Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll 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

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becoming one. Welcome back to another episode of More From Sam, where we get more from Sam.

Hi, Sam.

Hey, good to see you.

Good to see you, too.

I have to start the show off by telling the audience about the new shows we've just announced for next year.

But first, I have a quick reminder that we have some tickets still available for Chicago on November 19th. So if anybody

wants to come out to that, come see us. But for 2026, here are the shows. We have not announced

yet. I mean, we have via newsletter and maybe some socials, but have not done it on the show yet.

January 21st, 2026 in Los Angeles, February 4th in Dallas, February 5th in Austin, March 11th in Portland,

March 12th in Vancouver, April 23rd in Palm Beach, Florida, May 12th in Toronto, May 13th in

Washington, D.C. and finishing off the tour with New York City on May 14th. So hopefully we'll see lots of people out there next year. Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. As you know, I'm continuing to evolve the talk. So it's kind of fun to, I've never done it like this where I've got a tour that's stretched out that far in the future. So I just know the talk is going to keep changing from event to event. So, yeah. Okay, onto our first topic. I did not know this, or at least I didn't remember it, but you used to have a fear of public speaking, and now you're on tour and seem very comfortable on stage. Can you talk about your journey from stage fright to where you are now? Well, so yeah, that was that blog post that got resurfaced, I think, on Reddit that I hadn't, I'd kind of forgotten about.

I think I wrote it 12 years ago, 15 years ago, something like that. And I think it's, I think the title is the silent crowd. I think that's what it is on my blog. Maybe I should repost it on Substack because people found it useful, I think.

Obviously, it's a very common fear, and I just had, you know, in this

blog post, I give some people fairly concrete advice about how to deal with it. Ironically, I mean,

though I think mindfulness is actually quite helpful, I don't think it's sufficient to deal

with it for most people. I think it's this. The crucial bit is to actually just do the thing you're afraid of

and get used to it and cease to catastrophize about it and to have some better or even just benign

outcomes after doing it, right? You know, to give a talk and to have it not be a catastrophe and

then to let your nervous system learn across those occasions. I think that's better than simply hoping that you're going to meditate or do talk therapy

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