#427 — AI Friends & Enemies

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about AI and current events. They discuss the state of LLMs, the risks and benefits of AI companionship, what it means to attribute consciousness to AI, relationships with AI as a form of psychosis, Trump’s attacks on science and academia, what Trump may be trying to hide in the Epstein files, how damaging Trump’s connections to Epstein might be, MAGA’s obsession with conspiracy theories, questions surrounding Epstein’s death, Paul’s research on revenge, Sam’s falling out with Elon Musk, where things went wrong for Elon, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe
0:21.9	at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely
0:27.3	through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider
0:31.7	becoming one. I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me. Sam, it's good to talk to you, as always. Yeah, great to see you. It's been, we were just talking off Mike. It was, it's been years. It's crazy how that happens. But it has been. I've been following you, though. You've been doing well. Yeah, nice. Yeah. Well, I've been following you.
0:55.5	I've read you and the New Yorker recently writing about AI.
1:00.0	I think you've written at least two articles there since we actually wrote a joint article for the New York Times seven years ago.
1:07.1	You can believe that.
1:08.4	Oh, yeah.
1:09.1	About Westworld and the philosophical import of watching it
1:13.9	and realizing that only a psychopath could go to such a theme park and rape Dolores and kill
1:20.3	children, et cetera. And I think we predicted no such theme park will ever exist because it'll just have,
1:26.2	it'll be a bug light for psychopaths
1:27.8	and normal people will come back. And if they do anything like that, they'll scandalize their
1:33.4	friends and loved ones and be treated like psychopaths appropriately. We'll see. We may be proven
1:39.0	wrong. Who knows? Who knows in this crazy time? But yeah, that was a fun article to write.
1:45.4	And I think we wrestled with the dilemmas of dealing with entities that at least appear
1:51.1	to be conscious and the moral struggles that leads to.
1:54.0	Yeah.
1:55.0	Well, so I think we'll start with AI, but remind people what you're doing and what kinds of problems you focus on. I think,
2:02.2	though we haven't spoken for several years, I think you still probably hold the title of most
2:08.1	repeat podcast guest at this point. I haven't counted the episodes, but you've been on a bunch,
2:13.9	but it's been a while. So remind people what you're, what you focus on as a psychologist. Yeah, I'm a, I'm a psychology professor. I have positions at Yale, but I'm,
	...

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