Politics and Sanity

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with David Frum and Andrew Sullivan about the Trump presidency, hyper-partisanship, how democracies fail, immigration, the lowering life expectancy in the U.S., racism, social media, the opioid crisis, marijuana legalization, religion, what a healthy politics might look like, and other topics.

David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, his ninth book. Frum spent most of his career in conservative media and research institutions, including the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. He is a past chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading center-right think tank in the United Kingdom, and a former director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. In 2001-2002, he served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. Frum holds a BA and MA in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard.

Andrew Sullivan is a writer at large for New York Magazine. He holds a BA from Oxford University in Modern History and Modern Languages and a PhD in government at Harvard University. He was editor of The New Republic from 1991 – 1996, and the creator of The Daily Dish, one of the first political blogs, from 2000 – 2015. A winner of three National Magazine Awards, he was also the weekly American columnist for the Sunday Times of London from 1996 – 2014. He wrote the first cover story and first book in favor of marriage equality in 1989 and 1995, an AIDS memoir, Love Undetectable, in 1998, and The Conservative Soul in 2006.

Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events.

Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.

Harris's work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.

Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.