Chapter 1: Who is Susan Harris and what is her significance?
guys my guest today is um it's hard to even describe what you what you what you've blossomed into uh he's got an app called waking up he's got a podcast the sam harris podcast i believe he's got a sub stack is that just sam harris yeah the podcast is making sense making sense yeah my fault um oh yeah it is okay I pay for something. I'm paying for something.
I think I'm paying for the podcast and books. How do you describe yourself at this point? Yeah, I'm rarely in a situation when I have to. You're in it. Hit me. I mean, I am essentially a philosopher of mind. Technically, my PhD is in neuroscience, but I got it really 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. So most of my writing is philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, but I get dragged into politics so much that I'm
Chapter 2: How did Sam Harris's childhood shape his philosophy?
The phrase public intellectual is sort of embarrassing to apply to oneself, but it's the way I'm functioning. I'm just bringing science and philosophy into whatever I can when we're talking about public policy. Do you find that you just bring science into 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.
Chapter 3: What led Sam to drop out of Stanford for writing?
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?
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 we even get into all that serious stuff, can you explain to people who your mother is? Because 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. But she created Soap and a bunch of, I don't know, 10 shows. Benson? Benson was a spinoff of Soap. Did she fire Jerry Seinfeld?
Chapter 4: What insights does Sam share about MDMA and personal transformation?
Jerry Seinfeld was a, didn't he had a bit part on Benson? He had a part on Benson, 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 he was trying to be a cast member. I think he was trying to be in the cast. Everybody was trying to be in the cast. Okay, well, I don't know the details on that. But she discovered Billy Crystal.
Soap launched Billy Crystal, which was great. Yes. Jessica, the homosexuals go way back in history. Who? Alexander the Great was gay. Plato was gay. Plato? Mickey Mouse's dog was gay? He was, well, I don't wanna say he was impressionist at that point, but kind of. And what was it like, was she a single mom? That's what I'm, what was, 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 i you know 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 you know so i think there's like one 500 check or something that 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 could write one of those scripts. And she wrote a first script and sold a first script, I think, for $2,000 or something. That's four months of child support. You're keeping track. I think it was for a show which I've never seen called Then Came Bronson. It was about a guy who rode a motorcycle from town to town.
Perfect. This is the 1970s? A sitcom then came out. I don't know, I don't think it was a comedy. Maybe it was a comedy, I don't know. But she wrote for Love American Style and then she started writing for some Norman Lear stuff. Did she, 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.
Both Gary Shandling and Norman Lear were instrumental in getting her to placement.
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Chapter 5: How does Sam Harris define the balance between meditation and activism?
I honestly can't remember if it was Norman or Gary. One of them said, listen, let's let her write a script, and if it's not good enough, I'll rewrite it, or something like that. Gary did that with me, too. Oh, yeah? One time, yeah. Incredibly nice. Yeah. And 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... She was, she wrote some of the biggest episodes of television. Yeah, she wrote like the Maude episode. The Maude 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.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of consuming bad news on mental health?
But in English. Yes, yes. And with Bea Arthur. In the role of Bad Bunny. Quarterback, yeah. Then she started creating her own shows with Paul Witt and Tony Thomas. So it was with Thomas Harris. And they created Soap and Benson and a few other shows. And Witt Thomas was still going in the 90s. Yeah. Or was she involved still? There were Whit Thomas shows that my mom wasn't involved in.
So they produced other stuff. She was only involved in stuff she wrote. And then she retired before they did. So there was, I think, Whit Thomas continued. Oh, got it, got it, got it. And what was it like... So was she working a lot once that all started? How old were you? Again, I was like three or something when she really had to start to work, or even two and a half.
I mean, so I had lots of babysitters. I mean, that was the thing. 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 like they had pools in their backyards and they had a kind of different uh quality of life um she apparently came to me and said um so that 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 gonna spend a lot more time with your babysitter. So I had this babysitter, I don't know who it was at that point, but she named her and said,
you know i'll be home late and um so it's really a choice for 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 she got the pool yeah it took took a while but uh she um I mean, we went from zero to being 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.
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Chapter 7: How does Sam Harris critique pacifism in today's political climate?
But at least, you know, I don't remember it being... So apart from just the house we were living in, I don't remember being so transformative. But 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 a woman in her...
I guess late 30s or mid-30s with a seven-year-old, eight-year-old taking him to Africa and China when it opened up and Europe. She was just traveling alone and she had not traveled a ton as a kid or a young adult herself because they didn't have a lot of money and it was a different time. She had just never traveled, and so she took, she schlepped me all over the world.
But by the time I was 14 or so, 15, I had gone many places, just the two of us. 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 the tip of the spear of women's lib, right? And was she, she's kind of, the word iconic is silly, 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. Yeah. And 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, because as somebody pointed out, Jimmy Carr pointed out, she created Golden Girls, she also created Sex and the City, because it's highly derivative. 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 the better part of three seasons something like that I did two seasons with another guy and I'm still mad about Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she never had a staff.
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 not... So she was really just...
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Chapter 8: What are Sam's views on Trumpism and leftist hypocrisy?
prolific in a way that is not normal. And was not a writer prior to that. No, no. She was a reader. She was an English major in college, so she loved story and fiction. She was mostly a reader of fiction, so she wasn't starting from zero in that sense, but no, but not a writer. And how does the, growing up, how often would you see your dad? Um, maybe twice a year or something like that.
It was just like a Christmas vacation for maybe two weeks and summer for three weeks, something like that. What do you make of it all looking back? Well, I didn't make anything of it, really, until I became a father. Like, it didn't seem, it didn't reveal itself to be as pathological as I, in fact, think it is until I had kids. And, you know, a kid of that age had a daughter, you know, of...
two and a half, I'm looking at my daughter and thinking, okay, what would it take for me to, at this point, decide to have an affair, and then leave, and then, okay, let's just be charitable and say that it was an unhappy marriage, say, and leaving made sense, but
then decide to move across the country because I'm an actor who can't figure out how to act in Los Angeles, so I gotta go to New York to act, right? That's a strange choice. And I realized that, forget about me, I knew a lot of dads of varying quality at that point. And I realized that as narcissistic or as noncommittal as any dad I could think of, I didn't know any who would do that.
Yeah, like that's that's an extreme choice. And and these are Hollywood deaths. Yeah. And you still couldn't find it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, so just it didn't I didn't triangulate on it as a thing until I was a parent. I did have a good relationship with him. It was a very loving relationship. He was a very good person in many respects, or at least he seemed that way to me.
We were very connected, but this was despite the fact that it was long distance. Also, because it was long distance, he was never really in the role of being a parent. He was always kind of a vacation dad. I would go there and we would just have fun. Okay, so then once you have kids and you're like, and is he still alive? And do you go like, hey man, it's Sam, it's your buddy Sam.
No, he died when I was 17. So I never had like an adult's point of view on his situation. Have you had an imaginary conversation with him? No, it's not. I mean, it's amazing how little I think about him, really. I mean, that's the kind of thing that, you know, time does.
And, I mean, it's just, you know, I guess it's, you know, I'm sure it's shaped me in many ways, but these ways are not, you know, obvious when I look at myself in the present. And I don't think I'm anything like him as a dad. So, you know, it's just nothing.
I think I internalized, I mean, the pop psychological version of it is that I, whatever I suffered, the perfectionism I suffered as a kid, which I did, you know, perfectionism was really sort of the frame in which a lot of my psychological suffering is best seen. Quickly?
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