Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 01, 2026


#483 — The Knots We Tie Ourselves Into

Topics
psychedelics exploration
Hosted by
Sam Harris
Guests
Alain
Mentioned
Greeks Christopher Hitchens Richard Dawkins Daniel Dennett Nietzsche Dionysus Rothko
#482 — More From Sam： The Iran Deal, College in the AI Age, Mamdani's DSA, and More #484 — Artificial Intimacy

Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

162.46

Word count

3,700

Sentence count

189

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Alain de Botton is a philosopher, writer, and thinker. He is the founder of The School of Life in London, an organization dedicated to helping people find meaning in their lives through the study of psychology, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. In this episode, we talk about his career, his work as a thinker, and his thoughts on the decline in the modern world.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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 here with Alain de Botton. Alain, thanks for joining me.
00:00:29.540 Thank you so much for having me.
00:00:31.180 So I think this conversation probably is, I don't know, two decades coming. I feel like I've known
00:00:38.020 about you for at least 20 years and admired your work from afar. You've done many things. You've
00:00:43.880 written many books and you have the School of Life, which I would love to talk about. But how
00:00:49.020 How do you describe your career at this point?
00:00:51.520 What is it that you focus on and how are you showing up mostly now as a thinker?
00:00:58.960 Sure.
00:00:59.200 I mean, I'm broadly interested in the slightly paradoxical and elusive sources of human
00:01:03.660 happiness, unhappiness, sorry, that are not really related to material or political shortfalls
00:01:09.200 or events, but broadly lie in the psychological space.
00:01:12.340 our amazing human ability to make a hell out of often pretty benign circumstances.
00:01:21.000 I'm fascinated by, as I say, the knots we tie ourselves into. And I write books. I operate on
00:01:28.620 YouTube. As you say, I run this organization called the School of Life in London. We're
00:01:34.740 interested in emotional education. And, um, I'm also a psychotherapist. So, um, I see clients
00:01:42.000 one day a week. Nice. And as well as writing books and things. And the school of life has
00:01:47.320 published many books that are, are you the author of those books or did you, is it? I am. I and a
00:01:53.460 colleague are the author of all the books. Yes. Wow. So, um, you are more prolific than you get
00:01:58.560 credit for then because how many books have you written? There are a lot of them. Well, the school
00:02:02.780 of life has 70 books under its brand and i've written 15 under my name so it's a little too
00:02:08.740 much and um i leave it to experts to diagnose what the problem might be this is this is l ron hubbard
00:02:14.680 territory though happily with much better content wow uh okay well then i'm glad to see you away
00:02:21.420 from your keyboard for the at least uh the hour that we're speaking thank you well see you have
00:02:29.060 focused on these timeless issues of, as you just put it, our capacity to suffer unnecessarily,
00:02:38.560 it's pretty easy to uncouple that from the historical moment. I mean, there are ways in
00:02:44.000 which current technology and changes in culture, I think, are amplifying that capacity and making
00:02:51.960 it more difficult to be happy in some very ordinary ways. Perhaps these changes are making
00:02:58.040 it easier too. Let's just talk about culture for a moment. What most concerns you about
00:03:03.620 the cultural changes that we're seeing happening, more or less accelerating hour by hour around us
00:03:11.760 now? I wonder if I might start in an unusual, slightly unusual and slightly provocative place,
00:03:17.900 which is with religion and with the decline in much of the modern world with what I would be
00:03:26.100 careful to call it a religious mindset as opposed to belief. And I think we're still, you know,
00:03:31.020 I still diagnose modern societies as coming out of the very long religious age which preceded it. 0.87
00:03:40.280 And, you know, taking my cue from a thinker like Nietzsche, who predicted, I think very accurately,
00:03:46.580 that the end of belief would be trouble for human beings. I mean, it's not like there was no trouble
00:03:51.920 before, and don't get me wrong, there was a lot of trouble before as well, but that there were
00:03:55.700 particular kinds of trouble that were going to beset non-religious eras, predominantly non-religious
00:04:02.180 eras. And I think it's a good place to look. I mean, let's look at some of the things that
00:04:08.360 religious societies do and secular societies have problems with. One of the things that
00:04:13.940 religious societies do is to socialize in ritual forms certain kinds of psychological transitions
00:04:22.220 which secular societies have a lot of trouble orchestrating or putting on the agenda. I mean,
00:04:28.060 our diaries are filled with business meetings and technical priorities. In the more religious eras,
00:04:34.740 days were devoted to ideas, to priorities of the soul, if you like. Now, one can have all kinds of
00:04:41.180 objections to how those priorities were framed, but it's a very interesting way in which
00:04:45.960 in the 19th century, what happens is that private life gets personalized and individualized to an
00:04:53.640 unprecedented degree. And so if you're in love, if you're struck by nature, if you're interested in
00:04:59.620 community, if you're moved by the sight of mountains, et cetera, you do that on your own.
00:05:04.020 You don't, you're not within any kind of structure. And, you know, we've had a hard time
00:05:10.200 cohering people into structures that, you know, guide psychological, I guess when you might call
00:05:18.240 health, religions talk to the soul. We don't need to use that word soul, but it's a very interesting
00:05:24.000 word. Let me just explore that in the current context. I mean, there are religious societies
00:05:29.880 or large communities now that you envy for the degree to which their commitment to
00:05:37.060 their specific doctrines and ideology grants them depth of community and kind of thickness of
00:05:45.900 culture? They're not atomized in ways that you admire? Yeah. Again, slightly strangely, no.
00:05:52.120 I'm not interested in looking backwards or sideways to religious eras. I'm doing something
00:05:58.420 slightly unusual, which is to say, to really advocate for creativity, creativity in the
00:06:04.420 areas in which religions used to operate. I'm not interested in reviving religions or fostering 0.98
00:06:11.560 new forms of religiosity, but rather in exploring what religions were up to and thinking about
00:06:16.960 what some of the gaps, you might say, are. I mean, many of the museums of Europe,
00:06:24.500 take the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, were explicitly modeled in the late 19th century on churches.
00:06:30.220 There was a very common belief that culture would replace scripture, that in the absence of
00:06:36.820 divine beliefs, what would pick up the slack, what would direct emotion, what would provide points of
00:06:43.540 communion, etc., would be the arts. And that's why, as I say, so many civic, cultural buildings
00:06:51.700 look like churches or temples, places of worship.
00:06:55.680 The very direct kind of reference.
00:06:57.600 And so one might say, well, isn't that fair enough?
00:06:59.860 And I draw attention really to the way in which
00:07:02.360 that seems a slightly incomplete project.
00:07:04.720 So I'm speaking to you from London.
00:07:06.420 If you showed up at the Tate Gallery
00:07:07.900 and went to the Rothko room
00:07:09.620 and knelt down in front of a Rothko
00:07:12.420 and burst into tears
00:07:13.560 and were profoundly moved in a way
00:07:15.820 that we're not really used to in the age of museums
00:07:19.420 and according to the codes of how to behave in a museum,
00:07:21.700 you'd be quickly ushered out by the guards. You're supposed to imbibe art in ways that are,
00:07:28.220 you know, one might say chilly, even cold. It's a private experience. It's non-ecstatic.
00:07:33.820 It is not done with others. And there's a sort of limit to what we're allowed to expect
00:07:38.500 from a work of art. It's both meant to be extremely important and nothing to cry about,
00:07:44.220 or indeed dance about. And that strikes me. And I'm intrigued because all societies, I mean,
00:07:49.820 take the ancient Greeks who had some fascinating rituals. So once a year, there was the festival
00:07:54.800 of Dionysus. Dionysus, the god of wine, the god of night, the god of folly. And he's got his
00:08:02.020 ritual moments. And the whole citizenry, especially women, exit the city during the 0.85
00:08:08.520 festival of Dionysus, dance in ecstatic ways to the beating of drums. And of course, our friend
00:08:14.860 Nietzsche here is very interested in this. What's going on here? What are the ancient Greeks
00:08:19.020 knowing? What do they know about us that we seem to have forgotten? And I'm not the first person
00:08:24.300 to point out that there has been a huge increase, at least in recorded incidents, of what we call
00:08:31.020 mental illness, mental unwellness. And one of the ways of thinking about that epidemic of mental
00:08:37.100 unwellness is that the extreme emotions, the untenable emotions that manifest themselves now
00:08:44.120 privately were, have been in different points in history, marshaled around common rituals,
00:08:52.860 which one might say handled them pretty cleverly, quite intelligently. You know, for the ancient
00:08:59.620 Greeks, the concept of going a little mad once a year, or perhaps more often, was taken very
00:09:06.120 seriously and was not seen, was seen as different from actually being mad. Going mad is something
00:09:13.860 that you do because, you know, there's divine madness in each of us. Being mad is a more
00:09:19.100 permanent state, often to do with denying the fact that there is divine madness in us. And so,
00:09:25.400 you know, the Greeks rather cleverly had these two characters, Apollo and Dionysus at the center
00:09:29.620 of their culture. Apollo, interested in reason, in calm, in order, balance, symmetry. And Dionysus,
00:09:36.540 very interested in other things. Again, I'm less interested in the specifics of these gods.
00:09:41.340 We might find other gods. We might find other festivals. We might look at things differently.
00:09:45.640 But there's a methodology there. There's a way of structuring experience, which modern society
00:09:51.220 doesn't have. And I'm very interested in drawing attention to that.
00:09:55.160 Well, that's very interesting. I think I want to just explore all of that terrain again a little more systematically, just because I'm interested to discover if there's anything we disagree about. I think you and I have been thought to have disagreed. I think your book, Religion for Atheists, came out. When was that?
00:10:14.860 2012.
00:10:15.900 Oh, yeah.
00:10:16.760 2012. So, yeah, about the same time as you were very prominent on what looked like another side.
00:10:22.320 I was the foreheaded atheist along with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. And yeah, I think people thought you and I fundamentally disagreed about a few things there. And I'm hearing echoes of that suspicion in what you just said, but I'm not sure I disagree with any of what you said, but I just want to try to figure this out.
00:10:42.680 So I think I can completely sign up to the set of claims that I thought I heard, which is that one, secular culture is uncomfortable with ecstasy, right? 0.69
00:10:56.580 We don't have a frame in which to think about it and integrate it and normalize it and even prioritize it.
00:11:04.900 And ecstasy might even be the wrong noun.
00:11:08.140 It's more that there's a positive end to the continuum of human well-being that has
00:11:13.800 not been well explored, especially in Western culture and especially of late.
00:11:18.960 And I very much like your use of the word ecstasy.
00:11:22.240 I think it's bang on.
00:11:24.200 And, you know, let's go straight to the nightclub at this point.
00:11:27.780 You know, the word ecstasy has been linked to, obviously, traditionally a drug that you
00:11:32.140 take at a nightclub.
00:11:33.400 And, you know, even if you think of the nightclub, the nightclub, there are nightclubs all over
00:11:37.760 the world, they don't have very high cultural prestige. There's no psychological meaning
00:11:43.320 appended to them. There's no transcendental function. They are in the world of fun,
00:11:48.960 of recreation, which I think is a real pity. And I think one of the things that the modern world
00:11:54.420 does is it misses out on drawing from things like the nightclub, the themes the previous ages
00:12:02.400 would have mined in them. So just to add a few pieces to this puzzle for you to work with,
00:12:08.020 I think what you're arguing for is that secular culture needs a conception of profundity and the
00:12:15.060 sacred that traditionally only religion was able to give us. Totally, totally. That's absolutely
00:12:21.660 right. And even, you know, take the concept of the planetarium. So all around the world,
00:12:26.740 planetariums, you go and look at stars. How do we justify planetariums? It's overwhelmingly
00:12:31.920 to do with scientific explanation rather than or, or A-W-E. In other words, you know, you go to
00:12:39.680 planetarium and they're very keen to tell you about the precise dimensions of, you know, Kepler 32b
00:12:44.060 and, you know, the rings of Saturn, et cetera, rather than what I think would be an equally
00:12:50.500 apposite point, which is how small we are in the universe, you know, ego reduction, which has
00:12:56.720 traditionally been one of the functions that religion has taken on very effectively. You know,
00:13:00.640 in Zen Buddhism, there were moon viewing ceremonies on platforms. Poetry was read,
00:13:06.140 rice cakes were eaten, or still are in some parts of Japan at some points. In other words,
00:13:10.720 the moon is being used not as an astronomical phenomenon, but as a sort of psychosocial
00:13:17.560 phenomenon, as a tool of culture. And that's very helpful. So if we look at, you know,
00:13:22.800 the nightclub, the planetarium, et cetera, there are lots of things that secular culture has,
00:13:28.560 but isn't properly connecting up with some of the themes that religions were pretty good
00:13:34.380 at bringing to the fore. Well, now, as you, I'm sure, are aware, there's this resurgent interest
00:13:41.000 in psychedelics, both on the research end and on the so-called recreational end. And granted,
00:13:48.360 there are two very different moods with which one can approach this project. It can be the nightclub
00:13:54.360 mood of just having fun or the more contemplative mood of actually trying to understand something
00:14:02.040 deep and durable and profound about the nature of your mind and your capacity for
00:14:07.040 overcoming the unnecessary suffering of which you referenced at the beginning here.
00:14:11.400 Yes. I mean, I think psychedelics are very interesting. I've explored this theme. I mean,
00:14:16.700 if we look at, you know, you mentioned these two functions. Absolutely. I mean, if you,
00:14:20.780 you know, one of the functions of psychedelics, MDMA, et cetera,
00:14:24.360 is socially to remind us of what we have in common with other people. You know, when people say,
00:14:30.620 I took this substance and I loved everybody. This is, of course, one of the feats of kind
00:14:36.020 of spiritual development in all religions, that it is through kind of meditative activities and
00:14:42.380 also ecstatic activities that you discover that the barriers between humans are, let's put it
00:14:48.460 gently, exaggerated in normal life. In normal life, we focus on the differences, but how
00:14:54.280 interesting and how nice life would be if we focused on the similarities. And we may need a
00:14:59.080 substance and a setting in which that can more easily be accessible to us. And then, you know,
00:15:04.240 you mentioned self-exploration. Well, exactly. I mean, the Freudians, bless them, and I'm very
00:15:09.420 indebted to the Freudian tradition, they understand that one of the main obstacles to thinking about
00:15:14.620 yourself is fear, that there are resistance based on a fear of all sorts of deeply uncomfortable
00:15:20.800 things about oneself, like, you know, one's sexuality may be more complicated, one may have
00:15:25.660 aggressive urges, where one's supposed to be merely, inverted commas, nice, etc. And that
00:15:30.360 a substance like MDMA might lower the defenses, enabling one to achieve insight. And again,
00:15:39.300 you know, what a serious mission for something which for too long languished in the lane called
00:15:45.160 fun. Have psychedelics been part of your process? I mean, have you taken the various drugs?
00:15:52.560 I don't know if I'm going to be arrested for saying so. I don't know. But yes, I have. I have
00:15:57.880 taken MDMA and psilocybin in sort of clinical or pseudo-clinical settings. In other words, for
00:16:04.220 these ends of self-exploration more than so-called fun. And they've been tremendously helpful in
00:16:10.240 essentially, you know, my problem with drugs and alcohol was always that these things were
00:16:17.540 not being used seriously. It's not the substance itself that I didn't have any problem with. And
00:16:21.800 again, religions have been wonderful at reminding us. I mean, you know, what is Dionysus responsible
00:16:27.620 for? He's responsible for the God of wine. He's a God of wine. And how interesting to put wine
00:16:32.760 right at the center of, you know, ritual and psychological development. And we too often
00:16:39.300 fail to do that. Yeah, well, the Greeks, as you know, had the Ellicinian mysteries for a couple
00:16:44.840 of millennia. And, you know, those who partook came away saying that this was the foundational
00:16:52.040 few days of their lives. And to some degree, at least if we don't blow it and recapitulate some
00:16:59.520 of the errors of the 1960s here, what the current moment promises is a more sober, more methodical,
00:17:07.500 more scientifically informed, but yet nonetheless profound kind of reintegration of that kind of
00:17:14.000 ritual, you know, the pharmacological ritual in culture.
00:17:18.240 I mean, you know, I'm thinking about why people are boring. All human beings have very complex
00:17:22.820 lives, but we all know some people who, when you come into their vicinity, you yourself feel that
00:17:28.900 you have an awful lot to say to them and around them. And there's a lot of feeling. And other
00:17:33.380 people, we feel, you know, they are saying, what have you been up to lately? And the mind goes
00:17:37.680 completely blank, largely because I tend to think that this is a function of how much they've
00:17:42.580 explored of themselves. A so-called interesting person is generally somebody who's been very
00:17:47.840 interested in themselves, not in a narrowly egocentric way, but they've opened a lot of
00:17:52.160 doors. And I think one unconsciously senses that when you come into contact with them and then you
00:17:57.180 have a lot to say. I would immediately put you in that category, Sam, which is why people enjoy
00:18:02.280 talking to you. And I think that one of the things that psychedelics allow people to do is more
00:18:08.120 easily explore bits of their minds, which when they are outside of the substance, continues and
00:18:14.360 gives them a kind of space, which they allow to other people to, you know, explore their own
00:18:20.520 minds. And so one ends up, you know, having a more interesting time and a more, if you use a
00:18:26.160 hackneyed word, compassionate time, where there's a lot more on the table to discuss and to feel.
00:18:31.320 Well, let's talk about the attenuation of the ego, because it strikes me that there's a normative, optimal, entirely desirable version of this. And it's one that I've thought a lot about and spoken a lot about. But there's also pathological counterfeits, I would say. And they relate to the discomfort we referenced a moment ago around ecstasy and secular culture and its political implications.
00:18:58.500 I mean, when you're talking about, you know, the Dionysian attitude and what that looks like at the level of a crowd, I mean, it looks one way in a rave or, you know, other nightclub setting.
00:19:12.600 It looks another way in a political context, you know, that, you know, one could argue that at a large political rally, you know, Nuremberg looking or otherwise, there is a kind of self-overcoming of the individual.
00:19:26.980 There's this kind of fusion to some larger end that amounts to people kind of losing themselves in shoulder-to-shoulder contact with their brothers and sisters.
00:19:39.300 And the pathology of all of that is all too obvious when you just read any bit of history.
00:19:46.900 How should we think about the success and failure of what lies beyond the ego?
00:19:54.400 Such a fascinating question.
00:19:55.820 I'd begin with the story of every human in a family. You emerge into the world with a mother
00:20:02.080 and a father. And it's hard to remember, but essential to remember how mighty every mother
00:20:08.280 and father or every caregiver looks to an infant. This large person can throw a ball across the
00:20:15.080 garden, can master language, can write, can sing, can pick you up and spin you around the room.
00:20:21.680 And from that experience, all of us have rooted in us, I think, a capacity to be awed by another
00:20:32.000 human and, as it were, to imagine, to project onto them an all-knowing quality. And in normal
00:20:41.020 development, in normal psychological development, we gradually discover in adolescence that our
00:20:48.540 parents are flawed, that even though they looked absolutely powerful when we were seven,
00:20:54.120 by the time we're 17, we discover that they're boring, frightened, uncertain, and in many ways,
00:21:01.240 not sure of where they're going. And these are wonderful discoveries, necessary discoveries
00:21:05.260 of adolescence. And if I can make a strange link of democracy, democracy is the democratic mindset
00:21:11.480 is one which is post-adolescent and properly recognizes the impossibility of heroes.
00:21:19.360 There are no heroes. There are merely humans like you and me who are finding their way prone to
00:21:26.380 error and not omnipotent. But in moments of stress, in moments of regression, people and peoples
00:21:32.980 will, as you know, of course, regress back to that childhood mentality. And then you get serious
00:21:40.220 dangers because if somebody's the daddy or the mummy and they don't have the benevolence that
00:21:45.380 you know we sometimes associate with those words then you've got trouble on your hands and I think
00:21:51.160 it's in all of us all of us can be in danger depending on our you know state of mind and
00:21:56.780 the atmosphere around of projecting onto leaders a power that that no adult can possess simply
00:22:04.680 because that's where we all came from and it's a lot easier when you're feeling under pressure
00:22:09.600 to believe that.
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00:22:17.700 you can use with your favorite podcast player.
00:22:19.980 Death is a very important thing to keep on the agenda,
00:22:22.060 not just for the actual moment you're going to die,
00:22:24.220 but for everything it symbolizes
00:22:26.480 about your limits of understanding and control.
00:22:30.360 Accepting death in its metaphorical sense of limits
00:22:34.040 is a wonderful route to making you,
00:22:37.400 you know, a little bit less of a difficult person, a little bit less of an awkward person.
00:22:42.460 People become a lot more fun when they accept their limitations.