The Collapse of American Trust — with Sam Harris

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Speaker 4 Episode 353.

Speaker 5 353 is the area code serving southwestern Wisconsin. In 1953, the first James Bond novel was published.

Speaker 4 What would happen if James Bond took Viagra?

Speaker 5 He would continue to be a state-sponsored terrorist whose actions disgrace us all.

Speaker 5 I didn't like that one. I was once in a James Bond-themed porn film.
I didn't enjoy it, but I did manage to come on queue.

Speaker 5 That's better.

Speaker 5 Go, go, go!

Speaker 5 Welcome to the 353rd episode of The Prop G-Pod. What's happening? I am in, I'm French dog right now.

Speaker 4 I'm a cheese-eating surrender dog.

Speaker 4 Is that fair?

Speaker 5 Is that fair? France did fall in about 11 days.

Speaker 4 So I'm in the south of France.

Speaker 5 You know, France absolutely would be the most amazing country in the world if it wasn't inhabited by the French.

Speaker 5 They just know how to do shit here. Everything is beautiful.
The Côte d'Azur is wonderful.

Speaker 5 I had a James Bond moment about, I don't know, about, I think the first time I came to Cannes, I bombed into, I I landed in the airport, Delta Airlines overnight, no sleep.

Speaker 5 And I pull up Uber to take an Uber to my hotel.

Speaker 5 And this is back when I was actually working for a living and I've got an Airbnb for like, I don't know, 70 euros a night, you know, 40 minutes out of town.

Speaker 5 And I pull up Uber and up pops this helicopter icon. So I'm like, what the fuck? So I press on it and it says, meet your helicopter.

Speaker 5 to Cannes and the baggage claim.

Speaker 5 And I show up and I meet this 13-year-old in what what looks like a Halloween costume of a pilot's uniform, puts me in a van, takes me to this thing where there's a lawnmower with a rotor blade called a helicopter.

Speaker 5 We take off, we zoom or whisk across the Côte d'Azur, land in the Palais, and I get out.

Speaker 5 And there's a bunch of people at Meta Beach kind of trying to figure out how they can get teenage girls to self-harm more.

Speaker 5 And they look up and they see me getting out of my helicopter, and I'm like, dunn, duna!

Speaker 5 Literally, that was kind of a James Bond moment. Now, my life is pretty much about to pursue a series of James Bond moments.

Speaker 5 I'm here at my favorite hotel in the world, the Hotel DuCap Eden Rock, which just reeks of European luxury.

Speaker 5 My favorite thing, and I've talked about this before, but that's not going to stop me from talking about it again.

Speaker 5 I go to the FTR, I go to this beautiful little patio at the Hotel DuCap, and I have my latte and my croissant

Speaker 5 and my freshly squeezed orange juice. And I sit there with my Financial Times, or as I like to call it, that salmon bitch, trying to signal that I'm smart and very international.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 I have, I hire a Zodiac for the week, this guy, French guy, who somehow

Speaker 5 manages to drive a boat while having two cigarettes lit at once. And he takes me in and I always crash the beach from, I'm like fucking the, you know, the 5th battalion of

Speaker 5 the U.S. Army crashing on Normandy.

Speaker 5 I go into Omaha Beach. Omaha Beach for is meta.
I hate those motherfuckers.

Speaker 5 And I was land on their beach and they look up and there's a security guard and they know what to do and I just bomb through there onto the Palais. That's what you do.
You go into the soft tissue.

Speaker 5 You land from the seaside. And I did it at Pinterest Beach, but they're nice.
They didn't care. They just looked up and said, oh,

Speaker 5 would you like to browse some soapstone kitchen counters or plan your wedding? Anyways, I love Can

Speaker 5 Lions. It used to be where they give out trophies to the ad execs who are all looking for a different job and then basically tech eight media.
I mean, it's just so hilarious.

Speaker 5 The lions of this industry were Martin Sorrell, Maurice Levy, and a guy named John Wren from Omnicom. And now between the three of them, they have a $40 billion market cap.

Speaker 5 And you're seeing,

Speaker 5 I mean, they're just unimportant. It's just hilarious we continue to talk about these companies.
Meta, Alphabet, or Amazon will lose or gain the value of all three of these companies in a trading day.

Speaker 5 And yet they're trying to hold on. And WPB just made this big announcement that they're moving to more of an influencer model.

Speaker 4 Well, oh, wow.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that'll help. It's got a $9 billion market cap.
And I'm pretty sure there's going to be an activist coming to WPP because my guess is they have some really good assets.

Speaker 5 And what you have now is a whole that's less than the sum of its parts. The original conglomerate model fashioned by Sir Martin Sorrell made a lot of sense and it no longer makes sense.

Speaker 5 Or it doesn't make sense when you have a lot of your assets are dying or in structural decline, especially with Meta deciding that, oh, using AI, we can do the creative and we can do the account planning and the media buying and stop hiring these very young, attractive people who you overpay, so that's how you can get invited to their used-to-be-cool party.

Speaker 4 Anyway, lovely to be here.

Speaker 5 My big tip around traveling is travel to hotels, not to cities. The best, it's like what school you pick for your kids.
We obsess over what school, we obsess over what city we're going to.

Speaker 5 Well, actually, if you find the right teacher, it doesn't matter what school. And if you have a bad teacher, it doesn't matter what school.
It's more about the teacher than it is the school.

Speaker 5 I think it's the same with hotels.

Speaker 5 I read all these hotel lists and I I travel to hotels versus a city because a mediocre hotel in LA makes LA kind of a hellish place with a bunch of freeways as you're trying to go somewhere and do something cool, staying at the Beverly's Hotel, or if you're having an affair with your, I don't know, secretary's husband or something, and that's the Hotel Bel Air.

Speaker 5 If you're younger and you want something a little cooler, you go to the Audition and they've got a cool restaurant there. I mean, it's all about the hotel.

Speaker 5 LA, yeah, LA is great, but you don't go to LA. You go to the hotel.
Where do you go? You don't go to the South south of France. Cannes itself is not that nice.
It's okay. It's okay.

Speaker 5 What's nice is the Hotel Du Cap, or what's over the top is the Hotel Du Cap, where you get a latte and a croissant for $38. No joke.

Speaker 5 And as I'm sitting there reading my FT, hands down, the highlight of the trip is these two ridiculously ripped, they look Italian, maybe they're French.

Speaker 5 They come out in these like cool polos and they're in between working out and taking human growth hormone. And they come out on their arm with these two peregrines, is that what they're called?

Speaker 5 Falcons? And they have the little hood on them and everyone just kind of stops eating, you know, their croquettes or whatever it is we were eating for breakfast.

Speaker 5 And they look at these two beautiful men with their two equally beautiful hawks.

Speaker 5 And the problem is occasionally a seagull, the seagulls haven't gotten the memo that these rooms are 4,000 euros a night. And they'll come up and literally steal your croissant.

Speaker 5 And seagulls are, I don't know, they're flying rats as far as I can tell.

Speaker 5 So what they do is they bring out these guys with these hawks and the seagulls are going around, you know, flying, and then they take the hood off and instinctively the hawk just bolts off the arm of the handsome ripped French/slash Italian guy and like takes a seagull.

Speaker 5 And when I say takes, I mean somehow in midair manages to rip the fucking thing apart. And then all of a sudden the seagulls are like, ah, ah, I mean, they're going crazy.

Speaker 5 They're going, for good reason, they're going crazy. And then there's no seagulls for like seven or eight minutes.
And it's just fucking hilarious.

Speaker 4 And I'm like, whoa, I see this thing.

Speaker 5 I see the rip guy.

Speaker 5 I see the falcon rip apart a seagull. And I'm like, I would pay 4,100 euros for my room right now.

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Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 In today's episode, we speak with one of my role models. People say, who do you look up to? And I have a lot of people I look up to, most of them nobody else knows.

Speaker 5 Just dudes getting up, you know, making money for their families, trying to be good role models, you know, absorbing blows, not being assholes. Those are the people I admire.

Speaker 5 But in terms of popular or pop figures, the individual I get a lot of guidance from is Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast.

Speaker 5 I find Sam is just literally a...

Speaker 5 a buoy, a, what's it called? A life raft, a port of call and stormy seas. I just find he has such moral clarity, does the work.

Speaker 5 If you listen to his podcast, every word is just, you can tell every word has been selected. The economy of words, it's so crisp, it's so tight.

Speaker 5 We discussed with Sam the collapse of trust in institutions, why getting off Twitter was the best decision he's ever made for his mental health, and what Elon Musk and Andrew Tate reveal about masculinity today.

Speaker 5 With that, from the south of France, from the Hotel Duca, Eden Rock, here's our conversation with Sam Harris.

Speaker 5 Sam, where does this podcast find you?

Speaker 4 Los Angeles.

Speaker 5 So I was struggling with what topics to cover, specifically what topics not to cover, so I thought I'd basically do a buffet here and have you decide of all the things we're most concerned about

Speaker 5 or of all the things to be concerned about, what are you most concerned about right now and why?

Speaker 4 I think it would have to be the way we're interacting with information. You know, I mean, it just is, and largely this is a story of what social media and the internet generally has done to us.
But,

Speaker 4 you know, you can throw into this bin the failure of institutions and the

Speaker 4 pervasive lack of trust in institutions that is far deeper and more widespread than the failures of those institutions would justify, right? I mean, people are far more distrusting of the media than

Speaker 4 the errors of, you know, the woke errors of the media over the last few years justify.

Speaker 4 People are far more distrusting of government and the scientific establishment than the errors committed during COVID justify.

Speaker 4 And so we've reached this kind of freefall condition, as far as I can tell, especially in independent media and over in Trumpistan, it's just a, you know, the physics have completely changed, wherein you have proper lunatics trusted as

Speaker 4 the,

Speaker 4 you know, as honest brokers of information. You've got people like Tucker Carlson and

Speaker 4 a host of slightly better behaved, but no less confused podcasters who I might not name here, and

Speaker 4 conspiracy theorists, people like Alex Jones. I mean, these people are in good standing right of center, and

Speaker 4 it's bonkers. And so I fear that we are in a position increasingly where we're rendering ourselves ungovernable or governable only by

Speaker 4 half the population willing to get absorbed into a personality cult and

Speaker 4 continuously fed lies. And it's just, you know, I don't know how we would respond to the next proper emergency.

Speaker 4 You know, if 9-11 happened now, if a pandemic worse than COVID happened now, if a real war happened now, I think we're in a society that is just riven by misinformation and, frank, dishonesty.

Speaker 4 And it's a very dark picture, I think,

Speaker 4 of us politically at the moment.

Speaker 5 Do you see any sources or paths to repair?

Speaker 4 Well, I do think we have to figure out how to reboot trust in institutions, which is obviously a two-sided problem. The institutions themselves have to

Speaker 4 become trustworthy.

Speaker 4 And the Trump administration is making that hard now by launching an all-out assault on them in ways that

Speaker 4 if the purpose was to make them trustworthy, you would go about it very differently, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, I share the concern that the Ivy League and other universities failed to deal with the explosion of anti-Semitism and, frank, moral confusion that happened after October 7th.

Speaker 4 But if that was your concern,

Speaker 4 if your concern was to deal with the

Speaker 4 merely deal with the ideological capture of so many of these departments and the administrators and talk some sense into them, you wouldn't go about it the way the Trump administration is.

Speaker 4 So we need to restore trust in institutions. We're not all going to independently do our own research in the face of the next great challenge to our society.
We need to have people we can trust.

Speaker 4 We need real air traffic controllers who can keep the planes in the air, right? And so

Speaker 4 there's been a kind of disavowal of expertise, especially in independent media and especially on podcasts,

Speaker 4 as though any comedian who's a quick study and

Speaker 4 can use ChatGPT can be an expert on the war in Ukraine or

Speaker 4 the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or epidemiology or whatever it is. And

Speaker 4 it's a free-for-all out there.

Speaker 4 And I just, so we're going to have to, it may require some very clear catastrophes born of misinformation to get our heads screwed on straight but you know eventually we're going to bump into some hard objects out there in the real world and we're going to want to know what real experts think about real problems and

Speaker 4 we're going to stop denying that expertise is really a thing and again i'm not i'm not arguing that mere credentialism is the way you find experts that's not you know that we could might go into that if you're interested but because people are confused about this but uh the idea that everyone's opinion is worth hearing on every topic is just a colossal load of bullshit.

Speaker 4 And everyone knows this at bottom. And yet

Speaker 4 the way we interact with information is not reflecting that.

Speaker 5 I'm curious, and I think you share this opinion. There's been so many things, I don't know if you,

Speaker 5 that I thought would have been disqualifying about the Trump administration just in the last 100 days that the public would have just, I'm like, you know, that's it. They're going to regurgitate here.

Speaker 5 There's going to be real pushback, and there hasn't been.

Speaker 5 And I've come to a very crude conclusion, and maybe I shouldn't conclude it, or a thesis I should say, that America would rather have an autocrat, a kleptocrat, than a weak party.

Speaker 5 And I saw a survey yesterday that said if the re-election, if the election were held yesterday, even knowing what we know so far in the Trump administration, that he would still win.

Speaker 5 I'm curious what underlying or what shifts in the ground you

Speaker 5 felt led to his reelection and what's happened since then, and why it just doesn't seem as if there's anything that can actually be disqualifying.

Speaker 4 Well, on that last point,

Speaker 4 I think I'm as confused as anyone. I mean, again, there are a thousand things, any one of which would have totally wrecked the presidency of any other American president.

Speaker 4 I mean, this is something that President Obama remarked on from some stage recently, where he just said, you know, can you imagine me doing any of these things?

Speaker 4 And then he went through a short list of things.

Speaker 4 Again, any one of which would have been a national scandal.

Speaker 4 I mean, it just would have been, the news cycle would have never stopped ruminating on just how appalling that thing was, whether it's launching a meme coin, which is a device calculated to accept bribes from crooks and

Speaker 4 foreign agents.

Speaker 4 and to very quickly reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits thereby, grifting your credulous cult. I mean, just one thing.

Speaker 4 It sounds hyperbolic to say a thousand, but that's conservative.

Speaker 4 There's well more than a thousand things Trump has done in the last 10 years, said or done, that would be perfectly disqualifying in another candidate or another president. I mean, the meme coin is

Speaker 4 such a shocking act of corruption. It's amazing we don't have very clear laws against it.
Apparently, we don't. And we're just discovering that.

Speaker 4 So the job of the next president, whoever that, or I should say the next sane and

Speaker 4 ethical president, whenever we get such a person, may not be in the next round, obviously.

Speaker 4 That person's job is going to, in my view, is going to be to do a post-mortem on this decade of American history, political history, and try to figure out how we never

Speaker 4 become vulnerable to this kind of thing again. I mean, clearly we need a system

Speaker 4 that is immune, as immune as a system can be, to the private derangement and corruption of a bad actor, right?

Speaker 4 Because we've proven ourselves as a population, as a citizenry, perfectly capable of electing a patently unqualified, malicious, vindictive, and

Speaker 4 morbidly selfish person to the highest office in the land. We did that.
I mean,

Speaker 4 we can wonder why we did that, but

Speaker 4 we've proved to ourselves and to the world that we're capable of doing that twice.

Speaker 4 We're capable of electing a person who we knew last time around tried to steal the election and lied about it having been stolen from him and told this lie again and again as a continuous provocation to political violence on the part of his cult.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 all of this is so weird and so destructive of the faith that so many people have had in the stability of our system of

Speaker 4 governance that,

Speaker 4 yeah, I think we have to figure out what laws we should have had

Speaker 4 to backstop some of the norms we thought were inviolate, all of which Trump and his administration have violated.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 I'm totally mystified as to why people aren't as allergic to these norm violations as we are. I mean, there's just, it's, again, there's

Speaker 4 you could name, I could easily name dozens here

Speaker 4 off the cuff, but it's, I mean, take, take just adjacent to the meme coin, the fact that we now are a country wherein the President is using our foreign policy, our tariff policy, to

Speaker 4 privately

Speaker 4 personally enrich himself.

Speaker 4 When we slap a 46% tariff on Vietnam, the Vietnam's response to mitigate that harm to their economy is to

Speaker 4 invite Elon to give them internet service through Starlink, right? So that's clearly a conflict of interest and

Speaker 4 a moment of self-dealing there on the part of the administration. But then also to greenlight a $1.5 billion resort from the Trump administration, right? Or from the Trump family.

Speaker 4 It's just in the perfect world, people would go to jail for this, right?

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 I just don't know how our system is this vulnerable. It's quite shocking.

Speaker 5 It's pretty obvious that the system, at least in the short term,

Speaker 5 does not have the resilience to arrest this or cauterize it.

Speaker 5 And I think a lot of Democrats

Speaker 5 are disappointed there hasn't been a more robust pushback.

Speaker 5 If you were advising the Democratic Party on how to be more effectively or robustly pushed back on what's going on, assuming the institutions aren't going to solve the problem right now, what advice would you give them?

Speaker 4 Well, that's very hard. It's hard to see what they can do.
I mean, Corey Booker standing up for 25 hours and talking doesn't move the needle, as far as I can tell. I mean,

Speaker 4 there may be nothing to do short of winning the midterms decisively. And

Speaker 4 for that, I just think the Democrats have to learn the lesson, the obvious lesson of

Speaker 4 the presidential election in 2024, which is that the far-left activist class of the party has no advice worth listening to, right? Their concerns are bogus. Their

Speaker 4 convictions are scarcely sane. They have to be ignored, right? I mean, all,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 I view Harris's loss as overdetermined, but she clearly lost based on her efforts to maintain something like

Speaker 4 a game of four-dimensional chess with woke identity politics.

Speaker 4 At a minimum, she was unable to properly disavow some of the crazy things she had said in 2019 and 2020, and just

Speaker 4 whenever put on the spot was

Speaker 4 either completely tongue-tied and just stonewalling, or she just produced something, some sort of woke word salad.

Speaker 4 And it was obvious that she couldn't be let loose on Joe Rogan's podcast for fear of what she might say

Speaker 4 over the course of three hours. That caution, that sense that there are all these third rails you can't touch, otherwise the

Speaker 4 intersectional maniacs will come for you on X.

Speaker 4 That spell has to be totally broken. And I'm hopeful that it has been, but I've yet to see real evidence of it.
I mean, what we need are charismatic candidates who will speak

Speaker 4 ad-lib and at length with a perfectly carefree attitude with respect to

Speaker 4 all the various shibboleths that gave us wokeness over the last decade or so. I mean, it's just all of that has to be just.

Speaker 4 continuously violated with abandon. And I'm not saying that we suddenly turn into bigots, but there's clearly a line that protects

Speaker 4 any sane political commitment to social justice of a sort that

Speaker 4 could have come out of the mouth of someone like Martin Luther King Jr.,

Speaker 4 which has us speaking sanely about things like immigration and

Speaker 4 youth, gender, dysphoria, et cetera, in ways that won't alienate half of American society.

Speaker 4 And we have to do that immediately, and we have to find the stars in the Democratic Party who stand a chance of getting elected to Congress and to the presidency in the next elections.

Speaker 5 You think it's fair to say that the Democrats have their hearts in the right place, but they go too far, and then they kind of invite an overreaction, and that's sort of playing out here.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So in that sense, I find the left fairly culpable for Trump and Trumpism, right?

Speaker 4 I just think it was obvious what should have been said about all of these culture war issues that would have been acceptable and sane, even if it departed from what the far right wants,

Speaker 4 it wouldn't have been a continuous SNL sketch of identitarian moral confusion.

Speaker 4 And so given that the party got that captured by these,

Speaker 4 which was effectively a new religion of,

Speaker 4 at the center of which was a kind of moral panic.

Speaker 4 The idea that in the aftermath of a two-term black presidency, not only had we made no progress on race issues in this country, racism was somehow at its most excruciating high tide, right? Like

Speaker 4 it's just everything was wrong. Systemic racism was everywhere.
And, you know, I mean,

Speaker 4 Joe Biden gave a speech. I think it was to Morehouse College very early in his presidency,

Speaker 4 which was the most delusional piece of

Speaker 4 pandering to the far left on this particular issue.

Speaker 4 I mean, he stood up in front of these black graduates and said, you know, the deck is so stacked against you, you're not only going to have to be the best, you're going to have to be better than the best to get your foot in the door in this society.

Speaker 4 It's so poisoned by racism. And he said this at a time when everyone, literally everyone knew that not only was this not true, the opposite was true.

Speaker 4 If you're at all qualified, if if you're a black graduate of a good institution in the year,

Speaker 4 this I guess was 2021,

Speaker 4 the chance that you were going to get into medical school or get a job at Netflix or

Speaker 4 get a job at the Ford Foundation or whatever, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, anywhere, any high status job, right, or position in academia was not only

Speaker 4 not harmed by being black, you were positively advantaged by being black. Literally everyone knew this.
They had known it for years.

Speaker 4 And yet the president of the United States is telling the graduating class of a black college that they're under the boot of a racist patriarchy.

Speaker 4 Undoubtedly, he would have added the variable of gender as well if he'd been given the chance. I mean, it's just, it was pure delusion, and everyone knew it.

Speaker 4 And so I think that that bell has to be unrung somehow, left of center. I think it's in the process of being.
I think we no longer believe this stuff. And DEI is now,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 the acronym is

Speaker 4 radioactive,

Speaker 4 I think for good reason.

Speaker 4 Again, none of this is to repudiate a commitment to civil rights, and none of it's to ignore that there are still real racists in our society and real threats of racism and probably policies that

Speaker 4 meet the test of institutional racism that still need to be found and changed. I mean, all of that's true, but this tip over into reverse racism, which really was what

Speaker 4 DEI became, was totally dysfunctional and unethical. And

Speaker 4 yeah, I mean, it gave us, in large measure, it gave us Trumpism.

Speaker 5 Do you distinguish between DEI efforts on campuses where

Speaker 5 You know, 60 years ago, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, 12 black people combined, that's a problem, but now 60% of Harvard's freshman class identifies as non-white

Speaker 5 versus the corporate world where we still have, I think, about 80 of the Fortune 500 CEOs or 16% are women, that there still are a lot of companies who their boards and their CEOs and their senior management just

Speaker 4 are

Speaker 5 much different than their broader employee base or their customer base.

Speaker 5 Do you make any distinction between kind of DEI and how far it's gone or not gone between academic institutions and the private sector?

Speaker 4 Well, I think it's a complex problem. And I think it changes depending on the context and

Speaker 4 the identity you're talking about, right?

Speaker 4 So for like women in the workplace, there's the obvious variable of women deciding to have families, getting pregnant, and the asymmetry there, what happens to them versus what happens to men. who

Speaker 4 ride shotgun with them and also get to have families, that has obvious consequences. And I think

Speaker 4 the wage gap,

Speaker 4 what I imagine is true, is that if you correct for the effect of

Speaker 4 losing those years of your life to pregnancy and raising kids,

Speaker 4 that closes the wage gap. And it also probably accounts for some of the differing ambitions between men and women.

Speaker 4 And those are differences that we might not want to correct for in the end. We might want some other way of correcting for it.
I mean, I think it's hard to know what is optimal there.

Speaker 4 The idea that every

Speaker 4 person

Speaker 4 just wants to be a CEO, really, at bottom and wants to make the sacrifices that entails, I think that's, you know, probably not true. And it's probably good that it's very good that it's not true.

Speaker 4 You know, I just think we had a moment in the 60s where a fairly heavy-handed

Speaker 4 approach to righting the wrongs of the past was warranted, right? And so I think that I think it was totally,

Speaker 4 I think our our approach to affirmative action then was totally justifiable. And then we entered a period where it did all the good it could do and it started doing some obvious harms.

Speaker 4 For me, the goal is quite clear and it is a goal that people like Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 4 explicitly articulated, which is we want to get to a colorblind society, which is not to say that it's a society where no one notices

Speaker 4 the superficial characteristics between people, but that those characteristics don't matter, right? That there's no political or moral significance to the color of a person's skin.

Speaker 4 We want to get to that world. And we were

Speaker 4 and are, I think, very close to getting to that world.

Speaker 5 Some of us live in that world already.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 in high status parts of culture, for much of the time,

Speaker 4 that's how you experience life.

Speaker 4 And I'm sure it is in other parts of culture. But

Speaker 4 insofar as we haven't perfectly gotten there, we want to get there. The problem with the far left is that they explicitly have disavowed that as the goal.

Speaker 4 They don't think colorblindness is a rational goal. What they want to do is play this intersectional game of

Speaker 4 power politics across identity groups,

Speaker 4 wherein

Speaker 4 white males have the least rank.

Speaker 4 And so you just flip the hierarchy on its head. And they want to prosecute this war of all against all until the end of time.

Speaker 4 Again,

Speaker 4 and the disavowal of colorblindness has been explicit.

Speaker 4 They think

Speaker 4 there's no getting over race. Race is just super important and super indelible.
And

Speaker 4 therefore, we've been living in a society. Again, I think the vapors of this lunacy are getting expunged.
But rolling back the clock, prior to the 2024 election, we were living in a world where

Speaker 4 left of center,

Speaker 4 people cared about race as much as

Speaker 4 the only people right of center who cared about race as much as the left wing of the Democratic Party are white supremacists and neo-Nazis and actual racists.

Speaker 4 I mean, that was what was so perverse about this.

Speaker 4 There were documents issued by

Speaker 4 the Democratic Party itself and certainly every activist.

Speaker 4 group supporting it, which if you had done a search replace for white and black in those documents, they would have read like Ku Klux Klan pamphlets from the early 20th century, right?

Speaker 4 It's just, it was completely bonkers. And how we lived so long under that mania is, again, is another one of these inscrutable things.
I mean, we can now say the same thing about Trumpistan.

Speaker 4 I mean, how is it that all of this is passing

Speaker 4 among otherwise sane people? It's a mystery, but it's, you know,

Speaker 4 the left is largely culpable for this pendulum swing into populist know-nothingism and

Speaker 4 the way immigration got weaponized. I mean, yes,

Speaker 4 both sides accounted for how we got here.

Speaker 5 We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Speaker 5 So you live in LA.

Speaker 5 I went to college in LA at UCLA and in 1997 they did away with race-based affirmative action and they moved to kind of an adversity score, which is essentially the way I can best describe it would be affirmative action based on income as opposed to race or sexual orientation.

Speaker 5 Do you think that's a good model Or

Speaker 5 are you part of

Speaker 5 the kind of merit-only philosophy?

Speaker 4 No, I think I mean, I'm very worried, as I know you are, about wealth inequality

Speaker 4 and income inequality. I think wealth inequality more so.

Speaker 4 And I think correcting for that is an intrinsic good. I think that this is a real disparity in

Speaker 4 luck that

Speaker 4 people suffer everywhere, everywhere, within our society and across societies.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 insofar as we can cancel it,

Speaker 4 I think we should be tolerant of a certain amount of inequality because I think that it is part of the flywheel of capitalism, that some people can get up earlier in the morning and strive harder and

Speaker 4 miss dinners with their kids and earn

Speaker 4 more money as a result because they just had that entrepreneurial ambition. I think we want to preserve that.
I think we want all the incentives that

Speaker 4 if there's a better incentive structure than capitalism, we haven't found it yet for producing wealth and

Speaker 4 creativity.

Speaker 4 Again, that we all benefit from, even the lazy benefit from it.

Speaker 4 But no, there are people who

Speaker 4 were born to immense advantages that others don't have, and we should try to figure out how to

Speaker 4 correct for that. And one of the disadvantages historically in the United States, certainly, has been the

Speaker 4 ambient level of racist bigotry and

Speaker 4 exclusion from

Speaker 4 economic opportunity on that basis, right? So, yes, I think it's still true to say that black families have, on average, one

Speaker 4 eighth the level of stored wealth as

Speaker 4 white families. And one must imagine that the legacy of racism has a lot to do with it.
The crucial thing to realize, however, is that the thing that is stopping any person

Speaker 4 from

Speaker 4 getting ahead now is very unlikely to be racism now, right? So that's the thing that was so misguided about so much of DEI thinking, right? It's like,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 if you wave a magic wand and get rid of all the racists, you're still not going to suddenly have

Speaker 4 more,

Speaker 4 you know, Fortune 500 people,

Speaker 4 more members of the black community who are qualified to be Fortune 500 CEOs or cardiologists or et cetera. So there are economic disparities

Speaker 4 which are riding on top of educational disparities and disparities in health outcomes and single-parent families at a much higher rate, et cetera. But if you use class as your

Speaker 4 proxy for all of your other concerns about

Speaker 4 disparities of outcome,

Speaker 4 educational health, et cetera. I think you do a lot of good, and you also disproportionately help people of color because as a

Speaker 4 class,

Speaker 4 the various identity groups are highly correlated with disparities in class difference.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So we're both dads.

Speaker 4 You know, we think a lot about and

Speaker 5 write a lot about and speak a lot about the struggles of young men right now. They're just

Speaker 5 as well and as much advantage as men have registered over the last

Speaker 5 several hundred, couple thousand years,

Speaker 5 the last twenty, thirty years, it would be hard to point to a group that's done worse in America than young men.

Speaker 5 I'm curious as a dad and as someone who's a keen observer of culture and society, what do you think has led to this? And any thoughts as a dad or just someone as an observer on how

Speaker 5 what we can do or what society, assuming you agree it's a problem, can do to help sort of right the ship around young men, you know, again starting to participate or be more productive members of society?

Speaker 4 Well, I must say, as a father of two girls, one

Speaker 4 in her teens and one soon to be, it's very easy for me to be taken in by the view of young men as just rapacious hoodlums who need to be viewed as a problem.

Speaker 4 But I can dimly remember that I was once a young man, and I know this problem from the other side, obviously.

Speaker 4 No, I mean, I think you have been a great voice of

Speaker 4 reason on this topic and a counterpoint to many of the examples that are getting

Speaker 4 that are serving as sort of pathological attractors to young men in our society.

Speaker 4 People like Andrew Tate, right? Like you, you know, you're like the anti-Andrew Tate, and you know, that's a good thing.

Speaker 4 I mean, we need more people like you who are modeling masculinity in a way that is ethical and

Speaker 4 just kind of conversant in the skill set you want young men to be conversant in, right? I mean, it's really amazing if you kind of hold your body of work up against

Speaker 4 the Andrew Tatification of similar topics.

Speaker 4 You're checking similar boxes, right? I mean, it's like

Speaker 4 economic independence is

Speaker 4 one variable, but when you look at the diabolical version of it, it's all about just the most

Speaker 4 obscene materialism, right? Without any

Speaker 4 deeper aspiration, right, without any ethical engagement with the problems of this world.

Speaker 4 It's just, if you can get a Bugatti, you know, or rent one in Dubai, you know, and pretend and pretend to your fans that this is your lifestyle, you've basically accomplished everything you need in life, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, that's, and so that is something that we need to

Speaker 4 offer a counterpoint to. And I think you're doing that.
I think you're doing a great job of it.

Speaker 5 I think you're being generous.

Speaker 4 No, I mean, honestly not. I mean, it's just you're, I think you do a fantastic job of

Speaker 4 putting the lie to the notion that money can't buy you happiness in any sense, right? I mean, we know that's not true.

Speaker 4 We know that being poor or being subjected, not even poor, but just having financial stress be a major component of your life, we know that's corrosive to a feeling of well-being.

Speaker 4 And we know it's corrosive to marriages and relationships.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 you have taken the taboo off of talking about wealth in an aspirational way, and you found a way of doing it that's not icky, that's not, that doesn't disregard the problem of wealth inequality and the ethical burden of being generous and creating a social safety net and paying taxes and

Speaker 4 everything in that bucket that is the antithesis of what the the President of the United States or his various acolytes like Elon Musk message about. I mean, it's just

Speaker 4 counter-programming that's absolutely necessary. And so I view you as a great

Speaker 4 messenger of what it's like to be a good citizen and a good man and just a mensch. I mean,

Speaker 4 the only good word we have for it is

Speaker 4 Yiddish.

Speaker 4 You're a mensch. So keep it up.

Speaker 5 Let me just say I'm really enjoying this podcast so far, Sam.

Speaker 5 So look, young men are going to look up to just naturally the President of the United States and the world's wealthiest man.

Speaker 5 And I don't think Donald Trump, I'm not sure Donald Trump was ever what you would call an aspirational man or a good person.

Speaker 5 But my sense is, and you've written about this, Elon Musk, you were friends with and had a lot of admiration for.

Speaker 5 And I think you had a similar type of relationship with Joe Rogan.

Speaker 5 And then, and I see one of the things I love about America is I do think there's a zeitgeist

Speaker 5 guideposts, a natural gravity towards once you experience success, it becomes correlated with trying to be kinder or start to think bigger picture about leaving your mark on society in a positive way.

Speaker 5 Even the robber barons at some point flipped the script and said, What can I build here with my wealth that would serve society well?

Speaker 5 And it seems as if those rivers have reversed, and that some of our most powerful people, as they get more powerful or a broader platform, don't evolve but digress.

Speaker 5 Do you have any sense for why that is happening now across some of our most powerful and influential men?

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, I think just a few people can do a lot of harm to the culture. I mean, you have in the person of Elon

Speaker 4 just this unique example of somebody who

Speaker 4 has so many obvious, genuine gifts. I mean, you know, above all, as an entrepreneur, I mean, he's clearly has a vision and can sell that vision to lots of talented people,

Speaker 4 tens of thousands of talented people

Speaker 4 who will

Speaker 4 stumble over themselves to get a chance to work for him. And

Speaker 4 they can do some amazing things.

Speaker 4 So he's aspirational and a great model of success in that regard.

Speaker 4 But he's had this kind of personal unraveling, which I'm at pains to explain apart from just the influence that Twitter and now X has had on his brain and the influence of

Speaker 4 fame, I guess,

Speaker 4 a certain kind of fame to which he's clearly addicted,

Speaker 4 that has just encouraged him to become this very different sort of person. And whether he was always this sort of person just kind of waiting to get out and I didn't see it, I don't know.

Speaker 4 I mean, so I'm forced to believe one of two things.

Speaker 4 Either he's changed a lot, having become the richest and one of the most famous people on earth, or I just didn't know him in the first place, right? So let me just press pause.

Speaker 4 You're a neuroscientist.

Speaker 5 Do you think ketamine could have anything to do with it?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, so I just have heard the reports that you've heard. I mean, this was reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 4 If I wanted to dig in his circle, I'm sure I could find

Speaker 4 first-hand reports of how much of that's true. But yeah, if he is using ketamine as frequently as was reported, that certainly can't help, right? I mean, he's he's but

Speaker 4 he's just

Speaker 4 honestly, his engagement with

Speaker 4 X

Speaker 4 was so dysfunctional for so long, even before he bought it,

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 it became his

Speaker 4 seemingly full-time preoccupation. It's just, it did something.
I mean,

Speaker 4 everyone who was ever addicted to it or is just too

Speaker 4 fixated on it has a

Speaker 4 homeopathic dose of this. I mean, they know it.

Speaker 4 I got off of Twitter now

Speaker 4 two and a half years ago because of how demonstrably harmful it was, it was proving in my life. And I was never somebody who was addicted to it.

Speaker 4 I was just somebody who was using it as an author and as a, you know, as a speaker and, you know, podcaster. I just thought it was a necessary marketing channel.

Speaker 4 It was also just very tempting to talk to other prominent people and

Speaker 4 try to clean up misinformation and react to things. And so I was using it in a normal way.

Speaker 4 I mean, and I do not consider Elon's use of it at all normal, but it was still probably the worst thing I did to my life in the last 10 years, right?

Speaker 4 And, you know, and getting off of it was, I'm always embarrassed to admit, the best thing, the best life hack I have found in the last decade.

Speaker 4 I mean, it was completely transformational of my life to get off Twitter. And that's just a sign of how debasing it was for me to use it the way I was using it.

Speaker 4 And again, I was not a super tweeter. I was maybe, you know, on average, once a day or so, a couple of times a day, but I would go for days without doing it.

Speaker 4 But it was still punctuating my life in a way and amplifying a certain kind of signal in a way that was proving quite harmful and quite disorienting.

Speaker 4 It was turning me into a bit of a misanthrope. I mean, I was seeing the worst in people, you know, pretty much all the time.

Speaker 4 I mean, just whenever I looked at my phone, I was just seeing some awful piece of

Speaker 4 dishonesty or malice broadcast to me by people who I knew in their in normal, you know, certainly most of them in their in their private and even public lives were not this sort of person.

Speaker 4 But in this context,

Speaker 4 it was amplifying for the worst in people. And so,

Speaker 4 you know, Elon has just performed a kind of human sacrifice of himself on the altar of

Speaker 4 that set of incentives. And

Speaker 4 he acts like a pro, you know, whether he is a psychopath or not, he acts like one, right? And I, and I'm not, not, I'm not actually exaggerating. He acts like a psychopath on X.

Speaker 4 He's completely callous as to the harms he causes, and all the while knowing the harms he causes, both in the lives of private citizens who get doxxed and get, you know,

Speaker 4 swarmed by his cult, and just the harm he causes in the world.

Speaker 4 I mean, just his adventures in Doge, when he, you know, fed, on his account, fed USAID into the wood chipper and stopped life-saving programs in sub-Saharan Africa, which people immediately recognized would lead to death

Speaker 4 in very short order. And if not corrected for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths within a year,

Speaker 4 the attitude he took to all of that was one of just

Speaker 4 probably

Speaker 4 fentanyl-adled ecstasy, right? I mean,

Speaker 4 he just reveled in the chaos he was causing. And so it was with his Hitler salutes, which may have not been Hitler's salutes.

Speaker 4 I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he's just a moron who has just bad, you know, awkward body English.

Speaker 4 Who knows what he was up to there with his my heart goes out to you, and now I look like Adolf Hitler,

Speaker 4 you know, twice in a row. But whatever his intentions, when he saw the blowback, when he saw how much, when he saw that every anti-Semite on planet Earth was celebrating, right,

Speaker 4 he could have very easily have signaled to his 210 million, whatever it was at that point, followers, listen, this is, I see how, I see what that looked like. You know, sorry, that's embarrassing.

Speaker 4 Obviously, I despise anti-Semitism, and if you're an anti-Semite, please unfollow me, right? Like that would have been the sane, ethical, manly thing to do, right?

Speaker 4 But instead, he just made Nazi jokes and trolled the world, right?

Speaker 4 All the while signal boosting the accounts of real anti-Semites and bringing real anti-Semites back onto Twitter with great fanfare, people like Nick Fuentes,

Speaker 4 and also funding the far-right party in Germany to boot, right? I mean,

Speaker 4 so his contributions to the greatest eruption of anti-Semitism in our lifetime have been at best ambiguous. And

Speaker 4 yeah, it's just totally irresponsible. So the fact that he is the cultural influence he has been

Speaker 4 has been directly harmful to a generation of young men who have worshipped him.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think the greatest thing to ding his reputation, and it really should have been a fatal blow, was the gaming controversy where it was revealed he was pretending to be one of the best gamers on earth.

Speaker 4 I don't know if you saw this, Scott.

Speaker 4 But, you know, a bunch of gamers saw him play one of these games in public, and it was totally clear.

Speaker 4 I'm not a gamer, so I can't get into the details here, but apparently it was clear to a moral certainty that he did not have the skills he was pretending to have.

Speaker 4 He had paid someone to build out his character, someone very likely in China, to play 24 hours a day and build out his character to superhuman levels so that he could inherit all those powers and then display them ineptly in front of the gamers who actually knew how to play the game.

Speaker 4 But he had gone on Joe Rogan's podcast and Lex Friedman's podcast and lied to their face about being a top 10 and in some cases,

Speaker 4 you know, the best gamer in the world on certain games. And when they lavished praise on him, you know,

Speaker 4 talking about what you just, that suggested that he has, you know, a kind of a neurological,

Speaker 4 you know, a six sigma level, you know, neurological health that

Speaker 4 would predispose him to those abilities. He totally owned it.
It's like, yeah, you know, it's gaming as a great surrogate for all kinds of talents.

Speaker 4 And yeah, it's really, and he was lying about all that, right? So that, if anything was going to destroy his reputation with young men, I thought that was going to be it.

Speaker 4 And I think it probably did in gaming circles.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 5 We're back with more from Sam Harris.

Speaker 5 I have to credit you. The first time we had dinner, you gave me permission to get off of Twitter.
I said,

Speaker 5 I acknowledge that probably 20 or 30% of my mental health episodes over the last few years had been triggered by something on Twitter. And you said, why are you there?

Speaker 5 And I'm like, well, I've got a big following, half a million people. And I think, how many did you walk away from?

Speaker 4 I think I had 1.5 million when I pulled the cord.

Speaker 5 I got off. And it's exactly what you said.
It's been one of the most accretive things to my mental health that I've done in the last 10 years.

Speaker 5 And what you realize, the thing I've, and I'm curious if you feel this this way, once you're off it, you're off it three or four months, you recognize just how small it is, that it really is a, it is a small part of the world that is occupying way too much of your world.

Speaker 5 I have no difference in my life, none, except I'm not, I don't venture into this strange moon of Mars that's hostile and

Speaker 5 biased and weird and angry. And it's like, why was I, why was I vacationing there, you know, seven times a day? You know, I'm, I've talked a lot about this a lot on the pod.

Speaker 5 And when I was younger, I didn't have enough anxiety. I wasn't worried about anything.
I almost failed out of UCLA several times. I didn't really care.
Almost got fired a lot. Didn't really care.

Speaker 5 Sleepwalking through life. Kind of 30 to 40, the right amount of anxiety.
Enough anxiety to be productive, worry about the right things. Now I have too much anxiety.
I worry about everything.

Speaker 5 Anything happens with my kids, I worry.

Speaker 5 And lately, I've had a really difficult time disassociating from things I can control and I can't control, specifically some of the things that are happening around the Trump administration.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's like this shit really rattles me. Like it's taking time from my presence

Speaker 5 and ability to just stay focused on the really important things in my life, such as when I'm with my kids or with my partner.

Speaker 5 I'm curious if you struggle with some of those same things, your inability to disassociate from some of these things that are going on.

Speaker 5 And if you are able to deal with it, what are the vehicles and practices for helping you do that?

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, as you know, or I think you know, meditation has been a very big focus of mine. And

Speaker 4 I mean, for me, that really is the

Speaker 4 kind of superpower because

Speaker 4 at a certain point, you recognize that your mind is all you have, really. I mean, obviously, you have a body, you have circumstances in the world, I mean, things matter, but

Speaker 4 your reaction to what happens is so much more

Speaker 4 important

Speaker 4 in almost every case than

Speaker 4 what happens. There's

Speaker 4 so much room for

Speaker 4 being

Speaker 4 on the negative side, being needlessly, pointlessly unhappy, right? I mean, worrying when worry does absolutely no good and you just suffer twice, right?

Speaker 4 If the bad thing happens and you were worrying the whole time before it happened, well, then you got to suffer all the way up to the bad thing happening.

Speaker 4 If it didn't happen, your worry was truly a hallucination. But in no case,

Speaker 4 I mean, for me, negative mental states like anxiety are useful in a very punctate way in that they give you information about the world or your place in the world or something that needs to be responded to.

Speaker 4 But then

Speaker 4 for virtually every moment thereafter,

Speaker 4 that state, whether it's anxiety or anger or impatience or

Speaker 4 pick your flavor, that state is almost always counterproductive, right? Which is to say you want to be in a different state when

Speaker 4 you are actually solving the problem at hand or you're just waiting to see what happens, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, there are many problems, as you point out, that we're powerless to solve and we're just kind of witnessing this kind of slow-rolling emergency.

Speaker 4 The question is, how unhappy do you have to be living under that condition of uncertainty? And the answer you find when you learn to meditate is not unhappy at all, really. And so, so my life is a

Speaker 4 very strange bifurcation

Speaker 4 between having a very high level of personal well-being,

Speaker 4 certainly most of the time,

Speaker 4 and also being very concerned about the state of our world.

Speaker 4 So I spend most of my time professionally and even just personally, privately, focusing on the bad things that are happening and the bad things that may yet happen, the bad things

Speaker 4 I think it's rational to worry

Speaker 4 will happen or very likely will happen.

Speaker 4 And yet my life is so good.

Speaker 4 It's so good in

Speaker 4 superficial contingent ways that could change.

Speaker 4 Much of that is born of my ability to notice what I'm doing with my attention and to cease to do the dumb thing that is causing me to be miserable in this moment.

Speaker 5 And you get that causing perspective from meditation.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, so, you know, mindfulness, for lack of a better word, I mean, that does cover basically what I mean, but it is something I get into in much greater detail over at Waking Up, which is the meditation app that

Speaker 4 I have and in my book by that same title. But briefly, it's just,

Speaker 4 I mean, if you're suffering, you are almost certainly thinking without noticing your thinking, without noticing the power of thought to determine how you feel and react in each moment to just

Speaker 4 your sensory, your raw sensory existence, right? I mean, you're just,

Speaker 4 in each moment, you're just seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking,

Speaker 4 and therefore feeling various moods and emotions.

Speaker 4 And the role that thought plays there, the role that our captivity to thought, our unawareness of any alternative to being identified with each thought that passes through consciousness, That role is decisive.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's every bit as decisive as when you're asleep and dreaming and you don't know you're dreaming, right? You're safely in your bed.

Speaker 4 In reality, you're safely in your bed, but now you're having some horrible dream that

Speaker 4 plunges you into shame, right? Or

Speaker 4 fear or some other negative mental state.

Speaker 4 The neurology of that, right? The failure of reality testing, the fact that

Speaker 4 your conscious life can be completely subsumed by self-generated imagery. That is

Speaker 4 a version of that is happening to us in the waking state, and we call it thought.

Speaker 4 We call it ourselves, really. We call it me.
It's like, what are you talking about? It's just me here. I'm thinking.
I'm the thinker, right?

Speaker 4 These thoughts are in my voice, right?

Speaker 4 That sense of being identified with thought

Speaker 4 is something that is a spell that gets broken ultimately when you actually learn how to meditate. And it does give you this.

Speaker 4 this degree of freedom that people otherwise don't have, which is to just get off the ride, right?

Speaker 4 You're feeling miserable because you're thinking about the thing that happened yesterday or the thing that might happen tomorrow. You can actually get off that ride.

Speaker 4 And you can get off of it even

Speaker 4 if

Speaker 4 it's a real problem, right? It's like, you know, your kid has some

Speaker 4 scary illness and you're going from doctor to doctor and you don't know what's what and you have real reason to be worried, right? I've been in that situation.

Speaker 4 You know, it's, of course, you're going to be unhappy. But the question is, how unhappy do you have to be? How contracted do you have to be?

Speaker 4 How ruled do you have to be by your thoughts from this moment to the next until you get the appointment next Tuesday or until you get the results of the scan?

Speaker 4 You know, you got a scan on Friday, and you know, perversely, we have a medical system that doesn't work on weekends, right? So you have to wait till Monday for the results of an MRI

Speaker 4 if you're lucky.

Speaker 4 How riddled by anxiety do you have to be? Meditation gives you a freedom to just actually just enjoy the beauty of your life in the meantime

Speaker 4 because

Speaker 4 you're going to be there to deal with it when you actually have to deal with it. I mean, Monday will come around, and then you'll be the guy who has to absorb whatever information you get.

Speaker 4 And the question is, do you want to

Speaker 4 do that well and to be a good father in that context? Do you want to be the guy who was just racked by anxiety all weekend?

Speaker 4 Or do you want to be the guy who actually had a good time with his kids on the weekend? And then you get the information on Monday, right? It's like, we're all going to die, this guy.

Speaker 4 You know where this is all going, right? We're going to die. Our kids hopefully are going to live long enough to be old enough to be the ripe old age that it's appropriate to die.

Speaker 4 But impermanence reigns, right? So the question is, how can we be happy under conditions where the punchline is that everything changes, right?

Speaker 4 And that everything that is gathered gets ultimately dispersed, right?

Speaker 4 That's the situation we're in. The people who first figured out how to meditate figured out that

Speaker 4 how you use attention really matters and really can spell the difference between happiness and suffering in each moment.

Speaker 5 As you've gotten older, the things that give you joy and peace, have they changed, become certain things more or or less?

Speaker 4 I think I'm a slightly odd case because I got

Speaker 4 very into meditation and

Speaker 4 became very cognizant of

Speaker 4 the finiteness of life very early, right? So I was a, you know, I was probably 18.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 4 I became kind of obsessed with my own mortality earlier than that. My best friend died when I was 13.
My dad died when I was 17.

Speaker 4 So loss was something that

Speaker 4 I understood fairly early. And

Speaker 4 the philosophical and psychological implications of that became interesting to me very early. So I was always

Speaker 4 a student of

Speaker 4 life-changing philosophy. I mean, not just purely academic.
questions of interest, but just like, what does it mean to live a good life

Speaker 4 in a context where we know

Speaker 4 we're ultimately going to lose everything.

Speaker 4 And so I was thinking about that very early. So I can't say that that has changed.
I just, in some ways, I'm learning, relearning the lessons I learned when I was 18 and 19 and 20.

Speaker 4 And they're landing harder and perhaps

Speaker 4 slightly differently now. But

Speaker 4 it's a continuation of where my head has been at for many decades, I have to say.

Speaker 5 Would you describe the loss of your father as sort of a defining or the defining moment in your life? Like, has there been one moment that sort of changed

Speaker 5 your orientation or approach to life or given you, you know, set you on a different path?

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 it was less so in this case. I mean, we were close, but it was a long-distance relationship.
He had left when I was

Speaker 4 two and a half.

Speaker 5 So you were raised by a single mother or did she remarry? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean, she eventually got remarried when I was 15.

Speaker 4 But yeah, no, for all intents and purposes,

Speaker 4 I was raised by a single mom, and she was quite a hero.

Speaker 5 I was raised by a single mother, too, and I didn't know that about you. Can you talk a little bit about

Speaker 5 the way I respond through the lens of being raised by

Speaker 5 a single mother? Can you talk a little bit about how that impact that's on had on you as an adult and your approach to partnership and being a dad?

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, so again, this is a

Speaker 4 case that is going to be somewhat somewhat atypical because my mom was just

Speaker 4 both very, very talented and very lucky, right? So she really did not have resources. My dad left.
I think he, on her account, he, I think, cut one child support check of $500, something like that.

Speaker 4 But I mean, he really did not discharge his responsibilities as a dad very well.

Speaker 4 I mean, he was a struggling actor, so he didn't have money either, but he was painting houses at that time to make money.

Speaker 4 But he abandoned me and my mom to go be an actor in New York. He couldn't figure out how to do that in L.A.
for some reason.

Speaker 4 So that attests to some other lack of commitment to being a parent. But

Speaker 4 my mom discovered one day that she could write

Speaker 4 television shows, and she discovered this very quickly. I mean, she just, I think she actually sold her first script.

Speaker 4 She was just watching television one day, trying to figure out how she was going to make money. Again, we really had nothing.
And she,

Speaker 4 I think she, I forget the, it was maybe $2,500 or something. But she sold the first thing she wrote and then

Speaker 4 just became a colossus within the television industry. And she

Speaker 4 eventually, I mean, her big hit was Golden Girls. She created Golden Girls.
And so we went from being

Speaker 4 poor to being wealthy over the course of

Speaker 4 probably it was probably a little more than a decade i mean i think i was oh my god susan harris yeah yeah yeah literally just thought i've kept my mom just i keep saying i thought i've seen the name susan harris on the in the credits of all these series in the 70s and 80s that was my mom is awesome

Speaker 4 um

Speaker 4 but so but it was a very weird time course and so there's a funny story that she likes to tell uh which um

Speaker 4 maybe says more about me than than uh i would like but she um i mean she was working really hard. Again, she was a single mom.
So I grew up with a long string of babysitters.

Speaker 4 And when I would come home from school, there would be a babysitter. My mom would be

Speaker 4 writing at the office. And at one point, she came to me and she said,

Speaker 4 we were living in a little rented house in the San Fernando Valley.

Speaker 4 But I was going to a private school that she had stretched to get me into. And

Speaker 4 so I was surrounded by kids who had much more money than we did. And she said to me, I don't remember this, but I'm sure this is true because this was indelibly etched upon her memory.
She said,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 if I have an opportunity here, if I work much harder than I'm working now,

Speaker 4 our situation is going to change. And, you know, you'll be able to, one day you'll be able to have a pool in the backyard like your friend, Tom Brown, who he had a great house with a great pool.

Speaker 4 But you're going to have much, you're going to have less of me. You're going to spend more time with babysitters.
And

Speaker 4 so there's going to be a sacrifice. And apparently I thought for a few seconds and I turned to her and I said, get the pool, mom.
I want the pool.

Speaker 4 I literally sit here. I'm not exaggerating, Sam.
I'm freaking out.

Speaker 5 I feel like you've raised me through my 50s, but your mother, I just figured out, kind of raised me. I was a child of television.

Speaker 5 Soap is the first time time I was ever introduced to a gay man, Billy Crystal.

Speaker 4 Well, then not only you, not only you, she's

Speaker 4 often credited with writing the first truly positive.

Speaker 4 I mean, I'm not sure it's totally aged well. I mean, it was probably more caricature than you would want, but

Speaker 4 it's the first truly positive role for a gay character in television. I believe that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, but she wasn't like a psycho killer or a pedophile. And then the first time I ever saw a black man in a position of leadership was Benson, which is also another show.

Speaker 5 And then when my mom was sick, she and I used to watch Everyone Loves Raymond, Frasier, and the Golden Girls.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 5 That is just wild.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 quite heroically, she wrote, I think this is a, I mean, this may not sound as impressive as it is because people.

Speaker 4 don't know how television gets made, but she famously wrote, she didn't have a writing staff for SOAP, so she wrote, I believe it's the first 75 episodes all by herself.

Speaker 4 I mean, she was banging out one episode a week of television, 22 weeks a year, all by herself. And I mean,

Speaker 4 very few people have done that in television. So it was quite amazing.

Speaker 5 So just as we wrap up here, you gave me a piece of advice about being a dad a couple of years ago that I've really held on to.

Speaker 5 And I want you to, I'm going to try and prompt you to remember it, but you said you figured out that you just, in certain instances, just needed to be dad. Can you speak more about that?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, and

Speaker 4 part of this was my realizing what I wanted in a school. I mean, I just wanted to outsource all of the

Speaker 4 role of being a teacher to the school so that, and I must say this has been achieved imperfectly in my daughter's schools, but I just wanted to be able to say, oh, you know, yeah, that, you know, that, you know, Mrs.

Speaker 4 Johnson, she's a hard teacher, you know, and just commiserate

Speaker 4 with my daughters without ever having to tiger mom anything, right? I just don't want to be that guy. And the truth is, I'm just not comfortable being that guy.

Speaker 4 I don't like the subtext of apparently conditional love that gets communicated

Speaker 4 when you really push.

Speaker 4 And so I just,

Speaker 4 I haven't. And

Speaker 4 I mean, both my daughters are good students and they're, you know, they're getting educated, but

Speaker 4 there's definitely a difference between

Speaker 4 tiger momming it and not. And I'm definitely not.

Speaker 4 And I realize I just want to have a, I want there to be no doubt in my daughters' minds how much I love them and how much I rejoice in who they are as people.

Speaker 4 And so whenever I'm in a mode that stands a chance of confusing that, you know,

Speaker 4 I'm alert to the downside there. So I just,

Speaker 4 yeah.

Speaker 4 And as a result, I I have very little stature in the home as a as a source of

Speaker 4 knowledge or wisdom.

Speaker 4 I mean, you know, when push comes to us up, that's probably not true, but there's a fair amount of comedy had at my expense. I mean, I'm in a, unlike you, I'm in a household with

Speaker 4 three girls or, you know, two girls and a mother. And

Speaker 4 it's,

Speaker 4 there's a, there's very little testosterone in the home.

Speaker 5 Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast. Sam,

Speaker 5 just to put some additional pressure on you, when people ask me who my role model is, I cite you.

Speaker 5 So, if you if something happens, I really hope for just selfish reasons you keep killing it, because if you go down, you're probably taking me with you.

Speaker 5 So, I need you, I need you to remain to be thoughtful and courageous and fearless and well-read and rigorous in your research, but always enjoy our time together.

Speaker 5 And I really do look at you as someone who looks at the issues and then

Speaker 5 and I've tried to model this and then says what you believe is right,

Speaker 5 regardless of what heckling from the cheap seats or shame you might endure.

Speaker 5 And it's something that's given me a lot of courage and discipline to say, Okay, where does where does in an attempt to find the truth, where does it take you?

Speaker 5 As opposed to constantly checking myself and thinking, well, what will the reaction be? So thank you.

Speaker 4 Well, thank you, and uh, high praise, but I will, I will, I'll try to keep it together.

Speaker 5 There you you go, brother. Take care, man.

Speaker 5 Okay, I was ruined of happiness. Father's Day just passed.

Speaker 5 I think like a lot of people, I have a complicated relationship with my father.

Speaker 5 My dad

Speaker 5 was

Speaker 5 pretty selfish and

Speaker 5 married and divorced four times, as far as we know. And I was the son by a second marriage.
He had another daughter by his third marriage. I've actually become quite close with.

Speaker 5 But, you know, at the end of the day, my dad left my mom and I and moved to Ohio because he got a promotion. And I saw my dad mostly in the summer and during the holidays.
And

Speaker 5 I've kind of never forgiven him.

Speaker 5 And also something that I think moms do, and I recognize accidentally, and it's usually the mom that's the single pet of the single-parent household, is my mom sort of weaponized me against my father and used to send very, very aggressive messages through me to my father.

Speaker 5 And then

Speaker 5 my father would respond equally angrily. And it kind of would ruin the weekend or the time I was spending with my dad.
And my mom sort of, I wouldn't say turn me against my dad, but

Speaker 5 there's just no getting around it. When your parents get divorced and you're living with mom, you're going to probably see, I think, dad is kind of the bad guy.
And I certainly did.

Speaker 5 And also, he just was so

Speaker 5 not generous with money.

Speaker 5 You know, he had a nice life economically. We did okay, but it was definitely a strain.
And I look back on it now, and

Speaker 5 I think one of the reasons I try to be, I won't even say generous but promiscuous with money was I was just so fucking turned off by how cheap he was.

Speaker 4 Anyways,

Speaker 4 I had a lot of issues.

Speaker 5 I never didn't speak to my dad, but I didn't feel very close to him for a long time. I resented him

Speaker 5 about,

Speaker 5 you know, with just a little bit of effort, he could have been so much more of a positive force in my life. But this is what I did and what I would suggest you do.

Speaker 5 If you have a great dad and it's all like shadow boxing and football games and he showed up every

Speaker 5 week on the sidelines for you, then great. Then you're not going to have a problem being good to your dad.
And if you do, if you aren't, then it's your problem.

Speaker 5 But for those of us, like most people, who have a father who is flawed or maybe doesn't fit the current version of what it means to be a dad in the Hallmark channel from 2025, what has helped me is I asked myself, I go to basic evolution, and that is, was your father better to you than his dad was to him?

Speaker 5 My dad, and I didn't know this, my dad never complained about this, but I found out from his sister.

Speaker 5 My dad was the oldest and living in Depression Air, Scotland, and his father, it sounds like, was an alcoholic. And his father was physically abusive.

Speaker 5 And she outlined one instant where

Speaker 5 my grandfather, my dad's dad, came home drunk one night, woke him up, and beat him. Can you imagine being a child and you get woken up by the guy who is supposed to be your protector and beats you?

Speaker 5 So my dad never beat me,

Speaker 5 was never physically.

Speaker 5 He came close a couple of times, and I was very scared of him. I think it was like the shark in jaws.
It was the unknown that was more scary than the actual shark.

Speaker 5 But he was much better to me than his dad was to him, which means he checked the

Speaker 5 dad box. And that is, he made the effort to be better to me than his dad was to him.
And my dad did make an effort.

Speaker 5 He would, when he was in Chicago and heard I was somewhere, he would fly me out and take me to museums and try and find something to do with a 14-year-old. And

Speaker 5 I've gotten much better at remembering the good stuff and then putting all the bullshit aside.

Speaker 5 And something that has been an enormous unlock for me, not only with my father, but with all of my relationships, is to not keep score.

Speaker 5 And what do I mean by that? Instead of thinking, oh, I'm his son. He owes me a lot.
And on a scorecard, he came up short. I just said, all right,

Speaker 5 what do I want to be his son? Who do I want to be as a son? And the answer is, I want to be a loving, generous son. Then hold yourself to that standard and don't keep score.

Speaker 5 Don't think about, well, did he do enough to deserve a loving, generous son? That's not the point. The point is, do you want to be a loving, generous son?

Speaker 5 Or if the answer is yes, then just be a loving, generous son.

Speaker 5 And if your father dies, which my father will soon, my father's 95 and in hospice and basically has the kind of mental complexion of a baby right now, doesn't recognize anybody, am I going to regret, am I going to think to myself, I just don't think there's any way I'm going to think to myself, I was too nice or too generous to my dad.

Speaker 5 And if you're better to your dad than he was to you,

Speaker 5 That's fine.

Speaker 5 I think that's kind of what it means to be a man. And then, and a nod to him, if he was better to you than his dad was to you, then you need to be better and hopefully will be to your own sons.

Speaker 5 But if you're like me and have a bit of a complicated relationship with your father, what I would suggest is just an enormous unlock is put away the scorecard, put the bullshit aside, and just be the son you want to be and enjoy Father's Day with your dad.

Speaker 5 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burris is our technical director.
Thank you for listening to the Prop GPod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 5 Stay tuned for next week's conversation featuring Robert Green.

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