#488 — Ego, Ecstasy, and Equanimity

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0:24Sam Harris:Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Now, today I'm sharing a conversation I had a few months ago, back in March, I think, with the comedian Neil Brennan, who's really fantastic. He's got a podcast. You may have seen him on Netflix. He has several specials there that are all worth watching. Just a genuinely hilarious guy. But I was on his podcast a few months ago and had a conversation that is pretty different from the kinds I have here on my own podcast. So many people thought that the Making Sense audience would like to hear this conversation. We go into my childhood, my mother's career in television, my father's absence, my early struggles with perfectionism.

1:13Sam Harris:I mean, there's lots of psychodynamic stuff that I never talk about on my own podcast. And Neil just pulled this out of me for some reason in a way that no one else ever has. So we thought you might want to hear it. As I said, this is a few months old, so I think some of the references might seem anachronistic, but I think the conversation holds up well, and I think you will enjoy it. So I now give you me and Neil Brennan.

1:46Guys, my guest today is, it's hard to even describe what you've blossomed into. He's got an app called Waking Up. He's got a podcast. He's got a sub stack and books. How do you describe yourself at this point?

2:02Sam Harris:Yeah, I'm rarely in a situation when I have to. You ran it. Hit me. I mean, I am essentially a philosopher of mind. I mean, technically my PhD is in neuroscience, but I got it really with, as an expression of my philosophical interest. I almost did a PhD in philosophy, but just did a lateral move to neuroscience because I wanted to know more about the brain. And so, you know, most of my writing is philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, but I get dragged into politics so much that I'm, you know, the phrase public intellectual is sort of embarrassing to apply to oneself, but it's like, it is, it's the way I'm functioning, right?

2:40Sam Harris:I'm just bringing science into science and philosophy into whatever I can when we're talking about public politics. Do you find that you just bring science into it or is it meaning you just end up inevitably talking about neuroscience within this stuff? Yeah, I mean, not just neuroscience, but I just think our understanding of ourselves scientifically is and should put pressure on what we think is real, obviously, and what we think human life is for and could be for and how good might it be and what sort of public policies make sense to implement. and what should we get our ethics? Should we get it from books that people think were dictated by the creator of the universe 2 ,000 years ago or 1 ,400 years ago, depending, or should we be having a 21st century conversation about the foundations of human flourishing?

3:27Sam Harris:And so every time I open my mouth on any of these topics, I'm trying to bring in kind of a secular rationality into pretty fraught topics. Yeah. But before even getting into all that serious stuff, Can you explain to people who your mother is? Cause this is, I'm getting ready to blow your head apart. He's gonna take a sip of water and then he's gonna tell you who his mom is. So my mom is Susan Harris, and she created a bunch of shows, but the one that was most seen and impactful was Golden Girls. So, but she created Soap and a bunch of, like, I don't know, 10 shows. Benson was a spinoff of Soap.

4:07Sam Harris:Did she fire Jerry Seinfeld? Jerry Seinfeld was a, didn't he had a bit part? He had a part of Benson and I think he didn't make it. Yeah, no, I don't think he, well, I don't know if that was just like a walk-on part or if that was, he was trying to be a cast. I think he wanted, I think he was trying to be in the cast. Everybody was trying to be in the cast. Okay, well, I have not, I don't know the details on that. But she discovered Billy Crystal, the soap launched Billy Crystal, which was great. Jessica, the homosexuals go way back in history. Who? Alexander the Great was gay. Plato was gay. Plato?

4:44Nicky Mouse's dog was... He was... Well, I don't want to say he was impressionist at that point, but kind of. Joe Frazier, don't want to talk about it. And what was it like? Was she a single mom? That's what I'm... Yeah. What was...

5:00Sam Harris:How did she start? Not in a way that sounds like it would give a high probability of success. So my dad left when I was two and a half, and I still had a relationship with him, but he moved to New York when I was three and a half. And so we were here. And like living in an apartment? Yeah. I live in an apartment in the Valley and my mother had no safety net. And I think my dad paid child support like once. So I think there was like one$500 check or something that discharged his responsibilities there. And she, I mean, as the story goes, she was watching television one day i don't know what she was doing for work or looking if she was looking for work at that point but i mean very soon after he left she was watching television and just thought i i could write one of those scripts and she wrote a first script and sold a first script i think for two thousand dollars or something i think it was that's four months of child support yeah yeah keeping track i think it was um for a show which i've never seen called um then came bronson it's about a guy who rode a motorcycle from town to town.

6:08Perfect. This is the 1970s?

6:11Sam Harris:Yeah, yeah. A sitcom called Then Came From a... I don't think it was a comedy. Maybe it was a comedy, I don't know. But she wrote for like Love American Style, and then she started writing for some Norman Lyra stuff. Did she, it was, she just wrote it and then sold it, and then did she think like, oh, I can now do this? Or was it just sort of... Yeah, well, she got a foothold. And then she just started going. And so she was never on staff anywhere, but she was submitting scripts. I don't even know if they had staffs back in the day there. But I mean, she wrote some of the biggest episodes of television.

6:47Sam Harris:Yeah, she wrote like the Maud episode. She wrote the Maud abortion episode, which I think was in a country that had like 150 million people. I think 60 million people got in front of their television sets and watched it that night. We finally have the right to decide what we can do with our own bodies. all right then will you please get yours into the kitchen so it was like a super bowl event so you got in english yeah yes yes and with b arthur the in the role of quarterback yeah then she started creating her own shows with paul witt and tony thomas so it was with thomas harris and um they created soap and benson and a few other and whit thomas was still going in the 90s or was was was she involved still there were whit thomas shows that were my mom wasn't involved in so they produced other stuff she just she was only involved in stuff she wrote and then she retired before they did so there was i think what thomas continued oh gosh after um and what was it like so what were you were you kind of was she working a lot once that all started how old were you again i was like you know three or something when she really had to start to work you know so or even two and a half but i was only i mean so i had lots of babysitters i mean that was like that was the thing.

8:01Sam Harris:I mean, the story I love, which I don't remember, I just remember in the retelling of it, but apparently she once asked me that when her career was starting to take off, she saw some daylight as to how successful this could be. At this point, we were living in a little rented house in the valley, but I was going to a private school where I had, so some of my friends were not like rich, rich, but I mean, they had pools in their backyards and they had a kind a different quality of life. She apparently came to me and said, so I have a choice to make. I could work a lot harder. And if I do, we may one day be able to get a pool like your friend, Tom Brown, but you're going to spend a lot more time with your babysitter.

8:43Sam Harris:So I had this babysitter. I don't know who it was at that point, but she named her and said, and you should kind of, you know, I'll be home late. And so it's really a choice for the two of us. It's, you know, we'll have a different life you know one way or the other and apparently i thought for about 10 seconds and i said get the pool mom so uh so she got the pool yeah it took took a while but she um i mean we went from zero to being you're just wealthy i mean i think that started when i was maybe 12 or 13 something like that was there a big difference like in your day-to-day life yeah i mean there was not i mean at that age, it's not such a big deal, but, or at least, you know, I don't remember it being, apart from just the house we were living in, I don't remember it being so transformative.

9:27Sam Harris:But she, you know, she was a single mom who wanted to travel. Actually, the big thing was that she took me on a bunch of trips, just the two of us. She was very brave, frankly. I mean, it was just, you know, a woman in her, I guess, late thirties with a, or mid thirties with a, you know seven-year-old eight-year-old taking him to africa and china when it opened up and europe and i mean she's just you know traveling alone and i mean she and she had not traveled a ton you know as a kid or a young adult herself because they didn't have a lot of money and it was you know a different time so she had just never traveled and so she took she slept me all over the world you know but by the time i was 14 or so 15 i had gone many places just you know just the two of us so do you think she was like typical of i mean because maude was kind of it was a lot of these shows at that point were like when like the tip of the spear of women's lip right and was she she's kind of i i hate the word iconic is silly but but she seems like emblematic of that and does she seem like she was living a life that a lot of women wanted to lead or she's very empowered yes because at a certain point she became a kind of a powerful person in the industry right so it's like she was just objectively successful and uh in demand i got her i mean i'm like hearing her credits i'm like she's top three maybe the best female ever top three ever in terms of sitcom writers yeah because as somebody pointed out my jimmy carr pointed out she created golden girl she also created second city because it's highly interesting derivative uh well the other thing the real feat of writing that i think very few people have matched is for soap she wrote one she wrote it entirely by herself for the first i think two and a half years so she was banging out one episode a week she did like 75 episodes straight you know over over you know the better part of three seasons something like that i did two seasons with another guy and i'm still mad about it yeah yeah yeah so she and she had no so she never had a stay on golden girls she got a staff after whatever like the first 10 episodes or something like that and then she stepped away yeah but so she was really just prolific in a way that is not and was not a writer no prior to that no no she i mean she had she was a reader uh she was an english major in college and she so she loved you know story and and uh fiction you know she was mostly a reader of fiction so uh she wasn't started from zero in that sense but no but not our not a writer and how does the growing up how often would you see your dad maybe twice a year or something like that it's just like like uh um a christmas like a christmas vacation for maybe two weeks and summer for three weeks something like that what do you what do you make of it all looking back members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org subscribers get a private rss feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.