Making Sense with Sam Harris - #488 — Ego, Ecstasy, and Equanimity

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

Sam Harris speaks with Neal Brennan about the experiences that shaped his life and work. They discuss Sam's mother's television career, growing up with an absent father, his struggles with perfectionism, his first experience with MDMA, dropping out of Stanford, meditation retreats, spiritual charisma and claims of psychic powers, the illusion of self, the limits of pacifism, deleting Twitter, Trump and the politics of shamelessness, hypocrisy and vice signaling, the future of American democracy, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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please consider subscribing today. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Now, today I'm sharing a conversation I had a few months ago back in March, I think, with the comedian Neil Brennan, who's really fantastic. He's got a podcast. You may have seen him on Netflix. He has several specials there that are all worth watching, just a genuinely hilarious guy. But I was on his podcast a few months ago and had a conversation that is pretty different from the kinds I have here on my own podcast. So many people thought that

the Making Sense audience would like to hear this conversation. We go into my childhood, my mother's career in television, my father's absence, my early struggles with perfectionism. There's lots of psychodynamic stuff that I never talk about on my own podcast. And Neil just pulled this out of me for some reason in a way that no one else ever has. So we thought you might want to hear it. As I said, this is a few months old, so I think some of the references might seem anachronistic. But I think the conversation holds up well, and I think you will enjoy it. So I now give you me and Neil Brennan. Guys, my guest today is hard to even describe what you've blossomed into. He's got an app

called Waking Up. He's got a podcast. He's got a substack. And books, how do you describe describe yourself at this point. Yeah, I'm rarely in a situation when I have to. You're in it. Hit me. Yeah. I mean, I am essentially a philosopher of mind. But technically, my PhD is in neuroscience, but I got it really with, as an expression of

my philosophical interest. I almost did a PhD in philosophy, but just did a lateral move to neuroscience because I wanted to know more about the brain. So, you know, most of my writing is philosophy of mind and moral philosophy, but I get dragged into politics so much that I'm, you know, the phrase public intellectual is sort of embarrassing to apply to oneself, but it's like it is, it's the way I'm functioning, right? I'm just bringing science into science and philosophy into whatever I can when we're talking about. Do you find that you just bring science into it or is it meaning you just end up inevitably talking about neuroscience

within this stuff? Yeah, I mean, not just neuroscience, but I just think we're, our understanding of ourselves scientifically is, is and should put pressure. on what we think is real, obviously, and what we think human life is for and could be for and how good might it be, and what sort of public policies make sense to implement, and, you know, what should we get our ethics? Should we get it from books that people think were dictated by the creator of the universe 2,000 years ago or 1,400 years ago, depending, or should we be having a 21st century conversation about the foundations of human flourishing? And so every time I open my mouth on any of these topics,

I'm trying to bring in kind of a secular rationality into pretty fraught topics. Yeah, you know, so. But before even getting in all that serious stuff, can you explain to people who your mother is? Because this is, this, I'm getting ready to blow your head apart. He's going to take a sip of water and then he's going to tell you who is mom is. So my mom is Susan Harris and she created a bunch of shows, but the one that was most seen and impactful was that were Golden Girls. Golden Girls. So, but she created soap and a bunch of, you know, like, I don't know,

Ten shows. Benson? Benson was a spinoff of soap. Did she fire Jerry Seinfeld? Jerry Seinfeld was a, uh, didn't he had a bit part. He had a part of Benson and I think he didn't make it. Yeah. No, I don't think he, well, I don't know if that was just like a walk-on part or if that was, he was trying to be a cast. I think he wanted, I think he was trying to be in the cast. Everybody's trying to be in the cast. Okay, well, I have not, I, I don't know the details on that. But she discovered Billy Crystal, the soap launched Billy Crystal, which was great. Yes.

Jessica, the homosexuals go way back in history. Who? Alexander the Great was gay. Plato was gay.

Plato? Plato? Mickey Mouse's dog was gay? Well, I don't want to say he was impressionist at that point,

but kind of. Joe Fraser, don't want talk about it. And what was it like? Was she a single mom? That's what I'm... Yeah.

What was, how did she start? Not in a way that sounds like it would give a high probability of success. So my dad left when I was two and a half and I still had a relationship with him, but he moved to New York when I was three and a half. And we were here. And like living in an apartment? Yeah, I live in an apartment in the valley and my mother had no safety net.

And I think my dad paid child support like once. So I think there was like one $500 check or something that discharged his responsibilities there. And she, I mean, as the story goes, she was watching television one day. I don't know what she was doing for work or looking if she was looking for work at that point. But I mean, very soon after he left, she was watching television and just thought I could write one of those scripts. And she wrote a first script and sold a first script, I think for $2,000 or something. I think it was it for show. That's four months of child support.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Keep me track. I think it was for a show, which I've never seen called Then Came Bronson. It was about a guy who rode a motorcycle from town to town. Perfect. This is the 1970. Yeah, yeah. A sitcom called Then Came Bronson.

I don't know, I don't think it was a comedy. Maybe it was a comedy. I don't know. But she wrote for like Love American style and then she started writing for some normally, Norman Lera stuff. Did she, did she, it was, she just wrote it and then sold it and then. And did she think like, oh, I can now do this? Or was it just sort of?

Yeah, well, she got a foothold. I mean, then she just started going. I mean, so she was never on staff anywhere, but she was submitting scripts. I don't even know if they had staffs back of the day there. But, I mean, she wrote some of the biggest episodes of television. Yeah, she wrote like the Maude episode. She wrote the Maude abortion episode, which I think was in a country that had like 150 million people, I think 60 million people got in front of their television.

and watched it that night. We finally have the right to decide what we can do with our own body. All right, then will you please get yours into the kitchen? So it was like a Super Bowl event. But in English. Yes, yes. And with B. Arthur that... In the role of that one.

Quarterback, yeah. Then she started creating her own shows with Paul Witt and Tony Thomas. So it was Whit Thomas Harris and they created soap and Benson and a few of the shows. And Whit Thomas was still going in the 90s. Or was she involved still? There were Whit Thomas shows that my mom wasn't involved in, so they produced other stuff. She just, she was only involved in stuff she wrote. And then she retired before they did.

So there was, I think, would Thomas continued. Oh, gosh, got to go. And what was it like? So what were you, were you kind of, was she working a lot? Once that all started, how old were you? Again, I was like, you know, three or something when she 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 of babysitters. I mean, that was like a, that was the thing.

I mean, the story I love, which I don't remember, I just remember in the retelling of it, but apparently she once asked me that when her career was starting to take off, she, she saw some, you know, daylight as to how successful this could be. At this point, we were living in a little rented house in the valley, but I was going to a private school where I had, so some of my friends were not like rich, rich, but, I mean, they had pools in their backyards and they had a kind of different quality of life. She apparently came to me and said, so I have a choice to make. I could work a lot harder. And if I do, we may one day be able to get a pool like your friend Tom Brown, but you're going to spend a lot more time with

your babysitter. This babysitter, I don't know who was at that point, but she named her and said, and you can have, you know, I'll be home late. And so it's really a choice for the two of us. It's, you know, it will have a different life, you know, one way or the other. And apparently I thought for about 10 seconds and I said, get the pool, mom. So she got the pool. Yeah, it took a while. But she, I mean, we went from zero to being, you're just wealthy. I mean, I think that started when I was maybe 12 or 13, something like that. Was there a big difference, like in your day-to-day life? Yeah, I mean, there was not, I mean, that age, it's not such a big deal, but, you know, I don't remember it being, apart from just the house we were living in, I don't remember it being so

transformative. But she, you know, she was a single mom who wanted to travel. Like for the, actually the big thing was that she took me on a bunch of trips, just the two of us. She was very brave, frankly. I mean, it was just, you know, a woman in her, I guess, late 30s with a, or mid-30s with a, you know, seven-year-old, eight-year-old taking him to Africa and China when it opened up and Europe. And, I mean, she was just, you know, traveling alone. And, I mean, and she had not travel a ton, you know, as a kid or a young adult herself because they didn't have a lot of money and it was, you know, a different time. So she had just never traveled. And so she took, she slept me all over the world, you know, but by the time

I was 14 or so, 15, I had gone many places, just, you know, just the two of us. So do you think she was like typical of, I mean, because Maude was kind of, it was a lot of these shows at that point were like, like the tip of the spear of women's lip, right? And, which She's kind of, I hate, the word iconic is silly, but she seems like emblematic of that. And does she seem like she was living a life that a lot of women wanted to lead? Or? She's very empowered. Yes.

Because at a certain point, she became a kind of a powerful person in the industry, right? So it's like she was just objectively successful and in demand. I got her, I mean, I'm like hearing her credits, I'm like, she's top three, maybe the best female ever. top three ever in terms of sitcom writers. Yeah. Because as somebody pointed out, my Jimmy Carr pointed out, she created Golden Girl, she also created Sex and the City because it's highly derivative. Well, the other thing, the real feat of writing that I think very few people have matched is for soap.

She wrote one, she wrote it entirely by herself for the first, I think, two and a half years. So she was banging out one episode a week. She did like 75 episodes straight, you know, over, you know, the better part of three seasons, something like that. I did two seasons with another guy, and I'm still mad about it. Yeah, yeah. So she had no, so she never had a, on Golden Girls,

she got a staff after whatever, like the first 10 episodes or something like that, and then she's stepped away. Yeah, but. So she was really just prolific in a way that is not. And was not a writer. No. Prior to that. No, no.

She had, she was a reader. She was an English major in college. And she, so she loved, you know, story and, uh, fiction. You know, she was mostly a reader of fiction. So she wasn't started from zero in that sense. But no, but not a writer. And how does the growing up, how often would you see your dad? Maybe twice a year or something like that.

That's funny. Like a Christmas vacation for maybe two weeks and summer for three weeks, something like that. What do you make of it all looking back? Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharis.org. Subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.