#482 — More From Sam: The Iran Deal, College in the AI Age, Mamdani's DSA, and More

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Jaron** (0:25)
Welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Hello, Sam.

**Sam Harris** (0:28)
Hey, good to see you.

**Jaron** (0:30)
Good to see you as well. This time we're not taping live in front of subscribers. I'm traveling and didn't want the stress of whether the Internet would hold. So if you're hearing this, obviously it did. Making Sense Community now has over 26,000 people in it and it's humming along nicely. I really enjoyed many of the exchanges with so many thoughtful people there. Everyone has been behaving and I think it's because they too wanted to see this succeed and you've been getting some good feedback and pushback in there.
It's definitely not been an echo chamber.

**Sam Harris** (1:00)
No worries of that. No.

**Jaron** (1:02)
You've been in there quite a bit yourself. It's almost like an Easter egg where I'm reading a thread and then I see a comment from you.
We don't have a follow feature and I think that works out better because we didn't want to build this community to be dependent on you and it certainly hasn't been. So for today's episode, I'm going to try something a little different. Rather than running down a bunch of topics related to the news cycle, I'm going to grab a sampling from the posts in our community. And get you to comment on them here. We'll also get your reactions to the Iran deal, whatever is happening over there and to whatever current events are necessary. So for those of you who are looking for that, don't worry. And just a quick note before we get going, if you want to join community or become a subscriber to the podcast, you can find subscription options by going to samharris.org/subscribe.
Okay, let's get started. One world government is global political unification inevitable? And would it be good? Should nation states eventually operate the way US states do under a federal umbrella?

**Sam Harris** (2:02)
Yeah, actually, this is not something I've thought about recently, but now that you mentioned it, this is probably something I've changed my mind about. I think in my first book, The End of Faith, I wrote somewhere probably in an end note that it was just obvious that the end game for civilization is some version of one world government. What we want in the end, if things work out, is for the prospect of war between China and the US say to be just as ridiculous and therefore unthinkable as the prospect of war is now between Vermont and Massachusetts. It's just not going to happen. Nobody's worried about it and that's the case because they're unified under a single government that has a monopoly on the use of force. Something like that for the entire world must be where we're headed unless we're going to keep killing one another. I don't think I believe that now or if I do believe it, I think that goal is far enough away and quixotic enough that we really can't argue for it in the current environment. The idea that in our case, the United States could ever be truly subordinate to the political whims of Europe or to say nothing of going further afield and greater cultural distance from us.
Our own society is so dysfunctional politically at this point that the idea of a global version of this just seems genuinely unthinkable to me.

**Jaron** (3:33)
You don't think some super AGI of some kind would be able to solve that for us or you're saying maybe?

**Sam Harris** (3:39)
Well, I could imagine the dystopian version of this. I mean, one world totalitarianism, tech enabled, I could well imagine that being in our future. But in terms of a desirable future where we realize that we have converged so fully on our cultural priorities that we're just gonna un-Brexit the whole world because it's just obviously good and we really trust our brothers and sisters over there in Belgium and Congo and just everywhere else. I mean, it's just, it's not gonna happen in the lifetime of our children or their children or any of their robots. I just don't see it the impossible.

**Jaron** (4:23)
You really think there's just no version where AI comes up with all the best answers and we've all just gathered around and said, oh my God, this is just, this is not comparable.