Sam Harris: Right to Reply
Decoding the Gurus
Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2024
⏱️ 134 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sam Harris is an author, podcaster, public intellectual, ex-New Atheist, card-returning IDWer, and someone who likely needs no introduction. This is especially the case if you are a DTG listener as we recently released a full-length decoding episode on Sam.
Following that episode, Sam generously agreed to come on to address some of the points we raised in the Decoding and a few other select topics. As you will hear we get into some discussions of the lab leak, what you can establish from introspection and the nature of self, motivations for extremism, coverage of the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and selective application of criticism.
Also covered in the episode are Andrew Huberman's dog and his thanking eyes, Joe Rogan's condensed conspiracism, and the value of AI protocol searches.
Links
- Our Decoding Episode on Sam
- Our interview with three virologists on the Lab Leak
- Kevin Drum's blog. 'I read the entire Slack archive about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. There is no evidence of improper behaviour'
- New York Magazine article by Eric Levitz 'Sam Harris’s Fairy-Tale Account of the Israel-Hamas Conflict'
- Making Sense Podcast Episode 351: 5 Myths about Israel and the War in Gaza
- Making Sense Podcast Episode 352: Hubris & Chaos- A Conversation with Rory Stewart
- Global Catastrophic Risk Institute: The Origin and Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Expert Survey.
- The Israel Democracy Institute. War in Gaza Public Opinion Survey (2): See Question 15.
- Atran, S. (2016). The devoted actor: Unconditional commitment and intractable conflict across cultures. Current Anthropology, 57(S13), S192-S203.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And Hello and |
| 0:25.0 | welcome to Decoding the Guru's the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist |
| 0:28.0 | listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand why they're talking about. |
| 0:32.5 | What they're talking about. |
| 0:34.3 | I'm Matt Brown, with me is Chris. |
| 0:36.2 | Kavanaugh, how you doing today, Chris? |
| 0:38.4 | Good, dude, I'm doing well. |
| 0:40.6 | Insight smart from the realm of psychology, the world of anthropology. |
| 0:45.1 | That's where we bring the expertise from, we gather, you know, |
| 0:49.9 | insights from these disciplines and we apply them critically to guru material. |
| 0:54.4 | That's what we do, ma'am. It's what we're here for. |
| 0:56.5 | Yeah, yeah. And you know a bit about psychology as well. You're not just an anthropologist. |
| 1:01.3 | I'm a professor of psychology. |
| 1:03.9 | Oh yeah, associate professor. |
| 1:05.7 | Associate professor. |
| 1:06.7 | But yes, I do. |
| 1:10.4 | I'm published in many psychology journals. |
| 1:12.4 | So take that, I'm published in many psychology journals so I'm published in one |
| 1:14.7 | philosophy journal. Take that philosophers and it's a German philosophy journal at |
| 1:20.0 | that so yeah. I remember when I published that article a couple of articles in vaccine yeah obviously vaccine and I felt |
| 1:28.7 | you know I'm a medical researcher you're a vaccine scientist? If we were gurus we could just be like, you know, well I'm a |
| 1:36.6 | neuroscientist now I'm published in cognition. You know that's that's it. So yeah, yeah, that's what we are up to. We're working hard. |
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