#445 — More From Sam: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Billionaires, Thanksgiving Political Debates, & Rapid Fire Questions

0:28Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

0:36Okay, welcome back to another episode of More from Sam, Thanksgiving edition, which really doesn't mean anything. It just means Happy Thanksgiving to everybody. And if you're not in the U.S., it just means a happy third week of November. Hi, Sam. How are you? Good, good. Good to see you. Yeah, good to see you. It was great seeing you in Chicago last week. I have to say that was by far my favorite show of yours thus far. Yeah, that was fun. It was a great venue and we had some friends there. It was really, it was a blast. Yeah. It felt like it's about 20 % different than the one you started with in Chicago.

1:08Yeah. Yeah. I keep revising it as things come into the news and drop out. So, yeah. Yeah. It's getting a little tighter as you go too. So it's enjoyable to watch that go. I'm starting to know what I think, apparently. Yeah. Well, you had your first heckler too, which was... Honestly, that is, it's possible that's the second heckler ever. I mean, it's the first legit heckler. I had something close to that before, but this is a person who actually had to be escorted out, you know. I don't think, do you know, I don't think I've, I did not know until yesterday what her position was. Do you think you know?

1:43Well, clearly she didn't like something I said about Islam. I'm not quite sure how, why or how far that ran, but that was the point of contention. That's when she shrieked bullshit. I happened to be on that topic. Okay, but I was guessing the wrong side. She was actually more to the right. No, no, no. Yes. No, no. One is very hard to get to the right of me on this particular point. Well, she yelled out bullshit when you said that Islam is a religion of peace. I don't know what her position was, but it seemed like she yelled it right at that. Okay. Pretty clearly, I was calling bullshit on that concept, right?

2:21So, and I think that was unmistakable. The line I was taking, there's no way she was to the right of me. So I originally thought that, I mean, being there, I thought that was the position, but then I was, I was informed yesterday that no, I'd, I'd gotten it wrong. Either way, we had great security there. So they had her removed immediately. But for anyone else who would like to see you perform live and not yell anything out, we have nine shows coming up for 2026. Just quickly. It's Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin, Portland, Vancouver, Palm Beach, Toronto, DC, and New York City again. Any words for the people of Portland, Sam?

2:55What is happening in Portland? Yeah, it's interesting to, I mean, you put these tickets on sale in multiple cities and there's just a radical difference in specific cities. I mean, it's like New York sells out in, I don't know, a day or virtually sells out in a day. I mean, literally like two hours, we're in 80 % sold or something. And, you know, Portland, it remains to be seen whether that's actually going to work, right? I don't know what I did to Portland, but the people are not coming out. And you just never really know what's going to happen when you put tickets on sale. I mean, usually it's not a disappointment, but occasionally there's a city where something has not gone well with me in that audience.

3:38So yeah, if you don't come out, we will cancel Portland, and we will not lie about why we canceled it. We will say that we didn't sell enough tickets in Portland if that's what happens. Right. Every other act will say something like, due to unforeseen circumstances, ours is due to unforeseen circumstances. Yeah, force majeure here is the people in Portland didn't buy enough tickets. So we'll see what happens. All right, Portland, you've been warned. Get your friends, buy tickets, or you may not see Sam. All right, on to our first topic. I want to talk about, I've seen many different reactions to Marjorie Taylor Greene, her apology for the role she's played in divisive politics.

4:13And I wanted to get your reaction. Well, honestly, I didn't see her apology. It was an apology video that she made. She was talking to Dana Bash, and she was pretty apologetic about it. Right. She acknowledged that she had played a role. Dana had called her out. Yeah, I mean, that's always nice to hear. I mean, she's been so crazy that I just don't know how rehabilitated she could conceivably be. I mean, she was out there with Jewish space lasers and QAnon, and it's hard to exaggerate. It's actually impossible to exaggerate how crazy she's been. So, I mean, she was right in the Candace Owens orbit with just everything's a conspiracy and there's nothing so bizarre that she didn't have a taste for it, at least.

4:53So, yeah, I mean, if she's had a reboot of her brain and is thinking rational thoughts and has now gotten out of politics for the moment because it's become so toxic for her, having gotten out of stride with Trump. I mean, that's kind of interesting, but I just I have no confidence that people change that fundamentally, especially not in a short news cycle. So I think we're going to get some more crazy from her. I just think it'd be very surprising if we don't. Well, it reminded me when I was watching her, she seemed entirely normal in that clip for six minutes. And it reminded me of when I watched Matt Gaetz.

5:33I don't know if you remember seeing him on Club Random with Bill Maher. He seemed entirely normal too. What do you make of this? These people present as crazy, but when they're in, they can find moments of sanity. Is it a show? Yeah, I think there are people who are, I mean, this is a huge problem. It extends obviously beyond these people, I mean, to many, many people in politics and public life at the moment, where you have very talented performers on some level who, if I had to summarize the character defect, it's that they have no principles or they have a serious software flaw, which is in many cases just kind of a ravenous appetite for the contrarian take on everything, which then summates as just one conspiracy theory after another is entertained and halfway believed or fully embraced, and there's no limit to it.

6:32So, I mean, that's what we're seeing a lot of, but there are a bunch of people out there who I think are probably diagnosable as psychopaths. I mean, I think they just have no real empathy for people, and they're manipulators, and they're charismatic, and they're good at what they do, and they're unhindered by any kind of moral compunction while doing it. I mean, Trump is certainly this type of character. I mean, you know, he cannot be embarrassed by being caught in a lie or being shown to have contradicted himself. I mean, all he can do, I mean, I guess he can become enraged by some bad press, but I mean, there's no conscience there that ever gets appealed to, right?

7:14I mean, none of these people ever apologize. They don't correct errors. They don't acknowledge fault. They don't think better of anything. I mean, there's just not, they just keep pivoting. I mean, even if they change views or change policies or change direction, they pivot, but it's unacknowledged. And they have absolutely no, I mean, take Elon in this case, right? Elon has now sidled up to Trump like a beggar once again, right? He went to the MBS dinner and took whatever crumbs from the table he could be given. I mean, it's just a completely pathetic picture, but why is it so pathetic? Because here's somebody who went to war with Trump, calling him a pedophile, effectively, in so many words, basically saying, this man is criminally culpable for his entanglement with Jeffrey Epstein.

8:04That's why, you know, these files haven't come out, and they're going to come out and destroy him, right? Basically, this is, he took as hard a swing as possible at the character of the president, he's offered absolutely no rational accounting of how his opinion of Trump has changed. And yet now he's back just begging him for attention and favor. Clearly he doesn't feel, he hasn't made sick by this process, right? He doesn't even see that it's done anything to his reputation, right? He's just operating. Honestly, I just don't know what you have to have in place or have to be missing, you know, cognitively and emotionally to be able to perform like that.

8:46But it's, it's unimaginable to me that like, if I were going to suddenly change my tune on Trump and not have to acknowledge why, right? Just start praising Trump and wanting to be his friend. And I mean, just imagine that, imagine that in front of my audience, just like, okay, like I'm all, I'm all full MAGA now. Trump is the greatest president we've had, but there's nothing to account for. Right. I mean, it's just like, I don't know how these people become these type of people. But just look at the people who have accomplished these kinds of, you know, pivots. I mean, Elon's is the most egregious of late that I can, I mean, it's just, it's impossible.

9:22It's impossible to even interpret because why would he have to do this, right? He's the richest man on earth. His businesses are going fine or they're doing whatever they're doing. He doesn't need Trump forever. He can just keep doing his thing. He could have stayed with Trump as a pedophile and this bill is an abomination and go fuck yourself. And he could have had the integrity of that epiphany, but no, he's back, you know, just being a sycophant mode. Why? Right. And how? I mean, the why is inscrutable. The how is impossible for me to understand. Well, Elon strikes me as somebody who's probably more or less the same on stage and off stage, whereas Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and even Trump, it feels like the costume comes off, they get off stage and they're a different person.

10:06Like it's a show. And I think there's something different about that. Well, we know all these people are liars, right? I mean, so Elon is a, he seems to be a compulsive liar to me at this point. So he can't be the same on stage and off stage because he's lying a lot. We know Tucker Carlson is, has been lying about his views. I mean, that was one product of the Dominion lawsuit that his private texts were leaked. And we know that he had been, you know, wishing for Trump to disappear for quite some time and calling him a demonic force and said he couldn't wait to be rid of him, etc. We know he didn't believe in the 2020 election was stolen and he'd been pushing all that.

10:42So he's a hypocrite and a liar, but he's functioning in a space where none of that matters, right? He's cultivated an audience that is not disposed to keep score in any way. They're just on to the next thing, right? You know, just the the next bright, shiny object of conspiracism or, or innuendo or, or, you know, smearing of political opponents or whatever it is. But they know they, these people understand their audiences and they understand how little they need to do to maintain their reputation in front of those audiences. Right. I want to switch gears. I think it was about two days after your most recent episode on Trigonometry podcast that I noticed you getting slammed online.

11:23And by the time I noticed it was sort of slammed online is that yeah yeah exactly so this is what i was going to say is i i feel like because i didn't know about it in real time that it never really happened and i want to know is this what it's like to be off social media these days oh yeah i mean it's i i don't know about it unless it's um been sent to me by by you or or somebody else who noticed it but yeah no it's amazing it doesn't even yeah like if you if you weren't paying attention there's not that many i can count on one hand or maybe three fingers of one hand the people who will send me stuff that happens on x or reddit or yeah i know so this in this case it was elon uh slamming me on x and so you would think that would matter if being slammed on x matters you think elon doing it would matter multiple times it doesn't it's amazing i mean again i i'm reluctant to make too much of this, all the while celebrating it, because I realize there are people with certain kinds of careers or jobs where being slammed by, you know, someone even much less of a platform than Elon's on X might matter to them, right?

12:30I mean, I think you, you know, it's very easy for me to say Twitter is in real life, but I think for many people it might still be, but man, it just doesn't exist for me. It's just amazing how much it doesn't exist. Well, you're very lucky to have a great group of subscribers and supporters that are supporting you, paying you to be this voice in the world. And so you do have a great audience. But I mean, even like at this point, it's just like, even if my audience were very different, it's still hard to see how it would matter. I mean, I say, yeah, I guess the way it matters is if something gets ginned up against you and your employer can still get, you know, worried about the backlash on social media and then you can get fired.

13:15I mean, I think that is probably still happening in some media space. I think it probably has to happen still more from the left than from the right. But it's just amazing not to have my mind polluted by any of it. I mean, I can still remember what it was like to feel like I had to respond. I mean, obviously on X or on Twitter when I was on Twitter, but on the podcast. and I would just get these cycles of kind of needless controversy that was all, I mean, it took me years to realize that not for me, at least none of it would exist, but for my engagement on Twitter. I mean, I just wouldn't, you know, the Ezra Klein thing, that was all Twitter.

13:55Yeah. I mean, I guess I'm not really given to regret very much, but if I regret anything, I regret it taking me that long to realize that I had invited this sort of river of digital sludge into my life and then spent an immense amount of time trying to figure out how to keep my life clean, not realizing that I could just turn off the tap. And yeah, it took years, but here we are. You're one of the rare few that was getting canceled when it was Twitter and now canceled when it's X. Right. Yeah. From each direction, yeah. Yeah. Never go back on. Everyone listening to this podcast has won some number of lotteries, whether it's with their health, the family, financial or in many other arenas.

14:37And given your belief around the myth of the self-made man, why do you think we struggle so much to craft a society that takes care of the versions of ourselves that could have just as easily not won some of these lotteries? We don't craft such a society. We don't. Why is it so hard? Why are we not able to put ourselves in the positions of having not won the lotteries? I'm going to praise the audience if they can understand that question. But basically you're saying that many of us have won the lottery and we don't recognize just how much luck is involved in us having what we have, even our talents that we've made the most of.

15:13And we're not nearly as compassionate as we should be given the role that luck is playing in the unequal success of people in our society. That's right. Thank you for restating that question for me. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, so it's a question about compassion and irrational understanding of just how unfair life is. yeah, I don't think we're, I mean, just look at, I mean, take the problem of homelessness, right? I mean, we all find it galling and we find that, you know, if you're living in a major city in America, our complete failure to respond to this problem in a sane way. And I mean, obviously it's a very difficult problem to solve, but the thing you, you know, drug abuse aside, when you just look at the component of mental illness here and you see, you're walking on the sidewalk and you see someone who's obviously been living on the streets forever, you know, ranting to invisible enemies.

16:02I mean, how you can't feel in your bones the role that luck has played in differentiating you from this person, right? I mean, the fact that you don't have the brain chemistry that has pitched you into that hellscape, it's pure luck. I mean, literally no one can take credit for not being floridly schizophrenic. The only sane response is compassion on some level. I mean, yes, fear is also understandable. Annoyance that we haven't figured out how to keep people suffering this kind of mental illness off the front steps of the restaurant we're trying to walk into. I mean, it's just like, obviously, that's not this, It's idiot compassion that suggests that someone should be free to live out their dysfunction on the sidewalk.

16:52Whatever services exist should be given to these people, and they should be given to them someplace where they can actually receive them. So I'm not saying that anything like the status quo of just tolerating this is compassion, but compassion really is the only sane response to this. I mean, just there, but for the grace of the great roulette wheel of the galaxy, go all of us. And it's, yeah, I mean, I just, again, Elon's another example of just somebody whose ethics seems entirely framed by utterances like, I wasn't given anything. I did everything myself. and when you think of the shit that president obama got when he said in silicon valley you know you didn't build this this being all of the infrastructure that has made it possible for there to be a silicon valley in america it's the ethical intuitions of of adolescence to not acknowledge the role of luck and the and the gratitude for all that has been built before you arrived on the scene right and all the investment that was required to create a canvas for you to work on.

18:00Anyone who's not vividly aware of that is just lost ethically, I think. Yeah, I just, I mean, going back to the question that wasn't correct. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.