4.6 • 29.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Sam Harris speaks with Helen Lewis about the culture wars. They discuss the role of journalists, DEI, political polarization, feminism, transgender activism, gender roles, the Rotherham scandal, Islam and jihadism, Elon Musk and X, the future of the Democratic Party, 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.
Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. |
0:10.0 | Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed, |
0:15.0 | and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. |
0:18.0 | In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, |
0:21.5 | you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to |
0:26.6 | your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the |
0:31.4 | podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you |
0:36.2 | enjoy what we're doing here, |
0:38.7 | please consider becoming one. |
0:48.6 | I'm here with Helen Lewis. Helen, thanks for joining me. |
0:50.3 | Thank you for having me. |
0:56.7 | So I've been a fan for quite some time. I have not read everything you've written or heard everything you've said, but I've been following you. I think it's been, it has been four or five |
1:02.2 | years or so. How long have you been at the Atlantic? Yeah, since 2019, so about then. Yeah, |
1:06.8 | yeah. So maybe we can start with your background as a journalist before we launch ourselves into the whole catastrophe, which is modern politics and culture war issues. How would you describe your focus as a writer and journalist? |
1:20.9 | These days, I'm more and more interested in reporting. I don't know about you, but I kind of went through a phase where I felt like I'd gorged on opinions. |
1:28.6 | I sort of thought everyone in the world has many opinions. I have many, many opinions, but actually |
1:33.0 | to me the hard work of journalism is going out there, talking to people, finding out facts, |
1:38.0 | writing them down, publishing them, all of which are, I think, a lot more difficult than sometimes |
1:42.1 | people would think. I always think a sort of sort of ration on as being the model for journalism. |
1:46.0 | You can get the same event that is reported by people who are there in the room into |
1:50.3 | you completely different ways. |
1:53.0 | And that is, you know, that is really hard intellectual work to do to try and sort out what |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -48 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Waking Up with Sam Harris, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Waking Up with Sam Harris and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.