#447 — The Unraveling of American Power

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'm here with Peter Zion. Peter, thanks for joining me again. Hey. It's great to be back. Well, so first, you've been on the podcast several times and most people will have, heard about you, seen you somewhere, if not here. Remind people briefly what you do, what's your day job when you're not doing podcasts like this. My job is to take demography and geopolitics and use it to paint a picture of the future and then show how it matters to the people who happen to be in front of me. So most of my clients are in the world of finance or manufacturing or agriculture, some sort of economic association or business, and I help them navigate the crazy that is to come. Speaking of, predicting the future and, I 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 gonna win the twenty twenty four election. So I have to ask you what the fuck happened right at the top of the Fair enough. Sorry. I I slept that day. Yeah. My general feeling was that it was gonna be America's independence that decided how things were gonna go. Not people who said they were republic or independent, but really were republicans and everything but name, but the actual 10% of the electorate that splits their vote because they had decided the last seven elections. So it felt pretty safe to me. And in the post election polls, it looks like that group decisively voted against Trump. Everyone else shifted, however, with one exception, Washington State. Every state in every demographic shifted substantially towards Donald Trump and allowed him to win with the margin that he got. Well, how would you rate his second term so far? We're we're gonna talk about tariffs and foreign policy and, supply chain and specifics like China, but what most concerns you? What have there been any pleasant surprises? How would you, how would you rate the last 10 on your budget? I usually try not to be critical of presidents in their first terms because, you know, they're they're learning. It takes time for the policies to kick in. The world doesn't move on a dime. Second term is different because they should have learned from what happened in their first term. And by that measure, it has not gone well. …