Sam Harris speaks with Sherry Turkle about her new book, Artificial Intimacy. They discuss the early optimism of the internet, the attention economy, the loss of solitude and boredom, the decline of empathy, whether the performance of empathy can ever be enough, AI as therapist, the first-person pronoun as the "original sin" of generative AI, humanoid robots and consciousness, loneliness among older people, and other topics.

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Sam Harris speaks with Jimmy Carr about comedy, culture, and the state of the West. They discuss Carr's new book on the craft of joke writing, why comedy should be taught, the ethics of crowd work, AI as a new god, cancel culture, attention and meditation, psychedelics, political violence and Italy's years of lead, immigration and unrest in Europe, Britain's economic decline, nuclear power, the case for educating for character, and other topics.

In today's conversation, Sam and Jimmy discussed meditation and why it's worth practicing. If that piqued your interest, we'd love to get you started with a free trial of Waking Up.

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Sam Harris speaks with Kevin Roose about the race to build artificial general intelligence. They discuss Roose's book The AGI Chronicles, the scaling laws behind AI's rapid progress, Dario Amodei's "big blob of compute" memo, the birth of reasoning models, Roose's encounter with Bing's Sydney chatbot, the roughly 50 people deciding humanity's future, the rivalries among lab leaders, AI agents and recursive self-improvement, the absence of regulation, and other topics.

If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.