This Is What a Modern American Civil War Would Look Like (feat. Stephen Marche)

Sam Harris October 31, 2025
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Sam Harris

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Sam Harris is the host of the widely acclaimed Making Sense podcast and the creator of the Waking Up app, which offers a modern approach to living a more examined life through in-depth mindfulness training and secular wisdom. He is also a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times bestsellers, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up. Sam’s work spans a broad range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, political polarization, rationality—but generally focuses on how a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world can transform the way we live. Sam has practiced meditation for over 30 years, studying with Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western teachers in both the United States and abroad. He holds a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

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You can watch the full episode—and all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast—on YouTube by becoming a channel member here: https://www.youtube.com/@samharrisorg/join You can also subscribe at samharris.org/subscribe. There, you'll get access to full-length episodes of the podcast, and Sam's Substack, where you can engage with the Making Sense community. We offer partial scholarships for those who cannot afford the full subscription price. Sam Harris speaks with Stephen Marche about his book The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future. They discuss tensions between the United States and Canada, what a modern American civil war might actually look like, the key risk factors for a civil war, diversity and immigration, extremism on the right and the left, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the assassination attempts on President Trump, conspiracy theories, how a civil war might be avoided, the possibility of secession, and other topics. Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist, and the author of On Writing and Failure and The Next Civil War, among many other works. He has written features and essays for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Walrus. He collaborated with artificial intelligence on the first AI-generated novel reviewed in The New York Times, Death of an Author. His most recent novel, The Last Election, was co-written with Andrew Yang. Website: stephenmarche.com X: @stephenmarche Become a channel member for full-length episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@samharrisorg/join Subscribe to the YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=samharrisorg Follow Sam on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samharrisorg/ Follow Sam on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Samharrisorg/ For more information about Sam Harris: https://www.samharris.org