The "After On" Interview

So, Sam, thank you so much for joining me here at Tom Merritt's lovely home studio.

Yeah, happy to do it.

You were a guest on the Art of charm podcast about a year ago, and they asked you to describe what you do in a single sentence, and you said, I think, in public, which I thought was a very elegant way of putting it. I was hoping you might elaborate on that. And in this case, feel free to use as many sentences as you wish.

Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that back to me, because I would have totally forgotten that description, and it's a useful one. Increasingly, I'm someone who's attempting to have hard conversations about what I consider some of the most important questions of our time. So the intersection of philosophy, particularly moral philosophy, and science and public policy, and just things in the news, topics like race and terrorism, the link between islam and jihadism, and things that are in.

The news but that have, when you begin to push on these issues, they.

Run very, very deep into the core of human identity and how we want.

Our politics to proceed and the influence.

Of technology on our lives. So you pull one of these threads, everything that people care about starts to move.

Yeah, there's a great deal of interconnection, and I'd say, and correct me if this is wrong, but I'd say you started thinking in public in earnest, perhaps back in 2004 with the release of your, your first book, the end of faith, in which you argued stridently against all types of organized religion and in favor of atheism, it peaked at number four. Was it on the New York Times bestseller list or thereabouts?

I don't even remember. It was on for, I think, 33 weeks, but I think four sounds about right.

Yeah.

So obviously, you got out there in a big way with a book you've since written. Is it four more bestsellers? New York Times bestsellers?

Yeah. Yeah.

That designation means less and less, as it turns out.

But there are bestsellers and there are bestsellers.

There are. They're the bestsellers that bounce off the.

List, which most of mine have been.

And then there are those that stay on forever.

But, yeah, I've had five that have hit the list. Yeah.

And what's intriguing to me is that quite recently you have developed a wildly successful podcast, and I was hoping you could characterize the reach that the podcast has attained compared to that of these very, very successful series of books that you did.

Yeah, the numbers are really surprising. And don't argue for the health of books, frankly, a very successful book in hardcover. Your book comes out in hardcover first.

Normally, some people go directly to paperback, but if you are an author who cares about the future of your book.

And reaching lots of people, you publish.

Your hardcover, and you are generally very.

Happy to sell 100,000 books in hardcover over the course of that first year.

Before it goes to paperback.

Indeed.

Ecstatic.

That would probably put you in the top percentile of all books published by major publishers.

Oh, yeah.

And that is very likely going to.

Hit the bestseller list.

Maybe if you're a diet book, you need to sell more than that. But if you sold 10,000 in your first week, depending on what else is happening?

You almost certainly have a bestseller, and.

In the best case, you could sell 200,000 books or 300,000 books in hardcover, and that's a newsworthy achievement. And then there's the one 100th of 1% that sell millions of copies. So with a book, I could reasonably expect to reach 100,000 people in a year, and then maybe some hundreds of.

Thousands over the course of a decade. Right. So all my books together now have sold.

I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm pretty sure I haven't reached 2.

Million people with those books. Somewhere between a million and 2 million.

But with my podcast, I reach that many people in a day.

Right.

And these are long form interviews, and sometimes it's standalone, sometimes just me just talking about what I think is important.

To talk about for an hour or two.

But often I'm speaking with a very smart guest and we can go very.

Deep on any topic we care about.

And again, this is not like going on CNN and speaking for six minutes in attempted soundbites.

And then you're is people are really listening in depth. And so if we were to clone.

You in two right now, and one of the Sam Harris's that we ended up with was to record a podcast, and the other Sam Harris was to write your entire literary output, who would require more time?

Yeah, well, that's the other thing. Forget about the time it takes to write a book, which in some cases.

Is years, in some cases is months.

Depending on how long the book is.

And how research driven it is.

But it's a lot of time.

It's a big commitment to write a book.

Once it's written, you hand it into your publisher and it takes eleven months for them to publish it. So there's that. Wait, there's a lack of immediacy.

Yeah.

And increasingly that makes less and less sense. Both the time it takes to do it and the time it takes to.

Publish it don't compare favorably with podcasting.

In defense of writing, there are certain.

Things that are still best done in written form.

Nothing I said has really any application.

To what you're doing. I mean, you're writing novels.

Reading a novel is an experience that people still want to have. Yes, but what I'm doing in nonfiction, that's primarily argument driven.

Right.

There are other formats in which to get the argument out.

And I still plan to write books.

Because I still love to read books.

And taking the time to really say something as well as you can affects.

Everything else you do. It affects the stuff you can say extemporaneously in a conversation like this as well.

So I still value the process of.

Writing and taking the time to think.

That carefully about things.

The thing that is striking, though, is the extraordinary efficiency that the podcast has become as a way for you and many others to disseminate ideas in terms of the hours that you put into the creation of it, which are nontrivial. I'm learning that as a very new podcaster myself, it ain't easy to research and put one of these things together, but compared to a just, there's just incredible leverage there. Now, another thing, speaking of large audiences, I believe I read somewhere that you were featured in the most heavily watched Bill Maher video clip of all time. Do you know if that statistic is accurate?

I suspect it still is accurate. It was at the time. It was the most viral thing that ever got exported from the show, and.

You were discussing islamophobia with the then future Batman. And why do you suppose that clip became so widespread? I mean, Bill Maher is no stranger to controversy. The exchange between you and Ben Affleck and between Maher and Ben Affleck did become quite heated. But in any given month, there are many interactions on cable news and on Sunday talk shows that are at least as lively. What do you think it was about that that made it go so widespread? And also, if you care to just characterize it briefly, for those who haven't.

Seen it, it was a combination of things.

It was the topic.

It was the fact that it was a star of Ben Affleck's caliber, going.