#486 — Luck All the Way Down

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Sam Harris** (0:24)
I am here with Kathryn Paige Harden. Paige, thanks for joining me.

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (0:28)
Thank you for having me.

**Sam Harris** (0:29)
It's been a while. It's been six years.

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (0:30)
I know. It was just like five minutes and a lifetime. Yeah. The last six years.

**Sam Harris** (0:35)
Crazy. Well, so I went, as you know, I sent you an e-mail yesterday not wanting to ambush you with my recent adventures in reviewing our previous podcast. So we spoke six years ago, basically a full two years after this major controversy that I had with having had Charles Murray on my podcast talking about race and IQ, that anodyne topic that provokes no controversy at all. Yeah.

**Kathryn Paige Harden** (1:03)
Easy. Light.

**Sam Harris** (1:05)
To remind people, my interest there was not in the topic, but in the fact that here's a guy who wrote a book on the topic and 25 years later, he's being physically assaulted on a college campus for talking about a different book and it just seemed to typify where free speech and tolerance and moral panic was going at that moment. I wanted to do a postmortem there and did, and put this in the no good deed goes unpunished category. For my troubles there, I got castigated as a racialist, pseudo-scientist, dupe of Charles Murray's in so many words. Part of that criticism came from you and your colleagues, Mark Turkheimer and Richard Nisbet in the pages of Vox. Ezra Klein published that and then gave it lots of top spin with his own op-eds. We got into a big fight by e-mail that spilled out into public. He came on my podcast and paragon of wokeness that he was at the time, he had counted the black and brown faces of the people I had interviewed in my catalog up until that point and found the ratio wanting and emblematic of my own racism, however unacknowledged and I don't know if you followed any of this, he recommended that I read closely the work of Ibram X. Kendi at the time to perform an exorcism on my brain. Kendi to my lights who is a man who if it wasn't obvious at the time, it is now is a kind of race hustler and academic imposter. But this is all to say that it was a very fraught time and you came on my podcast two years later to just we kind of processed it and I thought we had a really good conversation.
I did then, I went back and listened to it yesterday and it was, I think it's still a good conversation. I invite people to go listen to it. I think it was a bit of a tightrope walk for me. I felt in listening to it again that you were gaslighting me and to the degree that you seemed oblivious as to how I could have wound up on the hate watch page of the Southern Poverty Law Center for the kinds of things that had been said about me in the aftermath of that podcast with Charles Murray.
And any contribution you made to it. And then I just happened to see in my email that Gideon Lewis Krauss, who profiled you in The New Yorker, I think a year after that, had reached out to me for comment and I had, I think quite correctly, declined to comment. But I just noticed in my exchange with him how pissed off I still was over the whole thing. And I wasn't pissed off when you and I spoke. I managed to repress that or transcend that or something. But the kinds of questions he was asking me by email, the way it was still unprocessed. The truth is I'm still pissed off about it. I'm still pissed off at Ezra Klein because I think what's happened is that the Overton window has moved, he's moved with it. He hasn't acknowledged any of the ways he was a woke enforcer and leftist knucklehead back in the day and now he's acting like none of that ever happened.
I think there is a reckoning to be had here because I blame all of this for many things, but chief among them that we have a President Trump now and a highly weaponized and energized right wing now, that is a backlash to wokeness and the intolerance and moral panic, I think I was discovering there. But I bring this all up with you and revisit it, and this is not what we're mostly going to talk about, because I've noticed that in the intervening years, you've written two books on behavioral genetics, and I experienced some amusement, if not schadenfreude to see you incur some of the same wrath that was directed at me, very much in the same terms. I mean, you've been attacked effectively as a eugenicist, as a handmaiden to the alt right. I think someone somewhere, I think I have this from Gideon's profile on you, someone called you Charles Murray in a skirt, which was just so on the nose that I couldn't help but smile, and I'm smiling even now.