#352 — Hubris & Chaos

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

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

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Rory Stewart about the fraying world order. They discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the problems with nation building, cultural ignorance, tolerance for corruption, our catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the role that Islam played in our failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, conspiracy theories, the influence of social media, cults of martyrdom, the war in Ukraine, the age of populism, Trump and the future of NATO, Brexit, the current state of politics, GiveDirectly, and other topics.

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.

Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and 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 Sam Harris.org. There you'll also find our
0:24.9	scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We
0:29.0	don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:34.0	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Rory Stewart.
0:47.0	Rory has written for the New York Times magazine, Granta, and the London Review of Books.
0:54.7	As you'll hear, he spent over a year
0:57.7	walking across Iran, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. And he also walked across Afghanistan in 2002 after the fall of the Taliban.
1:09.6	He describes that last part of the journey in his book The Places in Between and he has also
1:14.7	run however unsuccessfully for a prime minister in the UK and his latest book
1:20.3	titled How Not to be a Politician describes that.
1:24.4	Rory is a former fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard's John
1:28.6	F. Kennedy School of Government.
1:31.0	And he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the British government for services in Iraq.
1:36.0	He now lives in Scotland and he runs a quite wonderful charity, which is Give Directly which we discuss at the end of
1:46.0	this episode. Give Directly is one of the favorite charities of GiveWell which many
1:52.2	people consider the most objective evaluator of charities,
1:56.0	and it is a charity I support, and I hope you will as well.
2:00.0	Rory is a fascinating person, and it is certainly nice to see someone who knows so much about
2:06.2	the world running a charity of this kind.
2:09.6	Today we speak about the Fraying World Order. We discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the
2:17.3	problems with nation-building, the problem of our cultural ignorance when trying
2:22.0	to build nations, tolerance for corruption, our catastrophic
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Waking Up with Sam Harris, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Waking Up with Sam Harris and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.