Sam Harris On Trump's Incurable Character, Biden's Flaws and Virtues, The Toll Of Wokeness, And How A Landslide Could Heal Us

The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan

Politics, News, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 836 Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2020

⏱️ 105 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, New York Times best-selling author, host of the Making Sense podcast, and creator of the Waking Up App. He’s also an old friend, jousting partner, meditation role model, and all round wonderful man. In thinking who might be an ideal first guest for the first Dishcast, and on the eve of an election, Sam came up immediately. Exactly four years ago, in an episode of his podcast titled “The Lesser Evil”, we had a rambling discussion that went viral, where we confessed how deeply we loathed Hillary Clinton and how vital nonetheless it was to vote for her against the far greater menace of Donald J Trump.

In this episode — the inaugural episode of The Dishcast — Sam and I pick up the conversation from 2016 by delving deeper into the incomprehensibly foul nature of Trump and the inability of his cult followers to care, and the danger of woke authoritarianism in the wake of Trump. I hope you have as much fun listening as we did chatting.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The I am back with Andrew Sullivan.
0:31.1	Andrew, thanks for joining me again.
0:32.5	It's always wonderful to talk to you, Sam.
0:35.7	So first, we should just say that this is a simulcast.
0:42.0	You are a freshly minted podcaster, and I'm quite honored to be your first podcast collaborator here.
0:51.1	At least, I mean, obviously you've done podcasts in the past, but this is your new dish podcast.
0:55.9	What's going on over there? Tell us your plans.
0:58.3	Well, I'm incredibly psyched to do this with you as the first one.
1:02.4	We're going to do this every week, we hope.
1:05.4	And the idea is to be able to have a conversation which is not constrained by all the pressures that
1:12.0	are on us now in the media wherever we are and to talk openly and reasonably with people of
1:18.7	different views, believe it or not, and to hash things out in a way that you've always been
1:23.3	a master of doing. And so I couldn't be prouder to be launching this alongside you in our,
1:31.3	in our, what seems to be now a tradition, right, every four years. We get together and explain
1:35.3	why we're both miserable about the coming election, but why we're going to vote anyway.
1:40.6	So thank you. It's a big honor. And I'm psycheded and this is a big new adventure for all of us.
1:46.9	Nice, nice. Well, I'm very happy to do this with you. I must say we have quite a checkered past here, however, because four years ago, I think we jinxed the presidential election. We had the brilliant idea of doing a podcast
2:01.3	wherein we proved that we were as in touch
2:05.4	with Hillary Clinton's flaws as anyone.
2:08.0	We were not to be outdone by any aspiring Trump voter.
2:12.2	And then in that podcast, we quite brilliantly to my ear, turned the tables
2:19.8	after about an hour of running down Hillary to make the case that Donald Trump was much,
	...

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