#489 — More From Sam: A Fabulist at Cambridge, the Strait of Hormuz, AOC in 2028, and More

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Jaron Lanier** (0:25)
Welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Hello, Sam.

**Sam Harris** (0:29)
Hey, good to see you.

**Jaron Lanier** (0:30)
Good to see you as well.
We are not taping in front of a live audience again because we weren't certain we were going to be able to tape today, and who knows, maybe this will become the new normal again. All right, you ready to jump in?

**Sam Harris** (0:41)
Yeah, let's jump in.

**Jaron Lanier** (0:42)
Jason Arday was found dead at the age of 41 For those who don't know who he is, he was a Cambridge professor and fast rising media star until his world collapsed over the summer. In July, there were credible plagiarism accusations that expanded into journalists questioning biographical claims which were incredible. He claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, which is something only the most elite ultra runners have done. Cambridge opened an investigation on August 5th and Arday resigned the same day. His autobiography, which many think contain bold falsehoods, was then published August 11th. Days later, he was found dead.
What do you make of all this?

**Sam Harris** (1:21)
Well, apparently, I saw him not being on social media. I don't think I saw just how big a story this was. Apparently, this was just wall to wall, and in the UK, this was just completely dominated the news cycle. Even before he died, it was the coverage, I think we could imagine precipitated his suicide. The onus is really on Cambridge and the other institutional actors who covered for him. I think the BBC and other journalists probably played an ignominious role in this because they attacked his unmasking as a plagiarist and a fabulist as a symptom of racism. Now, it didn't help that the philosopher at Cambridge or former fellow at Cambridge who's a philosopher has as his hobby horse something like race realism. He spends a lot of time thinking about intelligence differences between groups. So the optics of that weren't great and understandably distracting, but it doesn't mean he was wrong about this case at all. It doesn't mean that this case was ever plausible.
The fact that Cambridge believed this guy's claims about himself, it just seems impossible. He claimed to have not spoken a word until age 11, to not be able to read and write until age 18
Then he got a Ph.D. in one of these fake woke disciplines, some backwater sociology that's all about racial grievance.
Intellectually, this whole area of every university is almost total bullshit, so there really needs to be a house cleaning there. But the fact that he was promoted as some kind of prodigy, given how crazy his self-representation was, is a sign of just how cultic and confused the left and left-leaning institutions have become. I mean, it's just a sign of the cancer having spread everywhere.

**Jaron Lanier** (3:24)
Why would Cambridge do this? Why would they not investigate? Why would they just take him at face value? Would they do this with anyone else or is just something special?

**Sam Harris** (3:32)
You can imagine they wouldn't do it with a Jew. I mean, this is all anti-racism. This is Ibram X. Kendi and the genius that became fully formed in the brains of everyone left of center post George Floyd. This is putting the BLM black square not only in your bio but in your brain. It's a cult. It's always been a cult. I mean, it's been obvious for about a decade now that this is what we're witnessing is the ramifications of a moral panic around race and social justice. They got engineered on the left and in large measure, it gave us Trump and Trumpism in my view. I mean, I think it's just as culpable for the derangement of the right as the derangement of the right is. It's intolerable and if we don't get our heads clear of its new variant, this far left socialist slash communist alliance with Islamism, we're going to go for another round of right-wing ascendancy in America and elsewhere.
To speak about Arday himself, I don't know whether he was just genuinely crazy or just a con artist. You can't really put much emphasis on the artist part of that. Again, these lies should not have been believable by anyone, but he might have had genuine mental illness, I don't know.