#447 — The Unraveling of American Power
Making Sense with Sam Harris
Waking Up with Sam Harris
4.6 • 29.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 December 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sam Harris speaks with Peter Zeihan about Trump's second term and its economic and geopolitical consequences. They discuss Zeihan's failed 2024 election prediction, the unprecedented unraveling of American power, Trump's tariff policies, the AI bubble, deglobalization and supply chain vulnerabilities, China's demographic and economic collapse, the degradation of military readiness, Trump's incompetent foreign policy team, Steven Witkoff's role as a Russian propaganda conduit, Melania Trump's unexpected effectiveness as Ukraine's unofficial ambassador, the 28-point peace plan and its $100 billion bribe, the repatriation of kidnapped Ukrainian children, 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 |
| 0:21.5 | subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made |
| 0:26.5 | possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, |
| 0:31.2 | please consider becoming one. |
| 0:36.6 | Hi, I'm here with Peter Zion. |
| 0:38.4 | Peter, thanks for joining me again. |
| 0:39.9 | It's great to be back. |
| 0:41.1 | Well, so first, you've been on the podcast several times, and most people will have heard about you, seeing you somewhere, if not here. |
| 0:48.3 | Remind people briefly what you do, what's your day job when you're not doing podcasts like this? |
| 0:53.0 | My job is to take demography and geopolitics and use it to paint a picture of the future and then |
| 0:59.0 | show how it matters to the people who happen to be in front of me. So most of my clients are |
| 1:03.0 | in the world of finance or manufacturing or agriculture, some sort of economic association or |
| 1:07.6 | business, and I help them navigate the crazy that is to come. |
| 1:11.6 | Speaking of predicting the future, and actually on points that matter, at least to me and a few of us, last time you were on the podcast, you told me that there was no way that Trump was going to win the 2024 election. So I have to ask you what the fuck happened right at the top here. |
| 1:26.6 | Yeah, fair enough. Sorry, I slept that day. My general feeling was that it was going to be America's |
| 1:33.1 | independence that decided how things were going to go. Not people who said they were independent, |
| 1:37.6 | but really were Republicans and everything but name, but the actual 10% of the electorate |
| 1:41.6 | that splits their vote. because they had decided the last |
| 1:45.3 | seven elections, so it felt pretty safe to me. And in the post-election polls, it looks like that |
| 1:52.3 | group decisively voted against Trump. Everyone else shifted, however, with one exception, |
| 1:59.8 | Washington state, every state and every |
| 2:02.0 | demographic shifted substantially towards Donald Trump and allowed him to win with the margin |
... |
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