#476 — The Bittersweet Age
Making Sense with Sam Harris
Waking Up with Sam Harris
4.6 • 29.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
Sam Harris speaks with Susan Cain about writing, creativity, and what AI means for human culture. They discuss the future of books and reading, the tells AI inherits from good writers, why the advent of AI may spark a revival of the humanities, following your bliss, the ethics of curing sadness, the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, and other topics.
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. |
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| 0:06.1 | so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. |
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| 0:24.9 | I am with Susan Kane. Susan, thanks for joining me. |
| 0:28.1 | Absolutely. It's so great to be here. |
| 0:29.9 | Yeah, it's great to see you. And that doesn't happen enough for me, but I want to make the most |
| 0:36.3 | of this occasion. So to remind people, you are the |
| 0:39.5 | all too famous author of the book Quiet, which became a Bible for introverts everywhere, |
| 0:46.4 | and then led to a TED talk that is, if not the most seen TED talk in the history of the |
| 0:51.6 | galaxy. It's among the most seen. So there's like tens of millions of |
| 0:54.8 | views on various platforms. And then more recently, that was about 15 years ago, 14 years ago, |
| 0:59.8 | quite came out. |
| 1:00.5 | 2012, whatever that was. Yeah. Yeah, 14. Yeah. And then you have, you have written a book |
| 1:05.9 | Bitter Sweet, which came out more like four years ago. It was 22 or? That's funny. I'm not even sure, but something like that, three or four years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And now my family and I actually have another book coming out. I don't know if I mentioned that to you. No. No. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we have a children's book coming out that we wrote with three generations of canes. So, yeah, my in-laws, |
| 1:30.3 | Ken and me and our two boys. We all wrote it together. And it was based on a really, really fun. |
| 1:36.9 | Yeah, and based on an experience that the boys had where we went on this childhood vacation and they |
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