A Podcast About Silicon Valley Oligarchs
- Lex Rieffel
- Oct 5
- 3 min read
I often listen to podcasts while driving, especially Freakonomics and People I Mostly Admire, but also Heavyweight, Radio Atlantic, TED Radio Hour, and Modern Love. This one was sent to me by one of my Peace Corps groupmates. It is an episode of “The David Krum Show”.
David Frum, if you don’t know him, is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a distinctly liberal talk head. He’s too liberal for my tastes and generally talks too much, but this episode had me engaged from beginning to end because he was interviewing Sam Harris.
A link to the YouTube version of the podcast can be found at the end of this note.
Sam Harris, whom I had not heard of before, is a “Silicon Valley product” (my description) who has scientific credentials in the area or neurology and a longstanding interest in religions. He created the Waking Up podcast in 2013, now renamed Making Sense. It now has roughly 800,000 subscribers.
This hour-long David Frum episode begins with a 15-minute monologue about the Trump Administration’s indictment of former FBI Director James B. Comey. Frum makes enough interesting points to make it worth listening to. It’s the next 40 minutes with Harris, however, that prompted me to produce this post on my website. The last 5 minutes, contrasting the Nazi “war on cancer” (deserving of more attention) with Trump’s war on vaccines, is interesting as an historical footnote but can be skipped.
The other reason for putting this podcast on my website is that it prompted some thoughts that I decided to share with my Peace Corps buddies. Here they are:
--The first topic [in the interview with Harris] that made me want to pause and reflect came toward the end of the podcast. It was the discussion about how (according to David Frum) the small group of super wealthy technocrats is obsessed with "immortality". Some of you know that I am passionate about demographics. What was missing from the Frum-Harris discussion of this topic was the other end of the human life story: fertility.
--The whole world is well into an unprecedented trend of declining fertility: the replacement rate for any population is 2.1 children per woman in her reproductive years. There are now half-a-dozen countries with fertility rates around 1.0. The UN in its latest forecast (2024) for example has China's population falling from 1.4 billion now to 633 million in 2100. The most obvious reason for this trend is that more women don't want to have any children or want fewer children. (Skipping over the reasons for this now.) There is also growing evidence that male infertility/impotence is also a factor. (Skipping over the reasons for now.).
--The point is that as members of the human race we should be more interested in how to stop reproducing ourselves out of existence than how to live longer. A key issue here is whether the solution is to start producing babies in laboratories, even as clones.
[Pieces on this topic that I have co-authored have been published in Scientific American and elsewhere. They can be found on my website under the Population and Migration topic.]
--A bit later in the interview, Sam Harris expresses optimism that Americans will "wake up" to the dangers of our current political/social moment and restore a system of government that is more grounded in science and an understanding of why fact-based history is more important than fiction. He describes the current moment as largely a reaction to the left/liberal/progressive extremes of the "woke" culture. My reaction years ago when I first heard criticism of the woke culture was thinking "isn't being awake better than being asleep". When I demonstrated on the Mall in April, the first text that came to mind for the sign I would carry was "Wake Up America". I eventually decided that a better across-the-partisan-divide text would be "Musk: Go to Mars. NOW!!" I am optimistic that enough Americans will wake up to the damage the Trump approach to governance is doing to our country and the world to stop it from getting worse. It could even be evident before the 2026 midterm elections. I hope I'm right.
--Finally, there ensued a short discussion between Frum and Harris about the link between MAGA and MAHA. I have often wondered about this, especially because of [a friend’s passionate] support of MAHA, but I never saw the connection suggested in this discussion. Harris suggested that many fans of MAHA believe that nature is perfect and therefore we shouldn't mess with it, such as by injecting new-born babies with germs produced in laboratories. I believe Frum's response is the right one: nature has never been friendly to human beings; for millennia we have been inventing ways to protect ourselves from things that can kill us.