Episodes
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/390-final-thoughts-on-the-2024-presidential-election
Sam Harris speaks with Mark Cuban about the 2024 presidential election. They discuss Trump’s ethics, his apparent political indestructibility, election denialism, the influence of Elon Musk, the strengths and weaknesses of the Harris campaign, the mystery of the southern border, Trump’s immigration and deportation policies, Elon’s trafficking in the “great replacement theory,” Trump’s economic policy, Harris’s tax and healthcare proposals, the effect of tariffs, the US supply chain, the problem of wealth inequality, a proposed tax on unrealized capital gains, support for Israel, a return to normal politics, and other topics.
Mark Cuban is an entrepreneur and investor. He is also known for his role in the television series Shark Tank and his ownership of the Dallas Mavericks. He has been an outspoken supporter of the Harris campaign.
Twitter: @mcuban
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/389-the-politics-of-risk
Sam Harris speaks with Nate Silver about cultural attitudes toward risk and the state of American politics. They discuss the erosion of trust in liberal institutions, polling and political narratives, different camps of cultural elites, the influence of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of FTX, Gell-Mann amnesia, Christopher Rufo, why Kamala Harris can’t admit to having changed her views, a problem with strict utilitarianism, AI and existential risk, what people misunderstand about election forecasting, which news events have affected the 2024 race, how current polls might be misleading, public vs. private polling, undecided and marginal voters, Gen Z, the gender divide, the likelihood that Trump won’t accept the election results if he loses, election integrity in the swing states, the chance of a landslide, the prospect of public unrest, and other topics.
Nate Silver is a statistician, writer, and poker player. He is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of the New York Times best sellers The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don't and On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. He writes the Substack Silver Bulletin.
Twitter: @NateSilver538
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Missing episodes?
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/388-what-is-life
Sam Harris speaks with Sara Imari Walker about a scientific understanding of life. They discuss the contributions of physics to this topic, Erwin Schrödinger, the inadequacy of standard definitions of life, the prospect of "artificial" life, the role of information, constructor theory, assembly theory, the space of all possible structures, a "block universe," the existence of abstract objects like numbers, the Fermi paradox, the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe, experiments that could decide how likely life is to emerge, the possibility of a Great Filter, the number of Earth-like worlds, and other topics.
Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. She is the deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She is also a fellow of the Berggruen Institute and a member of the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She is a recipient of the Stanley L. Miller Early-Career Award for her research on the origin of life, and her research team at ASU is internationally regarded as being among the leading labs aiming to build a fundamental theory for understanding what life is. Her research has been featured in Scientific American, Quanta Magazine, and a variety of other international outlets. Her book, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence, is available now.
Website: https://search.asu.edu/profile/1731899
Twitter: @Sara_Imari
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/387-politics-power
Sam Harris speaks with Ambassador Rahm Emanuel about the state of world order and American politics. They discuss the mystery of Japan’s economic health, U.S. competition with China, possible conflict over Taiwan and the Philippines, the significance of the South China Sea, the history of the Japan-U.S. friendship, how the Democratic Party lost its way, immigration, whether Vice President Harris needs a “Sister Souljah moment,” whether she should explain her changes of position better than she has, the standing of Israel in the eyes of the world, antisemitism, the Abraham Accords, Hamas, the West Bank, the influence of the religious right in Israel, a possible war with Iran, Netanyahu and Israeli security, a two-state solution, whether a Harris administration would reliably support Israel, and other topics.
Rahm Emanuel is currently the U.S. ambassador to Japan. He was a senior advisor to President Bill Clinton before being elected to represent Illinois in the House of Representatives in 2003. He was also President Barack Obama’s chief of staff from 2009 to 2010. In 2011, he was elected mayor of Chicago, where he served until 2019.
Twitter: @RahmEmanuel, @USAmbJapan
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/386-information-social-order
Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about his new book, Nexus, and its application to current crises. They discuss humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, democracy and dictatorship as information networks, the “naive view of information,” the advantages of fiction over truth, trust in institutions, self-correction in a democracy, truth vs. power, truth vs. order, the suicide of conservatism, fixing social media, algorithms as editorial choices, efficiency vs. inefficiency, threats to democracy, the authoritarian character of Trump’s candidacy, the need for patriotism and nationalism, Israeli politics, the peaceful transfer of power, Putin and the war in Ukraine, the vulnerability of world order, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, antisemitism and anti-colonialism, religious fanaticism among Israelis, the status of Arabs in Israeli society, biblical and post-biblical Judaism, whether a wider war in the Middle East is necessary, the danger of spirituality without ethics, and other topics.
Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the series Sapiens: A Graphic History and Unstoppable Us, and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. His books have sold over 45 million copies in 65 languages, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today.
Website: https://www.ynharari.com/
Twitter: @harari_yuval
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/385-ai-utopia
Sam Harris speaks with Nick Bostrom about ongoing progress in artificial intelligence. They discuss the twin concerns about the failure of alignment and the failure to make progress, why smart people don’t perceive the risk of superintelligent AI, the governance risk, path dependence and "knotty problems," the idea of a solved world, Keynes’s predictions about human productivity, the uncanny valley of utopia, the replacement of human labor and other activities, meaning and purpose, digital isolation and plugging into something like the Matrix, pure hedonism, the asymmetry between pleasure and pain, increasingly subtle distinctions in experience, artificial purpose, altering human values at the level of the brain, ethical changes in the absence of extreme suffering, our cosmic endowment, longtermism, problems with consequentialism, the ethical conundrum of dealing with small probabilities of large outcomes, and other topics.
Nick Bostrom is a professor at Oxford University, where he is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He is the author of more than 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which sparked the global conversation about the future of AI. His work has framed much of the current thinking around humanity’s future (such as the concept of existential risk, the simulation argument, the vulnerable world hypothesis, astronomical waste, and the unilateralist’s curse). He has been on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice, and was the youngest person to rank among the top 15 in Prospect’s World Thinkers list. He has an academic background in theoretical physics, AI, computational neuroscience, and philosophy. His most recent book is Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World.
Website: https://nickbostrom.com/
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/384-stress-testing-our-democracy
Sam Harris speaks with Barton Gellman about election integrity and the safeguarding of American democracy. They discuss the war games he's run to test our response to an authoritarian president, using federal troops against American citizens, the difference between laws and norms, state powers to resist the federal government, voter identification and election integrity, political control over election certifications, the Bush-Gore election, the Electoral Count Reform Act, the prospect of public unrest after the November election, January 6th, George Soros, the "good people on both sides" calumny against Trump, what happens to Trump and Trumpism if Harris wins in November, the presidential debate with Harris, the authoritarian potential of a second Trump term, Project 2025, and other topics.
Barton Gellman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. He currently serves as Senior Advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Previously, he was a staff writer at The Atlantic and The Washington Post. He is the author of Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State and Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, for which he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Website: bartongellman.com
Twitter: @bartongellman
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/383-where-are-the-grown-ups
Sam Harris talks about the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the cesspool of X, Tucker Carlson’s conversation with Darryl Cooper, freedom of speech, and other topics.
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/382-the-eye-of-nature
Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins about his new book The Genetic Book of the Dead, the genome as a palimpsest, what scientists of the future may do with genetic information, genotypes and phenotypes, embryology and epigenetics, why the Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics couldn't be true, how environmental selection pressure works, why evolution is hard to think about, human dependence on material culture, the future of genetic enhancement of human beings, viral DNA, symbiotic bacteria, AI and the future of scholarship, resurrecting extinct species, the problem of free speech in the UK, the problem of political Islam and antisemitism in the UK, reflections on Dan Dennett, and other topics.
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and a best-selling author. He is celebrated globally for his unwavering critique of religion and his commitment to critical thinking. His books include The Ancestor’s Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth, The Magic of Reality, his two-part autobiography An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark, and Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide. His final book tour, “An Evening with Richard Dawkins,” is currently underway.
Website: richarddawkinstour.com
Twitter: @RichardDawkins
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/381-delusions-right-and-left
Sam Harris speaks with “Destiny” (Steven Bonnell) about politics and public debate. They discuss how he approaches debate, “Trump derangement syndrome,” January 6th, why Trump’s norm violations don’t matter to many people, misadventures on the information landscape, social media and the problem of being too online, Islam and conflict in the Middle East, the difference between the far left and the far right, the lack of sane conservative policies to counterbalance the left, whether the pendulum is swinging back on the left, the ethics and politics of apology, private friendships and public disagreements, and other topics.
Steven Bonnell, otherwise known as Destiny, is a YouTuber and political streamer. His commentary on politics and culture has made him almost ubiquitous online, where he stirs up controversy on both the right and the left. He grew up in a conservative Catholic household, and now spends much of his time arguing against American conservatism. He’s debated many controversial figures, such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
Website: www.destiny.gg
Twitter: @TheOmniLiberal
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/380-the-roots-of-attention
Sam Harris speaks with Amishi Jha about attention and the brain. They discuss how attention is studied, the failure of brain-training games, the relationship between attention and awareness, mindfulness as an intrinsic mental capacity, the neurological implications of different types of meditation, the neural correlates of attention and distraction, the prospects of self-transcendence, the link between thought and emotion, the difference between dualistic and nondualistic mindfulness, studying nondual awareness in the lab, the influence of smartphones, the value of mind wandering, and other topics.
Dr. Amishi Jha, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she cofounded in 2010. She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis, and did postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Her work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and the Pentagon, and she’s been covered in The New York Times, NPR, Time magazine, and Forbes. With grants from the Department of Defense and several private foundations, she leads research on the neural bases of attention and the effects of mindfulness-based training programs on cognition, emotion, resilience, and performance. Dr. Jha’s national bestseller, Peak Mind, describes her work with a variety of high-demand groups, from special forces, elite athletes, and first responders, to teachers, business and medical professionals, and students. Her forthcoming app, Pushups for the Mind, will be available to U.S. military service members in the fall of 2024, and for public release in early 2025.
Website: https://amishi.com/
Twitter: @amishijha
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/379-regulating-artificial-intelligence
Sam Harris speaks with Yoshua Bengio and Scott Wiener about AI risk and the new bill introduced in California intended to mitigate it. They discuss the controversy over regulating AI and the assumptions that lead people to discount the danger of an AI arms race.
Yoshua Bengio is full professor at Université de Montréal and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila - Quebec AI Institute. Considered one of the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence and deep learning, he is the recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, known as the Nobel Prize of computing.
He is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, a member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology, and Chair of the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI.
Website: https://yoshuabengio.org/
Scott Wiener has represented San Francisco in the California Senate since 2016. He recently introduced SB 1047, a bill aiming to reduce the risks of frontier models of AI. He has also authored landmark laws to, among other things, streamline the permitting of new homes, require insurance plans to cover mental health care, guarantee net neutrality, eliminate mandatory minimums in sentencing, require billion-dollar corporations to disclose their climate emissions, and declare California a sanctuary state for LGBTQ youth. He has lived in San Francisco's historically LGBTQ Castro neighborhood since 1997.
Twitter: @Scott_Wiener
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/378-digital-delusions
Sam Harris speaks with Renée DiResta about the state of our information landscape. They discuss the difference between influence and propaganda, shifts in communication technology, influencers and closed communities, the asymmetry of passion online and the illusion of consensus, the unwillingness to criticize one's own side, audience capture, what we should have learned from the Covid pandemic, what is unique about vaccines, Renée's work at the Stanford Internet Observatory, her experience of being smeared by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, Elon Musk and the Twitter files, the false analogy of social media as a digital public square, the imagined "censorship-industrial complex," the 2024 presidential election, and other topics.
Renée DiResta is a social media researcher and the author of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. Her work focuses on adversarial abuse online, including child safety issues, spammers and scammers, and influence campaigns run by state actors. From 2019 to 2023, she was the Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching, and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies.
Renée has advised Congress and the executive branch, as well as academic, civic, and business organizations on technology policy and trust & safety topics, including information operations, generative AI, election security, data transparency, and child safety.
Website: reneediresta.com
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/377-the-future-of-psychedelic-medicine
Sam Harris speaks with Dr. Jennifer Mitchell and Dr. Sarah Abedi about recent developments in research on psychedelics. They discuss the history of this research and the war on drugs, recent setbacks in the FDA approval process, MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the challenges of conducting this research, allegations of therapist misconduct, new therapeutic models for mental health treatment, psychoneuroimmunology, "non-psychedelic" psychedelics, good and bad trips, the FDA's coming decision on MDMA-assisted therapy, "right-to-try" policies for pharmaceuticals, the role of psychedelic therapists, the problem of having all this therapeutic work being done underground, and other topics.
Petition to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD: https://www.approvemdmatherapy.com/
Dr. Jennifer Mitchell is a professor in the UCSF Department of Neurology and Associate Chief of Staff for Research and Development at the San Francisco VA. Her research focuses on identifying and developing novel therapeutics for drug and alcohol abuse, PTSD, stress, anxiety, and depression, as well as on understanding the neural mechanisms responsible for these disorders. Dr. Mitchell has extensive and diverse experience with human and animal pharmacology, hypothesis-driven neuroscience, human proof-of-concept studies, and clinical trials. For the past few years, her work has centered around the development of psychedelic medicines for a broad range of mental health conditions, including PTSD.
Website: https://profiles.ucsf.edu/jennifer.mitchell
Dr. Sarah Abedi is a board-certified emergency medicine physician and psychedelic facilitator for clinical trials. She has worked as a psychedelic facilitator at the Pacific Neuroscience Institute and is set to join the psilocybin and mindfulness study at the USC Center for Mindfulness Science. She works on policy change to expand funding for mental health research. She served as Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Campaign Manager for TREAT California, a citizen-driven ballot initiative aimed at establishing a $5 billion funding agency to explore novel therapeutics, including psychedelics. Currently, Dr. Abedi is the Chief Medical Officer of TREAT Humanity, an organization dedicated to advancing the research of mental health therapeutics, including psychedelics, through enhanced funding mechanisms.
Website: www.sarahabedimd.com
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/376-how-democracies-fail
Sam Harris and Anne Applebaum discuss the nature of modern autocracies and how democracies fail. They discuss the power of ideas, why autocracies seek to undermine democracies, cooperation among dictators, how Western financial experts and investors have enabled autocracies, how Putin came to power, the failure of engagement and investment to create political change, what’s at stake in the war in Ukraine, Trump’s charisma, the current symptoms of American democratic decline, the ideologues around Trump, the hollowing out of institutions, how things might unravel in America, anti-liberal tendencies in American politics, the role of social media, the different pathologies on the Left and Right, analogies to Vichy France, the weakness of the Democrats, the political effects of the assassination attempt on former President Trump, and other topics.
Anne Applebaum is a historian, journalist, and staff writer at The Atlantic. She was a columnist for The Washington Post for 17 years. She is the author of five critically acclaimed books: Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington D.C. Her newest book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.
Website: anneapplebaum.com
Twitter: @anneapplebaum
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/374-consciousness-and-the-physical-world
Sam Harris speaks with Christof Koch about the nature of consciousness. They discuss Christof’s development as a neuroscientist, his collaboration with Francis Crick, change blindness and binocular rivalry, sleep and anesthesia, the limits of physicalism, non-locality, brains as classical systems, conscious AI, idealism and panpsychism, Integrated Information Theory (IIT), what it means to say something “exists,” the illusion of the self, brain bridging, Christof’s experience with psychedelics, and other topics.
Christof Koch is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. He is the former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and a former professor at the California Institute of Technology. He writes regularly for Scientific American and is the author of five books, most recently Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It.
Website: https://christofkoch.com/
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/373-anti-zionism-is-antisemitism
Sam Harris speaks with Michal Cotler-Wunsh about the global rise of antisemitism. They discuss the bias against Israel at the United Nations, the nature of double standards, the precedent set by Israel in its conduct in the war in Gaza, the shapeshifting quality of antisemitism, anti-Zionism as the newest strain of Jew hatred, the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the U.N., the lie that Israel is an apartheid state, the notion that Israel is perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, the Marxist oppressed-oppressor narrative, the false moral equivalence between the atrocities committed by Hamas and the deaths of noncombatants in Gaza, the failure of the social justice movement to respond appropriately to events in Israel, what universities should have done after October 7th, reclaiming the meanings of words, extremism vs civilization, and other topics.
Michal Cotler-Wunsh is Israel’s Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism. She is a prominent public speaker, author, researcher, and independent policy and strategy advisor on intersecting issues of antisemitism, law, human rights, and Zionism. Michal was a member of Israel’s 23rd Knesset, where she chaired the Addictions Committee & Subcommittee for Israel-Diaspora Relations, was a member of the Foreign Affairs & Security, Constitution, and Law & Justice committees, and co-founded the Interparliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism. Michal is a Trustee in the Rabbi Sacks Legacy.
Twitter: @cotlerwunsh
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/372-life-work
Sam Harris speaks with George Saunders about his creative process. They discuss George’s involvement with Buddhism, the importance of kindness, psychedelics, writing as a practice, the work of Raymond Carver, the problem of social media, our current political moment, the role of fame in American culture, Wendell Berry, fiction as way of exploring good and evil, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, missed opportunities in ordinary life, what it means to be a more loving person, his article “The Incredible Buddha Boy,” the prison of reputation, Tolstoy, and other topics.
George Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas, and raised in Chicago. He is the author of twelve books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Booker Prize for the best work of fiction in English, and Tenth of December, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a book about the Russian short story. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He has taught in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University since 1997.
Website: https://georgesaundersbooks.com/about-george-saunders
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
-
Share this episode: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/371-what-the-hell-is-happening
Sam Harris speaks to Bill Maher about the state of the world. They discuss the aftermath of October 7th, the cowardice and confusion of many celebrities, gender apartheid, the failures of the Biden campaign, Bill’s relationship to his audience, the differences between the left and right, Megyn Kelly, loss of confidence in the media, expectations for the 2024 election, the security concerns of old-school Republicans, the prospect of a second Trump term, totalitarian regimes, functioning under medical uncertainty, Bill’s plan to stop doing stand-up (maybe), looking back on his career, his experience of fame, Jerry Seinfeld, and other topics.
Bill Maher has been on TV for 30 years. His new book What This Comedian Said Will Shock You reached number one on the NYT bestseller list. Watch his podcast Club Random on YouTube or listen everywhere.
Website: billmaher.com
Twitter: @billmaher
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
- Show more
