This episode was originally recorded for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

Preet Bharara is the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and is currently a partner at the law firm WilmerHale. Before serving as US Attorney, Bharara was Chief Counsel to Senator Charles Schumer, the current US Senate Minority Leader. He wrote the New York Times best-seller Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law. Bharara also shares his perspectives as host of the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts on the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara

Law and politics, from reasoned voices in unreasonable times.

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Further reading: How to Stop a Lab Leak From Starting the Next Pandemic

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Daniel Kahneman was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on decision-making. He was the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and co-author, with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, of Noise.

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Neal Brennan is a comedian, writer, and director best known for co-creating and co-writing Chappelle’s Show with Dave Chappelle, for which he received three Emmy nominations. He also co-wrote the film Half Baked and has written and directed for comedians including Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, and Seth Meyers. His most recent stand-up special is Crazy Good. He also hosts the popular Blocks podcast, where he interviews friends and colleagues about the psychological struggles that shape their lives.

Website: www.nealbrennan.com

X: https://x.com/nealbrennan

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Cameron Berg is the founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit AI research lab. Using mechanistic interpretability, computational neuroscience, and psychometric tools, he studies whether frontier AI systems exhibit computational properties associated with consciousness. His aim is to reduce uncertainty about the kinds of cognitive systems we are building, an important but neglected component of the alignment problem. A cognitive science graduate of Yale and former Meta AI resident, he writes regularly about these questions in The Wall Street Journal, and his research has been covered by The Washington Post. He is the subject of the feature documentary AM I?.

Website: https://reciprocalresearch.org

X: @camhberg

Annaka Harris’s upcoming book: Unlocking Consciousness

Kathryn Paige Harden, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and serves as Director of Clinical Training. Paige is a graduate of Furman University and the University of Virginia. She has published over 150 scientific papers on the nature and nurture of human behavior. She is also the author of two books: The Genetic Lottery (2021) and Original Sin (2026).

Website: kpharden.com

X: @kph3k

Related Episode: #212 - A Conversation with Kathryn Paige Harden

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Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell; The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; and The Laws of Medicine. He is a Rhodes scholar, an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, and a cancer physician and researcher. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and others.

Website: SiddharthaMukherjee.com

X: @DrSidMukherjee

[Note: The original email for this post contained the wrong URL for sharing. The error has been corrected below. Apologies!]

Many of you know me primarily through my writing and the Making Sense podcast, where I spend most of my time thinking about intractable problems: political and religious extremism, existential risk, the unintended harms of new technology. Waking Up is a place where I don’t think about any of those things. Or so it seems. In truth, the connection is direct: every problem I examine outside the app is, at some level, the result of human minds being out of control. A person who can notice negative emotions like fear or anger, without being ruled by them, can stay in a difficult conversation. A society of such people can disagree without coming apart.

The mind you train in meditation is the same mind you bring to your marriage, to your work, to your friendships, and to your encounters with strangers. By meditation, I don’t mean anything spooky: it’s simply the practice of noticing what your mind is doing before it does something you’ll regret. That gap—between impulse and response, between an arising thought and your helpless identification with it—is where freedom can be found.

We don’t merely live our own lives. We inhabit the lives of others. So a practice that might begin as “self-help” can become the foundation of an ethical life. Once you see it this way, sharing the practice of meditation stops being a matter of just marketing a product.

Anyone who follows the link below gets 30 days of Waking Up for free, with full access to the app and no obligation to subscribe. And if you already use Waking Up, I want to encourage you to share it with others. You can do that by forwarding this post, or by using the Share button inside the app. You can also send individual sessions to friends or link to them wherever you spend time online.

It’s awkward for me to ask you to share my work. But picture how things look from my side: Many thousands of people, from complete beginners to those who have practiced meditation for decades, have told me that Waking Up profoundly changed their lives. The response to the app is unlike anything I’ve received for my books or my podcast. Apart from just eating more ice cream, helping to improve the lives of others is the whole point of being here.

So if your life was changed, as mine was, by paying closer attention to the nature of your own mind (meditation, by whatever name), please help me change someone else’s life. And if you’ve never tried Waking Up, let this be the month you do.

Access your free 30 days of Waking Up here: www.wakingup.com/sam

Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. Paul Bloom studies how children and adults make sense of the world, with special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of seven books, including his latest Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. You can subscribe to his Substack, Small Potatoes.

Small Potatoes

Psychology, philosophy, jokes, and more

By Paul Bloom

Website: paulbloom.net

X: @paulbloomatyale

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Alain de Botton is a writer, psychotherapist, and founder of The School of Life. He is interested in art, ideas, and the need for emotional education to help us manage relationships and make better choices.

Website: alaindebotton.com, theschooloflife.com

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Noah Smith is an economics blogger and former finance professor. He writes a Substack called Noahpinion.

Website: http://noahpinion.blog

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Note (6/12/26): The response to this essay has been quite colorful. I’ve added a few footnotes to clarify points that seem easily misunderstood.

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.1

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise).2 My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides,3 and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.4

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.5

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace.6 There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).

If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:

What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?

Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.

If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th. And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.

Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.

The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.

We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.

To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it. The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.

Of the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.

This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”

I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.

Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral community is for.

Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor, and technology fan. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, focused on impactful technology investments in software, AI, robotics, 3D printing, healthcare, and more​. Mr. Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. One of Mr. Khosla’s greatest passions is being a mentor to entrepreneurs, assisting entrepreneurs, and helping them build technology-based businesses. ​Mr. Khosla is driven by the desire to make a positive impact through technology to reinvent societal infrastructure and multiply resources. He is also passionate about Social Entrepreneurship. Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from IIT, New Delhi, a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

X: @vkhosla

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Dr Carhart-Harris moved to Imperial College London in 2008 after obtaining a PhD in Psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol. He has designed human brain imaging studies with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT, and several clinical trials of psilocybin therapy for severe mental illnesses, including 3 key trials in depression plus 2 further trials in anorexia and fibromyalgia syndrome. Dr Carhart-Harris founded the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London in April 2019, the first of its kind in the world. In 2020, he was named among the top 31 medical scientists by The Times newspaper. Dr Carhart-Harris became the inaugural Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco in 2021, and in the same year, was listed in TIME magazine’s ‘100 Next’ - a list of emerging leaders from around the world who are shaping the future.

Website: carhartharrislab.com

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In this latest episode of the More From Sam series, Sam and Jaron talk about current events. They discuss the Trump administration’s bungled Iran campaign, the information war surrounding Gaza and October 7, Nicholas Kristof’s disputed New York Times report on Israeli prisoner abuse, Sam’s controversial take on AI-generated music, Claude solving a decades-old math problem, the ethics of concealing GLP-1 use, and other topics.

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We’ll be recording the next episode of More From Sam live on Monday, May 25th, at 2pm ET, right here on Substack. This event is for subscribers only.

Your reactions and pushback can shape the episode as it’s being made. If Sam is missing something, has the balance wrong, or is glossing over a real objection, you can say so in the chat while we’re recording, and we can respond to it in real time. That doesn’t happen with a standard recording.

How to get involved:

1. Submit your questions and topics in the comments below before the taping. We’ll use these to make sure the things you most want covered are already on the table.

2. Join the livestream and use the chat to share reactions, pushback, or follow-ups as the conversation unfolds.

The episode will be released the following day as usual — the difference is that your input will have helped shape it.

You’ll get an email notification when the stream goes live. See you Monday!

Not yet a subscriber? Join at samharris.org/subscribe or subscribe here on Substack.

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Team Sam

Susan Cain is the author of the global sensation and #1 New York Times bestseller Quiet, and the instant #1 New York Times bestseller Bittersweet, an Oprah Book Club selection. Susan’s new children’s book Lucky & Norman will be published on June 2, 2026. She has spent the last twenty years exploring a particular realm of human nature: the quiet, the sensitive, the thoughtful, the bittersweet. It has always seemed clear to her—and to her millions of readers—that this way of being can lead to a richer, deeper form of happiness. Susan is the host of The Quiet Life Substack community, and her newsletter is read by people in all 193 countries and all 50 American states. Join her at TheQuietLife.net!

Website: https://thequietlife.net/welcome

X: @susancain

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Michael Pollan is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, his 2018 account of the renaissance of scientific research into psychedelics. In July 2022, Netflix released a docuseries based on How to Change Your Mind, exploring the history and uses of substances including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and mescaline. His latest, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, explores consciousness—what it is, who has it, and why.

Website: https://michaelpollan.com/

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