All right. I want you to picture a dinner party.
It's a hypothetical dinner party, but the guest
list is very real. Okay. I'm with you. Sounds
intriguing. At the head of the table, you have
a neuroscientist, and I mean a serious one. He's
got a PhD from UCLA. He spent years studying
belief in the brain using fMRI machines. Right.
So very rigorous, very scientific, hard data.
The hardest. but sitting right next to him is
a meditation teacher you know the kind of guy
who dropped out of college to spend 11 years
in silence mostly in the himalayas okay someone
who talks about things like unconditional love
and the illusion of the self a little contrasting
to say the least but i can see it you know science
and spirituality they can sometimes mix they
can but wait Then across from them is a guy who
is absolutely scorching the earth on the topic
of Islam. He's arguing that we need to stop being
so polite about religious dogmas that, in his
view, get people killed. He's making a case for
profiling. He's even arguing that torture might
be rational in very specific ticking time bomb
scenarios. Wow. OK, that that definitely changes
the vibe of the party. Significantly. And next
to him is a registered Democrat who says he hates
Donald Trump, has voted for every Democrat from
Obama to Kamala Harris, but is being shouted
down by his own party. For what? For owning guns
and for criticizing what he calls wokeness. And
let me guess. The punchline here is that every
single. person at this table is the same man
every single chair is occupied by the same man
that is exactly it today we are talking about
sam harris and i have to say preparing for this
deep dive was Kind of exhausting. I believe it.
It really feels like we're trying to analyze
four completely different people who just happen
to inhabit the same body. You know, it's funny
you say that because that feeling of confusion
is actually central to understanding him. Pass
off. Well, Harris is arguably one of the most
difficult public intellectuals to categorize
in the 21st century. I mean, depending on your
Twitter algorithm, he is either a hero of reason
who speaks the uncomfortable truths nobody else
will touch, or he's a gateway drug to the alt
-right. And a pseudoscientist. He's been called
a champion of reason and also accused of peddling
junk science or just outright bigotry. The pendulum
swing on public opinion of him is just wild.
I mean, you have Ben Affleck on HBO literally
screaming that Harris's views are gross and racist.
I remember that clip vividly. And then on the
other hand, you have millions of people, literally
millions, using his app, waking up to find inner
peace and compassion. How do we square that circle?
And that is our mission today. We are not here
to decide if Sam Harris is good or bad. We're
not trying to cancel him or canonize him. No,
not at all. We are here to look at the architecture
of his mind. We have a massive stack of sources
in front of us. His books like The End of Faith,
Waking Up, The Moral Landscape, Free Will. We've
got hours and hours of his podcast, Making Sense,
and of course, the transcripts of his biggest
public controversies. So the goal is to figure
out how he gets from meditation is the path to
happiness all the way over to free will is a
total lie. And how he manages to make almost
everyone, from the religious right to the progressive
left, absolutely furious in the process. It's
a journey into what he calls the middle way.
It is. But I should warn you, it's not a comfortable
path. It really requires checking your tribal
allegiances at the door before we begin. I think
that's fair. So let's start where it all began,
the origin story. Because if you only know him
as this, you know, horseman of atheism, you probably
expect a certain kind of background. Right. You'd
probably guess either a cold clinical scientific
upbringing or maybe a really traumatic religious
one that he's now rebelling against. And you
would be wrong on both counts. Completely wrong.
Let's go back to 1967. Sam Harris is born in
Los Angeles, and this is probably my favorite
random fact about him, and I refuse to just gloss
over it. I think I know where you're going with
this. His mother is Susan Harris. The legendary
TV creator. Not just any TV creator. She created
the Golden Girls. It's a fantastic detail that
I think most people completely miss. It's just
a perfect piece of trivia. Right. So the man
who writes about the end of religion and the
apocalypse of artificial intelligence is the
son of the woman who gave us Rose, Blanche, Dorothy
and Sophia. It's amazing. And his dad, Berkeley
Harris, he was an actor. He came from a Quaker
background and his mother's background was Jewish.
But here's the crucial part. Harris wasn't raised
in some militant atheist household. That's not
the story at all. No, and that's a really important
distinction he makes all the time. He's spoken
about this extensively. It wasn't that his parents
sat him down and said, there is no God, religion
is stupid. It's just nothing. It was just irrelevant.
It wasn't a topic of conversation. He was raised
entirely secular. He's even said he didn't really
realize he was Jewish in terms of ancestry until
much, much later. He was just a kid growing up
in L .A. So, OK, he's this kid in L .A. He heads
off to Stanford University, starts out as an
English major, seems like a pretty standard path
for a bright kid. But then something happens.
The catalyst. And it's not a book. It's not a
lecture he attended. It's MDMA. He takes ecstasy.
Now. Usually when we hear stories about college
kids taking ecstasy, the story ends with a rave
or maybe a really bad hangover. But for Harris,
this was something else entirely. Yeah. And we
have to be really careful here because Harris
is very specific about how he frames this experience.
He isn't out there telling his audience, hey,
go do drugs. Of course not. But he describes
this moment as. An epistemological shock. Epistemological.
Okay, so break that down. It changed how he knew
what he knew. Exactly that. Before the MDMA,
Harris lived in what most of us consider normal
reality. You know, you wake up, you're anxious
about your grades, you're annoyed by the weather,
you're thinking about what to have for lunch.
The constant internal monologue. Yes. You assume
that this low -level hum of neurosis, that voice
in your head that is constantly chattering away,
you just assume that's what being a human is.
It's the default setting. It's like the water
we're all swimming in. And then the chemical
hits his brain. And suddenly that self, that
anxious neurotic knot that feels like it's in
the center of his chest, it just unspools. It
dissolves. It dissolves. He describes feeling
this boundless sense of love for a friend he
was sitting with. But it wasn't just feeling
good. The crucial part was the realization that
his capacity for well -being was much, much deeper
than he had ever thought possible. That's a great
analogy I heard you use once. It's like discovering
your car has a sixth gear you never even knew
about. That's it, exactly. You've been driving
in third gear your whole life thinking that was
the top speed, and then suddenly you realize
the machine can do so much more. A perfect analogy.
He realized that the ceiling of human consciousness
was miles higher than where he had been living
day to day. But here's the kicker, and this is
the quintessentially Sam Harris part of the story.
He didn't want to just keep taking the drug.
Right, because the drug wears off. And, you know,
presumably you can't be high on MDMA while you're
trying to write an English paper or navigate
rush hour traffic. Precisely. The drug wears
off. It has physiological costs. And it's not
a sustainable way to live. So the question that
seized him was, is this state of mind real? Or
is it just a chemical trick, an illusion? And
if it is real? Can I get back to that mountaintop
without needing the helicopter? Can I train my
mind? Sober. to inhabit that space of well -being.
And that one question, can I train my brain to
be this happy sober, is what made him drop out
of Stanford. He literally walked away. He left
Stanford in his second year. And this is the
part that's hard to fathom. He spent the next
11 years, over a decade, primarily in India and
Nepal. 11 years. Can you imagine telling your
parents, hey, so that whole English major thing
at Stanford isn't working out. I'm going to go
sit in silence in the Himalayas for about a decade.
I am sure that was a difficult conversation to
have, but we need to dispel this idea that this
was some kind of vacation. He wasn't just drifting
or finding himself in some vague eat, pray, love
kind of sense. He was training. What does that
training actually look like? What was he doing
for 11 years? It looks like silence. A lot of
silence. He did silent retreats that would last
for months at a time. I mean, just try to imagine
that. No talking, no reading, no writing. Nothing.
Just sitting for 12 to 18 hours a day, staring
at the back of your own eyelids, trying to dissect
your own mind piece by piece. I can barely sit
still for 15 minutes without wanting to check
my phone. 11 years of that kind of mental rigor
is... It's just hard to fathom. It really shows
the level of obsession he had with that question.
And he studied with some real heavy hitters,
too. People like Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who
was a master of a Tibetan practice called Dzogchen.
And this is crucial for you, the listener, to
understand. Harris wasn't looking for God. He
wasn't praying for a miracle or trying to find
a new religion. No, he was treating meditation
as a technology. A technology. Explain that.
He viewed these ancient contemplative traditions
not as religions full of dogma, but as user manuals
for the human brain. He wanted to strip away
all the cultural baggage, you know, the chants,
the robes, the incense, and just find the source
code. He wanted to understand the mechanics of
how to stop suffering. That's it. It was an engineering
problem for him. And there's one detail from
this period that I just found absolutely wild.
In the early 90s, he actually served as a volunteer
guard for the Dalai Lama. It's such a striking
image, isn't it? It really is. Sam Harris, the
future scourge of all religious dogma, wearing
a suit and an earpiece or whatever, the security
detail war standing guard for the leader of Tibetan
Buddhism. But it actually makes perfect sense
when you look at his later work. He was seeing
religion up close, but he was viewing it through
that specific lens of practice rather than dogma.
He saw the Dalai Lama not as a divine being,
but as a master practitioner of the mind, an
Olympian of consciousness. So after 11 years
of seeking this middle path, he finally returns
to the West. He goes back to Stanford, finishes
up, gets his philosophy degree in the year 2000.
He seems ready to be a quiet philosopher or maybe
a meditation teacher. And then... The world changes.
September 11, 2001. This is the trigger. This
is the moment everything pivots again. The attacks
on the World Trade Center radicalized him, not
in a violent way, of course, but intellectually.
He looked at what happened, and he saw it not
just as a political event or purely as a reaction
to U .S. foreign policy. He saw it as a direct
and horrifying consequence of belief. Of ideas
in people's heads. Yes. He saw 19 highly educated
men. engineers and so on, who flew planes into
buildings because they genuinely believed they
would be rewarded with paradise for doing so.
And that connection between belief and action
became his obsession. So he started writing The
End of Faith almost immediately after the attacks.
He did. And while he was writing it, he realized
he needed more scientific ammunition for his
arguments. So he didn't just write. He went back
to school again, this time to get a Ph .D. in
cognitive neuroscience from UCLA, which he finished
in 2009. Using fMRI to study belief in the brain.
Exactly. His PhD thesis was actually titled The
Moral Landscape, How Science Could Determine
Human Values, which later became one of his most
famous books. So by the late 2000s, the figure
we know today is fully formed. He has the philosophical
training, he has the deep spiritual and meditative
background, and he has the hard neuroscience
credentials. And he is ready to enter the public
arena. And enter it he did. Which brings us,
of course, to The Four Horsemen. A very dramatic
title for a very dramatic shift in the culture
at the time. I mean, it really was a moment.
You had Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher
Hitchens, and the philosopher Daniel Dennett.
They were like the Avengers of atheism. Or maybe
the Legion of Doom, depending on who you ask.
Right. And this new atheism was distinct from
the kind of atheism that came before, wasn't
it? Old school atheism was often polite. It was
a private disbelief. It was quiet. The new atheists,
led by these four, argued that faith wasn't just
wrong. It was actively dangerous. Harris's core
argument, which he repeated over and over, was
that pretending to know things one doesn't know
is a betrayal of science. But Harris differs
from someone like Dawkins, doesn't he? Dawkins
seems to view all religion as a kind of virus
of the mind, all equally silly. Harris gets much
more specific and I think much more controversial.
He does. And this is really where he gets into
the most trouble. Harris argues very forcefully
that the specific content of the religious doctrine
matters. He says, it matters what you believe.
And to prove this, he constantly uses this one
comparison. Joanism versus Islam. Jainism versus
Islam. It's his go -to example. So for anyone
who doesn't know, tell us about the Jains. This
is his model of a religion of peace, right? It
is. Jainism is an ancient Indian religion. Its
core, fundamental, non -negotiable doctrine is
nonviolence, or ahimsa. The most extreme fundamentalist
Jains are so committed to nonviolence that they
wear masks over their mouth so they don't accidentally
inhale a gnat and kill it. They sweep the ground
in front of them as they walk. Exactly. So they
don't step on an ant. This is what a Jain extremist
looks like. They are pathologically committed
to pacifism. OK, I see where he's going with
this. If you have a Jain extremist, the worst
you get is a guy who is terrified of hurting
a fly. Precisely. Harris then contrasts this
with his view on Islam. He argued, and this was
way back in 2006, remember, that Islam is all
fringe and no center. He called it, in a now
infamous phrase, a motherload of bad ideas. Wow.
And his point was that if you have a doctrine
that, in his reading, glorifies martyrdom and
jihad and promises specific rewards in the afterlife
for dying in battle for the faith, then a fundamentalist
of that religion is going to behave very, very
differently than a fundamentalist Jain. So his
argument is really this. Beliefs are the software
running in the human brain. If you run the Jainism
software, you get pacifism as the output. If
you run what he calls the jihadist software,
you get violence. And therefore, we can't just
treat all religions as equally harmless. Correct.
He completely rejects the idea that all religions
are just different paths up the same mountain.
He thinks some of those paths lead directly off
a cliff. Now, this obviously led to the intense
accusations of Islamophobia. But before we get
there, we should be clear that he wasn't just
attacking Islam. He went after Christianity just
as hard. Oh, absolutely. He was scorching on
Christianity. He attacked the Christian right
relentlessly for focusing on what he called pseudo
problems. What's a pseudo problem in his view?
Gay marriage is his classic example. He argued
it was morally absurd that people were organizing
their entire political lives around stopping
two men from getting married. while ignoring
what he saw as actual immense suffering in the
world, like poverty or preventable disease. And
he also went after the Catholic Church with a
sledgehammer, particularly regarding the child
abuse scandals. He did. He often made this comparison
between their focus on contraception and their
handling of the abuse. Right. What was the argument
there? He said it was morally grotesque that
the church spent so much energy and resources
preventing contraception. which he argued prevents
zero actual suffering, while simultaneously covering
up the systematic rape of children by priests.
He even called for ending the Vatican's diplomatic
immunity. He wanted the Pope and the bishops
to be held legally liable in secular courts.
That is pretty hardcore. But what I find really
interesting is that he also attacked liberal
Christians. Why go after the moderates? They're
not the ones causing the problems. Because in
his view, they provide rhetorical cover. for
the fundamentalists. How does that work? He argues
that by demanding respect for faith as a valid
way of knowing, moderate Christians make it impossible
to effectively criticize the extremists. If we
all agree that faith is a legitimate reason to
believe something without sufficient evidence,
then we have no tools left to tell the fundamentalists
that he's wrong about his 72 virgins. So he wants
to destroy the very prestige of faith as a concept.
The entire concept. He wants it to be seen as
intellectually disreputable. But the Islam critique.
That's what really exploded in the public sphere.
And we have to talk about the Ben Affleck incident.
It's probably the single most famous moment of
his career, at least in the mainstream media.
This was in 2014 on the show Real Time with Bill
Maher. I remember watching this clip go viral.
It's just electric. You have Bill Maher who agrees
with Harris and Sam Harris. And then you have
Ben Affleck who looks like he's about to physically
explode with rage. He's vibrating. He is. Harris
starts trying to explain his critique of Islam,
distinguishing between the ideology of Islamism
and the people who are Muslims. And Affleck just
loses it. He interrupts him and calls it gross
and racist. And that one moment perfectly encapsulated
the entire cultural divide. on this issue. Harris
was trying to make a very precise philosophical
point. I am criticizing a set of ideas, not a
race of people. Islam is not a race. But Affleck
wasn't hearing that. No. Affleck was reacting
from a different place. He was reacting to the
vibe, to the feeling that Harris was demonizing
a marginalized group that was already facing
a lot of discrimination in the post -911 West.
It was a clash of logic versus emotion, or ideas
versus people. And it wasn't just Affleck. I
mean, Noam Chomsky, the titan of the left, called
Harris's charges hysterical and slanderous. Yeah,
their exchange was legendary in its own right.
Others like Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan, they
all essentially labeled him a bigot. So what
has Harris's defense been over the years? It
has been remarkably consistent. He rejects the
term Islamophobia entirely. He calls it a pernicious
meme that was specifically designed to silence
legitimate criticism of dangerous ideas. He argues
that if you can't criticize bad ideas just because
they are considered religious, that you are abandoning
the most important tool we have, which is reason.
And he tried to bridge this gap, right? He co
-wrote a book with Majid Nawaz. He did. The book
is called Islam and the Future of Tolerance.
And Majid Nawaz is a fascinating figure. He's
a former Islamist radical. someone who was actively
recruiting for a global caliphate, who then had
a change of heart and became a secular reformer.
So Harris wanted to show, look, I'm not against
Muslims. I can have a productive conversation
with a Muslim. In fact, I am supporting the reformers
against the fundamentalists. That was the goal,
to show it was a battle of ideas, not of people.
So that's the new atheist Sam Harris, the polemicist.
But then you close that book and you open his
app, waking up. And suddenly he's gently guiding
you through a loving kindness meditation. It
feels like a total 180 degree turn. It really
does. But Harris insists it's all perfectly consistent.
Yeah. And this brings us to what we could call
section three of his thought. Spirituality without
religion. Right. He totally rejects the binary.
He says you don't have to choose between being
a hard nosed scientific materialist on one hand
and having deep profound spiritual experiences
on the other. And he has this quote that I think
sums it up perfectly. He says. Everything of
value that people get from religion can be had
more honestly without presuming anything on insufficient
evidence. That is his core thesis for this part
of his life's work. It is. He is trying to reclaim
words like spirituality and mysticism from the
grip of religion. He believes these are fundamental
human experiences related to the nature of consciousness,
not supernatural ones. But what is he actually
teaching in this app and in his book, Waking
Up? It's not just... relax and breathe deeply
right it's more than that oh it's much more rigorous
it goes right back to his 11 years in the himalayas
he's teaching practices from tibetan zogchen
and from vipassana meditation and the central
insight the one thing he's trying to drive home
in every single session is the illusion of the
self okay this is the heavy stuff the self is
an illusion What does that actually mean? Because
right now, I feel like I'm here. I feel like
I'm a passenger sitting behind my eyes driving
this body. I am the thinker of my thoughts. That
feels very real. And Harris would say that that
feeling, that very sensation of being a passenger,
a little homunculus in your head, is a persistent
and convincing trick of the mind. He argues that
if you look closely enough in meditation, you
can't actually find the thinker. But wait, if
I can't find the thinker, who is doing the looking?
Exactly. That is the question he wants you to
ask. He argues there is just consciousness. There
is just the raw experience of seeing, of hearing,
of thinking. There isn't a little you that is
separate from the experience itself. Can you
give me an analogy? Sure. He sometimes uses the
analogy of a movie screen. The screen doesn't
watch the movie that's projected onto it. The
screen is the place where the movie is happening.
He's saying your consciousness is the screen,
not the guy in the audience eating popcorn. That
sounds honestly a little terrifying, the idea
of losing yourself. He argues it's the most liberating
experience a person can have. If there is no
self to protect, there is no reason to be defensive
or insecure. If someone insults you and there's
no solid ego there to receive the insult, the
words just pass through you like the wind. He
believes this insight is the only key to actual
sustainable happiness. And he put all of this
into practice with the Waking Up app. And speaking
of putting things into practice, he also put
his money where his mouth is. He signed the Giving
What We Can pledge. That's right. He was actually
the first company to sign this pledge, which
commits him to donating at least 10 % of the
app's profits to the world's most effective charities.
And he even did it retroactively back to the
app's launch. And this connects to his belief
in effective altruism. It does. Using reason
and data to maximize the good you can do in the
world, it all flows from the same rationalist
worldview. Which segues perfectly into his views
on morality. Because this is the classic question.
If there is no God who says what is good and
what is bad, why is donating to charity good?
Why isn't it just survival of the fittest? This
is the entire subject of his book, The Moral
Landscape. And in it... Harris makes a very bold,
very controversial claim. Science can determine
human values. Okay, now most philosophers would
hear that and say, whoa, stop right there. You
know, the famous is -ought problem from David
Hume. You can't get an ought from an is. Right.
The traditional view is that science can tell
us facts about what is. But religion or philosophy
has to tell us about values, about what we ought
to do. And Harris thinks that whole distinction
is nonsense. He thinks it's a philosophical mistake.
He proposes this metaphor he calls the moral
landscape. So I want you to imagine a vast landscape
with many peaks and many valleys. The peaks represent
the greatest possible well -being for conscious
creatures. The valleys represent the worst possible
suffering. Think of it as... Hell of the worst
imaginable torture and misery for everyone. Okay,
so obviously we want to be on the peaks, not
in the valleys. Right. And Harris argues that
moving from the valleys up toward the peaks is
an objective navigation problem. He says it's
just like medicine. How is it like medicine?
I don't see the connection. Well, think about
it. Medicine is a science. Its goal is health.
Now, health is a value judgment. We all agree
that living is preferable to dying, that not
being in pain is better than being in pain. But
once we agree that health is the goal, there
are objective scientific facts about how to get
there. Like drinking bleach is objectively bad
for your health. Exactly. And eating vegetables
is objectively good for your health. Those aren't
opinions. They are facts based on biology and
chemistry. So he's saying morality is just the
medicine of human flourishing. That's it. Exactly.
He says a statement like forcing women to wear
bags over their heads and denying them an education
is bad for their well -being isn't a cultural
opinion. He argues that is a scientific fact
about the human brain and societal flourishing.
So he rejects moral relativism entirely. He doesn't
care if it's their culture. Not one bit. If a
practice demonstrably harms the well -being of
conscious creatures, he says it is objectively,
morally wrong. It's a very confident worldview.
It really cuts through a lot of that who are
we to judge hesitancy that you see in modern
liberalism. But then... Just as you're on board
with this hyper -national project, he takes another
step that seems to undermine everything we just
talked about. You're talking about free will.
The book Free Will, published in 2012. This is,
for me, perhaps his most provocative and brain
-bending philosophical stance. He argues that
free will is a complete and total illusion. He
calls us the biochemical puppet. Yes. And he
has this great line. He says, you can do what
you decide to do, but you cannot decide what
you will decide to do. Let's break that down
because it does break your brain the first few
times you hear it. Please. So I chose to have
coffee this morning. I stood in the cafe. I thought
about maybe getting tea. And then I consciously
said, I'll have a coffee. That felt like a free
choice. Okay. But did you choose to want coffee
in that moment? I guess not. The desire for coffee
just appeared. Just appeared. And why did you
want it? Maybe you were tired. Did you choose
to be tired? No, my kid kept me up half the night.
Right. And did you choose to have the specific
genes that make you like the taste of coffee?
Did you choose to be born into a culture that
sells coffee on every corner? Did you choose
the specific pattern of neurons firing in your
brain a millisecond before the thought of coffee
even surfaced in your consciousness? No. No to
all of that. Harris's argument is that if you
look closely enough at any choice, you'll see
it's just the final domino falling in an unimaginably
long chain of prior causes that goes all the
way back to the Big Bang. Your genes, your upbringing,
your environment, the state of your nervous system,
you didn't author any of that. Thoughts simply
arise in consciousness. You don't create them,
you witness them. So if we could have rewound
the universe by five minutes this morning with
every atom in the exact same position, I would
have ordered the coffee again. 100 % of the time.
You are a biological machine processing inputs
and producing an output. There's no ghost in
the machine making a free choice. Wow. Okay,
if that's true, that changes everything. Especially
something like criminal justice. If a murderer
is just a broken machine, how can we possibly
blame him? We can't. And Harris fully embraces
that radical conclusion. He argues that hating
a murderer makes no logical sense. That seems
impossible. I mean, it's a basic human instinct.
If someone hurts your family, you're going to
hate them. But think about it this way. Would
you hate a hurricane that destroyed your house?
Would you hate a bear that attacked you while
you were hiking? I'd be angry and terrified,
but I wouldn't think the bear was evil. It's
just a bear doing what bears do. Harris says
that human beings are just very, very complicated
bears. If a man has a brain tumor that presses
on his amygdala and makes him uncontrollably
violent, which has actually happened in real
court cases, we don't say he is evil. We say
he is sick. Harris's point is that everyone is
just a product of their tumors, their genes,
and their bad wiring. So does that mean we shouldn't
punish people? We just let them go? No, of course
not. We should absolutely restrain them. You
lock up the bear so it doesn't hurt anyone else,
but you don't torture the bear for revenge. You
don't punish it because you think it deserves
to suffer. He believes that realizing free will
is an illusion should lead to a profound sense
of compassion. No one chooses to be broken. No
one chooses their worst impulses. It's such a
wild combination of ideas. On the one hand, he's
judging ideologies like Islamism incredibly harshly.
But on the other hand, he's saying the individual
people who hold those views are just biological
robots who couldn't have turned out any other
way. And that's the tension at the heart of his
worldview. It's a kind of deterministic humanism
that is deeply concerned with bettering the code
that we are all running, even if we can't choose
it. Which brings us inevitably to the messy,
messy world of politics. Because if you thought
his views on religion and free will were polarizing,
just wait until we get to his politics. Yeah,
this is where a lot of people get confused. He
describes himself as a liberal. He's a registered
Democrat. Let's check the receipts on that. He
supported Obama in 2008. He supported Hillary
Clinton in 2016. He supported Andrew Yang in
the 2020 primary. And then Joe Biden in the general.
He's on record supporting Kamala Harris for 2024.
And he is famously. profoundly anti -Trump. He
has called Trump's assault on truth unprecedented.
For him, Trump isn't just a bad politician with
bad policies. He views him as a kind of moral
and intellectual black hole that threatens the
very foundations of a reality based society.
But this is a huge but for many on the left.
He also owns guns. And this is where his liberal
allies get off the bus. He does. And this really
confuses people. But again, if you look at it
through his rationality first framework, it makes
a certain kind of sense. Explain his logic there.
He argues that the police cannot always be there
in time. That's just a fact. If someone breaks
into your house, you are on your own for. Five,
10, maybe 15 minutes. Yeah. Therefore, from a
purely rational standpoint, self -defense is
a problem you may need to solve for yourself.
So he treats it like a math problem, not a culture
war issue. Exactly. He's on record opposing assault
weapons bans, not for some ideological reason,
but because he looked at the FBI crime statistics
and sees that handguns are used to commit the
vast majority of gun crimes. He supports universal
background checks and rigorous training, but
he refuses to treat guns as a totem of evil.
He just sees them as tools and he makes a rational
case for owning them for self -defense. And then
there's the whole intellectual dark web chapter,
the IDW. This is a huge cultural moment around
2018. IDW, yes. The journalist Bari Weiss wrote
that famous article in The New York Times and
she grouped Harris with people like Jordan Peterson,
Joe Rogan, Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro. They
were the renegades. The Avengers of free speech.
The critics of cancel culture. They were united
by a willingness to discuss topics that were
considered taboo by the mainstream media and
academia. And Harris was, for a while, seen as
a central figure in that group. It didn't last.
Harris very famously and publicly handed in his
imaginary membership card. He did. He walked
away from the whole thing. Why? Why did he leave?
It seemed like he was the star of that particular
show. The wedge issues were Donald Trump. and
later, COVID -19, Harris has a very, very low
tolerance for what he sees as conspiracy thinking.
So he couldn't stand the stuff about the 2020
election being stolen. Exactly. When people in
that circle, like Brett Weinstein, started promoting
ivermectin and questioning the safety of vaccines,
or when Majid Nawaz, his former co -author on
the book about Islam, went down the election
fraud rabbit hole, Harris cut ties. He criticized
something he called audience capture. What is
that? Audience capture is his term for when a
public figure starts saying what their audience
wants to hear rather than what they believe is
true in order to keep the clicks, the downloads,
and the money flowing. He saw the IDW sliding
into what he called Trumpism just to please their
right -leaning followers. So he basically said,
I don't care if we agree on criticizing wokeness.
If you are pushing anti -vaccine nonsense or
saying the election was stolen, you are fundamentally
damaging the epistemological health of our society,
and I'm out. That's a perfect summary. You really
burned some bridges there. And speaking of burning
bridges, we have to talk about the Hunter Biden
comment. This is the one thing that the right
still hammers him for years later. Oh, man. The
corpses of children comment. Even just saying
it out loud sounds completely insane. He was
on a podcast after the 2020 election. He was
trying to explain why he didn't care about the
Hunter Biden laptop story, which was being suppressed
by the media and Twitter at the time. And in
a moment of extreme hyperbole, he said that even
if Hunter Biden had corpses of children in his
basement, he wouldn't have cared. Which on its
face sounds deranged. It sounds morally monstrous.
Taken literally, yes, it's a terrible thing to
say. But his point was meant to be a utilitarian
calculation. He viewed Donald Trump as an existential
threat to democracy like an asteroid headed for
Earth. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in his
view, was just standard political sleaze. So
he was arguing that you don't worry about the
petty thief in your house, Hunter, when the asteroid
that will wipe out all life, Trump, is about
to hit. That was the intended logic. He was saying,
I would accept a deeply corrupt administration
to stop a democracy ending one. But the clip
went viral completely out of context. And it
cemented the idea on the right that Harris suffers
from a terminal case of Trump derangement syndrome.
And speaking of existential threats, we have
to talk about his other great obsession, artificial
intelligence. Yes, AI. Long before Chad GPT made
it a dinner table conversation, Harris was one
of the loudest voices sounding the alarm about
the potential risks. What is his specific fear?
Is it, you know, Terminator robots with glowing
red eyes? It's actually much simpler and more
logical than that. He uses a simple syllogism.
One, intelligence is just information processing
in a physical system. Two, we will continue to
improve our machines and make them more intelligent.
Three, we are nowhere near the peak of possible
intelligence. Wait, four. Therefore, it is almost
inevitable that we will eventually create machines
that are far, far more intelligent than we are.
And when they surpass us, what happens then?
Then we are in the position of ants trying to
negotiate with human construction workers. The
humans don't hate the ants. They're not evil.
But if the humans want to build a new highway
right where the ant hill is... It's very bad
news for the ants. So his fear is that we are
building a god that might not share our values
and we have absolutely no safety features in
place to control it. That is his nightmare scenario.
He calls it the alignment problem. How do you
make sure his super intelligence is aligned with
human well -being? And his answer is, we have
no idea and we are not taking the risk seriously
enough. Okay, let's move into the really recent
history. The last few years, from 2020 to 2026
in our timeline, have been particularly intense
for his public reputation. To say the least,
it's been a whirlwind. So we mentioned COVID.
He was a hardliner on vaccines and very critical
of the skeptics. He said in 2023 that if COVID
had killed more children, there would have been
no patience for all the skepticism. But he was
also open to the lab leak theory, wasn't he?
He was. He hosted scientists like Matt Ridley
and Alina Chan on his podcast to discuss it.
This is a key part of his mindset. He was willing
to follow the scientific evidence wherever it
led, even if it led to an unpopular conclusion
like the lab leak. But he had zero tolerance
for the plandemic -style conspiracy theories.
He still fundamentally trusts scientific institutions,
which puts him very at odds with the current
populist moment. Then came October 7, 2023, the
Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war.
And this put Harris right back in the center
of the debate on religion, ideology, and violence.
He has a nuanced but very firm stance here. So
on the one hand, he opposes all religious claims
to land. He doesn't think God gave real estate
to anyone. Right. But on the other hand, he supports
Israel's existence as a necessary haven for Jewish
people, given the long and brutal history of
global anti -Semitism. After the attacks, he
came out swinging against what he called moral
equivalence. He did. He argued that there is
a fundamental moral difference between a terrorist
group that intentionally targets civilians and
uses its own people as human shields, which is
Hamas, and a state army that he says accidentally
kills civilians while trying to target those
terrorists, which is the IDF. And he took a lot
of heat for that from the left. A huge amount.
From people who looked at the staggering civilian
death toll in Gaza and said, a dead child is
a dead child. The intent doesn't matter. But
at the same time, he's not a blank check supporter
of the Israeli government. He's not a Netanyahu
fanboy. And not at all. By July of 2025, according
to the Our Timeline, he was expressing deep reservations
about his support, specifically citing Netanyahu's
corruption charges and the presence of religious
extremists in the Israeli cabinet. He makes a
sharp distinction between the defense of the
state of Israel and the actions of its specific
government. And looking at our timeline here,
June 2025, there's an entry called Operation
Midnight Hammer. Yes. This refers to a moment
during the escalation of the Iran -Israel war.
And Harris publicly supported this specific Israeli
military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.
And that's consistent with his view from the
end of faith 20 years prior. Chillingly consistent.
His view has always been that a messianic, apocalyptic
Islamist regime, like the one in Iran, armed
with nuclear weapons, represents a unique danger
to civilization. Why unique? Because the Cold
War logic of mutually assured destruction, or
mad eye, might not work on them. Because if you
truly believe that dying as a martyr in a holy
war will send you to paradise, you might not
be afraid of nuclear annihilation. Exactly. If
you love death more than you love life, as some
extremists claim, then nuclear deterrence fails.
And Harris argued we simply could not let the
mullahs get the bomb. Before we wrap up the controversies,
we have to touch on the Charles Murray incident.
This is the one that really got him labeled a
peddler of junk science by places like Vox. This
was a pivotal and very damaging moment for his
reputation on the left. In 2017, he hosted Charles
Murray, the co -author of the infamous book The
Bell Curve. on his podcast. The bell curve being
the book that discusses statistical differences
in IQ scores between racial groups. Right. It's
radioactive material. Now, Harris claimed he
didn't care about the data on race and IQ one
way or the other. He said he invited Murray on
his show because Murray had been violently protested
and shut down at Middlebury College. For Harris,
it was a free speech issue. He wanted to protest
the mob. But by hosting him to talk about the
book, he walked right into the minefield of race
science. He jumped in with both feet. Ezra Klein
at Vox, along with a number of scientists, wrote
scathing critiques, accusing him of naively promoting
racialist speculation and junk science. Harris
viewed this as a defamatory moral panic. He argued
that as scientists, we have to be able to follow
data wherever it leads without fear. But his
critics argue that he was promoting data that
has a century -long history of being used to
justify racism, and he was doing it without understanding
the historical context or the scientific critiques
of the work itself. It was a complete mess, and
it really solidified his reputation on the progressive
left as someone who was anti -woke first and
liberal second. So we've covered the man, the
monk, the atheist, the neuroscientist, and the
political polemicist. That is a lot of hats for
one head. It is a very crowded head, I imagine.
So if we try to synthesize all of this, if we
try to step back and sum up Sam Harris. What
is he? You know, I've come to view Sam Harris
as a kind of stress test for modern discourse.
He forces you to confront the contradictions
and the uncomfortable gray areas in your own
worldview. I mean, well, think about it. If you
were a religious conservative, he agrees with
you that Islamism is a profound threat. But then
he turns around and tells you that your own belief
in God is a dangerous fairy tale. If you are
a secular liberal, he agrees with you on gay
rights and abortion and taxing the rich, but
then he tells you that your identity politics
are toxic, your cultural relativism is cowardice,
and you should probably own a gun. He fits nowhere.
He is politically and tribally homeless. He combines
this rigid, almost robotic adherence to scientific
materialism with a deep, almost poetic appreciation
for the subjective first person experience of
consciousness. He is a liberal who hates the
left's current iteration. He is an atheist who
thinks the most important thing you can possibly
do is close your eyes and find the sacred in
your own mind. This bundle of contradictions.
And that brings us to the final provocative thought,
the paradox that. honestly keeps me up at night
when I read his work. I think I know what it
is. The free will paradox. Exactly. Here is a
man who has convinced himself, through logic
and introspection, that we are all biochemical
puppets. He believes our thoughts are just neurons
firing, determined by the laws of physics stretching
back to the dawn of time. We have no choice.
We are not the authors of our actions. Right,
that's the core of his argument. And yet... He
spends his entire life writing books, recording
podcasts, giving lectures, debating people, arguing,
trying to persuade us. It is the ultimate irony,
isn't it? If we are just puppets, what is the
point of the podcast? Why try to change a puppet's
mind if the puppet has no actual mind to change?
Why write a book called The Moral Landscape if
we can't freely choose to climb toward the peaks
of well -being? I think Harris would have an
answer for that. He would say that the argument
itself is just another input into the biological
machine. My words entering your ear are a physical
cause that will change the physical state of
your brain. He is simply providing a new set
of causes into the system that will hopefully
have a new and better effect. He sees himself
as reprogramming the robots. Essentially, yes.
But you're right to point out the tension. There's
a deep emotional contradiction between viewing
human beings as wet robots on one hand and viewing
them as rational agents who can be persuaded
to save the world through reasoned conversation
on the other. Is the rationality that he prizes
so highly just another biological program playing
itself out? Is his lifelong commitment to reason
just another flavor of instinct that he himself
did not choose? That is the question. And I don't
think even Sam Harris is fully or satisfactorily.
answered it well we are going to leave you with
that particular philosophical headache if you
want to dive deeper into this yourself check
out his book the end of faith to meet the firebrand
harris or his book waking up to meet the guru
harris or you can download the app and see if
you can find your own illusion of the self just
uh don't blame us if you disappear in the process
exactly thanks for listening to the deep dive
we'll see you next time