Making Sense with Sam Harris - #474 — More From Sam: Hasan Piker, Islamism, Making Sense Community, and More

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events. They discuss the launch of Making Sense Community, Sam's Ben Shapiro conversation, the New York Times's embrace of Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani's approach to Islamism, the misuse of the word "genocide," AI-driven job displacement, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharis.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable,

please consider subscribing today. Welcome back to another episode of more from Sam. Once again, we're taping this live in front of subscribers. I'll be asking Sam many of the questions that you, subscribers have submitted, will be fielding reactions in real time so that Sam can address those. Before we get to our first topic, I just want to quickly mention that Sam has shows in Toronto, which is sold out next week, D.C. in New York City. There are still tickets for D.C. in New York. And then the following week on May 20th and 21st, you'll be in Dallas and Austin.

Also, you have some great podcast guests coming up in the next month or so. Michael Pollan will be released next week. Susan Kane, Elaine de Baton, who's just like an incredible human. or seems to me, I haven't met him. Vinod Kossela, Noah Smith, Jonathan Swan, and others. Okay, I want to get to our first topic. Actually, this is also a bit of an announcement, but since we're going to discuss it, I think it counts. We have launched a new community,

and for those who haven't heard about it yet, why don't you tell us what your intentions are with it? Yeah, this is really, I guess, I mean, in my mind, something like a replacement for Reddit, no offense to all the Redditors out there, but I just think we need a situation where there's less noise and more signal and more civility. And so we've created something here,

which is going to be web-based for the first month, but there's an app in development. And anyone who subscribe now or subscribes before June 1st will have access to the community for free. I mean, it comes with the subscription, but after June 1st, we're breaking them apart, I believe, should this thing work? We're going to go on a month-to-month basis.

If the whole thing catches fire, we're going to yank it and realize the social media of any sort is impossible. But we're going to take a stab at building a community that is not selecting for any of the usual variables of engagement and weirdness and division, but just actually a place where you want to have a conversation with people. Right. I think the goal for this community, for it to work, it should feel like we've just widened our friend circles.

And so some of the experiences we have in WhatsApp or the communication in Slack, you should feel that comfortable. And everyone there will be using their real names. So that's also going to change that. That's one innovation, which I hopefully will mean something. Yeah. So it's an experiment. I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be fun. Me too. You've had some great conversations this past month. Rahm Emanuel, Francis Fukuyama, Ben Shapiro, Lloyd Blank, Vine, and others. I'm curious if you have any post-mortem thoughts on any of those, especially something you may have enjoyed or wish you would have done differently. I think I got some criticism for the Shapiro conversation that it wasn't as much of a debate as some people wanted or I didn't hold his feet to the fire on Trump's record as much as I

could have. I think that's probably true. Actually, yeah, Rabbi David Wolpey wrote a very nice email on that topic, you know, criticizing me for not having pointed out some specifics about how much damage Trump has done to our standing. At one point, Ben, compared the president, really any president to a plumber. It just, you know, he just, he's not looking to him for inspiration. He just needs to unblock the toilet. And I sort of let him get, get away with that facile analogy. It's just not true. He's not a plumber. He's somebody whose character affects everything. I think I said something about, you know, the effect on culture and our, on our politics. But he's also affected our standing in the world by alienating all of our

allies and giving comfort to many of our actual enemies. So, I mean, the thing I found with Ben, which was interesting, I guess I could have anticipated it, is that he's such a, calling him a single-issue voter is probably not fair, but he was like a two-issue voter. You know, it was Israel and the Jews being one issue, and, you know, wokeness being another, and wokeness in large part is a problem for how it affects that first issue. And if you think that it enforced choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, if you think Kamala Harris is likely to be sufficiently bad on those two issues,

there's really nothing Trump can do that you're going to regret, unless it crosses the line into something so awful that it's worse than your worst imaginings about what Kamala Harris was going to be like on those two issues. So every time I pushed him on what was wrong with Trump and Trumpism, he more or less agreed. And yet he said explicitly or implicitly that none of that's as bad. I mean, Trump grifting billions of dollars for his family and friends is awful, corrupt, embarrassing, et cetera, but still not as bad as what Kamala Harris could have done or would have done for, you know, on those two issues. And it's a counterfactual. I can't really, really adjudicate. No one can. I mean, I disagree with him, obviously. And I think I wait those

issues differently than he does. But, you know, it's not really, there's not really much to debate there. He just, he hasn't seen the thing that Trump has done that is sufficiently awful for him to feel any regret over his choice. So that's where we kind of left it. Yeah. I thought that email he wrote would have been great for new community. So hopefully he'll join us over there. Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm hoping for. Yeah, one thing Ben Shapiro mentioned that felt right to me was the line about the slight of hand that seems to be happening around anti-Semitism where all the Jews and anti-Semites know exactly what's going on, but it feels as though everyone else isn't seeing that. Yeah, I mean, I again, I think that's a good way to describe

what's happening. I think we'll get to people like Mamdani and Hassan Piker, and that's part of the problem there. People just don't see what's happening there. But I don't view it as so much a matter of Jews and anti-Semites. I view it as a matter of Islamism and the values of open societies, right? So that's what I'm tracking. I mean, I'm also tracking anti-Semitism, unfortunately now, but anti-Semitism was not something I was been focused on for the last quarter century. Islamism is, and it overlaps with the problem of anti-Semitism,

but they're not quite the same problem. Yeah, we'll get to those two guys shortly. I thought the Lloyd Blankfine conversation was great too. He seems like a very thoughtful guy. I liked him. He seems like somebody who would make for a great politician, the right kind that you'd want. He's just a great communicator and a great thinker.

Speaking of politicians, this is just my intuition, but about Rom, I know he's looking at perhaps running for president, but my sense is I don't think he thinks he has the best shot at winning, but I think that's probably one of the best platforms for him to influence others with his his ideas. And I think, you know, if the Democrats win in 2020, he'll use that as an opportunity to play a big role in the next administration. What do you think about that? Well, I'm happy he'll be, if he is actually in the race for the duration, I'm happy he'll be there because I think he'll push the Democrats to have something like a sister-soldier moment around the lingering shades of

wokeness, which are all too lingering. I mean, from what I can tell, we're really poised to pitch back into some sort of George Floyd hysteria. I mean, I, you know, we'll get to Hassan Piker. I think the fact that the New York Times is burnishing Hassan Piker as though he were the future of progressive politics in America is a very bad sign. I think it's done immense brand damage in my mind to the Times. I mean, it's as though that that hasn't been happening for years and years. But I mean, it's just such a colossal moral and political error. But it makes me worry that I'm just, you know, wishcasting all of this and that the Democratic Party is unrecoverable now. I mean, I just think the fact that the people of the New York Times think that Hassan Piker is worth signal boosting,

I mean, tells me something that it tells me that I'm out of, either they're out of touch or I'm out of touch with the culture left of center, because he's basically our Nick Fuentes, you know, I mean, that exaggerates it by 10%, but, I mean, Totally irredeemable character. I'm just launching into Hassan Piker now because it's time. Keep going since you're on him. He's on record saying that America deserves 9-11. He supports Hamas. He supports He supports Hezbollah.

He supports the Houthis. Needless to say, he thinks that Israel is an apartheid state that is guilty of genocide in Gaza. I'm sure we'll get to the genocide charge in other contexts. And just remember what the New York Times has done. They gave him a very favorable style section profile. They gave him his own op-ed. Ezra Klein idiotically embraced him in an op-ed title, Hassan Piker is not the enemy.

He was on at least two New York Times podcasts, one of which he was there celebrating micro-looting against corporations that you just think have too much money. This is just not anything like sanity for the Democrats, right? This is suicide in 2028. So, I mean, we can talk about, obviously, wealth inequality is a huge problem. Can we play a clip for a second? I'd love to play a clip from, I think it's Potsay of America.

Yeah, that's his. Hamas is a thousand times better than a fascist settler, colonial apartheid state. I stand by that. Do you actually mean that? Or is that a rhetorical move or like a solidarity signal? Like, what, I mean, it's all of the above. I do mean it. I think it's a rhetorical move because it frustrates a lot of people.

I've also said, I'm a harm reduction voter. I'm a lesser evil voter. And therefore, I would vote for Hamas. over Israel every single time because I'm looking at the situation as a paramilitary organization that has like a political party as well, a Politburo as well, that is entirely comprised, not as an alien force, but of orphaned children that have, you know, had their parents killed by an apartheid state that has been dominating the lives of Palestinians for 80 years at this point. And they've done a genocide at this point as well, but like it started off with

the Nakhpa and has only evolved as technology has gotten better to become more heinous. And Gaza is this hermetically sealed area that many people correctly point to as the world's largest open air prison before October 7. So my perspective on this has always been that I think that Hamas's tactics, which I oppose at times, right? Or it's like internal governance issues are secondary to this conversation because they're, it's like placing a lot of emphasis on the Nat Turner rebellion

or instead of talking about the much larger, much more consequential, much bigger harm that, you know, chattel slavery was to black people, to like sell black people and to rape them. Okay, I think I got enough of this clip. I think that's the end of it anyway, yeah. Yeah, so I didn't see that podcast,

and I don't know how Favreau dealt with that, you know, vomitous confusion, but the fact that he was talking to the guy in the first place makes me worry that, again, the Democrats are lost here, right? So if you want President J.D. Vance or Tucker Carlson or, I guess, in the best case, Marco Rubio, well, then by all means, you know,

signal boosts Hassan Piker for the next two years, but it's a disaster. Yeah, so I don't know, you know, it's very hard for me to know what's going on in the Democratic Party, really. We have 77% of Democrats who think that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Those are Hassan Pikers people. 77% is a big number that attest to some serious moral and political confusion on that issue alone. I mean, for anyone who's confused about that, I mean, the word genocide means something. It meant something yesterday or the day before that, it means the effort to eradicate a people in whole or in part as such, right? It's like, you know, the Nazis killed Jews, tried to kill every last Jew they could get their hands on because they were Jews. The Hutus tried to kill all the Tutsis

with machetes over the course of 100 days in 1994. Those are genocides, and there's a, and we need that word, if we're going to redefine genocide to mean, you know, simply a war we don't like or a war that has too much collateral damage, well, then we're just going to need to invent a new word to signify actual genocides, which are, again, efforts to eradicate people simply because they belong to a specific group. And by that measure, Hamas is explicitly

and has always been a genocidal organization. This group of paramilitary fighters who are exclusively orphans whose what internal procedures, Hassan Piker, can quibble with, but they have a polyp bureau. I mean, this guy is such a colossal moron. It's a genocidal organization that aspires to genocide directly in his charter, and since October 7th has said it would repeat October 7th again and again and again at infinitum. If it had the ability, it would kill every Jew in Israel. We know that. All the Palestinians know that. Hassan Piker knows that. There's a lot of

people on the left who apparently are confused about that or don't care, either because they're so anti-Semitic or they're so deranged by the SIOP that's been worked on them over Gaza, but there has been no genocide in Gaza, right? It doesn't matter how many people were killed. It's still not a genocide as witnessed by the fact that Israel could commit genocide anytime it wants and hasn't. No country attempting genocide sends millions of text messages and cell phone calls and drops leaflets trying to get people to evacuate buildings before they bomb them. No country trying to commit genocide opens humanizing. humanitarian corridors in the middle of its war. No country trying to commit genocide sends its own

sons and daughters at great peril to clear booby-trapped buildings rather than just obliterating them from the sky at no risk of themselves, right? None of this makes any sense. So that the use of those war genocide is nothing short of a blood libel. And it's intended as such by people who know what they're talking about, but it seems to be confusing 77% of Democrats. And the New York Times is now participating in this confusion. And Pod Save America, one of the biggest liberal podcasts is participating in this confusion. It's just not, I mean, it's deeply immoral, but it's also just not functional politically. I mean, all of this is going to come back to make whoever we put forward under these forces in 2028 unelectable if he or she has to pay lip service to this Shibboleth that

Israel is now a genocidal apartheid state. And we all know that, you know, the war in Gaza was totally unjust. So we're getting pushback from the audience saying it doesn't matter how many people were killed. It couldn't be a genocide. It's not an accurate statement. Okay. So we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II, right? You might quibble with that. You might think that was a war crime. You might think that was a horrific evil. It wasn't a genocide. And no one calls it a genocide. We vaporized 100,000 people instantaneously, and then we killed another 100,000 slowly by radiation poisoning and fire and infection. No one calls that a genocide. No serious person calls that a genocide, and no human rights organization calls that a genocide. Amnesty International

does not call that a genocide, but do you know what they call the war in Gaza? A genocide, right? So that's the moral confusion. We know our dropping atomic bombs on Japan wasn't a genocide. because what did we do after Japan surrendered? We went in there and we occupied them and we rebuilt their society. And by 1952, when we left, they had ceased to be our enemies. They were our allies, right? At no point did anyone think that our goal was to eradicate the world of Japanese people, right? So that's what a genocide is, the eradication project.

And the fact that people are confused about what this word means is culturally appalling. But this confusion has been engineered by people who know what they're doing. This is my problem with the Hassan Pikers of the world and the people who influence him. And it's a problem with the Zoran Mamdani's of the world, which I'm sure we'll get to. These people know what genocide means, right? And they're lying about it. So before we get to Mamdani, how do you think that explains Andrew Sullivan's position? What is he getting wrong here?

Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharis.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.