The sad decline of Sam Harris

It was the North By Northwest comment that set the alarm bells ringing. I’d listened to hundreds of hours of Sam Harris – and read a good deal of what he’d written – and I liked most of what he said, but a few years back he related on his podcast that he and his wife Annaka had walked out of a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest because they found it slow and boring.

What?! I thought. Are you kidding me?! It's one of the Master’s greatest suspense thrillers, a brilliant film that harkened back to the likes of Hitch’s own The 39 Steps, while providing something of a template for the James Bond films. And for Harris to say that not only did he not like it, but he had walked out of it, well, that’s a shocker! 

So the warning signs were there.

Fast forward to mid 2023 and myself, like many others, have given up on Sam Harris. He’s lost the plot. He’s discredited himself in a number of ways, including infamously telling Triggernometry that he wouldn’t care if Hunter Biden had the corpses of children in his basement, and in another podcast making the bizarre statement that the lockdown and vaccine sceptics are wrong because covid could have been vastly worse than it was. Could have been, but wasn’t. Which is kind of important.

As I say, though, the warning signs were there, and they weren’t all classic movie related. First off, look at some of the folk that Harris has broken bread with on his Making Sense podcast: Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced FTX boss accused of donating stolen customer funds to politicians; Johann Hari, the liar and cheat who has been delivering plagiarised and low quality information to his readers for years; Yuval Noah Harari, the icy intellectual foghorn of the WEF possibly relaxed about ushering in a transhuman dystopia; Andrew Yang, the failed Democratic Presidential candidate in favour of UBI; and Nicholas Christakis and Eric Topol, two of Anthony Fauci’s corrupt mates who told constant lies about everything during covid. 

(I should note here that Harris has also had many excellent guests on, such as Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Coleman Hughes and many more.)

Talking of Eric Topol, it’s him – and Harris for facilitating him – I blame for initially setting me off on the wrong path regarding the deadly-once-in-a-century-pandemic-that-wasn’t when he came on the podcast in March 2020 with his warnings of impending doom. I distinctly remember him criticising the early British approach, ie the correct approach, to reach herd immunity by allowing people to get what would be a mild illness for most, before it was U-turned on by a foolish prime minister devoid of courage or principles. At that point I largely trusted Harris and his guests. And so I went round telling friends that this was a deadly disease and we’d better be mighty careful.

Because Harris had surrounded himself with the likes of Topol and Christakis, he managed to get virtually everything wrong throughout the pandemic of tyranny. What a contrast to, say, Bret Weinstein who, after a slightly shaky start, got almost everything right, including on the vaccines that aren’t vaccines, and aren’t safe or effective, something that Harris has been woefully wrong about. But Harris is perhaps a typical Californian neurotic: this is a guy who, right at the very start of covid, straight away took his two daughters out of school and kept them out.

Folk like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson have commented on the fact that Harris has gone wayward, I’m not alone. A supposed free speech absolutist, Harris threw his toys out of the pram when Elon Musk took charge of Twitter, and deleted his account. What a bizarre, close-minded thing to do. So he preferred Twitter when it was deliberately limiting free speech and scientific discussion? Previous to deleting his account, he’d unfollowed friends with different opinions like Dave Rubin, another erstwhile member of the IDW and someone who has got most things right about the covid tyranny. Another warning sign. 

Arguably yet another portent was the way Harris would talk with great verbosity when given the chance, which was on most of his podcasts. In his semi-somnambulistic LA tones, interspersed with the odd casual obscenity, he’d intone at length on a variety of subjects. When faced with probing questions, such as those by Konstantin Kisin in the Triggernometery interview, he’d use this technique to endlessly talk out an issue, attempting to blind his interlocutor with science. I can see through this now; I couldn’t before. 

I first fell for Sam Harris, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and AC Grayling around 15 years ago when what they were saying about rationality and belief chimed with me and gave me what I feel was the second of my three great intellectual leaps forward (the first was economics in the 1980s, the third has been the evil madness of the last three years). Hitchens is now sadly deceased, Grayling got a terrible case of Brexit Derangement Syndrome, Dawkins is still mostly a good egg, railing against woke madness but dialling back his criticism of the world’s deadliest religion, and Harris is in this place. His Trump Derangement Syndrome surely affected his mental acuity. Although I now think to myself: was he ever that great? In 2019 there was a damning review of Harris’s contribution to the Four Horseman discussion and I thought it grossly unfair. Now I think: hmmm, did the reviewer have a point? I’ll have to go back and listen to the discussion again.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Last night I read some of The End Of Faith again, and it is a fine book, very well written and extremely persuasive. Harris was brave to write it.

Perhaps what all this most tells us is that intelligent people can be stupid. They can make bad mistakes. They can be right on some things and wrong on others. Their brains are so big there’s room for huge contradictions and cognitive dissonance and flitting about. Neil deGrasse Tyson is another who has made some disastrous statements in recent times. Quillette’s Claire Lehmann found that some opinions were too heterodox for her, blocking those on Twitter who didn’t support her call for vaccine mandates, and damaging her fine website’s credibility. There have been many other public intellectuals who have let themselves and us down since 2020.

To me, though, Sam Harris has been the greatest disappointment. I finally unsubscribed from his podcast last year. I still have his meditation podcast, but I rarely use it now. As Rev Avora writes in a brilliant Substack article, he has to re-consider his pandemic views and course-correct. But I doubt he will.

Now for another watch of North By Northwest.