Sam Harris

Maybe there is some deal in Ukraine or with China that is just like, this guy's not who he seems, he's not the public servant he's been pretending to be, he's been on the take for decades and decades, and he's just, he's as dirty as can be, he's all mobbed up and it's a nightmare, and he can't be trusted, right?

That's possible,

if you show me that his life is not at all what it seems.

But on the assumption that having looked at this guy for literally decades, and knowing that every journalist has looked at him for decades, just how many affairs is he having, just how many drugs is he doing, how many houses does he have, what are the obvious conflicts of interest?

You hold that against what we know about Trump,

And I mean, the litany of indiscretions you can put on Trump's side that testify to his personal corruption, to testify to the fact that he has no ethical compass, there's simply no comparison.

So that's why I don't care about what's on the laptop.

Now, if you tell me Trump is no longer running for president in 2024, and we can put Trumpism behind us,

And now you're saying, listen, there's a lot of stuff on that laptop that makes Joe Biden look like a total asshole.

Okay, I'm all ears, right?

I mean, it was a forced, in 2020, it was a forced choice between a sitting president who wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and a guy who's obviously too old to be president, who has a crack addicted son who lost his laptop

And I just knew that I was gonna take Biden in spite of whatever litany of horrors was gonna come tumbling out of that laptop.

Yeah, but it's not just superficial.

It is...

When someone only wants wealth and power and fame, that is their objective function, right?

They're like a robot that is calibrated just to those variables, right?

And they don't care about the risks we run on any other front.

They don't care about...

environmental risk, pandemic risk, nuclear proliferation risk, none of it, right?

They're just tracking fame and money and whatever can personally redound to their self-interest along those lines.