TRIGGERnometry - Sam Harris Returns to TRIGGERnometry

Starting point is 00:00:01 I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for having brought the hostages back. There was no Democrat who was going to do it. If you were concerned about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop, it still doesn't compare to what Trump is doing right now out in the open. You know, the real Trump derangement syndrome, in my view, is to think that the president's character doesn't matter. We are doing massive brand damage to our country. Very prominent people from the president and Elon.

Starting point is 00:00:31 down, treated it like the first shot fired in the Civil War. This was a highly asymmetric moment of political hysteria. It was their George Floyd moment. Again, yes, without the riots. Well, that's quite a big deal, Sam. Before we had a vaccine, Republicans and Democrats died at the same rate. Once we had a vaccine, Republicans died more than Democrats. Rogan is implicated in all of this.

Starting point is 00:00:55 Show was a super spreader of those ideas. Quick reminder. VPN for sponsoring this video, a top-tier VPN for two bucks a month. Click the link in the description to get their special offer. Sam Harris, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thank you. It's good to see you guys. It's good to spend a couple years, right? It's been a couple of years. Last time we saw it was with Eric, so that was a kind of different conversation. And of course, there was the time before that. Now, I wouldn't bring it up,

Starting point is 00:01:23 actually, but I saw you had a bit on your YouTube channel in which you addressed the whole Hunter Biden laptop thing that happened on our show recently. So I have to bring it up because of that. Okay. Coming back to this thing, you make these comments, you know, they kind of blew up. I never noticed anything. Sorry if that caused a headache, but you've caused me a headache in case you forgot. How do you reflect on what happened? Well, it's just in many respects, it's like a massive misunderstanding.

Starting point is 00:01:58 You know, people are living and dying by clips. days and no one can you know no one apparently can take the time to view the clip in context so i would think that a significant percentage of your audience and certainly a significant percentage of people right of center uh simply don't understand what i was saying on your podcast um and it's in in their defense i the truth is i was speaking somewhat less carefully and clearly than i that i'm capable of so um but i think in context i it was clear what I was saying, my position really hasn't changed on the matter. I mean, I think, I mean, if you care about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop because it suggested

Starting point is 00:02:43 some level of possible corruption for Joe Biden, you know, as president or as vice president at the time. So, I mean, if you are concerned about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop because it's suggested there's some level of corruption coming from Biden himself, well, then you're then you should be concerned about the level of corruption that we know to be true of Trump and his family, right? And we've known this for years. I mean, we've known it for, honestly, it precedes his entry into politics. So what I was saying in that context is that I would be willing to bet that there's virtually nothing on that laptop that rises to the level of what I already know to be true of Trump and his family. I think I've said, I compared to, you know, comparing

Starting point is 00:03:28 a firefly to the sun or something. It's like I know how the, the comparison is going to come out without even seeing what's on this laptop. And it was also a scandal involving Hunter Biden, and it wasn't even clear that it reached to Joe Biden. And I'm still not sure that there's anything on that laptop that I care about. I certainly haven't heard anything that was, you know, dispositive with respect to Biden's corruption, apart from this, you know, somewhat ambiguous phrase,

Starting point is 00:03:53 10% for the big guy. But read into that as a, you know, sinister practice as you want, it still doesn't compare to what Trump is doing right now out in the open. I mean, his adventures in cryptocurrency, he and his families. I mean, it's, it is, if that were the only thing we knew about him as president, it should be the scandal that no one stops talking about. I mean, it's just, it's the most corrupt thing imaginable. Sam, can I just pause you there?

Starting point is 00:04:27 Because there are people who are going to be listening to this, who may be heard of it loosely, or maybe haven't this followed this story at all. So could you just expand upon that and explain to the listener what or the viewer why it's so egregious? Okay, so right before he was sworn in, I think the day before he was sworn in, they launched their meme coin, which is just a pure mechanism by which people can give Trump and his family money directly in a way that is unaccountable. and it just invites, it's a pure mechanism for corruption and bribery, right? So anyone on any grifter or foreign agent or anyone can decide, okay, I'm just going to funnel money to the Trump's and tell them about it and buy my way into their favor.

Starting point is 00:05:16 And Trump is so transactional and he's done this so many times. Again, so much of it's out in the open. I mean, none of this is a conspiracy theory. This is just all proudly celebrated. I mean, he had dinner with the people who had given him the most money through this mechanism. And it's not the only mechanism. It's World Liberty Financial and their deal with finance. And, you know, we decide whether or not to give the UAE access to our most advanced AI chips.

Starting point is 00:05:45 And we decide to do that despite the fact that they do joint military exercises with the Chinese, who we don't want to get our most advanced AI chips. And immediately $2 billion go from the UAE into the Trump-Witts family business to shore up finance with a world liberty crypto coin. And there's just endless examples of this. This is corruption. This is, it makes sense in a transactional way, just purely in monetary terms, obviously.

Starting point is 00:06:24 But then there are other things like, you know, Trump imposes a 50% tariff on India because Narendra Modi declined to nominate him for the Peace Prize. So he's using the levers of U.S. power to, as a kind of extortion racket with dozens of countries at this point. I mean, you know, he slaps a 46% tariff on Vietnam. What does Vietnam do to get that remediated? they green light a $1.5 billion resort deal for the Trump family. Right. So this is pure corruption. And it's what's amazing is he's using the power of the

Starting point is 00:07:05 presidency to monetize the office in this way. He's using U.S. trade policy and foreign policy to extract concessions that were down to the advantage of him and his family and their friends. There's nothing in Biden's universe that rises to that level. Whatever is in Biden's universe. I mean, there's no fan of Joe Biden's presidency. I could talk, we could fill this whole podcast with what was wrong with that. But if you pretend to care about corruption in government, you should, there is only one elephant in the room, and that is Trump. The thing is, Sam, with the Hunter Biden thing, I think that it, for many people, it wasn't actually about corruption at all. What it was about was the cover up. What it was about was, was, what it was about was,

Starting point is 00:07:53 the fact that the news story about his laptop couldn't be shared. Well, we disagree about the, both the, the, the, we don't really disagree about the optics of the cover-up, but we disagree about the mechanics of it. I mean, I think a lot of this was good faith fumbling around a story that couldn't be characterized quickly enough, and given what had happened previously, given that we know that Jim Comey's reopening of the email, the Hillary Clinton email non-story, was to see. in her losing that election. I mean, you could just see her poll numbers

Starting point is 00:08:26 go down by the hour at the moment he started talking about it. And that was like 10 days before the election. And we know this time around, Rudy Giuliani held on to this bombshell as an October surprise and released it strategically close to the election. I think there were two weeks left in the election, knowing that there was simply enough time

Starting point is 00:08:48 for the Democrats and the mainstream media to have a spas attack and not get to ground truth on this laptop. That, again, from my point of view, this is what I said in that original podcast, I don't think it made it to that nefarious clip, but for me at the time, and it still is a genuine coin toss journalistic judgment

Starting point is 00:09:12 about what to do with this story two weeks before the election. Journalistic judgment, yes, but this wasn't journalistic judgment. This was big tech judgment. Well, no, so there was- There was Twitter knocking the New York post off for whatever, 48 hours or 24 hours. And preventing the story from being shared. Right. That, I think, almost certainly is a mistake, however you look at it. And I believe I said that at the time. I mean, I thought there were gradations of this.

Starting point is 00:09:38 There's what Twitter did. This is where the New York Times did or didn't do, et cetera. But I think it was, I mean, for instance, all those former intelligence officials who signed that open letter saying this looks like Russian disinformation. I don't think those guys were lying. I think those guys were genuinely thought, this is completely crazy. We got Rudy Giuliani with a laptop he got from some computer store, and it's got everything, it's got the smoking ruins of Hunter Biden's reputation. This certainly looks sketchy.

Starting point is 00:10:11 I don't think those guys volunteered to have their reputations destroyed in plain view of everyone, just to eke out an advantage for Hillary. Clinton. Why not? Well, just who does that? Who says, I'll listen, I'm going to, I'm going to take my reputation for discernment as an intelligent, the former head of the CIA or the NSA or both. I'm going to, again, I don't remember the signatories to that letter specifically, but, I mean, who's going to, it's just not in their, it's not in their interest. It's not likely to be decisive. It's not, it's just, and it's so obviously looked kooky, right? It looked, it looked completely. I mean, this does not look like a normal way you would discover the smoking laptop from hell.

Starting point is 00:10:59 And, again, it was, there was simply not, to have simply played Connect the Dots journalistically and even from Twitter's point of view, just slavishly just propagating this information or misinformation to the ends of the earth at that moment with the clock ticking, given what had happened in the previous election, journalistically, it could have seemed totally irresponsible. I mean, in hindsight, Jim Comey's re-airing of that fake email scandal was totally irresponsible. It's why we had President Trump in the first place.

Starting point is 00:11:33 He couldn't have known that at the time, perhaps, but in retrospect, it would have been better had he not done that. So I have to think, again, I'm not close. I mean, the other thing was weird about that interview is people took what I was saying as somehow insider knowledge that there was this vast conspiracy to keep, you know, of journalists and academics and scientists and media figures to keep, that we all met in a star chamber somewhere to keep Trump from getting reelected.

Starting point is 00:12:04 I mean, if that happened, I wasn't privy to it, right? So that's not what I was saying. What I was saying in a, I mean, there were a few places there were, because I went back and watched it because I needed to, once this thing was detonating in my life, and I could see how radioactive it was being perceived to be. I had to see what I'd actually said in context. And there was at least one moment where I got interrupted

Starting point is 00:12:25 and didn't complete a sentence. And so, like, my half sentence and the thrust of what I was saying before that made it seem like I was making a more extreme statement than I was, in fact, making. But my views are unchanged from that hour. So, I mean, I'm happy to talk about anything. the um if you were interrupted it was almost certainly have been me yeah i i apologize but let me just recap it before just very quickly summarize what you're saying so what you're saying is

Starting point is 00:12:53 basically a number of things number one uh journalistically in terms of publishing the story you call it a coin toss it looked kind of kooky therefore is this a reasonable thing to publish with two weeks to go before an election before you can properly check it etc number one number two you didn't agree with media companies preventing the story from being published or shared. Right. Right. And you feel that if we're talking about the corruption element of it, what you were trying to say with an outrageous example is no matter how corrupt Hunter Biden turns out to have been, that will not be as bad as the Trump corruption. Is that fair summary? Yeah, well, especially because we're talking about Hunter Biden. I don't care about Hunter Biden. Well, Hunter Biden did get a lot of money from a Ukrainian company

Starting point is 00:13:39 in which he was employed as some sort of expert while knowing Jack. Hold that. up against what any of the Trumps have done in the last hour. So, I mean, it's just, there's just no, and they were, it was clear they were already these people, right? From the first time around and from, you know, years previous, there's just no, I mean, what the magic of Trump is that because he, I mean, the one thing you can say about him that is, is, sounds like praise, but in fact isn't, is that he's not a hypocrite, right? hypocrite because he's not pretending to be a good person, right? He's not pretending to follow any of the norms by which hypocrisy would normally be measured, right? So, and what's, the reason why this is a kind of superpower is that there's nothing more galling, at least at this, you know, at this moment in our politics, than hypocrisy, especially left-wing hypocrisy.

Starting point is 00:14:36 So the moment you can find that, you know, a Democrat didn't floss his teeth, when he said he did, right? All of a sudden, that's a 20 megaton scandal. Trump can just, you know, basically like he's like the Dan Dillzerian of politics, right? Like there's no pretense of being ethical or monogamous or like, so I'm going to just show you how I live like a maniac and you're not going to be able to measure any specific indiscretion because, you know, I don't view, you know, any of them as indiscretions and they're not going to be it all then functions by a different reputational physics.

Starting point is 00:15:15 So you find him to have done something that's 10 times worse than the thing you say you care about on the other side of the aisle. And for some reason, it doesn't register, right? So he's created a political culture, right of center, where the very concept of corruption doesn't even exist anymore. The very concept of a conflict of interest or self-dealing. And it's just that it's completely evaporated. So let's set.

Starting point is 00:15:44 So this is one of the things I really, I'm keen to discuss with you. Let's move on from, you know, the first podcast and what happened. And just talk about President Trump as a president, right? Because I hear this a lot, you know, we posted that you were coming on the show, people message you, you know. And they say, well, look, I love Sam, right? And I think his reaction to Trump as a person, clouds his view of Trump as a politician, right? Well, I can demonstrate that that's not so, but what's upstream of that is a pretty

Starting point is 00:16:22 important piece of confusion, because the, you know, the real Trump derangement syndrome, in my view, is to think that the president's character doesn't matter, right? He's the most distractible, venal, corrupt, self-dealing, narcissistic, self-absorbed, petty person to ever occupy the office. And that doesn't matter. Now, the reason why his character matters is because he's got three more years in office. We have no idea what kinds of challenges we're going to face as a country. But we know that all of his decisions are downstream of who he is, of the kind of thinker he is, of how he engages with information, of what he knows and doesn't know, what he cares to know and doesn't care to know. Right. So what does he know about Putin? What does he

Starting point is 00:17:09 know about the Middle East? What does he know about China? What is he, what is going to modify his judgment about what he should do? I mean, you know, if how, would we have bombed Iran if the Mullahs had been smart enough to offer him a golf course deal in Iran? I actually don't know. I think it's, you know, even bet that our policy with respect to Iran could have been different had there been massive financial opportunity for the Trump's in Iran, right? He might have, he might have had a a Gulf Arab, you know, autocrat vibe, you know, an MBS vibe with the Mols in Iran. He could have seen the wisdom of that. Certainly if it's a big enough deal, I wouldn't have put that.

Starting point is 00:17:47 Hold on, Sam. But isn't that a little bit unfair in that you were judging somebody not on the things they actually did? No, I will. I'm just telling you why you need to care about who he is as a person. Okay. I understand. And look, I think a person's character really matters. I do.

Starting point is 00:18:02 But I also think when you're evaluating a president, you have to look at deliverables. What are the deliverables? There's probably a lot to criticize, and I'm sure you've got them, lots of them. But getting the hostages back from Gaza. Yeah. So let me just deal with that because that's on everybody's mind and square this statement. Let me give you a list and then you address them all. Is that okay?

Starting point is 00:18:26 Well, I mean, this one's worth just hitting off the tea because I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for having brought the hostages back. I mean, I think that's, I have no problem saying that, right? So square that with accusations of Trump derangement syndrome. I mean, I can readily admit that that was a massive achievement. Whatever happens next. I mean, there's not going to be peace in the Middle East as a result of this ceasefire. So I'm not, I'm very skeptical and pessimistic about the outcome. But just that piece, getting all the living hostages back, was massive.

Starting point is 00:19:03 There was no Democrat who was going to do it. President Kamala Harris wasn't going to do it. Biden wouldn't have done it. Many of his weaknesses as a president, as a person, translated in that specific area into strengths, right? His unpredictability, his unprincipledness, his, his, the fact that he could just throw over the chessboard and walk away for another year, right? I mean, I think he got more out of Netanyahu and more out of all the parties to that negotiation than a more principled, more methodical, more process-oriented expert on geopolitics would have very likely. So that's one area where sort of the madman theory of politics, I think, worked for him. Okay. And that's to the good that does not compensate for all the other

Starting point is 00:19:54 damage he's done to our country. Okay, fair. And I want to hear both of these, right? But I want to put some more to you that I would say positive things, right? We get asked a lot which VPN we actually trust. The answer is always CyberGhost VPN. It's one of the most respected VPNs in the world with 38 million users and over 20,000 five-star reviews on Trust Pilot, which honestly is pretty rare. Check it out now at CyberGhostVPN.com slash trigonometry. Cybercoast encrypts your internet traffic so your provider, your job, school or anyone on public Wi-Fi can't see what you're doing.

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Starting point is 00:21:17 That's protection of your browsing data plus access to all blocked content on the internet for only $2 a month, totally risk-free. Click the link in the description to grab the offer or go to CyberGhostVPN.com slash trigonometry. I can give you criticism as well. I mean, look, I was hopeful that he would do on Ukraine something more positive than he has done. I think Steve Whitkoff hasn't done very well, put it gently and diplomatically. We haven't had any progress so far. I hope that changes, as you know. But maybe, you know, if the Middle East is tick, that's, No tick. What about dealing with illegal immigration, right? The way it's being done, we can have a discussion about, but he's literally the first president, first leader of Western

Starting point is 00:22:05 country to deal with illegal immigration. We can have a huge discussion about that. I mean, so the fact that the Democrats treated any concern about the border as a symptom of racism and thought that it just wasn't a problem to have untold numbers of people just streaming across the border for years at a time. That was just a colossal. That was just a colossal. own goal that is just in my view politically inexplicable. I mean, it's just politically suicidal, right? It's just, that's, among other reasons, that is the reason why Trump got elected.

Starting point is 00:22:35 But I mean, that's just, it's, I still don't understand it. It's stupid, it's unethical, it serves no real sane purpose, right? I mean, even if you want the same numbers of people in the country, because you really think we just have to have an immigration forward policy, there's no argument for not knowing who's coming into the country. You should want the people in the country who you want in the country, right?

Starting point is 00:23:01 And you should be able to screen out terrorists and et cetera. So, yeah, it is true that the Biden administration tried to pass a bill that would have done something. And then Trump cynically got the Republicans to block it, right? So there was a Trump delayed progress on that point so that he could use it as an issue in the campaign. And that was, you know, a cynical bit of politics. But still, the Democrats were totally out to lunch on that issue for years at a stretch. Unforgivable, politically unforgivable. And so it is with all the other woke derangement in the Democratic Party.

Starting point is 00:23:42 I mean, the irony here is that there's virtually no, nothing that any super red-pilled MAGA had who sees no, for whom there's no daylight between them and Trump, there's nothing they can say about the far left of the Democratic Party that I don't agree with and haven't said myself on my podcast, right? So it's not like my animus toward Trump is based on some sort of progressive blindness about, you know, the ethical primacy of DEI

Starting point is 00:24:16 or anything else that he's steamrolling over. But I'll remind you that we didn't, used to live in a country where masked men who won't identify themselves steal peaceful people off the sidewalk and disappear them and occasionally disappear them to foreign countries, right? I mean, that's not America and that's happening, right? That's totally unacceptable. I mean, it's Orwellian and insane, and it's insane that anyone has acclimated to it. And in saying that we've got this, we've got an attorney general, and she's attorney general who won't answer questions,

Starting point is 00:24:55 but one brought before Congress. And she just, you know, just is messaging to an audience of one and to her social media feed. She's just insulting senators. I mean, it's just, it's, the optics of all of this are so hunger games and bizarre, right? I mean, we've got a White House that messages on social media, like the accounts being run by 18-year-old trolls that just spend half their time

Starting point is 00:25:28 on 4chan and then half their time on the official White House X-Feed. We've got a president who forwards AI videos of him shitting on his fellow Americans, right? And half of our country imagines some kind of progress in political communication, right? I mean, this is a, I mean, the official, I don't know if you've seen this, but the official White House page that talks about the rebuilding of the east wing of, you know, the ballroom. It's got, it has become a troll account where it does, it kind of gives the history of, you know, construction at the White House. But then intersperses that with like Hunter Biden bringing cocaine into the White House with the shot of him in the bathtub with a cigarette and, you know, Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from Monica Lewin. It's just, this is the official White House communication to the world, right? This is not, we're, I mean, I get that it's entertaining, right?

Starting point is 00:26:29 But if there's no difference between the Babylon B and the official White House website, we've got a problem. And we're doing massive brand damage to our country. That's what I care about. I care about what's durable here, you know, in terms of when Trump goes away and let's say there's a sane Democrat or Republican next time around in 2028, but at the moment I don't see much hope of that. What bells can't be unwrung in any kind of near-term time frame?

Starting point is 00:27:05 You know, what damage has been done that we can't immediately apologize for sufficiently such that we have a proper reset. And I think a lot of damage has already been done that's hard to recover from. We've announced to the world at a minimum. We've announced to the world. Look at what Trump has done with the tariff policy, just tariffing every member of our species. And again, based on whims and imaginary political imperatives

Starting point is 00:27:35 that only exist in his brain and then in the brains of the people who pretend to understand what he's doing because he's created a personality cult around him where no one is going to, you know, everyone is Baghdad, Bob, and no one is going to tell the boy king that he's lost his marbles. But he's basically ignoring all of our treaties and our ally and our alliances in a way that has announced to the entire world that basically our country is in any four-year period.

Starting point is 00:28:11 It cannot be counted on to honor anything that has been agreed to before that that clock starts, right? So with a new president, we can just completely reinvent ourselves and tear up everything. You know, every trade agreement, every expectation of an alliance, are we going to, you know, if Poland gets invaded by Russia, do we even care about NATO anymore? Probably not, right? I mean, see, this is the issue, though, Sam. You're making, like, really good points that make perfect sense.

Starting point is 00:28:42 But I'm going, but the flip side of all of those structures that he's disrupting was Well, he's actually got Europeans to pay for their membership of NATO. That's a good outcome. Right? He's actually... The old... The old... The old...

Starting point is 00:28:54 There was another way to do that, but a part of destroying her reputation. But isn't this exactly the problem? No one was. No one was. No one. There, surely there was a way to make the case that our European allies weren't paying their fair share short of destroying our reputation for being the world's loan superpower. Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:16 But was Kamala Harris? going to do it? Was Kamala Harris? Probably not. Probably not. Was Kamala Harris going to close the border? I think we both agree she wouldn't. Was Kamala... That I don't, because I think they were trying to do that because I saw that it was a disaster. No, no, I think they, I mean, everyone could see this was a disaster. I mean, you get fucking Elon Musk at the border with his own iPhone showing a zombie movie of people streaming across the border. It was, it was a four-alarm fire. Was it four. It was a four. alarm fire. I don't know what's it was the most number of alarms. Five alarm fire. Um, everyone could see that they were going to, I think they were going to get a handle on that. But still, it's unforgivable

Starting point is 00:29:57 that they waited as long as they did. I mean, but this is why I disagree with you. They waited as long as they did because they are ideologically pro open borders. Not the mainstream Democratic Party. Like the rest of the Western world. All the left of center parties, they talk a good game, but they don't actually take action to close the border, not least because, because it looks ugly and it's very unpleasant, right? Well, I don't see why it need to look ugly and be... How do you deport millions of people without a look like that? Well, no, so deporting millions of people is separate from closing the border.

Starting point is 00:30:28 So I don't think we should be deporting millions of people. I think we should close the border and then deport all the criminals, right? But then you don't need this chaotic process. You don't need to say, if you happen to be in a Home Depot and look Latino, know, we might just bring you to the ground for guys who, again, will not identify themselves, are going to, you know, break your arms and bring you to the ground. And when we find out that you're a father of three and all three of your sons have served in the Marines, we still don't fucking care, right? I mean, that's awful. I mean, it's just absolutely awful. It's a, it's disgraceful.

Starting point is 00:31:07 It's totally unethical. And this is not the country. I'm amazed. I would be amazed if it were in fact true that 50% of Americans want to live in a country that treats people that way, whatever their immigration status. I mean, it's just not right. And yet, there's no question we could close the border without doing that, right? I mean, this is the thing is, if you close the border and really you have control over who's coming into the country, that's the first piece. If you accomplish that, you then don't have to make the experience being inside the border

Starting point is 00:31:49 terrifying so as to send a message to the rest of the world not to come, right? You don't have to lock people, separate people from their kids or lock people in cages or disappear people to foreign gulags or any of that stuff because you've closed the border. Right. So this is why Tom Holman's argument that, you know, you have to send a message by beating the shit out of people. otherwise people are going to keep coming. It doesn't matter if you've closed the border, right?

Starting point is 00:32:14 So close the fucking border, right? Anyone could have done that without mistreating people inside our country. Then it's a separate question. What do you want to do inside this country? In a city like Los Angeles, I mean, we've got vast

Starting point is 00:32:30 amount of productive work being accomplished right now by people who we know are here illegally. Most of the people who are in this town illegally are doing work we deem necessary and most Americans don't want to do it, right? Now

Starting point is 00:32:46 what should we do with that? I think we should again, this is not, I'm sure there are corner conditions that we might want to debate, but generally speaking, if someone's been here for years and, I mean, again, the details here matter.

Starting point is 00:33:04 A lot of these people have kids who are citizens, right? So we're talking about people who have been here for years have an illegal immigration immigration status, but they've got young kids who are American citizens, and still, these people are at risk. Or being deported. In 90% of those cases, what I'm just guessing, maybe it's 99.9% of those cases, you've got people who are here doing productive work that we want done. We have whole industries predicated on that work being done, agriculture, the service industry, restaurants, etc.,

Starting point is 00:33:44 Americans are not lining up. We've got 4% unemployment. The 4% who are unemployed are not lining up to do those jobs, to be landscapers and dishwashers, et cetera. There should be some rational process of keeping these people here and getting their immigration status sorted out, right? So call that amnesty, whatever you want to call it. But by all means, if somebody's here,

Starting point is 00:34:12 He's got four DUIs and was in prison for raping somebody, et cetera. Get that person out immediately on the first plane. I mean, there's zero controversy around whether or not to deport criminals who are here illegally. None of this has to be inflammatory and divisive. The thing is, Stephen Miller and Donald Trump clearly want this to be inflammatory and divisive. There's a political advantage, or at least they perceive a political advantage in making it so, right? And what I do think they want is and have wanted are, you know, protests against this to get out of hand where they can point to a city like Los Angeles and say, look, okay, look at these, you know, blue-haired maniacs who have been raised, you know, to believe that there should be open borders. and they're throwing chunks of concrete at the cops,

Starting point is 00:35:13 we have to use a heavy hand to respond. And I mean, so those demonstrations got out of hand slightly. There certainly wasn't as bad as it could have been. But yeah, I mean, I think fears that Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act are rational, right? Because he's just the sort of guy to do it, right? It's not, and that will be, I mean, there's several bright lines, but that will certainly be one bright line

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Starting point is 00:37:21 But there's one other bit of this I want to explore with you before Francis takes over, which is the one thing, look, I'm not American, Francis is not American, we love this country, we have so many great American friends. The one thing that does really give me pause is this conversation that I don't understand about a third term. Steve Bannon was pushing this idea a long time ago. And as we sat down to record this,

Starting point is 00:37:48 President Trump was asked about this. He sort of gave a bit of a non-answer. He did say he wouldn't run as life president, the sort of Russian Putin-Medvedev switcher route that they did way back when. But that, like, that's, that to me is the one bit of. The one out of a, thousand things that caught your attention. I mean, like, the fact that he's even, after January 6th, the fact that we're even having

Starting point is 00:38:14 this conversation is insanity. I'm trying to make my point in a way that is easier to access for people who may not agree with you. Right. I'm trying to take some of the age of some of hours. You know your audience. All right. I know.

Starting point is 00:38:26 I'll take all the help I can get. Well, what I'm saying is all of these other things, for example, take the corruption stuff, right? A lot of people are just going to go, I don't give a share. I care about, he sorted the hostages, he's dealing with immigration. Sam Harris doesn't like the way he's dealing with it, but at least he's dealing with it in some way. He's got NATO to pay that way. I could give you other examples, right? Repatriating manufacturing back to the rest, whatever.

Starting point is 00:38:52 But the one bit that I think a reasonable person, including after January 6th, would have to look at and be worried about, is... Why? If he's the right guy for the job, why wouldn't we want him for a third term? Because you have a constitution. Yeah, but... And an unwillingness to follow the Constitution is an indicator of some serious problems, wouldn't you say? Well, I would say, but he views the Constitution like most rich people view the tax code. Were you just looking for loopholes? If there's a loophole, then why not use it, right?

Starting point is 00:39:24 And some constitutional scholars think there are several significant loopholes in the Constitution that could allow for tyranny. I mean, that are... The framers did. didn't anticipate, in some cases they did anticipate, and they basically just said that there's no perfect way to deal with a sufficiently unethical president, right? But one could argue that they didn't anticipate anything like Trump and the full capture of the Republican Party into something like a personality cult. I mean, what they clearly didn't anticipate is that

Starting point is 00:39:59 the separation of powers had broken down because Congress doesn't care to be its own power anymore because the Republicans are just wanting to ratify whatever lies and indiscretions the executive branch throws up so you know Congress has been neutered right Congress owns tariff policy right Congress should be setting the tariffs probably these tariffs might you know I'm again I'm not a lawyer but it remains to be seen I mean there's no hundreds of cases in front of the courts much of what Trump has done already might might be ruled illegal. But Congress is sitting on its hands for patently political reasons. I mean,

Starting point is 00:40:43 every Republican who has any hope of maintaining a political career at this point knows that they can't cross the MAGA base. Some actually fear for their lives in crossing the MAGA base. And we know this, again, when we look at the people who said they would have impeached Trump after January 6 and didn't because they were afraid for that lives. And that's already a lurched toward tyranny in this country. I mean, that is an unraveling of democratic norms that we can't afford to let unravel. And the Constitution is no complete bulwark against any of that. We know this.

Starting point is 00:41:19 I mean, the greatest lesson we've learned from now two experiments with Trumpism is that in the place of laws, we have had, we have, we have, in many, many places where you thought we were shored up against chaos and the unraveling of democracy by law, we really weren't. It was just no one, everyone before Trump had the decency not to do that thing because it would look so terrible, right? I mean, no one thought that you could, I mean, we got an emoluments clause, but it turns out that whatever Trump does, I mean, Trump can't be prosecuted for any crime while president, and he can just, launch a Bitcoin into the ether and literally earned billions of dollars over months. And I mean, I can still dimly remember a time when it was being debated whether or not members of Congress could go to functions, whether they had to declare the price,

Starting point is 00:42:32 of the food they were being served if it was a seeded meal. I mean, it was like, past hors d'oeuvres that could pass, but a seated meal was an emolument that invited, you know, real scrutiny around corruption and the, and undue influence on our legislators, you know, by pharmaceutical companies or whoever. You can now transact business directly with the Trump family, who, from any place on earth.

Starting point is 00:43:00 It's... Sam, come back to my question. Yeah. My question is, are you concerned that President Trump will not relinquish power? Ironically, I'm less concerned about that than anything I've talked about. But the truth is, I'm not... If you've listened to everything I've said, I believe none of it is hypothetical, right? I'm talking...

Starting point is 00:43:25 I'm complaining about stuff that's already happened. I'm complaining about the brand damage that's already been done to my country. Sure. But I'm asking you a different question. I think the chance that he's going to run for a third term effectively, that we will actually be faced with this eventuality is very, very low. And I'm not, again, there are people who are better informed about the mechanics of all this, and, you know, unfortunately, one of those people is Steve Bannon.

Starting point is 00:43:52 So, yeah, I'm not saying I know something that Steve Bannon doesn't know about how all this works, because I certainly don't. But I just have to think that our system, that we, We've maintained enough guardrails in, you know, our, just the basics of federalism and the fact that this all has to be run at the state level, you know, the elections at the state level. I have to think that we are going to be sufficiently allergic to that, that it's not going to happen. Moving forward, the Charlie Kirk assassination was obviously something that left an imprint in all of our minds. It was profoundly shocking. You made some very interesting comments criticizing the rights and the rights response to the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Starting point is 00:44:38 So why don't we just go through it? You say what you thought and then let's get into it. Sure. Well, I was just starting in my tour. Actually, I think I was doing my first event the day he was assassinated. So I just had them, like many people, there are many people in our orbit who were doing live events. And I think Ben Shapiro was in a similar situation where. it's like, you know, it's like the world stopped

Starting point is 00:45:03 and, you know, like, you know, Live Nation got on the phone with everyone who they were working with and said, you know, listen, if you don't want to go out on stage, you know, just let us know. But, so it's, it's just, and I said a few things about it, you know, at those live events that I was doing that week. I mean, it was a terrible thing. It was terrible on every level. It's terrible just as a murder of a young father. is terrible that his family was there. I mean, it's just awful.

Starting point is 00:45:35 It's additionally terrible because a political assassination is genuinely dangerous because we are so combustible as a society. And the fact that we're this combustible, a lot of the onus goes to, I mean, goes to both sides, but I would put most of the onus, as well not surprise you,

Starting point is 00:45:58 on the president and his cult. And I would say that the response to the assassination was highly asymmetrical in ways that don't make Trump and Trumpism look good. I mean, I thought, for instance, all the people right of center were watching those awful videos of Gen Z maniacs celebrate Kirk's murder. And obviously, all those people are dangerous morons on some level. And many of them, you know, just obviously mentally ill, too. I mean, these are not, you know, it was not the cream of the crop of the woke intelligentsia. You know, there's just the sheer number of facial piercings

Starting point is 00:46:40 you saw in those videos that have told you something. But what you didn't have, left of center, were prominent people with big platforms, you know, prominent media figures or, you know, to say nothing, of political figures, like, you know, from Obama on down, say anything but this was horrible and we should never let it come to this in American politics, right? Like, there's no party left of center, real party for political assassination. And yet right of center, very prominent people from the president and Elon on down treated it like the first shot fired in the civil war.

Starting point is 00:47:27 totally irresponsible, totally dishonest. I mean, these people were arsonists pretending to be firefighters. Elon jumped on X within minutes before, I think before Kirk was declared dead, certainly before his killer was caught and said, the left is the party of murder. And then I think some hours later he said, if they won't leave us in peace, there's nothing to do but fight or die. Right. I mean, to 225 million people, right?

Starting point is 00:47:59 So to have the richest guy in the world on the most politically important social media platform in the world say this sort of thing is just, it's, I mean, it's beyond reckless. I mean, it's just sociopathic. He is just flinging matches into a landscape that has been just soaked in gasoline. And the soaking has been done mostly by Trump and Trumpism and just what's, you know, the grifters right of center like Candice Owens and Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones. I mean, you know, and I know you have your differences with those guys and perhaps we'll get into it. We have a lot of differences with those guys. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how the landscape is fracturing right of center. and I think it would be good to talk about all of that because it's I think it's more fractured than you guys think it is. I think there are more casualties

Starting point is 00:48:59 than just Tucker and Candice there or at least should be. But it's, this was a highly asymmetric moment of political hysteria. Right. So left of center, you had genuine lunatics who represent no one celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk. At a time when truth feels under siege, sometimes the best way to get perspective is to go back to the source.

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Starting point is 00:51:08 Isn't there an argument to be made, Sam, that the rhetoric of the left, calling everyone fascists and Nazis, when quite patently they're neither fascist. Look, you can have your criticisms about Charlie Kirk's politics, but let's be honest, he was a right-wing conservative, a Christian conservative. He's not a fascist, he's not a Nazi. Yet that accusation had been made time and time again, not only against Kirk, but also people of that particular branch of politics.

Starting point is 00:51:34 Doesn't that incentivize these type of murders, this type of violence? Well, it's more complicated than that. because so Trump is not Hitler. I've never said he was. We're not living in Weimar, Germany now in America. But he is a genuine, want to be authoritarian, doing many authoritarian things

Starting point is 00:51:58 and damaging our democracy with both hands, every chance he gets, right? So I don't know, and we're just taught, you're now asking me what I think about the prospect of him running for a third turn, term in just overt defiance of the 22nd Amendment, right? That's, it's not fascism. I mean, fashion is just the wrong term, right?

Starting point is 00:52:22 I mean, it's just got too much, you know, culturally specific and historically specific baggage attached to it. But authoritarian is the right term, and aspiring tyrant is the right term, and he's just not, the truth is, he's not effective enough, he's not ideological enough, he doesn't care about enough big things to worry me that much, right? I mean, if he were a, I mean, this is a point I've made to the,

Starting point is 00:52:48 to the consternation and confusion of many audiences, but the irony is if he were a better person, he'd be a more dangerous person, right? If he were a smarter person, a more committed person, I mean, if he could possibly commit to something beyond himself, right? And, you know, he's, he'd be more dangerous, right? if he were less distractible, et cetera. So I don't view him as a Hitler figure, but I do, everyone who's calling him an authoritarian,

Starting point is 00:53:17 which sounds a lot like fascist. And, you know, you just turn up the dial on authoritarianism. There's no important difference between what you're talking about in fascism. Then you're just talking about, like, the clothing, and whether the Catholic Church was ever in the mix, et cetera. So he's not as bad as Putin, right? But he's, if we give him a chance, who have as much power as he wants, where does he stop?

Starting point is 00:53:44 Right? He certainly doesn't, he would run for a third term. If we discovered that the 22nd Amendment just didn't apply, and there's just an open fairway between him and the green, of course he's going to run for a third term. It's like the, he doesn't care about the spirit of the Constitution, where it's clearly meant that you should not, it's not that you can't be elected twice,

Starting point is 00:54:08 that you can't be president twice. So I take your point about Trump, but let's come back because they don't only say it about Trump. So I didn't answer your question. Yes, certain terms are inflammatory and imprecise, but it's a much grayer area than you're making it out to be. And I mean, many people would say that what I've just said in the hour so far about Trump

Starting point is 00:54:35 is just a species of that very, you know, irresponsibility of you, of condemning him to the point where, okay, any sane person is going to look at this and say, okay, we have a political emergency and, you know, anything, you know, anything is warranted in resistance to this, right? I'm certainly, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying we have a political emergency, right? And we need our institutions to function to contain the damage. But do you not think that it's really important when you criticize your political enemies? It's important to be honest. But it's also important to be accurate.

Starting point is 00:55:17 In the same way that you can think somebody's a terrible person and their politics are awful, it doesn't make them a paedophile, for instance. Yeah. And this kind of escalatory language, I personally think it's highly dangerous. And when you live in a country like America where you have access to guns, and there's so many people with mental illnesses, I mean, that's dangerous. But nobody uses more inflammatory language less responsibly than Trump and his enablers, right? I mean, again, Elon jumped on X and basically said, our political opponents are murderers. The left is the party of murder.

Starting point is 00:55:53 There is no party of murder in America, right? Trump in his address to the nation immediately after Kurt's death effectively said in so many words, not just that these mania, these Gen Z maniacs on TikTok were responsible for his death. He effectively said that his mainstream political opponents were culpable for murder, right? which is just not true. Again, everyone from Obama on down said, this is fucking horrible, right? Let's like, we have to pull back from the brink here.

Starting point is 00:56:30 This is not acceptable on any level. And then you had people bending over backwards to sanewash Kirk's actual politics. Ezra Klein jumps on, you know, his opinion column at the New York Times that says Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way for which he got no end of shit left or center. everyone was being sensitive.

Starting point is 00:56:55 Everyone with any real platform was being sensitive, and what you had right of center were just, with the important exception of Perk's wife, during her eulogy, who struck a very different note, I mean, Stephen Miller's eulogy was madness. It was a fascistic madness. I mean, this is right, I mean, like Stephen Miller is a, character apart from the fact that he's Jewish he's a character right out of Weimar right I mean he's a

Starting point is 00:57:28 lunatic in in how he messages into this combustible environment um I mean you remember do you watch his speech I didn't watch his okay you should watch his speech it was the most insanely vituperative just what does the super hatred for everyone left of center I mean just you people are nothing, you will destroy you, you have awakened a dragon, you have no idea what you, and the, not so much from him, but from other people on the dais that day, there was just this volcanic expression of Christian nationalist kind of just, I mean, it's just pure moral confusion and political hysteria from my point of him. It was their George Floyd moment, again, Yes, without the riots and obviously-

Starting point is 00:58:22 That's quite a big deal, Sam. No, no, it's... But this is what I was going to bring up. It's a superficial deal. Hold on a second. Hold on. It's a big deal, but it's not... No, no, it is a bigger deal

Starting point is 00:58:32 to have the President of the United States come before the country and say, basically, half of mainstream America is a terrorist organization. Like, that was the... Those are not his words? That was the subtext of everything he said

Starting point is 00:58:50 in that. that address to the nation. It was completely of a piece with Elon's tweets, right? Let me, let me, the George Floyd thing, I think you're going way too far, Sam. And here's why. There's no daylight between us about the George Floyd riots. I mean, we viewed in precisely the same way. I just view Trump differently. Hold on. What I'm saying is something else. We agree that burning down cities and taking over districts in America and burning police stations and killing a lot of black people and these moronic chance of defund the police, which led to more black people being killed in their communities in the inner cities.

Starting point is 00:59:26 All of that's crazy, right, and wrong. But what I noticed, and I'm just telling you what I noticed, right, is when Charlie Kirk was murdered in this way, which I thought was horrific, and I think we do know, as far as I can tell, that it was politically motivated. And I would argue, you may disagree, but for me, the word Nazi and fascist has a very unique dimension to it, which is we have been trained as a culture to view these people as a specific threat to the democratic order, to minorities. When we think of a Nazi, we think of someone who's going to take over the country, destroy democracy, and murder millions of people. That's what a Nazi is.

Starting point is 01:00:07 So what happened was... I do think they're... Hold on, let me finish my point. What happened was a lot of people on the right and even people like you and even people like us who are not even on the right have been called those terms by some people in your case for being critical of Islam in our case for questioning the insanity of the left etc right in my view that is putting a target on people's back but the other point is when charlie kirk was murdered it was horrific for anyone really watching it and what happened did you worry for one second that there's going to be streets burning in in in America. Did you worry that police stations

Starting point is 01:00:50 were going to be burning down? Did you worry about any of that? Because I didn't. No, but again, the reason why it's an unfair, it's a valid point, but it doesn't, it's not as significant as you're making it out to seem. So it's of a piece with a point that many people made during the, the elections, right?

Starting point is 01:01:10 When businesses and, you know, Beverly Hills are boarding up their windows, right, in anticipation of political chaos out, should the election go one way or the other, many people right of center pointed out, okay, the people are boarding up those windows, not because they think Trumpists are going to start looting William Sonoma, should Trump lose, right? There was just one side that was being worried about in those moments. And it was indecent on some level not to notice that, right?

Starting point is 01:01:40 Same point. It's just, so that, yes, it is true that the left, and especially the black community expresses itself in that way when the unhappiness gets dialed up to 11. What I worry about on the right is of much greater concern, ultimately, and it's hardcore political violence. Like, you know, Timothy McVeigh-style,

Starting point is 01:02:11 you know, truck bomb violence and real militias really committed and trained people who have been training for years, some of whom are Nazis, right? I mean, they're not German Nazis, but they're neo-Nazis. There's much more of that on the right. When you look at just the fringes of gun culture, and again, this all predates this moment.

Starting point is 01:02:34 I mean, we could have had this conversation 10 years ago. There's much more, the powder keg of real political violence and civil unrest in this country that is constantly, It's not just looting and burning, but like, you know, it's your AR-15s that you've been polishing for years and training on for years and you've got 10,000 rounds of ammunition already stored for this purpose. Those people are right of center, right? And that's not telling that you had to go back to Timothy McVeigh. I mean, that's what, the 1990s? No, there's no, there are other, that's just the big one. There are other examples of, even just in this recent cycle. And this is the thing that we was so dishonest about Trump's address to the nation. He talked about political violence and political assassination as though it was well established that it was only a left-wing thing. But even with Kirk's assassination, it's still, in recent memory, has been more of a right-wing

Starting point is 01:03:30 thing. I mean, just simply more incidents of right-wing political violence, including assassination or attempted assassination. And then there's just ambiguous ones, which is frankly a crazy person who's not ideological and represents nobody. But, no, I mean, just, it's like, you see, it's like. The attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer was a punchline right of center. I literally, Kirk himself used it as a punchline.

Starting point is 01:03:56 Elon himself has used it as a punchline. Trump himself has used it as a punchline. It's literally been a laugh line for all three of them. This guy was almost killed with a hammer by a guy who is somewhat ideological, also probably crazy, but certainly right of center. who was planning to torture Nancy Pelosi, should she be home, right? This was not funny. And, again, that level of callousness and recklessness and cruelty that you're worried about

Starting point is 01:04:30 in using a term like Nazi indiscriminately, so much, it's been a fire hose of that on the right, right? Yes, there are people on the left who are dangerous idiots, I will be the first to admit, but it is different when it's coming from the Oval Office. It's different when it's coming from people. It's like for every one of those people who, the Gen Z maniacs who made a video celebrating Kirk's death, there's an equivalent lunatic on the right who's much closer to power. Like people who've got like Laurel Lumer's phone number in their phone are crazy and dangerous, right?

Starting point is 01:05:08 Like this is not, there's a fever swamp as you move right of center. And again, we'll talk about Tucker. and Candace and Nick Flentes, like, as you begin to move rightward and toward the weird, right, and you get into Q&N and you start glad-handed all the anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists, it gets very, very, very weird, very, very dark, and very well-armed in a way that isn't mirrored on the left. And that's an important difference. I'm not worried about, yes, who's going to, who's going to, you know, if you tell me that Louis Vuitton, as being looted in Beverly Hills, I'm pretty sure I know who's doing it.

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Starting point is 01:07:16 No, thank you. Thank you for connecting that. Yeah. That would be helpful. Apologies for the people who are already typing. Yeah, because you know how people like to then, and then, I don't need to explain that. It was a George Floyd moment in the sense.

Starting point is 01:07:29 The level of emotionality and lack of caution and lack of honesty around the messaging was equivalent, right? Now, it's not, again, it different from coming from different, people and different levels with different implications. But yeah, I mean, what I saw at Kirk's memorial, some of it was fine and some of it was actually beautiful and inspiring. And some of it was just a patent explosion of Christian nationalism and, you know, an appeal to theocracy, right? And again, a kind of, I mean, Elon's tweet was all of this in crystal form.

Starting point is 01:08:24 To say that the left is the party of murder, right, which is going to be interpreted as not just the fringe of the fringe of the fringe, you know, in some trans cult somewhere who happened to have guns. no, the left is synonymous in that statement with effectively the Democratic Party, right? I mean, just the mainstream political opponents of Trump. It's totally irresponsible, right? And that's a level of demonization. I mean, what we have to, to take this from the kind of the highest level, I mean, this comment is true now, and it'll be true. 50 years from now, what we have to surmount here to live sanely are two things, tribalism and dogmatism.

Starting point is 01:09:18 I mean, like, tribalism and dogmatism are the generic, you know, software flaws in our politics, in our culture and in our, you know, personal psychology, you know, social psychology that make solving all of these collective problems impossible. Right? And it just the the antithesis of both of those things is intellectual honest. I mean, one of the reasons why I criticize religion so much is that religion's the only area of culture where tribalism and dogmatism get this new gloss and they seem like virtues. They can be made to pass as virtues. Moral virtues, you know, moral necessities, intellectual virtues. We call the dogmatism of religion. faith, right? When you don't have good reasons for what you believe and you're immune to the good reasons of others that are that are countering your beliefs, and there are certain conversations

Starting point is 01:10:17 you refuse to have because you've got these cherished beliefs that you want to guard from all streams of evidence or argument, right? We call that faith, but no, that's just dogmatism, right? In fact, the word dogmatism is a, you know, it's a Catholic term, it's a Latin term. Dogma is a good, good word in Catholicism, right? I mean, it's not pejorative. But in the political space, you know, tribalism and dog, what's wrong with identity politics? What's wrong with the woke mob and cancel culture and all the blasphemy tests left of center and all that? It is the tribalism and dogmatism of all of that. And insofar as it's mirrored on the right, it's the same problem. It just has different nouns and verbs associated with it. Well, look, I'm glad actually that we're

Starting point is 01:11:02 talking about the right, because one of the things that we've been talking about on the show more and more is seeing the right and who have always marketed themselves as a party of, shall we say, facts and logic, even though that's a hack term. And then you look at the way some of them are going, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of facts and even less logic. Right. So how are you guys dealing with that? I mean, you have... I'm one of the people who came up with the concept of the woke right. And everyone who is work right is really happy that I've come up with it. They're delighted. They're delighted. They love it. They're so great. Well, they think it's a specious.

Starting point is 01:11:39 Are you joking or they just think it's... I'm being sarcastic. No, they hate it because it's accurate. Okay, so I thought you were saying that they thought it was not accurate. I get the sense from the way you asked a question that you're, you sort of, you are with the people who think we are on the right. No, no, no. I've been tracking how you've been navigating this, but I think it's just important to acknowledge

Starting point is 01:12:00 and to acknowledge to your audience that there is a... There's something to navigate here. I mean, I think you and I have a different relationship to this ecosystem. So it's a different challenge, but... You know, the way we think about is very simple. It's that I always forget his full title, Lord, the former Foreign Secretary of the British Foreign Secretary. What's his name?

Starting point is 01:12:28 Lord Palmerston. Oh, yeah, Lord Palmerston. He said, we have no permanent alliances, we have permanent interests, and it's to them that we are allegiance. And that's, that's, we're coming at it from the perspective of what is true. But what about friendships? Actful friendships. I'm capable of being friends with whom I disagree.

Starting point is 01:12:45 I disagreed with what you said on our podcast three years ago. I consider you. Well, what is that? I got, I don't want to relitigate all of that, perhaps, but what did you disagree with? Oh, let's not, let's not bother with that. We've, we've done the whole 45 minutes on it. But I don't think I heard your disagreement apart. Yeah, I can't be bothered.

Starting point is 01:13:04 We've dealt with it. It's something happened three years ago. What's the point. What I'm saying is there are, of course, exceptions to this, but I'm capable of being friends with people. I was never friends with the people who are going Tonto right now. Because I always knew they were going to be crazy, and I never made friends with them in the first place.

Starting point is 01:13:22 Is that what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, I just think the crater that we're talking about is bigger than I think you think it is, and some of your friends are in it. Tell me more. So, I mean, Rogan is implicated in all of this in a way that, I mean, and Rogan, I've considered Rogan a friend for years. But, you know, but, like, we're sort of out of touch now, and I think, I think there's probably a reason for that.

Starting point is 01:13:48 I mean, he's like, specifically, like, you know, he has not answered my texts. I tried to give him some, knowing that I was going to have to comment publicly about some of the interviews he's done. and I think how irresponsible he's been with his platform, you know, I reached out to him by text and he hasn't, you know, respond to those texts. Perhaps my text got lost in the mail, but usually he's pretty good on his text. So I'm not sure, honestly, I'm conflicted around the ethics of all of this.

Starting point is 01:14:22 I mean, like I feel terrible talking about Joe. And yet he's got the biggest platform on planet Earth, or nearly so, and I think he's done an immense amount of harm to our national conversation, our political conversation. So, like, I couldn't have done, like, you guys were just on his podcast. I watched that. I couldn't have had the conversation you had with him there because I would have had to have said this.

Starting point is 01:14:49 And, you know, presumably he wouldn't have liked it, and there's a lot to talk about. I thought, you know, I thought his, that the interview he had with Trump was, incredibly consequential and incredibly irresponsible, right? I mean, he didn't ask a single difficult question of Trump and just help midwife his lives, I mean, among which was the 2020 election was stolen lie. Right? I mean, like, that's a shattering lie

Starting point is 01:15:21 for a former president to have told in our society and to have half the society believe it. It's a perpetual invitation to violence. It gave us the violence of January 6th. things could have been a lot worse, et cetera. If you have the biggest platform on earth, you can't just have the kind of conversation that Joe did, had with Trump,

Starting point is 01:15:43 and then open the door to everyone else to have their version of that irresponsible conversation. So many people think that this was the, the 2024 was the podcast election. I agree it was the podcast election, but what it was was many people following Joe's lead in being completely irresponsible with how they use their platform.

Starting point is 01:16:01 And to be specific there, I'm not saying you shouldn't talk to certain people. Joe can talk to anyone he wants to, right? I mean, I think there are certain people you probably shouldn't talk to. But there are certain people that if you're going to talk to them, given that you have a big platform, literally tens of millions of people in Joe's case, you have a responsibility to do more than just establish good vibes with them and make them seem normal, especially if they're not normal and especially if they're

Starting point is 01:16:35 trafficking in lies and half-truths that are going to delude a significant percentage of your audience and that are deluding you as the host because you haven't done your fucking homework and so I mean his conversation with Darrell Cooper completely irresponsible right I mean we're living in an age of I mean

Starting point is 01:16:52 Daryl Cooper is a fake historian who's trafficking in David Irving's lies about the Holocaust right he bounces from Tucker's podcast to Joe's podcast. On those two podcasts alone, he gets a larger audience, perhaps than any real historian ever has had in the history of history, right? I mean, it has to be over 50 million people who saw those two interviews combined. His wrong in episode didn't do very well. Between Joe and Tucker. Look, you've got to separate Tucker from Joe. It's a completely different conversation. It's not a completely different conversation. In fact, you could, so,

Starting point is 01:17:30 You could argue that Joe's was worse because Joe's happened after Tucker. There was a mess to clean up, which Joe, rather than clean up that mess, he basically, with his imprimatur as the host who knew everything about Daryl Cooper, who had done all the homework and listened to 30 hours of Cooper's podcast on the matter, he could sign off, he could sign a blank check morally, assuring his audience that Cooper's a good guy, not an anti-Semite, all of this is good faith,

Starting point is 01:18:05 and that the thing he just had said on Tucker, there's nothing wrong with it. It's all just a tempest in a teapot, and people are lying, besmirching him, and it's just, you know, libtard hysterics who are having a bad reaction

Starting point is 01:18:18 to the truth getting out on some level. And he's done it with RFK Jr. He's done it with all kinds of maniacs, right? I mean, I mean, these are people who are, in many cases, liars. Some of them are probably mentally ill, right? Some of them just have character defects where they just love to touch. Find me a third rail and I'm going to touch it. No matter how combustible our society is, no matter how little I know,

Starting point is 01:18:46 I'm just going to keep touching the button to see what goes off. Dave Smith, again, like, Dave Smith is not a morally sense. voice about the war in Gaza, right? Now he's, and he's, and he is the person he is because of what Joe has made him, right? And that debate with Douglas, you know, I've commented on, with Douglas about, you know, what I thought went wrong there. But all of this has created immense harm in our culture, right? We're all in the business of building culture. Culture is the operating system of our society, right? Like, like everything we care about is a matter of culture working better and better or worse and worse, right?

Starting point is 01:19:34 Like whether we can solve any of the collective action problems we need to solve, whether we can, whether this, whether our species survives is entirely a story, apart from an asteroid impact, it's entirely a story of whether we can sort our culture out enough so as not to annihilate ourselves. And you literally have people doubting whether the Holocaust was even a thing in the context of the greatest explosion of anti-Semitism we have seen in our lifetime, in the middle of a very clear clash between aspiring Islamist theocracy globally and the West, and Israel being the tip of the spear of all of that, massive moral confusion being spread in our society around that, quite consequentially so.

Starting point is 01:20:24 and Joe is doing as much as anybody to spread that confusion, and he doesn't know it. I mean, I think Joe is a good guy. I don't think he wants to harm anybody. I would not say the same about Tucker Carlson. I mean, I think they're completely different types of people. But, I mean, it's a disaster what has happened on Joe's podcast politically and culturally.

Starting point is 01:20:52 He's on thousands of podcasts. Thousands of them are great, right? But there are, but he, his approach to this, he's taken absolutely no responsibility as a journalist or as an intellectual or as a historian or as a scientist because he doesn't view himself as a journalist or an intellectual or historian as a scientist. He's a comic and he's just shooting the shit with people

Starting point is 01:21:17 and he's just exploring his interests and great. It's Joe Rogan University. but he's doing, he has to recognize that he's doing more than that. He's doing more than that just by virtue of having the audience that he has. But he's also doing more than that because he has this taste for conspiracy theories. He's got this taste for contrarian and anti-establishment views and the debunking of the elites, right? He's bought in to that side. The scales are not just balanced in a truly open-minded.

Starting point is 01:21:52 and kind of intellectually disinterested way. No, no, he's got an appetite for the false flag operation. Right. Like if there's something, if the non-standard view can be spun at all, he wants to hear about it. And that acts like a bug light for maniacs. Right. I mean, then you just, you just get these, there's an endless number of people who seem to have the right credentials. And many people who don't. obviously have the right credentials like Dave Smith, but you can get an endless number of people with PhDs or MDs or whatever the requisite degree is who are crazy, right? Or just terrible people,

Starting point is 01:22:37 right? When you have a platform like Joe has, you have a responsibility to not just lay yourself open and your audience open to a fire hose of bullshit and half-truth. and lies, um, isn't there all filtered? Chances are, if you're a trigonometry fan, you understand the importance of free speech and privacy. And you'll also probably know the fan of Unplugged, Eric Prince, because he's been a guest on our show. Eric created the Upphone by Unplugged to solve a huge problem. Our smartphones have become the most powerful surveillance devices ever built. Governments want back doors, corporations harvest your data and sell it. Both sides chip away at your

Starting point is 01:23:22 your freedom. The Upphone is different. It's built from the ground up for privacy with its own operating system, no big tech backdoors, and a built-in firewall that blocks thousands of trackers every day. I have one of these because I want the peace of mind that my personal data isn't being sold or spied on. Go to unplug.com slash trigonometry and use our code trigonometry for $20 off a protective case with the obphone. Okay, but isn't there also a way that you could say, look, you know, Some of these ideas are going to be bullshit. Some of your half-truth. Some are going to be highly controversial, which in a few years' time, you look at in the cold light of day and was like, well, it was unpleasant, but it was true.

Starting point is 01:24:04 Okay, wait a minute. Like, Joe, some sort of about COVID, for example. Okay, but at the time, I called that correctly. Yeah, but somebody, I mean, that was so easy to see as an instance of left-wing, politically correct. overreach, right? Like calling the lab leak hypothesis racist at the time. I mean, the very hour, the first instant of it's happening, every sane person who's not indoctrinated into wokeism at that moment saw, okay, that's bullshit. Sam, I don't think you're remembering this correctly with all due respect. I remember, and just tell you our perspective of people who make

Starting point is 01:24:45 videos on YouTube, right, that we were having conversations about, are we allowed to have this particular discussion about COVID or masks or vaccines or whatever. Okay, that's a bigger conversation. And the Wuhan thing, because if you'd said that that was the case at the time you were not allowed to say it, YouTube would literally nuke your YouTube channel, right? So when Joe pushed back on it, which I'm grateful to him for doing on that thing, he was leading the way in challenging some of this public health nonsense. Okay, so yes, if you want me to say that some conspiracy theories are true,

Starting point is 01:25:21 Yes. So you saw conspiracy theory. Alex Jones is going to get it right some of the time. That doesn't vindicate Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a madman who has created tremendous harm, full stop. It doesn't matter how long the list of things is that he was right about. I mean, he's just, he's going to be, he's, he is endorsing every crazy conspiracy allegation. some are going to be, at some point, you're going to say, oh yeah, this thing that seemed totally implausible and even irresponsible to entertain, turns out that was right. The CIA did do that. But it's also on a more prosaic level, like school closures. We had Boris Johnson, our former prime minister, who actually said the school closures that went on in the UK were wrong and it damaged a whole generation of children.

Starting point is 01:26:20 And maybe if there'd been more people to push back on that, we could have actually dealt with. You can count on one hand. So the post-mortem on COVID, I guarantee you that the post-mortem on COVID that passes for truth in Joe's world is not true. Like, I mean, on Joe's account, COVID was just a cold. The vaccines were fucking dangerous, right, and may have killed a lot of people. In Brett Weinstein's world, the vaccines killed millions of people, right?

Starting point is 01:26:53 And et cetera, right? So all of that's upside down, right? Yes, there were some very clear moments where the mainstream political messaging, public health messaging was disastrously bad and or dishonest, and that was super consequential. And there were things were kept closed for much longer than they should have been. We were not nearly as flexible as we should have been in just understanding that this was a moving object. And with each new variant, things were changing, and that the science is catching up to the problem.

Starting point is 01:27:35 And there's lots of scientific uncertainty at every stage along the way. And there are people covering their ass. And it's not a plandemic, right? But it's just whatever here, but it's just whatever. Again, if you just add up the indiscretions of people covering their ass and people not knowing what they're talking about and it being a moving target and us doing lots of stuff for the first time that's really difficult and lots of people also dying and there being a real risk of the health care system collapsing, it explains 99% of how badly we handled it. But the lessons being drawn from how badly we handled it in many, many cases are the wrong lessons. I mean, we're just, we're living in, you know, land of hallucinations, right of center, around what should have been learned from COVID.

Starting point is 01:28:21 I mean, again, COVID was a dress rehearsal for something quite a bit worse that we fucked up the dress rehearsal. And we, and, I mean, I hope someone's learned actionable lessons that can be implemented in real time next time. But what I fear has happened is that as a culture, we're actually less prepared for a worse pandemic because of how badly we learn the lessons of our failure. Well, no, I agree with you. And I think there is no doubt that COVID broke a lot of brains. And by the way, I can't speak for Joe, obviously.

Starting point is 01:29:00 But I suspect if you speak to him, he'll feel that you went crazy over COVID. Yeah, no, 100%. He has no idea. But one of us is right, right? He's, again, he's... You could both be wrong. No, no, okay.

Starting point is 01:29:12 I guarantee you that... That there is a consensus understanding around what happened during COVID that is not in Joe's brain or in the brain of most of his audience. And it's in broad strokes the best understanding we have. It's not to say that we know down to the last person who died of COVID. But within well within an order of magnitude, we know what happened. right? And that's not what Joe is saying about COVID. Let me make the point I was going to make, which was more about why COVID affected a lot of people the way that it did. And, you know, broke people's brains as a strong statement. I use it because I do feel that happened.

Starting point is 01:29:58 There was, and I'm not talking about Joe specifically, I just mean that a lot of people felt this way. A lot of people ended up being much more conspiratorial coming out than they came in, right? Because we had this thing called public health and we had this other thing called science, scientific truth, right? And we went so far away. And these two things are in tension. Because if you're trying to communicate, nuanced, complicated, ultimately unverifiable scientific theories or hypotheses to a public with an average IQ who are in panic and fear, scared for the lives, they're being fed all kinds of crazy stuff in the media. You have to take the scientific truth and you have to, this is best case in order. This is why people being corrupt

Starting point is 01:30:46 without Fauci having funded the lab in China, all of this other stuff, right? Just in a perfect world. And you have to condense that complex scientific truth into public health messaging. Yeah. Which is a political process. And that process ended up going so far over to public health and then you add on top of other things that happened, cover-ups of certain things that we now know to be true, or as best we can, like where COVID came from, et cetera, that a lot of people went, well, this thing you told me in the interest of public health was actually just you lying, right? Because it turned out not to be true. Well, but in many of those cases, it was not just people lying. I know. I know. But if you're being bombarded with messages and told you're a terrible

Starting point is 01:31:34 person for not believing them, and you then discover that those messages were actually false. Most people are going to say, I have been lied to. Yeah. Right. And so we've ended up in a very conspiratorial world, partly, I think, because of what happened during COVID. And by the way, if you lock people in their homes for two years, some of them are going to loop it. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 01:31:52 Yeah, yeah. But part of the burden that our public health authorities couldn't effectively shoulder was that they were messaging into a polluted information landscape that was all it was poised to be this conspiratorial and this distrustful of authority and in large measure independent media is culpable for that i mean it's it's the candace owens of the world and the joes of the world who were calling bullshit where things were actually bullshit and calling bullshit on absolutely standard science and i mean the people who Joe had on his podcast again and again, Brett Weinstein and all the other Ivermectin cultists, that was genuinely harmful, right? It's not that they were wrong about everything,

Starting point is 01:32:50 but they were wrong about most things, and it was dangerous. But what about the vaccine when you have people coming out going, if you take the vaccine, you're not going to be able to pass it on? There was a moment that, okay, before we had a vaccine, Republicans and Democrats, at the same rate. Once we had a vaccine, Republicans died more than Democrats. That's true. That's bizarre. Shouldn't be that way. That's message, that's political, that's consequence of political. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's political messaging. Obesity or age, all of that as far as they know, they are. Because the republics tend to be older, right? But it was not, not factoring. I believe that's just purely a matter of

Starting point is 01:33:30 of vaccine hesitancy. So you're saying, so I get, your claim is just so that I understand what you're saying, is Republic, right off center people got anti-vax messaging, didn't take the vaccine, and all other things being equal died at a higher rate. Right. That's your clue. Yes. Right. Yeah. And honestly, Joe was a super spreader of those ideas. Right. So the last I looked, I mean, I haven't looked at these data for some months, but, you know, within the last, I think I did a podcast a couple of months ago and the authority who I had on at the time, Mark Lipsich, I believe signed off on these numbers. I mean, do you have these numbers?

Starting point is 01:34:14 How many people in the United States do you think died from COVID? How many do you think were saved by the vaccine? How many you think died who shouldn't have died based on vaccine hesitancy? I don't know. Right. I don't think there's any way of knowing, if I'm going to be honest with you said.

Starting point is 01:34:28 Well, no, there's a way of it. There's not a way of knowing exactly, but there's a way of knowing you can triangulate on these numbers in many, but based on excess deaths and just reported deaths. And I mean, the epidemiology of this is not mysticism. I mean, there's a scientific understanding of just how people die and how many people are likely to die in any given society in any given moment. We're not off by a factor of 10, right? Let's say we're off by 20 percent. But we're not, this is not like we think X and it's really, you know, one-tenth of X, right? Something like 1.2 million Americans died from COVID, right?

Starting point is 01:35:16 Now, from or with? COVID is the reason they died. Okay. Right? Not that they got hit by a bus and they also had COVID. Okay. Now, that's not the bubonic plague in the 14th century, but. it's also not a cold, right?

Starting point is 01:35:35 It's, yes, most of those people were old. Most of those people were not fit young men who didn't want to take the vaccine because they heard about the heightened risk of myocarditis, right? I mean, there was all kinds of wrinkles there. It mattered, you know, how old you were in addition to being obese, et cetera. But this was a real health challenge

Starting point is 01:35:55 before we got the vaccines. Now, how many people do we think died because of vaccine hesitancy, who wouldn't do you? have died had everyone who could have gotten the vaccine gotten vaccinated. That number is around 300,000 right now. That's a lot of people. Again, most of those people are almost certainly old. You know, they're not four-year-olds. I mean, it's like a thousand kids or something like a thousand kids died from COVID. But 300,000 people, it used to be a lot of people. Now, like in the

Starting point is 01:36:28 It's a huge number. Yeah, but so what did it mean to have the world's largest podcast basically endlessly messaging against the vaccine? I mean, Joe can say he's not anti-vax, but the primary message around the COVID vaccine and COVID itself coming from his podcast and coming from the so-called experts he had on was that the vaccines are fucking dangerous, man. The vaccines, again, Brett Weinstein told us that the vaccine is likely to kill something like 17 million people, right? I saw a credible estimate of something like 17 million deaths globally from this technology. So 17 million deaths from the COVID-Vax? Well, when, you know, when you scale up to billions, it's not hard to reach a number like that with the technology that's dangerous. Zero evidence of anything like that.

Starting point is 01:37:25 that happening. That is a complete hallucination. So it was a problem that some of the biggest podcasts in the world, and it's not just Joe, but Joe's was certainly among the biggest, had an appetite for this contrary intake on everything such that just let's just, let's just stick a mic in front of RFK Jr. I mean, he might be president. RFK, tell us what you think. Right. It's he is a confabulation machine, right? He, it's not, it's, some of its lying, some of its delusion, some of its, I don't know what is wrong with the person, but... I get your point, Sam, and I think you make it, like, look, in terms of, let me tell you what we said on trigonometry about this, it's relevant to the point I'm going to make. We said, I said specifically, I don't remember Francis can speak for himself.

Starting point is 01:38:21 If I were elderly or away, I'd definitely take the vaccine. And given that I've had COVID twice, I probably have a lot of natural immunity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I kind of left it there. And it's ultimately up to you, speak to your doctor. The most important thing is that you take professional advice on this. That's what we always said, right? And if you've got comorbidity. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:44 But if I were 75 years old and morbidly obese, I'd be taking the vaccine. That's what we said repeatedly, right? I mean, just to give you a point of reference, that's my view of it as well. Like, I haven't been vaccinated in years. I wasn't finished. I wasn't finished. It's relevant, right? But what I also said is government tyranny that we experienced in relation to the pandemic

Starting point is 01:39:07 was an outrage. Was an outrage? Well, at what point was it an outrage? Second lockdown. Second lockdown onwards. In our country. So in our country, we basically, we locked down the first time. And then it became very, very clear that lockdowns don't actually work, right, and do a lot of harm.

Starting point is 01:39:26 And we kept locking down and we kept wearing these fucking masks that don't work and all this other nonsense. Complete garbage. Right. While being told, no, no, the virus didn't come from a lab in China. No, no, Fauci is the best guy ever, all of the stuff. I get it. I mean, it's, I was, yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 01:39:42 So that being the case, the question, a lot of people will agree with what you're saying. A lot of people would disagree with what you're saying. But the question for me is, what do you think should be the case? Because my view is, people are free and they can listen to information and they can make their own decisions. They can listen to trigonometry and go, Constantine and Francis think you should probably speak to a doctor. They can listen to Joe and get whatever perspective they get from that. And they can make their own decision. That sounds quite dangerous, but I worry that whatever is that is the opposite of that,

Starting point is 01:40:19 is also really dangerous, where you are now deciding that, oh, it's a pandemic, therefore these people shouldn't, oh, I don't know what it is that you think, should have happened, other than perhaps calling on Joe to, as you said, take more responsibility, but what else should happen in relation to this? What's the answer? Well, it depends on how bad the disease is.

Starting point is 01:40:40 What should have happened during COVID? Well, we should have acknowledged that we are catching up to reality, right? like we didn't understand how it was spreading. I mean, there was that period where we thought, you know, it was spreading based on contact with packages. We're all wiping down packages. You know, the foamite transmission, right? It took a while to even acknowledge that it was airborne.

Starting point is 01:41:04 And therefore, it took a while to acknowledge that lockdowns would be less effective and maybe even totally ineffective. It took a while to understand that it wasn't, that bad for kids and was pretty damn bad for the elderly. Many diseases are the opposite of that, or at least that they hit kids and the elderly kind of equally. I think the Spanish flu actually targeted the young more than the elderly. Yeah, yeah. So if this had been, if, you know, the bodies of elementary school children had been stacking up like cordwood, we would have had a very

Starting point is 01:41:43 different risk tolerance. And we would have been right to have a very different risk tolerance. The lockdown would have been far more like China, however ineffectual that would have been. It remains to be seeing what we should do, given the specifics, as we come to understand them. And at every point along the way, we should have figured out how to message around scientific uncertainty better than we did. But the problem, again, is we're messaging into a space that is super-conspiratory, territorial, hyperpartisan, or people are using any expression of uncertainty as a means to discredit the authority, right? So, I mean, this is the asymmetric warfare that has always been true.

Starting point is 01:42:37 Whenever a scientist gets on, I mean, it used to be CNN, not so much anymore because nobody's watching, but, you know, you got six minutes on CNN as a scientist to talk about climate change or anything, the moment you begin to calibrate your statement with the completely normal degree of scientific caution and uncertainty and humility appropriate to a scientific presentation among scientists, to the general public, it sounds like, oh, this guy, you know, you could drive a truck through all the holes in this guy's account, right? Like, even he says he's not sure, right? So why am I going to take the vaccine, right? So, I mean, we're in some, the political imperative of public health messaging has to deal with the fact that on some level you are, you're, it's very easy to see how a feeling of paternalism creeps in because you're worried about people taking the, the nuanced truth the wrong way, right?

Starting point is 01:43:46 And that invites, again, this temptation should never be taken, but it invites the prospect of a noble lie or a noble half-truth, right, which again is a disaster, but it's easy to see how people get lured in that direction because they're talking to Candace Owens, right? I mean, on some level, like when you look at what Candace herself was doing on Twitter around COVID, it was madness.

Starting point is 01:44:16 Did you know that the biggest threat to your retirement is not something that's talked about often? The increased longevity of American citizens means default retirement accounts like IRAs, 401Ks and TSPs may not suffice. If you have over $50,000 in your retirement account, get instant access to a free two-minute report from Augusta Precious Metals that reveals the one step you can take to secure your financial future. Visit trigger gold.com or text trigger to 35052 today. So I was watching a documentary on Flat Earthers, and at the end of it, they interviewed this scientist from NASA, and they said, oh, you must find this funny and blah, blah, blah, and she went, well, no, because what that tells me is that scientists aren't doing their jobs. If we allow, if we, not if we allow, but if conspiracies like Flat Earth is allowed to propagate and, people are talking about it, it's because we're not doing our jobs. We are flawed in our

Starting point is 01:45:17 communication. Would you not say that is also an issue as well? That the scientists aren't actually communicating effectively. Absolutely. But there's a, I mean, it's worth acknowledging how difficult a task it is when they're talking to people who have been raised. I mean, There are many different kind of orbits of ignorance here, but I mean, there's a very clear kind of religious anti-science orbit where it's just, you know, this is, their worldview is anchored to something else other than empirical science, right? And so it's, there's a massive amount of distrust of science,

Starting point is 01:46:04 just as science coming from, you know, functionally half of our society. I mean, probably more like 35% of America is devout in precisely this way, where it's like evolution is just bullshit, right? Like this, we did not, you know, my great, great, great grandma was not a monkey and I'm not going to be told otherwise, right? That's where the understanding of the relevant science stops. And so, and then there's lots of anti-science cultishness around specifically things. things like vaccines. I mean, it was a perfect storm. You know, a pandemic is a kind of perfect storm because it taps into subcult. Specifically, the anti-vax subculture got weaponized during COVID

Starting point is 01:47:00 in a way that was, you know, it might have been waiting for, but it was, it wasn't quite effective. It was a little bit, I mean, it was just as effective, bizarrely effective and and destabilizing as the weaponization that we've seen around Gaza against Israel. It's like how did Israel got attacked on October 7th by absolute barbarians, unambiguously so. I mean, though the moral high ground could not be more clear. The very people who were raped and killed and tortured and kidnapped were the peace nicks in Israel, right?

Starting point is 01:47:40 Not the, you know, not the ultra-Orthodox religious maniacs. on the Jewish side or the settlers or just the very people who are, you know, you would think would do the most PR damage to the Hamas's side of the story. And yet magically this, they've managed to weaponize the information landscape in such a way that wherever it wasn't already destroyed by the ambient level of anti-Semitism that exists in the world. Israel's reputation has been completely destroyed over the war in Gaza, just by having lost an information war. They also haven't helped themselves, Sam. No, they haven't even tried.

Starting point is 01:48:26 No, they haven't. Number one, and number two, you have people like Smotrick and Ben-Gavir who've been in the cabinet, going around and saying things that are quite frankly just beyond the pale as well. But there's just, I mean, there's just two of them. There's only two anyone can name. Yeah. And yeah, but that when you hold that up against the reality of religious fanaticism on the other side, it's just we're not talking about similar world. I'm glad we're moving on to that issue because you mentioned earlier that you don't think the ceasefire is likely to lead to peace in the Middle East.

Starting point is 01:49:08 Why? I just think it's too deep a problem. I mean, I think, I mean, one, Hamas is, you know, agreeing to a ceasefire in so far as they are. I mean, now they're killing their fellow Palestinians. And strangely, there's not much complaint about that coming from Hollywood or, you know, any of the ceasefire people left of center who ostensibly are worried about Palestinians. But, I mean, they would agree to a ceasefire so as to regroup, to live. to fight another day, right? I mean, they're not people,

Starting point is 01:49:46 not people who are gonna be happily shopping in whatever mall that the Kushner's and the Trumps and the Whitkoff's build in Gaza City in a few short years should all this work out. I mean, they're a death cult, right? They're real jihadists who really want things. They're not transactional, they're not hoping to be secretly hoping to just be wealthy or just be, I mean,

Starting point is 01:50:10 I'm sure there's some peripheral, cynical people who might be like that. But the true believers are true believers, and they're in a religious war, not just with Israel, but with everyone who's not Muslim, right? And even Muslims as well. Even Muslims who they consider to be apostates. And so when viewed from, I mean, this whole peace process is not credible from the point of view of real jihadists, right? Like the people who are representing the other Arab interests, I mean,

Starting point is 01:50:52 they're, you know, the crown prince of wherever is just another apostate who would be condemned by Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State or al-Shabaab or any other organization, including Hamas. I'm not saying all jihadists are the same, but they're the same in this regard. And they really are committed to a longer-term project of winning a religious war. But that's why the original Trump plan, it imposed dismantlement and disarmament of Hamas as part of its terms. Now, that hasn't transpired. But basically, everyone in the region, other than Iran and Hamas, agrees that Hamas cannot

Starting point is 01:51:35 be allowed to remain in power in Gaza. So the question is, can you get beyond that? If you listen to our discussion with Joe, I made this point, which was about the Kushner plan as I understand it, is to try and get the moderate Arabs to work with Israel in opposition to Iran. You have to get rid of Hamas for that to happen, and then you get them all trading together, and then they hold hands in sync to Mubayat. Yeah, but again, you're talking about the wealthy monarchs of the region who have the so-called Arab street to worry about.

Starting point is 01:52:15 And the Arab street in all the scores of countries, I mean, there's 50 plus Muslim majority countries, not all Arab, is highly radicalized. It's not as radicalized as the Palestinians. I mean, the Palestinians are, Hamas is still popular among the Palestinians, especially in the West Bank. I think it's true to say that they would win an election in the West Bank today. Also as well, Sam, we need to take into account that the first thing that they did when Israel stopped bombing Gaza was, it then went out and shot people, it regarded as traitors,

Starting point is 01:52:51 knee-capped them, tortured them, all the rest of them. You can't be, you can't be certain of the opinion polls reflect people's genuine sense. Yeah, but you can be certain of the level of religious fanaticism in the area. You know, what people care about, I mean, they care about above all, like, like, the top of the list would be any desecration of the Al-Axam mosque in Jerusalem. Like, there's no number of kids you can kill that matters more than that. And that's bizarre. I mean, that's insane.

Starting point is 01:53:23 That's morally upside down to have a culture that is framing their core moral concerns around religious fiction. Right. I mean, there are many cultures like that. But the Islamic culture is the world over has the worst version of that. Right? I mean, again, like you and I could say some, the three of us could say something on this podcast, sufficiently provocative or do something like burn a Quran that could literally cause embassies to burn tomorrow in a dozen countries. I mean, it's like that's the world we're living in. The Muslim community, the world over, is uniquely combustible based on the significance of religious symbols. And they're not uniquely combustive.

Starting point is 01:54:16 We've seen protests after protest over things like cartoons and the naming of a teddy bear. We have not seen protests, certainly not sizable ones, over what an outrage it is that groups like Hamas or Hezbollah or Al-Shabaab or al-Qaeda or Lashkarate or Bhaka or any of these jihadists and Islamist groups. over the fact that they have committed atrocities against now practically countless innocent people, most of whom are Muslim, right? Like, where the pro? How can you not have 100,000 people turning up in the streets of London to protest the Islamic State at its height? Where were those protests? Where were all the Muslims who were desperate to disavow jihadism?

Starting point is 01:55:18 in the face of the Islamic State. What you had is you had people dropping out of medical school in London. People dropping out of the London School of Economics to go join the Islamic State to take Yazidi women as sex slaves and then bragging about it on Twitter, right? And where were the protests? No, the protests were over the Danish cartoons.

Starting point is 01:55:39 Mm-hmm. Right. What's your point, Sam? What they care, what the center of gravity for far too much of this community, this community, this community of two billion people in the world over, is around religious pride and humiliation, religious symbolism. It's not around the real consequential body count of, you know, violence and its and peacemaking, right? It's not it's not about,

Starting point is 01:56:15 Most of the world and certainly most of the Muslim world doesn't care when Muslims kill other Muslims. They care when Jews do it. Most of the world doesn't care when Muslims kill Christians. I mean, this is something I'm genuinely surprised about and confused about. I'm not quite sure why fundamentalist Christians aren't more agitated around the murder of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. by Muslims. I mean, right now, the Islamic State is cutting the heads off of Christians in Nigeria and maybe also Uganda, but it's definitely Nigeria. It's like that you would think that would be a pretty big deal. It's not, it's, no, it's the most inflammatory thing on earth is Jews killing Muslims in the Holy Land. So, I mean, we, we, we

Starting point is 01:57:18 need, I mean, yes, we desperately need a war of ideas, if not a natural civil war within the Muslim world in scores of countries to nullify the cancer of jihadism. I mean, Islam plus jihadism is going to prove totally unworkable for open societies everywhere in the future. There's no way of assimilating jihadists. It's not, I mean, what you're experiencing in the UK right now is what it's like to have 6% of your society be Muslim and some percentage of those Muslims to want to live under Sharia law and some percentage of those Muslims to happily create, you know, so-called grooming gangs because it's in line with their view of

Starting point is 01:58:15 how you think about infidel young girls. And you're trying to absorb all that. And you've got Tommy Robertson out there complaining. The Muslim community has to figure out how to purge itself of this level of religious fanaticism. And these specific commitments around things like punishing apostasy and blasphemy and. And I, you know, in the fullness of time, maybe they'll do that.

Starting point is 01:58:55 Under pressure, maybe they'll do that. But they're not tending to do it organically. Well, this is where the Saudi and the UAE are interesting, right? Because they are trying to do this. They're trying to replace Islamism with a more moderate version plus economic growth. So the young men in particular have things to do. and a purpose and life and a family to feed and all this other stuff, and are not drawn towards these sorts of ideologies.

Starting point is 01:59:29 I mean, you seem skeptical about that. Yeah, because I think these religious commitments are sincere for many, many millions of people. And also, it's just for everyone. I mean, wealth is not enough on some level. I mean, this is a, I mean, many people think they need religion. I mean, you're certainly aware of this, and you're talking about this more, and I mean, you and I view this differently.

Starting point is 01:59:59 I think the burden is on us to understand that the real depths of human flourishing need to be talked about in ways that are non-sectarian. I mean, the truth is non-sectarian. The truth is not Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish. So that's true of physics, and it's also true of the mind, right? Whatever is possible for us mentally and emotionally. and socially and whatever happens after death.

Starting point is 02:00:28 And whatever is, it's like to believe otherwise is to believe that one isolated community 2,000 years ago that had no access to science or even scientific values, much less scientific tools, got it perfectly right and everyone else got it wrong. So one of these revealed texts is true, despite the fact that none of them seem to recognize that slavery was a problem morally,

Starting point is 02:00:54 among other things. They know nothing about DNA or electricity or information science or the real scale of the cosmos or how disease spreads or anything, but they can tell you how to sacrifice a goat. And they've got some good wisdom in there too, but not, they don't have a monopoly on that because, you know, the Greeks had that and the Buddhists had that. And, you know, it's the golden rule exists in many different contexts. And, you know, even monkeys seem to intuit some basic version of it when you treat them all. unfairly or you know reward one with a cucumber and another with a grape they send it and not like that whatever's true about us spiritually and ethically is deeper than culture and it's certainly deeper than any ancient culture right and the fact that the world was partitioned by language barriers and geographical barriers for thousands of years and everyone came to came up with different books is an

Starting point is 02:01:50 artifact that we have to recognize as an artifact and it's it's it's specious It's spurious. It's not the actual foundation of our moral knowledge or anything else. And when you go into the Bible and read it and purport to find wisdom there, even if you're a fundamentalist, fundamentalists are picking and choosing the stuff they think is wise and the stuff they think is better left ignored. And they're doing that on a basis of a larger cultural conversation that is secular

Starting point is 02:02:22 and that has moved on. So it's like, The fact that you're still not trying to figure out whether you should kill somebody for working on the Sabbath if you're Jewish and reading the Pentateuch. Or, you know, whether to, whether you really need to hunt witches in your community for the crime of witchcraft. But the fact that you can ignore all that and just take the so-called good stuff. Again, that's an editing procedure that is the gold standard of that is your own moral intuitions that have been tuned up by your engagement. with the 21st century, your inevitable engagement with the 21st century and a wider secular culture, right? So none of these religions have a monopoly on anything other than their own sectarian

Starting point is 02:03:07 ignorance and tribalism and dogmatism. And all of that is best disavowed. And we can have a real conversation about what is truly transcultural and deeper than the artifacts of whatever, you know, grandma had in her bag before we knew anything about biology or the human brain or etc. But most of the world doesn't see it that way. Most of the world is mightily attached to whatever they got at mother's knee about the unique sanctity of a specific book and what happens after death. And they've organized our lives around it. And in the case of Islam, you're talking about a much wider culture that has been insulated from modernity to a remarkable degree and has not had the same kinds of collisions with rationality or science or secular politics. And so on some

Starting point is 02:04:14 level, it's like we're dealing with the Christians of the 14th century in many, many places. And even on the streets of London. Sam, it's been an absolute pleasure as always has always had. having you on the show. The final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Sam answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you head to Triggerpod.co.uk, where he will answer your questions. Presidential nominees for 2028, who would you like them to be and who do you think will actually be chosen? I'm very curious to know who his top three nonfiction authors would be. What do you think

Starting point is 02:04:52 about the idea that new atheism might have paved the way for wokeism? I think we're not talking about solving coordination problems that by definition are global in scale. So much of what we've talked about so far represents a massive opportunity cost around the problems that really are huge that we can't even think about solving. It's like we haven't talked about AI, right? So AI is a global phenomenon now, it's going to impose whatever global risks it imposes on us to get out of this arms race condition and develop this technology sanely in a way that's going to be compatible with our flourishing or even our survival is going to require cooperation that we just can't

Starting point is 02:05:53 figure out how to even begin to engineer. Right. I mean, how do we get the entire world on the same page around what is safe and ethical around AI? That's not going to happen. And so many other problems. I mean, the next pandemic is another coordination problem. But coordination problems are specifically interesting because we can fail to solve them even when everyone wants the same thing. Right. Like it's not just people having different interests or or seeing tradeoffs differently. We can just, we can all fail together because we simply haven't figured out how to move collectively. Even when everyone could be incentivized to do that and everyone has the same basic interest.

Starting point is 02:06:45 There you go, an uplifting message from Sam Harris to finish on. All right, head on over to Substack where we ask Sam your questions. Are you encouraged that a critical mass of the best new media platforms, including trigonometry, is evolving beyond commentary into high-quality interview journalism and the kind of genuine shoe-leather reporting traditional media seems unable or unwilling to deliver? A text says, you're on my mind. A bouquet from 1-800-flowers says, you're my everything. Heartfelt moments belong in the real world, not just your phone.

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TRIGGERnometry - Sam Harris Returns to TRIGGERnometry

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