Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Sam Harris speaks with Judea Pearl about causality, AI, and antisemitism. They discuss why LLMs won’t spawn AGI, alignment concerns in the race for AGI, Pearl’s public life after the murder of his son Daniel, the post-October 7th shift toward open anti-Zionism, the overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the misuse of “Islamophobia,” Israel’s fracture under Netanyahu, confronting anti-Zionism in universities, and other topics.
Judea Pearl is the Chancellor's professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is known internationally for his contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning and philosophy of science. He has received numerous scientific awards, including the 2012 ACM A.M. Turing Award (often described as the "Nobel Prize of computing"). Judea is the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. He also writes and lectures on Jewish identity and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002--2025 collects his essays on these topics.
Website: https://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html
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Sam Harris speaks with Judea Pearl about causality, AI, and antisemitism. They discuss why LLMs won’t spawn AGI, alignment concerns in the race for AGI, Pearl’s public life after the murder of his son Daniel, the post-October 7th shift toward open anti-Zionism, the overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the misuse of “Islamophobia,” Israel’s fracture under Netanyahu, confronting anti-Zionism in universities, and other topics.
Judea Pearl is the Chancellor's professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is known internationally for his contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning and philosophy of science. He has received numerous scientific awards, including the 2012 ACM A.M. Turing Award (often described as the "Nobel Prize of computing"). Judea is the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. He also writes and lectures on Jewish identity and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, 2002--2025 collects his essays on these topics.
Website: https://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html
SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast at samharris.org/subscribe OR become a channel member to access episodes on YouTube. For those who can't afford the full subscription price, we offer partial scholarships samharris.org/subscribe/scholarship
Stay updated on new episodes, essays, and events — subscribe to Sam Harris’s free newsletter: samharris.org/newsletter-signup
