The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Collapse of American Trust — with Sam Harris

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, bestselling author, and host of the Making Sense podcast, joins Scott to discuss the collapse of trust in institutions, the dangerous rise of misinformation and cults of personality, and why mindfulness might be our best tool for surviving modern chaos. Algebra of Happiness: father’s day reflections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We do take it seriously. We're thinking about new product extensions and wanna know what we can do better. More dick jokes, more dick jokes, read your mind. Episode 353. 353 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! but I did manage to come on cue. That's better. Go, go, go!

["French Dog"] 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, 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 was back when I was actually working for a living, and I've got an Airbnb for like, I don't know, 70 euros a night, 40 minutes out of town. And I pull up Uber and up pops this helicopter icon. So I'm like, I don't know, 70 euros 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 Cannes 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, dah, dah, dah! Literally, 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 at 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 gonna stop me from talking about it again. I go to the F.T. or I go, 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, um, uh, I have, 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 fucking the, you know, the fifth battalion of, of the U S 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 guard and they know what to do. I just bomb through there onto the Palais. That's what you do, you go into the soft tissue, you land from the seaside. I did it at a Pinterest speech,

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 Cannes Lions. It used to be where they give out trophies to the ad execs who were all looking for a different job. And then basically tech ate media.

I mean, it's just so hilarious. The lions of this industry were Martin Sorrell, Murray Sleavy, and I got him John Ren 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. WPP just made this big announcement that they're moving to more of an influencer model. Well, oh wow, that'll help. It's got a $9 billion 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 Sorrell 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 Hills Hotel. Or if you're having an affair with your, I don't know,

secretary's husband or something, and 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's great, but you don't go to LA. You go to the hotel.

Where do you go? You don't go to the South of 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 du 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 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 euros 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

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 euros 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 done 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, wherever I am at 10 PM Greenwich Mean Time, I call in and give my unfiltered take on the issue

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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, making money for their families, trying to be good role models, 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 buoy, what's it called, a life raft, a port of call in stormy seas. I just find he has such moral clarity, does the work. If you listen to his podcasts, every word is just, you can tell every word has been selected.

The economy of words, 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? Los Angeles. 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 we're most concerned about, or of all the things to be concerned about, what are you most concerned about right now and why? I think it would have to be the way we're interacting with information, you know, I mean, it just is, and largely this is a story of what social media and the internet generally has done to us,

but you know, 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. 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. So we've reached this kind of freefall condition as far as I can tell, especially in independent

media and over in Trumpistan, it's just the physics have completely changed. Wherein you have proper lunatics trusted as the, you know, as honest brokers of information. You've got people like Tucker Carlson 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. These people are in good standing right of center and it's bonkers. I fear that we are in a position increasingly where we're rendering ourselves ungovernable or governable only by half the population willing to get absorbed into a personality cult and continuously fed lives.

And it's just that I don't know how we would respond to the next proper emergency. If 9-11 happened now, if a pandemic 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. Do you see any sources or paths to repair? 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, you know, if the purpose was to make them trustworthy, you would go about it very differently, right? I mean, I share the concern that the Ivy League and other universities failed to deal with the explosion of anti-Semitism and frank moral confusion that happened after October 7th. But if that was your concern, if your concern was to deal with the, merely deal with the ideological capture of so many of these departments and the administrators

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 gonna 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, especially on podcasts, as though any comedian

who's a quick study and can use chat GPT 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 I just, so we're gonna have to, it may require some very clear catastrophes born of misinformation to get our heads screwed on straight, but eventually we're gonna bump into some hard objects out there in the real world, and we're gonna wanna know what real experts think about real problems,

and we're gonna 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, you know, we could, might go into that if you're interested, but the 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. I'm curious, and I think you share this opinion. There's been so many things, I don't know, that I thought would have been disqualifying about the Trump administration just in the last 100 days

that the public would have just, you know, that's it, they're going to regurgitate here. There's going to be real push 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 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 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. 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, you know, 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 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 a thousand, but that's conservative. There's well more than a thousand things Trump has done in the last 10 years, said or done, that 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.

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. 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 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'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, you could name, I could easily name dozens

here off the cuff, but it's, I mean, take just adjacent to the meme coin, the fact that we now are a country wherein the president is using our foreign policy, our tariff policy to privately, personally enrich himself. When we slap a 46% tariff on Vietnam, the Vietnam's response 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 green light a $1.5 billion resort from the Trump administration, right, or from the Trump administration, right? Or from the Trump family. It's just in the 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. 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, um, 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 pushback on what's going on, assuming the institutions aren't going to solve the problem right now, what advice would you give them? 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 to do short of winning the midterms decisively. And for that, I just think the Democrats have to learn the 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. Their concerns are bogus. Their convictions are scarcely sane.

They have to be ignored, right? I mean, all, you know, I view Harris's 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. I mean, she was 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 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 you can't, there are 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 chiboleths that gave us wokeness over the last decade or so. 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

and 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. 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? 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. Given that the party got that captured by these, which was effectively a new religion at the center of which was a 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? Like it's just, everything was wrong. Systemic racism was everywhere. And, you know, I mean, Joe Biden gave a speech, I think it was to 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 gonna get into medical school or get a job at Netflix or get a job at the Ford Foundation

or whatever, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, anywhere, any high status job, right, or position in academia was not only not harmed by being black, you were positively 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 a 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 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 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. All of that's true, but this tip over into reverse racism, which really was what DEI became, was totally dysfunctional and unethical. Yeah, it gave us, in I mean, it gave us, in large measure, it gave us Trumpism. Do you distinguish between DEI efforts on campuses

where, you know, 60 years ago, Harvard, Princeton, 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? 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 like women in the workplace, there's the obvious variable of women

deciding to have families, getting pregnant, and 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 just 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, 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 think it's hard to know what is optimal there. I don't, the idea that every person is, it just wants to be a CEO really at bottom and wants to make the sacrifices that entails. I think that's, you know, probably not true. And it's probably good that it is, very good that it's not true.

You know, 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, right? And 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 wanna 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 wanna prosecute this war of all against all until the end of time. Right. Again, this goal and the disavowal of, of color blindness has been explicit. Uh, they think there's no, there's no getting over race. Race is just, just super important and super indelible. And, and therefore it's, 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 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, you know, like the Democratic Party itself and certainly every activist group supporting it, which if you had done a search for place for white and black in those documents, they would have read like Ku Klux Klan pamphlets from the early 20th century. It was completely bonkers. And how we lived so long under that mania is, again, is another one of these inscrutable things.

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 the left is largely culpable for this pendulum swing into populist, no-nothingism, and the way immigration got weaponized. I mean, yes, there were both sides accounted for how we got here. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Aura. A common piece of advice for staying healthy

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What are you waiting for? Give your cat the food they deserve. For a limited time only, because you are a Prop G 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 have the Smalls.com and use promo code PROPG. Again, that's promo code PROPG for an additional 50% off your first order plus free shipping at Smalls.com. So you live in LA. I went to college in 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? 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 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 mean, I don't think... I think we should be tolerant of a certain amount of inequality because I think that 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 to preserve that. I think we want all the incentives that, if there's a better incentive structure than capitalism, 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. So yes, I think it's still true to say that black families have on average one eighth the level of stored wealth as white families. And one must imagine that the legacy of racism

has a lot to do with it. I mean, 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. So that's the thing that was so misguided about so much of DEI thinking. It's like, if you wave a magic wand and get rid of all the racists,

you're still not gonna suddenly have more, you know, Fortune 500 people, you know, more members of the black community who are qualified to be Fortune 500 CEOs or cardiologists or et cetera. So there are economic disparities, there are, 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 a class, the various identity groups are highly correlated with disparities in class difference. Yeah, so we're both dads.

You know, we think a lot about, write a lot about and speak a lot about the struggles of young men right now. They're just as well and as much advantage 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, um, 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? Well, I must say as a father of two girls, uh 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 getting, that are serving as sort of pathological attractors to young men in our society.

I mean, it's people like Andrew Tate, right? Like you, you know, you're like the anti-Andrew Tate and you know, that's a good thing. I mean, we need more people like you who are modeling masculinity in a way that is ethical and just kind of conversant in the skillset you want young men to be conversant in, right? I mean, it's really, it's amazing if you kind of

hold your body of work up against, you know, the, the Andrew tatification of similar topics. It's, um, you know, you're, 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 it, it 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, you know, and pretend to your fans that this is your lifestyle, you've basically accomplished everything you need in life. Right, I mean, that's, 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. I think you're being generous No, I mean honestly not. It's just you're I think you do a fantastic job of Putting the lie to the notion that 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 subjected, not even poor, but just having financial stress be a major component of your life, we know that's corrosive to a feeling of wellbeing. 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's not, 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, 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 have, the only good word we have for it is, is Yiddish. You know, it's a, you know, you're a mensch. So keep it up. Well, let me just say, I'm really enjoying this podcast so far, Sam. Um, so like men, 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 I see one of the things I love about America is I do think there's a zeitgeist, guideposts, 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? 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, 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, to 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've had 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, a certain kind of fame to which he's clearly addicted, that has just encouraged him to become this very different sort of person. And 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'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. You're a neuroscientist. Do you think ketamine could have anything to do with it? Yeah, I mean, so I've 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, like I'm sure I could find, you know, first-hand reports of how much of that is true. But, um, yeah, if he is using ketamine as, as frequently as was reported, that certainly can't help, right?

I mean, he's, he's, um, but he's just, uh, honestly, his engagement with, 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, 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 know podcaster I just thought it was a necessary marketing channel. It was also just very tempting to talk to other prominent people and and you try to clean up misinformation and react to things and 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, you know, on average once a day or so, a couple of 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 mean, I was seeing the worst in people, pretty much all the time. I mean, just whenever I looked at my phone, I was just seeing some awful piece of

dishonesty or malice broadcast to me by people 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, Elon has just performed a kind of human sacrifice of himself on the altar of that set of incentives.

And whether he is a psychopath or not, he acts like one. And I'm not actually exaggerating. He acts like a psychopath on X. He's completely callous as to the harms he caused, all the while knowing the harms he causes, both in the lives of private citizens who get doxed and get, you know, swarmed by his cult and just the harm he causes in the world. I mean, just his adventures in Doge,

when he, you know, fed, on his account, fed USAID into the wood chipper and stopped, you know, lifesaving programs in sub-Saharan Africa, which people immediately recognize would lead to death 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 probably fentanyl-addled ecstasy. I mean, he just reveled in the chaos he was causing. And so it was with his, you know, Hitler salutes, which, you know, may have not been Hitler salutes, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he's just a moron, uh, who has just bad, you know, awkward body English, uh, who knows what he was up to there with his, my heart goes out to you and now I look like Adolf Hitler, uh, you know, twice in a row,

but whatever his intentions, when he saw the blowback, when he saw how much, when he saw that every antisemite on planet earth was celebrating, right? 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, you know, sorry, that's embarrassing, obviously I despise anti-Semitism and if you're an anti-Semite, please unfollow me, right? Like that would have been the same ethical, manly

thing to do, right? But instead he just made Nazi jokes and trolled the world, right? All the while signal boosting the accounts of real anti-Semites and bringing real anti-Semites back onto Twitter with great fanfare and people like Nick Fuentes. And also funding the far right party in Germany to boot, right? So his contributions to the greatest eruption of anti-Semitism 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 worshipped him. I think the greatest thing to ding his reputation and it really should have been a fatal blow was the gaming controversy where he 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 on certain games. And when they lavished praise on him, talking about what you just, that suggested that he has a kind of a neurological, a 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 gonna destroy his reputation with a young man, I thought that was going to be it. And I think it probably did in, in gaming circles. 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 fog without offending my taste buds. Well, there is. It's called grooms. Grooms are a convenient, comprehensive formula packed into eight delicious gummies a day.

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No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFriills.ca. 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 percent of my mental health episodes

over the last few years had been triggered by something on Twitter. You said, why are you there? I'm like, well, got a big following, half a million people. I think, how many did you walk away from? I think I had 1.5 million when I pulled the cord. And I got off.

And it's exactly what you said. It's been one of the most creative things to my mental health that I've done in the last 10 years. And what you realize, the thing I've, 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, it 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, of Mars venture into this strange moon of Mars that's hostile and biased and weird and angry. And it's like, why was I, why was I vacationing there, you know, seven times a day? You know, I'm, 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 filled out a UCLA several times. I 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 from 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, your inability to disassociate from these, 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? Yeah. Well, as you know, or I think, you know, meditation has been a very big focus of mine and, um, I mean, for me, that really is the, it's a kind of superpower because 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, you know, on the 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 does, I mean, 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 pick your flavor, that state is almost always counterproductive, which is to say you want to be in a different state when you're actually solving the problem at hand or you're just waiting to see what happens, right? 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, so my life is a very strange bifurcation

between having kind of a very high level of personal wellbeing, you know, certainly most of the time, and also being very concerned about the state of our world. Right. I mean, so I spend most of my time professionally and also being very concerned about the state of our world. 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. Right. And you get that perspective from meditation? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, 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 in 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, I mean, if you're suffering, you're 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, your raw sensory existence, right? I mean, you're just, 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, right? 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, right, or fear or some other negative mental state. The neurology of that, right, the failure of reality testing, the fact that 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, right? That's the 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. Even if, and you can get off of it,

even if it's a real problem. 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. I've been in that situation. Of course you're gonna be unhappy. But the question is, how unhappy do you have to be?

How contracted 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 until Monday for the results of an MRI. If you're lucky, how, 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, 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 wanna be the guy who was just wracked

by anxiety all weekend? Or do you wanna 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. This guy, you know, where this is all going, right? All right, we're going to die. Our kids are hopefully are going to live long enough to be old enough to be, you know, the ripe old age that that is 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. As you've gotten older, the things that give you joy and peace, have they changed, become certain things more or less? 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 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? 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 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. Would you describe the loss of your father as sort of a defining or the defining moment in your life? Like has there been one moment that sort of changed or your orientation or approach to life

or given you, set you on a different path? 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. So you were raised by a single mother or did she remarry? 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 a hero. 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. Yeah well so again this is a case that is going to be somewhat atypical because my mom was just both very very talented and and very lucky right so she's she really did not have resources my dad left I think he on her, 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. And 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, you know 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. She discovered this very quickly.

I think she actually sold her first script. She was just watching television one day, trying to figure out how she was going to make money. Again, we really had nothing. 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 probably, it was probably a little more than a decade. I mean, I think I was- Oh my God, Susan Harris? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I literally just thought, I've kept seeing through this. She's my mom, yeah. I keep seeing, I thought, I've seen the name Susan Harris in the credits of all these series in the 70s and 80s. That was your mom. I know, my mom is awesome. Where is she now?

But so, but it was a very weird time core. And so there's a funny story that she likes to tell, which maybe says more about me than I would like. But she was working really hard. Again, she was a single mom. So I grew up with a long string of babysitters. When I would come home from school, there would be a babysitter, my mom would be writing at the office.

At one point, she came to me and she said, we were living in a little rented house in the San Fernando Valley, and but I was going to a private school that she had stretched to get me into. And 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 we'll be able to, you'll be able to have a pool in the backyard like your friend, Tom Brown, who has,

he had a great house with a great pool. And, but you're gonna have much, you're gonna 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. I want the pool.

I'm listening here. I'm not exaggerating, Sam. I'm freaking out. You're, yeah, 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. Only soap is the first time I was ever introduced

to a gay man, Billy Crystal. Well, not only you, not only you, that's, she's a little. In America. Oh my, Soap is the first time I was ever introduced to a gay man, Billy Crystal. Well, not only you, not only you, she's often credited with writing the first truly positive, I'm not sure it's totally aged well, I mean, it was probably more caricatured than you would want, but it's the first truly positive role for a gay character in television, I believe.

I believe that's true. 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 sick, she and I used to watch Everyone Loves Raymond, Frasier, and the Golden Girls. Right.

Wow, that is just wild. So like- 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 or so, so she wrote, I believe it's 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 herself. And I mean, very few people have done that in television. So it was quite amazing. So just as we wrap up here, you gave me a piece of advice about being a dad a couple of years ago that I've really held onto.

And I want you to, I'm gonna try and prompt you to remember it, You gave me a piece of advice about being a dad a couple of years ago that I've really held onto. And I want you to, I'm gonna 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, 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, 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 tiger mom anything.

I just don't wanna be that guy. And the truth is I'm just not comfortable being that guy. 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 getting educated, but there's definitely a difference between

tiger-momming it and not, and I'm definitely not. And I realized 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, I'm alert to the downside there. And as a result, I have very little stature in the home as a source of knowledge or wisdom.

I mean, when push comes to shove, that's probably not true, but there's a fair amount of comedy had at my expense. Unlike you, I'm in a household with three girls or two girls and a mother, and there's very little testosterone in the home. 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. Okay. 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, 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 Well, thank you and high praise but I will I'll try to keep it together. There you go, brother. Take care, man Okay, I was real 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, you know, 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 turn 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 gonna 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. You know, 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'm gonna say, generous but promiscuous with money, was I was just so fucking 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 of effort, he could have been so much 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 going to 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 2025. What has helped me as I asked 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 depressionary era Scotland and his father, it sounds like it was an alcoholic and his father was physically abusive. And she outlined one instant where, um, 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. Um, was never fit.

It was, uh, it came close to a couple of times. I was very scared of him. I think it was like the shark in jaws. It was the unknown. That was more scary than the actual shark. Uh, 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, 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 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 compunction 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 Then he was to you That's fine

then I think that's kind of what it means to be a man and then In 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-Dubrow. She's our technical director.

Thank you for listening to the Proficy Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Stay tuned for next week's conversation featuring Robert Greene.