#415 — The Cover-Up

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

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Jake Tapper about Jake’s new book (with Alex Thompson), Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. They discuss how the mainstream media failed to cover the issue of Biden’s health, how Biden shielded himself from criticism, the false notion that Biden was simply a bad speaker, the audio released from Biden’s 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur, Jake’s experience moderating Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump, Jill and Hunter Biden’s influence on former President Biden’s decision to run again, the Hunter Biden laptop story, anti-democratic processes in the Democratic Party, 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 we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to
0:21.5	subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made
0:26.5	possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here,
0:31.2	please consider becoming one.
0:36.4	Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. I have a brief housekeeping here. I want to
0:44.3	update you all on some changes we're making to the podcast. After many years of giving free subscriptions
0:50.9	to everyone who asked for them, usually at least 100 people a day, some days
0:55.2	over 1,000. It has become clear that this policy is no longer working as intended.
1:02.6	Unfortunately, just too many people are taking advantage of it. We've always known that some
1:07.4	percentage of people would abuse the policy, but things have recently
1:11.5	gotten out of hand. This might have something to do with my releasing more podcasts on video.
1:17.6	I'm not sure, but it's just obvious from the pattern of behavior that this is not what we intended or what anyone would assume we would
1:33.0	intend. And so regrettably, we have been forced to acknowledge that the policy is well and truly
1:39.8	broken at this point. We might revisit it in the future or not, I don't know. But for now,
1:46.8	the paywall on the podcast and on Substack will be a normal paywall. If there's content,
1:52.8	we feel that really must reach a wider audience, we can release that as a public service
1:57.1	announcement, so I'm sure that'll happen, and that ensures that the most essential
2:02.8	messages get out there and remain accessible to everyone regardless of their subscription status.
2:09.3	I just want to take a moment to acknowledge all of you who have been supporting my work with
2:13.9	your subscription throughout this whole time, and thank you for doing that and choosing to pay
2:20.1	when you could have taken it for free. It's really all of you who deserve the credit for enabling
2:25.8	us to offer this free policy for so many years. In truth, it worked far longer than anyone would
	...

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