Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content
Sam Harris
Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events. Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live. Harris's work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere. Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Oct 2, 2019 • 1h 32min
#170 - The Great Uncoupling
Sam Harris speaks with Andrew McAfee about the history of human progress and the modern uncoupling of our prosperity from resource consumption. They discuss the pitfalls and hidden virtues of capitalism, technological progress, environmental policy, the future of the developing world, and other topics.
Andrew McAfee is Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and he was previously a professor at Harvard Business School. Andrew studies how digital technologies are changing the world. He has written several books on this topic including The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future, both coauthored with Erik Brynjolfsson. His latest book is titled More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next.
Website: andrewmcafee.org
Twitter: @amcafee
Sep 20, 2019 • 1h 33min
#169 - Omens of a Race War
Sam Harris speaks with Kathleen Belew about the white power movement in the United States. They discuss white supremacy, white nationalism, white separatism, the militia movement, “The Turner Diaries,” the connection between the white power movement and war, the significance of Ruby Ridge and Waco, the Christian Identity movement, the significance of “leaderless resistance,” the failures of the justice system in prosecuting white power crimes, and other topics.
Kathleen Belew is a historian and the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. She is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. Kathleen specializes in the recent history of the United States, examining the long aftermath of warfare.
Website: www.kathleenbelew.com
Twitter: @kathleen_belew
Sep 10, 2019 • 1h 26min
#168 - Mind, Space, & Motion
Sam Harris speaks with Barbara Tversky about how our senses of space and motion underlie our capacity for thought. They discuss the evolution of mind prior to language, the importance of imitation and gesture, the sensory and motor homunculi, the information communicated by motion, the role of “mirror neurons,” sense of direction, natural and unnatural categories, cognitive trade-offs, and other topics.
Barbara Tversky is a professor emerita of Psychology at Stanford University and a Professor of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Experimental Psychology. Barbara has published more than 200 scholarly articles about memory, spatial thinking, design, and creativity. She is the author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought.
Aug 26, 2019 • 41min
#167 - A Few Thoughts on White Supremacy
Sam Harris addresses listener concerns that he uses a “double standard” to evaluate the relative threats of white supremacy and jihadism.
Aug 21, 2019 • 1h 4min
#166 - The Plague Years
Sam Harris speaks with Matt McCarthy about his book Superbugs: The Race to Stop an Epidemic. They discuss the problem of drug resistant bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses, and the failure of the pharmaceutical industry to keep pace with evolution.
Matt McCarthy, MD, is an infectious disease physician and assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell. His writing has appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, Sports Illustrated, Slate, and other journals. He is the author of Superbugs: The Race to Stop an Epidemic, The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly, and Odd Man Out.
Website: drmattmccarthy.com
Twitter: @DrMattMcCarthy
Aug 13, 2019 • 2h 15min
#165 - Journey into Wokeness
Sam Harris discusses controversies, feminism contradictions, MeToo, new sexuality norms, wokeness in academia, affirmative action, college admissions, HR departments, sexual harassment, and more with Caitlin Flanagan, contributing editor for The Atlantic and former staff writer for The New Yorker.
Aug 5, 2019 • 1h 54min
#164 - Cause & Effect
Sam Harris speaks with Judea Pearl about his work on the mathematics of causality and artificial intelligence. They discuss how science has generally failed to understand causation, different levels of causal inference, counterfactuals, the foundations of knowledge, the nature of possibility, the illusion of free will, artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, and other topics.
Judea Pearl is a computer scientist and philosopher, known for his work in AI and the development of Bayesian networks, as well as his theory of causal and counterfactual inference. He is a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. In 2011, he was awarded with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science. He is the author of The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (coauthored with Dana McKenzie) among other titles.
Twitter: @yudapearl
Jul 12, 2019 • 2h 11min
#163 - Ricky Gervais
Sam Harris speaks with Ricky Gervais. They discuss fame, the effect of social media, the changing state of comedy, offensive jokes, Louis CK, political hypocrisy, Brexit and Trump, the state of journalism, and other topics.
Ricky Gervais is a stand-up comedian, actor, director, and screenwriter. He co-created and starred in the BBC mock documentary series The Office and the sitcom series Extras. His recent projects include the show After Life and the stand-up comedy special Humanity, both released on Netflix. He is currently working on another comedy special for Netflix called Supernature.
Website: rickygervais.com
Twitter: @rickygervais
Jul 3, 2019 • 1h 20min
#162 - Medical Intelligence
Sam Harris speaks with Eric Topol about the way artificial intelligence can improve medicine. They talk about soaring medical costs and declining health outcomes in the U.S., the problems of too little and too much medicine, the culture of medicine, the travesty of electronic health records, the current status of AI in medicine, the promise of further breakthroughs, possible downsides of relying on AI in medicine, and other topics.
Eric Topol, MD, is a world-renowned cardiologist, Executive Vice-President of Scripps Research, the founder of a new medical school and one of the top ten most cited medical researchers. He is the author of The Patient Will See You Now, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again.
Website: drerictopol.com
Twitter: @EricTopol
Jun 24, 2019 • 1h 28min
#161 - Rise & Fall
Sam Harris speaks with Jared Diamond about the rise and fall of civilizations. They discuss political polarization, disparities in civilizational progress, the prospect that there may be biological differences between populations, the precariousness of democracy in the US, the lack of a strong political center, immigration policy, and other topics.
Jared Diamond is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among his many awards are the U.S. National Medal of Science, Japan’s Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of the international best-selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse; Why Is Sex Fun?; The World until Yesterday, and The Third Chimpanzee. He is also the presenter of a TV documentary series based on three of those books. His newest book is Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.
Website: jareddiamond.org
