Making Sense of Encounters With Violence | Episode 4 of The Essential Sam Harris

This episode centers around the specter of violence and surfaces some of Sam’s most controversial positions and difficult conversations. We begin with author and former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, who delivers some potentially life-saving aspects of “tactical empathy,” which can also be applied to less extreme circumstances. Author and security expert Gavin de Becker then lays out his thesis from The Gift of Fear , which recasts this unfairly maligned emotion as an important attention-demanding, evolved signal. We then spend time with Sam’s position on “profiling” and the moral and political complexities woven into it. This careful consideration leads to a conversation with author and firearms instructor Scotty Reitz, as they paint a stark picture of certain extremes of vi