#409 — "More From Sam": Religion, Deportations, Douglas Murray vs. Rogan, & Bill Maher's Dinner with Trump

0:29Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

0:45Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm answering some more questions that were submitted by subscribers on my Substack page and discussing some current events. Once again, the voice you're hearing on the other end is that of my manager and business partner, Jaron Lowenstein. We're hoping to continue this series of episodes. So if you're a subscriber to the podcast, you can submit topics over on Substack. And if you're not a subscriber, you can become one at samharris.org slash subscribe.

1:24okay sam we have a lot to get into today and obviously i want to get your thoughts on douglas murray our buddy who appeared on joe rogan's podcast last week feels like it was a month ago i want to also ask you about the financial luminaries who have praised the handling of trump's terrorists we'll get into that as well the art of the deal bill ackman And the art of the deal. The art of the deal. Yeah. We will also discuss our friend Bill Mars. We're going to get into all that, Sam. I could just tell you're ready to go. We're going to discuss our friend Bill Mars' review of his White House dinner with Trump.

1:57Hold, hold. And discuss deportations and more. But before we get into that, I want to get your reactions on some of the questions we got over at your Substack page. These aren't the exact questions, but I put them together to represent the gist of them. All right? Okay. Here we go. Scott Galloway has been vocal about his concerns for the well-being of young men. Jonathan Haidt, vocal about his concerns for the well-being of teenagers, predominantly girls. Obviously, social media plays a huge role in this. But do you think the erosion of religion plays a role here as well? And what are you doing to protect your daughters from social media?

2:33And how are you providing a sense of community for them that is lost without religion? Well, we've kept them off social media. they're exposed to the internet, obviously, and they watch a lot of YouTube. And so they're, you know, they're getting fed by the algorithm. So I mean, there's only so much control you can exert there. I think we, our oldest didn't get a smartphone until she was in seventh grade. And that was really just kind of born of a necessity to get in touch with her. And, you know, she also would have been the last kid without a smartphone at that point. I think we'll hold that same policy for our youngest, but they don't have any public facing social media experience, even our our 16-year-old now doesn't.

3:12I think that's true. I think she has some private thing with her friends, right? I think they use Snapchat, which is not now. Now I'm going to sound like a boomer. I'm not quite a boomer, but I think it was Snapchat, at least for a while, and those videos disappear. But again, it's all within nothing public facing, or at least not to my knowledge. I could be one of those parents who's being carefully deceived and it could get ugly out there, but the intention was to keep it from them as long as possible and also to educate them in how bewildering and soul-crushing it can be to, you know, have your self-worth anchored to, you know, the feedback you get in those channels.

3:53And so they're aware of the social problem and they have not yet been, again, to my knowledge, personally exposed to any of it. And they've seen some friends, you know, have, you know, crazy experiences, you know, some friends with public facing YouTube channels, et cetera, that just look like brain damage for the whole family. So there's that. So I think it's, you know, I definitely take Jonathan Haidt's instruction here to the degree that we can. We don't have a school, unfortunately, that will ban phones or, you know, demand that phones stay in lockers for the whole day. Though I think we've, some parents have tried to make it that.

4:30I think that's Jonathan's recommendation. As far as religion and its absence being consequential for a generation. I'm not so sure how to parse all that. I mean, obviously, the trend towards secularization in America has been pretty strong in the last 20 years, and the trend toward atheism, too, has been pretty strong. I mean, the Pew data on that suggests that the secularists and the atheists have been winning, notwithstanding the claims that there's been a pendulum swing back, a la Jordan Peterson and others making those noises. And I mean, I do think, frankly, that secular culture needs some things that it doesn't have, right?

5:12We don't have a sense of the sacred that is not embarrassing or, you know, just got a new age and its own version of irrational. So the piecemeal efforts people have been using to be spiritual but not religious often don't make a ton of sense. And as you know, over at Waking Up, we're trying to present what we think does make sense. I think, you know, I think you want a contemplative life, you want community, you want strong ethical instruction, you want all those things that people have traditionally associated with religion. And secular culture doesn't really offer institutions and off-the-shelf versions of that that you can readily point to.

5:51And I think many of us are just kind of coupling that together, you know, ourselves, and it's a work in progress. Yeah, I mean, I found it to be a big void of my life, having grown up religious and having a great sense of community. I no longer wanted the thou shall nots and the religious aspects, but I sorely still today miss community. I've since been able to make it up in a number of ways with guy groups and other projects. But I felt for a long time that I had wandered out into the desert alone and have long since wished there was some version that's not dorky of a community that could come together around a set of ideas.

6:29And you're right, maybe waking up will be one of those places that'll establish that one day. Well, speaking of that - Yeah, I mean, people have meditation groups and book clubs, and we've launched, as you know, the digital version of community, and people are doing some of that stuff out there in real life. So I certainly encourage that. But again, speaking much more widely for the culture, it's clear that being really into sports or you know into entertainment or you know guys groups or whatever it is it's not the same thing as having an amazing building you know in the center of town that everyone goes to on sunday and it's been that way for a century the gorgeous windows not the same thing so yeah uh and maybe this is related to your meditation practice but how do you stay balanced with all the stuff that creeps into your life from the podcast the political bullshit and whatnot.

7:21And really, before you answer this, I think what many are looking for is a way to stay sane today while surrounded by many people in their lives with whom they disagree. Well, I tend to pay attention to what I'm doing with my mind. And if I'm feeling unhappy or irritable or something, a mindfulness alarm tends to go off. And if it doesn't go off, if I'm in the presence of Annika, my wife, her alarm will go off and she'll say, you know, what the fuck is wrong with you? And that'll get my attention. So, um, yeah, I mean, I just, you know, I, this is just the universal solvent for unhappiness. I mean, pay attention to what you're doing with your attention and notice the consequences.

8:03Yeah. Well, I know that's the sort of the normal prescription, but what about today with how divided we are and many, many people, including myself, having people in my family that wildly disagree about politics and both sides seem to be concerned about the other. How do you come together? I've found a way to find joy in that, but how have you found that? I mean, not to out you, but your two best friends are MAGA or MAGA adjacent. And so how have you been able to succeed? I watch you navigate that beautifully. How do you advise for maybe others, maybe you can share how you're able to do that so well?

8:39Well, I think you'd have to keep your priorities straight. I mean, there are certain relationships that you know you are not going to sacrifice to the gods of politics and political disagreement, right? So you just know going in that you have to figure out how to navigate this. Other relationships, frankly, I'm happy to sacrifice. This is what I've run into. We've seen that. Yeah. I mean, this is what I've run into with people who have public-facing platforms. Some of them have much bigger platforms than I do, and I think they're doing immense harm in the world, right? So in those cases, it's a different ethical responsibility, right?

9:18That when the conversation breaks down there, it matters not just for the relationship, but for my sense of, again, kind of a civic responsibility, right? So I mean, I think Elon has completely lost his way. I think he's behaving like a psychopath. He used to be a friend. He's a friend no longer because he's behaving like a psychopath, not merely interpersonally with me. I mean, that might be a survivable event if it could be talked about. But at scale, you know, I mean, he's doing more harm than almost anyone on planet Earth to our culture. I mean, I would certainly defend that thesis to anyone who might be rolling their eyes or throwing their brow when they hear me say it like that.

10:00I just think it's absolutely awful what he's doing. He's in second place to Trump, and sometimes not even in second place. But personally, you know, I have, you know, some very close friends who voted for Trump. The thing I don't really get in those collisions when we do talk about politics is a real case on the other side. And I've spoken about this. I bash these guys, not in name, but in fact, on several podcasts because they're my canaries in the coal mine or they're my lab rats who I keep returning to. And I keep noticing things about the ordinary Trump supporter at this moment in Trump's despicable career, which is that they don't have a lot to say in defense of Trump and Trumpism.

10:42And what they do say and what other people say, certainly in the media, I mean, I'm now not talking about friends, but just the kinds of people who step forward to defend Trump tends to be dishonest or delusional, right? I mean, you know, the 4D chess people, right? So anyway, we'll talk about that. But the case to be made for Trump at the moment is most often made by simply averting one's eyes and saying, you don't want to talk about politics and let's wait and see what happens. That's basically the holding pattern. Right. Well, aside from that, so basically you just figured out how to prioritize your relationships over politics when it matters.

11:21And you say, look, I love you guys. We're going to stop short here and we'll pick it up and talk about something else. Yeah. And I'm confident that when something sufficiently salient comes around, I mean, there's actually been cases of this already where something that's truly indefensible that is also not debatable. Right. And there's that Venn diagram is a little hard. It's a little hard to clarify for people. But because the number of things that I think Trump has done or said and done that are totally indefensible and totally disqualifying in a president, many of them, it seems, although I don't really see it this way, it seems many are open to alternate interpretations.

11:58You know, who knows if it was really that way. There's another way of seeing it. Blah, blah, blah. January 6th was just a demonstration that got out of hand. Didn't you see the footage of the cops actually letting them in the building? What was that about? Maybe it was a false flag operation. Thank you, Tucker Carlson. When you find the stuff that's really not debatable and also indefensible, then I'm confident that the people we're talking about will see those situations as I do. Right. Well, we'll see what that line is. I know you've asked a number of times, what's it going to take? How far does one have to go before they have regret their decision?

12:37I'm confident we will get there. At this rate, we're going to get there, probably. in a week. Yeah. When we all move out and do a shelter together. Yeah. I don't know what country will have us at this point. All right. Moving on to this, just as a question that you said, I think it was the most popular question presented to you after you wrote your book, Lying. But I'm just going to reframe it here because I saw a lot of these comments coming in. So I find it annoying that my kids believe in Santa or the tooth fairy, but what's the big deal with people lying to their kids about stuff like that?

13:09Isn't it good to engage in fantasy play? What's wrong with lying to your kids about Santa? Well, first, the surprising thing is, and I really didn't anticipate this until I wrote the book and published it, and it just came back at me. I never anticipated it, is that I heard from many, many people who remember what it was like to discover that their parents had lied to them about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, most often Santa Claus, and they considered it a moral injury. They were just horrified to discover that an elaborate lie could be told like that. And they wondered what other lies had been told in the family.

13:48And in fact, also I heard from fundamentalist Christians who, I think I have this right, would say that their family never lied about Santa because they didn't want any suspicion generated that they could be lying about Jesus, right? Like that, there was cross-talk between the real religious beliefs there and the fun, fake ones. Anyway, so I heard from people that I didn't even know existed who actually had been traumatized by discovering such an elaborate lie in the household. But yeah, you know, my ethics around lying were established clearly enough, early enough, so long before we had kids that it was just clear we weren't going to lie to them about Santa or the Tooth Fairy or anything else.

14:29And I would just point out, nobody is tempted to lie about Halloween or Middle Earth or Harry Potter or anything else that's super fun for kids to fantasize about. And you could suspect that it might be a little more fun if you lied about those things, if you said Frankenstein was real or vampires are real or Dumbledore is real. But I mean, that's just not... We're not tempted to do that and there's no problem. And so I can assure you Christmas is a ton of fun for kids if you never lie to them about it. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think more, I think people more use the lie of Santa today, uh, for the invisible babysitter for the, uh, you get a month or two to hang that over your kids' heads to get them to behave better.

15:15Listen, you know, but they behave just fine. If you tell us, say, if you tell them there are real consequences, even, even Christmas shaped consequences to, you know, their misbehavior. You could say, listen, if you really want that stuff for Christmas, stop doing that. And it would be the same message. I just think it does introduce perhaps a weird social experiment in the school. If your kid is the only kid who knows the truth about Santa and they're surrounded by dummies who believe. But flip it around and ask yourself, do you want your kid to be the last kid in second grade or whatever grade it is to believe in Santa and to be teased by their friends?

15:51You don't want that. So at what point do you want them to be disabused of this fiction? You want them to be the last boy or girl standing, because that's embarrassing. So why not be the first, right? Or the second? I like it. I think it's great. Anybody who has more questions, please come over to the Substack page and you can ask and we'll try to answer those for next time. But all right, it's time to get back to our friend Douglas Murray, who, by the way, will be on the podcast with you later this week, promoting his book called Democracies and Death Cults. And I'm sure you'll be discussing his appearance on the Rogan podcast, which was incredible.

16:28So we don't have to go crazy here, but I certainly want to hear your reactions and see if you have anything to say, which I know you do. Yeah. Well, I mean, the most incredible thing for me was the result of it, right? I mean, Douglas was great. You know, I think I might disagree with a couple of things he said, and I think I might have taken a slightly different line in that conversation. But in many respects, he was much better than I would have been in having that conversation, too. So I thought he was spectacular. And yet, it was obvious from the beginning that the conversation was going to fail as an intervention because of who Joe and Dave are, because of the audiences they've cultivated.

17:10If you look at the response, I mean, I haven't done this in recent days, but in the immediate aftermath, I think when it had some hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, I looked at the comments and, you know, at that time, maybe things have changed. I can't imagine, but it was 100%, I mean, not even 99%, 100 % against Douglas, right? Douglas was just a pompous asshole, just arguing from authority. There's no value in what he said. I can't believe Joe even had him on. Dave Smith's a genius, right? I mean, that was the center of narrative gravity there. Obviously, all of that is completely delusional and symptomatic of the problem that we have in our culture and the problem that Joe has created for himself over there with his immense audience, right?

17:56I mean, Joe has cultivated that audience. Joe is, in some sense, a part of his audience, right? He's, you know, his reaction to Douglas in the moment, when Douglas was trying to perform an intervention on him, pointing out the obvious fact that he has played footsie with some very dangerous conspiracy theories. He has had people like Daryl Cooper on the podcast and not had the searching conversation that was ethically necessary in the aftermath of Daryl Cooper's appearance on Tucker Carlson. He didn't, you know, he can use the phrase sunlight is the best disinfectant, and perhaps it is, but he brought none of it to that conversation.

18:31And he brings none of it to any conversation where he hasn't done his homework in advance so as to detect the lies and the delusions of his guest, right? He didn't do it with Trump. He doesn't do it with people like RFK Jr. I mean, he just said he - Which ironically, he did it here with Douglas, who's an expert. So he brought on a non-expert to counterbalance him. Listen, if you get across the table from Joe and you don't have your facts straight about MMA, or you're going to say something bad about marijuana, he's going to crush you, right? He'll crush you in five seconds and he will never let up until you start making sense.

19:06And if you don't, the conversation's over, right? I mean, maybe he'll change the subject politely, but you're never coming back. And he will make no secret of the fact that he thinks you're a moron, right? He doesn't do that when Daryl Cooper, the podcast host and amateur historian who he really admires, gets on there and starts spouting David Irving's fake Holocaust history because he doesn't know that he's doing that, right? He hasn't prepared himself to do that, and he doesn't see the liability of talking to an entirely self-taught, you know, enthusiast of taboo history and not being prepared to push back against it.

19:47Again, it's easy to see the source of the confusion because because there's this basic assumption that there can be nothing wrong in having, quote, good faith, good-natured conversation with somebody and just getting their view of the world, right? What could be wrong with that? And, I mean, Lex Friedman, while he has a slightly different approach, I mean, I criticized Lex in the last podcast, too. He was very annoyed to be wrapped up in the same sentence with Joe. And perhaps that was to some degree unfair because my gripe with Lex is slightly different. It's not that Lex does no preparation.

20:22He obviously does. And I think he tweeted, he got on Twitter and read me the riot act and said he does more preparation than 99 % of journalists. We might doubt that. But it's just that what he doesn't do with all that preparation is actually effectively push back against people who really need to hit a brick wall at that point of the conversation. He platforms people he shouldn't platform. You know, Kanye West is the example I really publicly whinged about. But even when he pushes back, even if he pushes back with words and you ask questions, you know, if this was the podcast election, what that really meant was over time, a few hours, you humanize somebody.

21:00And if the vibes are good, even if you're pushing back and you're hanging out, sitting across from one another, the energy is going to be such that the audience is led to believe that this can't be too bad of a person, no matter what you say. And so there's some responsibility there that even if you're going to have journalistic integrity and say, push back wherever is necessary, it's really hard when you're smiling and giggling in between questions and there's nice moments to be had. Even if you say, look, let's just agree that this was a bad idea. And I think you lied on that one or whatever.

21:34They're going to find something two minutes later because it's just a hang. And those hangs are effective in sane washing or humanizing people. Yeah. You really can't have it both ways. I mean, many of these podcasters celebrated the 2024 election as the podcast election, but that was really just to claim that these podcasts had been instrumental in changing public opinion, right? I mean, in getting Trump elected, people saw his humanity. They saw he's a real guy who can just hang and who can talk about anything. He's not afraid, but Kamala Harris is afraid to go on Rogan's podcast. And that was scored against her pretty heavily, right?

22:12She's just got canned talking points, and she's so terrified to touch all the third rails, you know, set up by the woke intelligentsia that, you know, she's going to be tongue-tied on any topic that would otherwise humanize her. She can't even risk turning on the microphone with someone like Joe. To say it was the podcast election is to say that those conversations mattered, right? And they did matter. I totally agree it was the podcast election. And so it mattered that none of these guys, not Joe, not even Lex, though he actually did try a little bit in his interview of Trump. Not Andrew Schultz, not the all-in guys, not Theo Vaughn, right?

22:47No one did what any sane and responsible journalist would have done, would have had to have done in one of those encounters, which is to push back against Trump's odious, divisive, dangerous lies, right? Which are well-established. This is not my opinion. This is not a topic about which there can be a credible difference of opinion. The man has lied about everything under the sun, and there's just a clear track record. And to take the most consequential, the big lie, that he won the 2020 election, right, that it was stolen from him, that Joe Biden was a fraudulent president because he stole the election.

23:28That was a dangerous lie that he still hangs over our society like a sword of Damocles, right? It's still a provocation to political violence. and one of the most depressing things about the you know election night in 2024 was not that trump won i mean that was that was depressing from my point of view but the genuinely scary thing and i've said this at least at one point on a podcast is that there was a moment in the evening where kamala harris still could have won right this so-called blue wall states hadn't fallen yet right i think the at that point the the new york times was giving her an 11 chance of winning.

24:05So it was still, it was in the realm of possibility for her to win. And many of us recognized at that point that given all the lying, given that even the, you know, Elon Musk at that point was lying about voting irregularities and fraud, obvious fraud in Pennsylvania, I think, it would have been dangerous for her to have won at that point. It was not safe for her to have won a free and fair election at that moment, given the messaging, right? We would have had an explosion of political violence coming from the right. I'm absolutely convinced of it. Because of what Trump had done for four years, the way he had lied about the lack of integrity of our electoral system, Joe Rogan, the all-in guys, Lex Friedman should have pushed really hard on that point.

24:50That was the only responsible thing to do. They did nothing like that. So it was the podcast election. What they did is they gave him a dozen hours, practically, of free media exposure to tens of millions of people, wherein they worked very hard to midwife the most humanizing conversation possible. They just created a good hang with the guy and made him look like the celebrity that he is. I mean, we can get to Bill Maher in a second, but I mean, the fact that he's a good hang is not relevant given his track record, given what we already know he has done to our politics. And any journalist, I mean, this is why it's so dangerous and irresponsible.

25:33The fact that the biggest media platforms in the world right now are providing an illusion of long-form journalism without any of the sanity-sparing principles of real journalism. Awesome. Well, I don't want to get back to Bill yet. I do want to get to him. But what I do want to talk about is maybe while we're here on the podcast, if you can just sharpen up or help clarify some of the confusion around freedom of speech versus responsibility and what you are really wanting these platforms to do. And then next, if you can talk about maybe some confusion around expertise. I do have some more questions there, but why don't you start with that?