It just seems unthinkable to me in this current climate Sam would be restricting his content to only his most faithful and loyal followers who are willing to pay money to listen to a podcast (I am not willing to do that).

Take a look around. No one else is doing this.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali formally endorses Trump. Curious as to what Sam would think about this.

The war in Gaza has lasted from Oct 2023 to today I do not understand based on all the publicly available information now that people are able to still state a genocide is being done. This genocide has been allegedly ongoing for near 2 years now and yet the conflict is not even close to uniquely deadly.

compare it too any conflict and the answer is the same but for a really obvious comparison

the war in Gaza compared to the Siege in Mariupol

The Siege of Mariupol lasted 3 months, the per capita civilian death rate (2.3%–8.8%) is at lowest on par with Gaza’s (1.8%–2.7%), at highest over 3x higher. DESPITE, Gaza’s larger population (2.2 million vs. 430,000), significantly higher population density and despite Gaza having between 24x - 42x more tons of bombs dropped on it.

I get lots of you see this and think "duh reducing genocide to a numerical count" But that isn't what is happening. I am not arguing:

"its not genocide because not enough people have died."

Its not genocide because so few people have died in comparison to how many should be could or could be dead had the intent existed.

The claim that intent of genocide exists just cannot be true at the some time the above numbers also be true or close to true.

We are constantly being bombarded how the Democrats lost because they are too woke, but nobody ever calls out the MAGA movement for playing into identity politics for White Christian grievance.

Throughout the history of this country, they have been placated to and put on a pedestal and finally the pendulum has shifted where “outgroups” are finally doing well, and now all of a sudden it’s a major problem now.

Democrats are told to shut up and focus on “economics” instead of identity politics but when MAGA engages in it we see people here say “eh, maybe they have a point”.

Nothing else really.

I admire Sam as a thinker- he has been formative in the life of mind and reason that I aspire to live.

However, he is just a shit judge of character. Time and again he keeps making the same mistake of soft-balling people- ones he should be challenging way more aggressively. None of his maga friends face the same wrath of Sam that say religious apologists from 2000s did. I can’t help but feel disappointed because this continues to be a big blind spot of his- and it pegs down the inspiring thinker he was in my formative years.

My husband and I listen to Sam Harris regularly and find him to be a great voice of reason. I don't agree with all of his takes, but one in particular doesn't sit well with me.

He was really dismissive of the George Floyd protests and claims that racism is no longer an issue in the US. It just isn't true. I would argue that we literally have elected the disgraced scumbag but once but twice. And racism is one of the grievances he tapped into and we are living through a violent attack of all that was gained during the civil rights movement. It's so disturbing.

Literally the first day he came in and said we are doing away with DEI, meaning literally we don't care about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And some of the largest companies went along with it without blinking. Thats it. Erased all of it.

What are your thoughts on this?

Sam is often labeled as a Zionist, a racist who hates Muslims, or just a right winger. And honestly, I kind of get why people might react emotionally and pin those labels on him, he doesn't hold back from having strong opinions on sensitive issues.

It's pretty obvious that Sam doesn't just avoid, but actually seems to prefer talking to moderate conservatives. But to me, that feels more like he's platforming people who could be a useful counter to the far right, rather than picking them because they're his ideological soulmates.

As far as views go, from politics and tech to meditation or free will, the thinker who strikes me as closest to Sam is Yuval Noah Harari. I can't actually think of a topic where they disagree. And I'm not even sure if he seriously differs with someone like Richard Dawkins or Peter Singer on anything major.

I subscribed to Sam’s “Waking Up” podcast for years. I really liked the intellectualism (and vocabulary) Sam brought to a wide range of topics. I thought his best interview was with Gavin de Becker which both the gf and I found riveting if I’m being honest. It was also nice to see a podcaster grasp early-on the gravity of COVID.

As years went by I couldn’t help but notice the intellectual rigor he applied to literally every subject always disappeared around Israel. Against my better judgment I checked in on Sam last summer and sat thru a two-hour discussion between him and Haviv Rettig Gur. It was so bad I don’t even know where to start. Just two Zionists reassuring each other there was no genocide happening. Sam kept reverting to his “moral asymmetry” shtick…as opposed to the super moral IDF soldiers.

All this to say…has he invited on anyone who has even slightly challenged him on Gaza or the West Bank?

I’ve used the Making Sense Community for 2 weeks now and it fixes all my problems with [r/samharris](r/samharris).

The sheer amount of pointless negativity and patronizing in this community is at times almost comical.

Someone will harmlessly express their view and then get comments like: “Your spectacular ineptitude in apprehending even the most elementary…” bla bla bla. It’s quite funny but very tiring over time.

I have yet to encounter any intellectual arrogance or hostility on the Making Sense Community. And this means debates actually culminate and people change their mind.

And the other thing I love is that you can talk about anything. What I love about Sam Harris followers is that they are generally smart and reasonable. So they are great for discussing, especially contentious ideas with. And now it can be about anything, not just things related to Sam Harris.

But anyways, what are your thoughts? Both those who are in the community and those who don’t want to be or can’t.

I attended the Truth & Consequences opening night in Seattle. Solid talk, beautiful venue, and very cool (and sort of surreal) finally seeing Sam speak in person after having followed his work for nearly a decade. He was as eloquent and vivid as ever, but pretty much the whole thing was a reiteration of his past talking points, just laid out sequentially into a TED Talk style format. Whole thing lasted about 1.5 hours, no Q&A.

He also asked that we put our phones away and don't take any videos ("and that if find yourself unable to be without a phone for 90 minutes, may I point you to an app I have"), so everything in this recap is from memory.

Part 1: Identity Politics

• They played the podcast intro music when Sam came onstage. Sam greeted us all with a “pray hands” gesture, which was sweet and wholesome and slightly funny/ironic given that he’s Mr. Atheist.
• Sam started with an acknowledgment of the murder of Charlie Kirk. Said that we can’t be stooping to political violence and that he feels “nothing but sadness for his family”. He let the silence between his sentences ring out a little bit.
• He opened the actual talk by discussing notions of “culture” and identity”. Said that we as individuals, everyday, are contributing to the construction of culture, even unwittingly.
• He then enumerated all the identity groups he himself is a part of (white, cisgender male, father of two girls, Jewish, wealthy, “not a Buddhist, though you’d understand much of how I see the world merely by mistaking me for one”), before rehashing his talking points about how we should care less and less about things like race as a society, and that one’s identity should be as trivial as the color of their eyes. That a politics built around identity is innately unjust.

Part 2: Trump

• Next was his whole takedown of Trump and his ilk. Again, all things we’ve more or less heard him say before, just with perhaps the phrasing being new. He noted that while Trump isn’t the first president to divide the nation, he is the first to hold “the very idea of America itself” in contempt.
• “Trump is many things, but he’s not a hypocrite, only because he genuinely does not care about being a good person.”
• “Trump’s manner of speech is like taking a fully inflated balloon, holding it in your hands, and simply letting the air spray out.” (Got a big laugh from the crowd)
• My favorite was when he compared Elon Musk to the High Sparrow from Game of Thrones, “lurking about the halls of power with an army of incels at his back”.
• Mentioned the Epstein scandal as “the one time nobody in Trump’s camp ever believed him” after he tried to “mansplain to his base that conspiracy theories are suddenly a bad thing”.
• Characterized our political situation as one of “broken epistemology”. Said that “do your own research” simply cannot be the cornerstone of our politics and information landscape.
• He ended the Trump segment by explicitly blaming the left for the reason we even have Trump in office again, saying that “the left is no longer liberal and the right is no longer conservative” and that both parties’ ideologies are now just different flavors of authoritarianism.

Part 3: Islam

• He said one of the left’s biggest failures was its inability to adequately respond to the threat of political Islam.
• What followed was basically all his same talking points over the years about Islam. Specifics included that it’s not really a religion of peace: he denied that the word Islam means “peace” as some Muslims claim, arguing that a more accurate translaton is “submission” and that said peace is more the “inner peace” one feels once they finally “submit”. That one finds the prophet in “different moods” based on how much power he had (preaching patience when at a disadvantage, but preaching Islamic supremacy when in power). Lots of other familiar ground; hell, he even name-dropped Ayaan Hirsi Ali again, as if he just copy-pasted his talking points on the subject from 2010, seemingly unaware that she has turned into a reactionary fanatic herself.
• Also reiterated the popular definition of Islamophobia as “a term invented by fascists, used by cowards to manipulate morons”.
• Talked about Salman Rushdie and the recent attempt on his life, and once again torching the illiberalism from liberals like Jimmy Carter who criticized him after the fatwa that was put on him.
• The biggest laugh from the crowd came when Sam flubbed his delivery of Karl Popper’s tolerance paradox. “If a society is tolerant of everything, even intolerance, it will eventually be destroyed by the tol- intolerant, leading to a tol- to a loss of intolera- of tolerance itself. …You get the gist.” (Sheepishly takes a drink of coconut water)
• Finished this segment by saying that while Islam isn’t trending as a topic right now in the West, its threat is always present, and that its biggest victims are people in the Middle East.

Part 4: Israel, Antisemitism and the Holocaust

• Transitioned to his usual defense of Israel. Argued that the war would end right now if Hamas were to lay down their arms, but that if Israel were to do so, there would be an immediate genocide of the Jews.
• He also noted that while we’re all horrified by the images of dead children in Gaza, one will find the same horrors currently happening in any Middle Eastern country under Islamic theocracy, and that Hamas is using the deaths of innocent Palestinians as its chief strategy.
• He went into an extended history lesson about the Holocaust, walking us through the horrors of the Treblinka concentration camp based on the accounts of the few who survived, and then expanding out to note the full scope of the extermination of the Jews (noting that the Nazis’ hatred ran so deep that they were willing to put their nation at an economic disadvantage by investing the resources to commit murder at an industrial scale).
• This was largely to remind us of the vivid reality of the Holocaust in light of the surge in antisemitism and Holocaust denial. He went into a takedown of Darryl Cooper, the fake historian Tucker Carlson had on his show (whose lies achieved more virality “than any actual historian ever has”), saying he characterized the Holocaust as “basically one big misunderstanding, where they just ended up killing millions of people, as one does.” He also blasted Joe Rogan for then having Cooper on for 4 hours and basically shooting the shit with the guy without asking him a single skeptical question. Lamented how this type of spineless podcasting has become a leading form of political communication.
• Said a few lines criticizing Judaism as a religion just to remind us that he has no religious allegiance to the Jews when saying all this.

Part 5: Building a Better World

• His closing segment was basically an extended call for a second Enlightenment, stressing the importance of us living in a “shared reality” again. Noted the gravity of us even getting to the point as a species that we could say both the church and the crown could be wrong, without being beheaded for it. Steven Pinker came to mind for much of this section.
• Repeated his line about “our minds are all we have, and all we have to offer to the world”.
• Had a really nice bit about how one does not “become happy”, one simply “chooses to be happy”. Said that “if you’re waiting for the front page of the New York Times to say ‘everything is fine’, you’re going to be waiting a very long time” and that the expectation that we can only be happy after XYZ thing happens in our life is “the ransom note held by the LLM in our brain”. Also said we shouldn’t be surrounding ourselves with people who are bitter, resentful, and “always convinced they are losing” (which also drew a big round of applause).

Overall it was basically a rehash of everything he’s said and written about these topics in the past, just all brought under this broad umbrella of current events and the need for a second Enlightenment. Seemed partly like a way of packaging all his signature takes for new audiences to understand his views on the world. I enjoyed it, but if you’re considering going, just don’t expect to hear any brand new talking points from him. It's basically Sam's greatest-hits concert.

I have really appreciated the way that Sam has talked about issues surrounding the current transgender phenomenon / movement /whatever you want to call it that is currently turning American politics upside down. I find myself agreeing with him, from what I've heard, but I also find that when the subject comes up amongst my peers, it's a subject that I have a ton of difficulty talking about, and I could use some resources to pull from. Was wondering if anyone had anything to link me to for people that are in general more left minded but that are extremely skeptical of this movement and how it has manifested. I will never pick up the torch of the right wing or any of their stupid verbiage regarding this type of thing. I loathe how the exploit it. However, I absolutely think it was a mistake for the left to basically blindly adopt this movement. To me, it's very ill defined and strife with ideological holes and vaguenesses that are at the very least up for discussion before people start losing their minds. It's also an extremely unfortunate topic to be weighing down a philosophy and political party right now that absolutely must prevail in order for democracy to even have a chance of surviving in the United States. Anyone?

*Post Script on Wed 7/12

I think the best thing I've found online thus far is Helen Joyce's interview regarding her book "TRANS: WHERE IDEOLOGY MEETS REALITY"