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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week my guest is Sam Harris, philosopher, neuroscientist, and now with great eminence,

podcaster. And his new book, based on his Making Sense podcast is called Making Sense, Conversations on

Consciousness, Morality and the Future of Humanity with, and it's got a list of some of his

guests, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, David Deutsch, Danny Carneman, David Krakauer,

Glensie, Lowry, Thomas Metzinger, Robert Sapolsky, Anil Seth, Timothy Snyder and Max Tegmark,

a sort of omnium gatherum of serious thinkers on serious subjects. Sam, you write in your

introduction that 10 years ago you'd have been very surprised if someone had told you that now

you'd be spending most of your time recording a podcast. Yeah, you know, I really just

feel like a very lucky beneficiary of changes in technology, both for my podcast and also for my

meditation app, you know, but for the existence of podcasts and the existence of apps. You know,

I'm sure I would be writing and I'd be writing more,

but there are obvious advantages to podcasting, and it's a very different way of spending time.

So it's, you know, on the whole, it's, you know, I miss writing to some degree. I may still do it,

but I, you know, find it harder to do just because it really does represent an opportunity cost now.

I mean, the stark fact is that I reach more people with my podcast in 48 hours than I reach in a decade with all of my books combined.

To sit down and spend a year writing a book

has to be a good reason for it at this point. And I think I can still come up with those reasons,

but it's harder and harder, and it's just much more natural to turn on the microphone

and have conversations with smart people and reach a comparatively much larger audience.

...