Today, it's great to have Sam Harris on the podcast. Sam is the author of five New York

Times bestsellers, including the end of faith, letter to a Christian nation, their moral

landscape, free will, lying, and waking up. The end of faith won the 2005 Penn Award for

nonfiction. Is writing in public lectures cover a wide range of topics, neuroscience, moral

philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality, but generally focus

on how a growing understanding of ourselves in the world is changing our sense of how

we should live. He also hosts the Making Sense podcast, which was selected by Apple as

one of the iTunes best and has won a Webby Award for Best Podcasts in Science and Education

category. Sam, thanks for making the time to chat. Happy to be here, Scott. I'm really

looking forward to this chat, and I really want to set the tone by saying I appreciate

your intellectual honesty and your intellectual bravery. Sometimes one can just be intellectually

honest, but it happens to go with the flow of the current of the culture, but you're

intellectually honest and you don't mind being intellectually honest if it doesn't always

when you're friends. So I really want to say I appreciate that even if I don't necessarily

appreciate, if I don't necessarily agree with everything you say in your arguments and

I thought we could go through very carefully today, lots of areas of mutual interest and

work through them very carefully and see if we can arrive at some, some maybe even transcendent

conclusions. So to sure, yeah, happy to do it. Cool. So since this is the psychology podcast,

I did want to start a little bit with your development, your child development, and that's

obviously a formed sum rule in who you are today and kind of interest you have. I'm curious

what you're like as a child and in particular, in the sort of way you interacted with other

people and in the way that you, which you engaged with the truth as a child.

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