Making Sense - Sam Harris - May 20, 2026


#476 β€” The Bittersweet Age

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Sam Harris
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Leonard Cohen Arthur Miller Anika
#475 β€” The Hard Problem of Consciousness #477 β€” More From Sam： Iran's Unraveling, The Gaza Information War, AI-Generated Music, and More

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22 minutes

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Summary

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In this episode of Making Sense With Sam Harris, author and speaker Susan Kane joins me to talk about her new book, The Quiet Life, and her new children's book, Bittersweet. We also talk about what it's like to be an introvert, what it means to be a writer, and what she thinks about the future of books.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:00.000 you're listening to making sense with sam harris this is the free version of the podcast so you'll
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00:00:22.960 i am with susan kane susan thanks for joining me absolutely it's so great to be here
00:00:29.980 Yeah, it's great to see you. And that doesn't happen enough for me, but I want to make the
00:00:36.160 most of this occasion. So to remind people, you are the all-too-famous author of the book
00:00:41.940 Quiet, which became a Bible for introverts everywhere, and then led to a TED Talk that
00:00:48.220 is, if not the most seen TED Talk in the history of the galaxy, it's among the most seen. So
00:00:53.360 there's like tens of millions of views on various platforms. And then more recently,
00:00:57.020 you, that was about 15 years ago, 14 years ago, you quite came out?
00:01:00.500 2012, whatever that was.
00:01:02.260 Yeah.
00:01:02.440 Yeah.
00:01:03.020 And then you have, you have written a book, Bittersweet, which came out more like four
00:01:09.620 years ago, 2022 or?
00:01:11.800 That's funny.
00:01:12.380 I'm not even sure, but something like that.
00:01:13.940 Three or four years ago.
00:01:15.020 Yeah.
00:01:15.620 Yeah.
00:01:16.000 And now my family and I actually have another book coming out.
00:01:20.180 I don't know if I mentioned that to you.
00:01:21.380 No, no.
00:01:21.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:01:22.480 Yeah, we have a children's book coming out that we wrote with three generations of canes.
00:01:27.800 Oh, sweet.
00:01:28.440 Yeah, my in-laws, Ken and me, and our two boys, we all wrote it together.
00:01:33.580 Oh, what a fun project.
00:01:35.600 Really, really fun.
00:01:36.940 Yeah, and based on an experience that the boys had where we went on this childhood vacation,
00:01:42.320 and they befriended two adorable donkeys and then had to say goodbye to them at the end of the vacation.
00:01:47.680 And so it's about bittersweetness and how to say goodbye.
00:01:50.140 Oh, nice.
00:01:51.280 When does that come out?
00:01:52.480 any minute now. I think it's June 2nd. And, you know, most recently and continuously, you have a
00:01:58.500 presence on Substack where you can be found under the banner of The Quiet Life, which is,
00:02:06.580 from the looks of it, is very focused on community as much as your actual writing.
00:02:13.560 What are you doing over there on Substack? Well, I write usually to, I guess, newsletters is what
00:02:21.400 people call them generically, but I call them kindred letters because I'm writing to people
00:02:27.380 who have the same orientation that I do towards quiet depth and beauty. And so I write two of
00:02:33.040 those kindred letters every week and then really encourage people to comment because, as you say,
00:02:39.260 the comments and the dialogue back and forth, I think, is some of the best part of the substack.
00:02:44.900 So a lot of it is that, and it's sharing, you know, I call it art, ideas, and consolations
00:02:51.640 So it's sharing all of those things.
00:02:53.360 And then we also come together once a month and do candlelight chats.
00:02:57.240 Actually, Anika was one of our guests.
00:02:59.360 Oh, nice.
00:02:59.980 One of everyone's favorites.
00:03:01.160 Nice.
00:03:01.500 I think I knew that at the time, but like everything else, it has been memory hold.
00:03:05.640 So people join you on Substack and go cameras on for that?
00:03:09.200 Or is that a Zoom call?
00:03:10.220 Or how does that work?
00:03:11.340 Yeah, we do that on Zoom.
00:03:12.960 It's live.
00:03:14.520 And so people can come on and talk to me, talk to our guest.
00:03:18.120 But then we also send out a replay later for the people who couldn't make it, especially
00:03:22.600 because we have people from all over the world.
00:03:24.620 But I like to do it live.
00:03:27.160 How are you thinking about the future of books now, if you are thinking about the future
00:03:32.020 of books as a writer?
00:03:33.180 Oh my gosh, I think about it all the time.
00:03:36.040 And in fact, I just went to a meeting of this author's group that I've been part of called
00:03:41.200 the Invisible Institute.
00:03:42.500 We've been together over 20 years, and that was the huge topic.
00:03:47.120 So I don't know.
00:03:48.000 I mean, I'm aware that I myself read many fewer books than I used to, but that when I do read them, I still really adore the experience and feel like there's nothing else.
00:03:58.800 But in terms of...
00:04:00.560 Well, talk to me about that for a second, because I think many people are feeling that it has somehow become more difficult to sustain their attention on anything, really, without getting interrupted by some self-interrupting device that is their smartphone.
00:04:16.600 But books in particular, it's just that the feeling of sitting down to read for an hour, it almost feels like a heroic and anachronistic, you know, just plunge into the past for which we're all nostalgic for.
00:04:32.020 But it's just, it has gotten harder. I mean, honestly, even for those of us whose job it is to read books. I mean, I can't say that I've stopped reading books, but I do notice that reading for pleasure, especially, is something that is just in a zero-sum contest with everything else that can be done for pleasure.
00:04:52.300 Even when it's reading, there's just so much, there's an endless amount of material online that one feels a professional or personal responsibility to read. So it's lots of magazine articles and, and, and substack newsletters, but my groaning shelves with thousands of books are looming over me at all times.
00:05:10.920 And I have an increasingly guilty relationship or even just greedy and, you know, I'm concerned it's degrading into this bittersweet relationship where, like, when am I going to find the time to make the progress I want to make through my own library?
00:05:27.280 I know exactly what you mean. And for me, the guilt of that relationship is embodied in the fact that I used to just know exactly where every single book sat on my bookshelf. Because I think I just spent so much time looking at the shelves. Just looking at them made me so happy. So I just memorized their placement. And now I have no idea where any book is. And I feel like that's really telling of how things have shifted.
00:05:53.240 But I do still have these moments, and they usually happen for whatever reason when we're traveling or on vacation.
00:06:01.220 It could be business travel and it could be vacation.
00:06:03.840 I can focus much more.
00:06:06.760 There's something about removing the everydayness of life and the feeling of daily responsibilities where I can still get back into that state.
00:06:14.980 Which doesn't mean that I'm not still checking my phone more than I wish I were.
00:06:19.420 But I'm still really loving books.
00:06:21.480 And every time that happens, actually, every time we're traveling, I vow to do the same thing as soon as we get home and then it all flies away.
00:06:30.280 So in writing on Substack, is this a decision to go where the people are or is it just you just like the demand you've placed on yourself to publish something without any friction on a regular schedule?
00:06:45.000 Or how are you thinking about Substack writing versus book writing?
00:06:48.200 I actually, with Substack, although writing is the central thing that I do there, I don't feel like writing is the primary impetus for why I do it. I think of it much more as tending to a community.
00:07:03.440 All my life, I felt really inspired by my grandfather, who was a rabbi who was serving his community until he was 94.
00:07:10.580 Like literally till like two weeks before he died, he was there with them.
00:07:14.440 And I feel a kind of love for my readers.
00:07:17.500 So I just wanted to have a way to be kind of more closely connected with them.
00:07:23.580 So I feel like that's what the Substack is really about.
00:07:26.020 and the tricky thing about it is to the extent i actually have three different books that i'm
00:07:32.060 thinking about writing now and files that i add stuff to all the time but i spend a lot of time
00:07:37.420 on the sub stack and so a lot of my creative energy is going in that direction and there's
00:07:41.940 less available for what used to go into book writing so that's something i'm trying to figure
00:07:46.640 out do you feel this with all the different projects that you have going yeah well you know
00:07:51.620 I just feel the poverty of 24 hours in the day, which afflicts everyone. But I mean,
00:07:57.720 I've always looked to do things that are synergistic or where you get two bites at
00:08:03.820 the same apple on some level. So you could write the, back in the day, you could write the op-ed,
00:08:08.260 which later would wind up in a talk or in a book. And I was hoping Substack would be that for me,
00:08:13.680 but it hasn't quite, I just have not been able to spend enough time writing there. So it really
00:08:18.440 has just defaulted to becoming a publishing channel for the podcast.
00:08:23.060 So are you working on another book right now?
00:08:25.200 I'm not.
00:08:25.580 Am I allowed to ask that?
00:08:26.540 No, I have something I'm working on, which I'm not ready to publicly announce because
00:08:30.600 I haven't fully admitted to myself that I'm working on it.
00:08:33.540 Oh, wow.
00:08:34.040 That's very intriguing.
00:08:35.660 Someday.
00:08:36.020 But how is AI showing up for you as a benefit or concern with respect to your own writing
00:08:44.300 or the writing of others or where our culture is headed?
00:08:47.340 What are your thoughts on AI?
00:08:48.440 So my thoughts are that I notice when I'm scrolling around on social media, it keeps happening to me that I'll start reading some kind of story that sounds really interesting. And then I quickly realize a paragraph in that it was just generated by AI. And I noticed that the moment that I know that it was AI, I have zero interest and I stopped reading.
00:09:10.860 so how are you noticing that because i i think i've seen you write about this on your own
00:09:15.740 substack that some of the famous tells for ai are not there by accident because they're actually
00:09:23.880 they've been scraped from the habits of good writers and for instance the m dash is something
00:09:29.180 that that i imagine i put into use basically as early as any member of our species and i'm not
00:09:35.140 giving it up right so it's rumored that an m dash is the signature of ai slop now but
00:09:39.980 i'm not stopping and uh yeah so how are you how do you think about that and how do you think
00:09:45.440 you're noticing that you're in the presence of the robots i feel the same way and by the way i
00:09:50.380 i recently learned that apparently writing in phrases of three is also apparently an ai tell
00:09:56.240 and i feel like i learned that painstakingly from loving cs lewis and reading his work and
00:10:01.660 trying to figure out what it was that was so moving about it and then realizing that he used
00:10:05.200 those threes so i'm very bummed about that now being a tell but yeah in the case of stories i
00:10:12.100 don't know there's just something on social media when they're when the stories are too packaged
00:10:15.780 and they're you too much feel like every beat follows the next one somehow you just know there's
00:10:22.380 there's just some note of artificiality about it but i must say like as a writer knowing that
00:10:28.800 I have noticed now when I do my substacks that sometimes I'll like add an awkward parenthetical or something. And it used to be that I would have, as a writer, taken the time to get rid of the awkwardness of it. And now I sometimes leave it in just to show that I'm actually the one who was doing the writing.
00:10:45.960 Proof of your humanity, yeah.
00:10:47.780 Yeah, yeah.
00:10:48.920 But I mean, I don't know.
00:10:50.080 Like, one big question I wonder about all the time is,
00:10:53.980 I've been really worried about the death of the humanities in our culture.
00:10:59.200 Like, long before AI came around, I've been super worried about that.
00:11:02.560 And there's a million reasons that it's happening.
00:11:04.520 But I'm actually wondering if the advent of AI is actually going to help
00:11:08.980 or cause us to turn towards the humanities.
00:11:12.200 I think this is something I've heard you talk about as well.
00:11:14.520 It's like, that's all that's left.
00:11:15.960 I've been thinking of it in terms of the revenge of the humanities.
00:11:18.780 Yeah.
00:11:19.080 Because obviously, learn to code is not a phrase that is tripping from the tongues of
00:11:23.400 anyone over in the CS department anymore.
00:11:27.180 And yeah, when you think of what will be left standing, should anything be left standing
00:11:32.700 when the robots take over, it has to be those things where we still care that a human is
00:11:39.500 in the loop, right?
00:11:40.180 It's not radiology.
00:11:41.400 It's not even scientific discovery, right? 0.77
00:11:43.760 I think if we could automate all science, we will not be nostalgic for the time that the apes were the authors of those discoveries.
00:11:52.680 I mean, we simply just want to know what's true, right? 0.93
00:11:54.680 So if we can get the real physics faster and the real medicine faster and everything in between, I think we want that from the robots.
00:12:02.140 But I'm not sure we want to see robots writing all or any of our novels or poems or, you know, we're not going to we're not going to show up in a Broadway theater to see robots perform Arthur Miller.
00:12:15.480 I mean, you know, I guess maybe for novelty's sake we might, but I just feel like there will be those things and they'll be disproportionately on the humanity side of the quad where we feel like we want the human connection both at the origination of the work or at least the curation of it, right?
00:12:33.120 We just want some, we want people with good taste, I think, guiding culture once more and more of it gets produced by machines.
00:12:40.420 Yeah, I think it's not only about wanting to know what's true. I think it's also about there's just
00:12:47.080 a deep insatiable curiosity about who humans really are, like who we are. So I think the
00:12:53.160 amazing thing about reading a novel is just the glimpse into the subjective inner life of another
00:12:59.400 human. That's really what we're in it for. And I think that's why I stop when I come across these
00:13:04.220 AI stories. I feel like, okay, it's not actually giving me a true insight because it was just
00:13:10.420 put together by some code. Do you think you feel that way about all art equally? Like,
00:13:15.560 I'm not sure I feel that way about music, maybe like purely instrumental music,
00:13:20.600 leaving, you know, the singing and the lyrics aside. If you play me some tune of any genre
00:13:28.680 that just sounds great, I don't know that it, I care. Like if you then pull back the curtain and
00:13:36.200 tell me that this is pure AI confection, it's possible I'll still like it better than the human
00:13:42.380 product because on some level music is doing something different for me. It's a little bit
00:13:47.180 like the difference between art and interior decorating. Like, you know, if you tell me that
00:13:52.260 couch, the color of the couch is what it is and I don't care how it got there, right? It's either
00:13:58.880 a couch I love the look of or not. It's either comfortable or I'm not. But if you tell me that,
00:14:04.980 you know, this, we just found the perfect fabric and the perfect color and it's all
00:14:08.640 made by robots. You know, I, on some level, I just care about the object itself and not how
00:14:13.740 it got there. So that's such a perfect analogy. It's a very, very Philistine analogy. All the
00:14:20.160 musicians are horrified that I went that far down the, down the hierarchy of, of mattering, but
00:14:26.620 yeah. But I don't actually feel that way about it. So, okay. What you just said, I would feel
00:14:31.980 If I were out at a restaurant and there's great background music playing, I don't care in that context who wrote the music or where it came from. But actually, the whole reason that I wrote Bittersweet, my last book, was because I have had all my life this incredibly intense, euphoric-slash-ecstatic reaction to certain forms of minor key sad music.
00:14:58.220 And I was just trying to figure out where on earth did that come from.
00:15:02.400 Have you experimented with trying to produce AI, minor key, sad music?
00:15:07.680 No, but I think I would have the same reaction to it that I have when I start reading the social media story and then realize it's AI and stop reading.
00:15:17.780 It would be an interesting psychological experiment to get someone.
00:15:21.000 I want to deputize someone.
00:15:22.700 Maybe one of our listeners can do this who's a musician.
00:15:25.240 This is against the grain of what anyone wants, I'm sure.
00:15:28.220 But if someone produced a test for you between the human-made minor key music that has organized all of your intuitions around this paradoxical emotion of bittersweetness and some AI version where we could do the Pepsi challenge here,
00:15:48.220 It would be interesting because if you wound up not being able to tell which was which or which you like better, that's, what do you think God does to you as a person who cares about all of this, this whole part of culture?
00:16:00.960 Okay, but here's the thing. I think I might not be able to tell the difference if it's a blind taste test, but I think part of what makes the reaction that I have, and many people have this same reaction, so ecstatic is because I'm aware that the music was produced by a human who has experienced all these things and was talented enough, gifted enough, and generous enough to turn it into something that beautiful and that transcendent.
00:16:30.140 So I start feeling this wash of love for the musician and for the other people who are listening to it. And so if you told me that the music was created by a machine, the wash of love wouldn't feel the same way, even if my initial response did.
00:16:43.920 But until these machines arose, it was just the safe assumption. You could be 100% sure that the music you're listening to was created by a person. And so you never had to think about it. So again, I'm not, as is probably already obvious, I'm not a deep student of music.
00:17:01.360 But when I listen to the soundtrack to a film, say, and the music is perfectly calculated to produce in me some set of emotions, take the bittersweet version, I guess I'm thinking maybe like the soundtrack for theβ€”is this Ennio Morricone, the soundtrack for The Mission? That might hit a similar spot, you tell me.
00:17:23.980 I don't know that soundtrack, but I'm guessing. Yeah, probably.
00:17:26.860 But it's just very affecting music. I don't think I'm ever thinking about how it was produced. Again, back in the day, you didn't have to think about it because you knew there was an orchestra there and there were people behind all that. But I don't think I was ever thinking. There's a much more fundamental, just purely neurological and primal response to a stimulus, right?
00:17:50.280 This is almost like, you know, tasting a fruit you've never tasted before, and it's just you've got this sunburst of flavor in your mouth, and you're not thinking about the evolution of this plant that gave you the fruit.
00:18:02.060 You're just having an experience, and I do think that the raw experience of bittersweetness or any other emotion to music can be fully uncoupled from any thought about how it got there in the first place.
00:18:14.660 Well, okay. So the example of the soundtrack to a movie, that's a really interesting example, because I feel like if we think of it as a continuum, it's not quite in the realm of interior design, but it's also not in the realm of just sitting quietly and listening to your favorite musician.
00:18:33.240 It's somewhere in between.
00:18:34.620 My Philistine bona fides are well-established at this point.
00:18:37.920 No, no. I might grant you that in the context of a movie, maybe it doesn't matter.
00:18:43.620 And in fact, my family and I talk about this all the time because that shows Succession.
00:18:47.780 I don't know if you've watched that one.
00:18:49.040 Yeah, yeah.
00:18:49.320 Yeah.
00:18:49.640 And the music for Succession.
00:18:51.120 Your music's perfect.
00:18:51.980 Oh my gosh.
00:18:52.860 It's so incredible.
00:18:54.220 And so we've talked about, okay, would it be as good if the music had been produced by a machine?
00:18:59.900 And maybe it would in that context.
00:19:01.960 But when it's purely a musical listening experience, I'm actually going to hold down a quote for my wall.
00:19:08.400 So as I like to say ad nauseum, I love Leonard Cohen, the musician. He's like my rabbi, my patron saint. And I literally have this quote hanging up on my wall that says, the only religion I've ever known is the church of Leonard Cohen. All others pale in comparison. That's what someone said about his music. And I thought, yeah, that's exactly what I feel.
00:19:28.880 whether someone else wrote that or whether leonard cohen wrote that no no no no this was
00:19:32.880 like a random comment on a youtube video of his music and when i read it i thought that
00:19:37.860 that doesn't work with ai because it's like the i know you don't like the probably the word soul
00:19:43.800 but it's like the soul of the musician is transmitting to you well that's why when you're
00:19:47.980 listening in that way i i held the lyric i held music with lyrics and voice to one side just
00:19:53.420 because there it's pretty obvious to me that I'm not so interested in the version of Hallelujah that is sung by a robot.
00:20:02.780 But it's not the singing, it's the creation of it.
00:20:05.080 It's the fact that a human actually created it.
00:20:07.260 Right, right.
00:20:08.140 So written and sung by a robot, whatever, the simulacrum of the same vibe, however successful.
00:20:15.340 I think it's not interesting once you know that it's the product of AI.
00:20:21.980 But again, not knowing in the Pepsi challenge, I think we will be fooled.
00:20:28.080 We could be fooled already.
00:20:29.260 And that there's something psychologically interesting about that.
00:20:32.840 I mean, like, imagine what it's like to withdraw your sympathy for a piece of art once you know that a human didn't make it right.
00:20:40.160 Imagine having the full effect of, if you can imagine or even remember what it was like to hear Leonard Cohen's version of Hallelujah for the first time and have it hit you exactly as it did. 0.89
00:20:54.400 Imagine having that experience with something that you don't know is just robot slop and then having to kind of break off that reaction because now you know you've been tricked on some level.
00:21:07.820 Yeah. I don't know. I don't know that it's any different than what we'll think if we get to the point that the robots really can look like another person and embody another person in that uncanny valley way. And they tell you they love you and you seem to love them. But then you know that it's not real and you switch them off at any moment.
00:21:28.900 I don't know. I'm still in the camp of thinking that unless we get to the point of thinking that there's something interesting and sympathetic about machine consciousness, that unless we get there, I think it's never going to feel the same. And we'll always know. And that that will invalidate the experience to some degree. Maybe not to the full degree. So again, I think it'll still work in the context of a movie soundtrack or that kind of thing, but not for the real experience.
00:21:54.980 My prediction is that, I don't consider this a hopeful one, but it might be less weird than the certainty of AI consciousness.
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00:22:11.620 All human beings are born into this world with the deep instinct that we belong in another more perfect and more beautiful place than this one.
00:22:21.780 We create religions in the name of that belief, that instinct.
00:22:25.920 I mean, we are longing for the Garden of Eden,
00:22:28.840 and we feel every so often like it's just around the corner.
00:22:31.300 Maybe we've glimpsed it, but we can never fully get there.
00:22:34.300 I don't feel like I have the fear of death so much.
00:22:36.520 I have the fear of mourning.