Making Sense with Sam Harris - #492 — The Second Plane, 25 Years Later

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

On the 25th anniversary of September 11th, Sam discusses the significance of the second plane, the writing of The End of Faith, the failure to take jihadist belief seriously, the costs of the war on terror, the abandonment of America's Afghan allies, the continuity between 9/11 and October 7th, the rise of Islamo-leftism, the misuse of "Islamophobia," and other topics. Making Sense has no advertisers and no sponsors, which is what allows Sam to talk about whatever he thinks is most important, with no one else having a say. If you already subscribe, thank you. If you'd like to subscribe, you can start at SamHarris.org. Subscribers can also join the Making Sense Community to keep the discussion going. This is the recording Sam refers to at 13:18. 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.  

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. So it's been 25 years since the morning of September 11th, 2001, which means that many of you listening to this will have no memory of that day at all. You can be out of college now and married and raising kids, and the defining event of my generation is something you only know from books or documentaries. For those of us who do remember it, the memory is of passing from one reality to another. There's a sense of before and after that I never experienced before that moment, a feeling of being helplessly pulled into the stream of history, where it seemed like literally anything could happen next. I've spoken about this on the podcast before. Five years ago on the 20th anniversary, I devoted an entire episode to it, and called it the second plane, because that was what really changed everything.

When the first plane hit the North Tower, you could still tell yourself a story that kept normal life intact. Maybe it was an accident, some catastrophic navigational failure, or the actions of a madman. But when United 175 hit the South Tower, those possibilities evaporated in an instant. The second plane proved that all the... this horror, this mass murder of thousands of innocent people, was intentional. It proved that the people who committed this atrocity also intended to die in the process. And once you have both intentionality and a willingness to die, you have sincere belief. In one plane could have been the act of a lunatic, but not too. The severely mentally ill don't coordinate to commit mass murder.

and most people who coordinate to commit mass murder aren't suicidal. So at 903 that morning, everyone on earth was asking the same question. What set of ideas could possibly get sane people to do such a thing intentionally, to murder innocent strangers by the thousands and to kill themselves in the process? Those of us who had spent time studying the world's religions didn't have to search very long for an answer. It wasn't going to be the Mormons. or the Anglicans or the Jews. From where I sat,

not much more information would have been added beyond the side of the second plane hidden the South Tower had we heard the hijackers screaming Alahu Akbar from the cockpit, as you can bet your life they were. The point I made then and the point I think bears repeating now

is that an understanding of who this enemy is and the time horizon across which they fight and the sacrifices they're willing to make should have been permanently inscribed on our minds in that moment. We fought an $8 trillion war on terror in the aftermath. We did many necessary things and made some catastrophic mistakes, but most of us have had the luxury of moving on, and forgetting about the problem of Islamic extremism for years at a stretch.

I've told this story before, but it bears repeating on this anniversary, because September 11th is quite literally the reason you're listening to me now. In the fall of 2001, I was in the middle of my PhD program in neuroscience. I'd finished most of my coursework and was just beginning my research on belief on what happens in the brain when we accept propositions as true or reject them as false. And I spent the better part of the previous decade immersed in religious and philosophical literature and in the practice of meditation. So when the towers came down, my concerns about faith,

about the way it leverages human hope and fear and delusional. and tribalism were already well formed. And on September 12th or 13th at the latest, I started writing. I didn't know I was writing a book. I thought I was just trying to get the feelings of horror and moral outrage out of my head and onto the page. But that document became the first chapter of the end of faith. And the resulting book pitched me into almost every culture war battle we fought since.

Also got me speaking and writing about how to live an ethical and spiritual life without believing any divisive bullshit. So my entire career, as an author and public speaker and as the creator of the waking up app, as the host of this podcast, is downstream of that morning. But the end of faith wasn't only a reaction to the crimes committed by jihadists on September 11th. It was a reaction to the confusion that surrounded these events.

We had just been attacked by religious faith at its most committed. 19 men murdered 3,000 people because they were certain that they were bound for paradise. And what was our response? Well, right of center, it was just more piety. We consoled ourselves with our own religious fanaticism, and we launched a crusade against evil. On the secular left, something arguably worse was happening. Within weeks, serious people, or seemingly serious people, prudentialed people at any rate, began telling themselves in the world

that the hijackers had been driven to take these desperate measures by poverty, or by American foreign policy, or by despair. And it didn't matter that the hijackers themselves and the people who trained them

told us why they did it. They left letters. They made videos. Twelve of the 19 hijackers had attended college. All four of the pilots had earned FAA credentials. These were not, as a group, poor and desperate men driven to terrorism

because they had nothing to live for. As it turns out, they really had something to live for and to die for, because they were obsessed with waging jihad against infidels and Jews and with achieving martyrdom in that cause as a way of getting to paradise directly. We know this from surveillance and from their recovered writings and correspondence and from witness testimony. The instructions the hijackers carried on 9-11 told them to anticipate paradise and to ask God to grant them martyrdom.

The atrocities committed that day were not political or economic or merely psychological. They were acts of religious worship and an entire class of Western liberals, academics, journalists, intellectuals, simply couldn't metabolize that fact at all, and many still can't. There's a version of skepticism and self-criticism here that isn't patently insane. You might think, well, whatever the hijackers believed or intended, and what's a whatever al-Qaeda itself took credit for, the greatest damage of 9-11 came from our response to it. 3,000 people died on the day itself, but we answered this evil by waging two decades of war and wasting trillions of dollars and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

We didn't kill all of these people directly. It's estimated that we killed anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq in all our years of waging war there, but our interventions unleashed civil wars in both places. leading to 10 times this number of dead at the hands of sectarian militias and other combatants, and many more people died from the indirect effects of all this social upheaval. So we invaded Iraq and broke that country, creating the conditions for even more jihadist violence in the form of the Islamic State, which we then had to deal with by killing even more people,

and after 20 years in Afghanistan, we handed that country back to the Taliban, in a withdrawal so ignominious that it stands at a monument to the foreign policy failures of several presidents. In fact, this withdrawal declared American impotence so effectively that many people think it triggered Putin's invasion of Ukraine. So the argument runs, wasn't the real lesson of 9-11 about the pathologies and misuses of American power? Well, some of that indictment is justified. My views on this front haven't changed all that much over the years, though the phrase nation building now has a ring of damnation about it that it didn't have at the time. The war in Afghanistan seemed quite necessary in 2001, and it does

even in retrospect, but it could have been very short, narrowly targeting al-Qaeda, and without our succumbing to the delusion that we could turn Afghanistan into a secular democracy. And delusional or not, the war had to end sometime. However, the manner of our exit under President Biden was a disgrace, however you look at it. And the subsequent abandonment of our Afghan allies, the thousands of translators and others who risked their lives to help us struggle to drag that country into the modern world, stranding them at the mercy of the Taliban, as the Trump administration has now done, is one of the greatest self-inflicted moral injuries I can think of. We made these people a promise, and we didn't keep it, and many of them will die because of that. It's absolutely

shameful. If any people on earth deserve expedited green cards, it's these Afghans who risked their lives to help us, along with their families. The war in Iraq always seemed like a bad idea, though I admit it's hard to imagine the counterfactual and be confident that leaving Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic sons in place for the last 20 years would have been good for the people of Iraq or for the world. Anyone who is confident about that is either Nostradamus, or a little crazy. But the claim was never that American foreign policy is perfect, or even good enough. It's neither. The claim is that we have enemies whom we have not merely made. Are there people who have rational grievances against America or against the West? Sure, but we have other

enemies, and we really must understand them. The claim, and this was obvious before 9-11, but the second plane should have proved the point for all time. The claim is that jihadism is a machine for converting sincere religious belief and spiritual aspiration into mass murder. And unfortunately, the gears of this machine exist perpetually, in plain language, in scripture that a quarter of the world's population

considers to be the literal word of the creator of the universe. Nothing we did wrong in Fallujah, or at Abu Ghraib, or in the aftermath of World War I, makes that claim false. And no doubts about the wisdom of nation-building tell us what to do about people who can sincerely claim to love death more than we love life.

Say whatever you want about the failures of American foreign policy, this criticism does not address the reality of jihadism. One thing that makes this anniversary strange is that in one sense, we have won the so-called war on terror, or at least we bought ourselves

an astonishing reprieve. Bin Laden is dead, and in the 25 years since 9-11, jihadists have managed to kill no more than a few hundred people inside the United States. A few hundred people in a quarter century, in a country where that many die

of drug overdoses every day, how much more successful could we have hoped to be? And it's worth reflecting on that, because this relative freedom from chaos and violence was secured by the very apparatus that critics of the war on terror have always deplored. Independent analysis by Rand and others

suggest that our counterterrorism efforts have stopped something like 100 attacks on American soil in that time. There have been a few small ones, mostly lone wolves, but almost everything that was being coordinated with overseas organizations has been stopped. We did trade away some significant freedom,

both at home and abroad, for this increased security, and it appears to have worked. So most of us have enjoyed the luxury of moving on to other concerns. The media moved on, the foreign policy establishment moved on, I've moved on for long stretches of time in my writing and on this podcast, to all kinds of topics, to AI and free will and wealth inequality and the absolute wreckage of our politics, research on psychedelics, meditation.

The war on terror began to feel like an artifact from history. that is if you weren't paying close attention to what was happening elsewhere on earth. There was never any reason to believe that jihadists had moved on, and October 7, 2023 put this back in perspective. What happened in southern Israel on that morning was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and it was documented by the perpetrators themselves on GoPro cameras. We have the audio of the young man calling his parents to boast in a state of rapid, about how many Jews he had just killed with his own hands.

You listen to that audio. That's not what despair sounds like. That is what religious certainty sounds like. And it was the same certainty that had been running in Muhammad Atta's brain on 9-11. The continuity between September 11th and October 7th could not be more clear. Martyrdom, paradise, the murder of Jews and infidels as a sacrament. To anyone who understands the problem of jihadism, recognize this immediately.

But then came the Western reaction, which is where 25 years of seeming progress collapses into nothing. In 2001, it took the apologists and useful idiots a few weeks to organize and spread their confusion. In 2023, it took minutes. There were people celebrating in the streets of New York on the campuses of our most prestigious universities

before Israel had even begun to defend itself. Over 30 student groups at Harvard held Israel entirely responsible for the massacre of its own civilians, for the rape, mutilation, and murder of kids at a music festival devoted to peace who were the same age and probably shared the same politics

of the kids who were celebrating their murder and spoke of this carnage in terms of liberation. It was resistance to occupation. It was decolonization. And they're still doing this. This is worse than the confusion I saw back in 2001. The old confusion was political. It referenced root causes and blowback and poverty as an engine of terror.

That was total bullshit. But it wasn't a new religion. The new confusion is a kind of religion. It's identitarian. There's now a pseudo-moral framework, which appears utterly dominant in a lead institution. institutions, in which the only questions worth asking about any conflict are who is the oppressor and who are the oppressed, and once those roles are cast, no facts on the ground can revise them.

A theocratic death cult that's explicitly committed to committing genocide and that throws gay men from rooftops gets classified as a liberation movement at Harvard and Stanford and Columbia. The political rise of Zoran Mamdani in New York, and Abdul El-Said in Michigan, whatever else it represents, tells you how little an entanglement with Islamism now costs a person on the left. If anything, it's an asset. We have a term, in fact, Islamo-leftism, or a red-green alliance, to name this phenomenon. And we now have a mayor of New York, which is home to more Jews than any place outside of Israel, who won't clearly condemn the phrase globalize the intifada, when he knows perfectly well that these words advocate

for a global campaign of terror against Jews. And we have a Democratic Senate candidate, and likely future senator, El Saeed, who in the aftermath of an attempted massacre of his own constituents in a synagogue in Michigan, said that, hurt people, hurt people, and then linked this barbaric attempt to kill 140 preschool-aged children to Israel's war in Lebanon.

And he's since apologized for this, at a political necessity. I don't mean to be cynical about apologies in general. I think it should be possible to apologize for something like this. But in the absence of any honest reckoning with the problem of jihadism and in light of his continued association

with the raving anti-Semite, Hassan Piker, I think we should understand the apology for what it is, his attempt to just barely appear like a decent enough human being to get elected. all the while saying nothing to disappoint the fanatics on the far left and in the Muslim community who've converged to support his campaign. Again, ideas have consequences. This truth shouldn't be remotely controversial.

And yet it has long been taboo to acknowledge this when discussing the religion of Islam. We don't even have a standard terminology to guide our thinking. When emphasizing the political dimensions of the problem, the term Islamism often seems best, When referring to Islamists who are eager to die as martyrs for their cause, we generally speak of jihadism. And I've used both words here. Depending on the context, we can also use terms like radical Islam, or Islamic extremism, or militant Islam, or even Islamo-fascism.

Call this dangerous, zealotry, whatever you want. What you cannot do, honestly, is claim that it has no connection to the mainstream religion of Islam. and this is why a topic that's now central to the health of open societies remains taboo to discuss. And there are several reasons for this. First, there are actual racists and xenophobes in every Western society. And wherever such people exist,

their bigotry can be used to discredit rational concerns about Islam. Second, Islamists have worked very hard to make any criticism of Islam as a system of ideas seem like bigotry. It would be natural, of course, for Muslims to feel uneasy about having their faith singled out for scrutiny, whether by governments or by the media. But much of this resistance reveals something more sinister,

coming as it so often does from genuine Islamists who know precisely how deep their theocratic aspirations run. Throughout the West, we find Islamists and their apologists working to increase their political power within a social order that they clearly despise, in which they hope to subvert by using. the values and norms of liberal tolerance to undermine liberalism itself. This can take countless forms from valorizing the hijab as a symbol of female empowerment,

where it is in fact the most conspicuous means of enforcing gender apartheid throughout the Muslim world, to seeking to criminalize blasphemy at the United Nations, to blaming Salman Rushdie for the fatwa against him, and the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for getting themselves butchered by jihadists, they should have been more sensitive to the delicate sensibilities of the Muslim community. Please don't lose sight of what is happening here

and how it is a direct assault on liberal values. Islam is the one religion on earth that seeks to force everyone, even those of us outside the faith, to live by its strictures. Take the cases of Rushdie or the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists or the Danish cartoon controversy

or dozens of other cases. The claim isn't that Muslims can't criticize or even depict the Prophet Muhammad in artwork without the risk of being killed. No, the claim is that no one can. And the truth is, that is our lived reality now, even in the West. Of course, there's no shortage of useful idiots to help in this cause.

I'm sure many kids at Harvard and Columbia and Stanford actually believe that the hijab is a sign of female empowerment. But Islamists know that it isn't, and they're very happy to use identity politics and grievance culture and the very norms of liberal tolerance as weapons against liberalism itself. It's a remarkably cynical strategy, but it's working. For decades now, Western liberals have defended Islamist intolerance in the name of tolerance. There is simply no question that this masochistic folly puts open societies at risk.

And crucially, it empowers the far right because if liberals won't protect us from Islamic theocracy and now Islamo-leftism, fascists will. And it's here that the term Islamophobia gets deployed to confuse matters

by conflating any criticism of the ideology of Islam with xenophobia or racism or an irrational hatred of Muslims as people. And this is why critics of Islam, even those who are born into the faith, and speak Arabic, or Urdu, or Farsi, and are non-white, even they can find themselves described as anti-Muslim extremists or absurdly as racists, and even get profiled on the hate watch page of the Southern Poverty Law Center. this inability or refusal to distinguish between a criticism of dangerous ideas and a hatred of people is itself a capitulation to the forces of theocracy. The term Islamophobia is routinely used as though we're analogous to anti-Semitism,

but it really isn't analogous to anti-Semitism. As a religion, Judaism is non-proselytizing. In the general case, the way you become a Jew is that you're born one, because your mother was born one. It's possible to convert to Judaism, but almost, no one does this, because Jews don't tend to make it very easy. However, the more important fact is that Jews are not looking for converts, and as a result there are only 15 million Jews on earth, nearly all of them born to parents who were themselves Jewish.

So Jews, along with the people who hate them, tend to agree about at least one thing. Being Jewish has ethnic and racial implications, at least most of the time. Islam, by contrast, is an aggressively missionary faith, and so it has nothing in principle to do with a person's ethnicity or race. They're now over 2 billion Muslims, a quarter of the world's population, and over 50 Muslim majority countries,

and none of them are good places to live if you care about human freedom. This is unlikely to be an accident. Is it actually a surprise that killing people for apostasy has a chilling effect on free thought? Might the explicit denial of political equality to women have something to do with its relative absence throughout the Muslim world? Even though our best newspapers and magazines still use the term,

there is no such thing as Islamophobia. There is such a thing as racism. There is such a thing as xenophobia. Both of these concepts cover any bigotry against immigrants from Muslim majority countries. Obviously, racism and xenophobia are worth condemning, but Islam is not a race or an ethnicity or a nationality. It's a set of ideas.

criticizing ideas is not bigotry. It's the essence of liberalism, in fact. Criticizing Islam as a system of ideas and noticing the terrible effects that some of these ideas have on our world is no more a form of bigotry than criticizing communism is. A third reason that any special focus on Islam

can seem suspect is that many of Islam's critics harbor other apparent loyalties. and pick any organization that focuses on the spread of political Islam or the dangers of jihadism, and you'll often find that it has been founded or funded, or both, by Christian fundamentalists, or Orthodox Jews, or ex-Muslims, some of whom they have since converted to Christianity. While it's natural to view such people as having conflicts of interest, in my experience, their outsized contributions to this topic result from the comparative blindness of secular liberals.

generally speaking, the people who most readily understand the threat of radical Islam tend to be devout believers in another faith or former Muslims because they know what secular liberals often do not, that religious fanatics actually believe what they say they believe. When jihadists shout, we love death more than the infidels love life, all evidence suggests that we should take them at their word. And if we care about maintaining the liberal values of open societies, tolerance of diversity, free speech, political equality for women, secularism, scientific rationality, we have to admit that we do not want more Islamists and jihadists in those societies. And this has implications for how we think about immigration. It means vetting people for their ideological commitments before letting them in.

I have zero sympathy for the racist or xenophobic concerns of people who simply don't want more dark-skinned foreigners in their countries. They don't want any more Indian or Persian or Ethiopian restaurants. They don't want to hear any weird music on their streets. That is not where I'm coming from at all. I'm actually a xenophile when it comes to that type of cultural diversity. However, we do not want radical diversity around the core values. that make open society as possible.

We don't want to open our borders to people who do not share the values that every liberal democracy depends upon for its very survival. This has nothing to do with American foreign policy or Israel's conduct in any war. The next jihadist attack in Paris or Madrid or Mumbai will have nothing to do with America or Israel. nothing, and it will be perfectly continuous with the events of September 11th and October 7th. We have to break this spell of delusion. Jihadists are enemies that we have not made.

They do not have rational grievances that we need to understand or accommodate. And we should never forget that the first and most numerous victims of Islamic extremism are Muslims themselves. There are dissidents and reformers and apostates and secularists fleeing or attempting to flee these theocracies. And these are precisely the people we should welcome into Western countries. And they're the ones who understand the problem of jihadism better than anyone. So what does a quarter century amount to? I sometimes think about what I would tell the person I was on September 12, 2001, sitting down to right, and fully expecting that the argument I was making would be conventional wisdom eventually.

The strange sadness of this anniversary is that the thesis of that book has required no revision at all. Beliefs matter. Specific doctrines about martyrdom and paradise and apostasy and blasphemy produce specific behaviors, as reliably as the belief that there's no more milk in the fridge will send a person to the supermarket. What I clearly got wrong, at least tacitly, was the timeline for the birth of our collective sanity. I really thought the second plane settled the question about whether ideas can be lethal on a scale that should concern us. I didn't imagine that a quarter century later, the most privileged people on earth would be tearing down posters of kidnapped children, or the distinguishing between an embattled democracy and a death cult would be a career risk. in most of our elite institutions.

Okay, the second plane told us everything we need to know about the power of bad ideas. The only question 25 years later is when will we admit this? Okay, before I go, I'd like to say a word about the podcast. First, we launched community a few months back, and that's been going great. It's exactly the sort of conversation I was hoping to see. There have been some great threads there on difficult topics.

You can just go to samharis.org and click the community tab at the top of the page, and then you just have to log in. Also, there's a Making Sense community app in the App Store. As you know, this podcast doesn't make money the way most of what you listen to does. There are no advertisers or sponsors. There's no network or parent company. Most podcasts run on some mix of those. Making Sense runs on one thing. You decide in that the work is worth supporting. As I've said before, I could read ads, here, because there are products and companies I genuinely love, but I don't want to think about anyone's brand concerns when deciding who to talk to or what to talk about. And the truth is,

even those of you who wish the podcast were free, don't want me thinking about those things either. And as much as you might be briefly amused by hearing me read an ad for mattresses or a VPN, I think you know that wouldn't do much for my credibility. There was a recent New York Times article about certain podcasters now being paid by political campaigns to promote various candidates and not disclosing this. There was some amazing footage of a podcaster dismissing a candidate at one point, and then later on, once he was being paid tens of thousands of dollars by the campaign, pretending to think that the candidate was fantastic.

I actually don't know how such a person gets out of bed in the morning. The truth is, I don't know how his audience gets out of bed in the morning. So I've been asking you to pay for this podcast for 10 years now, and many of you have said yes, and that's why I get to do this week after week. And most of you pay because you want to hear full episodes. Some of you also want the occasional bonus content or early access to tickets when I tour. And those reasons are good enough. But there's one reason that matters to me more than any, and it's why the podcast has truly succeeded,

even in a world where there are now millions of podcasts. Some of you just want this work to exist. The information landscape has gotten much more crowded since you first discovered this show. Again, there are literally millions of podcasts now, and many more things have a claim on your attention. As you know, most of that content is nominally free because its creators are farming your attention and user data and selling both to advertisers. As it's often said now, if you're not paying for a product, you are the product. And in this context, I'd like to suggest that you not think about your support for the show transactional. Of course, you could run the numbers.

I've actually seen some people do this over the years. You could say, Netflix spends $20 billion a year on content. So if I'm paying $20 a month for a subscription, I'm getting access to something like $100 million worth of content for every dollar I spend. So by that measure, a podcast episode should never cost more than two cents. Or you could say I only listened to one episode last month. So that episode cost as much as a book,

which takes a lot more work to produce. I hope it's clear that that's not how the world actually works. The question will never be whether you can put one rational price on all forms of digital media and then have it metered to you by the minute. The question is whether you want work like this done in the first place. As you know, subscribing doesn't buy you a vote on what I say, but it's what guarantees that no one but me has one. And that is the only reason I've been able to tell you exactly what I think,

even on the most controversial topics for over a decade now. I think most of you would be amazed to know the kinds of conversations I have in private with people who you would think could say exactly what they believe publicly, but can't, or feel they can't. Some of these people are rich and famous. They're precisely the people you would think would have the power to say whatever they want. But given how the world actually works, they don't see it that way. I can assure you that you can be very wealthy and very famous and just fucking terrified of being on the wrong side of a moral panic.

Of course, there are exceptions, but they are comparatively rare. Let me take the author J.K. Rowland. Now, I might not want to sign off on everything she's said in her various skirmishes online with trans activists. But generally speaking, I think we view the topic from more or less the same angle. Having a mob suddenly proscribe the use of the term woman, demanding instead that we speak of birthing person or menstruators or people with ovaries or some other absurd construction, was always insufferable.

And the fact that many of our most elite institutions, even scientific ones, bent the knee to this idiocy, is deeply embarrassing. But J.K. Rowling is only one of maybe a dozen writers who could have withstood the assumption. on her career and reputation that came in response to her pushing back against this moral panic. Again, I've been off social media for years.

So if Rowland has been radicalized and says something that I wouldn't want to defend, I'm not aware of it. Like many people, I think she's probably been driven half crazy by her engagement with social media, and she would do well to get off it. But my point is that as successful a writer as she is, in making a billion dollars from her books alone, she is just barely someone who survived the pushback against her, given the incentives in mainstream media.

I don't mean physical survival, though she has received endless death threats and doxing. You can be sure she spends a fortune on security, and her security concerns are perfectly rational. But leave all that aside. I'm talking about just being able to work and to do the thing you love to do. Rolling is someone for whom, quite literally,

theme parks have been opened and billion-dollar film franchises spawned on the basis of her books. And yet she had the stars of those very films, everyone from Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe on down, who owe their entire careers

to her intellectual property, denounce her essentially as a witch. Whatever those actors actually believe about the complex issue of gendered sporia, you can be sure that they were afraid not to denounce her, for fear of never working in Hollywood again. Most writers would have been destroyed by that sort of backlash.

Their books would have been unpublished. I mean, do you have any idea how many writers agree with rolling on this issue but won't dare open their mouths about it? Of course, the same thing happened with Black Lives Matter, the same thing's happening now with Israel and Gaza, and there will be the next thing, and the thing after that. but because many of you subscribe to the podcast, I don't have those concerns. It's not that I don't pay any price for expressing my views.

I mean, not many people have gotten smeared from both the left and the right as much as I have. But the fact that I continue to thrive, while remaining free to focus on whatever I think is most important, that is entirely due to those of you who pay for the podcast. Of course, with some regularity, there's a conversation that I think should reach people who will never, pay for it, and we put that episode out for free. But again, that's only possible because of those of you who subscribe. And this work travels in other ways, too, whether or not anyone listens to a full episode. Ideas get clipped and argued about and repeated by people who've never heard the original. You've probably had a conversation with someone whose views were informed by an episode

that they only heard a clip of. But the work had to get done in the first place for that clip to get out there. So I just want to thank all of you who maintain a subscription to the podcast, especially with so much else competing for your attention, because you make everything I do possible. And of course, if any of you want to begin supporting the podcast, you can start a subscription at samharris.org. As always, thanks for listening.