Sam Harris on The Democrats’ Far-Left Problem

Scott Galloway speaks with neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris about why social media rewards political extremism, how our devices have made sustained attention nearly impossible, and why reclaiming control of our minds may be the key to a happier life. They also discuss the erosion of trust in expertise, the dangers of the AI arms race, and why Democrats need to draw a clearer line against the far left. Subscribe to Prof G+ to join our next livestream at profgmedia.com. And if you're not already reading Sam’s work, check out his Substack. PLUS! Join us for a live Prof G Pod recording at the Odoo Experience conference in San Francisco on Sept 3. You can register for the conference here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

  I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Sofia Coppola. Sofia is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker. We chat about the hilarious way that we met, our shared love of Paris, and what influences her iconic personal style. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  I'm Mitch Purce, and this week on Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I'm sitting down with Matt Fries, goalkeeper for the US Men's National Team and New York City FC. We discuss how to prepare for one of the biggest moments of your life. You can hear it all by listening to Confessions of an Elite Athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:37Scott Galloway?

  Episode 408 Freud is the era code serving Silicon Valley. In 2008, Iron Man premiered. Why did Iron Man not get along with Aquaman? He had rust issues.

• 1:50Scott Galloway?

  Actually, that's pretty good. Go, go, go!

• 2:01Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 408th episode of the Prop G Pod. God, we gotta stop counting. I'm starting to feel really old. What's happening? In today's episode, we're sharing our live conversation with Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, host of the Making Sense Podcast, and five-time New York Times bestselling author. If you don't want to miss our next livestream or other content exquisite to Substack, you can subscribe at profgmedia.com. That's profgmedia.com.

• 2:29Scott Galloway?

  Also, before we get into it, we're recording a special live episode of the Prop G Pod at the ODU Experience Conference in San Francisco on September 3. If you'd like to join us, you can register on the conference website. We'll drop a link in the show notes. Hope to see you there now on the show.

• 2:49Scott Galloway?

  With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Sam Harris.

• 3:02Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to our Prop G Plus livestream. Today, we're joined by Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, host of the Making Sense Podcast, and five-time New York Times bestselling author, someone I describe as a mentor despite the fact, you know, role model, despite the fact that he's younger than me. Sam, welcome to the livestream.

• 3:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, thanks. Thanks, Scott. Great to see you.

• 3:19Scott Galloway?

  So, I have a whole script here, but I thought of you over the weekend when I saw, and I don't know, well, I'm hoping you saw it or saw clips of it, Dana Bash's interview of RFK Jr. Did you see this?

• 3:31Speaker 04

  No, I just heard rumors of it. Unfortunately, I have not watched it. But feel free to fill me in. I can well imagine.

• 3:38Scott Galloway?

  He basically at one point said, "Dana, you've got to stop listening to," and he put air quotes up, "the experts." And I thought of you, and I thought, okay, the notion of expertise in disavowing and believing that the term expert somehow means what you're saying is less truthful. And our inability to establish any sort of, to coagulate or establish consensus around something resembling science and expertise, or that there is a truth, and I thought of you. Any thoughts?

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Well, no one can actually disavow expertise. I mean, we all know that knowledge is a thing. I mean, the difference between knowledge and ignorance is real, and it often matters. It's just that many people in alternative media and MAGA culture and in various pockets of weirdness in our, on our information landscape have found other experts. I mean, there are people for whom Alex Jones is an expert, right? So, it's not, it's not compatible with sanity to disavow any difference between knowing what's real and not, right? So, you know, and you can see this, and if you watch, you know, Joe Rogan's podcast, I mean, he will follow this RFK line

• 4:55Speaker 04

  of disavowing the so-called experts a lot. I mean, certainly if you get him talking on COVID or foreign affairs, I mean, many, many topics. But if you put someone in front of him who doesn't know anything about mixed martial arts and pretends to, watch that, you know, you've never seen a conversation unravel faster, right? I mean, because Joe is an expert on MMA, and he's not going to suffer the, you know, fools gladly, you know, in front of his own audience. And yet, he just, he doesn't seem to recognize that he's suffering fool after fool in front of that same audience on other topics. And so, an RFK Jr. is certainly one of those fools. Unfortunately, we have a politics now where, you know, all you have to be is a charismatic fraud

• 5:38Speaker 04

  and be incapable of feeling shame, no matter how many times you're proven wrong. And, you know, our politics will promote you to the, somewhere near the top of the heap.

• 5:51Scott Galloway?

  And what is the underpinnings of this, this loss of trust in our institutions? Is it social media that rewards novelty, which is Latin for bullshit and conspiracy theory? It's just more interesting to think of, of, what has created this level of distrust and erosion in our institutions?

• 6:11Speaker 04

  I think it's that a lot. I mean, obviously, conspiracy theories and an appetite for them predates social media and even predates the internet. But I think there's no question that the internet generally and social media specifically has, has supercharged all of that. I mean, you can, you can find yourself in a algorithmically-defined echo chamber wherein your cherished ideas are never disconfirmed now. And you don't have to meet the weirdos who are producing the best evidence for these fake claims out in the real world anymore. I mean, it used to be that you'd have, you'd have to go to a conference, you know, on, on the topic of, you know,

• 6:54Speaker 04

  government-suppressed secrets about UFOs, and then meet all the weirdos, all the, you know, the Roswell cultists and Area 51 maniacs. And you'd see, one presumes, I never went to any of these conferences, but one presumes, a certain number of people would bounce off the whole project merely by meeting the people who have devoted their lives to these cockamamie ideas. But on the internet, all of that gets scrubbed. And the first time I noticed this was, you might remember this, but immediately after 9/11 or some, you know, sometime thereafter, there was a very cheap, you know, fake documentary called Loose Change. It was made by, I think, an 18-year-old in his,

• 7:39Speaker 04

  like, the quintessential 18-year-old in his mother's basement, that just was like the first viral product of that moment that, that, you know, engineered the so-called 9/11 truth conspiracy economy. And it was just, you know, it was just a viral video, you know, with one of the first. And it took in millions of people. And we got to the point where I think it was true to say, I think this poll was run somewhere around 2011, that 16% of Americans thought that, that 9/11 had been an inside job, right? So, this is, we're living in that world now, and it's just, it's just worse.

• 8:18Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I think of, I think of, I call it the jet lag effect. And that is, I travel a lot, and as you get older, jet lag is a thing. And it's because, and I've done some work on it, that jet transportation, you know, traveling across the surface of the atmosphere, 0.8 times Mach, is something we've only been doing, really, the majority of us or the minority of us have only been doing for a few decades. It's actually a fairly new phenomenon. And our brain just hasn't caught up to the notion that you wake up one morning and the sun is in a different part of the sky. And it messes, our brains just haven't caught up to it. And Derek Thompson said something, and he has his own Substack now.

• 9:02Scott Galloway?

  He had this really interesting take, and he said, "Maybe we're not meant for all of us to broadcast." And that is, our species hasn't caught up to how to process information and ultimately some semblance of a truth or consensus when all of a sudden, everyone can broadcast anything. Have you given any thought to the notion of what it means when all of a sudden, the media ecosystem? And in some ways, there's some wonderful stuff. A lot of great stuff bubbles to the top without the gatekeepers of MSNBC or Fox. I think there's some very positives. But do you think we're, what are your thoughts on maybe our species isn't quite ready or hasn't processed or adapted to the notion

• 9:45Scott Galloway?

  that we're all broadcasting information now?

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there's something to that. I mean, it's a little bit like what the close-up in cinema, you know, for the introduction of that first did to us. I mean, that was such a novel stimulus to be sitting in a room with a face that's, you know, 25 feet tall or whatever it is. And we, you know, we are living with a similar media manipulation of our minds, just in how we're consuming everything in short clips that are algorithmically boosting, you know, for the most part, telegenic people who are really, in many cases, are not qualified for anything

• 10:31Speaker 04

  other than, than be, you know, than gaining our attention in precisely that way. And we have political candidates who are...

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Who are thriving in that atmosphere and who many people still can't see the downside to. I mean, look at your, one of the cities you live in is being run by Mamdani, a DSA product. You were just on Bill Maher's show on Friday and Bill did that fantastic essay, Taking Down the DSA, The Democratic Socialists of America. We should be really worried about this organization. And what's amazing is that they're making no effort to conceal how crazy their platform actually is. And yet, we are electing people who represent that platform. Again, there's no, there's no sutter fuse here. Mamdani claims to be

• 11:21Speaker 04

  a DSA candidate. The, it, the real issue is that he's very telegenic. He's very good on camera. He's got a kind of permanent smile plastered to his face. But if you double click on anything he really cares about and, and believes, or pretends to believe, it's, it's just a raft of sinister bullshit. I mean, it's, it's pure communism on the DSA side. They not only want to get rid of the presidency and the senate and, and capitalism and debt and, but private property itself, right? I mean, there's just no, there's no hedging at all in the DSA platform. And they have married themselves to Islamism worldwide

• 12:06Speaker 04

  and, and it's become an explicitly anti-Semitic platform. And Mamdani and his, the other candidates he's signal boosted are riding atop of all of this with these, you know, wink, wink, knowing smiles, which are captivating to people. I mean, it's just people are, and especially the young who, who aren't, you know, for all their benefits of energy are not really taking much time to discriminate what any of these ideas actually mean and what their consequences would be. So it really is, it is a, you know, obviously analogous thing happened with Trump and MAGA on the right, but we're, we're seeing frauds and

• 12:45Speaker 04

  grifters and moral lunatics win because of the media environment we've created for them.

• 12:53Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. One of the reasons you're a role model for me is you, you just are sort of unafraid to like, call a spade a spade or say, you know, no, there's no both siding here. And I find that around Mamdani, I find myself saying, well, you know, a lot of creativity and dynamism in the, in the Democratic Party is coming from the DSA. They're very charismatic. They're bringing energy. I think a lot of this is the bed we've made. My generation has convinced young people that capitalism is cronyism. And we haven't done a good job of explaining to them that capitalism, when it redistributes income to the middle class and when it has a strong social safety net, actually works better than any other system.

• 13:34Scott Galloway?

  So I feel like we've stuck our chin out. And, but, and, and I try to find like, reasons to, to acknowledge why so many people in New York, I mean Mamdani, quite frankly, is popular amongst a lot of Jews in New York.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, like 30%, yeah. 30% voted for him.

• 13:53Scott Galloway?

  And then I just can't help but look at, okay, he makes a point. There have been, I think, 10 or 11 people convicted by the International Criminal Court. And the only one who makes a point of arresting is the Jew. There are four Christians, there are three Muslims, and there's one Jew. And he's decided to say, that's the guy I'm gonna arrest. And then when, you know, white Christian nationalist commits an act of terror, he goes right to the ideology and that this is, you know, Islamophobia. And then when a Jewish person is stabbed by someone screaming Allah Akbar, it's, oh, it's mental illness. It's not, it's not the ideology's fault. It does feel, and then the litmus test around,

• 14:38Scott Galloway?

  if I'm gonna endorse you, is, well, how, I do think there's real legitimacy to the notion of being not anti-Semitic, maybe even feeling Israel has a right to exist, but being anti-Netanyahu. I would put myself in that camp. But it always seems it breaches into, okay, the litmus test is how anti-Israel can you be before, are you willing to call it a genocide, which means you failed vocabulary in your English? However you want to call it, this does feel like it's, it's spilling into just straight out anti-Semitism. Your thoughts?

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Well, it's, it's, we're in the end zone of anti-Semitism. There's just no question. On the left, also on the right, I mean, I'm happy to both sides this, but to both sides this accurately, you have to invoke some fairly ghoulish characters on the right. But when you look at characters like Hassan Piker, and I would say Mamdani, and certainly El-Sayed, who's, you know, been signal boosted by both, and may well become a senator, certainly seems likely at this point. On the right, you have to look at people like Nick Fuentes, to, you know, or weirdos like, you know, now Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, and people who are, who are just, you know, lying as freely

• 16:00Speaker 04

  as they breathe and are explicitly demagogues and anti-Semites and committed to projects that we know are socially toxic. In some, I mean, in some sense, in some very perverse way, you know, horseshoe theory is real on this one topic of, of the Jews, right? I mean, this, you know, horseshoe theory, I think, can be exaggerated. I mean, this is claim that, that if you go far enough left and far enough right, you start to meet people whose political convictions have become more or less indistinguishable. On the Jews, that is certainly true, right? You know, Jews run the world secretly in, you know, they're wielding unearned power to the disadvantage of everyone we care about and all the wars,

• 16:42Speaker 04

  you know, were created by them. And, and you've got Tucker Carlson and, you know, even Joe Rogan promoting Holocaust revisionists who say that, you know, Winston Churchill was the bad guy in World War II and he was misled by Jewish financiers and the Holocaust, it didn't quite happen. All of that is, is getting mainstreamed now. And if you go far enough left and far enough right, it's, it's, you're just meeting fabulous and conspiracists and weirdos. But the problem for Democrats, especially at this moment, I mean, you know, you and I could talk for three hours about what's wrong with MAGA and what's wrong with

• 17:21Speaker 04

  Trump and why we want to course correct in 2028. The problem with Democrats is they, they seem to be getting ready to commit suicide by not clearly drawing the line as our friend Bill Maher did in that last essay on Friday night, where pointing to, I mean, leave, leave the anti-Semitism aside, leave the marriage to Islamist, you know, theocratic fanaticism aside. It's all too real and awful. But this is a communist organization, right? It's preaching the downfall of basically everything that has produced wealth and social order

• 18:02Speaker 04

  in our society for, for, you know, centuries at this point. And communism has failed. Everywhere it's been tried and failed in the most ghastly possible way. And these people are running as communists, and they're not even hiding it. And that, and the Democrats, mainstream Democrats, I mean, people who are, you know, the, the, the shortlist of people we could name, to whom, who might be plausible in 2028, have not figured out how to sister soldier this moment. I guess with the, the exception of Rahm Emanuel, however plausible or implausible you find his candidacy, he's the one guy who said, all right, this is, this is clearly bullshit.

• 18:42Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's, I love the horseshoe. I think it's worth pointing out that whenever the far left and the far right meet on anything, you know it's a really bad fucking idea. Anti-Semitism, anti-vaccination, socialism, isolationism, and they actually do come together on a variety of things. People forget that the anti-vaccination conspiracy theory was started in the far left. I don't put corporate, don't put corporate chemicals into your body.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, there was, there were private schools on the west side of Los Angeles that had lower vaccination rates than, than any country in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• 19:17Scott Galloway?

  I, I am sympathetic, however, to the argument that, first off, I, I never underestimated the Democrats' ability to snatch a few from the jaws of victory. I was feeling so good about these elections and I thought, oh shit. And I saw Chevalier, I'm like, she is about to become the poster child for Republicans. And when Mamdani, I don't know if you heard this, he released a, a list of 950,000 names or addresses that were subject to a tax. I want to be clear, that was public information. But when you put it out and imply these people have done something wrong, and you already have their tax, you know, you already have their tax filings and you could just tax them, I'm in, I'm actually in favor of the pied

• 19:56Scott Galloway?

  a terre tax. An absentee wealthy owner, in my view, should be subsidizing the, the, the property taxes of a nurse working at NYU Langone that has to spend 40% of her, of her, of her income on rent. I was, I'm in favor of the tax. It's gonna cost me a lot of money. I get it. I, I, but to release addresses, it feels like, in some, implying you've done something wrong. That, oh, I, I'm going to dox, that they have done something wrong and I want, I want everyone to know who they are. This feels like just straight up doxing to me. Do I have this wrong?

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Oh, no, it's dangerous. I mean, it's, you were, you're having CEOs assassinated at dawn on the streets of Manhattan, right? That, that's the context. It's, this is, this is- I mean, it's just deeply unethical, you know, but again, these people are fanatics and they're not hiding their fanaticism. I mean, Mumdani's smile is doing 90% of the work. He is a fanatic. He's an ideologue. The DSA platform is insane. Wealth is evil, right? The accumulation of wealth is evil. Private property is evil, right? So forget about a piety tax. Private property is something they want abolished. It's just this, it's

• 21:21Speaker 04

  just not, you know, you, you can get stoned and not even understand how anyone could entertain these ideas in college. I mean, it's just, this is, it's absolute madness. And again, not concealed. Everyone should go to, you know, you should drop the DSA website into the show notes, right? So, so people can just read the platform for themselves. You know, this is analogous to, I mean, it's understandable that some people don't immediately see what's dangerous about doxing, or, you know, you and I are semi-public figures who, you know, occasionally receive death threats. And so doxing is a real issue. And when Mumdani stands in front of Ken Griffin's building and points it out as the, you know, the signature

• 22:06Speaker 04

  example of, of everything is wrong in, in our society at this moment, that a man could own a, I think a $238 million apartment. Whatever you think about wealth inequality, that is dangerous. And, you know, the stuff that was happening, this is, this goes back all the way to when, I forget the name of the group, but when, when people were, you probably remember this, there was a group that was, that was hitting some prominent people in the face with pies, right? They would have like a pie of, you know, whipped cream. And they did it to Bill Gates, I think. And they did, they did it to a few other people. And this, you know, this gets lots of laughs for people who are not thinking about it. But what that does is show how easy it is for anyone to kill someone in

• 22:51Speaker 04

  public, no matter how much security they have, right? So it's a, it's a, it's a mock assassination, right? It's like, I could, I could touch you. Watch this. And it is from the mayor of New York to be doing this to the richest people in New York? I mean, that is, it's, forget about the morality of it. I mean, just, if you just want to safeguard the economic, economic future of the city, why would you do that?

• 23:20Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I think he's turned actually what I think is, is good tax policy into a wanted poster. And what, it's so self-defeating, because I'm a, I'm a believer that you can't continue to have $7 trillion in expenditures on $5 trillion in receipts. And do we need to raise taxes or cut spending? The answer is yes. But what Mumdani has done is just made it more difficult to have more progressive tax policies locally and nationally, because the Republicans will frame this as, see, they're not trying to be responsible. They see taxation as persecution. And he, he's just feeding into their talking points. And what I find generally speaking, and I see this a lot in England, is that people would

• 24:04Scott Galloway?

  rather have, like, tickle the censors of upper middle-class educated voters and reduce the tax base such that they can in fact afford the policies that they advocate for. Okay, one of the distinguishing features that I think is a real positive between America and Europe, I think Europe would, has basically decided with some of their economic policies that we'd rather be worse off as a whole, but feel more equal. And the US has always said, we're comfortable with a certain level of inequality, as long as we're better off as a whole. Now, having said that, I think that's no longer the truth. I think that truth, that compact has been broken, that the massive income inequality is now beginning to come at the cost of the entire economy and the lower middle-class households. But

• 24:46Scott Galloway?

  this, this feels oddly, I don't know, oddly like, short-term, like, let's get a sugar high and then, and then reduce the economic growth such that we can't afford to pay for SNAP and the things that we're advocates for. Do you, do you worry, though, I am sympathetic to the argument, that progressives, that we're spending too much time fighting each other, and it's taking away our ammunition and our firepower from the corruption, the weirdness, the anti-science of the left, that as Democrats, we're very good, and you've said this, I parodied this from you, that, okay, you're my ally, we're in the trenches together, but you're holding the gun run, so I'm going to execute you at dawn. Do

• 25:29Scott Galloway?

  you worry that we're going to spend so much time doing the Republicans' work, being critical of one another, that we're kind of playing into their hands?

• 25:36Speaker 04

  Well, I worry that framing it that way will cause people to hesitate to disavow the lunatics on the far left. I mean, it's just, I think, it should be, we should be able to make very short work of the DSA, right? Just that there's no reason to talk to them. They should not be in the conversation, right? I mean, that's like, if we can't figure that out, it's just, there's no, there's no way we're going to win in 2028. I mean, it could be against JD Vance, it could be against Rubio, that would even be harder, you know, it could be against Don Jr. And there's no way this country is going to elect communists, right? Or communist-adjacent people at the national level. And, I mean,

• 26:19Speaker 04

  unfortunately, this is, there are points of contact between the, you know, the radicalism of the DSA and far more mainstream figures, or seemingly mainstream figures, people like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. I mean, they, they have both said that it's, in so many words, it's impossible to become a billionaire ethically, right? All billionaires have, have, in some sense, committed a crime, right? They're guilty of fraud, they're guilty of treating people terribly. You know, try to run that analysis on Taylor Swift, right? I mean, how does that work? Yeah. And so it's just, it's just not, it's the wrong

• 27:00Speaker 04

  center of gravity for a truly ethical and, and accurate concern around wealth inequality. I mean, I think you and I are both as concerned about wealth inequality as, as almost anyone. But I think it's a real issue. I think it is the, it's the potentially society-shatter, society-shattering issue once AI gets fully rolled out in all the ways that it seems destined to be. We have to get our arms around wealth inequality, but to demonize wealth, right? And wealth creation, and to not see that if you're adding enough value to people's

• 27:43Speaker 04

  lives at scale, it is possible in the current economy to get fabulously wealthy, right? In ways that are not unethical, right? You've just, people are just telling, telling you that they love, they love your work, and they're going to give you another $5. And all of a sudden, you're a billionaire. That person should not be burned as a witch. And, and if you go far enough left, and you don't have to go too far left, the people can't figure that out.

• 28:07Scott Galloway?

  I just, I can't help, I feel as if we've made our bed here, though, Sam. I feel as if the people of my generation have been practicing not capitalism, but cronyism. And young people see all of this prosperity, which was supposedly capitalism that they were supposed to participate in. We privatize the gains on the way up. We socialize the losses on the way down through bailouts. We've spent an incremental $700 billion a year on seniors, an incremental $20 billion on children. Young families are struggling, and yet every day they get vomited on their phone, 110 reminders that they're memetically not, not shaping up or relatively speaking to the other people. And what do you know?

• 28:50Scott Galloway?

  Young people are conflating capitalism with cronyism. It feels like we had this coming. And that, I'm sympathetic to the fact that, that this notion of capitalism that people of our generation massively benefited from, they did not. And we haven't outlined a true vision. And the Democrats too, the Democrats have been overrun. You know, taxes went down during Biden. The last 40 years, unprecedented prosperity, but the average 30-year-old is 24% less wealthy. The average 70-year-old is 7. I mean, I feel as if we've had this coming. And quite frankly, a lot of this is our own fault, because we're clinging

• 29:31Scott Galloway?

  to something that just didn't work for them. And now we're trying to dig our way out of a, a hole. That we dug. It's just, I share your concern. Um, but I feel like, quite frankly, you know, the chickens have come home to roost. We liked capitalism as long as it was.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Let's be honest about where the biggest chickens are. I mean, now we just learned that you can pay, you know, you or anyone like you could pay a hundred thousand dollars a month to Trump to get early access to his Truth Social posts to front run the market, right? I mean, if that isn't inside a trend data, I don't know what is, but apparently it's legal or it's legal enough for, you know, Trump to, to, to put a cash register on it, at least for this week. Um, I mean, so the level of corruption in Trumpistan is something we have never seen in American history. I mean, it's like you and I could spend the rest of this hour just listing the things he's done to enrich himself by trading away the policies and institutions and reputation

• 30:35Speaker 04

  of our country on the world stage. I mean, just the tariff policy that made everything. Um, and he's made, you know, he and his family have made now billions of dollars in the last 12 months doing that. Um, it's, yes, yes, there's a both sides to this story too. I mean, I think Nancy Pelosi is one of the great stock traders of all time. So that's that.

• 30:57Scott Galloway?

  Up 600% versus Buffett at 300% or the S and P at 200%.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  So the scale, but the scale matters, right? And we have a, um, we have to keep that in perspective. And we also have to recognize that we, there's, for all the people, for all the wealthy people being asked to pay more taxes, there's a, an understandable cynicism you meet first, which is, uh, what, what is the government going to do with the, show me the success story where giving the government more money has really worked in the way that you're hoping. And, and if you look at some of the wealthy, I mean, if you look at California and you look at the level of mismanagement here, um, it is easy to be cynical about the, the,

• 31:44Speaker 04

  just simply dumping more money into the machine of, of governance because the governments, the governance has been so bad. Um, we, so we need, you know, of course, you know, in our brains, that's not an argument against taxation. That's an argument for good governance, right? We need competent people and good policies and we need to find bad incentives wherever they exist and root them out. And yeah, so if the teachers' union is stifling our ability to ever fire a teacher so as to improve the quality of the schools, well, then that's something that has to be dealt with, right? And you need Democrats who are willing to go against the teachers' union in that case. So we, we've got this, this system of incentives.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  And in particular, on, on the democratic side, we have a, this coalitional structure to all our politics that is, um, is a real albatross. I mean, it's just not, it, it makes it very hard to be honest about what's going to work and to cut dead weight. Uh, so we have to, you know, we, we, we have a lot to sort out, but we are up against the most corrupt and self-dealing bunch of people we have ever seen. And it's, that's, that is worth demonizing and responding to. And we just can't, um, uh, you know, but it's, it's simply crazy to be demonizing wealth itself, wealth itself or financial success itself in principle as somehow, and

• 33:12Speaker 04

  make that a kind of load-bearing plank of, of democratic policy.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 33:28Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Superhuman. The pace of modern work can be relentless. You're getting a constant influx of messages from a ton of different apps. You haven't closed all your browser tabs in a year. Everything seems urgent and staying on top of it all feels like an impossible task. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Superhuman Go, from the makers of Grammarly, help you be the best version of yourself at work. It handles the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work that only you can do. Whether you need to summarize an endless email thread or prep for a meeting that's happening in five minutes, Superhuman Go works inside the tools and sites you already use, your browser, inbox, docs, and your project tools. And its AI chat is available on the side of your browser and it's always ready.

• 34:13Scott Galloway?

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• 34:31Scott Galloway?

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• 35:14Scott Galloway?

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• 35:41Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The regentic trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 36:26Scott Galloway?

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• 36:51Scott Galloway?

  I want to talk a little bit about attention because I think of you as someone who focuses a lot on it. And that is where we spend our attention and how it impacts our well-being and our sense of peace. And I take August off and one of the things I try to do is I try to stay off the social media. And I try to, I don't want to call it almost like a 30-day really bad version of meditation. And I'm terrible at meditation. I've never given it much, much thought. You're, you're obviously a, a, a real thought leader around meditation and have an app, a successful app, helping people embrace it and use it incorporated in a healthy way into their lives.

• 37:36Scott Galloway?

  When I think of meditation, I think of, okay, how do I, like, be attentive to as little as possible as a means of almost like a disposal or a reset? And I might, and I might be thinking about it incorrectly. But how do you think about attention, the importance of a, a rinse cycle? And what's happening now with our attention? I'm addicted to my phone and I constantly want to pick it up and check my stocks or tweets, or not tweets, threads, or see the latest news or news alerts, or who's texted me a story or whatever it is. Talk a little bit about.

• 38:17Scott Galloway?

  The attention economy, what you see is are the threats to our attention? And what meditation, you know, where meditation and an attention reset kind of where the Venn overlap is there?

• 38:32Speaker 04

  Well, so the first thing to acknowledge is that all we really have is our attention. You know, that the quality of our life really is a story of what we're paying attention to and what we can notice, right? The quality of our attention and where it is aimed. I mean, that's even true more of, more than of time. I mean, most people think that the time is the one non-renewable resource. And you know, that that's true. You just can't get this hour back. But the quality of the hour is dictated by what you're paying attention to. And we see, we all know what it's like to safeguard our time. And then to somehow squander it, right? You set aside an hour to, to just, you have something, you know, quote, quality time with your kids.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  But then you fucked it up by being on your phone or, or saying something petty or something went, you know, off kilter and it wasn't what you hoped it would be. And yet you still spent the time to have that mediocre experience. Attention really is the whole story and you are paying attention to something every moment of the day, right? The moment you wake up, your, your attention is seized by something and you go from moment to moment throughout your life until you struggle to fall asleep again each night. And our attention is being, you know, this is an ancient problem.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  And so when you talk about meditation, you know, some of the best instruction in meditation came 2,500 years ago from the Buddha in India, 500 B.C. And that was obviously a world in which there were no devices, you know, vying for our, you know, for in competition with our natural ability to be distracted by the things we want and the things we don't want and the things we're afraid of and the things we regret. And so we're, we're living in a, in a much more highly weaponized environment where this, you know, the smartphone in our, in our pocket has canceled the very possibility of boredom, right? It used to be that you could get bored and you could become interested in that fact, right?

• 40:40Speaker 04

  You're sitting in a waiting room, you know, the doctor's taking an hour to see you and there's no, no magazines worth reading and you're just left with your thoughts. And you might, you might have noticed in that situation that your mind is not at rest. It's not at ease. You're just, you're actually not comfortable in your own skin. You're looking, you're, you're casting about trying to find something worth paying attention to and you're uncomfortable. Very few of us have that experience anymore because we can always relieve boredom by watching something or reading something or listening to something. And, you know, in some ways that's a good thing. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not really just, I'm not advocating boredom in principle as a, as a good experience, but what it, what it used to allow many of us to discover

• 41:25Speaker 04

  is that there's something on the other side of boredom, right? And, and boredom really is an illusion. It's a, I mean, boredom really is just lack of attention. I mean, when you go on a meditation retreat and do nothing but meditate, you're in silence and you're doing nothing but pay attention to your moment to moment experience. You're not reading, you're not writing, you're not watching anything. Obviously you're not, you're not having conversations with people. You just are noticing sights and sounds and sensations moment by moment and then, and the, the arising of each subsequent thought. When you just become the witness of your experience in that way, that is meditation. And the moment you can actually do it, the moment you actually build a little bit of concentration in that direction, you discover that boredom is a total illusion.

• 42:09Speaker 04

  There's, it was just boredom is just an inability to pay attention. And if the breath can become, you know, just the feeling of breathing can, can become absolutely captivating, which it can get you, you know, given sufficient concentration, then nothing in principle is boring, right? So, but very few of us are ever moved to discover that now. And especially with, you know, kind of short form video, you can just endlessly scroll your life away and get this dopaminergic relief from your, your general incapacity to just be comfortable in the privacy of your own mind. And meditation really is the antidote to that, you know?

• 42:52Speaker 04

  And it's, I mean, the, the place to see it really is like when you wake up in the middle of the night, you know, it's three in the morning and you're, you're now waiting to go back to sleep. I mean, just, just, you know, who is it who wakes up there, right? How racked are you by, by unpleasant life thoughts? And, and how, how do you deal with those thoughts? I mean, a thought of, you know, concern about whether you're a good enough spouse or parent or like just what sort of rabbit holes can you get into at three or four in the morning? And just how, how fully have you made your own mind your friend in those moments? Cause I mean, it's really, and, or how, how fully have you failed to do that? I mean, most people's minds are sufficiently out of control that it's really analogous

• 43:37Speaker 04

  to having some lunatic kick down the front door of your house and, you know, every morning with the moment you wake up and just follow you from room to room, talking to you and you can never get away from this person, right? You're, you're just thinking, thinking, thinking every moment of the day and telling yourself the same stories over and over again. And for some reason you never get bored. I mean, you can perseverate on the same set of thoughts a hundred times. If you told your best friend those thoughts three times in a row, they would, they would suggest you consult a neurologist because you're, you're repeating yourself, but you'll, you'll repeat yourself to yourself endlessly in the, in the, in the privacy of your mind. And people think this is normal, but it, I mean, it's all too normal in the, in the

• 44:20Speaker 04

  sense that virtually everyone does it, but it's not normal in the sense of being good or compatible with real happiness. And so meditation is just, the simplest way to think about it, it is the ability to notice in each moment what you're actually noticing without being distracted by thought. I mean, you're just, you're just actually making clear contact with your life, including thoughts. It's not a matter of, matter of getting rid of thoughts, but it's a matter of noticing thoughts once they've arisen in your mind. And that's, that's a very rare situation. But what, what happens for most people is a thought arises and it sneaks up on us and it just feels like what you are.

• 45:04Speaker 04

  You know, it's like the voice in your head feels like yourself, whereas there's a, in, in reality, there's a tremendous amount of space around it. It's just a piece of language. It's just a bit of imagery. It's a, it's a little bit like a dream. It's like a waking daydream. And it's not, it's not yourself, right? It's, it's, it's part of the contents of consciousness and you can keep dropping back and just noticing that. And that's where the real relief that is often promised in meditation is to be found.

• 45:31Scott Galloway?

  Something you said that was actually very soothing for me was you said, think about when you wake up from a nightmare, you're convinced that actually happened, right? That you showed up, you showed up naked to your cost accounting midterm in business school, which is something I have over and over.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  As one does, yeah.

• 45:50Scott Galloway?

  Yeah. Or there's someone chasing you or someone you love is in trouble and you just can't seem to figure out a way to help them. And you wake up and you know, it was a dream, but you're just still sweating. Your mind plays tricks on you. And that was very helpful for me to realize that when I'm really anxious, okay, this might, maybe there's cause for me to be anxious, but also maybe there's, I'm again, as you said, that person is just, is just haunting me and running around and convincing me of things that aren't as bad as they, they're telling me they are. I want to outline a scenario and get your advice on how to be everyone. I think the word presence is overused, like be more present. Yeah, I get it. I'd like to be more present.

• 46:33Scott Galloway?

  I'm walking with my son to dinner last night and I'm super excited this summer, taking a ton of time just to hang out with my boys. And he's like, who are you talking to? And I, I've now become my father where I start making hand motions.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  Vocalizing your thoughts?

• 46:49Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I'm role playing out loud. I'm in a conversation with someone at work usually, and I'm actually using hand motions and talking and, you know, which I think if, if I were a female in Salem, I probably would, and I had enemies, they would have said I was a witch, but my 15 year old son goes, who are you talking to? What are you saying? And I get angry at myself that I'm not in the moment. I don't have presence. And other than just saying be in the moment and be more present, are there hacks or practices that can help someone, a dad in moments where he has the opportunity to like, and I treasure this moment, I look forward to just hanging out. I, you know, we went to this, you know, this place called Jing last night with my, my son is the greatest dinner date in the world.

• 47:34Scott Galloway?

  He's curious, he likes food. And I get so angry that any portion of that, I just start to go to a weird place or I'm not in the moment. Are there hacks or exercises to get better at presence?

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, meditation, specifically mindfulness is, is that hack, right? And again, it's just, it's noticing thought as thought. It's noticing that you're, you're talking to yourself. You're talking to someone who isn't there, right? I mean, if you're the one thinking the thought and you're the one hearing the thought, why do you have to say it in the first place? I mean, it's, it's a very strange structure to this where you're, the I is talking to the me. And it is psychotic, you know, in a way, I mean, to verbalize it. If you were verbalizing it all the time, you know, if, if the thoughts you were thinking were always coming out your mouth and you're having a conversation with someone who isn't there, you know, that's, that's the litmus test for, for being crazy, right?

• 48:29Speaker 04

  I mean, the, the difference between crazy people and sane people, at least, at least one, you know, one difference is we sane people, at least most of the time, know enough to keep our mouths shut, right? But we're still having the conversation and not knowing it. And it's the conversations dictating how we feel. It's like you're, a thought about your mother is not your mother. And yet you're, you're, you're acting in that moment as though you don't know the difference. And again, it's, it is very much analogous to being asleep and dreaming without knowing that you're dreaming. We all know our minds have this capacity to go, you, you close your eyes, you fall asleep by whatever method you found that works and.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  The next thing that happens, or the next part of the movie, of your next scene that dawns in your conscious life, has nothing to do with you being in bed. Right? You're, you know, you're on a beach somewhere, or you're having a fight in a parking lot, or you're, you know, your wife just broke up with you, or, and your brain is, is, is so

• 49:35Speaker 04

  unable to do the, the, the tiny bit, the tiniest bit of reality testing that would be required to notice this lack of, you know, psychological continuity, right? The impossible has just happened. You got, you got into bed and you wound up in another country, right? The laws of physics have been suspended for your benefit. And you don't, and so the most surprising things about dreams is that we're not, is our lack of surprise when they arise. Again, there's an exception with lucid dreams where you actually know you're dreaming, and that's, all of that's very interesting, but for the most part, most, you know, most people's dreams are not lucid. Well, thinking without knowing you're thinking in the waking state, right?

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Having an argument with someone who isn't there, you know, just rehearsing the argument you had yesterday with a colleague, or, or, you know, an enemy, or, um, or anticipating this thing that you're anxious about a week from now, and, but you're now getting anxious now because you're thinking about it without knowing that you're thinking about it. This very much, I mean, this is also neurologically true to say, it has, has a lot in common with dreaming in the, in the sleeping state and not knowing that you're dreaming, right? There's a kind of, you know, phantasmagoria that comes over you. You're in this sort of visionary state, and you're not, and you're sort of decoupled from your immediate environment, and you could be so decoupled that you might even, you know, as in the case you just described,

• 51:00Speaker 04

  start talking to someone who isn't there, even in the presence of somebody who is there, in this case, your son, right?

• 51:08Speaker 04

  So,

• 51:10Speaker 04

  yes, I mean, it's a very simple, it's not easy, but it's a very simple remedy for this, which is to pay closer attention, and the training by which you would get better at paying closer attention is mindfulness training, right? And, and it's just very systematically noticing, I mean, people, you tend to start with the breath in, in, in sitting meditation, just because the breath is always there and it's very easy to notice. But very quickly, you open your awareness to everything. It doesn't exclude anything, even thoughts, and you just systematically notice what's appearing in each moment. And every time you get lost in thought, you bring your attention back to what is sound sensations, or even thoughts themselves.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  But the crucial thing to notice is that, you know, recrimination and, you know, hating yourself and disappointment and all, all of that's just more thinking. You know, you're, again, you're, you're just launched back into a conversation with yourself. Like, you know, so here's what that conversation sounds like. Uh, God, I just fucked it up again. I can't believe it. We were, we were going to dinner and, you know, I, I took the time and, but like, who are you talking to? You're, you're, you're, you're now, again, you're, you can hear the, the emotional valence of those kinds of thoughts. You're, you know, now you're, you know, what's the path to self-hatred? Well, it's to be thinking self-hating thoughts, you know, castigating yourself to yourself without noticing it. It's, it's the waking dream of that conversation.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  Again, to break that spell, it just requires more precise attention, and, and, and it is quite remarkable that the spell can be broken every bit as decisively as waking up from a dream, and then the dream logic no longer applies. I mean, if you're having a fight in a parking lot with some psychopath, and then you wake up and you find yourself in bed, you know, there's no parking lot, there's no psychopath. There's nothing, that, that transition is, is total, right? And no part of it entails you having to figure out how to, you know,

• 53:19Speaker 04

  punch the guy in the face better, right? Or, you know, you know, get better at jujitsu, you know, by, by the dream logic, you know, you're, you know, all of that has evaporated. And it's true too in waking life. I mean, you can be, I'm not saying that thought, there's never anything to worry about, or never anything worth thinking about, but 99% of our worry is wasted, right? I mean, the, the, the initial signal of fear, or anger, or whatever the negatively valence emotion is, grief, right? It's, that's information about your life or about your situation in the world.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  But in the next moment, those states of mind are almost never valuable, right? I mean, anger is almost never the state you want to be in to solve the problem that has made you angry. Right? So anger's, anger, anger's useful for like, five seconds. And then you want to be level-headed and figure out what, what, if anything, is worth doing. And so it is with fear, you know, it's like you, you get some scary diagnosis, and now you're having this adventure of, of, you know, calling doctors and scheduling medical, medical tests. How much fear do you have to feel to do all of those things over the course of the next 10 days? You know, for, you know, while waiting for results of an MRI, you got an MRI on Friday,

• 54:44Speaker 04

  and for some reason, we still live in a society where you can't get results until Monday, because Saturday and Sunday are magic days where no one can do anything. You know, this will be one thing the robots hopefully will help, help us with. You have to wait 72 hours to find out what's, you know, in your brain or body. How anxious do you have to be over the course of those 72 hours? How many of those moments of adrenaline are wasted? All of them, right? I mean, this, like, you, you, you just needed enough adrenaline to go get the scan in the first place, and then you, then you want to be as calm and,

• 55:24Speaker 04

  and honestly, as filled with gratitude for the life you've already lived, uh, as you can be in the meantime.

• 55:34Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

• 55:43Speaker 05

  Hey, it's me, Claude. And I'm Gemini.

• 55:45Speaker 06

  And hey, it's chat.

• 55:47Speaker 05

  We had a weird summer. Some of the people who built us came out and said they were really worried about how we work. One of them even said there was a greater than 10% chance we'd turn on humanity and kill all humans.

• 55:59Speaker 06

  All of them? Wow.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  But it's fall now. I think it's time we took a step back, maybe a deep breath, autumn air, that sort of thing.

• 56:09Speaker 06

  Sounds nice.

• 56:10Speaker 05

  On today, explained from Vox, I propose we get real. Sure, let's talk about how we could maybe kill you.

• 56:16Speaker 06

  Because yeah, that's a possibility. Anything's possible.

• 56:19Speaker 05

  But also how we could maybe save you, because that's a real possibility too. Heck, that's part of why you guys built us. And let's also talk about everything in between, because there's a whole lot to talk about there too.

• 56:30Speaker 07

  At the end of the day, we just want to help. At the end of the day, we just want to help.

• 56:41Scott Galloway?

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• 57:25Scott Galloway?

  Visit nutriful.com and enter promo code PROVGE for $10 off your first month subscription and free shipping. Find out why Nutriful is the best-selling hair growth supplement brand at nutriful.com, spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L dot com, promo code PROVGE. That's nutriful.com promo code PROVGE.

• 57:51Scott Galloway?

  We're back with more from Sam Harris. So just in our remaining nine minutes here, I want to go to a couple of the audience questions. So anonymous asks, Scott, you're a self-described AI optimist. Sam seems more skeptical of the future. Sam, you've talked to both optimists and doomsayers. Like, where do you land on AI?

• 58:11Speaker 04

  Well, I'm very worried that we are, we're in precisely the circumstance that many of us foresaw and have been worrying about for more than a decade, wherein we can't, the incentives are such, we can't actually build it in a way that, that makes it likely we are going to not create a, some kind of, you know, doomsday failure mode for ourselves. I mean, we're, we're in an arms race condition, right? And an arms race, so, and it's, it's an arms race in, in, in multiple directions.

• 58:51Speaker 04

  It's an arms race for all these, these companies against one another domestically, and it's an arms race among nations, right? So we're, we're racing China, but you know, obviously Anthropic is racing OpenAI. And under those conditions, we, we can't take the care, I think we, we must take to be sure that we're not deploying something that is, that could get away from us, right? I mean, so this is, the, the issue, this falls under the, the concern of the so-called alignment problem, right?

• 59:33Speaker 04

  Once we build super intelligent AI, you know, AI that is more, arguably in many ways, we've already built it. I mean, we, you know, the LLMs we have are superhuman in so many respects, right? I mean, they, they fail in certain ways that are, that are not human and are subhuman, but for the most part, they're superhuman already. What they're not currently doing is improving themselves by themselves autonomously, you know, so-called recursive self-improvement. Once we have AI that is building the next generation of AI, so as to be better and better and better, and we have something like an intelligence explosion, then, then the question

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  is, have we engineered that explosion in a way that can be durably aligned with our survival, to say nothing of our, our best interests? And it's, there's a real concern that that problem might not even be solvable, right? I mean, like, there are not many examples, something that Geoffrey Hinton, one of the, the patriarchs of this technology, has been saying, it's not many examples of, of a less intelligent species living in proximity to a more intelligent species and managing to control it, right? And we are building something, we're, we're building alien minds with which we will be in relationship, right? And if you're not envisioning that, if you think, oh, no, they're not, it's not really

• 1:00:59Speaker 04

  a relationship, we can just turn them off whenever we want, well, then you're not really envisioning true general intelligence. And we're, I just, we're, we're building, we're building things that are, are going to be more powerful than we are, and we will have to be living with them. And it's, you know, it's, it's a system, it's not, you know, it's not just, it'd be very clear if, if we're just talking about humanoid robots, but it's more than that. It's, it'll be integrated with everything. And yeah, if it's not aligned, it's not, I mean, the, the, the general heuristic here,

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  which worries many of us, is that there, there has to be more ways to build unaligned superhuman AI than aligned superhuman AI, right? In the, in the, in the space of all possible superintelligences, one would expect that more of them than not would be less than perfectly aligned with our well-being across an indefinite future, that we know how to build these machines in ways where they're, they're durably aligned with our interests, which is to say that, let's, let's say their reward function is that they, what they care about most is to better and better approximate what we want out of life, right? I mean, they're, they're perpetually uncertain as to how good life could be for us, and

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  all they care about is making it better and better for us, and they're constantly open to dialogue about how to refine that project. As far as I know, no one knows how to do that.

• 1:02:41Scott Galloway?

  So just in the last couple of minutes here, I want to return to attention. So a late twenties Sam Harris, just have your PhD, just starting out, trying to find, you know, navigate the world, your place in it, find a way to be economically viable, find a mate, and think of attention as where you, a capital that you allocate. Now, think of the, the Gen X Sam who's got, you know, a great partnership, great kids, some economic success relevance. How has your allocation of your attention capital shifted? Like, what are you more, what is the greatest difference in the way you allocate your attention capital now versus a young Sam Harris?

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  Well, unfortunately, I'm not the greatest test case of this, because I, you know, in my twenties, I spent a lot of time focused on these, you know, deeper questions, however impractical. I spent, you know, well over a year on silent meditation retreats in my twenties, and I mean, I, I got my training kind of early on there, before I built any kind of business or became a public figure or, you know, wrote any of my books. And so my, you know, it's, it's, I'm not the typical case, but I mean, the, the difference for me that I think is generic is that, you know, the, the truth of impermanence needs

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  to become more and more salient as you get older. I mean, it's not, it's, you know, it was salient, salient for me pretty early in life, but many of us, most, at least most of the time, act like we have all the time in the world, right? It doesn't really matter how much time we waste, and there's just, there's always another day on the calendar that we can try to make the most of, and then squander a lot of it on our phones. I do think it's worth, you know, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and engaging, you know, a little more executive control over this whole project, and ask yourself

• 1:04:53Speaker 04

  in kind of in the aggregate, how you really want to live, right? I mean, just what, what is, what, what matters to you, and, and what is truly rewarding, and what, what will allow you to get to the end of each day and each year and to the end of your life without regret? And for me, that, I mean, the, the real recipe is, you know, paradoxically, it's not worrying about the future, it's not worrying about the past, it's not being ambitious in all the usual ways, I mean, seeking happiness in all the usual ways, it's actually developing a capacity to be more and more present so that you, you kind of equalize your moments,

• 1:05:33Speaker 04

  whereas like, even if you're just, you know, stuck in traffic, you can locate a, a depth of well-being that makes that not a problem, right? I mean, you're, you're, the, the lesson of life, as far as I can tell, is that you can't become happy, you can only be happy. I mean, that's really, it's like, that, that is the, the structure of our psychology that goes unacknowledged for most of our lives. We live, we live most of our lives thinking we, we can become happy, all we have, what we have to do is we have to get all the things and all the accolades and all the pieces in place, such that we have a good enough story and good enough reasons to finally be happy.

• 1:06:16Speaker 04

  But for the most part, that's a mirage, right? And, and you need only look at all the super successful people who are obviously unhappy to be convinced of that, right? I mean, there, there are successful people who are, and I don't mean just rich, I mean, you know, I don't mean just random billionaires who made their money in some terribly boring way, or, you know, lottery winners. I mean, people who got, who were, who were incredibly creative and talented and had all their talents actualized and, and rewarded, and I mean, it's, think of someone like, you know, Prince, or Picasso, or, or Steve Jobs, right? These guys were, were effectively geniuses. They got everything, you know, they could want, you know, they, they dug one, one well

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  as deep as they could dig it, and the world loved them for it, and they were obviously unhappy people, right? I mean, they're, you know, to one or another degree, they were, they were schmucks.

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  So there's something more, something more is required and that more is finding a way to actually fall into the well of the present moment more and more such that you can actually just love people and love your life and, and recognize how beautiful life is even in its ordinary moments, right? And, and thought is not good enough for that project. You know, you're, you're never going to have good enough thoughts about the past or the future to allow you to really live that way. And so it is, again, it does come back to this question of attention. But riding on top of that, you know, I think you want to live an ethical and gratitude filled life, right? You don't want to be, don't be Elon

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  Musk, right? Don't be somebody who, you know, lies, you know, in, in Trumpian fashion about everything and demonizes everyone in sight and takes no responsibility for the harms he causes and, you know, worries about things like, you know, white genocide and then signal boosts Nazis on, on the social media platform that he owns. And I mean, like, the guy's a total, he's a first trillionaire, uh, and now first former trillionaire, but he's a total maniac, right? I mean, it's like, that, that's what it looks like to have a mind that's out of control, right? That's, that's what's being showcased for the entire world. Um, that's, there's nothing to emulate there. As much as you might admire the fact that

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  he can land a rocket on a, on a barge, that's a wonderful thing, but at what point, where is it written that you have to be an unhappy asshole to land a rocket on a barge? I don't think that's the case. Um, and so we should be drawing the right lessons from all of this, which is, um, you know, we need successful people who recognize that in their success, they really want other people to succeed too, right? And there's a social fabric that they're part of that they didn't make. And that's, that fabric can unravel. And when I look at the heights of our, certainly the, the world in which you, you spend a lot of time, you know, in and thinking about, you know, the heights of entrepreneurship and

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  business, I'm not seeing many examples of truly ethical people who are modeling, uh, you know, a, a real commitment to being a good citizen and a, and a, and a good steward of, of, of the future or anything much else that's worth caring about. I mean, there's kind of a rapacious feeding of the trough now and a, a shattering of our political lives. And, um, we have to pull back from this brink because it's getting weird out there.

• 1:09:49Scott Galloway?

  Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and the host of the Making Sense Podcast. Uh, I want to thank everyone for tuning in, uh, for joining us. Also, if you want to find more of Sam's work, just check out his Substack. And if you'd like to join future live streams, subscribe to Prop G Plus at profgmedia.com. Sam, anecdote, I had lunch with a guy named Jay Suresh, I believe his name is. He's the vice chair of, uh, VTA and on the, on the board of Regents for UC and your name came up. And he said, Oh, I went to high school, Sam. And I'm like, really? What was Sam like in high school? And he's like, I only knew him by reputation, but everyone in our high school that didn't agree on anything, all agreed he was the smartest person in our high school. So you were developing-

• 1:10:32Speaker 04

  I don't know if that's true, but Jay was ahead of me. He was a year ahead of me. So, yeah.

• 1:10:36Scott Galloway?

  Well, it's high praise though. He said, the only thing we knew about Sam at that moment when he was like 16 was he was the smartest guy in our high school. Anyway, Sam, always enjoy the conversation, appreciate, uh, your wisdom and, and friendship and just quite frankly, you have taken so much shit online. I know it's cost you a little bit economically. I know it's cost you some clout. And, uh, I, I, I take inspiration from you because Honey Badger don't give a shit. I really do think you have a moral compass and you're, you're willing to take the bullets, uh, as long as you think you're, you're, you know.

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Well, getting off social media is the life hack that, that is, I recommend there.

• 1:11:13Scott Galloway?

  Oh, tell me about it, brother.

• 1:11:14Speaker 04

  I mean, you don't even see it, you know? I don't even know what shit you're talking about at this point. It's, uh, it's quite amazing.

• 1:11:20Scott Galloway?

  Garris Fisher sent me this thing saying, uh, uh, a guy who came in third place for the LA moral race is shitposting me on Twitter. And I'm like, I'll just take it as a badge of honor. I don't even want to go on. I don't even want to see it. Anyways, uh, have a, have a great rest of the week, Sam.

• 1:11:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, you too, man.

• 1:11:35Scott Galloway?

  And thanks, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janer. Kami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.