#444 — America's Zombie Democracy

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 samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with George Packer. George, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. Great to see you.

I'm a huge fan of your work. I'm uh an avid reader of everything you write in The Atlantic. I am also now a reader of uh your latest novel, which is titled The Emergency. uh which I haven't yet finished. I actually wasn't planning to talk about it, but I I can just say that it's extraordinarily good and alarming.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (21 minutes, 3,488 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.