Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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I have Paul Bloom on the line. Paul, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Sam, thanks for

having me back. You are now officially my, well, I have, I think only two return guests,

but you have just edged out David Deutsch who has two appearances. So you're the only third

appearance on this podcast. So that says something. It's not exactly like a 20th appearance on the

tonight show, but it is a measure of how good a guest you are. I'm touched. Maybe a decade from

now, who knows we could be doing our 20th anniversary show. Well, after we did our second show, people

just emailed me saying just have Paul on the podcast all the time. You don't need any other guests.

So you are a popular guest. Well, we had a great discussion. I think a little bit of what makes

for a good discussion, which is you and I agree on a lot. We have a lot of common ground,

but there's enough tension and enough things to rub against so we get some good discussion going.

We will see if we can steer ourselves in the direction of controversy perhaps, but you have just

released a book, which we talked about to a significant degree. I think in your first appearance

here and we would be remiss not to talk about it some. So we'll start with that, but

people should just know that if they find what we were about to say about empathy,

intriguing, our first podcast has a full hour or more on it and it is an incredibly

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