#483 — The Knots We Tie Ourselves Into
Making Sense with Sam Harris
Waking Up with Sam Harris
4.6 • 29.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 July 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
Sam Harris speaks with Alain de Botton about the psychology of unhappiness, the secular world's discomfort with ecstasy and ritual, psychedelics as a tool for self-discovery, Freud's legacy, AI as the ultimate mirror, the case against meritocracy, the cancel culture purity trap, the psychological meaning of death, and other topics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. |
| 0:04.3 | This is the free version of the podcast, |
| 0:06.1 | so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. |
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| 0:25.0 | I am here with Alain de Botton. Alan, thanks for joining me. |
| 0:29.4 | Thank you so much for having me. |
| 0:31.1 | So I think this conversation probably is, I don't know, two decades coming. I feel like |
| 0:37.3 | I've known about you for at least |
| 0:38.9 | 20 years and admired your work from afar. You've done many things. You've written many books, |
| 0:44.5 | and you have the School of Life, which I would love to talk about. But how do you describe your |
| 0:50.0 | career at this point? What is it that you focus on and how are you showing up mostly now as a |
| 0:57.3 | thinker? Sure. I mean, I'm broadly interested in the slightly paradoxical and elusive sources of |
| 1:03.4 | human happiness, unhappiness, sorry, that are not really related to material or political |
| 1:08.0 | shortfalls or events, but broadly lie in the psychological space, |
| 1:12.8 | our amazing human ability to make a hell out of often pretty benign circumstances. |
| 1:20.4 | I'm fascinated by, as I say, the knots we tie ourselves into. And I write books. |
| 1:29.0 | I operate on YouTube. |
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