#438 — “More From Sam”: Israel-Hamas Deal, Qatari Air Force Base, Trump, Charlie Kirk, Ezra Klein, & Rapid Fire Questions

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Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam, where we get to hear more from Sam.

Hello, Sam.

How are you?

Hey, how's it going?

Going well.

Going well.

Good to see you.

Are you ready for the shows coming up next week in New York and Boston?

I am.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

As you know, I've been changing the talk incrementally as...

things happen in the world.

So it's kind of a living document at this point, which is fun.

I haven't had a,

I can't even remember having a project like that where it just keeps changing and I keep, it keeps maintaining its relevance to me because there's a date on the calendar where I have to deliver it by.

So yeah, it's kind of cool.

It is enjoyable because I get to hear, you know, obviously read the different drafts and I feel like I'm going to get to watch the first few shows will be probably entirely differently or a lot different from the final shows.

And speaking of that, I kind of just let people know that we're going to be announcing some new shows coming up next year.

So if anybody wants wants to get notified about those, please head over to samharris.org and join the mailing list because we're going to make that announcement, I think, next week or the week after for 2026.

And anybody who wants to come to Boston, I think that show sold out in a day or two.

New York has a few tickets, maybe a dozen or so for next week, October 15th, I believe.

So come out and join us.

All right.

On to the first topic.

Trump got a deal done.

And that's something I don't believe you believe would have happened under a President Harris.

It pains me somewhat to admit this, but yes,

he's certainly been good for the Middle East and for Israel in a way that I don't think there was any reason to expect Harris to be good.

And Biden certainly wasn't good apart from the first few weeks after October 7th or maybe a couple of months after October 7th, he proved quite an unreliable ally there.

So yes, I think Trump, for reasons that are still somewhat inscrutable,

I think he's also an unreliable ally for Israel.

All the Israelis

and the Jews of the world who think that he's just an unalloyed good for their cause, just a clear-eyed defender of Western civilization generally and of the lone democracy and battle democracy in the Middle East in the case of Israel.

He certainly is not that.

I don't think he understands the issues.

I think he's surrounded by various maniacs who are wanting to break trust with Israel.

There are anti-Semites on the right wing who have J.D.

Vance's phone number on speed dial, I can imagine.

So it's a very muddled picture, just how good he is for the Jews.

But it's true that the Democrats can be counted upon to be reliably bad for the issues around domestic anti-Semitism and defense of Israel.

It also, you know, so what's inscrutable about Trump's situation is that obviously he's got all these entanglements in the Gulf.

He's just grifting like a madman.

He and his family and their allies earning billions of dollars, cutting deals with the Gulf, you know, cryptocurrency and otherwise.

So there's this kind of this weird algebra around his short-term and narrowly constructed personal interests and whatever his allegiance is to Israel, his hatred of immigration from so-called shithole countries, his animus toward our European allies and their multiculturalism, which I actually understand, at least that second piece.

So all of that summates into him just being able to ride into Qatar.

and start making demands and offering promises, promises that Israel will never bomb them in Doha again.

And so, yeah, it seems like he's at a minimum, it seems like the hostages are going to come home.

We're recording this on a Friday.

I think they're expected to be released on this coming Sunday.

It remains to be seen whether that's going to happen, but I think everyone believes it's going to happen at this point.

I think I'm more skeptical than many are about the durable peace that this is promising.

I'm not expecting that, but I will be genuinely surprised if this really does offer in a new dawn and a two-state solution and the lions lay down with the lambs.

I think that's all to be bracketed with serious doubts, no matter what happens in the next 48 hours.

But this is definitely better than we could have expected under Harris.

I freely admit that.

Is that why you think that the entire world is not cheering about this?

All those that thought this was a genocide, well, why aren't you coming forth to say, all right, well, that's whatever that was.

It's now over.

Do you think it's because it's not durable peace and they're not making it?

No, no, no, no.

The Mark Ruffalos of the world who are not cheering this, it has nothing to do with their circumspection around thinking that the ceasefire can become a durable peace.

No,

they just don't really care about what they say they care about in the end.

I mean, there's a very cynical and delusional mixture of kind of moral emotions and moral illusions here that is causing everyone to celebrate the wrong thing, not celebrate when they get precisely what they said they wanted, et cetera.

I If you really thought there was a genocide in Gaza and this is ending it decisively, where are the celebrations?

Where is Greta Thunberg and Mark Ruffalo and the rest of the

celebrity brigade who doubled down on so-called Palestinian rights, which was really just

useful idiots supporting Hamas in the end?

Where are their appeals to Hamas to accept this deal immediately?

Every hour they delay is costing more lives.

Where's the pressure applied to Hamas by the people who pretend to support the Palestinian cause?

I mean, maybe it exists somewhere, but I certainly haven't seen it.

And they should be celebrating more than anyone.

They should be celebrating as much as the families of the hostages.

I mean, it should be an unalloyed good from their point of view.

What's happening here?

Given that, they should have been pushing Hamas a long time ago to return the hostages.

Of course.

Yeah, but so maybe they, from their perspective, maybe they're thinking that this is just not a good deal and they're going to, the Palestinians are going to find themselves yet again under the Israeli thumb of power and to have lost their rights and whatever position they take.

And that this deal, they just don't have a lot of faith in Netanyahu and Trump that they're going to do what they say and they're going to lose all their leverage, giving the hostage back.

And we'll be right back where we were before, you know, again, in 10, 15 years.

So again, I'm just trying to paint their position as best I can.

I obviously understand the cynical take that they just hate the Jews, but there may be other reasons.

Maybe they want to wait a few weeks.

Maybe they want to see how things play out before they begin to celebrate.

Well, above all, they claim to want a ceasefire, right?

Just stop the killing.

That's just the master value that they're expressing.

And this does that and then stands a chance of making that ceasefire a durable peace if the other parties in the region, the other Gulf states take an interest in helping restore order and rebuild Gaza, right?

This whole plan to rebuild Gaza.

I mean, of course, you know, Trump, to some degree, you know, what's worked for him is this kind of madman theory of diplomacy, right?

I mean, he came in there and basically said, we're going to ethnically cleanse the region and erect gold statues to me and open casinos, right?

But that was basically the vision.

I mean, he literally shared an AI animation of that, you know, just pimping the ride of the Middle East, you know, Trump style.

And, you know, he got behind that.

And it's just, it's a, it was a morally obscene declaration of an intention, which just rattled the brains of every party to this conversation and clearly affected the thinking in Qatar.

The other crucial piece, though, is not just Trump's weird contribution to it.

It's the fact that all the while Israel was decisively winning the war against her myriad enemies, right?

So it was the destruction, the apparent, you know, virtually complete destruction of Hezbollah, not totally complete, but decisive.

The bombing of Iran, you know, along with what the U.S.

did there, the complete defeat of Hamas.

I mean, Hamas, by all accounts, scarcely exists anymore.

I mean, there's a few people who are going to stand up and declare victory, no doubt, after Sunday.

But if Israel hadn't accomplished all of that on the battlefield,

there would be no deal here.

It's not just a matter of diplomacy.

So you said you're not optimistic that there's going to be a durable peace.

Why is that?

And is there anything that could happen that you would think

would make for a lasting peace in the Middle East?

Why don't you see Qatari partnership there and with along with

Saudis and see Turkey coming in?

Why don't you see a future for the Middle East where there is some form of lasting peace?

Well, so the Qataris are a unique case because they're playing a double game of funding terrorism and funding Islamist and jihadist memes worldwide.

I mean, they're destabilizing much of the Western world with their funding of Islamist lives and stealth theocracy.

They're basically an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Muslim Brotherhood has

command of their theology.

So they're state funders of terrorism and any negotiation with them or alliance with them on any topic should be clear-eyed about that.

Now, let's say they had a sea change from the top in their attitude toward Islamism and jihadism of the sort that someone like MBS seems to have had, right?

So MBS is seemingly reining in the fundamentalist clerics in his own society and giving a lot of scope to the more secular, modern aspirations of Saudis.

And other Gulf states have a kind of secular leaning there too.

And that's all to the good.

I mean, you sort of have to get the help from wherever it's coming.

I mean, MBS is a very mixed figure ethically, right?

He kills journalists and he imprisons.

people for having advocated the very things that he's now implementing in his society.

If I'm not mistaken, some of the women who protested for the rights of women to drive are still in prison, even though he's kind of rolled out the rights of women to drive in Saudi.

So

this is not a bastion of freedom.

This is an intolerant despotism still.

But if he's reigning in religious fanaticism in the Gulf, and if the other states begin to do that, that's all good.

And we have to work with that.

But the reality is there's going to be, there is, and there will continue to be a tension between what these rulers want and the so-called Arab street, right?

And from the point of view of the real religious fanatics, these look like apostate regimes now, right?

And they always have.

That was always al-Qaeda's view of the Saudis.

And, you know, so that's the view of the Muslim Brotherhood.

So there's this tension there that still exists.

And there's the source code of Islam that's there to be rediscovered at every point along the way.

And even if everyone got on the same page and accepted Israel in the Middle East, it doesn't doesn't change the fact that you have 50,000 people on the terror watch list in the UK alone, right?

I mean, you've got the problem of jihadism and Islamism in Western Europe that is continuing to seethe.

These ideas aren't going away.

These ideas have to be combated.

And again, it is a good thing.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing that MBS is reigning in his own jihadists and Islamists.

That is good.

But there's

a war of ideas that has to be waged and won within Islam.

And

there's a civil war.

There's no way it's going to be just a matter of ideas.

Muslims have to be willing to fight jihadists

across the board and purge that whole orientation from their faith.

That's going to be very hard to do.

And I think the willingness to do that in 100 countries is going to be

very hard to kindle.

So it's, I mean, it's a huge project.

I don't expect our children to live to see the end of this project.

That's my sense of

what has to happen.

I'm a little bit more optimistic, but

let's move on to, I really do think that we're going to see some sea change there.

And I really do, I hope in our lifetime that we do find that, as I've said, that Beirut and other wonderful places return to be glorious and with prosperity comes.

Well, again, well, the change will have to be,

there's a Potempkin view of secularism and tolerance that you see in some of these Gulf states, but these are totally authoritarian regimes, right?

I mean, so they're going to, so the question is, how are they going to lock all this down?

How are they going to change minds?

How are they going to establish peace in the region?

How is Gaza going to be a vacation place when you still have jihadists who want to spread the faith to the ends of the earth and establish a caliphate, right?

There's going to be a lot of violence keeping a lid on all of that.

I just, I don't see how that happens otherwise.

It's not going to be a democracy.

The idea that you could spread democracy to these societies and have everyone

normalize and secularize.

And I do not see that happening in the lifetime of anyone listening to it.

Maybe just a handful of benevolent dictatorships.

Maybe that'll work.

Who knows?

Yeah.

Or, yeah.

Or just dictatorships.

Yeah.

They get what they need.

Moving over,

did you see the announcement today about the Qatari Air Force facility base in Idaho?

I just heard a rumor of it, which

my jaw is still somewhere.

A little bit like a Borat skit.

But apparently, these are similar arrangements we've had with Singapore, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, as well as NATO allies, other ones, including Italy, Netherlands, as well as Turkey.

So I wonder just the timing of the announcement of this.

Again,

I just saw this.

I don't know that much about any of this.

I'm wondering if maybe it's a distraction or it's part of the deal.

Well, it came over with the plane, the gift of the $400 million plane.

It should be of concern to people that Qatar is literally the largest state funder of U.S.

academic institutions, right?

A foreign funder of U.S.

academic institutions, to the tune of billions of dollars.

What's that for?

Well, it's just a sane watching of their theocratic agenda.

Al Jazeera is not a journalistic organization.

It's a PSYOP that's been performed on the West for however many years.

You know, these are not good faith actors.

at all.

So the question is, you know, what happens over the course of some years of engagement with them?

That remains to be seen.

But I think the only thing that really mattered so far is Israel winning the real wars on the ground and showing that if Qatar doesn't get on the right side here, Doha itself is part of the field of battle.

That I think got their attention.

What do you say to those who might say Qatar is giving billions of dollars to Harvard and Northwestern and all these institutions?

So why can't Trump get a plane?

Why aren't they both wrong?

They are both wrong.

I mean, they're both wrong.

Harvard shouldn't be taking funding from a Midis theocracy that is now creating a Midi's studies program that is indoctrinating a generation of credulous students into a distorted view of the history of the region or the...

the ease with which open societies can integrate greater numbers of Muslim citizens.

Again, this is a purely purely propagandistic and sinister operation.

But we have so in America, the Council on Islamic, American Islamic Relations Care is imagined to be the Muslim equivalent of the ACLU or the NAACP.

It's nothing of the sort, right?

It is an Islamist front group.

It is a stealth theocracy group of bullies.

And yet it is the mouthpiece for the Muslim community that

people listen.

So when something happens in the news of relevance to the Muslim community in America, it's someone from CARE who gets on CNN to tell the rest of the country

what Muslims think.

Now, this is a totally sinister arrangement.

I mean, these are not, again, they're not good faith actors.

There are direct ties between CARE and the Muslim Brotherhood.

And that's the theology in the background that is guiding everyone's actions here.

If you think of it in terms of communism, I mean, think of a set of ideas.

The fundamentalist Islam is a set of ideas, and it has its adherents in every Western country, and they have an agenda.

And if you switched it out from being a religion to a political religion like communism, everyone would suddenly understand, okay, there's something to pay attention to here.

This could be an instance in which the value, the master value of tolerance in an open society is being used to subvert the society itself and to evaporate the very reality of tolerance.

And this is the paradox of tolerance that Karl Popper described.

You can't be endlessly tolerant of intolerance and survive as an open society.

And what we have here in an organization like CARE and in the seemingly generous benefaction of a state like Qatar, again, a state that openly funds terrorism.

We have people who are deeply illiberal and committed to an illiberal worldview, using our own liberal values as a shield to protect their project

inside our societies, right?

And so they'll be the first to cry intolerance.

So everything I'm saying now is going to be, if any of them listen, this will be derided as Islamophobia and bigotry and racism, as though that made any sense.

And they will be championing our virtues of tolerance and non-discrimination, right?

Whereas the actual worldview that they want to implement in their own lives and in the lives of others is deeply intolerant.

Open societies have to find some way of playing this game successfully so as to defend their own values without tipping over into proper closure or, you know, or xenophobia or bigotry or jingoism.

I mean, all of that, you know,

all of those looming problems on the right are worth worrying about.

I mean, this is back to David Frum's great line that, you know, if liberals can't figure out how to police borders, fascists will.

That's the problem.

We're between useful idiots on the left just letting the barbarians in the gate and fascists on the right showing you how to close a gate properly.

We don't want to be at either extreme.

Yeah, but can you see the argument from the right that says, okay, now when Trump does it, it's a problem.

And everybody's screaming.

But for years, if not decades, the Qatari money has come in.

And you could argue it's been damaging

the major war.

Well, I think we should dream about both.

But no, the one difference, and it's an important difference, is Trump is president of the United States.

He's monetizing the role of president in the most corrupt way.

I mean, it's so corrupt that it's just clear that Republicans no longer have an idea of corruption in their minds.

I mean, it's like they've just torched the very distinction between being corrupt and non-corrupt, right?

No one is even paying attention to any of this, apparently.

But no, he's just, you know, it's a kind of kleptocracy, right?

He's using the levers of our state power to enrich himself and his friends very, very directly.

He's taking $2 billion directly into the family business from the UAE and then greenlighting the sale of our most advanced AI chips to the UAE.

And all the while knowing that the UAE does joint military exercises with China and that it's a security concern that our best chips get in China's hands, right?

Like it's just pure graft and personal corruption, and we have never seen anything like it.

Yeah.

Speaking of Trump, you sent me a clip yesterday.

I think it was from 2018 about him cheating at golf, where I think he had won the club championship that he actually didn't play.

And while that seems like, you know, Kim Jong-un level of insanity, why does Trump cheating at golf bother you?

Why is that a big deal?

Well, it's a very interesting window onto him as a person.

And people who don't follow golf have no feel for this, right?

I mean, golf is, as far as I know, a total outlier with respect to the norms of the sport.

I mean, so you take

like one extreme is you've got soccer where people pretend to have been fouled and they fall down.

The soccer players fall down on the ground and flop around in agony.

And then the moment the foul isn't called, you know, in their favor, they just jump back up and they're fine.

Right.

And it's just this bizarre, really shameful performance, but the norms of soccer have just

relaxed and relaxed and relaxed to the point where everyone accepts it.

It's just part of the game.

Or

in hockey, you can just begin punching somebody in the face,

seemingly violating the rules of the sport, but everyone accepts it.

It's like, this is sort of the sport now.

Somebody gets to punch somebody in the face.

Golf is in a different universe.

When Tiger Woods won the Masters, which is the most prestigious event in the U.S., at least, If he had misreported his score or if he had failed to even sign his scorecard, he would have been immediately disqualified.

He would have lost the Masters, right?

The second place finisher would have won the Masters.

I mean, that's analogous.

It's impossible to even understand that in relation to other sports.

I mean, it's like Tom Brady, you know, forgetting to sign a piece of paper after winning the Super Bowl, and they lose the Super Bowl.

right?

It's just, how would anyone even think that should be within the realm of possibility?

That is golf.

Golf is just a religion of personal integrity, really.

I mean, it's just, so two things.

One is that it is central to Trump's life.

He spends 30% of his time on the golf course, right?

As president, he has done that.

And he spends more time just hanging out at his own golf courses

at great expense to the U.S.

taxpayer.

I mean, they charge millions of dollars that go directly into Trump properties.

uh for all these trips to his golf courses but golf is the center of his life and he cheats at it in ways that should should be impossible.

I mean, he cheats at it

over the course of play.

I mean, you can see this, the footage of his caddy just dropping a ball, you know, where he, or he lost the ball in the water, or it was ball went into the sand trap, and the caddy will just drop a ball, you know, to give him a more favorable lie.

But then there are all these other stories of him pretending to have won tournaments that didn't even exist.

Like he'll buy a golf course and play around by himself and call that the first club championship that he's now the winner of and put a fucking flak on the wall.

Right.

Or Or he'll, in the case, in the story you heard, there was a tournament he didn't even enter, right, where a guy won it.

And then he sees the guy on the golf course

after the tournament and says, you know, you didn't really win that tournament because I didn't play in it.

So let's do a little playoff right now.

And the guy's playing with his son and he doesn't want to, but then Trump says, no, no, we're doing a playoff right now.

And he does a playoff with him where, you know, Trump hits a ball into the lake, but, you know, pretends it didn't hit it into the lake, pretends the sun hit it into the lake, steals the sun's ball on the green.

I mean, this has all been reported by a guy who wrote a book.

It's worse.

It's not that he steals it.

His handlers do it.

It's a whole, it's the machinery.

Like they already know what to do.

That's the problem.

But the truly egregious thing is he's the sort of person for whom golf really is at the center of his life.

I mean, he's, he cares about it.

He loves it.

I mean, it's clearly what he wants his life to be, 30% golf at least.

And yet.

he is violating its norms in a way that not one in a million golfers, if given the chance, would ever do.

I mean, it's the most shameful desecration of the actual norms of the sport that you can imagine.

I mean, pretending to have won, literally stealing the title of a club championship from its rightful winner by lying, right, and putting your name on the wall attesting to your victory.

I mean, to call it sociopathic doesn't even quite get at it.

I mean, there's really...

It's so far out on the tail end of aberration of human behavior.

Again, given that the relevant relevant cultural norms surrounding the whole project, it's just, it's almost uninterpretable.

I mean, you literally, you have never met anyone who has ever met anyone who would behave this way.

And this guy is president of the United States.

Right.

Plus with golf, as anyone who plays, you know, you're playing the course.

So it's really about your own personal best.

So when you lie, you're not just, you're not cheating somebody else.

You're actually completely missing.

the entire point of the game.

Oh, yeah.

You know, it's like cheating at prayer or something.

I mean, it's just, it's, it's insane.

Yeah.

It's not insane in the sense of being psychotic, delusional, but it is morally insane.

Yeah.

I mean, this is my point about, it's always been my point about Trump.

There are people you can point to who are much worse people.

They've created many more overt harms and intended to create those harms.

I mean, just like, you know, prototypically evil people, they are easier to understand in some sense than Trump.

I mean, his psychology is just frankly bizarre.

Yeah.

All right.

We got to, we got to move on.

I want to, I want to talk about,

we were together last month in Seattle when we heard about Charlie Kirk's assassination.

I was pretty shaken up by it.

I want to see if you'll share any of your thoughts on that and perhaps your thoughts about how others responded as well.

Well,

so much is wrong with.

I mean, first it's just a terrible tragedy for the family and friends of Charlie Kirk.

And I mean, it's just awful in every respect.

there.

And my immediate reaction to it was just to be purely horrified by it.

I mean, just on that personal level.

Additionally, it's horrible for other reasons that affect a much wider set of people and concerns.

I mean, so the thing that's horrible about a political assassination is that it's happening, especially in this case, it's happening in an environment where we are combustible as a society.

The level of trust in institutions is so low.

It's so much lower than it

has been, really, at least in modern memory, that a political assassination is just much more dangerous now.

I mean, there's just so much dry tinder.

It's like when JFK was assassinated or MLK or Robert Kennedy, those assassinations happened in a context where there was massive trust.

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