#474 — More From Sam: Hasan Piker, Islamism, Making Sense Community, and More

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0:24Jaron Lanier:Welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Once again, we're taping this live in front of subscribers. I'll be asking Sam many of the questions that you subscribers have submitted. We'll be fielding reactions in real time so that Sam can address those. Before we get to our first topic, I just want to quickly mention that Sam has shows in Toronto, which is sold out next week, DC and New York City. There are still tickets for DC and New York. And then the following week on May 20th and 21st, you'll be in Dallas and Austin. Also, you have some great podcast guests coming up in the next month or so.

0:54Jaron Lanier:Michael Pollan will be released next week. Susan Cain, Alain DeBaton, who's just like an incredible human, or seems to me I haven't met him, Vinod Khosla, Noah Smith, Jonathan Swan, and others. Okay, I want to get to our first topic. Actually, this is also a bit of an announcement, but since we're going to discuss it, I think it counts. We have launched a new community, and for those who haven't heard about it yet, why don't you tell us what your intentions are with it?

1:19Sam Harris:Yeah, this is really, I guess, I mean, in my mind, something like a replacement for reddit not no offense to all the redditors out there but i just think we need a situation where there's less noise and more signal and and more civility and so um we've created something here which we're it's going to be web-based for the first month but there's an app in development and um anyone who subscribe now or subscribes before june 1st will have access to the community for free i mean it comes with the subscription but after June 1st, we're breaking them apart, I believe, should this thing work. We're going to go on a month-to-month basis.

1:58Sam Harris:If the whole thing catches fire, we're going to yank it and realize that social media of any sort is impossible. But we're going to take a stab at building a community that is not selecting for any of the usual variables of engagement and weirdness and division, but just actually a place where you want to have a conversation with people. So, right.

2:17Jaron Lanier:I think the goal for this community, for it to work, it should feel like we've just widened our friend circles. And so some of the experiences we have in WhatsApp or, or the communication we have in Slack, you should feel that comfortable and everyone there will be using their real names. So that's also going to change. That's one,

2:33Sam Harris:that's one innovation, which I hopefully will, will mean something. Yeah. So it's an experiment. I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be fun.

2:40Jaron Lanier:You too. You've had some great conversations this past month, Rahm Emanuel, Francis Fukuyama, Ben Shapiro, Lloyd Blankvine, and others. I'm curious if you have any post-mortem thoughts on any of those, especially something you may have enjoyed or wish you would have done differently.

2:54Sam Harris:I think I got some criticism for the Shapiro conversation that it wasn't as much of a debate as some people wanted, or I didn't hold his feet to the fire on Trump's record as much as I could have. I think that's probably true. Actually, Rabbi David Wolpe wrote a very nice email on that topic, criticizing me for not having pointed out some specifics about how much damage Trump has done to our standing. At one point, Ben compared the president, really any president, to a plumber. He's not looking to him for inspiration. He just needs to unblock the toilet. And I sort of let him get away with that facile analogy.

3:34Sam Harris:It's just not true. He's not a plumber. He's somebody whose character affects everything. I think I said something about, you know, the effect on culture and our politics. But he's also affected our standing in the world by alienating all of our allies and giving comfort to many of our actual enemies. So, I mean, the thing I found with Ben, which was interesting, I guess I could have anticipated it, is that he's such a, calling him a single-issue voter is probably not fair, but he was like a two-issue voter. It was Israel and the Jews being one issue and wokeness being another, and wokeness in large part is a problem for how it affects that first issue.

4:10Sam Harris:And if you think that in a forced choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, if you think Kamala Harris is likely to be sufficiently bad on those two issues, there's really nothing Trump can do that you're going to regret unless it crosses the line into something so awful that it's worse than your worst imaginings about what Kamala Harris was going to be like on those two issues. So every time I pushed him on what was wrong with Trump and Trumpism, he more or less agreed. And yet he said explicitly or implicitly that none of that's as bad. I mean, Trump grifting billions of dollars for his family and friends is awful, corrupt, embarrassing, etc.

4:48Sam Harris:But still not as bad as what Kamala Harris could have done or would have done on those two issues. And it's a counterfactual I can't really adjudicate. No one can. I mean, I disagree with him, obviously, and I think I weight those issues differently than he does. But, you know, it's not really there's not really much to debate there. He just he hasn't seen the thing that Trump has done that is sufficiently awful for him to feel any regret over his choice. So that's where we kind of left it.

5:16Jaron Lanier:Yeah. I thought that email he wrote would have been great for new community. So hopefully he'll join us over there.

5:22Sam Harris:Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm hoping for. Yeah.

5:24Jaron Lanier:One thing Ben Shapiro mentioned that felt right to me was the line about the sleight of hand that seems to be happening around anti-Semitism where all the Jews and anti-Semites know exactly what's going on, but it feels as though everyone else isn't seeing that.

5:38Sam Harris:Yeah, I mean, again, I think that's a good way to describe what's happening. I think we'll get to people like Mamdani and Hassan Piker, and that's part of the problem there. People just don't see what's happening there. But I don't view it as so much a matter of Jews and anti-Semites. I view it as a matter of Islamism and the values of open societies, right? So that's what I'm tracking. I mean, I'm also tracking anti-Semitism, unfortunately, now. But antisemitism was not something I was been focused on for the last quarter century. Islamism is so. And it overlaps with the problem of antisemitism, but they're not quite the same problem.

6:18Jaron Lanier:Yeah, we'll get to those two guys shortly. I thought the Lloyd Blankfein conversation was great, too. He seems like a very thoughtful guy. I liked him. He seems like somebody who would make for a great politician the right kind that you'd want. He's just a great communicator and a great thinker. Speaking of politicians, this is just my intuition, but about Rahm, I know he's looking at perhaps running for president, but my sense is I don't think he thinks he has the best shot at winning, but I think that's probably one of the best platforms for him to influence others with his ideas. And I think if the Democrats win in 2028, he'll use that as an opportunity to play a big role in the next administration.

6:59Jaron Lanier:What do you think about that?

7:00Sam Harris:Well, I'm happy he'll be, if he is actually in the race for the duration, I'm happy he'll be there because I think he'll push the Democrats to have something like a sister soldier moment around the lingering shades of wokeness, which are all too lingering. I mean, from what I can tell, we're really poised to pitch back into some sort of George Floyd hysteria. I mean, you know, we'll get to Hassan Piker. I think the fact that The New York Times is burnishing Hassan Piker as though he were the future of progressive politics in America is a very bad sign. I think it's done immense brand damage, in my mind, to The Times, as though that hasn't been happening for years and years.

7:43Sam Harris:But I mean, it's just such a colossal moral and political error. But it makes me worry that I'm just, you know, wish casting all of this and that the Democratic Party is unrecoverable now. I mean, I just I just think the fact that the people at The New York Times think that Hassan Piker is worth signal boosting, I mean, tells me something that it tells me that I'm out of either they're out of touch or I'm out of touch with the culture left of center because he's basically our Nick Fuentes. You know, I mean, that exaggerates it by 10%, but I mean, totally irredeemable character. I mean, I'm just launching into Hassan Piker now because it's time.

8:25Sam Harris:Keep going since you're on him, but - I mean, he's someone who, he's on record saying that America deserved 9-11. He supports Hamas. He supports Hezbollah. He supports the Houthis. Needless to say, he thinks that Israel is an apartheid state that is, guilty of genocide in Gaza. I'm sure we'll get to the genocide charge in other contexts. And just remember what the New York Times has done. They gave him a very favorable style section profile. They gave him his own op-ed. Ezra Klein idiotically embraced him in an op-ed titled Hassan Piker is not the enemy. There was more, he was on at least two New York Times podcasts, one of which he was there celebrating micro-looting against corporations that you just think kept too which money.

9:09Sam Harris:I mean, this is just not anything like sanity for the Democrats, right? This is, this is suicide in 2028. So, I mean, we can talk, I mean, obviously wealth inequality is a huge problem.

9:20Jaron Lanier:Can we play a clip for a second? I'd love to play a clip from, I think it's Pot Save America. Yeah, that's his. Hamas is a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state. I stand by that. Do you actually mean that? Or is that a rhetorical move or like a solidarity signal? Like what? I mean, it's all of the above. I do mean it. I think it's a rhetorical move because it frustrates a lot of people. I've also said I'm a harm reduction voter. I'm a lesser evil voter. And therefore I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time because I'm looking at the situation as as as a paramilitary organization that has like a political party as well, a politburo as well, that is entirely comprised not as an alien force, but of the orphaned children that have, you know, had their parents killed by an apartheid state that has been dominating the lives of Palestinians for 80 years at this point.

10:14And they've done a genocide at this point as well. But like it started off with the Nakba and has only evolved as technology has gotten better to become more heinous. And Gaza is this hermetically sealed area that many people correctly point to as the world's largest open air prison before October 7. So my perspective on this has always been that I think that Hamas's tactics, which I oppose at times, right, or it's like internal governance issues are secondary to this conversation because they're it's it's like uh placing a lot of emphasis on the nat turner uh rebellion or or uh instead of talking about the the much larger much more consequential much uh bigger harm that you know chattel slavery was uh to to black people to like sell black people and to to rape them and

11:12Sam Harris:okay i think i think i got enough of this clip right that's the end of it anyway yeah yeah so I didn't see that podcast and I don't know how Favreau dealt with that, you know, vomitous confusion. But the fact that he was talking to the guy in the first place makes me worry that, again, the Democrats are lost here, right? So if you want President J.D. Vance or Tucker Carlson or I guess in the best case, Marco Rubio, well then by all means, you know, signal boost Hassan Piker for the next two years. But it's a disaster. Yeah. So I don't know. you know, it's very hard for me to know what's going on in the Democratic Party, really.

11:50Sam Harris:I mean, we have 77 % of Democrats who think that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Those are Hassan Piker's people. 77 % is a big number that attests to some serious moral and political confusion on that issue alone. I mean, for anyone who's confused about that, I mean, the word genocide means something. It meant something yesterday or the day before that. It means the effort to eradicate a people in whole or in part as such, right? It's like, you know, the Nazis killed Jews, tried to kill every last Jew they could get their hands on because they were Jews. The Hutus tried to kill all the Tutsis with machetes over the course of 100 days in 1994.

12:30Sam Harris:Those are genocides, and we need that word. If we're going to redefine genocide to mean, you know, simply a war we don't like or a war that has too much collateral damage, well, then we're just going to need to invent a new word to signify actual genocides, which are, again, efforts to eradicate people simply because they belong to a specific group. And by that measure, Hamas is explicitly and has always been a genocidal organization. This group of paramilitary fighters who are exclusively orphans whose, what, internal procedures Hassan Piker can quibble with, but they have a Politburo. I mean, this guy is such a colossal moron.

13:10Sam Harris:It's a genocidal organization that aspires to genocide directly in his charter, and since October 7th has said it would repeat October 7th again and again and again ad infinitum. If it had the ability, it would kill every Jew in Israel. We know that. All the Palestinians know that. Hassan Piker knows that. There's a lot of people on the left who apparently are confused about that or don't care, either because they're so anti-Semitic or they're so deranged by the PSYOP that's been worked on them over Gaza. but there has been no genocide in Gaza, right? It doesn't matter how many people were killed, it's still not a genocide as witnessed by the fact that Israel could commit genocide anytime it wants and hasn't.

13:49Sam Harris:No country attempting genocide sends millions of text messages and cell phone calls and drops leaflets trying to get people to evacuate buildings before they bomb them. No country trying to commit genocide opens humanitarian corridors in the middle of its war. No country trying to commit genocide sends its own sons and daughters at great peril to clear booby-trapped buildings rather than just obliterating them from the sky at no risk of themselves, right? None of this makes any sense. So the use of this word genocide is nothing short of a blood libel. And it's intended as such by people who know what they're talking about, but it seems to be confusing 77 % of Democrats.

14:30Sam Harris:And the New York Times is now participating in this confusion. And Pod Save America, one of the biggest liberal podcasts, is participating in this confusion. It's just not, I mean, it's deeply immoral, but it's also just not functional politically. I mean, all of this is going to come back to make whoever we put forward under these forces in 2028 unelectable if he or she has to pay lip service to this shibboleth that Israel is now a genocidal apartheid state. And we all know that, you know, the war in Gaza was totally unjust.

15:01Jaron Lanier:So we're getting pushback from the audience saying it doesn't matter how many people were killed, it couldn't be a genocide is not an accurate statement. Okay.

15:10Sam Harris:So we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II, right? You might quibble with that. You might think that was a war crime. You might think that was a horrific evil. It wasn't a genocide and no one calls it a genocide. We vaporized 100 ,000 people instantaneously. and then we killed another 100 ,000 slowly by radiation poisoning and fire and infection. No one calls that a genocide. No serious person calls that a genocide and no human rights organization calls that a genocide. Amnesty International does not call that a genocide, but do you know what they call the war in Gaza? A genocide, right?

15:48Sam Harris:So that's the moral confusion. We know it's, we know our dropping atomic bombs on Japan wasn't a genocide because what did we do after Japan surrendered. We went in there and we occupied them and we rebuilt their society. And by 1952, when we left, they had ceased to be our enemies. They were our allies, right? At no point did anyone think that our goal was to eradicate the world of Japanese people, right? So that's what a genocide is, the eradication project. And the fact that people are confused about what this word means is culturally appalling. But this confusion has been engineered by people who know what they're doing.

16:29Sam Harris:This is my problem with the Hassan Pikers of the world and the people who influence him. And it's a problem with the Zoran Mamdani's of the world, which I'm sure we'll get to. These people know what genocide means, right? And they're lying about it. So before we get to

16:44Jaron Lanier:Mamdani, how do you think that explains Andrew Sullivan's position? What is he getting wrong here.