The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Moral Illusions

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

Sam Harris joins Scott to discuss current economic constructs, America’s failure to lead during the pandemic, and what’s to come on the other side of this crisis. Harris also shares ways to live a more thoughtful and open life. This week’s Office Hours cover the long term effects of the stimulus packages, the future of voice technology, and the critical need for socialization during K-12 education.   Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, and author of five New York Times best sellers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Episode 10. Remember what a big deal turning 10 was? Birthdays in general, but 10 was real. 10 was a march into teenage years. It meant that you were exiting whatever childhood was. It meant that the merch, the gifts were going to probably get a little bit better,

a little bit better. You started getting things like cash. Occasionally, your parents would let you watch a PG-13. And then when mom was out of the house, an R-rated movie. I'm projecting right there because my parents were divorced by the time I was eight. Painful story. Scarred me the rest of my life. Thanks, Dad. Anyways, 10. This episode is not as important, but it is episode 10, and it's important in one sense that I think this is our best interview ever, and we've crowded out a lot of room for this interview and are cutting out some of the other stuff we typically do, and are just going to do office hours and then bust into our interview with Sam Harris, philosopher, neuroscientist, and a legitimate philosopher

and neuroscientist, has undergraduate and doctorates in those fields. He's also the author of five New York Times bestsellers. I was on his podcast several weeks ago because I'm kind of a big deal, kind of a big deal. And this guy is a scary blue flame thinker. And he has one of those tricks, and I don't know if he does it, where he has this very like warming lullaby voice. And he speaks very slowly, Scott. And you just sort of hang on his every word, but his words are very thoughtful. My sense is he really kind of looks at issues and wrestles them. Anyways, I just thought this was one of our better, if not best interviews that I've been

involved in a long time. So we wanted to give it its full purchase. So before we get started, a quick reminder, as I whore myself out in linear podcasting or nonlinear podcasting. Tonight, our third episode of No Mercy, No Malice TV show on Vice TV. Tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Aswath Damodaran, who I think is the best teacher in the world talking about markets and if they're overvalued or not. We'll also be talking about media and dating in a post-COVID world. And I'll be doing a rant on the biggest unlock, which we've talked about here, and that is Amazon's vaccination of their supply chain. So with that, with that, let's bust right into office hours. Here we go. Here we go. First question. Hey, Prof G, Ryan Conda here,

calling in from Salt Lake City, Utah. I wanted to ask you a question around all these stimulus packages. So there's a lot of numbers being thrown around, a lot of trillions of dollars. You highlighted it a little bit in a previous podcast, but ultimately, what does this mean for our kids and grandkids? Can you just really print trillions and trillions of dollars? What are the long-term effects from it? Everybody's talking about the short-term and saving the economy in the short-term. I don't understand what happens long-term. Please set some light on that, or at least what your two cents are in terms of how does

this affect us long-term? Thanks. So Ryan from Salt Lake, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you are Mormon, that you're a white Mormon dude living in Salt Lake and that you're a good skier. Unbelievable, inappropriate stereotypes. I feel triggered. By the way, by the way, I fucking love Mormons. I was raised by a single mother and the Church of Latter-day Saints in Westwood took me in. My best friend Brett is or was and is a Mormon, and he and I hung out. I played on their sports teams, and they were nothing but wonderful and generous to me.

And I found that a focus on family and an absence of alcohol and a focus on sports and country and success and education, that there's this cartoon of Mormons on cable TV of being polygamous and strange. And I'm sure that that is a part of it. But the part I was subjected to were these incredibly generous, gracious, loving people. So Ryan, anyways, no idea if you're Mormon. I'm making an assumption because you live in Salt Lake. But anyway, that's not your question. The stimulus package. I think the stimulus package should be more accurately called a hate crime against future generations. because money, if you think about it, is nothing but a transfer of work and time from one entity to the other. If I give you money, I'm effectively reducing the amount of time and work you need to apply to other means of getting the requisite funds to buy food, et cetera. It's a transfer

of time and work. And we have decided that we want our kids and grandkids to spend less time with their kids to have less free time such that we can flatten the curve of rich people here. It is outrageous in my viewpoint what is going on. This is Madoff times 2000. They didn't want to put Representative Katie Porter on the oversight committee of the Democrats. Why? Representative Porter brings this incredible attribute called math to their oversight. We're going to find out that this was an enormous abuse of the commonwealth. The impact supposedly, and I don't fully understand this, I was a graduate student instructor in micro and macroeconomics, but I still don't fully understand how you can print this much

money and not have inflation. What you do have is asset inflation, but product prices are going down, which holds inflation kind of steady. But at some point when the interest on our debt, if interest holds inflation steady. But at some point, when the interest on our debt, if interest rates go up, and at some point they will, supersedes everything else in terms of discretionary spending. Right now, the interest payments on our debt are greater than the cost of our military. Then it crowds out all discretionary spending and all spending and investment we can make in things like infrastructure or education, and you end up with a shitty society. Or you end up like Japan, where it doesn't grow for 20 or 30 years. When I went to

business school, graduate institutions are the ultimate luxury item. Who could afford the luxury item in the early 90s? Japanese. 20% of my business school class were kids from Japan. Now, 20% of the class, or 11% of the class actually at NYU Stern, are Chinese nationals because they are printing money. They're killing it. And Japan has been in sort of recession, stagflation, whatever you want to call it, low growth for 20 years or 30 years. And we might be doing that by borrowing money against the future, potentially setting ourselves up for reckless deficits. So I find it an absolute, I find it criminal. Now the economic impact, we'll see. If it saves us from a depression,

you could argue that it was worthwhile. I think we could have saved us from a depression with a lot less reckless spending than this, a lot more effective spending, specifically putting money in the hands of households. But the fear, Ryan, the fear is this results in inflation and such extraordinary debt, it crowds out the type of investments we need to maintain our culture of innovation. And that is investments in infrastructure, investments in innovation, investments in research. Thank you for the call, Ryan. Love the Mormons. Love the Mormons. Next question. Hey, Scott. Deb here in Toronto. Big fan. Thanks for all that you do. Got a question for you. So you've spoken a lot about new investments

in the home due to more work from home, live from home, exercise from home, be at home, whatever life situation. So I buy a fancier TV, a nicer couch, whatever. What do you think happens with the smart home? The smart home had huge market promise a few years ago, and the reality hasn't exactly panned out. Some tech one-offs have done well in smart access, smart thermostats, smart speakers, but the grand vision of a smart home, a connected, intelligent home, never really emerged. Do you think that this new surge of focus on the home might enable new investments in the smart home, or will people be satisfied with basic consumer home improvements? I guess my question is, are there any key new use cases powered by a smart connected home that are now valuable as we shift

more of our professional and social lives home? And if so, do you think that the tech giants will once again focus on the smart home? Thank you. Deb from Toronto, a very thoughtful question. So I would push back and I would say the future of this smart hub home brought to you by IBM or Cisco or all these shitty little bucket shop companies control for and all this shit that has confused your home. And if you buy a nice home, you pay some what's called a trunk slammer to come and wire your house for a hundred grand such that he has to come out every two weeks because the fucking thing doesn't work. And I speak from experience here. I think it's happening, but I think the smart hub is now brought to you by Amazon specifically Alexa. And that is, I think

voice is taking over the home and is the smart hub or the hub is in the cloud, if you will, and Alexa is the agent for it in the home. And if you think about this, there's been very few missteps on the part of Apple, probably their biggest misstep of the last 20 years was ceding voice to Alexa. The home is so dramatically important for the reasons you talked about. We're spending more time at home.

We're going to spend more money in our home, more work at home. But it's really the thing that's unique about the home is it's the only place where our smartphone is not a fifth appendage. And that is our digital interface to the world is not through our smartphone, but it is going to be through our voice. We don't walk around with a phone in our pocket typically at home or in our hand, but we're starting to see voice permeate into all kinds of other areas. And you could see how this will be kind of the helm of the bobsled for healthcare. Alexa, get me an appointment at a dermatologist. Alexa, around food ordering, leaving town for two weeks, stop all grocery delivery, Alexa, dinner party for eight. One is a vegan. As of the second quarter of 2019,

US smart speaker ownership rose to 76 million and about two thirds of US households now have a smart device or a voice device. We're starting to see payments and the market is supposed to be about $620 billion. So the same size as groceries. So US grocery is about to be the same size as your smart home. So smart home is booming, Deb. I think Alexa is the early winner. Amazon has more open job positions in their voice group than Google does at all of its firm, which gives you a sense of the kind of staggering investment that Amazon is trying to make in voice. I mean, Amazon, it just blows my mind, whether it's cloud, whether it's e-commerce, and oh, the technology of the future, voice, they're number one. So it's only going to get bigger from here. And if I were

coming out of college or an investor, I would be trying to figure out a million different ways to get into the voice ecosystem. Deb from Toronto. Love the Canadians. Love the Canadians. Next question. Hey, Scott. My name is Scott, and I'm one of your Canadian friends up in Calgary, Alberta. I've heard your takes on the changes to education and how distance learning could become more popular because of COVID-19. But are we overlooking the critical socialization that happens in schools? How do we create these opportunities for socialization while moving to a more digital education delivery model? Wow, that's a big one.

All right. Thank you, Scott from Calgary, another Canadian. So it depends on what you're talking about. Socialization for K through 12 is paramount. I have two sons and one of them is struggling, is not living his best life right now. And I think a lot of it has to do with the lack of socialization, that he really misses his friends at school and misses some of the boundaries and behavioral modification that being around other kids sort of trains. And I worry that a lot of kids are at home and their development has been stunted or arrested, cauterized, whatever fancy word I can say.

So I think it's a big deal, K through 12. And I think it's part of the reason that majority, unlike most universities, which I do not believe will open in person, I do think you're seeing K-12 schools, as they are in France, reopen. And they're enduring a certain amount of infection. Supposedly, France has already identified 60 COVID-19 infections from the reopening of schools, but it basically said it's worth it. We're going to be doing a lot of those measurements around what level of infection is worth it. And I think school, K through 12 opening, most societies are going to decide that it's worth it. There was such a really jarring image of these beautiful French kids in a classroom, all with a mask and a face shield on. And you just thought, wow, that was just jarring about what this has come to. It was so sad. And then all I had to do was think about, okay, there's that. And then French kids who are 18 or 19, whatever it was seven years ago, were put in uniform to go dodge bullets or not.

So I guess it's all a matter of perspective. And we'll get used to this and this too shall pass. But the socialization is hugely important. At the college level, the socialization is a bit of a luxury item. And that is people who have cars and can drink and can get around are going to socialize. They're going to understand technology. They'll figure it out on their own, but it won't be a safe or joyous or fun place to socialize as at the Rose Bowl when I watched UCLA beat USC or go to parties or in the dorms. Unfortunately,

I think that's going to become a bit of an accoutrement of wealthy people. I think there'll be certain universities that put in place the protocols and the distancing and have the resources for the traditional fall leaves, dead poet society-like experience. But the real damage here, and then we got to think about a socialization among our younger students, and I think they will get that as we decide to send them back because the risks are worth it. Universities are going to be hugely disrupted because the experience part will be severely diminished, which will lend people to focus on the education part. And what we are realizing via Zoom is that

the education has been vastly overrated. So socialization, hugely important. We'll get back there with K through 12. The experience will be likely diminished and catalyze greater scrutiny at universities, which is going to result in enormous disruption at the university level. Strive is so long-winded. Go Canada! We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you,

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Ready, set, grow. Go to constantcontact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to constantcontact.ca for your free trial. Constantcontact.ca. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover We love your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. We love your questions. If you'd like to submit one, please email a voice recording to officehours at section4.com. And now on to Sam Harris, wrestles complex issues down to the ground. This is our best interview yet.

Sam, where do we find you? I am at home, hunkered down for, what is this, month number three? Let's bust right into it. Post-corona, when you think about nations, economic constructs, and norms, who do you think are the biggest winners and losers, or where are the biggest changes going to register in our society post-corona? Well, I think the biggest loser, I mean, I guess this could be a symptom of my being too close to the problem, but the biggest loser is the United States at the moment. I mean, when you just look at the utter failure to help lead the world out of this crisis, I mean, we're the most conspicuous case of just ineptitude in the face of the crisis. We had,

conservatively, we had a full month to prepare. We really had probably two to prepare. We knew this was coming. Even if you're going to be generous and say this wasn't clear until the end of January, it was absolutely clear then. And we spent February just bickering over politics and trying to relearn basic facts of epidemiology. And we watched the complete implosion of our institutions and institutions that you wouldn't think would be vulnerable to implosion and would stand totally above the fray

of politics, like the CDC. I mean, the CDC still can't get its act together. We still have Dr. Birx, who's running the COVID task force, and she's another one of these characters who, for whatever her virtues previously, she seems to have come into Trump's orbit. She's losing, it seems, integrity and gravitas by the second, which happens to everyone in Trumpistan. But she's saying she can't trust anything that comes out of the CDC. I mean, this is just astonishing that we're in this situation. So, yeah, I would put the U.S. as the place we really need to understand what happened here. I mean, you know, once we have the luxury of being able to look back and do a postmortem on it. But it's quite alarming how fully we failed to perform here on every level.

What do you think are the long-term, are there scars? Is this an opportunity for reflection? What happens? Let's buy into your notion, and I think most people do, that we did not handle this well. What impact does that have on us? What are the unlocks that might be waiting for us as we come to grips with some of the ugly truths here? Or does this just permanently scar us and kind of signal the end of that beacon on a hill, if you will? Well, everything depends on what we do from now on. There are obviously some very important dates on the calendar. And what we do in November around the election is of enormous significance. If we double down on Trump, despite who he is and who we know him to be and the last few years and the last few months, how he's handled this crisis, that will be one

world. That'll be a very different world than one in which we don't reelect him because we recognize the gravity of the risk, you know, his incompetence, you know, if nothing else, imposes on all of us. You know, it's just a massive question mark. I think we have a real opportunity here to create a new social contract and to recognize that there are whole parts of our society that need a significant overhaul. And, you know, we need to create a digital infrastructure Manhattan project that two years out, we could look back and say, well, this was an enormous opportunity and we seized it and we rectified many problems that were problems already. And this just hastened the coming wave of political discontent and forced us to deal with things like wealth inequality, et cetera. But I'm worried we're not going to be able to do it because political partisanship and social media and just the ubiquitous distrust in institutions like, you know, the media at the

moment, this has shattered our shared reality. We just don't share a reality now. And it certainly hasn't helped that the left, I mean, so you have, you know, two ends of this spectrum, obviously. I mean, you have what, you know, pornographers like Rupert Murdoch and Alex Jones and Trump himself have done to our public conversation. And the harm has been enormous and all the lies and the conspiracy theories, they just make our situation very precarious. But the left for its part, and by left here, I don't mean the extreme left. I mean, even the New York Times has become unhinged in its own way. And this, you know, we have this new religion of wokeness that has made real journalism very hard to protect. And, you know, I feel like I'm, you know, we're watching Notre Dame burn. And the right is busy swapping in gasoline for water in the hoses, and the left

is complaining that there are not enough women or people of color in the fire department. And I mean, it's not quite the same error, but both sides are making it almost impossible to marshal an intelligent response to very real problems. You talked about certain sectors, there's an opportunity for overhaul. Where would you start? Give us some example of sectors that require an overhaul and what do you mean by that? Well, we're just encountering, and again, I don't have any special privilege access to this. I'm just reading the news like most people, but it is just astounding that we just haven't fully modernized. I mean, you and I spend a lot of time noticing what Silicon Valley does, and it's very easy to sense that we've made much more progress than we have. But when you look

at just the computer infrastructure of institutions like the CDC, right? I mean, it's clearly, this is not being run like Google or Facebook or any, you know, actually high-tech, you know, profitable company. It's just, we just have not invested in a 21st century infrastructure. I mean, the fact that we can't even produce cotton swabs at this point when we need them suggests that so many things are broken. So this has been a stress test that we have failed. I mean, with the fact that we can't figure out

how to get money to people in a way more sophisticated and more timely than mailing them checks once they show us their tax returns, right? I mean, it's just, we're not even targeting the right people. So we need to think this through really from, you know, the studs inward. And it does strike me as a massive opportunity if we could get out of our own way and stop. I mean, the only way to seize the opportunity, obviously, is to be able to talk about a shared set of facts, right? We have to acknowledge the same reality. And if we can't actually have a conversation about what's happening in the world, it's very hard to see how

we converge on real solutions. And that's on the most basic level, our conversation is failing. And obviously, I locate Trump at the center of that bottleneck, but the problem is also far larger than just him. If we try to go to the root cause or one of the root causes, despite pandemics having killed more people than wars or violence. We've delegitimized and defunded our government institutions. Isn't it the very root of this that you get the government and the institutions you deserve? Haven't we sort of lost the script in terms of human and financial capital allocation? Don't we need a fundamental rethink around what's important and how we allocate capital? Isn't that a decent place to start? Yeah.

And we need to understand how difficult that is to do or how badly placed we are to feel the need to do that. I mean, we are social primates that harbor some rather obvious biases. And they're the biases that we can only correct for once we recognize them and recognize how non-optimal they are. I mean, so for instance, we heavily discount the significance of the future, you know, our future, even our own future. So we heavily discount the well-being of our future selves, but we discount the well-being of our children in the future. We heavily discount the well-being of people who are far away from us, just physically far away in space, as though that had any ethical significance. And pandemics are also just much harder for us to marshal an emotional response to because we're talking about an invisible threat as opposed to something that we can see and really intuitively understand the physics of. not intuitive that this invisible thing that's, you know, whatever it is, one four hundredth the

width of a human hair can, you know, spell the difference between you being able to breathe and not. So we know we're badly placed to respond to this kind of thing. And when you're asking people to make significant sacrifice, you know, or at least perceived sacrifice on, you know, on some level, it's just, these are just numbers that, you know, people don't have a strong feeling about. But when you're saying we need to spend, you know, an order of magnitude more, you know, every year to prepare for this, what seems like a hypothetical threat is asking a lot of people who are, you who are captivated by the one story that has an identifiable protagonist, right? They don't really care about hundreds of thousands of people suffering a specific fate, but they really do care about a little girl or boy who gets stuck up in a tree or falls down a well. And so we just know that our emotional hardware is really badly coupled to our ability to reason effectively about how we should prioritize risk. And we just have to figure out how to correct for that.

And people can't reliably correct for that on a minute-by-minute basis within their own lives. We have to correct for it in a kind of sidebar conversation we have with ourselves and then enshrine that wisdom into our laws and our tax codes and our institutions. So we don't have to rethink it, or at least our rethinking of it happens at the level of, you know, serious, sober people bringing to bear the best arguments and the best data on each one of these topics. We're just not in that spot most of the time. And on social media, we're almost never in that spot. And we have a president who doesn't even know that spot exists. And so our public conversation about risk and priorities and what is happening in the world and what is likely to happen is at a level that is just tracking facts almost by

accident. Do you think there might be opportunity? Let's take Alex Jones as an example. His message resonates with X number of people, but because it is so inflammatory and creates so much rage, which translates to engagement for a platform and their business model is based on engagement, which backward integrates to content that is rage-worthy. Thereby, Facebook has an economic interest in taking that content that registers traction of X and amplifying it for him. Do you think that we would both respect First Amendment rights? We would give people the audience they deserve instead of the audience they're getting because they're enraging people and put in place some sort of taxation system or some sort of mandate around a business model where we'd say, okay, we respect First Amendment rights, but we

don't respect companies or we're going to tax companies that have this omission or these omissions or these emissions or these externalities where they are giving the most outrageous, the most enraging content, more oxygen than they have earned on the merits of their own ideas. Do you think there's a potential solution in there? Yeah, well, I do think most of what ails us is a story of bad incentives, right? If we can work out the incentives, we have canceled most of what seems to be wrong with human nature. And so, yeah, I mean, you've just hit upon what I really

put at the bottom of most of our digital problems, which is the advertising model and the bad incentives it sets up. So yeah, I think the principle of clickbait and the need for even the most respectable organs of journalism to rely to some degree, I mean, even if they have subscribers, they're still rowing in two boats and trying to extract as much ad revenue as possible in most cases.

I think that need has created the truly perverse incentive, which, as you say, has led to amplifying messages that shouldn't be amplified and just keeping the outrage machine running. So yeah, I do think that ultimately, if we have a healthy internet at some point, it will be because we have recognized that on some level you get what you pay for and the Netflix model wins over the Facebook model. But again,

the path from here to there is going to be bumpy. So imagine Trump gets reelected. Where do you think we are in two to three years? Where do you think America's position in the world is? Where do you think the notion of a liberal democracy, and when I say liberal democracy, I don't mean progressive, but the purposeful insertion of institutions that are meant to slow us down? Have you thought through different scenarios? Well, in truth, it's almost too depressing to think about. I think if we reelect him, we will have put, on some level, the final nail in the coffin on American influence in the world. I mean, we will just have told the rest of civilized humanity to go fuck itself and declared ourselves masochists and sadists simultaneously with respect to the most important problems humanity faces.

We were basically saying, all right, we don't care about climate change. We don't even believe in climate change. And even if we did, we care more about 75,000 coal miners than we care about the billions of people who will suffer its impacts first and worst. Every other problem of consequence, both those we know about or should know about or should have known about, like the problem of emerging pandemics, the wars we may be tempted to fight in the near term. It seems fairly clear that we're stumbling into a cold war, at least with China. So what kinds of minds do you want to have in charge when it comes time to wonder whether we're now in a shooting war or soon to be in a shooting war with China. Putting Trump and the kinds of people he attracts into his orbit in charge for all of that a second time, the sky's the limit

on how bad that could all get. But I think it'll just be clear, I think, to the rest of the world that they have lost their main collaborator. when Trump came on board, we were the lone superpower. Now we're seeing the rise of China in several ways. At least it's, you know, it's aspiring to challenge our status as a superpower. It's certainly challenging our influence in many ways. And we're in a kind of Thucydides trap with them, or at least there's concern that we are. You have this weakening power, which is us, and a rising power. And as Graham Allison points out in his book by that title, history is fairly gloomy with respect to the range of

outcomes there. So again, having a dangerously selfish and unethical and almost supernaturally dishonest imbecile in charge for a second term, given the kinds of challenges we face, and given that his track record has only been to alienate our friends and to embolden our enemies. I mean, just doubling down on that is an error, a political error of such catastrophic proportions. I have no idea what the world looks like in a few years if we do that. It's really just awful. I am definitely a half glass empty kind of guy. And I think you're more right in the middle, at least when I listen to your podcast. Do you think there's opportunity for a younger generation, the Gen Z millennials who are supposed to be so fragile that they are observing what's going on here and might see the cooperation and that our superpowers of species being cooperation and that pandemics don't care about border walls? Do you think we might be maturing a generation that approaches problems differently? I don't know if I would think of it in terms of those cohorts.

I mean, I guess I'm not, I don't feel in touch enough with each of them to generalize about how they might meet this challenge. But I do worry if you put in those terms, I worry that there's a, there's just a pervasive lack of respect for institutions and institutional knowledge and the kind of conversation we need to have with ourselves, you know, both in the present and with respect to the past and future. I mean, there's no group of human beings that can get a lot of things done, right? I mean, you know, any group of thousand mean, there's no group of human beings that can get a lot of things done, right? I mean, any group of thousand people, it's still hard to get much of anything that

civilization requires done. If we reboot successfully, it will be because we have modernized our institutions to a degree that they're agile enough and they're wise enough to respond to whatever our top 10 problems really are, not just what deranged people might think they are, right? So, you know, we have to get the religious fundamentalists sidelined for these important conversations, and we have to get the wokeness police sidelined. And we need, you know, just to actually have honest conversations about real risk and what it's going to take to mitigate it. And so, I mean, you know, forget it. We're in the middle of a pandemic that is cratering the global economy. Just look at this as an opportunity cost, right? What are all the problems that have not gone away, that were still enormous problems

in December before anyone outside of China had heard of this novel coronavirus, all these problems are still here. I mean, the problem of, you know, I've got a few podcasts I recorded on the threat of nuclear war that I haven't even released because, you know, who wants to hear about nuclear war right now? But I'm sitting on two hours of conversation with William Perry, who has never been more worried about the threat of us having an accidental nuclear war. I mean, this is like, in his world, we're in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, essentially, and no one has the bandwidth to even think about it. It's amazing the situation we're in and what is actually taking up our

bandwidth in terms of our public conversation. And so I don't have an answer for you, much less a hopeful one, but there is no, in principle, there is no limit to how creatively and intelligently we could respond to these problems. I mean, the only barrier is honest reflection and conversation and a sorting out of our priorities. I mean, we have all of the intellectual resources we need to solve our problems. And if we don't have them right now, we can get them. You know, the final chapter of human progress is not only not written, it's not even imagined. We seem capable of dropping the baton, right? I mean, if you look at human history as a relay race of sorts where, you know, each generation

passes the baton to the next and we keep racing into a future of, you know, again, unimaginable progress, right? I mean, there's just no telling how good things could get for us if we sort out our norms and shore up our politics and let science do its thing and just celebrate human ingenuity and creativity in a context of real political freedom and collaboration. There is no limit to how good things can get. We're on the cusp of something here. I mean, we're living through a time. It's a unique time. It's a time where we do have the capacity to ruin everything. Now, that was not true 100 years ago. 100 years ago, no one had the capacity to ruin everything.

As our technology gets more and more powerful and we don't get commensurately more wise, we get into this unhappy bottleneck where the risk of us screwing up everything is growing and we seem to have regressed. And we find ourselves in the middle of a vast psychological experiment with things like social media, where we're just rolling the dice with new ways of interacting, where the outcome of the experiment is completely uncertain. Right. this period. But on the other side of it, I'm incredibly optimistic about what awaits us if we navigate this precipice well in the next two decades, say. But this seems like a very important year. I mean, there's no question. So let's talk about that important year. And do you or have you run across any of your guests that you feel have had some novel ideas, big or small, a service core, a rethinking of tax structure, a decision to never go back to the emissions levels we were at, any small or big ideas that you think we should be actively considering, trusting that the world isn't what it is, it's what we make of it coming out of this? Well, there are many things in the air here that surround the problem of wealth inequality and

its political consequences, which more and more, long before COVID, I was beginning to worry about wealth inequality. Just when is it that it will become politically and ethically unsustainable in our society? And I'm concerned that this pandemic will accentuate the problem before it resets it somehow. And there are ways to reset it that can be incredibly painful and there are ways to reset it

that I think could inspire everyone. And obviously we need to find that other path. So yeah, for instance, I was speaking to this Yale professor, Daniel Markovits, about meritocracy. He's got this book, The Meritocracy Trap. I haven't released that podcast yet, but it's coming. And he's just putting into question the whole notion of meritocracy. It's a fairly deep criticism of just what's happening and what has been happening for now many decades in higher education and the way in which it has become a machine for accentuating inequality and the need to reset some of our

norms there. And yeah, I do think that if we can't get to a place where most of us feel like they have skin in the game and they have an upside for the success of our society, if we can't get there, I just don't see how we solve any of these other problems. And so inequality and the perceived lack of opportunity, even where it may exist, insofar as it seems not to exist, that's the nearest pain point I think we need to come out of this crisis having solved. Yeah, it feels as if one of the most disappointing things, and we knew the numbers, but to see it happen is especially jarring that in the wealthiest nation in the world, half our population can't go 30, 60, much less 90 days without a paycheck, without feeling food insecure. You just think, well, how did we get here?

How did it happen such that people are living on such a razor's edge in the wealthiest economy or in the wealthiest country in history. Is there an opportunity? So I've been thinking a lot about education. Is there an opportunity that we might see the rivers of the flight out of private schools? You're in Los Angeles, right, Sam? So Windward, Westlake, Harvard,Westlake, these private schools have seen... I went to university high school, a public high school in West Los Angeles. I was there in the late 70s when we started busing and integration and basically any white kid with wealthy parents left. And it started, I think, a downward spiral of a lack of empathy and kind of set the stage

for a continued or greater casting of our society. Is there an opportunity that if we're relegated to Zoom classes, that people might decide at $48,000 a year, whatever, when we're to Harvard-Westlake charges for Zoom classes, that there might be a reversion to public schools? Because if you're going to get mediocre Zoom classes for your 15-year-old, you might as well pay free versus $48,000. Is there an opportunity that we might see the rivers of flight of not only financial capital, but human engagement from the public school system where income classes and demographic groups mixed,

which has, I think you would agree, a lot of benefit, could we see a huge reinvestment in our public schools? Well, I would certainly hope so. I mean, I think just a first principles approach to this could have landed us here long ago. I mean, we have to get to the point where we realize that there is nothing more important than education, right? And, you know, the right, then the question is, you know, what is the right kind of education? But the idea that teaching kids is a low status job and a low wage job in our society, I mean, that's just, that is the founding travesty here, right, that begets so many other problems. And we need to figure out how to flip this situation where it is a highly competitive, coveted job attracting some of the most talented people in our society.

And, you know, I don't know how we get there, but the idea that there's so little investment made in education, and it's not to say that we don't spend a lot of money on it, but the money we spend seems to be spent terribly in many cases. So there's real opportunity for innovation. But yeah, your initial comment is about just how close people are to being in extremis here financially. One of the details that was shocking to come out of the first weeks of lockdown was that the real problems in closing schools is not the fact that we will then be failing to educate kids or educate them well thereafter, is that having schools open is the only thing that guarantees a significant number of kids a decent meal that day in our society. The way we think about inequality and try to correct for it, I mean, the place, clearly the place to correct for it is not at the, you know, the Harvard admissions meeting, right, where they're trying to figure out who to let in and how to let in more people who have been socially disadvantaged for the last 18 years. Clearly, we need resources to come in earlier and at the earliest point.

What we run into, though, among wealthy people, and this is in Silicon Valley and anywhere else know, anywhere else really where wealth has concentrated, is a fundamental distrust of government doing anything right, right? So it's like, why should I pay more taxes if, you know, the government's just going to essentially burn up the money in a bonfire or, you know, buy, you know, $4,000 toilet seats or, you know, keep teachers who are completely incompetent employed for the rest of their lives. I understand that skepticism or that despair, but the answer to that is not for the rich people to keep all of their money and to shave off a tiny percentage of it for philanthropy. The answer is better government, right? I mean, there are certain problems that only government can respond to, and it can't be a matter of a few billionaires riding into the rescue. I mean, we need effective government. Certainly, if the pandemic has taught us anything,

it should have taught us that. And for all the good Bill Gates is doing, Bill Gates is not a replacement for the CDC, right? We need an effective CDC. So all the people who read too much of Ayn Rand need to understand that there are certain things the market can't do for us. And I mean, obviously anything that the market can do best, we want it to do best and let's privatize the hell out of all of those occasions. But there are clearly places where there is no substitute for an effective government, and we need to fund that government. And our allergy to redistribution is going to have to be cured here in the near term. You had a great podcast where you talked about the economy and the price we're willing to pay to reopen the economy.

Give us your viewpoint there. Well, I mean, there are certain moral illusions here that people are not correcting for. So the people who are most galled by the lockdown, people who just think this is insane, we have overreacted to this problem. COVID was a problem or is a problem, but the cure is now much worse than the disease. The people who are in that camp are almost invariably making a false comparison. They're making a comparison between what the economy is like based on the lockdown and what the economy was like before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. That's not how to run the counterfactual. The two states of the world you have to compare is lockdown and what would have happened if we had not locked down at all, right? And just let this virus burn through our population. This is the pandemic paradox that many of us foresaw, but it has absolutely no

rhetorical force to point this out. The people who are looking outside their windows saying, look, only 80,000 people have died. This has been massively exaggerated as a problem. We were hearing that it might be a million or 2 million people dead. Well, 80,000 people have died with us locking society down to the degree that we have, right? The projections of a million dead, certainly at the time we had them, were not at all far-fetched. And the truth is, they're still not far-fetched if we just open everything up and let this thing roll through us. So the fact that we can't get to a ground truth with respect to the case fatality rate here is another alarming fact. But at no point has it been rational to believe that COVID-19 is just the flu. And it's still not rational to believe that.

And the people who think we could have just not locked down or which could have opened up much earlier and all of our economic problems are just a self-inflicted wound because we overreacted. They're just not thinking about what society would be like and may in fact be like in the coming months when you have just an explosion of disease and people don't want to go to restaurants, right? You're free to go to a restaurant, but nobody in their right mind wants to eat in one because, you know, no meal in even the best restaurant in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco is worth rolling the dice on whether you're going to wind up on a ventilator for it. And that's, you know, so that's the situation we've been in all this time and we're still in it. And again, we're hamstrung by our inability

to converge on a shared understanding of the basic facts of epidemiology. And we have the pedal to the metal, it seems, on producing vaccines. So, you know So hopefully we'll break a record. But the fact that we are so far behind other developed societies like Australia and New Zealand and South Korea and Singapore around just being able to live more normally and test and trace assiduously, I mean, that's just a society-wide embarrassment and politics has a lot to do with it.

It definitely feels as if we're having two pandemics. We have the CNN and New York Times pandemic where we're not supposed to leave our houses until there's a vaccine. And then we have the Fox News pandemic where we're supposed to stop by the pub on the way to work. It does feel as if there's a lack of nuance and a lack of recognition that the strategy for Montrose reopening might be different than the

one for Manhattan. It feels like there's just no shades of gray here. You're a neuroscientist and a philosopher. Where do you find comfort when you, you know, what eases your pain? Well, as you know, you know, meditation is something that I've spent a lot of time, you know, practicing and focusing on. And, you know, we spoke about this on my podcast and, you know, I have a meditation app that I'm putting a lot of my resources into at the moment. And I mean, this experience, again, it's such a weird thing to have acclimated to it because it is such a strange experience we're all collectively going through. And it's, you know, it's not one thing. People are having very different experiences. You know, this respect to health and our finances and our social fabric.

Everything is up in the air. And so, you know, I have found really by sheer good luck that the kinds of things I've been paying attention to for many decades, you know, things like meditation and just thinking about what it takes to live a life that you don't regret, you know, that you don't regret at the end of your life, but that you don't regret at the end of any given day, right, where each day feels well lived. That's where my head has been for quite some time. You know, all of that is really paying off for me now. And so, I mean, it's not to say that I haven't been pushed around a little bit here, but I've been, you know, happily pushed in the direction of feeling like I just want to walk my talk even more, you know, in my personal life, in my relationships, as a father, as, you know, someone who's philanthropically engaged with the world. I mean, just, you mean, just supporting causes that are not just important to me,

but just obviously important. And doing that in ways that corrects for the vagaries of my own compassion. When I decide something is worth supporting, now I'm inclined to support it in a way where I don't have to depend on my waking up each day and still feeling the same, you know, vivid connection to that cause, right? I mean, the clearest case for me happened before COVID, but I've drawn some lessons from that. So I had the moral philosopher, Will McCaskill on my podcast, who's one of the people who started this movement we call effective altruism, which is a great fusion of kind of results-based managerial thinking and

ordinary philanthropy. I mean, they just look for what really works to save lives and mitigate human suffering in the world, and they kind of rank order all of those projects. And so he came on the podcast and he convinced me that some fairly unsexy causes are in fact the most important causes when you're talking about a return on investment in mitigating, you know, death, unnecessary death and human suffering. And one of the things at the top of the list was malaria mitigation. I mean just putting out bed nets to the people who can most use them in places like sub-Saharan Africa and bringing down the mortality from malaria from something like, it was like 2.2 million people a year dying not that many years ago. And now we're down to something like 500,000 or 600,000. And most of the people who die are kids and pregnant women from malaria. So I felt the ethical imperative of supporting that cause for the

duration of that conversation. But I recognize that I'm only human and that kind of inspiration has a half-life, right? And so why should the problem of malaria mitigation be dependent on me waking up each morning or each quarter once again inspired to help procure bed nets for people I will never meet? So in that case, I just automated my donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. month I give a significant chunk of money there, which is frankly more than I would give. It's definitely more than I would give if I had to decide each month anew, how much are you worried about malaria this month? I'm eager to correct for what are clearly software flaws in my own mind with whatever levers I can pull and automating certain things, that's a kind of lever. And so I'm just kind of thinking these things through more and more now because I, on some level, have more time to put my house in order. And so it feels like a very fertile period

ethically for me personally, because I just feel like I can straighten things out that should have been straightened out a long time ago. And so in that sense, I'm using the opportunity fairly well. Last question, Sam. Try to give us one piece of advice. When I say us, as a father and as a husband, what one piece of advice do you think or best practice would you want to share with other men that want to be better men, that want to share with other men that want to be better men, they want to be better husbands, they want to be better dads? I mean, some of the best advice or the wisest thoughts sound trite when you just articulate them, but when they're deeply felt or their implications are lived, they're not not tried at all and you know why we

have these aphorisms. But I continually rediscover this epiphany and it just matters each time. In your relationships with people, certainly the people you just referenced, I mean, the people who should be closest to you, your spouse, your kids. Your job really is just to love them, right? I mean, that's your fundamental job. It's not to change them, improve them, coerce them into doing what you think they should do to live better lives. I mean, obviously there's some guidance as a parent you need to worry about, right? You want to give them good information, but I just know I was in the situation with one of my daughters the other day where she was

in a state and it was a kind of thing that previously I could have been sucked into worrying about and reacting to from a place of actually just being worried, you know, worried about her, worried about, you know, how she was developing, worried about my responsibility to make sure she's developing well. Just feeling like there's a problem here that I need to fix. And the motive force behind, you know, fixing it had to be, you know, something like panic that we got to fix this, right? So there's a kind of urgency that, you know, would normally have come through there. And for some reason I was just, you know, I was just in a clearer headspace when I encountered her, you know, in the midst of this, this problem. And I just, I just recognized that all I really needed to do,

I mean, what she needed from me in that moment was just a completely non-coercive space that just communicates love, right? I mean, that's it. It was such a simple job. And I have failed at that so many times. And, you know, the difference was miraculous. I mean, the difference between just hugging her without any other message and what I would have likely done previously, it was just enormous. And so again, those are moments of kind of found wealth emotionally and ethically that are not just local to one's intimate relationships. But I'm just finding more and more of those in this context. And so again, if there's a silver lining here, I'm finding it in places like that.

So that registers in sort of a jarring way. One of my sons is struggling more with this than the other. And I immediately do a ton of research around finding the right child therapist and setting up a Zoom call and getting them out of nature. I immediately come up, I immediately see this as a problem that as a successful head of household, I will address on every angle and marshal resources and intelligence and Google searches. And there is no silver bullet here, but the first line of defense is just a love of more. I think that just feels right. Sam Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host. Sam, best to you and yours. Stay safe. Yeah. Thank you so much, Scott. Great to talk to you.

We trust you enjoyed our interview with Sam Harris. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, or subscribe. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week with another episode of The Prof G Show from Section 4 and Westwood One Podcast Network.