Making Sense with Sam Harris - #175 — Leaving the Faith

Episode Date: November 11, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Yasmine Mohammed about her book "Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam." They discuss her family background and indoctrination into conservative Islam, the double standard that Western liberals use when thinking about women in the Muslim community, the state of feminism in general, honor violence, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and many other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, no housekeeping today. Just a reminder, if you're a podcast podcast supporter to get the supporter RSS feed because some changes are coming. I don't want you to miss content, so go to the subscriber content page on my website and make sure you've got the subscriber feed in your favorite podcasting app. Thereafter, the Making Sense icon will show up in red rather than black. Today I'm speaking with Yasmin Mohamed. Yasmin is a human rights activist and a writer. She's a very eloquent advocate for women living in Islamic-majority countries and in the Muslim

community generally, worldwide, and a very effective critic of religious fundamentalism. And her new book is Unveiled, How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. And I've been in Yasmin's corner for a little while when she was getting ready to write her book, and it was at the proposal stage, I blurbed her. This is a blurb that appears on the book, but this is a blurb really for her as a person before her book was even written. I'll just read that here to give you some context. Women and free thinkers in traditional Muslim communities inherit a double burden. If they want to live in the modern world,

they must confront not only the theocrats in their homes and schools, but many secular liberals, whose apathy, sanctimony, and hallucinations of, quote, racism, throw yet another veil over their suffering. Yasmin Muhammad accepts this challenge as courageously as anyone I've ever met, putting the lie to the dangerous notion that criticizing the doctrine of Islam is a form of bigotry. Let her wisdom and bravery inspire you. And so you should. And here Yasmin and I talk about her background and indoctrination into conservative Islam and the double standard that Western liberals use to think about women in the Muslim community. We talk about feminism generally, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and other related topics. So now I bring you a very brave woman and one of my heroes, Yasmin Muhammad. I am here with Yasmin Muhammad. Yasmin Mohamed. email? Well, I was supposed to do a talk in Australia with Majid about the Assumption of the Future of Tolerance documentary. And then I had to cancel it because I was going through

a lot of, you know, basically I was having consistent panic attacks and I had to take some time off work and then I just had to cancel all of my speaking engagements. So I sent you a letter to sort of apologize that I wasn't going to be able to make it. And then you wrote back to me and started asking me about the panic attacks and everything that was going on with there. And so then that's how I got into meditation actually. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So yeah, I remember that, but I don't remember that being the first contact. Did you not have a Twitter presence yet? I did have I remember that, but I don't remember that being the first contact. Did you not have a Twitter presence yet?

I did have a Twitter presence, but you weren't following me yet. Oh, okay. Well, someone could have been forwarding your stuff. I feel like I saw you there first, but maybe not. Anyway, you go hard on Twitter. That's something we're going to talk about. Yeah, it's the Arab in me. So let's just take it from the top. We're talking about your book, Unveiled, in the end, but let's just take it from the top we're talking about your book unveiled in the end but let's

let's just start with your story from the beginning where where did you come from and what were your parents like and what was your upbringing like this is the beginning of of your story that has for better or worse made you one of the most courageous voices i can name at the moment so to the beginning, I guess, would be my parents meeting each other in university in Egypt. So my dad's from Palestine and my mom is Egyptian. But Palestinians could go to university in Egypt. It was all covered. They were treated as Egyptians, but they weren't given citizenship. So they met in university in Egypt. And my mother's family were very angry at her for

marrying a Palestinian because they thought he was so beneath her. But they got married and then they moved to San Francisco together. And they were there during the peace, love, hippie era. And they had my sister and it was a bit too much peace and love. And so my mom wanted like a quieter place to raise the kids. And so then they moved to Vancouver, Canada, and that's where I was born. But then their marriage fell apart in the end anyway. So when I was about two years old, my dad, you know, left us, went to the other side of the country. So here my mom is now in a new country, no support system, no community, three children,

and she's feeling depressed, vulnerable, sad, lonely, all that stuff. And how religious were they at this point? No religiosity whatsoever, neither of them. They both grew up very secular. My dad had like zero connection to religion. It was just like a cultural thing. He's very anti-Israel, just being Palestinian, but there's no religious, like him personally,

he wasn't very, he wasn't practicing. And then my mom's all alone. And so she goes looking for a support system and she goes looking at the mosque for community. And at the mosque, she finds a man who is already married, already has three children, but he offers to take my mom on as his second concurrent wife. So she is happy to have somebody take care of her and take care of her kids. And so she's willing to put up with whatever

he's dishing out. My dad was abusive towards her. He used to hit her and this man never hit her. He'd hit us, of course, but he never hit her. So she felt like this was a better relationship for her. So she stayed with him as a second concurrent wife. We lived in his basement and he is very, like my life changed completely when he entered our lives. So before him, I used to be able to, you know, play with my neighbor's friends. Like we'd play Barbies together. I'd go swimming. I'd ride my bike. I'd go to birthday parties, listen to music, just like a normal childhood. And then once he entered our lives, it was just immediate. Everything is haram. Everything is forbidden. And all of a sudden, my mom started covering her hair

and we had to start reading from this book of these words that I didn't understand. And I had to start praying five times a day. And I resisted it from the beginning. Of course, I missed my old life. I was especially upset that I couldn't play with Chelsea and Lindsay anymore. They'd always come knocking on the door wanting to play Barbies and I was never allowed to go and they were never allowed in. You're going to the same school at this point? Yep, but not for long. Then I got, as soon as the Islamic school was, I mean, it wasn't built. It was in the mosque. But as soon as it was established that we would have an Islamic school and my mom was teaching in it, then I started going there.

Was this associated with any religious awakening on your mom's part or she just needed a man to take care of her and it was just practical and romantic? Well, I don't know if romantic is part of it. I think practical for sure. And it was a combination of both of those things. So she needed, I think she was happy to have somebody to take care of her, but then also she just became a full-on born again Muslim. So she just entered it like she just jumped all in. It was never like, you know, if you see her wedding photos, she looked like a bond girl, like short wedding dress, big, huge beehive. You know, there was a belly dancer at her wedding. And to go from that to the woman that raised me that I remember is just a pretty shocking difference. And I used to always, you know, resent that. I'd

be like, how come you got freedom? How come you got to live like this? Look at your pictures when you were a kid. You know, how come I don't get that life? And she'd say, because my parents didn't know any better. And I'm raising you better and you're going to be a better person and you're going to go to heaven. And my parents did the best they could, but they were wrong. And so how old are you when you're expressing these doubts or? Well, I was about, you know, about six years old when he entered our life. And I just, I resisted all the way up at probably about nine years old is when I stopped. Cause that's when the hijab was put on me and I started going to Islamic school and it was just too much. So you can't really fight anymore when everything

in your life is, you know, pushing you in one direction. You just, you know, succumb, especially when you're a kid. But according to my mom, I was never, you know, good enough. I, the devil was always whispering in my ear and making me question. I always asked questions, right? Like if Allah created everything, who created Allah and stuff like that? Like, how could I even, these are such blasphemous, you know, if Adam and Eve are, you know, the parents of all people, are we all children of incest? So these basic questions of, you know, that a kid would ask, I'd get in trouble for them. So was there any point where you just went hook, line, and sinker and fully adopted the worldview without doubt? Or did you always have some doubt humming in the background? The doubt humming in the background

finally went quiet once I was forced into the marriage with Faisal. So once I married him and I wore niqab, so that's like full face covering, gloves, everything, I was so diminished that I didn't have anything left. And I also kind of made the conscious decision that, I mean, I was desperate for my mom's love and approval. My sister was always the good girl that always listened and never questioned. And I wanted that. I wanted to have that relationship with my mom. So she kept on pressuring me to marry this man. And I eventually gave in because I thought, you know what, maybe she'll actually love me if I follow what she wants me to do. I'll marry the man she tells me to marry. I'll do everything the way she says to do it. I've been fighting against this my whole life.

What happens if I just let go and see if she's actually right? And how old are you at this point? So I'm 20. And I did let go. And I did follow exactly what she said. And I did follow exactly what she said. And until I had my daughter and held her in my arms and saw that she was about to grow up in the same environment that I grew up in, my mom was talking to her the same way she had talked to me.

Her father was talking about FGM and her dying a martyr for a law and things like that. And I'm like, okay, enough. I could maybe accept this world for myself, but I'm not going to accept it for my daughter. There's no way she's going to live this same life. And was he Egyptian? Yeah. Yeah.

And I think people aren't generally aware that FGM is practiced in Egypt. Like 98% of Egyptian women. Basically like Somalia in terms of the prevalence of that practice. And this was just a fully arranged marriage or it had been encouraged once you had met him? So it wasn't fully arranged in that I didn't know I was going to marry him my whole life. Sometimes people arrange marriages for their kids, like from the get-go, but it was definitely a forced marriage, which is a very common thing in the Arab world. So it's like, this is the man we want you to marry. And then you basically just get introduced to him. And the woman doesn't need to consent.

Like in Islam, it says silence is consent. So if you just sit there and cry, it's like, okay, we're good. Yeah. You're now, you know, that's like saying I do. And so it was, you know, you get pressured into it in the same way you get pressured into everything else. So it's just like wearing the hijab and you get given two choices. Like, do you want to go to heaven or do you want to go to hell? Do you want to be a good, pure, clean girl? Or do you want to be a filthy whore? Like, these are your choices. Make the right choice. So forcing you into a marriage is similar kind of

coercion. So it would be things like, there's a hadith that says, heaven is at the feet of your mothers. So your mother gets to decide whether you're going to go to heaven or not. So this was the one that was used all the time. And it's a very dangerous weapon for an abusive mother to have. So she would use that one. She'd say, you're never going to go to heaven unless I approve you to enter heaven. And if you don't marry this man, you will never going to go to heaven unless I approve you to enter heaven. And if you don't marry this man, you will never go to heaven. You will burn in hell for eternity. And you will suffer here on earth because you are no longer my daughter. I want nothing to do with you. I won't even allow you to come to my funeral because I don't, like, as far as anyone is concerned,

you're no longer my family. And then when you die, you'll burn in hell for eternity. So go ahead and make the choice. Yeah. Yeah. Reading your book, it's a fairly harrowing account of what your childhood and adolescence and young adulthood was like. And I think it's useful to differentiate what is just the sheer bad luck of having an abusive and perhaps mentally ill mom and having married somebody who will get into his story

in a moment. But that's bad luck that could happen to anyone in any culture with or without religion. Then there are the cultural practices, which aren't necessarily mandated by Islam and maybe don't necessarily represent every Muslim's or even most Muslims' experience. And then there's just what is fairly common under Islam because you can just play Connect the Dots and see that it is mandated or at least encouraged in the texts. So how do you kind of carve out those different strands for me? What is just the sheer bad luck based on the personalities involved and where is the contribution of Islam? Yeah. So the problem is a lot of these elements are sanctioned in Islam. So Islam says, for example, tells a man, if you fear that your wife is, you know, arrogant or disobedient, then, you know, go through these steps and then beat her. So it's like Allah is telling men, if you fear that your wife, you know, is going to give you any trouble, beat her.

Right. that your wife, you know, is going to give you any trouble, beat her. So not every single man is going to beat his wife and not every single man is going to, you know, viciously beat his wife. There's going to be, you know, different men are going to react in different ways, but the problem is the fact that it is sanctioned. So if you complain about it, like in my example, when I went to my mom and said, he just punched me in the face when he saw that I wasn't wearing hijab in the house on the 17th floor, because he was afraid people like, I don't know, seagulls, people in helicopters might see me through the window. And her response was, he has every right to be you. You are his. It says so right there, right to be you. You are his. It says so right there, chapter 4, verse 34. So that's the problem.

The problem is that it's codified, it's in the religion, and so it can be used in different ways. You know, like I said, not every Muslim man is going to be his wife, but those who do have scriptural support. Yeah. Yeah. And the debate really is not whether or not that support exists, but what is meant by beating? It's like how hard you can beat your wife. That's very subjective. And there's scholars that come forward and they say things like, oh no, it's like with a toothbrush or whatever. But those are just scholars offering their interpretations. As far as the Quran is concerned, it doesn't say that. It just says, that's it. It offers no, there's no asterisks there.

But that's subjective anyway. It depends on the country that you're in, depends on the environment that you're used to. Yeah, beating can be pretty bad. And any obviously hitting another human being is a bad thing anyway. And the creator of the universe really should not be sanctioning husbands to be beating their wives. But there's a famous critic of Islam named Hamid Abdus Samad, who is an Egyptian-German man, who had a really great way of describing this. And he says, it's like Allah's at the bar,

and he had a bit much to drink, and he's like, you guys should just beat your wives, man. And his friends, the scholars, are behind him going, no, no, no, he doesn't really mean that. He doesn't actually mean that. He means like with a feather or something. So those are just the scholars trying to soften it up. But at the end of the day, people read the Quran and they quote that verse. Right. And you're wearing the niqab at this point? At what point did that happen?

Hijab was at nine years old, as far as I could remember. And then once I was engaged to him, started wearing the niqab, he got it all delivered from Saudi Arabia. And that really helps in dehumanizing you. That really helps in turning me into a nothing that he can control very easily. It just suppresses your humanity entirely. It's like a portable sensory deprivation chamber. And you are no longer connected to humanity. You can't see properly, you can't hear properly, you can't speak properly. People can't see you. You can only see them. I mean, just little things like passing people in the street and just making eye contact and smiling, like that's gone. You're no longer part of this world. And so you very, very quickly

just shrivel up into nothing under there. Yeah, well, we're going to get to this, but it is amazing how sanguine Western feminists are around this practice. This is just another culture's ideal of how to honor feminine beauty and empower women. Who are we to criticize it? We should differentiate the hijab from the niqab. The hijab is just a straight-up symbol of female empowerment now in the West, right? Despite your best efforts on Twitter, it is just amazing to see what is being done with this. And we have, you know, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre, the Prime Minister of New Zealand puts it on as the only possible show of respect for the community. Like, there's just no other way to express solidarity but to There's just no other way to express solidarity but to don the symbol.

And we have got Linda Sarsour organizing the Women's March. And there's so many examples of this. For some reason, people, one, can't see that most of the women on earth right now who are wearing a hijab are not doing it based on some empowerment they felt at an Ivy League institution where they're just going to take the male gaze off them at their own discretion. So they're forced to do it. The consequences of not doing it in many cases are, if not absolutely coercive social pressure, it's actually physical violence. But it is also just a step toward the niqab and the burqa which are the actual crystallization of the ideal here that's being enshrined which is it's all the female modesty is the only thing that safeguards male sexuality from completely running amok. It's like all men would be

gropers and rapists, but for the fact that women hide themselves. Maybe we should jump into that now. I want to talk about who your husband revealed himself to be, but what have your encounters with Western feminists been like? Well, that makes me really sad that they consider Muslim women to be of some other species and that are so completely different from them. So for themselves, they will recognize all of those things that you talked about are basically victim blaming, you know, slut shaming. They recognize those elements of rape culture when we're in the Western context, which are, you know, they're much harder to see in the Western context. But under Sharia, it's very, very easy to clearly see a perfect example of rape culture.

a perfect example of rape culture, but they somehow, when it's those women over there, it's empowering. Like, would it be empowering for you if you were told you have to wear this clothing in order to protect yourself from men who might rape you? Or you have to wear this clothing in order to be good and pure and go to heaven because if you don't wear it, then you're a filthy whore. No woman would want to hear that. No seven-year-old child would like to be told you have to wear this in order to go to school and your brother doesn't have to. He can wear whatever he wants, but you must wear this or you're not allowed to get educated. It is an atrocity. That's something that every human being should be upset about. And the fact that they think that it's okay for those humans over there, but not for us, is the part that really upsets me. Yeah. And what do you do with the fact that you could go into any one of these cultures

and find women who will say, I want to wear the niqab, I want to wear the burqa, just take your colonial bullshit elsewhere? Yeah. Oh, of course there will be. And you can also go to fundamentalist Christian cults and they will tell you, I want to be a servant for my husband. You see people like that on Twitter all the time, right? They're like, you know, I quit my job and I cook and clean for my husband and I'm proud of it. And whatever it is, like women make all sorts of choices and decisions and that's completely up to them and they're free to do that. And, but I'm also free to make a judgment on the decisions that they're making. So when I'm talking about

the hijab as a symbol of patriarchy and a symbol of misogyny, I'm saying that because, as you mentioned, not only are girls coerced into it because of family or government or religion, but girls can be killed because of this. And not just in the Muslim world, but in Canada, in America, in France, in Sweden, there's honor violence and honor killing going on. A girl, a 16-year-old girl in Canada was strangled to death by her father and her brother with the hijab that she refused to wear. And then her parents refused to bury her because they didn't want anything to do with her. There are so many stories around this. The one that sounds stranger than fiction

is the case in Saudi Arabia. The school. Where the school was on fire and the religious police wouldn't let the fire department put it out because the girls weren't appropriately veiled. Yeah. And there are literally parents standing at the gates of the school watching their daughters burn alive. It's just, it absolutely matters. And there are women that are in Iran today that are being imprisoned for 15 years and more

for refusing to wear this cloth on their head. So it's not just a benign choice. When the prime minister of New Zealand or when Meghan Markle put a hijab on their head, it's not just a benign support of some benign cultural thing. It is not just a symbol, but an actual tool of oppression. There are women being imprisoned and women being killed. There is a fight over this hijab going on right now. Women in Sudan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, they're burning their hijabs in the streets. They're fighting against this thing. And then to see free Western women, free Western women leaders take this thing that they are

fighting against and voluntarily donning it and supporting it, what those women are doing is they are supporting the oppressors. They are supporting the oppressors that these women are fighting against. Yeah, the double standard is so clear, and it really is sanity straining that it's so hard for people to see. So the clearest case for me in the media was when, I don't know if you remember this, but Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Mormon cult, his compound was raided, and all these little girls and young women were led out in these little house on the prairie dresses, right? They were made to wear these awful 18th century dresses. And they had been married to men who were, you know,

their grandfather's ages. And these forced marriages were described as rapes. And the men were totally unrepentant. And, you know, Jeff's got, I think it's at least 15 years in prison. I forget, he got a real prison sentence. And this was all talked about on the news as just an unambiguous example of patriarchal exploitation of girls. The fact that it was associated with religious belief was not even slightly exculpatory. And everyone celebrated the fact that there was a SWAT team raid on the compound. We kicked in the door of this place to free those girls. And it didn't matter at all that the girls didn't want to be freed. I mean, we knew they had been brainwashed. So when they're talking about how they love their husband for to a man or whatever it was, no one had any qualm

discounting that for their obvious ignorance and brainwashing, right? And when you compare that to what is happening routinely in the Muslim world, the mainstream media has the opposite response. And this is

the most benign case of real extremism in the Muslim world. In truth, it's not even extreme, but the extremism in the Muslim world, you have to add to that the clitorectomies that would have been performed on these girls. The fact that they were raising their sons to be suicide bombers, right? And there was an explicit indoctrination of martyrdom. be suicide bombers, right? And there was an explicit indoctrination of martyrdom. And they were exporting terrorism to the capitals of Europe and America. That's how the fundamentalist Mormon cult would have to behave to make it an analogous situation. And no one can see it on the left.

I guess the other example I should mention, I believe I mentioned this on a previous podcast, but it really belongs here because we were talking about this last night. I just saw Ayaan Hirsi Ali give a talk at a university for the first time in three years since she was deplatformed at Brandeis. And it's a fairly conservative college, Pepperdine, an explicitly Christian college. And she ran through her whole life story on stage, starting with female genital mutilation,

abuse in school, physical abuse, sexual abuse. She described it as routine among her friends at the school she was in. She described all this and how she escaped a forced marriage, became a member of parliament. I mean, she's just a true feminist success story, right? And as she starts to get into a discussion of contemporary politics, I mean, honestly, the edgiest thing she said was, if I were teaching at a university and

someone, and one of my students said that they didn't want to read a certain novel because it triggered them, I would insist that they read that want to read a certain novel because it triggered them, I would insist that they read that novel because that's what a university is for. And then I think the other thing she said was when Me Too came up, she expressed blanket support for it, but she said, we have to keep a sense of proportion. There are the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, and then there are people who just put a hand where it's not wanted and you slap it away. She was trying to give some articulating this spectrum of misbehavior that we need to differentiate. And as she's talking about this, again, she had just spent a half hour describing in a background so replete with abuse, patriarchal abuse, that you would think it would have earned

her intersectionality points of a sort that, you know, few people have. And I've got these white women students behind me who are beginning to almost heckle her, right? It was just, you know, almost heckled her, right? It was just, you know, hissing and laughter among themselves. And then they walked out. It was like, I mean, again, it was another kind of brainwashing. There's a kind of moral panic happening around variables of gender and race on the left that is making it impossible to even parse the statements of a Somali woman, right, who just recapitulated the entire Enlightenment success story of reclaiming secularism and modernity and humanistic values in her own case in a few short years. It's just amazing. So anyway, I... Yeah. I mean, if Ayaan had white skin and had overcome all of those things in the West,

had white skin and had overcome all of those things in the West, she would be celebrated. She would be hailed as a feminist hero. So, I mean, when you were talking before about the difference between that Mormon cult and girls in the Muslim world, I started to tear up because it reminded me of your TED Talk, which I'm going to tear up again. That TED Talk to me hit me so hard because it was the first time anybody in like media I'd ever heard somebody care about those girls the same way you would care about any other girls. Like the argument you were making in that ted talk like these girls in afghanistan why are they different than the girls from the mormon cult

sorry sam no that's great that talk was like, thank you so much. That's, you don't have to apologize. This is good radio. Yeah, a few people notice it, but I actually teared up in that TED Talk. I can't remember if we spoke about this or not, but there was a point where I talk about honor killing. And I said, imagine your daughter gets raped and what you want to do is, is kill her out of shame. And, you know, obviously I had rehearsed that talk a ton. I mean, unlike any other talk you ever give, a TED talk

is like this memorization feat, right? Where you have to remember every line because you're, you've got a hard time limit and no notes. And so it's a very odd talk to give because you're basically, it's a performance as yourself. I mean, you're not thinking out loud because you really have a script that you've memorized. At least that's the way most people do it and the way I've done both of my TED Talks. And so obviously I knew exactly what I was going to say and I had done this a dozen times at least. But I had just been told a couple of hours before going out on stage that my first daughter had taken her first steps.

So when I got to that point in the talk, it totally punctured me. And I actually almost burst into tears. And you can sort of say, people who are just watching it as a TED Talk don't tend to notice. But you can see that I'm almost totally derailed in the talk at that moment. You could see that you actually care. is because I'm so used to there being this two-tier system of like all, you know, girls that matter and then the girls that don't matter. And that was the first time I had seen in the Western world, somebody standing up like in a TED talk, speaking up for us as if we were human beings, like every other girl on the planet. And that was very evident in

your talk. And then of course, you know, immediately after your talk, you get questioned about it and you know, the, the, all the predictable things happen. And so, you know, that's a, that's a very quick, the wokeness comes to swallow you after. Yeah, exactly. Here I am feeling all excited and happy and there it is, you know, it is. But I just wish that, this is why the subtitle of the book, How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, that's what it's all about. I want my liberal friends and, my, this is where I see myself. I am in this realm too. So when I talk about liberals, I'm not saying those people over there, I'm saying us over here, we need to look at what we are doing and we need to stay consistent. And if we believe that all humans are equal, then why are we having a different set of,

you know, why do we use a different yardstick for these people versus these people? I feel like if they could see that, if they could understand that, then they would get it. Like, I feel like if they could get the lunacy of, would you celebrate a Mormon underwear on the cover of Sports Illustrated? No, you wouldn't. You would automatically see that that's ridiculous for many different reasons. But then having a burkini on the cover of Sports Illustrated, that's something to be celebrated?

Like, I just want them to stay with the thought for four more seconds and just continue on with that and think, okay, why is this celebrated and this is not? Yeah, again, it's very hard to understand how the point doesn't run through and change people's outlook just in real time whenever you have the conversation. So like an example I occasionally use when I'm getting criticized for judging another culture, like, and again, I always go to the most extreme and still that's not extreme enough. So I talk about the Taliban or you started the Taliban a lot before ISIS came around. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. You'll get access Thank you. Make & Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.