The Border, DEI, Trump, Islam, BLM & the Misinterpretation of Data | Sam Harris PT 1

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu
Episode: The Border, DEI, Trump, Islam, BLM & the Misinterpretation of Data | Sam Harris PT 1
Date: June 4, 2024
Guest: Sam Harris

---

Episode Overview

This episode features a deep and often provocative discussion between Tom Bilyeu and Sam Harris on a spectrum of contentious issues shaping the American social, political, and cultural landscape. The conversation covers systemic racism, policing and crime statistics, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) practices, the manipulation of compassion, social media activism, and the challenge of creating meaningful and effective policy. The dialogue examines both the philosophical underpinnings and the real-world implications of these subjects, aiming to cut through headline-driven narratives and find clarity in outcomes-focused reasoning.

---

Major Discussion Points & Insights

1. Compassion, DEI, and Societal Incentives

• Compassion Circuitry Hijacked:
  Tom argues that well-meaning people are often manipulated by more cynical actors to support policies that end up breaking institutions rather than improving them.

  • “DEI is designed to do is break institutions by hijacking people's compassion circuitry.” (01:38, Tom)

• Incentive Structures:
  Sam suggests ethical behavior is often a function of incentives, not just intentions. Good systems make it easier for even selfish people to act ethically, while bad systems can corrupt even the virtuous.

  • “If you have the right system of incentives, you can even have sociopaths effectively behaving like saints… If you have the wrong incentives, you can have people who are nearly saints behaving like sociopaths.” (02:47, Sam)

• Misdirected Compassion in Policy (e.g., Policing):
  On “Defund the Police,” Sam states the slogan stems from genuine compassion but is misinformed by inaccurate data about police violence, resulting in ineffective or harmful outcomes.

  • “The people who were in favor of defunding the police…genuinely thought there was an epidemic of racist police violence… that's just not true.” (03:40, Sam)

2. Systemic Racism and Crime Data

• Sam challenges prevailing narratives about police violence against Black men, arguing the data does not support the existence of an epidemic of racist cop shootings and the real risk to young Black men is crime within their own community.

  • “The problem [of racist police violence] they think exists simply does not exist to the best of our knowledge.” (06:04, Sam)

• Tom explores how lived experience and “whole life beer goggles” shape activists' frames of reference, making rational debate difficult. The emotional attachment to systemic explanations makes it hard for factual arguments to penetrate.

  • “When somebody has a frame of reference…it's just distorts wildly everything you see, but you're actually seeing it.” (06:19, Tom)

• The Poverty Trap:
  Both speakers agree systemic poverty isn’t a moral failing of individuals but recognize that only individuals can act to change their current circumstances, even if external help is needed.

  • “Only you can do something about it. That's where the collision has to happen...” (07:25, Tom)

3. Inequality, Outcomes, and Western Values

• Sam highlights that while some inequality is inevitable (and perhaps even beneficial for innovation), extreme inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) leads to social dysfunction and violence.

  • “We do not want to live in a society where you have a Gini coefficient like in Brazil…because people are desperately poor and they're not figuring out anything else creative to do…but to rob people richer than themselves.” (09:40, Sam)

• Tom frames the defense of Western systems as an argument for outcomes over ideology:

  • “The west is predicated on one simple fact. Some ideas yield better outcomes than others.” (11:12, Tom)
  • Criticizes the modern rejection of results-based systems, warning that trading what works for what sounds good is corrosive.

4. Policy Failure, Homelessness, and Moral Confusion

• Sam points out the challenges when compassionate or progressive policies (e.g., in California homelessness) have bad unintended consequences–they can attract problems from elsewhere or worsen local conditions.

  • “Idiot, compassion can have bad consequences…if you're just essentially subsidizing fentanyl addiction on your sidewalks, that’s obviously stupid…” (15:21, Sam)

• He emphasizes the need for coordinated national policies, not just local action, because of interconnected consequences (e.g., climate change, pandemics).

  • “We have a coordination problem that we have to solve as a nation and arguably as a global civilization.” (16:59, Sam)

• Argues that real compassion sometimes means intervention:

  • “The really compassionate thing to do is to intrude into their lives and get them the help they need at a place where it can be delivered, not on the sidewalk in front of a department store.” (20:40, Sam)

5. Class Resentment and Policy Paralysis

• Sam discusses how resentment towards gentrification and claims about privilege are used to paralyze effective policy, painting any challenge to the status quo as “white privilege.”

  • “You are not doing this person any favors letting them bake in the sun on fentanyl on a sidewalk. That is not the freedom you should want them to be exercising.” (24:33, Sam)

• There is a persistent confusion between genuine compassionate action and virtue signalling or class-based moralizing, blocking real solutions.

6. Social Media Distortion & Preference Falsification

• Loud fringe voices on social media distort perception of public opinion, leading to “preference falsification” where most people remain silent, creating a false sense of consensus.

  • “So many people agree with me on my edgiest opinions and just would never say anything in public...But they don't see the consequence of their silence in their lane...” (31:42, Sam)

• Tom and Sam both fear that policy change is too often reactive, waiting for disaster or social breakdown rather than persuasive moral reasoning.

  • “Good men, hard times like that whole cycle is just a cycle and we have to go through it.” (29:23, Tom)

7. DEI, Meritocracy, and Reputational Risk

• DEI in critical sectors can backfire by undermining trust in qualifications, perpetuating reverse racism, and harming meritocracy.

  • “To lower the standards so that when you walk into an office and your doctor’s black…and now I'm left thinking, does this guy or gal have lesser qualifications…that's awful, right? It's racist to have to think that way.” (34:42, Sam)

• Sam critiques the failure to address root causes of inequality, supporting measuring and correcting for historical disadvantage, but not at the cost of essential standards.

  • “Everyone is an elitist. Everyone wants a qualified pilot…When it's brain surgery for your kid, you're an elitist. You want a qualified brain surgeon. You don’t want the DEI version of brain surgery.” (36:46, Sam)

8. Education & Early Intervention

• Tom proposes the best way to address inequality long-term is to focus on intensive early childhood education, referencing Geoffrey Canada’s successes and the futility of trying to "save" adults en masse.

  • “In some ways you have to give up on adults...98% though, did nothing with the ideas. It was crazy because they were blinded by their frame of reference...” (41:36, Tom)

• Sam agrees that early interventions are more impactful but maintains that adults should not be abandoned altogether.

  • “If you can radically change a person’s life at age six in a way you absolutely can’t at age sixteen, well then, yeah, we need to be driving toward the earlier interventions.” (44:21, Sam)

9. The Power and Limits of Ideas

• Tom reflects on the uphill battle of changing minds, the susceptibility of the “compassion circuit” to manipulation, and the challenge of staying results-driven amid emotionally persuasive but destructive narratives.

  • “They just have better bumper stickers…it's just way easier to say that we need to take care of these people...” (46:30, Tom)

• Both agree that while free will may be an illusion, ideas still matter because human beings are systems that can be influenced at every stage.

  • "We’re systems that can be influenced at every stage." (47:20, Sam)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On incentives & moral outcomes:
  "If you have the right system of incentives, you can even have sociopaths effectively behaving like saints." (02:47, Sam)

• On the risk of “Defund the Police”:
  "The real risk to young black men is that they're going to get killed by cops. That's just not true. The real risk to young black men are other young black men... This is just established beyond any possibility of doubt by the actual statistics." (04:20, Sam)

• On progress and inequality:
  "We want some of that wealth to continue to raise the floor beneath which no one is going to fall in our society." (08:57, Sam)

• On social media & activism:
  "You have a very small percentage of activists who are seriously confused about right and wrong and good and evil, who are so loud on social media that they cow everyone into silence." (25:50, Sam)

• On DEI and trust in expertise:
  ”You want a qualified brain surgeon. You don’t want the DEI version of brain surgery.” (36:46, Sam)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Compassion and incentive structures: 01:38 – 06:00
• Debating systemic racism & crime statistics: 06:00 – 10:00
• Inequality, results-based systems, Western values: 10:00 – 13:50
• Homelessness, policy failure, and moral confusion: 13:51 – 24:33
• Activism, social media, and preference falsification: 25:35 – 31:40
• DEI, meritocracy, and trust issues: 31:20 – 38:25
• Education as the path out of inequality: 38:25 – 44:21
• Limits of adult transformation vs. early intervention: 41:36 – 44:21
• On persuasion, compassion circuits, and bumper sticker politics: 46:30 – end

---

Concluding Reflection

This episode of Impact Theory offers a rigorous, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately earnest exploration of the conflict between intentions and outcomes in public policy. It examines how compassion can be weaponized, how public discussion is distorted by activist minorities and social media, and how real progress requires relentless focus on data, incentives, and long-term educational investment. Both Tom and Sam demonstrate the difficulty—but necessity—of challenging comforting myths in pursuit of what actually works.

Transcript

[A]

You didn't start a business just to keep the lights on. You're here to sell more today than yesterday. You're here to win. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet like the just one tapping ridiculously fast acting sky high sales stacking champion at checkouts. That's the good stuff right there. So if your business is in it to win it, win with Shopify. Start your free trial [e-mail] winner this summer.

[B]

Don't squeeze in, spread out. Find homes big enough for your whole guest list on vrbo. That's vacation rentals done right. Book your stay now.

[C]

Welcome back to Impact Theory. As we dive into part two, Sam Harris and I confront the urgent matters of systemic racism. Trump the problem with the right and rehash an old beef he had with me and Konstantin Kissen's position. Let's get back into it. So the border I think is something that we can end up over focusing on. I think the border is a symptom of something larger. For me it is a few different ideas that are people are in the grips of. So thing number one is that for call it the last 50ish years there's been a march through the institutions with a radical Marxist just to directionalize it viewpoint that has come out to dei. And I think what DEI is designed to do is break institutions by hijacking people's compassion circuitry. And that the real thing that makes that stick is that also everybody wants to do something incredibly meaningful for the world. And so you have people that have a pretty cynical desire. They're driven by will to power. And so their cynical desire is oh I can break this institution, I can tear it down. I can do my good thing in the world by convincing people to do make their contribution to the world by just absolutely obliterating power dynamics and that ultimately this is a game of power being played. But the the sort of ground troops I think oftentimes really do have wonderful motives are motivated by compassion. They really want to help. Does that feel accurate or do you think I'm oversimplifying or missing something?

[D]

Yeah, I agree with that. I think certainly most people most of the time have reasonably good intentions. Incentives are a lot. I mean people can be relied upon to get pushed around by what's in their self interest. So if you're going to make windfall profits going down one path, even if that path seems ethically suspect, it's going to take a very high integrity person to resist those incentives. So the larger solve here Is we want systems of incentives that make it easier and easier for even selfish people to behave more and more ethically and even more and more like saints. Right. If you have the right system of incentives, you can even have sociopaths effectively behaving like saints because they're appropriately incentivized to do that. Whereas if you have the wrong incentives, you can have people who are nearly saints behaving like sociopaths because it's just that the incentives are just overwhelmingly aimed in the wrong direction. But I agree with you that compassion has been misdirected and just informed by bad information. I mean, most people who think to take something like defund the police, for instance, that the worst political slogan ever hatched, the people who were in favor of defunding the police, I'm sure 100% of them genuinely thought and probably still think that there is an epidemic of racist police violence aimed at the black community, and that the way to address that compassionately is to have fewer cops on the streets. The real risk to young black men is that they're going to get killed by cops. That's just not true. The real risk to young black men or other young black men. This is just established beyond any possibility of doubt by the actual statistics on crime and violence in American society. And what you have in the black community is bad policing, failures of policing. Murders don't get solved. Right. Petty crime. You have a history of the war on drugs, which was targeted disproportionately to minorities. And that has been terrible and has created a cycle of incarceration that has been a genuine source of misery and unfairness in our society. And so the war on drugs is its own problem. And what it did to our justice system is certainly worth analyzing and not making those mistakes again. But when you actually look at the reality of murder in America, it is overwhelmingly a story of black men, young black men killing other young black men in the black community, and ineffective policing of those crimes. Right.

[C]

But even on that, and this is one of the areas where I feel like people aren't having the right. They're not arguing at the right level. So I don't think anything you said is untrue, though people will certainly debate that. But compassion is going to follow you here as well. So when you say white cops just really aren't the problem, the stats bear that out immediately. They're going to have an emotional reaction. They're they being activists that are trying to make life better for young black men. And so they look at that and say, okay, well, it sounds, Sam, like you're trying to say that there isn't a problem. And even if. Sam.

[D]

Well, I am literally saying there isn't. The problem they think exists simply does not exist to the best of our knowledge. I'm not saying there's no racist cops out there. I mean, yes, but that is a rounding error on the problem of lethal violence against black people.

[C]

Let me land the plane about what happens to this part of the audience when they hear you. What they're thinking in their minds is, sure, but the reason that black on black violence is the real concern, even if I concede that point, is that they've grown up in a racist system. So of course that's going to be a problem. And what I'm saying is, you said earlier it's very hard to convince people to change their mind. And I think the reason for that is what I call frame of reference. When somebody has a frame of reference, they're wearing what I call whole life beer goggles. It just distorts wildly everything that you see, but you're actually seeing it. So you're looking at it, and you actually see that this is a problem of systemic racism. That's why my neighborhood is terrible. That's why black on black violence is there. And so anybody that denies that is just part of the systemic racist problem, which is why I don't even necessarily think they're being manipulative when they say anybody that denies this is just racist, plain and simple. Whether there's the whole concept of I don't need another black face, I need another black voice, right? So that even if somebody who is black is saying, this just isn't true, the stats don't bear it out, they're going to get attacked as well, because what they're not addressing is the worldview that says this isn't their fault and that anybody that's being oppressed, anybody that's starting, certainly poverty is just such an easy way to see somebody being crushed by some unseen hand, right? You just go, anybody being crushed, it isn't their fault. And therefore I'm looking for an external problem. I am not saying, hey, even though this isn't your fault that you're growing up in poverty, clearly it's not your fault. You were just born into it, bad luck, but only you can do something about it. That's where the collision has to happen, where it's like, I get it, this isn't their fault. Poverty is a cycle that people are just born into. But the only way out is for that individual to do a thing well,

[D]

they may need help. I mean, I think we simply don't know what the perfect social policy is to eradicate inequality in our society. I think we should be. I mean, two things are true simultaneously. I think it's foolish to imagine that there will be no inequality. And I think it's even foolish to imagine that we want a society with zero inequality. I mean, there's something about inequality that is probably useful in a variety of

[C]

ways, but you've already moved on.

[D]

But just let me just lay on the point. A certain degree of inequality should be it's right to play on our compassion circuits. It should be intolerable to us. If we have people starving to death in America, that's just a level of dysfunction we have to figure out some way to correct. We don't have people starving to death in America. And that's one measure of how much better life is in a society like ours than it is elsewhere in the world. But we want the floor to keep. As we produce more and more wealth, we want some of that wealth to continue to raise the floor beneath which no one is going to fall in our society. So even the poorest person in our society is much less poor than they are in sub Saharan Africa and much less poor than anyone was 100 years ago. And that's good, that's progress. And I think we do not want to live in a society where you have a Gini coefficient like in Brazil, where it becomes just rational for rich people to live with in gated compounds with razor wire across the top because there's just so much crime out on the sidewalk for obvious reasons, because people are desperately poor and they're not figuring out anything else creative to do with their lives, but to rob people richer than themselves.

[C]

Well, so this gets to the thing that I'm really trying to drag people to. And there's something about the way that I approach this. I am not able to get people in my lane here. The reason the Gini coefficient matters is there is a true thing about human psychology, which is poverty isn't a problem. Poverty next to wealth is a problem because it triggers the. I know, you know, the capuchin monkey thing. Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber for doing a thing and is perfectly happy to take it, but it prefers grapes. So if you give its neighbor a grape for the same task, the capuchin monkey getting the cucumber goes fucking ballistic. Yanking on their cage, throwing the cucumber back at the person I Mean, it's absolutely just funny if I'm honest, just watching it happen. Because you recognize the truth of that in yourself as a human. And so what where I'm trying to get people to go is because this all started with is the west committing suicide? And if it is committing suicide, how do we defend the west if. If it is worth defending? I think you've already made a good case that the west is worth defending. But the line that people need to draw is it's worth defending because it yielded better outcomes. So now that our current system is beginning to yield a Gini coefficient that is bad, we can say, okay, something is starting to break down. And so now we need only address that it is currently yielding an ever increasing Gini coefficient. And if we know that leads to violence, and our North Star is human flourishing and humans don't flourish in violence, we now have a system that is no longer outputting the thing it needs to output. So to me, the west is predicated on one simple fact. Some ideas yield better outcomes than others. You must put those ideas out into a marketplace and let them compete. So we let people have free speech, we let people have private property, we let people generate wealth by creating things that other people want. And hey, even though it's a trade off, it is definitely not a perfect system that you can then just track based on results. Now what I see breaking down is an assault on results based systems full stop because they yield inequality. And going back to you have cynical actors driven by will to power, hijacking the compassion of people to get them to stop looking at outcomes. And so now you have Thomas Sowell's quote. The last 30 years have been marked by exchanging what works, meaning it yields an outcome with what sounds good. So I'm, I, from what I can see, the only way to defend the west is to get people to buy into some ideas yield better outcomes. And that we must judge every social program, every potential way that we solve a problem through the outcome that it generates.

[E]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place. From H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your Playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[D]

Yeah, there's a couple in this. There's intentions. You have to have the right intentions. I mean, if you have bad intentions, then you're going to seek bad outcomes. So we don't want to discount the role of intention. But yeah, we want to know whether the goods we're attempting to achieve in the world are actually achievable. And if we're producing harms that we don't want, we should be aware of that and we should error. Correct. And insofar as we don't have systems that are responsive to that or incentives that are responsive to that, that's clearly a problem. But we should recognize that there are consequences to just failing to coordinate. If you take American society as a whole, if you have, let's say, I mean, I'm not saying we have good remedies for homelessness in California, but let's say we just had the most compassionate and well intended and in fact wise policies with respect to homelessness and what to do about it in California. And they didn't have any of that in neighboring states. Right. In neighboring states they just had a draconian get off my lawn policy. Right. Well then California is going to attract all of the nation's homeless or all of the homeless from the surrounding states, even with a good policy, and be overrun. And to some degree I think that's probably happened in California because our.

[C]

But doesn't that to you automatically mean it isn't a good policy?

[D]

Well, no, but I'm saying idiot, compassion can have bad consequences that way. Where if you're just essentially subsidizing fentanyl addiction on your sidewalks, that's obviously stupid, even locally, but it's going to have this global consequence of drawing more of the drug addicted and homeless to you. But I'm saying that even if we had a good policy which is better than just funding drug addiction on our sidewalks, if no other neighboring states have good policies, well then we're still going to be pulling more than our fair share and it could break our system too. So we have a coordination problem that we have to solve as a nation and arguably as a global civilization. I Think there are problems that we can't solve as a nation. Climate change is not something that any one nation can address, and a global pandemic is not something that any one nation can address. So we, we need coordinated efforts, even at a global scale. And we should recognize this even from a position. I mean, you don't have to be a saint or even to be especially motivated by compassion to want these goods to be shared broadly. You just have to be wisely selfish. I mean, you just have to recognize, no matter how selfish you are as a billionaire in Silicon Valley, no matter how much you are taken in by the illusion that you are completely self made and that nobody gave you any help at all, even though you can't account for any of the abilities and context that allowed you to do the work you did. But be as resolutely selfish as you want. Then ask yourself the question, just how many homeless people do you want to have to step over on the sidewalk leaving your compound? Do you want to feel unsafe at a restaurant because there's so many people panhandling at the tables in the cafe? Do you want people to sit outside in a restaurant? Or is that going to be unthinkable now because there's just so much chaos on the street? Just what sort of society do you want to be in? Do you want to be surrounded by desperate, envious people? Or do you want to be surrounded by creative, self actualized, happy people who can be your customers and who are going to celebrate your success when you do something visibly successful? Or do you want to be surrounded by people who are thinking, maybe it's time to get the pitchforks and murder you? Even just a psychopathic commitment to self should bear at least some modicum of altruism for self preservation alone. You should want life to be minimally good for everyone around you. And so we don't need widespread sainthood to agree on policies that would make life better for more and more people and solve a problem like homelessness, what

[C]

do you need then?

[D]

Well, we need to cancel dumb ideas, right? I mean, they're obvious. So, for instance, our default is in America, that in public space we've got freedom of assembly, right? You are free to be on the sidewalk. It's a public space. You're not trespassing. It's not a private space. And our default sense is that someone should be free to live out the chaos of their mental illness or their drug addiction or their violence in front of us, and even die in front of us on the sidewalk. And that Compassion, the better part of compassion is allowing that to happen, allowing the autonomy of just living your dysregulation out in front of others. And it somehow is unseemly or bigoted or otherwise selfish to point to the obvious social cost of having to live with this dysfunction in our midst. To have to cross the street with your children so as to avoid the obviously insane or obviously drug addicted person on this side of the street. That's a social cost, right? There are businesses that aren't opening or that will soon be closing because of all this chaos here. There are parts of town that you're not going to want you as a parent, not going to want to go to or have your kids go to. Those restaurants will close. All of this spirals. And we all have an interest in figuring out how to help that person and figuring out how that help is best delivered in a way that doesn't make this particular part of the city, and in some cases some of the nicest parts or the most valuable parts of a city uninhabitable.

[C]

And

[D]

so we need policies. So in this specific case, we need a policy that allows you to take someone off the sidewalk and a recognition that the really compassionate thing to do is to intrude into their lives and get them the help they need at a place where it can be delivered, not on the sidewalk in front of a department store. And yes, there are people who need to be taken out of society and institutionalized in some sense. Whether it's just to deliver rehabilitation with respect to drug addiction, or it's mental health treatment or getting them on appropriate medication. There are better and worse ways to do this. There's no perfect way to do any of this.

[C]

But why don't we get these policies?

[D]

Well, because at the first cut, you have people who have a very confused notion of compassion, which is it is to intrude upon this person, to move them off the sidewalk, to move them out of your nice neighborhood, to be concerned in the first place about your nice neighborhood, for you rich guy to care about crossing the street with your kids. All of that is white privilege and gentrification and, and completely uninteresting from an ethical perspective. That is some species of selfish evil.

[C]

Does that feel like a trick that has been played on people or is that just accidental? Did that come from a good place? How did that narrative get started?

[D]

Well, it's easy to see how if you have a very class based view of everything and you resent certain parts of you resent areas of town becoming gentrified and rents going up and it becoming harder to live in those areas because rents have gotten higher. If that whole process seems dystopian to you in principle, well then you're going to say, well, all of this is a consequence of the rich people getting what they want and extracting it from this part of society. We wouldn't have this homelessness problem in the first place if housing was just more affordable. That may be true in a few cases, some cases, some percentage of cases. It's not true across the board. I mean, so much of the homeless problem is a problem of substance abuse and mental illness. Right. It's not just that rents are too high, but insofar as building more housing, affordable housing is the remedy, we should do that. But we have to recognize it's not the remedy across the board. And we in California can't become a sanctuary for the entire country's homeless problem. So again, it requires a coordinated effort across states. But you have to dissect at each moment of moral confusion. That is a blocker to an actually compassionate and effective policy. And the first one here is people have a right. That person who's lying in his own vomit in front of the J. Crew store on the mall has just as much a right to be there as you do to go shopping there. And if you own J. Crew, well, you're just some rich guy who is worried about your retail business. And that's a completely superficial concern compared to the real human emergency of this person's life on the sidewalk. And it stops there, right? You're some species of bigot to not want to have to step over that person in order to go into a store. And you're some species of bigot if you're a store owner noticing your business being destroyed by the chaos and dysfunction on the sidewalk and all of that class based resentment toward the rich people who are trying to figure out how this, what used to be a nice neighborhood got so ugly that has to be dissected and realigned with a really compassionate policy, which is you are not doing this person any favors letting them bake in the sun on fentanyl on a sidewalk. Right? That is not the freedom you should want them to be exercising. Right? You have to figure out a. A policy by which you can intrude upon their lives and move them to a place where they can actually get help.

[C]

Do you think simply explaining to people what the moral math ought to be will actually make this happen? Or do things have to get so bad that pain and suffering plus Having heard somewhere a podcast at one time, Sam Harris walks me through the moral math, swings us back in the opposite direction.

[D]

Well, I don't think there are that many minds that have to be changed. I think the people in charge, the people who are on our city councils and in the mayor's offices and the governor, et cetera, those are the minds that have to be changed. And then we can get new policies. So far as people have to vote for initiatives, all of that, there's a war of ideas that has to be won, but I don't think it's hard to win it. And certainly there's a lot of low hanging fruit here. I think the. Again, to come back to where we started with this conversation, there's a distortion that social media has created for us where you have a very small percentage of activists who are seriously confused about right and wrong and good and evil, who are so loud on social media that they cow everyone into silence. I mean, it's just so painful to become the target of people who have way too much time on their hands on social media that people step away from it. But it is a minority. I mean, we just have a very distorted sense of just how many people are, I mean, to take an issue we haven't touched here, but around which there's a ton of activism, just what percentage of people in the trans community are actually trans activists who are making people's life hell online? Right. It's probably a small percentage of even the trans community. And the trans community is the tiniest percentage of any society. And so you have not a lot of people just going scorched earth online. And it's such that, I mean, it becomes a, a national political priority if you're a Democrat, to figure out just what's your policy on the whole trans thing, as though it's right up there with a civilizational collision with China and Russia and Iran. It's like we got that here. And then pretty much at the same level, we've got trans athletes and trans bathrooms and maybe have to give equal time to those things. And even if you're Biden, you know, I mean, like, I mean, it's insane what he has done to his own political prospects just on that issue. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be compassionate around the trans issue and that we shouldn't have political equality for trans people, all of that's real and worth talking about. But the idea that Biden has used the amount of political capital that he barely had on that issue, the way he Has, I mean, it's a pure distortion based I think largely upon what activists have managed to do on social media.

[C]

There's a concept in finance about debt cycles and that there's no escaping the debt cycle and they don't take the exact amount of time. But there's six stages that people move through. You start by reshuffling all the debt, usually through just blood, death, turmoil. You start building from the ground up in this really great society that has not tripped into over accumulating debt yet, has not had the inflationary practice of printing money. And you just basically march your way towards the sixth phase, which is total collapse because you've overprinted the money, you get hyperinflation, your debt is just unimaginably high. And the only way to discharge that is through bloodletting. And so people war and fight and they just say, okay, Jesus, we're just going to let go of the old debt and start a new. And that's your cycle. You go over and over. I, I don't want the following statement to be true, but I worry that it might be that the good men, hard times like that whole cycle is just a cycle and we have to go through it. And that my earlier statement about there just has to be enough pain where your daughter gets attacked by a crackhead on your doorstep and now enough people have that kind of experience that they just don't care whether they sound good PC or not. They're just like, nope, this isn't going to happen anymore. To your earlier point about if the Democrats don't protect the border, then fascists will. Like at some point people have just had enough and they're going to stand up and they're going to take this back and you get this violent swinging of the pendulum. I would much prefer that people can be persuaded with ideas, but when I look at the world, I just, in the face of you saying there's only a few people that have to have their minds changed and I'm like, you've been out here for 20 years yelling into the wind, and I have certainly been influenced by your ideas, but it doesn't seem like the right people are. It seems instead that people are breaking off into different states and people are leaving California, going to Texas, going to Florida, if they don't want to put up with this kind of thing, which is not in my estimation, the ideal scenario. So do you think that it just. There's a better way to present these ideas and we really will win at that level or not?

[E]

Tired of overpaying with DirecTV, Dish offers a reliable low price every month without surprises. Get the TV you love and start watching live sports news and the latest movies, plus your favorite streaming apps all in one place. Switch to Dish today and lock in the lowest price in satellite TV, starting at $89.99 a month with our two year price guarantee. Call 888 add dish or visit dish.com today.

[D]

Well, I do worry about that kind of pendulum swing and us just losing our patience and losing our cool and suddenly becoming way more callous than we are just because we're swinging away from. Some very silly policies and they're bad consequences. Again, I've mentioned this a couple times, but it's just worth keeping in mind there is this massive problem of preference falsification. It's seeming like many more people agree with the fringes than do so the silence of the majority is being misread as agreement, or at least certainly not disagreement, whereas it really is just silence. And in many cases, I mean, I know this firsthand, there are many people who agree with me on my edgiest opinions and just would never say anything in public. I mean, they're so grateful that I'm out here saying the things I'm saying so that they don't have to. But they don't see the consequence of their silence in their lane, whatever that lane is, because it seems like in most cases, it seems like mere acquiescence to the crazy opinions that they're happy I'm criticizing. Right? So what you said about DEI right until yesterday, to be against DEI in any way, really, I mean, to do anything other than celebrate it as finally we've arrived, is to be racist and to be called racist in America, certainly it's the worst thing you can be called probably next to a pedophile. And to merely be called it is to be tainted with. I mean, to be called it with no justification is in many cases enough to perform a kind of reputational murder. And. That's just we have to grow out of that. So if you really want equality, if you really want to embrace MLK's vision of value in people based on the content of their character and get past the superficial differences between people like skin color, you have to hold to that. And you can't overcorrect into this IBR Mex Kendi anti racist, that is reversed racist attitude, which is white people are bad and it's completely legitimate to harm their interests preferentially as a way of correcting for all the history of inequality in our society. I think it's totally valid to look at the consequences of past racism and worry that there's something more we should be doing to correct for what is currently a status quo. That when you look at the details, should still make people uncomfortable. I mean, the fact that on average, white families have eight times the wealth of black families in America, right? To whatever degree past racism is the reason why that's the case. That is a legacy that nobody should be happy about. And it's completely understandable that there are people who look at that and say, okay, well, we should pay reparations, right? That's the way to solve this problem. Now, I happen to think it's the wrong way to solve the problem. And if you want to hear someone withstanding on this topic talk about it, you can listen to John McWhorter and Glenn Lowry. They've kind of dissected why they think this would be a disaster. But the impulse, just based on we know what our history was with respect to race in America, and to look at present inequality with respect to wealth and health outcomes and levels of crime, it's completely natural to say, okay, wait a minute, we've got something to atone for here, and what can we do to help? I'm totally sympathetic with that. DEI at the level of who gets into medical school is the wrong way to help to lower the standards so that when you walk into an office and your doctor's black and you have to think, oh, my God, I know that for the last 15 years, standards have been lowered at every stage along the way to promote more black cardiologists and black neurologists. And now I'm left thinking, does this guy or gal have lesser qualifications than the Asian doctor that I could go to or the Jewish doctor I could go to? And to know that in many cases, the answer is probably yes, given the system we've built, that's awful, right? It's racist to have to think that way. But the fact that you could be justified in thinking that way based on bad policies, that's serving no one's interest, certainly not the black community's interest. So if we're going to put a thumb on the scale, we have to figure out ways of doing it that don't actually destroy what is good about meritocracy, where you know that the person who's flying the plane is actually qualified to fly the plane, and you didn't grade on a curve based on skin color so as to get more black or brown pilots. I mean, that's just. No one wants that at 30,000ft. Everyone's an elitist. Everyone wants a qualified pilot. Right? Everyone. When it's brain surgery for your kid, you're an elitist. You want a qualified brain surgeon. You don't want the DEI version of brain surgery. And when we find out that Asians had to score 400 points higher on the SAT to get into Harvard because of their DEI policy, and then Harvard was correcting for it on the admissions committee by saying that Asians had lacked personality and this was their euphemism for how they were going to implement their reverse racism. It's an embarrassment, and rightly so, for the whole institution. So. There's no question that there are inequalities that we want to respond to compassionately. There's no question that there'll still be some amount of inequality left that we ultimately have to convince ourselves we don't care about, because there's no way to make everything equal all the time. There's no question we want to figure out how to spread the wealth around, but we want to incentivize creative, selfish people to make as much wealth as possible. There are going to be trade offs at the margins, but in the current environment, it's very easy to recognize bad policies.

[C]

Yeah. I want to paint a vision for how I think we get out of this. And let me know if you see any holes in this because you've done a good job of mapping the problem space. I come at it as a business guy, which I think is the right training for looking at something like this. Because you're getting punched in the face by the market all day and you realize to pay your staff their salaries and make sure they can take care of their family, you better solve these problems real fast. You have to understand what a good outcome is. It has to be very well defined. And you have to be thinking kind of like a pool player. It's not enough to get the ball in the pocket. You want it to go in. You have to set up the cue ball for the next one that you're going to knock in. So think of it as second and third order consequences. So I think I'll just grant that doing some of the admissions things that Harvard was doing was really coming from a wonderful place. And they were just only thinking first order consequences. They were just thinking, I'm going to give more African Americans a chance at this. But they may not have even looked at the die already being cast by. If Jeffrey Canada is right and it really comes down to the number of words that a child hears by the age of three and the ratio of positive to negative words because of what it does to the language centers of your brain that by the time they get to a college admissions board, that's really not the place to try to help them again. Now I'm looking at it as a business guy and I'm willing to say, and quite frankly, I changed the whole direction of my business when I realized that this was true, that in some ways you have to give up on adults and that's just you're going to work so hard to try to overcome those problems. Whereas Geoffrey Canada has started schools and he'll put the school in the same building as a school that's failing. I mean, just bad test grades everywhere you look. And he chooses children randomly from the population of kids that would go to that school so they're not hand selected and they just absolutely crush the test scores that they get. So same kids, same school building, but different teachers, different techniques and they just absolutely smash. And it's really, really incredible. And so I'd be very curious to know again, I need to know what outcome I consider desirable if those kids which have better reading, learning, mathematics scores, more of them go to and graduate from college. I'm going to guess now, I am guessing this part that they have higher lifetime earnings, but I'm also going to guess that they're higher in verbal fluency, they're higher in mathematical fluency. All of things which just as a selfish person in society, I just want to through human freedoms and ensuring that they are armed with the best education and thusly best brain development humanly possible, I get to extract the value that they'll add to the world. Right? So roads are going to get better, maybe cars get better, education gets better, just medicine gets better, everything gets better, better, better. Yeah, but that is again it's an out focusing on the outcome and understanding not just the getting the first ball in the pocket, but how do I set myself up well for the next shot. But the thing that I think freaks everybody out so much that I just cannot get this idea to be repeated by anybody is that I say you have to give up on adults. Like it's just the reward of time and energy is just not there. They can make change, adults can make change. Please understand. Like I have a university that I teach only adults at, but they're what I call the 2%. And so I started all of this trying to teach adults when I was running my previous company, Quest Nutrition and I Just had so many kids that grew up in the inner cities. 2% of them changed their life forever. 98% though, did nothing with the ideas. It was crazy because they were blinded by their frame of reference and potentially just not having encountered enough of these ideas early enough in their brain development that it just made it harder for them later in life. Again, that's a poverty thing. It doesn't have anything to do with skin color. So anyway, that to me seems the way out. You just have to be relentlessly focused on nipping the problem in the bud, which as far as I can tell, is poverty. That you need education that is going to dramatically impact brain development. And then you have metrics all along the way for early indicators of future success. Verbal fluency, reading comprehension, mathematics, problem solving, how to be creative and address novel problems, so on and so forth. Do you think maybe that's impossible? But do you think if it were possible that that would work? Or am I missing something?

[D]

Well, so I don't know. I can't speak to Canada's results in Geoffrey Canada's results in education, but assuming they are as you say, yeah, obviously there's a consequence to having the right techniques at the earliest possible level in education versus the wrong ones. And we want good teachers and we want good methodologies. And insofar as we know how to implement all that, we should do it. And I think we should prioritize it at a level that's far beyond what we do. It's amazing that being a primary school teacher is a very low status job compared to all the other jobs on offer. And it's. It pays badly, it attracts people who couldn't get. I mean, you're not choosing between going into aerospace engineering or teaching kindergarten. The educational track that would get you there is different. It should be a much higher value job. How we educate our kids and it's quite possible we haven't figured out. We certainly haven't figured out how to use technology so as to make that a better process than. I mean, if Covid taught us anything. Just getting more iPads into the system is not improving things. And I'm amazed at how mediocre education can seem even when it's seemingly the best education on offer, like a private school education. So much of it seems to be just warehousing kids. The real problem that's being solved is the parents have to go to work every day. We have to get these kids up earlier in the day. Physiologically, they can even begin to pay attention because the parents have to leave the house at that hour to get to work. And so we have these bleary eyed kids getting warehoused with nice laptops in private schools that cost $50,000 a year. And it's much worse obviously in bad public schools. And yet even bad public schools cost, whatever it is, $17,000 a year per student in California, I think something like that, there's an insane level of bureaucracy around it. So there's just a reaming out of the system we have to do and a lot of change we need to make to do it. But I agree with you that we want to prioritize the changes we can effectively make. I don't think we can give up on adults, but in terms of how we weight our resources, yeah, I mean, if you can radically change a person's life at age six in a way that you absolutely can't at age 16, well then, yeah, we need to be driving toward the earlier interventions. And then we have to do whatever we can do for older kids and adults because again, self interest alone should make you want to not have to confront the stark chaos and violence of a totally dysregulated life right outside your office or the restaurant you've gone to with your kids or your home.

[C]

I just don't think it works because the compassion circuit is too easy to hijack. When you were talking earlier, I took a note that said they just have better bumper stickers. So compassion people on the left, like it's, it's just way easier to say that we need to take care of these people and that, you know, think about how much of the things that you have. If you grew up in a good family, middle class, that, yeah, that really is privilege and did you really do anything to earn it? And by the way, neither of us believe in free will. So it's like really, really? Did I earn any of this? No, because this is essentially billion billiard balls bouncing around. However, the reason that I stay trying to push these ideas out is that regardless of whether free will exists or not, we do respond to encountering ideas.

[D]

We're systems that can be influenced at every stage.

[C]

Exactly.

[B]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for management, multiple suppliers, and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.