Sam Harris Returns to TRIGGERnometry

20:22Sam Harris:Certainly, if it's a big enough deal, I wouldn't have put that... Hold on, Sam.

20:25Francis Foster:But isn't that a little bit unfair in that you're judging somebody not on the things they actually did? No, I will judge.

20:32Sam Harris:I'm just telling you why you need to care about who he is as a person.

20:35Francis Foster:Okay. I understand. And look, I think a person's character really matters. I do. But I also think when you're evaluating a president, you have to look at deliverables. What are the deliverables? There's probably a lot to criticize, and I'm sure you've got them, lots of them. But getting the hostages back from Gaza. Yeah.

20:54Sam Harris:Let me just deal with that because that's on everybody's mind and square this statement.

21:01Francis Foster:Let me give you a list and then you address them all. Is that okay? Well, I mean, this one's worth just hitting off the tee because I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for having brought the hostages back. I mean, I think that's I have no problem saying that.

21:17Sam Harris:Right. So square that with accusations of Trump derangement syndrome. I mean, I can readily admit that that was a massive achievement. Whatever happens next. I mean, there's not going to be peace in the Middle East as a result of this ceasefire. So I'm very skeptical and pessimistic about the outcome. But just that piece, getting all the living hostages back, was massive. There was no Democrat who was going to do it. President Kamala Harris wasn't going to do it. Biden wouldn't have done it. But many of his weaknesses as a president, as a person, translated in that specific area into strengths, right?

21:55Sam Harris:His unpredictability, his unprincipledness, the fact that he could just throw over the chessboard and walk away for another year, right? I think he got more out of Netanyahu and more out of all the parties to that negotiation than a more principled, more methodical, more process-oriented expert on geopolitics would have, very likely. So that's one area where sort of the madman theory of politics, I think, worked for him. Okay. And that's to the good. That does not compensate for all the other damage he's done to our country.

22:33Francis Foster:Okay, fair. And I want to hear both of these, right? But I want to put some more to you that I would say are positive things, right? We get asked a lot which VPN we actually trust. The answer is always CyberGhost VPN. It's one of the most respected VPNs in the world with 38 million users and over 20 ,000 five-star reviews on Trustpilot, which honestly is pretty rare. Check it out now at CyberGhostVPN.com slash Trigonometry. Cybercoast encrypts your internet traffic so your provider, your job, school, or anyone on public Wi-Fi can't see what you're doing. It reroutes your connection through secure servers in 100 countries, hides your IP address, and keeps no logs at all, so no one will be able to track your online activity.

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24:12Francis Foster:I can give you criticism as well. I mean, look, I was hopeful that he would do on Ukraine something more positive than he has done. I think Steve Witkoff hasn't done very well, put it gently and diplomatically. We haven't had any progress so far. I hope that changes, as you know. But maybe, you know, if the Middle East is tick, that's no tick. What about dealing with illegal immigration, right? The way it's being done, we can have a discussion about, but he's literally the first leader of a Western country to deal with illegal immigration.

24:45Sam Harris:We can have a huge discussion about that. I mean, so the fact that the Democrats treated any concern about the border as a symptom of racism and thought that it just wasn't a problem to have untold numbers of people just streaming across the border for years at a time. That was just a colossal own goal that is just, in my view, politically inexplicable. It's just politically suicidal, right? It's just, that's, among other reasons, that is the reason why Trump got elected. But I mean, that's just, it's, I still don't understand it. It's stupid. It's unethical. It serves no real sane purpose, right?

25:23Sam Harris:I mean, even if you want the same numbers of people in the country because you really think we just have to have an immigration forward policy, there's no argument for not knowing who's coming into the country. You should want the people in the country who you want in the country, right? And you should be able to screen out terrorists and et cetera. So, yeah, it is true that the Biden administration tried to pass a bill that would have done something and then Trump cynically got the Republicans to block it. So there was a Trump delayed progress on that point so that he could use it as an issue in the campaign.

26:01Sam Harris:And that was a cynical bit of politics. But still, the Democrats were totally out to lunch on that issue for years at a stretch. unforgivable, politically unforgivable, right? And so it is with all the other woke derangement in the Democratic Party. I mean, the irony here is that there's virtually nothing that any super red-pilled MAGA head for whom there's no daylight between them and Trump, there's nothing they can say about the far left of the Democratic Party that I don't agree with than having said myself on my podcast, right? So it's not like my animus toward Trump is based on some sort of progressive blindness about the ethical primacy of DEI or anything else that he's steamrolling over.

26:58Sam Harris:But I'll remind you that we didn't used to live in a country where masked men who won't identify themselves steal peaceful people off the sidewalk and disappear them and occasionally disappear them to foreign countries, right? I mean, that's not America, and that's happening, right? That's totally unacceptable. I mean, it's Orwellian and insane, and it's insane that anyone has acclimated to it. And it's insane that we've got this, we've got an attorney general who won't answer questions, but one brought before Congress, and she just, you know, just is messaging to an audience of one, and to her social media feed.

27:39Sam Harris:She's just insulting senators. I mean, it's just, it's... The optics of all of this are so Hunger Games and bizarre, right? I mean, we've got a White House that messages on social media like the account's being run by 18-year-old trolls that just spend half their time on 4chan and then half their time on the official White House X feed. We've got a president who forwards AI videos of him shitting on his fellow Americans, right? And half of our country imagines this as some kind of progress in political communication, right? I mean, this is a, I mean, the official, I don't know if you've seen this, but the official White House page that talks about the rebuilding of the East Wing, of the ballroom, It's got, it has become a troll account where it does, it kind of gives the history of, you know, construction at the White House, but then intersperses that with like Hunter Biden bringing cocaine into the White House with a shot of him in the bathtub with a cigarette and, you know, Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky.

28:57Sam Harris:I mean, it's just, this is the official White House communication to the world, right? I get that it's entertaining, but if there's no difference between the Babylon Bee and the official White House website, we've got a problem. We are doing massive brand damage to our country. That's what I care about. I care about what's durable here in terms of when Trump goes away and let's say there's a sane Democrat or Republican next time around in 2028. but at the moment I don't see much hope of that.

29:38Sam Harris:What bells can't be unrung in any kind of near-term timeframe? What damage has been done that we can't immediately apologize for sufficiently such that we have a proper reset? And I think a lot of damage has already been done that's hard to recover from. And we've announced to the world, at a minimum, We've announced the world, we'll look at what Trump has done with the tariff policy, just tariffing every member of our species. And again, based on whims and imaginary political imperatives that only exist in his brain and then in the brains of the people who pretend to understand what he's doing because he's created a personality cult around him where no one is going to, you know, everyone is Baghdad Bob and no one is going to tell the, the boy king that he's lost as marbles.

30:33But he's basically ignoring all of our treaties

30:38Sam Harris:and our ally and our alliances in a way that has announced to the entire world that basically our country is, in any four-year period, it cannot be counted on to honor anything that has been agreed to before that clock starts, right? So with a new president, we can just completely reinvent ourselves and tear up everything. You know, every trade agreement, every expectation of an alliance. Are we going to, you know, if Poland gets invaded by Russia, do we even care about NATO anymore? Probably not, right?

31:14Francis Foster:See, this is the issue, though, Sam. You're making, like, really good points that make perfect sense. But the flip side of all of those structures that he's disrupting was, well, he's actually got Europeans to pay for their membership of NATO. That's a good outcome. Right? He's actually masked men dragging people off. There was another way to do that, but apart from destroying our reputation. But isn't this exactly the problem? No one was.

31:39Sam Harris:No one was. No, surely there was a way to make the case that our European allies weren't paying their fair share, short of destroying our reputation for being the world's lone superpower.

31:53Francis Foster:Okay, but was Kamala Harris going to do it? Probably not. Probably not. Was Kamala Harris going to close the border? I think we both agree she wouldn't.

32:01Sam Harris:No, that I don't, because I think they were trying to do that because I saw that it was a disaster. No, no, I think they, I mean, everyone could see this was a disaster. I mean, you get fucking Elon Musk at the border with his own iPhone showing a zombie movie of people streaming across the border. It was a four-alarm fire. Was it four-alarm fire? I don't know. What's the most number of alarms? Five-alarm fire. Everyone could see that. I think they were going to get a handle on that, but still, it's unforgivable that they waited as long as they did.

32:38Francis Foster:But this is why I disagree with you. They waited as long as they did because they are ideologically pro-open borders.

32:45Sam Harris:Not the mainstream Democratic Party.

32:47Francis Foster:Like the rest of the Western world. All the left-of-center parties, they talk a good game, but they don't actually take action to close the border, not least because it looks ugly and it's very unpleasant, right?

32:58Sam Harris:Well, I don't see why it need to look ugly.

33:00Francis Foster:How do you deport millions of people without it looking like it?

33:03Sam Harris:Well, no, so deporting millions of people is separate from closing the border. So I don't think we should be deporting millions of people. I think we should close the border and then deport all the criminals, right? But then you don't need this chaotic process. You don't need to say, if you happen to be in a Home Depot and look Latino, we might just bring you to the ground. four guys who again will not identify themselves uh are gonna you know break your arms and bring you to the ground and uh when we find out that you're a father of three and all three of your sons have served in the marines we still don't care right i mean that's awful i mean it's just absolutely awful it's it's a it's disgraceful it's totally unethical and this is not the country i'm I'm amazed if, I would be amazed if it were in fact true that 50 % of Americans want to live in a country that treats people that way, whatever their immigration status.

34:01Sam Harris:I mean, it's just not right.

34:06And yet, there's no question we could close the border without doing that, right?

34:12Sam Harris:I mean, the thing is, if you close the border and really you have control over who's coming into the country, that's the first piece. If you accomplish that, you then don't have to make the experience being inside the border terrifying so as to send a message to the rest of the world not to come, right? You don't have to separate people from their kids or lock people in cages or disappear people to foreign gulags or any of that stuff because you've closed the border. This is why Tom Holman's argument that you have to send a message by beating the shit out of people, otherwise people are going to keep coming.

34:50Sam Harris:It doesn't matter if you've closed the border. So close the fucking border. Anyone could have done that without mistreating people inside our country. Then it's a separate question. what do you want to do inside this country in a city like Los Angeles? I mean, we've got vast amount of productive work being accomplished right now by people who we know are here illegally. Most of the people who are in this town illegally are doing work we deem necessary, and most Americans don't want to do it right now.

35:27Sam Harris:What should we do with that? I think we should, And again, I'm sure there are corner conditions that we might want to debate, but generally speaking, if someone's been here for years, and again, the details here matter. A lot of these people have kids who are citizens, right? So we're talking about people who have been here for years, have an illegal immigration status, but they've got young kids who are American citizens, and still these people are at risk. or being deported.

36:05Sam Harris:In 90 % of those cases, I'm just guessing, maybe it's 99.9 % of those cases, you've got people who are here doing productive work that we want done. We have whole industries predicated on that work being done, agriculture, the service industry, restaurants, et cetera.

36:25Sam Harris:Americans are not lining up. We've got 4 % unemployment. The 4 % who are unemployed are not lining up to do those jobs, to be landscapers and dishwashers, etc., there should be some rational process of keeping these people here and getting their immigration status sorted out, right? So call that amnesty, whatever you want to call it. But by all means, if somebody's here and he's got, you know, four DUIs and, you know, was in prison for raping somebody, et cetera, get that person out immediately on the first plane. I mean, there's zero controversy around whether or not to deport criminals who are here illegally.

37:08Sam Harris:None of this has to be inflammatory and divisive. The thing is, Stephen Miller and Donald Trump clearly want this to be inflammatory and divisive. There's a political advantage, or at least they perceive a political advantage in making it so. And what I do think they want and have wanted are protests against this that get out of hand, where they can point to a city like Los Angeles and say, look, okay, look at these blue-haired maniacs who have been raised to believe that there should be open borders. and they're throwing chunks of concrete at the cops, we have to use a heavy hand to respond. And I mean, so those and those demonstrations got out of hand slightly.

37:58Sam Harris:This certainly wasn't as bad as it could have been. But yeah, I mean, I think I think fears that Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act are rational. Right. Because he's just the sort of guy to do it. Right. And it's not. And that will be I mean, there's several bright lines, but that will certainly be one bright line where we will have lost something and it could be very hard to get it back.

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39:38Francis Foster:Click the link in the description or go to pure-gold.co slash trigger to get your free copy of the investor guide. That's pure-gold.co slash trigger. Take control of your financial future today. Francis, sorry, I know this has gone on for a long time with just me talking, but this is like a meme, me talking too much. But there's one other bit of this I want to explore with you before Francis takes over, which is the one thing, look, I'm not American. Francis is not American. We love this country. We have so many great American friends. The one thing that does really give me pause is this conversation that I don't understand about a third term.

40:20Francis Foster:Steve Bannon was pushing this idea a long time ago. And as we sat down to record this, President Trump was asked about this. He sort of gave a bit of a non-answer. He did say he wouldn't run as vice president, the sort of Russian Putin medvedev switcheroo that they did way back when but that like that's that to me is the one bit of the one out of a thousand things

40:45Sam Harris:that caught your attention i mean like the fact that he's even after january 6 the fact that we're even having this conversation is is insanity i was i'm trying to make my point in a way that

40:56Francis Foster:is easier to access for people who may not agree with you right okay i'm trying to take some of the age of Sam Harris.

41:01Sam Harris:You know your audience. I'll take all the help I can get.

41:05Francis Foster:Well, what I'm saying is all of these other things, for example, take the corruption stuff, right? A lot of people are just going to go, I don't give a shit. I care about, he sorted the hostages. He's dealing with immigration. Sam Harris doesn't like the way he's dealing with it, but at least he's dealing with it in some way. He's got NATO to pay that way. I could give you other examples, right? repatriating manufacturing back to the rest, whatever. But the one bit that I think a reasonable person, including after January 6th, would have to look at and be worried about is...

41:39Sam Harris:Why? If he's the right guy for the job, why wouldn't we want him for a third term?

41:43Francis Foster:Because you have a constitution. And an unwillingness to follow the constitution is an indicator of some serious problems, wouldn't you say?

41:50Sam Harris:Well, I would say, but he views the Constitution like most rich people view the tax code, where you're just looking for loopholes. If there's a loophole, then why not use it? Right? And some constitutional scholars think there's several significant loopholes in the Constitution that could allow for tyranny. I mean, that are... The framers didn't anticipate... In some cases, they did anticipate, and they basically just said that there's no perfect way to deal with a sufficiently unethical president, right? But one could argue that they didn't anticipate anything like Trump and the full capture of the Republican Party into something like a personality cult.

42:35Sam Harris:I mean, what they clearly didn't anticipate is that the separation of powers had broken down because Congress doesn't even care to be its own power anymore because the Republicans are just wanting to ratify whatever lies and indiscretions the executive branch throws up. So, you know, Congress has been neutered, right? Congress owns tariff policy, right? Congress should be setting the tariffs. Probably these tariffs might, you know, again, I'm not a lawyer, but it remains to be seen. I mean, there's now hundreds of cases in in front of the courts. Much of what Trump has done already might be ruled illegal.

43:15Sam Harris:But Congress is sitting on its hands for patently political reasons. I mean, every Republican who has any hope of maintaining a political career at this point knows that they can't cross the MAGA base. Some actually fear for their lives in crossing the MAGA base. And we know this, again, when we look at the people who said they would have impeached Trump after January 6th and didn't because they were afraid for their lives. And that's already a lurch toward tyranny in this country. I mean, that is an unraveling of democratic norms that we can't afford to let unravel. And the Constitution is no complete bulwark against any of that.

43:56Sam Harris:We know this. The greatest lesson we've learned from now two experiments with Trumpism, is that in the place of laws, we have norms in many, many places. Where you thought we were shored up against chaos and the unraveling of democracy by law, we really weren't. It was just no one, everyone before Trump had the decency not to do that thing because it would look so terrible, right? I mean, no one thought that you could, I mean, we got an emoluments clause, but it turns out that whatever Trump does, I mean, Trump can't be prosecuted for any crime while president, and he can just launch a Bitcoin into the ether and literally earn billions of dollars over months.

44:53and I can still dimly remember a time when it was being debated whether or not members of Congress

45:03Sam Harris:could go to functions, whether they had to declare the price of the food they were being served if it was a seated meal. I mean, it was like past hors d 'oeuvres that could pass, but a seated meal suddenly was an emolument that invited real scrutiny around corruption and undue influence on our legislators, you know, by pharmaceutical companies or whoever. You can now transact business directly with the Trump family from any place on earth. It's...

45:40Francis Foster:Sam, come back to my question. My question is, are you concerned that President Trump will not relinquish power?

45:49Sam Harris:Ironically, I'm less concerned about that than anything I've talked about. The truth is, I'm not... If you've listened to everything I've said, I believe none of it is hypothetical, right? I'm complaining about stuff that's already happened. I'm complaining about the brand damage that's already been done to my country.

46:09Francis Foster:Sure, but I'm asking you a different question.

46:11Sam Harris:I think the chance that he's going to run for a third term effectively, that we will actually be faced with this eventuality is very, very low. Okay. And I'm not, again, there are people who are better informed about the mechanics of all this, and, you know, unfortunately, one of those people is Steve Bannon. So, yeah, I'm not saying I know something that Steve Bannon doesn't know about how all this works, because I certainly don't. But I just have to think that our system, that we've maintained enough guardrails in, in our, just the basics of federalism and the fact that this all has to be run at the state level, the elections at the state level.

46:55Sam Harris:I have to think that we are going to be sufficiently allergic to that, that it's not going to happen. Moving forward, the Charlie Kirk assassination was obviously something that left an imprint in all of our minds. It was profoundly shocking. you made some very interesting comments criticizing the Wrights and the Wrights' response to the Charlie Kirk assassination. So why don't we just go through it? You say what you thought, and then let's get into it. Sure. Well, I was just starting my tour. Actually, I think I was doing my first event the day he was assassinated. So I had him, like many people.

47:31There are many people in our orbit who are doing live events. and I think Ben Shapiro was in a similar situation where it's like, you know, it's like the world

47:41Sam Harris:stopped and you know Live Nation got on the phone with everyone who they were working with and said, hey listen, if you don't want to go out on stage, you know, just let us know. But so it's just, and I said a few things about it, you know, at those live events that I was doing that week. I mean, it's just a terrible thing. It was terrible on every level. It was terrible just as a murder of a young father. It's terrible that his family was there. I mean, it's just awful. It's additionally terrible because a political assassination is genuinely dangerous because we are so combustible as a society.

48:25Sam Harris:And the fact that we're this combustible, a lot of the onus goes to, I mean, it goes to both sides, but I would put most of the onus, as will not surprise you, on the president and his cult. And I would say that the response to the assassination was highly asymmetrical in ways that don't make Trump and Trumpism look good. I mean, I thought, so for instance, all the people right of center were watching those awful videos of Gen Z maniacs celebrate Kirk's murder. And obviously all those people are dangerous morons on some level. And many of them, you know, just obviously mentally ill, too. I mean, these are not, you know, those are not the cream of the crop of the woke intelligentsia.

49:15Sam Harris:You know, just the sheer number of facial piercings you saw in those videos could have told you something.

49:25Sam Harris:But what you didn't have left of center were prominent people with big platforms, you know, prominent media figures or, you know, say nothing of political figures like, you know, from Obama on down, say anything but this was horrible and we should never let it come to this in American politics, right? Like, there's no party left of center, real party for political assassination. And yet right of center, very prominent people from the president and Elon on down, treated it like the first shot fired in the Civil War. Totally irresponsible, totally dishonest. I mean, these people were arsonists pretending to be firefighters.

50:12Sam Harris:I mean, Elon jumped on X within minutes before, I think before Kirk was declared dead, certainly before his killer was caught and said, the left is the party of murder, right? And then I think some hours later, he said, if they won't leave us in peace, there's nothing to do but fight or die, right? I mean, 225 million people, right? So to have the richest guy in the world on the most politically important social media platform in the world say this sort of thing is just, it's, I mean, it's beyond reckless. I mean, it's just sociopathic. It's just, he is just flinging matches into a landscape that has been just soaked in gasoline.

51:00Sam Harris:And the soaking has been done mostly by Trump and Trumpism and just what, you know, the grifters right of center like candace owens and tucker carlson and uh alex jones i mean you know and i know you have your differences with those guys and perhaps we'll get into it um yeah i mean it's interesting what's how the landscape is fracturing right of center um and i yeah i think it would be good to talk about all of that because it's um i think it's more fractured than you guys think it is and i think they you know there are more casualties than just Tucker and Candace there, or at least should be.

51:44Sam Harris:But this was a highly asymmetric moment of political hysteria, right? So left of center, you had genuine lunatics who represent no one celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk. At a time when truth feels under siege, sometimes the best way to get perspective is to go back to the source. Milton's Paradise Lost isn't just a poem. It's a tour from the depths of hell to the heights of heaven. Hillsdale College's free online course, Paradise Lost from Hell to Heaven, explores why the fall happened and what it tells us about human nature. Access the whole course at hillsdale.edu slash trigger. Professor Stephen Smith, the Temple Family Professor in English Literature, leads you through nine 40-minute lectures that examine love, sin, grace, and eternal providence, you'll see how Milton contrasts Satan's lies with God's truth and why there's hope even in the midst of decay.

52:40We proudly promote Hillsdale's courses time and again and for good reason. They're beautifully produced, deeply thoughtful, and absolutely free. You can work through this course at your own pace and even earn a certificate. If you want to understand the limits of our human perspective and how true liberty comes from obedience to God, this is a series to watch. Go to hillsdale.edu slash trigger to enroll for free. That's hillsdale.edu slash trigger and discover how Milton's masterpiece can help you see our world more clearly. Let's just pause out there. Isn't there an argument to be made, Sam, that the rhetoric of the left calling everyone fascists and Nazis, when quite patently they're neither fascist?

53:24Look, you can have your criticisms about Charlie Kirk's politics, but let's be honest, He was a right-wing conservative, a Christian conservative. He's not a fascist. He's not a Nazi. Yet that accusation had been made time and time again, not only against Kirk, but also people of that particular branch of politics. Doesn't that incentivize these type of murders, this type of violence?

53:46Sam Harris:Well, it's more complicated than that. So Trump is not Hitler. I've never said he was. We're not living in Weimar, Germany now in America. But he is a genuine, wannabe authoritarian, doing many authoritarian things, and damaging our democracy with both hands every chance he gets, right? So I don't know, and we're just taught, you're now asking me what I think about the prospect of him running for a third term in just overt defiance of the 22nd Amendment, right? That's, it's not fascism. Fashionism is the wrong term, right? I mean, it's just got too much, you know, culturally specific and historically specific baggage attached to it.

54:36Sam Harris:But authoritarian is the right term, and aspiring tyrant is the right term. And he's just not... The truth is, he's not effective enough. He's not ideological enough. He doesn't care about enough big things to worry me that much, right? I mean, if he were a, I mean, this is a point I've made to the consternation and confusion of many audiences, but the irony is, if he were a better person, he'd be a more dangerous person, right? If he were a smarter person, a more committed person, I mean, if he could possibly commit to something beyond himself, right, and make, you know, he'd be more dangerous, right?

55:18Sam Harris:If he were less distractible, et cetera. So I don't view him as a Hitler figure, but I do. Everyone who's calling him an authoritarian, which sounds a lot like fascist, and you turn up the dial on authoritarianism, there's no important difference between what you're talking about and fascism. Then you're just talking about like the clothing and whether the Catholic church was ever in the mix and et cetera. So he's not as bad as Putin, right? But if we give him a chance to have as much power as he wants, where does he stop? He certainly doesn't. He would run for a third term. If we discovered that the 22nd Amendment just didn't apply, and there's just an open fairway between him and the Green, of course he's going to run for a third term.

56:05Sam Harris:It's like he doesn't care about the spirit of the Constitution, where it's clearly meant that you should not. It's not that you can't be elected twice. You can't be president twice. So I take your point about Trump, but let's come back because they don't only say it about Trump. So I didn't answer your question. Yes, certain terms are inflammatory and imprecise, but it's a much grayer area than you're making it out to be. And I mean, many people would say that what I've just said in the hour so far about Trump is a species of that very, you know, irresponsibility of condemning him to the point where, okay, any sane person is going to look at this and say, okay, we have a political emergency and anything is warranted in resistance to this, right?

57:03Sam Harris:I'm certainly, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying we have a political emergency, right? And we need our institutions to function, to contain the damage. But do you not think that it's really important when you criticize your, You criticize your political enemies. It's important to be honest. But it's also important to be accurate. In the same way that you can think somebody's a terrible person and their politics are awful, it doesn't make them a pedophile, for instance. Yeah. And this kind of escalatory language, I personally think is highly dangerous. And when you live in a country like America where you have access to guns and there's so many people with mental illnesses, I mean, that's dangerous.

57:44Sam Harris:But nobody uses more inflammatory language less responsibly than Trump and his enablers, right? I mean, you know, so again, Elon jumped on X and basically said, our political opponents are murderers. The left is the party of murder. There is no party of murder in America. Right. Trump, in his Trump, in his address to the nation immediately after Kurt's death, effectively said in so many words, not just that these Gen Z maniacs on TikTok were responsible for his death. He effectively said that his mainstream political opponents were culpable for murder, right? Which is just not true. Again, everyone from Obama on down said, this is fucking horrible, right?

58:36Sam Harris:We have to pull back from the brink here. This is not acceptable on any level. And then you had people bending over backwards to sane wash Kirk's actual politics. Ezra Klein jumps on his opinion column at the New York Times that says Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way, for which he got no end of shit left of center. everyone was being sensitive everyone with any real platform was being sensitive and what you had right of center were just by with the important exception of of Kirk's wife during her eulogy right who struck a very different note um I mean Stephen Miller's eulogy was madness it was it was a fascistic madness I mean this is right I mean, like, Stephen Miller is a character, apart from the fact that he's Jewish, he's a character right out of Weimar, right?

59:35Sam Harris:I mean, he's a lunatic in how he messages into this combustible environment. I mean, do you remember, did you watch his speech?

59:42Francis Foster:I didn't watch his speech.

59:43Sam Harris:Okay, you should watch his speech. It was the most insanely vituperative, just expressive of pure hatred for everyone left of center. I mean, just you people are nothing. You will destroy you. You have awakened a dragon. You have no idea what you... And the, not so much from him, but from other people on the dais that day, there was just this volcanic expression of Christian nationalist.

1:00:21Sam Harris:It's just pure moral confusion and political hysteria from my point of view. It was their George Floyd moment, again, yes, without the riots. Well, it's quite a big deal, Sam.

1:00:31Francis Foster:But this is what I was going to bring up.

1:00:34Sam Harris:It's a superficial deal.

1:00:35Francis Foster:Hold on a second. Hold on.

1:00:36Sam Harris:It's a big deal, but it is a bigger deal to have the president of the United States come before the country and say, basically, half of mainstream America is a terrorist organization. Like, that was the, that was, those are not his words. That was the subtext of everything he said in that address to the nation. It was completely of a piece with Elon's tweets, right?

1:01:02Francis Foster:Let me, let me, the George Floyd thing, I think you're going way too far, Sam, and here's why.

1:01:09Sam Harris:There's no daylight between us about the George Floyd riots. I mean, We view it in precisely the same way. I just view Trump differently. Hold on.

1:01:16Francis Foster:What I'm saying is something else. We agree that burning down cities and taking over districts in America and burning police stations and killing a lot of black people and these moronic chants of defund the police, which led to more black people being killed in their communities in the inner cities, all of that's crazy, right, and wrong. But what I noticed, and I'm just telling you what I noticed, right, is when Charlie Cook was murdered in this way, which I thought was horrific. And I think we do know, as far as I can tell, that it was politically motivated. And I would argue, you may disagree, but for me, the word Nazi and fascist has a very unique dimension to it, which is we have been trained as a culture to view these people as a specific threat to the democratic order, to minorities.

1:02:06Francis Foster:When we think of a Nazi, we think of someone who's going to take over the country, destroy democracy, and murder millions of people. That's what a Nazi is. So what happened was -

1:02:18Sam Harris:I do think they're - Hold on, let me finish my point.

1:02:21Francis Foster:What happened was a lot of people on the right, and even people like you, and even people like us who are not even on the right, have been called those terms by some people, in your case for being critical of Islam, in our case for questioning the insanity of the left, etc. In my view, that is putting a target on people's back. But the other point is, when Charlie Kirk was murdered, it was horrific for anyone really watching it and what happened. Did you worry for one second that there's going to be streets burning in America? Did you worry that police stations were going to be burning down? Did you worry about any of that?

1:03:00Francis Foster:Because I didn't.

1:03:00Sam Harris:No, but again, the reason why it's an unfair, it's a valid point, but it doesn't, it's not as significant as you're making it out to seem. So, and it's of a piece with a point that many people made during the elections, right, when, you know, businesses in, you know, Beverly Hills are boarding up their windows, right, in anticipation of political chaos, should the election go one way or the other. many people right of center pointed out, okay, that people are boarding up those windows not because they think Trumpists are going to start looting William Sonoma should Trump lose, right? There was just one side that was being worried about in those moments.

1:03:44Sam Harris:And it was indecent on some level not to notice that, right? Same point. It's just, so yes, It is true that the left and especially the black community express itself in that way when the unhappiness gets dialed up to 11. What I worry about on the right is a much greater concern ultimately. and it's hardcore political violence, like, you know, Timothy McVeigh style, you know, truck bomb violence and real militias, really committed and trained people who have been training for years, some of whom are Nazis, right? I mean, they're not German Nazis, but they're neo-Nazis. There's much more of that on the right.

1:04:35Sam Harris:When you look at just the the fringes of gun culture, and again, this all predates this moment. We could have had this conversation 10 years ago. There's much more, the powder keg of real political violence and civil unrest in this country that is consequential, that's not just looting and burning, but like, you know, it's your AR-15s that you've been polishing for years and training on for years, and you've got 10 ,000 rounds of ammunition already stored for this purpose. Those people are right of center, right? Is it not telling that you had to go back to Timothy McVeigh?

1:05:13Francis Foster:I mean, that's what, the 1996?

1:05:16Sam Harris:No, that's just the big one. There are other examples of, even just in this recent cycle, and this is the thing that was so dishonest about Trump's address to the nation. He talked about political violence and political assassination as though it was well established that it was only a left-wing thing. But even with Kirk's assassination, it's still in recent memory has been more of a right wing thing. There's simply more incidents of right wing political violence, including assassination or attempted assassination. And then there's just ambiguous ones, which is frankly a crazy person who's not ideological and represents nobody.

1:05:49Sam Harris:But no, I mean, it's like the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband with a hammer was a punchline right of center. Literally, Kirk himself used it as a punchline. Elon himself has used it as a punchline. Trump himself has used it as a punchline. It's literally been a laugh line for all three of them. This guy was almost killed with a hammer by a guy who is somewhat ideological, also probably crazy, but certainly right of center, who was planning to torture Nancy Pelosi, should she be home, right? This was not funny. And again, that level of callousness and recklessness and cruelty that you're worried about, in using a term like Nazi indiscriminately, so much, there's been a fire hose of that on the right, right?

1:06:45Sam Harris:Yes, there are people on the left who are dangerous idiots, I will be the first to admit, but it is different when it's coming from the Oval Office. It's different when it's coming from people. It's like for every one of those people, the Gen Z maniacs who made a video celebrating Kirk's death, there's an equivalent lunatic on the right who's much closer to power, right? Like people who've got like Laura Loomer's phone number in their phone are crazy and dangerous, right? I mean, like this is not, there's a fever swamp as you move right of center. And again, we'll talk about Tucker and Candace and Nick Fuentes.

1:07:25Sam Harris:As you begin to move rightward and toward the weird, right? And you get into QAnon and you start glad-handing all the anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists, it gets very, very weird, very, very dark, and very, very well-armed in a way that isn't mirrored on the left. And that's an important difference. I'm not worried about, yes, who's going to, who's going to, if you tell me that Louis Vuitton is being looted in Beverly Hills, I'm pretty sure I know who's doing it. I'm not as worried about that.

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1:09:12Sam, and just for the people watching, and you said that this was a George Floyd moment for the right, you weren't saying that Charlie Kirk and George Floyd are equivalent in who they were as people. No, thank you.

1:09:25Sam Harris:Thank you for connecting that. Yeah, that would be helpful. Apologies for the people who are already typing. Yeah, because you know how people like to then, I don't need to explain that to you. It was a George Floyd moment in the sense that the level of emotionality and lack of caution and lack of honesty around the messaging was equivalent. Now, again, coming from different people and different levels with different implications, But, yeah, I mean, what I saw at Kirk's memorial, you know, some of it was fine and some of it was actually beautiful and inspiring. And some of it was just a patent explosion of Christian nationalism and, you know, an appeal to theocracy.

1:10:19Sam Harris:Right. And and again, a kind of a. I mean, Elon's tweet was all this in crystal form to say that the left is the party of murder. Right. Which is going to be interpreted as not just the fringe of the fringe of the fringe, you know, in some trans cult somewhere who happened to have guns. No, the left is synonymous in that statement with effectively the Democratic Party, right? I mean, just the mainstream political opponents of Trump. It's totally irresponsible, right? And that's a level of demonization. I mean, what we have to... I mean, to take this from kind of the highest level, I mean, like this comment is true now and it'll be true 50 years from now.

1:11:17Sam Harris:What we have to surmount here to live sanely are two things, tribalism and dogmatism. I mean, like, tribalism and dogmatism are the generic, you know, software flaws in our politics, in our culture, and in our, you know, personal psychology, you know, and social psychology that make solving all of these collective problems impossible right and it just the the the antithesis of both of those things is intellectual honesty i mean one of the reasons why i criticize religion so much is that religion is the only area of culture where tribalism and dogmatism get this new gloss and they can they seem like virtues they can they can maybe they can be made to pass as virtues uh moral virtues you know moral necessities intellectual virtues.

1:12:13Sam Harris:You know, we call the dogmatism of religion faith, right? When you don't have good reasons for what you believe, and you're immune to the good reasons of others that are countering your beliefs, and there are certain conversations you refuse to have because you've got these cherished beliefs that you want to guard from all streams of evidence or argument, right, we call that faith. But no, that's just dogmatism, right? In fact, the word dogmatism is like, you know, it's a Catholic term, it's a Latin term. Dogma is a good word in Catholicism, right? I mean, it's not pejorative. But in the political space, you know, tribalism and dogmatism, what's wrong with identity politics?

1:12:51Sam Harris:What's wrong with the woke mob and cancel culture and all the blasphemy tests left of center and all that? It is the tribalism and dogmatism of all of that. And insofar as it's mirrored on the right, it's the same problem. It just has different nouns and verbs associated with it. Well, look, I'm glad actually that we're talking about the right, because one of the things that we've been talking about on the show more and more is seeing the right and who have always marketed themselves as a party of, shall we say, facts and logic, even though that's a hack term. And then you look at the way some of them are going, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of facts and even less logic.

1:13:30Sam Harris:Right. So how are you guys dealing with that? I mean, you have.

1:13:34Francis Foster:I'm one of the people who came up with the concept of the woke right. Right. And everyone who is woke right is really happy that I've come up with it. They're delighted. They're delighted. They love it.

1:13:44Sam Harris:They're so great. They think it's a specious... Are you joking or they just think it's... I'm being sarcastic.

1:13:49Francis Foster:No, they hate it because it's accurate.

1:13:51Sam Harris:Okay, so I thought you were saying that they thought it was not accurate.

1:13:54Francis Foster:I get the sense from the way you asked the question that you are with the people who think we are on the right.

1:14:00Sam Harris:No, no, no. I've been tracking how you've been navigating this, but I think it's just important to acknowledge to your audience that there's something to navigate here. I mean, I think you and I have a different relationship to this ecosystem, so it's a different challenge.

1:14:23Francis Foster:But, um, you know, the way we think about it is very simple. It's, it's that I always forget his full title, Lord, the former foreign secretary of the British foreign secretary. What's his name? Lord Palmerston? Palmer? Oh yeah. Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston. And he said, we have no permanent alliances. We have permanent interests and it's to them that we are allegiance. And that's, that's, we are coming at it from the perspective of what is true. But what about friendships? Actual friendships? I'm capable of being friends with whom I disagree. I disagreed with what you said on our podcast three years ago.

1:14:56Francis Foster:I consider you -

1:14:57Sam Harris:Well, what is that? I don't want to relitigate all of that, perhaps, but what did you disagree with?

1:15:03Francis Foster:Oh, let's not bother with that. We've done a whole 45 minutes on it.

1:15:08Sam Harris:But I don't think I heard your disagreement apart.

1:15:10Francis Foster:Yeah, I can't be bothered. We've dealt with it. It's only happened three years ago. What's the point? What I'm saying is there are, of course, exceptions to this, but I'm capable of being friends with people. I was never friends with the people who are going Tonto right now. Right. Because I always knew they were going to be crazy and I never made friends with them in the first place. You see what I'm saying?

1:15:31Sam Harris:Yeah. Well, I just think the crater that is, we're talking about is bigger than I think you think it is. And some of your friends are in it.

1:15:40Francis Foster:Tell me more.

1:15:41Sam Harris:So, I mean, Rogan is implicated in all of this in a way that, I mean, and Rogan, I've considered Rogan a friend for years, but we're sort of out of touch now, and I think there's probably a reason for that. Specifically, he has not answered my texts. I tried to give him some... Knowing that I was going to have to comment publicly about some of the interviews he's done and I think how irresponsible he's been with his platform, um you know i reached out to him by text and he hasn't you know responded to those texts so perhaps my text got lost in the mail but usually he's pretty good on his text so um and i'm not sure honestly i'm i'm conflicted around the ethics of all of this i mean like i feel um i feel terrible talking about joe and yet he's got the biggest platform on planet earth or nearly so and i think he's done an immense amount of harm to our national conversation our political conversation um so like i couldn't have done like you guys were just on his podcast i watched that i couldn't have had the conversation you had with him there because i would have had to have said this um and you know presumably he wouldn't have liked it and there's a lot to talk about um i I thought the interview he had with Trump was incredibly consequential and incredibly irresponsible.

1:17:14Sam Harris:He didn't ask a single difficult question of Trump and just helped midwife his lies, among which was the 2020 election was stolen lie. right? I mean, like, that's a shattering lie for a former president to have told in our society, and to have half the society believe it. It's a perpetual invitation to violence. It gave us the violence of January 6th. Things could have been a lot worse, et cetera. If you have the biggest platform on earth, you can't just have the kind of conversation that Joe did, had with Trump, and then open the door to everyone else to have their version of that irresponsible conversation.

1:17:55Sam Harris:So many people think that this was the 2024 was the podcast election. I agree it was the podcast election. But what it was was many people following Joe's lead in being completely irresponsible with how they use their platform. And to be specific there, I'm not saying you shouldn't talk to certain people. Joe can talk to anyone he wants to, right? I mean, I think there are certain people you probably shouldn't talk to. But there are certain people that if you're going to talk to them, given that you have a big platform, literally tens of millions of people in Joe's case, you have a responsibility to do more than just establish good vibes with them and make them seem normal, especially if they're not normal.

1:18:41Sam Harris:and especially if they're trafficking in lies and half-truths that are going to dilute a significant percentage of your audience and that are diluting you as the host because you haven't done your fucking homework. And so, I mean, his conversation with Daryl Cooper, completely irresponsible, right? I mean, we're living in an age of, I mean, Daryl Cooper is a fake historian who's trafficking in David Irving's lies about the Holocaust, right? He bounces from Tucker's podcast to Joe's podcast. On those two podcasts alone, he gets a larger audience, perhaps than any real historian ever has had, in the history of history.

1:19:20Sam Harris:I mean, it has to be over 50 million people who saw those two interviews combined. His Rogan episode didn't do very well. Between Joe and Tucker?

1:19:30Francis Foster:Look, you've got to separate Tucker from Joe. It's a completely different conversation.

1:19:33Sam Harris:It's not a completely different conversation. In fact, you could argue that Joe's was worse because Joe's happened after Tucker. There was a mess to clean up, which Joe... Rather than clean up that mess, he basically, with his imprimatur as the host who knew everything about Daryl Cooper, who had done all the homework and listened to 30 hours of Cooper's podcast on the matter, he could sign off, he could sign a blank check morally assuring his audience that Cooper's a good guy, not an anti-Semite, all of this is good faith, and that the thing he just had said on Tucker, there's nothing wrong with it, it's all just a tempest in a teapot, and people are lying, besmirching him, and it's just, you know, libtard hysterics who are having a bad reaction to the truth getting out on some level.

1:20:33Sam Harris:And he's done it with RFK Jr. He's done it with all kinds of maniacs, right? I mean, these are people who are, in many cases, liars. Some of them are probably mentally ill, right? Some of them just have character defects where they just love to touch. You find me a third rail and I'm going to touch it. No matter how combustible our society is, no matter how little I know, I'm just going to keep touching the button to see what goes off. Dave Smith, again, another, like, Dave Smith is not a morally sane voice about the war in Gaza, right? Now, he's, and he is the person he is because of what Joe has made him, right?

1:21:14Sam Harris:And that debate with Douglas, you know, I've commented on, with Douglas about, you know, what I thought went wrong there. but all of this has created immense harm in our culture, right? We're all in the business of building culture. Culture is the operating system of our society, right? Like everything we care about is a matter of culture, working better and better or worse and worse, right? Like whether we can solve any of the collective action problems we need to solve, whether our species survives is entirely a story, apart from an asteroid impact, it's entirely a story of whether we can sort our culture out enough so as not to annihilate ourselves.

1:21:59And you literally have people doubting whether the Holocaust was even a thing

1:22:06Sam Harris:in the context of the greatest explosion of anti-Semitism we have seen in our lifetime. time, in the middle of a very clear clash between aspiring Islamist theocracy globally and the West and Israel being the tip of the spear of all of that, massive moral confusion being spread in our society around that, quite consequentially so. And Joe is doing as much as anybody to spread that confusion, and he doesn't know it. I mean, I think Joe is a good guy. I don't think he wants to harm anybody. I would not say the same about Tucker Carlson. I think they're completely different types of people. But there, I mean, it's a disaster what has happened on Joe's podcast, politically and culturally.

1:23:00Sam Harris:he's done thousands of podcasts thousands of them are great but his approach to this he's taken absolutely no responsibility as a journalist or as an intellectual or as a historian or as a scientist because he doesn't view himself as a journalist or an intellectual or historian as a scientist he's a comic and he's just shooting the shit with people and he's just exploring his interests and great. It's Joe Rogan University, but he's doing, he has to recognize that he's doing more than that. He's doing more than that just by virtue of having the audience that he has. But he's also doing more than that because he has this taste for conspiracy theories.

1:23:46Sam Harris:He's got this taste for contrarian and anti-establishment views and the debunking of the elites, right? He's bought into that side. The scales are not just... balanced in a truly open-minded and kind of intellectually disinterested way. No, no, he's got an appetite for the false flag operation, right? Like if there's something, if the non-standard view can be spun at all, he wants to hear about it. And that acts like a bug light for maniacs, right? I mean, then you just get these, there's an endless number of people who seem to have the right credentials, and many people who don't, obviously, have the right credentials, like Dave Smith, but you can get an endless number of people with PhDs or MDs or whatever the requisite degree is who are crazy, right?

1:24:42Sam Harris:Or just terrible people, right? When you have a platform like Joe has, you have a responsibility to not just lay yourself open and your audience open to a firehose of bullshit and half-truths and lies,

1:25:04Sam Harris:unfiltered.

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1:25:41Francis Foster:I have one of these because I want the peace of mind that my personal data isn't being sold or spied on. Go to unplugged.com slash trigonometry and use our code trigonometry for$20 off a protective case with the Arb phone. Okay, but isn't there also a way that you could say, look, you know, some of these ideas are going to be bullshit, some of you are half true, some are going to be highly controversial, which in a few years time you look at in the cold light of day and was like, well, it was unpleasant, but it was true.

1:26:12Sam Harris:Okay, wait a minute. Wait a minute. stuff about covid for example okay but at the time i i called that correctly everybody i mean that was so easy to sit to see as an instance of left-wing politically correct overreach right like calling calling the the lab leak hypothesis racist at the time i mean the very hour the first instant of this happening every sane person who's not indoctrinated into wokeism at that moment saw, okay, that's bullshit.

1:26:46Francis Foster:Sam, I don't think you're remembering this correctly with all due respect. I remember, and just telling your perspective as people who make videos on YouTube, right, that we were having conversations about, are we allowed to have this particular discussion about COVID or masks or vaccines or whatever? Okay, that's a bigger conversation. And the Wuhan thing, because if you'd said that that was the case at the time, you were not allowed to say it, YouTube would literally nuke your YouTube channel, right? So when Joe pushed back on it, which I am grateful to him for doing on that thing, he was leading the way in challenging some of this public health nonsense, right?

1:27:25Sam Harris:So yes, if you want me to say that some conspiracy theories are true, yes. So conspiracy theory, Alex Jones is going to get it right some of the time. That doesn't vindicate Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a madman who has created tremendous harm, full stop. It doesn't matter how long the list of things is that he was right about. I mean, he's just, he's going to be, he is endorsing every crazy conspiracy allegation. Some are going to be, at some point, you're going to say, oh yeah, this thing that seemed totally implausible and even irresponsible responsible to entertain. Turns out that was right. The CIA did do that.

1:28:13But it's also on a more prosaic level, like school closures. We had Boris Johnson, our former prime minister, who actually said the school closures that went on in the UK were wrong and it damaged a whole generation of children. And maybe if there'd been more people

1:28:29Sam Harris:to push back on that, we could have actually dealt with - You can count on one hand. So the The postmortem on COVID, I guarantee you that the postmortem on COVID that passes for truth in Joe's world is not true. On Joe's account, COVID was just a cold. The vaccines were fucking dangerous and may have killed a lot of people. In Brett Weinstein's world, the vaccines killed millions of people.

1:29:02And et cetera.

1:29:03Sam Harris:So all of that's upside down. Yes, there were some very clear moments where the mainstream political messaging, public health messaging, was disastrously bad and or dishonest, and that was super consequential. And there were there were things that things were kept closed for much longer than they should have been. We were not nearly as flexible as as we should have been in just in just understanding this was a moving object. And with each new variant, it was things were changing and that the science is catching up to the problem. And there's lots of scientific uncertainty at every stage along the way.

1:29:45Sam Harris:And there are people covering their ass. And it's not a plan demic. Right. Well, you know, but it's just whatever. Again, if you just add up the indiscretions of people covering their ass and people not knowing what they're talking about and it being a moving target and us doing lots of stuff for the first time that's really difficult and lots of people also dying and there being a real risk of the healthcare system collapsing, it explains 99 % of how badly we handled it. But the lessons being drawn from how badly we handled it, in many, many cases, are the wrong lessons. I mean, we're just, we're living in, you know, land of hallucinations right of center around what should have been learned from COVID.

1:30:29Sam Harris:I mean, again, COVID was a dress rehearsal for something quite a bit worse that we fucked up the dress rehearsal. And I mean, I hope someone's learned actionable lessons that can be implemented in real time next time. But what I fear has happened is that as a culture, we're actually less prepared for a worse pandemic because of how badly we learn the lessons of our failure.

1:31:00Francis Foster:Well, no, I agree with you. And I think there is no doubt that COVID broke a lot of brains. And by the way, I can't speak for Joe, obviously, but I suspect if you speak to him, he'll feel that you went crazy over COVID. Yeah, no, 100%.

1:31:12Sam Harris:He has no idea. But one of us is right, right? He's, again, he's...

1:31:17Francis Foster:You could both be wrong.

1:31:18Sam Harris:No, no, okay. I guarantee you that there is a consensus understanding around what happened during COVID that is not in Joe's brain or in the brain of most of his audience. And it's in broad strokes the best understanding we have. It's not to say that we know down to the last person who died of COVID, but well within an order of magnitude, we know what happened, right? And that's not what Joe is saying about COVID.

1:31:53Francis Foster:Let me make the point I was going to make, which was more about why COVID affected a lot of people the way that it did. And, you know, broke people's brains as a strong statement. I use it because I do feel that happened. There was, and I'm not talking about Joe specifically, I just mean that a lot of people felt this way, not felt this way, a lot of people ended up being much more conspiratorial coming out than they came in, right? Because we had this thing called public health and we had this other thing called science, scientific truth, right? And we went so far over, and these two things are intentioned because if you're trying to communicate nuanced, complicated, ultimately unverifiable scientific theories or hypotheses to a public with an average IQ who are in panic and fear, scared for their lives.

1:32:44Francis Foster:They're being fed all kinds of crazy stuff in the media. You have to take the scientific truth and you have to, this is best case scenario, this is why people being corrupt without Fauci having funded the lab in China, all of this other stuff, right? Just in a perfect world. And you have to condense that complex scientific truth into public health messaging. Yeah.

1:33:06Sam Harris:Which is a political process.

1:33:08Francis Foster:And that process ended up going so far over to public health. And then you add on top of other things that happened, coverups of certain things that we now know to be true or as best we can, like where COVID came from, etc., that a lot of people went, well, this thing you told me in the interest of public health was actually just you lying, right? Because it turned out not to be true.

1:33:32Sam Harris:Well, but in many of those cases, it was not just people lying. I know.

1:33:37Francis Foster:I know. But if you're being bombarded with messages and told you're a terrible person for not believing them, and you then discover that those messages were actually false, most people are going to say, I have been lied to. Yeah. Right? And so we've ended up in a very conspiratorial world, partly, I think, because of what happened during COVID. And by the way, if you lock people in their homes for two years, some of them are going to loop it. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.

1:34:00Sam Harris:But part of the burden that our public health authorities couldn't effectively shoulder was that they were messaging into a polluted information landscape that was poised to be this conspiratorial and this distrustful of a thing. and in large measure, independent media is culpable for that. I mean, it's the Candace Owens of the world and the Joes of the world who were calling bullshit where things were actually bullshit and calling bullshit on absolutely standard science. I mean, the people who Joe had on his podcast again and again, Brett Weinstein and all the other ivermectin cultists, that was genuinely harmful, right?

1:34:55Sam Harris:It's not that they were wrong about everything, but they were wrong about most things. And it was dangerous. But what about the vaccine when you have people coming out going, if you take the vaccine, you're not going to be able to pass it on? There was a moment that, okay, before we had a vaccine, Republicans and Democrats died at the same rate. Once we had a vaccine, Republicans died more than Democrats. That's bizarre. It shouldn't be that way. That's political. Yeah, that's political messaging.

1:35:28Francis Foster:Obesity, age, all of that. Because Republicans tend to be older, right?

1:35:33Sam Harris:But it was not factoring in there. I believe that's just purely a matter of vaccine hesitancy.

1:35:39Francis Foster:So your claim is, just so that I understand, what you're saying is right-of-center people got anti-vax messaging, didn't take the vaccine, and all other things being equal died at a higher rate. That's your claim.

1:35:52Sam Harris:And honestly, Joe was a super spreader of those ideas. So last I looked, I mean, I haven't looked at these data for some months, but within the last, I think I did a podcast a couple of months ago and the authority who I had on at the time, Mark Lipsitch, I believe, signed off on these numbers. I mean, do you have these numbers? How many people in the United States do you think died from COVID? How many do you think were saved by the vaccine? How many do you think died who shouldn't have died based on vaccine hesitancy? I don't know. Right. I don't think there's any way of knowing if I'm going to be honest with you, Sam.

1:36:36Sam Harris:Well, no, there's not a way of knowing exactly, but there's a way of knowing. You can triangulate on these numbers based on excess deaths and just reported deaths. I mean, the epidemiology of this is not mysticism. I mean, there's a scientific understanding of just how people die and how many people are likely to die in any given society, in any given moment. We're not off by a factor of 10, right? Let's say we're off by 20%, but this is not like we think X and it's really one-tenth of X.

1:37:17Sam Harris:Something like 1.2 million Americans died from COVID. From or with? COVID is the reason they died. Okay. Not that they got hit by a bus and they also had COVID. Okay. Now, that's not the bubonic plague in the 14th century, but it's also not a cold, right? Most of those people were old. Most of those people are not fit young men who didn't want to take the vaccine because they heard about the heightened risk of myocarditis, right? I mean, there was all kinds of wrinkles there. It mattered, you know, how old you were in addition to being obese, et cetera. But this was a real health challenge before we got the vaccines.

1:38:04Sam Harris:Now, how many people do we think died because of vaccine hesitancy? Who wouldn't have died had everyone who could have gotten the vaccine gotten vaccinated? That number is around 300 ,000 right now. That's a lot of people. Again, most of those people are almost certainly old. You know, they're not four-year-olds. I mean, it's like 1 ,000 kids or something like 1 ,000 kids died. from COVID. But 300 ,000 people, it used to be a lot of people. Now, it's like in the... It's a huge number. Yeah, but so what did it mean to have the world's largest podcast basically endlessly messaging against the vaccine?

1:38:49Sam Harris:I mean, Joe can say he's not anti-vax, but the primary message around the COVID vaccine and COVID itself coming from his podcast and coming from the so-called experts he had on was that the vaccines are fucking dangerous, man. The vaccines, again, Brett Weinstein told us that the vaccine is likely to kill something like 17 million people, right? I saw a credible estimate of something like 17 million deaths globally from this technology. 17 million deaths from the COVID Well, when you scale up to billions, it's not hard to reach a number like that with a technology this dangerous. There's zero evidence of anything like that happening.

1:39:34Sam Harris:That is a complete hallucination. So it was a problem that some of the biggest podcasts in the world, and it's not just Joe, but Joe's was certainly among the biggest, had an appetite for this contrarian take on everything such that just, let's just, let's just stick a mic in front of RFK Jr. I mean, he might be president. RFK, tell us what you think, right? It's, he is a confabulation machine, right? It's not, it's some of it's lying, some of it's delusion, some of it's, I don't know what

1:40:12Francis Foster:is wrong with the person, but - I get your point, Sam, and I think you make a, like, look, Let me tell you what we said on trigonometry about this. It's relevant to the point I'm going to make. We said, I said specifically, I don't remember, Francis can speak for himself. If I were elderly or overweight, I'd definitely take the vaccine.

1:40:35Francis Foster:And given that I've had COVID twice, I probably have a lot of natural immunity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I kind of left it there. And it's ultimately up to you. Speak to your doctor. So the most important thing is that you take professional advice on this. That's what we always said, right? And if you've got comorbidity. Yeah. But if I were 75 years old and morbidly obese, I'd be taking the vaccine. That's what we said repeatedly, right?

1:41:00Sam Harris:I mean, just to give you a point of reference, that's my view of it as well. Like, I haven't been vaccinated in years. I wasn't finished. And that's relevant, right?

1:41:09Francis Foster:But what I also said is government tyranny that we experienced in relation to the pandemic was an outrage. Was an outrage.

1:41:19Sam Harris:Well, at what point was it an outrage? Not in the first of all. Second lockdown.

1:41:23Francis Foster:Second lockdown onwards. Okay. In our country. So in our country, we basically, we locked down the first time. Then it became very, very clear that lockdowns don't actually work, right? And do a lot of harm. And we kept locking down and we kept wearing these fucking masks that don't work and all this other nonsense. complete garbage, while being told, no, no, the virus didn't come from a lab in China, no, no, Fauci is the best guy ever, all of the same stuff.

1:41:47Sam Harris:I get it. I mean, I was, yeah.

1:41:49Francis Foster:Okay. So that being the case, the question, a lot of people will agree with what you're saying. A lot of people would disagree with what you're saying. But the question for me is, what do you think should be the case? Because my view is people are free and they can listen to information and they can make their own decisions. They can listen to trigonometry and go, Constance and Francis think you should probably speak to your doctor. They can listen to Joe and get whatever perspective they get from that, and they can make their own decision. That sounds quite dangerous, but I worry that whatever it is that is the opposite of that is also really dangerous, where you are now deciding that, oh, it's a pandemic, therefore these people shouldn't, oh, I don't know what it is that you think should have happened, other than perhaps calling on Joe to, as you said, take more responsibility.

1:42:41Francis Foster:But what else should happen in relation to this?

1:42:43Sam Harris:What's the answer? Well, it depends on how bad the disease is. So what should have happened during COVID? Well, we should have acknowledged that we are catching up to reality, right? Like, we didn't understand how it was spreading. I mean, there was that period where we thought, you know, it was spreading based on contact with packages. We're all wiping down packages, the fomite transmission, right? It took a while to even acknowledge that it was airborne. And therefore, it took a while to acknowledge that lockdowns would be less effective and maybe even totally ineffective. It took a while to understand that it wasn't that bad for kids and was pretty damn bad for the elderly.

1:43:32Sam Harris:Many diseases are the opposite of that, or at least that they hit kids and the elderly kind of equally. I think the Spanish flu actually targeted the young more than the elderly. Yeah, yeah. So if this had been, if the bodies of elementary school children had been stacking up like cordwood, we would have had a very different risk tolerance, and we would have been right to have a very different risk tolerance. The lockdown would have been far more like China, however ineffectual that would have been.

1:44:05Sam Harris:it remains to be seen what we should do given the specifics as we come to understand them. And at every point along the way, we should have figured out how to message around scientific uncertainty better than we did. But the problem, again, is we're messaging into a space that is super conspiratorial, hyper-partisan, or people are using any expression of uncertainty as a means to discredit the authority, right? So, I mean, this is the asymmetric warfare that has always been true. Whenever a scientist gets on, it used to be CNN, not so much anymore because nobody's watching, but, you know, you've got six minutes on CNN as a scientist to talk about climate change or anything.

1:44:58Sam Harris:The moment you begin to calibrate your statement with the completely normal degree of scientific caution and uncertainty and humility appropriate to a scientific presentation among scientists, to the general public, it sounds like, oh, this guy, you could drive a truck through all the holes in this guy's account. Even he says he's not sure. So why am I going to take the vaccine? right? So, I mean, we're in some of the political imperative of public health messaging has to deal with the fact that on some level you are...

1:45:42Sam Harris:It's very easy to see how a feeling of paternalism creeps in because you're worried about people taking the nuanced truth the wrong way, right? And that invites, again, this temptation should never be taken, but it invites the prospect of a noble lie or a noble half-truth, right? Which, again, is a disaster, but it's easy to see how people get lured in that direction because they're talking to Candace Owens, right? I mean, on some level, when you look at what Candace herself was doing on Twitter around COVID, it was madness.

1:46:25Francis Foster:Did you know that the biggest threat to your retirement is not something that's talked about often? The increased longevity of American citizens means default retirement accounts like IRAs, 401ks, and TSPs may not suffice. If you have over$50 ,000 in your retirement account, get instant access to a free two-minute report from Augusta Precious Metals that reveals the one step you can take to secure your financial future. Visit TriggerGold.com or text Trigger to 35052 today. So I was watching a documentary on flat earthers. And at the end of it, they interviewed this scientist from NASA. And they said, oh, you must find this funny and blah, blah, blah.

1:47:06And she went, well, no, because what that tells me is that scientists aren't doing their jobs. If we allow, if we, not if we allow, but if conspiracies like Flat Earth is allowed to propagate and people are talking about it, it's because we're not doing our jobs. We are flawed in our communication. Would you not say that is also an issue as well? That the scientists aren't actually communicating effectively? Absolutely.

1:47:34Sam Harris:But there's a... I mean, it's worth acknowledging how difficult a task it is when they're talking to people who have been raised... raise, I mean, there are many different kind of orbits of ignorance here, but I mean, there's a very clear kind of religious anti-science orbit where it's just, you know, this is, their worldview is anchored to something else other than empirical science, right? And so it's, there's a massive amount of distrust of science just as science coming from, functionally half of our society. I mean, probably more like 35 % of America is devout in precisely this way, where it's like evolution is just bullshit, right?

1:48:28Sam Harris:Like this, we did not, you know, my great-great-great-grandma was not a monkey, and I'm not going to be told otherwise, right? That's where the understanding of the relevant science stops. And then there's lots of and kind of anti-science cultishness around specifically things like vaccines. I mean, it was a perfect storm. A pandemic is a kind of perfect storm because it taps into

1:49:03Sam Harris:specifically the anti-vax subculture got weaponized during COVID in a way that was, you know, that it might have been waiting for, but it was quite effective. It was a little bit, I mean, it was just as effective, bizarrely effective and hysterical and destabilizing as the weaponization that we've seen around Gaza against Israel. It's like, how did Israel got attacked on October 7th by absolute barbarians, unambiguously so? I mean, the moral high ground could not be more clear. The very people who were raped and killed and tortured and kidnapped were the peaceniks in Israel, right? Not the, you know, not the ultra-orthodox religious maniacs on the Jewish side or the settlers, I mean, just the very people who are, you know, you'd think would do the most PR damage to the Hamas side of the story, And yet, magically, they've managed to weaponize the information landscape in such a way that, I mean, wherever it wasn't already destroyed by the ambient level of anti-Semitism that exists in the world, Israel's reputation has been completely destroyed over the war in Gaza, just by having lost an information war.

1:50:30They also haven't helped themselves, Sam.

1:50:32Sam Harris:No, they haven't even tried. No, they haven't. Number one. And number two, you have people like Smotric and Ben Gavir who've been in the cabinet going around and saying things that are quite frankly just beyond the pale as well. But there's just, I mean, there's just two of them. There's only two anyone can name. But when you hold that up against the reality of religious fanaticism on the other side, it's just we're not talking about a similar world. Well, I'm glad we're moving on to that issue because you mentioned earlier that you don't think the ceasefire is likely to lead to peace in the Middle East.

1:51:15Why?

1:51:17Sam Harris:I just think it's too deep a problem. I mean, I think, I mean, one, Hamas is, you know, agreeing to a ceasefire insofar as they are. I mean, now they're killing their fellow Palestinians. And strangely, there's not much complaint about that coming from Hollywood or, you know, any of the ceasefire people left of center who ostensibly are worried about Palestinians. but um i mean they would agree to a ceasefire so as to regroup to live to fight another day right i mean they're not you know people not people who are going to be happily shopping in whatever mall that the kushners and the trumps and the woodcoffs build in gaza city in a few short years should all this work out um i mean they're they're a death cult right they're they're real jihadists who really want things.

1:52:11Sam Harris:They're not transactional. They're not secretly hoping to just be wealthy or just be... I mean, I'm sure there are some peripheral cynical people who might be like that, but the true believers are true believers, and they're in a religious war, not just with Israel, but with everyone who's not Muslim, right? And even Muslims as well. even Muslims who they consider to be apostates. And so when viewed from, I mean, this whole peace process is not credible from the point of view of real jihadists, right? Like the people who are representing the other Arab interests, I mean, the crown prince of wherever is just another apostate who would be condemned by Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State or Al-Shabaab or any other organization, including Hamas.

1:53:13Sam Harris:I'm not saying all jihadists are the same, but they're the same in this regard. They really are committed to a longer-term project of winning a religious war.

1:53:27Francis Foster:But that's why the original Trump plan imposed dismantlement and disarmament of Hamas as part of its terms. Now, that hasn't transpired. But basically, everyone in the region other than Iran and Hamas agrees that Hamas cannot be allowed to remain in power in Gaza. So the question is, can you get beyond that? If you listen to our discussion with Joe, I made this point, which was about the Kushner plan, as I understand it, is to try and get the moderate Arabs to work with Israel in opposition to Iran. You have to get rid of Hamas for that to happen. And then you get them all trading together and then they hold hands and sink in Baya.

1:54:06Sam Harris:Yeah, but again, you're talking about the wealthy monarchs of the region who have the so-called Arab street to worry about. And the Arab street in all the scores of countries, I mean, there's 50-plus Muslim-majority countries, not all Arab, is highly radicalized. It's not as radicalized as the Palestinians. I mean, the Palestinians are—I mean, Hamas is still popular among the Palestinians, especially in the West Bank. I think it's true to say that they would win an election in the West Bank today. also as well sam we need to take into account that the first thing that they did when israel stopped bombing gaza was it then went out and shot people it regarded as traitors kneecapped them tortured them all the rest of them you can't be you can't be certain that the opinion yeah but you can be certain of the level of religious fanaticism in the area you know what people care about, I mean, they care about above all, like the top of the list would be any desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

1:55:22Sam Harris:Like that's, there's no number of kids you can kill that matters more than that. And that's bizarre. I mean, that's insane. That's morally upside down to have a culture that is framing their core moral concerns around religious fiction, right? I mean, there are many cultures like that, but Islamic culture is the world over has the worst version of that, right? I mean, again, like you and I could say something, the three of us could say something on this podcast sufficiently provocative or do something like burn a Quran that could literally cause embassies to burn tomorrow in a dozen countries.

1:56:08Sam Harris:I mean, it's like that's the world we're living in. The Muslim community the world over is uniquely combustible based on the significance of religious symbols. And they're not uniquely combustible. I mean, they don't, we've seen protest after protest over cartoons, things like cartoons and the naming of a teddy bear, we have not seen protests, certainly not sizable ones, over what an outrage it is that groups like Hamas or Hezbollah or Al Shabaab or Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba or Boko Haram or any of these jihadists and Islamist groups over the fact that they have committed atrocities against now practically countless innocent people, most of whom are Muslim, right?

1:57:06Sam Harris:How can you not have 100 ,000 people turning up in the streets of London to protest the Islamic State at its height? Where were those protests? Where were all the Muslims who were desperate to disavow jihadism in the face of the Islamic State? What you had is you had people dropping out of medical school in London, people dropping out of the London School of Economics to go join the Islamic State to take Yazidi women as sex slaves and then bragging about it on Twitter, right? And where were the protests? No, the protests were over the Danish cartoons.

1:57:47Francis Foster:Mm-hmm.

1:57:48Sam Harris:Right.

1:57:49Francis Foster:What's your point, Sam?

1:57:51Sam Harris:The center of gravity for far too much of this community, this community of two billion people in the world over, is around religious pride and humiliation, religious symbolism. It's not around the real consequential body count of, you know, violence and peacemaking, right? It's not about... Most of the world, and certainly most of the Muslim world, doesn't care when Muslims kill other Muslims. They care when Jews do it. Most of the world doesn't care when Muslims kill Christians, right? I mean, it's strange. I mean, this is something I'm genuinely surprised about and confused about. I'm not quite sure why fundamentalist Christians aren't more agitated around the murder of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa by Muslims.

1:58:54I mean, right now, the Islamic State is cutting the heads off of Christians in Nigeria and maybe also Uganda.

1:59:06Sam Harris:But it's definitely Nigeria.

1:59:10Sam Harris:It's like you would think that would be a pretty big deal. It's not, it's, no, it's the most inflammatory thing on earth is Jews killing Muslims in the Holy Land. So, I mean, we need, I mean, yes, we desperately need a war of ideas, if not an actual civil war within the Muslim world in scores of countries.

1:59:42Sam Harris:to nullify the cancer of jihadism. I mean, Islam plus jihadism is going to prove totally unworkable for open societies everywhere in the future. There's no way of assimilating jihadists. I mean, what you're experiencing in the UK right now is what it's like to have 6 % of your society be Muslim and some percentage of those Muslims to want to live under Sharia law, and some percentage of those Muslims to happily create so-called grooming gangs because it's in line with their view of how you think about infidel young girls. And you're trying to absorb all that, and you've got Tommy Robinson out there complaining.

2:00:38Sam Harris:The Muslim community has to figure out how to purge itself of this level of religious fanaticism and these specific commitments around things like punishing apostasy and blasphemy.

2:00:59And in the fullness of time, maybe they'll do that.

2:01:03Sam Harris:Under pressure, maybe they'll do that. But they're not tending to do it organically.

2:01:09Francis Foster:Well, this is where the Saudi and the UAE are interesting, right? Because they are trying to do this. They're trying to replace Islamism with a more moderate version plus economic growth. So the young men in particular have things to do and a purpose in life and a family to feed and all this other stuff and are not drawn towards these sorts of ideologies. You seem skeptical about that.

2:01:39Sam Harris:Yeah, because I think these religious commitments are sincere for many, many millions of people. And also it's just for everyone. I mean, wealth is not enough on some level. I mean, this is a...

2:01:56Sam Harris:I mean, many people think they need religion. I mean, you're certainly aware of this and you're talking about this more and you and I view this differently.

2:02:09I think the burden is on us to understand that the real depths of human flourishing need to be talked about in ways that are non-sectarian.

2:02:20Sam Harris:I mean, the truth is non-sectarian. The truth is not Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish. So that's true of physics. And it's also true of the mind, right? Whatever's possible for us mentally and emotionally and socially and whatever happens after death. And whatever is, it's like to believe otherwise is to believe that one isolated community 2 ,000 years ago that had no access to science or even scientific values, much less scientific tools, got it perfectly right and everyone else got it wrong, right? So one of these revealed texts is true, despite the fact that none of them seem to recognize that slavery was a problem morally, among other things.

2:03:03Sam Harris:They know nothing about DNA or electricity or information science or the real scale of the cosmos or how disease spreads or anything, but they can tell you how to sacrifice a goat. And they've got some good wisdom in there too, but they don't have a monopoly on that because the Greeks had that and the Buddhists had that. The golden rule exists in many different contexts. And even monkeys seem to intuit some basic version of it when you treat them unfairly or reward one with a cucumber and another with a grape. They tend to not like that.

2:03:40Sam Harris:Whatever is true about us spiritually and ethically is deeper than culture and is certainly deeper than any ancient culture. right and the fact that the world was partitioned by language barriers and geographical barriers for thousands of years and everyone came to came up with different books is an artifact that we have to recognize as an artifact it's and it's it's it's specious it's spurious it's not that the actual foundation of our moral knowledge or anything else and when you go into the Bible and read it and find and purport to find wisdom there even if you're a fundamentalist, fundamentalists are picking and choosing the stuff they think is wise and the stuff they think is better left ignored.

2:04:26Sam Harris:And they're doing that on the basis of a larger cultural conversation that is secular and that has moved on. So it's like the fact that you're still not trying to figure out whether you should kill somebody for working on the Sabbath, if if you're Jewish and reading the Pentateuch,

2:04:45or whether you really need to hunt witches in your community

2:04:50Sam Harris:for the crime of witchcraft, right? But the fact that you can ignore all that and just take the so-called good stuff, again, that's an editing procedure that is... The gold standard of that is your own moral intuitions that have been tuned up by your engagement with the 21st century, your inevitable engagement with the 21st century, and a wider secular culture, right? So none of these religions have a monopoly on anything other than their own sectarian ignorance and tribalism and dogmatism. And all of that is best disavowed. And we can have a real conversation about what is truly transcultural and deeper than the artifacts of whatever, you know, grandma had in her bag before we knew anything about biology or the human brain, etc.

2:05:41Sam Harris:But most of the world doesn't see it that way. Most of the world is mightily attached to whatever they got at mother's knee about the unique sanctity of a specific book and what happens after death. And they've organized their lives around it. And in the case of Islam, You're talking about a much wider culture that has been insulated from modernity to a remarkable degree and has not had the same kinds of collisions with rationality or science or secular politics. And so on some level, it's like we're dealing with the Christians of the 14th century in many, many places and even on the streets of London.

2:06:29Sam, it's been an absolute pleasure as always having you on the show. The final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

2:06:40Francis Foster:Before Sam answers the final question, at the end of the interview, make sure you head to triggerpod.co.uk where he will answer your questions. Presidential nominees for 2028, who would you like them to be and who do you think will actually be chosen? I'm very curious to know who his top three non-fiction authors would be. What do you think about the idea that new atheism might have paved the way for wokeism?

2:07:05Sam Harris:I think we're not talking about solving coordination problems that, by definition, are global in scale. So much of what we've talked about so far represents a massive opportunity cost around the problems that really are huge that we can't even think about solving. We haven't talked about AI, right? So AI is a global phenomenon now. It's going to impose whatever global risks it imposes on us to get out of this arms race condition and develop this technology sanely in a way that's going to be compatible with our flourishing or even our survival is going to require cooperation that we just can't figure out how to even begin to engineer, right?

2:08:03Sam Harris:How do we get the entire world on the same page around what is safe and ethical around AI? that happens. And so many other problems. I mean, the next pandemic is another coordination problem that we're just... But coordination problems are specifically interesting because we can fail to solve them even when everyone wants the same thing, right? Like it's not just people having different interests or seeing trade-offs differently. We can all fail together because we simply haven't figured out how to move collectively, even when everyone could be incentivized to do that and everyone has the same basic interests.

2:08:52Francis Foster:There you go. An uplifting message from Sam Harris to finish on. All right, head on over to Substack where we ask Sam your questions. Are you encouraged that a critical mass of the best new media platforms, including trigonometry, is evolving beyond commentary into high-quality interview journalism and the kind of genuine shoe-leather reporting traditional media seems unable or unwilling to deliver.