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- [00:01]
Scott Galloway
Support for Prof. G comes from Intuit QuickBooks, Intuit QuickBooks and Mailchimp are celebrating three small businesses who are doing big things for their communities. Perry's Joint Cafe in Pasadena, California the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, California and BJ's Nevada Barbecue in Sparks, Nevada. These three businesses are the latest winners in the Intuit QuickBooks and Mailchimp Small Business Hero program. If you know a small business doing big things, you can nominate them to win $20,000 in resources for their business through the program. Visit intuit.com Prof. G to learn more about the winners and nominate a local hero in your neighborhood. No purchase necessary. 50 USDC 18 and over. See rules@intuit.com HeroProgram Enter by May 15, 2026.
- [00:46]
Sam Harris
Bring the Savor with Modelo Chilada, a mouthwatering mix of authentic Mexican beer, bold fruit flavors and spices. Bring the heat with Sandia Picante or the citrus burst of Limonizal Modelo Chalada. Bring the Sabor drink responsibly. Modelo Chelada flavored beers imported by Crown.
- [01:00]
Scott Galloway
Imports, Chicagoland as marketing channels have multiplied.
- [01:04]
Sam Harris
The demand for content has skyrocketed.
- [01:07]
Scott Galloway
But everyone can make content that's on.
- [01:09]
Sam Harris
Brand and stands out.
- [01:10]
Scott Galloway
With Adobe Express, you don't have to.
- [01:12]
Sam Harris
Be a designer to generate images, rewrite text and create effects.
- [01:16]
Scott Galloway
That's the beauty of generative AI that's commercially safe. Teams all across your business will be.
- [01:21]
Sam Harris
Psyched to collaborate and create amazing presentations.
- [01:24]
Scott Galloway
Videos, social posts, flyers and more.
- [01:27]
Sam Harris
Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on brand content.
- [01:31]
Scott Galloway
Learn more at Adobe.com, express Business.
- [01:38]
Sam Harris
Episode.
- [01:39]
Scott Galloway
353353 is the area code serving southwestern Wisconsin. In 1953, the first James Bond novel was published. What would happen if James Bond took Viagra? He would continue to be a state sponsored terrorist whose actions disgrace us all. 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 cue. That's better. Go, go go. Welcome to the 353rd episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? I am in. I'm French dog. Right now I'm a cheese eating surrender dog. Is that fair? Is that fair? France did fall in about 11 days. So I'm in the south of France. You know, France absolutely would be the most amazing country in the world if it wasn't inhabited by the French. They just know how to do shit here. Everything is beautiful. The Cote d' Azur is wonderful. 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 landed in the airport, Delta Airlines overnight, no sleep. And I pull up Uber to take an Uber to my hotel. 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 a night, you know, 40 minutes out of town. 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 to can and the baggage claim. And I show up and I meet this 13 year old in 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. We take off, we zoom or whisk across the Cote d' Azur, land in the Palais and I get out 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. And they look up and they see me getting out of my helicopter and I'm like, dun dun, dun.
- [03:42]
Sam Harris
Literally.
- [03:43]
Scott Galloway
That was kind of a James Bond moment. Now my life is pretty much about trying to pursue a series of James Bond moments. I'm here and my favorite hotel in the world, the Hotel Du Cap, Eden Rock, which is reeks of European luxury. My favorite thing. And I've talked about this before, but that's not going to stop me from talking about it again. I go to the ft or I go to this beautiful little patio at the Hotel du Cap and I have my latte and my croissant 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. And then I hire a Zodiac for the week. This guy, French guy who somehow manages, 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 the, you know, the 5th Battalion of the US army crashing on Normandy. I go into Omaha Beach. Omaha beach for me is meta. I hate those motherfuckers. And I was land on their beach and they look up and there's a security garden. They know what to do. And I just bombed through there onto the Palais. That's what you do. You go into the soft tissue, 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, would you like to browse some soapstone kitchen counters or plan your wedding? Anyways, I love Can 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 Tech8 Media. I mean, it's just so hilarious. 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. And you're seeing. 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, 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. Well. Oh, wow. Yeah, that'll help. It's got a 9 billion dol 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. 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 Sorel made a lot of sense. And it no longer makes sense 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 such that you can get invited to their used to be cool party. Anyway, lovely to be here. 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. 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. I think it's the same with hotels. I read all these hotel lists and 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 you. That's the Hotel Bel Air. If you're younger and you want something a little cooler, you go to the addition and they've got a cool restaurant there. I mean, it's all about the hotel. 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 France. Cannes itself is not that nice. It's okay. It's okay. What's nice is the Hotel du Cap. Or what's over the top is Hotel de Cap, where you get a latte and a croissant for $38. No joke. 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. 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 and with these two peregrines. Is that what they're called? 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. And they look at these two beautiful men with their two equally beautiful hawks. And the problem is occasionally a seagull. The seagulls haven't gotten the memo that These rooms are €4,000 a night. And they'll come up and literally steal your croissant. And seagulls are. I don't know, they're flying rats, as far as I can tell. 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. 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. 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. And I'm like, whoa. I see this thing. I see the rip guy. I see the falcon rip apart a seagull. And I'm like, I would pay €4,100 for my room right now. Just a reminder that Propg Markets is now daily. That's Right. You'll find it only on the Propg Markets feed. We've gone daily. We still do two days a week, me and Ed. And then the other three days it's just Ed reading the headlines with some guests talking about specific topics. A little crisper, a little shorter, 20 or 30 minutes instead of 60 or 80. And then I do what's called phoning it in where wherever I am at 10pm Greenwich Mean Time, I call in and give my unfiltered take on the issue of the day. So far, it's doing really well. I don't want to brag, but we are number one globally in business podcasts. Again, you can find Prof. G Markets on the Profit G Markets feed. So we have. We're excited about that. Also, be sure to get propagandarkets for you to follow wherever you get your podcasts. And speaking of more promotion, we now have our new product, the Property Markets newsletter. It's a breakdown if you want to forward charts if you want to forward data. Every Monday, we break down the most important stories and why they matter. It's designed for anyone who wants to understand the capital markets and establish economic security. Subscribe@profitingmarkets.com subscribe. Thank you for enduring that. Thank you for enduring that. I'm going to. If you come up to me and say I've endured the ads and I don't skip them, I'm going to reward you with 10 seconds of uninterrupted eye contact. Okay. 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. 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. But in terms of popular or pop figures, the individual I get a lot of guidance from is Sam Harris, a neuroscientist philosopher, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast. I find Sam is just literally a. A buoy. 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. If you listen to his podcast, every word is just. You can tell every word has been selected. The Economy Awards. It's so crisp. It's so tight. 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. With that, from the south of France, from the Hotel Du Cap, Eden Rock, here's our conversation with Sam Harris. Sam, where does this podcast find you?
- [11:28]
Sam Harris
Los Angeles.
- [11:30]
Scott Galloway
So I was struggling with what topics to cover specifically, what topics not to cover. So I thought, I'll basically do a buffet here and have you decide. Of all the things we're most concerned about or of all the things to be concerned about, what are you most concerned about right now and why?
- [11:48]
Sam Harris
I think it would have to be the way we're interacting with information. You know, I mean, just and largely this is a story of what social media and the Internet generally has done to us. But you can throw into this bin the failure of institutions and the 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 the errors of the woke errors of the media over the last few years justify. People are far more distrusting of government and the scientific establishment than the errors committed during COVID justify, right? And so we've reached this kind of free fall 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 the zombies brokers of information. You've got people like Tucker Carlson and, and a host of slightly better behaved but no less confused podcasters who I might not name here, and conspiracy theorists, people like Alex Jones. I mean, these people are in good standing, right of center and it's bonkers. And so I fear that we are in a position increasingly where we're rendering ourselves ungovernable or governorable only by, you know, half the population willing to get absorbed into a personality cult and continuously fed lives. And it's just, you know, I don't know how we would respond to the next proper emergency. You know, if 911 happened now, if a pandemic, you know, 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. And it's a very dark picture, I think, of us politically at the moment.
- [13:59]
Scott Galloway
Do you see any sources or paths to repair?
- [14:02]
Sam Harris
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 become trustworthy and the Trump administration is making that hard now by launching an all out assault on them. In ways that if the purpose was to make them trustworthy, you would go about it very differently. I share the concern that the Ivy League and other universities failed to deal with the explosion of antisemitism and frank moral confusion that happened after October 7th. But if that was your concern, if your concern was to merely deal with the ideological capture of so many of these departments and the administrators and. And talk some sense into them, you wouldn't go about it the way the Trump administration is. 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. We need real air traffic controllers who can keep the planes in the air. And so there's been a kind of disavowal of expertise, especially in independent media and especially on podcasts, as though any comedian who's a quick study and can use ChatGPT can be an expert on the war in Ukraine or the Israeli Palestinian conflict, or epidemiology or whatever it is. And it's a free for all out there. And 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 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 we're going to stop denying that expertise is really a thing. And again, I'm not arguing that mere credentialism is the way you find experts. That's not. We might go into that if you're interested, because people are confused about this. But the idea that everyone's opinion is worth hearing on every topic is just a colossal load of bullshit. And everyone knows this at bottom. And yet the way we interact with information is not reflecting that.
- [16:29]
Scott Galloway
I'm curious, and I think you share this opinion. There's been so many things, I don't know if you. That I thought would have been disqualifying about the Trump administration just in the last hundred days, that the public would have just, that's it. They're going to regurgitate here. There's going to be real pushback, and there hasn't been. 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. And I saw a survey yesterday that said if the reelection if the election were held yesterday, even knowing what we know so far in the Trump administration, that he would still win. I'm curious what underlying or what shifts in the ground you. You 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.
- [17:20]
Sam Harris
Well, on that last point, 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. I mean, this is something that President Obama remarked on from some stage recently where he just said, can you imagine me doing any of these things? And then he went through a short list of things again, any one of which would have been a national scandal. 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. From crooks and foreign agents and to very quickly reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, thereby grifting your credulous cult. That's just one thing. It sounds hyperbolic to say 1000, but that's conservative. There's well more than a thousand things Trump has done in the last 10 years, said or done, they would be perfectly disqualifying in another candidate or another president. I mean, the meme coin is 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. So the job of the next president, whoever that, or I should say, the next sane and ethical president, whenever we get such a person, may not be in the next round. Obviously, 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 become vulnerable to this kind of thing again. I mean, clearly we need a system that is immune, as immune as a system can be to the private derangement and corruption of a bad actor. Right? Because we've proven ourselves as a population, as a citizenry, perfectly capable of electing a patently unqualified malicious, vindictive, and morbidly selfish person to the highest office in the land. We did that. I mean, we can wonder why we did that, but we've proved to ourselves and to the world that we're capable of doing that twice. And, right, 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. And 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 governments, that of governance, that, yeah, I think we have to figure out what laws we should have had to backstop some of the norms we thought were inviolate, all of which Trump and his administration have violated. So, I mean, 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, you could name, I could easily name dozens here off the, you know, off the cuff, but it's, I mean, take, take just adjacent to the meme coin, the fact that, that we now are a country wherein the president is using our foreign policy, our tariff policy, to privately, personally enrich himself. You know, when, when we slap a 46% tariff on Vietnam, the Vietnam's response to, to mitigate that harm to their economy is to invite Elon to give them Internet service through starlink. Right. So that's clearly a conflict of interest and 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. It's just in a perfect world, people would go to jail for this. Right. And so I just don't know how our system is this vulnerable. It's quite shocking.
- [21:55]
Scott Galloway
It's pretty obvious that the system, at least in the short term, does not have the resilience to arrest this or cauterize it. And I think a lot of Democrats are disappointed there hasn't been a more robust pushback. If you were advising the Democratic Party on how to be more effectively or robustly push back on what's going on, assuming the institutions aren't going to solve the problem right now, what advice would you give them?
- [22:25]
Sam Harris
Well, that's very hard. It's hard to see what they can do. I mean, Cory Booker standing up for 25 hours and talking doesn't move the needle. As far as I can tell, there may be nothing to do short of winning the midterms decisively. And for that, I just think the Democrats have to learn the less lesson, the obvious lesson of 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 convictions are scarcely seen. They have to be ignored. Right. I mean, all. You know, I view Harris loss as overdetermined, but she clearly lost based on her efforts to maintain something like a game of four dimensional chess with woke identity politics at a minimum. She was unable to properly disavow some of the crazy things she had said in 2019 and 2020 and just whenever put on the spot was, was either completely tongue tied and just stonewalling or she just produced something, some sort of woke word salad. And it was obvious that she couldn't be let loose on Joe Rogan's podcast for fear of what she might say over the course of three hours. That caution, that sense that there's all these third rails you can't touch, otherwise the intersectional maniacs will come for you on X. 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 ad lib and at length with a perfectly carefree attitude with respect to 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 continuously violated with abandon. And I'm not saying that we suddenly turn into bigots, but there's clearly a line that protects any sane political commitment to social justice of a sort that could have come out of the mouth of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. Which has us speaking sanely about things like immigration and youth, gender dysphoria, et cetera, in ways that won't alienate half of American society. 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.
- [25:24]
Scott Galloway
Do 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.
- [25:35]
Sam Harris
Yeah. So in that sense, I find the left fairly culpable for Trump and Trumpism. Right. 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. It wouldn't have been a continuous SNL sketch of identitarian moral confusion. And so given that the party got that captured by these, which was effectively a new religion, at the center of which was a kind of moral panic, 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. It's just everything was wrong. Systemic racism was everywhere. And Joe Biden gave a speech, I think it was, at Morehouse College very early in his presidency, which was the most delusional piece of pandering to the far left on this particular issue. I mean, he stood up in front of these black graduates and said, the deck is so stacked against you, you're not only gonna have to be the best, you're gonna have to be better than the best to get your foot in the door in this society. 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. If you're at all qualified, if you're a black graduate of a good institution in the year this, I guess, was 2021, the chance that you were going to get into medical school or get a job at Netflix or get into, you know, get a job at the Ford foundation or whatever, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, anywhere in any high status job, right. Or position in academia was not only not harmed by being black, you were positively advantaged by being black. Literally everyone knew this. They had known it for years. 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. 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. And so I think that bell has to be unrung somehow left of center. I think it's in the process of being. I think we're, we no longer believe this stuff. And DEI is now, you know, the acronym is radioactive. I think for good reason. 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 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 DEI became, was totally dysfunctional and unethical and yeah, I mean, it gave us, in large measure, it gave us Trumpism.
- [29:06]
Scott Galloway
Do you distinguish between DEI efforts on campuses where, you know, 60 years ago, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, 12 black people combined, that's a problem. But 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 and the private sector?
- [29:49]
Sam Harris
Well, I think it's a complex problem and I think it changes depending on the context and the identity you're talking about. So for 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 ride shotgun with them and also get to have families, that has obvious consequences. And I think the wage gap, what I imagine is true is that if you correct for the effect of 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. 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. 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 probably good that 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. So I think it was totally, I think 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. 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 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. Some of us live in that world already, I mean, 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 power politics across identity groups wherein white males have the least rank. 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. Right again. And the disavowal of colorblindness has been explicit. They think there's no getting over race. Race is just super important and super indelible. And 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 left of center people cared about race as much as 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. I 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 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? 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, this the way immigration got weaponized. I mean, yes, both sides accounted for how we got here.
- [34:30]
Scott Galloway
We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from aura. A common piece of advice for staying healthy is listen to your body. But that's easier said than done. What is your body actually saying? Oura Ring can give you incredibly rich data about your body, including long term trends and feedback on the stats that matter for actually making you feel better over the long run. It helps you understand what your body needs by tracking over 30 biometrics 24 hours a day right from your finger, then delivers personalized insights and recommendations. To help you improve how you feel every day. Because that's what it's really all about, improving how you feel. Instead of just focusing on activity and performance, Aura emphasizes balance and rest. It also focuses on metrics related to mental health, heart health, stress and other areas that are critical for helping you live better, better and longer. And Oura Ring looks like a regular piece of jewelry. It's subtle, comfortable, stylish, waterproof, and has a battery that lasts up to eight days. That means you actually wear it. Getting old has never looked so good. Now give Ora the finger. Learn more@ouraring.com Support for the show comes from NPR's Planet Money Tariffs, the budget deficit, the difference between flying coach and business class. What ties them together? One word, money. It's the connective tissue of our lives. It drives behavior, shapes culture and reveals who we are in a tangible way. Economics isn't just inflation and gdp. It's everywhere and everything, fueling how we live. If you're looking for a smart, entertaining breakdown of how the world of money really works, check out Planet Money from npr. It's sharp, fast and relentlessly curious. But the Planet Money hosts go to great lengths to help explain the economy. They've done things like shoot a satellite into space, become a record label, label, make a comic book, and shorted the entire stock market. All to help you better understand the world around you. If you're curious to learn something new and exciting about economics every week, listen to the Planet Money podcast from npr. I love npr, grew up with it and generally find they try and call balls and strikes and think the production values are unprecedented. Tune into Planet Money every week for entertaining stories and insights about how money shapes our world. Stories that can't be found anywhere else. Listen now to Planet Money from npr. Support for this show comes from Smalls Cat Food. Have you seen those ads where there's a pet that looks so sad when they're forced to eat bad food? No pet wants to live like that, even if they're just being a really good animal actor. And giving your cat some actually tasty and nutritious food can get them looking great. And Smalls Cat Food is here to help your feline friend enjoy their next meal. Smalls Cat Food has protein packed recipes made with preservative free ingredients you'd find in your fridge and it's delivered right to your door. And now you can add other cat favorites, including amazing treats and snacks to your Smalls order. The team at Smalls is so confident your cat will love their product that you can try it risk free. That means they will refund you if your cat won't eat their food. What are you waiting for? Give your cat the food they deserve. For a limited time only. Because you are a property list listener. You can get 35% off smalls plus an additional 50% off your first order by using our code Prop G. That's an additional 50% off when you head to smalls.com and use promo code propg. Again, that's promo code Prof. G for an additional 50% off your first order plus free shipping@smalls.com so you live in LA? 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. Do you think that's a good model or are you part of the kind of merit only philosophy?
- [38:27]
Sam Harris
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 mean, I think that this is a real disparity in luck that people suffer everywhere within our society and across societies. And insofar as we can cancel it, I think we should be tolerant of a certain amount of inequality because I think that is, it is part of the flywheel of capitalism that some people can get up earlier in the morning and strive harder and miss dinners with their kids and earn 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 if there's a better incentive structure than capitalism, but we haven't found it yet for producing wealth and creativity again, that we all benefit from, even the lazy benefit from it. But 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. Right. So yes, I think it's still true to say that black families have on average 1/8 the level of stored wealth as, 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 Right. So that's the thing that was so misguided about so much of DEI thinking. Right. It's like if you, if you wave a magic wand and get rid of all the racists, you're still not going to suddenly have more Fortune 500 people, more members of the black community who are qualified to be Fortune 500 CEOs or cardiologists or et cetera. 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, et cetera. But if you use class as your proxy for all of your other concerns about disparities of outcome, again, educational, health, et cetera, I think you do a lot of good. And you also disproportionately help people of color because as class, the various identity groups are highly correlated with disparities in class difference.
- [41:42]
Scott Galloway
Yeah. So we're both dads, you know, we, we think a lot about and write a lot about and speak a lot about the struggles of young men right now. They're just as, as well, and as much advantage as, 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? And 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.
- [42:40]
Sam Harris
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. People like Andrew Tate. Right. You're like the anti Andrew Tate. And that's a good thing. 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.
- [43:41]
Scott Galloway
Right.
- [43:41]
Sam Harris
I mean, it's amazing if you kind of hold your body of work up against 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 is all about just the most obscene materialism. Right. Without any deeper aspiration. Right. Without any ethical engagement with the problems of this world. It's just if you can get a Bugatti or rent one in Dubai and pretend to your fans that this is your lifestyle, you've basically accomplished everything you need in life. 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.
- [44:44]
Scott Galloway
I think you're being generous.
- [44:45]
Sam Harris
No, I mean, honestly not. I mean, it's just, I think you do a fantastic job of 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. We know that being poor or being subject to 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 and we know it's corrosive to marriages and relationships. And so 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 everything in that bucket that is the antithesis of what the President of the United States or his various acolytes like Elon Musk message about. I mean, it's just, it's counter programming that's absolutely necessary. And 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 had, the only good word we have for it, is Yiddish. You know, you're a mensch, so keep it up.
- [46:09]
Scott Galloway
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, and I think you had a similar type of relationship with Joe Rogan. And then. And. 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. Do you have any sense for why that is happening now across some of our most powerful and influential men?
- [47:26]
Sam Harris
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 Musk just this unique example of somebody who has so many obvious, genuine gifts. I mean, above all, as an entrepreneur. I mean, he clearly has a vision and can sell that vision to lots of talented people, tens of thousands of talented people who will stumble over themselves to get a chance to work for him. And they can do some amazing things. Right. So he's aspirational and a great model of success in that regard. 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 fame, I guess, certain kind of fame to which he's clearly addicted to, that it's just encouraged him to become this very different sort of person. Now, 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 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.
- [48:51]
Scott Galloway
You're a neuroscientist. Do you think ketamine could have anything to do with it?
- [48:55]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I mean, I just heard the reports that you've heard. I mean, this was reported in the Wall Street Journal. If I wanted to dig in his circle, I'm sure I could find firsthand reports of how much of that's true. But, yeah, if he is using ketamine as frequently as was reported. I certainly can't help, right? I mean, but he's just. Honestly, his engagement with X was so dysfunctional for so long, even before he bought it, and 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, 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. And it was also just very tempting to talk to other prominent people and try to clean up misinformation and react to things. 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, right? 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 on average once a day or so, a couple times a day, but I would go for days without doing it. 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. It was turning me into a bit of a misanthrope. 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, who I knew in their, 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. And 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. 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 doxxed and get swarmed by his cult. And just the harm he causes in the world. I mean, just his adventures in Doge, when he 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, you know, in very short order and 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 just reveled in the chaos he was causing. And so it was with his Hitler salutes, which may have not been Hitler salutes. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he's just a moron who has just bad 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 twice in a row. But whatever his intentions, when he saw the blowback, when he saw that every antisemite on planet Earth was celebrating, he could have very easily have signaled to his 210 million whatever it was at that point, followers, listen, I see what that looked like. Sorry, that's embarrassing. Obviously I despise anti Semitism and if you're an anti Semite, please unfollow me. That would have been the sane, ethical, manly thing to do, but instead he just made Nazi jokes and trolled the world. All the while signal boosting the accounts of real anti Semites and bringing real anti Semites back onto Twitter with great fanfare, like Nick Fuentes. And also funding the far right party in Germany to boot. Right? I mean, so his contributions to the greatest eruption of antisemitism 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 worshiped 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 a bunch of gamers saw him play one of these games in public and it was totally clear 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. 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. 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 the best gamer in the world in certain games. And when they lavished praise on him, just talking about what you just that suggested that he has a kind of a neurological, six sigma level neurological health that would predispose him to those abilities, he totally owned it. It's like, yeah, 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 young men, I thought that was going to be it and I think it probably did in. In gaming circles.
- [55:51]
Scott Galloway
We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Grooms. If you've ever gone down the rabbit hole of trying different nutrition solutions, you've likely had the thought, surely there's a way to improve my skin gut health immunity and brain health fog without offending my taste buds. Well, there is. It's called Grunds. Grunds are a convenient, comprehensive formula packed into eight delicious gummies a day. It's not a multivitamin, a greens gummy or a prebiotic. It's all of those things and then some at a fraction of the price. In a Gruns daily Snack pack, you get more than 20 vitamins and minerals plus more than 60 whole food ingredients, all of which help you out in different ways. For example, Grunds has six times the gut health ingredients compared to the leading green powders like biotin and niacinamide, which help with thicker hair, nails and skin health. They also contain mushrooms which can help with brain function. And of course you're probably familiar with vitamin C and how great it is for your immune system. On top of all that, Grunds are vegan and free of nuts, dairy and gluten. Get up to 45% off when you go to Grunds.co and use code Prof. Giving that's G R U N S CO using code PROFG for 45% off. Support for the show comes from SoFi Small Business Lending. If you run a small business, you're probably dealing with cash flow, trying to find capital for new opportunities, or thinking about other ways to expand. SoFi Small business lending Marketplace is your new best friend. No more chasing bankers or wasting time at a branch. SoFi's marketplace offers a fast digital solution. In one Single simple search, SoFi matches you with vetted providers for your business in just minutes. Search for quotes that meet your specific needs and you can find an option that works for you. You may receive funds as soon as the same day you're approved. Say it's working capital you need, or a line of credit or an SBA loan or equipment financing. SoFi is marketplace can help you find all of the above. It's already helped thousands of small businesses find the funding they need. SoFi also offers business owners curated tools, vetted business bank accounts, business credit card recommendations, and a ton of resources to help you scale your business like a boss SoFi now helping you get your business right? Visit sofi.com prod and see your options in minutes.
- [58:19]
Sam Harris
Support for this show comes from smartsheet. Do you ever wonder how many times a day you toggle between different screens, applications and windows on your computer? Maybe 20 times? Okay, maybe 50 on a bad day. Try 1200 times a day in a single day. Now multiply that by all the days you work in a year and that's 9% of the your time spent toggling. That is so much wasted time simply clicking back and forth. Imagine what you could do with all that extra time. Smartsheet is here to help you take all that extra time back. Smartsheet is the work management platform that helps your team remove roadblocks, ease friction, and cut those back and forth clicks down to a number that doesn't make your head hurt. With tools that allow your team to manage their workflow all in one place, you'll spend less time toggling and more time driving results, fostering creativity and scaling to new heights. Smartsheet Work with flow. Learn more@smartsheet.com Vox.
- [59:30]
Scott Galloway
We'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% of my mental health episodes over the last few years had been triggered by something on Twitter. And you said, why are you there? I'm like, well, got a big following. Half a million people and I think, how many did you walk away from?
- [59:55]
Sam Harris
I think I had 1.5 million.
- [59:58]
Scott Galloway
When I pulled the cord, 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. And what you realize the thing. 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 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 a lot about this, a lot on the pod. 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 and 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 to 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. I'm curious if you struggle with some of those same things. You're an 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?
- [61:42]
Sam Harris
Yeah, well, as you know, 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. 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. There'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 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. But then for virtually every moment thereafter, that state, whether it's anxiety or anger or impatience or just pick your, your flavor, that state is almost always counterproductive, which is to say you want to be in a different state when you are actually solving the problem at hand or you're just waiting to see what happens. 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. And so my life is a very strange bifurcation between having kind of 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 it's 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.
- [64:32]
Scott Galloway
And you get that perspective from meditation?
- [64:35]
Sam Harris
Yeah, I mean, so 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 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 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 your sensory, raw, sensory existence. Right. I mean, in each moment you're just seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking and therefore feeling various moods and emotions. 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. I mean it's every bit as decisive as when you're asleep and dreaming and you don't know you're dreaming, you're safely in your bed. In reality, you're safely in your bed, but now you're having some horrible dream that plunges you into shame or fear or some other negative mental state. The neurology of that, the failure of reality testing, the fact that you're your conscious life can be completely subsumed by self generated imagery that is a version of that is happening to us in the waking state. And we call it thought, 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? These thoughts are in my voice. That sense of being identified with thought is something that is a spell that gets broken ultimately when you actually learn how to meditate. And it does give you this degree of freedom that people otherwise don't have, which is to just get off the ride, right? 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 and you can get off of it, even if it's a real problem, right? It's like your kid has some 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. 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? 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 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, do 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 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? That's the situation we're in. 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.
- [69:03]
Scott Galloway
As you've gotten older, the things that give you joy and peace, have they changed, become certain things? More or less.
- [69:12]
Sam Harris
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. Right. So 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. So loss was something that I understood fairly early. And the philosophical and psychological implications of that became interesting to me very early. So I was always a student of life changing philosophy. I mean, not just purely academic, but questions of interest, but just like what does it mean to live a good life 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, they're landing harder and perhaps slightly differently now, but it's a continuation of where my head has been at for many decades, I have to say.
- [70:39]
Scott Galloway
Would you describe the loss of your father as sort of a defining or the defining moment in your life? Has there been one moment that sort of changed your orientation or approach to life or given you, set you on a different path?
- [70:52]
Sam Harris
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.
- [71:03]
Scott Galloway
So you were raised by a single mother or did she remarry?
- [71:05]
Sam Harris
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.
- [71:16]
Scott Galloway
I 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?
- [71:36]
Sam Harris
Yeah. Well, so, again, this is a case that is gonna be somewhat atypical because my mom was just both 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. But, I mean, he really did not discharge his responsibilities as a dad very well. 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 to go be an actor in New York. He couldn't figure out how to do that in LA 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 mean, she just. I think she actually sold her first script. She was just watching television one day, trying to figure out how she was gonna make money again. 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.
- [73:13]
Scott Galloway
Oh, my God, Susan Harris.
- [73:15]
Sam Harris
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [73:16]
Scott Galloway
I literally just thought. I've kept saying, I thought I've seen the name Susan Harris in the credits of all these series in the 70s and 80s.
- [73:26]
Sam Harris
No, no. My mom is awesome. But it was a very weird time course. And so there's a funny story that she likes to tell, which maybe says more about me than I would like, but she. I mean, 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 riding 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. 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, you know, if I have an opportunity here, if I work much harder than I'm working now, our situation's gonna change. And 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. But you're gonna have much. You have less of me, you know, you're gonna spend more time with babysitters and, you know, so there's gonna be a sacrifice. And apparently I thought for a few seconds and I turned to her and I said, get the pool, Mom.
- [74:54]
Scott Galloway
I want the pool. I literally sitting here, I'm not exattering. Sam, I'm freaking out. You're. 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.
- [75:14]
Sam Harris
Well, that was not only you. Not only you. She's America, often credited with writing the first truly positive. I'm not sure it's totally aged well. I mean, it was probably, you know, more caricature than you would want, but it's the first truly positive role for a gay character in television.
- [75:35]
Scott Galloway
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 6, she and I used to watch Everyone Loves Raymond, Frasier and the Golden Girls.
- [75:52]
Sam Harris
Right.
- [75:53]
Scott Galloway
Wow, that is just wild.
- [75:57]
Sam Harris
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 was the first 75 episodes all by herself. I mean, she was banging out one episode a week of television, 22 weeks a year, all by yourself. And I mean, very few people have done that in television, so it was quite amazing.
- [76:26]
Scott Galloway
So just as we wrap up here, you gave me a piece of advice about being a dad a couple years ago that I've really held onto. 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.
- [76:44]
Sam Harris
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, but I just wanted to be able to say, oh, 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 really push. And so I just. I haven't. And I mean, 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 moming it and not. And I'm definitely not. And I realize 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. The downside there. So I just. Yeah. And as a result, I have very little stature in the home as a. As a source of knowledge or wisdom. I mean, you know, when push comes to stuff, 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 three girls or two girls and a mother, and there's. There's very little testosterone in the home.
- [78:34]
Scott Galloway
Sam 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.
- [78:54]
Sam Harris
Okay?
- [78:55]
Scott Galloway
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. And it's something that's given me a lot of courage and discipline to say, okay, 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.
- [79:36]
Sam Harris
Well, thank you and high praise, but I'll try to keep it together.
- [79:40]
Scott Galloway
There you go, brother. Take care, man. Okay. I was worth 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 a second marriage. He had another daughter by his third marriage. I've actually become quite close with. But 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. And 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 turned 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. 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 turned off by how cheap he was. Anyways, 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 effort, it could have been so. 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 shadow boxing and football games and he showed up every. 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 what has helped me is I ask 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, 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. And she outlined one instant where 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? So my dad never beat me, was never physically. He came close a couple times and I was very scared of him. I think it was like the shark and 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. 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. 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? If 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 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 you will be to your own sons. 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. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burroughs is our Technical Director. Thank you for listening to the Prophet GPOD from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Stay tuned for next week's conversation featuring Robert Green. Support for this show comes from Pure.
- [85:28]
Sam Harris
Leaf Iced Tea when you find yourself.
- [85:30]
Scott Galloway
In the afternoon slump, you need the.
- [85:32]
Sam Harris
Right thing to make you bounce back. You need Pure Leaf iced tea. It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the.
- [85:40]
Scott Galloway
Right amount of naturally occurring caffeine. You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next.
- [85:47]
Sam Harris
The next time you need to hit.
- [85:49]
Scott Galloway
The reset button, grab a Pure Leaf iced Tea.
- [85:52]
Sam Harris
Time for a tea break. Time for a Pure Leaf. Support for the show comes from Mercury. What if banking did more? Because to you, it's more than an invoice. It's your hard work becoming revenue. It's more than a wire. It's payroll for your team. It's more than a deposit. It's landing your fundraise. The truth is, banking can do more.
- [86:19]
Scott Galloway
Mercury brings all the ways you use.
- [86:21]
Sam Harris
Money into a single product that feels extraordinary to use. Visit mercury.com to join over 200,000 entrepreneurs who use Mercury to do more for their business. Mercury Banking that does More.
- [86:37]
Scott Galloway
Support for this show comes from WhatsApp.
- [86:39]
Sam Harris
The personal chat on WhatsApp is a place where you share everything, from the mundane connections to the memories that mean everything.
- [86:47]
Scott Galloway
It's a place that can truly feel.
- [86:49]
Sam Harris
Like it's your own. And WhatsApp makes sure everything stays protected from outside eyes, even theirs.
- [86:56]
Scott Galloway
No one, not even WhatsApp, can see or hear your personal messages. That includes personal calls, plus any documents, photos or media that you share in your personal chat.
- [87:07]
Sam Harris
WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [87:11]
Scott Galloway
Visit WhatsApp.com privacy to learn more.