Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content

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 B...

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 m...

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 U...

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 po...

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 sp...

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...

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 @ggre...

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 Mind...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 s...