#204 with Jonathon Haight

Jonathan is a thinker I highly admire: I consider his book The Righteous Mind to be a life-changing read. So I was excited to see this episode. And I wasn’t disappointed, even though no new ground was broken or surprising ideas revealed. Because let's face it: in May of 2020, it's just nice just to occasionally hear two adults talking.

But lest you think I’m referring supporters of the orange baby-monster in the White House (actually, I was) I should note that Jon warned against the polarization not only of ideology but also of personality, which he thinks is more dangerous. So, okay, let me walk that back. Supporters of the orange baby-monster may not all be infantile in their cognitive ability.

In the past, Jon says people just fought over ideologies. But now we hate each other's lifestyles too: coastal elites hate the flyover deplorables, MAGA-cap wearers hate urban degenerates, etc.

True to his form, Jon points out more stirring psychological pitfalls. For instance, if you say “Trump is a corrupt liar,” that may be obvious to the people on your side, and incomprehensible that anyone would debate the point. But, amusingly, Jon says that all the other side has to do to disprove you is find something--one thing--he said that wasn’t a corrupt lie, and they'll think they've refuted you. Which I happen to know is true, at least with my own mother.

If you think this glorifies fuzzyheaded and obfuscating thinking, Jon cautions, remember that the alternative is to believe, as many intelligent people do, that the other side are all evil monsters who want to destroy humanity. That's obviously just stupid, so an explanation like Jon's has to have some merit.

On a non-Trump note, Jon also corrected his earlier claim that “screen time is bad for kids.” He amended it to “middle school girls should not be on Instagram.” In other words, he thinks it’s just fine for middle school or other boys to, say, play interactive video games a few hours a day. (Or even ten hours a day, according to my own middle-schooler.)

Jon's final words: follow the Buddhists and the great way: lose your judgmental partisanship and stop thinking that the other side is stupid and evil.

(But you still shouldn't vote for Trump!)

#205 with Daniel Markovits

I absolutely LOVED this episode. It covers one of the most pressing issues that, for me, loom as the one that may ultimately destroy America: the incipient American oligarchy.

My enjoyment was exponentially increased by the problem that I, as a resident of Silicon Valley, am increasingly concerned with: the myth of the meritocracy.

Here are some random observations during the course of this conversation that struck me as noteworthy:

The elite pay 15 times as much on pre-college education than the middle class. This creates an enormous obstacle to equality.

Poverty is falling, but we conversely have a growing gap between the merely rich and the super rich.

Most kids born in 1940 had an excellent chance of being richer than their parents. Most middle class kids born in 1980 have only a small chance of being richer than their parents. Only the 1% and those below poverty are likely to do better.

There is a moral insult to the erstwhile middle class that the reason you aren’t keeping up is because you aren’t good enough. So their life expectancy is actually decreasing... and it's happening overwhelmingly through their own self-harm: overeating, smoking, drugs and alcoholism.

I don’t understand why Daniel tries to make a distinction between the cost of living in San Francisco or New York versus--I don't know, say, Duluth--and pretend that some things are cheaper in San Francisco. Nothing is cheaper in San Francisco.

Daniel brings up a fascinating point that the elitist educational system helps train the meritocracy to invent things which only to further their socioeconomic class--open heart surgery for the super rich, and not a simple exercise device that the masses can consume. Or mortgage back derivatives for the upper 1% to invest in, and not a public financing device that might lift all boats.

Daniel points out the the tax break Princeton gets per student is $100k per student per year, whereas community college tax breaks is a tiny fraction of that.

Daniel suggests that Ivy League schools could double their enrollment and give opportunities to a wider spectrum of kids. However, my personal suspicion is that if Ivy League colleges doubled their enrollment tomorrow, the level of accepted applicants wouldn't drop by any noticeable level. My experience as the dad of a college freshman is that the extremely competitive level of kids on the waiting list were for all intents and purposes completely equal to those who made it in.

Daniel makes an interesting point that not all government services are so much less efficient in private industry. Consider, he says, the benefits to the average American household from paying $10,000 per year in taxes: they get police, fire, ambulance, roads, garbage, water, sewer, city planning, emergency care for indigenous, etc. etc. Now compare that to the cost of subscription to Comcast: $2000 per year, and they don’t even get a single TV show they like, plus crappy customer service.

I object to one flaw in this argument: the question isn’t how much some particular household pays into the tax roll, but rather how much is the total cost of government services per household. Even if they don't pay proportionately as much taxes per dollar earned, the wealthy do still pay more in taxes. They are subsidizing the rest of us by some amount. So maybe the true number is $20-$30k per houshold is what our government services cost. But it's still a valid arguement. As a businessman, I see ungodly tons of private money being flushed down drains every day.

Daniel thinks the lifelong rat race the super elite live might provide an incentive to change the system.

Ok, after that disconnected jumble of thoughts, here's my attempt at a Recap: The meritocracy system is working so well that it is very efficiently focusing wealth within the rich and super rich. If we don’t soon fix this, we will be soon be in a feudalistic society that will make 10th century China or Europe to look positively egalitarian in comparison. Even though we currently think nothing could be more egalitarian than a meritocracy.

No 201 with Yuval Noah Harari

Sam didn't book this fellow in order to talk about some particular issue with his trademark intensity and focus. This was more like one of his Paul Bloom conversations, where they just allow the conversation to wander as it will. And one get the sense that Yuval wasn't asked to be on as an "expert" in anything--AI or MeToo or whatever--but to just give his thoughtful take on larger picture trends. They mostly talk about wealth inequality, some limits of democracy, and the shifting roles of science and religion.

LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY
Yuval distinguishes between allowing “experts” to define the larger goals of society, versus asking experts to tell us the best plan to accomplish these goals.

Don’t ask the AMA how to respond to COVID, or NOAA how to to solve global warming. Instead, have a plebiscite and vote on the overall solution. Then, once you have agreed upon a goal--i.e. that you don’t want 5% to die--that is when you call in the experts and ask for the scientifically valid path to that goal.

One other point Yuval makes is that it has always been risky,throughout history, to allow the hoi polloi to vote democratically. But now for the first time in history our leaders have the technology to hack us and our desires (through google analytics etc) so we need to be vigilant about that.

SCIENCE V RELIGION
Yuval tells us that in the time of the Black Death, the king of France asked the best minds of the University of Paris what was causing the plague, and they put together a report saying the problem was astrological. So at least we're doing better than that, this time around.

Yuval points to three changes in our society thanks to modern medicine:

Number one. Because death is no longer an omnipresent phenomenon, we no longer incorporate the afterlife into modern philosophies. In other words, feminism, communism--they are not concerned about what happens after we die because we don’t have to answer that question on a daily basis anymore.

Number two. Because science has a good understanding of when somebody dies, we no longer accept an untimely death without objection and reaction--somebody is to blame

Number three. The role of religion is diminished in modern life, and we no longer ask our spiritual guides to heal us like we used to back in the time of Jesus and Mohammed and so on. "Religion was invented to find excuses, but science was invented to find solutions."

#203 with Kaitlyn Flanagan

This is an interesting new conversation that manages to avoid rehashing stuff that Sam and Kaitlyn have already gone over—they spend a fair amount of time talking about her stage-four cancer diagnosis and also the tweet that some doctor named Amitha Kalaichandran who posted about her which belied that doctor’s status as a contributor to the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, because the doctor plays her #WOC race card in an astoundingly tone-deaf way. And it’s not even correctly applied!

They also talk about Tara Reid and Joe Biden. Kaitlyn tries to make a very important solid point that we need to come up with something about Biden that will inspire people to vote FOR him and not merely AGAINST Trump, but unfortunately Sam doesn’t hear that very clearly, and it passes over.

They wander from there onto the larger question of “whither feminism” and some AP style manual update which says not to refer to the female lover of a married man as “his mistress” because that is archaic. Fortunately both Kaitlyn and Sam stand on the same side of that gate, which has probably most of the left and also the AP style manual playing the role of the barbarians.

Another Story Collection Available

Just a quick note to say that I'm releasing a new collection of thirteen stories entitled The Absent and the Dead. And, for a limited time, it's available for free as an e-book!
Here's a blurb from the back cover:
"Renowned poet Charles Joseph Albert brings you seventeen stories populated by ghosts, monsters and incompetent gods. From the dawn of man to the twilight of a life, from San Francisco to Kuala Lumpur to Uzhgorod, these stories of humor and imagination will transport you."

#196, The Science of Happiness--with Laurie Santos

This is one of those episodes which keeps me sending in the monthly financial contribution to the podcast—an excellent interview with practical, potentially life-changing information, from a guest I would never have heard of otherwise!

You may not find it quite as much of a revelation, if you find that you can predict much of the findings that his guest discusses. And I'll grant you that for the most part they make perfect sense and you find yourself thinking, "shoot, I probably would have said something very similar, if pressed." But in my mind, those ar ethe best kinds of truths to be exposed to--the kind you realize you should have been able to figure out for yourself. And, if perchance you had done so, then I congratulate you on your maximizing of your wellbeing.

This podcast doesn't get deep into the details of her ideas, and if that was what you wanted, you could probably skip the episode and go straight to Laurie Santos’s podcast, the Happiness Lab. Or you could go to the Yale website and download her classroom (I don’t know if it is free, though).

If on the other hand you're content to begin with a quick thumbnail sketch, then here is a very brief recap of nine points I took to be most important:

1. The level of happiness you experience is something that you can consciously affect.

2. You can measure two different kinds of happiness in your life: how happy you are at the moment (warm, well-fed, relaxed) versus how happy you are with what you are doing with your life, your purpose and your goals and what you take to be your meaning.

3. In general, people‘s happiness improves if they nurture and expand social connections, as opposed to isolating themselves.

4. People tend to derive more happiness and pleasure out of generosity (time, money, etc) to other people, rather than indulging themselves.

5. You can improve your happiness by exercises (such as meditation) to increase your sense of gratitude. T

6. Taking part in religious rituals can increase people’s happiness. (This one strikes me as problematic because I don’t believe in any of the major religions. But maybe we just need an agnostic church. Or maybe an agnostic can get the same beneficial effect by in some other tribal activity, such as volunteering in a soup kitchen.)

7. People’s intuitions about how to increase their happiness has been shown wrong in some common situations like whether to talk to a stranger while standing next to her in line--that usually gives a net increase in happiness, but people often avoid doing so because they’re afraid it might be awkward.

8. Our phones tend to impede happiness by replacing physical interactions (virtual interactions don’t contribute much to wellbeing). 

9. We often don’t have enough faith in our own psychological immune system, and avoid taking risks even when they aren't particularly harmful and often hold beneficial rewards.

#182, Unlearning Race with Thomas Chatterton Williams

I went into this one with some trepidation, and some hope.

I thought that Sam had dug his heels into the race quagmire with a bit of unfortunate zeal, turning a willfully blind eye toward the problems with the Charles Murray research, and further demonstrating at least tone deafness, if not an outright blind spot, in his sparring with Ezra Klein. So this would either be a chance to walk back some of that obstreperousness, or to dig in even further.

It's been a several weeks since I listened to this episode, and a whole elephant-load of shit has since hit the fan (COVID19), but I think he did an admirable job of walking things back, and I remember a couple of things that I really liked about this episode:

"The goal has to be to get to a post-racial society."

"I've never understood having shame for these histories and deeds that have been done to and by people you're supposedly related to."

"One of the things in Between the World And Me that really bothered me was the way that he seemed to give short shrift to the idea that blacks can ever have any form of agency over their own lives."

This conversation also pushed the needle for me just a little bit toward being in favor of reparations. It sounds like intelligent people would be able to come to some meaningful gesture that at least acknowledges the legacy of shame and objectification that this country has never admitted to.