#226 — The Price of Distraction

Richard Dawkins presents Sam Harris with the 2026 Richard Dawkins Award at a live Center for Inquiry event. After the tribute, the two friends discuss consciousness and epiphenomenalism, AI and the Turing test, the scientific basis of morality, the failures of democracy and Trump ...  Show more

Sam Harris speaks with economist and Substack writer Noah Smith about the U.S. national debt, wealth inequality, and the economic consequences of AI. They discuss the mechanics of debt and inflation, the case for fiscal austerity, why the U.S. squandered low interest rates, moder ...  Show more

Sam Harris speaks with Adam Gazzaley about the way our technology is changing us. They discuss our limited ability to process information, our failures of multitasking, “top-down” vs “bottom-up” attention, self-interruptions and switching costs, anxiety, boredom, “digital medicin ...  Show more

In this episode we bring you our event ‘The Battle for Your Brain’, recorded on the 2nd of May 2023. Imagine a world where people who suffer from epilepsy receive alerts moments before a seizure, where the average person can peer into their own mind to eliminate painful memories ...  Show more

My thoughts on 8 possible long-term futures of Neuralink after attending the August 2020 progress update. This is a solo episode #2 of the podcast. Hopefully it’s interesting to some folks. The aim is for these episodes to be focused on a particular topic, at times challenging, a ...  Show more

A special interview from the Padverb Podcast, in which I discuss my research on language in the brain and thoughts on AI. The discussion covers topics such as backpropagation, how humans acquire language and concepts, how artificial neural networks differ from biological neural n ...  Show more