Making Sense of Encounters With Violence | Episode 4 of The Essential Sam Harris

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

🗓️ 26 January 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This episode centers around the specter of violence and surfaces some of Sam’s most controversial positions and difficult conversations.

We begin with author and former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, who delivers some potentially life-saving aspects of “tactical empathy,” which can also be applied to less extreme circumstances. Author and security expert Gavin de Becker then lays out his thesis from The Gift of Fear, which recasts this unfairly maligned emotion as an important attention-demanding, evolved signal.

We then spend time with Sam’s position on “profiling” and the moral and political complexities woven into it. This careful consideration leads to a conversation with author and firearms instructor Scotty Reitz, as they paint a stark picture of certain extremes of violence and consider what responsible gun ownership might look like.

Sam then answers questions directly on his often criticized and often misunderstood position on gun ownership before we turn to author and former Navy Seal Jocko Willink to apply pressure on the philosophical stance of pacifism. We conclude with the philosopher Tamler Sommers, who ponders the idea of “honor” in society and inspects how third-party delegation of violence might generate an illusive sense of justice.

About the Series

Filmmaker Jay Shapiro has produced The Essential Sam Harris, a new series of audio documentaries exploring the major topics that Sam has focused on over the course of his career.

Each episode weaves together original analysis, critical perspective, and novel thought experiments with some of the most compelling exchanges from the Making Sense archive. Whether you are new to a particular topic, or think you have your mind made up about it, we think you’ll find this series fascinating.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

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.
0:38.7	Welcome to the Essential Sam Harris. This is Making Sense of Encounters with Violence.
0:57.7	The goal of this series is to organize, compile, and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris
1:04.5	into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's
1:10.8	perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant
1:17.1	agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced.
1:24.3	The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue,
1:29.2	but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we'll point you to the full
1:35.1	episodes with each featured guest, and at the conclusion we'll offer some reading, listening,
1:41.2	and watching suggestions which range from fun and light to densely academic.
1:47.6	One note to keep in mind for this series. Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge
1:53.5	where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of
1:58.4	unnecessarily partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study
2:04.3	naturally bleeds into and greatly affects others. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics
2:11.5	as these dives into the archives unfold, and you're thinking about a particular topic may shift
2:17.4	as you realize its contingent relationships with others. In this topic, you'll hear the natural
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Waking Up with Sam Harris, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Waking Up with Sam Harris and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.