#415 — The Cover-Up

Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. I have a, brief housekeeping here. I wanna update you all on some changes we're making to the podcast. After many years of giving free subscriptions to everyone who asked for them, usually at least a 100 people a day, some days over a thousand, it has become clear that this policy is no longer working as intended. Unfortunately, just too many people are taking advantage of it. We've always known that some percentage of people would abuse the policy, but things have recently gotten out of hand. This might have something to do with my releasing more podcasts on video. I'm not sure. But, it's just obvious from the pattern of behavior that this is not what we intended or what anyone would assume we would intend. And so regrettably, we have been forced to acknowledge that the policy is well and truly broken at this point. We might revisit it in the future or not. I don't know. But for now, the paywall on the podcast and on Substack will be a normal paywall. If there's content we feel that really must reach a wider audience, we can release that as a public service announcement. So I'm sure that'll happen, and that ensures that the most essential messages get out there and remain accessible to everyone regardless of their subscription status. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge all of you who have been supporting my work with your subscription throughout this whole time, and thank you for doing that and choosing to pay when you could have taken it for free. It's really all of you who deserve the credit for enabling us to offer this free policy for so many years. In truth, it worked far longer than anyone would have expected. I also want to address those of you who will rightly claim that I originally said that anyone who couldn't afford the podcast could always get it for free. At the time, I certainly meant that, and I still wish this could be the case. But this policy was a novel experiment for a digital subscription business, And at this point, the results are just not compatible with what we're trying to do here. That said, we will continue to offer partial scholarships and you can find information about that and how to apply on the subscription page of my website. On another note, I'm gonna …