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
Sep 5, 2017 • 2h 4min
#95 - What You Need to Know About Climate Change
Joseph Romm is one of the country’s leading communicators on climate science and solutions. He was Chief Science Advisor for “Years of Living Dangerously,” which won the 2014 Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Series. He is the founding editor of Climate Progress, which Tom Friedman of the New York Times called “the indispensable blog.” In 2009, Time named him one of its “Heroes of the Environment,” and Rolling Stone put him on its list of 100 “people who are reinventing America.” Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in low-carbon technology development and deployment. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. He is the author of Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know.
Aug 29, 2017 • 1h 25min
#94 - Frontiers of Intelligence
Max Tegmark, MIT physics professor and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, dives into the intriguing relationship between artificial intelligence and humanity. He discusses the societal risks of advanced AI, highlighting the importance of aligning technology with human values. Tegmark redefines life, emphasizing information processing over biology, and explores the ethics of creating conscious machines. He also addresses the future of work impacted by automation, advocating for proactive conversations about creativity and wealth distribution in an AI-driven world.
Aug 21, 2017 • 1h 27min
#93 - Identity & Terror
Douglas Murray is Associate Editor of the Spectator and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Sunday Times, Standpoint and the Wall Street Journal. He has also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments and at the White House. He is the author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.
Aug 16, 2017 • 2h 21min
#92 - The Limits of Persuasion
David Pizarro is an associate professor in the department of psychology at Cornell University. His research focuses on how and why humans make moral judgments (such as what makes us think certain actions are wrong, or that some people deserve blame or praise for their actions). He’s also interested in how emotions—especially disgust—influence a wide variety of social, political, and moral judgments.
Tamler Sommers is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. He teaches primarily in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law, specializing in issues relating to free will, moral responsibility, punishment, and revenge.
Pizarro and Sommers host the Very Bad Wizards Podcast.
Aug 9, 2017 • 1h 38min
#91 - The Biology of Good and Evil
Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about the brain and human behavior. They discuss the relationship between reason and emotion, the role of the frontal cortex, the illusion of free will, punishment and retributive justice, neurological disorders and abnormal behavior, the relationship between science and religion, and other topics.
Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. He is the author of A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
Episodes that have been re-released as part of the Best of Making Sense series may have been edited for relevance since their original airing.
Aug 6, 2017 • 2h 14min
#90 - Living With Violence
Sam Harris speaks with Gavin de Becker about the primacy of human intuition in the prediction and prevention of violence, the value of crime statistics, self-defense, stalkers and assassinations, guns, and other topics.
Gavin de Becker is a three-time presidential appointee whose pioneering work has changed the way the U.S. government evaluates threats to its highest officials. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on the prediction and management of violence. His firm, Gavin de Becker and Associates, advises many of the world’s most prominent media figures, corporations, and law enforcement agencies on predicting violence, and it also serves regular citizens who are victims of domestic abuse and stalking. Gavin is the author of #1 New York Times bestseller The Gift of Fear.
Episodes that have been re-released as part of the Best of Making Sense series may have been edited for relevance since their original airing.
Jul 25, 2017 • 53min
#89 - On Becoming a Better Person
David Brooks is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and appears regularly on the PBS NewsHour and Meet the Press. He is the bestselling author of The Social Animal, Bobos in Paradise, and The Road to Character.
Twitter: @nytdavidbrooks
Jul 21, 2017 • 1h 8min
#88 - Must We Accept a Nuclear North Korea?
Mark Bowden is the author of thirteen books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Black Hawk Down. He reported at the Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty years and now writes for the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and other magazines. He is also the writer in residence at the University of Delaware. His most recent book is Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.
Article: “How to Deal with North Korea.” The Atlantic. (July/August, 2017).
Jul 18, 2017 • 2h 17min
#87 - Triggered
Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular comic strips of all time. He has been a full-time cartoonist since 1995, after 16 years as a technology worker for companies like Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell. His many bestsellers include The Dilbert Principle, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook, and How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. His forthcoming book is Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.
Jul 14, 2017 • 2h 4min
#86 - From Cells to Cities
Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology. He is a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he served as the president from 2005-2009. In 2006 he was named to Time’s list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” He is the author of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.
