Sam Harris: Transcending it All?

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2023

⏱️ 200 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris is the subject today and a man who needs no introduction. Although he's come up and he's come on, we've never actually (technically) decoded him. There is no Gurometer score! A glaring omission and one that needs correcting. It would have been easy for us to cherry-pick Sam being extremely good on conspiracy theories, or extremely controversial on politics, but we felt that neither would be fair. So we opted for a general and broad-ranging recent interview he did with Chris Williamson. Love him or loathe him, it's a representative piece of Sam Harris content, and therefore good material for us.

Sam talks about leaving Twitter, and how transformative that was for his life, then gets into his favourite topic: Buddhism, consciousness, and living in the moment. That's the kind of spiritual kumbaya topics that Sam reports causing him little pain online but Chris and Matt- the soulless physicalists and p-zombies that they are- seek to destroy even that refuge. On the other hand, they find themselves determined by the very forces of the universe to nod their meat puppet heads in furious agreement as Sam discusses the problems with free speech absolutism and reactionary conspiracism.

That's just a taste of what's to come in this extra-ordinarily long episode to finish off the year. What's the DTG take? You'll have to listen to find out all the details, but we do think there is some selective interpretation of religions at hand and some gut reactions to wokeness that leads to some significant blindspots.

So is Sam Harris an enlightened genius, a neo-conservative warmonger, a manipulative secular guru? Or is he, in the immortal words of Gag Halfrunt, Zaphod Beeblebrox's head specialist, "just zis guy, you know?".

Sam was DTG's white whale of 2023, but we'll let you be the judge as to whether or not we harpooned him, or whether he's swimming off contentedly, unscathed, into the open ocean.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're going to be. Oh, Hello and welcome to Dakota the Gurus the podcast where an anthropologist
0:28.5	and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
0:34.0	I'm Matt Brown. With me is my partner in crime, in defeating crime, Chris Kavanaugh,
0:39.1	the robin to my Batman, a young mind himself that I'm trying to cultivate and educate welcome
0:45.2	Chris some would say grooming in a good way the best the best of senses in the way
0:52.0	that you grew a horse.
0:54.0	I was going to say a bush.
0:56.0	That meant like the plant, you know, the...
1:00.0	Oh good, good, good.
1:02.0	Yeah, yeah. So with that auspicious start, hello Matt.
1:06.0	Hello, the audio listeners cannot say the Matt is rocking cat burglar cheek today. He's got a kind of hype bandana, sunglasses, a floral pattern
1:19.1	shirt. He's like an ity drug dealer. Or maybe that's just in my mind, math.
1:23.4	Don't listen to him, fellas.
1:24.9	This is like when you're telling people
1:26.4	that I say all kinds of mean and nasty things,
1:28.4	all fair.
1:29.1	We all know that's untrue.
1:30.2	Is that?
1:31.2	You're just trying to cover up for the fact that you're the mean one.
1:33.2	I'm as nice as apple pie. Yeah I know you like Scott Adams I don't like Scott Adams.
1:37.6	We've got the princess of opinions. This is true and actually it's going to be worse on the
1:45.1	episode today. I know I can feel it in my bones. No it'll be fine. It'll be fine
	...

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