Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway The Dangers of Woke Culture — with Sam Harris About this episode Sam Harris returns for part two of our conversation. Today, Sam shares his thoughts on why call out culture is an unproductive vehicle for creating change, addressing systemic problems, and facilitating debates. He also explains how we should establish a principle of charity — even with those who we may not agree with. Follow Sam on Twitter, @SamHarrisOrg.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:23 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 83rd episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we're bringing you part two of our interview with Sam Harris. We discuss with Sam the dangers of woke culture, misinformation, and how to have more effective conversations. This is something I think about a lot. I think of myself as a warrior for progressive values and want to be an ally and find myself, oftentimes because of what I perceive as unfair judgments or people not taking gestures with the intention they were intended.
1:55 Scott Galloway? And using it as an excuse to make a caricature of someone's comments and come after you. And I find that in some instances, it has made me somewhat indifferent to their cause. Not an enemy, whereas I used to be an ally, but indifferent, and it's dangerous. There's plenty of discussion around what it means to be woke. Some of it well founded, some of it hyperbole. Yes, absolutely be awake to the privileges and prejudices that surround you and rigorously honest about the world you're inheriting. But in my view, the word has lost that original meaning. Beyond the media noise, an insidious pattern is emerging in academic and professional settings. The insistence on filtering everything through the lens of personal identity and experience, the prioritization of victimhood, the belief that to be offended is to be right.
2:40 Scott Galloway? Reacting to every slight and demanding satisfaction from every insult is what the system wants you to do. Joining a Twitter mob seizing on a hapless middle manager or an out of touch English professor may feel like justice, but it's just a cheap drip of dopamine lost in an ocean of social media profits. So my advice, my advice, be a warrior. Before you resort to violence, make a thoughtful assessment. Register the intention behind people's gestures, ideas and words. Don't make a caricature of people's actions and speech so you can draw your sword and feel righteous. Be a highly skilled, devastatingly strong warrior who exerts their power by example and leaves their weapon in its sheath.
3:24 Scott Galloway? Forgiveness is also a strength. Demonstrate it every day. Be a warrior, not a wokester. All right, on that note, let's get into our conversation with Sam Harris. Sam, welcome back. Happy to be here, Scott. So let's, we're going to do a conversation around woke culture. You often talk about the dangers of woke culture and how it coincides with misinformation. Can you speak to this and also talk a little bit about the impact on our social discourse?
3:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, so what this phenomenon is, is hotly disputed now. I mean, there are people who will tell you this is a non-issue. This goes by many names. There are many intersecting problems here, but it's, you know, it's identity politics, it's woke culture, it's cancel culture, it's, you know, far-left activism, it's the social justice movement, you know, by its adherence, you know, and/or it's anti-racism, you know, to take racism as one variable, right? It's, you know, who could disagree with anti-racism? Don't we all want to be
4:37 Speaker 03 anti-racist? Anti-fascism? Who could disagree with anti-fascism? What, are you a fan of fascism, right? So there are many memes here and concepts that disorder are thinking about what's actually going on here. But I think what is, should be uncontroversial is that there is a criticism of resistance to, allergy to free speech on a wide variety of topics now. You know, this is not necessarily a First Amendment issue. We're not talking about the government infringing upon people's right to speak freely. But what we are seeing
5:18 Speaker 03 is that more and more, if you touch a specific topic in the wrong way, you are open to a kind of reputational destruction and, quote, cancellation, that seems fundamentally new. And this has, you know, been weaponized on social media. There are these, you know, mobbings on Twitter that would be very easy to withstand if people didn't care about them, but people really do care about them, and corporations care about them, universities care about them. And so what we're seeing is a... Really a ubiquitous failure of nerve on the part of the most powerful people in our
6:02 Speaker 03 society. You know, the CEOs of major corporations will, you know, call for someone to be fired the moment there's a significant backlash on Twitter over something they might have said or tweeted a decade ago, even as teenagers, right? You have, you know, cases now too numerous to cite of people who have just, you know, lost jobs they just got because someone discovered something they tweeted when they were 17 or something that they, you know, said on a hot mic that really wasn't even all that offensive, but someone got offended by it.
6:41 Speaker 03 You have people who have had their careers destroyed for using a slur, but not as a slur, right? Like merely talking about the N-word, even in the mode of saying, listen, we really have to be careful never to utter this word, right? But using the magic syllables in that context. And those magic syllables are deemed so radioactive that they get fired, even when no one calling for them being fired thinks that they used the word as a slur or even thinks that they're racist, right? I mean, it's like saying, you know, the word Voldemort in the Harry Potter, Harry Potter novels, you know, it's, we're now in the, in the realm
7:26 Speaker 03 of magic and superstition and taboo. And, you know, I'm not the first person to notice that all of this has the character of a cult-like phenomenon or a religious phenomenon or a pseudo-spiritual awakening. And this is, this is happening, I think disproportionately in, you know, the younger generations. But it has captured guys and gals our age who are, you know, running most of the world. I mean, we, people who have A lot of skin in the game who have something to lose are so risk averse here that they're just, the moment something begins to brew on Twitter,
8:07 Speaker 03 you know, you've got editors and administrators at universities and CEOs just trying to put the fire out by any means necessary and the means they too often take is a mere abject capitulation to the mob.
8:24 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I'm dealing with this personally. I'm supposed to do, launch a show, The Prop G Show on Bloomberg, and I put out a teaser without their permission, a little 30-second teaser that was profane, vulgar, references to religion, sex, and immediately heard back that some people in the newsroom were offended. And they wanted me to, A, clarify that they didn't approve this, which was the truth, and I was happy to do that, but also to muster up as an authentic and apology as possible. And I refused to do that because I said, "Look, I'm not sorry. I get it wrong all the time. I never, I never seek to offend people, but I don't avoid it."
9:06 Scott Galloway? And I think entertainment and being vulgar and profane has been conflated with something much more sinister. And it just feels very, almost like thought police. And I'm curious to get your take on this. When I think about, in their studies, the people who overcome injustice, who are resilient, who bust out of their standards or bust out of the hand that's not great that's been dealt them, one of the key components of that type of resilience is them believing they have a locus of control. And it feels to me like a lot of this is leading, trying to tell young people that they don't have agency, that there's a good chance that something in their background
9:46 Scott Galloway? has deemed them unable to compete, unable to dig out of this hole. And I wonder if we're just undermining our own ability to create a more just society when we constantly tell people, you know, "The die had been cast for you." It feels very, not only unproductive, it feels counterproductive. Any thoughts, Sam?
10:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, but first on the point of apology, I think your your intuitions are quite sound there. But first, I think you should never apologize falsely. I mean, you shouldn't, if it's not honest, you should never offer an apology. If you don't think you did anything wrong, I think that kind of damage control always backfires. But in the current environment, it really, even honest apologies seem to backfire. Right? So like, I think you, you know, it would be hard for me not to apologize for something that I really think I should apologize for. That just seems like, you know, like the decent thing to do. But in
10:51 Speaker 03 the current environment, it really does seem like you run a risk because the research is showing that apologies not only don't help, but they people feel, you know, a greater disgust over the thing you, you know, may or may not have done or almost did. And so it's, you know, you, from a PR, just a purely pragmatic PR point of view, you want you to always question whether apologizing is the right thing to do. But as far as this this issue around the victimology that is being recommended on on more or less all fronts, I mean, this really, there's two, at least two things wrong with this. One
11:33 Speaker 03 is the point you make is that around locus of control and just how one, how one thinks about one's advantages and disadvantages in life and whether and to what degree it's ever useful to view oneself as a victim. Right? And we seem to have this, this, a spreading ideology that power is found in victimization now. I mean, like, the most victim points you you can marshal is that is, that is the path to power. And perversely, it is in this subculture among activists and hysterics who are, you know, fomenting
12:17 Speaker 03 this moral panic, you know, around issues of race and gender and sexuality and
12:24 Speaker 03 Not so much religion, but religion does fall into it insofar as it's a surrogate for race in many people's minds. So if you find yourself criticizing one religion more than another, you know, let's say if you're me and you talk about the problem with Islam during times of jihadist terrorism, well, then you that begins to fall in the same rubric. And Muslims, you know, are viewed as a victim group. And, you know, again, this for reasons that have no coherence whatsoever, this is often framed as a racial question. Anyway, the identity politics is at the bottom of all of this. And it's, you know, from
13:08 Speaker 03 my point of view, absolutely clear that increasingly solidifying our identities around various subgroups that have zero sum political concerns, right? And they're just bound to be winners and losers if you're advocating for one group versus other groups, rather than a common project for an entire society. It's obvious this is a bad idea. It's obvious that progress resides in the other direction, right? It's obvious that we're not going to overcome racism, for instance, in our society by caring more and more about race and about racial difference and about the actual color of a person's skin, right? I
13:52 Speaker 03 mean, that can't be the direction we should be going in. And yet, that's the direction that's being advocated by these so-called woke activists. And the one thing to be aware of, I mean, it's hard to notice in real time, but it is just in fact the case that
14:15 Speaker 03 It can be a tiny minority of people who are consuming all of the oxygen in the conversation and making it seem like there's a consensus around specific issues, right? So it's not, it's not a majority of people who are woke or who think that, you know, the last guy who got canceled for his or her nonexistent racism should have been canceled. But they're so loud and they're so insistent and they're so unavailable to, you know, the rational part of the conversation that they win, right? And they scare everyone else into silence and it's, and they force upon the rest of
14:58 Speaker 03 us a kind of coordination problem because this whole problem would go away if you could get 10,000 people to step forward at the same moment and be rational, right? But because you can't engineer that, it becomes rational for any one person not to step forward by him or herself and become the target of the next cancellation, right? So like we, this is, this is likely, you know, it's a, it's a dark emperor's new clothes phenomenon where everyone is pointing to some fake moral atrocity and reacting to
15:40 Speaker 03 it, but the, those who are, who are reacting most loudly to it are the 8% of people on the far left who are, you know, the woke activist class. And everyone else just doesn't want to go near this thing because they don't want to be the next target. And there's just no incentive to put yourself out there unless you happen to be a, you know, a public intellectual whose job is to do that. There's no incentive to do that, especially if you're white, especially if you're rich, especially if you're male. It's like, you're just the wrong person to be doing it, right? So that's why we have this, this. Seeming silent consensus that this is all, this is all making sense, right?
16:23 Speaker 03 And that allegations that the, you know, the Academy Awards are racist, right? Like what we've seen over and over again are some of the least racist pockets of humanity that have ever, ever existed, be condemned as racist and castigate themselves as racist in order to get the mob off of them, right? See, Juilliard, you know, the drama department at Juilliard just went through this, right? It's 50% people of color, right? And it's rending itself over its racism and, you know, systemic and otherwise and the, you know, all of the violence meted out upon the black bodies of its students over this,
17:07 Speaker 03 this unconscionable status quo. Again, you're talking about the least racist social experiments that have ever happened in, in, in the career of our species, right? And, and so there's something is, is, is wrong here. And yet you win no points for saying this alone, right? We need, we need the 10,000 people who, who matter to step forward and say, okay, enough is enough. Let's, let's talk sanely about the boundaries of real racism and, and, and let's, let's acknowledge, first of all, how much progress we've made on this front, right?
17:50 Speaker 03 I mean, we, it's like, you know, yes, the, the four years under Trump were an embarrassing anomaly on the, on the arc of moral progress and probably did unmask some, some pockets of concern in our society that we, you know, that were, that are worth worrying about, right? I mean, I think the, the, the far fringe on the right is still the fringe, right? And it's not that we have a white supremacist nation. And what we're talking about here is, is an asymmetry that is worth paying attention to because the far fringe on the left isn't the fringe.
18:29 Speaker 03 The far fringe on the left has significantly captured academia and media and tech and Hollywood, right? So that's, that's why it's worth responding to.
18:42 Scott Galloway? Coming up after the break.
18:43 Speaker 03 You have to extend a principle of charity even to people who you're pretty sure you're going to totally disagree with. And even if you think they're committed to genuinely bad ideas, you should care to get those ideas right.
18:59 Scott Galloway? Stay with us.
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21:29 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I was talking to some of the regents at the University of California, and we were talking about resources. And I made the comment that typically, offices of diversity and inclusion, there's a lot of these popping up at universities, are coming about in the most diverse and inclusive places in the world. Right. It's strange. We're allocating resources to this in the areas that need it the least. And also, and I'd like to think, and I'm curious if you see this, or maybe it's just wishful thinking, that we are beginning to see a bit of a gag reflex or a pushback on the notion that to be offended is to be right. And that while you can be, and it goes back,
22:13 Scott Galloway? the term used is exactly the word "incentives." There's a lot of incentive to be offended and outraged and to make a caricature of someone's comments and extrapolate it to an untrue gesture, mischaracterize it such that you can be upset and you're seen as a leader, you're seen as virtuous, and you get all sorts of points. But if someone crosses the line and takes comments totally out of context and has proven to be a bad actor and going after someone for the wrong reasons and using some of these issues as a red herring or a false flag. There's no, there's, there's very little disincentive or punishment around that.
22:57 Scott Galloway? It just feels as if, it feels as if there's, okay, if you incorrectly cancel someone, well, you were doing your best. You're a warrior, right? And there's some shrapnel, but you know, there are a lot of people have been canceled and we look back and think, should they have been canceled? I mean, I, I think of Al Franken being canceled and then I think, what price has Kristen Gillibrand? Most people acknowledge that Al Franken, that they were probably heavy-handed with an individual who was constantly fighting for many of these disenfranchised groups. A real effective advocate for a lot of, for a lot of groups. But Senator Kristen Gillibrand has paid no price.
23:36 Speaker 03 Right, right.
23:37 Scott Galloway? Do you think that there's a bit, do you think that we're potentially, that the pendulum is beginning to swing back or is it getting worse?
23:45 Speaker 03 It's hard to take the temperature of that because I just, I recognize the extent to which all of us are in one echo chamber or another, despite our best efforts. I mean, just the kinds of media you wind up seeing. But I think there will, there will be a backlash to this. I'm worried about the wrong kind of backlash. I mean, I'm worried that it's the, the silent seething of everyone who has been either victimized or, or knows someone who was victimized or is just, has been spectating upon this horror show for long enough, is, is coarsening people and hardening their
24:28 Speaker 03 hearts in the face of real problems, right? So I mean, so like racism, racism is, it still exists. It's a real problem and racism aside, the problem of inequality is immense, right? There's an immense problem of wealth inequality and health inequality and just social inequalities of various kinds and they're, they're significantly correlated with race for reasons that are complex and need to be discussed rationally. But I'm worried that people who, who's, who feel like their backs are against the wall or that they can't say anything that they think in public anymore and it even becomes increasingly hard in private. I'm worried that the backlash that could come is just a...
25:11 Speaker 03 Frankly, a kind of increase in racism, right?
25:14 Scott Galloway? But isn't the backlash, didn't the backlash happen? Wasn't it Donald Trump? Weren't people under the breath just so disgusted with this out of control political correctness? And when someone came along and was so politically incorrect, he was arguably a racist, a bigot. They ignored it and they voted for him. Hasn't the backlash happened?
25:31 Speaker 03 Well, so that's, that's, that's one backlash, but I'm worried about a more subtle and insidious and more well subscribed backlash. I mean, I'm worried about myself, frankly. I mean, someone like me, right? This is, you know, it's unlikely to happen to me because I, you know, this, this is my full time preoccupation to not get this sort of thing wrong. But I can easily see someone just like me, after seeing one after another dishonest claim of victimhood, right? To just, the temptation is to throw up your hands and say, just fuck it. I'm done caring about this particular flavor of human problem, right?
26:15 Speaker 03 Like, you guys work it out, right? Let me know when you've sorted out your problems in the inner city or, you know, wherever you are, I'm done thinking about it, right? Now, that's not the kind of person I want to be, but the level of dishonesty behind so many of these allegations is so appalling, right? And so corrosive of so much else that we value and should value, right? You know, the real reputations of good people who are not racist, just going up in flames over just deranged allegations that no sane person should have ever been taken in by, right? I mean, Al Franken, Al Franken is kind of a liminal case.
27:00 Speaker 03 I share your view of it and, and, you know, it was in, at the time in counterpoint with just the, the obvious depredations of Roy Moore, right? You know, who was grabbing 14 year olds and suffering no penalty in his world.
27:14 Scott Galloway? Who almost won, who almost won.
27:16 Speaker 03 Right, so that asymmetry politically, even if your concern is just politics, that asymmetry is unsustainable. The fact that we have a circular firing squad on the left where we, you know, kill, you know, we just kill one another, you know, without the slightest hesitation and, you know, just hurling senators overboard for, you know, comical photos and.
27:40 Speaker 03 On the other side, you can be a pedophile, you can be a serial abuser, you can be just a maniac. Mark disabled. No problem, yeah. I'm worried about tribalism, you know, I'm worried about, it's like, obviously, you don't want to be identified with a subset of humanity that isn't, that is smaller than humanity, right? You, you, you want, we want to be human beings getting better and better at cooperating with eight billion strangers to solve massive problems and to enjoy massive opportunities.
28:20 Speaker 03 And we don't want to be people who are constantly doing the Dungeons and Dragons calculations with each roll of the dice on, wait a minute, I'm an elf who's cisgendered, you know, but I'm short and, you know, I, and not green enough to count as part of your tribe, right? It's like, it's an awful game to be playing and to be identified as, I mean, so ultimately, I mean, the punchline for me is to take, again, to take race as, as one salient variable here, but obviously there's these adjacent issues like, you know, gen, gender and, and even religion.
28:57 Speaker 03 I think we have to get to a place where the color of a person's skin is no more interesting than the color of their hair, you know, morally and politically, right? We just do not care how many redheads are working at Google right now, right? No one has thought to look, right? And no one, if, if we found that there was some imperfect fidelity between the, the, the numbers of, of, of redheads at Google and Apple and other major corporations and their representation in, in society at large. I don't think anyone would find that interesting and they certainly wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Now, I understand we're not coming from a, we don't have a legacy
29:39 Speaker 03 of caring too much about hair color that we're trying to come out from under. But we are so close to being out from under a truly racist, the truly racist legacy that is behind us. And to then sort of turn on our heels at this, you know, when we're on the final, you know, something like the final yard and declare that not only have we made no progress, this is like the height of the emergency now, right? It's sanity straining and it's, and it's a lie, right? It's just, it's just a lie.
30:19 Speaker 03 And, and so it's, um, it's like we've run out of real racists to find. And so now our racist detector had to be recalibrated and now we're finding, you know, fake racists everywhere, right? And, and it's, so I do think, yes, I think people are getting fed up with it. I know they're getting fed up with it in private. I mean, I have these conversations and I get these emails and I talk to the CEOs who won't say anything publicly and I talk to the venture capitalists who won't say anything publicly. Again, because there's no percentage in it for them, you know, there's too many people relying on them for their financial wellbeing. Why would they want to come on a podcast and say that they're not woke?
31:00 Scott Galloway? Yeah, there's, it struck me as you talk about this self-defeating strategy where, you know, the moderates are where elections are won. If you think that it's important to have a government representative, a progressive government, an empathetic government, it's, it's one in the middle. And it strikes me that a lot of people in the middle who we profess to be, you know, raging moderates. Are so turned off by this that, to your point, we don't become, we don't go from allies to being enemies of progressive values, but we become indifferent. And that is, we just get exhausted by it and we become resentful of anyone, of a civil discourse around it. It doesn't seem like there's any room for civil discourse.
31:45 Scott Galloway? What are some steps to try and make the dialogue more productive and move back to this, being a little bit more generous with each other, realizing that progress is a function of conflict and debate, instead of always looking for reasons to go after one another?
32:03 Speaker 03 Well, I think a principle of charity is essential and it has to be one's default. And when you lose your purchase on it, you have to notice that and get back to it, no matter who you're talking to. I mean, I think you should extend a principle of charity even to people who you think are probably bad actors, right, and who you don't want to have anything to do with. I mean, principle of charity is just, you know, allow your opponent, allow the person you're talking to, to put forward their best case. And if they're not especially sure-footed in doing that, help midwife the best case
32:47 Speaker 03 so that then when you respond, you're actually dealing with the best case, right? So you're steel manning rather than straw manning their position. Whereas, most people do their best to straw man the opponent so that they can knock it down, especially in the performative way we see on social media, that's the default. And worse than that, it's not just a straw man. People will hold you accountable to the least charitable, barely plausible version of what you said, and the most odious possible construal of what you said.
33:26 Speaker 03 And I've had this happen even where it's literally the opposite of what you've said. My cartoon version of this, but I mean, the cartoon has been achieved in many cases for me. The cartoon version of this is if I said... Uh, black people are just apes. White people are just apes. We're all just apes. Racism doesn't make any sense. Right? If that's the total statement, there are people who would make a meme with my that says, black people are just apes. Sam Harris. Right. Put that out there. Right? I have those enemies and, you know, they're not going away.
34:07 Speaker 03 And so now, and I've kind of given up the game trying to speak so carefully that you could not possibly arm your enemies with that kind of, you know, verbatim ammunition. And it's just, it's unavoidable. I mean, you just can't live that way. So you have to trust people to stay around until you get to the end of the paragraph to understand what you actually intend to say. But, you know, on one's own side, ethically, as a matter of improving conversation, you have to extend a principle of charity, even to people who you're pretty sure you're going to totally disagree with.
34:48 Speaker 03 And even if you think they're committed to genuinely bad ideas, you should care to get those ideas right. So like, you know, there, there are people who I think are pretty unsavory, right? Whose views I do not share. But it matters like if the allegation is, you know, they're bigoted, right? That's not the same thing as calling them a Holocaust denier. Right? If you call them a Holocaust denier, and they really are not, they just, they, they don't deny the Holocaust. I think six million Jews were killed, et cetera, et cetera. Right? That inaccuracy matters, right? It matters legally in some countries where Holocaust denial is actually illegal.
35:31 Speaker 03 It's actually a crime, but it just matters intellectually and morally. It's like you have to, you have to target. I mean, this, this happened a lot with Trump, right? Like, I, I think. I'm reasonably sure Trump really is a racist, right? But fully half, if not three quarters of the allegations of racism against him were so badly targeted as to be false and undefensible, right? Like, he was, every opportunity to construe anything he said or did as racist was taken by the left. And it was almost always wrong, right? Now, I think I know enough about Trump. I mean, most of what I think I know about Trump, I know, you know, it's the kind of behind closed doors stuff,
36:13 Speaker 03 which is not, you know, is not really publicly actionable. But it matters. So it's like, you know, as a critic of Trump, and I really put myself in second position to no one for the, you know, the kind of velocity of my diatribes against him, you know, when he was in office. I was constantly parsing the valid criticisms from the invalid ones, right? And I was, and I was doing my best to disavow the invalid ones because it's just, it's corrosive. If you're, if you're going to get, if Trump says something that you're going to score as racist,
36:54 Speaker 03 and it really could be totally innocent and would seem totally innocent if someone else said it, well, then you have to keep track of that. Otherwise, that someone else is going to be tarred with precisely the same allegation when they say that, that innocuous thing.
37:11 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
37:15 Scott 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.
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38:49 Scott Galloway? In the last minute here, Sam, the last time you were on the podcast, you said something that was really profound for me. And that is, you were talking about fatherhood and you said that your observation personally was, yeah, you need to be a disciplinarian. You need to be someone who coaches them, someone who advises them, someone who course corrects them. But more than anything occasionally, or more, you just need to love them.
39:16 Scott Galloway? And it tangibly changed my behavior because when I would put my kids to bed, I saw that as like a teaching moment and I might review the day, especially with my younger one who's a bit tougher. I find the majority of our interaction is around me course correcting him, feeling that that's my responsibility. I'm the disciplinarian. I'm supposed to be the guy that tells him where he got wrong. And I've tried to be much more active in just taking that ratio of time or taking more of that space and just loving them. Yeah. And so I would like you to just finish. Any, any other observations on parenting and fatherhood coming out of the, or hopefully coming out of the pandemic?
39:57 Speaker 03 Well, just more and more, I'm aware of the passage of time, that everything changes, right? And this is obviously with the course of years and months, but it's over the course of days, you know, I mean, I'm sure you've had this experience many times at this point as a dad, where you look at your kid and you realize there's been some kind of some step change in growth, whether it's physical growth or just kind of firmware upgrade. Yeah, but like, yeah, it happened on a Thursday, right? Like, they're just bigger, you know, and they're just, they have a different mind, right? They're just, they're using words
40:39 Speaker 03 differently, or they have a different attitude around life. And this change is indelible, right? Like, they're never, you're never gonna get back.
40:52 Scott Galloway? He's gone, the 12-year-old is gone. No, he's gone.
40:55 Speaker 03 Yeah. So how much did you enjoy Wednesday? Because Thursday arrived and you have a new person in your house. And I, there's something phantasmagorical about parenthood, where I find myself continually lulled back into this, this default expectation that I'm dealing, the person I'm dealing with now is the person I'm always gonna be dealing with, right? Like, it's like, this is the relationship. This is, this is my daughter now. And when, so when, whenever there's a change, I'm always ambushed by it. And that is, I mean, more
41:33 Speaker 03 and more, the preciousness of the opportunity to enjoy every single stage is becoming salient to me. Right? It's like, I don't, it's not, I don't wanna miss, I don't wanna miss any of it. I don't wanna fail, fail to connect with any of it. I don't wanna lose the opportunity. To have adequately communicated my love to the person my daughter was at that point in her development, right? I don't get that opportunity back again. So I just, I mean, it's the preciousness of the moment and the incessance of change is something
42:16 Speaker 03 that is, I'm just reflecting on that more and more. And, you know, being locked in a house together for 15 months or so during the pandemic was, made that even more obvious. But, yeah, it's something that I'm gonna make a conscious effort not to lose because I, it's just, I, you know, it's not the only important thing in my life. Obviously, I've got work and I've got other relationships and I have, you know, you just have the solitude of your own mind, which ultimately you can never get away from. I mean, when you, when you, you know, you really are as happy as you can be happy in each moment, apart from
42:58 Speaker 03 all of the other things you engage. And I would say apart, apart even from the, these core relationships. But I'm like you, I can, I can fall into the trap of teaching and, you know, just, just pedagogy and think that I'm edifying my, my daughters in some necessary way. And this, and, you know, some of that's unavoidable. You want that. But ultimately, it has to be fun and it has to be communicative of the love that you feel. You know, I mean, you want them to, you want, you don't want there to be a shadow, you
43:36 Speaker 03 don't want there to be a shadow of a doubt at any point in their lives that their dad really loves them, you know? And that's, so whatever you can do to make that beyond the possibility of doubt, I think you, you want that. And, and I think it's possible to erode that confidence in ways that you might not expect and, or didn't, certainly didn't intend, right? You know, it's just, and I do think slipping into Into disciplinarian mode or pedag- or teacher mode too much and too often and
44:17 Speaker 03 can be a part of that. I mean, it just, it can seem like criticism and, and, you know, I think that your, your kids can get starved for, for just a, a communication that has no real agenda. So I think really just being with them and being happy with them is, is the, is the sweet spot.
44:36 Scott Galloway? Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times bestsellers. He's also the podcast host of Making Sense and the creator of the Waking Up Meditation app. He joins us from his home in Los Angeles. Sam, stay safe.
44:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, thanks so much, Scott.
44:59 Scott Galloway? Algebra of Happiness. So we referenced in our discussion with Sam Harris, something you said that had really resonated with me, and that is, as dads, it's easy for us to fall into, it's probably just true of parents in general, into this construct, and it makes sense, where you're there to correct your children, where you're there to guide them, where you're there to advise them, counsel them. And I always saw my role as to kind of be, or have seen my role as to sort of be the heavy and disciplinarian and take them aside and tell them that, I have these little episodes called, "This is what a man does." And I tell my kids, "This is what a man does. When they toast people, they look everyone in the eyes. This is what a man does. When he meets people, he grabs their hand firmly and he looks at, this is what a man does. When we have visitors, you offer
45:44 Scott Galloway? to take their luggage to the car. This is what a man does. He protects others." Anyways, I'm constantly editing and correcting my boys. And that's important. No one did it for me. I think I lacked a lot of character and professional success early on in my career because just no one was course correcting me around anything. Anyways, didn't mean this to be all about me. I'm outstanding at figuring out a way to turn it all into, let's talk more about me, but. Something that Sam said in the last time we had been really resonating with me and tried to take some action around it. And that is on a regular basis, distinctive review of the day or of their behavior, but just to spend more time loving them.
46:28 Scott Galloway? And this has had a real impact on my time with my kids. And that is, I used to think about every interaction with them as an opportunity to tell stories and learning moments. And now I'm just ensuring that, you know, as I'm walking to the park with my kid, I remind them, you know why we walk to the park? And my son will say, why? I'll say, because my favorite thing in the world, and my favorite thing in the world is spending time with you and your brother. And constantly trying to remind them of how much worth they have and, and also couch your advice in the context of, you know, you know why I do this, right? And, and they'll tell you why they, they know you're doing it.
47:08 Scott Galloway? But trying to increase the ratio of time, just showing them why you're doing all this. And it's because you love them a great deal. Our producers are Caroline Shager and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll catch you next week on Monday and Thursday, still not used to that.
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