Waking Up With Sam Harris - Subscriber Content

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