Making Sense with Sam Harris - #189 — Wealth & Happiness

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

Sam Harris speaks with Scott Galloway about the connection between wealth and happiness. They discuss the problem of wealth inequality, the transfer of wealth from the young to the old, class warfare in Democratic politics, deficit spending, means testing Social Security, Bloomberg’s campaign and “stop and frisk,” breaking up big tech, privacy absolutism, meditation, mortality, atheism, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, no housekeeping today. Today I'm speaking with Scott Galloway. Scott is the New York Times bestselling author of The Four, the hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, and a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. He is a serial entrepreneur and has founded nine companies, including L2, Red Envelope, and Profit. In 2012, he was named one of the world's 50 best business school professors by Poets and Quants,

and his weekly YouTube series, Winners and Losers, has generated tens of millions of views. He is the co-host of the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher, and that's where I normally hear him. I'm a big fan of that podcast. And his latest book is The Algebra of Happiness, Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning. And it's a really fun and wise little book. I highly recommend it. Also, Scott's about to launch a new podcast titled The Prof G Show. That's the letter G with Scott Galloway. And we get into many things here. We talk mainly about the connection between wealth and happiness.

So we cover the problem of wealth inequality, the transfer of wealth from the young to the old, class warfare and democratic politics, deficit spending, means testing, social security. And then we get into politics proper. We talk about the Bloomberg campaign and stop and frisk, the breaking up of big tech, privacy absolutism, whether you want anyone to ever get into your iPhone. And then we also cover topics like meditation and mortality, atheism, etc. If we sound a little behind the curve here politically and with respect to the news, that's because we are.

We recorded this podcast a couple of weeks ago. I would say about 90% of what we say still stands with respect to the presidential campaign, but a few things have changed. Mayor Pete dropped out yesterday, for instance, and tomorrow is Super Tuesday. So depending on when you're listening to this, the candidacy of Michael Bloomberg may seem more or less plausible. Also, we don't mention coronavirus, which will seem a strange omission, given that it's pretty much all anyone is talking about at the moment. I'm sure I'll do a full episode on it before too long. I'm definitely paying attention to it. Anyway, I'm a big fan of Scott's, as you'll hear, and it was great to talk to him.

So now I bring you Scott Galloway. I am here with Scott Galloway. Scott, thanks for joining me. Sam, there are so few things that impress my colleagues about my professional achievements, and this is one of them. They practically closed the office when they heard that I was going to be on your podcast. You're like a royalty around here. Well, it's a dubious distinction with your co-host, Kara Swisher, on the Pivot podcast. Not her. Not her. Let's be clear. Kara, not that impressed. Not as much. That's hilarious. Well, first, let me say I'm a huge fan of yours. I love your book,

The Algebra of Happiness, which we'll certainly talk about much of it. And there's a great book of advice you give to all comers and just a lot of wisdom and a lot of candor in that book. And it's a very easy read. So I recommend people pick it up. And I'm also a huge fan of the podcast you do with Kara, the Pivot podcast, despite the fact that she treats me with, it seems to me, a kind of a borderline unethical way. I was on her other podcast, Recode, and it was not exactly a meeting of the minds. But there's something so likable about her, even though her shtick is to be truly irascible. I find there's a kind of a strange form of charisma coming off her. Our conversation stayed, to my eye, totally on the rails, even though it had every opportunity to go off.

So I like her, despite the fact that she beats me up. I think people sense that the way I describe her is she's an igloo, you know, kind of hard on the outside, chewy and soft on the inside. I think sort of her, I don't know how to describe it, her maternal or I think she's a caring person and surrounds herself in this hard candy shell. And I think people sense that, or at least that's been my experience. I don't really know her well. I know her, I don't know her well, but yeah, she's kind of, you know, tough on the outside, but a softy on the inside. Anyways. Yeah. Gary Swisher, everybody. Yeah. Well, anyway, so I do recommend your podcast. You guys just go into tech kind of endlessly and continually find interesting

stuff to touch there, which we'll hit a bit here because I, as I think you know, I'm, I share your concerns about what tech is doing to us at every level personally and the level of fragmenting our society. So there's so many places we could start here. I think before we dive in, give me your potted bio here in terms of just how you view your place in the world and you're a professor at NYU Business School. So that's the, I'll give you a proper intro obviously at the top, but how do you view what you're a professor at NYU Business School, so I'll give you a proper intro, obviously, at the top. But how do you view what you're doing now? Because you're certainly not a normal academic in the way you're showing up.

Yeah, so I think of myself as a teacher, my identity, or what I kind of lean on, if you will, or what I'm most proud of or hope is the business card I carry the rest of my life is a professor or teacher. You and I actually have something in common in our background. Do you know what that is? You didn't do your research. Growing up in California? Yeah, we're Bruins. Oh, yeah. So I'm of, I always say I'm a product of big government raised by a single mother who lived and died a secretary in the regions of the University of California and California taxpayers. Their vision and generosity are the reason I'm here speaking to you. I went to UCLA, got in with unremarkable grades and even worse SAT and rewarded them with a 2.27 GPA. Graduated, lied about my grades a couple of years in Morgan Stanley.

UC smiled on me a second time, let me into Berkeley. I went to the hospital of business, started a business my second year, found a company called Profit, a brand strategy firm, grew that to about 400 people, sold that. I decided I didn't want to be in the services business. It was just a lot of planes, very difficult lifestyle. And then in the late 90s, decided to hit reset on my life. Got divorced, left the Bay Area, resigned from the boards of all the companies I was on, resigned from the company I'd started, Red Envelope, which had recently gone public. And moved to New York and decided, you know, blessed with a lot of opportunities and options, decided I wanted to teach. And in 2002, joined the faculty of NYU, and I've taught there for the last 18 years. And then to get in trouble, and as such that I can afford to live in Manhattan and Florida with two kids, I do a bunch of other stuff. I'm an entrepreneur.

I started an analytics company and a bunch of other stuff. But that's the headline news. You're very edgy in the way you sound off on various topics. You seem to be right up against the line of what I would imagine to be the comfort zone of being inside academia. Does business school give you a different physics of the university to work with? Have people tried to cancel you as an academic? Are you uncancelable on some level. So I don't think I would survive. I don't think I would have survived at almost any university in any other department other than the business school at Stern because I got very fortunate. We've had a couple of deans who've sort of been my Kevlar. And also the trends have been in my favor. And that is as schools have become more expensive, kids have become more demanding as they should be. And they want people with practical domain expertise brought into the classroom.

So if you will, the markets kind of come to me. But I'm not only—you're being generous. I, on a regular basis, say stupid things. And it creates headaches for the university. Sometimes they're right. So I like to think a lot of times I say right things that are provocative that other people are thinking, but sometimes I say stupid things. And what you find at universities right now, which were initially supposed to be places where we were supposed to be charged with provoking people. I mean, that was original. That was initially the

mission. The reason they took a piece of land outside the city center was to give people a safe place to be provocative. But that's not the case at universities right now. And that is we are exceptionally tolerant and forgiving and understanding of people who don't look like us, but we're not especially tolerant of people who don't think like us. And even as someone who considers themselves a progressive, I find that on a regular basis, my colleagues and students are looking to score virtue points and enter into this council culture, which you've talked a lot about. But having said that, I've always had, whenever I've gotten in trouble, a dean, Peter Henry or Raghu Sundaram, step in and say, this is the point. We're here to create a dialogue.

And you can't do that. Conflict and debate are part of progress. And you can't do that. Conflict and debate are part of progress. So I actually feel really blessed that I'm in an environment that mostly encourages this type of provocative thought. But there's no getting around it. I know how my career ends. I have insulted, circulated, and I've got the wrong dean, and it's NASCAR, and I'm sweet savage, and I spin around in a ball of flames, and it's all over. Well, you have at least some cover from your colleague there, Jonathan Haidt, who's been on the podcast, who's a great voice on that. My role model. But his provocative statements are more data-driven and, quite frankly, more thoughtful. But he is a perfect example of, I think, a good countermeasure to some of the PC weirdness that's injected, that's been injected into universities. Yeah, he's really been great. There are so many places we could launch from here. I mean, I think there are sort of two lenses through which we

come at these shared concerns. I mean, we have the individual level and we tend to think of questions like, what does it mean to live a good life? And then there's the societal level where we're faced with the project of creating institutions and laws and social norms that allow a maximum number of people to arrive at some kind of satisfying answer to that first question. Let's start with on the topic of wealth and happiness. How do you think about the connection between wealth and happiness? So there's a post-marketing or my personal experience with money, and then there's the research around it. And my personal experience is, and this sounds crass, but this is what I tell my kids or my students. At a very young age, I made the connection between money and options and happiness. And it came to me because my mother was very sick. And I

remember coming home from grad school and feeling emasculated and feeling like I wasn't able to take care of her to the extent I wanted to because I didn't have any money. And I decided that I was going to, that's when I kind of got my act together. And I started, you know, I spent most of my undergraduate years at UCLA smoking pot and playing sports and watching Planet of the Apes trilogies. And I decided when my mom got sick that that was it. You know, shit's getting real. I got to get money. And I've been very focused on economics. And this notion that I just found what I loved is not true. I moved to where the puck was. I've placed a lot of value on economic security. And so it's been very important for me. The research shows that there is a correlation between money and happiness.

That's the bad news. The good news is that it tops out. And once you get to a point of affording housing, good schools for your kids, take a vacation, absorb an economic shock, which is $100,000 in Ohio and $800,000 a year in L.A. or New York, happiness tops out. Now, you don't get any less happier. The research shows that the cartoon of a billionaire being really unhappy is not real either. They're no less happier, but they're no happier than millionaires. But money has been an enormous driver for me. And I find that when wealthy people tell you to follow their passion, it's because they're already rich. And that in a capitalist society, more money means more opportunity for your children, better healthcare, More money means more opportunity for your children, better health care, and a greater selection set of mates, which are all wonderful things.

So, yeah, I've been very focused on economics. I'm finally at a point where I can pursue stuff that doesn't impact that, and I'm enjoying economic security. But it's always been a—I've been howling in the money storm for a long time. It depends on how you assess happiness. Actually, that seminal paper that many people drew this punchline from, that happiness tops out at, I think the figure was $75,000 a year in that study. There's a famous paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton. paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton. So the moment-to-moment estimation of one's own well-being is the thing that tops out this in Danny's more recent language. This is the experiencing self versus the remembered self. But the remembered self is the self you're talking to when you ask

someone how satisfied they are with their lives, and you're asking them to give a global and of necessity retrospective evaluation of just how good it is to be them, that global measure of life satisfaction doesn't really top out. It keeps going the richer you get. And that's something that, you know, people are kind of reluctant to remember that part of the study, but that's just, you know, that was the unhappy punchline there. It's not surprising that that would be so, especially if you're living in anything like an ethical way with your wealth. You're given opportunities to meet the people you want to meet and support the causes you want to support. And so there's philanthropy and there's...

The biggest thing I think is the equation between money and time. I mean, the fact that you can hire people to do the things you don't want to do anymore, or you can hire people who are better at doing the things that you are not great at. It's not a surprise that that correlates with satisfaction in many ways. Yeah, it's interesting. I was just sitting there thinking, you know, Bezos looks pretty happy, right? And one thing I admire about him, and there's a lot of things I don't admire about him, is that he's living out loud. He's buying, he's assembling a series of man caves, and he's unashamed about it. And, you know, yeah, he does, he's not trying to live below the radar. And good for him. It's his money, do what he wants, whatever, whatever makes him happy. What I have found as you get older that it's important, I think it's important to realize there's a great analogy that money is the ink in your pen. You need a certain amount and it can write different chapters. It can make certain chapters burn brighter, but it's sort of not your story, if you will. And also the relationship between money and being rich. My father gets $58,000 a year from his Royal Navy pension, Social Security, and he spends about 50. So at the age of 89, he's still saving money and he's very happy. And I have a lot of friends who are masters of the universe, investment bankers, making several million bucks a year, but between their ex-wife, their kids, alimony, house in the Hamptons, helicopters out to Nantucket, they spend all of it and they have

a lot of stress in their lives. So, you know, the court depends what you mean by how much money you make, how much money you have, where you live. But yeah, I think about that stuff a lot. And I still feel money stress and I have a lot more than I ever had in my life. And I always want more. It's definitely a weirdness. And I find that wealthy people like to pretend that we don't think about money. And the reality is the wealthy people I know don't have to think about it from a stress level. people I know don't have to think about it from a stress level, but one of the reasons they're wealthier is they are absolutely conscious of it on a variety of dimensions. And that's one of the reasons they're wealthy. Yeah. So what do you think about that psychological process of moving the goalpost with respect to what one feels one needs in terms of wealth, right? I mean, this is, I'm sure, a very common

phenomenon in the circles you run in, and most of us have experienced this personally. As you begin to succeed, the illusion that you are going to arrive at some place of real emotional serenity around the amount of money you have, it tends to be a mirage where you get there and then you have a set of other comparisons you make between yourself and others. Your tastes grow to fill the shape of the incoming resources. And, you know, I mean, it sounds like your father has escaped this dynamic, but how often do you see someone get to their number and really feel that they've arrived and they're basically done stressing about money on every level? I don't know anybody. I know a lot of people, including a couple billionaires, and I don't know anybody that

doesn't stress. It's a different type of stress. The stress moves from economic to maintaining relevance, but the scorecard for their relevance is their ability to increase their wealth. I don't know anyone that's there that's truly self-actualized. Maybe that's a testament or a lack thereof of the people I'm hanging out with, but the majority of the people I hang out with have money stress, but it's on a higher level. And what you have in capitalism that's in some ways so incredible is that capitalism keeps creating incentives. I remember the first time I backpacked around Europe and I went to Hungary and I exchanged $100 and I got this pile of money called, you know, forens, which were the currency was crashing. And I remember thinking, I'm rich.

And I went into Hungary and there was nothing to buy. There was no incentive to be rich. And in the U.S., look at what happens. You want to take your kids to Harry Potter. It's a hundred bucks. The new Harry Potter ride, that means you're waiting in line for three hours. So for $135, you get a fast pass and it's only 20 minutes. And then you can go to the VIP tour, which is $3,500 for five people to have some very high EQ, attractive person take you around and not only cut the line, but take you on the employee entrance. And then all you have to do is give the operator a hand signal so you can do the ride several times. When I was growing up, it was coach and first class, and they invented business class. Now there's a certain type of first class on

Emirates where you get in a car and they take you to the plane so you don't have to associate or make eye contact with the other passengers. And then above that, there's private aviation now. I mean, the capitalist economy keeps segmenting offerings such that there's always more and more incentive. If you give a certain amount of money to NYU Langone, and I'm sure UCLA has this, you get a phone number. And when anything comes up with you or your family, and I don't have this, you call them and there's just a different level of health care and attention that you get from the medical professionals. So a capitalist society is great at constantly creating and incentivizing grit and innovation and the want for more. But my appetite's not sated as yours. I mean, on one level it is. I mean, in terms of my perception of risk, there's definitely, as you say, the stress changes its character. But the truth is I came to it pretty late. I feel like I've done many

things backwards in my life. And I'm kind of a reluctant entrepreneur that I've just kind of stumbled into digital media and had to figure out how to make it work. And I found that process fascinating. But yeah, it's, you know, happily, it's working. And you know, I have all the benefits of it's working. but money is something that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about and it does cause stress, but it is a different kind of stress because it's working. Not working would be worse stress. But I worry a lot about the problem of wealth inequality now.

I've been worried about it ever since the financial crisis in 2008. And I published a few essays on it, I think, in 2009 and 2010. But it seems like it's now shaping up to be the big political problem of this election cycle and our time. It's a problem, obviously, for individuals, but it's a problem for culture, too, and for the segmentation of society and the insulation of wealthy people from everybody else, as you just described. Obviously, I want to talk to you about your political intuitions here. How do you view wealth inequality as the long lever that everyone's going to pull here in the next nine months to determine what happens in our presidential election? I mean, it seems like the Democratic Party is, at least the Warren and Sanders wing of it, is gearing up for something like class warfare.

And if Bloomberg fails to become the nominee, it will be in large measure because the Democratic Party couldn't stomach having a billionaire appear to buy his way onto the platform. There's obviously a lot more here in terms of just what the economic stratification of our society is doing to culture. But how are you viewing the collective concern around wealth now? Yeah, well, I think you're onto something. And the fact that you started writing about it in 2009, 2010 means you're ahead of the curve. And look, it's distinct to the moral argument around this or the just ethical concerns around having some comity of man or even remembering your past. People credit their character and their grit for their success, and then they credit the markets for their failures. And I have no such delusions. Getting access to free education, coming of age in an era of processing power, explosion in the 90s in San Francisco. Being a white heterosexual male born in 1964 meant that the majority of the rooms you walked into for the next 50 years, you were right.

a series of moons lined up to take some talent and some grit. I have both of those things. I'm not a modest person. And fling me into the, you know, into the stratosphere. And when I would fail, give me another opportunity and opportunity after opportunity. So you, A, look back and think, okay, it just seems like a nod to future generations to try and ensure some of those dynamics are still alive. And when I got out of Berkeley, my total tuition at the Haas School of Business was $1,000 a year. And I got a job where I decided to start my own business, but I had an offer at 100K a year. So 100 to 1. Now tuition at Berkeley is $68,000 and the average salary is 140. So it's 2 to 1. My first house in Potrero Hill was $285,000, so 2.85 times my freshman or my first year starting salary. Now our average house is $1.4 million, and they're making $100,000. So it of wealth from the young to the old. I think the largest socialist program in the world, Social Security, a trillion dollars greater than the European and

American defense budgets, reallocated from working age people to a cohort that is the wealthiest generation in the history of mankind. And people say, well, it's done its job. It's pretty much solved poverty among seniors. You know, they say somewhere between 29 and 39 percent of seniors would be in poverty without Social Security. Now it's nine. But, you know, one in three kids live in food-insecure households. That doesn't mean that we drop $300 worth of groceries off at every household per week with kids, because we realize that's inefficient. And whether it's escalating costs of housing because of artificially suppressed interest rates, whether it's the greed or the

loss of script among myself and my colleagues at universities thinking we're luxury goods, not public servants, and not expanding freshman class seats as quickly as population is expanding so we can brag about how hard it is to get into these schools and continue to raise prices. Everything, I see almost everything is nothing but an elegant transfer of wealth from young people to baby boomers who have totally co-opted, in my opinion, government and are transferring and sucking wealth from future. I mean, government's going to take in $3.5 trillion in tax revenues. They're going to spend $4.5 trillion. You talk about money

in an eloquent way that money is really just a transfer of time and work from one entity to another. And it seems when we're racking up trillion-dollar deficits, what we've decided is in order to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy such that we can borrow time with loved ones from our children and our grandchildren. I think it's a moral issue. That's the bad news. We have dramatic wealth inequality. The good news is it almost always self-corrects. But the further bad news is those mechanisms of self-correction are usually war, famine, or revolution. And I think we're in the midst of a soft revolution. It's weird how it's happening, but I think we're in the midst of a soft revolution around income inequality. It seems to me that the ethics here are really clear. I mean, you mentioned in your

own case that you don't have any illusions about how lucky you've been. And I feel that really clearly myself. And it's clear that it extends to everything. I mean, any talent a person can notice in themselves, and they imagine correctly that it's the proximate cause of their success, I mean, so intelligence, say, or grit, or a desire to succeed, right? Where is this coming from? No one invented themselves, right? And if you make the best use of your gifts, you didn't pick your gifts and you're not responsible for the fact that you were given the opportunities you were given, that you were born into a society that wasn't plunged into a civil war on your fourth birthday. And your ability to make use of the opportunities you're given, again, is coming from some set of causes that you

didn't author. And so what we see everywhere is, I mean, this is not an argument for not making effort. It's not an argument against the necessity of effort and working hard. But a person's ability to work hard, again, is something that is the product of genes and environment. And even if you're going to smuggle in an immortal soul into the clockwork, no one picked their soul, right? If you believe in souls, you certainly don't believe that you created your own. So at no point do you see

someone truly, deeply lay title to the claim that they were self-made. And this is a point that, on some level, Obama made a while ago. I guess we're at the end of his presidency and was derided for it on the right. I think he said, you know, you didn't build that. You're talking about infrastructure that, you know, every technocrat and billionaire has benefited from. But it seems to me that the only moral position to have recognizing the general shape of this thing, which is that there's a massive disparity between good and bad luck in this world, is that you should want to cancel the worst forms of that disparity and figure out how can we continually make the floor get higher and higher for the least lucky among us. So then agreeing with that, one wonders what the solutions are here. The proffered solution from someone like Warren or Sanders now is a wealth tax. I mean, they give it the top spin of wealth in excess of however many millions of dollars is not only egregiously unfair for anyone to have acquired,

there was in fact no ethical way for them to acquire it in the first place. At least one of them, if not both of them, I saw recirculate a tweet saying, basically, there's just no way to become a billionaire without having been a fraud or inheriting it. There's no noble way to acquire that much wealth, which is clearly untrue, right? I mean, you mentioned Harry Potter. It's like, does anyone think that J.K. Rowling really got her wealth by starkly unethical means? She's being rewarded for the amount of joy people have taken in her creative output. So what do you see as a remedy here? I mean, wealth tax seems fairly unworkable from my point of view, but what should we do here when admitting that at a certain point, inequality will become

something that even the wealthiest among us won't be able to stomach? Yeah. Well, you said a lot there. I feel like we're going to need a bigger boat. Yeah. So let's start. I think a lot of it, I think you came, you're more self-aware at a younger age than I was. I found that I was constantly reminding people, as I did at the outset of your show, that I was born and raised by a single immigrant mother. And that's my way of trying to impress people by saying that my success was 100% due to me and I deserve everything I have. And I think that where we start is with our kids. And that is to ensure that, and I find that this kind of

third base mentality is so rampant in the Bay Area where I came from, where a VC thinks he's a genius in changing the world because he invested in the C round of Pinterest and not Friendster, that someone just got incredibly lucky and his or her parents managed to get them into Stanford. And what do you know, his or her parents are very wealthy and went to Stanford. And the thing that really brought it home for me was, born in 1964, white heterosexual male, and born in Southern California, was winning the lottery. He came into a great university system that was free. He came into a professional environment in the was free. You came into a professional

environment in the 90s in San Francisco where more wealth was created in a seven-mile radius of SFO International from 92 to 99 and had been created in Europe since World War II. You had discrimination. You made up 22% of the American populace, but 97% of all venture funding went to that profile. In the 90s, I raised a ton of money for my startups, and I didn't know a single woman who raised more than a million dollars. And what's embarrassing is it seemed normal. You didn't question it. You didn't say, well, something's all fucked up here. It seemed normal that, oh, they'd made their own choices, right? Maybe it wasn't a feature, but it wasn't a bug. And the thing that really I'd heard about, my freshman roommate from the

fraternity at UCLA was born a white male in 1964 in California, but his DNA, my DNA was heterosexual. His DNA was homosexual. And he ended up dying, you know, alone of AIDS. And so to not, you know, to not recognize just how much of your success is not your fault. Yeah. I've come to that later in life. Yeah. So let's get out of that. Solutions. So I find we're having a knee-jerk gag reflex when Senator Sanders accuses Pete Buttigieg of taking money from 42 billionaires

as if that's a bad thing. I see that as a feature. The cartoon of billionaires being mean people or bad people, I generally find, and I know a lot of billionaires, that they're good, decent people, that in general, to be very successful in business, it helps to be ethical. It helps to be a good person. It helps to invest in relationships. People want those people to win. And the notion that it's bad, I buy into the notion that billionaires inherently are no better than the rest of us, but I'm almost positive they're no worse. So this notion that they've done something wrong. And meanwhile, these senators have had a lot of opportunity to try and pass laws that create a more equitable tax structure, and they have failed to do so. So what frustrates me about the current environment

in the Democratic presidential race is we seem to be bringing purity tests to a gunfight. I mean, what is the point of that? I believe this comedian, Larry Wilford, summarized it perfectly. And he said, why don't we just give all Democrats a hall pass on racism for the next nine months and kick the racist out of office. And the notion that, but for example, a wealth tax, they've tried that in France, and then the wealthiest man in Europe moved to Belgium. So maybe it's a good idea, maybe it's a bad idea. But first, maybe we just start with figuring out a way that Amazon, that Walmart pays $70 billion in corporate income taxes, and Amazon pays two over the last 10 years.

Meanwhile, Amazon is out of the value of Walmart in a three-month period. Maybe we just start with kind of more equitable corporate income taxes. Maybe we start with, okay, if the wealthiest man in the world effectively doesn't pay taxes because he can borrow wealth, borrow money against his stock holdings paying 1.8% on margin to JP Morgan, thereby never really triggering a capital gains event. You know, maybe we start there. Maybe we start with this really fucked up notion that money is more noble than sweat. Why on earth have we decided that the income that muscle and sweat, current income, should be taxed at a higher rate than the money that money makes, capital

gains. Why wouldn't we go back to where Reagan was and just have one tax rate on money that you make? And if you don't, if you're worth over a certain amount of money and accreting it, there's an alternative minimum tax. If you're a corporation, you can't do these crazy inversions or tax avoidance. It seems to me that Washington has been overrun and corporations' tax lawyers are smarter than our IRS. But the notion that we're going to demonize billionaires, the notion that we have to have 70% and 80% taxes, there's a lot of sunlight in between those two places. And I worry that the Democrats, out of this kind of purity or notion of what is the right thing to do, are showing up with

lanterns and pitchforks. That doesn't work. They can't Robin Hood billionaires. Billionaires are the most mobile people in the world. If they want to start a wealth tax, it sounds crazy. 2% doesn't sound like a lot. If you tax someone 2% a year, that probably means every 15 to 20 years, you're cutting their wealth in half. And one of the reasons these people are wealthy is they think long-term. They're going to move. They're going to leave. And a lot of countries want them. So I find in, I don't know if I'm, it sounds like you've been following the political content. It's no accident that the people, the candidates who are getting and firing people and real-time decisions. They weren't just voting and pontificating.

They had to make difficult decisions. And there's no way to run a city for eight years, much less 12 years, and not make decisions that are going to age poorly. And the notion that we're in this cancel culture where we're calling each other racist on the Democratic side, that's just fucking stupid. I mean, we're going to disarm unilaterally against Republicans right now by convincing America that we're racist? Anyways. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to go into that swamp with you full on in a second. But this issue with just how to mitigate the problem of inequality seems to me to be genuinely difficult. The solutions proffered, I mean, something like a wealth tax seems like it, first of all, creates all of this overhead in terms of the work that has to be done to enforce compliance with it and just to, you know, estimate people's wealth and get them to pay these taxes. It would be all these edge cases where, you know, you'll have people who are wealthy by normal standards because they live in, you know, an expensive house that they've been in for 20 years. But, you know, if you're trying to claw back their wealth, at a certain point, you're going to have some 80-year-old person who used to be wealthy forced to sell her house

because she doesn't have the liquid assets to pay the wealth tax. You know, and no one who's urging us to have a wealth tax in the first place is going to shed a tear over this, but it's just a crazy mechanism to claw it back when you could have something like a value-added tax, or just, as you say, just follow Warren Buffett's admonition and tax him more than his assistant is taxed. What do you think about UBI as a solution here to create some tide that is raising all boats? You know, I think it's a compelling idea. It's kind of an interesting idea from leveling up, sort of say, okay, everyone's going to level up.

But I don't, at the end of the day, I think we should be, I think there are simpler, more effective, less expensive solutions. Senator Michael Bennett proposed expanding the earned, should be, I think there are simpler, more effective, less expensive solutions. Senator Michael Bennett proposed expanding the child's earned income tax credit that most studies show would take 40 to 60 percent of kids out of poverty and be 40 billion instead of a trillion or be dramatically less expensive. I think just truing up and making tax complexity favors the wealthy because we have accountants. I live in Florida. I paid 22.8% or 23.8% on long-term capital gains. If you start companies, which is how I have generated the majority of my wealth, the first $10 million

is tax-free. If you hold onto the stock for longer, it's 1202 passed by Obama. There's no reason for that. And they say, well, we want to incentivize our innovators. I couldn't have told you what tax rates were. Starting a business, people start businesses because they don't have any options. Or generally speaking, we romanticize it. The reality is I don't have the skill set to be successful in the greatest wealth creation engine in the history of mankind, and that's the U.S. Corporation. They're incredible platforms, but I'm not emotionally secure enough to work in a large corporation where other people have power over me. I could just never handle that. I didn't have the self-awareness, so I started companies. And because we romanticize entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs, when they sell their companies,

pay an effective tax rate usually of 17 or 18 percent, whereas people who are just working hard for companies in lower level positions and trying to put their kids through school pay 30 to 40. And in New York, you know, I mean, we like to demonize all wealthy people. If you're making half a million dollars a year as a lawyer, partner in a law firm in Manhattan, and you got two kids, you're probably paying an effective tax rate of 48 to 52%. But if you own the law firm, or if you figured out a way to turn your gains to sell shares in the law firm, you pay 22.8, and then maybe with the money, you at some point move to Texas or Florida and avoid state and city

taxes, and just you make the jump to light speed. So taxes are progressive until you hit a point where you can get the majority of your income from capital gains, and then you make the jump to light speed. So taxes are progressive until you hit a point where you can get the majority of your income from capital gains, and then you make the jump to light speed, and your tax rate plummets. And we just have to decide, do we want a progressive tax rate or not? The idea of coming in and violating a core tenant of Western European and American economic and sociological and political philosophy of private property, that's a very powerful draw. And even if it means some inequity or... But I think lookbacks where we show up and start Robin Hooding and saying, all right, you pay taxes on that wealth at some point, it's yours,

but we're going to show up and start taking it away from you in the form of a wealth tax. To me, that sort of violates this basic norm of private property. And now even Illinois is saying, there's a huge fiscal crisis coming with these states that quite frankly aren't worth the taxes. Sam, where do you live? California. Okay. So California, particularly like another 11 or 12% a year, is that about what it costs on current income out there to live in California? It'll be a sign of my white privilege that I can't even give you an answer to that question. So I think it's somewhere between 11% and 13%. California is worth it. I mean, you wake up in

February and it's 65, In-N-Out Burger, the highway, Pacific Coast Highway, the opportunity to work at Snap or Warner Brothers or Facebook, California is worth it. Manhattan is worth the 13%. The density of creativity, culture opportunity here is worth the additional 13%. Is it worth it in Evanston, Illinois? Is it worth it in Summit, New Jersey? So you're having these fiscal crises in Illinois and in Jersey and Connecticut where people said, I'm not going to pay the taxes of California and New York and not get the sunshine and the opportunity. And so there's this migration, which is essentially driven by two things, right? Low taxes and sunshine.

So we're facing what will be a really interesting kind of fiscal crisis. But Illinois is now talking about an exit tax, which, again, is reaching into people's private property. So I think there's a lot of solutions before we have what I'd call this gag reflex overcorrection, where we start demonizing wealthy people. And I worry that the majority of people in the U.S. are capitalists who believe in fair tax policy, who believe in a progressive tax policy, but don't inherently want to demonize wealthy people. They want to be them. They aspire to be them. And I think that is where the Democratic Party right now is kind of coming off the tracks a little bit. Yeah, that's an interesting point politically. I mean, whatever the ethics is here, and I agree with you on the

ethics, it just seems like bad politics because so many people who will never be, not only will they not be billionaires or even meet billionaires, they aspire to be billionaires or at least aspire to achieve wealth such that they feel psychologically implicated in this kind of overreach. I forget what the statistic is. It's something like 0.2% of society ever has to pay an estate tax, but a majority of people are against the estate tax, or a majority of people are against the estate tax, or at least under some description, they're against it. And so this aspirational relationship

to wealth makes it politically unwise for Democrats to be striking a note of class warfare here. What it comes right down to, I believe in America, and one of the fundamental tents of capitalism is you can't reward the winners without punishing the losers. And that sounds harsh, but I do believe in America we are comfortable with winners and losers. We're just not comfortable with the Hunger Games, where a small group of people go on to live an amazing life and everyone else dies a gruesome death. We're comfortable with billionaires. We're not comfortable barreling towards a society with 350 million serfs serving 3 million lords. We want economic opportunity.

We want luck. We want dramatic incentives for people to get wealthy, but we don't want a level of income inequality where if the middle class goes away, you're just going to stop producing billionaires in the same frequency we produce them, or millionaires, if you don't want a level of income inequality where if the middle class goes away, you can't have, you're just going to stop producing billionaires in the same frequency we produce them, or millionaires, if you don't have a thriving middle class, right? Going back to our tax policy, $4.5 trillion in tax expenditure, government expenditures, taking in $3.5 trillion in revenue, so a trillion-dollar deficit. You know, deficit spending and debt spending can be a powerful part of growth. You know, what are you investing in is the question you ask to your CEO if they're losing money. Are we investing in technology? No. Are we investing in our young people in subsidized education or trade schools such that we have better human capital that makes our nation more competitive? No. Are we investing in infrastructure that would make a quality of life or opportunity to spend more time with our kids or more efficiency. No. We've decided that our investment in the future is to invest in wealthy people and profitable organizations in the form of reduction in corporate income tax from 35 to 21 and reduction in income taxes that have largely accrued to the wealthy. So there is some

trickle down, but the reality is middle-class people spend most or all of their money. And so there's a greater multiplier effect. So just surely from, it seems like, economic growth, we'd want to reinvest in middle-class. And from a corporation standpoint, having served on boards, we got this tax cut. And what did we do with the money? We bought back shares, which took the share price up. Who owns 80% of the shares in the United States, the top 10% income earnings household. So again, it's just this exponential upward spiral of the people who have made the jump to light speed. And people know that the lottery is a bad business, that they may not win, but their ticket's the winner. And we are really

moving towards this Hunger Games economy. And I just think there's a huge amount of daylight between what Senators Warren and Sanders are proposing and where we are. There's got to be room here for nuance and calibration. What about means testing Social Security? You spoke about Social Security as being this wealth transfer. I mean, we want the transfer in the sense that it's taking the tragedy out of living too long and dying abjectly poor. I mean, that was the genius of social security. But if it's just going to people who don't, in fact, need it, is this just going to be viewed as an unethical clawback of wealth that they assumed was their own? I think you and I are probably in violent

agreement here. I think they call it Social Security tax, not the Social Security pension fund, because it's a tax. And people say, well, it's unfair. I've been paying into it. People on Social Security are taking out somewhere between 3 and 6x what they actually put in. And for the majority of people receiving Social Security, it's not to save them from poverty. It's the most expensive trillion-dollar upgrade from Carnival to Princess Cruises. It makes their life nicer, but it's not keeping them out of poverty. I believe we should have greater assistance through Social Security or another program for seniors who are in poverty. A decent judge of a society is to look at our seniors who are in poverty and say, what are we doing to give them a more dignified life? I think that is a

decent metric for a society. Where we have gone is we use that noble cause as a means of transferring more. The greatest transfer in the history of mankind goes to the wealthiest cohort in the history of mankind. That policy has not kept up with demographics. Everyone's living into their 80s, 90s. The fastest growing demographic group in America are centenarians. We're all going to know someone over the age of 100. So the notion that we're not massively, people are working longer, increasing the age, means testing, it is ridiculous my father's getting Social Security. You and I, Sam, should not be eligible for Social Security. It is a tax. We should bring people out of poverty. But the reason why we have so many young people embracing socialism is it's sort of a, it really is, it's a battle of nomenclature. You and I but the notion of canceling $1.5 trillion of student debt, which seems ridiculous, is basically young people just saying, you know, Scott and Sam, I want the same deal on education you had. I don't have student debt because tuition for me, undergrad at UCLA and graduate of School of Berkeley, was a total. My total tuition, undergrad and grad, and five years at undergrad, C above, smoking dope, watching Planet of the Apes trilogy, my total tuition was $7,000. And then they see this transfer of wealth to

seniors. So we've had a socialist economy for a long time. It's just young people want to call it that. We called it something else. We called it the University of California. We call it social security. But if we don't, you know, it has gotten so, in my opinion, so systematic. I mean, even if it's white coaches or universities or the head of the NCAA making $4.5 million a year such that amazing young athletes don't make any money and calling it the purity of the game, that again is a transfer of wealth from young people to old people. Look at millennial homeownership. Look at artificially depressing interest rates to ensure that asset prices are inflated. You know who needs a correction in stock markets and the property market? Young people. The reason I'm

financially secure is I got to buy Amazon at 60 bucks a share. The reason I'm financially secure is I got to buy Amazon at $60 a share. The reason I'm financially secure is after 2008, I looked at Apple and I said, okay, Apple, at $40 a share, you're a good buy. I'm going in. We have this notion, this kind of predetermined gestalt that keeping asset prices high is our number one priority. No, it's not. Young people need an opportunity to get into

assets at a relatively decent price, and markets should fall and rise to kind of the natural levels. We shouldn't be issuing a trillion dollars in debt, again, pulling forward prosperity to artificially inflate the assets that are predominantly owned by, guess what, old people. Yeah, okay. So let's... It's not a lot there. No, no, it's good. Let's look at the political implications of this because politics is on everyone's mind, and I'm trying to pick my moments

between here and November because it just cannot subsume all or even most of my bandwidth. It just gets too boring. But with you, I think it's very interesting to consider what this landscape looks like. Let's start with Bloomberg, because he's someone who is getting, there's at least an attempt to defenestrate him based on a few things he said as mayor, which may have been politically

imprudent or too candid by half, but in many respects, not obviously wrong. And the arguments against him really seem to be pseudo arguments. And so I'll just, at the time we're recording this, this is a fairly vivid scandal or pseudo scandal in journalism now, but the Democrats are pillorying him over remarks he made that were just unearthed from the Aspen Institute in 2015 when he was talking about stop and frisk. And I have the quote here. So this is Bloomberg in 2015 after he was mayor. He was, I believe, mayor for 11 years of New York City. And the policy, for those who don't recall it, it's been since more or less phased out, but the cops were stationed more in minority areas and stopping and frisking people looking for guns, mostly. And, you know, crime rates plummeted.

There's some uncertainty about the causal factor there, but it was not irrational at the time to think that stop and frisk was part of the policy that was succeeding in causing crime rates to plummet. Anyway, so Bloomberg said, 95% of your murders and murder victims fit one MO. You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15 to 25. That's true in New York. That's true in virtually every city in America. And that's where the real crime is.

You've got to get the guns out of the hands of the people who are getting killed. So you want to spend the money on a lot of cops in the streets. Put those cops where the crime is, which means minority neighborhoods. And then in a subsequent interview, he said, one newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, oh, it's a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group. That may be, but it's not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the crime. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It's exactly the reverse of what they're saying. I don't know where they went to school, but they certainly didn't take a math course or a logic course. All right, so he's clearly making it difficult for himself there, you know, in hindsight,

politically. But the reality is, all the data I've ever read about violent crime support what he's saying here, that the disproportionate number of perpetrators and the disproportionate number of victims are coming from minority communities. And what these communities suffer from, it's not too much policing. It's been the wrong type of policing. There'srisk policy was born of racism and not caring about the disparities of the way in which crime victimizes communities, that's just clearly untrue. A completely rational and compassionate attempt to mitigate violent crime could have given you this policy. And it seems to me that the thing the Democratic Party has to be able to admit at this point in order to talk anything like sense on this topic is that it's a difficult social problem. That the mayor was right in his diagnosis, that you could win money all day long in a casino that would allow you to place a bet on the age range and gender and minority identity of a perpetrator of a violent crime in New York

City. You know, it's not the ultra-Orthodox Jews who are mugging people in New York City, but that's a politically toxic thing to make salient. And the remedy of stop and frisk became politically toxic and probably wasn't worth doing in hindsight. And he could have figured that out earlier than he did, perhaps. But the fact that he's being castigated on the left as a racist monster just seems to be emblematic of all of the miscalibrations in our politics on the left that the wokeness is ensuring. And it seems, above all, a recipe for giving us four more years of Trump in the end. Yeah, 100%. I thought you spoke eloquently about, and you showed, I thought, some real backbone,

and I don't think I would have had the courage to say this without you saying it first. When I go through TSA, I want them profiling people. And if there's some recent young man from Pakistan coming through TSA, I want a different set of security standards for him other than some 85-year-old Latino grandmother. I want a different set of standards. And that's profiling. And I understand the indignance around it. I understand the dangers around it. But I think the situation warrants it. And I was in New York during Stop and Frisk, and I remember a lot of some national outrage about it. But there was, I think, a feeling.

And first off, as a white guy who lives in Soho, who's never been thrown up against a wall and violated like that, I can't fully empathize with what that does to young men who are innocently, and there were a lot of people who were stopped and frisked who just shouldn't have been over and over. And it creates sort of this victim slash criminal mentality. I get it. It hasn't aged well. It was probably the wrong thing. But I remember back in the time reading about it in the New York Times and them saying that the communities that had the greatest damage levied upon them from crime were these communities. And this was

an attempt to reduce the crime that was holding these communities back. And the reason why Mayor Bloomberg is picking up endorsements from Black leaders around the nation, the reason why Mayor Bloomberg has gone up 1% in every national poll every 72 hours since he got in the race versus, and everyone says, oh, he's a billionaire. Tom Steyer's never busted through 1%. The guy I was supporting, Michael Bennett, I love Michael Bennett. He was my man. School superintendent, understands the economy, worked for a private equity firm, a senator that was seen as somebody who could work across the aisle, went out of his way to never personally attack anybody. I just thought he's

our man. Got no traction. That's the reality. And where I am, and the reason I'm now supporting Mayor Bloomberg, is that I think we as a Democratic Party have one moral imperative, I think we as a Democratic Party have one moral imperative, and that's to get a bigoted, dangerous, and stupid man out of office. That's it. Those are my top three priorities. The way we're going to get there is with someone with relevant experience, someone who has an on-the-ground understanding of politics and how to win elections, and somebody who is worth $60 billion that can bring shock and awe to this campaign. Because

the DNC has $8 million. The Republican committee is going to raise... You know Donald Trump is going to put a price on ambassadorship. Say, I've got the DOJ in my back pocket. Would you like them in your back pocket for the next four years? That's $25 million. You want to be ambassador to Spain? That's $10 million. Ambassador to the Bahamas, that's 3 million. He's going to raise a billion dollars overnight. There's this illusion that Democrats understand online better than Republicans. That is a myth. They understand it better than us already working on it. If we don't bring in somebody with massive resources, and quite frankly, a lot of the

stuff about stop and frisk, I think it helps them with the core constituents we need, and that is moderates. You have to turn out two cohorts to win this election. You have to turn out your base, which Hillary wasn't able to do. I think Donald Trump is going to turn out our base for us. I think people are genuinely scared that this individual has absolutely no empathy for them and is willing to ignore their needs and run roughshod over their rights. And I think he is turning them out. So the race, I believe, is going to be won or lost for Democrats. And by the way, the good money's on Trump right now because the number of times we've kicked a president out mid-cycle without a recession is zero. So the good money's on him being reelected. The only shot we have is to win over

almost every independent. Independents are moderates. Moderates, their top priorities aren't the black community. Moderates aren't trying to figure out who's the most swole, woke candidate. So I think you're going to see a massive pivot to the center as Democrats realize, okay, this is about getting a guy in office. And all the people complaining about billionaires buying elections, well, what the hell were you doing in Senate? How come you were unable to pass any sort of campaign finance reform? This is the world we live in. We're going to need someone who's willing to come up, do a trace comma investment personally to go toe to toe-toe with what you just know that Trump's going to raise a ton of money. So anyways, I'm all in on Bloomberg. If we were at a different point in our society, might I be with someone else? I think Bernie's an inspiration. He loses 38 states. It's socialism versus capitalism. Capitalism beats socialism in this economy seven days and on Sunday. In my home state of Florida, they will position Bernie Sanders. They'll just show videos of him standing next to socialists, fascists in Southern America. He's done in Florida. He loses a swing state. No problem. Elizabeth Warren is, I think, got incredible character, strength, intellectual firepower. She's declining. I think Amy Klobuchar

is an inspiration. I like her as a moderate. I think Mayor Pete is fantastic. All of them are out of money. They're all literally going to be out of breath coming into Super Tuesday. And I was down in New Orleans last week, and I decided, you know, this is how old I'm getting, I decided to take a self-guided tour of the Garden District and go see the World War II Museum. And there was a Bloomberg office there. And I walked in and it was thriving. And there were people in meetings showing PowerPoint. They are on the ground moving. So at this point, if Mitt Romney ran for the Democratic election and was going to have billions of dollars, I would vote for him. And I'm not a fan of Senator Romney. We have one imperative, and that's find the guy that will get Trump out of office. And for me, that's Mayor Bloomberg. So these purity tests are just, they're just ridiculous. We're trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, missing an opportunity, you know, never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Enough already. Black people, I believe, in New York, after spending 12 years with Michael

Bloomberg, would say that rather than focusing on a specific frame of the movie that is Michael Bloomberg, the movie plays well. He is an empathetic, decent man. The Black community will do better. The Black community, communities of color, women will do better under a Michael Bloomberg administration. He is a decent man who gets it wrong, but is willing to admit his mistakes and is an empathetic guy with an extraordinary, extraordinary nose for success in how to get things done. I mean, can you imagine managing all the constituencies in New York? He managed to thread the needle between police unions, housing advocates, billionaires, JP Morgan, right? Google wanting to open their campus here. And those 12 years were seen as incredibly, incredibly robust years that included a crisis that we survived. So anyways,

as you can tell, I like Mike, I'm in. And I think this, I'm hoping that this bullshit purity test, we've decided to stick a gun in our own mouth and then shoot our feet. I'm hoping we put the gun away and start aiming it across the aisle. Yeah, but snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Have you heard this rumor? I think it's now 48 hours old that Bloomberg is or was considering picking Hillary as his running mate. That's a head scratcher. Oh, my God. I mean, that would be the stupidest political decision of our lifetime, I think. But I can't see him doing that. I just can't see him doing that. I'm just so kind of freaked out about this. I want the I want the clearest blue line path to the White House. And everyone was you know, there was some there was some nonsense,

some people exit polls, people saying, oh, I didn't know Mayor Pete was gay. Give me my vote. And the reality is, if you look at the data, America know Mayor Pete was gay. Give me my vote. And the reality is, if you look at the data, America is less homophobic than it's ever been. We've made huge progress around that. Where we haven't made progress or as much progress is people still have a problem with imagining a woman as president. And we're also quite ageist. We, you know, we're being over the age of 75 is an issue. So people have an easier time imagining a gay president than they do imagining a female president or an individual going into their ninth decade. Okay. So an adjacent concern here is what is tech doing to all of us and what's tech?

I've heard a lot of your endlessly entertaining whinging on this topic, and I have my own version of this, and I've spoken to people like Tristan Harris. And the concern about the big four, but I would probably put, I think as you do, Google and Facebook out there as a greater concern than Apple and Amazon, at least in terms of what's happening to our information ecosphere. There are calls to break up big tech, obviously. And well, let's draw a narrow focus here. Let's talk about Facebook for a second, because I actually have a personal ethical dilemma here. So I have a meditation app, which I'm very happy with, and people seem to be getting a lot of benefit from it. And I'm now tasked with how to push that out into the

world. And beyond just flogging the captive audience on this podcast, really the only way to push it out into the world to people who have not yet heard of it is to advertise. And I'm told the only reliable way to advertise these days is to buy ads on Facebook and Instagram. In terms of their targeting, you're basically just burning up money in a bonfire if you're advertising some other way. But I share your concerns about the ethics of this company and about the cavalier attitude they apparently have in witnessing the ruination of our democracy based on their use of attention-driven economics. So if you had a product that, you know, I'm not spreading divisive political opinions, I'm trying to put something out there that I think is really valuable for people, but I have genuine misgivings cutting a check to Facebook. What do you think? What should I do?

So I believe that Facebook's underlining business model is fueled by rage. And I also think that sitting on top of that unbelievable rage machine that creates rage and dissent among a population greater than the Southern Hemisphere plus India is controlled by a single voter shareholder class owned by one individual who got his start building a website, evaluating women on their physical appearance, screwed over his friends in college, totally fucked over his best friend out of school. It demonstrates all the characteristics of a sociopath and is the most dangerous person on the planet and can't be removed from office potentially for another 60 or 70 years, who's brought in an individual to go on a charm tour and has paid her $2 billion to wrap herself in a pink blanket that delay and obfuscates the

necessary regulation and scrutiny we've provided to other organizations such that this platform can be weaponized by advertisers paying in rubles that suppress the turnout in key swing districts, electing an illegitimate president that puts people on the Supreme Court that every day are chipping away at a woman's rights for sovereign domain over her own person and body. I think Facebook is the most dangerous organization in the world. If I were you, I would 100% advertise on Facebook. And the reason why is, my guess is you're not a believer in coal, but you turn on your lights. And this is the issue. Facebook is now a monopoly. If you have a small business,

you have no choice but to be on Facebook or Google, who control two-thirds of digital marketing. You're not going to use digital marketing to build a business. Why don't you just say, that's it? No electricity for us. The world is heating. The majority of our, too much of our electricity is coming from coal fire plants. That's it. No electricity at this business. You have to be on Facebook, Sam. I own their stocks. I actually just sold Facebook, but I own their stocks because if you look at returns the last 10 years, somewhere between 22% and 33%, I think, of the S&P's gains have been around six stocks. It's the four, and then you add in Netflix and Microsoft. And to ignore and to not invest in those companies because of moral issues, and I respect people who decide to do that,

is to say, I'm not going to participate in the upside in our economy. And I've always said, if it's a choice between moral clarity and my Range Rover, I'm picking my Range Rover. And I'm not proud of that, but I think the majority of people think that way. People will make incremental rationalizations to make decisions that create economic security for them and their families, even if it results in small, incremental damage over the medium and the long-term to the Commonwealth. And the reason we pay 23 cents on the dollar to the U.S. government is we want them to think long-term for us. The people at Philip Morris weren't bad people, but they continued to kill

500,000 people a year. The people at General Motors and Ford in the 50s and 60s that were pouring mercury into the rivers weren't bad people. But we have an FDA, we have an EPA, we have laws for a reason that they recognize these externalities and they step in. And for some reason with big tech, or not for some reason, they don't apply the same scrutiny and level of scrutiny that every other organization has applied. If we found out that your podcast could be reverse engineered to an increase in self-harm among young girls, we'd shut this shit down right away. You'd be out of business, but not Facebook. And it all goes back to Steve Jobs. In a society where there's a... As societies become wealthier and more educated, there's the

reliance on a super being and church attendance goes down. But that need for spiritual clarity and guides and mentors only increases. In step the innovators that command this godlike magic called technology that put a man on the moon, that arrested the AIDS virus, that turned back Hitler. And these very charismatic people armed with their 900-person PR teams and their lobbyists overrunning Washington where the DOJ has been emasculated. The FTC is now flaccid, where journalists have been cut in half, but the number of PR executives has gone up threefold, creating a six-to-one ratio of bullshit spin to actual supervision or regulation, as resulted in private power co-opting the government, as opposed to the government being a countervailing force. And the reality is we have a series of small number of companies that are aggregating all the spoils

while no one else can compete. The categories growing fastest in our economy, tech hardware, search, social media, e-commerce, get the least seed funding because no one wants to compete with a monopoly. And so I don't think you break these guys up because they're necessarily evil. I have a lot of friends at these companies. Amazon is the largest recruiter out of my class. I'm economically secure because I invested in these companies. But the one thing the government always gets right is antitrust, or typically. There was huge arguments around not bringing AT&T up. They're the only ones with the capital to make the requisite investments in hardline phones and sell. Bullshit. We broke them up. All of the seven or the nine baby bells 10 years later were all worth more than the

original AT&T. We absolutely need to go in there and oxygenate the economy, get more venture capital, more business startup, more taxation, more employment. The only person that typically loses, the only stakeholder that loses in a breakup is typically the CEO who wants to sit on the iron throne of Westeros versus one of the seven realms. So it is time to oxygenate the economy. I think regulation is important. I think Tim Wu is a gangster here. Tristan has done amazing work showing how they have leveraged addiction to move further down our brainstem to get us, I mean, absolutely wed to these things. I'm addicted to Twitter and it enrages me and depresses me, and I'm 100% addicted to it, but I can modulate it. When my son comes home and asks me to post his handstand on YouTube, and then we go to the beach,

and we're boogie boarding, and I see him say, can we go home? And I'm like, why do you want to go home? We're having such a great time. He goes, I want to see how many likes I got on YouTube. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs

and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.