"...some of the fault lies with me, if I were a better writer, a better communicator of these ideas I would have fewer problems.". Sam Harris is a breath of fresh air in this world full of extreme polarization and reputation protection. He understands truth and spreads it in the best way he can, becoming better and better as time goes on.

Sam is one of the great intellects of our time. His work will be remembered in the fields of sceptical and ethical thought. The clarity and eloquence of his talk here is something most of us will never get close to. He is an excellent example of what a modern philosopher should be doing.

Sam Harris really is one of the smartest people I've ever listened to.

Sam is really nice to listen to. He's got a pleasing, smooth voice.

Sam Harris is a real inspiration to me. A real life role model on moral intergrity.

I could listen to Sam Harris all day. Such a great man

Harris is so well-read. smart guy.

Love this guy. Fucking bulletproof.

"Cognitive illusion". I love it! I sometimes refer to it as "third person" from Douglas Harding's work. Or color commentary. "Ego" of course is a common name for the separate sense of self. Or the illusory self. I love to name call in this case. The more names I can give it the less real it becomes for me. Thanks again Sam for your vocabulary and way of phrasing things. I am learning so much from you in languaging things to help me in my daily life and work. 🎆

I'm grateful to Sam for helping me to fine-tune my bullshit detector over the last 7 years.

This was great! Thank you for uploading the video.

Thanks for all you have done and continue to do for the advancement of reason. I always feel a little better after hearing or watching you speak. And I enjoyed your “Waking Up}” audiobook on Audible. I might not agree on 100% on everything. But I still believe you are 100% open to changing your view when the evidence deems it necessary. And that is all I ever ask of anyone. I wish the world had more people with that quality. Again I want to say thank you so much for the passionate and engaging conversation you share with us!

This seems like ancient history but it was only seven years ago. Sam has always been amazing. I wish he had video on his current podcasts.

Sam Harris is an intellectual, capable of knocking sense into the brains of people who are blind believers of religion and faith in non existing divine character. It would be incredible to see such intellectuals elected to public offices and make living a great pleasure on earth.

Cannot wait for the new book!

Just listening to him makes my heart melt like butter.

25 minutes in he talks about MDMA. Most everyone does ecstasy to socialize and rave, but my first time was with my best friend for the first hour then alone till it wore off. It changed my life completely. I have aspergers and had never really been aware of OTHER people's emotions and had felt very depressed. MDMA made me realize that happiness was a choice, I decided from then on out, I would chose to be happy. Everyone saw this confidence, and in the past year my life has been incredible.

sam harris for president please

Your ability to keep calm and to the point are quite impressive!

I love this form - just being able to take the time to answer really good frequent questions fully without some live audience to worry about.

"I share your disappointment railboy" what I love about Sam Harris is that he is making a concerted effort to engage with the larger community, in novel ways, and willing to try new avenues to spread his message, and ultimately what will form his legacy - I know he'll probably never read this, but hopefully one day we'll meet and I can say it in person!

Sam Harris voice always puts me at ease. Great independent critical thinker and intellect

There are 15 more videos in this playlist. Best day ever!

Always a breath of fresh air......... Peace.........

Like Sam, my son has a doctorate in neuroscience, but did research on the peripheral nervous system, not the brain. My son's focus has been on robotics from an electromechanical and system dynamics standpoint, using computer control (he's an engineer). Sam's comments about how we naturally perceive ourselves to exist behind the eyes invoked my experience of considering myself as an organic robot! I'm a retired engineer who automated several machines & instruments over the years. Most were robots to some extent or another, each requiring a control system. That challenge of designing or specifying control circuits had me thinking about the thought processes of making the body move, and how those processes are determined; all begging to regard the rest of my human body as separate from 'me'. This illusion of duality is pervasive and not surprising, considering that most information comes to us through our eyes and ears! As Sam said, what we are, each of us is a biological entity from head to toe, and no further. Consciousness seems to be disembodied from us, not anything physical! This illusion persists in most of us, but a few have broken through to understand the mind a little better, to see it as very sophisticated computer's processes! The brain is a computer. Consciousness is part of the process, as far as scientist have discovered so far! Beyond that it's still a huge mystery that's unfolding. Regarding the sensation that the body is separate, my son shocked me with his research. He's discovering that the motion of our bodies is controlled directly from the spine! Of course, the spinal column is integrated with the brain to communicate directives that are interpreted to produce complex motion, but the actual commands & feedback often bypass the brain with nerve routes from muscles & some organs directly to the spinal cord. When we learn complex, coordinated motions, especially in childhood, much of the feedback information is precisely processed and memorized within structures in the column; my son speculates that such learning and muscular control evolved as the shortest, most fast-acting nerve circuits to enhance our physical response to threats, while freeing the brain to make slightly slower rational decisions. [I'm very loosely paraphrasing] So, it looks like who we are must include our bodies because the brain is tightly integrated into the entire body as a part of the central nervous system. One explanation for the mind-body duality illusion is that thinking is an electro-biochemical *process*, not the physical matter itself; so it seems to be an abstraction to us, that it can't be detected. Another explanation might be that we're somehow aware that our bodies are largely controlled by local subsystems for the extremities. So far, the concept of the 'soul' is not holding up to the mounting evidence that we are self-contained biological robots with brains.

One of the smartest people on the planet at this moment. Brilliant

Much thanks to this man for promoting meditation outside of any religious or traditional context!!!

The meditation mean...for me..is to ignore all the things in life .. because the life is like that and it is always .. this is what i learn from the meditation, sometime the problems so heavily, hard to carry on my shoulder.. but I can not leave all over the area.. it is not good ..not to responsibility or st least fight for the right or something.

Ben Stiller is right!

Seriously? Why the fuck is it important that he's using a macbook? For fuck sake.. This humble man talks for almost one hour about very interesting subjects, and most of the comments below are people ranting about his macbook, which maybe isn't even his. But even if it is, why is it a problem?

Not only is his logical point of thinking right on par with the top intellectuals of the day his voice is soothing in a way that it comforts you and makes you believe what he's saying... almost hypnotic like( I wonder if that's coincidental)

Let me sum up some of Sam's important points for you: 1) If it has no evidence do not claim it to be true or base your behavior on it. 2) Although all religions are equally false they are not all equally dangerous. For example: Islamic scripture has the concept of holy war in it - so it gives followers justification for killing others in defense of the faith. Jainism, on the other hand, has the concept of not harming any living creature - and although there is no reason to assume their assumptions about reality, Jains are simply not going to find a way through their faith to justify killing people. 3) There is no free will. Our consciousness and experiences are to be talked about in terms of brains. Brains have systems in them that through hierarchical processes produce our thought patterns and our thoughts, we are not the authors of those thoughts and therefore we have no free will: for example - think of a city. You cannot explain why your brain brought into consciousness those 3-5 cities and no other cities, even though you knew the names of other cities. More then that, when you actually picked one of those cities and said to yourself - "I was the one who freely chose that city among those 3-5 cities that came to my mind" - you cannot explain why you chose that city over another, and if you try to give reasons you quickly find that you cannot explain why that reason and not another came to mind, and if you think you know why that reason came to mind, you still cannot explain why an experience, that was the cause of the reason, didn't produce another choice. For example: "I chose Tokyo because I went to Japan last year", well guess what, you cannot explain why the fact that you were in japan last year made you choose Tokyo, it could have easily been something like this: "well I was in Japan already last year so I'm gonna pick another city that isn’t in Japan". Its all processes which most of them you are not aware of. You are simply at a receiving end of thoughts (and emotions) arising in your mind. This fact doesn't lessen value at all, brains can learn and change, well being is still better then suffering. Its just that you are not producing your thoughts, that is all it means. 4) When we are fighting religious people about their faith, we must understand that we are not fighting about logic, they are actually more logical then most people think. What we are really fighting is grief over dead family members, we are fighting their fear of death. They fight for their faith because they know that if their bible has even one falsehood in it then it is possible that it is wrong about our origins and the afterlife. So they fight to defend it all - for example they would defend beating children with a rod even though we know today that its not a good way to bring up children to become compassionate, non violent, adults. 5) There is no word that describes non astrologers, and for good reason. There is no place to define groups by their non belief in things we cannot be sure exist. A catholic never needs to define a word for the fact he does not believe in Zeus does he? Atheism is therefore a silly word. So is 'brights' and so is any word that tries to define people by their non belief, we are simply people who follow what we can know by reason. Words like Catholic and Muslim are ok, because we need a word to describe sectarian belief systems, since there are so many of them - we need to keep track of what assumptions the person we are engaging with has (So we can anticipate how he is likely to act based on those assumptions). 6) Any dogma shuts down free inquiry and is therefore counter to discovery of truths about the nature of reality. Hitler, Maw, Stalin... they created dogmatic societies which distorted a few scientific truths to fit their dogma. After they let those few truths in, they closed the doors for any further inquiry that could question their dogma, that is not the way to do science. Therefore, they cannot be used as examples to show what happens to any society who does not follow dogma (Look at Scandinavian countries - atheistic+non dogmatic, peaceful and the happiest societies on the planet). Sam is really fighting dogma, it just happens to be that religions are extremely dogmatic. So he criticizes them first. 7) Experiences don't have to last forever in order for them to have meaning. A good friendship has meaning even if it ends. A good meal was good even if it didn't last forever. So can your whole life be full of meaning even if it ends.

I looked up "badass" in the dictionary and I found a picture of sam harris.

His blue eyes, his huge arms, his face, his hair, and don't forget his obvious amazing brain, my god, this guy is the bomb!

Awesome video!

I greatly appreciate Sam mentioning cultivated meat in his response to the question about veg(etari)anism. I've seen several discussions on this topic as of late and this point was strangely absent from all of them. Having our natural/preferred diet without the ethical and ecological problems meat production normally comes with would be the best solution we could possibly come up with, I think.

When Reality is believed to be myth and myth is believed to be Reality...you have religion.

"Go forth and roll" -Sam Harris on MDMA

Thanks, I went to read it after you sent me the response.

Sam you are good i agree with you 100 %

His words are the future of our civilization.

If you cross Ben Stiller with Bradley Cooper you get Sam Harris. Spooky.

His voice is so soothing😘

Right or wrong it doesn't matter I have to say .. and it is so true.. it is about if the kids know that what the kids did it need to change and try to do the different way to .. make thing ...perfect

I tend to zone out when the legendary Sam Harris talks about meditation. Maybe it's working for me...

When I win the Powerball, I'm going to hire Sam to read me bedtime fairy tales from the bible every night.

Go forth and roll. By the MILLIONS!

Guitar lessons and sam harris. BEST KZfaq CHANNEL EVER!!

If only Sam could be elected. I'm 66, and I doubt I'll ever see an atheist elected to public office. Sigh....

He's better in a debate forum. Smart guy, speaks well.

I like how calm Sam Harris is and every answer is reasonably thought trough, I wish more people would think as clear and rational as him, in a world which becomes increasingly polarised with stupitidy and irratonality.

Amen to that,brother!!!!

Nice job Mr. Ham sarris

he is so coooool aaaaaaaah man.

Finally, a video.

So true.

It's Ben Stiller!

Sam for president

It’s actually interesting to me meditation comes hard for some people, the effects of it come very easy for me, almost immediately when I found meditation I could understand these ego things and recognize them in my brain. I didn’t like who it made me though and chose Travis over the vessel type mentality. I think ego is important for psyche, maybe I’m wrong, but I think allowing my body and mind to work autonomously is the best choice for me and the people around me.

I too have read all his books, seen most of his lectures, and consumed most of his media, but I would have to say my favorite work you've done is playing White Goodman in Dodgeball.

I wish Sam Harris would grow a beard, he'd look like an ancient middle-eastern God.

"Living in an echo chamber of confirmation bias" - that some good talking right there!

How can you live happily without the feeling of "self"? For example, I've believed that my feeling of low self-esteem has caused much suffering in my life. So my goal has been to raise my self-esteem. But if the feeling of a "self" is just an illusion, how can you even function happily in your life???

i started noticing sams hand gestures.. kinda funny to focus on :) sam rocks!

how to win in armwrestling match, Sam ?

His comment about it being difficult to be an active vegetarian was the most flawed of that talk. He has since walked back that comment a bit, & said he is reconsidering the issue. It's a medical fact that people can be perfectly happy & healthy without animal products in the diet at all (Harvard Medical & every other major health researcher agree.) Sam has since explained that he was irresponsible with his eating habits when he was vegetarian. The truth is that vegans & omnivores alike typically get *more* than enough protein. Sam has clarified that he didn't eat well enough when he abstained from meat, but it's not difficult to abstain from meat or other animals products in the developed world regarding health.

I really like Sam Harris. The only thing I dislike is his Mac... I just can't understand why he would use a Mac. :)

dèepak chopra is insane

I have a man crush on this guy.

Goddammit, cannot unsee.

An important thing to point out is that if a person was happy because of a religion, and that religion turns out to be false, the happiness was still real. It shows the potential we humans have. The sense of security and purpose is something we ourselves can create. The mental crutches in the form of religion is redundant. Even IF the religion was true, we ourselves have that power over our own feelings in our hands.

Islam in Europe is different for one important distinction. Muslims in Europe are in there for the social welfare in overwhelming percentage (80%). It's quite hard to live by Sharia and have a job other than herding goats and beating wives or vice versa. In European welfare state you can radicalize yourself, grow beard and walk in pajamas whole day and still be able to take care of 5 kids and three wives (you "divorce" 2 of them so they can get support for single mothers), because tax payer supports you in unreasonable faith that he will enrich him by his difference and that his kids will sustain the ponzi scheme of pension and universal health care system.

Sam talks about vegetarianism at 25:25. As an informed vegan atheist I have to say that I love Sam's works and talks. I've read The End of Faith, Free Will, Letter to a Christian Nation, I use his meditation app and find them all great. Here Sam is right when he said that there is no ethical argument or excuse for killing a living being and eating its meat. He is also right when he said that, if you couldn't bring yourself to kill an animal, then paying someone else to do it while still eating meat is not a solution. But it saddens me that Sam also makes the same fallacies and excuses as most other non-vegans. He said that: 1) He didn't get enough protein and therefore still eats meat, 2) We should slaughter them in a more humane way, 3) He is very buisy and active, and therefore needs the strenght of meat. 1. Protein is not a worry in a vegan diet. As long as you eat enough calories, you get enough protein. There are many vegan bodybuilders. Protein is highly found in beans, dark green leaves, peas and nuts. The fact is that we are herbevores by nature and don't need animal products to survive. Infact we live healthier if we only eat plants and get less diseases. 2. Rape is bad but we should still rape in a more humane way. Humane means compassionate. How do you compassionately take the life of an animal that does not want to die, for unnecessary reasons? You can't. Humane *Slaughter* is an oxymoron. 3. As I said, there are vegan bodybuilders. Dr. Michael Greger, Earthling Ed and Gary Yourofsky (whoms videos I highly recommend) did a lot, and I really mean a lot, of activism, lectures and public enlightenment - and are vegan. If you just try it, and pay attention to a well planned, plant based diet, then its pretty easy. Veganism is the best for your health, the best for the climate and the best for all animals. Watch the documentary 'What the health', 'Dominion', Ed's talk 'You Will not look at your life the same way again' and Dr.Gregers lecture 'The Leading Causes of Death' on KZfaq, get more enlightened than just being an atheist, and know that you are right and most of the masses are blind, ignorant psychopaths.

Sam is a great intellect and he's good at making me laugh too. Insightful and enlightening, he provides comic relief without trying. He needs to be listened to by our leaders and public intellectuals.

7:35 there isn't only that one form of "classic" meditation where you pay attention to the breath. I remember teaching myself "meditation"... basically just being curious if I could stop the chatter of my thoughts. If I could stop thinking. I got to a point where I could wander around my house without thinking thoughts. It was a really bizarre feeling. I could walk around and look at things, and make decisions, but there was no internal dialogue. There was no talking in my head. There were no thoughts or commentaries. But I could freely "float" through my house, I guess making decisions, but with no words or internal dialog. So the whole "mantra" or concentrating on your breathing thing isn't the only way to meditate or relax your mind. To give your brain a rest. Getting rid of the ongoing "chatter" seems to be important.

on a more serious note; sam harris burns away money on apple products

Harris/Clinton 2016 It's time....we must all rally around him

Situations are complex. There are deeper degrees of happiness and suffering than the mere consumption or non-consumption of drink. Liberty, trust, and respect, are some of them, and they should factor into our decisions. In Sam's words, experiences that are deeper are more valuable.

Well said, The lack of an explanation does not give you the right to make something up without evidence. Kudos to you!

I have a question for him.. If you're ever free, would you marry me? :O) What a lovely bloke!

I'm 100% with sam on all these topics except for vegetarianism. compassion towards all sentient beings must be cultivated. you can't just "eat pigs and cows but not cats and dogs" and expect to be taken seriously.

yes

You are fond of the word ‘marshal’. And no doubt, you are very articulate.

Thanks for calling Depok Chopra what he is, a con-man. Was Oprah's fave for awhile. Some ppl feel desperate I guess.

That white background is brighter than heaven- great talk, but way to white.

yeah!

Sam is one of my favorite personalities.

Sam Harris would love the truthcontest website. The site is something that has *a good chance to wake people up (wake yourself up)*. I really recommend it. Both spirituality and science. Something that *makes sense*, like sam (y)

Sam please let me know where can I buy your books

With regard to the final point, starting around 50:00... seems to me that there might be some sort of phenomenon (related perhaps in character to the Dunning Kruger effect) in which the capacity for honest intellectual self reflection and ability to honestly assess one's own blind spots is reduced to the degree that ... higher cognition? Tribal affiliation? Self actualization? ... has(ve) taken place, relative to what would be typical for a member of an older, different culture, with regard to one or more neural 'subject maps'. In other words: Where's that study at?

sam is amazing!

How come?

Loving the dig at Chopra...

Powerful Bas Rutten

where can i submit a question for sam harris to answer? I want to know whether or not he is 1. aware of who Alan Wilson Watts is, and 2. if he is familiar with his views (all/some), and 3. his reactions to them. Its not enough to know argument per argument where they stand, I'd rather like to know Sam's reaction to Watts' articulation of Causation, Free Will, and Consciousness. please let me know as I would like to frame the questions to him..

Judge others by how sensing they are. Right. Glad this is just your opinion.

24:49 - you heard it here folks! Go forth and roll!

I've also seen Hitch using a Mac before too.

Can you tell me where that Bible ad is. I looked for it but I couldn't find it. :(

I wonder why that is. I have the same problem too. I am an agnostic and had been for some time. but I still take art and music importantly. not just for entertainment purposes, but for their spiritual humane purposes.