#489 — More From Sam: A Fabulist at Cambridge, the Strait of Hormuz, AOC in 2028, and More

0:01Jaron Lanier:You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today. Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam. Hello, Sam. Hey, good to see you. Good to see you as well. We are not taping in front of a live audience again because we weren't certain we were going to be able to tape today.

0:36Jaron Lanier:And who knows, maybe this will become the new normal again. All right, you ready to jump in? Yeah, let's jump in. Jason Erday was found dead at the age of 41. And for those who don't know who he is, he was a Cambridge professor and fast rising media star until his world collapsed over the summer. In July, there were credible plagiarism accusations that expanded into journalists, questioning his biographical claims, which were incredible. He claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, which is something only the most elite ultra runners have done. Cambridge opened an investigation on August 5th and Airday resigned the same day.

1:11Jaron Lanier:His autobiography, which many think contained bold falsehoods, was then published August 11th. Days later, he was found dead. What do you make of all this?

1:21Sam Harris:Well, apparently, I saw, not being on social media, I don't think I saw just how big a story this was. Apparently this was just wall to wall. And in the UK, this was just completely dominated the news cycle. And even before he died, I mean, it was the coverage, I think we could imagine, precipitated his suicide. The onus is really on Cambridge and the other institutional actors who covered for him. I think the BBC and other journalists probably played an ignominious role in this because they attacked his unmasking as a plagiarist and a fabulist as a symptom of racism, right? Now, it didn't help that the philosopher at Cambridge or a former fellow at Cambridge who's a philosopher has as his hobby horse, you know, something like race realism, right?

2:13Sam Harris:He spends a lot of time thinking about intelligence differences between groups. And I mean, so, so the optics of that weren't great and understandably distracting, but it doesn't mean he was wrong about this case at all. It doesn't mean, it doesn't mean that this case was ever plausible, right? I mean, the fact that Cambridge believed this guy's claims about himself, I mean, it just seems impossible. I mean, he, he claimed to, to have not spoken a word until age 11, to not be able to read and write until age 18. Then he got a PhD in one of these fake woke disciplines, some backwater of sociology that's all about racial grievance.

2:53Sam Harris:Intellectually, this whole area of every university is almost total bullshit. There really needs to be a house cleaning there. But the fact that he was promoted as some kind of prodigy, given how crazy his self-representation was, is a sign of just how cultic and confused the left and left-leaning institutions have become. I mean, it's just a sign of the cancer having spread everywhere.

3:23Jaron Lanier:Why would Cambridge do this? Why would they not investigate? Why would they just take him at face value?

3:28Sam Harris:Would they do this with anyone else or is there something special? You can imagine they wouldn't do it with a Jew. I mean, it's just, this is all anti-racism. This is Ibram X. Kendi and, you know, the genius that became fully formed in the brains of everyone left of center post-George Floyd, right? This is putting the black, the BLM black square, not only in your bio, but in your brain. It's a cult. It's always been a cult. I mean, it's been obvious for about a decade now that this is what we're witnessing is the ramifications of a moral panic around race and social justice that got engineered on the left.

4:07Sam Harris:And in large measure, it gave us Trump and Trumpism, in my view. I mean, I think it's just as culpable for the derangement of the right as the derangement of the right is. it's intolerable. And if we don't get our heads clear of its new variant, this far left socialist slash communist alliance with Islamism, we're going to go for another round of right-wing ascendancy in America and elsewhere. So to speak about Arday himself, I don't know whether he was just genuinely crazy or just a con artist. I mean, I can't really put much emphasis on the artist part of that. I mean, again, these lies should not have been believable by anyone, but I mean, he might've had genuine mental illness.

4:53Sam Harris:I don't know. So he's some kind of George Santos character or some, it means it's a totally bizarre story, but again, whatever his sins as a person or his deficits as a person, again, I don't know. All in the onus is totally on Cambridge and everyone who believed this. It's just incredible.

5:13Jaron Lanier:But are you putting the onus on Cambridge because they just didn't ask questions or because they used him to propel him to the top so that they could tell a nice story about a guy like this.

5:22Sam Harris:They're an institution that has become totally corrupt in its desperation to believe that somebody who checks all the identitarian boxes is some kind of woke superhero, right? So these are claims that would not have been believed about anyone else. I mean, just none of this passes the laugh test. It's just, again, you're in the presence of a lunatic who's making these claims about himself, right? I mean, he might as well have said that he used to be able to fly, but gave it up because he got bored, right? I mean, it's just, it's madness. So I don't know what to make of the fact that they believed all this, but then when they double down and triple down and castigate anyone who doubts this stuff as a racist motivated by bad motives, but by definition, how else could you, you know, what other reason could you possibly have for doubting the gifts of this man with dreadlocks?

6:19Sam Harris:You know, I mean, it's, it's, um, the social justice hysteria around race that has occurred in the last decade has been almost totally dishonest. Almost. I mean, this is the Jussie Smollettification of everything, right? And Cambridge and the BBC and the New York Times and all of our most trusted institutions are the main participants in it. They've been activated and baffled by the far left willingly. And it's this, again, the spell, I'm convinced that the spell is in the process of breaking. It's been, I don't think we're anywhere near peak woke, but this recent variant of it with the DSA among Democrats and the obvious confusion there, you know just take the american context um really has me worried about the next two years in in our

7:12Jaron Lanier:politics and maybe um when the gulf states said they wouldn't send their students or whatever it was to uh yeah the ua universities or maybe they meant the woke left too these are also the problems and i also want to touch on the failure of institutions i want to talk to you about fauci in a minute but first i want to move to uh shortly after the iran memorandum of understanding was signed you said i don't think the details much matter because i don't think it's real I don't think it's going to last. Now I've checked with the judges and they're not going to give you any points for calling this one.

7:41Jaron Lanier:But a few weeks later, we're right back here where we started. Trump is now saying the strait will become U.S. territory. And he's backed up that claim with a photo of the location encircled by his magic Sharpie. Any new thoughts or is this just the

7:54Sam Harris:same disaster with new details? Yeah. I mean, so I don't think I deserve much credit for calling bullshit on the MOU. I mean, it was just obvious. So too is this obvious. I mean, we don't have a good way out of this war. There's certainly no way for Trump to declare victory credibly and move on, which is obviously what he wants to do. But there's just certain things are objectively true. Iran has more, despite all the people we've killed, all the leadership we've killed. Iran has more power today than it did before the war. We've demonstrated that it can have a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz and we can't do much about it.

8:38Sam Harris:It can attack our allies in the region and our own bases in the region. And we've run out of the interceptors and other weapons we need to defend all that. We're virtually run out. So we've advertised our weakness and Iranian strength over the course of this war in a way that is impossible for anyone to ignore, despite what Trump says about it. So that's where we are. I mean, this is just total incompetence, as far as I can tell. I mean, it's just, it's not to say that the initial, you know, bombing run with Israel wasn't a display of massive military competence. I think it probably was. And I guess at that point might have been plausible to think that the regime might fall.

9:23Sam Harris:But the fact that we were so low on the weapons we need to fight a longer war, the fact that a war with China seems more or less unthinkable given how a war with Iran has played out. I mean, all of this is, I mean, we might have known this about ourselves. One would have hoped we would have known this about ourselves and not have just been completely surprised on all counts here. But the world didn't know it about us. And the world has, you know, Iran has called our bluff and now the world sees that in many respects, we are a paper tiger. And in addition to all of that, Trump has alienated all of our allies, taught them all that we can't be relied upon.

10:03Sam Harris:Our military weakness aside, we have a moral weakness, which is that we've become completely transactional and open-minded to collaborating with genuine enemies. And we now have Trump appraising Kim Jong-un and denigrating South Korea in the last week, just in a way that, you know, completely bewildering and pointless inversion of our actual alliance. None of this is four-dimensional chess. This is just a know-nothing and moral lunatic in charge of our quickly waning superpower. I mean, he's done more to reduce our power and influence in the world than I think anyone could have imagined. I mean, short of just blowing up our own cities in, you know, self-inflicted harm, he's torched our reputation in every respect.

10:58Sam Harris:I mean, again, our allies are finding ways to hedge against our failures of competence and loyalty hour by hour now. And it's just not like the world is now learning to work around us and to figure out how to fill the void that's being left by the leadership role we once had. Yeah.

11:21Jaron Lanier:And I'm also seeing a parallel between health care and military that we're great at acute, not very good at chronic.

11:27Sam Harris:Well, but I mean, acute, one would have thought this would have been acute too. I mean, this is not, again, Iran is nobody's idea of a state actor that should confound us when we're using something close to 100 % of our resources to execute regime change. I mean, the fact that we're entangled in something that we can't get out of and can't seem to win. I mean, this, you know, I think this is, I put it down to surely some, someone in the Pentagon knew exactly how this was likely to play out. But in terms of the people who made the decisions, I think they've probably just been continually surprised based on their not having actually had the conversations or read the briefs or done the war games.

12:15Sam Harris:I think it's totally possible that Trump was surprised that the Iranians seized the Strait of Hormuz in the first place, which is something we knew they would do for decades.

12:25Jaron Lanier:So you don't think staying at a Holiday Inn Express the night before qualifies you for this? Speaking of this, I want to talk just quickly, get your thoughts on the credible Iranian assassination threat against Trump, where they thought his plane may be shot down by a missile. So he boarded Air Force One and secretly moved to a military jet. But the early reports had him being smuggled out through a food cart and not a food truck. And of course, the internet was not allowing that to go on. Any thought about that? And you just imagine Trump getting out through a food cart.

12:56Sam Harris:I think I missed most of the comedy there. So the final story is he actually was on Air Force One?

13:02Jaron Lanier:He was on Air Force One. He boarded it. Then they smuggled him out through a food truck. But early reports was that he was smuggled out through a food cart. Oh, so he was smuggled off, but the journalists were left on the plane? Yeah, everyone. And he took off as planned. But I saw a bunch of flight attendants saying, excuse me, that's not physically possible. But yeah, he did. That's the story that I'm more of.

13:26Sam Harris:Well, I honestly didn't follow the details that closely. I think there has to be something ethically interesting about a president who's pretending to be on Air Force One as a decoy, and that the Air Force One is in fact filled with journalists and other aides whose risk of death now has gone way, way up. He was probably hoping it got shot down. Yeah. I mean, they're incurring all the risk that was deemed intolerable for a president to take. So I think that's strange on some level. I'm not quite sure what he should have done, but I could imagine that leaving a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who worked at CNN who had to take that ride.

14:08Sam Harris:So, yeah. Unbelievable. You guys, you're going to be fine. Don't worry about it. We're serving these. I'll be over here. Just don't tell anybody.

14:15Jaron Lanier:Yeah, it'll be Chateaubriand. You're going to enjoy it and get some wine. Wow. Yeah. All right. I want to move on to Dr. Fauci. This situation is complicated. I want to know what you think he did. What did he get wrong? And what are people getting wrong about him or tease this out however you want?

14:33Sam Harris:Well, it's sort of all things are true here in this situation. I mean, it's he seems to have done many things wrong. He seems to have not been entirely candid. He's his the contents of his journal are, you know, much of it is embarrassing. And I haven't I've just seen the clips of it. I haven't read it myself. But, you know, it's, I think it's wrong for his personal journals to be leaked in this way. I mean, I don't think, you know, nobody should really be judged on the contents of what they were writing to themselves, thinking it was going to be private. So I think it's probably cynical and damaging to our culture to be leaking them this way.

15:11Sam Harris:But nonetheless, it reveals something about the man and his level of narcissism and star fuckery and just how blown around he was by proximity to celebrity. I mean, that's all embarrassing. It seems that he was not, he had, you know, thought in some cases thought one thing and said another publicly about COVID or about its origins or about the effectiveness of vaccines or whatever. And so that's not a good look insofar as he was part of the campaign to demonize any speculation about the origins of the virus being from a, from a lab versus a wet market as, as racist. That I think is, as I've said since the beginning, that was just odious and dishonest and, and just so obviously counterproductive.

15:54Sam Harris:and also incoherent. I've said this many times, but I just don't see how you think, how really anyone can think that a lab leak, an allegation of a lab leak for a country like China is more invidious politically than an allegation of a wet market leak, right? I mean, lab leaks occur everywhere in the UK, in the US. I mean, this is like, this is, we understand that lab leaking is a problem. Having a wet market where you have pangolins on top of raccoon dogs, on top of bats, posing a perpetual risk to our species. This is just the stupidest fucking practice practically that can be named. And the fact that the Chinese can't figure out how to stop doing this because they have such an appetite for eating these loathsome creatures, that, if anything, culturally, if anything is culturally disparaging, pointing, you know, just circulating pictures of Chinese people eating bats and raccoon dogs, that's worse than a lab leak, right?

16:52Sam Harris:So the zoonotic origin thing, the idea that this is somehow benign and that a president who was walking around talking about the Kung flu is being a racist for speculating about lab leak. I mean, I would love to have heard Trump talk about wet markets and their details. You know, I mean, if you want to look at, you know, jingoistic comedy, I mean, that's a much richer source of it. So these are just stupid people, you know, following some, again, some other kind of woke laser pointer that, you know, caught their attention. And the fact that it distorted the public communication of science and, you know, our efforts to understand the origins of COVID is just deeply embarrassing.

17:38Sam Harris:So I don't know how much Fauci contributed to that. I certainly some. I don't know. I think the other shoe hasn't dropped yet with respect to our involvement as a country and his involvement as a person in gain-of-function research and specifically at Wuhan or elsewhere and whether he was ever disingenuous about all of that. Going back years, I remember Rand Paul's interrogation of him and Fauci's kind of rabbinical hair splitting of the phrase gain of function. That always struck me as suspicious. I worried about him as a communicator of science in that moment, and that was years ago. But on the other hand, he's also someone who has spent decades in the public service and I think did an immense amount of good during the AIDS epidemic.

18:32Sam Harris:I mean, it's just the fact that his life is being summarized in this way, in the middle of the dynamics of what really is a kind of witch hunt. Again, that's not to say there's no truth to any of it, right? I mean, there are probably things for which he's culpable, but the whole thing is a mess. I mean, it's sort of, so it's all, all sides to this have a point, I think.

18:55Jaron Lanier:But a lot of people were punished for even challenging him. And, you know, you got to trust the science and you were thrown off for even suggesting it may be a lab leak that you'd be thrown off socials.

19:07Sam Harris:I didn't, I haven't followed what his role was in enforcing all that. I remember like, you know, Francis Collins was, there's some emails that got leaked from him on this subject. He certainly allowed it. He didn't say, wait a second, we shouldn't be doing that. Yeah, I mean, it's not, none of that's good because it was always plausible. So first of all, there are a lot of people speaking now as though we know for sure it was a lab leak. I don't think that's true either. I think that scientifically the jury is still out on this and you can find virologists who have a coherent case to make still for the wet market origins of the virus.

19:43Sam Harris:again wet markets are so awful and so stupid and it's it's it's an international scandal that they exist right so like this this is a problem too it's not like oh we just got unlucky with the wet market and you know so you know no harm no foul china no like both are bad has anyone ever

20:02Jaron Lanier:put together a list of wet markets and labs doing gain of function in the same city to find out you know how common this is i mean with the the fact that there's a lab in wuhan you know how many

20:14Sam Harris:there are different things to emphasize in the story i mean i still think it is true to say that the first cases the epicenter around around the first logged cases is the wet market it's not the lab it's not some other part of wuhan i think i think that is still true again i haven't this is all in the rearview mirror for me i haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this of late but But last I looked, you know, someone in the audience can correct me if I'm wrong, but last I looked, it is still an open question of where COVID came from, right? But the crucial thing is that it was always plausible that it came from a lab.