Sam Harris on The Democrats’ Far-Left Problem

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Episode 408, 408 is the year of code-serving Silicon Valley. In 2008, Iron Man premiered. Why did Iron Man not get along with Aquaman? He had rust issues. Actually, that's pretty good. Go, go, go.
Welcome to the 408th episode of The Prof G Pod. We got to stop counting. I'm starting to feel really old. What's happening? In today's episode, we're sharing our live conversation with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, a host of the Making Sense Podcast, and five-time New York Times bestselling author. If you don't want to miss our next live stream or other content exclusive to Substack, you can subscribe at profgmedia.com. That's profgmedia.com. Also, before we get into it, we're recording a special live episode of The Prof G Pod at the Odoo Experience Conference in San Francisco on September 3rd. If you'd like to join us, you can register on the conference website. We'll drop a link in the show notes. Hope to see you there, now, on the show. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Sam Harris.
Welcome to our Prof G Plus live stream. Today, we're joined by Sam Harris, Neuroscientist, Philosopher, a host of the Making Sense Podcast, and five-time New York Times Best Selling Author, someone I describe as a mentor, despite the fact that a role model, despite the fact that he's younger than me. Sam, welcome to the live stream.

**Sam Harris** (3:08)
Yeah. Well, thanks, Scott. Great to see you.

**Scott Galloway** (3:10)
So, I have a whole script here, but I thought of you over the weekend when I saw, and I don't know, well, I'm hoping you saw it or saw clips of it, Dana Bash's interview of RFK Jr. Did you see this?

**Sam Harris** (3:22)
I know. I just heard rumors of it. Unfortunately, I had not watched it. But feel free to fill me in.
I can well imagine.

**Scott Galloway** (3:29)
He basically at one point said, Dana, you've got to stop listening to it. He put air quotes up, the experts. And I thought of you and I thought, okay, the notion of expertise in disavowing and believing that the term expert somehow means what you're saying is less truthful and our inability to establish any sort of to coagulate or establish consensus around something resembling science and expertise or that there is a truth. And I thought of you. Any thoughts?

**Sam Harris** (4:01)
Well, no one can actually disavow expertise. I mean, we all know that knowledge is a thing. I mean, the difference between knowledge and ignorance is real and it often matters.
It's just that many people in alternative media and maga culture and in various pockets of weirdness on our information landscape, have found other experts. They're people for whom Alex Jones is an expert. So it's not compatible with sanity to disavow any difference between knowing what's real and not.
And you can see this, if you watch Joe Rogan's podcast, he will follow this RFK line of disavowing the so-called experts a lot. I mean, certainly, if you get him talking on COVID or foreign affairs, I mean, many, many topics. But if you put someone in front of him who doesn't know anything about mixed martial arts and pretends to watch that, you've never seen a conversation unravel faster, right? I mean, because Joe is an expert on MMA, and he's not going to suffer fools gladly in front of his own audience. Yet, he doesn't seem to recognize that he's suffering fool after fool in front of that same audience on other topics. So an RFK junior is certainly one of those fools. Unfortunately, we have a politics now where all you have to be is a charismatic fraud and be incapable of feeling shame no matter how many times you're proven wrong. And our politics will promote you to somewhere near the top of the heap.