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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the malicious prosecution of James Comey and what it reveals about Donald Trump’s growing power over the justice system. He explains how the United States, unlike other advanced democracies, has allowed prosecutions to become instruments of presidential will, why Watergate-era norms of independence have eroded, and how the Supreme Court’s recent rulings have accelerated the drift toward one-man rule.
Then Frum is joined by Sam Harris—author, podcaster, and creator of the Waking Up app—for a conversation about Silicon Valley’s dark political evolution toward authoritarianism. They discuss how the emancipatory optimism of the early internet gave way to surveillance, manipulation, and the shattering of shared reality; why prominent tech figures are embracing authoritarian politics; and how conspiracy, anti-vaccine movements, and the pursuit of profit have corroded the culture of innovation.
Finally, David closes with a discussion of Robert Proctor’s The Nazi War on Cancer. He notes how the Nazi regime advanced anti-smoking and cancer-prevention campaigns even as it committed atrocities, tracing the deeper links between politics and health. Drawing a parallel to today, David connects that history to the rise of the MAHA movement: where anti-vaccine ideology and wellness grifts overlap with MAGA politics, fueled by distrust of experts and a refusal of solidarity and empathy with the sick and suffering. He argues that the Trump administration is recasting health as a test of personal virtue to reinforce its authoritarian project.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Sam Harris, and we’ll discuss the turn in the politics of Silicon Valley away from some of the hopeful politics that prevailed in the past to a dark, authoritarian politics that determines the present. Sam will help me to understand why this happened and how, and what it may mean for the politics of the rest of the country.
In the book section, I’ll be discussing a 1999 historical classic by Robert Proctor. But before getting to those subjects of the middle and the end of the show, I want to open with some preliminary thoughts about the recent malicious prosecution of James Comey by the [Donald] Trump administration.
This podcast will release on the 1st of October, and by then we may be in a government shutdown. If that does happen, I will have some thoughts next week on what happened and why and what to do about it. But I don’t want to speculate here about hypothetical contingencies when we have this glaring, shocking event from the recent past that needs to be discussed a little bit.
What I want to add to this conversation—because a lot has been said, some of it, I’ve been on television, and I’ve done some writing about it for The Atlantic—I want to put this story of this malicious prosecution into a larger institutional context, a global context.
Now, what happened to James Comey is something that really could not happen in most other developed countries. I mean, imagine supposing you’re, for example, the chancellor of Germany, and you decide you want to indict a political opponent. How would you go about doing it? The short answer is: You couldn’t, and if you tried, you’d probably end up in handcuffs yourself. Because the person who handles all the prosecutions in Germany, to whom every one of the hundreds of German federal prosecutors answers, is a director of public prosecutions—it’s got a very complicated German title, but that’s the basic idea. This person is typically a career civil servant. The current holder of the office is a man named Jens Rommel—no relation to the famous general—and he has devoted his lifetime to the service of the German courts and legal system. The German public prosecutor, federal prosecutor, is appointed by the president of the German state on the advice of the minister of justice, and then has to be confirmed by the German Bundesrat, the upper house of the German legislature.
Now, the chancellor has absolutely no rule in this, and not only no rule, but typically—because Germany’s governed by coalitions—the chancellor and the minister of justice, who will nominate the probable prosecutor, are from different political parties. Right now, the chancellor is a Christian Democrat, but the minister of justice is a Social Democrat, and so is the president of the German state. So multi parties are involved in this, and the Bundesrat—which is produced by the 16 German states and whose membership constantly fluctuates, as each state has its own elections on its own timetable—is a stew of many other parties. So whoever gets this job is going to have broad acceptance in German society, and the chancellor has no role whatsoever and no influence on the actions of the public prosecutor.
Now, the Germans have a special pain point on the political abuse of criminal prosecutions. So their system is especially robust at cutting the head of government out of the process. But most advanced democracies do make the prosecutions quite far away from the head of government. In Britain and Canada, Italy and France—I don’t know how all of these countries work, but in just about every case, there is little or no role for the prime minister or the head of government to influence the way the prosecution does its work.
Now, I don’t want to say that these systems are without flaw and without scandal. I mean, the Canadian example, which I know well—in 2019, there’s a huge scandal in Canada because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put pressure on his minister of justice to go easy on a company that had paid bribes in Libya to get contracts. This company was an important employer in Trudeau’s province of Quebec and had important connections to Trudeau’s Liberal Party. And he pressed the minister of justice to reduce the fine for the bribery scandal. But the minister of justice did say no, and the scandal did explode. And although Trudeau survived it, he was never quite the same after.
And there’s something a little different about a prime minister saying, Look—can we go easy on this big employer that also is giving some money to my political party? And the president saying to a prosecutor, That guy over there, I don’t like him. I want you to put him in prison. Go do it. There is some difference there. And that latter thing: That can really only happen in the United States, not in pure democracies. And this unique American politicization of prosecution raises powerful questions about what course the United States will take in the post-Trump era, if there is a post-Trump era.
Here’s how things work in the United States. The prosecutors are appointed by the president—U.S. attorneys, the federal prosecutors, there’s a whole state system—in the federal system. Federal prosecutors are appointed by the president, confirmed by the Senate, and they answer to the attorney general, who’s a member of the president’s Cabinet and often a political ally of the president.
This situation would strike most people in most other developed countries as highly anomalous. When the system was created in the 18th century, it didn’t seem so dangerous as it does now. In the early days of the American republic, the federal government had a very limited role in prosecuting crimes. And the U.S. attorneys were days’ travel away from the center of government in Washington, and the president wasn’t there all the time. They were mostly operating on their own initiative. But as the federal government grew, as the federal criminal code grew, as federal prosecutions multiplied, abuses really did happen. And they happened thicker and faster in the 20th century, and they culminated with a big explosion of abuse that we know collectively as the Watergate scandal.
During and after Watergate—really beginning with the New Deal, but especially after Watergate—the United States tried to come up with some workarounds to the problem of the influence of the president over the system of prosecutions. They developed norms of professionalism and independence in the Department of Justice, norms that the U.S. attorneys—although appointed by the president—weren’t supposed to answer to the president. Norms that the attorney general should try to keep a distance away from individual prosecutions, and norms that the president himself should never talk to anybody about the individual prosecutions that he wanted. But these norms were just practices. They weren’t written down in any kind of law. They were a habit. Like, for example, the habit that the FBI director should be above politics. This was very much a creation of the post-Watergate world after the end of the abuses under J. Edgar Hoover, and as there were revelations during Watergate, a new professionalism came to the FBI. Richard Nixon in July of 1973 appointed a distinguished legal figure named Clarence Kelley to be head of the FBI. And Kelley served through the entire [Gerald] Ford administration, while he and Nixon were the same party, and then through half of [Jimmy] Carter’s administration. Carter appointed a man named William Webster to succeed Clarence Kelley, and Carter’s choice served through the remainder of Carter’s administration and almost all of Ronald Reagan’s administration. It just wasn’t done to replace the head of the FBI, because the head of the FBI was supposed to be independent.
But this was just a practice. It wasn’t written down anywhere, and no one could make it stick. Donald Trump fired one FBI director at the beginning of his first term. That was James Comey. He replaced him with a man named Chris Wray, and then he fired Chris Wray at the beginning of Trump’s second term because Trump wanted to have someone who would answer to him. And he installed Kash Patel as the current FBI director—a total personal loyalist, exactly the kind of person who would’ve been regarded as utterly unsuitable for the job anytime from the 1970s until the day before yesterday.
And so it is with the U.S. attorneys. Again, U.S. attorneys were appointed by the president, but they weren’t supposed to act in the name of the president, and they aren’t supposed to take orders from the president. Yet, when the U.S. attorney who had jurisdiction over James Comey refused to prosecute because there was no case, Trump then appointed, again, a complete personal loyalist with very thin professional qualities to do Trump’s bidding.
These are changes in the way the American system has worked, and the United States is discovering that there’s very few restraints on these changes. The United States, as the federal government got more powerful, tried to find various ways to make important federal agencies more independent of the president. There, commissions were set up, agencies that were—there would be some directors appointed by the president and some by Congress. But the Supreme Court has recently been on a rampage where to say, just no. You saw a case a little while ago: Trump wanted to fire a federal trade commissioner, just because he wanted to replace the federal trade commissioner, who was a Democrat, with a Republican. There had been a practice of a certain number of Democrats and a certain number of Republicans on the Federal Trade Commission, as is the case with the Federal Communications Commission and many other federal supervisory bodies. And Trump has said, No, the president will appoint all of them. And the Supreme Court has said, Well, there’s really nothing to stop the president from doing that. Any deal that the presidents of the past have struck with Congress are there at the whim of the president and can be overridden at any time. Every executive function belongs to the president, and the president can fire anybody.
Now, we’re coming to a real crisis test of this, because Donald Trump wants to fire a Federal Reserve Board governor. The Supreme Court has always carved out a special place of protection for the Federal Reserve. But Trump wants to fire one of the governors of the Federal Reserve. He has the power in law to do so for reasons of fault: if the Federal Reserve governor has done something wrong. And the Trump administration has made allegations that this person had two mortgages instead of—that claimed both that a house was a principal residence. But it looks like the Federal Reserve governor in question, Lisa Cook, is probably completely innocent and obeyed every law. This obviously is going to end with Donald Trump doing as he so often does and saying, The hell with it; I’ll just tell the truth, I don’t like her. She’s not doing what I want. I want to fire her. I have a right to fire her. And that case will end up at the Supreme Court very soon, and the Supreme Court will rule whether the Federal Reserve joins all the other federal agencies in being subject to the whim of the president or not. But whatever they say about the Federal Reserve, they’ve made it clear that through the rest of the federal government, there is no restraint on the will and whim of the president over any aspect, including law enforcement.
We are learning in the Trump years how much of the American system depends not just on the character of the president but of the parties around him. That it just used to be thought that if a president, if he sort of singled out people and said, Punish that person, punish that person, that enough people in the system, both in his own—not only in the other party—but in the president’s own party would rise to stop him. We’re seeing that’s not happening. Trump wants a more absolute power in the hands of the president, and his own party is welcoming that.
Now, there are two considerations here: If that is your approach to power, it’s hard to imagine that you will ever willingly lay down the power. Because you have built a machine that can be used by the other party against you if they ever get a chance, and it will simply be too dangerous ever to let any other Democratic president, any other president, get the powers that Trump is claiming for himself. I don’t know how Trump is going to feel about a world in which, say, a President Newsom can give an order to the attorney general, Put this person in prison; put that person in prison. At that point, it’ll become a pretty existential matter to prevent a President Newsom from ever coming to power, or any other president of it, by any other Democrat.
But the Supreme Court is also creating a situation where it’s becoming impossible for Americans to reform their legal system by acts of law. I mean, if the Supreme Court says, We don’t care what laws you pass, a law creating the Federal Trade Commission; we don’t care whether you write a law making the attorney general independent of the president. Our theory of the case is that everyone with any ability to enforce the law answers to the president and can be fired at any time by the president—then we have a system of one-man rule that lasts for four years or eight or longer, against which there is no institutional stopgap. The most important institution in American society, the Supreme Court, is destroying the integrity of all the other institutions in American society.
It’s a very dangerous situation, and it raises this most fundamental question to which I don’t have an answer. And I invite you to think about it. If we ever do get to a post-Trump era, is the first job to reassert the institutions of the past and to do so into the face of the opposition of the Supreme Court that says you can’t do it? Or is the first priority to use these changes in institution that Trump has wrought to punish the people who did the things that Trump ordered them to do that are so improper? Are we going to be in a cycle of infinite payback, or are we going to try to do institutional reform in the face of opposition from a Supreme Court that rejects the most necessary premise for institutional-reform limits on the personal power of the president? I don’t know what is the right thing to do. It’s something I think about a lot. I ask everyone I get a chance; I ask this question, which is: Would you do if it were you? I continue to think about this. I invite you to think about it too.
And now my conversation with Sam Harris.
[Music]
Frum: Sam Harris needs little introduction to anyone who listens to podcasts. If he didn’t literally invent the form, he certainly perfected it. He launched his Making Sense podcast series in 2013, and since then has come to dominate the world of serious-minded conversation everywhere where the internet is carried.
Harris’s first book, The End of Faith, was a publishing event: more than half a year on the New York Times bestseller list. He followed that success with five more books, joining his interest in science and nondogmatic spirituality. He’s the founder and creator of the Waking Up app to lead users through courses of guided meditation. I’ve had the honor and pleasure of being welcomed as a guest on the Sam Harris podcast and one of his live events here in Washington, D.C. And now it is an honor and pleasure to welcome Sam Harris onto my podcast. Sam, welcome to The David Frum Show. Thank you for joining.
Sam Harris: Thank you, David. Great to be here.
Frum: Now, as I mentioned when we set this up, I wanted to get you to comment on what has happened to our sense of the internet and the computer world. I shared with you a television advertisement—if you can believe such a thing—from 1998 introducing the Windows 98 operating system. And if you watch the ad, it’s full of tributes to the emancipatory potential of all of these new technologies linking people together to study, to work, to play in new and exciting ways across borders, across age, across disability. You look at that world, and you realize we’re in a very different world in the world of the internet today. It seems to be dominated by leaders who read Carl Schmitt and are influenced by thoughts of Clifford Jarvin.
Harris: Curtis. Curtis Jarvin.
Frum: Curtis; I beg your pardon. Thank you.
I don’t think anybody looks at TikTok and thinks, Boy, this is emancipatory. Modern digital technology seems to exist to survey, monitor, and manipulate us. Do you agree that it used to be different? What went wrong?
Harris: It was very reasonable to expect that unlimited access to information would be intrinsically good and intrinsically biasing toward us being increasingly in contact with reality, right? I mean, just if you can get access to all the scientific knowledge—I mean, if you had added to that picture that we were forming in our heads about what the internet was gonna be in 1997 or 1998, the prophecy that in 10 short years we would all have access, in our pockets, we would have access to a supercomputer and the totality of human understanding on any topic that had been published on, right? And that knowledge in every specific science would be doubling more or less every three years, which I think is probably the current pace in terms of publications. How could that not be good? But we find ourselves in a world where access to all of this information and the ability to be connected to anyone in any place at any time is shattering culture and making it more and more difficult to fuse our cognitive horizons, right? Which is to say: You can stay in your echo chamber and be as crazy as you want to be for as long as you want to be, and you can find millions of people to help you do it. And now, increasingly with AI, you can find imaginary people to help you do it.
Frum: Well, let me give you a concrete example to illustrate exactly what you just said.
So I was looking at the Centers for Disease Control chart of measles infections in the United States. So there are quite a lot of [measles cases] in the 1980s and early 1990s. And perhaps in response to that, the [Bill] Clinton administration, in 1993—the new Clinton administration—rose out a program to make childhood vaccination universal and free. And, boom; it’s just miraculous that measles outbreaks in the early 1990s tumble. By the year 2000, the United States government is anticipating that measles will follow smallpox into extinction. And the cases remain very low in the early 2000s. And then the trend begins to rise. Now, still not as bad as it was in the 1980s, but there are increasing outbreaks, each more serious than the last. One in 2014. Another outbreak in 2019. We’re having yet another in 2025, and each of them is bigger than the one before. And it looks like the price we are paying for our new information environment is the return of completely preventable infectious disease.
Harris: Yep. Yeah, it might be a good time to invest in that iron-lung company that you were thinking about.
Frum: (Laughs.)
Harris: Maybe Tesla’s gonna make iron lungs.
Yeah, I mean, again, it seems like it shouldn’t be so. But I mean, we’re part of this psychological experiment now being run on all of humanity, and we can see some of the results. They’re in. We know empirically that this is the effect of connecting everybody, at least so far with our current tools.
Frum: Well, let me ask you about individuals—and these are people in many cases whom you know. You don’t have to use names, so we can hazard generalizations, and people who know how well you know this world. The leading figures in the technological world of the 1990s, who were very rich—not as unimaginably, arithmetically, impossibly rich as the richest people are today, but still very, very rich—were people who thought they were doing something good for humanity. Bringing people better products. And when they expressed themselves in public, which they didn’t do all that often, they had views that aligned along the perspectives of liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat—all accepting the American constitution, the American way of life. And now we seem to have these people who are enthralled by neo-dictatorship and who are making products that, it’s hard to argue that anybody is better off for any of these products. And even the people bringing us the product say, Just warning: Side effect of this thing I’m working on may be the extinction of human life on Earth. So that’s a possibility. In fact, not a negligible one, but I’m doing it anyway
Harris: Yeah. Well, so I think it’s important to admit that what we’re seeing—we’re seeing the loudest voices who are some of the most prominent people in tech. And we’re not just seeing the most prominent, influential; we’re seeing the ones who have this aptitude or inclination for making a lot of noise, right? We’re seeing people who are grabbing the mic and telling us what they think about the world. But not every billionaire is doing this, right? I mean, there are a lot of VCs and tech founders who are far more discreet in expressing their political opinions and not at all eager to be internet famous in the way that some of these principle people you’re thinking of are.
So you have a half a dozen, a dozen, people making a tremendous amount of noise. And they’re incredibly influential, and they’re cutting large checks to Trump and his enablers. And all of that has been very divisive and harmful, I would agree. But it doesn’t indicate that there’s been a sea change in the political culture of Silicon Valley. I mean, I think Silicon Valley voted 70-30 Democrat in the last election, and maybe that changed by 5 percent since 2016, right? So if you look at the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections, it went from something like, you know, 75-25 to 70-30 still in favor of the Democratic candidate.
I think what explains the very voluble and fairly authoritarian characters you’re thinking of is that they individually and collectively are articulating this backlash to the left-wing moral panic that many of us refer to as “wokeness,” that took over Silicon Valley and much of the country, certainly much more elite institutions, about 10 years ago. And it was somewhere around 2017 that I noticed the revulsion to this, and I shared the revulsion to this. And you had things that happened in Silicon Valley—like the firing and defenestration of James Damore who wrote the Google memo that you might remember. That was 2017, I think. There was the obvious dysfunction in how San Francisco was being run and the capture of all of the relevant levers of government by fairly crazy woke ideologues. And so the reaction to that—which had, I mean, as painful as this was on university campuses and over at the New York Times and other elite institutions—Silicon Valley got a double dose of this craziness. So some of the reaction to that is understandable. But rather than walk this tightrope, keeping both the errors of the left and the errors of Trumpist populism on the right in view, for these guys it tipped over into just supporting Trump, unabashedly. Admittedly, also for other reasons. I mean, there were people who were very concerned about crypto regulation and people who just wanted to make a lot of money and thought that Trump would be the best way to do that. And, I think, viewing their cases very narrowly, they were probably right about that. I mean, the level of crony capitalism and oligarchy that we’re seeing play out in front of us—I mean, certainly with respect to crypto—is fairly breathtaking, right? So a lot of these guys were proved right to back him as their horse.
But anyway, I think it’s the reaction to the excesses of liberal—not really, I mean left-wing illiberalism—explains a lot of this.
Frum: I want to put an asterisk besides something you said a few seconds ago just to clarify a thought, because I think there’s a risk that you would be misunderstood.
You’re not suggesting that voting 70-30 for the Democrats is some proof of virtue and Democrats are better than Republicans, but just that—
Harris: No.
Frum: I mean, if this were Mitt Romney versus [Barack] Obama and it was 50-50, you would think the world was functioning the way it should.
Harris: Yeah.
Frum: Or that it’s a very particularly special case. The crypto people, I get them. Look—there is nothing more American than the invention of a new credit product that contains fathomless risk. And the effort to get to sell that to people who don’t understand this new credit product, and load the risk onto the banking system and everybody else, and then walk away with bags of swag. That’s been going on since the Andrew Jackson administration. That’s America at its most traditional. And when the crypto currency explodes in the bank crisis that it’s going to lead us all to, it’s going to look a lot like 1837 and 1857 and 2008-09. This crisis is going to be—nothing will be more traditional than the crisis that that is leading to. And nothing will be more traditional than the way people who knew what they were doing loaded the risk onto others and took away money for themselves. And nothing will be more traditional than the backlash that will follow—and that may be one of the things that I think ultimately does consume this so-called populous project, is the way that it is opening the door to financial risk on an unprecedented scale.
But, let me tell you, let me just repeat to you that I’ve heard a couple of stories about why Silicon Valley changed. And you guide me through whether you think there’s any merit to any of these stories.
So you point to wokeness. One of the stories I hear a lot is: It was about this particular woke moment that occurred in coincidence with the pandemic. That very rich people were putting up with a lot of stuff they didn’t like from their underlings. And especially in 2017, with the Me Too movement—very rich men were putting up with backtalk from women of a kind they didn’t like, but they sort of put up with it or were afraid of it. Then comes the pandemic, and their employees stopped coming to work and never want to come back. And at that point, something snaps. And all these people who didn’t like woke, certainly didn’t like Me Too, and now their employers are saying that the pandemic isn’t over and they don’t want to come back to work—the boss class just goes nuts. Especially because they were looking through the pandemic for ways to get people back to work by promoting various kinds of improvised medicines; Ivermectin and things like that. And they found the Trump people believed in these medicines that would get their employees back to work, and other people did not believe in these medicines, so-called, that would not, they would get people back to work. And that’s it. We are for whatever gets people back to the office. If we have to tell them Ivermectin is a magic powder, we’ll tell them. What do you think of that story?
Harris: Well, there perhaps there’s something to it. But I think the problem, the cultural problem, became excruciating a couple years before COVID, right? So I think, I mean, COVID was a pressure cooker and produced a kind of shattering of our information landscape and our political culture. That was already happening, but it sped everything up, and it magnified every problem in sight. So, it’s not irrelevant, but when I think of 2017, 2018, these conversations were happening. These very wealthy, smart people had their arms twisted to the point where they couldn’t figure out how they didn’t have to tolerate this. And then the dam broke at some point, and everyone reset their sense of what was normal. What was compatible with sanity, what you had to apologize for, what was worth murdering somebody’s reputation over, etcetera. And we had this shaking of the snow globe of norms and expectations, and Trump certainly contributed to that. And a lot of these guys said, All right: no more, not another inch. We’re rolling back all of this craziness, right? We know people are getting canceled for bad reasons. We know we’re having fake conversations. And again, I agree with a lot of that, right? But the overreach is: You have people who are now blind to, or completely unconcerned about, authoritarianism and the shattering of American democracy and the embarrassment of us on the world stage. Etcetera, etcetera. All things that you and I agree too much about. But COVID again exacerbated everything here—but the dam was bursting before COVID.
Frum: Let me tell you another story that I’ve heard that explains this, and you tell me whether you think it has validity.
So when we watch that 1998 ad, one of the things that is very much a premise of the ad is that we are living in an American-led world. And although there are lots of people across borders—and you’re communicating with your friends in Shanghai or Montevideo—just like James C. Kirk on the United Federation of Planets, it will look a lot like 1960s America, and its leadership will look a lot like the [John F.] Kennedy administration. There’s an assumption in 1998 that the world’s going to be very American.
And then comes the decade of the ’00s, where China becomes this gigantic fact and India leap-vaults. And a lot of these leaders of companies say, You know what? The action is in India; the action is in China. Turkey is suddenly an important country for our business. And all of the places where things are happening are governed in very authoritarian ways. And it turns out a billionaire can be very comfortable in such a place; in some ways more comfortable than the United States with all its backtalk. So maybe, and first: We want to appease those societies and not offend them. Second: We identify with them. And third: We think the United States might do better if it were more like them. So is that part of the story?
Harris: Yeah. I do think, again, we’re talking about a handful of people, right, who have an outsized influence on this conversation. Right? So the numbers of people who have billions of dollars, who were listening to Curtis—who were getting their politics from Curtis Jarvin, I mean—you can count these on two hands and two feet, perhaps. So it’s not—as you point out, I referenced the partisanship of Silicon Valley, not as some kind of norm, but just to say that it hasn’t changed very much. Which is to say somebody like Reid Hoffman, I think, has a bigger constituency in Silicon Valley than Elon Musk or David Sacks, or anyone who you would want to reference there.
I mean, a lot of these guys are very idiosyncratic thinkers, who had their formative intellectual moments reading Ayn Rand and science fiction, right? I mean, these guys are not intellectuals. They’re smart. They have some indelible political intuitions and social intuitions and ethical intuitions that were derived from not the most interesting sources, right? And they haven’t upgraded their firmware since high school, it seems. So again, if The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged completely blew your mind, and it’s all you need to know about the topic of altruism, say—thereafter, you’re a difficult person to deal with when you have a hundred billion dollars.
Frum: Does that influence explain the startling lack of recent large-scale charity from Silicon Valley?
Harris: Yeah. I would think so. I’m obviously going on intuition here. But these guys have a view of philanthropy that is very self-serving, if you imagine that your selfish interests are best served by holding onto all your money. And it’s very depressing. There’s a lack of commitment to the common good that is palpable. A lot of thought being expended on just how to grow your business at all costs and imagining that if you’re working on the right thing, that’s the best way to serve the common good. Even if that thing is just obviously shattering our culture, to take social media as one example.
But we’re not living in an age where the wealthiest people feel that, if only for purely self-serving reasons—I mean, just defensive reasons, just I don’t want to see the pitchforks coming sorts of reasons—they’re not disposed to increase the beauty and stability of our society by being extraordinarily generous and philanthropic. That’s just not what’s happening.
Frum: That way. I mean, Bill Gates is much more like people who came 70 years before him than he’s like people who came 20 years after him.
Harris: He’s the quite extraordinary exception. And I mean, what’s interesting is, if you just look at the kinds of the vilification that Bill Gates receives—I mean, I don’t know Bill, I’ve only met him once, I think, and he might be a peculiar person in all kinds of ways that would attract criticism. The details of his private life, or at least; there’s some of them are out there, and they may be the fodder for weird stories. Which is to say: The guy might not be St. Francis of Assisi, but he is clearly the greatest philanthropist in human history if you talk about the scale of his giving to the causes of global health. But when you look at how he is vilified, when you look at just how much energy the vaccine controversy got—right of center online, all the people who thought he was putting trackers in human bodies by supporting the COVID vaccine—it indicates how the derangement in our culture that many of these people are signaling to and becoming famous on the basis of, right? That is the digital abyss that Elon spends all his time howling into, right? And drawing so much energy from. And so all the people for whom Elon Musk can do no wrong, whether he seems to produce a Nazi salute or whether he destroys USAID gleefully and causes the immediate immiseration and death of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. I mean, you hold that up against Bill Gates’s contributions to global health. I mean, to take one variable among a dozen, we might pick out the fact that there’s so much celebration of Elon’s project and so much denigration of Gates’s online, in this part of the culture. It just shows you just how ethically upside down it all is.
Frum: Well, and Gates is not criticized for the things that he did or may have done that may be wrong. Again, we don’t know; there are stories about his private life, we don’t really know any of the details of them, or at least I don’t. But let’s suppose they’re bad. That’s not what he gets heat for. What he gets heat for is lifesaving vaccines—because vaccines are an enemy of a certain kind of Silicon Valley mind.
And this takes into something that I just find baffling, which is, look—I think there’s a certain kind of Marxist who thinks there’s a capitalist cabal, and they’re wearing top hats and striped pants and monocles and serving up Fox News to their serfs. But they read The Financial Times. They want good information. They’re not going to actually poison their own brains with Fox News.
And then you watch what’s going on. Realize, no, the leaders of the anti-vax movement actually are—for better or worse—sincere. They believe the shamanistic garbage that they are foisting on others. It’s not like they’re having their own children secretly vaccinated while letting the devil take everybody else. They’re in this whole craziness themselves: amulets, incancations. And genuinely condemning Bill Gates not for anything he may have done wrong in his personal life, but for advancing science and protecting people and saving lives.
Harris: Yeah, I mean, again, this comes back to where we started: the shattering of our information landscape. And the fact that it has—connecting everybody to everyone at all times has created a kind of new religion of anti-establishment, conspiracy theorizing. I mean, ironically, the people who least trust mainstream science and real institutions and real journalism, etcetera, are the most sure that they know what is really going on in the world. I mean, like, the people who are divesting themselves of the best tools we have with both hands and seeking to destroy—to reduce everything to rubble—around them. Every institution. I’m not denying that our institutions have had some problems, right, and they’re worthy of criticism. But the place you stand from which to criticize them are on the same principles of objectivity and self-criticism and scientific methodology, etcetera. It’s a free-for-all, and it’s selecting for the most confidently asserted lunacy that you can find.
And again, what the paradoxes are. In advance, it would seem that all of this would seem impossible. You’re looking at some of the most-witnessed events in human history within moments become objects of pure controversy. I mean, everyone just saw Charlie Kirk assassinated in real time, and there now, on the right of center, or perhaps even left of center too, there are conspiracies about everything. You know, just the Nothing is as it seems, right? And, The Mossad did it, right? There are no informational guardrails. If the experts are—if you can credibly say to some audience of millions that all the experts are lying, and all the institutions are captured, and the only check on sanity here that’s needed is some guy with a podcast who’s going to sell you gold 10 minutes from now, or military rations. And he’s going to tell you what’s really going on, and Here’s how we know the Jews did it. It’s absolutely the Tower of Babel moment. And we’re there.
Frum: Can I ask you about the quest for immortality that seems to haunt the imaginations of more than a few of the people we’re talking about?
I mean, you are a person who rejects religion, but wants to unite the human self with some larger spirit or sense. You’re famous for your advice to people who are seeking to escape the purely material, the purely commercial, the purely monetary aspects of life. And we all welcome the advent of the improvements of science and technology that extend life, and especially even better extend health. There [is] recent great news about progress on Huntington’s disease, which is very exciting. There may be breakthroughs coming in Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. They may have been postponed by some of the bad decisions of the Trump administration, but those advances seem to be coming. And how welcome they are.
But human beings aren’t engineered to live forever, and you wouldn’t be human if you did. And there’s something kind of crazy about the desire to do so. I mean, I just turned 65. I’m on the downward slope. I’m counting down the minutes. And part of being human is learning to accept that, and to find relief in your love of others and the hope that the people you love and the human race generally will continue after you.
But so many people who should be giving money to take care of the environment, take care of the sick, take care of the poor, take care of the hungry, instead [are] spending their money so they themselves, personally, would never have to share the common lot of humanity. Where does that come from? And how do people not see that as crazy and Frankenstein-like?
Harris: Well, so this might be a topic where there is some daylight between us because I am—I mean, I’m not expecting to be delivered into immortality. I think you and I are old enough that whatever advances are going to come here, that we’re going to miss them. But in principle, I think it’s possible that that old age is really just an engineering problem that can ultimately be solved. I mean, there’s not that many things that happen to us biologically that would need to be stopped or reversed, that would just remove this expectation of death by natural causes at some point within a hundred years. And given that old age is synonymous with a bunch of diseases that we want to cure, right?
It is very common; the skepticism you just articulated is very common. Like, why would the Faustian absurdity of thinking you’re ever going to cure old age is obvious? Except, if I give it to you in this form: Well, are you in favor of curing cancer? You would say, Of course, yes. Are you in favor of curing Alzheimer’s? Yes, of course, yes. And are you in favor of curing a handful of other diseases, you know, heart disease? Of course, yes. We want to cure all those things. But then I say to you, Well, what about curing old age itself? The whole shebang? You say, Well, that’s utopian insanity. I don’t think it necessarily is. Again, it might be a hundred years out, or more, or in principle we might discover there’s some reason why it’s not possible. But, I just think we want to deploy our resources as sanely and as compassionately as we can in the meantime. So let’s find the problems that are most galling to us and producing the most needless human suffering and get to work on those immediately. But I do think in tackling some of those problems—like Alzheimer’s, like cancer, like heart disease—we are, in fact, sneaking up on this problem of old age in principle, and it may be solvable.
If you were to tell me that we get through this bottleneck of dystopia in the next 50 years and iron out our political problems to the point where we can simply—just as intelligent, social primates—cooperate open-endedly for the next thousand years to solve everything else that ails us, and you were to say that lo and behold, the average human lifespan a hundred years from now is 500 years. That actually wouldn’t surprise me.
Frum: So here, okay, I welcome all forms of medical technology, but there is a difference between the quest to alleviate pain and suffering and the quest to escape—the scientist’s generous impulse to search for ways to alleviate suffering, and the donor’s selfish fear of his own mortality and his desire for a world in which he personally will be exempted from it. Maybe he’ll drag us all along, too. But the moment people cease to die, they cease to be human. They become something else. And if you were—
Harris: But I don’t think you would say that about—leaving immortality aside, I mean, granted, that’s a very high bar. But, if you just imagine a world where our healthspan was increased more or less arbitrarily, so that you could be, you would view the kinds of things, the kinds of infirmity we take for granted now associated with the passage of time as basically unnecessary, right? In the same way that many of the infectious diseases that we’ve cured, or should have cured, or had cured until we’ve ushered them back in recent years, we no longer take those for granted.
If we ever return to a world where people are getting polio and becoming paralyzed by it, that’s going to seem like just a colossal and an unnecessary error, right? It’s quite possible that we will get to a world where they’ll look back on all of us who died of heart disease and cancer and Alzheimer’s and think, Wow, that was completely unnecessary. Given the requisite knowledge, it could have been unnecessary in the year 1970, but unfortunately those people didn’t have the knowledge.
But again, the thing that is so appalling is that standing between us and all of these interesting conversations and well-intentioned marshaling of our resources are these political problems that seem completely unnecessary when you look at them for five seconds. And yet they’re so intractable, and they’re so dangerous, and they’re so needlessly confounding of our capacity to cooperate at scale with one another. I mean, just forget about just our national problems; we have global problems we can’t even talk about solving because our politics is so sick. It’s there really, is the—
Frum: Let me ask you: Do you see a change there? I mean, just as the Silicon Valley leadership group seems to be significantly worse in 2025 than it was in 1998, could it be better in 20 years? Are there any forces driving it to be better? Are there people in the technological world who look at what has happened over the past few years and months and say, You know what? We need to back away from politics. We need not to support dictators. We need to find products that actually are good for people rather than the digital equivalent of cigarettes. Is this, in the next generation, do you see any signs of a shift, or is this crew the future?
Harris: Well, obviously it could go either way. Or it could get much worse before it gets better. But I am hopeful that in many ways, we are in a kind of emperor’s-new-clothes situation: where the truth is obvious, the ethical truth is obvious, the economic truth is obvious, the social truth is obvious, the political truth is obvious, and it’s just going unacknowledged. Because there are some perverse incentives and political pressures that are being brought to bear on people who, in many cases, are just cowards. Right? Personal cowardice and self-interest accounts for a lot of this. And when you look at how these billionaires and founders scrambled to get to Trump’s feet in the immediate aftermath of his election win, you can ask the question, How many billions of dollars do you need to have a spine?
But it answers itself when you see these people, who have more money than can really be imagined by most people. And apparently that’s not enough, right? And more or less to a man, these are people who know Trump to be what he is, right? I mean, they know he’s essentially an imposter when considered as a businessman. He’s a game-show host who, under the tutelage of Mark Burnett, got branded as a business genius for 14 long years, or 14 long seasons of The Apprentice and sold to the country that way. And none of these guys really respect him, right? And yet they’re now engaged in this massive pretense for reasons that are, in some cases, very hard to understand. But in most cases, it’s just that they are unlucky enough to be running public companies. And they think that their fiduciary duty to their shareholders accounts for every other ethical question that might be rattling around in their brains at this moment.
Frum: They may also know that he’s a mercilessly vindictive man in control of the resources of the American state at a time when that state has shed a lot of its inhibitions against the misuse of the resources of the American state.
Harris: I mean, I understand that. Except I really don’t understand why one of these guys didn’t just say, Listen—you know, I have $75 billion. I run one of the most valuable companies on Earth. This is America. If this orange moron is going to come for somebody, let him come for me. We all know what’s happening to this country, and I’m not gonna be part of it. Why didn’t Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or somebody of their—or Tim Cook—somebody of their stature and impregnability say something like that? I simply don’t know. I mean, it’s very hard to believe that this is the situation we’re in. But nevertheless, it is.
At a certain point, the revulsion with this flirtation with autocracy, I think, will reach some kind of tipping point. Or just the dysfunction that it produces, right? I mean, a real economic downturn. Something’s going to go sideways, and everyone is going to recognize that they knew it all along. That is my expectation. I don’t know what I’m actually predicting there, specifically, but it’s just—many of these people are too smart not to see what you and I see in this political moment, and their collaboration with it is appalling. And it will eventually be embarrassing. I think that is likely.
Frum: Sam Harris, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m so grateful to you for your time.
Harris: Yeah. Great to see you, David. Thank you.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Sam Harris for joining me today. My book this week that I will discuss is a history published in 1999 by Robert Proctor and Princeton University Press, The Nazi War on Cancer. Proctor did amazing work in the German archives and discovered that the Nazi regime of the Third Reich led the world in the 1930s and early 1940s in its investigation of the causes of cancer. It was Nazi scientists who first documented and confirmed the link between tobacco smoking and cancer. And not only did the researchers find this link, but the Nazi regime actually acted on it and implemented various anti-tobacco measures that had long-term effects on German public health, reducing—especially for German women—cancer death rates in the 1950s and 1960s. The Nazis investigated and found links between various kinds of food dyes and food additives and cancer, all of this correct science. And the Nazis promoted the consumption of whole-grain bread over highly processed flour: again, a major, successful campaign against cancer.
Now, Robert Proctor didn’t produce these findings in order to congratulate the Nazis on excellent work well done. Because many of the same scientists who did this important and pioneering work against cancer were also complicit in some of the most heinous of the Third Reich’s medical crimes against humanity: horrible experiments on living human beings from malicious ends, done in complete disregard of human life and human rights. He wants to tell a complicated story: that good politics and good science do not always go hand in hand, and that bad politics can often lead to good science for complicated reasons inherent in the bad politics itself.
In the Nazi case, as Robert Proctor demonstrates, a lot of the Nazi vigilance against cancer came about because of the deformity of Nazi politics. Nazis envisioned the Third Reich—the German body politic—as invaded by hostile, destructive aliens. Jews especially, but others too. And the way to protect the body politic was by eliminating these pathogenic people from the body politic. That way of thinking made them very open to the possibility that the individual human body might be made sick in the same way. It was a very strange idea in the 1920s and ’30s that a person could be exposed to something and not get immediately sick, but that this exposure would trigger a long-run reaction to the body that would cause cancer 20 or 30 years after the exposure. But the Nazis were very ready to believe this because it suited their political ideas.
This is a story not just with fascinating implications for the past—for the political past, for the medical past—but also with some troubling implications for our own time.
And I’ll admit that one of the reasons I returned to this book, which I first read a long time ago, that I returned to this book was: As I witnessed the present United States government—which is obviously a much more benign form of politics than the Third Reich, no comparison there—but this government, which is authoritarian in its own way, has been advancing and advocating attacks on public health and very bad science. Attacks on vaccines, promotions of crazy, untrue attacks on household pain relievers, especially for women. And in fact, showing a special display and contempt and indifference to the well-being of women, and of children too.
Robert Proctor thought hard about where these links come from: how politics and health care intersect, how ideas about politics and ideas about health care intersect. And it led me to think some thoughts about the interconnection between the MAGA movement—Make America Great Again, the movement of loyalists to President Trump—and the so-called MAHA movement: Make America Healthy Again, which is code for anti-vax theory and other kinds of crackpottery. Now, there is a connection here, and it’s one that really should trouble us about the state of present-day American thinking, in the same way that Proctor invited us to be troubled and to think differently about the politics of the 1930s and Nazi Germany.
Now, the MAHA—the Make America Healthy—movement, a lot of it is a scam and a grift. Selling people things that don’t do any good, influencers cashing in on the attention economy, crackpot or authentic in some cases. Authentic crackpots not motivated by money but by delusions and need for attention. And yet beneath it all, there are some ideas that fit in with the MAGA political movement that incubates the MAHA movement. [Health and Human Services Secretary] Robert Kennedy and the people around him think of human health as the product of individual choice, and good health is a reward for good choices, and—they don’t lay too much stress on this—but bad health is a punishment for bad choices. They also have a vision of nature as profoundly benign. They will talk again and again: Here you have a beautiful baby, and you inject it with this sharp needle. And the needle contains all these man-made derivatives. And why would you put your beautiful, natural baby, expose the new, beautiful, natural baby to the sharp needle and the man-made things? Because nature is so good and kind. A thought that could only occur to a person who grew up in the health and safety and security and abundance of 21st-century America. Because, of course, for most of human history, nature was not benign. As we discussed last week, two weeks ago, with Kyle Harper: Until the year 1900, the majority of deaths in the most advanced countries came about because of infectious diseases. And children, newborn children, and even children under five, had astonishingly poor chances of survival into older childhood.
But MAHA wants to tell a story of health care as something that is a product that we do for ourselves, and that we owe nothing to our collective society. Now, one of the things that proper health care makes us think—proper health, medical ideas—make us understand, is the inevitable solidarity that human beings have. I can do everything right. I can eat right, I can exercise. I can avoid all kinds of artificial, toxic ingredients. And yet I am no more proof against a deadly virus or deadly bacteria than anybody else. Your bacteria is my bacteria. My virus is your virus. They spread, and we are in this all together. Human beings cannot be healthy and in privacy. They can only be healthy collectively, in solidarity with one another. And if you really hate the idea of solidarity, if you really hate the idea of human empathy, then yeah—the idea that if you just eat the right supplements and stay away from things that other people do, you can be healthy on your own. That’s an attractive idea.
Also, modern medicine requires us to show some deference to earned intellectual authority. Very few of us can understand very much of modern medicine, and even the leading experts understand their own field, but in a different field, there is dependence on the learning and achievement of others as any civilian is. But if you hate the idea of deferring to earned intellectual authority—if your idea of authority is one that depends on charisma or wealth or strength—you’re going to be kind of helpless in the world of modern medicine.
So these two tendencies—a lack of empathy and a contempt for earned intellectual authority—that’s, along with the grift, that’s the bedrock out of which the MAHA movement grows. And it’s the reason why it does seem why these kind of crank anti-vax ideas, which a generation ago tended to prevail in sort of crunchy, granola parts of the country—Marin County, places like that, where people believed nature is kind and only artificial things are bad—it’s migrated from left to right. Because it has connected to this deep lack of empathy that defines the modern right-wing politics. This deep contempt for earned intellectual authority that defines modern right-wing politics.
Now, there are things in MAHA that are good. You certainly should eat healthier foods. We should all exercise more, just walking every day. These things that are promoted, they’re not bad ideas. And, of course, the concern against reducing obesity, especially in childhood: That was a good idea when Michelle Obama talked about it, to the horror of the right-wing-talk industry in the Obama days, and it is still a good idea. But as Robert Proctor reminds us, health-care arguments are very complicated, and they fit into politics in very oblique ways. And you can hear good news from some very, very bad people indeed.
Thank you so much for watching The David Frum Show today. Thank you to Sam Harris for joining me. I hope you all share and subscribe to this program on whatever platforms you use to view or listen to it. As always, the best way to support the work of this podcast and all my colleagues at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic, and I hope you’ll consider doing that. See you next week on The David Frum Show.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
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