Making Sense with Sam Harris · Sam Harris

#453 — AI and the New Face of Antisemitism

January 16, 2026·22 min·1 clip

Judea Pearl: any system smart enough to explore its environment will eventually play with us the way a baby plays with toys.

Sam Harris opens episode 453 of the Making Sense podcast with the standard subscriber notice and welcomes Judea Pearl, computer scientist and author of The Book of Why, back to the show. They begin with Pearl's biography. He was born in 1936 in Bnei Brak, a town founded in 1924 by his grandfather Chaim Pearl with 25 other Hasidic families from Poland. Pearl tells the family lore that his grandfather came home bloody after a Polish priest assaulted him, and immediately ordered his wife and four children to pack for Palestine. Pearl describes his unique Tel Aviv high school education, taught in Hebrew by German university professors who had been expelled by Hitler from Heidelberg and Berlin. Harris pivots to artificial intelligence. Pearl argues current LLMs are not on the path to AGI because they summarize human-authored world models rather than discovering them directly from data, and he cites mathematical limitations from his ladder of causation framework: you cannot get causation from correlation, and you cannot get interpretation from intervention without additional assumptions. He notes Geoffrey Hinton has acknowledged a deadlock without elaborating on causality. Harris asks about alignment and existential risk. Pearl says he sees no computational impediment to a recursively self-improving system that could acquire something like free will, consciousness and the desire to play with humans, and he is skeptical that any architecture can guarantee perpetual alignment. He criticizes the cultural strangeness of AI lab leaders like Sam Altman quoting 20 percent existential risk while continuing to plow trillions of dollars into the build-out, contrasting this with the Manhattan Project physicists who refused to proceed when initial atmosphere-ignition risks looked too high. Pearl is dismissive of Stuart Russell-style approaches based on uncertainty about the human utility function. Harris pivots to antisemitism and Israel. He acknowledges Pearl's son Daniel Pearl was murdered by Al-Qaeda in 2002. Pearl describes founding the Daniel Pearl Foundation to support East-West and Jewish-Muslim dialogue and traveling town to town with a Pakistani scholar. He describes a 2005 Doha conference with moderate Muslim scholars where the message he received was that any modernization was conditioned on the destruction of Israel. He notes he has lived in Los Angeles since 1966. The audio cuts off at the standard paywall outro before the conversation moves into October 7 territory.

As heard by us

Pearl on where AI reasoning stops short, AGI risk he takes at face value, and an antisemitism that came dressed as a negotiation.

Judea Pearl, author of The Book of Why and a founding figure in AI, returns to Making Sense with two subjects that rarely share an episode: causal reasoning's case against large language models, and antisemitism.

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Why you'd press play

Judea Pearl on what today's AI still cannot do -- and the AGI scenario he calls quite feasible.

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