Making Sense with Sam Harris

Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events. The Making Sense podcast was selected by Apple as one of iTunes Best of 2015.

Harris is the author of the best-selling books The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, and Waking Up—along with Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Harris’s work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

Sam Harris's blog and podcast, and much more, can be found at samharris.org.

#313 — Apocalypse

Mar 25, 2023

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.

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Making Sense of Belief and Unbelief | Episode 6 of The Essential Sam Harris

Mar 15, 2023

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,...

#312 — The Trouble with AI

Mar 7, 2023

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,...

#311 — Did SARS-CoV-2 Escape from a Lab?

Feb 20, 2023

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"...

Making Sense of Free Will | Episode 5 of The Essential Sam Harris

Feb 14, 2023

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...