#389 — The Politics of Risk

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Nate Silver about cultural attitudes toward risk and the state of American politics. They discuss the erosion of trust in liberal institutions, polling and political narratives, different camps of cultural elites, the influence of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of FTX, Gell-Mann amnesia, Christopher Rufo, why Kamala Harris can’t admit to having changed her views, a problem with strict utilitarianism, AI and existential risk, what people misunderstand about election forecasting, which news events have affected the 2024 race, how current polls might be misleading, public vs. private polling, undecided and marginal voters, Gen Z, the gender divide, the likelihood that Trump won’t accept the election results if he loses, election integrity in the swing states, the chance of a landslide, the prospect of public unrest, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll also find our
0:24.9	scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We
0:29.0	don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:34.0	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. We've got 11 days left until the presidential election and I must say I am
0:51.2	concerned at this point.
0:54.2	I know the polls still have it more or less even,
0:58.2	but it's not feeling that way somehow.
1:01.5	What has worried me about the Harris campaign from the beginning still worries me.
1:07.8	For some reason I can't understand, she and her campaign have not found a way for her to explain her changes of position on border security, on crime and policing, on trans activism, and the result is that many people don't know what her views are
1:27.7	or they think they do know and they suspect that she's some kind of woke
1:31.8	Manchurian candidate who will govern like a far left activist.
1:36.4	Now I'm not even slightly concerned that that's true, but it really seems that there are millions and millions of people who are worried
1:46.0	about this.
1:48.1	And she is not saying much to put them at ease. She can't put them at ease unless she articulates how her views have
1:57.6	changed. Whenever she's asked about a position she held in 2019 or 2020. She just looks evasive. She looks
2:07.5	like she's above all trying to not acknowledge that she changed her mind and then she seems desperate to change the subject.
2:16.0	This has produced a long series of own goals that she seems condemned to score on herself again and again. I don't understand it. Needless
2:28.0	to say, there is not a lot of time left to make sense on these topics.
2:35.0	And we turn our attention to the election today,
2:38.0	because today I'm speaking with Nate Silver.
2:41.0	Nate Silver has been a professional poker player for quite some time, but he's famous for being
2:46.1	the founder of 538, which is an election forecasting website, and he's also a New York Times best-selling author. He wrote the
	...

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