#492 — The Second Plane, 25 Years Later

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 https://www.samharris.org/subscribe. Subscribers can also join the Making Sense Community to keep the discussion going. This is the recording Sam refers to at 13:18. https://x.com/IDFSpokesperson/status/1716867039300846031?s=20 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.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  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

• 1:01Speaker 00

  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

• 1:44Speaker 00

  an instant. The second plane proved that all 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. And one plane could have been the act of a lunatic, but not two. 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 9:03 that morning, everyone on Earth was asking the same question: What set of ideas could

• 2:27Speaker 00

  possibly get sane people to do such a thing intentionally, to murder innocent strangers by the thousands and to kill themselves in the process? For 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 sight of the second plane hitting the South Tower had we heard the hijackers screaming "Allahu 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

• 3:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  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 delusion 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've fought since. Also got me speaking and writing about how

• 4:35Speaker 00

  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. Nineteen 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

• 5:16Speaker 00

  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, credentialed people at any rate, began telling themselves and 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 nineteen hijackers had attended college. All four of the pilots had earned FAA credentials. These were not,

• 6:00Speaker 00

  as a group, poor and desperate men driven to terrorism because they had nothing to live for. No, 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

• 6:44Speaker 00

  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 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

• 7:29Speaker 00

  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 as a monument to the foreign policy failures of several presidents. In fact, this withdrawal declared American impotence so effectively

• 8:11Speaker 00

  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

• 8:51Speaker 00

  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

• 9:35Speaker 00

  these Afghans who risked their lives to help us, along with their families.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  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. And 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

• 11:52Speaker 00

  was secured by the very apparatus that critics of the War on Terror have always deplored. Independent analysis by Rand and others suggests 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

• 12:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  We have the audio of a young man calling his parents to boast in a state of rapture about how many Jews he had just killed with his own hands. Okay, 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 Mohammed Atta's brain on 9/11. The continuity between September 11 and October 7 could not be more clear. Martyrdom, paradise, the murder of Jews and infidels as a sacrament, anyone who understands the problem of jihadism recognized this immediately.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  But then came the Western reaction, which is where 25 years of seeming progress collapses into nothing. Okay, 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 and 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

• 14:42Speaker 00

  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 elite institutions, in which the only questions worth asking about any conflict are, who is the oppressor

• 15:27Speaker 00

  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 Zohran Mamdani in New York and Abdul El-Sayed 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.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  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-Sayed, 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, out of political necessity.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  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 Islamofascism. 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.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  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

• 19:06Speaker 00

  political power within a social order that they clearly despise, and 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. Por favor, no sepa lo que está sucediendo aquí

• 19:49Speaker 00

  y cómo es un ataque directo a los valores liberales. El Islam es la única religión en la Tierra que busca forzar a todos, incluso a los de nosotros fuera de la fe, a vivir bajo sus restricciones. Take los casos de Rushdie o los cartoonistas de Charlie Hebdo, o la controversia de los cartoons daneses, o decenas de otros casos. La afirmación no es que los musulmanes no puedan criticar ni siquiera representar al Profeta Muhammad en la obra de arte sin el riesgo de ser matados. No, la afirmación es que nadie puede. Y la verdad es que esa es nuestra realidad vivida ahora, incluso en el Occidente. Por supuesto, no hay escasez de idiotas útiles para ayudar en esta causa.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Estoy seguro de que muchos niños en Harvard y Columbia y Stanford realmente creen que el hijab es un signo de empoderamiento femenino. Pero los islamistas saben que no lo es, y están muy felices de usar la política de identidad y la cultura de los resentimientos y las normas muy claras de la tolerancia liberal como armas contra el liberalismo en sí. Es una estrategia notablemente cínica, pero está funcionando. Por décadas ahora, los liberales occidentales han defendido la intolerancia islamista en el nombre de la tolerancia. Simplemente no hay duda de que esta follia masochista pone a las sociedades abiertas en riesgo. Y crucialmente, empoderan a la derecha de más.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Porque si los liberales no nos protegen de la teocracia islámica y ahora el islamofobia izquierda, los fascistas lo harán. Y es aquí donde el término islamofobia se implica para confundir las cuestiones al conflitar cualquier crítica de la ideología del Islam con xenofobia o racismo o un odio irracional de los musulmanes como gente. Y es por eso que los críticos del Islam, incluso los que nacen dentro de la fe y hablan árabe o urdu o farc y son no blancos, incluso ellos pueden encontrarse descritos como extremistas anti-musulmanes o absurdamente como racistas y incluso ser perfilados en la página Hate Watch del Centro de Derecho de la Pobreza Sur.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Esta incapacidad o renuncia a distinguir entre una crítica de ideas peligrosas y un odio de la gente es en sí una capitulación a las fuerzas de la teocracia. El término islamofobia se usa rutinariamente como si fuesesos analogos al antisemitismo, pero realmente no es similar al antisemitismo. Como religión, el judízmo no es proslitizado. En el caso general, la forma en que se convierte en judío es que se nace uno porque su madre nació uno. Es posible convertirse en judío, pero casi nadie hace esto porque los judíos no tienden a hacerlo muy fácil. Sin embargo, el hecho más importante es que los judíos no están buscando convertidos. Y como resultado, hay solo 15 millones de judíos en la Tierra, casi todos nacidos por padres que mismos eran judíos. Así que los judíos, junto con la gente que los odian,

• 22:46Speaker 00

  tienden a estar de acuerdo en al menos una cosa: ser judío tiene implicaciones etnicas y raciales, al menos la mayoría de la vez. El Islam, en contraste, es una fe agresivamente misionaria, y así no tiene nada en principio que ver con la etnica o la raza de la persona. Hay ahora más de dos mil millones de musulmanes, un cuarto de la población mundial y más de 50 países de mayor mayoría musulmana, y ninguno de ellos es un buen lugar para vivir si te importa la libertad humana. Esto es improbable ser un accidente. ¿Es realmente sorprendente que matar a la gente por apostas tenga un efecto caluroso en el pensamiento libre? ¿Podría la denuncia explícita de la igualdad política con las mujeres tener algo que ver con su ausencia relativa en todo el mundo musulmán?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Aunque nuestros mejores periódicos y revistas todavía usan el término, no existe tal cosa como islamofobia. Hay tal cosa como el racismo. Hay tal cosa como la xenofobia. Ambos conceptos cubren cualquier bigotisa contra inmigrantes de países de mayor mayoría musulmana. Obviamente, el racismo y la xenofobia valen la pena condenar, pero el Islam no es una raza o una etnica o una nacionalidad. Es un conjunto de ideas. Criticar ideas no es bigotisa. En realidad, es la esencia del liberalismo. Criticar el Islam como un sistema de ideas y notar los terribles efectos que algunas de estas ideas tienen en nuestro mundo

• 24:11Speaker 00

  no es más una forma de bigotisa que criticar el comunismo. Una tercera razón por la que cualquier especial enfoque en el Islam puede parecer sospechoso es que muchos de los críticos del Islam abarcan otras aparentes lealtades y elige cualquier organización que se enfoca en la propagación del Islam político o los peligros del jihadismo, y a menudo encontrarás que ha sido fundado o financiado o ambos por fundadores cristianos o judíos ortodoxos o ex-musulmanes, algunos de los cuales han convertido en cristianismo. Mientras que es natural ver a tal gente como teniendo conflictos de interés, en mi experiencia, sus contribuciones excesivas a este tema resultan en la comparação de la blindnessa de los liberales seculares.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Generalmente hablando, la gente que más fácilmente entiende la amenaza del Islam radical tiende a ser creyentes devotos en otra fe o musulmanes anteriores porque saben lo que los liberales seculares a menudo no saben: que los fanáticos religiosos realmente creen lo que dicen que creen. Cuando los jihadios gritan: "Nosotros amamos la muerte más que los infidels aman la vida", toda la evidencia sugiere que deberíamos tomarles en su palabra. Y si nos importa mantener los valores liberales de las sociedades abiertas: la tolerancia de la diversidad, el libre discurso, la igualdad política para las mujeres, el secularismo, la racionalidad científica, tenemos que admitir que no queremos más islamistas y jihadios en esas sociedades.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Y esto tiene implicaciones para cómo pensamos sobre la inmigración. Significa vetar a la gente por sus compromisos ideológicos antes de dejarlos entrar. No tengo ninguna simpatía por los preocupaciones racistas o xenofóbicas de la gente que simplemente no quiere más extranjeros de piel negra en sus países. No quieren más restaurantes indios o persianos o etíopeos. No quieren escuchar ninguna música rara en sus calles. Eso no es de donde estoy viendo en absoluto. En realidad, soy xenófilo cuando se trata de ese tipo de diversidad cultural. Sin embargo, no queremos la radical diversidad alrededor de los valores centrales que hacen posible las sociedades abiertas. No queremos abrir nuestras fronteras

• 26:23Speaker 00

  a la gente que no comparte los valores que depende de cada democracia liberal para su propia supervivencia. Esto no tiene nada que ver con la política exterior estadounidense o la conducta de Israel en cualquier guerra. El próximo ataque jihadista en París o Madrid o Mumbai no tendrá nada que ver con América o Israel, nada. Y será perfectamente continuo con los eventos de 11 de septiembre y 7 de octubre. Tenemos que romper este espejo de delusión. Los jihadios son enemigos que no hemos hecho. No tienen resentimientos racionales que necesitamos entender o acomodar.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Y nunca olvidemos que los primeros y más numerosos víctimas del extremism islámico son mismos musulmanes. Hay disidentes y reformadores y apostas y secularistas huyendo o intentando huir de estas teocracias. Y estas son precisamente las personas que deberíamos bienvener a los países occidentales. Y son los que entienden el problema del jihadismo mejor que nadie. Entonces, ¿cuánto vale un cuarto de siglo? A veces pienso en lo que diría a la persona que era en 12 de septiembre de 2001, sentado para escribir y esperando plenamente que el argumento que estaba haciendo sería la sabiduría convencional eventualmente. La extraña tristeza de este aniversario

• 27:52Speaker 00

  es que la tesis de ese libro no ha requerido ninguna revisión en absoluto. Las creencias importan. Las doctrinas específicas sobre el martirio y el paraíso y la apostas y la blasfemia producen comportamientos específicos. Como la creencia de que no hay más leche en la nevera enviará a la persona al supermercado. Lo que claramente cometí mal, al menos tacitamente, fue la línea de tiempo para la nacimiento de nuestra sanidad colectiva. Realmente pensé que el segundo plan abordó la pregunta sobre si las ideas pueden ser letales en una escala que nos preocuparía. No imaginé que un cuarto de siglo después, las personas más privilegiadas de la Tierra estarían rompiendo posters de niños secuestrados

• 28:35Speaker 00

  o que distinguir entre una democracia embattida y un culto de muerte sería un riesgo de carrera en la mayoría de nuestras instituciones. El segundo plan nos dijo todo lo que necesitamos saber sobre el poder de las malas ideas. La única pregunta 25 años después es: ¿Cuándo admitiremos esto?

• 28:57Speaker 00

  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 samharris.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 deciding that the work is worth supporting.

• 29:41Speaker 00

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• 30:26Speaker 00

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• 31:09Speaker 00

  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 is 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 transactionally. 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

• 31:50Speaker 00

  $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 $0.02. 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

• 32:32Speaker 00

  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

• 33:15Speaker 00

  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. Rowling. 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 prescribe 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

• 33:57Speaker 00

  knee to this idiocy is deeply embarrassing. But J.K. Rowling is only one of maybe a dozen writers who could have withstood the assault 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 Rowling 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, I mean, 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.

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  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. Rowling 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.

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  Whatever those actors actually believe about the complex issue of gender dysphoria, 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 Rowling on this issue but won't dare open their mouths about it? Of course, the same thing happened with Black Lives Matter. 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.

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  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 have never heard the original. You've probably had a conversation with someone whose views were informed by an episode

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  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.