#490 — Lies, Bulls**t, and the Rule of Law

0:02You'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. Sam Harris, welcome back to the show. How are you? I'm good. Great to see you, Preet. It's been a while. It's been a while, and I'm just trying to figure out if things are the same, if they've gotten better, if they've gotten worse.

0:35I don't want to talk about politics just yet. Okay. Something that's been on my mind, I know is on your mind, and one of the things that you're known for is your commitment to and dedication to and concern about good faith debate and discussion, right? Is that a fair statement?

0:52Sam Harris:Yeah, sure. That's one of the reasons you have a podcast. It's one of the reasons I have a podcast. So before we talk about how political debate unfolds, because that's a subspecies of overall conversation and debate, there are discussions on college campuses, there are discussions in people's homes, there are discussions at Thanksgiving, cable television, podcasts, you name it. Has the quality of discussion, we love to say, you hear this all the time, and I heard it 20 years ago and 30 years ago also, that the quality of dialogue has gone down. Is that true, or do we just reinvent a reason to be concerned and critical and annoyed every few years?

1:33Sam Harris:No. Well, I think both things are also true. I mean, those aren't mutually exclusive, but I do think it has gone down for some obvious reasons. I mean, I think the information siloing born of social media and the fragmentation of culture as a result of that, that has preceded apace for the last 20 some odd years. I think people are reading less and what they read is shorter and less carefully argued. I think much of what people are consuming is, if not AI slop entirely. It's the slopification born of hot takes and, you know, frankly, podcast conversations such as this, although, you know, I think you and I are...

2:17Sam Harris:Hopefully we're okay. Yeah, we're not going to be displaying the most egregious sins of the format here, but so many podcasts are just a matter of the host and the guest bloviating without much care to observe anything like academic or or journalistic, or intellectual norms, right? They're just, I mean, we have so many podcasts that are run by comedians and entertainers and also just unserious people. And so the appetite for contrarianism and conspiracy thinking has been supercharged during COVID and beyond. That's one big cultural change. And so there's very little respect for institutions and institutional narratives and gatekeeping and expertise.

3:07Sam Harris:And so that unwinding has had an effect. It's not to say that there weren't reasons for it, but I think it has been in the main disastrous. I'll just take a moment to defend some comedians I know who are not unserious people. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Before you get mail on them. You want to name names? Well, I think some of the late night hosts, I don't know that they have podcasts. I think David Letterman is not an unserious person. I certainly wasn't thinking of the old guard. I think Stephen Colbert is not an unserious person. And there are some other comedians. I won't name them. Well, I'll name one.

3:37Sam Harris:I mean, he was a friend, but I'm quite worried about his cultural influence. I've named him on many other podcasts. But I think the effect that Joe Rogan's podcast has had has been, I mean, it's been many things, but it has been politically disastrous, I think. I just think it's not just what's happened on his podcast, but the instruction that every other independent broadcaster on earth has taken from his example. I think it's been terrible. But sort of the odd thing is you would think people would have a base level of credulousness about things that they hear. And in both regards, with respect to people that folks think they shouldn't agree with, someone from a different party, they don't believe anything that comes out of the mouths of the people who are on the other side of the fence.

4:25which I sort of get that. But you couple that with simultaneously taking his gospel, everything said by the folks on their own side of the fence. That's true with Joe Rogan. That I don't really understand. Do you have a theory about that?

4:40Sam Harris:Well, it is a form of tribalism. It's a form of confirmation bias. I mean, there are certain sources that you prejudge as friendly or through cruel experience, you realize that certain sources are kind of weaponized against you and you just are not disposed to take them seriously. I mean, if I'm going to tell you, you know, again, so much of this, you can date to COVID and what it did to our society. I mean, both the fact of the pandemic and the reaction to it and the overreaction to it and the counterreaction to it. I mean, all of that was a great shattering of culture that I still think we're working out the consequences of and living under the shadow of.

5:23Sam Harris:But yeah, you know, if CNN, you know, colorizes your face to make you look sick and tells the world that you're, you're a racist or you're, you know, and you're eating, you know, horse tranquilizer or, you know, horse dewormer. I mean, you know, Rogan got completely slimed by the mainstream media. So it's natural to think he's going to have a reaction against it. And I, you know, in miniature, I know what that's like, right? So it's, and I, and you know what it's like when When you see a story that you're close to, many of us have had the experience of seeing the bias and, you know, frank idiocy of even the best organs of journalism, like the New York Times, on full display.

6:04Sam Harris:I mean, as recently as today, I'm reading an article in the New York Times and I see them predisposed to get many things wrong because they're tending to various, you know, left-leaning shibboleths, you know, on a topic that I know very closely, right? So, you know, all of that stuff is infuriating, frankly. And if you don't have enough of a foothold in the norms of proper critical thought, it's easy to see how someone who bills himself as really just an entertainer, someone who's just having fun on his podcast with friends, you know, mainly, doesn't have a responsibility to keep bending over backwards to give the usual gatekeepers and the usual authorities a fresh hearing, right?

6:46Sam Harris:And so, yeah, there are many people who just think that you shouldn't believe anything in the New York Times, but you should believe what some, you know, fairly crazed person thinks about vaccines, you know, in the same breath as he tells you that he was denied a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work. I mean, they're listening to crazy people, but some of these crazy people are running parts of our government now. I mean, again, there's been a great unraveling. Since you mentioned COVID, do you have a view on how Dr. Fauci has been described, how he's been treated, and how he's been received and thought of?

7:23And how do you think of him?

7:24Sam Harris:Well, there are a few layers to this onion. So the first thing I would say is that in defense of all the people who are outraged at how the government handled everything, there are kernels of truth to that outrage. And one kernel is that the immediate branding of any speculation about the origins of this virus being not a wet market, but a lab leak as racist, right? That kind of vilification of people who were just following some obvious chains of thought at the time, that was terrible and terribly counterproductive, right? It had nothing to do with racism. Just step back for a second and ask yourself, how is a lab leak more politically invidious, i.e.

8:11Sam Harris:racist, than a wet market outbreak? right? I mean, if anything, I would say the fact that the Chinese can't figure out how to stop eating bats and pangolins and raccoon dogs, that is more, quote, racist to observe about their culture than their propensity to have a lab leak out of a level two or level three lab, which happens to more or less everyone, right? So, I mean, the racism charge was always idiotic. It was always going to produce rage in anyone who it was directed at. And so that's true. And Fauci was part of that. And his leaked journals, though I don't think they should have been leaked, I think that's awful, are obviously embarrassing.

8:52Sam Harris:I mean, the contents there, I mean, his level of star fuckery - It's consistent with libertarianism, is it not? What is consistent? Rand Paul's libertarianism is consistent with releasing the diary. Yeah, yeah. So there's hypocrisy there. So, yeah, I don't support the leaking of private journals in this way. I mean, I think many people would be embarrassed by that process. But what is, in fact, on display is also as objectively embarrassing as almost anything in a public health official. I mean, he was just blown around by his fame in a way that it was, it's just hard to defend. But he's, you know, and as to whether or not he was doing anything to cover, you know, the, for the improprieties of himself or his friends in trying to quash any investigation of a lab leak, I mean, I think that remains to be seen.

9:42Sam Harris:But I do think he's also the focus of a witch hunt. and the attacks on him and the glee with which many people are expecting an 85-year-old man to spend the rest of his days in prison. I mean, like all of this is just a kind of moral panic and a burning of a witch, which I think is, again, it's a sign of the times we're living in. So I think the most of it's awful, and yet there are kernels of truth in there that are also understandably getting people tuned up. Yeah. So you raised something else that is sort of part of this whole discussion about good faith debate and the lack of it and where people go directionally with their complaints and what outcomes they want.

10:26And this one is near and dear to my heart. It's criminal prosecution. And I don't know if it's the case 50 years ago that people were so quick to say, if you disagreed with somebody or you thought someone violated a quote unquote norm, and I want to talk about norms in a minute and what they mean, or someone was on the other side of the fence or someone committed an ethical violation or someone told an untruth in some context other than when they're like, it doesn't matter what it is. If they're not in your tribe, lock them up. If they're not in your tribe, lock her up. And there's lots of things that are morally blameworthy.

11:01I dare say that I've committed a number of them. I'm sure you have. There's not a human who hasn't, but if you're in the other tribe, the call to imprison you, I feel comes much more quickly than it ever did before. And that's even true on the left sometimes too. What's that? I'm just going to keep asking you questions that are impossible to answer.

11:20Sam Harris:Let me volley this back to you with a similar question, but I'm wondering, I mean, there's some significant asymmetries here, right? So it's like, if you were someone who claimed to care about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop or about the impropriety of him having a, you know, a sinecure in a Ukrainian oil company for which he was clearly not qualified and what that might say about corruption from the, you know, in the Biden family and the Biden, you know, coming Biden presidency. Okay, well, it's fine to care about all of that, I guess, but then how can you not care about a president who has already enriched himself billions of dollars by trading away our, you know, tariff policies and our foreign policy?

12:01Sam Harris:He's my guy. He's my guy. But it's the scale of the thing that is so different. And, you know, Nancy Pelosi's stock trades are one thing. What Trump and company are doing now is orders of magnitude worse, even if you're going to take the least charitable view of the Pelosi case. So my question to you is, if there are not laws against what Trump and family are doing now, I mean, the cryptocurrency scams or creating an insider trading mechanism, you know, selling access, early access to his truth social posts for $100 ,000 a month so that you can bet on their implications in the market. I mean, one, aren't there laws against that?

12:41Sam Harris:And why wouldn't somebody be going to prison once the Democrats have enough power to actually investigate things? But that's question number one. I mean, are there laws? And if so, why not? But two, my concern is that once the Democrats are in a position to investigate these sorts of things, it's all going to be spun as just more lawfare, more cynicism, more tribalism and attention to details of scale and to the egregiousness of some of these offenses will go completely out the window. and we will just be swinging back and forth between these misuses of American justice, wherein one is actually its proper use.

13:21Sam Harris:If this kind of financial behavior and self-dealing can't be investigated, I don't know what can be. Well, so number one, I think it will be. I think the House will be in the hands of the Democrats. The Justice Department is not. And you have my erstwhile friend, Todd Blanche, and former colleague saying words to the effect of, You know, neither he will say, nor should any attorney general say that they're independent from the White House, which is astonishing. But when you ask a question like that, and a lot of people do on a going forward basis, there's some history here. And Donald Trump has been investigated multiple times, again and again and again, both by state courts, I'm sorry, state jurisdictions, state DAs, by federal prosecutors, a number of them, by a state attorney general, by Congress multiple times.

14:09He has been sued. He is lost. So, you know, there is a mechanism for doing this that doesn't always succeed because there are problems of proof or there are problems of who's directing the investigation and who's not. And I think the things that you're talking about are ripe for investigation and will be investigated, not by the Justice Department over the next two and a half years, but at some point they will. Now, the other paradox here is, you know, I come from a law enforcement background. And so if someone committed a crime or there's sufficient predicate to investigate a crime, then you do that.

14:43And you walk away if there's not enough evidence or it's not in the interest of justice. And otherwise, no matter what the hue and cry is, you go forward. The problem is when you investigate and or prosecute or decline to prosecute someone like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or anyone else who has a political following, and in some cases, a subset of a political following that is sort of blindly following, I'm not going to say which side I mean that to be, sometimes politically the best thing that can happen to them is to get investigated or to get indicted. You know, I haven't looked at the charts myself, but multiple people have said, and I actually look at it myself, that Donald Trump was deader than dead as a political prospect after he lost the election in 2020.

15:27And if you look at the, people tell me, if you look at the graphs, his popularity began to rise again when he was indicted by the Manhattan DA. And the other thing that happens is, which I don't know how, you know, this is a sort of a general question for us to discuss, this sort of drowning in information, and not just information, but drowning in conspiracy theories and drowning in lies and drowning in controversies. Donald Trump, even though the publicity he was getting was largely negative, right? You had the prosecution in Manhattan, you had the prosecution in Georgia, you had the two special counsel prosecutions.

16:01He was taking up all the air, right? So even if somebody else on his side, on the Republican side, had a message, and even if the information about Donald Trump was bad, it was all about Donald Trump going to prove, you know, that old saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity. I don't know if that's true or not. And you combine that with, and I'm curious what you think about this assessment, you combine that with J.D. Vance's recent pronouncement that if Watergate happened today, it would be a 12-hour story. And can you imagine how ridiculous it is that that little thing called Watergate toppled a presidency?

16:35How do you react to all of that stuff?

16:37Sam Harris:Well, I think it's probably right about that, But I would draw the opposite lesson, I think, there. I mean, that is a sign of just how deep a hole we are in politically and culturally. It's not that it should have been a 12-hour story. It's that it would be now a 12-hour story given how much noise and how little signal there is on our information landscape. But is there always that noise or does Donald Trump strategically, tactically, instinctively create that noise? I mean, was there that much noise when Biden was president? I don't think so. Well, there have been kind of Trump-like reverberations that crossed the four years where he wasn't president.

17:25Sam Harris:I mean, we continue to unravel and there's a left wing version of the Trumpist noise machine. But I mean, for Trump specifically, I mean, this is, I think, a kind of unpopular opinion of him, but this is the framing I have always had of him. And I think I still have it. I think a lot of his success and his ascendancy and his invulnerability to scandal has less to do with him being some kind of political genius and more to do with the situation in which he has found himself. So I view him as a, the analogy that has worked for me is that he's kind of an evil version of the Chauncey Gardner character from the Jersey Kosinski book and the being there and the film by that name.

18:08Sam Harris:If people remember, Peter Sellers played this character who is just kind of alone in the house and he's all he is is the gardener. And he gets a thrust into a situation where he can be everything he says can be mistaken for political wisdom. But he's really an imbecile. Right. And he's he never ceases to be an imbecile, but he's in a context in which everything he does begins to look profound and has a profound effect on the people around him. There's something like that going on with Trump, right? So ask yourself now, is Trump being a genius when he contradicts himself 15 times over the course of 30 minutes on topics of enormous importance, like what's going on in our current war with Iran, right?

18:52Sam Harris:Right. He he'll he'll claim that the Iranians are, you know, just peace loving people just like ourselves who want the best for their country. And then he'll turn around and say they're scum. He'll say he's going to annihilate them. But then then he'll say that the war has already been won and the Straits of Hormuz are wide open. And he lurches back and forth. It is just a word salad. Right now, that is not, I would say, calculated to confound the audience. And no, it's just he has found himself in the presence of a of an electorate where tens of millions of people simply do not care about what is real.

19:33Sam Harris:Right. They don't. It's not like so an ordinary con man has to lie so as to be believed. Right. He had he has to he has to be aware of the logical expectations of his audience. And the con is to shade the truth or to lie outright in such a way that the puzzle piece has to fit. Right. Or seem to fit so that everyone doesn't call bullshit on on the whole enterprise where the situation Trump is in is he's got enough people, you know, something like 30 percent of Americans, maybe 40 percent of Americans who simply don't care if the puzzle piece fits. They're not tracking the truth. They're signaling to themselves in some kind of extended loyalty test that they will eat everything that comes out of his mouth.

20:22Sam Harris:Lie, insult, hallucination. And they'll give him money. Then he'll print another fake gold coin. And it doesn't matter what that gold coin says. I mean, he could mint a coinage that says, you're all a bunch of dumb cucks. Come and get it. And he would sell millions of dollars of those coins. Right. So that's the situation he's in. And given that he's got tens of millions of people who will never be dislodged from that cult, he looks like some kind of political genius. Would you describe him as a demagogue? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And so demagogues never have a majority, I don't think. Right. It's unlikely that they have majorities because there are thinking, intelligent, rational people in any given population, particularly one that's a democracy, that may be under threat of becoming something less than or different from a democracy.

21:14And, you know, most people as politicians, whether it's a Republican like John McCain or it's a Democrat like Barack Obama, you know, try to strike themes of unity and stitching together coalitions and big tents. And there's always talk about tents. Is a tent big enough? Is a tent too big? and Donald Trump seems to have figured out again instinctively because I don't think he gives deep thought to anything he doesn't have a manifesto at home he has instinct in his head that you don't need to have 51 percent of the people yeah you don't need to have 60 percent of the people and if you if if your particular appeal is to that subset of any population who is who is more likely to believe in conspiracy theories and is and is more likely to not be attached to democracy I mean And Ann Applebaum has this statistic that I think about all the time.

22:05And I was looking back at one of her books over the weekend that I think there are social scientists who believe that even in Western liberal democracies, there is like a latent subset of, I don't know, they claim 20, 25, 30%. We're like, yeah, look, if we have to have some autocracy, but we get the outcomes we want, then we're okay. And he figured that out. I mean, look, even now, with his very low poll rating, he's basically alienated all the people who have some skepticism about him, even if they voted for him. And the only people that are left are the ones who don't. And if that's of a sufficient number to win the electoral college, then that's all you need.

22:44Does that mean the system is messed up? And then I guess my question is, on the pie chart of blameworthiness about our being in this predicament, how much of that pie chart is filled with Trump and how much of that pie chart is filled with Trump supporters?

22:58Sam Harris:Well, I would point to the other part of the pie, which I think is, I would say at least half of it, which is the miscalculation and frank idiocy and confusion of the left. Right. I blame the left in large measure for the fact that there's a President Trump in the first place. Let's go through that. Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at SamHarris.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player. Literally, the president of the United States commander in chief, who also calls himself the chief federal law enforcement officer of the country, is saying that certain people are guilty and should go to prison and, in the case of some, should get the death penalty.

23:38In the old days, if a sitting president of the United States openly called for the death penalty of a duly elected member of the Senate from the largest state in the country from the other party, that would be close to presidency ending that day.

23:57you