Waking Up With Sam Harris - Subscriber Content

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.

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

Known as “Mad Max” for his unorthodox ideas and passion for adventure, Max Tegmark’s scientific interests range from precision cosmology to the ultimate nature of reality, all explored in his new popular book Our Mathematical Universe. 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.” For more information about his work, please visit his MIT website and the Future of Life Institute.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, 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.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, 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).

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.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with the filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer about his remarkable documentaries, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

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

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, 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 Sci

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 prod

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, 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.

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, c