What Keeps Sam Harris Up At Night

27:27Sam Harris:Well, I would admit that there you can logically differentiate anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. I mean, I think that those are distinct, at least in principle, but in practice, I think most people who are anti-Zionist are in fact anti-Semitic. And I think that the unique focus, the special focus on Israel as a country that has a problem in justifying its right to exist. The only way I can explain that is, at some level, anti-Semitism, globally speaking. I don't know how else to explain the focus on Israel at this point. There's something like 195 countries on Earth. I think about two-thirds of them were formed, their boundaries were formed by map makers just drawing those boundaries on a map without much regard for the lives of the people living within those boundaries, which is to say that there's just, you know, something like two-thirds of existing countries have a similar origin story to Israel's, right?

28:28Sam Harris:It's just there's a mess on the ground, and, you know, in the aftermath of wars, people just divided up the map. only Israel is constantly put into question, right? And it has to justify its existence when its neighbors are actually trying to murder its inhabitants, right? It's not a normal situation. I mean, they're threatened. They continually are attacked and they win wars, And then the world demands that they give back the strategically valuable land they got after they won those wars, defensive wars, purely defensive wars. I don't know where else this has happened in human history. I mean, it should strike us as astonishing that the UN and the Human Rights Commission have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined, right?

29:30Sam Harris:And those countries include countries that have perpetrated actual genocides. I mean, we're talking about countries like Sudan and Syria and Yemen and Iran and North Korea. I mean, just like the worst actors, you add them all together and they have not had enough opprobrium heaped on them to equal what Israel has attracted on the world stage, right? So how do you explain that? I don't have an explanation beyond some weird fixation on the country because of its character as the Jewish state, right? And yes, you can be an anti-Zionist. You can be fundamentally critical of this whole project. You could think, you know, the Jews don't need a state, don't deserve a state, don't require a state.

30:20Sam Harris:They can just live wherever they live, you know, like the Roma do. There would be some way to do a tightrope walk through all that and still come out not saying anything bad against the Jews as Jews. But practically speaking, most people who are really concerned about the existence of Israel, I think, are probably also anti-Semitic.

30:52Coleman Hughes:I've been genuinely surprised by the degree to which anti-Semitic obsession has flowered on the far right. I genuinely wouldn't have predicted it two or three years ago. um it's and you know maybe it's a failure of me updating my model of right-wing psychology but it's uh like i was genuinely surprised for instance that when charlie kirk was killed that very same day you see viral tweets instantly blaming israel that couldn't possibly have had evidence because it had just happened right from like total moron like just people on on the internet, right? And that... But then Candace Owens.

31:37Sam Harris:Yeah, but then that would filter

31:40Coleman Hughes:even to people who I had some degree of respect for, like Megyn Kelly would be just asking questions about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And that almost uniquely Ben Shapiro would be like the last major conservative broadcaster to just not entertain any of this BS, especially when it seemed obvious pretty immediately after that he was killed by someone who probably had left-wing views and hated him for what he perceived as like right-wing bigotry. Seems like a lot of the right is just driving right past very simple explanations for phenomena and going straight to anti-Semitism. Again, the Iran war is another example.

32:25Coleman Hughes:President Trump has said he believes Iran tried to kill him. Now, put aside where the state of the evidence actually is on those claims right now, I think it's kind of murky. I wouldn't have trouble believing it, but I don't think it's like a rock-solid capital F fact yet. But Trump has said he believes that. We know how famously vindictive he is, right? That itself would be a parsimonious explanation for his aggressive posture towards Iran, but people drive right past that on the freeway. go right to the stop where Beebe's controlling him.

33:00Sam Harris:He's been saying that we should do something against Iran since, I think, 1980. Right. He's an old guy, and he remembers 1979, right? He remembers Jimmy Carter pathetically, you know, speaking from the Oval Office, you know, helplessly talking about our hostage crisis day after day after day. And, you know, just what a, on some level, what a national humiliation that was, right? So from his point of view, we should have kicked the shit out of Iran a long time ago. I mean, I can only imagine that's his default. I think he spoke out against Obama's nuclear deal from the very beginning.

33:49Sam Harris:I think it's a, I mean, the anti-Semitism problem on the right is not surprising. I mean, this is, you know, antisemitism has always been a problem right of center. And, you know, William F. Buckley and other gatekeepers on the right have kept it at bay for many decades. And now that we live in some sort of hunger games like dystopia online, all the guardrails are gone. And now we're just seeing what people think and believe and want to talk about. But in addition to that, we're seeing an appetite for conspiracism, conspiracy theories that seems unslakeable right of center. I mean, there's some conspiracy thinking left of center, too, but on the right, it's just, it is one of the most pervasive features of the culture.

34:49Sam Harris:And anti-Semitism is like the Ur conspiracy theory, right? It's just one of the most well-subscribed strands of virtually any conspiratorial style of accounting for world events. is just the most obvious attractor on that landscape. So almost everything winds up coming back to the Jews at some point if you're a conspiracist. Not always, but so often that it's just, again, this is unsurprising, but what is surprising is just how many seemingly normal people have so much time for conspiracy thinking. The independent media space has been an engine of conspiracism. Look at Joe Rogan's podcast, which alone has brought conspiracism back into the public conversation on almost every point in a way that it's almost impossible to exaggerate.

36:04Sam Harris:And that's just one podcast. But then you add to that the truly crazy permutations that come from people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. It's just what the right is doing now with its collective mind. And that doesn't go well for the Jews.

36:26Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I think it's just a feature of human psychology that we prefer the structure of conspiracy theories to the way that problems actually play out. So if you open up any Hollywood screenwriting book, it's basically going to tell you that you should write a conspiracy plot and then have a hero uncover it. And that's not something Hollywood invented. That's something Hollywood discovered. It discovered that stories which have that structure do better. And I think people look for stories of that structure in the news. And it's also possible that more and more we're, I think Tyler Cowen made this point somewhere that we are becoming less of a literate culture and more of a oral culture.

37:16Coleman Hughes:Not meaning that people can't read. Obviously, people can read, but most people are just not reading the news anymore. They're not reading the newspaper. And that actually changes how you interact with information. Yeah. It makes charisma more important and logic less important, I think. And I don't think anyone's immune from this.

37:39Sam Harris:The way you produce this content, I mean, think about how these documents get made. If someone is taking the time to write an article for The Atlantic that has been deeply researched, that's one sort of way to produce propositional claims of knowledge about the world. if somebody's just shooting the shit on a podcast, and even, you know, even, you know, the two of us talking now is, is looser than, than, than a written document. But, you know, Dave Smith over on Joe Rogan's podcast, I mean, that's just, it's, it's just tennis without the net. Right. And so someone who's just speculating, so just, just creating a vibe with words, just saying, maybe, maybe it's like this right in front of 20 million people um if that's your new if that's your news diet right you're going to be reliably misinformed yeah this is all of these concerns are why i had

38:44Coleman Hughes:michael tracy on my podcast recently to talk about epstein and related conspiracies because on his sub stack he's been doing the hard work of like writing down everything we know as a fact and distinguishing that from just conjecture and vibes. And when you pair out everything that isn't a confirmed fact and keep it to what we actually know and do the work and track down the footnotes of the footnotes of the footnotes, it becomes much more, in my view, a story of one man's depravity than a story that really should interest the public. At least how I feel about it. How do you feel about that story?

39:30Sam Harris:Well, I don't think I've looked into it as deeply as you have, certainly not as deeply as Tracy has. I've seen, I've read and seen some of what he's produced. I worry a little bit about him and his focus on this. I mean, again, I don't, this is slightly unfair to say and slightly ad hominem, But I feel like my spidey sense is going off a little bit around his deep dive down this particular rabbit hole. There's a reason why I haven't invited him on my podcast to have that conversation. But again, I could be wrong about all that. I just, I think, I do share his sense and I think your sense that there's a bit of a moral panic around this.

40:14Sam Harris:But I also, at this point, think we should just see all the evidence, right? I mean, normally I wouldn't be in favor of just airing, you know, unvetted emails and pictures and documents, you know, online to millions of people to just let the public make of it what it will. But given how we got here, given the level of betrayal by our institutions and the level of distrust in our institutions, now well-earned distrust, I think that the only remedy is sunlight. So I would be in favor of just revealing everything in as unredacted a way as possible. and I think the suspicion that the Trump administration has something to hide is probably warranted at this point because these guys are inveterate liars on every other point, right?

41:15Sam Harris:They're just, this is the, again, this is the most dishonest group of people we've ever assembled in a government. So there's no reason to trust anything that comes out of Trump's mouth or J.D. Vance's mouth or Pam Bondi's mouth or Cash, but I mean, these are, again, this is just, to call them liars doesn't even quite get at what it's like to hear them message on any topic. It's not that they sometimes lie or lie when they need to. They lie always and everywhere, and even when it doesn't serve their interest, right? I mean, it's just, it's like they're malfunctioning robots on some level. I mean, it's just like the mendacity knob got turned to 11 and it just got stuck there.

42:01Sam Harris:I have no idea what these people, why they even lie the way they lie. But that's all, it's all to say that, yeah, let's see what's in the files. And maybe -

42:12Coleman Hughes:I'm off two minds about that because, you know, when I saw someone like Larry Summers emails coming out with, where he's talking about... Actually, strangely, I had the woman he was talking about as a guest on my podcast a couple years ago, by coincidence. But he's basically just asking for advice about how to pursue this younger woman who is in her 20s. And do we need all... Should the government be releasing and embarrassing and at the height of basically a witch hunt of these people, people that are not even within miles of being accused of a crime. I mean, that seems like a big price to pay for releasing files that I doubt will actually ever satisfy the crazies.

43:06Sam Harris:Yeah, no, I totally agree that it's not fair and it's not good. I just think I'm just wondering what the path back to normalcy is. Right. And to release pages where every word has been blacked out and to and to expose everything about Bill Clinton and nothing about Donald Trump. I mean, clearly, that's that this is not how we can play the game at this moment. So I wouldn't know what to do. If I could walk back in time, I would say a more judicious process is the right one. But given that we're here, I mean, I showed up in those files, right? And some of that communication, I think, was misunderstood by some people.

43:58Sam Harris:I mean, I found it just, frankly, funny how I was in there. And then there's some other person named Sam Harris in there, too. There's a woman named Sam Harris in there who I think was buying Epstein shoes. And so people thought I was buying Epstein shoes, and that was funny. But so, in any case, it's just, it's not good that we're here. It's not good that we have a culture that is as defined as it is by conspiracy loons. I mean, this is like the pizzagatification of our entire society, right?

44:41Sam Harris:Most of the people who have contributed to this discourse are people we should never consult again on any topic. I mean, they're like, how is Kash Patel running the FBI, right? How is he even a person whose name I know? It's madness, right? Jack Posobiec, why is this a guy who's right of center of influence in any way, right? I mean, this guy gave us Pizzagate, right? This is just not, you know, and yet this is, I mean, this is Alex Jones's world and we're just living in it, right? And yet it's a, you have to figure out how to find a path back to the adults in the room You know, identifying them, promoting them, getting them, you know, to be in charge once again.

45:28Sam Harris:And I don't know how to do that on this particular case, given the level of mistrust, but apart from attempting to slake the thirst of all the crazies who think that this is the biggest story of the decade, right? So let's just open all the files and see what's there. I do worry that, you know, Pacey, Michael Tracy, that there might be more there that should be prosecuted and that is worth being shocked by, right? I mean, it could be that the word trafficking here means more than, you know, Epstein and Maxwell were just trafficking to Epstein. and maybe, you know, Prince Andrew and maybe one or two other people.

46:16Sam Harris:Maybe there was just, maybe there are a lot of people who should go to jail. I don't actually know. I mean, it's just, it remains to be seen. But it's possible that there are a lot of guys who had sex with girls they knew to be underage on Epstein's Island. Or it's possible that he was the only person who ever did anything like that. And even his crimes have been exaggerated. I just don't know what's true.

46:41Coleman Hughes:Some things are just better in person. High fives, hugging your dog, and shopping for Crocs. If you've never been to a Crocs store, you're missing out. Sure, you can find us online, but when you step inside our shop, you'll get it. And your feet will feel fantastic with a fresh pair of classic cloths, or cozy slippers, or beach-ready sandals, or even sneakers. Everything's ridiculously comfy, and you can even pick out Gibbets Charms to personalize your new pair. Go check out your nearest Crocs store. You deserve that in-person moment. Okay, let's shift topic a little bit. I'm curious what you think, and Jonathan Haidt, you know, does a lot of work on this, about age restricting social media, banning various parts of social media.

47:28Coleman Hughes:Do you have a strong position on that topic and on the wider question of what social media is doing to mental health and well-being? Well, I, at this point, see no reason to doubt that it's a problem, more or less of the shape and depth that Haidt

47:56Sam Harris:claims. I think social media has done something. It's done many things, but most of them were bad to our culture in the last 15 some odd years.

48:21Sam Harris:I mean, I can say, you know, I can speak personally about the effects of, of deleting my Twitter account. And that was, you know, I'm always embarrassed to say this, but it's the greatest life hack I've discovered in the last quarter century, right? I mean, it's just, just unbelievable improvement in my day-to-day wellbeing by deleting my Twitter account. Now that, now granted, I'm not a general case. I was a public-facing person who had a fairly large following on Twitter, and I'm a controversial public figure who is getting a lot of hate from both the left and the right. And so it's probably not a surprise that when I pull the plug on all that and then just live my life in the real world, there's a lot of relief to be found.

49:06Sam Harris:But it is more than that. It's just even when social media was a source of apparent pleasure and I was using it, you know, to my advantage, um, the, the fragmentation of my life, I mean, just the checking of it, you know, just, just the dopaminergic, you know, invitation hour by hour. Um, you know, if, whether I did, whether I checked it 10 times or 20 times or a hundred times, if things were really happening. In retrospect, I think virtually all of that time was misspent, right? And the effect on my other moments in life was on balance negative. So this is obviously my use case is completely different from a teenager's, you know, a teenage girl on Instagram has a different set of problems on social media than I ever had.

50:00Sam Harris:But I think on balance, a lot of that has to be bad. And so I do think that Haidt is probably right about this being a kind of emergency for teens. And, you know, Anik and I have kept our daughters off social media in any kind of public-facing way until the last minute. And, you know, I think our oldest daughter has accounts that are private with her friends. But still, I mean, our kind of rolling out the leash on all that has been careful because we are just sensitive to the prospects of this just being a really unhappy influence on a young mind, right? To feel that your personhood, in some important sense, exists online and has to be managed there.

51:04Sam Harris:I mean, it's inevitable to some degree, but we should allow our kids to migrate their lives onto that digital landscape.

51:23Sam Harris:very, I mean, it should be, this process should be very carefully thought out and circumspect because the way it can go wrong is just so obvious. Yeah.

51:37Coleman Hughes:I was listening to a podcast a couple months ago. It was Haviv Retigor's podcast where he was interviewing a former Al-Qaeda spy. This was, I don't know if you caught this, he was an Al-Qaeda member who flipped. It was a really good podcast. Haviv is great. I'm a huge Haviv fan. He's the man. But this guy was making the argument that we, I'm translating it into my own conceptual terms, that we kind of overly fetishize democracy in the West because it's worked very well for us. But if you look at the Middle East, all of the places, virtually all the places that are sort of stable and going in the direction broadly of our values are the monarchies, not the democracies.

52:28Coleman Hughes:The democracies generally turn out to be failed states or civil conflicts or Islamist states. And I thought that was a provocative, but I think very interesting argument. Where do you actually place democracy as a political system in your set of priorities for encouraging other countries in terms of our foreign policy?

52:53Sam Harris:Yeah, I don't think democracy itself is an intrinsic good. So yeah, I think I would take instruction from that former jihadist on this point. I mean, it's totally plausible to me that there are societies that are not ready for democracy and that some kind of benevolent dictatorship is, it might be the path to democracy for them. But what you need is that you need cultural change sufficient for most people to want to live in a way that makes democracy viable, right? And a path to human flourishing, right? So if you're just going to just give everyone the right to vote for, because voting is some kind of sacred right that supersedes all others, well, you might run that experiment once in a society that will vote in the theocrats, right?

53:47Sam Harris:And then it's over. So there's nothing to be recommended about that project. So I do think you want people who are ready for something like secularism and something like liberalism, right, before you can be confident that whether it's a democracy or anything else is going to matter. What's the majority going to want to do? Are they just going to want to stifle the free speech of everyone, including themselves? Are they going to want to hang people for blasphemy? I mean, it's just, if the majority is sufficiently crazy, well, then it almost doesn't matter, right? Then you want some authoritarian, you know, albeit a benevolent one to say, no, no, sorry, we're not going to hang people for blasphemy.

54:43Sam Harris:You don't get a vote on that. And so I would agree that, you know, just empirically, what we're seeing in the Middle East is that these closed societies, these authoritarian, really even despotic societies like Saudi and the UAE, are the ones that are both reigning in their religious fanatics to a degree at this moment and taking obvious steps toward some version of secularism and integration with modernity. And the so-called Arab street, when left to its own devices, seems to want to you know, kill people like Salman Rushdie, right? It's just, I mean, that's, if you can get the mob together and ask it what it wants, it's not going to sound like, you know, what they want in Marin County or any other place that many left of center secularists would find recognizable.

55:46Coleman Hughes:How worried are you about declining birth rates all around the world? Obviously, this is a much talked about phenomenon. We are below replacement level, meaning, you know, left to our own devices. our population is shrinking everywhere from America to basically every country in Europe, basically everywhere in the developed world outside of Israel, which has a real culture of having big families and feeling a sort of responsibility to bring about a new generation. Everywhere except Israel, basically, we're shrinking. And this creates economic problems, first of all, but do you think this is a problem?

56:30Coleman Hughes:If so, how big a problem is it, and how should we think about mitigating it?

56:37Sam Harris:Well, I can well imagine it's a problem. It's not a problem I've thought much about. I mean, this is certainly an argument for at least hoping for robots that we can rely on in our old age to care for us, right? I mean, this is, you know, if the human experiment is at bottom, a kind of Ponzi scheme that requires, you know, more and more people always at the bottom, you know, in the limit, it obviously doesn't, it can't work, right? I mean, we can't just, we can't get to, I mean, what's the, I think the carrying capacity of the earth, or at least the last time I heard anyone estimate what the carrying capacity of the earth was, was something like 40 billion people, Right.

57:20Sam Harris:So we're not we can't get to 60 billion people, presumably, just because, you know, everyone on Social Security needs 2.1 people beneath them to take care of them. Right. So technology is going to have to come to our rescue on some level or there there's going to have to be some path to. To population decline that is more benign than others. I mean, obviously, having it get cut in half in a generation has got to be dystopian. But I don't know what is to be hoped for here. I mean, in the limit, the arithmetic just doesn't work out, right? Or we have to fly away to other planets, right? So I just have to think that ultimately, technology is going to come to our rescue here.

58:19Coleman Hughes:I think I'm trying to, if I put together my model of Sam Harris based on having followed you for a long time on many different topics from Islam to AI to, you know, to any number of issues. It seems like you, more than other public intellectuals and authors I follow, focus on the 1 % chance that something will go very wrong. and that you allocate a much larger percentage of your intellectual energy towards preventing— oh, pandemics would be another example— to the worst-case scenario, to preparing for the worst-case scenario than most people who do this kind of work. Do you think that's accurate as a perception?

59:12Coleman Hughes:And does that come from a philosophical concern? or is it personality?

59:23Sam Harris:I guess I would dispute the allegation because just take jihadism, say. I don't think it's a 1 % chance that things are going to go very wrong there. I think it's 100 % chance that things have already gone wrong and they will keep going wrong until we get a handle on it. I mean, it's just a guarantee. It's guaranteed to be a problem. And it's an asymmetric problem, right? So it's just so easy to do something sufficiently terrible that it deranges a society for a year, five, ten, right? A bunch of guys with box cutters got us to spend trillions of dollars fighting wars. you know a you might think those wars were misbegotten and at least one of them probably was but still right it's like the asymmetry the amount of leverage you get for being a suicidal maniac supported by lots of people who are just fans of suicidal maniacs it's just so extraordinary that it's just it's not a one percent problem this is a this is a hundred percent problem um so just with pandemics just if we wait around long enough we're going to have another pandemic that's worse than COVID, I would put the chances of that at 100%.

1:00:40Right?

1:00:41Sam Harris:So, and much worse than COVID. So, and to say nothing of engineered pandemics, if we just democratize the ability to engineer, you know, pandemic, you know, pandemically plausible viruses, I think the chance that some death cult is going to do that, whether it's a jihadist one or it's one like Aum Shinrikyo or some other group of crazies, I think the chances of that happening are close to 100%. So these are not tail risks. These are just, you take any, on a generational timeline, just give me 30 years, both of these things are going to happen. Let me just underscore that.

1:01:28Coleman Hughes:I remember I told this story on Joe Rogan years ago, but I haven't told it in a while, that when COVID first started and people were debating about whether it was lab leak or not, many people emphasized, well, they did this research in Wuhan in a BSL-3 lab, and that's like a really, the security of that lab is super tight. I instinctively didn't believe that because my then girlfriend, now fiance, had been working in a BSL-3 lab in Colombia, and she had just, she wanted to show it to me one time, like show me the research she was doing. So I just walked in. Like I just walked in. I don't think I washed my hands.

1:02:09Coleman Hughes:I don't think I had a mask on. So, which is just like, you know, on paper, something is what it is, but it's only ever as secure as the people working in it, in which case was me.

1:02:22Sam Harris:And I was talking about intentional, you know, weaponizing of lethal agents. But yeah, the inadvertent spread is also, So again, given enough time, I think on the order of 100 % likely to occur. So, I mean, the BSL-4 labs leak, right? So this is just an enduring problem worth worrying about. and when you look at what we spend our time and attention and resources on, I mean, they're not apportioned in any rational way commensurate with these risks, right? I just think we should be much more focused on, I mean, there are even tail risks that I think we should be more focused on. And I think with AI too, it's just, is the alignment problem a 1 % risk?

1:03:16Sam Harris:I don't know, but the people who are doing the work are rarely estimating it to be that low, right? It's like when you ask Sam Altman, what are the chances that AI ruins everything? I think he once gave an answer of like 20%, right? So it's not, maybe he's down to 1 % now, but no one's lower than 1%, right? And if during the Manhattan Project, if you had asked the assembled scientists, you know, what's the chance that you, you know, your Trinity test is going to ruin everything? I mean, just ignite the atmosphere and all the nitrogen in the atmosphere and cancel life on Earth. I mean, they were debating the possibility of that.

1:04:00Sam Harris:They put it in, I think, at the end, one in some millions, but they did several rounds of calculation to ensure themselves that there's no significant risk there. But what if at the end of all that calculation, they had said, yeah, we think it's probably a 1 % risk or a 10 % risk? What if you had Edward Teller saying it was a 20 % risk and you had one outlier, like the analogous person to Jan LeCun, saying that there's no risk, but everyone else couldn't drive it even into single digits for the most part. And they still detonated the bomb at Alamogordo, just rolling the dice with the future. That would have been astonishing and astonishingly irresponsible.

1:04:50Sam Harris:And yet that's where we seem to be with AI on the account of the people who are closest to this, to advancing the technology. So it's, again, I don't know what the real, I don't know what it is rational to believe about the alignment problem. I don't know if it is a 1 % risk or a 90 % risk, really. But I guess I'm disputing that the things that have captured my attention here are really the kind of tiny tail risks.

1:05:23Sam Harris:I spent a lot of time whinging about Trump and the prospects of having him for a second term. And now we're, whatever, 14 months into a second term. what was the risk that he was going to do massive harm to the integrity of our society and its standing on the world stage? You know, if I had estimated 100%, I don't think I would have been wrong, right? So it wasn't a 1 % risk. All those hours spent worrying about Trump and his incompetence and his corruption and his aptitude for alienating our allies and giving comfort to our enemies, that seems to be how it's been playing out. And so it's, I mean, I don't know what probability I would have put it at, but it would have been very high.

1:06:09Coleman Hughes:Okay, final question. You're a longtime resident of California and Gavin Newsom seems, based on prediction markets, to be the best hope for the Democrats in 2028. What do you make of him as a politician and a candidate and his record in California?

1:06:30Sam Harris:Well, I certainly hope it doesn't come to pass that we're running Newsom in 2028. I mean, leaving aside his qualities as a person or a politician, I mean, just take any liberal coming out of California or anyone who's had to have a political life in California and had to pander to the leftist interests that you had to pander to in order to succeed as a politician in California. So whatever leftist pieties you're trailing in your wake to accomplish that, that candidate is going to have a hard time selling him or herself to the other 49 states, I think, in 2028. I just think the albatross of California hung around his neck, and its reputation, real and imagined, in the other 49 states is not good, right?

1:07:27Sam Harris:So I just think it's the oppo research and the negative ads sort of cut themselves, right? You just show a lot of footage of homeless encampments and fentanyl addled addicts on the sidewalk in San Francisco and elsewhere. And fires burning down half of Los Angeles. And California is a much better place to live than its critics imagined, but it's so easy to straw man the state. And there are so many real problems that politically speaking, it just doesn't seem pragmatic to put forward a Californian. And in addition to that, I think Newsom has some other strikes against him. And he's also very talented in other ways and very telegenic.

1:08:22Sam Harris:And, you know, he looks the part. And I think he, you know, I would imagine, you know, in a debate against J.D. Vance, I think he probably would do well, right? But, again, I do think the reputation of California for the rest of the country is an albatross that we just shouldn't, you know, voluntarily put around our necks as Democrats. it.

1:08:45Coleman Hughes:Okay, Sam Harris, until next time, thanks for coming on.

1:08:49Sam Harris:Yeah, good to see you, Coleman.