#438 — "More From Sam": Israel-Hamas Deal, Qatari Air Force Base, Trump, Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, & Rapid Fire Questions

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 the Israel-Hamas peace deal, the plans to build a Qatari air force facility in Idaho, why Trump lies about golf, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the reactions from the Left and the Right, what Ezra Klein got wrong in his piece about Kirk, Sam's relationship with Christopher Hitchens, Bari Weiss and The Free Press, and rapid fire questions.

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 to hear more from Sam. Hello, Sam. How are you?

• 0:44Sam Harris?

  Hey, how's it going?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Going well, going well.

• 0:46Sam Harris?

  Good to see you.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Are you ready for the shows coming up next week in New York and Boston?

• 0:49Sam Harris?

  I am, yeah. I'm looking forward to that. As you know, I've been changing the talk incrementally as things happen in the world. So it's kind of a living document at this point, which is fun. I haven't had a, I can't even remember having a project like that where it just keeps changing and I keep, it keeps maintaining its relevance to me because there's a date on the calendar where I have to deliver it by. So yeah, it's kind of cool.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  It is enjoyable because I get to hear, you know, obviously read the different drafts and I feel like I'm gonna get to watch it. The first few shows will be probably entirely differently or a lot different from the final shows.

• 1:23Sam Harris?

  Yeah.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  And speaking of that, I kind of just let people know that we're going to be announcing some, some new shows coming up next year. So if anybody wants to get notified about those, please head over to samharris.org and join the mailing list because we're going to make that announcement, I think, next week or the week after for 2026. And anybody who wants to come to Boston, I think that show sold out in a day or two. New York has a few tickets, maybe a dozen or so for next week, October 15th, I believe. So come out and join us. All right, on to the first topic. Trump got a deal done and that's something I don't believe you believe would have happened under a President Harris.

• 1:56Sam Harris?

  It pains me somewhat to admit this, but yes, he's, he's certainly been good for the Middle East and for Israel in a way that I don't think there was any reason to expect Harris to be good. And Biden certainly wasn't good apart from the first. Few weeks after October 7th, or maybe a couple of months after October 7th, he proved quite an unreliable ally there. So yes, I think Trump, for reasons that are still somewhat inscrutable, I think he's also an unreliable ally for Israel. All the Israelis and the Jews of the world who think that he's just an unalloyed good for their cause, just a clear-eyed defender of Western civilization generally and of the lone democracy, embattled democracy in the Middle East, in the case of Israel.

• 2:41Sam Harris?

  He certainly is not that. I don't think he understands the issues. I think he's surrounded by various maniacs who are wanting to break trust with Israel. And there are anti-Semites on the right wing who have J.D. Vance's phone number on speed dial, I can imagine. So it's a very muddled picture, just how good he is for the Jews. But it's true that the Democrats can be counted upon to be reliably bad for the issues around domestic antisemitism and defense of Israel. It also, you know, so what's inscrutable about Trump's situation is that obviously he's got all these entanglements in the Gulf. He's just grifting like a madman. He and his family and their allies earning billions of dollars, cutting deals with the Gulf, cryptocurrency and otherwise.

• 3:24Sam Harris?

  So there's this weird algebra around his short-term and narrowly constructed personal interests and whatever his allegiance is to Israel, his hatred of immigration from so-called shithole countries, his animus toward our European allies and their multiculturalism, which I actually understand, at least that second piece. So all of that summates into him just being able to ride into Qatar and start making demands and offering promises, promises that Israel will never bomb them in Doha again. And so, yeah, it seems like he's, at a minimum, it seems like the hostages are going to come home. We're recording this on a Friday.

• 4:08Sam Harris?

  I think they're expected to be released on this coming Sunday. It remains to be seen whether that's going to happen, but I think everyone believes it's going to happen at this point. I think I'm more skeptical than many are about the durable peace that this is promising. I'm not expecting that, but and I will be genuinely surprised if this really does offer in a new dawn and a two-state solution and the Lions lay down with the Lambs. I think that's all to be bracketed with serious doubts, no matter what happens in the next 48 hours. But this is definitely better than than we could have expected under Harris. I freely admit that.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Is that why you think that the entire world is not cheering about this? All those that thought this was a genocide? Well, why aren't you coming forth to say, all right, well, that's whatever that was, it's now over? Do you think it's because it's not durable peace and they they're not making?

• 4:58Sam Harris?

  No, no, no, no. I mean, the Mark Ruffelos of the world who are not cheering this, it has nothing to do with their circumspection around thinking that the ceasefire can become a durable peace. No, they're just, they just don't really care about what they say they care about in the end. I mean, there's a very cynical and delusional mixture of kind of moral emotions and moral illusions here that is causing everyone to celebrate the wrong thing, not celebrate when they get precisely what they said they wanted, et cetera. I mean, if you really thought there was a genocide in Gaza and this is ending it decisively, where are the celebrations? Where is Greta Thunberg and Mark Ruffalo and the rest of the celebrity brigade who doubled

• 5:43Sam Harris?

  down on so-called Palestinian rights, which was really just, you know, useful idiots supporting Hamas in the end? Where are their appeals to Hamas to accept this deal immediately? Every hour they delay is costing more lives. Where's the pressure applied to Hamas by the people who pretend to support the Palestinian cause? I mean, maybe it exists somewhere, but I haven't seen, I certainly haven't seen it. And they should be celebrating more than anyone. They should be celebrating as much as the families of the hostages. I mean, they should be an unalloyed good from their point of view, what's happening here.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Right. Given that, they should have been pushing Hamas a long time ago to return the hostages.

• 6:20Sam Harris?

  Yeah, of course.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but so maybe they, from their perspective, maybe they're thinking that this is just not a good deal and they're going to, the Palestinians are going to find themselves yet again under the Israeli thumb. Of power and to have lost their rights and whatever position they take. And that this deal, they just don't have a lot of faith in Netanyahu and Trump that they're going to do what they say and they they're going to lose all their leverage, giving the hostages back and we'll be right back where we were before, you know, again, in 10, 15 years. So again, I'm just trying to paint their position as best I can. I obviously understand the cynical take that they just hate the Jews, but there may be other reasons. Maybe they want to wait a few weeks. Maybe they want to see how things play out before they begin to celebrate.

• 6:59Sam Harris?

  Well, above all, they they claim to want a ceasefire, right? Just stop the killing. That's just the master value, right? That they're expressing. And this does that and then stands a chance of making that ceasefire a durable peace if the the other parties in the region, the other Gulf states, take an interest in in helping restore order and rebuild Gaza, right? This whole plan to rebuild Gaza. I mean, of course, you know, Trump, to some degree, you know, what's worked for him is this kind of madman theory of diplomacy, right? I mean, he's he came in there and basically said, we're going to ethnically cleanse the region and erect gold statues to me and open casinos, right? That was basically the vision.

• 7:43Sam Harris?

  I mean, he literally shared a an AI animation of that, you know, just pimping the ride of the Middle East, you know, Trump style. And, you know, he got behind that. And it's just, this is, it's a was a morally obscene declaration of an intention, which just rattled the brains of every party to this conversation and clearly affected the thinking in Qatar. The other crucial piece, though, is not just Trump's weird contribution to it. It's the fact that all the while, Israel was decisively winning the war against her myriad enemies, right? So it was the destruction, the apparent, you know, virtually complete destruction of Hezbollah, not totally complete, but decisive.

• 8:25Sam Harris?

  The the bombing of Iran, you know, along with what the US did there, the complete defeat of Hamas. I mean, Hamas, by all accounts, scarcely exists anymore. I mean, there's a few people who are going to stand up and declare victory, no doubt, after Sunday. But if Israel hadn't accomplished all of that on the battlefield, that, you know, there would be no deal here. It's not just a matter of diplomacy.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  So you said you're not optimistic that there's going to be a durable peace. Why is that? And is there anything that could happen that you would think, you know, would make for a lasting peace in the Middle East? Why don't you see? Qatari partnership there and with along with Saudis and see Turkey coming in. Why don't you see a future for the Middle East where there is some form of lasting peace?

• 9:13Sam Harris?

  Well, so the Qataris are a unique case because they're playing a double game of funding terrorism and funding Islamist and jihadist memes worldwide. I mean, they're destabilizing much of the Western world with their funding of Islamist lies and self-theocracy, right? I mean, they're basically an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Muslim Brotherhood has command of their theology. So they're state funders of terrorism, and any negotiation with them or alliance with them on any topic should be clear-eyed about that. Now, let's say they had a sea change from the top in their attitude toward Islamism and jihadism of the sort that someone like MBS seems to have had, right?

• 9:55Sam Harris?

  So MBS is seemingly reining in the fundamentalist clerics in his own society and giving a lot of scope to the more secular, modern aspirations of Saudis. And other Gulf states have that, have a kind of secular leaning there, too. And that's all to the good. I mean, you sort of have to get the help from wherever it's coming. I mean, MBS is a very mixed figure ethically, right? He kills journalists and he imprisons people for having advocated the very things that he's now implementing in his society. If I'm not mistaken, some of the women who protested for the rights of women to drive are still in prison, even though he's rolled out the rights of women to drive in Saudi. So it's not a, this is not a bastion of freedom.

• 10:38Sam Harris?

  This is an intolerant despotism still. But if he's reining in religious fanaticism in the Gulf, and if the other states begin to do that, that's all good and we have to work with that. But the reality is, there's going to be, there is and there will continue to be a tension between what these rulers want and the so-called Arab street, right? And from the point of view of the real religious fanatics, these look like apostate regimes now, right? And they always have, and that was always Al Qaeda's view of the Saudis. And, you know, that's the view of the Muslim Brotherhood. And so it's, there's this tension there that still exists, and there's the source code of Islam that's there to be rediscovered at every point along the way.

• 11:23Sam Harris?

  And even if everyone got on the same page and accepted Israel in the Middle East, It doesn't change the fact that you have 50,000 people on the terror watch list in the UK alone. Right? I mean, you've got the problem of jihadism and Islamism in Western Europe that is continuing to seethe. These ideas aren't going away. These ideas have to be combated. And again, it is a good thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing that MBS is reining in his own jihadists and Islamism. That is good, but there's a war of ideas that has to be waged and won within Islam. And there's a civil war. There's no way it's going to be just a matter of ideas. Muslims have to be willing to to fight jihadists.

• 12:07Sam Harris?

  Right? You know, across the board and purge that whole orientation from their faith. That's going to be very hard to do. And I think the willingness to do that in 100 countries is going to be very hard to kindle. So it's, I mean, it's a huge project. I don't expect, I don't expect our children to live to see the end of this project. That's my sense of what what has to happen.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  I'm a little bit more optimistic, but let's move on to, I really do think that we're going to see some sea change there. And I really do, I hope in our lifetime that we do find that, as I've said, that Beirut and other wonderful places return to be glorious. And with prosperity comes

• 12:49Sam Harris?

  Again, well, the change will have to be, there's, there's a Potemkin view of secularism and tolerance that you see in some of these Gulf states. But these are totally authoritarian regimes, right? I mean, so they're, they're gonna, so the question is, how are they going to lock all this down? How are they going to change minds? How are they going to establish peace in the region? How is Gaza going to be a vacation place when you still have jihadists who want to spread the faith to the ends of the earth and establish a caliphate, right? There's going to be a lot of violence keeping a lid on all of that. I just, I don't see how that happens otherwise. It's not going to be a democracy. The idea that you could spread democracy to these societies and

• 13:28Sam Harris?

  have everyone just normalize and secularize. And I do not see that happening in the lifetime of anyone listening to

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Maybe just a handful of benevolent dictatorships. Maybe that'll work. Who knows?

• 13:41Sam Harris?

  Or, yeah, or just dictatorships.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, they get what they need. Moving over, did you see the announcement today about the Qatari Air Force facility base in Idaho?

• 13:52Sam Harris?

  No, I just heard a rumor of it, which my jaw is still somewhere on the floor.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Sounds a little bit like a Borat skit, but apparently these are similar arrangements we've had with Singapore, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, as well as NATO allies, other ones, including Italy, Netherlands, as well as Turkey. So I wonder just the timing of the announcement of this. Again, I don't, I just saw this. I don't know that much about any of this. I'm wondering if maybe it's a distraction or it's part of the deal.

• 14:20Sam Harris?

  Well, it came over with the plane, the gift of the $400 million plane. It should be of concern to people that Qatar is literally the largest state funder of US academic institutions, right? A foreign funder of US academic institutions to the tune of billions of dollars. What's that for? Well, it's just a sane watching of their theocratic agenda. Al Jazeera is not a journalistic organization. It's a psyop that's been performed on the West for however many years. You know, these are not good faith actors at all. So the question is, you know, what happens over the course of, you know, some years of engagement with them?

• 14:59Sam Harris?

  That remains to be seen. But I think the only thing that really mattered so far is Israel winning the real wars on the ground and showing that if Qatar doesn't get on the right side here, you know, Doha itself is part of the field of battle, right? I mean, that I think got their attention.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  What do you say to those who might say Qatar is giving billions of dollars to Harvard and Northwestern, all these institutions? So why can't Trump get a plane? Why aren't they both wrong?

• 15:32Sam Harris?

  They are both wrong. I mean, they're both wrong. Harvard shouldn't be taking funding from a Mideast theocracy that is now creating a Mideast studies program.

• 15:43Sam Harris?

  That is indoctrinating a generation of credulous students into a distorted view of the history of the region, or the ease with which open societies can integrate greater numbers of Muslim citizens. Again, this is, it's a purely propagandistic and sinister operation. But we have, so in America, the Council on Islamic, American Islamic Relations, CARE, is imagined to be the Muslim equivalent of the ACLU or the NAACP. It's nothing of the sort, right? It is an Islamist front group. It is a stealth theocracy group of bullies.

• 16:23Sam Harris?

  And yet, it is the mouthpiece for the Muslim community that, that, that people listen to. So when something happens in the news of relevance to the Muslim community in America, it's someone from CARE who gets on CNN to tell the rest of the country what, you know, what Muslims think, right? Now, this is a totally sinister arrangement. I mean, this, these are not, again, they're not good faith actors. There's, there are direct ties between CARE and the Muslim Brotherhood. And that's the theology in the background that is guiding everyone's actions here. If you think of it in terms of communism, I mean, think of a set of ideas, you know, the fundamentalist Islam is a set of ideas.

• 17:04Sam Harris?

  And it has its adherents in every Western country, and they have an agenda. And if you switched it out from being a religion to a political religion like communism, everyone would suddenly understand, okay, there's something to pay attention to here. This could be an instance in which the value, the master value of tolerance in an open society is being used to subvert the society itself and to evaporate the very reality of tolerance, right? This is the paradox of tolerance that Karl Popper described. You can't be endlessly tolerant of intolerance and survive as an open society. And what we have here in, in, in an organization like CARE, and in the, the seemingly generous,

• 17:48Sam Harris?

  you know, benefaction of a state like Qatar, again, a state that openly funds terrorism, we have people who are deeply illiberal and committed to an illiberal worldview, using our own liberal values.

• 18:03Sam Harris?

  As a shield to protect their project inside our societies. And so they'll be the first to cry intolerance. Everything I'm saying now is going to be, if any of them listen, this will be derided as Islamophobia and bigotry and racism, as though that made any sense. And they will be championing our virtues of tolerance and nondiscrimination. Whereas the actual worldview that they want to implement in their own lives and in the lives of others is deeply intolerant. Open societies have to find some way of playing this game successfully. So as to defend their own values without tipping over into proper closure

• 18:47Sam Harris?

  or xenophobia or bigotry or jingoism. And all of that, all of those looming problems on the right are worth worrying about. And this is back to David Frum's great line that if liberals can't figure out how to police borders, fascists will. That's the problem. We're between useful idiots on the left, just letting the barbarians in the gate, and fascists on the right showing you how to close a gate properly. We don't want to be at either extreme.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but can you see the argument from the right that says, okay, now when Trump does it, it's a problem and everybody's screaming. But for years, if not decades, the Qatari money has come in. And you could argue it's been damaging to the society in a major way.

• 19:32Sam Harris?

  I think we should scream about both. But no, the one difference, and it's an important difference, is Trump is President of the United States. He's monetizing the role of president in the most corrupt way. I mean, it's so corrupt that it's just clear that Republicans no longer have an idea of corruption in their minds. I mean, it's like they've just torched the very distinction between being corrupt and non-corrupt. Right? No one is even paying attention to any of this, apparently. But no, he's just, it's a kind of kleptocracy. He's using the levers of our state power to enrich himself and his friends very, very directly.

• 20:11Sam Harris?

  He's taking $2 billion directly into the family business from the UAE and then greenlighting the sale of our most advanced AI chips to the UAE, right? And all the while, knowing that the UAE does joint military exercises with China and that it's a security concern that our best chips get in China's hands, right? Like, it's just pure graft and personal corruption, and we have never seen anything like it.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Speaking of Trump, you sent me a clip yesterday, I think it was from 2018, about him cheating at golf, where I think he had won the club championship that he actually didn't play.

• 20:51Sam Harris?

  Right.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  And while that seems like, you know, Kim Jong-un level of insanity, why does Trump cheating at golf bother you? Why is that a big deal?

• 21:00Sam Harris?

  Well, it's a very interesting window onto him as a person. And people who don't follow golf have no feel for this, right? I mean, golf is, as far as I know, a total outlier with respect to the norms of the sport. I mean, so you take, like, one extreme is you've got soccer where people pretend to have been fouled and they fall down, the soccer players fall down on the ground and flop around in agony. And then the moment the foul isn't called, you know, in their favor, they just jump back up and they're fine. Right? And it's just this bizarre, really shameful performance. But the norms of soccer have just, you know, just relaxed and relaxed and relaxed to the point where everyone accepts it's just part of the game. Or, you know, in hockey, you know, you can just begin punching somebody in the face,

• 21:43Sam Harris?

  you know, seemingly violating the rules of the sport, but everyone accepts it's like, this is sort of the sport now, you, somebody gets to punch somebody in the face. Golf is in a different universe. When Tiger Woods won the Masters, which is, you know, the most prestigious event in the US at least, if he had misreported his score, or if he had failed to even sign his scorecard, he would have been immediately disqualified. He would have lost the Masters, right? The second place finisher would have won the Masters. I mean, that's analogous, it's impossible to even understand that in relation to other sports. I mean, it's like Tom Brady, you know, forgetting to sign a piece of paper after winning the Super Bowl. And they lose the Super Bowl, right? It's just, how would anyone even think that should be within the realm of possibility?

• 22:28Sam Harris?

  That is golf. Golf is just a religion of personal integrity, really. I mean, it's just, so two things. One is that it is central to Trump's life. He spends 30% of his time on the golf course. Right? As president, he has done that. And he spends more time just hanging out at his own golf courses to, at great expense to the US taxpayer. I mean, they, they charge millions of dollars. They go directly into Trump properties for all these trips to his golf courses. But golf is the center of his life and he cheats at it in ways that should be impossible. I mean, he cheats at it in, in just the, over the course of play. I mean, you can see this, the footage of his caddy just dropping a ball, you know, where he, or he lost the ball in the water

• 23:09Sam Harris?

  or it was ball went to the sand trap and the caddy will just drop a ball, you know, to give him a more favorable lie. But then there are all these other stories of him pretending to have won tournaments that didn't even exist. Like he'll buy a golf course and play around by himself and call that the first club championship that he is now the winner of, and put a fucking plaque on the wall, right? Or he'll, in the, in the case, in the story you, you heard, there was a tournament he didn't even enter, right? Where a guy won it and then he sees the guy on the golf course that, you know, after the tournament and says, you know, you didn't really win that tournament because I, I didn't play in it. So let's do a little playoff right now. And the guy's playing with his son and he doesn't want to, but then Trump says, no, no, we're, we're doing a playoff right now.

• 23:49Sam Harris?

  And he does a playoff with him where, you know, Trump hits a ball into the lake, but, you know, pretends it didn't hit it into the lake, pretends the sun hit it into the lake, steals the sun's ball on the green. I mean, this, this has all been reported by a guy who wrote a book. It's worse. It's not the, it's not that he steals it. His handlers do it. It's a whole, it's the machinery. Like they already know what to do. That's the problem. But the truly egregious thing is he's the sort of person for whom golf really is at the center of his life. I mean, he is, he cares about it. He loves it. I mean, it's clearly what he wants his life to be, 30% golf at least. And yet he is violating its norms in a way that not one in a million golfers, if given the chance, would ever do.

• 24:31Sam Harris?

  I mean, it's the most shameful desecration of the actual norms of the sport. That you can imagine pretending to have won still literally stealing the title of a club championship from its rightful winner by lying, right? And putting your name on the wall attesting to your victory. I mean, to call it sociopathic doesn't even quite get at it. I mean, there's really it's so far out on the tail end of aberration of human behavior. Again, given that the relevant, you know, cultural norms surrounding the whole project, it's just, it's almost uninterpretable. I mean, you literally, you have never met anyone who has ever met anyone who would behave this way. And this guy is president of the United States.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Right. Plus with golf, as anyone who plays, you know, you're playing the course. So it's really about your own personal best. So when you, when you lie, you're not just, you're not cheating somebody else. You're actually completely missing the entire point of the game.

• 25:25Sam Harris?

  Oh, yeah. You know, it's like cheating at prayer or something. I mean, it's just, it's, it's insane.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:30Sam Harris?

  It's not insane in the sense of being psychotic, delusional, but it is morally insane.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:36Sam Harris?

  I mean, this is my point about, it's always been my point about Trump. There are people you can point to who are much worse people. They've created many more overt harms and intended to create those harms. I mean, just like, you know, prototypically evil people, they're easier to understand in some sense than Trump. I mean, his psychology is just frankly bizarre.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. We gotta, we gotta move on. I wanna, I wanna talk about, um, we were together last month in Seattle when we heard about Charlie Kirk's assassination. I was pretty shaken up by it. I wanted to see if you'll share any of your thoughts on that and perhaps your thoughts about how others responded as well.

• 26:13Sam Harris?

  Well, there's so much is wrong with them. At first it's just a terrible tragedy for the family and friends of Charlie Kirk. And I mean, it's just awful in every respect there. And, and my immediate reaction to it was just to be purely horrified by it. I mean, just on, on that personal level. Additionally, it's horrible for other reasons that affect a much wider set of people and concerns. I mean, so the thing that's horrible about a political assassination is that it's happening, especially in this case, it's happening in an environment where we are combustible as a society. The level of trust in institutions is so low, it's

• 26:53Sam Harris?

  so much lower than it has ever, has been, really, at least in modern memory, that a political assassination is just much more dangerous now. I mean, there's just so much dry tinder. It's like when JFK was assassinated, or MLK, or Robert Kennedy. Those assassinations happened in a context where there was massive trust. 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.