Hey, listeners, and happy 2026. I hope you're enjoying your holiday break, and while you are, I wanted to give you a little gift. The author and podcaster and controversialist Sam Harris recently invited me on his show, Making Sense. I was there, I think, officially to talk

about religion and politics, but we ended up debating a lot more, pretty much all of human

history, the future, the nature of consciousness, the rationality of faith, the Spanish

Inquisition, and even the existence of demons. Sam and I come from pretty different

perspectives, but I like to think that we pretty much wrapped up all the big questions of human

life in two hours together. So enjoy this episode of Sam Harris's Making Sense podcast, and

we'll be back with a new episode of interesting times right here next week. I am here with Ross Douthit.

Ross, thanks for joining me. Sam, thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure.

So we've never met.

Am I right in thinking that?

We have never met.

Okay.

This is, no, this is the closest I've come to your physically embodied presence.

All right.

Well, let's see if the Internet keeps us together here for the requisite hour or hour or two. Well,

so I've been reading your book this week, Believe, which, when did this come out? It's pretty

recent, right? Yeah, it came out, I think, February of this year of 2025. Yeah. And this is where

you make your case for the rationality and even necessity of religion,

which I think we're going to get to because I think you and I have a, we share a sense that

our culture is ailing, but I think we probably diverge, at least on several key points as to whether religion is part of the cure

or part of the disease. But we don't, you know, I don't think, I mean, I think our core

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