Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing

the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making

Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private

RSS feed to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We

don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support

of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

Today I'll be speaking with a man whose work I greatly admire, Dan Carlin, the host of the

Hardcore History and Common Sense Podcasts, and Dan and I will be releasing this conversation

jointly on both of our podcasts. We're calling this a cross-cast, which is analogous to a

cross-post one sometimes sees on blogs that publishes the same content simultaneously. It

turns out we have many listeners in common, and many of you have been urging us to have

a conversation together, I think, anticipating considerable disagreement on issues like

the war on terror and state security and foreign policy. I don't know that we collided as

much as anyone might have expected, but we had a good energetic conversation, which I greatly

enjoyed, and I hope you will too. So in a moment, I give you Dan Carlin.

Hey Dan, how you doing? I'm good. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. Well, listen, as my

fans know, I have been frequently referring to you as the greatest history professor on

Earth at the moment, and I know this may cause you to blush, but listen, I'm just a huge

fan of your Hardcore History podcast and have been recommending it to anyone with the

ears at this point. That is very dirty pool to start off a discussion

with a compliment like that, because now what am I supposed to say, Sandel? You said some

...