Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 04, 2026


#488 — Ego, Ecstasy, and Equanimity


Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

195.46

Word count

2,442

Sentence count

79


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris.
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00:00:24.720 Welcome to the Making Sense podcast.
00:00:27.060 This is Sam Harris.
00:00:28.160 today i'm sharing a conversation i had a few months ago back in march i think with um the
00:00:35.400 comedian neil brennan who's really fantastic he's got a podcast uh you may have seen him on
00:00:41.020 netflix he's has several specials there that are all worth watching just a a genuinely hilarious
00:00:47.260 guy but i was on his podcast a few months ago and had a conversation that is pretty different from
00:00:54.960 the kinds I have here on my own podcast. So many people thought that the Making Sense audience
00:01:00.660 would like to hear this conversation. We go into my childhood, my mother's career in television,
00:01:07.300 my father's absence, my early struggles with perfectionism. There's lots of psychodynamic
00:01:15.000 stuff that I never talk about on my own podcast. And Neil just pulled this out of me for some
00:01:22.300 reason in a way that no one else ever has. So we thought you might want to hear it. As I said,
00:01:28.200 this is a few months old, so I think some of the references might seem anachronistic. But I think
00:01:33.660 the conversation holds up well, and I think you will enjoy it. So I now give you me and Neil
00:01:40.560 Brennan. Guys, my guest today is, it's hard to even describe what you've blossomed into.
00:01:52.300 He's got an app called Waking Up.
00:01:55.600 He's got a podcast.
00:01:57.140 He's got a sub stack and books.
00:02:00.240 How do you describe yourself at this point?
00:02:02.920 Yeah, I'm rarely in a situation when I have to.
00:02:05.060 You're in it.
00:02:05.920 Hit me.
00:02:09.640 I mean, I am essentially a philosopher of mind.
00:02:14.040 I mean, technically my PhD is in neuroscience,
00:02:16.260 but I got it really as an expression
00:02:18.820 of my philosophical interest.
00:02:20.100 I almost did a PhD in philosophy,
00:02:21.540 but just did a lateral move to neuroscience because I wanted to know more about the brain.
00:02:25.200 So, you know, most of my writing is philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, but I get dragged
00:02:30.960 into politics so much that I'm, you know, the phrase public intellectual is sort of
00:02:35.040 embarrassing to apply to oneself, but it's like, it is, it's the way I'm functioning,
00:02:40.120 right?
00:02:40.240 I'm just bringing science into science and philosophy into whatever I can when we're
00:02:44.980 talking about public politics.
00:02:45.620 Do you find that you just bring science into it or is it meaning you just end up inevitably
00:02:50.260 talking about neuroscience within this stuff yeah i mean not not just neuroscience but i just think
00:02:55.380 we're our understanding of ourselves scientifically is is and should put pressure on what we think is
00:03:02.640 uh real obviously and what uh what we think human life is for and could be for and how good might
00:03:09.640 it be and which you know what sort of public policies make sense to implement and you know
00:03:13.520 what is ethic what should we get our ethics should we get it from books that people think were
00:03:17.400 dictated by the creator of the universe 2,000 years ago or 1,400 years ago, depending? Or should
00:03:22.280 we be having a 21st century conversation about the foundations of human flourishing? And so
00:03:28.160 every time I open my mouth on any of these topics, I'm trying to bring in kind of a secular
00:03:34.040 rationality into pretty fraught topics. Yeah. But before even getting into all that serious
00:03:42.060 stuff, can you explain to people who your mother is? Because I'm getting ready to
00:03:47.400 blow your head apart.
00:03:48.940 He's gonna take a sip of water
00:03:50.140 and then he's gonna tell you who his mom is.
00:03:52.260 So my mom is Susan Harris,
00:03:54.020 and she created a bunch of shows,
00:03:56.640 but the one that was most seen and impactful
00:04:00.060 was Golden Girls.
00:04:01.700 But she created Soap and a bunch of,
00:04:03.380 like, I don't know, 10 shows.
00:04:04.820 Benson?
00:04:05.740 Benson was a spinoff of Soap.
00:04:07.200 Did she fire Jerry Seinfeld?
00:04:08.840 No, Jerry Seinfeld was a, didn't he had a bit part?
00:04:12.000 He had a part of Benson, and I think he didn't make it.
00:04:14.280 Yeah, no, I don't think he,
00:04:15.340 Well, I don't know if that was just like a walk-on part
00:04:18.000 or if that was, he was trying to be a cast.
00:04:19.680 I think he wanted, I think he was trying to be in the cast.
00:04:21.800 Everybody's trying to be in the cast.
00:04:23.120 Okay, well, I have not, I don't know the details on that.
00:04:27.060 But she discovered Billy Crystal.
00:04:29.060 Soap launched Billy Crystal, which was great.
00:04:31.080 Yes.
00:04:31.820 Jessica, the homosexuals go way back in history.
00:04:34.940 Who?
00:04:36.380 Alexander the Great was gay.
00:04:38.640 Play-Doh was gay.
00:04:40.240 Play-Doh?
00:04:41.120 Nicky Mouse's dog was,
00:04:45.720 he was, well, I don't want to say
00:04:49.440 he was impressionist at that point, but kind of.
00:04:51.780 Joe Frazer, don't want to talk about it.
00:04:54.320 And what was it like, was she a single mom?
00:04:58.300 That's what I'm, what was, how did, how did she start?
00:05:02.760 Not in a way that sounds like it would give
00:05:05.560 a high probability of success.
00:05:07.360 So my dad left when I was two and a half
00:05:10.300 and i still had a relationship with him but you know he moved to new york when i was three and
00:05:14.540 a half and so i you know we were here and like living in an apartment yeah i live in an apartment
00:05:20.060 in the valley and my mother had no safety net and i think my dad paid child support like once you
00:05:28.860 know so i think there was like one 500 check or something that that discharged his responsibilities
00:05:33.660 there and she i mean as the story goes she was watching television one day i don't know what she
00:05:39.660 was doing for work or looking if she was looking for work at that point but i mean very soon after
00:05:44.780 he left she was watching television and just thought i i could write one of those scripts
00:05:50.540 and she wrote a first script and sold a first script i think for two thousand dollars or
00:05:55.100 something i think it was that's four months of child support yeah yeah keeping track i think it
00:06:00.540 was um for a show which i've never seen called um then came bronson it's about like about a guy who
00:06:06.300 rode a motorcycle from town to town perfect this is the 1970s yeah yeah uh sitcom called then came
00:06:13.020 yeah i don't think i don't know i don't think it was a comedy um maybe it was a comment i don't
00:06:16.380 know but she um she wrote for like love american style and then she started writing for some
00:06:21.740 normally norman lyric stuff and did she did she it was she just wrote it and then sold it and then
00:06:27.980 did she think like oh i can now do this or was it just sort of yeah well she got a foothold and then
00:06:33.980 she um she just started going and so she was she was never on staff anywhere but she was submitting
00:06:39.820 scripts i don't even know if they had staffs back in the day there but i mean she wrote some of the
00:06:44.860 biggest episodes of television yeah she wrote like the mod episode the mod abortion episode
00:06:50.780 which i think was um in a country that had like 150 million people i think 60 million people
00:06:56.940 got in front of their television sets and watched it that night we finally have the right to decide
00:07:01.740 what we can do with our own body all right then will you please get yours into the kitchen
00:07:07.100 so it was like a super bowl event but in english yeah yes yes and would be arthur
00:07:13.660 in the role quarterback yeah then she started creating her own shows with paul witt and tony
00:07:19.500 thomas so it was with thomas harris and um they created soap and benson and a few others and whit
00:07:26.140 thomas was still going in the 90s or was was was she involved still there were whit thomas
00:07:31.580 shows that were my mom wasn't involved in so they produced other stuff she just she was only involved
00:07:36.780 in stuff she wrote and then she retired before they did so there was i think wood thomas continued
00:07:41.980 oh gosh after um and what was it like so what were you were you kind of was she working a lot
00:07:48.060 once that all started how old were you again i was like you know three or something when she
00:07:52.540 really had to start to work you know so or even two and a half but i was only i mean so i had lots
00:07:58.300 of babysitters i mean that was like a that was the thing i mean the story i love which i don't
00:08:03.100 remember i just remember in the retelling of it but apparently she once asked me that when her
00:08:07.100 career was starting to take off she she could she saw some you know daylight as to how successful
00:08:13.500 this could be at this point we were living in a little rented house in the valley but i was going
00:08:18.780 to a private school where i had so some of my friends were not like rich rich but i mean they
00:08:23.260 they had pools in their backyards and they had a kind of different quality of life. She apparently
00:08:28.320 came to me and said, so I have a choice to make. I could work a lot harder. And if I do, we may
00:08:36.280 one day be able to get a pool like your friend, Tom Brown, but you're going to spend a lot more
00:08:41.640 time with your babysitter. So I had this babysitter, I don't know who it was at that
00:08:45.500 point, but she named her and said, and you should kind of, you know, I'll be home late. And so it's
00:08:50.220 really a choice for the two of us it's you know it will have a different life you know one way or
00:08:54.260 the other and apparently i thought for about 10 seconds and i said get the pool mom so uh so she
00:09:00.800 got the pool yeah it took took a while but she um i mean we went from zero to being you're just
00:09:07.200 wealthy i mean i think that started when i was maybe 12 or 13 something like that was there a
00:09:13.620 big difference like in your day-to-day life yeah i mean there was not i mean that age it's not
00:09:19.380 such a big deal, or at least, you know, I don't remember it being, apart from just the house we
00:09:25.360 were living in, I don't remember it being so transformative. But she, you know, she was
00:09:29.080 a single mom who wanted to travel. Actually, the big thing was that she took me on a bunch of
00:09:35.360 trips, just the two of us. She was very brave, frankly. I mean, it was just, you know, a woman
00:09:40.420 in her, I guess, late 30s with a, or mid 30s with a, you know, seven-year-old, eight-year-old
00:09:46.000 taking him to africa and china when it opened up and europe and i mean she's just you know
00:09:51.240 traveling alone and i mean she and she had not traveled a ton you know as a kid or a young adult
00:09:56.900 herself because they didn't have a lot of money and it was you know a different time so she had
00:10:01.180 just never traveled and so she took she slept me all over the world you know but by the time i was
00:10:05.360 14 or so 15 i had gone many places just you know just the two of us so do you think she was like
00:10:11.020 typical of i mean because maude was kind of it was a lot of these shows at that point were like
00:10:17.480 went like the tip of the spear of women's lip right and was she she's kind of i i hate the
00:10:25.180 word iconic is silly but but she seems like emblematic of that and does she seem like she
00:10:30.640 was living a life that a lot of women wanted to lead or she's very empowered yes because at a
00:10:36.280 certain point she became a kind of a powerful person in the industry right so it's like she
00:10:41.200 was just objectively successful and uh in demand i got her i mean i'm like hearing her credits i'm
00:10:48.580 like she's top three maybe the best female ever top three ever in terms of sitcom writers yeah
00:10:55.760 because as somebody pointed out my jimmy carr pointed out she created golden girl she also
00:11:00.360 who created Sex and the City,
00:11:01.720 because it's highly derivative.
00:11:04.920 Well, the other thing, the real feat of writing
00:11:07.320 that I think very few people have matched is for Soap.
00:11:11.020 She wrote one, she wrote it entirely by herself
00:11:14.460 for the first, I think, two and a half years.
00:11:17.040 So she was banging out one episode a week.
00:11:19.400 She did like 75 episodes straight, you know,
00:11:21.580 over the better part of three seasons, something like that.
00:11:24.240 I did two seasons with another guy,
00:11:26.120 and I'm still mad about it.
00:11:27.160 Yeah, yeah.
00:11:28.400 So she, and she had no, so she never had a, on Golden Girls, she got a staff after whatever,
00:11:32.900 like the first 10 episodes or something like that. And then she stepped away.
00:11:35.580 Yeah, but.
00:11:36.300 So she was really just prolific in a way that is not.
00:11:39.680 And was not a writer.
00:11:41.400 No.
00:11:41.740 Prior to that.
00:11:42.160 No, no, no. I mean, she had, she was a reader. She was an English major in college and she,
00:11:47.900 so she loved, you know, story and fiction, you know, she was mostly a reader of fiction. So
00:11:53.840 she wasn't starting from zero in that sense, but no, but not a, not a writer.
00:11:57.600 and how does the growing up how often would you see your dad maybe twice a year or something like
00:12:04.120 that it's just like like uh um a christmas like a christmas vacation for maybe two weeks and
00:12:10.280 summer for three weeks something like that what do you what do you make of it all looking back
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00:12:27.600 Amen.