Making Sense with Sam Harris
#474 — More From Sam: Hasan Piker, Islamism, Making Sense Community, and More
07 May 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Once again, we are taping this live in front of subscribers. I'll be asking Sam many of the questions that you subscribers have submitted. We'll be fielding reactions in real time so that Sam can address those.
Before we get to our first topic, I just want to quickly mention that Sam has shows in Toronto, which is sold out next week, DC and New York City. There are still tickets for DC and New York. And then the following week on May 20th and 21st, you'll be in Dallas and Austin. Also, you have some great podcast guests coming up in the next month or so. Michael Pollan will be released next week.
Susan Cain, Belinda Baton, who's just like an incredible human, or seems to me, I haven't met him. Vinod Khosla, Noah Smith, Jonathan Swan, and others. Okay, I want to get to our first topic. Actually, this is also a bit of an announcement, but since we're going to discuss it, I think it counts.
We have launched a new community, and for those who haven't heard about it yet, why don't you tell us what your intentions are with it?
Yeah, this is really, I guess, I mean, in my mind, something like a replacement for Reddit. No offense to all the Redditors out there, but I just think we need a situation where there's less noise and more signal and more civility. And so we've created something here, which is going to be web-based for the first month, but there's an app in development. And
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the Making Sense Community's launch?
Anyone who subscribed now or subscribes before June 1st will have access to the community for free. I mean, it comes with the subscription, but after June 1st, we're breaking them apart, I believe, should this thing work. We're going to go on a month-to-month basis. If the whole thing catches fire, we're going to yank it and realize that social media of any sort is impossible.
But we're going to take a stab at building a community that is not Not selecting for any of the usual variables of engagement and weirdness and division, but just actually a place where you want to have a conversation with people.
Right. I think the goal for this community, for it to work, it should feel like we've just widened our friend circles. And so some of the experiences we have in WhatsApp are, or the communication we have in Slack, you should feel that comfortable. And everyone there will be using their real names. So that's also going to change things.
That's one innovation, which hopefully will mean something. Yeah. So it's an experiment. I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be fun.
Me too. You've had some great conversations this past month. Rahm Emanuel, Francis Fukuyama, Ben Shapiro, Lloyd Blankfein, and others. I'm curious if you have any post-mortem thoughts on any of those, especially something you may have enjoyed or wish you would have done differently.
I think I got some criticism for the Shapiro conversation that it wasn't as much of a debate as some people wanted, or I didn't hold his feet to the fire on Trump's record as much as I could have. I think that's probably true. Actually, yeah, Rabbi David Wolpe wrote a very nice email on that topic, criticizing me for not having pointed out some specifics about how I'm
much damage Trump has done to our standing. At one point, Ben compared the president, really any president, to a plumber. He's not looking to him for inspiration. He just needs to unblock the toilet. And I sort of let him get away with that facile analogy. It's just not true. He's not a plumber. He's somebody whose character affects everything.
I think I said something about the effect on culture and on our politics, but he's also affected our standing in the world by alienating all of our allies and giving comfort to many of our actual enemies.
So, I mean, the thing I found with Ben, which was interesting, I guess I could have anticipated it, is that he's such a, calling him a single-issue voter is probably not fair, but he was like a two-issue voter. It was Israel and the Jews being one issue and wokeness being another, and wokeness in large part is a problem for how it affects that first issue.
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Chapter 3: What is the focus of the Making Sense Community?
Yeah. I thought that email he wrote would have been great for new community. So hopefully he'll join us over there.
Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm hoping for.
Yeah, one thing Ben Shapiro mentioned that felt right to me was the line about the sleight of hand that seems to be happening around anti-Semitism, where all the Jews and anti-Semites know exactly what's going on, but it feels as though everyone else isn't seeing that.
Yeah, I mean, again, I think that's a good way to describe what's happening. I think we'll get to people like Mamdani and Hassan Piker and... That's part of the problem there. People just don't see what's happening there. But I don't view it as so much a matter of Jews and anti-Semites. I view it as a matter of Islamism and the values of open societies, right? So that's what I'm tracking.
I mean, I'm also tracking anti-Semitism, unfortunately, now. But anti-Semitism was not something I've been focused on for the last quarter century. Islamism is. And it overlaps with the problem of anti-Semitism, but they're not. quite the same problem.
Yeah. We'll get to those two guys shortly. I thought the Lloyd Blankfein conversation was great too. He seems like a very thoughtful guy. I liked him. He seems like somebody who would make for a great politician, the right kind that you'd want. He's just a great communicator and a great thinker. Speaking of politicians, this is just my intuition, but about Rahm,
I know he's looking at perhaps running for president, but my sense is I don't think he thinks he has the best shot at winning, but I think that's probably one of the best platforms for him to influence others with his ideas. And I think if the Democrats win in 2028, he'll use that as an opportunity to play a big role in the next administration. What do you think about that?
Well, I'm happy he'll be, if he is actually in the race for the duration, I'm happy he'll be there because I think he'll push the Democrats to have something like a sister soldier moment around the lingering shades of wokeness, which are all too lingering. I mean, from what I can tell, we're really poised to pitch back into... some sort of George Floyd hysteria.
I mean, you know, we'll get to Hasan Piker. I think the fact that the New York Times is burnishing Hasan Piker as though he were the future of progressive politics in America is a very bad sign. I think it's done immense brand damage in my mind to the Times as though that
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Chapter 4: What insights did Sam gain from his conversation with Ben Shapiro?
And by that measure, Hamas is explicitly and has always been a genocidal organization. This group of paramilitary fighters who are exclusively orphans whose, what, internal procedures Hassan Piker can quibble with, but they have a Politburo? I mean, this guy is such a colossal moron.
It's a genocidal organization that aspires to genocide directly in its charter, and since October 7th has said it would repeat October 7th again and again and again ad infinitum. If it had the ability, it would kill every Jew in Israel. We know that. All the Palestinians know that. Hassan Piker knows that.
There's a lot of people on the left who apparently are confused about that or don't care, either because they're so anti-Semitic or they're so deranged by the PSYOP that's been worked on them over Gaza. But there has been no genocide in Gaza, right?
It doesn't matter how many people were killed, it's still not a genocide as witnessed by the fact that Israel could commit genocide anytime it wants and hasn't. No country attempting genocide sends millions of text messages and cell phone calls and drops leaflets trying to get people to evacuate buildings before they bomb them.
No country trying to commit genocide opens humanitarian corridors in the middle of its war. No country trying to commit genocide sends its own sons and daughters at great peril to clear booby-trapped buildings rather than just obliterating them from the sky at no risk to themselves, right? none of this makes any sense. So the use of the word genocide is nothing short of a blood libel.
And it's intended as such by people who know what they're talking about, but it seems to be confusing 77% of Democrats. And the New York Times is now participating in this confusion. And Pod Save America, one of the biggest liberal podcasts, is participating in this confusion. It's just not, I mean, it's deeply immoral, but it's also just not functional politically.
All of this is going to come back to make whoever we put forward under these forces in 2028 unelectable if he or she has to pay lip service to this shibboleth that Israel is now a genocidal apartheid state, and we all know that the war in Gaza was totally unjust.
So we're getting pushback from the audience saying it doesn't matter how many people were killed. It couldn't be a genocide is not an accurate statement.
Okay. So we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II, right? You might quibble with that. You might think that was a war crime. You might think that was a horrific evil. It wasn't a genocide, and no one calls it a genocide. We vaporized 100,000 people instantaneously, and then we killed another 100,000 slowly by radiation poisoning and fire and infection.
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