#442 — More From Sam: Public Speaking, Nuclear War, & Christian Nationalism

In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events and answer some of the questions you all submitted on Substack. They discuss how Sam overcame his fear of public speaking, the ongoing threat of nuclear war and the new Netflix movie A House of Dynamite—which was inspired by episode #210 of Making Sense, the resurgence of Christianity, Sam's upcoming conversation with Pastor Doug Wilson, and lightning round questions. 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 http://samharris.org/subscribe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Sam Harris?

  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 will 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 at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam, where we get more from Sam. Hi, Sam.

• 0:41Sam Harris?

  Hey, good to see you.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Good to see you, too. I have to start the show off by telling the audience about the new shows we've just announced for next year. But first, I have a quick reminder that we have some tickets still available for Chicago on November 19th. So if anybody wants to come out to that, come see us. But for 2026, here are the shows we have not announced yet. I mean, we have via newsletter and maybe some socials, but have not done it on the show yet. January 21st, 2026, in Los Angeles, February 4th in Dallas, February 5th in Austin, March 11th in Portland, March 12th in Vancouver, April 23rd in Palm Beach, Florida, May 12th in Toronto, May 13th in Washington DC, and finishing off the tour with New York City on May 14th.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  So hopefully we'll see lots of people out there next year.

• 1:30Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. As you know, I'm continuing to evolve the talk. So it's kind of fun to... I've never done it like this, where I've got a tour that's stretched out that far in the future. So I just know the talk is going to keep changing from event to event, so.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Okay, on to our first topic. I did not know this, or at least I didn't remember it, but you used to have a fear of public speaking, and now you're on tour and seem very comfortable on stage. Can you talk about your journey from stage fright to where you are now?

• 1:56Sam Harris?

  Well, so yeah, that blog post that got resurfaced, I think, on Reddit that I hadn't, I'd kind of forgotten about, I think I wrote it 12 years ago, 15 years ago, something like that. And I think it's, I think the title is "The Silent Crowd," I think that's what it is on my blog. Maybe I should repost it on Substack because people found it useful, I think. Well, obviously, it's a very common fear, and I just had, you know, in this blog post, I give some people fairly concrete advice about how to deal with it. Ironically, I mean, though I think mindfulness is actually quite helpful, I don't think it's sufficient to deal with it for most people. I think it's this, the crucial bit is to actually just do the thing you're afraid of and get used to it, and cease to catastrophize about

• 2:37Sam Harris?

  it, and to have some better, or even just benign outcomes after doing it, right? You know, to give a talk and to have it not be a catastrophe, and then to let your nervous system learn across those occasions. I think that's better than simply hoping that you're going to meditate, or do talk therapy, or anything else, in the absence of just doing more of that thing you're afraid of. So something like cognitive behavioral therapy is probably still the gold standard for this, where you have strategies for reframing the experience itself, and approaching the experience itself. And yeah, no, it was something that I always was very anxious about. I mean, it wasn't a huge variable in my life, but I was avoiding

• 3:21Sam Harris?

  it. You know, as a student, I was avoiding it. I was the valedictorian of my high school, and as the valedictorian, you have to give a talk at graduation. And so I declined the honor of being a valedictorian. I just said, "No, I'm not doing that." And there were several instances like that, where I just passed up the opportunity to speak, because I was, I didn't want to have to pass through this wall of anxiety on the way to the event. And it wasn't until I was in graduate school, which was a good, long while, because I went to graduate school late. So I was in my early 30s, I just, I realized I had to get over this, and with, especially with the release of my first book, I had to get over it, right? There's just no way to be a successful author, except for the extreme case of just becoming a man of mystery somehow, that people who still want to read.

• 4:06Sam Harris?

  Somebody like J D Salinger, or Trevanian, or Thomas Pynchon. But most authors need to get out there in front of crowds and talk about the fact that they just wrote a book. And most publishers would demand that of them. So I knew that was coming with my first book. And so I just had to get behind myself and push and very quickly got over it. And I had some very high stakes appearances out of the gate. I mean, like, you know, the truth is, I still haven't done that much public speaking. You know, this is the first tour I've done in like six years, as you know. But, you know, in my first couple of events, you know, so I was very quickly, I was in situations where I was, it was going to be like a televised debate. You know, so the stakes kind of ramped up pretty quickly, but in the end it was fine.

• 4:51Sam Harris?

  And now, as you know, I simply complain about the fact that the auditorium isn't full.

• 4:58Sam Harris?

  My concern is that I just get more people in the seats. So things have flipped nicely, but it's, they're not that many tangible experiences of self overcoming. Where the thing you are most avoidant of is the thing that you actually sort of like doing now. And that to be able to flip one of those is notable and psychologically empowering. And this is one that's pretty easy to do. And anyway, in that blog post, I get into some more concrete recommendations for people.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  And is it gone now? Does it ever, you know, come back any, any sort of pre-show jitters?

• 5:34Sam Harris?

  You know, I think I have like physiological arousal that is sort of akin to anxiety before an event. But it's, I just perceive it as energy now. I mean, that is kind of a just a reframing of anxiety that is available to anyone. You can notice that anxiety is fairly indistinguishable physiologically from excitement. And apart from your thoughts about it, about what the thoughts you're using to frame it and. You can just kind of grab the reins of your mind and reframe it. You can just decide to think about the fact that you actually just care to how this event goes. You want to do a good job. You want you to, in this case, people paid for tickets. They took a night out of their lives to come and see me.

• 6:16Sam Harris?

  I care that they have a good time or find it valuable. So if I feel any energy, you know, any energy that that's like anxiety, it really feels that I actually just care, you know, and that I'm that, you know, I have a stake in this. But no, it's really, it's the experience has been flipped for me. It's really, it's pretty nice to have flipped it that way.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  I used to, before I'd go on stage, I would imagine that I had just gotten offstage and was very disappointed in my performance. And now I get a chance to go back up there. And how would I do that now?

• 6:51Sam Harris?

  That's a nice reframing. Yeah, that's a very, I mean, that could apply to many situations.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, well. So. Whatever it was, now I'm a manager, so it didn't work out, it didn't work out too well for me. All right, I saw that there's a movie on Netflix directed by Catherine Bigelow and written by Noah Oppenheimer, and I mentioned the writer here specifically because he has credited the Making Sense podcast with the title of the film. So of course I had to watch it and scared the shit out of me. How about you?

• 7:19Sam Harris?

  Oh, I thought it was very, it was like the world's most effective PSA, right? It's just a very, I mean, it is, it's a film, you know, with great actors, but it really plays like a PSA because it is just exposing how morally insane and psychologically implausible our nuclear status quo is, right? I mean, just it just, for people who haven't seen it, I'm not giving anything away. It depicts a, an America that is now on the receiving end of a, a single missile, incoming missile presumed to be a nuclear first strike, the source of which can't be identified because I think the satellite that would track that was jammed.

• 8:03Sam Harris?

  And now we've got whatever 20 minutes to decide whether to return fire. And so our doctrine. Is to launch if there's, you know, incoming missile, especially in the case where you have more than one incoming missile. And there's this prospect of having our launch capacity destroyed by a first strike. If we see a bunch of missiles coming our way, the doctrine suggests that there's some version of our retaliating before anything has landed, before we know absolutely for certain that this isn't some kind of radar error, error, et cetera. So, but when you actually look at how this unfolds psychologically and socially among all the participants, and this is not the first document to depict this, but in film form, this is the only one I know that's done it this effectively

• 8:48Sam Harris?

  and has shown all these beats. It just, it's completely insane, right? I mean, this is something that is, you can read about this at greater length in Eric Schlosser's book, Command and Control, which shows our whole continuity of government plan and how we've trained for it. And there are these scenes in that book that, and there's similar moments in this film, that show just how impractical and in some sense morally unconscionable the expected behavior is. So the drilled behavior is, you know, certain key people need to be spirited away before the missiles hit. They need to be taken to some underground lair where they can ensure the continuity of government. And, you know, in Dr. Strangelove style, repopulate the earth.

• 9:31Sam Harris?

  And so one of these drills, like an army helicopter lands on the soccer field to grab, I think it was the Secretary of State or someone like that, who's at his daughter's soccer game. And he's expected to leave at that moment without his, his family to go underground, you know, to, to continue the American project in the face of a presumed nuclear attack. And he's like, what are you kidding? I'm not getting on that helicopter, right? I'm not leaving my family here to die, right? And he knew it was a drill, but it was just like, this is the plan and it's insane, right? And what's especially insane is the, is the doctrine that has to be, that falls under the judgment of one person,

• 10:13Sam Harris?

  the President of the United States, who has to decide with the clock ticking in a, in mere minutes, in some cases like six minutes. Whether or not to annihilate tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people as perhaps his last act on Earth, right? And ushering in the extreme case ushering a nuclear winter that more or less destroys everyone, right? And so who's going to do that? Who's going to think it's sane to do that? How is our deterrence against our enemies predicated on their assumption that our president will do that? The whole thing is bonkers. And anyway, the film gives you a glimpse of how bonkers it is.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, the film is really well done, and I encourage everyone to go check it out because it really is, as you said, a great PSA. But I just wanted to stay here for a second on, you've talked about this before. I mean, you know, the mutually assured destruction mad concept does seem insane. I mean, you know, if the president, whoever he or she is at that time fires back, you know, you said they'll go down as, you know, potentially the one of the greatest killers of humankind in history.

• 11:19Sam Harris?

  Well, not even potentially, I mean, just emphatically so in addition to whoever sent the incoming missiles in the first place. Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Right. And so if they don't do anything and we lose 200 million Americans, but yet they spare the rest of the world, perhaps that's the better position.

• 11:34Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I just don't see how the the expectation of retaliation is at all credible or plausible. I think it's important, I mean, mutually assured destruction is predicated on the bluff and the acceptance of that bluff that we will respond. But I don't think it is compatible with anyone's sanity to think that we really will respond. I mean, I just, I think it's morally insane to think that, okay, we're going to all die here. Basically, we're going to be reduced to, you know, radioactive ruins and, you know, whoever's left alive is going to be like the people on the, you know, the perimeter of Hiroshima or Nagasaki moments after the blast.

• 12:20Sam Harris?

  Because now, I mean, this is not what House of Dynamite depicts, but again, that was just a single missile. But in the true nuclear first strike concern against, you know, with Russia or now China. It really is a picture of, okay, we've got all these ICBMs incoming. There's nothing we're going to be able to do to stop them till we get some magical golden dome technology, which presumably we're now working on. But even there, there are reasons to believe that that's not something we're going to be able to rely on. But in the current case, we know we can't knock these missiles down. And if hundreds are coming in and they're all aimed at major cities and population centers, we're all going to die. So what exactly is achieved by now killing hundreds of millions of people on the other side of the world?

• 13:05Sam Harris?

  Well, exactly nothing. And the thing that, the only thing that what could have been achieved was the credible threat of doing that that would have stopped the incoming missiles in the first place. But that hasn't happened, right? For whatever reason, our deterrence has failed. And now the missiles are incoming. I just, honestly, I just don't see anyone in that position deciding to kill hundreds of millions of people. It just seems, it doesn't serve any purpose at that moment. The purpose that was served was the bluff that was called. And now, now the bluff is no longer operative.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense to me. And related to that, it seems that Trump wants to resume nuclear testing because apparently Russia is doing it. And I guess, well, we have to as well. I think that's almost a direct quote.

• 13:47Sam Harris?

  Yeah, I don't know what that means. I don't know what testing actually means. If you, if we're talking about, you know, above ground tests where you see the gigantic mushroom cloud.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  I think it's below ground, I think they're doing, they're wanting to do.

• 13:59Sam Harris?

  Right. Well, I mean, maybe there's ways of testing parts of weapon. Clearly, we can't have an arsenal that is decades old and we don't know whether or not it works, right? So there's got to be some way of maintaining our credible deterrence. Again, rumors about the status of our technology are fairly alarming, right? I mean, the kinds of computers that are governing the launch of ICBMs, et cetera. I mean, this is not modern equipment, as far as I know. And so.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  All on floppy disks?

• 14:30Sam Harris?

  I mean, I guess there's a, there's an irony that it's probably less hackable as a result of being so antiquated, too. So it's, there may be a layer of safety built into its obsolescence as well. But I mean, still, it's just the idea that we can just sit on all this tech year after year and not reinvest in it doesn't seem tenable to me. But clearly, the world has to figure out how to walk back from this particular brink and denuclearize. I mean, I don't, I don't see how the end game is for us to just keep this world rigged to explode the way it is. I mean, the thing that's so scary, above and beyond the malicious use of these weapons, the thing that's truly terrifying is the, the inadvert, the possibility

• 15:11Sam Harris?

  of an inadvertent use of these weapons, or, or a launch based on misinformation, or, you know, cyber attack, or, I mean, there've been so many accidents and near accidents, and it's just, we're continuing to, to roll these invisible dice, and eventually, if we roll them enough, they're going to come up to our peril. Yeah. So I think it's worth continually to revisit this topic. I mean, that's what, what's so valuable about this film is that it's gotten people talking about nuclear weapons. We, we have a generation of people that have more or less forgotten that this was a thing. One review of this movie was completely insane, that it seemed to suggest it was kind of an anti-American, you know, libtard document that just was, made it seem

• 15:53Sam Harris?

  like the nuclear status quo was somehow a bad thing. Well, well, it is quite obviously a bad thing, right? It's just the idea that, that we're in some ideal circumstance here, where having brought the world to this capacity of, of mutual annihilation, it's bonkers. I mean, the, the only argument in its favor is that a world of true mutually assured destruction with two, only two superpowers, which we've, you know, that is a world we're now quickly losing, that deterrence, nuclear deterrence, the, the specter of a world, of a war escalating, a conventional war escalating into a nuclear one, may have mitigated the risk of conventional war between superpowers. And that may be, in fact, be true. I mean, maybe we would have fought a war with Russia in the absence of nuclear weapons already.

• 16:38Sam Harris?

  But, I mean, we're, we're just seeing the unraveling of the status quo and the, and the, the urge toward proliferation. I mean, the game theory of all of this just looks awful.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  What are your thoughts about the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, and other people right of center suddenly finding Jesus after considering themselves atheists or secular and moving into Christianity while claiming it as the bedrock of Western values?

• 17:03Sam Harris?

  Hmm, well, I've avoided commenting on this specifically in many contexts.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And I think your Substack fans know this, which is why they've asked this again and again.

• 17:12Sam Harris?

  Well, I mean, so first, I never want to say anything about Ayaan that is derogatory. I mean, I just... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org.