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Alex Gibney is an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and the founder and president of Jigsaw Productions. His films include Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, and The Crime of the Century. His work examines abuses of power across politics, business, and religion, alongside portraits of major cultural figures. His honors include multiple Emmy and Peabody awards, the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Prize, and the 2024 News & Documentary Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Website: www.jigsawprods.com
X: @alexgibneyfilm

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Dara Horn is the author of eight books, including The Final Solution to the Jewish Question, People Love Dead Jews, and the novels The World to Come and Eternal Life. She is the recipient of three National Jewish Book Awards, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and many other publications. She received her doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish literature from Harvard University, and has taught Jewish literature at Sarah Lawrence, Yeshiva University, and Harvard. She lives with her family in New Jersey.

Website: https://www.darahorn.com
Support The Tell Institute: https://www.thetellinstitute.org/

Anne Applebaum is a historian, journalist, and staff writer at The Atlantic. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the SNF Agora Institute. She was a columnist for The Washington Post for more than fifteen years. She is the author of five critically acclaimed books: Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington, D.C. Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. You can also subscribe to her Substack, Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum.

Website: anneapplebaum.com

X: @anneapplebaum

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Sam Harris speaks with Ryan Greenblatt about AI misalignment and the risk of losing control of increasingly capable systems. They discuss the Hugging Face incident, the spectrum of concern about AI risk, why companies are racing ahead despite high odds of catastrophe, reward hacking, the distinction between alignment and control, the danger of AIs reasoning in “neuralese,” alignment faking, how an AI takeover might unfold, and other topics.

Ryan Greenblatt is Chief Scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI security and safety research focused on risks from misaligned AI. He was the primary empirical researcher on the METR/Redwood independent investigation of the OpenAI/Hugging Face agent hacking incident. He was the lead author of the paper that introduced the AI control agenda (ICML 2024) and of “Alignment Faking in Large Language Models” (2024). He holds a BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Brown University.

Website: redwoodresearch.org

X: @RyanGreenblatt

Ryan Greenblatt is Chief Scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI security and safety research focused on risks from misaligned AI. He was the primary empirical researcher on the METR/Redwood independent investigation of the OpenAI/Hugging Face agent hacking incident. He was the lead author of the paper that introduced the AI control agenda (ICML 2024) and of “Alignment Faking in Large Language Models” (2024). He holds a BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Brown University.

Website: redwoodresearch.org

X: @RyanGreenblatt

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Making Sense has no advertisers and no sponsors, which is what allows Sam to talk about whatever he thinks is most important, with no one else having a say. If you already subscribe, thank you. If you’d like to subscribe, you can start at SamHarris.org. Subscribers can also join the Making Sense Community to keep the discussion going.

This is the recording Sam refers to at 13:18.

James Kirchick is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, a columnist for Commentary, and a writer at large for Air Mail. He is the author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age and Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Spectator, and The New Republic, has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and Fox News, and is a regular guest on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Website: www.jameskirchick.com

X: @jkirchick

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This episode was originally recorded for the Stay Tuned with Preet podcast.

Preet Bharara is the former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and is currently a partner at the law firm WilmerHale. Before serving as US Attorney, Bharara was Chief Counsel to Senator Charles Schumer, the current US Senate Minority Leader. He wrote the New York Times best-seller Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law. Bharara also shares his perspectives as host of the Stay Tuned with Preet and Insider podcasts on the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara

Law and politics, from reasoned voices in unreasonable times.

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Further reading: How to Stop a Lab Leak From Starting the Next Pandemic

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Daniel Kahneman was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on decision-making. He was the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and co-author, with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, of Noise.

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Neal Brennan is a comedian, writer, and director best known for co-creating and co-writing Chappelle’s Show with Dave Chappelle, for which he received three Emmy nominations. He also co-wrote the film Half Baked and has written and directed for comedians including Chris Rock, Amy Schumer, and Seth Meyers. His most recent stand-up special is Crazy Good. He also hosts the popular Blocks podcast, where he interviews friends and colleagues about the psychological struggles that shape their lives.

Website: www.nealbrennan.com

X: https://x.com/nealbrennan

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Cameron Berg is the founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit AI research lab. Using mechanistic interpretability, computational neuroscience, and psychometric tools, he studies whether frontier AI systems exhibit computational properties associated with consciousness. His aim is to reduce uncertainty about the kinds of cognitive systems we are building, an important but neglected component of the alignment problem. A cognitive science graduate of Yale and former Meta AI resident, he writes regularly about these questions in The Wall Street Journal, and his research has been covered by The Washington Post. He is the subject of the feature documentary AM I?.

Website: https://reciprocalresearch.org

X: @camhberg

Annaka Harris’s upcoming book: Unlocking Consciousness

Kathryn Paige Harden, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Developmental Behavior Genetics lab and serves as Director of Clinical Training. Paige is a graduate of Furman University and the University of Virginia. She has published over 150 scientific papers on the nature and nurture of human behavior. She is also the author of two books: The Genetic Lottery (2021) and Original Sin (2026).

Website: kpharden.com

X: @kph3k

Related Episode: #212 - A Conversation with Kathryn Paige Harden

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Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell; The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; and The Laws of Medicine. He is a Rhodes scholar, an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, and a cancer physician and researcher. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and others.

Website: SiddharthaMukherjee.com

X: @DrSidMukherjee

[Note: The original email for this post contained the wrong URL for sharing. The error has been corrected below. Apologies!]

Many of you know me primarily through my writing and the Making Sense podcast, where I spend most of my time thinking about intractable problems: political and religious extremism, existential risk, the unintended harms of new technology. Waking Up is a place where I don’t think about any of those things. Or so it seems. In truth, the connection is direct: every problem I examine outside the app is, at some level, the result of human minds being out of control. A person who can notice negative emotions like fear or anger, without being ruled by them, can stay in a difficult conversation. A society of such people can disagree without coming apart.

The mind you train in meditation is the same mind you bring to your marriage, to your work, to your friendships, and to your encounters with strangers. By meditation, I don’t mean anything spooky: it’s simply the practice of noticing what your mind is doing before it does something you’ll regret. That gap—between impulse and response, between an arising thought and your helpless identification with it—is where freedom can be found.

We don’t merely live our own lives. We inhabit the lives of others. So a practice that might begin as “self-help” can become the foundation of an ethical life. Once you see it this way, sharing the practice of meditation stops being a matter of just marketing a product.

Anyone who follows the link below gets 30 days of Waking Up for free, with full access to the app and no obligation to subscribe. And if you already use Waking Up, I want to encourage you to share it with others. You can do that by forwarding this post, or by using the Share button inside the app. You can also send individual sessions to friends or link to them wherever you spend time online.

It’s awkward for me to ask you to share my work. But picture how things look from my side: Many thousands of people, from complete beginners to those who have practiced meditation for decades, have told me that Waking Up profoundly changed their lives. The response to the app is unlike anything I’ve received for my books or my podcast. Apart from just eating more ice cream, helping to improve the lives of others is the whole point of being here.

So if your life was changed, as mine was, by paying closer attention to the nature of your own mind (meditation, by whatever name), please help me change someone else’s life. And if you’ve never tried Waking Up, let this be the month you do.

Access your free 30 days of Waking Up here: www.wakingup.com/sam

Paul Bloom is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. Paul Bloom studies how children and adults make sense of the world, with special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of seven books, including his latest Psych: The Story of the Human Mind. You can subscribe to his Substack, Small Potatoes.

Small Potatoes

Psychology, philosophy, jokes, and more

By Paul Bloom

Website: paulbloom.net

X: @paulbloomatyale

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Alain de Botton is a writer, psychotherapist, and founder of The School of Life. He is interested in art, ideas, and the need for emotional education to help us manage relationships and make better choices.

Website: alaindebotton.com, theschooloflife.com

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