#61 — The Power of Belief

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2017

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with author Lawrence Wright about al-Qaeda & ISIS, Arab culture, 9/11 conspiracy theories, the migrant crisis in Europe, Scientology, parallels between L. Ron Hubbard and Donald Trump, the Satanic cult panic, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:46.8	Today I am speaking with Lawrence Wright. Lawrence is a journalist and an author and a
0:52.7	screenwriter and a playwright. He is very well known as a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.
1:00.4	And he has written many works of nonfiction, a book called Remembrane Satan,
1:05.9	the looming tower for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, going clear, the revelatory work about
1:12.9	Scientology. It was made into a documentary, 13 days in September, and his most recent book is
1:19.5	The Terror Years, which is a compilation of all his writing on Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State
1:25.2	that he did for the New Yorker. So Needles to say our interests on a variety of topics here
1:31.2	overlap. I've never met Lawrence. I've never gotten a chance to speak with him before, so
1:36.3	it was great to have an excuse to do it. That's one of the amazing things about having this podcast
1:41.9	as a forum. I can send someone I admire or an email, I ask them if they want to have a conversation,
1:47.9	sometimes they do, and you get to hear it. So without further ado, I introduce you to the great
1:55.7	Lawrence Wright. I have Lawrence Wright on the line. Lawrence, thanks for coming on the podcast.
2:06.3	Good to talk to you, Sam. So I will have introduced you before we got on here, but tell people
2:12.8	how you describe yourself. Do you think of yourself as a journalist first or are you an author more
2:18.4	generally? How do you think of yourself? I guess I think of myself as a writer. I write in addition
	...

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