This week we are serializing yet another episode from the After On Podcast here on Ars. The broader series is built around deep-dive interviews with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists, and tends to be very tech- and science-heavy. You can access the excerpts on Ars via an embedded audio player, or by reading accompanying transcripts (both of which are below).

This week my guest is Sam Harris: a neuroscientist turned bestselling author turned podcasting colossus. We’ll be running the episode in four installments, starting today. Harris has described his job as “thinking in public.” In doing this, he has never been one to shrink from controversy. He irked many by revealing himself as a committed atheist in his first book, 2004’s End of Faith. He’s spent much of the time since then articulating a genuinely heterodox set of political and other beliefs.

The uniqueness of Harris’ perspective is evidenced by his ability to trigger comparable gusts of outrage from both the left and the right (generally from the extremes of each camp). The many fans and supporters he has won likewise hail from throughout the political spectrum. I’ll add that a lot of Sam’s fascinations and domains of expertise are apolitical. These include meditation and the nature of consciousness, as well as both philosophy and neuroscience writ large.

My podcast series began as a limited eight-episode run, covering topics prominent in my most recent novel, After On. One of those topics is terrorism, and I interviewed Harris because he’s quite outspoken about it. We enter that subject toward the start of today’s segment, by way of discussing an incident in which Ben Affleck initiated a famous shouting match with Harris when both were guests on Bill Maher’s show (it was the single most-viewed clip in the long history of Maher’s show at the time, and probably still is).

If you enjoy my conversation with Harris, a full archive of my episodes can be found on my site or via your favorite podcast app by searching for “After On.” I’ve posted dozens of deep-dive interviews with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists, tackling subjects including cryptocurrency, astrophysics, drones, genomics, synthetic biology, neuroscience, consciousness, privacy and government hacking, and more.

Finally, I’d like to briefly mention a series of four articles that I’m posting to Medium this month on the uplifting topic of existential risk—which is to say the grim yet perversely fascinating possibility that our technological creations might just annihilate us. I believe I present some arguments and analytic lenses that are new to this important topic—and some of these tie quite closely to the issues that Harris and I discuss in our conversation. The first piece in the series is right here. I should note that Medium is running this in its editorially curated, paid, members-only section. The good news is that Medium gives everyone access to a few articles per month with essentially zero friction.

To continue on to part two of this podcast, click here

This special edition of the Ars Technicast podcast can be accessed in the following places:

iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ars-technicast/id522504024?mt=2 (Might take several hours after publication to appear.)

RSS:

http://arstechnica.libsyn.com/rss

Stitcher

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ars-technicast/the-ars-technicast

Libsyn:

http://directory.libsyn.com/shows/view/id/arstechnica