Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today should be very

comfortable with the prospect of a serious conversation about how and why we humans behave the way

we do. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, a writer and a podcaster whose quest to make sense of the

world around him has won him a fanbase of millions.

It has also won him a fair few enemies, too, because he marches into intellectual territory where others fear to tread.

He is an atheist who finds all religion preposterous, but Islam uniquely pernicious. He's a small L. Liberal

who is at odds with the politically correct, woke culture, which he claims is stifling honest

debate and inadvertently boosting support for Donald Trump. And to the fury of many black Americans, he rails against the

Black Lives Matter movement as a form of corrosive identity politics. Human beings have a choice,

he says, between conversation and war. Well, right now, which is winning out? Sam Harris joins me

on the line from California. Welcome to

Hard Talk. Thanks, Stephen. Sam, you have an extraordinarily popular podcast in which you talk with

leading intellectuals across the world, but you also express your own trenchant opinions in a host of

books that you've written,

which is more important, more meaningful to you, the conversation or expressing your strong

opinion? Good question. I think I kind of split the difference there because, as you know,

I don't do much in the way of standard interviews. I'm really trying to have a conversation

every time I do a podcast. So I take up probably 40% of the bandwidth in any interview. So it really is

it's, you know, I get to hear myself talk to my heart's content, perhaps to the exasperation of

certain guests. When you choose guests for the Making Sense podcast, which is listened to by

millions of people across the world, do you like to bring people in with whom you know you

disagree and disagree really quite profoundly? Occasionally, yeah. I mean, you know, a little of that

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