I agree with this article about Sam Harris. He’s smarter than most people and he leverages that intelligence and monetizes it by being someone who exists to sound smart to people dumber than he is.

This part, though, is misleading/inaccurate given the context of the article.

But humans went one person from going extinct. We are all the decedents of a single woman.

This is always going to be the case. If you think about it for a moment, you can see why. Trace any lineage back far enough, there will always be a single common ancestor somewhere — and usually not that far back. It’s just an identity. There is nothing special about this. That and the three major population bottlenecks of human history have nothing at all to do with one another.

See here for more info. In a similar vein, everyone in Europe is related to Charlemagne, even though there was no genetic bottleneck during that time. See here for an ok-ish summary for the three main Homo genetic/population bottlenecks known to have affected human development.