#440 — A World in Crisis

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 Robert Kaplan. Robert, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here. 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 rather shocking article in The Atlantic in 1994, the the coming anarchy, which, I think was probably the most read piece in the magazine for quite some some time. I I don't know if it's been supplanted by anything in in recent years, but that article was everywhere. Yes. See, remember, it was the nineteen nineties, so it was photocopied. It was the most photocopied article of the decade because that was the technology there. Nowadays, you have so many outlets, so many things coming at you that it's hard for a piece really to rise above the rest, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah. Well, then and then you followed it up, if, memory serves, with the book length version, The Ends of the Earth, which I also read at the time, in hardback. So I've been I've been following you for quite some time. Let let before we jump in and talk about your new book and all manner of thing that, worries us, how do you describe your career and your focus as a a writer and journalist? Well, I started out as a journalist at a newspaper in Vermont, the Rutland Daily Herald, And then I bought a one way ticket to, Europe and North Africa. And I traveled the world essentially over the years. And I got bored with conventional journalism, you know, with standard narrowly focused journalism. When I was in Turkey, I didn't care how many F fifteen's the Turkish government was gonna buy from The United States. I wanted to visit the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. I thought that would tell me more about Turkey than how many f fifteens they were gonna buy. So I just gradually emerged out of daily journalism, and I had an editor who really helped me in this regard, William Whitworth, who was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly for twenty years Mhmm. From 1980 to 2000. And he died last year. Without him, I don't know what I would have done, but he recognized something in me and, let me do the kind of writing I wanted to do, which was to incorporate with journalism philosophy, geography, history, literature. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you do that, …