#410 — The Whole Catastrophe

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Murray about Douglas’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. They discuss Douglas’s recent experience on Joe Rogan’s podcast, the need for experts, conspiracy theories, the origins and aims of Hamas, the moral asymmetries between Israel and Hamas, what makes jihadism a uniquely dangerous ideology, Hamas’s attack on the Nova music festival, Douglas’s associations with Trump and Trumpism, Elon Musk and X, antisemitism on the Right, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe
0:21.9	at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts
0:27.2	to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made
0:31.4	possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here,
0:36.1	please consider becoming one. I am here with Douglas Murray.
0:45.3	Douglas, it's great to see you again.
0:48.3	Very good to see you, Sam.
0:50.3	So this has been interesting.
0:52.3	I feel like I'm riding shotgun on at, at least one car crash of late.
0:57.5	We're going to talk about your experience on the Joe Rogan experience and it was an experience.
1:03.1	But we're going to talk about your book as a...
1:05.1	I'm not sure I like the opening about a car crash, but yeah.
1:07.9	Well, I'll... Maybe grand theft or auto. It'll be justified. Get out of a crash and, but yeah. Maybe grand theft, auto.
1:12.7	It'll be justified.
1:13.5	Get out of a crash and just get into another car.
1:15.7	Yeah, yeah, well, that's, I think that is our method.
1:19.4	But you have a book on democracies and death cults, Israel and the future of civilization,
1:24.5	which is, I guess, as part of a now a quartet of books, the strange death of
1:30.1	Europe, the death of the West, or, uh, the War of the West, the War of the West, and Manus of Crops,
1:35.2	yeah.
1:35.6	I mean, all of which hit the same grotesque object of, um, Western capitulation to unreason
1:43.9	and, uh, a kind of masochistic flight from sanity in the face of
	...

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