Special Episode: Interview with Sam Harris on Gurus, Tribalism & the Culture War

I'm unusually vulnerable to criticism. I've cultivated an audience that values intellectual honesty, I think, above all else ... I see many people with audiences where they get things wrong, and there's just no accountability. They're just playing tennis without the net with their audience. Somebody like Trump is the ultimate example of this; he literally can contradict himself in the span of 30 seconds, and no one cares. If I do that, everyone in my audience cares ... I get a lot of pain when I get things wrong or seem to get things wrong in front of my audience.

Trump should be cancelled. Trump is guilty of 10,000 things that should have annihilated him as a politician, should have made his presidency impossible, and should certainly reveal him now to be the most dangerous cult leaders on Earth. And yet, even though there are those 10,000 things, the left is so sloppy and so unprincipled that they're going to lie about 5,000 other things.

I have said publicly that I think Osama bin Laden was almost certainly a better person than Donald Trump.

I'm distinguished among the citizens of Earth at the moment in having a subreddit devoted to me where most people, or certainly many people, seem to despise me. There's a lot of criticism out there, even among my so-called fans.

Every very experienced meditator who agrees with me about the nature of mind or who's kind of gone through this experience of looking closely enough and then finding that they're not who they thought they were, or that the sense of self is a construct or an illusion that can dissipate the moment it's clearly looked for, every person like that knows exactly what it's like to have not seen that originally.

I had less restraint going after Candace Owens on Twitter at the outset of COVID because she was tweeting some truly diabolically stupid things—and still does.

Academia is so captured by social justice leftist thinking, I mean, it's like 95% left, left, left of center in almost every college on Earth, or at least every college in the west, at the moment.

I say what I say about Islam. I have all of this concern about the ideas that anchor Jihadism to the real religion of Islam. But I also say that the first people I would want to let into this country when we're going to have an immigration debate are secular Muslims and moderate Muslims. You'd think, if I'm so worried about Islam, maybe I've got this anti-immigrant, keep the brown people out bias, but that's absolutely not what I have.

I believe I know Trump is a racist based on private conversations I've had with people who know that Mark Burnett suppressed tapes of him on 'The Apprentice' using the n-word in earnest.

The only legitimate media, for the most part, is left-wing media.

I think people should pay for content, and they should get over there hang-ups around that because we're living with what I consider to be the disastrous consequences of people thinking everything's free, and yet, our societies are being torn apart by what is, in essence, just a badly incentivized information economy.

I don't know if you notice what Gad [Saad] says about me on social media, but the guy is working very hard to make a permanent enemy of me. He's just attacking me by name as a utter hypocrite and sell out. I don't recall the specific allegations, but he thinks my reaction to Trump has destroyed my mind and made me a totally dishonest person.

Face-to-face relationships can be distorting of one's willingness to publicly attack someone for their bad ideas.