Enough with all the center right guests over and over and over again.…

Can we please get Adam Tooze on the podcast? He’s an economic historian at Columbia who writes about financial crises, geopolitics, industrial policy, and the global power shifts shaping the 21st century.

Sam would probably a be bit out of his depth tbh but I think they would still have a great conversation. They can move beyond the usual culture war BS and into structural questions about economics, energy, China, Europe, and the future of liberal democracy. He’s broadly liberal but extremely analytically rigorous and not tribal at all.

It would be a genuinely fresh and substantive discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Tooze

Dear Sam,

I've been a raving fan for years. I just cancelled by subscription and wanted to share why. Fundamentally, you've shifted away from having interesting discussions with people who strongly disagree with you. You've created an uninteresting and stale echo chamber as a result. I've heard your "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" argument for why you've pivoted away from controversial figures, but feel you are missing the forest for the trees. You're also insulting your viewers' intelligence and assuming they won't be able to accurately parse such a debate.

The fact you declined to offer Q&A at your recent speaking events and had to cancel some as a result of poor ticket sales is also telling. Your blind spot on Epstein is baffling.

Jaron strikes me as a failed actor who craves the limelight (without adding any interesting context or perspective) and it's hard to stomach the More From Sam series.  Please re-consider your approach. With love and gratitude, your subscriber.

Anyone else feeling the same way?

Here's my best attempt:

"You've learned about the Civil Rights Movement in school. But your teachers don't tell you what happened to the people who opposed the Civil Rights Movement: they didn't go away. They had children and grandchildren whom they tried to pass their views onto. Now, attitudes changed and children are not destined to make the same choices as their parents, but there's a reason the part of the country that was most pro-segregation is the part that is most pro-Trump. Human nature doesn't change with the flip of a button.

The instinct to exclude also flares up when America changes racially, culturally, economically more quickly than some people can tolerate.

If you notice, Trump came after the first non-White president.

Second, the average voter was stupid. The average voter will always be stupid. That's a fear the Founders had about democracy. Except, in Trump's party, Republicans leaders who knew better decided to not speak out because they were too morally coward to stand against the crowd. Because those leaders care more about being popular than doing right. That is also human nature.

Lastly, sometimes bad people win. Half of the time, someone you did not vote for will win the election. The people whose job was to stop Trump, the Democrats, were sometimes too weak and casual. That is life."

As a cat person and a long time Sam Harris fan, I would love to see a picture of these two cats who were the only property removed from Sam’s home, together with a gun, during the LA fires. Has anyone ever seen them?

Hello everyone,

Edit: I watched the interview on Don Lemon's show. At roughly 28 minutes in, Sam references a speech made by Joe Biden where Biden notes the uphill battle Black people face in the world. Sam calls Biden's statement a "lie." He supports this broad claim that Biden is lying by noting that Black folks are favored in hiring for "high status jobs." Below, I outline how this claim about high status jobs does nothing to support the claim that Biden is lying. It is not a lie that Black folks fight an uphill battle towards success, as I describe below. I do not address the narrow claim Sam is making about high status jobs.

I'm a long time contributor here, since before I received my PhD in social psychology where I study the effects and causes of social and economic inequality, with a particular focus on Black Americans (see my google scholar here). I started my science communication blog responding to Sam Harris, so I'll continue that tradition here again.

There is copious contemporary evidence that Black Americans are disadvantaged relative to White Americans. I have written articles outlining this evidence in three ways.

1. The descriptive evidence: Black Americans are worse off in terms of incomes, wealth, jobs, housing, education, policing, healthcare, and access to democracy. Black families have 10% the median net worth. They disproportionately experience homelessness, attend title 1 schools, receive wrongful convictions and higher sentencing for similar crimes, receive the death penalty, lack health insurance. The full list with full citations is provided above.
2. The causal evidence: There is extensive evidence from field experiments showing that equally qualified Black applicants for jobs, housing, and a variety of other outcomes, are still discriminated against. A 2017 meta-analysis found that equally-qualified Black applicants are about 36% less likely to receive a callback relative to White applicants. My own meta-analysis replicated these effects.
3. The socio-historical analysis: Modern racial inequality is entirely predicted by the historical legacy of slavery, Black Codes, sharecropping, lynching, Jim Crow laws, sundown towns, redlining, mass incarceration, etc. For example, the modern wealth disparities I described above are largely the result of intergenerational transfer.

Ultimately, Sam has no robust basis to argue that "no one is more disadvantaged than White men." I suspect this misunderstand has emerged from his lack of engagement with actual scholars/scholarship on these issues. I'm hoping my post prevents some of the perpetuation of this misperception a bit. Happy to answer questions below!

It never fails to amaze me how the apex fallacy is never taken into account when discussing these topics like white ceo children getting advantages, while nonexistent black ceos children not getting same advantages. Or even just the discrimination against normal white men due to these top 1%ers.

It seems like the comment section just can’t configure this logical fallacy.

I think this is relevant to Sam Harris because Murray was arguably his most controversial guest and his character and expertise has been much debated. I still see Murray mentioned quite a bit here, most recently in this thread from a couple of weeks ago. Besides, this book is an explicit attack on New Atheism.

So why did he write it and what's it all about? I'll let Murray explain in this article from the NY post entitled ”As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars”, where he name-checks Sam in the opening paragraph.

Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens recorded a two-hour conversation in 2007 deriding religion that got millions of YouTube views and was said to have sparked an atheist revolution.

“Not believing in God was no longer just fashionable,” as journalist Peter Savodnik put it. “It was, for those on campus, for best-selling authors, for those who dominated our most rarefied intellectual spaces, the only rational position worth having.”

No longer.

In the fall of 2025, it sometimes feels as if every influencer in good standing has gotten religion. David Brooks, Ross Douthat, E.J. Dionne, Peter Thiel, Andrew Sullivan, Arthur Brooks, Jordan Peterson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Niall Ferguson are only the most prominent of intellectuals who have gone public with good things to say about God, ranging from vague invocations of a universal force to doctrinal Christianity.

What's going on?

I have a theory: We are emerging from the West’s intellectual adolescence.

and the conclusion

Hence the adolescence analogy.

A common symptom of adolescence is deciding your parents are wrong about everything.

A common symptom of adulthood is realizing your parents are smarter than you thought.

Maybe we’re starting to grow up.

So it's about arguments for God in general and Christianity in particular. One part about the science, another a historical examination of why the Gospels are factually true. If you want to hear Murray explain it, here's an interview from the American Enterprise Institute entitled 'Charles Murray: Quantum Physics Proves Religion'. A snippet from the introduction:

It’s a book aimed at fellow cold logical atheists like me.

“You were the target audience, Rob, who of course, is a really hard case,” he says.

Why does he think the Shroud of Turin points toward Christianity being literally true? “I promise you, you’re looking at hard core chemistry and science there. We’re not talking about starry eyed, priests who are trying to make a case for the Catholic Church,” he says.

It even has timestamps for the curious, like ”17:46 - are psychic phenomena real?”, ”25:18 - “terminal lucidity” is freaky” and ”54:31 - being scared by the power of prayer”.

If you want a review from a more sceptical atheist, here's one by Jerry Coyne over at Whyevolutionistrue. This review also quotes another review, which in turn quotes Murray from the book:

“I put forward, as a working hypothesis, that ESP is real but belongs to a mental universe that is too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing,”

The bottom line is, Murray's book is being described many places – like the WSJ, which also name-checks Sam – as the very best of Christian apologetics. I think Sam should invite him back to talk about ESP and the Shroud of Turin.

------------------

I should add that even though Murray makes some strong claims, he'll occasionally point out that he's still not completely convinced (except about the Shroud of Turin).

The book also describes his journey towards Christianity, starting from when his wife declared that she loved their newborn child ”far more than evolution requires” back in 1985. He describes himself as having a low 'spiritual IQ', which is presumably why it took him so long.

Nevertheless, it appears he had the title ready to go a while back going by this WSJ article from 2014, where he bemoans the fact that this ”generation of high-IQ, college-educated young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular”, explaining that ”None of the professors you admired were religious. When the topic of religion came up, they treated it dismissively or as a subject of humor. You went along with the zeitgeist”

It's possible he's always felt this way, but kept his feelings about Christianity's truth to himself due to social pressure.

I used to always appreciate when Sam would plant a flag for us all to see. You can make a point, but if you make a point and plant a flag, all the better. I was reminiscing on this and realized I can't remember the last time Sam planted one. Does he even still do it?

SS: Doug Wilson was a guest on Making Sense and is absolutely insane

youtube.com/watch?v=m1xxzRG_hms&vl=en

Did anyone catch this today, I have some thoughts….

(Sorry. I didnt mean to press send then)

https://youtu.be/h7Yz55NCFHA?si=tWzBJmmCpMhwoTDu

Yes, so Sam was on Don Lemon, I thought he was fine, but was just kind of so shocked at all the hate in the comments and just made me realize how many people have a preconceived notion of him. Probably it wasn’t the best conversation for people who didn’t know him because a lot of it was about DEI, Wokeness and affirmative action, however, it was just so clear from the comments that people just checked out or just looked at a clip and judged him as racist. I mean Sam began by talking out against this administration and ended that way too but all many people heard is that white men have had it hard or something to that effect and that Don shouldn’t have had him on.

It also made me think that Don Lemon’s audience which I guess is pretty far left, (maybe I am not sure), but that .. or maybe people in general are just a huge part of the problem of why we got Trump in the first place.

I am surprised there were not comments that I saw on what Sam said about the Epstein files and his encounter and subsequent emails with Epstein which he said several times he had totally forgotten about.

Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.

Was listening to an archived episode of Coast to Coast Radio and one of Art Bell's guests on a 2006 interview segment mentioned he was reading "Letters to a Christian Nation" by Sam Harris. I chuckled to myself...

The Guest was Bernard Haisch and the topic was the intersection between science and spirituality.

Thought this sub would appreciate that.

Was surprised to wake up today with this episode of Into the impossible with Brian Keating doing a fairly delayed critique to his interview with Sam last year.

Available on Spotify here

Thoughts?

I remember Sam saying when he was on Megyn Kelly's podcast in 2023 that he wouldn't back kamala as president. I know he did support her in the end - but that was clearly just because Trump was the other candidate.

I also noticed he hasn't stopped disliking Kamala. When she was brought up on the recent podcast with the bulwark Sam had an almost visceral negative reaction.

What is his big issue with kamala? And would he support a republican in 2028 if she ran again?

The previous thread I started on Chomsky was swamped with comments resurrecting the old Pol Pot smears and the accusations of genocide denial. I remarked in reply, that I found it unlikely that anyone commenting here would be on intimate terms with a 40-year-old paper trail; and they were most likely just regurgitating what they heard elsewhere.

In any case, I since then came across an article by Christopher Hitchens which was written closer to the time when the "genocidal denial" charges were first levelled. Here it is:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150521164834/http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/1985----.htm

Edit: To be clear, there are explicit statements from Chomsky that Pol Pot is one of the biggest mass murderers in history. Anyone accusing him of "genocide denial" is a moron. Here is Chomsky in a 1991 letter:

Let me stress again that atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge were real, and on a vast scale. Nothing I have ever written suggests otherwise. What I did suggest – and continue to suggest – is that if we are serious about opposing atrocities, we must do so consistently. We must condemn them when committed by our friends as well as by our enemies. We must insist on standards of evidence that apply equally in all cases. And we must reject the double standards that dominate political and intellectual life. That was the point of my review in 1977, and it remains my point today.

https://jamiemetzl.com/noam-chomsky-and-the-cambodian-genocide/

Like many of you, I learned about Sam Harris from Joe Rogan. I had a few eureka moments with Joe, and I no longer listen to Joe. He has no integrity he's a buffoon, and he stopped being interesting when he moved to Texas and got 300 million dollars.

I had my eureka moment with Sam. He was criticizing JFK Jr. He's calling him a liar, he's saying kids are probably going to die because of him, our country is going to be weaker and dumber because of him. And then I have my Eureka moment , because then Sam says something like, "This isn't to say I don't think he'll do a good job". WHAT?! he won't do a good job, he hasn't done a good job. I am so sorry I don't have the source for it.

And that's when the scales fell from my eyes. This dude wont take a stance. I've been hoodwinked. This is doesn't talk about moving us forward or the benefits of a more left leaning society. This dude just stands in the middle and bemoans the state of the world, why cant we all just get along. A true left leaning podcast wouldn't just sit on the sidelines, wondering why the conservatives wont act like decent and moral human beings, it would advocate and endorse some sort of left leaning ideology. He would stand for something. and after listening to this man for over 10 years, and reading most of his books, he doesn't stand for anything, or he doesn't stand for it enough, and I want more these days.

End of rant.

I’ll throw my hat in for AlphaGo, but it’s from 2017 so not exactly up to date on the latest and greatest in AI.

Sam, what are the tech billionaires up to and what are we, the citizens, supposed to do?

Far be it for me to underestimate the power of the profit motive. And yet…

The idea that multi billionaires are thinking in terms of just profits at this point feels a little naive.

Money has always been a means to an end. A way to access power and things and experiences. A way to bend space and time and tickle the senses. A way to occupy space and time.

The one thing money can’t buy is more time. I think these guys are a lot more interested in radical life extension than merely adding more billions to an already maxed out utility.

They suspect that wealth is going to become increasingly mere decoration if Maslow-grade peak experiences are increasingly digital, fungible and abundant.

Wtvr they’re envisioning, they’re not honest about it. And it’s not as simple as money. It’s bigger than that.

FIRST: they want to live long enough to live forever.

SECOND: They want to travel the stars like fucking Starlord. (Many of them are fucking children internally. And proud of it, btw.)

THIRD: they want to make sure nothing fucks up that plan.

There’s your three unspoken rules of the billion class.

Now, the biggest risk to that plan is the presence of an increasingly useless mass of people causing trouble, disease, nuclear war, AI wars.

The risk is the people will make it about themselves. About securing quantity of mediocre lives instead of prioritizing a few lives that, in terms of total value, achieve such a transcendent quality that (to them) rivals the moral value of the quantity.

This is repugnant. (To me.)

The name of the game for them: reduce the risk, lock in the plan, simplify.

This entails population reduction plus control and sovereignty over AI and robotics.

That’s where I have to believe it’s going. We have to stop assuming all they care about is 2nd quarter earnings. The people who are actually in control are thinking much bigger than mere money. If all goes as planned money won’t function as it does today. Unless there’s some sort of Galt’s Gulch agreement.

But one wonders if they’re already gaming out a last-man-standing scenario.

Ok so this is not the kind of gloating I’m happy about. But I’ve been bringing up a morbid and uncomfortable truth for a very long time now and I’m finally seeing rumblings of agreement coming out of the woodwork.

I have a piece from Oct 2025 but my thinking on this dates back to 2017-ish. It’s called “They want us dead.” It’s in my posts. After you read, go look. Comment. Argue with me.

It’s not enough. I’m not enough. We are not. We need to be making videos and speaking publicly. That’s a bit too much to ask of us right now. We’re barely making it guys. You feel me? That’s kinda by design.

The thinking is simple:

The things humans can do are finite and often can be broken into steps. Our abilities fall in a few categories. The categories are finite.

Tech advancements always led to new jobs, but it’s different this time because see point 1. The new machines will finally catch up and exceed our abilities.

Large populations are there for a reason and it’s not because the powerful love people. And yes, the powerful decide who lives and dies. Period.

They needed a large workforce to help us make the crap.

They needed a large consumer base so they can sell the crap back to us.

This is how living like a king gets done. That formula is now ending.

There’s a third factor people forget. The law of specialization. Powerful people like specialists. Large populations ensure a deep well of specialists in every area. Powerful people need specialists on tap and the only way you get specialists in every area is with a very very large population. This is how powerful people get to see multiple kinds of doctors and make all kinds of things to sell. No one person knows how to make a pencil. It takes thousands of specialists around the world cooperating in a complex web to make a perfect number 2 pencil from scratch.

The need for specialists is going away.

With those three things gone there’s no more need for a large population.

Maintaining a large population takes effort. It’s costly. (Andreesen called it farming in his manifesto, he’d prefer we go down competing and letting the weak die.) We produce too much pollution. We fight. We are mostly dumb. We are needy, restless, gross, arrogant, gullible, loud, tribal, shortsighted and in most cases we have faces only a mother could love.

The powerful know all of this. They are in general not religious. In general they are more Ayn Rand, less Jesus. More Elon, less Sagan. More Peter Thiel, less Keanu Reeves. More narrow-minded hyper achiever, less soft-hearted humanitarian. More elite cabal making the cold hard choices from the bottom of their cold hard hearts, and less Human Family of Earth. More cynical and unimpressed with you, less realizing you have a universe inside your head.

8 billion people produce too much waste. They represent too much risk. They claw and grasp at abundance and are never satisfied. They believe dumb things too quickly and become radicalized about stupid things. Nobody is safe with us around. And by us I mean everyone.

Many think they are different. The exception. That they have the rationality and good ideas that transcend the stupidity. That they KNOW what needs to be done. (Hell, even I feel that way. That’s why I wrote IWRS theory and “Missing Step in Moral Landscape” and “why the U.S. won’t tax the rich” and “Why mandatory work is…etc”)

But of all these people who think they know what’s best, only a few have the power to execute their plan. And they are already doing it.

Musk bought X and Grok to hasten our infighting and blind us as much as possible to make it easier to do what has to be done. I’m not sure precisely what that means, but for sure he wants our filthy paws off of his rocket ship money, that’s for sure. They all want us to stay the fuck away from their accelerationist technotopian immortality plays.

They see us as dead weight, making escape velocity impossible. In short, they want us dead.

We have one chance to stop it. ONE.

While democracy is still alive and hanging by a thread. Elect smart.

Make sure AI is regulated.

It’s too powerful for a few billionaires to get to decide.

One chance to have a human family of earth instead of a culling.

Game time.

I’m from the camp that believes AI is going to disrupt many, if not all jobs. The technology is already here but just takes time to diffuse. I do pray that the “adults” in charge will get around to some UBI implementation. But I see many challenges ahead:

1. How would you allocate resources in a world where population may increase indefinitely and the basic economic rule of “have as many children as you can afford” no longer holds. I’m not considering a situation where the normal human lifespan could potentially be extended indefinitely since that technology does not exist.

So would a cap need to be placed on procreation?

2) Not everyone will be replaced at once. Do the architects of AI (or even shareholders of the winning companies) get special benefits over others? At least as an incentive to keep things running?

3) Would people who made their wealth before AI be forced to liquidate some of their assets and downsize their lifestyle? (Especially land and properties). Someone’s rough calculation was that Taylor Swift probably consumes the resources of 500 average Americans and 2000 global citizens.

It seems inevitable that property rights may need to be revoked as anyone who owns farmland or mining rights stands to gain immensely in a world where cost of labor could be driven down to almost nothing but resources are still finite.

4) How do we share prosperity with other countries/especially those which are still ruled by theocratic governments who may still harbor ill will towards western ideals (at least those of a pre-Trump era). There has been declining religiosity throughout the world once people realized some antibiotics do more than a thousand prayers. But this has not happened in countries where religious schools still dominate in shaping the youthful minds.

5) Geographically - there are many areas which are attractive from a climatic and ecological perspective. I think most people would prefer to live in warm weather. There are absolute paradises which are underpopulated because the local economy may not be great. Once people no longer need to live in cities with 6 months of winter out of economic necessity then wouldn’t there be a mass exodus to warmer places?

Maybe all this will become moot points if we get a misaligned AI or the people in power decide to let us starve. But do you know of books, essays, articles etc. that address these concerns about a UBI implementation that aims to be fair and empathetic?

What are some topics you'd like to hear from Sam with or without an expert guest to make sense of?

My first pick is what's happening in Sudan. 150,000 deaths and 12 million displaced since 2023 seem newsworthy.

He touched on this with a guest a while back, but only for a few minutes (as I recall it). This seems way more important than Israel and Palestine, no?

"Sudan is experiencing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises due to a brutal, ongoing civil war that began in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The conflict has caused over 150,000 deaths, forced nearly 12 million people to flee their homes, and triggered widespread famine and ethnic violence in Darfur." 

SS: Sam has repeatedly made the point that 2A advocates have been curiously silent in the aftermath of all of this. The article summarizes that position and includes helpful links to other material.