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Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/390-final-thoughts-on-the-2024-presidential-election Sam Harris speaks with Mark Cuban about the 2024 presidential election. They discuss Trump’s ethics, his apparent political indestructibility, election denialism, the influence of Elon Musk, the strengths and weaknesses of the Harris campaign, the mystery of the southern border, Trump’s immigration and deportation policies, Elon’s trafficking in the “great replacement theory,” Trump’s economic policy, Harris’s tax and healthcare proposals, the effect of tariffs, the US supply chain, the problem of wealth inequality, a proposed tax on unrealized capital gains, support for Israel, a return to normal politics, and other topics. Mark Cuban is an entrepreneur and investor. He is also known for his role in the television series Shark Tank and his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks. He has been an outspoken supporter of the Harris campaign. Twitter: @mcuban   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/389-the-politics-of-risk Sam Harris speaks with Nate Silver about cultural attitudes toward risk and the state of American politics. They discuss the erosion of trust in liberal institutions, polling and political narratives, different camps of cultural elites, the influence of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of FTX, Gell-Mann amnesia, Christopher Rufo, why Kamala Harris can’t admit to having changed her views, a problem with strict utilitarianism, AI and existential risk, what people misunderstand about election forecasting, which news events have affected the 2024 race, how current polls might be misleading, public vs. private polling, undecided and marginal voters, Gen Z, the gender divide, the likelihood that Trump won’t accept the election results if he loses, election integrity in the swing states, the chance of a landslide, the prospect of public unrest, and other topics. Nate Silver is a statistician, writer, and poker player. He is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of the New York Times best sellers The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't and On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. He writes the Substack Silver Bulletin. Twitter: @NateSilver538   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/388-what-is-life Sam Harris speaks with Sara Imari Walker about a scientific understanding of life. They discuss the contributions of physics to this topic, Erwin Schrödinger, the inadequacy of standard definitions of life, the prospect of "artificial" life, the role of information, constructor theory, assembly theory, the space of all possible structures, a "block universe," the existence of abstract objects like numbers, the Fermi paradox, the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe, experiments that could decide how likely life is to emerge, the possibility of a Great Filter, the number of Earth-like worlds, and other topics. Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. She is the deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She is also a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is a recipient of the Stanley L. Miller Early-Career Award for her research on the origin of life, and her research team at ASU is internationally regarded as being among the leading labs aiming to build a fundamental theory for understanding what life is. Her research has been featured in Scientific American, Quanta Magazine, and a variety of other international outlets. Her book, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence, is available now. Website: https://search.asu.edu/profile/1731899 Twitter: @Sara_Imari   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/387-politics-power Sam Harris speaks with Ambassador Rahm Emanuel about the state of world order and American politics. They discuss the mystery of Japan’s economic health, U.S. competition with China, possible conflict over Taiwan and the Philippines, the significance of the South China Sea, the history of the Japan-U.S. friendship, how the Democratic Party lost its way, immigration, whether Vice President Harris needs a “Sister Souljah moment,” whether she should explain her changes of position better than she has, the standing of Israel in the eyes of the world, antisemitism, the Abraham Accords, Hamas, the West Bank, the influence of the religious right in Israel, a possible war with Iran, Netanyahu and Israeli security, a two-state solution, whether a Harris administration would reliably support Israel, and other topics. Rahm Emanuel is currently the U.S. ambassador to Japan. He was a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton before being elected to represent Illinois in the House of Representatives in 2003. He was also President Barack Obama’s chief of staff from 2009 to 2010. In 2011, he was elected mayor of Chicago, where he served until 2019. Twitter: @RahmEmanuel, @USAmbJapan    Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/386-information-social-order Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about his new book, Nexus, and its application to current crises. They discuss humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, democracy and dictatorship as information networks, the “naive view of information,” the advantages of fiction over truth, trust in institutions, self-correction in a democracy, truth vs. power, truth vs. order, the suicide of conservatism, fixing social media, algorithms as editorial choices, efficiency vs. inefficiency, threats to democracy, the authoritarian character of Trump’s candidacy, the need for patriotism and nationalism, Israeli politics, the peaceful transfer of power, Putin and the war in Ukraine, the vulnerability of world order, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, antisemitism and anti-colonialism, religious fanaticism among Israelis, the status of Arabs in Israeli society, biblical and post-biblical Judaism, whether a wider war in the Middle East is necessary, the danger of spirituality without ethics, and other topics. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us, and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. His books have sold over 45 million copies in 65 languages, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today. Website: https://www.ynharari.com/ Twitter: @harari_yuval   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/385-ai-utopia Sam Harris speaks with Nick Bostrom about ongoing progress in artificial intelligence. They discuss the twin concerns about the failure of alignment and the failure to make progress, why smart people don’t perceive the risk of superintelligent AI, the governance risk, path dependence and "knotty problems," the idea of a solved world, Keynes’s predictions about human productivity, the uncanny valley of utopia, the replacement of human labor and other activities, meaning and purpose, digital isolation and plugging into something like the Matrix, pure hedonism, the asymmetry between pleasure and pain, increasingly subtle distinctions in experience, artificial purpose, altering human values at the level of the brain, ethical changes in the absence of extreme suffering, our cosmic endowment, longtermism, problems with consequentialism, the ethical conundrum of dealing with small probabilities of large outcomes, and other topics. Nick Bostrom is a professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He is the author of more than 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which sparked the global conversation about the future of AI. His work has framed much of the current thinking around humanity’s future (such as the concept of existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, astronomical waste, and the unilateralist’s curse). He has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice, and was the youngest person to rank among the top 15 in Prospect’s World Thinkers list. He has an academic background in theoretical physics, AI, computational neuroscience, and philosophy. His most recent book is Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World. Website: https://nickbostrom.com/   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/384-stress-testing-our-democracy Sam Harris speaks with Barton Gellman about election integrity and the safeguarding of American democracy. They discuss the war games he's run to test our response to an authoritarian president, using federal troops against American citizens, the difference between laws and norms, state powers to resist the federal government, voter identification and election integrity, political control over election certifications, the Bush-Gore election, the Electoral Count Reform Act, the prospect of public unrest after the November election, January 6th, George Soros, the "good people on both sides" calumny against Trump, what happens to Trump and Trumpism if Harris wins in November, the presidential debate with Harris, the authoritarian potential of a second Trump term, Project 2025, and other topics. Barton Gellman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. He currently serves as Senior Advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Atlantic and The Washington Post. He is the author of Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State and Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, for which he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.  Website: bartongellman.com Twitter: @bartongellman   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/383-where-are-the-grown-ups Sam Harris talks about the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the cesspool of X, Tucker Carlson’s conversation with Darryl Cooper, freedom of speech, and other topics.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/382-the-eye-of-nature Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins about his new book The Genetic Book of the Dead, the genome as a palimpsest, what scientists of the future may do with genetic information, genotypes and phenotypes, embryology and epigenetics, why the Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics couldn't be true, how environmental selection pressure works, why evolution is hard to think about, human dependence on material culture, the future of genetic enhancement of human beings, viral DNA, symbiotic bacteria, AI and the future of scholarship, resurrecting extinct species, the problem of free speech in the UK, the problem of political Islam and antisemitism in the UK, reflections on Dan Dennett, and other topics. Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and a best-selling author. He is celebrated globally for his unwavering critique of religion and his commitment to critical thinking. His books include The Ancestor’s Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth, The Magic of Reality, his two-part autobiography An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark, and Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide. His final book tour, “An Evening with Richard Dawkins,” is currently underway. Website: richarddawkinstour.com Twitter: @RichardDawkins   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/381-delusions-right-and-left Sam Harris speaks with “Destiny” (Steven Bonnell) about politics and public debate. They discuss how he approaches debate, “Trump derangement syndrome,” January 6th, why Trump’s norm violations don’t matter to many people, misadventures on the information landscape, social media and the problem of being too online, Islam and conflict in the Middle East, the difference between the far left and the far right, the lack of sane conservative policies to counterbalance the left, whether the pendulum is swinging back on the left, the ethics and politics of apology, private friendships and public disagreements, and other topics. Steven Bonnell, otherwise known as Destiny, is a YouTuber and political streamer. His commentary on politics and culture has made him almost ubiquitous online, where he stirs up controversy on both the right and the left. He grew up in a conservative Catholic household, and now spends much of his time arguing against American conservatism. He’s debated many controversial figures, such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. Website: www.destiny.gg Twitter: @TheOmniLiberal   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/380-the-roots-of-attention Sam Harris speaks with Amishi Jha about attention and the brain. They discuss how attention is studied, the failure of brain-training games, the relationship between attention and awareness, mindfulness as an intrinsic mental capacity, the neurological implications of different types of meditation, the neural correlates of attention and distraction, the prospects of self-transcendence, the link between thought and emotion, the difference between dualistic and nondualistic mindfulness, studying nondual awareness in the lab, the influence of smartphones, the value of mind wandering, and other topics. Dr. Amishi Jha, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she cofounded in 2010. She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and did postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Her work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and the Pentagon, and she’s been covered in The New York Times, NPR, Time magazine, and Forbes. With grants from the Department of Defense and several private foundations, she leads research on the neural bases of attention and the effects of mindfulness-based training programs on cognition, emotion, resilience, and performance. Dr. Jha’s national bestseller, Peak Mind, describes her work with a variety of high-demand groups, from special forces, elite athletes, and first responders, to teachers, business and medical professionals, and students. Her forthcoming app, Pushups for the Mind, will be available to U.S. military service members in the fall of 2024, and for public release in early 2025. Website: https://amishi.com/ Twitter: @amishijha   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/379-regulating-artificial-intelligence Sam Harris speaks with Yoshua Bengio and Scott Wiener about AI risk and the new bill introduced in California intended to mitigate it. They discuss the controversy over regulating AI and the assumptions that lead people to discount the danger of an AI arms race. Yoshua Bengio is full professor at Université de Montréal and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila - Quebec AI Institute. Considered one of the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence and deep learning, he is the recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, known as the Nobel Prize of computing. He is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, a member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology, and Chair of the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI. Website: https://yoshuabengio.org/   Scott Wiener has represented San Francisco in the California Senate since 2016. He recently introduced SB 1047, a bill aiming to reduce the risks of frontier models of AI. He has also authored landmark laws to, among other things, streamline the permitting of new homes, require insurance plans to cover mental health care, guarantee net neutrality, eliminate mandatory minimums in sentencing, require billion-dollar corporations to disclose their climate emissions, and declare California a sanctuary state for LGBTQ youth. He has lived in San Francisco's historically LGBTQ Castro neighborhood since 1997. Twitter: @Scott_Wiener   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/378-digital-delusions Sam Harris speaks with Renée DiResta about the state of our information landscape. They discuss the difference between influence and propaganda, shifts in communication technology, influencers and closed communities, the asymmetry of passion online and the illusion of consensus, the unwillingness to criticize one's own side, audience capture, what we should have learned from the Covid pandemic, what is unique about vaccines, Renée's work at the Stanford Internet Observatory, her experience of being smeared by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, Elon Musk and the Twitter files, the false analogy of social media as a digital public square, the imagined "censorship-industrial complex," the 2024 presidential election, and other topics. Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. Her work focuses on adversarial abuse online, including child safety issues, spammers and scammers, and influence campaigns run by state actors. From 2019 to 2023, she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Renée has advised Congress and the executive branch, as well as academic, civic, and business organizations on technology policy and trust & safety topics, including information operations, generative AI, election security, data transparency, and child safety. Website: reneediresta.com   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/377-the-future-of-psychedelic-medicine Sam Harris speaks with Dr. Jennifer Mitchell and Dr. Sarah Abedi about recent developments in research on psychedelics. They discuss the history of this research and the war on drugs, recent setbacks in the FDA approval process, MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the challenges of conducting this research, allegations of therapist misconduct, new therapeutic models for mental health treatment, psychoneuroimmunology, "non-psychedelic" psychedelics, good and bad trips, the FDA's coming decision on MDMA-assisted therapy, "right-to-try" policies for pharmaceuticals, the role of psychedelic therapists, the problem of having all this therapeutic work being done underground, and other topics. Petition to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD: https://www.approvemdmatherapy.com/ Dr. Jennifer Mitchell is a professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and Associate Chief of Staff for Research and Development at the San Francisco VA. Her research focuses on identifying and developing novel therapeutics for drug and alcohol abuse, PTSD, stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as on understanding the neural mechanisms responsible for these disorders. Dr. Mitchell has extensive and diverse experience with human and animal pharmacology, hypothesis-driven neuroscience, human proof-of-concept studies, and clinical trials. For the past few years, her work has centered around the development of psychedelic medicines for a broad range of mental health conditions, including PTSD. Website: https://profiles.ucsf.edu/jennifer.mitchell   Dr. Sarah Abedi is a board-certified emergency medicine physician and psychedelic facilitator for clinical trials. She has worked as a psychedelic facilitator at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute and is set to join the psilocybin and mindfulness study at the USC Center for Mindfulness Science. She works on policy change to expand funding for mental health research. She served as Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Campaign Manager for TREAT California, a citizen-driven ballot initiative aimed at establishing a $5 billion funding agency to explore novel therapeutics, including psychedelics. Currently, Dr. Abedi is the Chief Medical Officer of TREAT Humanity, an organization dedicated to advancing the research of mental health therapeutics, including psychedelics, through enhanced funding mechanisms. Website: www.sarahabedimd.com   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/376-how-democracies-fail Sam Harris and Anne Applebaum discuss the nature of modern autocracies and how democracies fail. They discuss the power of ideas, why autocracies seek to undermine democracies, cooperation among dictators, how Western financial experts and investors have enabled autocracies, how Putin came to power, the failure of engagement and investment to create political change, what’s at stake in the war in Ukraine, Trump’s charisma, the current symptoms of American democratic decline, the ideologues around Trump, the hollowing out of institutions, how things might unravel in America, anti-liberal tendencies in American politics, the role of social media, the different pathologies on the Left and Right, analogies to Vichy France, the weakness of the Democrats, the political effects of the assassination attempt on former President Trump, and other topics. Anne Applebaum is a historian, journalist, and staff writer at The Atlantic. She was a columnist for The Washington Post for 17 years. She is the author of five critically acclaimed books: Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington D.C. Her newest book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.  Website: anneapplebaum.com Twitter: @anneapplebaum

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/375-on-the-attempted-assassination-of-president-trump

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/374-consciousness-and-the-physical-world Sam Harris speaks with Christof Koch about the nature of consciousness. They discuss Christof’s development as a neuroscientist, his collaboration with Francis Crick, change blindness and binocular rivalry, sleep and anesthesia, the limits of physicalism, non-locality, brains as classical systems, conscious AI, idealism and panpsychism, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), what it means to say something “exists,” the illusion of the self, brain bridging, Christof’s experience with psychedelics, and other topics. Christof Koch is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. He is the former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and a former professor at the California Institute of Technology. He writes regularly for Scientific American and is the author of five books, most recently Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. Website: https://christofkoch.com/   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/373-anti-zionism-is-antisemitism Sam Harris speaks with Michal Cotler-Wunsh about the global rise of antisemitism. They discuss the bias against Israel at the United Nations, the nature of double standards, the precedent set by Israel in its conduct in the war in Gaza, the shapeshifting quality of antisemitism, anti-Zionism as the newest strain of Jew hatred, the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the U.N., the lie that Israel is an apartheid state, the notion that Israel is perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, the Marxist oppressed-oppressor narrative, the false moral equivalence between the atrocities committed by Hamas and the deaths of noncombatants in Gaza, the failure of the social justice movement to respond appropriately to events in Israel, what universities should have done after October 7th, reclaiming the meanings of words, extremism vs civilization, and other topics. Michal Cotler-Wunsh is Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism. She is a prominent public speaker, author, researcher, and independent policy and strategy advisor on intersecting issues of antisemitism, law, human rights, and Zionism. Michal was a member of Israel’s 23rd Knesset, where she chaired the Addictions Committee & Subcommittee for Israel-Diaspora Relations, was a member of the Foreign Affairs & Security, Constitution, and Law & Justice committees, and co-founded the Interparliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism. Michal is a Trustee in the Rabbi Sacks Legacy. Twitter: @cotlerwunsh

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/372-life-work Sam Harris speaks with George Saunders about his creative process. They discuss George’s involvement with Buddhism, the importance of kindness, psychedelics, writing as a practice, the work of Raymond Carver, the problem of social media, our current political moment, the role of fame in American culture, Wendell Berry, fiction as way of exploring good and evil, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, missed opportunities in ordinary life, what it means to be a more loving person, his article “The Incredible Buddha Boy,” the prison of reputation, Tolstoy, and other topics. George Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and raised in Chicago. He is the author of twelve books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Booker Prize for the best work of fiction in English, and Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book about the Russian short story. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He has taught in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University since 1997. Website: https://georgesaundersbooks.com/about-george-saunders   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/371-what-the-hell-is-happening Sam Harris speaks to Bill Maher about the state of the world. They discuss the aftermath of October 7th, the cowardice and confusion of many celebrities, gender apartheid, the failures of the Biden campaign, Bill’s relationship to his audience, the differences between the left and right, Megyn Kelly, loss of confidence in the media, expectations for the 2024 election, the security concerns of old-school Republicans, the prospect of a second Trump term, totalitarian regimes, functioning under medical uncertainty, Bill’s plan to stop doing stand-up (maybe), looking back on his career, his experience of fame, Jerry Seinfeld, and other topics. Bill Maher has been on TV for 30 years. His new book What This Comedian Said Will Shock You reached number one on the NYT bestseller list. Watch his podcast Club Random on YouTube or listen everywhere. Website: billmaher.com Twitter: @billmaher   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/370-gender-apartheid-and-the-future-of-iran In today’s housekeeping, Sam explains his digital business model. He and Yasmine Mohammed (co-host) then speak with Masih Alinejad about gender apartheid in Iran. They discuss the Iranian revolution, the hypocrisy of Western feminists, the morality police and the significance of the hijab, the My Stealthy Freedom campaign, kidnapping and assassination plots against Masih, lack of action from the U.S. government, the effect of sanctions, the cowardice of Western journalists, the difference between the Iranian population and the Arab street, the unique perspective of Persian Jews, Islamism and immigration, the infiltration of universities, and other topics. Yasmine Mohammed is the founder and president of Free Hearts Free Minds, a nonprofit charity that provides mental health support for freethinkers living in Muslim-majority countries—where the 'crime' of renouncing religion can be punished by execution. ​Her book, Unveiled, is a memoir that recalls her experiences growing up in a fundamentalist Islamic household and her arranged marriage to a member of Al-Qaeda. In it, she sheds light on the religious trauma that so many women are still unable to discuss. Unveiled has been translated into fifteen languages so far, including German, Finnish, Catalan, Swedish, French, Farsi, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, and Italian. Copies of her book in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Indonesian can be accessed here for free, courtesy of The Richard Dawkins Foundation. She is also the host of the Yasmine Mohammed Podcast, where she has conversations with inspirational people from restrictive religious or cult backgrounds who have fought and overcome. Website: www.yasminemohammed.com Twitter: @yasmohammedxx   Masih Alinejad is an Iranian-American journalist, a women’s rights campaigner, and the author of the best-selling memoir The Wind in My Hair. In 2023, TIME named Alinejad one of the Women of the Year, and she was elected President of the World Liberty Congress. She is one of the most prominent and vocal figures challenging the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2014, she launched the My Stealthy Freedom campaign against compulsory hijab, which became the largest civil disobedience movement in the history of the Islamic Republic. Today, Masih continues to write and host Tablet, a satirical weekly show on VOA, and is campaigning to #EndGenderApartheid in Iran and Afghanistan. Website: https://worldlibertycongress.org/ Twitter: @AlinejadMasih

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/369-escaping-death Sam Harris speaks with Sebastian Junger about danger and death. They discuss Sebastian's career as a journalist in war zones, the connection between danger and meaning, his experience of nearly dying from a burst aneurysm in his abdomen, his lingering trauma, the concept of "awe," psychedelics, near-death experiences, atheism, psychic phenomena, consciousness and the brain, and other topics. Sebastian Junger is the New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, and co-director of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting. His most recent book is In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Website: https://www.sebastianjunger.com/ Twitter: @sebastianjunger   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/368-freedom-censorship Sam Harris speaks with Greg Lukianoff about free speech and cancel culture. They discuss the origins of political correctness, free speech and its boundaries, the bedrock principle of the First Amendment, technology and the marketplace of ideas, epistemic anarchy, social media and cancellation, comparisons to McCarthyism, self-censorship by professors, cancellation from the Left and Right, justified cancellations, the Hunter Biden laptop story, how to deal with Trump in the media, the state of higher education in America, and other topics. Greg Lukianoff is the President & CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He earned his undergraduate degree from American University and his law degree from Stanford, and he worked for the ACLU of Northern California and other organizations before joining FIRE in 2001. He is one of America’s most passionate defenders of free speech. He has written about the issue in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He also co-wrote The Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt and, most recently, The Canceling of the American Mind with Rikki Schlott. Website: http://thefire.org, https://greglukianoff.substack.com/ Twitter: @glukianoff   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/367-campus-protests-antisemitism-and-western-values Sam Harris discusses the recent protests on college campuses, why focusing narrowly on the problem of "antisemitism" will be counterproductive, widespread confusion about the threat of Islamic extremism, and the necessary defense of Western values. A transcript of this podcast is available on Sam’s blog.   Image: Probal Rashid/Sipa USA via AP

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/366-urban-warfare-2-0 Sam Harris speaks with John Spencer about the reality of urban warfare and Israel's conduct in the war in Gaza. They discuss the nature of the Hamas attacks on October 7th, what was most surprising about the Hamas videos, the difficulty in distinguishing Hamas from the rest of the population, combatants as a reflection of a society's values, how many people have been killed in Gaza, the proportion of combatants and noncombatants, the double standards to which the IDF is held, the worst criticism that can be made of Israel and the IDF, intentions vs results, what is unique about the war in Gaza, Hamas's use of human shields, what it would mean to defeat Hamas, what the IDF has accomplished so far, the destruction of the Gaza tunnel system, the details of underground warfare, the rescue of hostages, how noncombatants become combatants, how difficult it is to interpret videos of combat, what victory would look like, the likely aftermath of the war, war with Hezbollah, Iran's attack on Israel, what to do about Iran, and other topics. John Spencer is an award-winning scholar, professor, author, and combat veteran. He currently serves as the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, Co-Director of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He is also a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare. John served 25 years in the U.S. Army, having held ranks from Private to Sergeant First Class and Second Lieutenant to Major. He was an active duty Army officer during two combat tours in Iraq.  His research focuses on military operations in dense urban areas, megacities, and urban and subterranean warfare. Spencer holds a Master of Policy Management from Georgetown University, and his writings have appeared in the Time magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many other publications. He is considered one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare and has served as an advisor to everyone from top four-star generals to world leaders. He is the coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare. Website: www.johnspenceronline.com Twitter: @SpencerGuard   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/365-reality-check Sam Harris begins by remembering his friendship with Dan Dennett. He then speaks with David Wallace-Wells about the shattering of our information landscape. They discuss the false picture of reality produced during Covid, the success of the vaccines, how various countries fared during the pandemic, our preparation for a future pandemic, how we normalize danger and death, the current global consensus on climate change, the amount of warming we can expect, the consequence of a 2-degree Celsius warming, the effects of air pollution, global vs local considerations, Greta Thunberg and climate catastrophism, growth vs degrowth, market forces, carbon taxes, the consequences of political stagnation, the US national debt, the best way to attack the candidacy of Donald Trump, and other topics. David Wallace-Wells is a best-selling science writer and essayist who focuses on climate change, technology, and the future of the planet and how we live on it. David has been a National Fellow with the New America Foundation, a columnist and deputy editor of the New York Magazine, and was previously at The Paris Review. Currently, David is a writer for The New York Times and a columnist for the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. Twitter: @dwallacewells   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/364-facts-values Sam Harris revisits the central argument he made in his book, The Moral Landscape, about the reality of moral truth. He discusses the way concepts like “good” and “evil” can be thought about objectively, the primacy of our intuitions of truth and falsity, and the unity of knowledge. A transcript of this podcast is available on Sam’s blog.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/363-knowledge-work Sam Harris speaks with Cal Newport about our use of information technology and the cult of productivity. They discuss the state of social media, the "academic-in-exile effect," free speech and moderation, the effect of the pandemic on knowledge work, slow productivity, the example of Jane Austen, managing up in an organization, defragmenting one's work life, doing fewer things, reasonable deadlines, trading money for time, finding meaning in a post-scarcity world, the anti-work movement, the effects of artificial intelligence on knowledge work, and other topics. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His most recent book is called Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. Newport lives with his wife and three sons in Takoma Park, Maryland. Website: https://calnewport.com/   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/362-six-months-of-war Sam Harris and Josh Szeps (episode co-host) speak with Douglas Murray about the ongoing war in Gaza. They discuss public opinion about the war, the prospect of a widening conflict with Hezbollah and Iran, whether the Iron Dome was a mistake, the sentiments of Israeli Arabs, the global problem of Islamism, the risk of a resurgent right-wing in Europe, the crisis at the southern border in the US, and other topics. Douglas Murray is the associate editor of The Spectator and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and The Sun. He has also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments and at the White House. He is the author of several books including The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, The Madness of Crowds, and most recently, The War on the West. Website: https://douglasmurray.net/ Twitter: @DouglasKMurray   Josh Szeps is an independent journalist. In New York City he was a founding host of HuffPost Live, the multi-award-winning streaming talk network, where he hosted thousands of hours of live TV with the world’s biggest names. In his native Australia, he hosted a national morning television show and had a talk radio show on the public broadcaster, ABC Radio. Josh left legacy media to focus on having bullshit-free conversations about provocative issues on his own platform, Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps, a podcast, live events operation, and YouTube channel. Website: https://bit.ly/UC_substack Twitter: @joshzepps   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/361-sam-bankman-fried-effective-altruism Sam Harris speaks with William MacAskill about the implosion of FTX and the effect that it has had on the Effective Altruism movement. They discuss the logic of “earning to give,” the mind of SBF, his philanthropy, the character of the EA community, potential problems with focusing on long-term outcomes, AI risk, the effects of the FTX collapse on Will personally, and other topics. William MacAskill is an associate professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University, and author of Doing Good Better, Moral Uncertainty, and What We Owe The Future. He cofounded the nonprofits 80,000 Hours, Centre for Effective Altruism, and Giving What We Can, and helped to launch the effective altruism movement, which encourages people to use their time and money to support the projects that are most effectively making the world a better place.  Website: ​​www.williammacaskill.com Twitter: @willmacaskill   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/360-we-really-dont-have-free-will Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about the widespread belief in free will. They discuss the limits of intuition, the views of Dan Dennett, complexity and emergence, downward causation, abstraction, epigenetics, predictability, fatalism, Benjamin Libet, the primacy of luck, historical change in attitudes about free will, implications for ethics and criminal justice, the psychological satisfaction of punishing bad people, understanding evil, punishment and reward as tools, meritocracy, the consequences of physical beauty, the logic of reasoning, and other topics. Robert M. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and most recently, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. His book titled Behave was a New York Times bestseller and named a best book of the year by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. He is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” He and his wife live in San Francisco.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/359-getting-used-to-it Sam Harris speaks with Cass Sunstein about habituation and its consequences. They discuss habituation to positive and negative experiences, marriage, happiness, meaning, variety, doing good vs feeling good, midlife crises, kids, wealth and happiness, things vs experience, the “illusory truth effect,” misinformation and social media, echo chambers and extremism, what governments can do to respond to misinformation, free speech on college campuses, the 2024 Presidential election, and other topics. Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Nudge (with Richard Thaler), #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, Too Much Information, Noise (with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony), and most recently Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There (with Tali Sharot). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, fake news, and freedom of speech. Website: https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/cass-r-sunstein/ Twitter: @CassSunstein   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/358-the-war-in-ukraine Sam Harris speaks with Yaroslav Trofimov about the War in Ukraine. They discuss the widespread false assumptions that Russia would win a swift victory, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia, the transformation of the Ukrainian military, Russian incompetence, Russian public opinion, the Azov Battalion and the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine, the role of the Orthodox Church, conspiracy thinking and Russian propaganda, Putin’s popularity on the Right, NATO membership, the Minsk 2 agreement, alleged failures of Western diplomacy, Zelensky’s leadership, the moral clarity of the war, Russian war crimes, the new cult of WW2 victory in Russia, the numbers of casualties and displaced people in Ukraine, delays in US aid to Ukraine, nuclear blackmail, long-range weaponry, the weakness of western sanctions, the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline, how the war might end, the complicated prospects of a Trump presidency, and other topics. Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and the author of several books including Faith at War, Siege of Mecca, and most recently, Our Enemies Will Vanish. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and educated at New York University, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2023, for his work on Ukraine, and in 2022, for his work on Afghanistan. His honors include an Overseas Press Club award for coverage of India as well as the Washington Institute gold medal for the best book on the Middle East. Website: www.yarotrof.com Twitter: @yarotrof

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/357-america-world-order Sam Harris speaks with Bret Stephens about America’s place in the world. They discuss the waning Pax Americana, American isolationism, Republican fondness for Putin, Tucker Carlson, why America should support Ukraine, the significance of Alexei Navalny, what it would mean to properly hold Putin responsible for his death, nuclear blackmail, valid criticisms of Israel, the war in Gaza, Palestinian public opinion, the need for total military defeat, a two-state solution, the isolation of Israel at the UN and the International Criminal Court of Justice, waning support for the war in the Biden Administration, Hezbollah and war with Iran, Israeli politics and the settlements in the West Bank, charges of “settler colonialism,” antisemitism as a series of double standards, the prospect of a Trump victory in 2024, Biden’s age problem, the crisis at the southern border, U.S. immigration policy, and other topics. Bret Stephens is an opinion columnist with The New York Times and editor-in-chief of Sapir, a new Jewish quarterly. He has previously served as editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post and as foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Stephens was raised in Mexico City and studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago and comparative politics at the London School of Economics. In 2022 he was banned for life by the government of Russia from ever visiting that country. Website: https://www.nytimes.com/column/bret-stephens   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/356-islam-freedom Sam Harris and Rory Stewart debate whether Islam poses a unique threat to open societies. Rory Stewart is a leading thinker on international affairs and development currently serving as Special Advisor to GiveDirectly, which delivers cash directly to the world’s poorest households. Stewart was a member of the British Parliament for almost a decade, where he served as secretary of state for international development, prisons minister, minister for Africa, development minister for the Middle East and Asia, and minister for the environment. In addition to his work with GiveDirectly, Rory Stewart is also the co-host of The Rest is Politics podcast and author of How Not to Be a Politician. Website: https://www.givedirectly.org/ Twitter: @RoryStewartUK   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/355-a-falling-world Sam Harris speaks with Peter Zeihan about the unraveling world order. They discuss the Bretton Woods system, America’s role in securing the global supply chain, the coming end of American security guarantees, the shrinking of the US Navy, Houthi terrorism, deterring Iran, conflict in the Middle East, the future of Israel, the limits of immigration, the demographic pyramid, the demise of Europe, the war in Ukraine, the prospect of nuclear war, demographic collapse in China, loose nukes, America’s relative immunity to the world’s chaos, U.S. debt, the U.S. Southern border and immigration policy, why Trump will not win the 2024 election, and other topics. Peter Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist and a global energy demographic and security expert. Over the course of his career, Peter has worked for the US State Department in Australia, the DC think tank community, and helped develop the analytical models for Stratfor, one of the world’s premier private intelligence companies. In 2012, Peter founded his own firm, Zeihan on Geopolitics, in order to provide a select group of clients with direct, custom analytical products. Today those clients represent a vast array of sectors including energy majors, financial institutions, business associations, agricultural interests, universities, and the U.S. military. Peter is a critically acclaimed author whose first two books—The Accidental Superpower and The Absent Superpower—have been recommended by Mitt Romney, Fareed Zakaria, and Ian Bremmer. His other books include Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World and The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. Website: https://zeihan.com/ Twitter: @PeterZeihan YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ZeihanonGeopolitics   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/354-is-moral-progress-a-fantasy Sam Harris speaks with John Gray about the possibility of moral and political progress. They discuss historical and current threats to freedom of thought, the limits of law, the spread of dangerous technology, failures of convergence on norms and values, Arthur Koestler, de-industrialization in Europe, fellow travelers and the progressive embrace of barbarism, Bertrand Russell, the absurdity of pacifism, utilitarianism, the moral landscape, George Santayana, moral and scientific realism, pragmatism, atheism, Schopenhauer, liberalism as an historical accident, and other topics. John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Silence of Animals, The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw Dogs. His latest book is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full-time. Website: https://www.newstatesman.com/author/john-gray   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/353-race-reason Sam Harris speaks with Coleman Hughes about race, racism, and social justice. They discuss the ideal of "color blindness," race and crime, Coleman's experience at TED, LatinX, the confusion of the elites, Ibram X. Kendi, affirmative action, class differences, poverty, single-parent families, the death of George Floyd and the trial of Derek Chauvin, mob rule, Candace Owens, Christopher Rufo, guilt by association, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow, immigrant communities, evidence of discrimination, Martin Luther King Jr., and other topics. Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcast host, and musician. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Quillette, The Spectator, and the City Journal. Currently, he is a contributing writer at The Free Press and an analyst for CNN. His latest book is The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. Website: https://colemanhughes.substack.com/ Twitter: @coldxman   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/352-hubris-chaos Sam Harris speaks with Rory Stewart about the fraying world order. They discuss the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the problems with nation building, cultural ignorance, tolerance for corruption, our catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the role that Islam played in our failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, conspiracy theories, the influence of social media, cults of martyrdom, the war in Ukraine, the age of populism, Trump and the future of NATO, Brexit, the current state of politics, GiveDirectly, and other topics. Rory Stewart is a leading thinker on international affairs and development currently serving as Special Advisor to GiveDirectly, which delivers cash directly to the world’s poorest households. Stewart was a member of the British Parliament for almost a decade, where he served as secretary of state for international development, prisons minister, minister for Africa, development minister for the Middle East and Asia, and minister for the environment. In addition to his work with GiveDirectly, Rory Stewart is also the co-host of The Rest is Politics podcast and author of How Not to Be a Politician. Website: https://www.givedirectly.org/ Twitter: @RoryStewartUK   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/351-5-myths-about-israel-and-the-war-in-gaza A transcript of this podcast is available on Sam’s blog.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/350-sharing-reality Sam Harris speaks with Jonathan Rauch and Josh Szeps about the foundations of knowledge and the fragmentation of society. They discuss the state of the mainstream media, diversity of viewpoints, the "reality-based" community, what Covid did to our information landscape, the Overton window and the news value of controversial stories, the unique challenge of Trump and Trumpism, the dangers of a second Trump term, the problem of immigration and controlling the southern border of the U.S., and other topics. Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, published in 2021 by the Brookings Press, is The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, a spirited and deep-diving account of how to push back against disinformation, canceling, and other new threats to our fact-based epistemic order. Website: www.jonathanrauch.com Twitter: @jon_rauch Related Link: Trump’s Second Term Would Look Like This   Josh Szeps is an independent journalist. In New York City he was a founding host of HuffPost Live, the multi-award-winning streaming talk network, where he hosted thousands of hours of live TV with the world’s biggest names. In his native Australia, he hosted a national morning television show and had a talk radio show on the public broadcaster, ABC Radio. Josh left legacy media to focus on having bullshit-free conversations about provocative issues on his own platform, Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps, a podcast, live events operation, and YouTube channel. Website: https://bit.ly/UC_substack Twitter: @joshzepps   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/349-generosity-cynicism-and-the-future-of-doing-good Sam Harris speaks with Chris Anderson about generosity in the age of the Internet. They talk about the new spirit of cynicism in tech and finance, the problems with DEI, the Coleman Hughes controversy at TED, the norm of color blindness, the science of generosity, the leverage of the Internet, the false opposition between selfishness and selflessness, mixed motives in giving, results vs reward, the importance of intentions, looking for the good in people, digital business models, the economics of TED, TEDx, wealth inequality, the ethics of billionaires, philanthropy at scale, the power of pledges, the arguments of Peter Singer, the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal, problems with Effective Altruism, how to improve our digital lives, and other topics. Chris Anderson is the curator of TED. Trained as a journalist after graduating Oxford University, he launched more than 100 magazines and websites before acquiring TED through his nonprofit foundation in 2001. His TED mantra—"ideas worth spreading"—continues to blossom on an international scale, with over 3,600 videos free on TED.com and 100,000 more on YouTube. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller TED Talks and has overseen the introduction of, among others, the TEDx program, the TED-Ed initiative, and the Audacious Project, a bold new philanthropic model to inspire change at scale. His latest book is Infectious Generosity. Website: https://www.infectiousgenerosity.org/ Twitter: @TEDchris Related Link: Both the income pledge and the 2.5% wealth pledge can be signed at givingwhatwecan.org   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/348-the-politics-of-antisemitism Sam Harris speaks with Rabbi David Wolpe about the global response to the atrocities of October 7th, 2023. They discuss the difference between Israeli and diaspora Jews, the history and logic of antisemitism, the role of conspiracy theories, Great Replacement Theory, reasons for Jewish success, right-wing antisemitism, left-wing antisemitism, the response of Harvard to October 7th, the college presidents’ testimony before Congress, the future of DEI and civil discourse, the BDS movement, antisemitism vs anti-Zionism, Jewish acceptance at Ivy League universities, the antisemitism endemic to Islam, foreign funding of US universities, and other topics. David Wolpe is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School, a Rabbinic Fellow at The Anti-Defamation League, a Senior Advisor to the Maimonides Fund, and the Emeritus Rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Rabbi Wolpe previously taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, Hunter College, and UCLA. He is the author of eight books, including the national bestseller Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times and  David, the Divided Heart. Website: www.facebook.com/RabbiWolpe Twitter: @rabbiwolpe

Share this episode: https://samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/347-finding-sanity-in-2024   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. Get 30 days free - https://www.wakingup.com/makingsense.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/the-best-kept-secret-in-history Sam Harris speaks with Brian Muraresku about ancient mystery religions and the possible psychedelic roots of Christianity. They discuss the Mysteries of Eleusis, the “pagan continuity hypothesis,” the cult of Dionysius, the Dead Sea scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels, Christianity as a cult of human sacrifice, the evidence for the use of psychedelics in ancient rites, the chemical analysis of ancient wine and beer, why Brian hasn’t tried psychedelics, the need for a modern Mysteries of Eleusis, and other topics. Brian Muraresku graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. As an alumnus of Georgetown Law and a member of the Bars of both New York and Washington D.C., he has been practicing law internationally for over fifteen years. He lives outside Washington D.C. with his wife and two daughters. The Immortality Key is Muraresku's debut book. Website: https://www.brianmuraresku.com/ Twitter: @BrianMuraresku Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/345-resilience Sam Harris speaks with Amanda Knox about her experience of having been falsely convicted and imprisoned for murder in Italy. Amanda Knox is an exoneree, journalist, public speaker, and author of The New York Times best-selling memoir Waiting to Be Heard. She is the co-host, with her husband Christopher Robinson, of the podcast Labyrinths. Between 2007 and 2015, she spent nearly four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit. She has since become an advocate for criminal justice reform and media ethics. She sits on the board of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice.  Website: www.knoxrobinson.com Twitter: @amandaknox Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/344-the-war-in-gaza Sam Harris comments on the recent testimony of university presidents before Congress, along with Elon Musk's reinstating of Alex Jones on X. He then introduces a recent episode of the Call Me Back podcast about the war in Gaza, hosted by Dan Senor. Sam really enjoyed listening to this conversation and we’re delighted to be able to share it with the Making Sense community. Dan Senor is co-author of a new book, The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World, which is a New York Times bestseller. This book on the origins of Israeli resilience—and what the U.S. can learn from Israeli society—is especially relevant since October 7. He is also co-author of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, which has been translated into more than 30 languages. Dan is the host of the Call Me Back podcast, which has been focused exclusively on Israel and the Middle East since October 7, with most of the episodes built around conversations with Israeli journalists, officials and other experts on the ground in Israel. Previously, Dan served in various foreign policy positions in the U.S. Government—including in Iraq for over a year during the George W. Bush administration—and as an advisor to Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and others. Website: https://www.dansenor.com/ Twitter: @dansenor   Douglas Murray is the associate editor of The Spectator and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and The Sun. He has also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments and at the White House. He is the author of several books including The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, The Madness of Crowds, and most recently, The War on the West. Website: https://douglasmurray.net/ Twitter: @DouglasKMurray   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/343-what-is-islamophobia Sam Harris discusses the social and political consequences of a weaponized term. A transcript of this podcast is available on Sam’s blog.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/342-animal-minds-moral-truths Sam Harris speaks with Peter Singer about important problems in ethics. They discuss his career as a philosopher, the moral status of non-human animals, the ethics of moral hierarchies, speciesism, the scale of animal suffering, conscientious omnivores, animal experimentation, the tragic case of Sam Bankman-Fried, concerns about Effective Altruism, the problems with focusing on existential risk, the comparative nature of human suffering, the work of Derek Parfit, objective morality, and other topics. Peter Singer, dubbed “the world’s most influential living philosopher” by The New Yorker, has written, co-authored, edited, or co-edited more than 50 books in over 25 languages, including Practical Ethics, Writings on an Ethical Life, The Life You Can Save, and more. His 1975 book Animal Liberation is often credited with starting the modern animal rights movement. His TED Talk has over 2.25 million views. Singer was educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford and is currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. When not teaching at Princeton, he lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife, Renata, with whom he enjoys hiking. He is also the author of Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed (Harper; May 23, 2023) and The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on Effective Altruism, Engaged Buddhism, and How to Build a Better World (Shambhala; December 12, 2023). Website: https://petersinger.info/ Twitter: @PeterSinger   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/341-gaza-global-order Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about the events of October 7th and the resulting war in Gaza. They discuss the unraveling of global order, the failure of the IDF, the incompetence of the Netanyahu government, the goals of Hamas, the Saudi peace treaty, the right of Israel to exist, the status of Palestinian and Jewish refugees, victim and perpetrator narratives, compromise vs justice, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, lessons from WW2, the danger of focusing on the past, the perverse significance of the al-Aqsa Mosque, the double standards to which Israel is held, false analogies to European colonialism, the rise of antisemitism, the future of politics in Israel, America’s role in preserving global order, the war in Ukraine, and other topics. Yuval Noah Harari, PhD, is a historian, philosopher and bestselling author, who is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today. His books have sold 45 million copies in 65 languages. In 2019, Harari and his husband Itzik co-founded Sapienship, a social impact company specializing in content and production, with projects in the fields of education and entertainment. Sapienship’s main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today. Website: ynharari.com Twitter: @harari_yuval

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/340-the-bright-line-between-good-and-evil Sam Harris speaks about the ongoing war in Gaza, the global rise of antisemitism, and the enduring problem of jihadism. A transcript of this podcast is available on Sam’s blog.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/339-the-infernal-logic-of-jihad Sam Harris speaks with Graeme Wood about the October 7th atrocities in Israel, the unfolding war in Gaza, and the ongoing problem of global jihadism. Graeme Wood is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. He was the 2014–2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he teaches in the political science department at Yale University. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Website: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/graeme-wood/ Twitter: @gcaw

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/338-the-sin-of-moral-equivalence A transcript of this podcast is available on Sam’s blog.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/337-the-future-of-psychedelic-medicine Sam Harris speaks with Jeannie Fontana and Robin Carhart-Harris about the TREAT Initiative in California and the growing promise of psychedelics for mental health care. Jeannie Fontana, MD, PhD, is a multifaceted leader in healthcare, specializing in Internal Medicine, Environmental Toxicology, and Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. She initiated an ALS-focused research team at Sanford Burnham Prebys and established the Cedars-Sinai ALS Center of Excellence, driving policy change and boosting federal funding for ALS research. As a founding trustee of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), she played a pivotal role in creating the world's largest stem cell granting agency with an $8.5 billion budget. Under her influence, the agency has achieved FDA approvals, fast-track designations, and launched groundbreaking clinical trials. Additionally, CIRM catalyzed the creation of over 55,000 jobs, 50 new companies, and $10 billion in added state revenue. Now, Jeannie is poised to address California's urgent mental health crisis through her role in the TREAT California Initiative. Website: treatcalifornia.org   Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, 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 Twitter: @RCarhartHarris   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/336-the-roots-of-identity-politics Sam Harris speaks with Yascha Mounk about identity politics. They discuss Yascha’s concept of the “identity synthesis,” skepticism about “cancel culture,” racial segregation in schools, the ideological change on college campuses, Michel Foucault and postmodernism, the rejection of universalism, Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, the “permanence of racism,” the indoctrination of children, intersectionality, white privilege, institutional racism, equity vs equality, racial preferences during the Covid pandemic, the asymmetric advantage of authoritarianism, class and elitism, affirmative action, media coverage of crime and violence, social media and the business model of mainstream journalism, and other topics. Yascha Mounk is the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. He is also a Professor of the Practice of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, the founder of Persuasion, and the host of The Good Fight podcast. Website: www.yaschamounk.com Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/334-the-low-trust-society Sam Harris speaks with David Brooks about the state of American democracy and the liberal world order. They discuss the weakness of moral individualism, the loss of social trust, the dangers of identity politics, what happened to the Republican Party, the hatred of elites, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Trump indictments, the war in Ukraine, moral force, the roots of liberalism, the various flavors of Trump support, the Biden presidency, Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, Biden’s prospects in 2024, Nikki Haley, economic inequality, the problems with meritocracy, the state of media and social media, the lure of conspiracy thinking, the politics of recognition, our handling of the Covid pandemic, our difficulties acknowledging uncertainty, our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the limits of American power, and other topics. David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times and a contributor to The Atlantic. He is a commentator on “The PBS Newshour." His forthcoming book How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen will be published in October. His previous three books were The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, and The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, all #1 New York Times bestsellers. Mr. Brooks has taught at Yale and Duke and now teaches at the University of Chicago. He has received over 30 honorary degrees from American universities and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  Twitter: @nytdavidbrooks Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/333-sanity-check-on-climate-change   Sam Harris speaks with Chris Field about climate change and its consequences. They discuss skepticism about climate change, the accuracy of climate models, the magnitude of temperature increases, how global temperatures are measured, the historical record of climate variation, the range of possibilities in the coming decades, feedback mechanisms, wildfires, water vapor, air pollution, solar geo-engineering, the biggest challenge to taking action on climate change, the costs of transitioning to a carbon-neutral economy, renewable sources of energy, nuclear power, carbon capture, hydrogen, the developing world, China and India, carbon taxes and other incentives, and other topics. Chris Field is the Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies. His research focuses on climate change, especially solutions that improve lives now, decrease the amount of future warming, and support vibrant economies. Recent projects emphasize decreasing risks from coastal flooding and wildfires. Field was co-chair of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 2008-2015. His widely cited work has earned many recognitions, including election to the US National Academy of Sciences, the Roger Revelle Medal, and the Japan Prize. Website: https://fieldlab.stanford.edu/   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/332-can-we-contain-artificial-intelligence   Sam Harris speaks with Mustafa Suleyman about his new book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma.” They discuss the progress in artificial intelligence made at his company DeepMind, the acquisition of DeepMind by Google, Atari DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaFold, the invention of new knowledge, the risks of our making progress in AI, “superintelligence” as a distraction from more pressing problems, the inevitable spread of general-purpose technology, the nature of intelligence, productivity growth and labor disruptions, “the containment problem,” the importance of scale, Moore’s law, Inflection AI, open-source LLMs, changing the norms of work and leisure, the redistribution of value, introducing friction into the deployment of AI, regulatory capture, a misinformation apocalypse, digital watermarks, asymmetric threats, conflict and cooperation with China, supply-chain monopolies, and other topics. Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI. Previously he co-founded DeepMind, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies. After a decade at DeepMind, Suleyman became vice president of AI product management and AI policy at Google. When he was an undergraduate at Oxford, Suleyman dropped out to help start a non-profit telephone counseling service. He lives in Palo Alto, California. Website:  https://www.the-coming-wave.com/ Twitter: @mustafasuleyman   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/330-the-doomsday-machine Sam Harris speaks with Carl Robichaud about the ongoing threat of nuclear war. They discuss the film "Oppenheimer," the ethics of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the history and future of nuclear proliferation, the logic of deterrence, cyber vulnerabilities, the history of de-escalation, the war in Ukraine, war games, the nuclear taboo, growing tensions between the U.S. and China, artificial intelligence, getting to nuclear zero, the role for private citizens in mitigating nuclear risk, the Longview Nuclear Risk Policy Fund (https://www.longview.org/fund/nuclear-weapons-policy-fund/), and other topics. Carl Robichaud co-leads Longview’s program on nuclear weapons policy. For more than a decade, Carl led grantmaking in nuclear security at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic fund which grants over $30 million annually to strengthen international peace and security. Previously, Carl worked with The Century Foundation and the Global Security Institute, where his research spanned arms control, international security policy, and nonproliferation. Robichaud holds an MPA in public policy and international affairs from Princeton University and a BA from Wesleyan University. He is a 1999 Thomas J. Watson fellow and a 2003 Harold W. Rosenthal fellow for international affairs and security at the Stimson Center and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Elsie Kagan, a painter. Website: https://www.longview.org/fund/nuclear-weapons-policy-fund/ Twitter: @carlrobichaud   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/329-what-happened-to-the-republican-party Sam Harris speaks with Bret Stephens about the current state of the Republican Party. They discuss the strange change in Republican attitudes toward Putin, the character of Tucker Carlson, the war in Ukraine, the failures of elites and experts, the tension between concerns about misinformation and free speech, the Hunter Biden laptop, the 2024 Presidential election, how Trump captured the Republican Party, the criminal charges against Trump, the future of conservatism, and other topics. Bret Stephens is an opinion columnist with The New York Times and editor-in-chief of Sapir, a new Jewish quarterly. He has previously served as editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post and as foreign-affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was raised in Mexico City, educated at the University of Chicago, and was a NeverTrumper from Day One. In 2022 he was banned for life by the government of Russia from ever visiting that country. Website: https://www.nytimes.com/column/bret-stephens   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/328-health-longevity Sam Harris speaks with Peter Attia about his book, “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.” They discuss "healthspan," centenarians, diet and nutrition, sugar, macronutrients, alcohol, fasting and time-restricted eating, exercise, Zone 2 training, heart disease, blood pressure, cholesterol, cancer, brain health, metabolic disorders, proactive medical testing, medication side effects, Rapamycin, emotional health, and other topics. Peter Attia, MD, is the founder of Early Medical, a medical practice that applies the principles of Medicine 3.0 to patients with the goal of lengthening their lifespan and simultaneously improving their healthspan. He is the host of The Drive, one of the most popular podcasts covering the topics of health and medicine. Website: https://peterattiamd.com/ Twitter: @peterattiamd   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with L.A. Paul about the nature of transformative experiences. They discuss how certain experiences change the self, the nature of regret, changing belief systems, conspiracy thinking, empathy, doing good in the world, our relationship to our future selves, changing our values, the nature of possibility, the ethics of punishment, moral luck, the moral landscape, consequentialism, and other topics. L.A. Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University and leads the Self and Society Initiative for Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute. Her research explores questions about the nature of the self and decision-making, and the metaphysics and cognitive science of time, cause, and experience. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Australian National University. She is also the author of three books, including Transformative Experience, and Causation: A User’s Guide, which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize. Website: www.lapaul.org   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Nina Schick about generative AI and information integrity. They discuss the challenges of regulating AI, authentication vs detection, fake video, hyper-personalization of information, the promise of generative design, productivity gains, disruptions in the labor market, OpenAI, and other topics. Nina Schick is a globally recognized author, entrepreneur, and advisor specializing in Generative AI. She has made it her mission to democratize AI and make it accessible to everyone, authoring the first book on AI-generated content in 2020. As one of the earliest GenAI experts, Nina analyzes how this nascent field of artificial intelligence will change humanity. Nina is the founder of Tamang Ventures, an advisory firm focused on Generative AI, and the creator of The Era of Generative AI, a 100K+ strong GenAI community featuring the weekly EGAI newsletter, exclusive content, and interviews with the pioneers of this space.  Website: ninaschick.org Twitter: @NinaDSchick   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris discusses Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s recent appearances on other podcasts.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Marc Andreessen about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). They discuss the primary importance of intelligence, possible good outcomes for AI, the problem of alienation, the significance of evolution, the Alignment Problem, the current state of LLMs, AI and war, dangerous information, regulating AI, economic inequality, and other topics. Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, and Samsara. He is also on the board of Meta. Twitter: @pmarca Website: https://a16z.com   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Martin Rees about the importance of science and scientific institutions. They discuss the provisionality of science, the paradox of authority, genius, civilizational risks, pandemic preparedness, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, the far future, the Fermi problem, the  prospect of a "Great Filter", the multiverse, string theory, exoplanets, large telescopes, improving scientific institutions, wealth inequality, atheism, the conflict between science and religion, moral realism, and other topics. Martin Rees is the UK's Astronomer Royal. He is based at Cambridge University where he is a Fellow (and Former Master) of Trinity College. He is a former President of the Royal Society and a member of many foreign academies. His research interests include space exploration, high-energy astrophysics, cosmology, and exobiology. He is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks at Cambridge University (CSER) and has served on many bodies connected with education, space research, arms control, and international collaboration in science. He is a member of the UK's House of Lords. In addition to his research publications, he has written many general articles and ten books including On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, The End of Astronauts, and If Science is to Save Us. Twitter: @lordmartinrees Website: www.martinrees.uk   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, we traverse a decade of Sam’s conversations on the topic of meditation.  We start with the very first recorded episode from the archives: a conversation with Sam’s meditation teacher and friend, Joseph Goldstein. Goldstein recalls how his thinking was unlocked—allowing him to fully realize the power of the practice—by the utterance of one single word. We then hear from author Richard Lang as he guides us towards a strangely obvious insight that came to be known as “the headless way.” Next, philosopher and neuroscientist Thomas Metzinger employs his vast expertise in both neurobiology and meditation to show how our brains generate a model of the world and self, and how meditation can help us catch that process in the act. Psychiatrist Judson Brewer then shifts the conversation to some very practical applications of mindfulness meditation, addressing the problem of addiction to things like food, smoking, or drugs by retraining the reward centers in our brains. Next, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson dig into the neuroscience of meditation and discuss how experienced meditators may actually be physically altering their brains.  We then listen in on Sam’s conversation with author Robert Wright, who defends the claim that “Buddhism is true.” Sam and Wright discuss the validity of this claim while ensuring they keep it separate from the political and moral behaviors of Buddhist nations and individuals. We conclude with Sam delivering the answer to a question posed by the Belgian neuroscientist Steven Laureys. In doing so, Sam provides a comprehensive tour of his philosophies. He ties together his personal brand of moral analysis, his reverence for science and truth seeking, and his reasoning as to why he still meditates and why he proudly promotes the practice.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Sam Harris speaks with Andy Clark about the predictive brain, embodied cognition, and the extended mind. They discuss the structure of perception, novelty, precision, pain, psychedelics, emotion, ways to hack our predictions, hypnosis, meditation, artificial intelligence, consciousness, and other topics. Andy Clark is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of several books including Surfing Uncertainty, Mindware, Supersizing the Mind, Being There, and most recently, The Experience Machine. His academic interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, and computational neuroscience.  Twitter: @CogsAndy Website: https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p493-andy-clark   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with David Edmonds about the life and philosophy of Derek Parfit. They discuss Parfit’s work on identity, time bias, the “non-identity problem,” population ethics and “the Repugnant Conclusion,” the ethical importance of future people, Effective Altruism, moral truth, and other topics. David Edmonds is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and a former BBC radio journalist. He is the author or editor of many books which together have been translated into over two dozen languages. His books include (with John Eidinow) the international best seller Wittgenstein’s Poker and, most recently, a biography, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality. David is also the host of a couple of philosophy podcasts including Philosophy Bites, which he creates with Nigel Warburton. Twitter: @DavidEdmonds100 Website: www.davidedmonds.info   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, we explore Sam’s conversations about the phenomenon of death. We begin with an introduction from Sam as he urges us to use our awareness of death to become more present in our day-to-day lives. We then hear a conversation between Sam and Frank Ostaseski, founder of the Zen Hospice Project, who shares the valuable lessons he has learned through caring for those in their very last days. Next, we move on to a conversation with Scott Barry Kaufman, who explains what it means to pursue a good life by putting a modern spin on Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Researcher and professor of neuroscience Roland Griffiths then details his findings on psychedelic therapies. He and Sam discuss the inexplicable powers of psychedelics in easing the anxiety around death, and how these experiences can potentially help us live fuller lives. Shifting perspectives, we move on by hearing NYU professor Scott Galloway explain the social and economic impacts of a society made painfully aware of death by the COVID-19 pandemic. We then listen in to author Oliver Burkeman as he outlines how the knowledge of our mortality can inform practical time management techniques before addressing an age-old question with physicist Geoffrey West: Theoretically, could we engineer humans to live forever? Sam closes this episode with a solo talk, explaining that we needn’t be cynical about the fact that all life must come to an end. Instead, it is the transient nature of life that might be the very thing which makes it beautiful in the first place.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Sam Harris speaks with Shamil Chandaria about how the brain constructs a vision of the self and the world. They discuss the brain from first principles; Bayesian inference; hierarchical predictive processing; the construction of vision; psychedelics and neuroplasticity; beliefs and prior probabilities; the interaction between psychedelics and meditation; the risks and benefits of psychedelics; Sam’s recent experience with MDMA; non-duality; love, gratitude, and bliss; the self model; the Buddhist concept of emptiness; human flourishing; effective altruism; and other topics. Dr. Shamil Chandaria is a philanthropist, serial entrepreneur, technologist, and academic with multidisciplinary research interests spanning computational neuroscience, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and the philosophy and science of human wellbeing. His PhD from the London School of Economics was in mathematical modeling of economic systems using stochastic differential equations and optimal control theory. Later he completed an MA in philosophy with distinction from University College London, where he developed an interest in philosophy of science and philosophical issues in biology, neuroscience, and ethics. In 2018, Dr. Chandaria helped to endow the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University, an interdisciplinary research institute focusing on the most important issues facing humanity. In 2019 he was a founder of the Centre for Psychedelic Research in the department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, a neuroscience research institute investigating psychedelic therapies for a number of conditions including treatment resistant depression. He has also funded research on the neuroscience of meditation at Harvard, and at the University of California in Berkeley. Twitter: @shamilch YouTube: @ShamilChandaria   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with David Auerbach about the problematic structure of online networks. They discuss the tradeoffs between liberty and cooperation, the impossibility of fighting misinformation, bottom-up vs top-down influences, recent developments in AI, deepfakes, the instability of skepticism, the future of social media, the weaknesses of LLMs, breaking up digital bubbles, online identity and privacy, and other topics. David B. Auerbach is a writer, technologist, and software engineer. He previously worked as a software engineer at Google and Microsoft for many years before turning to writing. He has written on technology, literature, and philosophy for many publications and is the author of MEGANETS: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Lives and Inner Realities and BITWISE: A Life in Code. Website: https://auerstack.substack.com/ Twitter: @AuerbachKeller   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, we examine a series of Sam’s conversations centered around social media’s impact on the information landscape. We begin with Sam’s second conversation with Tristan Harris, which was conducted shortly after the release of Tristan’s documentary, The Social Dilemma. The documentary lays out Tristan’s thesis on how social media is causing the deterioration of both individual and societal welfare. Author and technologist Jaron Lanier follows, echoing Tristan’s concerns and shifting the conversation to social media’s unique business model, addressing how perverse incentives reliably produce such detrimental outcomes. We then hear from Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter. Sam and Dorsey’s conversation took place when Dorsey was still working at Twitter, and Sam still had an account. However, the questions they pose—relating to issues of content moderation and corporate transparency—are even more relevant today. Next, psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents the alarming findings from his research on the psychological effects of social media, detailing how teenage girls are bearing the brunt of a mental health crisis.  Shifting to a more political lens, Sam and Cass Sunstein discuss Sunstein’s book, #Republic, and Sunstein addresses one of Sam’s most pressing fears of the last seven years: how social media is warping our opinions on politics. We then narrow down on this issue, with Zeynep Tufekci explaining the real-life consequences of social media’s influence on protest movements. Finally, Sam and technology analyst Nina Schick dive into one of the most urgent concerns of the AI boom: deepfakes and how they might be weaponized to further pollute and degrade our information landscape.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Sam Harris speaks with Tim Maudlin about the foundations of physics and metaphysics. They talk about the nature of scientific reductionism, emergence, functionalism, the nature of time, presentism vs eternalism, causation, the nature of possibility, the laws of nature, David Lewis’s possible worlds, rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, free will, and other topics. Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at NYU and the Founder and Director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. He has a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Yale and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the author of books on the foundations of physics, logic, and foundations of mathematics. His books include Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity, Truth and Paradox, The Metaphysics Within Physics, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time, and Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory. Website: www.JohnBellInstitute.org   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about the state of psychological science. They discuss fiction as a window onto the mind, recent developments in AI, the tension between misinformation and free speech, bullshitting vs lying, truth vs belonging, reliance on scientific authority, the limits of reductionism, consciousness vs intelligence, Freud, behaviorism, the unconscious origins of behavior, confabulation, the limitations of debate, language, Koko the gorilla, mental health, happiness, behavioral genetics, birth-order effects, living a good life, the remembered and experiencing selves, and other topics. 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. Website: paulbloom.net Twitter: @paulbloomatyale   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Matt Thornton about his new book, The Gift of Violence: Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World. They discuss his background in martial arts, the reasons to train in combat sports, the UFC and the evolution of mixed martial arts, the fundamental principles of effective martial arts, the "street" vs "sport" fallacy, grappling vs striking, the persistence of fake martial arts, Bruce Lee’s legacy, male violence and emotional maturity, the male fear of humiliation, violence against women, the validity of instinct, the behavior of predators, weapons, avoiding violence, and other topics. Matt Thornton has been teaching functional martial arts for more than thirty years and holds a 5th degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His organization, Straight Blast Gym, has more than seventy locations worldwide and has produced champion MMA fighters as well as world-class self-defense and law enforcement instructors. He lives with his wife Salome and their five children in Portland, Oregon. Website: mattthornton.org Twitter: @aliveness_ape   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, we examine the topic of existential threat, focusing in particular on the subject of nuclear war. Sam opens the discussion by emphasizing the gravity of our ability to destroy life as we know it at any moment, and how shocking it is that nearly all of us perpetually ignore this fact. Philosopher Nick Bostrom expands on this idea by explaining how developing technologies like DNA synthesis could make humanity more vulnerable to malicious actors. Sam and historian Fred Kaplan then guide us through a hypothetical timeline of events following a nuclear first strike, highlighting the flaws in the concept of nuclear deterrence. Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry echoes these concerns, painting a grim picture of his "nuclear nightmare" scenario: a nuclear terrorist attack. Zooming out, Toby Ord outlines each potential extinction-level threat, and why he believes that, between all of them, we face a one in six chance of witnessing the downfall of our species. Our episode ends on a cautiously optimistic note, however, as Yuval Noah Harari shares his thoughts on "global myth-making" and its potential role in helping us navigate through these perilous times.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Sam Harris speaks with Tim Urban about his new book, What’s Our Problem: A Self-Help Book for Societies. They discuss Tim’s unusual career, the finitude of life, existential risk, exponential technological change, political tribalism, the corruption of the media, how one thinks vs what one thinks, trust in institutions, the firing of James Bennet at the New York Times, digital mobs, the mechanics of cancellation, Alex Jones, election integrity, and other topics. Tim Urban is a writer, illustrator, and co-founder of the blog Wait But Why, best known for its long-form articles on a wide range of topics, many of which have gone viral. His TED Talk “Inside the mind of a master procrastinator” is the third most viewed talk of all time. Website: waitbutwhy.com Twitter: @waitbutwhy   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Megan Phelps-Roper about the new podcast series she hosts and produced, “The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling.” The series is also produced by Andy Mills and Matt Boll for The Free Press.  Born and raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan Phelps-Roper left a life of religious extremism in 2012. She has spent the past decade using her experiences to work with schools on anti-bullying campaigns, with law enforcement organizations investigating deradicalization, and with tech companies on the intersection of safety, free speech, and the value of dialogue across ideological divides. Her journey has been chronicled in a trio of BBC documentaries, a TED talk, and her memoir Unfollow. Podcast: The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling Twitter: @meganphelps   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Bart D. Ehrman about the prophecies contained in the book of Revelation. They discuss his latest book, Armageddon, and widespread Christian beliefs about the coming end of the world. Bart D. Ehrman is a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity and a Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author of six New York Times bestsellers, he has written or edited more than thirty books, including Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, The Triumph of Christianity, and Heaven and Hell. Ehrman has also created nine popular audio and video courses for The Great Courses. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages, with over two million copies and courses sold.  Website: https://ehrmanblog.org/ Twitter: @BartEhrman   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, we examine a series of Sam’s conversations centered around religion, atheism, and the power of belief.  First, we hear the stories of three guests who have fled their respective oppressive religious organizations. We begin with Sarah Haider, founder of the advocacy group Ex-Muslims of North America, who details how her encounters with militant atheists catalyzed her journey to secularism. Then our narrator, Megan Phelps-Roper, walks us through her story of abandoning the Westboro Baptist Church. Finally, Yasmine Mohammed presents her harrowing account of escaping fundamentalist Islamism and Sam’s role in inspiring her public advocacy work. We then tackle the concept of belief more broadly, diving into Sam’s understanding of atheism and what sets it apart from the views of other atheist thinkers like Matt Dillahunty and Richard Dawkins. We also revisit an infamous conversation between Sam and Jordan Peterson, wherein they attempt to come to some universal definition of the word “truth.” The episode concludes with two Q&A portions from life events in which Sam addresses some real concerns about purpose and meaning in the absence of religion.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Sam Harris speaks with Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus about recent developments in artificial intelligence and the long-term risks of producing artificial general intelligence (AGI). They discuss the limitations of Deep Learning, the surprising power of narrow AI, ChatGPT, a possible misinformation apocalypse, the problem of instantiating human values, the business model of the Internet, the meta-verse, digital provenance, using AI to control AI, the control problem, emergent goals, locking down core values, programming uncertainty about human values into AGI, the prospects of slowing or stopping AI progress, and other topics. Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, co-authored with Peter Norvig, is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. Russell is also the author of Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with a current emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons. Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stuartjonathanrussell/   Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. He was Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine-learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, co-authored with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI. His podcast Humans versus Machines, will come later this spring. Website: garymarcus.com Twitter: @GaryMarcus   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan about the origins of the COVID pandemic. They discuss the evidence of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, media and academic censorship of this topic, the history of collaboration between western scientists and Chinese labs, the risks of "gain-of-function" research, the evidence for the zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2, the initial complacency and denialism of the Chinese, the biosafety levels at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, molecular evidence of a lab leak, the practical constraints on synthesizing viruses, lack of international cooperation, conspiracy theories promulgated by the CCP, EcoHealth Alliance, different kinds of "gain-of-function" research, virus hunting, the history of lab leaks, risk and reward in the search for knowledge, Anthony Fauci, and other topics. Matt Ridley is a writer whose books have been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, and The Evolution of Everything. His new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, co-authored with Alina Chan, was published in 2021. Matt sat in the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the science and technology select committee and the artificial intelligence select committee. He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist for the Times 2013-2018. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Website: mattridley.co.uk Twitter: @mattwridley   Alina Chan, Ph.D., is a scientific advisor and viral vector engineer at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. She is a recent Broad Ignite fellow and Human Frontier Science Program fellow with a background in medical genetics, synthetic biology, and genetic engineering. During the pandemic, Dr. Chan investigated problems relevant to finding the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and co-authored Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 with Matt Ridley. In 2022, she joined the Pathogens Project Taskforce organized by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to generate new thinking on responsible high-risk pathogen research. Website: harpercollins.com/blogs/authors/alina-chan Twitter: @Ayjchan   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, we examine the timeless question of “free will”: what constitutes it, what is meant by it, what ought to be meant by it, and, of course, whether we have it at all. We start with the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky who begins to deflate the widely held intuition and assumption of “libertarian free will” by drawing out a mechanistic and determined description of the universe. We then hear from the philosopher who has long been Sam’s intellectual wrestling opponent on this subject, Daniel Dennett. Dennett and Sam spar about definitional and epistemological frameworks of what Dennett insists is “free will,” and what Sam contends could never be. The author and physicist Sean Carroll then engages Sam with more attempts to find a philosophically defensible notion of free will by leaning on the unknowable nature of the universe revealed by quantum mechanics. We then listen in on Sam’s engagement with the mathematician and author Judea Pearl who focuses on matters of causation to tease out a freedom of will. After a historical review of Princess Elizabeth’s famous exchanges with Rene Descartes, we hear from the biologist Jerry Coyne, who firmly agrees with Sam that a deterministic picture of reality leaves absolutely no room for anything like free will. We then hear from the curiously entertaining mind of comedian and producer Ricky Gervais who was thinking about free will while taking a bath when he decided to phone Sam. We conclude with Sam’s own response to concerns that an erasure of free will inevitably result in fatalism, loss of meaning, and passive defeat. Sam insists that the loss of free will actually pushes us in the opposite direction where we begin to see hatred and vengeance as incoherent and start to connect with a deeper and truer sense of genuine compassion.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Sam Harris speaks with Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, and Renee DiResta about the release of “the Twitter files” and the loss of trust in the institutions of media and government. They discuss Bari and Michael’s experience of participating in the Twitter files release, the problem of misinformation, the relationship between Twitter and the federal government, Russian influence operations, the challenges of content moderation, Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, the need for transparency, platforms vs. publishers, Twitter’s resistance to the FBI, political bias at Twitter, J.K. Rowling, the inherent subjectivity of moderation decisions, the rise of competitive platforms, rumors vs. misinformation, how Twitter attempted to control the spread of Covid misinformation, the throttling of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the failure of institutions to communicate Covid information well, the risk of paternalism, abuses of power, and other topics. Bari Weiss is the founder and editor of The Free Press and host of the podcast Honestly. From 2017 to 2020, Weiss was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine. Weiss is the winner of the LA Press Club's 2021 Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. She is also the winner of the Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.” In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times's "star opinion writer." Weiss is a proud Pittsburgh native. Her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, was the winner of a 2019 National Jewish Book Award. She lives with her wife and daughter in Los Angeles. Website: thefp.com Twitter: @bariweiss   Michael Shellenberger is the author of two best-selling books, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. He’s been called an “environmental guru,” a “climate guru,” “North America’s leading public intellectual on clean energy,” and a “high priest” of the pro-human environmental movement. Michael is the founder and president of Environmental Progress, an independent non-profit research organization that incubates ideas, leaders, and movements. He is also a co-founder of the California Peace Coalition, an alliance of parents of children killed by fentanyl, parents of homeless addicts, and recovering addicts.  He also has a newsletter on Substack titled Public.  Website: public.substack.com Twitter: @ShellenbergerMD   Renée DiResta is the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies. Her work examines the spread of narratives across social and media networks, how state and non-state actors leverage the information ecosystem to exert influence, and how policy, education, and design can mitigate manipulative dynamics. She is currently working on a book about propaganda and influence. Website: reneediresta.com, io.stanford.edu Twitter: @noUpside Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

This episode centers around the specter of violence and surfaces some of Sam’s most controversial positions and difficult conversations. We begin with author and former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, who delivers some potentially life-saving aspects of “tactical empathy,” which can also be applied to less extreme circumstances. Author and security expert Gavin de Becker then lays out his thesis from The Gift of Fear, which recasts this unfairly maligned emotion as an important attention-demanding, evolved signal. We then spend time with Sam’s position on “profiling” and the moral and political complexities woven into it. This careful consideration leads to a conversation with author and firearms instructor Scotty Reitz, as they paint a stark picture of certain extremes of violence and consider what responsible gun ownership might look like. Sam then answers questions directly on his often criticized and often misunderstood position on gun ownership before we turn to author and former Navy Seal Jocko Willink to apply pressure on the philosophical stance of pacifism. We conclude with the philosopher Tamler Sommers, who ponders the idea of “honor” in society and inspects how third-party delegation of violence might generate an illusive sense of justice.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Sam Harris speaks with Martha C. Nussbaum about her philosophical work. They discuss the relevance of philosophy to personal and political problems, the influence of religion, the problem of dogmatism, the importance of Greek and Roman philosophy for modern thought, the Stoic view of emotions, anger and retribution, deterrence, moral luck, sexual harassment, the philosophical significance of Greek tragedy, grief, human and animal flourishing, the "capabilities approach" to valuing conscious life, the rightness or wrongness of moral hierarchies, "the fragility of goodness," and other topics. Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School of the University of Chicago. She gave the 2016 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the 2018 Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2020 Holberg Prize. These three prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards available in fields not eligible for a Nobel. She has written more than twenty-two books, including Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice; Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; and The Monarchy of Fear. Website: simonandschuster.com   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Waldinger about the Harvard Study of Adult Development. They discuss the limitations of relying on self-report to assess a person’s well-being; Daniel Kahneman’s remembering and experiencing selves; why it can be hard to figure out what makes us happy; the effects of alcohol, smoking, and exercise; the connection between work and fulfillment; the primacy of relationships; the diminishing importance of wealth; status vs feeling valued; the connection between good relationships and physical health; having kids and marital satisfaction; introversion vs extroversion; mortality and loss; collecting experiences vs things; the benefits of walking; taking relationships for granted; quantity vs quality time; the self and self states; the guru-disciple relationship; and the possibility of enlightenment. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cofounder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. Dr. Waldinger received his AB from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he directs a psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. He is also a Zen master (Roshi) and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. Robert is the co-author of the book The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study on Happiness (Simon and Schuster; January 10, 2023). Website: robertwaldinger.com Twitter: @robertwaldinger   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, we try to trace morality to its elusive foundations. Throughout the compilation we take a look at Sam’s “Moral Landscape” and his effort to defend an objective path towards moral evaluation. We begin with the moral philosopher Peter Singer who outlines his famous “shallow pond” analogy and the framework of utilitarianism. We then hear from the moral psychologist Paul Bloom who makes the case against empathy and points out how it is more often a “bug” in our moral software than a “feature.” Later, William MacAskill describes the way a utilitarian philosophy informs his engagement with the Effective Altruism movement. The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt then puts pressure on Sam’s emphasis on rationality and objective pathways towards morality by injecting a healthy dose of psychological skepticism into the conversation. After, we hear a fascinating exchange with the historian Dan Carlin where he and Sam tangle on the fraught issues of cultural relativism. We end by exploring the intersection of technological innovation and moral progress with the entrepreneur Uma Valeti, whom Sam seeks out when he encounters his own collision with a personal moral failure.   About the Series Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Sam Harris discusses Elon Musk's behavior on Twitter and the illusion of "free-speech absolutism." Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced a new series of audio documentaries, exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating. And make sure to stick around for the end of each episode, where we provide our list of recommendations from the worlds of film, television, literature, music, and art.   In this episode, we survey the landscape of consciousness and get acquainted with the mystery of the mind. We start with an attempt to define consciousness–and veterans of conversations on consciousness will know that this is a huge part of the challenge.  David Chalmers begins with his conception of what he coined “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” and a famous question offered by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.  We then construct a “Philosophical Zombie” before the philosopher Thomas Metzinger explains why he is thoroughly unimpressed by the ability to imagine “such a thing,” while he simultaneously warns us against ever attempting to build one. Anil Seth brings some hope of whittling away the intuition gap of the hard problem by pursuing the “easy” problems, with clear scientific reasoning. Later, Iain McGilchrist lays out the intuition-shattering implications of the famous Roger Sperry experiments with split brain patients that suggest that consciousness can be cut with a knife… at least temporarily. Annaka Harris then shifts the conversation to the realm of panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness is nomologically fundamental and potentially permeates all matter.  Finally, Don Hoffman explains that consciousness is not only fundamental and non-illusory, but that the physical world we appear to be navigating is merely a virtual space-time interface, which has evolved to hide the true nature of reality from us.

Sam Harris speaks with Roland Griffiths about psychedelics and mortality. They discuss the current state of psychedelic research, the timeline for FDA approvals, the risks to mental health posed by psychedelics in vulnerable populations, the use of psychedelics among the well, the relationship between psychedelics and meditation, advice for “bad” trips, microdosing, Roland’s stage-4 cancer diagnosis, reflections on death, and other topics. Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He is author of 420 journal articles and book chapters, and has trained more than 50 postdoctoral research fellows. Roland has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of new psychotropic drugs, and as a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence for the World Health Organization. Roland has a long-term meditation practice and has been conducting human research with psychedelics for more than 20 years. Website: Griffithsfund.org, Endowment Funding Letter, hopkinspsychedelic.org   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Sam Harris speaks with Erik Hoel about the nature of moral truth. They discuss the connection between consequentialism and Effective Altruism, the problems with implementing academic moral philosophy, bad arguments against consequentialism, the implications of AI for our morality, the dangers of moral certainty, whether all claims about good and evil are claims about consequences, the problem of moral fanaticism, difficulty in thinking about low-probability events, and other topics. Erik Hoel is an author and scientist who grew up in his mother’s independent bookstore and later received his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was previously a Forbes 30 Under 30 in science, and he's been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced study in Princeton, as well as a New York City Emerging Writer’s Fellow. His debut novel The Revelations was published last year. Erik recently left his professorship to write on his Substack, The Intrinsic Perspective, full-time. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Website: https://erikhoel.substack.com/about Twitter: @erikphoel   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Only the first 1 hour and 9 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 2 hours and 34 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris explains why he deleted his Twitter account. He then speaks with Cal Newport about the fragmentation of modern life. They discuss the history of computer science, how information technology has changed our lives, the effects of social media, the business model of the Internet, the power of TikTok, the future of Twitter, winner-take-all dynamics in podcasting, conspiracy thinking, the way technology drives cultural change, email and the loss of productivity, the cognitive cost of context switching, deep work, the benefits of controlling one's time, the problem with the advice to "follow your passion," and other topics. Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general-audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. He is the author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. These titles include multiple New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into over 40 languages. Newport is also a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. Website: calnewport.com   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced a new series of audio documentaries, exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career. Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating. And make sure to stick around for the end of each episode, where we provide our list of recommendations from the worlds of film, television, literature, music, and art.   In this episode, we explore the landscape of Artificial Intelligence. We’ll listen in on Sam’s conversation with decision theorist and artificial-intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, as we consider the potential dangers of AI — including the control problem and the value-alignment problem — as well as the concepts of Artificial General Intelligence, Narrow Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Super Intelligence. We’ll then be introduced to philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “Genies, Sovereigns, Oracles, and Tools,” as physicist Max Tegmark outlines just how careful we need to be as we travel down the AI path. Computer scientist Stuart Russell will then dig deeper into the value-alignment problem and explain its importance. We’ll hear from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the geopolitical realities of AI terrorism and weaponization. We’ll then touch the topic of consciousness as Sam and psychologist Paul Bloom turn the conversation to the ethical and psychological complexities of living alongside humanlike AI. Psychologist Alison Gopnik then reframes the general concept of intelligence to help us wonder if the kinds of systems we’re building using “Deep Learning” are really marching us towards our super-intelligent overlords. Finally, physicist David Deutsch will argue that many value-alignment fears about AI are based on a fundamental misunderstanding about how knowledge actually grows in this universe.

To gain access to ALL full-length episodes, you'll need to subscribe. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Sam Harris discusses the recent Sam Bankman-Fried fiasco, the collapse of FTX, and the future of Effective Altruism. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 49 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 39 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris speaks with Neil deGrasse Tyson about his new book, Starry Messenger. They discuss what makes science a unique human endeavor, the tension between respecting scientific consensus and overturning it, confusion about paradigm shifts and scientific controversies, the social importance of probability and statistics, climate change, the consequences of exponential cultural change, social media, social inequality and affirmative action, identity politics and a post-racial future, the wisdom of focusing on class rather than race, and other topics. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of fifteen books—many of them international bestsellers—and numerous articles, both scholarly and for the general public. He is the host of StarTalk, a podcast, and two seasons of Cosmos, televised by Fox and National Geographic. He has received 21 honorary doctorates as well as NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal. He and his wife live in New York City.   Website: https://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/ Twitter: @neiltyson    Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first hour of this episode is available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 39 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris speaks with Timothy Snyder about the ongoing war in Ukraine. They discuss the effect of Russian propaganda, Putin’s motives, whether the US and NATO bear some responsibility for the war, widespread calls for de-escalation, nuclear blackmail and nuclear risk, and other topics. Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is the author of a dozen books, including the bestsellers On Tyranny, Our Malady, The Road to Unfreedom, Black Earth, and Bloodlands. His work has been translated into forty languages and received a number of prizes, including the literature award of the American Academy of Art and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. Website: https://snyder.substack.com/ Twitter: @TimothyDSnyder   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

To gain access to ALL full-length episodes, you'll need to subscribe. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Sam Harris speaks with Meg Smaker about the controversy around her documentary, "The Unredacted (Jihad Rehab)." They discuss her background as a firefighter; the effect that 9/11 had on the firefighting community; her subsequent adventures in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the deprogramming of jihadists; the organized campaign to silence her film; the capitulations Sundance, SXSW, and other festivals; and other topics. Before becoming a filmmaker, Meg Smaker served as a firefighter for over a half-decade. She spent almost 10 years living and working in the Middle East, five of them in Yemen, where she learned Arabic and studied Islam while teaching firefighting to Yemeni men. As a filmmaker, Meg explores controversial subjects from unorthodox viewpoints. Her films have won numerous awards, including Best Short Documentary at SXSW (South By Southwest) and a Student Academy Award. Her film, Boxeadora, received critical acclaim as “one of the best boxing films of all time” by Paste Magazine. Meg was also featured in the Hollywood Reporter’s “Next Gen” issue as one of the film industry's most promising new nonfiction filmmakers, and just this year Filmmaker Magazine named her one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Meg’s most recent film, Jihad Rehab—her début feature-length documentary—premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Meg received an MFA in Documentary Film from Stanford University, Graduate Certificate from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a BA with honors in Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis (PLEA) from Mills College.   Websites: jihadrehab.com, gofundme.com/f/the-unredacted-jihad-rehab, Fairforall.org Twitter: @Meighon   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 40 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 2 hours and 3 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris speaks with Russ Roberts about decision-making and the nature of moral progress. They discuss the shortcomings of economics as a science, the power of books, the difference between "wild" and "tame" problems, Darwin’s embarrassing thoughts about the value of marriage, the utility of decision of analysis, incommensurate goods, free riding, counterfactuals, how the decisions we make change us, the difficulty of predicting future experience, changing moral norms, Effective Altruism, free speech, whether we are making moral progress, social media, truth vs comfort, problems with consequentialism, rule-based consequentialism, free will, meditation, and other topics. Russ Roberts is president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the host of EconTalk: Conversations for the Curious and the co-creator of the Keynes-Hayek rap videos. He started EconTalk in 2006—past guests include Christopher Hitchens, Angela Duckworth, Milton Friedman, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Piketty, Emily Oster, and Michael Lewis. His books include How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness, and his latest—Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Website: russroberts.info Twitter: @econtalker   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

To gain access to ALL full-length episodes, you'll need to subscribe. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.  Sam Harris speaks with Yasmine Mohammed about her book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. They discuss her family background and indoctrination into conservative Islam, the double standard that Western liberals use when thinking about women in the Muslim community, the state of feminism in general, honor violence, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and many other topics. Yasmine Mohammed is a human rights activist and writer. She advocates for the rights of women living within Islamic majority countries, as well as those who struggle under religious fundamentalism. She is the founder of Free Hearts Free Minds, an organization that provides psychological support for ex-Muslims living within Muslim majority countries. Website: YasmineMohammed.com Twitter: @YasMohammedxx Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 1 hour and 4 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 2 hours and 13 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris speaks with BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger about preparing for death. They discuss the difference between palliative care and hospice, the tension between getting the most out of life and not clinging to experience, planning for death while still healthy, the importance of an advance directive, navigating the healthcare system, pain control at the end of life, assisted suicide, psychedelic therapy for end-of-life anxiety, and other topics. BJ Miller, MD, is a longtime hospice and palliative medicine physician and educator. He currently sees patients and families via telehealth through Mettle Health, a company he co-founded with the aim to provide personalized, holistic consultations for any patient or caregiver who needs help navigating the practical, emotional and existential issues that come with serious illness and disability. BJ has worked in all settings of care: hospital, clinic, residential facility, and home. Led by his own experiences as a patient, BJ advocates for the roles of our senses, community and presence in designing a better ending. His TED Talk has been viewed over 15 Million times and he speaks internationally on themes of illness, death and loss. Website: www.mettlehealth.com Twitter: @bjmillermd Shoshana Berger is the Global Executive Editor of IDEO, where she has worked on projects related to organization transformation, the end of life, modern Judaism, and school lunch. Before joining IDEO, she was a Senior Editor at WIRED, where she launched WIRED Design, and prior to that, founder of the DIY magazine, ReadyMade, later turning it into a book, Ready Made: How to Make (Almost) Everything. She is the coauthor, with Dr. BJ Miller, of A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. She has written for The New York Times, TIME, WIRED, and Fast Company. Website: linkedin.com/in/shoshanaberger Twitter: @shoshanaberger   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 42 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the black podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour 42 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear red. Sam Harris speaks with Jonah Goldberg about the state of American politics and civil society. They discuss the hyperpartisanship of the Left and Right, what Trump has done to the Republican party, the breakdown of trust in institutions, the “new catastrophism” enabled by social media, the problem of populism, and other topics. Jonah Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of The Dispatch. He holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute and was previously a senior editor at National Review, where he worked for two decades. He is also the host of the podcast The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and a CNN commentator. His nationally syndicated column appears regularly in over a hundred newspapers across the United States. He was the founding editor of National Review Online and appears regularly on NPR's Morning Edition. The Atlantic magazine has identified Goldberg as one of the top 50 political commentators in America, and he is the author of three New York Times bestsellers. Website: thedispatch.com Twitter: @JonahDispatch   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 44 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the black podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour 56 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear red. Sam Harris speaks to Kieran Setiya about the relevance of philosophy to living a good life. They discuss the existence of objective moral truths, being happy vs living well, our response to grief, the difference between "telic" and "atelic" activities, the power of reframing, FOMO, bias toward the future, regret, the asymmetry between pain and pleasure, and other topics. Kieran Setiya is a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His new book, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, comes out October 2022. He is the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, The New York Times, Aeon, and The Yale Review. Website: www.ksetiya.net  Twitter: @KieranSetiya   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 40 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the black podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour 25 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear red. Sam Harris speaks with Will Storr about the role that status plays in human life and culture. They talk about the taboo around caring about status, egalitarianism, the perpetual insecurity of status, how we play multiple status games simultaneously, identity, social connection, dominance, virtue, success, status as an evolved mechanism, gossip, status and health, the consequences of humiliation, the role of social media, status and politics, conspiracy thinking, moral panics, status and philanthropy, and other topics. Will Storr is an award-winning writer. He's the author of six critically acclaimed books, including the Sunday Times bestseller The Science of Storytelling. His journalism has appeared in titles such as The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His work on sexual violence against men earned the Amnesty International Award and a One World Press Award. Website: willstorr.com  Twitter: @wstorr   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

To gain access to ALL full-length episodes, you'll need to subscribe. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Sam Harris responds to a controversy over a recent podcast appearance.   If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

To gain access to ALL full-length episodes, you'll need to subscribe. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Sam Harris speaks with William MacAskill about his new book, What We Owe the Future. They discuss the philosophy of effective altruism (EA), longtermism, existential risk, criticism of EA, problems with expected-value reasoning, doing good vs feeling good, why it's hard to care about future people, how the future gives meaning to the present, why this moment in history is unusual, the pace of economic and technological growth, bad political incentives, value lock-in, the well-being of conscious creatures as the foundation of ethics, the risk of unaligned AI, how bad we are at predicting technological change, and other topics. William MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. He is one of the primary voices in a philanthropic movement known as “effective altruism” and the co-founder of three non-profits based on effective altruist principles: Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. He is also the Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and the author of Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference. Website: williammacaskill.com Twitter: @willmacaskill   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 1 hour and 4 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 43 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris speaks with Arthur C. Brooks about what it takes to build a good life. They discuss the power of social comparison, the intelligence taboo, political dignity and ethical hierarchy, the Dalai Lama, the nature of love, fluid and crystallized intelligences, the strange case of Linus Pauling, the limits of identity, atheism and religious faith, fear of death, psychedelics, existentialism, St. Thomas Aquinas, and other topics. Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the popular “How to Build a Life” column. Brooks is the author of 12 books, including the 2022 #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. He speaks all around the world about love and happiness, giving more than 150 speeches and lectures per year in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.  Brooks began his career as a classical musician, leaving college at 19, and performing with ensembles in the United States and Spain. In his late twenties, while still performing, he returned to school, earning a BA in economics through distance learning. At 31, he left music and earned an MPhil and PhD in public policy analysis, during which time he worked as a military analyst for the Rand Corporation. Brooks then spent the next 10 years as a university professor at Syracuse University, where he taught economics and nonprofit management. In 2009, Brooks became the president of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, one of the world’s most influential think tanks, which he led for a decade. During this period, he was selected as one of Fortune Magazine’s “50 World’s Greatest Leaders” and was awarded seven honorary doctorates.  Originally from Seattle, Brooks currently lives outside Boston, with his wife Ester Munt-Brooks, who is a native of Barcelona. They have three adult children. Website: arthurbrooks.com  Twitter: @arthurbrooks   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 48 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 53 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Marc Andreessen about the current state of Internet technology and culture. They discuss Marc's background in tech, the birth of the Internet, how advertising became the business model for digital media, the three stages of the Web, the blockchain, how successful technology reorders status and power in society, the Bitcoin white paper, the mystery surrounding the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the importance of distributed consensus, Bitcoin as digital gold, how society has performed during Covid, James Burnham and managerial capitalism, the principal-agent problem, negative externalities, risk and regulation, trust in institutions, WTF happened in 1971, regulatory capture, banning Trump and Alex Jones from social media, perverse incentives in philanthropy, and other topics. Marc Andreessen is a co-founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Dialpad, Honor, OpenGov, and Samsara Networks. He is also on the board of Meta. Website: a16z.com Twitter: @pmarca   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Only the first 38 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 28 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris presents an unconventional perspective on time management from Oliver Burkeman. Rather than focusing on rote efficiency or productivity, Burkeman calls on us to embrace our finitude and surrender to the rhythms of life, so that we may “end our struggle with time”—and live with “more accomplishment, more success, and more time spent on what matters most.” Oliver Burkeman is the author of the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, about embracing limitation and finally getting round to what counts, along with The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking and Help!: How to Be Slightly Happier, Slightly More Successful and Get a Bit More Done. For many years he wrote a popular column on psychology for The Guardian, This Column Will Change Your Life, and has reported from London, New York, and Washington, D.C. In his email newsletter, The Imperfectionist, he writes about productivity, mortality, and building a meaningful life in an age of distraction. Website: oliverburkeman.com  Twitter: @oliverburkeman   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 54 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 50 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris speaks with Peter Zeihan and Ian Bremmer about Peter's new book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning. They discuss a wide range of issues related to the deglobalization and demographic collapse, the differing fates of China and America, climate change, the war in Ukraine, and other topics. Peter Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist, speaker, and author. Peter founded his own firm, Zeihan on Geopolitics, in 2012 in order to provide a select group of clients with direct, custom analytical products. Today those clients represent a vast array of sectors including energy majors, financial institutions, business associations, agricultural interests, universities, and the U.S. military. He is the author of The Accidental Superpower, The Absent Superpower, Disunited Nations, and most recently, The End of the World is Just the Beginning. Website: https://zeihan.com/ Twitter: @PeterZeihan   Ian Bremmer is a political scientist who helps business leaders, policymakers, and the general public make sense of the world around them. He is president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political risk research and consulting firm, and GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of international affairs. Ian is an independent voice on critical issues around the globe, offering clearheaded insights through speeches, written commentary, and even satirical puppets (really!). He is the host of GZERO World on US public television and is the author of eleven books including his latest, The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats—and Our Response—Will Change the World. Ian also serves as the foreign affairs columnist and editor at large for Time magazine and teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Website: ianbremmer.bulletin.com  Twitter: @ianbremmer   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Only the first 50 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 2 hours and 7 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. Sam Harris speaks with Morgan Housel about the psychology of money and investing. They discuss how personal history shapes one’s view of economic risk, the implications of not understanding the future, being rich vs being wealthy, how we measure success, the problem of social comparison, happiness vs life satisfaction, saving and investing, Warren Buffett and the power of compounding, rational vs reasonable decisions, the role of luck, optimism vs pessimism, dollar-cost averaging, and other topics. Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. His book The Psychology of Money has sold over 1.9 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He serves on the board of directors at Markel and has presented at more than 100 conferences in a dozen countries. Website: morganhousel.com Twitter: @morganhousel   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Sam Harris shares an audio essay exploring how psychedelics are, for many, the only way to glimpse "the vast firmament beyond the prison walls” of the “conceptual mind”—and often serve as the gateway to meditation. He also discusses how the very profundity of the psychedelic experience can distract us from the true purpose of mindfulness—the recognition that consciousness is always already free, in every moment. Also included are highlights from the Waking Up app created for a recent Tim Ferriss podcast. Website: http://wakingup.com/makingsense

Sam Harris speaks with David French about forces that are pulling American society apart. They discuss David’s experience as a JAG officer in Iraq, his experience of harassment for coming out against Trump, the way real grievances drive political derangement, the illiberalism on both the Left and the Right, the role of prophecy in Evangelical support for Trump, honor culture, the response to Hunter Biden’s laptop, the January 6th hearings, the personality cult of Trumpism, federalism, geographic sorting, group polarization, cultural divisions in sports and entertainment, the gun rights movement, the ethics of gun ownership, whether Trump will be prosecuted, the 2024 Presidential campaign, the dangers of online activism, and other topics. David French is a senior editor at The Dispatch and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. A graduate of Harvard Law School, David was previously a senior writer for National Review and a columnist for Time. He is a former constitutional litigator and a past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. David is a New York Times bestselling author, and his most recent book, Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, was released last September. David is a former major in the United States Army Reserve and is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he was awarded the Bronze Star.  Website: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/ Twitter: @DavidAFrench   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Judd Apatow about his career in comedy. They discuss his new documentary on George Carlin, why so much comedy ages badly, Carlin’s drug use, how Judd structures his work, using improv in his films, adventures in parenthood, what is worth worrying about, the downside of fame, advice for creatives, the unique properties of standup comedy, the problem of political fragmentation, the consequences of not believing in free will, and other topics. Judd Apatow is an Emmy Award®-winning director, producer, screenwriter, author and comedian who is one of the most prolific comedic minds in the industry.  Apatow recently co-directed, with Michael Bonfiglio, and produced the HBO Films two-part documentary GEORGE CARLIN’S AMERICAN DREAM.  Apatow also recently authored the New York Times best-seller, Sicker in the Head, an all-new collection of honest, hilarious, and enlightening conversations with some of the most exciting names in comedy, a follow-up to his New York Times best-seller Sick in the Head. Upcoming, he produced the romantic comedy, BROS, for Universal starring, and co-written by, Billy Eichner, set for release on September 30, 2022.  The film follows two gay men with commitment problems attempting a relationship and is the first major studio film to feature an all LGBTQ+ principal cast.   Website: juddapatow.com Twitter: @JuddApatow

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Graeme Wood about the problem of gun violence in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Graeme Wood is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. He was the 2014–2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he teaches in the political science department at Yale University. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Website: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/graeme-wood/  Twitter: @gcaw

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Jay Garfield about the illusion of the self. They discuss the default sense of subjectivity, the difference between absolute and conventional truth, interdependence, free will, subject-object duality, emptiness, the “mind-only” school of Buddhism, scientific realism and experiential anti-realism, and other topics. Jay L. Garfield is Chair of the Philosophy department at Smith College, visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, professor of philosophy at Melbourne University and adjunct professor of philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies. Academicinfluence.com has identified him as one of the 50 most influential philosophers in the world over the past decade. Garfield’s research addresses topics in cognitive science, modern Indian philosophy, ethics, epistemology, logic, the Scottish enlightenment, and Buddhist philosophy—particularly Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka and Yogācāra. He is the author or editor of over 30 books and nearly 200 articles, chapters, and reviews. Website: jaygarfield.org   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Murray about his new book, The War on the West. They discuss the problem of hyper partisanship on the Left and Right, the primacy of culture, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the de-platforming of Trump and Alex Jones, the new religion of anti-racism, the problem of inequality, the 1619 Project, history of slavery, moral panics, the strange case of Michel Foucault, and other topics. Douglas Murray is the associate editor of The Spectator and writes frequently for a variety of other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and The Sun. He has also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments and at the White House. He is the author of several books including The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam and most recently, The War on the West. Website: douglasmurray.net Twitter: @DouglasKMurray   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Eric Schmidt about the ways artificial intelligence is shifting the foundations of human knowledge and posing questions of existential risk. Eric Schmidt is a technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001 where he served as chief executive officer and chairman from 2001 to 2011, and as executive chairman and technical advisor thereafter. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a culture of innovation. In 2017, he co-founded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. He serves as chair of The Broad Institute, and formerly served as chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, a podcast exploring how society can build a brighter future after the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently, he is the co-author of The Age of AI: And Our Human Future.  Website: https://ericschmidt.com/ Twitter: @ericschmidt   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and Ricky Gervais discuss the infamous Oscar slap. We’re excited to announce the launch of the Absolutely Mental app for iOS users. All three seasons of Absolutely Mental are available for purchase on the app. Subscribers to the Making Sense podcast will hear the episode in its entirety in their subscriber feed. If you’d like to hear this entire episode for free, you can access it by downloading the Absolutely Mental app. This bonus episode is listed in Season 3. Note: If you’ve previously purchased any Absolutely Mental content on the website, you will be able to access it in the app. Please check the FAQ for more info.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks to Graeme Wood about Muhammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. They discuss the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the imprisonment of Saudi elites in the Ritz Carlton, the Vision 2030 campaign, relations with Israel, the posture of the Biden administration, energy policy, Saudi efforts to deprogram jihadists, the strange case of Musa Cerantonio, John Walker Lindh, the current condition of ISIS, the war in Ukraine, Russian propaganda, how Finland has made itself invasion-proof, and other topics. Graeme Wood is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. He was the 2014–2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he teaches in the political science department at Yale University. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Website: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/graeme-wood/  Twitter: @gcaw   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Ian Bremmer about the ongoing war in Ukraine. They discuss the current state of the war, the power of sanctions, Biden's "gaffe" about regime change, fear of nuclear war, the logic of mutually assured destruction, the role of China, the most likely outcomes of the war, and other topics. Ian Bremmer is a political scientist who helps business leaders, policy makers, and the general public make sense of the world around them. He is president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political risk research and consulting firm, and GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of international affairs. Ian is an independent voice on critical issues around the globe, offering clearheaded insights through speeches, written commentary, and even satirical puppets (really!). He is the host of GZERO World and is the author of eleven books including the New York Times bestseller Us vs Them: The Failure of Globalism. His forthcoming book The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats—and Our Response—Will Change the World will be published on May 17, 2022 and is available for preorder now. Ian also serves as the foreign affairs columnist and editor at large for Time magazine and teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Website: ianbremmer.bulletin.com Twitter: @ianbremmer

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about the wider implications of Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine. They discuss different forms of war, Putin’s miscalculation regarding the internal divisions of America and the EU, the problem of misinformation, international norms of behavior, the role of China, the civilizational importance of trust, globalization and de-globalization, existential risk, the role of India, Ukrainian leadership, the danger of nuclear war, regime change in Russia, and other topics. Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. His books have been translated into 50+ languages, with 12+ million copies sold worldwide. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind  looked deep into our past, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow considered far-future scenarios, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century focuses on the biggest questions of the present moment.   Website: www.ynharari.com Twitter: @harari_yuval

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Garry Kasparov about Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. They discuss Putin’s larger objectives, the perception of the war inside Russia, whether US and EU foreign policy is to blame, the expansion of NATO, American weakness, Republican support for Putin, the sanctions regime, whether the US and EU should impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, whether to openly seek regime change in Russia, how we can avoid WW3, what post-Putin government in Russia might look like, Western economic entanglement with autocracies, and other topics. Garry Kasparov is a Russian pro-democracy leader, Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, business speaker and author, and former world chess champion. He has been a contributing editor to The Wall Street Journal since 1991 and in 2013 he was named a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School. He is the author of several books including How Life Imitates Chess, and his most recent book, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.   This Saturday (March 12, 2022), Garry will be sharing more information about these topics in an upcoming Briefing with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba & Soldiers from the Frontlines. The event is hosted by Renew Democracy Initiative, a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization dedicated to defending liberal democracy at home and abroad.   Twitter: @Kasparov63 Website: kasparov.com, rdi.org

Sam shares an episode from the third season of Absolutely Mental, his audio series with Ricky Gervais. All 10 episodes have been released today (Wednesday, March 2, 2022) and are available for purchase now at AbsolutelyMental.com.

In this episode of the podcast, Rob Reid and Kevin Esvelt discuss USAID’s new “Deep VZN” program, which aims to discover new pandemic-grade viruses and publish their genomes to the world. Esvelt estimates that there are currently around 30,000 people who could then easily build them. Rob Reid is a podcaster, author, and tech investor, and was a long-time tech entrepreneur. His After On podcast features conversations with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists on topics including synthetic biology, super-AI risk, Fermi’s paradox, robotics, archaeology, and lone-wolf terrorism. Science fiction novels that Rob has written for Random House include The New York Times bestseller Year Zero, and the AI thriller After On. As an investor, Rob is Managing Director at Resilience Reserve, a multi-phase venture capital fund. He co-founded Resilience with Chris Anderson, who runs the TED Conference and has a long track record as both an entrepreneur and an investor. In his own entrepreneurial career, Rob founded and ran Listen.com, the company that created the Rhapsody music service. Earlier, Rob studied Arabic and geopolitics at both undergraduate and graduate levels at Stanford, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Cairo. You can find him at www.after-on.com, or on Twitter at @Rob_Reid.   Kevin M. Esvelt is an assistant professor of the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Sculpting Evolution Group in advancing biotechnology safely. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University for inventing a synthetic microbial ecosystem to rapidly evolve useful biomolecules, and subsequently helped pioneer the development of CRISPR, a powerful new method of genome engineering. In 2013, Esvelt was the first to identify the potential for CRISPR “gene drive” systems to alter wild populations of organisms. Recognizing the implications of an advance that could enable individual scientists to alter the shared environment, he and his colleagues chose to break with scientific tradition by revealing their findings and calling for open discussion and safeguards before they tested it and demonstrated reversibility in the laboratory. An outspoken advocate of sharing research plans to accelerate discovery and improve safety, Esvelt's lab at MIT seeks to accelerate beneficial advances while safeguarding biotechnology against mistrust and misuse. Projects include building catalytic platforms for directed evolution, pioneering new ways of developing ecotechnologies with the guidance of local communities, developing early-warning systems to reliably detect any catastrophic biological threat, applying cryptographic methods to enable secure and universal DNA synthesis screening, and advising policymakers on how best to mitigate global catastrophic biorisks. His work has been published in Nature and Science, covered by the New York Times and Washington Post, and featured on Last Week Tonight and the Netflix special Unnatural Selection. You can find him at https://www.sculptingevolution.org/kevin-m-esvelt, or on Twitter at @kesvelt. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Barton Gellman, and George Packer about the ongoing threat to American democracy posed by Republican misinformation and disinformation regarding the 2020 Presidential Election and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.   Anne Applebaum is a journalist, a prize-winning historian, a staff writer for The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-leads a project on 21st century disinformation and co-teaches a course on democracy. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Her most recent book is The New York Times bestseller, Twilight of Democracy, an essay on democracy and authoritarianism. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications. Website: anneapplebaum.com Twitter: @anneapplebaum    David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy, his tenth book. Frum spent most of his career in conservative media and research institutions, including the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. He is a past chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading center-right think tank in the United Kingdom, and a former director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. In 2001-2002, he served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. Frum holds a B.A. and M.A. in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Website: davidfrum.com Twitter: @davidfrum   George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about American politics, culture, and foreign affairs. He is the author, most recently, of Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal. He is also the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Hitchens Prize), and seven other books.   Barton Gellman, a critically honored author and journalist, is a staff writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at the Century Foundation in New York. He is the author, most recently, of Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State and Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. His awards include The Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy for documentary filmmaking, and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Website: bartongellman.com Twitter: @bartongellman   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam responds to the controversy over his friend Joe Rogan's use of the N-word and his subsequent public apology.

In this Ask Me Anything session, Sam answers the following questions:What is your position on vaccine mandates, school closures, etc.?Do you think painful memories remain painful because there is something left unresolved?How can you forgive a consequential lie?Can you clarify your plans to support effective altruism with NFTs?What are your views on transgender women in sports?How can we combat disinformation and misinformation coming from friends and family?You’ve said that we shouldn’t demonize billionaires, but is it really possible to become that wealthy without perpetuating the evils of capitalism?How do you guard yourself against cognitive bias?Can mindfulness provide relief in the case of extreme suffering (e.g. after the death of a child)?

In this episode, Sam discusses some of the topics he has and hasn't covered, to the disappointment of many Making Sense listeners.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Sam Bankman-Fried about effective altruism. They discuss how he became the wealthiest self-made billionaire under 30, what might go wrong with cryptocurrency, the Giving What We Can pledge, how SBF thinks about using his resources to do the most good in the world, how not to stigmatize wealth, wealth redistribution, norms of generosity among the ultra-wealthy, pandemic preparedness, impact through lobbying, how ambitious should we be in doing good, and other topics. Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. He is also the CEO of Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm. Forbes has described him as "the richest person in crypto" and "one of the richest people under 30 in history." What is more remarkable is that he set out to make this money for the purpose of giving almost all of it away to the most effective charities, and to thereby do as much good in the world as he can. He was an early adopter of the Giving What We Can Pledge, and he is now one of the more prominent people in the effective altruist community. Sam is the son of two Stanford law professors, and he received a degree in physics from MIT. Website: http://ftx.com Twitter: @SBF_FTX Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about the lessons of the COVID pandemic. They discuss our failures to coordinate an effective response, the politics surrounding vaccination, vaccine efficacy, vaccine safety, how to think about scientific controversies, the epidemiology of excess deaths, transmission among the vaccinated, natural immunity, selection pressures and new variants, the failure of institutions, the lab-leak hypothesis, the efficacy of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, boosters, what would happen in a worse pandemic, and other topics. Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.  He is the author of several books—Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, and most recently Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Website: www.humannaturelab.net  Twitter: @NAChristakis    Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Oliver Burkeman about our relationship to time. They discuss the perils of efficiency, being vs becoming, the illusion of time as a resource, parenting and childhood, work-life balance, the loss of leisure, the planning trap, social isolation, a modern Sabbath, and other topics. Oliver Burkeman is the author of the New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, about embracing limitation and finally getting round to what counts, along with The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking and Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done. For many years he wrote a popular column on psychology for the Guardian, 'This Column Will Change Your Life', and has reported from London, New York, and Washington, DC. In his email newsletter, The Imperfectionist, he writes about productivity, mortality, and building a meaningful life in an age of distraction. Twitter: @oliverburkeman Web: www.oliverburkeman.com    Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Stephen Fleming about the neuroscience of self-awareness. They discuss the nature and limits of metacognition, the relationship between self-knowledge and intelligence, error monitoring, theory of mind, mirror neurons, deception and self-deception, false confidence, probabilistic reasoning, where metacognition fails, cognitive decline, calibrating one’s confidence, and other topics. Dr. Stephen Fleming is a Wellcome/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, and leads research groups at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. He has published over 75 peer-reviewed papers in and won multiple awards for his research on metacognition, including the Wiley Prize in Psychology from the British Academy in 2016, the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology in 2017 and the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal in 2019. His book Know Thyself: The Science of Self-awareness was published by Basic Books in 2021.   Twitter: @smfleming Web: metacoglab.org  Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Matthew Walker about the nature and importance of sleep. They discuss sleep and consciousness, the stages of sleep, sleep regularity, light and temperature, the evolutionary origins of sleep, reducing sleep, the connection between poor sleep and all-cause mortality (as well as Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease), sleep across species, learning and memory, mental health, dreams as therapy, lucid dreaming, heart-rate variability, REM-sleep behavior disorder and parasomnias, meditation and sleep, sleep hygiene, different types of insomnia, caffeine and alcohol, sleep efficiency, bedtime restriction, cognitive-behavioral therapy, napping, sleep tracking, and other topics. Matthew Walker earned his PhD in neuroscience from the Medical Research Council in the UK, and subsequently became a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is currently Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. Matt’s research focuses on the effect of sleep on human health and disease, brain, and body. Walker has published more than 100 scientific research studies and has received numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He was recently awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Matt has given a main-stage TED Talk that has been viewed over 13 million times, has also created several TED Miniseries on sleep, a MasterClass series on sleep, and is author of the New York Times bestseller, Why We Sleep. Matt is also host of the 5-star-rated, The Matt Walker Podcast. Twitter: @sleepdiplomat Web: www.sleepdiplomat.com    Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about the role that pain and suffering play in living a good life. They discuss the limitations of hedonism, the connection between chosen suffering and meaning, the research of Daniel Kahneman on well-being, integrating the experiencing and remembering selves, moral motivations, the effects of parenthood on happiness, unchosen suffering, the asymmetry of loss and gain, Nozick’s “experience machine” thought experiment, effective altruism, valuing the future more than the past, the power of contrast, false ideals of happiness, polyamory, money and status, the role of the imagination, boredom, the power of apology, and other topics. 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 six books, including his forthcoming, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. Website: https://paulbloom.net/ Twitter: @paulbloomatyale Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about his new book “Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America.” They discuss how the “social justice” narrative of the Left has become a religion, how this new faith has taken over institutions, and what to do about it. John McWhorter teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He is a columnist at The New York Times, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and the host of the language podcast Lexicon Valley. He is the author of over twenty books, including Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter—Then, Now and Forever and Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Twitter: @JohnHMcWhorter Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Anil Seth about the scientific study of consciousness, where consciousness emerges in nature, levels of consciousness, perception as a “controlled hallucination,” emotion, the experience of “pure consciousness,” consciousness as “integrated information,” measures of “brain complexity,” psychedelics, different aspects of the “self,” conscious AI, and many other topics. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Founding Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. In his work, he seeks to understand the biological basis of consciousness by bringing together research across neuroscience, mathematics, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, philosophy, and psychiatry. In addition to delivering new insights into the nature of consciousness, his research has helped shape novel approaches to psychiatric disorders, as well as driving innovative methods in machine learning and in brain-inspired technologies.  His recent book—Being You: A New Science of Consciousness—explores what it means to “be you”—that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it. Website: www.anilseth.com Twitter: @anilkseth  Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris reflects on the subjective continuity of consciousness, the nature of identity, and the possibility that death isn’t the end of experience. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Andrew Yang about the state of American democracy. They discuss Andrew’s run for the Presidency, the humiliations of campaigning, the manipulation of politics by the media, Andrew’s run for the mayor’s office in NYC, the power of bad incentives, open primaries, rank-choice voting, the Forward Party, the weakness of a two-party system, inequality, the child tax credit, enhanced unemployment, UBI, worries about inflation, and other topics. Andrew Yang was a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and a 2021 candidate for mayor of New York City. Named by President Obama as a Presidential Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship, he is the founder of Humanity Forward and Venture for America. Yang’s New York Times bestselling book The War on Normal People helped introduce the idea of universal basic income into the political mainstream. Yang is a graduate of Brown University, where he graduated with degrees in economics and political science, and Columbia Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review. Andrew’s newest book, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, outlines the problems in our broken system and a way forward to prevent the decline of American Democracy. Website: movehumanityforward.com Twitter: @AndrewYang Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Jonas Kaplan about the neuroscience of belief change. They discuss the illusory truth effect, the backfire effect, failures of replication, “The Fireplace Delusion,” the connection between reason and emotion, wishful thinking, persuasion and the sense of self, conspiracy theories, the power of incentives, in-group loyalty, religion, mindfulness, cognitive flexibility, and other topics. Jonas Kaplan is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the cognitive and social aspects of brain function. He is an Associate Professor of Research at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute, where his work has explored issues relating to consciousness, identity, empathy, and social relationships. He uses functional neuroimaging combined with machine learning to examine the neural mechanisms that underlie our sense of who we are, including research on how the brain processes stories, imagination, beliefs, and values. This work has focused in particular on how the brain deals with the beliefs that are most important to us such as those relating to religion and politics. He is currently the Co-Director of USC’s Dornsife Neuroimaging Center. Website: www.jonaskaplan.com Twitter: @Jonas_Kaplan   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, Sam shares a clip from the second season of Absolutely Mental, his audio series with Ricky Gervais. All 10 episodes have been released today (Friday September 24th, 2021) and are available for purchase at AbsolutelyMental.com.

In this Ask Me Anything session, Sam answers the following questions:Why won’t you discuss COVID vaccines and Ivermectin with Bret Weinstein on the podcast?What do you think about the recent prosecution of a 100-year-old Nazi in Germany?How can we understand voluntary behavior without free will?Does aid to the developing world do more harm than good?Have your views about the risk of artificial general intelligence changed in recent years?What did you think of Simon Biles’s decision to drop out of the Olympics?How should Facebook and other social media platforms deal with the tradeoff between misinformation and censorship?Why are people so resistant to changing their beliefs?

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris recalls his experience of September 11th, 2001, and considers the future of American foreign policy.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Balaji Srinivasan about several civilizational challenges and possible paths forward. They discuss the evidence of American decline, the rise of India and China, centralizing and decentralizing trends in politics, the relationship between politics and technology, the failures of the FDA and TSA, how regulation preserves monopolies, the significance of Bitcoin and blockchain technology, the problem of cybersecurity, the Chinese government’s attack on Bitcoin, the threat of US regulation of cryptocurrency, blockchain scalability, creator coins, life in Singapore, virtual government, the future of decentralized journalism, independent replication in science, wealth inequality, ubiquitous investing, social status, non-zero-sum capitalism, “start-up countries”, and other topics. Balaji S. Srinivasan is an angel investor and entrepreneur. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he was also the cofounder of Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), Counsyl (acquired by Myriad), Teleport (acquired by Topia), and Coin Center. Website: Balajis.com Twitter: @balajis   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this Ask Me Anything session, Sam begins by addressing the blowback that followed a recent podcast episode on “vaccine hesitancy” with Eric Topol and then answers the following questions:How can I inoculate my biracial children against identity politics?In what way is journalism broken, and how can we fix it?Have you read the research suggesting that the effects of microdosing psychedelics are indistinguishable from taking placebos?Can you comment on the degree to which Leftist political ideas have captured the Buddhist community?What should Democrats do to prevent a resurgence of Trumpism?What are the ingredients for a good life?Is it ever ethical for governments to lie to their citizens?If the present moment is all that matters, how can we plan for the future?

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Peter Bergen about the US exit from Afghanistan, the resurgence of the Taliban, and his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” They discuss the Neo-isolationist consensus on the Right and Left, the legitimacy of our initial involvement in Afghanistan, our ethical obligations to our Afghan allies, Biden’s disastrous messaging, the weakness of the Afghan army, the advantages of the Taliban, the implications for global jihadism, the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda, how Osama bin Laden came to lead al-Qaeda, bin Laden’s sincere religious convictions, our failure to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora, the distraction of the war in Iraq, the myth that the CIA funded al-Qaeda, bin Laden’s wives, his years of hiding in Pakistan, his death at the hands of US Special Forces, and other topics. Peter Bergen is the author or editor of nine books, including three New York Times bestsellers and four Washington Post best nonfiction books of the year. His most recent book is The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. Bergen is a Vice President at New America, a professor at Arizona State University, and a national security analyst for CNN. He has testified before congressional committees eighteen times about national security issues and has held teaching positions at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. Website: peterbergen.com Twitter: @peterbergencnn Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Dambisa Moyo about the state of the world. They discuss public goods, economic growth, capitalism, American economic history, bad public-policy choices, inequality, tax avoidance among the wealthy, government inefficiency, the problems with democracy, the breakdown of trust in institutions, failures of transparency, voter participation, future automation and unemployment, identity politics, the reality of racism in America, the problems with affirmative action, competition with China, and other topics. Dambisa Moyo is a prizewinning author of the New York Times bestsellers Edge of Chaos, Winner Take All, Dead Aid, and How Boards Work. Born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia, Moyo holds a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. She worked for the World Bank as a consultant, at Goldman Sachs, and serves on a variety of corporate boards. She regularly contributes to the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times and was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time magazine. She lives in New York City and London. Website: dambisamoyo.com Twitter: @damibisamoyo   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Eric Topol about vaccine hesitancy and related misinformation. They discuss the problem of political and social siloing, concerns about mRNA vaccines, the Emergency Use Authorization by the FDA, the effectiveness of the COVID vaccines, vaccine efficacy vs effectiveness, the Delta variant, the misuse of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), concerns about long-term side effects from vaccines, bad incentives in medicine, ivermectin, government and corporate censorship, vaccine mandates, and other topics. Eric Topol is the Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, Professor of Molecular Medicine, and Executive Vice-President of Scripps Research. As a researcher, he has published over 1200 peer-reviewed articles, with more than 290,000 citations, elected to the National Academy of Medicine, and is one of the top 10 most cited researchers in medicine. His principal scientific focus has been on the genomic and digital tools to individualize medicine—and the power that brings to individuals to drive the future of medicine. In 2016, Topol was awarded a $207M grant from the NIH to lead a significant part of the Precision Medicine (All of Us) Initiative, a prospective research program enrolling 1 million participants in the US. Prior to coming to lead the Scripps Research Translational Institute in 2007, for which he is the principal investigator of a flagship $35M NIH grant, he led the Cleveland Clinic to become the #1 center for heart care and was the founder of a new medical school there. He has been voted as the #1 most Influential physician leader in the United States in a national poll conducted by Modern Healthcare. Besides editing several textbooks, he has published 3 bestseller books on the future of medicine: The Creative Destruction of Medicine and The Patient Will See You Now. His latest book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again came out in 2019. Topol was commissioned by the UK 2018-2019 to lead planning for the National Health Service’s integration of AI and new technologies. Recently, he has been reporting insights and research findings for COVID-19 on his popular Twitter feed. Website: drerictopol.com  Twitter: @EricTopol  Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Jeff Hawkins about the nature of intelligence. They discuss how the neocortex creates models of the world, the role of prediction in sensory-motor experience, cortical columns, reference frames, thought as movement in conceptual space, the future of artificial intelligence, AI risk, the “alignment problem,” the distinction between reason and emotion, the “illusory truth effect,” bad outcomes vs existential risk, and other topics. Jeff Hawkins is a scientist whose life-long interest in neuroscience led to the co-founding and creation of Numenta, a team of scientists and engineers applying neuroscience principles to machine intelligence research. His research focuses on how the cortex learns predictive models of the world through sensation and movement. In 2002, he founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, where he served as Director for three years. The institute is currently located at U.C. Berkeley. Previously, he co-founded two companies, Palm and Handspring, where he designed products such as the PalmPilot and Treo smartphone. Jeff has written two books, On Intelligence (2004 with Sandra Blakeslee) and A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (2021). Jeff earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1979. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. Website: numenta.com Twitter: @Numenta Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with David Buss about the differential mating strategies of men and women. They discuss the controversy that surrounds evolutionary psychology, the denial of sex differences, cross-cultural findings in social science, the replication crisis in psychology, the biological definition of sex, why men and women have affairs, ovulatory shifts in mate preference, sex differences in jealousy and infidelity, the sources of unhappiness in marriage, mate-value discrepancies, what we can learn from dating apps, polyamory and polygamy, the plight of stepchildren, the “Dark Triad” personality type, the MeToo movement, and other topics. David Buss is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Buss previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. He is considered the world’s leading scientific expert on strategies of human mating and one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. His books include The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating; Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Sex, The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill, and Why Women Have Sex (with Cindy Meston). His new book When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault uncovers the evolutionary roots of conflict between the sexes. Buss has more than 300 scientific publications. In 2019, he was cited as one of the 50 most influential living psychologists in the world. Website: davidbuss.com Twitter: @ProfDavidBuss    Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it. 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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Jason Fried about the recent controversy over the “no politics” policy at his company Basecamp. They discuss his business philosophy, the surrender of institutions to “social-justice” activism, how politics has acquired a religious fervor, some of the cultural risks of remote work, keeping activists out of one’s company, social media use as analogous to smoking cigarettes, antitrust regulations for big tech, how social media might be improved, the tax-avoidance schemes of the richest Americans, the prospect of implementing a wealth tax, and other topics. Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, makers of Basecamp and HEY.com. He’s also the co-author of a number of unusual business books, including New York Times Bestseller REWORK, REMOTE, Getting Real, and his latest It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work which The Economist called “funny, well-written and iconoclastic and by far the best thing on management published this year.” Website: world.hey.com/jason Twitter: @jasonfried Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Neil deGrasse Tyson about our place in the universe. They discuss our current understanding of extra-solar planets, the prospect that there is complex life elsewhere in the galaxy, the Fermi problem, the possibility that all advanced civilizations self destruct, how we can detect life on exoplanets, recent media interest in UFOs, whether a direct encounter with alien life would change our world, the flat-Earth conspiracy, the public understanding of science, the problem of political partisanship, racial inequality, and other topics. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. He is the author of fifteen books—many of them international bestsellers—and numerous articles, both scholarly and for the general public. He is the host of StarTalk, a podcast, and two seasons of Cosmos, televised by Fox and National Geographic. He has received 21 honorary doctorates as well as NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal. He and his wife live in New York City.   Website: https://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/ Twitter: @neiltyson  Essay: Reflections on the Color of My Skin by Neil deGrasse Tyson   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Antonio García-Martínez about his recent firing at Apple. They discuss his experience in tech, his book “Chaos Monkeys,” the controversy at Apple, cancel culture, and other topics. Antonio García Martínez is a former early Facebooker, advisor at Twitter, and (very briefly) an employee at Apple before being the object of a petition for his dismissal. His memoir Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure was on The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal bestseller lists, as well as NPR’s Best Books of 2016, and still somehow manages to be a subject of debate five years later. Website: https://www.thepullrequest.com/ Twitter: @antoniogm   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Jesse Singal about a variety of controversial topics. They discuss fragmentation in the media, bad incentives in journalism, Jesse’s encounters with cancel culture, transgender activism, the case of J.K. Rowling, the capture of cultural institutions by the far Left, racism, class inequality, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, whether Jesse should try psychedelics, and other topics. Jesse Singal is the co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported and the author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. A contributing writer and former senior editor at New York Magazine, his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and other outlets. He has a master’s in public affairs from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Website: https://jessesingal.substack.com/ Twitter: @jessesingal Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and David Whyte further explore his work in his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. David Whyte is a poet and the author of 11 books of poetry along with four books of prose, including Still Possible, David Whyte: Essentials and The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationships. David holds a degree in Marine Zoology, honorary degrees from Neumann College and Royal Roads University, and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon, and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures, and workshops. Website: davidwhyte.com  Twitter: @whytedw

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Michele Gelfand about the difference between tight and loose cultures. They discuss the primacy of cultural norms in governing human behavior, the trade-offs between order and freedom, conservatism vs liberalism, sensitivity to threat, scarcity, the COVID pandemic, the Jeffrey Toobin affair, political polarization, the problem of extreme stereotypes, and other topics. Michele Gelfand is a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences. Her work has been published in outlets such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Applied Psychology. Gelfand is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology series (Oxford University Press). Her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World was published by Scribner in 2018. She is the past President of the International Association for Conflict Management and co-founder of the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution. Gelfand was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.  Website: https://www.michelegelfand.com/ Twitter: @MicheleJGelfand

In this nearly 4-hour SPECIAL EPISODE, Rob Reid delivers a 100-minute monologue (broken up into 4 segments, and interleaved with discussions with Sam) about the looming danger of a man-made pandemic, caused by an artificially-modified pathogen. The risk of this occurring is far higher and nearer-term than almost anyone realizes.  Rob explains the science and motivations that could produce such a catastrophe and explores the steps that society must start taking today to prevent it. These measures are concrete, affordable, and scientifically fascinating—and almost all of them are applicable to future, natural pandemics as well. So if we take most of them, the odds of a future Covid-like outbreak would plummet—a priceless collateral benefit.  Rob Reid is a podcaster, author, and tech investor, and was a long-time tech entrepreneur. His After On podcast features conversations with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists on topics including synthetic biology, super-AI risk, Fermi’s paradox, robotics, archaeology, and lone-wolf terrorism. Science fiction novels that Rob has written for Random House include The New York Times bestseller Year Zero, and the AI thriller After On. As an investor, Rob is Managing Director at Resilience Reserve, a multi-phase venture capital fund. He co-founded Resilience with Chris Anderson, who runs the TED Conference and has a long track record as both an entrepreneur and an investor. In his own entrepreneurial career, Rob founded and ran Listen.com, the company that created the Rhapsody music service. Earlier, Rob studied Arabic and geopolitics at both undergraduate and graduate levels at Stanford, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Cairo. You can find him at www.after-on.com, or on Twitter at @Rob_Reid.   Organizations Supported by this Podcast: Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics: https://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/ The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations: https://cepi.net/

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Lisa Feldman Barrett about the origins and function of the human brain. They discuss how brains evolved, the myth of the “triune brain,” the brain’s network organization, the predictive nature of perception and action, the construction of emotion, concepts as prescriptions for action, culture as an operating system, and other topics. Lisa Feldman Barrett is University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Barrett is among the top 1% most-cited scientists for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. She is the recipient of a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for transformative research, the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (APA). She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and a number of other honorific societies. She has authored two popular science books for the public: How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and more recently, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.   Website: https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com, https://affective-science.org Twitter: @LFeldmanBarrett

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Rener Gracie about police procedure and about the special relevance of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for safely controlling resisting suspects. Rener Gracie is a third-generation member of the legendary Gracie Family credited with creating the self-defense system known as Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. He started learning the family craft at two years old, and he was 10 years old when his father created the UFC. Today, Rener is the co-owner and chief instructor at the Gracie University of Jiu-Jitsu, the global jiu-jitsu organization headquartered in Southern California. With over 180 brick-and-mortar locations worldwide, and over 300,000 students learning via the interactive online jiu-jitsu portal (GracieUniversity.com), Rener has dedicated his life to sharing jiu-jitsu with the world.  In recent years, Rener has become a central figure in the discussion surrounding police use of force in the United States. With over 20 years of experience teaching law enforcement professionals, he presents compelling data that substantiates the need for more training for police officers at a time when many are fighting to “defund the police,” which would accomplish the exact opposite.  Website: https://www.gracieuniversity.com/ Twitter: @RenerGracie Instagram: @renergracie YouTube: @GracieBreakdown McDonald’s Taser Incident: https://youtu.be/F4VeHOkt_o8 Jiu-Jitsu Cop Breaks Down His Own Encounter: https://youtu.be/BOBsTJdr0Oo 2 Cops vs. 1 Huge Guy: https://youtu.be/FFTJHu4b4Sw Marietta Police Department Jiu-Jitsu Study: https://youtu.be/pDIG_SKhjUw Gracie University—Police Training Reimagined: GracieUniversity.com/Reform

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahan about the newly launched Journal of Controversial Ideas. They discuss the ethics of discussing dangerous ideas, the possibility of having a market in vaccines, the taboo around the topic of race and IQ, the relationship between activism and academia, the shallow-pond argument for doing good, and other topics. Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He focuses on practical ethics, and is best known for his book Animal Liberation and for his writings about global poverty. Francesca Minerva is a research fellow at the University of Milan and a co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Controversial Ideas. Her research focuses on applied ethics, medical and bioethics, discrimination, and academic freedom. Jeff McMahan is a professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. He focuses on a range of issues related to harm and benefit—including war, self- and other-defense, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, personal identity, the moral status of animals, causing people to exist, disability, philanthropy, and other topics. Website: https://petersinger.info/, http://francescaminerva.com/, http://jeffersonmcmahan.com/ Twitter: @PeterSinger, @FranciMinerva, @JConIdeas

In this episode of the podcast Sam Harris speaks with Bruce Friedrich and Liz Specht from the Good Food Institute about the way the problems of climate change and pandemic risk are directly connected to animal agriculture. The Good Food Institute is an international nonprofit reimagining protein production. Bruce Friedrich oversees GFI’s global strategy, working with the U.S. leadership team and international managing directors to ensure that GFI is maximally effective at implementing programs that deliver mission-focused results. Bruce is a TED Fellow, Y Combinator alum, and popular speaker on food innovation. He has penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Wired, and many other publications. Bruce’s 2019 TED talk has been viewed two million times and translated into dozens of languages. He graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and also holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics. Liz Specht works to identify and forecast areas of technological need within the alternative protein field. Her efforts also catalyze research to address these needs while supporting researchers in academia and industry to move the field forward. Liz has a bachelor’s degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins University, a doctorate in biological sciences from the University of California San Diego, and postdoctoral research experience from the University of Colorado Boulder. Prior to joining GFI in 2016, Liz had accumulated a decade of academic research experience in synthetic biology, recombinant protein expression, and development of genetic tools. Website: gfi.org Twitter: @GoodFoodInst, @BruceGFriedrich, @LizSpecht

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In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with James Fadiman about the psychedelic experience. They discuss who should and shouldn’t take psychedelics, set and setting, the role of a guide, the effects of microdosing, the difference between MDMA and true psychedelics, “good” and “bad” trips, the power of thought, the fiction of a unified self, changing states of self, compassion, and other topics. James Fadiman, Ph.D., has been exploring psychedelics since 1961 and the effect of microdosing since 2010. As well as holding consulting, training, counseling and editorial jobs, he has taught in psychology and design engineering at San Francisco State, Brandeis, and Stanford. His most recent books are The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are (with Jordan Gruber). Website:  https://www.jamesfadiman.com microdosingpsychedelics.com Twitter: @Jfadiman

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris presents his full argument on the illusoriness of free will—and explores its ethical and psychological implications.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam speaks with poet David Whyte about his new and on-going series for the Waking Up app, based on his book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. With the imagery of a poet and the reflection of a philosopher, David turns his attention to ordinary words, each a doorway into the underlying currents of human life. They discuss 4 tracks from the first installment—Friendship, Honesty, Ambition, and Alone. David Whyte is a poet and the author of 11 books of poetry along with four books of prose, including Still Possible, David Whyte: Essentials and The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationships. David holds a degree in Marine Zoology, honorary degrees from Neumann College and Royal Roads University, and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon, and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures, and workshops. Website: davidwhyte.com  Twitter: @whytedw

Ricky Gervais calls Sam to ask if AI will replace comedians. They also discuss the implications of not having free will and if a chimp has ever asked, “what does it all mean?” They agree that bears are dangerous.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Frank Wilczek about the fundamental nature of reality. They discuss the difference between science and non-science, the role of intuition in science, the nature of time, the prospect that possibility is an illusion, the current limits of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, space-time as a substance, the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics in science, the possibility that we might be living in a simulation, the fundamental building blocks of matter, the structure of atoms, the four fundamental forces, wave-particle duality, the electromagnetic spectrum, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the implications of infinite space-time, dark energy and dark matter, and other topics. Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student. He was among the earliest MacArthur fellows, and has won many awards both for his scientific work and his writing. He is the author of A Beautiful Question, The Lightness of Being, Fantastic Realities, Longing for the Harmonies, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, and hundreds of articles in leading scientific journals. His “Wilczek’s Universe” column appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal. Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founding director of the T. D. Lee Institute and chief scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center in Shanghai, China, and a distinguished professor at Arizona State University and Stockholm University. Website: https://www.frankawilczek.com/ Twitter: @FrankWilczek   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.

Ricky Gervais calls to discuss Sam’s monster joke from their last conversation and then other things happen…

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with mayoral candidate, Andrew Yang, about the future of New York City. Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur, founder of Humanity Forward, and host of the weekly Yang Speaks podcast. Andrew also recently ran as a democratic candidate in the 2020 Presidential primary election. In his early career, Andrew served as the CEO, co-founder or executive at a number of technology and education companies including the well-known test preparation company, Manhattan Prep. In 2011, he founded Venture for America, a non-profit which connects recent college graduates with start-ups. His book, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future was published in 2018, shortly after announcing his run for presidency. He is now focused on his mayoral campaign, but also leads Humanity Forward, a non-profit organization dedicated to continuing the movements inspired by his campaigns for public office. Websites: https://www.yangforny.com/ https://movehumanityforward.com/ Twitter: @AndrewYang

Ricky Gervais calls Sam to ask why we dream? They discuss why puns are terrible and breakdown some of the mechanics of comedy.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Iain McGilchrist about the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the human brain. They discuss the evolutionary history of the divided brain, research on surgically divided brains, popular misconceptions about the differences between the hemispheres, the left hemisphere’s propensity for confabulation, the prospect that consciousness might be partitioned in an intact brain, the difference between consciousness and attention, the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind, how face-to-face encounters differ between the hemispheres, the unique deficits resulting from damage to the left and right hemispheres, the ascendancy of the left-hemisphere in modern culture, the possibility that the brain is a mere receiver of mind, the prospect of surviving death, and other topics. Iain McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. He is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and a former research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. His work on hemispheric specialization inspired the The Divided Brain, a documentary produced for the CBC featuring McGilchrist and other scientists. Website: https://channelmcgilchrist.com

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Zeynep Tufekci about the problem of misinformation and group-think. They discuss the Covid-19 pandemic, the early failures of journalists and public health professionals to make sense of it, the sociology of mask wearing, the problem of correcting institutional errors, Covid as a dress rehearsal for something far worse, asymmetric information warfare, failures of messaging about vaccines, the paradox of scientific authority, the power of incentives, how to reform social media, and other topics. Zeynep Tufekci is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, an opinion writer at the New York Times, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She studies the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence, and society. Twitter: @zeynep Website: https://zeynep.substack.com/

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Jack Goldstone about the rise in social inequality and political instability in the United States. They discuss how wealth is deployed, the loss of social mobility, comparative judgments of well-being, cosmopolitanism and the isolation of the rich, decreased life expectancy, taxation, the need for government to solve problems, success and social obligation, the causes of revolution, universal basic income (UBI), and other topics. Jack Goldstone is a sociologist and is also the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Chair Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. He is a Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center, a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and is the Director of Schar’s Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions and Policy (SCIP). Jack is a leading expert on revolutions and the social, political and economic variables that produce them. His research focuses on conditions for building democracy and stability in developing nations, particularly the impact of global population changes. His 2010 essay in Foreign Affairs, The New Population Bomb, analyzed the impact of aging and youth bulges on the global economy and international security, and was one of the most downloaded and viewed essays in recent years. His latest book is Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford’s widely-read Very Short Introductions series and his latest article, Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties’, was published by Noema Magazine. Twitter: @jgoldsto

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with General Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell about the radicalization of the far Right under Trump. They discuss the events of January 6, 2021, the behavior of the Capitol police, the history of white supremacy in the US, the effect of banning extremists from social media, the logic of insurgency, the consequence of public lies, what should happen to Trump and his enablers, and other topics. Stanley McChrystal retired from the US Army as a four-star general after more than 34 years of service. In his last assignment, he was the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. He has written several books including a memoir titled My Share of the Task, which was a New York Times bestseller. Stanley is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and he is the founder of the McChrystal Group leadership institute. Chris Fussell is a Partner at the McChrystal Group and the co-author (with Stanley McChrystal) of Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, which was also a New York Times bestseller. Chris was a commissioned naval officer and he spent 15 years in the Navy SEALs in various points around the globe. He served as the aide-de-camp to General McChrystal during his final year commanding the joint special operations task force fighting Al Qaeda. Chris is on the board of directors of the Navy SEAL Foundation and is a lifetime member of The Council on Foreign Relations. Chris also teaches at the Jackson Institute at Yale University.  Together, Stanley and Chris host No Turning Back—a podcast that explores the future of leadership and teams with the world’s most consequential leaders.   Website: www.McChrystalGroup.com Twitter: @McChrystalGroup, @StanMcChrystal, @FussellChris

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris discusses two dangerous misconceptions about the siege of the Capitol.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris analyzes a few disturbing trends and shares his hopes for 2021.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with William MacAskill about how to do the most good in the world. They discuss the “effective altruism” movement, choosing causes to support, the apparent tension between wealth and altruism, how best to think about generosity over the course of one’s lifetime, and other topics. William MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Research Fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. He is one of the primary voices in a philanthropic movement known as “effective altruism” and the co-founder of three non-profits based on effective altruist principles: Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. He is also the Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and the author of Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference. Website: williammacaskill.com Twitter: @willmacaskill

In this episode of the podcast, Stephen Laureys interviews Sam Harris about meditation practice and the scientific study of the mind. They discuss why Sam began to practice meditation, the difference between dualistic and nondualistic mindfulness, the search for happiness, wisdom vs knowledge, our relationship with death, the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, the hard problem of consciousness, the role of introspection in science, meditation and free will, the self and the brain, the difference between voluntary and involuntary actions, dangerous knowledge, the mystery of being, the power of hypnosis, and other topics. Steven Laureys, MD, PhD, FEAN (Fellow of the European Academy of Neurology), is a Belgian neurologist, neuroscientist, author, and speaker. He has written several publications including The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology and the well-received La Méditation, c’est bon pour le cerveau, which will be published in English as The No-Nonsense Meditation Book in April 2021 (UK) and June 2021 (US). Dr. Laureys also maintains a clinical practice at the University Hospital of Liège where his research focuses on understanding consciousness, meditation, and the mind. Website: drstevenlaureys.org Twitter: @drstevenlaureys Email address mentioned in the podcast for the purpose of sharing information about an NDE (Near Death Experience): NDE@uliege.be

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Adam Gazzaley about the way our technology is changing us. They discuss our limited ability to process information, our failures of multitasking, “top-down” vs “bottom-up” attention, self-interruptions and switching costs, anxiety, boredom, “digital medicine,” neuroplasticity, video games for training the mind, the future of brain-machine interface, and other topics. Adam Gazzaley, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor in Neurology, Physiology, and Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, and the Founding Director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center, Neuroscape Lab, and the Gazzaley Lab, which explores mechanisms of neuroplasticity and designs, develops and validates new technologies to optimize cognitive abilities. He is also co-founder and Chief Science Advisor of Akili Interactive, a company developing therapeutic video games and Chief Scientist of JAZZ Venture Partners, a venture capital firm investing in experiential technology to improve human performance. Adam co-authored the award-winning MIT Press book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World with Dr. Larry Rosen. Website: gazzaley.com Twitter: @adamgazz   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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris discusses President Trump’s failure to concede the 2020 presidential election.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris describes his new understanding of why people support President Trump.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan sing the praises of President Trump. Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic from 1991 – 1996 and was an intellectual architect of the campaign for marriage equality. He is the author of The Conservative Soul and Virtually Normal. Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish, pioneered online journalism from 2000 to 2015, and he recently revived it as a Substack newsletter, The Weekly Dish. He is writing a book on the future of Christianity, and his collection of essays will be published in 2021. Website: andrewsullivan.substack.com Twitter: @sullydish

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the breakdown of trust in institutions and experts, the corruption of science by politics, the ineptitude of the Trump administration in handling the pandemic, whether the gravity of Covid-19 has been exaggerated, preparing for future pandemics, whether Covid deaths are being over-reported, bad incentives in the medical system, tracking “excess death” statistics, the prospect that the novel coronavirus will evolve to become more benign, the efficacy of current treatments, safety concerns about a rushed vaccine, the importance of public health communication, when life might return to normal, the economic impact of the pandemic, long term social changes, the future of universities, Nicholas’s personal habits during the pandemic, the importance of rapid testing, and other topics. Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.  He is the author of several books—Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, and most recently Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Website: www.humannaturelab.net Twitter: @NAChristakis

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Michael Sandel about the problem with meritocracy. They discuss the dark side of the concept of merit, the pernicious myth of the self-made man, the moral significance of luck, the backlash against “elites” and expertise, how we value human excellence, the connection between wealth and value creation, the ethics of the tax code, higher education as a sorting mechanism for a caste system, alternatives to 4-year colleges, and other topics. Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. His writings—on justice, democracy, ethics, and markets—have been translated into 27 languages. His course “Justice” was the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television and has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was recently named the “most influential foreign figure of the year.” Sandel has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His BBC series “The Global Philosopher” explores the ethical issues lying behind the headlines with participants from over 30 countries. His latest book is titled The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Website: http://justiceharvard.org/    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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Nina Schick about the growing epidemic of misinformation and disinformation. They discuss the coming problem of “deep fakes,” the history of Russian “active measures” against the West, the weaponization of the EU migration crisis, Russian targeting of the African-American community, the future of Europe, Trump and rise of political cynicism, QAnon, the prospect of violence surrounding the 2020 Presidential election, and other topics. Nina Schick is an author and broadcaster who specializes in how technology and artificial intelligence are reshaping society. She has worked on the frontline of major global events including Brexit, the EU’s migrant crisis, election interference, and the evolution of disinformation and information warfare. Nina has advised a group of global leaders on deepfakes, including Joe Biden and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Secretary General of NATO. Nina is a contributor to Bloomberg, Sky, CNN and the BBC and has been published by The Times, CNN, the Daily Beast, and TIME. She speaks seven languages and holds degrees from Cambridge University and University College London. Nina’s new book Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse explores the corrosion of our information ecosystem. Website: ninaschick.org Twitter: @NinaDSchick

Sam Harris speaks with James R. Doty about his memoir Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart. They discuss the significance of childhood stress, the possibility of changing one’s core beliefs about oneself, the relationship between surgeons and their patients, the nature of compassion, the Dalai Lama, the relationship between wealth and empathy, the worsening problem of social inequality, the physiology of compassion, the broken healthcare system in the U.S., and other topics. James R. Doty is a clinical professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University School of Medicine.  As director of CCARE, Dr. Doty has collaborated on a number of research projects focused on compassion and altruism including the use of neuro-economic models to assess altruism, use of the CCARE-developed compassion cultivation training in individuals and its effect, assessment of compassionate and altruistic judgment utilizing implanted brain electrodes and the use of optogenetic techniques to assess nurturing pathways in rodents. Presently, he is developing collaborative research projects to assess the effect of compassion training on immunologic and other physiologic determinants of health, the use of mentoring as a method of instilling compassion in students and the use of compassion training to decrease pain. Dr. Doty is also an inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist having given support to a number of charitable organizations including Children as the Peacemakers, Global Healing, the Pachamama Alliance and Family & Children Services of Silicon Valley. He is on the Board of Directors of a number of non-profit foundations including the Dalai Lama Foundation, of which he is chairman and the Charter for Compassion International of which he is vice-chair. He is also on the International Advisory Board of the Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions. He also writes for The Huffington Post. Twitter: @jamesrdotymd   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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Tristan Harris about the ways in which social media is fracturing society. They discuss the rise in teen depression and suicide, political polarization, conspiracy theories, information warfare, the decoupling of power and responsibility, the distinctions between platforms and publishers, the cancellation of Alex Jones, social media-inspired ethnic cleansing, concerns about the upcoming presidential election, culture as an operating system, and other topics. Called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” by The Atlantic magazine, Tristan Harris spent three years as a Google Design Ethicist developing a framework for how technology should “ethically” steer the thoughts and actions of billions of people from screens. He is now co-founder & president of the Center for Humane Technology, whose mission is to reverse ‘human downgrading’ and re-align technology with humanity. Additionally, he is co-host of the Center for Humane Technology’s Your Undivided Attention podcast with co-founder Aza Raskin. He also recently appeared as a central figure in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Twitter: @tristanharris

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about race, racism, and “anti-racism” in America. They discuss how conceptions of racism have changed, the ubiquitous threat of being branded a “racist,” the contradictions within identity politics, recent echoes of the OJ verdict, willingness among progressives to lose the 2020 election, racism as the all-purpose explanation of racial disparities in the U.S., double standards for the black community, the war on drugs, the lure of identity politics, police violence, the enduring riddle of affirmative action, the politics of “black face,” and other topics. John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics, philosophy, and music history at Columbia University, and writes for various publications on language issues and race issues such as Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, CNN, and The Atlantic.  He also hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley at Slate. He most recently wrote Talking Back Talking Black: Truths About America’s Lingua Franca. Twitter: @JohnHMcWhorter

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Graeme Wood about the breakdown of social order in the U.S. They discuss the recent eruptions of violence, the loss of trust in the media, the cases of Jacob Blake and Kyle Rittenhouse, how to understand police videos, the risks of vigilantism, the politicization of race, the problem of deep fakes, Trump not actually wanting to be president, the prospect that Trump might attempt to pardon himself, and other topics. Graeme Wood is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. He was the 2014–2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he teaches in the political science department at Yale University. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Twitter: @gcaw

In this episode the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with David Miliband about his work with the International Rescue Committee. They discuss the crisis of internally displaced peoples and refugees, the problem with open borders, the vetting of refugees, the limits of nation-building and diplomacy, the realities of globalization, global risks, defending human rights, a “post-values and post-competence” America, the breakdown of trust in institutions, the prospects of a second Trump term, and other topics. David Miliband is President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), where he oversees the agency’s humanitarian relief operations in more than 40 war-affected countries and its refugee resettlement and assistance programs in over 20 United States cities. Under Miliband’s leadership, the IRC has expanded its ability to rapidly respond to humanitarian crises and meet the needs of an unprecedented number of people uprooted by conflict, war and disaster. The organization is implementing an ambitious global strategy to bring clear outcomes, strong evidence and systematic research to the humanitarian programs through collaborative partnerships with the public and private sectors. From 2007 to 2010, Miliband was the 74th Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of the United Kingdom, driving advancements in human rights and representing the U.K. throughout the world. In 2006, as Secretary of State for the Environment, he pioneered the world’s first legally binding emissions reduction requirements. He was Member of Parliament for South Shields from 2001 to 2013. Miliband graduated from Oxford University in 1987 and received a master’s degree in political science in 1989 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he attended as a Kennedy Scholar. Miliband’s first book, Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of our Time, was published by TED Books in November 2017. Website: Rescue.org Twitter: @DMiliband  @RESCUEorg

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Siddhartha Mukherjee about our ongoing failure to adequately respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the significance of asymptomatic spread, the lack of Chinese cooperation, the failures of testing, travel restrictions, the missteps of the FDA and the CDC, controversy around masks, the lack of coordination among the states, conspiracy thinking about mortality statistics, the political contamination of public health information, electronic medical records, preparing for the next pandemic, the immunology of Covid-19, the long term consequences of the disease, concerns about a vaccine, the coming prospect of school openings, and other topics. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. A former Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford (where he received a PhD studying cancer-causing viruses) and from Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods. He has published articles and commentary in such journals as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron and the Journal of Clinical Investigation and in publications such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic. His work was nominated for Best American Science Writing, 2000. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. His most recent book is The Gene: An Intimate History. Twitter: @DrSidMukherjee

In this episode the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Gabriel Dance about the global epidemic of child sexual abuse. They discuss how misleading the concept of “child pornography” is, the failure of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem, the tradeoff between online privacy and protecting children, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, photo DNA, the roles played by specific tech companies, the ethics of encryption, “sextortion,” the culture of pedophiles, and other topics. Gabriel J.X. Dance is the deputy investigations editor at The New York Times where he works with a small team investigating all things technology – from online child sexual abuse imagery to the companies that trade and sell our data. Previous to The Times, he was a founding managing editor at The Marshall Project where his work focused on the criminal justice system and the death penalty in particular. Before that, he was interactive editor for The Guardian, where he was part of a group of journalists who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service for coverage of widespread secret surveillance by the N.S.A. Website: https://www.nytimes.com/by/gabriel-dance Twitter:  @gabrieldance

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Kathryn Paige Harden about the public controversy over group differences in traits like intelligence and ongoing research in behavioral genetics. They discuss Harden’s criticism of the Making Sense episode featuring Charles Murray, the mingling of scientific thinking with politics and social activism, cancel culture, environmental and genetic contributions to individual and group differences, intellectual honesty, and other topics. Kathryn Paige Harden is a tenured professor in the Department of Psychology at UT, where she leads the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and co-directs the Texas Twin Project. Dr. Harden received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Virginia and completed her clinical internship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School before moving to Austin in 2009. She has published over 100 scientific articles on genetic influences on complex human behavior, including child cognitive development, academic achievement, risk-taking, mental health, sexual activity, and childbearing. Her research has been featured in popular media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Huffington Post. In 2017, she was honored with a prestigious national award from the American Psychological Association for her distinguished scientific contributions to the study of genetics and human individual differences. Dr. Harden teaches Introduction to Psychology in a synchronous massive online class format, with over 2000 undergraduate students per year. She is currently writing a book on genetics and social inequality, to be published by Princeton University Press. Website: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/prc/directory/faculty/kh24738 Twitter: @kph3k

Robert Plomin is MRC Research Professor in Behavioral Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London and has previously taught at the University of Colorado Boulder and at Pennsylvania State University. He has received lifetime research achievement awards from the major associations related to his field (Behavior Genetics Association, Association of Psychological Science, Society for Research in Child Development, International Society for Intelligence Research), as well as being made Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, British Academy, American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Academy of Medical Sciences (UK). Robert’s latest book, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, makes the case that DNA inherited from our parents at the moment of conception can predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses. Website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/robert-plomin

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Plomin about the role that DNA plays in determining who we are. They discuss the birth of behavioral genetics, the taboo around studying the influence of genes on human psychology, controversies surrounding the topic of group differences, the first law of behavior genetics, heritability, nature and nurture, the mystery of unshared environment, the way genes help determine a person’s environment, epigenetics, the genetics of complex traits, dimensions vs disorders, the prospect of a GATTACA-like dystopia and genetic castes, heritability and equality of opportunity, the implications of genetics for parenting and education, DNA as a fortune-telling device, and other topics. Robert Plomin is MRC Research Professor in Behavioral Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London and has previously taught at the University of Colorado Boulder and at Pennsylvania State University. He has received lifetime research achievement awards from the major associations related to his field (Behavior Genetics Association, Association of Psychological Science, Society for Research in Child Development, International Society for Intelligence Research), as well as being made Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, British Academy, American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Academy of Medical Sciences (UK). Robert’s latest book, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, makes the case that DNA inherited from our parents at the moment of conception can predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses. Website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/robert-plomin   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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with William J. Perry and Lisa Perry about the ever-present threat of nuclear war. They discuss the history of nuclear weapons, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the present threat of accidental nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, unilateral disarmament, the psychology of deterrence, tactical nuclear weapons, cybersecurity, details of command and control, nuclear proliferation, the steps we could take toward safety, strategic missile defense, nuclear winter, and other topics. William J. Perry served as the U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration and then as the 19th U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. He oversaw the development of the strategic nuclear systems that are currently in our arsenal. His new offset strategy ushered in the age of stealth, smart weapons, GPS, and technologies that changed the face of modern warfare.  In 2015, he founded the William J. Perry Project, outlining his vision of a world free from nuclear weapons, and educating the public on the urgent but practical steps that could be taken to reduce nuclear dangers.  Dr. Perry has now co-authored a new book—THE BUTTON: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump—which recounts the terrifying history of nuclear launch authority, with firsthand testimonies from the front lines of our nation’s nuclear history. He is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at Stanford University. At 92 years old, he continues to travel the world in pursuit of his goal of reducing the threat from nuclear weapons. Lisa Perry is the Communications Director for The William J. Perry Project. The granddaughter of Secretary Perry, she has dedicated her career to sounding the alarm about the modern threat of nuclear weapons for the post cold war generations. Lisa is committed to empowering the public by breaking down the complex issues surrounding these weapons. At the Brink is a new podcast about humanity’s most terrifying weapon and the stories of those who have shaped its history. When former Secretary of Defense William Perry declared he believed that the danger of a nuclear catastrophe was greater today than any time in history, his granddaughter, Lisa Perry, set out to discover why. Featuring the personal stories of presidents, cabinet members, congressmen, nuclear physicists, atomic bomb survivors, military officials, and activists, At The Brink is a primer for every world citizen to learn how close we’ve come to disaster, and how we can still step back from the nuclear brink. William Perry’s Nuclear Terrorism Scenario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUuOskX3z7U Website: www.wjperryproject.org Twitter: @SecDef19 and @LisaAtTheBrink

Sam Harris speaks with Scott Barry Kaufman about human well-being. They discuss intelligence and creativity, wisdom and transcendence, the history of humanistic psychology, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the connection between well-being and ethics, self-esteem, psychedelics and meditation, peak and plateau experiences, mortality salience, the pre-trans fallacy, fear of uncertainty, work and meaning, intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards, pathological altruism, intimacy vs. belonging, two aspects of self-transcendence, and other topics. Scott Barry Kaufman is a humanistic psychologist exploring the depths of human potential. He has taught courses at the nation’s leading universities including Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. He writes the column Beautiful Minds for Scientific American and hosts The Psychology Podcast, which discusses insights into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. He has also written for The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review. Scott’s latest book Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization is a reimagining of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. It provides new insights for realizing one’s full potential and living a creative, fulfilled, and connected life. His previous books include Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, and Twice Exceptional: Supporting and Educating Bright and Creative Students with Learning Difficulties. Scott is also credited for editing The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. Website: scottbarrykaufman.com Twitter: @sbkaufman 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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Toby Ord about preserving the long term future of humanity. They discuss moral biases with respect to distance in space and time, the psychology of effective altruism, feeling good vs. doing good, possible blindspots in consequentialism, natural vs. human-caused risk, asteroid impacts, nuclear war, pandemics, the potentially cosmic significance of human survival, the difference between bad things and the absence of good things, population ethics, Derek Parfit, the asymmetry between happiness and suffering, climate change, and other topics. Toby Ord is a philosopher at Oxford University, working on the big picture questions facing humanity. He is focused on the ethics of global poverty and is one of the co-founders of the Effective Altruism movement in which thousands of people are using reason and evidence to help the lives of others. Along with William MacAskill, Toby created the online society, Giving What We Can, for people to join this mission, and together its members have pledged over $1.5 billion to the most effective charities. His current research is on the risks that threaten human extinction or the permanent collapse of civilization, otherwise known as existential risk. Toby has advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the US National Intelligence Council, and the UK Prime Minister’s Office. Toby’s new book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. He puts risks in the context of the greater story of humanity, showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. Toby also points the way forward to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. Website: http://www.tobyord.com/ Twitter: @tobyordoxford

Sam discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America. An annotated transcript of this podcast, complete with links to relevant videos, data, etc. is available on Sam’s blog.   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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with David Frum about the shifting political landscape. They discuss the secularization of politics, distrust of the media and other institutions, voter suppression, the 2020 elections, what happens if Trump gets a second term, the role of money in politics, conspiracy theories around Covid-19, the Michael Flynn controversy, the prospect that Trump will refuse to leave office, and other topics. David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy, his tenth book. Frum spent most of his career in conservative media and research institutions, including the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. He is a past chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading center-right think tank in the United Kingdom, and a former director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. In 2001-2002, he served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. Frum holds a B.A. and M.A. in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Website: https://davidfrum.com/ Twitter: @davidfrum

Sam Harris speaks with Daniel Markovits about the problems with meritocracy. They discuss the nature of inequality in the United States, the disappearance of the leisure class, the difference between labor and capital as sources of inequality, the way the education system amplifies inequality, the shrinking middle class, deaths of despair, differing social norms among the elite and the working class, universal basic income, the relationship between meritocracy and political polarization, the illusion of earned advantages, and other topics. Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law. Markovits works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics.  His writing has appeared in a number of notable publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Science, The American Economic Review, and The Yale Law Journal. His latest book, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles The Middle Class, and Devours The Elite, places meritocracy at the center of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy’s orbit.  Website: https://law.yale.edu/daniel-markovits Twitter: @DSMarkovits 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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Jonathan Haidt about the maintenance of a healthy society. They discuss the problem of orthodoxy, the history of political polarization in the US, the breakdown of public conversation, remaining uncertainty about Covid-19, motivated reasoning, the 2020 election, the future prospects for Gen Z, the effect of social media on the mental health of girls, Jonathan’s experience with psychedelics, positive psychology, loss of self, the experience of awe, and other topics. Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. In his work as a social psychologist, he uses research on moral psychology to help people understand each other and to help important social institutions work better. He is the co-developer of Moral Foundations theory, and of the research site YourMorals.org. He also co-founded Ethical Systems to help companies improve their ethical cultures, Heterodox Academy to help universities improve their ability to pursue truth, and the OpenMind Platform to help all groups function better in an era of rampant and destructive political polarization. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. His latest book (with Greg Lukianoff) is The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting a generation up for failure. Website: jonathanhaidt.com Twitter: @JonHaidt

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Caitlin Flanagan about her cancer recurrence and the response to her recent article in The Atlantic discussing it. They discuss the dynamics of apologies and forgiveness, the #MeToo movement and the allegations against Biden, modern feminism, and other topics. Caitlin Flanagan is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and a former staff writer for The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in a number of notable publications including Time, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of two books: To Hell with All That and Girl Land. Twitter: @CaitlinPacific

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Andrew Yang about the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the future of the middle class, Andrew’s experience campaigning for President, the need to build new digital infrastructure, universal basic income (UBI), concerns about the Biden’s age and #MeToo allegation, hostility between the United States and China, problems with the global supply chain, concerns about social cohesion, market failures, and other topics. Andrew Yang is an entrepreneur, founder of Humanity Forward, and host of the Yang Speaks podcast. Andrew also recently ran as a democratic candidate in the 2020 Presidential primary election. In his early career, Andrew served as the CEO, co-founder or executive at a number of technology and education companies including the well-known test preparation company, Manhattan Prep. In 2011, he founded Venture for America, a non-profit which connects recent college graduates with start-ups. His book, The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future was published in 2018, shortly after announcing his run for presidency. He is now focusing on his podcast and Humanity Forward, a non-profit organization dedicated to continuing the movement inspired by his presidential campaign. Website: movehumanityforward.com Twitter: @AndrewYang

Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. His books have been translated into 50+ languages, with 25+ million copies sold worldwide. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind looked deep into our past, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow considered far-future scenarios, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century focuses on the biggest questions of the present moment. Website: https://www.ynharari.com/ Twitter: @harari_yuval Instagram: @yuval_noah_harari

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about the Covid-19 pandemic and its future implications. They discuss the failures of global leadership, the widespread distrust of institutions, the benefits of nationalism and its current unraveling in the U.S., politics as a way of reconciling competing desires, the consequences of misinformation, the enduring respect for science, the future of surveillance, the changing role of religion, and other topics. Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. His books have been translated into 50+ languages, with 25+ million copies sold worldwide. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind looked deep into our past, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow considered far-future scenarios, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century focuses on the biggest questions of the present moment. Website: https://www.ynharari.com/ Twitter: @harari_yuval Instagram: @yuval_noah_harari

Sam Harris speaks with James Clear about habit formation. They discuss the difference between creating good habits and discontinuing bad ones, the role of the environment, the misalignment between immediate and long term outcomes, the remembering self vs the experiencing self, goals vs systems, the compounding of incremental gains, the role of attention, the four laws of behavior change, “temptation bundling,” and other topics. James Clear is an author and speaker focused on habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Time, and on CBS This Morning. He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. His book Atomic Habits is a New York Times bestseller and has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. Website: www.jamesclear.com Twitter: @jamesclear  Instagram: @jamesclear   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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and Caitlin Flanagan discuss the ethics of abortion, the fact that universities with immense endowments are laying off staff during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Woody Allen autobiography, the moral hypocrisy of Hollywood, the lessons of “Tiger King,” and other topics. Caitlin Flanagan is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and a former staff writer for The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in a number of notable publications including Time, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of two books: To Hell with All That and Girl Land. Twitter: @CaitlinPacific

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and Paul Bloom discuss the false tradeoff between the economy and public health, putting a price on human life, framing effects for moral questions, how Covid-19 may change human behavior, “turn-key totalitarianism,” the future of education, the long term psychological effects of the pandemic, the 2020 election, the prospect that Sanders supporters won’t vote for Biden, and what Sam means when he says “the self is an illusion,” and other topics.  Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. Website: http://campuspress.yale.edu/paulbloom/ Twitter: @paulbloomatyale

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Caitlin Flanagan. They discuss the different sorts of experiences people are having during the Covid-19 pandemic, what it has exposed about our education system, the 2020 election and the many problems with Joe Biden, why the press has been slow to cover Biden’s #MeToo allegation, the perceived double standards in the press and within feminism, and other topics. Caitlin Flanagan is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and a former staff writer for The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in a number of notable publications including Time, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of two books: To Hell with All That and Girl Land. Twitter: @CaitlinPacific

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Laurie Santos about the scientific study of happiness. They discuss people’s expectations about happiness, the experiencing self vs the remembered self, framing effects, the importance of social connections, the effect of focusing on the happiness of others, introversion and extroversion, the influence of technology on social life, our relationship to time, the connection between happiness and ethics, hedonic adaptation, the power of mindfulness, resilience, the often illusory significance of reaching goals, and other topics. Laurie Santos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. She hosts the popular podcast The Happiness Lab and she teaches the most popular course offered at Yale to date, titled The Science of Well-Being. Laurie is also the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory and the Canine Cognition Center at Yale. She received her B.A. in Psychology and Biology from Harvard University in 1997 and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard in 2003. Twitter:@lauriesantos Website: https://caplab.yale.edu/   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.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with General Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell about the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the nature of the ongoing crisis, the threat of a breakdown in social order, the problem of misinformation, the prospects of a nationwide lockdown, the trade off between personal freedom and safety, the threat of tyranny, the concerns about the global supply chain, concerns about the price of oil, safeguarding the 2020 Presidential election, and other topics. Stanley McChrystal retired from the US Army as a four-star general after more than 34 years of service. In his last assignment, he was the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. He has written several books including a memoir titled My Share of the Task, which was a New York Times bestseller. Stanley is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and he is the founder of the McChrystal Group leadership institute. Twitter: @StanMcChrystal Chris Fussell is a Partner at the McChrystal Group and the co-author (with Stanley McChrystal) of Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, which was also a New York Times bestseller. Chris was a commissioned naval officer and he spent 15 years in the Navy SEALs in various points around the globe. He served as the aide-de-camp to General McChrystal during his final year commanding the joint special operations task force fighting Al Qaeda. Chris is on the board of directors of the Navy SEAL Foundation and is a lifetime member of The Council on Foreign Relations. Chris also teaches at the Jackson Institute at Yale University.  Twitter: @FussellChris   Website: www.McChrystalGroup.com Twitter: @McChrystalGroup

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Matt Mullenweg about the evolution of distributed work. They discuss the benefits of working from home, the new norms of knowledge work, relevant tools and security concerns, the challenges for managers, the importance of written communication, the necessity of innovating in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, delivery networks as critical infrastructure, economic recovery, and other topics. Matt Mullenweg is a founding developer of WordPress, the Open Source software used by 36% of the web. In 2005, he founded Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and many other products. Matt has unique insight into running distributed teams. Automattic is entirely distributed—with 1,172 employees working in 75 countries. Website: https://ma.tt/ Twitter: @photomatt

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks about social contagion and about the importance of understanding one’s own mind in an emergency.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and Paul Bloom speak about the psychology of adapting to the coronavirus pandemic, the disastrous analogy between coronavirus and flu, the political siloing of information, true and false concerns over “panic,” pressuring China to close down their live animal markets, the economic implications and possible silver linings of the pandemic, what our response suggests about our ability to deal with climate change, Biden vs Sanders, the ethics of praising one’s enemies, and other topics. Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. Website: http://campuspress.yale.edu/paulbloom/ Twitter: @paulbloomatyale

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Amesh Adalja about the spreading coronavirus pandemic. They discuss the contagiousness of the virus and the severity of the resultant illness, the mortality rate and risk factors, vectors of transmission, how long coronavirus can live on surfaces, the importance of social distancing, possible anti-viral treatments, the timeline for a vaccine, the importance of pandemic preparedness, and other topics. Amesh Adalja, MD, is an infectious disease specialist at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. His work is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. Amesh has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security, co-editor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks, and a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine. Amesh actively practices infectious disease, critical care, and emergency medicine in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Website: www.trackingzebra.com Twitter: @AmeshAA

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about the coronavirus pandemic. They discuss the likely effects on society, proactive vs reactive school closures, community transmission, false comparisons between coronavirus and flu, the imperative of social distancing, the timeline of the pandemic, Trump’s political messaging, the widespread distrust of expertise, the importance of “flattening the curve” of the epidemic, the possible failure of our healthcare system, gradations of personal response to this threat, and other topics. Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab and is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, and known for his research in the areas of social networks, biosocial science, behavior genetics, and public health. Website: www.humannaturelab.net Twitter: @NAChristakis

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Scott Galloway about the connection between wealth and happiness. They discuss the problem of wealth inequality, the transfer of wealth from the young to the old, class warfare in Democratic politics, deficit spending, means testing Social Security, Bloomberg’s campaign and “stop and frisk,” breaking up big tech, privacy absolutism, meditation, mortality, atheism, and other topics. Scott Galloway is a New York Times bestselling author and a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. A serial entrepreneur, he has founded nine firms, including L2, Red Envelope, and Prophet. In 2012, he was named one of the “World’s 50 Best Business School Professors” by Poets & Quants. He is the host of Pivot with Kara Swisher and the forthcoming The Prof G Show with Scott Galloway. His latest book is The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning. Website: www.profgalloway.com Twitter: @profgalloway

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and Paul Bloom speak about the virtues of President Trump, the campaign prospects of Bloomberg and Sanders, the asymmetrical norms of the Democratic and Republican parties, the marginal role that parents play in the development of their children, wealth inequality and the breakdown of the nuclear family, whether Paul should take LSD, the deplatforming of Peter Singer, and other topics. Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. Website: http://campuspress.yale.edu/paulbloom/ Twitter: @paulbloomatyale

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and Paul Bloom speak about the epidemic of child sexual abuse, the ethics of loyalty, eugenics, existential risk, the Bloomberg and Sanders campaigns, and other topics. Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on 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, one of the major journals in the field. Dr. Bloom 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 or editor of seven books, including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil and Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Website: http://campuspress.yale.edu/paulbloom/ Twitter: @paulbloomatyale

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Fred Kaplan about the ever-present threat of nuclear war. They discuss the history of nuclear deterrence, U.S. first-strike policy, preventive war, limited nuclear war, tactical vs. strategic weapons, Trump’s beliefs about nuclear weapons, the details of command and control, and other topics. Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for Slate and the author of five previous books, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestseller), 1959, Daydream Believers, and The Wizards of Armageddon. His latest book is The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Website: http://www.fredkaplan.info/ Twitter: @fmkaplan

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris and Paul Bloom speak about “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” inequality, the relationship between wealth and happiness, the downside of fame, psychological impediments to noticing progress, and other topics. Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on 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, one of the major journals in the field. Dr. Bloom 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 or editor of seven books, including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil and Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Website: http://campuspress.yale.edu/paulbloom/ Twitter: @paulbloomatyale

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with poet David Whyte about the importance of work and relationships, the balance between training and expressing of one’s talents, the lessons of mortality, and other topics. David Whyte is a poet and the author of 11 books of poetry along with four books of prose, including Still Possible, David Whyte: Essentials and The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationships. David holds a degree in Marine Zoology, honorary degrees from Neumann College and Royal Roads University, and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes, Amazon, and Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures, and workshops. Website: davidwhyte.com Twitter: @whytedw

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris and Paul Bloom discuss topics in the news including the tragic death of Kobe Bryant. They also explore the paradoxes of moral responsibility. Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on 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, one of the major journals in the field. Dr. Bloom 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 or editor of seven books, including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil and Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Website: http://campuspress.yale.edu/paulbloom/ Twitter: @paulbloomatyale

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast Sam Harris speaks with Thomas Chatterton Williams about the reality and politics of race. They discuss his book Self Portrait in Black and White, race as a social and biological construct, the prospects of achieving a “post-racial” society, interracial marriage, and other topics. Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and American Scholar, and a 2019 New America Fellow. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, and other journals. Website: www.thomaschattertonwilliams.com Twitter: @thomaschattwill

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Richard Lang about how to experience the world beyond the illusion of the self. Richard Lang is a meditation teacher and writer. He was a longtime student of Douglas Harding, the author of On Having No Head, among other books. Richard has written several books, including Seeing Who You Really Are, The Man with No Head, and Open to the Source: Selected Teachings of Douglas Harding. In 1996, Richard co-founded Shollond Trust, a charity created to help share Harding’s vision as widely as possible.  Website: www.headless.org Twitter: @headexchange

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Meghan Daum about her book The Problem with Everything. They discuss contemporary feminism, violence against women, campus sexual assault, moral panics, new norms of conversation, the 2020 Presidential campaign, and other topics. Meghan Daum is the author of five books, including My Misspent Youth, The Quality of Life Report, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, The Unspeakable, and Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed. Meghan also writes a biweekly column about culture and politics for Medium. She was an opinion columnist for The Los Angeles Times from 2005 to 2016 and has written for numerous journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Vogue. Website: www.meghandaum.com Twitter: @meghan_daum

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Judson Brewer about addiction, craving, and mindfulness. They discuss the nature of reward-based learning, the role of subjective bias in addiction, the neuroscience of craving, the neural correlates of the sense of self, real-time neuroimaging, effort and effortlessness in meditation, smoking cessation through mindfulness, the difference between dopamine-driven reward and happiness, how to make meditation a habit, working with anxiety, and other topics. Judson Brewer, MD PhD., is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT. Before that, he held research and teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness. Jud is the founder of the digital therapeutics platform, MindSciences, and author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits. Website: DrJud.com Twitter: @judbrewer

Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of more than 90 scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Scientific American, Edge.org, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Quanta. In 2015, he gave a mind-bending TED Talk titled, “Do we see reality as it is?”

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast Sam and Annaka Harris speak with Donald Hoffman about his book The Case Against Reality. They discuss how evolution has failed to select for true perceptions of the world, his “interface theory” of perception, the primacy of math and logic, how space and time cannot be fundamental, the threat of epistemological skepticism, causality as a useful fiction, the hard problem of consciousness, agency, free will, panpsychism, a mathematics of conscious agents, philosophical idealism, death, psychedelics, the relationship between consciousness and mathematics, and many other topics. Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of more than 90 scientific papers and his writing has appeared in Scientific American, Edge.org, The Atlantic, WIRED, and Quanta. In 2015, he gave a mind-bending TED Talk titled, “Do we see reality as it is?” Twitter: @donalddhoffman Annaka Harris is the New York Times bestselling author of CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. She is an editor and consultant for science writers, specializing in neuroscience and physics, and her work has appeared in The New York Times. Annaka is the author of the children’s book I Wonder, a collaborator on the Mindful Games Activity Cards, by Susan Kaiser Greenland, and a volunteer mindfulness teacher for the Inner Kids organization. All of her guided meditations and lessons for children are available on the Waking Up app. Website: annakaharris.com Twitter: @annakaharris

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Roland Griffiths about the current state of research on psychedelics. They discuss the historical prohibition against their use; the clinical and scientific promise of psilocybin, mescaline, LSD, DMT, MDMA, and other compounds; the risks associated with these drugs; the role of “set and setting”; the differences between psychedelics and drugs of abuse; MDMA and neurotoxicity; experiences of unity, sacredness, love, and truth; the long-term consequences of psychedelic experiences; synthetic vs natural drugs; the prospects of devising new psychedelics; microdosing; research on psilocybin and long-term meditators; the experience of encountering other apparent beings; psilocybin treatment of addiction; and other topics. In his Afterword, Sam discusses his experience on a large dose of psilocybin—his first psychedelic experience in 25 years. Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He is author of over 380 journal articles and book chapters, and has trained more than 50 postdoctoral research fellows. Roland has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of new psychotropic drugs, and as a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence for the World Health Organization.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Lynn Novick about her four-part documentary College Behind Bars. The film follows the progress of students in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) as they pursue their undergraduate degrees. Sam and Lynn are joined by Jule Hall, a BPI graduate who served a 22-year sentence and is now working for the Ford Foundation. Lynn Novick is an Emmy, Peabody and Alfred I. duPont Columbia Award-winning documentary filmmaker. She has been producing and directing documentaries about American culture, history, politics, sports, art, and music for nearly 30 years. In collaboration with co-director Ken Burns, she has created more than 80 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS, including The Vietnam War, Baseball, Jazz, Frank Lloyd Wright, The War, and Prohibition. Jule Hall is a BPI graduate who completed an undergraduate degree in German Studies in 2011. He continued his education by enrolling in a graduate-level, Public Health specialization and became a BPI-Tow Public Health Fellow. In 2015, he volunteered at the Brownsville Community Justice Center, where he tutored justice-involved youth in preparation for high school equivalency exams. In 2016, he secured employment as a campaign coordinator at Picture Motion, where he helped to create social impact campaigns for award-winning documentaries examining Prisoner Reentry, Gun Violence and Inequality in America. In 2017, Jule served on the Documentary Selection Committee of NBCUniversal and AFI DOC’s 2017 Impact Lab. Currently, Jule works as a program associate for the Ford Foundation where he provides data analysis and strategy development in its unit for Gender, Racial and Ethnic Justice. Website: skiffmountainfilms.com Twitter: @LynnNovick

Sam Harris speaks with Yasmine Mohammed about her book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. They discuss her family background and indoctrination into conservative Islam, the double standard that Western liberals use when thinking about women in the Muslim community, the state of feminism in general, honor violence, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and many other topics. Yasmine Mohammed is a human rights activist and writer. She advocates for the rights of women living within Islamic majority countries, as well as those who struggle under religious fundamentalism. She is the founder of Free Hearts Free Minds, an organization that provides psychological support for ex-Muslims living within Muslim majority countries.  Website: YasmineMohammed.com Twitter: @YasMohammedxx   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.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins. They discuss the strangeness of the “gene’s-eye view” of the world, the limits of Darwinian thinking when applied to human life, the concept of the extended phenotype, ideologies as meme complexes, whether consciousness might be an epiphenomenon, psychedelics, meditation, and other topics. Richard Dawkins is an ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer. His latest book is Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide. Website: richarddawkins.net Twitter: @RichardDawkins

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Bari Weiss about her book How to Fight anti-Semitism. They discuss the three different strands of anti-Semitism (rightwing, leftwing, and Islamic), the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the difference between anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, “Great Replacement Theory,” the populist response to globalization, the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S., criticisms of Israel, the fate of Jews in Western Europe, and other topics. Bari Weiss is a writer and editor of the opinion section of The New York Times. She was also a book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and an editor at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish news, politics, and culture. Bari is a native of Pittsburg, attended Tree of Life Synagogue, and had her Bat Mitzvah ceremony there. Website: BariWeiss.com Twitter: @bariweiss   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.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Andrew Marantz about his book Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. They discuss the effect of social media on politics, the distinction between publishers and platforms, the problem of guilt by association, getting too close to interview subjects, the confusing nature of troll culture, the notion of “dog whistles,” how to respond to the current reality of racism, and other topics. Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, New York, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and many other publications. A contributor to Radiolab and The New Yorker Radio Hour, he has spoken at TED and has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and many other outlets.  Website: andrewmarantz.com  Twitter: @andrewmarantz

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris is interviewed by Chelsea Handler for her Netflix documentary, Hello Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea. They discuss racism, “white privilege,” the #MeToo movement, and other topics. Chelsea Handler is a comedian, TV host, and author. In recent years Chelsea hosted the late-night talk show Chelsea Lately, released a documentary series Chelsea Does, and hosted the talk show Chelsea. Website: chelseahandler.com Twitter: @chelseahandler

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Megan Phelps-Roper about her book Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. Megan Phelps-Roper is a writer, educator, and former member of the Westboro Baptist Church. After leaving the church in 2012, Megan began writing and speaking about her experience within the church and decision to defect. As an educator, she covers topics related to extremism and communication across ideological lines. Website: meganphelpsroper.com Twitter: @meganphelps

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

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

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.

Sam Harris addresses listener concerns that he uses a “double standard” to evaluate the relative threats of white supremacy and jihadism.

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

Sam Harris speaks with Caitlin Flanagan about her work as a writer. They discuss controversies on social media, the contradictions within feminism, media bias, #MeToo, the new norms of sexuality, the wokeness of academia, affirmative action, college admissions, HR departments, sexual harassment, and other topics. Caitlin Flanagan is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and a former staff writer for The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in a number of notable publications including Time, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of two books: To Hell with All That and Girl Land. Twitter: @CaitlinPacific

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

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

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

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

Sam Harris speaks with Michael Weiss and Yascha Mounk about the state of global politics. They discuss the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the prospect that democracy could fail in the US, Trump’s political instincts, the political liability of “wokeness,” the Left’s failure to re-think its support of Chavez, the dangers of political polarization, the attractions of extreme partisanship, cancel culture, and other topics. Michael Weiss is an internationally respected investigative journalist who has covered the wars in Syria and Ukraine and published widely on Russian espionage and disinformation. His first book, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror (co-written with Hassan Hassan), was a New York Times bestseller and named one of the Top Ten Books on Terrorism by the Wall Street Journal as well as one of the Best Books of 2015 by The Times of London. Weiss is a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, the BBC and Real Time with Bill Maher. He writes a column for The Daily Beast. Website: michaelweissjournalist.com Twitter: @michaeldweiss Yascha Mounk is a writer, academic, and public speaker known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. He is an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a senior advisor at Protect Democracy. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Die Zeit, Mounk is the host of Slate’s The Good Fight Podcast. He has written three books: Stranger in My Own Country, The Age of Responsibility, and The People versus Democracy, which explains the causes of the populist rise and investigates how to renew liberal democracy. Website: yaschamounk.com Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk

Sam Harris speaks with his wife, Annaka Harris, about her new book, CONSCIOUS: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Annaka Harris is an author, editor, and consultant for science writers, specializing in neuroscience and physics. Annaka is also the author of the children’s book I Wonder, a collaborator on the Mindful Games Activity Cards, by Susan Kaiser Greenland, and a volunteer mindfulness teacher for the Inner Kids organization. All of her guided meditations and lessons for children are available on the Waking Up app. Website: annakaharris.com Twitter: @annakaharris   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.

Sam Harris speaks with Adam Grant about the social science of the workplace. They discuss how teams work effectively, the nature of power, personality types and fundamental styles of interaction, the critical skill of saying “no,” creativity, resilience, the strange case of Jonas Salk, the nature of mindfulness, the power of cognitive reappraisal, reflections on mortality, the replication crisis in social science, and other topics. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. As a leading expert in bringing social science into the workplace, he hosts WorkLife, a TED original podcast, and writes on work and psychology for the New York Times. He is the author of Give and Take, Originals, Option B (coauthored with Sheryl Sandberg), and Power Moves.   Website: adamgrant.net Twitter: @AdamMGrant

Sam Harris speaks with Benjamin Wittes about both volumes of the Mueller Report. Benjamin Wittes is a legal journalist who focuses on issues of national security and law. He is a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law. Benjamin is also the cofounder of Lawfare, a blog devoted to discussion of U.S. national security choices, and a cohost of the Rational Security podcast. His books include The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting A New Age of Threat (coauthored with Gabriella Blum), Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor after Guantánamo,  and Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror. Website: benjaminwittes.com Twitter: @benjaminwittes

Nicholas Christakis is a sociologist and physician known for his research in the areas of social networks and biosocial science. He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. His books include Death Foretold: Prophecy and Prognosis in Medical Care and Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (coauthored with James H. Fowler). He was on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009.

Sam Harris speaks with Nicholas Christakis about his new book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. Nicholas Christakis is a sociologist and physician known for his research in the areas of social networks and biosocial science. He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. His books include Death Foretold: Prophecy and Prognosis in Medical Care and Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (coauthored with James H. Fowler). He was on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009. Website: humannaturelab.net Twitter: @NAChristakis

Sam Harris speaks with Shane Parrish about some of the mental models that should guide our thinking and behavior. Shane Parrish is the host of The Knowledge Project podcast and the founder of Farnam Street blog, which aims to help others develop an understanding of how the world works, make better decisions, and live a better life. Shane was previously a cybersecurity expert at Canada’s top intelligence agency, Communications Security Establishment, a division of Canada’s Defense Department. Website: fs.blog Twitter: @farnamstreet

Sam Harris reads from an issue of Dabiq, the magazine of ISIS, and discusses the beliefs and goals of jihadists worldwide.

Sam Harris introduces John Brockman’s new anthology, “Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI,” in conversation with three of its authors: George Dyson, Alison Gopnik, and Stuart Russell. George Dyson is a historian of technology. He is also the author of Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral. Alison Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley and a leader in the field of children’s learning and development. Her books include The Philosophical Baby. Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the author of (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the most widely used textbook on AI.

Sam Harris speaks with Roger McNamee about his book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for thirty-five years. He has cofounded successful venture funds including Elevation with U2’s Bono. He was a former mentor to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and helped recruit COO Sheryl Sandberg to the company. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Twitter: @Moonalice

Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence. He is Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias, Global Catastrophic Risks, Human Enhancement, and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, a New York Times bestseller. Website: nickbostrom.com

Sam Harris speaks with Nick Bostrom about the problem of existential risk. They discuss public goods, moral illusions, the asymmetry between happiness and suffering, utilitarianism, “the vulnerable world hypothesis,” the history of nuclear deterrence, the possible need for “turnkey totalitarianism,” whether we’re living in a computer simulation, the Doomsday Argument, the implications of extraterrestrial life, and other topics. Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence. He is Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias, Global Catastrophic Risks, Human Enhancement, and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, a New York Times bestseller. Website: nickbostrom.com 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.

Sam Harris speaks with Daniel Kahneman at the Beacon Theatre in NYC. They discuss the replication crisis in science, System 1 and System 2, where intuitions reliably fail, expert intuitions, the power of framing, moral illusions, anticipated regret, the asymmetry between threats and opportunities, the utility of worrying, removing obstacles to wanted behaviors, the remembering self vs the experiencing self, improving the quality of gossip, and other topics. Daniel Kahneman is 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. His most recent book is Thinking Fast and Slow.

Sam Harris speaks with Sally Satel about addiction. They discuss whether addiction should be considered a disease, the opiate epidemic in the U.S., the unique danger of fentanyl, the politicization of medicine, PTSD, and other topics. Sally Satel, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine who examines mental health policy as well as political trends in medicine. Her publications include PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine; When Altruism Isn’t Enough: The Case for Compensating Organ Donors; One Nation Under Therapy (coauthored with Christina Hoff Sommers); and Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (coauthored with Scott Lilienfeld), which was a 2014 finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science. Website: sallysatelmd.com Twitter: @slsatel

What are your thoughts about picking a career, or about picking areas of academic study that lead to viable careers?Recently you mentioned that Noam Chomsky had expressed interest in coming on the podcast. Can you provide an update on whether this is happening?Who is your favorite thinker that you mostly disagree with?What exactly were the "pointing out instructions" you got from Tulku Urgyen that you described in your book Waking Up as "the most important thing you ever learned from another human being"?I’m a middle-aged man who has never had children. Do I need to have kids for my existence to matter?They say that "the unexamined life is not worth living," but is this really true? I spend hours every day thinking about (and sometimes agonizing over) "deep" questions and political problems, and I experience real suffering as a result. My girlfriend is completely oblivious to these concerns, and she’s generally happy. What should I make of this?How do you see the election of Trump now that a few years have gone by? Have you come to new insights or conclusions?Teachers like Eckhart Tolle advise us to “let go of the past.” Jordan Peterson and others recommend that one “go through one’s life with a fine-toothed comb” to become a better person. Which approach do you feel is more beneficial?Does the rigorous nature of scientific consensus itself justify belief?Do you see any downside to your association with the "Intellectual Dark Web"?What are your thoughts on the morality of football given its connection to CTE?What do you think of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s suggested marginal tax of 70% on income above $10M?How do you determine when it is a good idea to respond to lies and dishonest criticism, and which charges are better ignored?You've said that society would be better off if we recognized that we don't have free will. What positive effects on society do you think would follow if people realized the self is an illusion?Have you ever had anti-Semitism directed at you? If so, how did it make you feel, given your ambivalence toward Judaism as a cultural identity?Under the influence of certain psychedelics, users regularly report "receiving messages" from entities, plants, or spirits. What is your take on this?What are your thoughts on the problem of cultural appropriation?How do you think about regret? If free will is an illusion, one cannot (or should not) feel regret towards something one didn’t choose. I can understand this conceptually, but this doesn’t eliminate feeling bad about past choices and their consequences.

Jack Dorsey is a tech entrepreneur and CEO of Twitter and Square, which he cofounded. He was recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people, was named an “outstanding innovator under the age of 35” by MIT Technology Review and named “Innovator of the Year” by the Wall Street Journal for his work in technology. Website: twitter.com and squareup.com Twitter: @jack

Sam Harris speaks with Jack Dorsey about how he manages his dual CEO roles at Square and Twitter, the role that Twitter plays in journalism, how it’s different from other social media, what makes a conversation healthy, the logic by which Twitter suspends people, the argument for kicking Trump off the platform, Jack’s practice of meditation, and other topics. Jack Dorsey is a tech entrepreneur and CEO of Twitter and Square, which he cofounded. He was recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people, was named an “outstanding innovator under the age of 35” by MIT Technology Review and named “Innovator of the Year” by the Wall Street Journal for his work in technology. Website: twitter.com and squareup.com Twitter: @jack

Stephen Fry is a comedian, actor, writer, presenter, voiceover artist and activist. Some of Stephen’s most well-known acting work includes A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, Blackadder, Kingdom, QI, and V for Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award–winning Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. Stephen has contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines and written four novels and three volumes of autobiography. He also appears frequently on British radio. Website: stephenfry.com Twitter: @stephenfry

Sam Harris speaks with Stephen Fry about comedy, atheism, political correctness, meditation, ambition, empathy, psychedelics, Christopher Hitchens, Stephen’s experience of manic depression, and much else. Stephen Fry is a comedian, actor, writer, presenter, voiceover artist and activist. Some of Stephen’s most well-known acting work includes A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, Blackadder, Kingdom, QI, and V for Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award–winning Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. Stephen has contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines and written four novels and three volumes of autobiography. He also appears frequently on British radio. Website: stephenfry.com Twitter: @stephenfry

Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Rushkoff about the state of the digital economy. Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Website: rushkoff.com Twitter: @rushkoff

Sam Harris speaks with Renée DiResta about Russia’s “Internet Research Agency” and its efforts to amplify conspiracy thinking and partisan conflict in the United States. Renée DiResta is the Director of Research at New Knowledge and Head of Policy at the nonprofit organization Data for Democracy where she investigates the spread of malignant narratives across social networks. She regularly writes and speaks about the role that tech platforms and curatorial algorithms play in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. She is the author of The Hardware Startup: Building your Product, Business, and Brand. Website: www.reneediresta.com Twitter: @noUpside

Sam Harris speaks with Deeyah Khan about her groundbreaking films “Jihad” and “White Right.” They discuss her history as a target of religious intolerance, her adventures with neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, the similarities between extremist groups, the dangers of political correctness, and other topics. Deeyah Khan is a two-time Emmy Award-winning and twice BAFTA-nominated documentary film director. She is the founder of Fuuse, a media and arts company that puts women and minority communities at the heart of telling their own stories. In 2016, she became the first UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom and creativity. Her 2012 film, “Banaz: A Love Story,” which earned Deeyah her first Emmy Award, chronicled the life and death of Banaz Mahmod, a young British Kurdish woman murdered by her family in a so-called honour killing. Her second film, “Jihad,” was nominated for a BAFTA; it involved two years of interviews and filming with Islamic extremists, convicted terrorists and former jihadis; and “White Right: Meeting the Enemy,” in which Deeyah travelled to the United States to filmed with neo-Nazis, including attending the now-infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, won her a second Emmy Award and a second BAFTA nomination. Twitter: @Deeyah_Khan

If you had to rewrite The Moral Landscape, would you change or expand on anything?If you designed a school for kids, what would be in the curriculum?Do you think white men really have too much power?What is your relationship to money? How important is it to your happiness?Political scientist Robert Pape claims that the root cause of suicidal terrorism is military occupation, do you contest his theory?What did you think of the debate between David Frum and Steve Bannon on populism?Which news sources do you trust and why?The spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is far scarier than AI, will talk about this on your podcast?Have you ever struggled with procrastination? Can mindfulness help with it?Is it possible to understand that the ego is an illusion without experiencing it as such?How does an intensely voluntary action feel once the illusion of the self has vanished?Can you explain the connection between religiosity and the denial of climate change?In the last few minutes of your conversation with Brian Greene, it seemed that one of your core beliefs about free will was shaken. Can you discuss this?Isn't your framework of the "moral landscape" just another form of moral relativism?When we focus our attention on consciousness, who is it that is paying attention?If you needed to join Alcoholics Anonymous, how would you rationalize a belief in "a higher power"?In your podcast with Rebecca Traister, you spoke about #MeToo exclusively in terms of its effects on the lives of rich and powerful men. But it has much greater implications for ordinary people. Please discuss this.Please elaborate on what you mean when you say "look of the one who is looking" or "look for your head" in your guided meditations.Is morality limited to human beings? For instance, can chimps behave immorally?What are your thoughts about lucid dreaming? Does it make sense to acquire this skill?A Dutch man wants to legally change his age from 69 to 49. Please discuss this in relation to transgenderism.

Sam Harris speaks with Derren Brown about his work as a “psychological illusionist.” They discuss the power of hypnosis, the power of expectations, the usefulness of Stoic philosophy, and other topics. Derren Brown began his UK television career in December 2000 with a series of specials called Mind Control. In the UK his name is now pretty much synonymous with the art of psychological manipulation. Amongst a varied and notorious TV career, Derren has played Russian Roulette live, convinced middle-managers to commit armed robbery, led the nation in a séance, stuck viewers at home to their sofas, successfully predicted the National Lottery, motivated a shy man to land a packed passenger plane at 30,000 feet, hypnotised a man to assassinate Stephen Fry, and created a zombie apocalypse for an unsuspecting participant after seemingly ending the world. He has also written several best-selling books and – a first in the history of magic – has toured with eight sell-out one-man stage shows. The shows have garnered a record-breaking five Olivier Award nominations for Best Entertainment, and won twice. This means Derren has had the largest number of nominations and wins for one-person shows in the history of the Awards. His 2017 US debut show SECRET won the New York Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical experience and is planning a Broadway return in 2019. His Latest book is Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine. Website: http://derrenbrown.co.uk Twitter: @DerrenBrown Instagram: @derrenbrown   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.

Johann Hari is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, which is being adapted into a feature film. He was twice named “Newspaper Journalist of the Year” by Amnesty International UK. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and others. His TED talk, “Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong,” has more than 20 million views. His most recent book is Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions. Website: johannhari.com Twitter: @johannhari101

Sam Harris speaks with Johann Hari about his books Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections. Johann Hari is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, which is being adapted into a feature film. He was twice named “Newspaper Journalist of the Year” by Amnesty International UK. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and others. His TED talk, “Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong,” has more than 20 million views. His most recent book is Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions. Website: johannhari.com Twitter: @johannhari101   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.

Sam Harris speaks with Rebecca Traister about her new book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine and a contributing editor at Elle. A National Magazine Award finalist, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour and Marie Claire. She is the author of All the Single Ladies and the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry. Website: http://www.rebeccatraister.com/ Twitter: @rtraister

Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Great Derangement, Griftopia, and The Divide. He is currently working on serial book about the failings of the media, titled The Fairway: Thirty Years After Manufacturing Consent, How Mass Media Still Keeps Thought Inbounds. Twitter: @mtaibbi Website: https://taibbi.substack.com

Sam Harris speaks with Matt Taibbi about the state journalism and the polarization of our politics. They discuss the controversy over Steve Bannon at the New Yorker Festival, monetizing the Trump phenomenon, the Jamal Kashoggi murder, the Kavanaugh hearing, the Rolling Stone reporting on the UVA rape case, the viability of a political center, the 2020 Presidential election, the Russia investigation, our vanishing attention span, and other topics. Matt Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Great Derangement, Griftopia, and The Divide. He is currently working on serial book about the failings of the media, titled The Fairway: Thirty Years After Manufacturing Consent, How Mass Media Still Keeps Thought Inbounds. Twitter: @mtaibbi Website: https://taibbi.substack.com

Sam Harris gets together with Bill Maher and Larry Charles to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their film “Religulous.” They discuss religion, politics, comedy, and other dangerous topics. Bill Maher has set the boundaries of where funny, political talk can go on American television. First on “Politically Incorrect” (Comedy Central, ABC, 1993-2002), and for the last fifteen years on HBO’s “Real Time,” Maher’s combination of unflinching honesty and big laughs have garnered him 40 Emmy nominations. Maher won his first Emmy in 2014 as executive producer for the HBO series, “VICE.” In October of 2008, this same combination was on display in Maher’s uproarious and unprecedented swipe at organized religion, “Religulous,” directed by Larry Charles. The documentary has gone on to become the 8th Highest Grossing Documentary ever. Larry Charles is an American writer, director, and producer. Charles was a staff writer for the American sitcom “Seinfeld“ for its first five seasons, contributing some of the show’s darkest and most absurd storylines. He has also directed the mockumentary comedy films “Borat” and “Brüno,” the documentary film “Religulous,” and comedy film The Dictator.

Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about his new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. They discuss the importance of meditation for his intellectual life, the primacy of stories, the need to revise our fundamental assumptions about human civilization, the threats to liberal democracy, a world without work, universal basic income, the virtues of nationalism, the implications of AI and automation, and other topics. Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in world history. His books have been translated into 50+ languages, with 12+ million copies sold worldwide. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind   looked deep into our past, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow  considered far-future scenarios, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century  focuses on the biggest questions of the present moment. Twitter: @harari_yuval

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years before moving to NYU-Stern in 2011. He was named one of the “top global thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the “top world thinkers” by Prospect magazine. He is the co-developer of Moral Foundations theory, and of the research site YourMorals.org. He is a co-founder of HeterodoxAcademy.org, which advocates for viewpoint diversity in higher education. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. His latest book (with Greg Lukianoff) is The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting a generation up for failure. Website: jonathanhaidt.com Twitter: @JonHaidt

Sam Harris speaks with Jonathan Haidt about his new book The Coddling of the American Mind. They discuss the hostility to free speech that has grown more common among young adults, recent moral panics on campus, the role of intentions in ethical life, the economy of prestige in “call out” culture, how we should define bigotry, systemic racism, the paradox of progress, and other topics. Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years before moving to NYU-Stern in 2011. He was named one of the “top global thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the “top world thinkers” by Prospect magazine. He is the co-developer of Moral Foundations theory, and of the research site YourMorals.org. He is a co-founder of HeterodoxAcademy.org, which advocates for viewpoint diversity in higher education. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. His latest book (with Greg Lukianoff) is The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting a generation up for failure.   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.

Jaron Lanier is a scientist, musician, and writer best known for his work in virtual reality and his advocacy of humanism and sustainable economics in a digital context. His 1980s start-up VPL Research created the first commercial VR products and introduced avatars, multi-person virtual world experiences, and prototypes of major VR applications such as surgical simulation. His books Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget were international bestsellers, and Dawn of the New Everything was named a 2017 best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Vox. His most recent book is 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Sam Harris speaks with Jaron Lanier about the economics, politics, and psychology of our digital lives. They discuss the insidious idea that information should be free, what we should want from an advanced economy, the role of advertising, libertarianism in Silicon Valley, the problems with social media, and other topics. Jaron Lanier is a scientist, musician, and writer best known for his work in virtual reality and his advocacy of humanism and sustainable economics in a digital context. His 1980s start-up VPL Research created the first commercial VR products and introduced avatars, multi-person virtual world experiences, and prototypes of major VR applications such as surgical simulation. His books Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget were international bestsellers, and Dawn of the New Everything was named a 2017 best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Vox. His most recent book is 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.   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.

Sam Harris speaks with Martie Haselton about sex and gender, the role of hormones in human psychology, “Darwinian feminism,” the unique hormonal experience of women, transgenderism, the Google Memo, and other topics. Martie Haselton is an interdisciplinary evolutionary scientist and Professor of Psychology at UCLA. She is the author of Hormonal: The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones – How They Drive Desire, Shape Relationships, Influence Our Choices, and Make Us Wiser. Twitter: @haselton

Q&A with Joseph GoldsteinHow should people with a history of trauma practice meditation?How do meditation teachers recognize progress in their students?How can a person’s claims to freedom and "enlightenment" be evaluated?What are further indicators of progress on the path of meditative insight?If the goal of meditation is to transcend desire, how is that different from mere apathy and purposelessness?How should we view the unethical behavior of certain (supposedly great) meditation masters?How do you reconcile concerns about racial and gender diversity with illusion of the self?Do psychedelics supersede the practice of meditation?What is a thought? And how can something so insubstantial define our subjectivity?Is being lost in thought analogous to a mental illness?What is the right amount of effort to apply in meditation?What is the biggest misconception about Buddhism?What’s the difference between mindfulness and other techniques of meditation, such as TM?Speaking of "consciousness and its contents" seems to suggest a duality between subject and object. In what sense can this duality be transcended?Does mindfulness exist on a spectrum of strength or depth, or is progress simply a matter of having more moments of it?Is there a range of natural talent among meditators?Can we think about traditional Buddhist concepts like karma and rebirth in a fully secular, rational way?How can we understand the concept of “emptiness” in Buddhism?

Sam Harris speaks with Coleman Hughes about race, racism, and identity politics. Coleman Hughes is an undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia University. His writing has been featured in Quillette, Heterodox Academy, and in the Columbia Daily Spectator. Twitter:@coldxman

What are your thoughts on suicide?What do you know about hypnosis?Do you see any value in being lost in thought, or is it always harmful?If you could acquire PhD-level knowledge of any subject other than neuroscience what would it be?My friend’s sister was murdered, and she claims that her faith is the only thing keeping her going. What would you say to her?Have you ever struggled with depression?Is there anyone you find intellectually intimidating? If so, why?You often speak of a failure of Muslims to assimilate to western society. Why should they have to assimilate?What do you think is the best strategy for Democrats to combat Trump and the GOP?Can you reflect on your two debates with Jordan Peterson in Vancouver?Why won’t you speak with Ta-Nehisi Coates on the podcast?You’ve said that it’s possible to cut through the illusion of free will. But you also acknowledge that there is a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. What is the difference in the absence of free will?What would constitute evidence for free will?What are your reading habits?How do you balance loyalty and honesty?

Sam Harris speaks with Ian Bremmer about the failure of globalism and the rise of populism. They discuss immigration, trade, automation, wealth inequality, Trump, identity politics and other topics. Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. Eurasia Group provides analysis and expertise about how political developments and national security dynamics move markets and shape investment environments across the globe. Bremmer created Wall Street’s first global political risk index (GPRI). He is the founding chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk and is an active public speaker. He has authored several books including the national bestsellers Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World and The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? Bremmer is a contributor to the Financial Times A-List and Reuters.com. He has written hundreds of articles for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Affairs. He appears regularly on CNBC, Fox News Channel, Bloomberg Television, National Public Radio, the BBC, and other networks. Bremmer earned a PhD in political science from Stanford University in 1994 and was the youngest-ever national fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a global research professor at New York University and has held faculty positions at Columbia University, the EastWest Institute, and the World Policy Institute. In 2007, Bremmer was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. His analysis focuses on global macro political trends and emerging markets, which he defines as “those countries where politics matter at least as much as economics for market outcomes.” His most recent book is Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism. Twitter: @ianbremmer

Sam Harris speaks with Chris Voss about his experience as a hostage negotiator for the FBI. They discuss different types of hostage crises, along with many of the lessons that apply to negotiating in normal life. Chris Voss is a 24-year veteran of the FBI and one of the world’s preeminent experts on the art of negotiation. He is the founder and principal of The Black Swan Group, a consulting firm that provides training and advises Fortune 500 companies through complex negotiations. Voss has taught for many business schools, including the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Harvard University, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, among others. He is the author of Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On it.

Sam Harris speaks with Masha Gessen about Vladimir Putin, the problem of gauging public opinion in Russia, Trump’s fondness for dictators, the challenges of immigration, comparisons between Christian and Muslim intolerance, “fake news” and the health of journalism, the #MeToo movement, and other topics. Masha Gessen began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017. Gessen is the author of nine books, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017; and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Gessen has written about Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, among others, for The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. On a parallel track, Gessen has been a science journalist, writing about aids, medical genetics, and mathematics; famously, Gessen was dismissed as editor of the Russian popular-science magazine Vokrug Sveta for refusing to send a reporter to observe Putin hang-gliding with the Siberian cranes. Gessen is a visiting professor at Amherst College and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013. Twitter:@mashagessen

Sam Harris speaks with presidential candidate Andrew Yang about “universal basic income” (UBI). They discuss the state of the economy, the rise of automation and AI, the arguments for and against UBI, and other topics. Andrew Yang is the founder of Venture for America, a major non-profit that places top college graduates in start-ups for two years in emerging U.S. cities to generate job growth and train the next generation of entrepreneurs. Yang has been the CEO, co-founder or executive at a number of technology and education companies. Yang was named a Presidential Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship and a Champion of Change by the White House and one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business.” He was also named to the National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship of the Department of Commerce. A major documentary with an Oscar-winning director, Generation Startup, featuring Yang and Venture for America, was released in Fall 2016 and is available on Netflix and other streaming platforms. He is a graduate of Columbia Law, where he was an Editor of the Law Review, James Kent Scholar and winner of the Class of 1912 Prize, and Brown University where he graduated with degrees in Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The War on Normal People: The Truth About America’s Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future. Website: https://www.yang2020.com/ Twitter: @AndrewYangVFA

Sam Harris speaks with Dr. Nina Shapiro about the practice of medicine. They discuss the unique resiliency of children, the importance of second opinions, bad doctors, how medical training has changed in recent years, medical uncertainty, risk perception, vaccine safety, and other topics. Dr. Nina Shapiro is the award-winning Director of Pediatric Otolaryngology and a Professor of Head and Neck Surgery at UCLA. She is featured in The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and CNN.com among others. She is a regular on CBS’s The Doctors. She is the author of Hype: A Doctor’s Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice – How to Tell What’s Real and What’s Not.

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist best known for his books The Mating Mind (2001), Mating Intelligence (2008), Spent (2009), and Mate (2015). He has a B.A. in Biology and Psychology from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University, and is a tenured associate professor at University of New Mexico. He has over 110 academic publications addressing sexual selection, mate choice, signaling theory, fitness indicators, consumer behavior, marketing, intelligence, creativity, language, art, music, humor, emotions, personality, psychopathology, and behavior genetics. He has also given 180 talks in 15 countries, reviewed papers for over 50 journals, and also worked at NYU Stern Business School, UCLA, and the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and his research has been featured in Nature, Science, The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Scientist, and The Economist, on NPR and BBC radio, and in documentaries on CNN, PBS, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, and BBC. He has consulted for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, governments, NGOs, advertising agencies, market research companies, and social media companies.

Sam Harris speaks with Geoffrey Miller about evolutionary psychology. They discuss sexual selection, virtue signaling, social media, public shaming, monogamy and polyamory, taboo topics in science, genetic engineering, gender differences and the “Google memo,” moral psychology, existential risk, AI, and other topics. Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist best known for his books The Mating Mind (2001), Mating Intelligence (2008), Spent (2009), and Mate (2015). He has a B.A. in Biology and Psychology from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University, and is a tenured associate professor at University of New Mexico. He has over 110 academic publications addressing sexual selection, mate choice, signaling theory, fitness indicators, consumer behavior, marketing, intelligence, creativity, language, art, music, humor, emotions, personality, psychopathology, and behavior genetics. He has also given 180 talks in 15 countries, reviewed papers for over 50 journals, and also worked at NYU Stern Business School, UCLA, and the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and his research has been featured in Nature, Science, The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Scientist, and The Economist, on NPR and BBC radio, and in documentaries on CNN, PBS, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, and BBC. He has consulted for a variety of Fortune 500 companies, governments, NGOs, advertising agencies, market research companies, and social media companies. Twitter: @primalpoly

Sam Harris speaks with Michael Pollan about his new book How to Change Your Mind. They cover the resurgence of interest in psychedelics in clinical practice and end-of-life care, the “betterment of well people,” the relationship between thinking and mental suffering, the differences between psychedelics and meditation, the non-duality of consciousness, the brain’s “default mode network,” their experiences with various psychedelics, and other topics. Michael Pollan is the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. His most recent book is How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Twitter: @michaelpollan   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.

What have been intellectually honest and fair criticisms of your views?What is the most consequential false belief you've ever held, and how did you shake it?What is the distinction between merely consuming the ideas of others and thinking things through on one’s own?I’m concerned that I’m only hearing half the argument with respect to the views of “social justice warriors.” Will you bring someone on the podcast who can defend this position?You once wrote a fascinating article titled “Adventures in the Land of Illness.” Do you still think that complaining about one’s physical suffering is a bad habit?What problems do you see with capitalism?What are your views on psychoanalysis?What do you think about the claim that “everyone engages in tribalism”?I’m a heart surgeon and an atheist. My patients often ask me to pray with them. How should I respond?What are your opinions of Alan Watts?Will you publish the audio from your upcoming events with Jordan Peterson?Will you get someone from the Southern Poverty Law Center on the podcast to talk about why they’ve taken a position against you, Maajid Nawaz, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali?What is the most low-brow thing you do on a regular basis?Jordan Peterson has claimed that the New Atheists haven’t grappled with Jung, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. How do you respond?What is your view of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” and are you happy to be a part of it?When will your meditation app be released?What social justice activism do you support?Will you invite someone on the podcast who can speak about “universal basic income”?Do you believe that you are overly sensitive to criticism?If free will can be an illusion, why can’t consciousness be one as well?What do you think about the (eastern) concept of enlightenment?How do you negotiate between the urge to know—to think about things continuously—and the urge to just be?How do you meditate with tinnitus?What are your thoughts on Terrence McKenna’s “stoned ape theory” regarding the origins of human language?

Sam Harris speaks with Tamler Sommers about cultures of honor. They discuss the difference between honor and dignity, “justice porn,” honor killings, honor and interpersonal violence, prison and gang culture, collective responsibility and collective punishment, retributive vs restorative justice, the ethics of forgiveness and redemption, #metoo, and other topics. Tamler Sommers is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. He is the host of the podcast “Very Bad Wizards” and holds a PhD in philosophy from Duke University. He is the author of Why Honor Matters. Twitter: @tamler   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.

Sam Harris speaks to Bart Ehrman about his experience of being a born-again Christian, his academic training in New Testament scholarship, his loss of faith, the most convincing argument in defense of Christianity, the status of miracles, the composition of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus, the nature of heaven and hell, the book of Revelation, the End Times, self-contradictions in the Bible, the concept of a messiah, whether Jesus actually existed, Christianity as a cult of human sacrifice, the conversion of Constantine, and other topics. Bart D. Ehrman is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including the New York Times bestsellers Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus Became God. Ehrman is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. He has been featured in Time, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, and has appeared on NBC, CNN, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The History Channel, National Geographic, BBC, major NPR shows, and other top print and broadcast media outlets. His most recent book is The Triumph of Christianity. Twitter: @BartEhrman 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.

Sam Harris speaks with Sean Carroll about our understanding of reality. They discuss consciousness, the many worlds view of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, free will, facts and values, and other topics. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at CalTech. He received his PhD from Harvard University. He has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. Carroll has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. He frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television. He is the author of The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. Twitter: @seanmcarroll   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.

Sam Harris speaks with Ezra Klein, Editor-at-Large for Vox Media, about racism, identity politics, intellectual honesty, and the controversy over his podcast with Charles Murray (Making Sense #73). Ezra Klein is the editor-at-large and founder of Vox. Before that, he was columnist and editor at the Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, and a contributor to Bloomberg. Twitter: @ezraklein

Sam Harris responds to the ongoing controversy over his interview with Charles Murray and discusses his upcoming conversation with Ezra Klein. He also announces a change he will be making to the format of the podcast.

Sam Harris speaks with Christian Picciolini about his experience as a neo-Nazi skinhead. They discuss how Christian got out of the movement, the limits of shame and forgiveness, the cult-like dynamics of white supremacy, the alt-Right, Russian support for white supremacy in the US, “fake news”, the significance of Charlottesville, the SPLC, and many other topics. Christian Picciolini became a white supremacist at the age of fourteen and went on to become the leader in the notorious Hammerskin Nation, one of the most violent hate groups in the world. After leaving the white power movement at twenty-two, he co-founded Life After Hate, a non-profit organization run by former extremists who are now dedicated to countering racism. He is a TEDx speaker and won an Emmy in 2016 for his role as director and executive producer of an anti-hate video campaign. He’s the author of White American Youth: My Descent in America’s Most Violent Hate Movement—And How I Got Out. Twitter: @cpicciolini

Sam Harris speaks with Rebecca Goldstein and Max Tegmark about the foundations of human knowledge and morality. Rebecca Goldstein is a MacArthur Fellow, a professor of philosophy, and the author of five novels and a collection of short stories. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Her latest book is Plato at The Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Twitter: @platobooktour Max Tegmark is a professor of physics at MIT and the co-founder of the Future of Life Institute. Tegmark has been featured in dozens of science documentaries. He is the author of Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Twitter: @Tegmark

Sam Harris speaks with Robin Hanson about our hidden motives in everyday life. They discuss selfishness, hypocrisy, norms and meta-norms, cheating, deception, self-deception, education, the evolutionary logic of conversation, social status, signaling and counter-signaling, common knowledge, AI, and many other topics. Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a Phd in social science from Cal Tech, master’s degrees in physics and philosophy, and nine years of experience as a research programmer in artificial intelligence and Bayesian statistics. He’s recognized not only for his contributions to economics (pioneering the theory and use of prediction markets) but also in a wide range of other fields. He is the author (along with Kevin Simler) of The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Twitter: @robinhanson

What are your thoughts on the Lawrence Krauss situation?Will you create a way for listeners to nominate and vote on podcast guests?Who are the philosophers that have most inspired you?My experience in meditation seems to increase my feeling of self. Can you say something about this?How does intelligence correlate with wellbeing?How should society deal with destructive drugs like methamphetamine?What are your thoughts on Stoicism?Can you further discuss the misgivings you have regarding Jordan Peterson’s work?Why do so many smart people not accept your arguments about the illusoriness of the self and free will?If you could speak with any person from history, who would it be and why?Do you think meditation can prevent a person from having bad experiences on psychedelics?Will you invite more guests on the podcast whom you strongly disagree with?What do you think about the ethics of inherited wealth?How can we differentiate abortion from murder?

Preet Bharara is an American lawyer who served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017. His office prosecuted cases involving terrorism, narcotics and arms trafficking, financial and healthcare fraud, cybercrime, public corruption, gang violence, organized crime, and civil rights violations. In 2012, Bharara was featured on TIME‘s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” On April 1, 2017, Bharara joined the NYU School of Law faculty as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence. He is Executive Vice President at Some Spider Studios where he hosts a podcast, Stay Tuned, focused on questions of justice and fairness. Twitter: @preetbharara

Sam Harris speaks with Preet Bharara about President Trump and the Russia investigation. Preet Bharara is an American lawyer who served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2017. His office prosecuted cases involving terrorism, narcotics and arms trafficking, financial and healthcare fraud, cybercrime, public corruption, gang violence, organized crime, and civil rights violations. In 2012, Bharara was featured on TIME‘s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” On April 1, 2017, Bharara joined the NYU School of Law faculty as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence. He is Executive Vice President at Some Spider Studios where he hosts a podcast, Stay Tuned, focused on questions of justice and fairness. Twitter: @preetbharara

Niall Ferguson is one of the world’s most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, Civilization, The Great Degeneration, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, and The Square and the Tower. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His many awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012), and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). Twitter: @nfergus

Sam Harris speaks with Niall Ferguson about his new book The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook . They discuss his career as a writer, networks and hierarchies, how history gets written, the similarity between the 16th century and the 21st, the role of social media in the 2016 Presidential election, the influence of advertising on the public sphere, Trump, the Russian investigation, Islamic extremism, counterfactuals, what would have happened if Clinton had won the presidency, immigration in Europe, conspiracy theories, capitalism, globalization, communism, wealth inequality, universal basic income, Henry Kissinger, the prospect of a US war with China, cyberwar, and other topics. Niall Ferguson is one of the world’s most renowned historians. He is the author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, Colossus, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, High Financier, Civilization, The Great Degeneration, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, and The Square and the Tower. He is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His many awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012), and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). Twitter: @nfergus

In his book "God is Not Great", Christopher Hitchens wrote very critically of meditation. Did you ever try to convince him that he was wrong? What is the ethical response to homeless people asking for money?What is your view of prostitution and pornography? Should they be legal?What podcasts do you personally listen to?You seem to neglect economics. Have you considered having more economists on your show?What is your process of developing your opinion on a new subject?What are your thoughts on the ethics of universal health care and a social safety net?How should we challenge our own beliefs in an ongoing way?How can the concept of “metaphorical truth” be reconciled with science?What are your thoughts on the ethics of suicide?You seem to be very good at emotional self-regulation, but is it possible to take this too far?You have said that moderate religion provides cover for religious extremism, could the same be said about your criticism of Islam, that it provides cover for bigotry against Muslims as people?How do you speak so eloquently?What is your view on living a solitary life?How would you compare the ethics of adoption versus having one’s own biological children?As a neuroscientist and father, what are your rules for your kids’ screen time?

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a decision theorist and computer scientist at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California who is known for his work in technological forecasting. His publications include the Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence chapter “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence,” co-authored with Nick Bostrom. Yudkowsky’s writings have helped spark a number of ongoing academic and public debates about the long-term impact of AI, and he has written a number of popular introductions to topics in cognitive science and formal epistemology, such as Rationality: From AI to Zombies and “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.” His latest book is Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck. Twitter: @ESYudkowsky

Sam Harris speaks with Eliezer Yudkowsky about the nature of intelligence, different types of AI, the “alignment problem,” IS vs OUGHT, the possibility that future AI might deceive us, the AI arms race, conscious AI, coordination problems, and other topics. Eliezer Yudkowsky is a decision theorist and computer scientist at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California who is known for his work in technological forecasting. His publications include the Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence chapter “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence,” co-authored with Nick Bostrom. Yudkowsky’s writings have helped spark a number of ongoing academic and public debates about the long-term impact of AI, and he has written a number of popular introductions to topics in cognitive science and formal epistemology, such as Rationality: From AI to Zombies and “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.” His latest book is Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck. Twitter: @ESYudkowsky Facebook: facebook.com/yudkowsky   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.

Sam Harris speaks with Lawrence Krauss and Matt Dillahunty about the threat of nuclear war, science and a universal conception of morality, the role of intuition in science, the primacy of consciousness, the nature of time, free will, the self, meditation, and other topics. This conversation was recorded at New York City Center on January 13, 2018.

Sam Harris speaks with David Frum and Andrew Sullivan about the Trump presidency, hyper-partisanship, how democracies fail, immigration, the lowering life expectancy in the U.S., racism, social media, the opioid crisis, marijuana legalization, religion, what a healthy politics might look like, and other topics. David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, his ninth book. Frum spent most of his career in conservative media and research institutions, including the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. He is a past chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading center-right think tank in the United Kingdom, and a former director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. In 2001-2002, he served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. Frum holds a BA and MA in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Andrew Sullivan is a writer at large for New York Magazine. He holds a BA from Oxford University in Modern History and Modern Languages and a PhD in government at Harvard University. He was editor of The New Republic from 1991 – 1996, and the creator of The Daily Dish, one of the first political blogs, from 2000 – 2015. A winner of three National Magazine Awards, he was also the weekly American columnist for the Sunday Times of London from 1996 – 2014. He wrote the first cover story and first book in favor of marriage equality in 1989 and 1995, an AIDS memoir, Love Undetectable, in 1998, and The Conservative Soul in 2006.

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Anil Seth about the scientific study of consciousness, where consciousness emerges in nature, levels of consciousness, perception as a “controlled hallucination,” emotion, the experience of “pure consciousness,” consciousness as “integrated information,” measures of “brain complexity,” psychedelics, different aspects of the “self,” conscious AI, and many other topics. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Founding Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. In his work, he seeks to understand the biological basis of consciousness by bringing together research across neuroscience, mathematics, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, philosophy, and psychiatry. In addition to delivering new insights into the nature of consciousness, his research has helped shape novel approaches to psychiatric disorders, as well as driving innovative methods in machine learning and in brain-inspired technologies.  His recent book—Being You: A New Science of Consciousness—explores what it means to “be you”—that is, to have a specific, conscious experience of the world around you and yourself within it. Website: www.anilseth.com Twitter: @anilkseth  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.

Sam Harris speaks with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro about the breakdown of shared values, the problem with identity politics, religion, free will, the primacy of reason, and many other topics. Eric Weinstein is a managing director of Thiel Capital in San Francisco. He is also a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. Weinstein speaks and publishes on a variety of topics including, gauge theory, immigration, the market for elite labor, management of financial risk and the incentivizing of risk taking in science. And he, along with brother Bret—whom I just did a podcast with in Seattle—has become an unusually powerful advocate for free speech. Ben Shapiro is editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com, and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the top conservative podcast in the nation, and a leading conservative speaker on college campuses, consistently defending free speech and open debate. Ben is the author of seven books, including The New York Times bestseller, Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America. He has also been a nationally syndicated columnist since age 17. He’s a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School. Twitter:@EricRWeinstein@BenShapiro

Sam Harris speaks with Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson about the current scientific understanding of meditation practice. They speak about the original stigma associated with meditation, the history of introspection in eastern and western cultures, the recent collaboration between Buddhism and western science, the difference between altered states and altered traits, an alternate conception of mental health, “meta-awareness,” the relationship between mindfulness and “flow,” the difference between pain and suffering, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and other topics. Daniel Goleman, known for his bestselling books on emotional intelligence, has a long-standing interest in meditation dating back to his two years in India as a graduate student at Harvard. A psychologist who for many years reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times, Dr. Goleman previously was a visiting faculty member at Harvard. Dr. Goleman has received many journalistic awards for his writing, including two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize for his articles in the Times, and a Career Achievement award for journalism from the American Psychological Association. Richard J. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in psychology and has been at Wisconsin since 1984. Davidson has published more than 320 articles, as well as numerous chapters and reviews, and edited fourteen books. His research has received many awards. Their most recent book is Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body.

Sam Harris speaks with A.J. Jacobs about religion, gossip, polyamory, health advice, our past and future selves, “radical honesty,” human genealogy, tribalism, and other topics. A.J. Jacobs is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, and The Guinea Pig Diaries. He is the editor at large of Esquire magazine, a contributor to NPR, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. His most recent book is It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree. He lives in New York City with his wife and kids. Visit him at AJJacobs.com.

Sam Harris speaks with Bret Weinstein about the moral panic at Evergreen State College, the concept of race, genetic differences between human populations, intersectionality, sex and gender, “metaphorical truth,” religion and “group selection,” equality, and other topics. Bret Weinstein has spent two decades advancing the field of evolutionary biology. He has made important discoveries regarding the evolution of cancer, senescence, and the adaptive significance of moral self-sacrifice. He is currently working to uncover the evolutionary meaning of large-scale patterns in human history, and applying evolutionary insight in the quest to prototype a liberating, sustainable anti-fragile governance structure for humanity’s next phase. Twitter: @BretWeinstein

Sam Harris speaks with Tom Nichols about his book The Death of Expertise. They discuss the “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” the growth of knowledge and reliance on authority, when experts fail, the repudiation of expertise in politics, conspiracy thinking, North Korea, Trump, and other topics. Tom Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School, and a former aide in the U.S. Senate. He is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, and as one of the all-time top players of the game, he was invited back to play in the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions. Nichols is the author of several works on foreign policy and international security affairs, including The Sacred Cause, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War, and The Russian Presidency. His most recent book is The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Twitter: @RadioFreeTom

Sam Harris speaks with David Benatar about his philosophy of “anti-natalism.” They discuss the asymmetry between the good and bad things in life, the ethics of existential risk, the moral landscape, the limits and paradoxes of introspection, the “experience machine” thought experiment, population ethics, and other topics. David Benatar is Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence and The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. 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.

Did the Vegas shooting change your position on guns in any way?Do you ever have arguments with your wife that result in total failures of communication?What is your opinion of Dave Rubin's approach to interviewing?What have you changed your mind about recently?Is it ever morally defensible to incite violence?Do you struggle with a feeling of superiority when around other people?Will you have Elon Musk on the podcast?If you ruled the world, what would you decree?What is your argument against Ayn Rand’s philosophy?If free will is an illusion, how can intentions be morally relevant?What is your response to Hume's Is-Ought distinction?What are your thoughts on feminism?

When you talk about creatitivity, what kind of art, music, and fiction do you like? Do you think creativity has as important of a role to play as reason in helping to maintain a civil and flourishing society?What one piece of advice would you give your 20-year-old self, your 30-year-old self, and your 40-year-old self?Have you ever considered that you may be wrong about the value–though of course not the veracity–of religion?In your opinion, why do so many Americans have trouble accepting science while enjoying the fruits of science in their daily lives? Can we blame religious fundamentalism as the only contributing factor? Do we have an uncommonly poor science education in the U.S.? Is science somehow disturbing some fundamental human value system or emotional state unique to Americans?In meditation, is it possible that the experience of selflessness is just the obscuring of the self by other cognitive processes and not proof that the self is an illusion? In other words, how can we be sure that the self is illusory and not just a construct that can be occluded?Are you concerned that some of your listerners are becoming dogmatic and inadvertenly taking the wrong lessons from your talks and podcasts? For example, the somewhat large number of listerners who support Trump and who are surprised that you didn't support him that would seem to indicate that some nominal supporters have a shallow understanding of your views.If you could and would you and should you choose not to die, is finding a "cure" for aging a laudable quest granting the fact that people die has been a great evolutionary benefit and that ubiquitous "immortality" would cause numerous practical problems? Would it be moral to deny people a choice when relevant technology is inevitably developed?What's a day in the life of Sam Harris like? How much of your time do you devote to writing, planning podcast, tweeting, meditating, etc?You've said that human life is inherently worth living. Why? How would you respond to a philosophical pessimist who says that even the best lives are not worth living because happiness cannot compensate for all the suffering? And there's a related question here from a different person: Why have children? I'm finding it hard to justify the decision to have biological children in the present-day given they're relatively likely to experience suffering. I believe it morally wrong to create life if the quality of that life is likely to be low. What is your take?Do you take notes when reading books or articles? How do you organize them? What's your process in other words? How do you optimize your reading experience in such a way that you will retain as much as possible from a book or article.Can you talk about your parenting philosophy in your experience raising your children and insights on how to raise an intelligent, mindful, thoughtful, and caring children. What values do you think most important to instill in your children?Who have been your favorite podcast guests?

Sam Harris speaks with Jennifer Doudna about the gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9. They talk about the biology of gene editing, how specific tissues in the body can be targeted, the ethical implications of changing the human genome, the importance of curiosity-driven science, and other topics. Jennifer A. Doudna is a professor in the Chemistry and the Molecular and Cell Biology Departments at the University of California, Berkeley, investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and researcher in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is internationally recognized as a leading expert on RNA-protein biochemistry, CRISPR biology, and genome engineering. She is the author (with Samuel Sternberg) of A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution.

The following conversation between Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Matt Dillahunty was recorded for the Making Sense podcast at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver on November 2, 2017.

Sam Harris speaks with Frank Ostaseski about death and dying—and about how the awareness of death can improve our lives in each moment. Frank Ostaseski is a Buddhist teacher, international lecturer and a leading voice in end-of-life care. In 1987, he co-founded of the Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America. In 2004, he created the Metta Institute to provide innovative educational programs and professional trainings that foster compassionate, mindfulness-based care. Mr. Ostaseski’s groundbreaking work has been widely featured in the media, including the Bill Moyers television series On Our Own Terms, the PBS series With Eyes Open, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and in numerous print publications. AARP magazine named him one of America’s 50 most innovative people. In 2001, he was honored by the Dalai Lama for his many years of compassionate service to the dying and their families. He is the author of The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. More info:mettainstitute.orgfiveinvitations.com 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.

Kurt Andersen is the bestselling author of the novels Heyday, Turn of the Century, and True Believers. He contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times, and is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award–winning public radio show and podcast. He also writes for television, film, and the stage. Andersen co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor in chief of New York, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was an editor of The Harvard Lampoon. His most recent book is Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500-Year History. Twitter: @KBAndersen

Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal, Three Scientists and their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the widely respected Bloggingheads.tv and MeaningofLife.tv. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time, Slate, and The New Republic. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, where he also created the popular online course “Buddhism and Modern Psychology.” He is currently Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. His most recent book is Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.  Twitter: @robertwrighter

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Nudge (with Richard Thaler), #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, and Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Nicholas A. Christakis is a sociologist and physician who conducts research in the area of biosocial science, investigating the biological predicates and consequences of social phenomena. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is appointed as the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Social and Natural Science, and he is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. Dr. Christakis’ lab is focused on the relationship between social networks and well-being. Ongoing investigations in the lab explore the genetic bases for human social behaviors and the application of social network principles to change population-level behavior related to health, cooperation, and economic development. Along with long-time collaborator, James Fowler, Dr. Christakis has authored a general-audience book on social networks: Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. Twitter: @NAChristakis

Sam Harris speaks with Mark Lilla about the fate of political liberalism in the United States, the emergence of a new identity politics, the role of class in American society, wealth inequality, and other topics. Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and a prizewinning essayist for the New York Review of Books and other publications worldwide. His books include The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction; The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West; The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, and The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. A former Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford (where he received a PhD studying cancer-causing viruses) and from Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods. He has published articles and commentary in such journals as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron and the Journal of Clinical Investigation and in publications such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic. His work was nominated for Best American Science Writing, 2000. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. His most recent book is The Gene: An Intimate History. Twitter: @DrSidMukherjee

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick are two of the most accomplished documentary filmmakers of our time. Their work includes The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, The War, along with many other acclaimed films. Their most recent project is the ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, The Vietnam War, which tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Vietnam War also features more than 100 iconic musical recordings from greatest artists of the era. Website: www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/home/

Thomas K. Metzinger is full professor and director of the theoretical philosophy group and the research group on neuroethics/neurophilosophy at the department of philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. He is the founder and director of the MIND group and Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, Germany. His research centers on analytic philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He is the editor of Neural Correlates of Consciousness and the author of Being No One and The Ego Tunnel.   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.

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.

Max Tegmark is a professor of physics at MIT and the co-founder of the Future of Life Institute. Tegmark has been featured in dozens of science documentaries. He is the author of Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Twitter: @Tegmark

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor for its first seven years. He has written for The New York Times, The Economist, Science, Time, and The Wall Street Journal among many other publications. His previous books include Out of Control, New Rules for the New Economy, Cool Tools, and What Technology Wants. His most recent book is The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

Fareed Zakaria is host of CNN’s flagship international affairs program — Fareed Zakaria GPS — a Washington Post columnist, a contributing editor at The Atlantic and a New York Times bestselling author. He was described in 1999 by Esquire Magazine as “the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation.” In 2010, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. He is the author of The Future of Freedom, The Post-American World, and In Defense of a Liberal Education. Twitter: @FareedZakaria

Graeme Wood is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. He was the 2014–2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he teaches in the political science department at Yale University. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Twitter: @gcaw

Sarah Haider is the co-founder of the Ex-Muslims of North America. Twitter: @SarahTheHaider

David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic. In 2001–02, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Twitter: @davidfrum

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001, he held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He has spent some ten years in Europe, and speaks five and reads ten European languages. He has also written for The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, and The New Republic as well as for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of several award-winning books including The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. His latest book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.

Zeynep Tufekci is a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She is the author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Twitter: @zeynep

Sam Harris speaks with Siddhartha Mukherjee about the human desire to understand and manipulate heredity, the genius of Gregor Mendel, the ethics of altering our genes, the future of genetic medicine, patent issues in genetic research, and other topics. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. A former Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford (where he received a PhD studying cancer-causing viruses) and from Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods. He has published articles and commentary in such journals as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron and the Journal of Clinical Investigation and in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. His work was nominated for Best American Science Writing, 2000. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. His most recent book is The Gene: An Intimate History.   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.

Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum and Juliette Kayyem about the unfolding Russia scandal in the White House.

Is it possible that the mindfulness notion of the self being an illusion is itself an illusion?Tell me some real life examples that are good for society and that are informed by Charles Murray's research in the bell curve.Do you think reducing animal suffering is a moral blind spot of modern humans or a moral error?How is Brazilian jiu-jitsu coming?What are your thoughts on Kevin Kelly's article The Myth of Superhuman AI?How do you think your friend the late, great Christopher Hitchens would have dealt with a Trump presidency?Will you do a podcast with Ben Shapiro on religion?How would someone lose their faith? Just a blow to the head or a good scare?Is there hope for a centrist politics?Can you share some insights on parenting? How does/did rational and mindful Sam Harris handle an angry toddler?How do you explain other religions and beliefs to your kids?Could you describe what it was like going through your PhD program? What was it like going back to undergrad after a long break?What's your gut feeling on the prospect of military conflict between the US and Russia, China, and North Korea in the near future?Will you have someone studying transgenderism biologically on [the podcast] at some point? How are you forming your opinions around this issue?Just finished your book Free Will and wish it was 10 times longer. Any plans for more on this topic?Do you plan to read more of The End of Faith?Do you think having a large vocabulary is valuable in your line of work and life in general and what is your advice for expanding it?

Gary Taubes is the author of Why We Get Fat; Good Calories, Bad Calories; and The Case Against Sugar. He is a former staff writer for Discover and a correspondent for the journal Science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Esquire, and has been included in numerous “Best of” anthologies, including The Best of the Best American Science Writing (2010). He has received three Science in Society Journalism Awards from the National Association of Science Writers. He is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research and a co-founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI). Website: garytaubes.com Twitter: @garytaubes

Charles Murray is a political scientist and author. His 1994 New York Times bestseller, The Bell Curve (coauthored with the late Richard J. Herrnstein), sparked heated controversy for its analysis of the role of IQ in shaping America’s class structure. Murray’s other books include What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Human Accomplishment, and In Our Hands. His 2012 book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 describes an unprecedented divergence in American classes over the last half century. Twitter: @charlesmurray

Michael Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy founded by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Hayden also serves as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Mason University School of Public Policy. He is the author of Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror.

Tristan Harris has been called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience,” by The Atlantic magazine. He was the Design Ethicist at Google and left the company to lead Time Well Spent, where he focuses on how better incentives and design practices can create a world that helps us spend our time well. Harris’s work has been featured on 60 Minutes and the PBS NewsHour, and in many journals, websites, and conferences, including: The Atlantic, ReCode, TED, the Economist, Wired, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the New York Review of Books. He was rated #16 in Inc Magazine’s “Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30” in 2009 and holds several patents from his work at Apple, Wikia, Apture and Google. Harris graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Computer Science.

Lawrence Krauss is a theoretical physicist and the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and nine books, including the international bestsellers, A Universe from Nothing and The Physics of Star Trek. The recipient of numerous awards, Krauss is a regular columnist for newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, and he appears frequently on radio, television, and in feature films. His most recent book is The Greatest Story Ever Told—So Far: Why Are We Here?

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a visiting Professor at the London School of Economics where she runs Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. Formerly a member of the Washington Post editorial board, she has also worked at the Spectator, the Evening Standard, Slate, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, the Economist, and the Independent. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, the New Republic, The National Review, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals. She is the author of Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which describes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after the Second World War. Her previous book, Gulag: A History, won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004. Twitter: @anneapplebaum

Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about meditation, the need for stories, the power of technology to erase the boundary between fact and fiction, wealth inequality, the problem of finding meaning in a world without work, religion as a virtual reality game, the difference between pain and suffering, and other topics. Yuval Noah Harari has a PhD in history from Oxford University and is a professor in the Department of History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He specialized in World History, medieval history and military history, but his current research focuses on macro-historical questions: What is the relation between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? He is the author of two blockbuster books, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. 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.

Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson discuss science, religion, archetypes, mythology, and the perennial problem of finding meaning in life.

Kate Darling is a leading expert in robot ethics. She’s a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, where she investigates social robotics and conducts experimental studies on human-robot interaction. Kate is also a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Yale Information Society Project, and is an affiliate at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. She explores the emotional connection between people and life-like machines, seeking to influence technology design and public policy. Her writing and research anticipate difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers, and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades. Kate has a background in law & economics and intellectual property. Twitter: @grok_

David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic. In 2001–02, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Twitter: @davidfrum

Any update on the project manager position?Sam addresses questions about conversation with Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist who was a guest on the podcast.What are your views on the so-called Muslim ban?Sam addresses questions about Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley.How do you think we can reasonably expect to break the echo chamber mentality and social media and online information? Do you think it's possible or do you expect our conversation to grow increasingly factionalized?Are you still giving $3,500 each month from the podcast to the Against Malaria Foundation as you spoke about in your podcast with Will MacAskill?One argument I've heard from someone who believes in God and an afterlife is that "energy can never be destroyed." I assume what is meant by this is that consciousness survives the body, as a soul perhaps. I think this is nonsense, but I don't really have a good enough comeback for it. What would your response be?What would you say to someone who claims that the humanities are an unnecessary waste of money because they have no immediate practical purpose and thus should not be taught at universities or given funds for research? I refer to subjects such as history, sociology, or philosophy.I'd like to hear your thoughts about the ethics of the anti-aging movement led by organizations such as the Sens Foundation, Human Longevity Inc., and so on.Have you read the criticisms on the Cogito [ergo sum]? You seem pretty obsessed with the fact that one can't argue with the existence of consciousness. Is consciousness really the best choice for an irrefutable proof?Would having a rational conversation about Islam still empower Islamists the same way the Trump-style rhetoric would?How much of morality–in your view–do we inherit from evolution?With large portions of society already arguing about what constitutes fake news, how will we handle future technology that makes these lines even more murky–for example, voice manipulating software or computer-generated facial expressions?I've heard you use the term zero-sum game when talking to guests on different subjects. Would you say that letting refugees into our country is not a zero-sum game?Are you open to doing a podcast with someone who voted for Trump?What should our policy be with respect to Muslim immigration?

Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein answer questions about the practice of mindfulness. They discuss negative emotions, the importance of ethics, the concept of enlightenment, and other topics.

Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and Professor at the University of Toronto. He formerly taught at Harvard University and has published numerous articles on drug abuse, alcoholism and aggression. He is the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His works of nonfiction include In the New World, Remembering Satan, The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and Thirteen Days in September. He has also written a novel, God’s Favorite. His books have received many prizes and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. His most recent book is The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State.

Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at a live event in Los Angeles (second of two). They discuss Richard’s experience of having a stroke, the genetic future of humanity, the analogy between genes and memes, the “extended phenotype,” Islam and bigotry, the biology of race, how to find meaning without religion, and other topics.

Maajid Nawaz is a counter-extremist, author, columnist, broadcaster and Founding Chairman of Quilliam – a globally active organization focusing on matters of integration, citizenship & identity, religious freedom, immigration, extremism, and terrorism. Maajid’s work is informed by years spent in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group, and his gradual transformation towards liberal democratic values. Having served four years as an Amnesty International adopted “prisoner of conscience” in Egypt, Maajid is now a leading critic of Islamism, while remaining a secular liberal Muslim. Maajid is an Honorary Associate of the UK’s National Secular Society, a weekly columnist for the Daily Beast, a monthly columnist for the liberal UK paper the ‘Jewish News’ and LBC radio’s weekend afternoon radio host. He also provides occasional columns for the London Times, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among others. Maajid was the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate in London’s Hampstead & Kilburn for the May 2015 British General Election. A British-Pakistani born in Essex, Maajid speaks English, Arabic, and Urdu, holds a BA (Hons) from SOAS in Arabic and Law and an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics (LSE). Maajid relates his life story in his first book, Radical. He co-authored his second book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, with Sam Harris. Twitter: @maajidnawaz

Garry Kasparov spent twenty years as the world’s number one ranked chess player. In 2005, he retired from professional chess to lead the pro-democracy opposition against Vladimir Putin, from street protests to coalition building. In 2012, he was named chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Václav Havel. He has been a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal since 1991, and he is a senior visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School. His 2007 book, How Life Imitates Chess, has been published in twenty-six languages. He lives in self-imposed exile in New York with his wife Dasha and their children. His most recent book is Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.

Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at a live event in Los Angeles (first of two). They cover religion, Jurassic Park, artificial intelligence, elitism, continuing human evolution, and other topics.

Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on 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, one of the major journals in the field. Dr. Bloom 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 or editor of seven books, including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil and Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World in the Center for Middle East Policy and the author of the new book Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World. His previous book, Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East, was named a Foreign Affairs “Best Book of 2014.” Hamid served as director of research at the Brookings Doha Center until January 2014. Prior to joining Brookings, he was director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Hamid is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the vice-chair of POMED’s board of directors.

James Kirchick is a journalist and foreign correspondent currently based in Washington. He has reported from Southern and North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, across the European continent, and the Caucasus. Kirchick’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Ha’aretz, Newsweek, Time, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Slate, The Weekly Standard, The American Interest, The Virginia Quarterly Review, World Affairs Journal, National Review and Commentary, among other publications. He is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative in Washington, D.C., a correspondent for The Daily Beast and is a columnist for Tablet. His first book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering, University of California, Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco. He is the author (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Personal website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ Story discussed in this podcast: E.M. Forster. 1909. “The Machine Stops.”

David Deutsch is best known as the founding father of the quantum theory of computation, and for his work on Everettian (multiverse) quantum theory. He is a Visiting Professor of Physics at Oxford University, where he works on “anything fundamental.” At present, that mainly means his proposed constructor theory. He has written two books – The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity – aimed at the general reader.

Sam Harris talks about the results of the 2016 presidential election and the prospects of a President Trump.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Senior Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at The Harvard Kennedy School, a Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was named one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” of 2005, one of the Glamour Heroes of 2005 and Reader’s Digest‘s European of the Year for 2005. She is the best selling author of Infidel (2007) and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015). She runs the AHA Foundation which seeks to elevate the status of women and girls globally. Lifting the Veil on “Islamophobia

Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic from 1991 – 1996 and was an intellectual architect of the campaign for marriage equality. He is the author of The Conservative Soul and Virtually Normal. Sullivan’s blog, The Dish, pioneered online journalism from 2000 – 2015. He is at work on a collection of essays and a book on the future of Christianity. Andrew Sullivan. “I Used to Be a Human Being.” New York Magazine. September 18, 2016.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He’s the author of Animal Liberation, The Most Good You Can Do, and many other books. His most recent book is Ethics in the Real World. He is also the co-founder of The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit devoted to spreading his ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty. Website: www.petersinger.infoTwitter: @PeterSinger   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.

Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and the holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. He has held Visiting Associate Professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California–Irvine. Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. His works include The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature; The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption; Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, along with 75+ scientific papers, many at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and a broad range of disciplines including consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics. He received a B.Sc. (1988) and an M.B.A. (1990) both from McGill University, and his M.S. (1993) and Ph.D. (1994) from Cornell University. YouTube Channel: The Saad Truth Twitter: @GadSaad

Sam Harris reads and discusses the third chapter of “The End of Faith.” Topics include: Christianity, Judaism, the Inquisition, witchcraft, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

Sam address questions regarding his Brazilian jiu-jitsu practice: Do I still train? What belt do I have? Why do I think the sport is so addictive?Can you expand on the topic of free will?What is the difference between Eckhart Tolle and Osho? According to Dan Harris' book, you seem to give credence to the idea that Tolle might actually have had a true spiritual experience while Osho is your go-to example for the fake guru and yet their books and ideas seem almost identical.Why podcast rather than just spend the time writing? And why ask for listener support rather than read ads like most podcasters do?What's your opinion of Milo Yiannopoulos and the alt-right?Describe your political beliefs.Chomsky says New Atheism is state worship in disguise. You don't subscribe to state communism or fascism, but at the same time, I don't see anything in your writings against the concept of the state. To believe states are necessary evils–would that count as state worship?How is your diet going? Are you still a vegetarian?I really want to do a 10-day retreat, but can I just go camping alone and do it? Is there a huge value in an organized retreat?Please comment on the Hannibal Buress podcast fiasco.

William MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was educated at Cambridge, Princeton, and Oxford. He is one of the primary voices in a movement in philanthropy known as “effective altruism” and the cofounder of three non-profits based on effective altruist principles: Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. William is the author of Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference.

Sam Harris reads from an issue of Dabiq, the magazine of ISIS, and discusses the beliefs and goals of jihadists worldwide.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. He has taught previously at Boston, Harvard and Northwestern Universities, and the University of Michigan. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics (Northwestern University, 1972) and a Ph.D. in Economics (MIT, 1976). Professor Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. He has been elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society, Member of the American Philosophical Society, Vice President of the American Economics Association, and President of the Eastern Economics Association. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholarship to support his work. As a prominent social critic and public intellectual, writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, Professor Loury has published over 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic. Professor Loury’s books include One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1995 – winner of the American Book Award and the Christianity Today Book Award); The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2002); Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK (ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005); and, Race, Incarceration and American Values (M.I.T. Press, 2008). Glenn Loury hosts The Glenn Show on Bloggingheads.tv, and he can be reached on Twitter at @GlennLoury. Books and articles discussed in this podcast: Ta-Nehisi Coates. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic. June, 2014. Thomas Chatterton Williams. “Loaded Dice.” The London Review of Books. December, 2015. Benjamin Wallace-Wells. “The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” New York Magazine. July, 2015. Jill Leovy. Ghettoside. Spiegel & Grau. 2015. Roland G. Fryer, Jr. “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. July, 2016. Glenn C. Loury. “Ferguson Won’t Change Anything. What Will?” The Boston Review. January, 2015.

Eric R. Weinstein is a managing director of Thiel Capital in San Francisco. He is also a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University. Weinstein speaks and publishes on a variety of topics including, gauge theory, immigration, the market for elite labor, management of financial risk and the incentivizing of risk taking in science. He can be contacted on Twitter: @EricRWeinstein. Articles mentioned in this podcast:A. Koestler. “The Nightmare That Is a Reality” The New York Times Magazine. January 9, 1944. S. Harris. “Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy” Visual aid:

Sam Harris speaks with biologist David Krakauer about information, intelligence, the role of IQ, complex systems, technological advancement, the future of humanity, and other topics. David Krakauer is President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. His research explores the evolution of intelligence on earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their generalities. He served as the founding Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, the Co-Director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and was Professor of mathematical genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He previously served as chair of the faculty and a resident professor and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has also been a visiting fellow at the Genomics Frontiers Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, a Sage Fellow at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of Santa Barbara, a long-term Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and visiting Professor of Evolution at Princeton University. In 2012 Dr. Krakauer was included in the Wired Magazine Smart List as one of 50 people “who will change the World.” For information about the Santa Fe Institute: www.santafe.edu The article discussed in this podcast: The Empty Brain 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.

Essays mentioned in this podcast: Reflections on “Free Will”by Daniel C. Dennett The Marionette’s Lamentby Sam Harris

Sam Harris reads and discusses the second chapter of “The End of Faith.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson is the head of Hayden Planetarium in New York City and the first occupant of its Frederick P. Rose Directorship. He is also a research associate of the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. His research interests include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. Tyson is the recipient of nineteen honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest award given by NASA to a non-government citizen. He holds a degree in physics from Harvard and a PhD in astrophysics from Columbia. Tyson has served on several Presidential commissions and government advisory councils. He has written ten books, including The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist and Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries, and Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier. Recently, Tyson served as executive editor, host, and narrator for Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, the 21st century continuation of Carl Sagan’s landmark television series. The show began in March 2014 and ran thirteen episodes in Primetime on the FOX network, and appeared in 181 countries in 45 languages around the world on the National Geographic Channels. Cosmos won four Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, two Critics Choice awards, as well as a dozen other industry recognitions.

Juliette Kayyem is one of the nation’s leading experts in homeland security. A former member of the National Commission on Terrorism, and the state of Massachusetts’ first homeland security advisor, Kayyem served as President Obama’s Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security where she handled crises from the H1N1 pandemic to the BP Oil Spill.  Presently a faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she also is the founder of Kayyem Solutions, LLC, one of the nation’s only female owned security advising companies. Kayyem is a security analyst for CNN, a weekly show contributor on WGBH, Boston’s NPR station, and the host of the podcast Security Mom, also produced by WGBH.  In 2013, she was the Pulitzer Prize finalist for her columns in the Boston Globe.  A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Kayyem lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and three children. She is the author of Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris reads and discusses the first chapter of The End of Faith.

Sam Harris speaks with philosopher David Chalmers about the nature of consciousness, the challenges of understanding it scientifically, and the prospect that we will one day build it into our machines. David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, and also holds a part-time position at the Australian National University. He is well-known for his work in the philosophy of mind, especially for his formulation of the “hard problem” of consciousness. His 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory was successful with both popular and academic audiences. Chalmers co-founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and has organized some of the most important conferences in the field. He also works on many other issues in philosophy and cognitive science, and has articles on the possibility of a “singularity” in artificial intelligence and on philosophical issues arising from the movie The Matrix. 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.

Anxiety is a monster that is crippling and paralyzed and keeps you in a loop of debiliating negative emotions even when one desperately wants out. What are the causes? What can one do to help themselves? What steps big or small do you suggest?What are your thoughts on immortality or at least living a very very long time as pursued by researchers like Aubrey de Grey? Do you think it's possible? Do you think it's desirable?I remember you mentioning getting flack from Maajid about not liking hip hop. I'm curious. What sort of music you do listen to? Stravinsky, Radiohead, Enya?Why aren't your books translated into Arabic?Can you please do a podcast with Richard Lang, disciple and close friend of the late Douglas Harding about The Headless Way, the westernized version of dzogchen?What are your preferred news sources?I heard you say once before that the left has one advantage over the right in that it has a self correcting mechanism. Well, now that the left seems to be going off the deep end, we need those mechanisms.Did you find that the initial onset of your fame altered your sense of self/ego at all even temporarily? If so, how? Do you credit your background in meditation for helping you keep level headed?On stoicism, you said you were disappointed in how you handled some recent battles. What are your strategies moving forward to evolve and prepare when you suit up for the next one?Sam address request for his views on abortion.We're always hearing about how Iran was a relatively more liberal nation before the Islamic regimes took over. We hear about how the problem of radical Islam is relatively new in the world and that historically Islam was not as violent. If we grab that this is true, does this make religion more or less scary considering that apparently these violent interpretations can arise suddenly and possibly without historical context?Can you tell us anything about your upcoming book on artificial intelligence?What are your thoughts on the transgender debate?What is your position on male circumcision?What would you be working on if 9/11 hadn't happened and you hadn't written The End of Faith? How would your work be different?

Sam Harris talks to Omer Aziz about Islam, Islamism, free speech, and related topics.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the NYU-Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and spent most of his career (1995-2011) at the University of Virginia. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures–including the cultures of American progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, and of The New York Times bestseller The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Michael Weiss is a Senior Editor at The Daily Beast and co-author of the New York Times bestseller ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. He also edits The Interpreter, an online translation and analysis journal devoted to all things Russian and Ukrainian. To support the Making Sense podcast, please visit: https://www.samharris.org/support

Sam Harris responds to criticism of his views on the Apple-FBI controversy and then speaks with Maryam Namazie about friendly fire among secularists, profiling, the immigration crisis in Europe, and other topics. Maryam Namazie is an Iranian-born atheist, a secularist, and a human rights activist. She is a spokesperson for a variety of organizations, including Fitnah (a movement for women’s liberation), Equal Rights Now, One Law for All (against Sharia Law in Britain), and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. She hosts a weekly television program in Persian and English called Bread and Roses, which is broadcast in Iran and the Middle East via New Channel TV. Website: maryamnamazie.com Twitter: @MaryamNamazie

Sam Harris offers a few more thoughts on Clinton vs Sanders, as well as on the ethics of strong encryption. He then speaks with Uma Valeti, cardiologist and CEO of Memphis Meats, about the future of food production.

Sam shares his thoughts on Eiynah Nice Mango's "Open Letter to Sam Harris" alleging that Douglas Murray is a bigot.How should we differentiate labels used for clarity and labels used in a way that encourages tribalism?What about the idea of "free won't" as opposed to "free will"?Why are you planning to vote for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders?Sam shares his thoughts on Noam Chomsky's interview with Medhi Hasan on Al Jazeera.What was the most unexpected and or remarkable audience reaction during your recent tour of Australia?Which misrepresentation of your views are you most tired of defending?What does agency mean in the context of free will? Is the difference between involuntary and voluntary action only an indication of future behavior?Can you talk about the distinction between an intellectual understanding of the self as illusion and an experience of no self?What do you think about the recent deplatforming of Richard Dawkins by the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism?What is your economic perspective? You have seldom commented on this topic other than saying that you wished taxes to be raised on the rich. What in your view are the moral highs and lows are free market and socialist economies?Does your dismissal of the matters of corporatism and imperialism come from believing that they are insignificant factors in the conflict we are having with Islam–extreme Islam–or is it a tactical reaction to the lack of voice given to critiquing extreme Islam and its destructive effects?Do you think there are people in the world who cannot learn to meditate just as there are tone deaf people who cannot learn a musical instrument and still others will never learn to sing? Did you ever discuss meditation with Christopher Hitchens?

Jocko Willink is a retired Navy SEAL officer, and co-founder of Echelon Front, where he is a leadership instructor, speaker, and executive coach. Jocko spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy SEAL Teams, starting as an enlisted SEAL and rising through the ranks to become an officer. As commander of SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser during the battle of Ramadi, he orchestrated SEAL operations that helped the “Ready First” Brigade of the US Army’s First Armored Division bring stability to the violent, war-torn city. Task Unit Bruiser became the most highly decorated Special Operations Unit of the Iraq War. Jocko returned from Iraq to serve as Officer-in-Charge of training for all West Coast SEAL Teams. There, he spearheaded the development of leadership training and personally instructed and mentored the next generation of SEAL leaders who have continued to perform with great success on the battlefield. During his career, Jocko was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and numerous other personal and unit awards. Jocko is the author (along with Leif Babin) of Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win.

Scott Reitz is a thirty-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police department. He worked in the elite Metropolitan Division and finally as a member of ‘D’ platoon (SWAT). He remained there for ten years until he became the primary firearms and tactics instructor for the whole of Metro Division and all LAPD advanced in-service firearms/tactics training. In addition to his work with the LAPD, Reitz has worked with U.S. Department of Energy, US Marine Corps, U.S. Army Delta, Naval Special Warfare’s Team 6 and Air Task Force assets that support special operations. He is also one of a very few firearms instructors who is a Federal and Superior Court qualified expert in deadly force, training, safety, and police tactics. Reitz has testified in the defense of police, F.B.I., U.S. Secret Service, and B.A.T.F., and consulted in many high profile cases. Reitz is also the author of The Art of Modern Gunfighting: The Pistol (Volume 1). For more information please visit his website: www.internationaltactical.com Videos mentioned in this podcast:1. Police Taser Man on Drugs at McDonald’s2. Police Release Webcam Video of Walmart Brawl

Sam addresses Twitter controversy regarding Fareed Zakaria, Dalia Mogahed, and John Esposito.What progress have you made toward becoming vegetarian or vegan?If the Islamic reformation/modernization movement doesn't succeed, what do you think should be the alternative?Do you think your reliance on hypotheticals and thought experiments has become a hindrance to making headway and discourse on important issues, in particular the thread of Islamic terrorism? Generally speaking, how big a role should thought experiments and hypotheticals play in discussing key issues?In what way should the imagined repercussions affect what you decide to publicly share? If you believe something to be true, would it be moral to withhold it? In this respect Is there such a thing as a noble lie of omission? Are there ideas you've decided against sharing? What are they? Are their views of yours that you believe don't get enough attention?Would you be willing to be ostracized from the people you love for the sake of the greater good? Should ex-Muslims like us delegate the task of critiquing religion to such people as Ali Rizvi and Sarah Haider who are able to leave the religion with fewer repercussions? Or do you believe the threat of fundamental Islam is so great that people should risk ostracism, violence, and even death to fight against it? Is it even possible to fully flourish as a human being while living your whole life under a pretense?I'll simplify your arguments against the regressive left and summarize them as: the left has missed the point so badly that they're basically responsible for smart and otherwise sensitive people to lean toward the right. This argument has always troubled me, and I saw it epitomized in the recent presidential elections in Argentina. Isn't it intellectual and politically lazy to support right-wing ideas and policy just because the left has gotten it or most of it wrong? Don't you think that people in positions like yours should also be advocating for a better left?How fast do you read?Is there anything inherently wrong with polygamy between three or more consenting adults? If so what? And if not, why call it out as an example of evil instead of the religious imperative itself?Do you think there's a possibility given advances in technology that you could have your stance changed on free will?Is killing another human being always wrong even in circumstances such as self-defense. Is there an ethics for killing?I wonder why you don't use the example of child abuse by Catholic priests as being another case of religious doctrine–in this case for celibacy having harmful repercussions in real life.

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Sam Harris talks to physicist David Deutsch about the reach and power of human knowledge, the future of artificial intelligence, and the survival of civilization. David Deutsch is best known as the founding father of the quantum theory of computation, and for his work on Everettian (multiverse) quantum theory. He is a Visiting Professor of Physics at Oxford University, where he works on “anything fundamental.” At present, that mainly means his proposed constructor theory. He has written two books – The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity – aimed at the general reader. Website: www.daviddeutsch.org.uk   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.

Further reading:Migrant Crisis? Europe Hasn’t Seen Anything Yetby Douglas Murray

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Sam Harris speaks with MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark about the foundations of science, our current understanding of the universe, the risks of future breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, and other topics. Max Tegmark is a professor of physics who has published more than two hundred technical papers and been featured in dozens of science documentaries. His work with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.” He is the author of Our Mathematical Universe. For more information about his work, please visit his MIT website and the Future of Life Institute. 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.

Sam Harris responds to misrepresentations of his views (again).

Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on 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, one of the major journals in the field. Dr. Bloom 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 or editor of six books, including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.

Sam and Joseph discuss the practice of meditation and answer questions that came from listeners in response to their first conversation, The Path and the Goal. Joseph Goldstein has been leading meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, and the Forest Refuge. Since 1967, he has practiced different forms of Buddhist meditation under eminent teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet. His books include The Experience of Insight, A Heart Full of Peace, One Dharma, and Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening. For those interested in practicing mindfulness, Joseph and Dan Harris have developed a short meditation course as an app, 10% Happier: Meditation for Skeptics. You can begin the course for free, and if you choose to purchase the full course, you will receive a 20 percent discount by using the code: WAKINGUP (all caps required).

Sam Harris speaks with psychologist Paul Bloom about the limitations of empathy as a guide to moral reasoning, why empathy is a bad metric for measuring one’s character, cognitive biases, and other topics. 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 a 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 six books, including The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. 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.

Sam Harris speaks with the filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer about his remarkable documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

Sam Harris speaks with Megan Phelps-Roper, granddaughter of Fred Phelps of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church.

Sam Harris and Dan Carlin (host of the Hardcore History and Common Sense podcasts) discuss American interventionism, the war on terror, and related topics. Read the transcript.

Jerry A. Coyne is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He received a B.S. in Biology from the College of William and Mary and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology at Harvard University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at The University of California at Davis, he took his first academic position as assistant professor in the Department of Zoology at The University of Maryland. In 1996 he joined the faculty of The University of Chicago and has been there ever since. Coyne’s work has been largely concerned with the genetics of species differences, aimed at understanding the evolutionary processes that produce new species. He has written 115 scientific papers and more than 130 popular articles, book reviews, and columns, as well as a scholarly book about his research area—Speciation, co-authored with H. Allen Orr—and a trade book about the evidence for evolution—Why Evolution is True, which was a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. Coyne is a contributor The New York Times, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Nation, USA Today, and other popular periodicals.Many people are confused about science—about what it is, how it is practiced, and why it is the most powerful method for understanding ourselves and the universe that our species has ever devised. In Faith vs. Fact, Coyne has written a wonderful primer on what it means to think scientifically, showing that the honest doubts of science are better—and more noble—than the false certainties of religion. This is a profound and lovely book. It should be required reading at every college on earth.—Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, and Waking Up The distinguished geneticist Jerry Coyne trains his formidable intellectual firepower on religious faith, and it’s hard to see how any reasonable person can resist the conclusions of his superbly argued book. Though religion will live on in the minds of the unlettered, in educated circles faith is entering its death throes. Symptomatic of its terminal desperation are the ‘apophatic’ pretensions of ‘sophisticated theologians,’ for whose empty obscurantism Coyne reserves his most devastating sallies. Read this book and recommend it to two friends.—Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion The truth is not always halfway between two extremes: some propositions are flat wrong. In this timely and important book, Jerry Coyne expertly exposes the incoherence of the increasingly popular belief that you can have it both ways: that God (or something God-ish, God-like, or God-oid) sort-of exists;  that miracles kind-of happen; and that the truthiness of dogma is somewhat-a-little-bit-more-or-less-who’s-to-say-it-isn’t like the truths of science and reason.—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

Sam Harris reflects on his failure to have a productive conversation with Noam Chomsky. Audio Transcipt: I wanted to do another “Ask me Anything” podcast, but I know I’m going to get inundated with questions about my conversation with Noam Chomsky, so in order to inoculate us all against that—or, at least, to make those questions more informed by my view of what happened—I wanted to do a short podcast dealing with the larger problem, as I see it, of having conversations of this kind. More and more, I find myself attempting to have difficult conversations with people who hold very different points of view. And I consider our general failure to have these conversations well—so as to produce an actual convergence of opinion and a general increase in goodwill between the participants—to be the most consequential problem that exists. Apart from violence and other forms of coercion, all we have is conversation with which to influence one another. The fact that it is so difficult for people to have civil and productive conversations about things like U.S. foreign policy, or racial inequality, or religious tolerance and free speech, is profoundly disorienting. And it’s also dangerous. If we fail to do this, we will fail to do everything else of value. Conversation is our only tool for collaborating in a truly open-ended way. So I’ve been experimenting by reaching out to people to have difficult conversations. I recently did this with the Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz, which resulted in a short book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, that will be published in the fall. As you’ll read in that book, this was not at all guaranteed to work—Maajid and I had a very inauspicious first meeting—but when I later saw the work he was doing, I reached out to him, and the resulting conversation is one in which we made genuine progress. He opened my mind on several important points and, most important, it was a genuine pleasure to show readers that conversation, even on genuinely polarizing topics, can occasionally serve its intended purpose, which is to change minds—even one’s own. Here, I would draw a distinction between a conversation and a debate. They’re superficially similar when the parties disagree, but to have one’s mind changed in a debate is to lose the debate and, very likely, to lose face before one’s audience. This is an incredibly counterproductive way to frame any inquiry into what is true. Occasionally, I engage in public debates, but I’ve never approached them like a high school exercise where one is committed to not changing one’s view. I don’t want to be wrong for a moment longer than I need to be, and if my opponent is right about something, and I can see that, then I will be very quick to admit it. So my dialogue with Maajid was not really a debate, even though at times we were pushing rather hard against one another. It was, rather, a conversation. On the heels of that success, I decided to attempt a similar project with Noam Chomsky, and the results of my failure are on my blog for all to see. Of course, many people understood exactly what I was trying to do and why I published the exchange, and they apparently appreciated my efforts. I tried to have a civil conversation on an important topic with a very influential thinker, and I failed. I published the result because I thought the failure was instructive—the whole purpose was to extract something of value from what seemed like a truly pointless exercise. But that’s not the lesson many readers took away from it. Many of you seem to think that the conversation failed because I arrogantly challenged Chomsky to a debate—probably because I was trying to steal some measure of his fame—and that I immediately found myself out of my depth. And when he devastated me with the evidence of my own intellectual misconduct, and my ignorance of history, and my blind faith in the goodness of the U.S. government, I complained about his being “mean” to me, and I ran away. Well, I must say, I find this view of the situation genuinely flabbergasting. Many of you seem to forget that I published the exchange—you must think I’m a total masochist, or just delusional. Now, I know that some of you think the latter. I heard from one person, I think it was on Twitter, who said, “Sam Harris reminds me of a little kid who thinks he’s playing a video game, and thinks he’s winning, but his controller isn’t actually plugged in.” I happen to love that metaphor. I’m just not so happy to have it applied to me. Anyone who thinks I’ve lost a debate here just doesn’t understand what I was trying to do or why, upon seeing that my attempt at dialogue was a total failure, I bailed out. I really was trying to have a productive conversation with Chomsky, and I encountered little more than contempt, false accusations, and highly moralizing language—accusing me of apologizing for atrocities—and weird evasions, and silly tricks. It was a horror show. I concede that I made a few missteps: I should have dealt with Chomsky’s charges that I misrepresented him immediately and very directly. They are, in fact, tissue-thin. I did not misrepresent his views at all. I simply said that he had not thought about certain questions when I should have said he had thought about them badly. Those of you who have written to tell me that what I did to Chomsky is analogous to what has been done to me by people who actually lie about my views are just not interacting honestly with what happened here: I did not misrepresent Chomsky’s position on anything. And, insults aside, he was doing everything in his power to derail the conversation. The amazing thing is that highly moralizing accusations work for people who think they’re watching a debate. They convince most of the audience that where there’s smoke there must be fire. For instance, when Ben Affleck called me and Bill Maher “racist,” that was all he had to do to convince 50% of the audience. I’m sorry to say that it was the same with Chomsky. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard from who think that he showed how ludicrous and unethical my concern about intentions was, for instance—he’s dealing in the “real world,” but all my talk about intentions was just a bizarre and useless bit of philosophizing. But think about that for a second: our legal system depends upon weighing intentions in precisely the way I describe. How else do we differentiate between premeditated murders, crimes of passion, manslaughter, criminal negligence, and terrible accidents for which no one is to blame? Imagine your neighbor’s house burns down and yours with it—what the hell happened? What happened has a lot to do with your neighbor’s intentions. If he had a cooking fire that got out of control, that’s one thing. If he tried to burn down his own house to collect the insurance payment, that’s another. If he tried to burn down the whole neighborhood, because he just hates everyone, that’s another. Intentions matter because they contain all of the information about what your neighbor is likely to do next. There’s a spectrum of culpability here and intention is its very substance. Chomsky seems to think that he has made a great moral discovery in this area and that not intending a harm can sometimes be morally worse than intending one. Now I’m pretty sure that I disagree, but I would have loved to discuss it. I wasn’t debating him about anything, I was trying to figure out what the man actually believes. It’s still not clear to me, because he appeared to be contradicting himself in our exchange. But in response to my questions and the thought experiments I was marshaling in an attempt to get to first principles, all I got back were insults. But worse, many people seem to think that these insults were a sign of the man’s moral seriousness. Many seem to think that belligerence and an unwillingness to have a civil dialogue is a virtue in any encounter like this, and that simply vilifying one’s opponent as a moral monster, by merely declaring him to be one, is a clever thing to do. Now, despite what every Chomsky fan seems to think, there was nowhere in that exchange where I signaled my unwillingness to acknowledge or to discuss specific crimes for which for the U.S. government might be responsible. The United States, and the West generally, has a history of colonialism, slavery, collusion with dictators, and of imposing its will on people all over the world. I have never denied this. But I’m now hearing from people who say things like, “well of course ISIS and al-Qaeda are terrible, but we’re just as bad, worse even, because we created them—literally. And through our selfishness and ineptitude, we created millions of other victims who sympathize with them for obvious reasons. We are, in every morally relevant sense, getting exactly what we deserve.” This kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the Left. I don’t think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting, much less wise. And many people, most even, who are this morally confused consider Chomsky their patriarch—and I suspect that’s not an accident. But I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off of this island of masochism so that these sorts of people, who I’ve been hearing from for years, could cross over to something more reasonable. And it didn’t work out. The conversation, as I said, was a total failure. But I thought it was an instructive one. So, I don’t know if that answers all of the questions I’m going to get about the Chomsky affair, but when I put out a call for an AMA later this week, forgive me for moving on to other topics, because I don’t think there’s much more to say on this one. But I’m going to keep trying to have conversations like this, because conversation is our only hope.

How does the struggle of atheists for acceptance compare with that of women, blacks, gays, etc? How long until true equality arrives?What is your view on laws that prevent people from not hiring on the basis of religion?Can you say something about artificial intelligence and your concerns about it?What do you think of Cenk Uygur's attack on you recently?How did you become such a good public speaker?Why do we have to meditate sitting up?Does your view that there's no free will give you sympathy for your enemies?Can the form of human consciousness be distinguished from its contents or are the two identical?What's your opinion of the rise of the new nationalist right in Europe and the issue of Islam there?What charity organization do you think is doing the best work?How you with complete certainty know there is no God. What proof do you have?Some of your critics like the paint you as a philosophically-illiterate scientist. Please speak about your relationship to philosophy.If you were going to criticize Sam Harris, what do you think the most valid intellectual criticism is?I'm often attacked for taking quotes out of scripture out of context and therefore misconstruing them or misrepresenting them and yet I complain incessantly about the people who do this to me. How is that fair?I'm worried you're spending too much time on defense. Have you ever considered completely ignoring misrepresentations?Who argues against your position on religion honestly?How often should we be aware of the illusion of free will? Should it serve a more reflective function rather than happen in real time?Sam addresses letter from listener about how reading Free Will helped him cope with his mother's suicide.

Sam Harris discusses the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult and argues that we all have something important to learn from them about the power of belief. The following videos are discussed: Audio Transcript: Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I’m going to talk about cults, mostly. I’ve been in a cultish frame of mind in the last week—and getting over bronchitis, so my apologies for my voice being even raspier than it usually is. But I’ve been paying attention to cults for some reason, and I’ve focused on two that have been around for a while, Heaven’s Gate and Scientology. I recently saw the film Going Clear based on Lawrence Wright’s book by that name. The book is well worth-reading, and the film is really a devastating takedown of Scientology. I can’t imagine it won’t do the organization lasting harm if enough people see it. It exposes how goofy L. Ron Hubbard was and how sinister his organization soon became under him and his successors. So, do see that film. It’s playing on HBO and had a theatrical release, as well. But I’ve mostly been thinking about the Heaven’s Gate cult which, as you might recall, about 18 years ago came to the world’s attention because 39 members—including the chief member, a man named Marshall Applewhite who was known as “Doe” to his devotees—all took their lives in a mansion near San Diego. They all donned identical pairs of Nikes and drank a cocktail of phenobarbital and vodka, I believe, and then got in their bunk beds and covered themselves with purple shrouds and departed, they imagined, for a spaceship that was following in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp. So this was a rather horrifying and peculiar news item. I think it remains the largest mass-suicide in US history, although I recall that my reaction at the time was a little less than reverential. I remember sitting on my couch watching this first footage that came out of this house, with everyone on their bunk beds with their Nikes, and hearing the voiceover announcer say, “And in their freezer, they had nothing but quart after quart of Starbuck’s Java Chip ice cream.” I remember sitting on my couch alone and saying, out loud, to myself, “Wait a minute. Starbucks makes ice cream?” And then I leapt to my feet and drove straight to the supermarket and bought some Java Chip ice cream. So I guess we all draw from these tragedies the lessons we need at the time. Obviously I’ve become more sympathetic to the plight of these people in the intervening years, and more interested in the phenomenon of cults, and have drawn other lessons from this one. In any case, the most fascinating thing about Heaven’s Gate is that the members of this “class,” as they called it, left final video testimonies as to why they were doing what they were doing, and how satisfied they were to be doing it. And this is, of course, analogous to the video testimonies one often finds from Jihadist suicide bombers. But these people were very aware of how inscrutable their behavior was going to seem to their loved ones, and to the rest of the society in which they were living, and they really made their best effort to defend their actions if not explain them, and to simply bear witness—and demand that the world bear witness—to the psychological fact that they were absolutely unconflicted in doing what they were doing. They felt immense gratitude for the experience of living for decades with their fellow cult members with whom they’d formed an obvious bond, and for the guidance of Doe and Ti—the woman who had been his partner and died a decade earlier. These were people who, for the most part, were clearly happy and approaching their deaths with genuine enthusiasm. They were gleeful about the prospect of departing this world and arriving elsewhere in the galaxy. So these videos are an amazing document, and I was tempted to put some audio in this podcast, but there really is no substitute for seeing the video themselves, so I will embed those on my blog. There’s about 2 hours of video—there’s additional hours of Doe himself giving his final testimony, and that’s also fascinating to watch. But the videos of the cult members are really profoundly strange and unnerving when you see just how sanguine they are about their whole project—which is, on its face, the most profligate misuse of human life imaginable. These are people who lived in total isolation, for decades, under the sway of obviously crazy ideas, depriving themselves of most of life’s experience. These are people who’d abandoned children. They’d abandoned the rest of their families, and abandoned every other human project that we might deem worthy of a person’s attention and energy, and then killed themselves in the most carefree state of mind. And it was entirely the result of what they believed about the nature of the soul, about the kingdom of heaven, about the hideous condition of this world, and about the coming apocalypse that Doe assured them was imminent and that this represented the last chance to migrate to the kingdom of heaven. If they didn’t seize it now, everything would be lost. So these videos really are quite unique and, above all, they offer an insight into just what it is like to be totally convinced of paradise. The most shocking thing about this—well there are a few things. One is the undeniable fact that most of these people were clearly happy. You struggle to detect in their faces and in their speech some clue to their deeper psychopathology. And in many cases, I think you will come up entirely empty. Now, these people bear all the signs of having spent, as most of them had, twenty plus years living in total isolation from the world. Most of them had been part of this cult since the mid-Seventies—and this was in 1997 that they killed themselves. They all wore identical terrible haircuts and all had androgynous clothing that they buttoned up to the neck. I believe they shared all of their clothing in common, including underwear—so they had a dogma of non-attachment that was operating here that led to a kind of self-effacement at the level of their presentation. They all wore equally terrible eyeglasses, those who needed them—like they all wandered into a Lenscrafters and asked for the worst pair of glasses that could possibly be pulled out of the box. So there’s something about these people, they are misfits of a sort, and it’s tempting to imagine that they were socially marginalized to a degree that somehow explains how they were recruited into this circumstance and, therefore, how they met their end. But that’s not to say that these aren’t happy, intelligent, relatively high-functioning people who could have succeeded in other contexts in life. And I think that’s obviously true of some of them. One thing that’s clear is that many of these people were parents who entirely abandoned their children to join Doe and Ti and submit their lives to this experiment which, when you look at the details, is rather shocking to consider. It’s shocking especially because when you listen to the teachings of Doe (you can also watch hours of video where he describes all that he knows about the workings of the universe), some of this video, at least an hour of it, is his final testament given with the full knowledge that they’re going to commit suicide in the coming days. And in watching Do’s performance here, I think you’ll also look in vain for an obvious reason why people would give their lives over to this man. A few things are conspicuous. One is the total absence of compelling intellectual content. This is not a brilliant person. He is not bowling you over with his ability to connect ideas or to turn phrases. The only clue to his powers of mesmerism is his quality of eye contact, which, as I discuss at one point in my book Waking Up, is a feature you find in gurus in general and in people who are making heroic efforts to persuade. And in Doe, this is conspicuous. The man rarely blinks. He’s looking at a camera lens for this video, but one can well imagine that this is the style of eye contact he used when talking to people directly. Maybe I’ll offer a brief digression on this topic, there’s actually a section in my book Waking Up where I talk about eye contact and I’ll just read it to you: A person’s eyes convey a powerful illusion of inner life. The illusion is true, but it is an illusion all the same. When we look into the eyes of another human being, we seem to see the light of consciousness radiating from the eyes themselves—there is a glint of joy or judgment, perhaps. But every inflection of mood or personality—even the most basic indication that the person is alive—comes not from the eyes but from the surrounding muscles of the face. If a person’s eyes look clouded by madness or fatigue, the muscles orbicularis oculi are to blame. And if a person appears to radiate the wisdom of the ages, the effect comes not from the eyes but from what he or she is doing with them. Nevertheless, the illusion is a powerful one, and there is no question that the subjective experience of inner radiance can be communicated with the gaze. It is not an accident, therefore, that gurus often show an unusual commitment to maintaining eye contact. In the best case, this behavior emerges from a genuine comfort in the presence of other people and deep interest in their well-being. Given such a frame of mind, there may simply be no reason to look away. But maintaining eye contact can also become a way of “acting spiritual” and, therefore, an intrusive affectation. There are also people who maintain rigid eye lock not from an attitude of openness and interest or from any attempt to appear open and interested but as an aggressive and narcissistic show of dominance. Psychopaths tend to make exceptionally good eye contact. Whatever the motive behind it, there can be tremendous power in an unwavering gaze. Most readers will know what I’m talking about, but if you want to witness a glorious example of the assertive grandiosity that a person’s eyes can convey, watch a few interviews with Osho. I never met Osho, but I have met many people like him. And the way he plays the game of eye contact is simply hilarious. I confess that there was a period in my life, after I first plunged into matters spiritual, when I became a nuisance in this respect. Wherever I went, no matter how superficial the exchange, I gazed into the eyes of everyone I met as though they were my long-lost lover. No doubt, many people found this more than a bit creepy. Others considered it a stark provocation. But it also precipitated exchanges with complete strangers that were fascinating. With some regularity people of both sexes seemed to become bewitched by me on the basis of a single conversation. Had I been peddling some consoling philosophy and been eager to gather students, I suspect that I could have made a proper mess of things. I definitely glimpsed the path that many spiritual imposters have taken throughout history. Interestingly, when one functions in this mode, one quickly recognizes all the other people who are playing the same game. I had many encounters wherein I would meet the eyes of a person across the room, and suddenly we were playing War of the Warlocks: two strangers holding each other’s gaze well past the point that our primate genes or cultural conditioning would ordinarily countenance. Play this game long enough and you begin to have some very strange encounters. I don’t remember consciously deciding to stop behaving this way, but stop I did. In any case, I think Doe was probably a master of the unblinking gaze, and this may account for why he had the effect he had on people because, having read some of his writing, if you can call it that, and listened to him speak about his doctrine, there’s nothing in the text of what he says that should have compelled people to follow him, much less follow him into their graves. But he persuaded people to follow him with surprising suddenness. There’s an account of one of his earlier meetings, I think in the early Seventies, where something like twenty people from a single lecture dropped their lives and disappeared from Portland or Seattle or wherever this talk happened—leaving their kids, and their parents, and their friends just aghast—and followed this man into the wilderness. So something was going on. I don’t know if it was the cologne he was wearing or the way he was boring holes into people’s heads with his eyes, but the man had something that people found profoundly attractive. So I think I should give a brief account of what Doe was teaching people. He claimed to be an extraterrestrial who inhabited his body, the body of Marshall Applewhite, at some point in adulthood. And he also claimed to be the same reincarnate personality who had been Jesus and who had gathered apostles, many of whom were now in the Heaven’s Gate class. So he had this project previously of trying to bring people to the Kingdom of Heaven, to the level above human, as the person of Jesus, but had failed because he had had the bad luck of getting crucified. And now he was back, delivering the wisdom of the ages. But now he could deliver it with a modern gloss. Now he could take into account the immensity of the cosmos and the existence of technology, like spacecraft, and now the Kingdom of Heaven was a place elsewhere in the physical universe that could be reached by dying at this most opportune time. Originally he had suggested that spaceships would actually land on earth and physically take people to this intergalactic space station where the level above human was being lived out by aliens, but since the spaceships didn’t land—and they had waited for years and years for spaceships to land—but since they didn’t, now the way to get to the space ship, which was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp, was to die and to leave the physical body. And all of these years of living in isolation was a preparation for the soul to take its place in this kingdom above human. These were the teachings from the beginning. I don’t think suicide was ever spoken of in the beginning because, again, they expected aliens to land and spirit them away on flying saucers. But death was often talked about as a possible way to get to the Kingdom of Heaven. In fact, cult members talked about hoping to provoke their own assassinations. In how they represented the teachings in front of fundamentalist Christians, they hoped that Christians would find their views so offensive that they would kill them and then engineer their escape to the next level. And Doe and Ti talked often—they believed that they were the two witnesses from the book of Revelation, and they thought that they would be martyred and brought to the Kingdom of Heaven that way. So death was always kind of working in the background and the idea was simply to live life in such a way as to divorce oneself from all human (“mammalian,” as he put it) appetites and prepare the soul to take a non-human form, on a spaceship. What I think is so interesting about this phenomenon and what can be seen so clearly by looking at these tapes is the role that belief played in driving this behavior. This behavior is totally uninterpretable but for the beliefs that these people espouse—and, given these beliefs, it seems to make rather clear sense. Looking at these tapes is a corrective to the crazy denials we hear from so many journalists and pseudo-journalists and social scientists and politicians about the link between belief and action in a religious context. So many people talk about religious beliefs as though they do not lead to behavior, that they’re somehow different from other sorts of beliefs—but of course we must know this isn’t true. And yet so many people pretend to know otherwise. Well, you can’t pretend here. There’s nothing apart from belief—no other variable explains this behavior.  What these people did was as straightforward as going to the candy store, given what they believed. So these exit interviews are a kind of microscope for the relevant psychology here, and when you map this on to the phenomenon of jihadism—in particular the kind of suicide bombing we see throughout the Muslim world—then the centrality of belief becomes obvious. And all of the obscurantism coming from people like Scott Atran and Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan stands revealed for what it is, a denial of the obvious. One can view cults as a kind of lens through which to view the phenomenon of the true believer. Of course, every religion is a kind of cult which just has more subscribers. That’s how we differentiate cults from religions. If you have millions of subscribers, you are a religion. If you have thousands—or, in this case, 40—then you are a cult. Now, it’s true that being in a tiny minority, and having to set yourself in opposition to the rest of your culture and to the religion of your birth, will tend to select for the truest of the true believers—the most credulous and most committed people. So cult members have, almost by definition, something in common with what we call “religious extremists” in the context of a religion. The buy-in is greater for a cult. To drop everything for a religion focused on UFOs, as was the case for Heaven’s Gate, takes a certain kind of person. And when you look at these people, you see some of the aberration of all of that. These are like the most fanatical people at a Star Trek convention who also happen to believe in the rapture. The Venn Diagram of cognitive commitments here is Trekky and people who took the Left Behind novels seriously. But you also should also remember that you’re watching people who are about to die. These are people who are planning to commit suicide in the next few days and they’re telling you why and they’re telling you how this fits into their worldview. And it is fascinating to see and quite tragic when you think about how these people used their lives—when you think of the children and the parents, and the other family members they abandoned—and when you finally grok the fact that these weren’t all mentally ill people. They were merely in the grip of specific ideas. What’s interesting about the behavior of this group of people, in fact, is that up until they killed themselves what they were doing was not that far from things that I’ve done (at least for months at a time, never for years). During my twenties, I spent about two years on silent meditation retreats in increments of up to three months and these were without question some of the most productive and valuable months of my life. And the best meditation teachers that I ever studied with were people who had truly spent decades in isolation, in some cases twenty years in a cave. So it’s not isolation itself that is synonymous with the wastage of one’s life. What one believes one is doing in isolation matters a lot. If you go into isolation for a year, and you hole yourself up in an apartment in some city with a dozen Barbie dolls and think that by the power of your concentration on these objects you’re going to turn them into real little girls—okay, you’re just a crazy pervert. Isolation can obviously become a circumstance of unethical delusion. In the case of Heaven’s Gate, it was clearly a circumstance of delusion. All of their discipline was anchored to the project of attenuating their humanity so fully that they would be welcome aboard a spaceship. And part of this project was consummated by the men by going to Tijuana and having themselves castrated. Eight of the men in this group, including Doe, the leader, had themselves castrated so that they could best resist the siren song of their own endocrine system and forget about sexuality altogether. And because of what they believed about the soul and where they were going after the death of their bodies, they felt truly lucky to be who they were. They were leaving a sinking ship and felt compassion for all of the confused people like ourselves who didn’t have the good sense to get off it. But the horror, of course, is that they were wrong. Their beliefs were almost certainly false in every respect, and this is the horror of religion generally. This is the horror of Islamism and jihadism. And, again, what is central to the phenomenon—the thing that makes it horrible and yet so captivating to true believers—is this promise of paradise. It’s the idea that most of what is good in any individual’s existence is the part that comes after death. That is really the claim that, just, leeches all of the value out of this world. For instance, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, wrote on the side of the boat where he was finally captured, “Know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that?” That’s what we’re dealing with, this expectation of paradise. I recently read an interview with a former ISIS fighter who spoke about the same thing. He talked about being motivated by his concern for the afterlife, which he called “the surest part of life.” The surest part of life. Paradise is the thing that you can most count on. It is the repository of most value. But, of course, it’s not the surest part of life at all. It’s at best an hypothesis, founded on nothing. But this is exactly the sentiment you get from the Heaven’s Gate members. They’re talking about how happy they will be when they finally get to the level above human, the Kingdom of Heaven. Look at what is going on in the Middle East—look at the behavior of a group like ISIS, look at the Western recruits who, by the thousands, are coming to fight alongside these guys, and recognize that, whatever the diversity of their backgrounds, whatever the variables we are told account for this behavior, simply realize that these people also believe what they say they believe, and that belief, in their case too, is the primary driver of behavior. These people, who in the case of ISIS are murdering apostates and seeking to murder vast numbers of their enemies, are just as eager to die, just as unconflicted about the apparent misuse of their lives in this world, just as expectant of eternity as the class members of Heaven’s Gate were. And when you have that epiphany, you’ll be in a position to see how confused most people are by current events. So much of what passes for an analysis of Islamism and jihadism, at this moment, skates across this psychological fact, or denies it outright, looking for other reasons for the phenomenon. And whatever contributions these other reasons might make—whatever contributions U.S. foreign policy, or the legacy of colonialism, or the lack of integration of Muslims in Western Europe might play—the basic fact, the fact at the core of the phenomenon, held and held deeply, is the belief in paradise. The belief that death is an illusion and that this world, therefore, can be forsaken—in fact, its purpose is to be forsaken.  Unless one has some countervailing philosophy that demands a truly ethical engagement with this world, a belief in paradise makes a person capable of anything. Nothing can go wrong. You can blow up crowds of children, and you’re doing them a favor. That’s what makes this type of religious certainty so terrifying. But the impulse to deny its power—to deny that it is even operating—is more terrifying still. In lying about the motivations of these people, we are sleepwalking towards a precipice. Perhaps it’s time we all woke up.

Sam Harris responds to the charge that “militant” atheism is responsible for the murder of three Muslim students in North Carolina. Note 2/18/15: Here was Reza Aslan’s response to this podcast: Starting to get creeped out by how obsessed Sam Harris is with me & @ggreenwald -as tho we’ve given him a 2nd thought http://t.co/RSbvjck96Q — Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) February 18, 2015   @neiltwit @ggreenwald @SamHarrisOrg oh no was I mean to your Sam? did I hurt your feelings? — Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) February 18, 2015   Very interesting. Aslan writes articles about me, hires people to write even longer ones (Nathan Lean is the editor-in-chief of Aslan Media), continually mentions me and distorts my views in his press appearances, and tweets about me with abandon—and he believes that I’m obsessed with him. It is safe to say that I would never mention Aslan again if he stopped spreading lies about me.—SH Audio Transcript: As many of you know, there was recently a triple-murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, committed by a person named Craig Stephen Hicks. He is still alive—this was not a suicide-murder—so, undoubtedly, we’ll one day hear what his conscious motives were. He killed three young people, apparently over a parking space. That was the subject of their dispute. But he also happens to be a person who identifies as an atheist on his Facebook page, and he has expressed admiration for people like Richard Dawkins. He might have said something about me, I’m actually not sure—but he was identified as an atheist and appear to be critical of all religion, according to his Facebook page. And because his victims were Muslim, this is now being widely described as a “hate crime” and as a symptom of a problem we have in the Atheist community—a problem of “militancy” and of anti-Muslim “bigotry.” And many people are saying that I am somehow responsible for this—both for the background problem and for the murders themselves, which is quite an amazing thing to be accused of. It seems to me that there’s a fair amount of moral confusion here—and also just factual confusion about the reality of violence in the U.S. and elsewhere. But the first thing to say is that I feel nothing but horror over this crime. These people were killed in the very prime of their lives—at the beginning of their adult lives—and they were, by all accounts, marvelous people. I can only imagine—in fact, I can’t imagine—the grief of their parents and loved ones. So there’s absolutely nothing in my work—or in my mind—that is supportive of a crime like this. And I would have hoped that could go without saying—but I think in this context, it probably can’t. Nevertheless, the deluge of claims of equivalence between this crime and the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, or the daily savagery of a group like ISIS, has been astonishing to witness. You can sense that people have just been waiting for a crime like this that could conceivably be pinned on atheism. Of course, the analogy between “militant” atheism and militant Islam is a terrible one—it is an anti-analogy, being false in every respect. Atheists simply are not out there harming people on the basis of their atheism. There may be atheists who do terrible things, but there is no atheist doctrine or scripture, and insofar as any of us have written books or created arguments that have persuaded people, these books and arguments—insofar as they’re atheistic—only relate to the bad evidence put forward in defense of a belief in God. There’s no argument in atheism that suggests that you should hate, or victimize, or stigmatize whole groups of people, as there often is in revealed religion. And yet people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan, the usual suspects—the bevy of apologists for theocracy in the Muslim world—are using this very real tragedy in Chapel Hill to try to stoke a kind of mob mentality around an imagined atheist campaign of bigotry against Muslims. It’s an incredibly cynical, tendentious, and ultimately dangerous thing to do. Of course, people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan are alleging that there’s some sort of double-standard here: atheists are quick to detect a religious motivation in the misbehavior of Muslims worldwide, but when it comes to their own, they discount the role played by atheism. But this is just a total misrepresentation of how an atheist like myself thinks about human violence. It is simply obvious that some instances of Muslim violence have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam—and I would never dream of assigning blame to the religion of Islam for that behavior. And, to my knowledge, I never have. Insofar as I’m confused as to the source of Muslim violence—well, then, I apologize in advance for that confusion. But the problem, of course, is that there are teachings within Islam that explicitly recommend, in fact, demand violence in certain circumstances—circumstances that we in the 21st century, if we’re decent human beings, will recognize as being morally insane. Blasphemy, apostasy, adultery, merely holding hands with a man who is not your blood relative or husband if you are a woman unlucky enough to be born in a country like Afghanistan—these are often killing offenses. And the link between the doctrine—as it is understood by Islamists and jihadists—and the behavior is explicit, logical, and absolutely unambiguous. And yet this doesn’t prevent people from denying it at every turn. There is no such link between atheism and violence of any kind, in any circumstance. There is nothing about rejecting the truth claims of religious dogmatists, or about doubting that the universe has a creator, that suggests that violence in certain circumstance is necessary or even acceptable. And all the people who are comparing these murders to Charlie Hebdo or to those committed by ISIS, as insane as that sounds, are trivializing a form of violence that threatens to destabilize much of the world. And, ironically, it is violence whose principal victims are Muslim. I should also point out that the notion that there is some kind of epidemic of intolerance against Muslims in the United States is totally at odds with the facts. You need only check the FBI website and you’ll see that there is no such wave of religious bigotry directed against Muslims, or against anyone at all. Hate crime is a very rare offense—five people were murdered due to hate crime in 2013. And when you look at the hate crimes directed at people based on religion, the crimes against Jews based on anti-Semitism outnumber the crimes against Muslims five-to-one—and this is every year, even in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. So, if we’re going to be concerned about hate crimes in the U.S., we should worry about anti-Semitism before we worry about anti-Muslim hate crime—and yet anti-Semitism is a miniscule source of violence here. I wouldn’t necessarily say the same thing of France, but in the U.S. it is virtually a non-problem—especially when you compare it to the tens of thousands of ordinary murders and rapes and aggravated assaults that are not ideologically motivated. Many people are saying that these murders in Chapel Hill could not have possibly have been inspired by a dispute over something so trivial as a parking space. But this is the most common form of interpersonal violence—it never makes sense “on paper.” We’re talking about people who fail to regulate their emotions and who have, in the U.S., ready access to weapons that makes it incredibly easy to kill other people impulsively. Hate crime per se is simply not a major problem, and those who are trying to whip-up a frenzy of concern over the ambient level of bigotry and violence against Muslims in the U.S. are trying to engineer a kind of moral panic, designed to distract people from the real problem that Muslims face—and that we all face, frankly—which is this basic incompatibility between 7th century theocracy and our collective aspiration to build a truly pluralistic and global civil society. You can view all of this through the lens of free speech. All you need to consider is a phenomenon like Charlie Hebdo or The Satanic Verses. And, for some reason, people on the left have aligned themselves with theocrats and those who are truly intolerant of the very liberal values that apologists for Islam think they are enunciating. As I’ve said before, tolerance of intolerance is just cowardice. And it’s a form of cowardice that is increasingly consequential. So the analogy between so called “militant” atheism and militant Islam is nothing more than a moral hoax. The thing that very few people seem able to distinguish, and the distinction that Greenwald and Aslan obfuscate at every opportunity, is the difference between criticizing ideas and their results in the world, and hating people as people because they belong to a certain group, or because they have a certain skin color, or because they have come from a certain country. There is no connection between those two orientations—the latter, of course, is bigotry, and I condemn it as much as anyone could hope. But criticizing ideas and their consequences is absolutely essential, and that is the spirit in which I have criticized Islam (in its various flavors), and Christianity, and Judaism, and Buddhism—and all of these criticisms are different because these belief systems are different. That’s the distinction one has to recognize, and the clarity of that distinction leads to an experience in the world that our critics seem to not imagine possible. For instance, after I had that collision with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s show Real Time, where I uttered this now infamous line “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas”—as I’ve said before, I slightly misspoke there; I should have said it is a motherlode of bad ideas; it’s not the only motherlode of bad ideas, but it’s the one that concerns me most at this moment in history—afterwards, I was in a restaurant and the maitre d’ came over and introduced himself, saying that he recognized me from the show and that he was Muslim. Our resulting conversation was a purely positive encounter between two people who simply had very different views about Islam. It was no surprise to me, and there was no difficulty in acknowledging, that my blanket condemnation of the doctrine of Islam didn’t capture his experience as a devout and peaceful Muslim. I understand that, and he understood where I was coming from. He understood that I wasn’t talking about him when I criticized ideas like jihad, and martyrdom, and apostasy. We had this conversation in a spirit of absolute mutual respect and tolerance. There was not a scintilla of bigotry in my mind. This guy was the nicest guy in the world. I’ve been back to the restaurant since. I hugged him—there’s absolutely nothing hostile about my orientation toward individual people who happen to be Muslim. Of course, given the requisite beliefs on their part, hostility might be inevitable. If I find myself in the presence of a Muslim who thinks that infidels are the scum of the earth, we’re probably not going to be hugging each other. But the idea that my criticism of concepts leads me to hate people—there’s simply no point of contact between that and my actual psychology. And I’m sure this true of Richard Dawkins. And it was true of Hitch, And it’s true of Lawrence Krauss, and every other prominent atheist who unfortunately has to waste a fair amount of his or her life criticizing the terrible doctrines of religion. Not to put too fine a point on this, but the psychological reality of being a so-called “militant atheist” seems to be so difficult for our critics to imagine that I feel like I need to give another example: I’m writing this book with Maajid Nawaz—no doubt many of you are familiar with who he is. He’s a former Islamist and now a Muslim-reformer—brilliant, interesting, indispensable—who I now consider to be a friend. He wasn’t a friend before this collaboration because we didn’t know each other, but now I consider him a friend, and actually a personal hero. He is just an immensely courageous man. So he and I are collaborating on this book, the title of which is Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And, as you’ll see, much of it has the character of a debate, where I push somewhat hard on specific ideas within Islam, and he tells me how these ideas are susceptible to more benign interpretations so as to move Islam forward into the 21st century. But the crucial point is that I do not have to censor myself on the topic of Islam to have this conversation. Maajid knows exactly what I think about Islam and concepts like jihad, martyrdom, and apostasy. He knows exactly how I feel about the treatment of women throughout the Muslim world. There is no contradiction between having a civil, but nonetheless hard-hitting and searching conversation about a very important, even inflammatory, topic, and having a positive ethical orientation toward the person you are arguing with. I actually said something to this effect in a recent Washington Post interview, and Glenn Greenwald linked to this article saying, “Sam Harris wants us to know that he has a Muslim friend.” He was accusing me of using the “some of my best friends are black” defense. And he also labeled Maajid “a critic of Islam” by way of dismissing him. Of course, he’s the kind of Muslim Sam Harris would associate with. So, he dismissed Maajid as an Uncle Tom—and please remember that this coming from a gay Jew living safely outside of the Muslim world who would be hurled from a rooftop anyplace within it. Perhaps the most charitable interpretation I can give to this behavior is that people like Greenwald and Aslan think that my criticism of Islam—and the work of the “New Atheists” generally—is so easily misunderstood by mentally unbalanced, racist, or xenophobic people that it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to focus on Islam because bad people will misinterpret the significance of this focus and commit murders of the sort we just witnessed in North Carolina. Let me concede that it’s certainly possible that the murders in North Carolina were a hate crime. It could be that when Hicks starts talking, he’ll tell us how much he hated Muslims and he just wanted to kill a few. And he might even say that he read The God Delusion and The End of Faith and God is not Great and took from these books some kind of rationale to victimize Muslims at random. I think it is incredibly unlikely that this is the case. I will be flabbergasted if Hicks says that his atheism drove him to commit these murders. And yet the next jihadist will almost certainly say that his religion mandated his behavior. So perhaps people like Greenwald and Aslan think that criticizing Islam is dangerous because it can be misunderstood by bad people. Well, by that standard, we couldn’t criticize anything. As Ali Rizvi pointed out, we shouldn’t criticize U.S. foreign policy because some number of people overseas could become so agitated by reading Noam Chomsky or Glenn Greenwald that they might then kill U.S. tourists at random. Is that possible? Sure, it’s possible. But we have to be able to criticize U.S. foreign policy—and some of what people like Chomsky and Greenwald say about U.S. foreign policy is correct. Should they be held responsible if some deranged person takes their writing and uses it as a basis for intolerance or even murder? Of course not. And the same can be said for any criticism of the doctrine of Islam. I want to make one thing very clear, however: Publishing the opinion that I have blood on my hands and then backing this claim up with conscious misrepresentations of my views about Islam is a dangerous thing to do. It’s dangerous for me. It’s not dangerous for Greenwald and Aslan, and they know it. But it increases the risk to me and my family from religious lunatics in the Muslim community. Both Aslan and Greenwald know that some number of people among their readers are proper lunatics—goons and madmen who are organized entirely around the sanctity of Islam and its importance to the future of humanity—and if you tell them, as Aslan and Greenwald repeatedly have, either in their own words or by circulating the lies of others, that I want to “nuke the Muslim world,” or that I want to “round the Muslims up for torture,” or that I am a “genocidal fascist maniac,” or that I want to profile dark-skinned people at airports, or that I want to kill people for “thought crimes,” or that I have “blood on my hands” for the murder of three beautiful people in North Carolina—this is dangerous. I’ve asked them to stop it, and I’m asking them to stop it again now. I’m about to release a book with Maajid Nawaz—and Maajid has serious security concerns. He is my co-author. Telling millions of people that I have incited hatred against Muslims that led to the deaths of these poor people in North Carolina is a totally unethical thing to do. Greenwald and Aslan are mendacious bullies who are making it unsafe to criticize bad ideas that must be criticized. There is no view that I have ever published that I am hiding from. I’ve written about torture and profiling, but none of my ideas reduce to anything that could be the basis for hatred against whole groups of people. And it’s very difficult—it just may be impossible—to counter these lies once they are in circulation. As I was recording this podcast, in the last few hours, there was an incident in Denmark where a meeting about these issues—about free speech and blasphemy and the drawing of cartoons—was attacked by a terrorist. One person died and several were injured, and then this terrorist went on to kill someone in a synagogue. You can hear the audio from this attack on the BBC website. In fact, I’ll play it for you. This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a café and attempt to have a conversation on these issues in an open society: [AUDIO…] You have to ask yourself, what kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in? This is the world you are living in now. As someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so. And apart from jihadists, themselves, there is no one I know of who is making this job less safe that people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan. And not just for me, obviously. I’m also talking about those people in Copenhagen, I’m taking about people in open societies everywhere who have to deal with this growing menace of jihadism. Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life—in fact, we have already lost it in many respects. We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So, if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech—real freedom of speech, not merely its political guarantee, but the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a religious mob—if you care about my work or the work of other secularists or atheists, if you care about the work of Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz, or apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, if you care about our ability to notice, and criticize, and correct for bad ideas, then you must condemn this behavior. You have to condemn the deliberate manufacture of lies designed to make it unsafe to have honest conversations. So please push back against this. Please lose your patience for shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty on the part of people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and all the other commentators who obfuscate the plain reality of religious extremism. Your response to this really matters. The things that you do on your own blogs, and on social media, and on comment threads really make a difference. Thanks for your help.

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Joseph Goldstein has been leading meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, and the Forest Refuge. Since 1967, he has practiced different forms of Buddhist meditation under eminent teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet. His books include The Experience of Insight, A Heart Full of Peace, One Dharma, and Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening. For more information about Joseph, please visit www.dharma.org. Joseph has been a close friend for more than 20 years. He was one of my first meditation teachers and remains one of the wisest people I have ever met. In this two-hour conversation, we discuss how he came to devote his life to the study of meditation. We also debate some of the finer points of the practice. Although parts of this discussion are accessible, much of it is quite esoteric. I suspect that only experienced meditators will find the second half interesting, or even intelligible. My latest book, Waking Up, provides some necessary context, but there is no substitute for time spent engaging these practices on retreat.—SH

I once participated in a twenty-three-day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world’s mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day. What was in essence a forced march through hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a ritual known as “the solo,” where we were finally permitted to rest—alone, on the outskirts of a gorgeous alpine lake—for three days of fasting and contemplation. I had just turned sixteen, and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother’s womb. It proved a sufficient provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the lake, the promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages of my journal not with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher, or mystic but with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and starlight, with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence, to be a source of perfect misery—for which I could see not so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any written at Shiloh or Gallipoli. So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our party, most of whom were a decade older than I, described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply didn’t know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could someone’s happiness increase when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me—only my life did. And I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to change. Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement—when your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But it’s the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it. Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that need to be solved. But what is the real significance of every item on such a list? Everything we want to accomplish—to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job—is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope. I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and fed—but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out. A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the winter of 1987, I took the drug 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA), commonly known as Ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind’s potential shifted profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at dance clubs and “raves” in the 1990s, at that time I didn’t know anyone of my generation who had tried it. One evening, a few months before my twentieth birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug. The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often consumed. We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked its way into our heads. Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear. In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have surprised me—he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound pedestrian on the page: I wanted him to be happy. That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own. A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety—and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend—about what, I don’t recall—and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person’s eyes. And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love—I love you because…—now made no sense at all. The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all. The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily communicated. My friend got the point at once: All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit. The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured. Love was—as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages—a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again? It would take me many years to put this experience into context. Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I now knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble. Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support. Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error.The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns.[1] Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives. Throughout this book, I discuss certain classically spiritual phenomena, concepts, and practices in the context of our modern understanding of the human mind—and I cannot do this while restricting myself to the terminology of ordinary experience. So I will use spiritual, mystical, contemplative, and transcendent without further apology. However, I will be precise in describing the experiences and methods that merit these terms. For many years, I have been a vocal critic of religion, and I won’t ride the same hobbyhorse here. I hope that I have been sufficiently energetic on this front that even my most skeptical readers will trust that my bullshit detector remains well calibrated as we advance over this new terrain. Perhaps the following assurance can suffice for the moment: Nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith. Although my focus is on human subjectivity—I am, after all, talking about the nature of experience itself—all my assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your own life. In fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that. Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes: Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind—parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky. In this vein, one finds Einstein’s amazement at the intelligibility of Nature’s laws described as though it were a kind of mystical insight. New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and other contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum mechanics and that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his identity with the One Mind that gave birth to the cosmos. In the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science. Few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of introspection—in fact, most doubt that such abilities even exist. Conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know nothing about science. But there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom, and it is more direct than most people suppose. Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world. There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain. This field of research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of self-awareness and related mental phenomena. Given recent advances in neuroimaging technology, we no longer face a practical impediment to investigating spiritual insights in the context of science. Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work. That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call “I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book. Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available. The landscape of human experience includes deeply transformative insights about the nature of one’s own consciousness, and yet it is obvious that these psychological states must be understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and related fields. I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines—such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is. This book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives: the feeling of self we call “I.” I have not set out to describe all the traditional approaches to spirituality and to weigh their strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond there, and I have devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating it, but getting it in hand requires that we remain true to the deepest principles of scientific skepticism and make no obeisance to tradition. Where I do discuss specific teachings, such as those of Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, it isn’t my purpose to provide anything like a comprehensive account. Readers who are loyal to any one spiritual tradition or who specialize in the academic study of religion, may view my approach as the quintessence of arrogance. I consider it, rather, a symptom of impatience. There is barely time enough in a book—or in a life—to get to the point. Just as a modern treatise on weaponry would omit the casting of spells and would very likely ignore the slingshot and the boomerang, I will focus on what I consider the most promising lines of spiritual inquiry. My hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see the nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves.   THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words, “God’s earth is vast,” name this region from which the saints have come. Jalal-ud-Din Rumi I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact that most atheists will view a statement like Rumi’s above as a symptom of the man’s derangement grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our least rational opponents. The human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover. And there is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to the grave. Perhaps I should speak only for myself here: It seems to me that I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. My experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists. It is possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time. Most cultures have produced men and women who have found that certain deliberate uses of attention—meditation, yoga, prayer—can transform their perception of the world. Their efforts generally begin with the realization that even in the best of circumstances, happiness is elusive. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside. And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment. Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having one’s favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy before anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death? We are all, in some sense, living our answer to this question—and most of us are living as though the answer were “no.” No, nothing is more profound than repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding one’s pains; nothing is more profound than seeking satisfaction—sensory, emotional, and intellectual—moment after moment. Just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road. Certain people, however, come to suspect that human existence might encompass more than this. Many of them are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated figure. And such people often begin to practice various disciplines of attention as a means of examining their experience closely enough to see whether a deeper source of well-being exists. They may even sequester themselves in caves or monasteries for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would a person do this? No doubt there are many motives for retreating from the world, and some of them are psychologically unhealthy. In its wisest form, however, the exercise amounts to a very simple experiment. Here is its logic: If there exists a source of psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying one’s desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness should be available to a person who has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced her career and material possessions, and gone off to a cave or some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations. One clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment inside a maximum-security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a room. And yet contemplatives in many traditions claim to experience extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while living in isolation for vast stretches of time. How should we interpret this? Either the contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having liberating insights under the name of “spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia. Unlike many atheists, I have spent much of my life seeking experiences of the kind that gave rise to the world’s religions. Despite the painful results of my first few days alone in the mountains of Colorado, I later studied with a wide range of monks, lamas, yogis, and other contemplatives, some of whom had lived for decades in seclusion doing nothing but meditating. In the process, I spent two years on silent retreat myself (in increments of one week to three months), practicing various techniques of meditation for twelve to eighteen hours a day. I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else—not speaking, reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness—one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice. I believe that such states of mind have a lot to say about the nature of consciousness and the possibilities of human well-being. Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves; there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional illusion of the self. Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between self-transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist. I have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd. But there are also forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically ethical. As I indicated earlier, for some states of consciousness, a phrase like “boundless love” does not seem overblown. It is decidedly inconvenient for the forces of reason and secularism that if someone wakes up tomorrow feeling boundless love for all sentient beings, the only people likely to acknowledge the legitimacy of his experience will be representatives of one or another Iron Age religion or New Age cult. Most of us are far wiser than we may appear to be. We know how to keep our relationships in order, to use our time well, to improve our health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and to solve many other riddles of existence. But following even the straight and open path to happiness is hard. If your best friend were to ask how she could live a better life, you would probably find many useful things to say, and yet you might not live that way yourself. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice. However, there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history. The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath—and our needs and desires seem to multiply by the hour. To spend any time in the presence of a young child is to witness a mind ceaselessly buffeted by joy and sorrow. As we grow older, our laughter and tears become less gratuitous, perhaps, but the same process of change continues: One roiling complex of thought and emotion is followed by the next, like waves in the ocean. Seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which we all are devoted, whether or not we choose to think in these terms. This is not to say that we want mere pleasure or the easiest possible life. Many things require extraordinary effort to accomplish, and some of us learn to enjoy the struggle. Any athlete knows that certain kinds of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it. And we always face tensions and trade-offs. In some moments we crave excitement and in others rest. We might love the taste of wine and chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. Whatever the context, our minds are perpetually moving—generally toward pleasure (or its imagined source) and away from pain. I am not the first person to have noticed this. Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong our health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness, aging, and death. All forms of media cater to our thirst for information and entertainment. Political and economic institutions seek to ensure our peaceful collaboration with one another—and the police or the military is summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its states. We are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in. And wherever we look, we see the evidence of our successes and our failures. Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment. Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can’t get enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon—and yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have room for dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste in your mouth must be banished by a drink of water. The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let’s take a look. Yes, there it is. You’re warm now, but you notice that your sweater has seen better days. Does it make you look carefree or disheveled? Perhaps it is time to go shopping for something new. And so it goes. We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life than this? Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense of better) than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change? Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such questions could well be “yes.” And a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self. Those who have never tasted such peace of mind might view these assertions as highly suspect. Nevertheless, it is a fact that a condition of selfless well-being is there to be glimpsed in each moment. Of course, I’m not claiming to have experienced all such states, but I meet many people who appear to have experienced none of them—and these people often profess to have no interest in spiritual life. This is not surprising. The phenomenon of self-transcendence is generally sought and interpreted in a religious context, and it is precisely the sort of experience that tends to increase a person’s faith. How many Christians, having once felt their hearts grow as wide as the world, will decide to ditch Christianity and proclaim their atheism? Not many, I suspect. How many people who have never felt anything of the kind become atheists? I don’t know, but there is little doubt that these mental states act as a kind of filter: The faithful count them in support of ancient dogma, and their absence gives nonbelievers further reason to reject religion. This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend. I can only hope that, whatever your background, you will approach the exercises presented in this book with an open mind.   RELIGION, EAST AND WEST We are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same: All teach the same ethical principles; all urge their followers to contemplate the same divine reality; all are equally wise, compassionate, and true within their sphere—or equally divisive and false, depending on one’s view. No serious adherents of any faith can believe these things, because most religions make claims about reality that are mutually incompatible. Exceptions to this rule exist, but they provide little relief from what is essentially a zero-sum contest of all against all. The polytheism of Hinduism allows it to digest parts of many other faiths: If Christians insist that Jesus Christ is the son of God, for instance, Hindus can make him yet another avatar of Vishnu without losing any sleep. But this spirit of inclusiveness points in one direction only, and even it has its limits. Hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas—the law of karma and rebirth, a multiplicity of gods—that almost every other major religion decries. It is impossible for any faith, no matter how elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another. Devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that theirs is the one true and complete revelation—because that is what their holy books say of themselves. Only secularists and New Age dabblers can mistake the modern tactic of “interfaith dialogue” for an underlying unity of all religions. I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language. Religion is a term like sports: Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free solo” rock climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful. The same could be said of spirituality. The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same underlying reality—and when they do, they don’t do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them. Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry. In one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address the same reality—because people of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths. Any view of consciousness and the cosmos that is available to the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone. It is not surprising, therefore, that individual Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists have given voice to some of the same insights and intuitions. This merely indicates that human cognition and emotion run deeper than religion. (But we knew that, didn’t we?) It does not suggest that all religions understand our spiritual possibilities equally well. One way of missing this point is to declare that all spiritual teachings are inflections of the same “Perennial Philosophy.” The writer Aldous Huxley brought this idea into prominence by publishing an anthology by that title. Here is how he justified the idea: Philosophia perennis—the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing—the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe.[2] Although Huxley was being reasonably cautious in his wording, this notion of a “highest common factor” uniting all religions begins to break apart the moment one presses for details. For instance, the Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith-based: In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the human soul is conceived as genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is some combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of God’s love and grace provide some relief—but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy. The Eastern tradition presents a very different picture of reality. And its highest teachings—found within the various schools of Buddhism and the nominally Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta—explicitly transcend dualism. By their lights, consciousness itself is identical to the very reality that one might otherwise mistake for God. While these teachings make metaphysical claims that any serious student of science should find incredible, they center on a range of experiences that the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rule out-of-bounds. Of course, it is true that specific Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Advaita, but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been regularly exiled or killed. Like Huxley, anyone determined to find a happy synthesis among spiritual traditions will notice that the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1327) often sounded very much like a Buddhist: “The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.” But he also sounded like a man bound to be excommunicated by his church—as he was. Had Eckhart lived a little longer, it seems certain that he would have been dragged into the street and burned alive for these expansive ideas. That is a telling difference between Christianity and Buddhism. In the same vein, it is misleading to hold up the Sufi mystic Al-Hallaj (858–922) as a representative of Islam. He was a Muslim, yes, but he suffered the most grisly death imaginable at the hands of his coreligionists for presuming to be one with God. Both Eckhart and Al-Hallaj gave voice to an experience of self-transcendence that any human being can, in principle, enjoy. However, their views were not consistent with the central teachings of their faiths. The Indian tradition is comparatively free of problems of this kind. Although the teachings of Buddhism and Advaita are embedded in more or less conventional religions, they contain empirical insights about the nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith. One can practice most techniques of Buddhist meditation or the method of self-inquiry of Advaita and experience the advertised changes in one’s consciousness without ever believing in the law of karma or in the miracles attributed to Indian mystics. To get started as a Christian, however, one must first accept a dozen implausible things about the life of Jesus and the origins of the Bible—and the same can be said, minus a few unimportant details, about Judaism and Islam. If one should happen to discover that the sense of being an individual soul is an illusion, one will be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the Indus. There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn’t the same as investigating the nature of one’s mind absent any doctrinal assumptions. Statements of this kind may seem starkly antagonistic toward Abrahamic religions, but they are nonetheless true: One can speak about Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. The same cannot be said of Christianity or Islam.[3] Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at least as far as Alexander’s campaign in India, where the young conqueror and his pet philosophers encountered naked ascetics whom they called “gymnosophists.” It is often said that the thinking of these yogis greatly influenced the philosopher Pyrrho, the father of Greek skepticism. This seems a credible claim, because Pyrrho’s teachings had much in common with Buddhism. But his contemplative insights and methods never became part of any system of thought in the West. Serious study of Eastern thought by outsiders did not begin until the late eighteenth century. The first translation of a Sanskrit text into a Western language appears to have been Sir Charles Wilkins’s rendering of the Bhagavad Gita, a cornerstone text of Hinduism, in 1785. The Buddhist canon would not attract the attention of Western scholars for another hundred years.[4] The conversation between East and West started in earnest, albeit inauspiciously, with the birth of the Theosophical Society, that golem of spiritual hunger and self-deception brought into this world almost single-handedly by the incomparable Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875. Everything about Blavatsky seemed to defy earthly logic: She was an enormously fat woman who was said to have wandered alone and undetected for seven years in the mountains of Tibet. She was also thought to have survived shipwrecks, gunshot wounds, and sword fights. Even less persuasively, she claimed to be in psychic contact with members of the “Great White Brotherhood” of ascended masters—a collection of immortals responsible for the evolution and maintenance of the entire cosmos. Their leader hailed from the planet Venus but lived in the mythical kingdom of Shambhala, which Blavatsky placed somewhere in the vicinity of the Gobi Desert. With the suspiciously bureaucratic name “the Lord of the World,” he supervised the work of other adepts, including the Buddha, Maitreya, Maha Chohan, and one Koot Hoomi, who appears to have had nothing better to do on behalf of the cosmos than to impart its secrets to Blavatsky. [5] It is always surprising when a person attracts legions of followers and builds a large organization on their largesse while peddling penny-arcade mythology of this kind. But perhaps this was less remarkable in a time when even the best-educated people were still struggling to come to terms with electricity, evolution, and the existence of other planets. We can easily forget how suddenly the world had shrunk and the cosmos expanded as the nineteenth century came to a close. The geographical barriers between distant cultures had been stripped away by trade and conquest (one could now order a gin and tonic almost everywhere on earth), and yet the reality of unseen forces and alien worlds was a daily focus of the most careful scientific research. Inevitably, cross-cultural and scientific discoveries were mingled in the popular imagination with religious dogma and traditional occultism. In fact, this had been happening at the highest level of human thought for more than a century: It is always instructive to recall that the father of modern physics, Isaac Newton, squandered a considerable portion of his genius on the study of theology, biblical prophecy, and alchemy. The inability to distinguish the strange but true from the merely strange was common enough in Blavatsky’s time—as it is in our own. Blavatsky’s contemporary Joseph Smith, a libidinous con man and crackpot, was able to found a new religion on the claim that he had unearthed the final revelations of God in the hallowed precincts of Manchester, New York, written in “reformed Egyptian” on golden plates. He decoded this text with the aid of magical “seer stones,” which, whether by magic or not, allowed Smith to produce an English version of God’s Word that was an embarrassing pastiche of plagiarisms from the Bible and silly lies about Jesus’s life in America. And yet the resulting edifice of nonsense and taboo survives to this day. A more modern cult, Scientology, leverages human credulity to an even greater degree: Adherents believe that human beings are possessed by the souls of extraterrestrials who were condemned to planet Earth 75 million years ago by the galactic overlord Xenu. How was their exile accomplished? The old-fashioned way: These aliens were shuttled by the billions to our humble planet aboard a spacecraft that resembled a DC-8. They were then imprisoned in a volcano and blasted to bits with hydrogen bombs. Their souls survived, however, and disentangling them from our own can be the work of a lifetime. It is also expensive.[6] Despite the imponderables in her philosophy, Blavatsky was among the first people to announce in Western circles that there was such a thing as the “wisdom of the East.” This wisdom began to trickle westward once Swami Vivekananda introduced the teachings of Vedanta at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Again, Buddhism lagged behind: A few Western monks living on the island of Sri Lanka were beginning to translate the Pali Canon, which remains the most authoritative record of the teachings of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. However, the practice of Buddhist meditation wouldn’t actually be taught in the West for another half century. It is easy enough to find fault with romantic ideas about Eastern wisdom, and a tradition of such criticism sprang up almost the instant the first Western seeker sat cross-legged and attempted to meditate. In the late 1950s, the author and journalist Arthur Koestler traveled to India and Japan in search of wisdom and summarized his pilgrimage thus: “I started my journey in sackcloth and ashes, and came back rather proud of being a European.”[7] In The Lotus and the Robot, Koestler gives some of his reasons for being less than awed by his journey to the East. Consider, for example, the ancient discipline of hatha yoga. While now generally viewed as a system of physical exercises designed to increase a person’s strength and flexibility, in its traditional context hatha yoga is part of a larger effort to manipulate “subtle” features of the body unknown to anatomists. No doubt much of this subtlety corresponds to experiences that yogis actually have—but many of the beliefs formed on the basis of these experiences are patently absurd, and certain of the associated practices are both silly and injurious. Koestler reports that the aspiring yogi is traditionally encouraged to lengthen his tongue—even going so far as to cut the frenulum (the membrane that anchors the tongue to the floor of the mouth) and stretch the soft palate. What is the purpose of these modifications? They enable our hero to insert his tongue into his nasopharynx, thereby blocking the flow of air through the nostrils. His anatomy thus improved, a yogi can then imbibe subtle liquors believed to emanate directly from his brain. These substances—imagined, by recourse to further subtleties, to be connected to the retention of semen—are said to confer not only spiritual wisdom but immortality. This technique of drinking mucus is known as khechari mudra, and it is thought to be one of the crowning achievements of yoga. I’m more than happy to score a point for Koestler here. Needless to say, no defense of such practices will be found in this book. Criticism of Eastern wisdom can seem especially pertinent when coming from Easterners themselves. There is indeed something preposterous about well-educated Westerners racing East in search of spiritual enlightenment while Easterners make the opposite pilgrimage seeking education and economic opportunities. I have a friend whose own adventures may have marked a high point in this global comedy. He made his first trip to India immediately after graduating from college, having already acquired several yogic affectations: He had the requisite beads and long hair, but he was also in the habit of writing the name of the Hindu god Ram in Devanagari script over and over in a journal. On the flight to the motherland, he had the good fortune to be seated next to an Indian businessman. This weary traveler thought he had witnessed every species of human folly—until he caught sight of my friend’s scribbling. The spectacle of a Western-born Stanford graduate, of working age, holding degrees in both economics and history, devoting himself to the graphomaniacal worship of an imaginary deity in a language he could neither read nor understand was more than this man could abide in a confined space at 30,000 feet. After a testy exchange, the two travelers could only stare at each other in mutual incomprehension and pity—and they had ten hours yet to fly. There really are two sides to such a conversation, but I concede that only one of them can be made to look ridiculous. We can also grant that Eastern wisdom has not produced societies or political institutions that are any better than their Western counterparts; in fact, one could argue that India has survived as the world’s largest democracy only because of institutions that were built under British rule. Nor has the East led the world in scientific discovery. Nevertheless, there is something to the notion of uniquely Eastern wisdom, and most of it has been concentrated in or derived from the tradition of Buddhism. Buddhism has been of special interest to Western scientists for reasons already hinted at. It isn’t primarily a faith-based religion, and its central teachings are entirely empirical. Despite the superstitions that many Buddhists cherish, the doctrine has a practical and logical core that does not require any unwarranted assumptions. Many Westerners have recognized this and have been relieved to find a spiritual alternative to faith-based worship. It is no accident that most of the scientific research now done on meditation focuses primarily on Buddhist techniques. Another reason for Buddhism’s prominence among scientists has been the intellectual engagement of one of its most visible representatives: Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Of course, the Dalai Lama is not without his critics. My late friend Christopher Hitchens meted out justice to “his holiness” on several occasions. He also castigated Western students of Buddhism for the “widely and lazily held belief that ‘Oriental’ religion is different from other faiths: less dogmatic, more contemplative, more . . . Transcendental,” and for the “blissful, thoughtless exceptionalism” with which Buddhism is regarded by many.[8] Hitch did have a point. In his capacity as the head of one of the four branches of Tibetan Buddhism and as the former leader of the Tibetan government in exile, the Dalai Lama has made some questionable claims and formed some embarrassing alliances. Although his engagement with science is far-reaching and surely sincere, the man is not above consulting an astrologer or “oracle” when making important decisions. I will have something to say in this book about many of the things that might have justified Hitch’s opprobrium, but the general thrust of his commentary here was all wrong. Several Eastern traditions are exceptionally empirical and exceptionally wise, and therefore merit the exceptionalism claimed by their adherents. Buddhism in particular possesses a literature on the nature of the mind that has no peer in Western religion or Western science. Some of these teachings are cluttered with metaphysical assumptions that should provoke our doubts, but many aren’t. And when engaged as a set of hypotheses by which to investigate the mind and deepen one’s ethical life, Buddhism can be an entirely rational enterprise. Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y. Although many Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an ordinary human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind. Buddha means “awakened one”—and Siddhartha Gautama was merely a man who woke up from the dream of being a separate self. Compare this with the Christian view of Jesus, who is imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. This is a very different proposition, and it renders Christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all but irrelevant to a scientific discussion about the human condition. The teachings of Buddhism, and of Eastern spirituality generally, focus on the primacy of the mind. There are dangers in this way of viewing the world, to be sure. Focusing on training the mind to the exclusion of all else can lead to political quietism and hive-like conformity. The fact that your mind is all you have and that it is possible to be at peace even in difficult circumstances can become an argument for ignoring obvious societal problems. But it is not a compelling one. The world is in desperate need of improvement—in global terms, freedom and prosperity remain the exception—and yet this doesn’t mean we need to be miserable while we work for the common good. In fact, the teachings of Buddhism emphasize a connection between ethical and spiritual life. Making progress in one domain lays a foundation for progress in the other. One can, for instance, spend long periods of time in contemplative solitude for the purpose of becoming a better person in the world—having better relationships, being more honest and compassionate and, therefore, more helpful to one’s fellow human beings. Being wisely selfish and being selfless can amount to very much the same thing. There are centuries of anecdotal testimony on this point—and, as we will see, the scientific study of the mind has begun to bear it out. There is now little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them. Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle, available to everyone, this possibility is only weakly attested to in the religious and philosophical literature of the West. Only Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.[9] As I wrote in my first book, The End of Faith, the disparity between Eastern and Western spirituality resembles that found between Eastern and Western medicine—with the arrow of embarrassment pointing in the opposite direction. Humanity did not understand the biology of cancer, develop antibiotics and vaccines, or sequence the human genome under an Eastern sun. Consequently, real medicine is almost entirely a product of Western science. Insofar as specific techniques of Eastern medicine actually work, they must conform, whether by design or by happenstance, to the principles of biology as we have come to know them in the West. This is not to say that Western medicine is complete. In a few decades, many of our current practices will seem barbaric. One need only ponder the list of side effects that accompany most medications to appreciate that these are terribly blunt instruments. Nevertheless, most of our knowledge about the human body—and about the physical universe generally—emerged in the West. The rest is instinct, folklore, bewilderment, and untimely death. An honest comparison of spiritual traditions, Eastern and Western, proves equally invidious. As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition. Again, one must deploy the necessary caveats: I am not saying that most Buddhists or Hindus have been sophisticated contemplatives. Their traditions have spawned many of the same pathologies we see elsewhere among the faithful: dogmatism, anti-intellectualism, tribalism, otherworldliness. However, the empirical difference between the central teachings of Buddhism and Advaita and those of Western monotheism is difficult to overstate. One can traverse the Eastern paths simply by becoming interested in the nature of one’s own mind—especially in the immediate causes of psychological suffering—and by paying closer attention to one’s experience in every present moment. There is, in truth, nothing one need believe. The teachings of Buddhism and Advaita are best viewed as lab manuals and explorers’ logs detailing the results of empirical research on the nature of human consciousness. Nearly every geographical or linguistic barrier to the free exchange of ideas has now fallen away. It seems to me, therefore, that educated people no longer have a right to any form of spiritual provincialism. The truths of Eastern spirituality are now no more Eastern than the truths of Western science are Western. We are merely talking about human consciousness and its possible states. My purpose in writing this book is to encourage you to investigate certain contemplative insights for yourself, without accepting the metaphysical ideas that they inspired in ignorant and isolated peoples of the past. A final word of caution: Nothing I say here is intended as a denial of the fact that psychological well-being requires a healthy “sense of self”—with all the capacities that this vague phrase implies. Children need to become autonomous, confident, and self-aware in order to form healthy relationships. And they must acquire a host of other cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal skills in the process of becoming sane and productive adults. Which is to say that there is a time and a place for everything—unless, of course, there isn’t. No doubt there are psychological conditions, such as schizophrenia, for which practices of the sort I recommend in this book might be inappropriate. Some people find the experience of an extended, silent retreat psychologically destabilizing.[10] Again, an analogy to physical training seems apropos: Not everyone is suited to running a six-minute mile or bench-pressing his own body weight. But many quite ordinary people are capable of these feats, and there are better and worse ways to accomplish them. What is more, the same principles of fitness generally apply even to people whose abilities are limited by illness or injury. So I want to make it clear that the instructions in this book are intended for readers who are adults (more or less) and free from any psychological or medical conditions that could be exacerbated by meditation or other techniques of sustained introspection. If paying attention to your breath, to bodily sensations, to the flow of thoughts, or to the nature of consciousness itself seems likely to cause you clinically significant anguish, please check with a psychologist or a psychiatrist before engaging in the practices I describe.   MINDFULNESS It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It’s not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different. [11] But it is true as a matter of conscious experience. The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world. But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. As a consequence, we spend our lives being far less content than we might otherwise be. We often fail to appreciate what we have until we have lost it. We crave experiences, objects, relationships, only to grow bored with them. And yet the craving persists. I speak from experience, of course. As a remedy for this predicament, many spiritual teachings ask us to entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very least to develop a fondness for the iconography and rituals of one or another religion. But not all paths traverse the same rough ground. There are methods of meditation that do not require any artifice or unwarranted assumptions at all. For beginners, I usually recommend a technique called vipassana (Pali for “insight”), which comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism, the Theravada. One of the advantages of vipassana is that it can be taught in an entirely secular way. Experts in this practice generally acquire their training in a Buddhist context, and most retreat centers in the United States and Europe teach its associated Buddhist philosophy. Nevertheless, this method of introspection can be brought into any secular or scientific context without embarrassment. (The same cannot be said for the practice of chanting to Lord Krishna while banging a drum.) That is why vipassana is now being widely studied and adopted by psychologists and neuroscientists. The quality of mind cultivated in vipassana is almost always referred to as “mindfulness,” and the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.[12] We will look more closely at the neurophysiology of mindfulness in a later chapter. Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali word sati. The term has several meanings in the Buddhist literature, but for our purposes the most important is “clear awareness.” The practice was first described in the Satipatthana Sutta,[13] which is part of the Pali Canon. Like many Buddhist texts, the Satipatthana Sutta is highly repetitive and, for anything but an avid student of Buddhism, exceptionally boring to read. However, when one compares texts of this kind with the Bible or the Koran, the difference is unmistakable: The Satipatthana Sutta is not a collection of ancient myths, superstitions, and taboos; it is a rigorously empirical guide to freeing the mind from suffering.The Buddha described four foundations of mindfulness, which he taught as “the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of Nibbana” (Sanskrit, Nirvana). The four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and attitudes), and the objects of mind (which include the five senses but also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture, equanimity, and even mindfulness itself). It is a peculiar list, at once redundant and incomplete—a problem that is compounded by the necessity of translating Pali terminology into English. The obvious message of the text, however, is that the totality of one’s experience can become the field of contemplation. The meditator is merely instructed to pay attention, “ardently” and “fully aware” and “free from covetousness and grief for the world.” There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. One of the great strengths of this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is that it does not require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of experience in each moment. The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking. In fact, thoughts of all kinds can be perfectly good objects of mindfulness. In the early stages of one’s practice, however, the arising of thought will be more or less synonymous with distraction—that is, with a failure to meditate. Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed. By practicing mindfulness, however, one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and begin to see each arising image, idea, or bit of language vanish without a trace. What remains is consciousness itself, with its attendant sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts appearing and changing in every moment. In the beginning of one’s meditation practice, the difference between ordinary experience and what one comes to consider “mindfulness” is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are. In this sense, learning to meditate is just like acquiring any other skill. It takes many thousands of repetitions to throw a good jab or to coax music from the strings of a guitar. With practice, mindfulness becomes a well-formed habit of attention, and the difference between it and ordinary thinking will become increasingly clear. Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous. And yet it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time. My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. Your perception is unchanged, but the spell is broken. Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives. Until we see that an alternative to this enchantment exists, we are entirely at the mercy of appearances. Again, the difference I am describing is not a matter of achieving a new conceptual understanding or of adopting new beliefs about the nature of reality. The change comes when we experience the present moment prior to the arising of thought. The Buddha taught mindfulness as the appropriate response to the truth of dukkha, usually translated from the Pali, somewhat misleadingly, as “suffering.” A better translation would be “unsatisfactoriness.” Suffering may not be inherent in life, but unsatisfactoriness is. We crave lasting happiness in the midst of change: Our bodies age, cherished objects break, pleasures fade, relationships fail. Our attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This may seem like a recipe for apathy, but it needn’t be. It is actually possible to be mindful—and, therefore, to be at peace with the present moment—even while working to change the world for the better. Mindfulness meditation is extraordinarily simple to describe, but it isn’t easy to perform. True mastery might require special talent and a lifetime of devotion to the task, and yet a genuine transformation in one’s perception of the world is within reach for most of us. Practice is the only thing that will lead to success. The simple instructions given in the box that follows are analogous to instructions on how to walk a tightrope—which, I assume, must go something like this: 1. Find a horizontal cable that can support your weight.2. Stand on one end.3. Step forward by placing one foot directly in front of the other.4. Repeat.5. Don’t fall. Clearly, steps 2 through 5 entail a little trial and error. Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does. And falling, for our purposes, occurs almost ceaselessly, every time we become lost in thought. Again, the problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without being fully aware that we are thinking. As every meditator soon discovers, distraction is the normal condition of our minds: Most of us topple from the wire every second—whether gliding happily into reverie or plunging into fear, anger, self-hatred, and other negative states of mind. Meditation is a technique for waking up. The goal is to come out of the trance of discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow of experience in the present. How to Meditate Sit comfortably, with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Notice the sensations associated with sitting—feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc. Gradually become aware of the process of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath most distinctly—either at your nostrils or in the rising and falling of your abdomen. Allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing. (You don’t have to control your breath. Just let it come and go naturally.) Every time your mind wanders in thought, gently return it to the breath. As you focus on the process of breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily sensations, or emotions. Simply observe these phenomena as they appear in consciousness and then return to the breath. The moment you notice that you have been lost in thought, observe the present thought itself as an object of consciousness. Then return your attention to the breath—or to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment. Continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even thoughts themselves—as they arise, change, and pass away. Those who are new to this practice generally find it useful to hear instructions of this kind spoken aloud during the course of a meditation session. I have posted guided meditations of varying length on my website.   THE TRUTH OF SUFFERING I am sitting in a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan, drinking exactly what I want (coffee), eating exactly what I want (a cookie), and doing exactly what I want (writing this book). It is a beautiful fall day, and many of the people passing by on the sidewalk appear to radiate good fortune from their pores. Several are so physically attractive that I’m beginning to wonder whether Photoshop can now be applied to the human body. Up and down this street, and for a mile in each direction, stores sell jewelry, art, and clothing that not even 1 percent of humanity could hope to purchase. So what did the Buddha mean when he spoke of the “unsatisfactoriness” (dukkha) of life? Was he referring merely to the poor and the hungry? Or are these rich and beautiful people suffering even now? Of course, suffering is all around us—even here, where everything appears to be going well for the moment. First, the obvious: Within a few blocks of where I am sitting are hospitals, convalescent homes, psychiatrists’ offices, and other rooms built to assuage, or merely to contain, some of the most profound forms of human misery. A man runs over his own child while backing his car out of the driveway. A woman learns that she has terminal cancer on the eve of her wedding. We know that the worst can happen to anyone at any time—and most people spend a great deal of mental energy hoping that it won’t happen to them. But more subtle forms of suffering can be found, even among people who seem to have every reason to be satisfied in the present. Although wealth and fame can secure many forms of pleasure, few of us have any illusions that they guarantee happiness. Anyone who owns a television or reads the newspaper has seen movie stars, politicians, professional athletes, and other celebrities ricochet from marriage to marriage and from scandal to scandal. To learn that a young, attractive, talented, and successful person is nevertheless addicted to drugs or clinically depressed is to be given almost no cause for surprise. Yet the unsatisfactoriness of the good life runs deeper than this. Even while living safely between emergencies, most of us feel a wide range of painful emotions on a daily basis. When you wake up in the morning, are you filled with joy? How do you feel at work or when looking in the mirror? How satisfied are you with what you’ve accomplished in life? How much of your time with your family is spent surrendered to love and gratitude, and how much is spent just struggling to be happy in one another’s company? Even for extraordinarily lucky people, life is difficult. And when we look at what makes it so, we see that we are all prisoners of our thoughts. And then there is death, which defeats everyone. Most people seem to believe that we have only two ways to think about death: We can fear it and do our best to ignore it, or we can deny that it is real. The first strategy leads to a life of conventional worldliness and distraction—we merely strive for pleasure and success and do our best to keep the reality of death out of view. The second strategy is the province of religion, which assures us that death is but a doorway to another world and that the most important opportunities in life occur after the lifetime of the body. But there is another path, and it seems the only one compatible with intellectual honesty. That path is the subject of this book.   ENLIGHTENMENT What is enlightenment, which is so often said to be the ultimate goal of meditation? There are many esoteric details that we can safely ignore—disagreements among contemplative traditions about what, exactly, is gained or lost at the end of the spiritual path. Many of these claims are preposterous. Within most schools of Buddhism, for instance, a buddha—whether the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, or any other person who attains the state of “full enlightenment”—is generally described as “omniscient.” Just what this means is open to a fair bit of caviling. But however narrowly defined, the claim is absurd. If the historical Buddha were “omniscient,” he would have been, at minimum, a better mathematician, physicist, biologist, and Jeopardy contestant than any person who has ever lived. Is it reasonable to expect that an ascetic in the fifth century BC, by virtue of his meditative insights, spontaneously became an unprecedented genius in every field of human inquiry, including those that did not exist at the time in which he lived? Would Siddhartha Gautama have awed Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Claude Shannon with his command of mathematical logic and information theory? Of course not. To think otherwise is pure, religious piety. Any extension of the notion of “omniscience” to procedural knowledge—that is, to knowing how to do something—would render the Buddha capable of painting the Sistine Chapel in the morning and demolishing Roger Federer at Centre Court in the afternoon. Is there any reason to believe that Siddhartha Gautama, or any other celebrated contemplative, possessed such abilities by virtue of his spiritual practice? None whatsoever. Nevertheless, many Buddhists believe that buddhas can do all these things and more. Again, this is religious dogmatism, not a rational approach to spiritual life.[14] I make no claims in support of magic or miracles in this book. However, I can say that the true goal of meditation is more profound than most people realize—and it does, in fact, encompass many of the experiences that traditional mystics claim for themselves. It is quite possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness—to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos. This says a lot about the possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large. And it sheds no light at all on the relationship between mind and matter. The fact that it is possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself should be a great finding for the field of psychology, but it lends absolutely no credence to the claim that Jesus was the son of God, or even that God exists. Nor does it suggest that the “energy” of love somehow pervades the cosmos. These are historical and metaphysical claims that personal experience cannot justify. However, a phenomenon like self-transcending love does entitle us to make claims about the human mind. And this particular experience is so well attested and so readily achieved by those who devote themselves to specific practices (the Buddhist technique of metta meditation, for instance) or who even take the right drug (MDMA) that there is very little controversy that it exists. Facts of this kind must now be understood in a rational context. The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of well-being that is imperturbable—or if perturbed, easily regained. The French monk Matthieu Ricard describes such happiness as “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind.”[15] The purpose of meditation is to recognize that you already have such a mind. That discovery, in turn, helps you to cease doing the things that produce needless confusion and suffering for yourself and others. Of course, most people never truly master the practice and don’t reach a condition of imperturbable happiness. The near goal, therefore, is to have an increasingly healthy mind—that is, to be moving one’s mind in the right direction. There is nothing novel about trying to become happy. And one can become happy, within certain limits, without any recourse to the practice of meditation. But conventional sources of happiness are unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions. It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to form deep friendships, to contribute to society in ways that are emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic, and intellectual skills—and to keep the machinery of happiness running day after day. There is nothing wrong with being fulfilled in all these ways—except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will see that there is still something wrong with it. These forms of happiness aren’t good enough. Our feelings of fulfillment do not last. And the stress of life continues. So what would a spiritual master be a master of? At a minimum, she will no longer suffer certain cognitive and emotional illusions—above all, she will no longer feel identical to her thoughts. Once again, this is not to say that such a person will no longer think, but she would no longer succumb to the primary confusion that thoughts produce in most of us: She would no longer feel that there is an inner self who is a thinker of these thoughts. Such a person will naturally maintain an openness and serenity of mind that is available to most of us only for brief moments, even after years of practice. I remain agnostic as to whether anyone has achieved such a state permanently, but I know from direct experience that it is possible to be far more enlightened than I tend to be. The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present. Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own minds. The promise of spiritual life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are. The moment we admit the possibility of attaining contemplative insights—and of training one’s mind for that purpose—we must acknowledge that people naturally fall at different points on a continuum between ignorance and wisdom. Part of this range will be considered “normal,” but normal isn’t necessarily a happy place to be. Just as a person’s physical body and abilities can be refined—Olympic athletes are not normal—one’s mental life can deepen and expand on the basis of talent and training. This is nearly self-evident, but it remains a controversial point. No one hesitates to admit the role of talent and training in the context of physical and intellectual pursuits; I have never met another person who denied that some of us are stronger, more athletic, or more learned than others. But many people find it difficult to acknowledge that a continuum of moral and spiritual wisdom exists or that there might be better and worse ways to traverse it. Stages of spiritual development, therefore, appear unavoidable. Just as we must grow into adulthood physically—and we can fail to mature or become sick or injured along the way—our minds develop by degrees. One can’t learn sophisticated skills such as syllogistic reasoning, algebra, or irony until one has acquired more basic skills. It seems to me that a healthy spiritual life can begin only once our physical, mental, social, and ethical lives have sufficiently matured. We must learn to use language before we can work with it creatively or understand its limits, and the conventional self must form before we can investigate it and understand that it is not what it appears to be. An ability to examine the contents of one’s own consciousness clearly, dispassionately, and nondiscursively, with sufficient attention to realize that no inner self exists, is a very sophisticated skill. And yet basic mindfulness can be practiced very early in life. Many people, including my wife, have successfully taught it to children as young as six. At that age—and every age thereafter—it can be a powerful tool for self-regulation and self-awareness. Contemplatives have long understood that positive habits of mind are best viewed as skills that most of us learn imperfectly as we grow to adulthood. It is possible to become more focused, patient, and compassionate than one naturally tends to be, and there are many things to learn about how to be happy in this world. These are truths that Western psychological science has only recently begun to explore. Some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it. Scientists and skeptics generally assume that the traditional claims of yogis and mystics must be exaggerated or simply delusional and that the only rational purpose of meditation is limited to conventional “stress reduction.” Conversely, serious students of these practices often insist that even the most outlandish claims made by and about spiritual masters are true. I am attempting to lead the reader along a middle path between these extremes—one that preserves our scientific skepticism but acknowledges that it is possible to radically transform our minds. In one sense, the Buddhist concept of enlightenment really is just the epitome of “stress reduction”—and depending on how much stress one reduces, the results of one’s practice can seem more or less profound. According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist. This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end. According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness. Of course, some people claim to love stress and appear eager to live by its logic. Some even derive pleasure from imposing stress on others. Genghis Khan is reported to have said, “The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters.” People attach many meanings to terms like happiness, and not all of them are compatible with one another. In The Moral Landscape, I argued that we tend to be unnecessarily confused by differences of opinion on the topic of human well-being. No doubt certain people can derive mental pleasure—and even experience genuine ecstasy—by behaving in ways that produce immense suffering for others. But we know that these states are anomalous—or, at least, not sustainable—because we depend upon one another for more or less everything. Whatever the associated pleasures, raping and pillaging can’t be a stable strategy for finding happiness in this world. Given our social requirements, we know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being must be compatible with an ethical concern for other people—even for complete strangers—otherwise, violent conflict becomes inevitable. We also know that there are certain forms of happiness that are not available to a person even if, like Genghis Khan, he finds himself on the winning side of every siege. Some pleasures are intrinsically ethical—feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and compassion. To inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be brought into alignment with others. In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.   To purchase Waking Up, visit Sam’s book page — Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT [Note: This is a verbatim transcript of a spoken podcast. However, I have added notes like this one to clarify controversial points.—SH] I was going to do a podcast on a series of questions, but I got so many questions on the same topic that I think I’m just going to do a single response here, and we’ll do an #AskMeAnything podcast next time. The question I’ve now received in many forms goes something like this: Why is it that you never criticize Israel? Why is it that you never criticize Judaism? Why is it that you always take the side of the Israelis over that of the Palestinians? Now, this is an incredibly boring and depressing question for a variety of reasons. The first, is that I have criticized both Israel and Judaism. What seems to have upset many people is that I’ve kept some sense of proportion. There are something like 15 million Jews on earth at this moment; there are a hundred times as many Muslims.  I’ve debated rabbis who, when I have assumed that they believe in a God that can hear our prayers, they stop me mid-sentence and say, “Why would you think that I believe in a God who can hear prayers?” So there are rabbis—conservative rabbis—who believe in a God so elastic as to exclude every concrete claim about Him—and therefore, nearly every concrete demand upon human behavior. And there are millions of Jews, literally millions among the few million who exist, for whom Judaism is very important, and yet they are atheists. They don’t believe in God at all. This is actually a position you can hold in Judaism, but it’s a total non sequitur in Islam or Christianity. So, when we’re talking about the consequences of irrational beliefs based on scripture, the Jews are the least of the least offenders. But I have said many critical things about Judaism. Let me remind you that parts of Hebrew Bible—books like Leviticus and Exodus and Deuteronomy—are the most repellent, the most sickeningly unethical documents to be found in any religion. They’re worse than the Koran. They’re worse than any part of the New Testament. But the truth is, most Jews recognize this and don’t take these texts seriously. It’s simply a fact that most Jews and most Israelis are not guided by scripture—and that’s a very good thing. Of course, there are some who are. There are religious extremists among Jews. Now, I consider these people to be truly dangerous, and their religious beliefs are as divisive and as unwarranted as the beliefs of devout Muslims. But there are far fewer such people. For those of you who worry that I never say anything critical about Israel:  My position on Israel is somewhat paradoxical. There are questions about which I’m genuinely undecided. And there’s something in my position, I think, to offend everyone. So, acknowledging how reckless it is to say anything on this topic, I’m nevertheless going to think out loud about it for a few minutes. I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion. So I don’t celebrate the idea that there’s a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. I certainly don’t support any Jewish claims to real estate based on the Bible. [Note: Read this paragraph again.] Though I just said that I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state, the justification for such a state is rather easy to find. We need look no further than the fact that the rest of the world has shown itself eager to murder the Jews at almost every opportunity. So, if there were going to be a state organized around protecting members of a single religion, it certainly should be a Jewish state. Now, friends of Israel might consider this a rather tepid defense, but it’s the strongest one I’ve got. I think the idea of a religious state is ultimately untenable. [Note: It is worth observing, however, that Israel isn’t “Jewish” in the sense that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are “Muslim.” As my friend Jerry Coyne points out, Israel is actually less religious than the U.S., and it guarantees freedom of religion to its citizens. Israel is not a theocracy, and one could easily argue that its Jewish identity is more cultural than religious. However, if we ask why the Jews wouldn’t move to British Columbia if offered a home there, we can see the role that religion still plays in their thinking.] Needless to say, in defending its territory as a Jewish state, the Israeli government and Israelis themselves have had to do terrible things. They have, as they are now, fought wars against the Palestinians that have caused massive losses of innocent life. More civilians have been killed in Gaza in the last few weeks than militants. That’s not a surprise because Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Occupying it, fighting wars in it, is guaranteed to get women and children and other noncombatants killed. And there’s probably little question over the course of fighting multiple wars that the Israelis have done things that amount to war crimes. They have been brutalized by this process—that is, made brutal by it. But that is largely the due to the character of their enemies. [Note: I was not giving Israel a pass to commit war crimes. I was making a point about the realities of living under the continuous threat of terrorism and of fighting multiple wars in a confined space.] Whatever terrible things the Israelis have done, it is also true to say that they have used more restraint in their fighting against the Palestinians than we—the Americans, or Western Europeans—have used in any of our wars. They have endured more worldwide public scrutiny than any other society has ever had to while defending itself against aggressors. The Israelis simply are held to a different standard. And the condemnation leveled at them by the rest of the world is completely out of proportion to what they have actually done. [Note: I was not saying that because they are more careful than we have been at our most careless, the Israelis are above criticism. War crimes are war crimes.] It is clear that Israel is losing the PR war and has been for years now.  One of the most galling things for outside observers about the current war in Gaza is the disproportionate loss of life on the Palestinian side. This doesn’t make a lot of moral sense. Israel built bomb shelters to protect its citizens. The Palestinians built tunnels through which they could carry out terror attacks and kidnap Israelis. Should Israel be blamed for successfully protecting its population in a defensive war? I don’t think so. [Note: I was not suggesting that the deaths of Palestinian noncombatants are anything less than tragic. But if retaliating against Hamas is bound to get innocents killed, and the Israelis manage to protect their own civilians in the meantime, the loss of innocent life on the Palestinian side is guaranteed to be disproportionate.] But there is no way to look at the images coming out of Gaza—especially of infants and toddlers riddled by shrapnel—and think that this is anything other than a monstrous evil. Insofar as the Israelis are the agents of this evil, it seems impossible to support them. And there is no question that the Palestinians have suffered terribly for decades under the occupation. This is where most critics of Israel appear to be stuck. They see these images, and they blame Israel for killing and maiming babies. They see the occupation, and they blame Israel for making Gaza a prison camp. I would argue that this is a kind of moral illusion, borne of a failure to look at the actual causes of this conflict, as well as of a failure to understand the intentions of the people on either side of it. [Note: I was not saying that the horror of slain children is a moral illusion; nor was I minimizing the suffering of the Palestinians under the occupation. I was claiming that Israel is not primarily to blame for all this suffering.] The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians. [Note: Yes, I know that not every Palestinian supports Hamas, but enough do to have brought them to power. Hamas is not a fringe group.] The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews. And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it. What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They’re not targeting children. They could target as many children as they want. Every time a Palestinian child dies, Israel edges ever closer to becoming an international pariah. So the Israelis take great pains not to kill children and other noncombatants.  [Note: The word “so” in the previous sentence was regrettable and misleading. I didn’t mean to suggest that safeguarding its reputation abroad would be the only (or even primary) reason for Israel to avoid killing children. However, the point stands: Even if you want to attribute the basest motives to Israel, it is clearly in her self-interest not to kill Palestinian children.] Now, is it possible that some Israeli soldiers go berserk under pressure and wind up shooting into crowds of rock-throwing children? Of course. You will always find some soldiers acting this way in the middle of a war. But we know that this isn’t the general intent of Israel. We know the Israelis do not want to kill non-combatants, because they could kill as many as they want, and they’re not doing it. What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere. [Note: Again, I realize that not all Palestinians support Hamas. Nor am I discounting the degree to which the occupation, along with collateral damage suffered in war, has fueled Palestinian rage. But Palestinian terrorism (and Muslim anti-Semitism) is what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible.] The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and her enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields? Well, Hamas certainly does. They shoot their rockets from residential neighborhoods, from beside schools, and hospitals, and mosques. Muslims in other recent conflicts, in Iraq and elsewhere, have also used human shields. They have laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies. Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. That is the difference we’re talking about. The Israelis and other Western powers are deterred, however imperfectly, by the Muslim use of human shields in these conflicts, as we should be. It is morally abhorrent to kill noncombatants if you can avoid it. It’s certainly abhorrent to shoot through the bodies of children to get at your adversary. But take a moment to reflect on how contemptible this behavior is. And understand how cynical it is. The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants. [Note: The term “Muslims” in this paragraph means “Muslim combatants” of the sort that Western forces have encountered in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The term “jihadists” would have been too narrow, but I was not suggesting that all Muslims support the use of human shields or are anti-Semitic, at war with the West, etc.] Now imagine reversing the roles here. Imagine how fatuous—indeed comical it would be—for the Israelis to attempt to use human shields to deter the Palestinians. Some claim that they have already done this. There are reports that Israeli soldiers have occasionally put Palestinian civilians in front of them as they’ve advanced into dangerous areas. That’s not the use of human shields we’re talking about. It’s egregious behavior. No doubt it constitutes a war crime. But Imagine the Israelis holding up their own women and children as human shields. Of course, that would be ridiculous. The Palestinians are trying to kill everyone. Killing women and children is part of the plan. Reversing the roles here produces a grotesque Monty Python skit. If you’re going to talk about the conflict in the Middle East, you have to acknowledge this difference. I don’t think there’s any ethical disparity to be found anywhere that is more shocking or consequential than this. And the truth is, this isn’t even the worst that jihadists do. Hamas is practically a moderate organization, compared to other jihadist groups. There are Muslims who have blown themselves up in crowds of children—again, Muslim children—just to get at the American soldiers who were handing out candy to them. They have committed suicide bombings, only to send another bomber to the hospital to await the casualities—where they then blow up all the injured along with the doctors and nurses trying to save their lives. Every day that you could read about an Israeli rocket gone astray or Israeli soldiers beating up an innocent teenager, you could have read about ISIS in Iraq crucifying people on the side of the road, Christians and Muslims. Where is the outrage in the Muslim world and on the Left over these crimes? Where are the demonstrations, 10,000 or 100,000 deep, in the capitals of Europe against ISIS?  If Israel kills a dozen Palestinians by accident, the entire Muslim world is inflamed. God forbid you burn a Koran, or write a novel vaguely critical of the faith. And yet Muslims can destroy their own societies—and seek to destroy the West—and you don’t hear a peep. [Note: Of course, I’m aware that many Muslims condemn groups like ISIS. My point is that we don’t see massive protests against global jihadism—even though it targets Muslims more than anyone else—and we do see such protests over things like the Danish cartoons.] So, it seems to me, that you have to side with Israel here. You have one side which if it really could accomplish its aims would simply live peacefully with its neighbors, and you have another side which is seeking to implement a seventh century theocracy in the Holy Land. There’s no peace to be found between those incompatible ideas.  That doesn’t mean you can’t condemn specific actions on the part of the Israelis. And, of course, acknowledging the moral disparity between Israel and her enemies doesn’t give us any solution to the problem of Israel’s existence in the Middle East. [Note: I was not suggesting that Israel’s actions are above criticism or that their recent incursion into Gaza was necessarily justified. Nor was I saying that the status quo, wherein the Palestinians remain stateless, should be maintained. And I certainly wasn’t expressing support for the building of settlements on contested land (as I made clear below). By “siding with Israel,” I am simply recognizing that they are not the primary aggressors in this conflict. They are, rather, responding to aggression—and at a terrible cost.] Again, granted, there’s some percentage of Jews who are animated by their own religious hysteria and their own prophesies. Some are awaiting the Messiah on contested land. Yes, these people are willing to sacrifice the blood of their own children for the glory of God. But, for the most part, they are not representative of the current state of Judaism or the actions of the Israeli government. And it is how Israel deals with these people—their own religious lunatics—that will determine whether they can truly hold the moral high ground. And Israel can do a lot more than it has to disempower them. It can cease to subsidize the delusions of the Ultra-Orthodox, and it can stop building settlements on contested land.  [Note: Read that again. And, yes, I understand that not all settlers are Ultra-Orthodox.] These incompatible religious attachments to this land have made it impossible for Muslims and Jews to negotiate like rational human beings, and they have made it impossible for them to live in peace. But the onus is still more on the side of the Muslims here. Even on their worst day, the Israelis act with greater care and compassion and self-criticism than Muslim combatants have anywhere, ever. And again, you have to ask yourself, what do these groups want? What would they accomplish if they could accomplish anything? What would the Israelis do if they could do what they want? They would live in peace with their neighbors, if they had neighbors who would live in peace with them. They would simply continue to build out their high tech sector and thrive. [Note: Some might argue that they would do more than this—e.g. steal more Palestinian land. But apart from the influence of Jewish extremism (which I condemn), Israel’s continued appropriation of land has more than a little to do with her security concerns. Absent Palestinian terrorism and Muslim anti-Semitism, we could be talking about a “one-state solution,” and the settlements would be moot.] What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want to stifle every freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way. This kind of confusion puts all of us in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don’t want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It’s just that some of us haven’t realized it yet.

I’ve noticed a happy trend in online video: People have begun to produce animations and mashups of public lectures that add considerable value to the spoken words. If you are unfamiliar with these visual essays, watch any of the RSA Animate videos, like the one below: People have also taken excerpts from my own lectures and combined them with stock footage. For example: I would like to encourage this behavior. To that end, I am offering the following voice-over track, adapted from one of my debates. This audio file is yours to use any way you see fit. And if you produce something especially creative, I will do my best to bring attention to your work.

Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these sets only partially intersect. Some drugs of extraordinary power and utility, such as psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well-tolerated, and yet one can still be sent to prison for their use—whereas drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth. There are other points on this continuum: MDMA, or Ecstasy, has remarkable therapeutic potential, but it is also susceptible to abuse, and some evidence suggests that it can be neurotoxic.[1] One of the great responsibilities we have as a society is to educate ourselves, along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting and for what purpose and which are not. The problem, however, is that we refer to all biologically active compounds by a single term, drugs, making it nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the psychological, medical, ethical, and legal issues surrounding their use. The poverty of our language has been only slightly eased by the introduction of the term psychedelics to differentiate certain visionary compounds, which can produce extraordinary insights, from narcotics and other classic agents of stupefaction and abuse. However, we should not be too quick to feel nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960s. Yes, crucial breakthroughs were made, socially and psychologically, and drugs were central to the process, but one need only read accounts of the time, such as Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, to see the problem with a society bent upon rapture at any cost. For every insight of lasting value produced by drugs, there was an army of zombies with flowers in their hair shuffling toward failure and regret. Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out is wise, or even benign, only if you can then drop into a mode of life that makes ethical and material sense and doesn’t leave your children wandering in traffic. Drug abuse and addiction are real problems, of course, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should these medicines be made illegal? Of course not. But people need to be informed about their hazards, and addicts need treatment. And all drugs—including alcohol, cigarettes, and aspirin—must be kept out of the hands of children. I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith, and my thinking on the subject has not changed. The “war on drugs” has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers, rapists, and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.) I have two daughters who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that they choose their drugs wisely, but a life lived entirely without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. I hope they someday enjoy a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If they drink alcohol as adults, as they probably will, I will encourage them to do it safely. If they choose to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation.[2]  Tobacco should be shunned, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer them away from it. Needless to say, if I knew that either of my daughters would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if they don’t try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience. This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear below, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug. It has been many years since I took psychedelics myself, and my abstinence is born of a healthy respect for the risks involved. However, there was a period in my early twenties when I found psilocybin and LSD to be indispensable tools, and some of the most important hours of my life were spent under their influence. Without them, I might never have discovered that there was an inner landscape of mind worth exploring. There is no getting around the role of luck here. If you are lucky, and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened (or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible). If you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane. While I do not recommend the latter experience, it does increase one’s respect for the tenuous condition of sanity, as well as one’s compassion for people who suffer from mental illness. Human beings have ingested plant-based psychedelics for millennia, but scientific research on these compounds did not begin until the 1950s. By 1965, a thousand studies had been published, primarily on psilocybin and LSD, many of which attested to the usefulness of psychedelics in the treatment of clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol addiction, and the pain and anxiety associated with terminal cancer. Within a few years, however, this entire field of research was abolished in an effort to stem the spread of these drugs among the public. After a hiatus that lasted an entire generation, scientific research on the pharmacology and therapeutic value of psychedelics has quietly resumed. Psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and mescaline all powerfully alter cognition, perception, and mood. Most seem to exert their influence through the serotonin system in the brain, primarily by binding to 5-HT2A receptors (though several have affinity for other receptors as well), leading to increased activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Although the PFC in turn modulates subcortical dopamine production—and certain of these compounds, such as LSD, bind directly to dopamine receptors—the effect of psychedelics seems to take place largely outside dopamine pathways, which could explain why these drugs are not habit-forming. The efficacy of psychedelics might seem to establish the material basis of mental and spiritual life beyond any doubt, for the introduction of these substances into the brain is the obvious cause of any numinous apocalypse that follows. It is possible, however, if not actually plausible, to seize this evidence from the other end and argue, as Aldous Huxley did in his classic The Doors of Perception, that the primary function of the brain may be eliminative: Its purpose may be to prevent a transpersonal dimension of mind from flooding consciousness, thereby allowing apes like ourselves to make their way in the world without being dazzled at every step by visionary phenomena that are irrelevant to their physical survival. Huxley thought of the brain as a kind of “reducing valve” for “Mind at Large.” In fact, the idea that the brain is a filter rather than the origin of mind goes back at least as far as Henri Bergson and William James. In Huxley’s view, this would explain the efficacy of psychedelics: They may simply be a material means of opening the tap. Huxley was operating under the assumption that psychedelics decrease brain activity. Some recent data have lent support to this view; for instance, a neuroimaging study of psilocybin suggests that the drug primarily reduces activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in a wide variety of tasks related to self-monitoring. However, other studies have found that psychedelics increase activity throughout the brain. Whatever the case, the action of these drugs does not rule out dualism, or the existence of realms of mind beyond the brain—but then, nothing does. That is one of the problems with views of this kind: They appear to be unfalsifiable.[3] We have reason to be skeptical of the brain-as-barrier thesis. If the brain were merely a filter on the mind, damaging it should increase cognition. In fact, strategically damaging the brain should be the most reliable method of spiritual practice available to anyone. In almost every case, loss of brain should yield more mind. But that is not how the mind works. Some people try to get around this by suggesting that the brain may function more like a radio, a receiver of conscious states rather than a barrier to them. At first glance, this would appear to account for the deleterious effects of neurological injury and disease, for if one smashes a radio with a hammer, it will no longer function properly. There is a problem with this metaphor, however. Those who employ it invariably forget that we are the music, not the radio. If the brain were nothing more than a receiver of conscious states, it should be impossible to diminish a person’s experience of the cosmos by damaging her brain. She might seem unconscious from the outside—like a broken radio—but, subjectively speaking, the music would play on. Specific reductions in brain activity might benefit people in certain ways, unmasking memories or abilities that are being actively inhibited by the regions in question. But there is no reason to think that the pervasive destruction of the central nervous system would leave the mind unaffected (much less improved). Medications that reduce anxiety generally work by increasing the effect of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, thereby diminishing neuronal activity in various parts of the brain. But the fact that dampening arousal in this way can make people feel better does not suggest that they would feel better still if they were drugged into a coma. Similarly, it would be unsurprising if psilocybin reduced brain activity in areas responsible for self-monitoring, because that might, in part, account for the experiences that are often associated with the drug. This does not give us any reason to believe that turning off the brain entirely would yield an increased awareness of spiritual realities. However, the brain does exclude an extraordinary amount of information from consciousness. And, like many who have taken psychedelics, I can attest that these compounds throw open the gates. Positing the existence of a Mind at Large is more tempting in some states of consciousness than in others. But these drugs can also produce mental states that are best viewed as forms of psychosis. As a general matter, I believe we should be very slow to draw conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences—no matter how profound they may seem. One thing is certain: The mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary, waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity (or seeming profundity) of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed. Many people wonder about the difference between meditation (and other contemplative practices) and psychedelics. Are these drugs a form of cheating, or are they the only means of authentic awakening? They are neither. All psychoactive drugs modulate the existing neurochemistry of the brain—either by mimicking specific neurotransmitters or by causing the neurotransmitters themselves to be more or less active. Everything that one can experience on a drug is, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has seen or felt after ingesting LSD is likely to have been seen or felt by someone, somewhere, without it. However, it cannot be denied that psychedelics are a uniquely potent means of altering consciousness. Teach a person to meditate, pray, chant, or do yoga, and there is no guarantee that anything will happen. Depending upon his aptitude or interest, the only reward for his efforts may be boredom and a sore back. If, however, a person ingests 100 micrograms of LSD, what happens next will depend on a variety of factors, but there is no question that something will happen. And boredom is simply not in the cards. Within the hour, the significance of his existence will bear down upon him like an avalanche. As the late Terence McKenna[4]  never tired of pointing out, this guarantee of profound effect, for better or worse, is what separates psychedelics from every other method of spiritual inquiry. Ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket without a guidance system. One might wind up somewhere worth going, and, depending on the compound and one’s “set and setting,” certain trajectories are more likely than others. But however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis. Hence, the terms psychotomimetic and psychotogenic that are occasionally applied to these drugs. I have visited both extremes on the psychedelic continuum. The positive experiences were more sublime than I could ever have imagined or than I can now faithfully recall. These chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of nature itself is a mere simulacrum. It is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant redwood and amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. It is quite another to spend an apparent eternity in egoless communion with it. Positive psychedelic experiences often reveal how wondrously at ease in the universe a human being can be—and for most of us, normal waking consciousness does not offer so much as a glimmer of those deeper possibilities. People generally come away from such experiences with a sense that conventional states of consciousness obscure and truncate sacred insights and emotions. If the patriarchs and matriarchs of the world’s religions experienced such states of mind, many of their claims about the nature of reality would make subjective sense. A beatific vision does not tell you anything about the birth of the cosmos, but it does reveal how utterly transfigured a mind can be by a full collision with the present moment. However, as the peaks are high, the valleys are deep. My “bad trips” were, without question, the most harrowing hours I have ever endured, and they make the notion of hell—as a metaphor if not an actual destination—seem perfectly apt. If nothing else, these excruciating experiences can become a source of compassion. I think it may be impossible to imagine what it is like to suffer from mental illness without having briefly touched its shores. At both ends of the continuum, time dilates in ways that cannot be described—apart from merely observing that these experiences can seem eternal. I have spent hours, both good and bad, in which any understanding that I had ingested a drug was lost, and all memories of my past along with it. Immersion in the present moment to this degree is synonymous with the feeling that one has always been and will always be in precisely this condition. Depending on the character of one’s experience at that point, notions of salvation or damnation may well apply. Blake’s line about beholding “eternity in an hour” neither promises nor threatens too much. In the beginning, my experiences with psilocybin and LSD were so positive that I did not see how a bad trip could be possible. Notions of “set and setting,” admittedly vague, seemed sufficient to account for my good luck. My mental set was exactly as it needed to be—I was a spiritually serious investigator of my own mind—and my setting was generally one of either natural beauty or secure solitude. I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasant until they weren’t, but once the doors to hell opened, they appeared to have been left permanently ajar. Thereafter, whether or not a trip was good in the aggregate, it generally entailed some excruciating detour on the path to sublimity. Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it. On my first trip to Nepal, I took a rowboat out on Phewa Lake in Pokhara, which offers a stunning view of the Annapurna range. It was early morning, and I was alone. As the sun rose over the water, I ingested 400 micrograms of LSD. I was twenty years old and had taken the drug at least ten times previously. What could go wrong? Everything, as it turns out. Well, not everything—I didn’t drown. I have a vague memory of drifting ashore and being surrounded by a group of Nepali soldiers. After watching me for a while, as I ogled them over the gunwale like a lunatic, they seemed on the verge of deciding what to do with me. Some polite words of Esperanto and a few mad oar strokes, and I was offshore and into oblivion. I suppose that could have ended differently. But soon there was no lake or mountains or boat—and if I had fallen into the water, I am pretty sure there would have been no one to swim. For the next several hours my mind became a perfect instrument of self-torture. All that remained was a continuous shattering and terror for which I have no words. An encounter like that takes something out of you. Even if LSD and similar drugs are biologically safe, they have the potential to produce extremely unpleasant and destabilizing experiences. I believe I was positively affected by my good trips, and negatively affected by the bad ones, for weeks and months. Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably shouldn’t spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one’s own skin and suffering less there. As I discussed in The End of Faith, I view most psychedelic experiences as potentially misleading. Psychedelics do not guarantee wisdom or a clear recognition of the selfless nature of consciousness. They merely guarantee that the contents of consciousness will change. Such visionary experiences, considered in their totality, appear to me to be ethically neutral. Therefore, it seems that psychedelic ecstasies must be steered toward our personal and collective well-being by some other principle. As Daniel Pinchbeck pointed out in his highly entertaining book Breaking Open the Head, the fact that both the Mayans and the Aztecs used psychedelics, while being enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice, makes any idealistic connection between plant-based shamanism and an enlightened society seem terribly naïve. As I discuss elsewhere in my work, the form of transcendence that appears to link directly to ethical behavior and human well-being is that which occurs in the midst of ordinary waking life. It is by ceasing to cling to the contents of consciousness—to our thoughts, moods, and desires— that we make progress. This project does not in principle require that we experience more content.[5]  The freedom from self that is both the goal and foundation of “spiritual” life is coincident with normal perception and cognition—though, admittedly, this can be difficult to realize. The power of psychedelics, however, is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. William James said it about as well as anyone:[6] One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question,—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 388) I believe that psychedelics may be indispensable for some people—especially those who, like me, initially need convincing that profound changes in consciousness are possible. After that, it seems wise to find ways of practicing that do not present the same risks. Happily, such methods are widely available. Recommended Reading: Huxley, A. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. McKenna, T. Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution. McKenna, T. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. McKenna, T. True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. Pinchbeck, D. Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. Stevens, J. Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. Ratsch, C. The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: Ethnopharmacology and Its Applications. Ott, J. Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History. Strassman, R. DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences. Related article: What’s the Point of Transcendence?     legacy-site/Pokhara.jpg