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.

#79 — The Road to Tyranny

May 29, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Timothy Snyder about his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

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#78 — Persuasion and Control

May 26, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Zeynep Tufekci about "surveillance capitalism," the Trump campaign's use of Facebook, AI-enabled marketing, the health of the press, Wikileaks, ransomware attacks, and other topics.

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#77 — The Moral Complexity of Genetics

May 22, 2017

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, controversies about race and intelligence, and other topics.

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#76 — The Path to Impeachment

May 18, 2017

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

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#75 — Ask Me Anything 7

May 12, 2017

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris answers questions from listeners about the illusion of the self, his podcast with Charles Murray, the future of brain-machine interfaces, his BJJ practice, reasoning with the extreme Left, mindfulness and parenting, his experience of going back to school after a...