Waking Up With Sam Harris - Subscriber Content

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein answer questions about the practice of mindfulness. They discuss negative emotions, the importance of ethics, the concept of enlightenment, and other topics.

Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and Professor at the University of Toronto. He formerly taught at Harvard University and has published numerous articles on drug abuse, alcoholism and aggression. He is the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His works of nonfiction include In the New World, Remembering Satan, The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and Thirteen Days in September. He has also written a novel, God’s Favorite. His books have received many prizes and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. His most recent book is The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at a live event in Los Angeles (second of two). They discuss Richard’s experience of having a stroke, the genetic future of humanity, the analogy between genes and memes, the “extended phenotype,” Islam and bigotry, the biology of race, how to find meaning without religion, and other topics.

Maajid Nawaz is a counter-extremist, author, columnist, broadcaster and Founding Chairman of Quilliam – a globally active organization focusing on matters of integration, citizenship & identity, religious freedom, immigration, extremism, and terrorism. Maajid’s work is informed by years spent in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group, and his gradual transformation towards liberal democratic values. Having served four years as an Amnesty International adopted “prisoner of conscience” in Egypt, Maajid is now a leading critic of Islamism, while remaining a secular liberal Muslim. Maajid is an Honorary Associate of the UK’s National Secular Society, a weekly columnist for the Daily Beast, a monthly columnist for the liberal UK paper the ‘Jewish News’ and LBC radio’s weekend afternoon radio host. He also provides occasional columns for the London Times, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among others. Maajid was the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate in London’s Hampstead

Garry Kasparov spent twenty years as the world’s number one ranked chess player. In 2005, he retired from professional chess to lead the pro-democracy opposition against Vladimir Putin, from street protests to coalition building. In 2012, he was named chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Václav Havel. He has been a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal since 1991, and he is a senior visiting fellow at the Oxford Martin School. His 2007 book, How Life Imitates Chess, has been published in twenty-six languages. He lives in self-imposed exile in New York with his wife Dasha and their children. His most recent book is Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at a live event in Los Angeles (first of two). They cover religion, Jurassic Park, artificial intelligence, elitism, continuing human evolution, and other topics.

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 seven books, including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil and Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World in the Center for Middle East Policy and the author of the new book Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the World. His previous book, Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East, was named a Foreign Affairs “Best Book of 2014.” Hamid served as director of research at the Brookings Doha Center until January 2014. Prior to joining Brookings, he was director of research at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and a Hewlett Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Hamid is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and the vice-chair of POMED’s board of directors.

James Kirchick is a journalist and foreign correspondent currently based in Washington. He has reported from Southern and North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, across the European continent, and the Caucasus. Kirchick’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Ha’aretz, Newsweek, Time, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Slate, The Weekly Standard, The American Interest, The Virginia Quarterly Review, World Affairs Journal, National Review and Commentary, among other publications. He is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative in Washington, D.C., a correspondent for The Daily Beast and is a columnist for Tablet. His first book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering, University of California, Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco. He is the author (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Personal website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ Story discussed in this podcast: E.M. Forster. 1909. “The Machine Stops.”

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.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris talks about the results of the 2016 presidential election and the prospects of a President Trump.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Senior Fellow with the Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at The Harvard Kennedy School, a Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was named one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” of 2005, one of the Glamour Heroes of 2005 and Reader’s Digest‘s European of the Year for 2005. She is the best selling author of Infidel (2007) and Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015). She runs the AHA Foundation which seeks to elevate the status of women and girls globally. Lifting the Veil on “Islamophobia

Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic from 1991 - 1996 and was an intellectual architect of the campaign for marriage equality. He is the author of The Conservative Soul and Virtually Normal. Sullivan’s blog, The Dish, pioneered online journalism from 2000 - 2015. He is at work on a collection of essays and a book on the future of Christianity. Andrew Sullivan. “I Used to Be a Human Being.” New York Magazine. September 18, 2016.

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He’s the author of Animal Liberation, The Most Good You Can Do, and many other books. His most recent book is Ethics in the Real World. He is also the co-founder of The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit devoted to spreading his ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty. Website: www.petersinger.info Twitter: @PeterSinger

Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) and the holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. He has held Visiting Associate Professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California–Irvine. Saad has pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior. His works include The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature; The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption; Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, along with 75+ scientific papers, many at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and a broad range of disciplines including consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics. He received a B.Sc. (1988) and an M.B.A. (1990) both from McGill University, and his M.S. (1993) and Ph.D. (1994) from Cornell University. YouTube Channel: The Saad Truth Twitter

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris reads and discusses the third chapter of “The End of Faith.” Topics include: Christianity, Judaism, the Inquisition, witchcraft, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.

William MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was educated at Cambridge, Princeton, and Oxford. He is one of the primary voices in a movement in philanthropy known as “effective altruism” and the cofounder of three non-profits based on effective altruist principles: Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the Centre for Effective Altruism. William is the author of Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference.