Sam Harris on Iran, Tucker Carlson’s Conspiracies, Antisemitism & the Future of Civilization

Sam Harris is one of the great thinkers of our time. The philosopher, neuroscientist, and host of the Making Sense podcast joined me to discuss some of the defining issues of the moment. We began with the ongoing war in Iran. While Harris is in favor of regime change, given the Islamic regime’s hostility to its own people as well as the United States, he is pessimistic about the possibility of success and raises his concerns about the competence of those carrying it out.

From there we dug into a wide range of issues: anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the rise in conspiracy theories, to the Epstein files and how they should have been handled, the mental health effects of social media, declining global birth rates, and what he thinks about Gavin Newsom as a potential presidential candidate.

At one point, I put to Harris my sense that, across an array of topics, he devotes an unusually large percentage of his intellectual energy to the 1 percent chance that something will go catastrophically wrong. But Harris disputed my assessment, explaining that the threats he’s most worried about—from jihadist attacks, to pandemics worse than Covid, to AI ruining civilization, to President Donald Trump doing lasting damage to the integrity of our society—are not remote tail risks, but real and plausible dangers that demand serious attention.