I first encountered Lawrence Krauss sometime in the early 2000s at a conference. I had just given my lecture and was answering questions when a rather small man with a loud voice and a highly articulate manner stood up and began berating me in what I initially thought was an aggressive manner. It turned out he wasn’t being aggressive; rather, his clear and direct way of speaking seemed forceful compared to the usual, more roundabout way people talk. Intrigued, I sought him out in the bar afterward, and we had a good discussion. This man was, of course, the distinguished physicist and public intellectual Lawrence Krauss. Shortly afterward, we continued our friendly disagreement in the pages of Scientific American, back when the publication still focused on science. Since then, I’ve interacted with Lawrence on stage more often than with anyone else. The following recording was made at Stanford University around 2007 and exemplifies how two people can have a fruitful public discussion without a chairman and outside of a debate format. The nature of our initial disagreement forms a good part of the discussion itself, so I won’t spoil it here. I hope you enjoy it.

The Reverend Michael Bray is a leading advocate of murdering abortion doctors. He also takes biblical literalism to the extreme of advocating the death penalty for adultery and homosexuality. His friend and coconspirator, the Reverend Paul Hill, was executed for murdering an abortion doctor and his bodyguard. Bray strongly defends Hill’s action and thinks he’s now being rewarded in heaven. Bray himself served 46 months of a 10-year jail sentence for conspiracy and possession of illicit explosives. What follows is an audio recording of a long conversation I had with him in a public park in Colorado. He struck me as a deeply confused individual but at the same time sincere, a mind addled and perverted by religious faith, walking evidence of Steven Weinberg’s well-known aphorism, which I quote at the end of this recording: for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.

There’s a kind of conventional wisdom among broadcasters that an interview has to be adversarial. The interviewer must probe in a critical kind of way. You must have arguments. This was brought home to me some years ago when I had a conversation on stage in London, a very large audience with Steven Pinker, and it went very well. The audience liked it, and the BBC, who weren’t there, got wind of it and decided they’d like to have a reprise of it later in the evening, in the News Night programme. So they asked us whether we would do it, and we agreed. Then the BBC producer rang me up and she said to me, “What’s the nature of your disagreement with Dr. Pinker?” I said, “Well, I don’t think there is a disagreement. I think we agree about most things.” She said, “No disagreement?” The interview was promptly cancelled.

That’s just an illustration, and it came to mind again when I did an interview with Steve Pinker in Boston, at Harvard. It was part of the programme I did for Channel Four in 1998 called The Genius of Charles Darwin. We had a very long conversation lasting about an hour, I suppose, and we agreed about just about everything. But I think it is illuminating. I think it’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever done. It’s two people who pretty much agree about everything we discussed, and it’s as though one person was having a conversation with himself. But it’s somehow better than that. I think that when you have two people who agree with each other in that kind of way, each one raises the game of the other. Let’s see if you agree, listen to this conversation between me and Steve Pinker.