The Collapse of American Trust — with Sam Harris

29:09But now 60 % of Harvard's freshman class identifies as non-white 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 are much different than their broader employee base or their customer base. Do you make any distinction between kind of DEI and how far it's gone or not gone between academic institutions in the private sector? Well, I think it's a complex problem, and I think it changes depending on the context and the identity you're talking about, right?

29:52So for, like, women in the workplace, there's the obvious variable of, you know, women deciding to have families, getting pregnant, and the asymmetry there, what happens to them versus what happens to men who, you know, ride shotgun with them and also just get to have families. that has obvious consequences. And I think, you know, that, you know, the wage gap, what I imagine is true is that if you correct for the effect of, you know, losing those years of your life to pregnancy and raising kids, you know, that closes the wage gap. And it also probably accounts for some of the differing ambitions between men and women.

30:30And 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. The idea that every person just wants to be a CEO, really, at bottom and wants to make the sacrifices, that entails. I think that's probably not true, and it's very good that it's not true. I just think we had a moment in the 60s where a fairly heavy-handed approach to righting the wrongs of the past was warranted, right? And so I think it was totally, I think our approach to affirmative action then was totally justifiable.

31:13And then we entered a period where it did all the good it could do, and it started doing some obvious harms. For me, the goal is quite clear, and it is a goal that people like Martin Luther King Jr. 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, you know, 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. We want to get to that world. And we were and are, I think, very close to getting to that world.

31:51Some of us live in that world already. I mean, some, you know, in high status parts of culture, for much of the time, that's how you experience life. And I'm sure it is in other parts of culture. But 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. They don't think colorblindness is a rational goal. What they want to do is play this intersectional game of, you know, power politics across identity groups, wherein, you know, white males have the least rank. And so you just flip the hierarchy on its head.

32:35And they want to prosecute this war of all against all until the end of time, right? Again, this goal and the disavowal of colorblindness has been explicit. They think there's no, there's no getting over race. Race is just, just super important and super indelible. And, and therefore it's, we've been living in a society, again, I think this, the vapors of this lunacy are, are getting expunged, but, um, rolling back the clock prior to, to the 2024 election, we were living in a world where left of center, people cared about race as much as the, 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.

33:24I mean, that was what was so perverse about this. There were documents issued by the Democratic Party itself and certainly every activist 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. 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. I mean, how is it that all of this is passing among otherwise sane people? So it's a mystery, but it's, you know, the left is largely culpable for this pendulum swing into populist, no-nothingism and, you know, the way immigration got weaponized.

34:18I mean, yes, there were both sides accounted for how we got here. We'll be right back after a quick break.

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36:11So you live in L.A. I went to college in L.A., 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. Do you think that's a good model or are you part of the kind of merit-only philosophy? No, I think, I mean, I'm very worried, as I know you are, about wealth inequality and income inequality. I think wealth inequality more so. And I think correcting for that is an intrinsic good. I think that this is a real disparity in luck that people suffer everywhere within our society and across societies.

37:06And insofar as we can cancel it, I think we should be tolerant of a certain amount of inequality because I think that is part of the flywheel of capitalism that some people can get up earlier in the morning and strive harder and, you know, miss dinners with their kids and earn, you know, 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. If there's a better incentive structure than capitalism, we haven't found it yet for producing wealth and creativity. again, that we all benefit from, even the lazy benefit from it.

37:46But no, there are people who were born to immense advantages that others don't have, and we should try to figure out how to correct for that. And one of the disadvantages historically in the United States, certainly, has been the ambient level of racist bigotry and exclusion from economic opportunity on that basis. So, yes, I think it's still true to say that black families have on average one eighth the level of stored wealth as 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 from getting ahead now is very unlikely to be racism now.

38:45Right. So that's that's the thing that was so misguided about so much of DEI thinking. Right. It's like, you know, if you wave a magic wand and get rid of all the racists, you're still not going to suddenly have more, you know, Fortune 500 people, you know, more members of the black community who are qualified to be Fortune 500 CEOs or cardiologists or etc. So there are economic disparities, which are riding on top of educational disparities and disparities in health outcomes and single-parent families at a much higher rate, etc. But if you use class as your proxy for all of your other concerns about disparities of outcome, educational, health, etc., I think you do a lot of good.

39:38And you also disproportionately help people of color because as a class, the various identity groups are highly correlated with disparities in class difference. Yeah. So we're both dads. You know, we think a lot about, write a lot about and speak a lot about the struggles of young men right now. They're just as well and as much advantage as men have registered over the last, you know, several hundred, couple thousand years. the last 20, 30 years, it would be hard to point to a group that's done worse in America than young men. 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?

40:29And any thoughts as a dad or just someone as an observer on how 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? Well, I must say, as a father of two girls, one 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. But I can dimly remember that I was once a young man, And I know this problem from the other side, obviously. No, I mean, I think you have been a great voice of reason on this topic and a counterpoint to many of the examples that are serving as sort of pathological attractors to young men in our society.

41:29People like Andrew Tate, right? Like, you know, you're like the anti-Andrew Tate. And, you know, that's a good thing. I mean, we need more people like you who are modeling masculinity in a way that is ethical and just kind of conversant in the skill set you want young men to be conversant in, right? I mean, it's really, it's amazing if you kind of hold your body of work up against, you know, the Andrew tatification of similar topics. It's, you know, you're checking similar boxes, right? I mean, it's like, it's all, you know, economic independence is, you know, is one variable. But when you look at the diabolical version of it, it is all about just the most obscene materialism, right, without any deeper aspiration, right, without any ethical engagement with the problems of this world.

42:30It's just, if you can get a Bugatti, you know, or rent one in Dubai, you know, and pretend to your, you know, fans that this is your lifestyle, you've basically accomplished everything you need in life, right? I mean, and so that is something that we need to offer a counterpoint to. And I think you're doing that. I think you're doing a great job of it. I think you're being generous. No, I mean, honestly not. I mean, it's just you're I think you do a fantastic job of putting the lie to the notion that that money can't buy you happiness in any sense. Right. I mean, we know that's not true. We know that being poor or being subjected, not even poor, but just having financial stress be a major component of your life.

43:18We know that's corrosive to a feeling of well-being and we know it's corrosive to marriages and relationships. And so, you know, 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 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, you know, everything in that bucket that is the antithesis of what the president of the United States or his various actions are. like Elon Musk message about. I mean, it's just, it's counter-programming that's absolutely necessary.

44:00And so, you know, I view you as a great messenger of what it's like to be a good citizen and a good man and just a mensch. I mean, the word we have, the only good word we have for it is Yiddish. You know, you're a mensch. So keep it up. Well, let me just say I'm really enjoying this podcast so far, Sam. So young men are going to look up to just naturally the president of the United States and the world's wealthiest man. 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. But my sense is, and you've written about this, Elon Musk, you were friends with and had a lot of admiration for.

44:45And I think you had a similar type of relationship with Joe Rogan. And I see one of the things I love about America is I do think there's a zeitgeist, guidepost, 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. 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? 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.

45:29Do you have any sense for why that is happening now across some of our most powerful and influential men? 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, just this unique example of somebody who 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, to lots of talented people and to, you know, tens of thousands of talented people who want, who will, you know, you know, stumble over themselves to get a chance to work for him and they can do some amazing things, right?

46:14So he's aspirational and a great model of success in that regard. But, you know, 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, you know, fame, I guess, a certain kind of fame to which he's clearly addicted, 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. I mean, so I'm forced to believe one of two things. 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?

47:00So - Let me just press pause. You're a neuroscientist. Do you think ketamine could have anything to do of it? Yeah. I mean, I, so I've, I just heard, I've heard the reports that you've heard. I mean, this was reported in the wall street journal. Um, if I wanted to dig in his circle, like I'm sure I could find, you know, uh, firsthand reports of how much of that is true, but, um, yeah, if he is using ketamine as, as frequently as was reported, that certainly can't help. Right. I mean, he's, he's, But he's just, honestly, his engagement with X was so dysfunctional for so long, even before he bought it.

47:41And it became his seemingly full-time preoccupation. It's just, it did something. I mean, you know, everyone who was ever addicted to it or is just too fixated on it has a homeopathic dose of this. I mean, they know it. Like, you know, I got off of Twitter now two and a half years ago because of how demonstrably harmful it was proving in my life. And I was never somebody who was addicted to it. I was just somebody who was using it as an author and as a speaker and a podcaster. I just thought it was a necessary marketing channel. It was also just very tempting to talk to other prominent people and try to clean up misinformation and react to things.

48:25And so I was using it in a normal way. 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. 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. 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. 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.

49:03But it was still punctuating my life in a way and amplifying a certain kind of signal in a way that was was proving quite harmful and quite disorienting. 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. I mean, just whenever I looked at my phone, I was just seeing some awful piece of, you know, dishonesty or malice broadcast to me by people who I knew in their, you know, certainly most of them in their private and even public lives were not this sort of person. But in this context, it was amplifying for the worst in people.

49:44And so, you know, Elon has just performed a kind of human sacrifice of himself on the altar of that set of incentives. And he acts like a—you know, whether he is a psychopath or not, he acts like one, right? And I'm not actually exaggerating. He acts like a psychopath on X. He's completely callous as to the harms he caused. and all the while knowing the harms he causes, both in the lives of private citizens who get doxed and get, you know, swarmed by his cult and just the harm he causes in the world. I mean, just his adventures in Doge when he, you know, fed on his account, fed USAID into the wood chipper and stopped, you know, life-saving programs in sub-Saharan Africa, which people immediately recognized would lead to death, you know, in very short order.

50:38and if not corrected for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths within a year. The attitude he took to all of that was one of just, you know, probably, you know, fentanyl addled ecstasy, right? I mean, he was just, he just reveled in the chaos he was causing. And so it was with his, you know, Hitler salutes, which, you know, may have not been the Hitler salutes. 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. Who knows what he was up to there with his, my heart goes out to you, and now I look like Adolf Hitler, you know, twice in a row.

51:16But 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, he could 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. 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? But instead he just made Nazi jokes and trolled the world, right? All the while signal boosting the accounts of real anti-Semites and bringing real anti-Semites back onto Twitter with great fanfare and people like Nick Fuentes, and also funding the far-right party in Germany to boot, right?

52:07I mean, so his contributions to the greatest eruption of anti-Semitism in our lifetime have been, at best, ambiguous. And, yeah, it's just totally irresponsible. So the fact that he is the cultural influence he has been has been directly harmful to a generation of young men who have worshipped him. 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. I don't know if you saw this, Scott, but, you know, a bunch of gamers saw him play one of these games in public, and it was totally clear.

52:52I'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. He had paid someone to build out his character, someone very likely, you know, 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. 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, you know, the best gamer in the world on certain games.

53:29And when they lavished praise on him, you know, talking about what you just, that suggested that he has, you know, a kind of a neurological, you know, a six sigma level, you know, neurological health that, you know, would predispose him to those abilities. He totally owned it. It's like, yeah, you know, gaming is a great surrogate for all kinds of talents. And yeah, it's really, And he was lying about all that, right? So that, if anything was going to destroy his reputation with a young man, I thought that was going to be it. And I think it probably did in gaming circles. We'll be right back.

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55:57We're back with more from Sam Harris. I have to credit you. The first time we had dinner, you gave me permission to get off of Twitter. I said, I acknowledge that probably 20 or 30 percent of my mental health episodes over the last few years had been triggered by something on Twitter. And you said, why are you there? 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? I think I had 1.5 million when I pulled the cord. And 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.

56:36and what you realize. The thing I've, I'm curious if you feel this way, once you're off it, you're off at 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. 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 biased and weird and angry. And it's like, why was I vacationing there? You know, seven times a day. You know, I've talked about this a lot on the pod. And when I was younger, I didn't have enough anxiety. I wasn't worried about anything.

57:18I almost failed out of UCLA several times. I didn't really care. Almost got fired a lot. Didn't really care. 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. Anything happens with my kids, I worry. 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. I mean, it's like this shit really rattles me. Like it's taking time for my presence 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.

57:58I'm curious if you struggle with some of those same things. your inability to disassociate from some of these things that are going on. And if you are able to do with it, what are the vehicles and practices for helping you do that? Yeah, well, as you know, or I think you know, meditation has been a very big focus of mine. And I mean, for me, that really is the, it's a kind of superpower because it, I mean, 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 your reaction to what happens is so much more important in almost every case than what happens.

58:41There's so much room for being, on the negative side, being needlessly, pointlessly unhappy, right? I mean, worrying when worry does absolutely no good, and you just suffer twice, right? 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. If it didn't happen, your worry was truly a hallucination. But in no case does—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.

59:23But then for virtually every moment thereafter, that state, whether it's anxiety or anger or impatience or pick your flavor, that state is almost always counterproductive, right? Which is to say you want to be in a different state when you're actually solving the problem at hand or you're just waiting to see what happens, right? 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. 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.

1:00:05And so my life is a very strange bifurcation between having a very high level of personal well-being, certainly most of the time, and also being very concerned about the state of our world. 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 I think is rational to worry will happen or very likely will happen. And yet my life is so good. It's so good in superficial, contingent ways that could change. 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, right?

1:01:00And you get that perspective from meditation? Yeah. I mean, so, you know, mindfulness, for lack of a better word, I mean, that does cover basically what I mean, but it's something I get into in much greater detail in over at Waking Up, which is the meditation app that I have and in my book by that same title. But briefly, it's just, I mean, if you're suffering, you're 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 your sensory and raw sensory existence, right? In each moment, you're just seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking, and therefore feeling various moods and emotions.

1:01:50And 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. 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. In reality, you're safely in your bed, but now you're having some horrible dream that, you know, plunges you into shame, right, or fear or some other negative mental state. Right. That the neurology of that, right. The, the, the failure of reality testing, the fact that your, your, your conscious life can be completely subsumed by self-generated imagery.

1:02:33That is a, a, a version of that is happening to us in the waking state. And we call it thought, you know, 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, I'm the thinker, right? I'm, these thoughts are in my voice, right? That's the, that sense of being identified with, with thought is something that is, is a spell that gets broken ultimately when you actually learn how to meditate. And it does give you this, this degree of freedom that people otherwise don't have, which is to just, just get off the ride, right? You're, you're feeling miserable because you're thinking about the thing that happened yesterday or the thing that might happen tomorrow.

1:03:12You can actually get off that ride, even if, and you can get off of it, even if it's, if it's a real problem, right? It's like, you know, your kid has some scary illness and you're going from doctor to doctor and you don't know what, what's what, and you have real reason to be worried, right? I've been in that situation. 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? How ruled do you have to be by your thoughts from this moment until you get the appointment next Tuesday or until you get the results of the scan?

1:03:54You 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, if you're lucky, 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, because 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. And the question is, do you want to do that well and to be a good father in that context?

1:04:37Do you want to be the guy who was just wracked by anxiety all weekend? 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, Scott. 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, you know, the ripe old age that it's appropriate to die. But impermanence reigns, right? So the question is, how can we be happy under conditions where the punchline is that everything changes, right? And that everything that is gathered gets ultimately dispersed, right?

1:05:14That's the situation we're in. And the people who first figured out how to meditate figured out that how you use attention really matters and really can spell the difference between happiness and suffering in each moment. As you've gotten older, the things that give you joy and peace, have they changed, become certain things more or less? I think I'm a slightly odd case because I got very into meditation and became very cognizant of the finiteness of life very early. I was probably 18. 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.

1:06:04uh so so loss was was something that i um uh i understood uh fairly early and the sort of the philosophical and psychological implications of that became interesting to me very early so i was always um a student of of life-changing philosophy i mean not just you know purely academic questions of interest but just like what does it mean to live a good life like in a context where we know we're ultimately going to lose everything. And so I was thinking about that very early. So I can't say that that has changed. In some ways, I'm relearning the lessons I learned when I was 18 and 19 and 20. And they're landing harder and perhaps slightly differently now.

1:07:00But it's a continuation of where my head has been at for many decades, I have to say. 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 your orientation or approach to life or given you, you know, set you on a different path? Well, 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 two and a half. So you were raised by a single mother or did she remarry? Yeah, yeah. I mean, she eventually got remarried when I was 15. But yeah, no, for all intents and purposes, I was raised by a single mom and she was quite the hero.

1:07:43I was raised by a single mother too and I didn't know that about you. Can you talk a little bit about, I think almost everything, I see almost everything the way I respond through the lens of being raised by a single mother. Can you talk a little bit about how that impact that's had on you as an adult and your approach to partnership and being a dad? Yeah, well, so again, this is a case that is going to be somewhat atypical because my mom was just both very, very talented and very lucky. Right. So she's 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.

1:08:27But, I mean, he really did not discharge his responsibilities as a dad very well. And he was a struggling actor, so he didn't have money either. But he was painting houses at that time to make money. But he abandoned me and my mom, you know, to go be an actor in New York. He couldn't figure out how to do that in L.A. for some reason. So that attests to some other lack of commitment to being a parent. But my mom discovered one day that she could write television shows. And she discovered this very quickly. I think she actually sold her first script. She was just watching television one day. trying to figure out how she was going to make money.

1:09:10Again, we really had nothing. And she, I think she, I forget, it was maybe$2 ,500 or something, but she sold the first thing she wrote and then just became a colossus within the television industry. And she eventually, I mean, her big hit was Golden Girls. She created Golden Girls. And so we went from being poor to being wealthy over the course of, it was probably a little more than a decade. I mean, I think I was... Oh my God, Susan Harris? Yeah, yeah. I literally just thought, I've kept seeing through this. I keep saying, I thought, I've seen the name Susan Harris in the credits of all these series in the 70s and 80s.

1:09:53That was your mom. My mom is awesome. Where is your mom? But it was a very weird time. And so there's a funny story that she likes to tell, which maybe says more about me than I would like. But she was working really hard. Again, she was a single mom. So I grew up with a long string of babysitters. And when I would come home from school, there would be a babysitter. My mom would be right in at the office. And at one point she came to me and she said, we were living in a little rented house in the San Fernando Valley. But I was going to a private school that she had stretched to get me into. And, uh, so I was surrounded by kids who had much more money than we did.

1:10:37And 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, um, you know, um, if I have an opportunity here, if I work much harder than I'm working now, our situation is going to change. And you'll, you'll be able to, one day we'll be able to, you'll be able to have a pool in the backyard like your friend, Tom Brown, who has, he had a great house with a great pool. And, um, but you're going to have much, you have less of me, you know, you're going to spend more time with, with babysitters and, um, you know, so it's, there's going to be a sacrifice.

1:11:17And apparently I thought for a few seconds and I turned to her and I said, get the pool, mom. I want the pool. I'm living in here. I'm not exaggerating, Sam. I'm freaking out. 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. Soap is the first time I was ever introduced to a gay man, Billy Crystal. Well, not only you, not only you, she's often credited with writing the first truly positive. I'm not sure it's totally aged well. I mean, it was probably more character than you would want. But it's the first truly positive role for a gay character in television.

1:12:02I believe that's true. Yeah, he 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. And then when my mom was six, she and I used to watch Everyone Loves Raymond, Frasier and the Golden Girls. Right. Wow. Wow. That is just wild. And quite heroically, she wrote, I think this is a, I mean, this may not sound as impressive as it is because people 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.

1:12:44I mean, she was banging out one episode a week of television, 22 weeks a year, all by herself. And I mean, very few people have done that in television. So it was quite amazing. 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. 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? Yeah. I mean, and part of this was my realizing what I wanted in a school. I mean, I just wanted to outsource all of the role of being a teacher to the school so that—and I must say, this has been achieved imperfectly in my daughter's schools.

1:13:29But I just wanted to be able to say, you know, yeah, that, you know, Mrs. Johnson, she's a hard teacher, you know, and just commiserate 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. I don't want, I don't like the subtext of apparently conditional love that gets communicated when you, when you really push. Um, and so I just, um, I haven't. And, uh, I mean, I, both my daughters are good students and they're, you know, they're, they're getting educated, but, you know, there's definitely a difference between, you know, tiger momming it and not, and I'm, I'm definitely not.

1:14:11And I realized I just want to have a—I want there to be no doubt in my daughter's minds how much I love them and how much I rejoice in who they are as people. And so whenever I'm in a mode that stands a chance of confusing that, you know, I'm alert to the downside there. So I just, yeah. And as a result, I have very little stature in the home as a source of knowledge or wisdom. I mean, you know, when push comes to this, that's probably not true, but there's a fair amount of comedy had at my expense. I mean, unlike you, I'm in a household with three girls or two girls and a mother. And there's very little testosterone in the home.

1:15:02Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast. Sam, just to put some additional pressure on you, when people ask me who my role model is, I cite you. So 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. So 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. And I really do look at you as someone who looks at the issues and then, and I've tried to model this and then says what you believe is right, regardless of what heckling from the cheap seats or shame you might endure.

1:15:49And 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? As opposed to constantly checking myself and thinking, well, what will the reaction be? So thank you. Well, thank you and high praise, but I will, I'll try to keep it together. There you go, brother. Take care, man.

1:16:26Okay, I was with happiness. Father's Day just passed. I think like a lot of people, I have a complicated relationship with my father. My dad was pretty selfish and married and divorced four times, as far as we know. And I was the son by his second marriage. He had another daughter by his third marriage, who I've actually become quite close with. 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 I've kind of never forgiven him. And also something that I think moms do and I recognize accidentally, and it's usually the mom that's the single head 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.

1:17:21And then 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 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. And also he just was so not generous with money. 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 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.

1:18:03Anyways, I had a lot of issues. I never didn't speak to my dad, but I didn't feel very close to him for a long time. I resented him about, you know, with just a little bit of effort. He could have been so much of a more of a positive force in my life. But this is what I did and what I would suggest you do. If you have a great dad and it's all like shadowboxing and football games and he showed up every week on the sidelines for you, then great. Then you're not gonna have a problem being good to your dad. And if you do, if you aren't, then it's your problem. 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, five.

1:18:44What 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? My dad, and I didn't know this, my dad never complained about this, but I found out from his sister, uh, my dad was the oldest and living in depression era Scotland and his father, it sounds like was an alcoholic and his father was physically abusive. And she outlined one instant where, um, 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?

1:19:23So my dad never beat me. He came close a couple 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. But he was much better to me than his dad was to him, which means he checked the, the 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. 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 I've gotten much better at remembering the good stuff and then putting all the bullshit aside.

1:20:07And 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. 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, what do I want to be a 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. 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?

1:20:39If the answer is yes, then just be a loving, generous son. 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. And if you're better to your dad than he was to you, that's fine. I think that's kind of what it means to be a man. And then in a nod to him, if he was better to you than his dad was to you, then you need to be better and hopefully you will be to your own sons.

1:21:14But 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.

1:21:34This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Stay tuned for next week's conversation featuring Robert Greene.

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