ethnicity. And it simply isn't, right? I mean, Islam is a system of ideas that now exists in at least 100 countries,

and it is, it has some attitudes toward things like the rights of women and free speech and, you know, the freedom to change your faith that are deeply anachronistic and, and, and, and dangerous. And we have to be honestly criticizing these ideas. Okay, so you get a call from the chair of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Tom Cotton, and the vice chair, Senator Mark Warner. And they say, Sam, we hear you. Whether it's $20 million or $60 million, what do we do? What specific policies do you think that you would recommend to the select committee that they consider implementing?

Well, we should empower genuine secularists and apostates, you know, ex-Muslims wherever we can. I mean, there's no one more articulated on this topic than ex-Muslims. I mean, people from these various cultures, right, about whom, the identity politics game cannot be played, right?

So half the people listening to us right now are beginning to whinge about, you know, two white guys talking about this, and this is just Islamophobia, right? So what you really need for this conversation to run through, if it can, in left of center circles, is to have, you know, an ex-Muslim from, you know, the Arab world or from, you know, Pakistan or some of you or some relevant place, who speaks the language, who knows what is being said, you know, behind closed doors, not in English, who knows exactly how deep anti-Semitism and misogyny and other noxious variables run within the teachings of Islam,

who can't be, you know, who can't be snowed on these topics. And you need to empower those people. You need to empower, and then you need to find the genuine liberals and genuine secularists within the Muslim world, and that is very, very hard. It's not that they don't exist, but it's difficult, right? I mean, all the definitions of terms change when you get into these cultures, right? And to talk about fundamentalism is not the same as talking about fundamentalism in a Christian context in America. And so it's, we need to provoke, again, a kind of renaissance and reformation.

And when push comes to shove a civil war in places where jihadism and Islamism are very, very threatening. And unfortunately, that's increasingly in places in the West. And we go to sleep on this issue. It just takes the next terrorist atrocity to wake us up for a time, you know, the next Charlie Hebdo massacre or, you know, Badaclan attack, you know, in a country like France, then all of a sudden we take this issue seriously. But, you know, that all of that has a certain half-life and we go to sleep again. Generally speaking, we need to recognize that we don't want more Islamists and jihadists in our societies, right? That has immigration implications. That has immigration implications that are on. comfortably, that have uncomfortable echoes of the kinds of bigoted and crazy things, someone like Stephen Miller will say, right? So, you know, so when Stephen Miller or Donald Trump will say, like, we don't want any more Muslims from shithole countries, right? Right. There's a kernel of truth in that, right? You have to cut through the bigotry and, you know, moral

insanity that those guys just radiate from their pores. But there is a kernel of truth. But there a kernel of truth. We don't want any more, you know, true believers who have no intention of assimilating in the West, in our open societies, right? And people do come here with no intention of assimilating. That's just a fact. It's not even a secret. It's, I mean, you can just read the documents that are, you know, have, you know, Muslim Brotherhood signatures on them attesting to this, right? And then we have our own internal organizations like the Council of American Islamic Relations that left of center get treated by journalists like they're the Muslim version of the ACLU or the NDACP, but they're actually stealth Islamist organizations that have direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. And you have the fact that a country like Qatar, the country of Qatar is the largest funder, the largest foreign funder of American universities. at this point. It's genuinely sinister, right? This is not, there's nothing benign about that.

And left of center, people are reliably confused on this, on this subject, and it's, the confusion is not going to age well. But crucially, Muslims who really want to live in open societies and want to support secular values that make that possible will be the first people to recognize the danger of certain of their co-religionists. right? And it's the fear that they won't that needs to be examined. Right. I mean, like, we have this fear on the left that if you speak too honestly about what's really in the holy books and talk about how dysfunctional all that is, you're going to alienate all the good Muslims, right? Well, if that's the problem, then we've already, then we have a much bigger problem than, then, you know, even I'm willing to admit, right? No, no, the good Muslims, the good, the sane ones, the ones who want to live the way we want to live, right, in tolerant, open societies are not going to be

alienated by an honest discussion of the doctrines around apostasy and blasphemy and homosexuality and jihad that really exist within the tradition and which really have to be kind of theologically recontextualized and disavowed and sidelined politically in our societies. And if that's not on the menu for most Muslims, then we have, you know, then it's going to be a very, very dark future, right? And that's not the future I expect. But that's the future that people seem to fear when they want to castigate someone like me as an Islamophob for the things I just said. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Grammarly.

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What turns unrest into a revolution and where could it lead? The big open question is whether this set of protests that are currently underway is the end or the beginning of the end of this third phase of sort of modern governance when it comes to Iran, the end of clerical rule. I'm Jake Sullivan. And I'm John Feiner. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we covered the massive nationwide protests in Iran and the U.S. response.

The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with more from Sam Harris. So you've been very generous with your time. And as we wrap up here, and there's no way to make this altitude change elegantly. but whenever we get together, one of the things I enjoy the most is talking about erectile dysfunction. That's just a given at our age.

But I'm just curious, any observations or thoughts you want to share about raising teenagers and your observations around having teenagers? I do think that they can be more sophisticated than we might expect in navigating this space. Because, I mean, it's evolving so fast, and they're digital natives in a way that we're not, I'm humbled by how much control we don't have. I mean, the research seems to suggest that, you know, any pretension that you're going to really impart your view of the world and your interest to your kids beyond just giving them your genes, you know, and their kind of native interests and aptitudes is fairly, um, forlorn. I mean, it's just not what the research shows. I mean, the research shows that for

basically anything of interest psychologically and as a matter of character, you know, it's like 50% genetic and 50% environmental, but the environment is not your parenting, right? It's, it's, um, uh, so, you know, it matters who their friends are. It matters, you know, what school they go to, to some degree. It matters to the, it matters the culture that, that gets in. But, we have very little control over that, I've noticed, right? Like, you pick a nice, like, in the most privileged case, you struggle to get your kid into a private school that you hope is going to be good,

but really you have no control over what that looks like, and you, you know, you have no control over the teachers they wind up getting, and there are many disappointments to be had on that front and surprises. And you can't pick their friends, and their friends turn out to be, you know, good or bad, depending. and it really is just a great spin of the lottery wheel, right? It's just the roulette wheel.

It's just not a control is not obvious, but good intentions can be, right? I mean, we really live with the character of our intentions here. I mean, that's what colors your mind with respect to your moment-to-moment engagement with other people. And if you love your kids and you want them to thrive and you delight, light in their, their, you know, creativity and, you know, you're going to have an experience of parenting, which is beautiful, despite the fact that you really don't have a lot of control over the world or their lives in the world. If you can think of them, give me one or two things that your wife and your daughters think

of you that is in stark contrast to what people think about you publicly. Oh, well, I mean, I can be the silly dad in a way that would be. I would be unrecognizable to my audience. If, you know, yeah, the home videos of me with the cats or with my daughters, I think, would show a face of me that would fairly astonish my audience. Those videos are never getting out, but, but yeah, they exist. But, I mean, there is something, I do, as you can tell from the hour we've already spent, I can get into a zone where, you know, because of the topic and, because of, you know, my thoughts on it, I'm, you know, I'm in an orbit where it doesn't allow for many of the other sides of my personality to come through, or at least, you know, for whatever

reason, you know, I don't allow it or it just doesn't happen. And I remember being quite amazed that the first time my wife, Anika, came on my podcast, I forget what episode it was. I mean, it was not an early episode. It might have been like episode 100 or something, or maybe 80, was the first time that my audience had ever heard me laugh. And, you know, it was like a, it was like some kind of religious revelation. I mean, like the response to it was just insane. So anyway, I mean, that's, yeah, I'm a, I'm a peculiar podcaster, I guess, but I think a reasonably fun dad, and my, my girls could probably attest to that. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense

podcast and also the silly dad, Sam, I always enjoy these conversations and appreciate your time. I know how in demand you are. Really, again, thanks so much for your continued good work. Yeah, always always had your talks about. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our associate producer is Laura Janair. Kamie Rik is our social producer, Joubros, is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Profji Pod from Profi Media. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard. enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated

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