Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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Today I am speaking with Robert Wright. Robert is an author, I think most famously of the book The

Moral Animal, which was one of the first books that many of us read on evolutionary psychology.

Robert has written many other books, and for many journals, he's written for The New Yorker,

The Atlantic, Time, Slate, The New Republic. He's a recipient of the National Magazine Award for

SA and Criticism, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's taught

in the psychology department, the University of Pennsylvania, and in the religion department at

Princeton. He's currently a visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary

in New York. Robert's new book is Why Buddhism Is True, The Science and Philosophy of Meditation

and Enlightenment. We talk almost entirely about the book. We start the conversation putting

some of our checkered history to rest so that we can move on. Those of you who know the history

will know that it has been, as I often say, of these kinds of things fairly prickly, but we have a

very collegial conversation on the topic at hand. We talk about the connection between meditation

and morality. There's a fair amount about the harmony between evolutionary psychology and the

Buddhist view of the mind, also a lot about the eluciriness of the self and how to make sense of

that claim. In any case, I now bring you Robert Wright. I am here with Robert Wright. Robert,

...