#440 — A World in Crisis

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

🗓️ 24 October 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Robert D. Kaplan about his new book, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. They discuss climate change, demographics, the primacy of order over freedom, why Russia is a country in decline, political extremism and the migration crisis in Europe and the UK, Israel's military successes, what the world could look like in the aftermath of the war in the Middle East, antisemitism on the left, how a war in the Pacific could cause a global economic catastrophe, whether the U.S. could win a war with China, President Biden's legacy, the pitfalls of globalization and social media, whether we can ever return to a "normal" America, and other topics.

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Transcript

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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 we'll 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
0:21.9	at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely
0:27.3	through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider
0:31.8	becoming one. I am here with Robert Kaplan. Robert, thanks for joining me.
0:38.3	It's a pleasure to be here.
0:40.3	So I've been a fan of your work for many, many years. I think like half of humanity I was first introduced to you when you wrote that
0:48.3	rather shocking article in the Atlantic in 1994, the coming anarchy, which I think was probably the most red piece in the
0:56.8	magazine for quite some time. I don't know if it's been supplanted by anything in recent years,
1:01.0	but that article was everywhere. Yes. See, remember, it was the 1990s. So it was photocopied. It was
1:09.1	the most photocopied article of the decade because that was the
1:12.8	technology then. Nowadays, you have so many outlets, so many things coming out to that it's hard for a
1:20.3	piece really to rise above the rest, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then you followed it up if
1:27.0	memory serves with the book-length
1:29.3	version, the ends of the earth, which I also read at the time in hardback. So I've been following
1:34.6	you for quite some time. Before we jump in and talk about your new book and all manner of thing
1:40.3	that worries us, how do you describe your career and your focus as a writer and
1:46.4	journalist? Well, I started out as a journalist at a newspaper in Vermont, the Rutland
1:52.6	Daily Herald, and then I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and North Africa, and I traveled
1:59.3	the world essentially over the years, and I got bored
2:03.4	with conventional journalism, you know, with standard narrowly focused journalism. When I was in
2:10.1	Turkey, I didn't care how many F-15s the Turkish government was going to buy from the United
2:15.7	States. I wanted to visit the Museum of
	...

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