Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

You can support our podcast by visiting Patreon.com

forward slash Quilett and becoming a monthly patron. By becoming a monthly

patron you'll also receive our weekly newsletter. Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm Jonathan Kay.

Back from a week-long vacation in Hollywood, Florida and ready to start off our spring

podcast season with a true podcasting heavyweight, the one and only Sam Harris.

If you're a fan of this podcast, you probably also listen to Sam's popular Making Sense Podcast, or at least have friends who talk incessantly about it.

You might also have read some of his books too, like The End of Faith.

Letter to a Christian nation, lying, free will, and waking up, a guide to spirituality without religion.

As you'll guess from the name of that last book title, which is also the name of his popular meditation app by the way,

Harris is a committed atheist and gained notice years ago and notoriety as well as an especially fearless critic of militant Islam.

In recent years he's also become a collaborator or in some cases a debating foil for many

other well-known public figures including Jordan Peterson,

D-Pak Chopra, Ben Shapiro, and Ricky Jervé. As we'll discuss people care a lot

about where Sam Harris stands on today's controversies, and he's not

shy about waiting into extremely contentious issues.

In recent days, for instance, he devoted a podcast episode to a passionate defense of his friend Joe Rogan.

In other episodes, he's held forth on another friend, or former friend, vaccine skeptic,

Brett Weinstein. But in that case delivering a very different verdict.

And I should warn you that these are just a few of the many issues we talk about in this episode.

...