The Crisis of Truth in American Politics — with Sam Harris

0:03Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world flock to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. And they spend a week trying to sell each other on the weirdest gadgets you've ever seen in your entire life. This week on The Vergecast, we're talking all about everything happening at CES. From the TVs, to the AI gadgets, to the humanoid robots that everybody is hoping might someday do your laundry and wash your dishes. All that and much more on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.

0:35Episode 379. 379 is the country code for Ratic Insidia. In 1979, McDonald's introduced the Happy Meal. True story, The Exorcist is actually having a sequel. Instead of a priest trying to get the devil out of a little girl, it's about trying to get a priest out of a little boy. Okay, that's not that good. I've used that one before. Asking churchgoers for money is like Epstein asking for bail money. Was that better? Actually, none of this is true. The Catholic Church just announced a new position on homosexuality. What is that new position? only if it's under 12. Go, go, go!

1:20Welcome to the 379th episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? I'm back in action. It's a busy first week traveling from New York to Miami. Then back to, let's talk about me. Let's talk about me. I was in Australia. I did that bridge climb thing. Had dinner at the Sydney Opera House. Very cheesy, very touristy, and I absolutely loved it. I've turned into that tourist where I'm now climbing bridges and going to have dinner in the Opera House. By the way, Opera House initially commissioned in 1959. It took 13 years. It was supposed to cost$7 million. It ended up costing$110 million. And in order to pay for it, they introduced the Australian lottery.

1:57Who would have thought it? I think we'd all live in Australia if it wasn't so goddamn far. Oh, my gosh. Great people, great food. I went to Lizard Island. It just reminded me a lot of the Bahamas. Very nice, but in my opinion, a brand that's a bit overrated. But what an incredible people country. I just had such a wonderful time. My boys, I got this great picture of my boys on the bridge. And I just had such a nice time. Stop by Singapore. If you haven't been there, just imagine if Nordstrom's was a city. But the good Nordstrom's, back in the 80s and 90s, Nordstrom's, imagine it was a city. That's Singapore.

2:35Had just an incredible time. Then went back to LA and worked on Netflix, which is Latin for had plastic surgery, as is the reason my camera is over. I asked my surgeon that I just wanted to look natural, but unfortunately I look naturally surprised all of the fucking time right now. And I wanted to look like, I don't know, a better version or a refreshed version of myself. Instead, I look like a distant cousin that just looks kind of scared all the time. That's why my camera's off. My nose looks like a minivan from the 80s. I'm pretty sure if I fell asleep, there'd be squatters in there by the time I woke up.

3:08Anyways, I'll do a reveal sometime next week. But I thought it was going to be really minor elective surgery, and I have been on opiates. Is this the opiate speaking? Is this the opiate speaking? And also, folks, what hole am I trying to fill here? I have people who love me unconditionally. I'm economically secure. I actually feel pretty attractive. I've got a lot of confidence for my looks. I'm rich, so I assume people think I'm good looking. So what the fuck is going on here? I need an intervention. You know what I was doing last night? I was looking at Ferraris online. Seriously, what the fuck is going on here?

3:47I'm about two years into a midlife crisis that I think is going to end in about 40 years. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going on. Anyways, longer conversation. But in today's episode, we have just the right person to talk to about it. A guy who's become a friend is, no joke, a role model of mine because he's courageous, unfiltered, and also just wicked smart. Wicked smart. Of course, I'm talking about the inimitable Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast. We discussed with Sam masculinity in the Democratic Party, the rise of conspiracy and trolling.

4:29Oh, my God. I'm just such an enormous fan of Sam. I think he is so good. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Sam Harris.

4:46Sam, where does this podcast find you? Los Angeles. There you go. With that, let's segue to ICE. What's your reaction to what's happening around ICE, specifically with the shooting, and what kind of damage, or do you think it's doing damage, or maybe if it's helping Trump and MAGA as a whole? A little backstory here. I've spent a lot of time focusing on the public misperception of police violence. People just, in my experience, don't know how to watch these videos. And the stuff that they often think is outrageous really isn't so when you think of the cop's eye view of the world. So my bias here, if anything, is to be very charitable to law enforcement because I've trained a lot with firearms.

5:34I've been trained by law enforcement at various levels. and I just, you know, it's very natural for me to see their perspective on these kinds of encounters. I mean, just the simple fact that, you know, when someone is being approached by a cop and, you know, who's maybe, you know, intending to arrest them or not, just approaching them, just approaching their car, the moment their hands disappear, you know, in a country like America where there's your 400 million guns, that becomes an evolving emergency, right? I mean, your hands are everything, right? So people have no sense of this, right? So they immediately duck down and reach for something and they don't realize they're putting themselves in danger.

6:19So that said, the video that we all saw of this encounter in Minneapolis and the subsequent killing of Renee Good, struck me as just a crystal clear instance of a terrible cop, you know, terribly trained, doing something quite unjustifiable leading to the death of an innocent civilian. I mean, just, it was, I think, any effort to defend it, I just, I have not seen even a slightly credible one. Even if you were going to defend the first shot, the subsequent two are just clearly an attempt to ensure that she's dead after the cop is just objectively out of harm's way. I mean, it's just not, but that, you know, so all of that's alarming and awful, but the worst part was the administration's response to it.

7:21I mean, just right out of the gate, they started lying in the most, I mean, it's not even, you can't even call it lying on some level because this is the, it's a type of lying that doesn't, it makes no pretense of being believable. Or I mean, if you were going to lie in a way that was meant to deceive, you'd make some contact with the evidence. But here we're just, you know, they just seem to think that they can bludgeon us with lies. And that's what's happening. I mean, just literally every word out of the mouth of the president, the vice president, Kristi Noem, it's just all been, you know, to encourage a kind of mass hallucination.

8:08And the fact that so many people seem willing to participate in that hallucination right of center is, frankly, fairly scary. What do you make of, what has struck me in addition to your, where you highlighted the administration's response, is how the media has responded. And I can almost tell you how the media responds based on the logo. It just seems like there's a total lack of all critical thinking. Specifically, I was especially triggered by Fox, who led with, you know, lesbian activists, You know, as if to say our audience clearly would hold her more culpable if we highlighted that she sleeps with someone of the same sex, that somehow that might in some way justify or make her seem less or more deserving of this kind of treatment.

8:57Any thoughts on how the media has handled it and how people are absorbing it? I've seen a GoFundMe for the officer that includes large donations from fairly public figures. Yeah. Well, I'm not even sure why that would be necessary at this point because it sounds like the administration has said nothing but exculpatory things about him. And so I can't imagine any kind of prosecution is in the offing. And I'm inclined to bend over backwards to be charitable to law enforcement in these situations. But from what we can tell about the vetting and frenzied recruitment of ICE, it's just clearly they're putting guns in the hands of people who are spectacularly unqualified to be wielding them.

9:49And they're putting them in situations with a kind of a philosophy of it's not even law enforcement. Right. It's just some kind of public intimidation. Again, it's just it's just not this is not a normal police work that we're we're seeing. And I think these kinds of errors, you know, I'm not, you know, be charitable with respect to the intentions of the cop in this case. But it's obviously an error to have shot this person and killed her. And again, what isn't an error or what can't plausibly be thought to be an error is the ongoing response to this from the government and from highly partisan media to describe her behavior as clearly terroristic.

10:42I mean, she's a terrorist who was trying to mow down cops. I mean, not even just the one cop. It sounded like to hear it described from on high. It was multiple cops. The cops were just trying to get their car out of the snow. And here came this maniac terrorist activist who was clearly weaponized by some enemy within. Right. There's some some Antifa cult that has funded all of this. Right. Probably George Soros is at the back of it and turn these these drones loose on our our innocent ICE officers. And she just tried to you know, this is one of the the car attacks that we see from jihadists. This is what you expect to see hearing it described.

11:26And then you turn on the video and one of these videos was shot by the officer himself. You might have asked why he was walking around her car filming her with his own cell phone. I mean, that was bizarre behavior. and then drew with his other hand and shot her through the windshield, shot her twice more once she was clearly past him. But from all of that video, you see an apparently benign person who's, yes, doing something probably illegal, for which maybe she should have been arrested. Yeah, I mean, that's fine. She's blocking traffic. She doesn't have a right to do that with her car. But the way she handled her car and the contradictory demands she was getting from the ICE agents, there was just no sign of her trying to kill anyone with her car.

12:20and again, even if you were going to make the worst interpretation of her initial movements, where let's say she's trying to run over that ICE agent from two feet away, albeit slowly, his subsequent shots are unjustified. He shot her through the windshield of her car. He's to the side of her car, which is moving at like two miles an hour. She's already been shot in the face, and he shoots her twice more. that part is an execution, right? So it's just, and how we have a government now who will double and triple down on obvious lies. I mean, there's just no burden to correct the record. There's no, there's nothing careful, you know, it's all partisan bile, you know, and it's, so it's, everything is political, right?

13:13Like, like what we have, We're just now in the presence of non-adults where, like, it's just a Stephen Miller-ish vibe that has spread everywhere where you just start demonizing your critics and making no contact with facts and then wait for the news cycle to move on to the next outrage, which will predictably appear within 24 hours given what's happening with this administration. Yeah, the recruitment strategy for these agents is telling. It feels as if it's very primal. This is an exact quote from the recruiting material. There is an invasion. We're in a war and we need you to fight. And then the language of protection, invasion, and insurgency, it can feel masculine and therefore emotionally powerful.

14:06Any thoughts on this ideology and what it's doing to our society and if there is a mainstream politics anymore? Yeah, it's hard to know where the mainstream is. We have just fragmented so totally with respect to how we consume information. But what's so disconcerting about this current event is that the information is so clear and you can be reasonably sure that everyone is seeing the same videos, right? There was this initial moment where there was a video shot from another angle, which seemed to make it a little less clear what was happening. But, I mean, this is not even a situation where we're, you know, so within our echo chambers that we're not making contact with the same data.

14:57In this case, I think we clearly are. But the commentary on that data is so hyper-partisan and, you know, then the echo chambers take over. um and i don't know it's so it's this is really not the the blue dress yellow dress moment where you you can you can understand how people are seeing it so differently i really i i honestly can't understand how anyone can honestly believe the descriptions that have come from the government so i mean this is a um an unusually extreme version of the shattering of our culture based on rival interpretations of facts. And that's what I think has caused people to kind of spin out so fully on it.

15:42I just, yeah, I'm worried. We have an administration who tends to frame everything in terms of there being an enemy within, that it's only decent and sane to be kind of filled with hate and fear with respect to some significant subset of your own population. There's not even a pretense of appealing to all of America with any initiative. It's intrinsically divisive, everything. It's just us against them, and them is half of America, and it's the institutions, and it's the media. It's been going on, obviously, for about a decade with Trump and Trumpism, But it's getting more and more excruciating to live with its consequences.

16:30What do you make of the spread of all the kind of conspiracy thinking, both on the left and the right? What need do you think it's fulfilling? Well, I think there's more of it on the right. It is everywhere. This is a kind of generic software flaw. We appear to be suffering. But right of center, the appetite for conspiracy thinking has just grown like a cancer. And the strangest case of it, which I think was impossible to anticipate, it was so extreme, was in the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk. You had Candace Owens, who's become this sort of supernatural grifting force, alleged that he had been assassinated by some combination of the French Foreign Legion and the Mossad and Turning Point itself.

17:29Right. Turning point. She was culpable for, if not initiating the the assassination. They were busy covering it up for some. I don't think I've heard what how they're incentivized to do this. But on her account, they're they're covering up the murder. So they have a hand in it. And so she's been saying these things to to great effect on the right to millions and millions of people. She has a huge fan base, apparently, on the right. But some of the other leading lights of independent media right of center, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly especially, have not wanted to condemn this lunacy. They want to preserve the space for her to say that, of course.

18:11It's well within her free speech rights to make these allegations. But the amazing thing is that when Tucker and Candace showed up at the Turning Point AmericaFest conference, where the 30 ,000 true believers are going to show up in person, but to buy a ticket for the privilege of being in the room where history is made, again, in the aftermath of the murder of their founder, and now patron saint, It turned out that when some people on the stage, like Ben Shapiro, condemned Candace and her enablers as being more or less the death knell of the Republican Party and conservatism in America, half the audience, it seemed, really wanted to hear more about the conspiracy.

19:01So you can tell members of Turning Point that they have had a hand in murdering their founder, and half of them want to hear more about that. I mean, that's how masochistic and insane this style of thinking is. And, yeah, it's just—I mean, it's a deeply unprincipled way of trying to make sense of anomalies in the world. I mean, any situation you can point to admits of highly unparsimonious, reckless, cognitively bizarre interpretations. You can just look for anomalies. You can ask the question, well, why was it? I think as Candace does, she asks questions like, well, why did the Egyptian Air Force have a plane in this city on this day?

19:58Just look for something weird and then begin to pull on that thread. It doesn't matter that it makes no connection to all the other threads you're pulling on. It's just some bright, shiny object that you can spin up into some weird implication. it's a character trait that certain people have. I mean, I am fairly allergic to it, but it's not to say that no one ever conspires or that no conspiracy theories ever turn out to be true. But so often it's so obviously unlikely because the incentives aren't aligned. You can't get hundreds, much less thousands of people to be equivalently incentivized to act like psychopaths and conceal the evidence of everyone else's wrongdoing until the end of time.

20:44because the incentives are just not aligned that way. And people have guilty consciences and people get at cross purposes with their previous collaborators and people want to be famous or they have a change of heart. And someone winds up on 60 Minutes spilling the beans about the thing that they conspired to do. But no, with so many of these conspiracies, what people imagine is just utter competence, just perfect psychopathy married to perfect competence and, you know, information concealment and the perfect alignment of incentives and a perfect ability to fake a far more plausible stream of evidence that people get in hand, right?

21:27So it doesn't matter that we've arrested the guy who, you know, quite obviously killed Kirk and that he had, you know, had the relevant communications about that on his phone and that his family turned him in and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it's just, it's, I don't know, it's a species of brain damage that something like a half, you know, the third to a half of our society seems to be suffering. And it's a cultural problem at bottom, I'm sure, but we have to get over it. We'll be right back after a quick break.

22:05Some of this video coming out of Minneapolis is telling a story about the surge of ICE agents that started last week after Renee Good was killed. Another controversial video has emerged of ICE. It turns out the people being arrested were U.S. citizens. These are observers making sure that kids can walk home from school without being taken apart by the horrible Gestapo that we have here. A group of men approached a woman at a bus stop, pulled her aside, and then walked her into a vehicle. The polling is also telling a story. Support for ICE is dropping. And more Americans than ever before, 46 percent, told economist YouGov pollsters they want ICE abolished.

22:49Meanwhile, the messaging from the White House is that ICE has immunity. So what does that mean for the people, some of them citizens, that ICE agents are dragging out of cars and workplaces and off of streets around Minneapolis? That's on Today Explained. We air every weekday. Support for the show comes from IM8. If you're looking for a daily all-in-one wellness drink that gives your body the support it needs, you might want to try IM8. IM8. It was co-founded by David Beckham and crafted with insight from experts at Mayo Clinic, Cedars-Sinai, and a former NASA chief scientist. I have tried IM8.

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25:27I'd like to pivot to what I think is probably the most relative to its implications and importance for women and globally in the Middle East, what feels like proportionally undercovered, and that is Iran. I'd be very curious to get your thoughts on Iran and how the West and different groups in the media are responding to it. Well, it is undercovered, suspiciously so. I think that could be changing as we speak today. But up until this moment, up until this very hour, it's really been a fairly telling silence from the mainstream media. I think the reason why it's undercover is probably twofold. One is the instability there seems to be a feather in Trump's cap with respect to foreign policy.

26:21I mean, you can only imagine that our support of Israel and our joining in the bombing of Iran has been the proximate cause of this. And if that winds up being a good thing, that, you know, it seems inconvenient for many of Trump's detractors. I mean, it's not inconvenient for me. I mean, I obviously despise Trump and Trumpism and, you know, 95 percent of what he's been about as president. But I can readily admit that some things he's done have been good. And one of the things is to be fairly uncompromising with respect to defending open societies and Israel against this specific species of enemy, which is, you know, the global jihadism and the culture that supports it.

27:14And the variant in Iran that has been a genuine tyranny for nearly as long as you and I have been alive, since 1979, is something that we should have always supported the uprisings against. I think it's scandalous how mealy-mouthed Obama and Biden were on that front. I mean, the Iranians have been showing a lot of courage, especially Iranian women, periodically to try to fight for their political equality going back many years. And under, you know, democratic governments, we have really been shamefully silent. And that probably leads to the second reason why. It's not, you know, obviously Trump isn't the explanation for why Obama and Biden couldn't have supported Iran more or the Iranian people more.

28:13And there it's this lingering moral confusion left of center around Islam and Islamism and jihadism and not wanting to draw too clear a line against the problem of theocracy there, right? I mean, Islamic theocracy is a deal-breaker for the West and for open societies. This is crystal clear, right? And I mean, now we have the spectacle of the UAE announcing—I don't know if you saw this—but the UAE recently announced that they will no longer support their own students studying abroad in the UK for fear that those students will be radicalized on British campuses by the Muslim Brotherhood, right? That's how bad this is.

29:06That's how blind we have been to the infiltration of our own institutions by this ideology. We have to get our heads screwed on straight around this. And Trump, for all of his flaws and for all of the flaws of the people around him, I mean, the truly awful people around him, just psychopaths and grifters and know-nothings and incompetents, the general shape of their corruption and their self-stealing and their

29:41unprofessionalism still leans in the direction of sanity on this point, right? There's just not much tolerance for jihadism and Islamism coming out of, you know, both within the West and coming from societies like Iran. And so I think Trump is a very uncertain ally for everyone, including Israel, given his aptitude for corruption and just pure self-interest and just his distractibility. But thus far, he's been better than many people could have hoped and certainly than really any Democrat would have been expected to be, at least at this moment. I hold out hope that it'll be a different story in 2028.