#8 — Ask Me Anything 1

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

🗓️ 24 April 2015

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris talks about atheism, artificial intelligence, rape, public speaking, meditation, consciousness, free will, intellectual honesty, 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
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:46.9	For today's episode, I've decided to do an Ask Me Anything podcast. So I solicited questions
0:51.8	on Twitter and got some hundreds of them, and I will do my best to answer as many as I can over
0:57.3	the next hour or so. And these will, by definition, not be on a theme. How does the struggle of
1:05.0	atheists for acceptance compare with that of women, blacks, gays, etc. How long until true equality
1:11.6	arrives? Well, I'm not sure I would want to draw any strict analogy between the civil right struggles
1:18.0	of blacks and gays and women and that of atheists, because while atheism is, as a political identity,
1:26.5	more or less a non-starter in American politics at the moment, which is to say that you just cannot
1:30.9	have a political career, or certainly no reasonable expectation of one, while being out of the closet
1:37.2	as an atheist, nevertheless atheists are disproportionately well-educated and well-off financially,
1:44.0	and powerful. Far more than 5% of the people you meet in journalism or academia or Silicon
1:52.2	Valley are atheists. This is just my anecdotal impression, and I don't know of any scientific
1:58.1	polling that has been done on this question apart from among scientists where the vast majority
2:03.5	are non-believers, and the proportion of non-believers only increases among the most successful
2:10.4	and influential scientists. But I'm reasonably confident that when you are in the company of
2:18.0	wealthy, connected, powerful people, internet billionaires, and movie stars, and the people who are
	...

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