Making Sense - Sam Harris - #198 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:10.960 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:49.200 I am back with my friend Paul Bloom.

00:00:51.360 Paul, thanks for joining me.

00:00:52.860 Nice to be with you, Sam.

00:00:54.160 It seems like in Earth time, it hasn't been that long since we've spoken, but in pandemic

00:00:59.460 time, it has been, I don't know, a year, a year and a half?

00:01:03.000 How are you?

00:01:04.340 Time is moving funny.

00:01:06.380 I am good.

00:01:07.560 Since we spoke last, absolutely nothing has happened to me.

00:01:10.600 I stayed in my apartment.

00:01:12.320 I go for walks and for runs, and I sit in front of my computer and watch.

00:01:16.820 Absolutely nothing interesting has happened to me.

00:01:18.480 What about you?

00:01:19.820 Yeah, I've been surprisingly locked down.

00:01:22.600 I mean, actually more locked down than I even sometimes intend.

00:01:26.540 I notice that there are days where I can actually just sort of forget to go outside, which doesn't

00:01:31.380 seem entirely healthy.

00:01:32.880 Yeah.

00:01:33.880 Yeah, I've learned from this that I really would not like prison.

00:01:37.700 I kind of knew I wouldn't like prison.

00:01:39.300 It was kind of overdetermined, but yet another reason is I got to go outside a bit.

00:01:44.160 I got to go outside.

00:01:44.820 I like walks.

00:01:45.420 I like sitting outside.

00:01:46.680 I like hanging out with friends.

00:01:48.060 And it's just, it's really, it really taught me that I got to avoid finding myself in prison

00:01:53.320 later in life.

00:01:54.020 Okay, well, let's talk about this situation and what, what of interest we can glean from

00:02:01.680 it.

00:02:01.860 There's a bunch of questions I've gotten from Twitter, and we won't be entirely on COVID

00:02:08.700 as a topic, but let's just get all the COVID stuff out of the way first, because I want

00:02:13.060 people to, everyone to have access to it, and hopefully some of it will be useful.

00:02:17.900 But there's this one idea that has been circulating as people struggle to figure out how and when

00:02:27.040 we can reopen society.

00:02:29.320 And it's this difficult equivalence between economic cost and lives lost, or the risk of

00:02:38.180 lives lost.

00:02:39.200 And people seem anchored to what appear to me to be patently false claims and false comparisons

00:02:47.960 here.

00:02:48.420 And so you have someone like Andrew Cuomo, who's been a superstar through this, but even

00:02:54.660 he will say patently absurd things like, you can't put a price on human life, right?

00:03:00.700 Like as though we are thinking about when to reopen society or whether or not to close it and

00:03:07.400 fully locked down as we have, it's obscene and impossible to even attempt to put a price

00:03:14.380 on human life, which is, which is obviously not true.

00:03:17.280 I mean, we put a price on human life all the time.

00:03:20.340 We know companies and governments do that explicitly sometimes, but even when it's not

00:03:25.400 explicit, it's absolutely there.

00:03:28.580 And it's there whenever we decline to spend all the money in the world on the project of

00:03:34.400 pushing the risk of dying as low as it can go.

00:03:37.840 We could make every car cost a million dollars by engineering maximum safety into them.

00:03:45.340 We could treat every plane flight like it was a rocket launch, right?

00:03:48.380 We could check and recheck everything prior to takeoff.

00:03:52.220 And the reason why we don't do this is that we've put a price on human life.

00:03:57.160 The fact that it's implicit really doesn't matter.

00:03:59.520 It's still there.

00:04:00.300 We've weighed some implicit price against the time and the money required to guarantee

00:04:06.920 everyone won't die in a circumstance.

00:04:09.900 And this opens on to kind of an interesting ethical question because there's an obvious

00:04:14.980 price disparity when you look at a country like the United States and the developing world.

00:04:20.880 A human life is obviously and even necessarily worth less in the developing world because 0.97

00:04:28.620 there's much less wealth.

00:04:31.120 And the trade-offs in the use of wealth translate into different kinds of lives lost.

00:04:38.820 I mean, when you think about what we would spend to resurrect someone from the dead, if

00:04:44.600 we could, let's say we had the power of resurrection, but it cost a billion dollars to resurrect somebody.

00:04:50.560 Well, we would do that in the United States at least once to prove that we could do it and

00:04:55.880 see if it works, and there'd be a few billionaires who would probably resurrect their mothers 1.00

00:05:00.000 or somebody.

00:05:01.480 But even in the U.S., there's no way we would spend a billion dollars per life.

00:05:06.900 We wouldn't spend 300 billion dollars to bring back 300 people and then 301 and then 302.

00:05:13.200 There's no way that would happen, even in the richest country on earth.

00:05:16.720 But when you look at the developing world, if it cost a billion dollars to resurrect someone

00:05:21.160 in Kenya, well, there's no way you would spend that even once because you can spend $5,000

00:05:28.120 on bed nets and save a life.

00:05:30.420 So it's literally something like a two million fold difference in the wise allocation of resources

00:05:36.320 there.

00:05:36.760 So I just wanted to kind of open with that reflection that we're putting a price on life all the

00:05:42.840 time.

00:05:43.280 And this is just a very uncomfortable fact when you spell it out, especially in a global

00:05:49.260 context where it's just obvious that we can't help but put less of a price on lives in the

00:05:56.260 developing world, where this pandemic is going to land and is certainly landing now with very

00:06:01.940 likely much greater consequence in well over 100 countries.

00:06:06.700 So it's certainly true.

00:06:08.120 We often have to deal with this trade-off, particularly in this case.

00:06:11.200 Now, to some extent right now in America and Canada and other countries, there really isn't

00:06:16.660 such a trade-off in that what a lot of economists would say is that the goal of helping out the

00:06:23.880 economy and the goal of saving lives, they actually lead to the same action at this point.

00:06:29.680 So pretty much every economist is saying, look, the lockdown is actually an end.

00:06:33.380 If all you care is about is business and money, the lockdown is still good for that.

00:06:37.300 And so you have a convergence of people on the right and the left agreeing that some degree

00:06:42.020 of lockdown, there's going to be disagreements at the margins, is right.

00:06:45.500 Later on, there's going to be trade-offs of exactly what you're saying.

00:06:49.800 I don't think anybody would say we should keep locked up in our houses until the virus is entirely

00:06:55.660 gone, until we have a vaccine that puts everybody out of risk.

00:06:59.160 No, they're going to say we're going to open things up a bit.

00:07:01.280 And if they're honest, they'll say, yeah, a few more people will die.

00:07:04.320 But the trade-off is worth it.

00:07:07.260 And I agree with you.

00:07:08.300 And one way to think about it is it's a mistake to think of this inherently as money versus lives.

00:07:14.640 What it ultimately is, is human flourishing versus human flourishing.

00:07:20.020 In that, you know, the people who want the lockdown to be alleviated are not just saying

00:07:24.800 because it leads to more money.

00:07:26.280 It's because they want, you know, they want people to get their jobs back.

00:07:29.280 They want businesses to flourish.

00:07:30.520 They want people to be able to get married and attend funerals and be present when their

00:07:36.420 loved one is having birth and have elected medical procedures and all of that.

00:07:41.560 There's no easy answer, but you're trading off different things.

00:07:45.260 But they're not different kinds of things.

00:07:47.260 They all revolve around what you've been most interested in, human happiness and human flourishing.

00:07:51.300 So you bring up what has struck me as a second fallacy here, which, you know, I'm hearing

00:07:56.960 many people resist the lockdown even now, suggesting that this cure is worse than the

00:08:03.940 disease, you know, that the economic costs are too high.

00:08:06.120 And these costs will translate, if not immediately, into lives lost.

00:08:11.260 There will be, you know, livelihood lost and sanity lost.

00:08:15.340 And the cost to human well-being is just too excruciating and will be in very short order,

00:08:21.600 such that we should just roll the dice and open everything up and realize everyone's going

00:08:26.280 to get this virus anyway.

00:08:28.420 And the reason why this seems to be a fallacy to me is these people are not properly comparing

00:08:36.480 two states of the world.

00:08:38.120 They're comparing the economic costs of lockdown to the way the world used to be, right, before

00:08:45.320 lockdown.

00:08:45.980 They're not comparing the costs of lockdown to even just the economic costs of doing nothing

00:08:51.920 or doing much less than we are now in terms of social distancing and letting the contagion

00:08:57.540 explode, right?

00:08:59.320 So you just have to imagine, what does the economy look like when literally everyone

00:09:07.100 you know has a story about a friend who went to a restaurant or to the mall or to a movie 0.99

00:09:14.180 theater and wound up on a fucking ventilator? 0.99

00:09:17.240 Where is your economy then? 0.99

00:09:19.120 When we've basically just ridden the exponential curve as far as we can with contagion, people

00:09:26.140 aren't making that comparison.

00:09:27.320 They're comparing the obviously scary and depressing effects, I'm sure they're only going to increase

00:09:34.660 now in the coming months, of lockdown to the way they remember the world of yesteryear.

00:09:42.160 But that world, there's no scenario under which that world exists before we get to a place

00:09:47.140 where we've got a vaccine or a truly effective treatment for COVID-19, where the risk of getting

00:09:53.580 this thing by living normally is absolutely tolerable and economic behavior can return to normal.

00:10:00.840 Yeah, I agree.

00:10:01.720 I think some people have a fantasy where you say, well, look, let's make a hard choice

00:10:06.560 here.

00:10:06.920 And we snap our fingers.

00:10:08.680 We snap our fingers and life goes on exactly as it had.

00:10:12.040 We go to sporting events and restaurants and everybody keeps their jobs.

00:10:15.560 And then just magically, some fairly small percentage, 1%, half of 1%, whatever, of humans disappear

00:10:23.220 due to the virus.

00:10:24.920 And they say, well, that's the cost we paid.

00:10:26.940 But that's bizarre.

00:10:28.980 It wouldn't happen that way.

00:10:30.900 Every projection done by a serious person, for instance, points out that the fact is as

00:10:35.300 people got sick, they would flood the hospitals.

00:10:37.160 And that would cause enormous collateral damage.

00:10:42.060 And so, besides being incredibly cold-blooded, because often this comes in with saying, well,

00:10:47.620 just the old people will get it, which isn't true.

00:10:52.180 And to the extent it is true that they're proportionally more likely to get it.

00:10:55.940 Well, some of us all love old people. 0.75

00:10:57.880 Some of us are old people.

00:10:59.500 Beyond being cruel, it's just irrational.

00:11:02.380 It doesn't take into account that economic damage cannot be disentangled from all the

00:11:07.300 lives lost.

00:11:08.640 What do you do with the moral non-equivalence between this kind of real-world decision and

00:11:15.660 a thought experiment we could easily cook up that could leverage the empathy module in

00:11:20.860 a way that would be, at minimum, misleading?

00:11:23.720 So, like, obviously, people are willing to accept some number of deaths here for life to

00:11:30.000 go back to normal.

00:11:30.740 And given the way we're anchored to certain figures, I mean, given that people have accepted

00:11:36.100 that in the worst year, the normal flu can kill 80,000 people in the U.S., right?

00:11:42.380 Like, well, it was sort of 80,000 people died in, I think it was 2017 or 2018, by the flu.

00:11:48.720 That's the worst influenza year in recent memory.

00:11:52.300 And more or less nobody noticed unless they happen to have had a loved one killed by the

00:11:57.420 flu.

00:11:57.680 And so we're sort of anchored to a figure like that.

00:12:01.900 And if COVID-19 only kills 80,000 of us, many people will be saying we overreacted and it

00:12:08.180 was no big deal.

00:12:08.940 It's just another flu.

00:12:10.300 You know, the flu came twice this year.

00:12:12.160 But when you picture it killing 80,000 people in any other way, I mean, what if we were given

00:12:18.940 a choice that we could just perform a human sacrifice of, you know, 18 people in order

00:12:26.160 to rid the world of this pandemic?

00:12:28.220 We would clearly balk at that.

00:12:30.600 The identifiable human life sacrificed is intolerable.

00:12:35.360 And yet the statistical life, I mean, this sort of brings us back to the, I guess it's

00:12:40.000 the Lenin quote, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.

00:12:45.120 How do you think about our failure to reconcile the moral arithmetic there?

00:12:49.920 There is a framing issue, which is how you put it.

00:12:53.800 I heard Rudy Giuliani say something to the effect of, you know, well, that many thousands

00:12:59.320 of deaths isn't that much.

00:13:00.480 It's equal to the flu.

00:13:01.820 And imagine after 9-11 and, you know, the planes, you know, crash into Twin Towers and

00:13:07.520 you say to Rudy Giuliani, you know, only about 2,800 people died.

00:13:11.820 That's infinite.

00:13:12.380 That's a rounding error when it comes to the flu.

00:13:14.820 Nobody should get upset at all. 0.93

00:13:15.960 You would be looked at rightfully as a monster.

00:13:19.940 And so the framing serves a rhetorical purpose.

00:13:23.280 You connect the deaths due to COVID due to some large number of things that we accept and

00:13:28.560 not something else in order to calm people down and get them to think this is a minor

00:13:33.060 matter.

00:13:33.880 But if it was any other thing, we would not think of it as minor.

00:13:37.240 And then, of course, this is something which utterly enrages me.

00:13:40.080 And I've seen this more than once, including by William Bennett on Fox News, where he says,

00:13:44.440 well, 60,000 Americans, we were told it was going to be much more.

00:13:49.240 We did all this, and for 60,000, for, you know, 60,000 deaths is not such a terrible thing.

00:13:56.620 Ignoring the fact that it's a number as low as 60,000, if that's what it's going to converge 0.88

00:14:01.460 on, precisely because we spent a damn month in quarantine. 0.96

00:14:05.880 Yeah. 0.94

00:14:06.620 You know, it's like I'm saying, I'm some guy saying, you know, we really need fire extinguishers

00:14:11.560 for the fire, the fire comes, I use the fire extinguishers, there's not much damage. 0.99

00:14:16.100 He says, you idiot, you thought we needed fire extinguishers, look, there's not much 0.99

00:14:19.800 damage. 1.00

00:14:20.860 Yeah.

00:14:21.420 Yeah, that's what I referred to on Twitter as the first paradox of quarantine.

00:14:24.540 If social distancing works exactly as intended by lessening the contagion, the people who were

00:14:31.260 against social distancing will feel vindicated that we overreacted.

00:14:35.680 So it is a, it's a paradox or a seeming paradox, but it's, you can knock your brain against it

00:14:44.780 and figure it out.

00:14:45.640 And the counterfactual is pretty clear and it's being advertised to us and will be continually

00:14:52.180 advertised to us in other countries that have not or cannot affect an actual lockdown.

00:14:59.060 We'll see what exponential spread looks like and what its consequences are in some places,

00:15:04.920 I'm sure.

00:15:06.440 That's right.

00:15:07.180 And you raised before something which really is a genuine moral problem, which is a problem

00:15:12.140 of how to, um, how to compare things that aren't naturally comparable.

00:15:16.780 So it's terrible for people to lose their jobs.

00:15:19.640 It is painful.

00:15:21.000 It could be humiliating.

00:15:22.180 It could lead to, you know, in this country, another country, you know, starvation, loss of

00:15:27.520 medical treatment and so on.

00:15:29.040 It is terrible.

00:15:29.880 How many jobs lost equals one life or one death actually?

00:15:36.240 And that's a strange question, you know, you know, but, but it's a strange question, but

00:15:41.900 it's one that people actually have to wrestle with.

00:15:44.260 I mean, if, if you knew that you could, you know, save the jobs of 10,000 people, but five

00:15:50.460 people had to die, and this isn't science fiction, this actually could be just a policy

00:15:54.940 analysis.

00:15:55.980 We'll open up these restaurants and these bars and these stores.

00:15:58.800 And, you know, you look at the numbers, five people will probably die because of it.

00:16:02.440 It's not monstrous to say, go ahead.

00:16:05.040 It would be monstrous to say that there's no amount of death that's worth people getting

00:16:10.040 their jobs back, businesses flourishing and so on.

00:16:12.700 That's, that's crazy.

00:16:13.540 That, that sanctifies human life in such a way that, that, that it treats it separately

00:16:18.540 from human happiness and human flourishing.

00:16:20.500 And I think to some extent we have to make these comparisons, but they're very difficult

00:16:25.440 to do.

00:16:26.480 But they may be impossible to do when made explicit, right?

00:16:32.020 I mean, just like the example that's always come to mind in this context for me is the

00:16:36.580 speed limit.

00:16:37.540 None of us have committed ourselves, you know, or very few people, I'm sure there's someone

00:16:42.780 out there, but very few of us have committed ourselves to getting the government to pass

00:16:47.920 speeding laws so as to bring the risk of death down on our highways as low as possible, right?

00:16:55.700 So the lowest possible speed limit that's still compatible with the functioning of society

00:17:02.120 so as to minimize death.

00:17:04.300 None of us is wanting that and yet are not wanting that is just paid for in blood every

00:17:11.720 day, right?

00:17:12.600 So the reasons why we don't want that, because we just, we like the freedom to drive more or

00:17:16.080 less as fast as we want, or, you know, it would just be too boring to spend that much

00:17:21.040 time in a car because it takes three times as long to get anywhere.

00:17:26.060 These are incredibly callous when held up against even a single death in a given year,

00:17:32.860 right?

00:17:33.180 And we know we reliably have something like 40,000 of them every year.

00:17:36.940 So like when it's spelled out, if you had to opt in rather than find yourself in this system

00:17:44.280 by default, but like if every time you got in your car, you had to, you know, sign a waiver

00:17:49.920 saying, yes, I consent to put the lives of my neighbors at intolerable risk or at needless

00:17:56.920 risk by driving this fast.

00:17:58.840 If made explicit, it would be somehow unsustainable.

00:18:03.820 And this just happens everywhere.

00:18:06.380 I'm not quite sure I know how to think about it beyond just flagging the problem.

00:18:11.700 But if you just had to honestly assess real risk and your choice to embrace it, you know, 0.98

00:18:19.440 you can't help but look like a psychopath. 0.97

00:18:22.860 That's right. 0.98

00:18:23.340 There, you know, Phil Tetlock calls them taboo trade-offs.

00:18:25.900 And, and the paradox we're in is we have to do this all the time.

00:18:30.020 We have to have some sort of speed limit and any speed limit we have, if it were lower,

00:18:35.340 it would save lives.

00:18:36.520 If you had a speed limit, 10 miles per hour, 40,000 people won't die on the roads.

00:18:41.000 It had just, well, what happened is you'd have millions of very pissed off people.

00:18:45.640 And in our heads, we don't talk about it.

00:18:48.640 We don't make this policy.

00:18:49.580 We say, well, that much inconvenience, that much waiting and sitting in your car and getting

00:18:55.840 bored out of your skull and not getting there on time.

00:18:59.000 Yeah, it's worth many, many people dying.

00:19:01.780 So we don't have to go through that.

00:19:03.260 And it's, it sounds psychopathic to say this, but if you don't say it, you're stuck with

00:19:07.660 absurdities where you demand a two mile per hour speed limit, or you're stuck with absurdities

00:19:12.100 where you say, we will not open up business and restaurants and bars and so on until the

00:19:18.000 coronavirus is entirely gone, entirely eradicated, which would be a ridiculous decision.

00:19:23.060 Yeah, although it'll be a decision that you can't make for everyone, right?

00:19:29.480 So we could decide to open restaurants tomorrow by fiat, but no one would go, you know, or few

00:19:36.000 sane people would go under the current conditions.

00:19:39.300 That's right.

00:19:39.620 We know there's no adequate testing.

00:19:40.960 We know there's no contact tracing.

00:19:42.420 We know we're just bailing water as fast as we can and the boat is still filling up,

00:19:48.300 right?

00:19:48.640 So if you flip the switch and turn the economy back on, there would still be whole sectors

00:19:54.480 of it where it would be dark.

00:19:57.360 And the only thing that's going to change that is the mass and hopefully veridical perception

00:20:03.780 that the risk has been diminished to a tolerable level.

00:20:08.260 That's right.

00:20:08.800 But diminished to a tolerable level.

00:20:10.920 Yeah.

00:20:11.220 Not, not eradicated.

00:20:12.920 Yeah.

00:20:13.180 So I, the easiest, we'll talk later about some predictions we want to make, but the

00:20:17.060 easiest prediction in the world is we will end the lockdown before we end coronavirus.

00:20:21.700 We will, it'll be a presence and we'll worry about it and we'll try to block it.

00:20:25.340 We'll test people.

00:20:26.260 We'll look for people who are immune to it.

00:20:27.820 We'll do all sorts of sensible things.

00:20:29.820 But if we're honest with ourselves, we will all take some risk.

00:20:34.300 But yeah, no.

00:20:35.800 So, so what do you think in terms of the, the complexion of life changing, what do you

00:20:41.740 anticipate in terms of new norms around greeting people, you know, just, where does the handshake

00:20:49.420 go for, let's start with the handshake.

00:20:50.760 So, so, so let's, so let's look at a few things.

00:20:52.580 Where would the handshake go?

00:20:54.360 You know, I could imagine, first thing, the handshake's going to stay.

00:20:57.520 There's enough people who shake hands, but I could imagine among certain elite groups,

00:21:03.080 people who travel a lot, people who worry a lot, people who are wealthy, maybe Hollywood,

00:21:09.420 which tends to come first.

00:21:10.980 The handshake may drop.

00:21:12.600 It could be replaced by the fist bump, the bow, other options.

00:21:17.360 I don't think it's going to entirely go away, but it wouldn't surprise me if five years from

00:21:20.740 now, there are some people who had, did handshaking, don't do it anymore.

00:21:25.520 I could see it actually bifurcating along the typical political lines in the United States,

00:21:31.800 where the Dems, many Democrats give it up and Republicans doggedly hold on to it.

00:21:36.660 And the fact that each one of them, each group is doing it makes the other one more extreme.

00:21:42.320 Where, you know, you and I shaking hands, we saw each other be like wearing MAGA hats.

00:21:46.400 And, you know, while, you know, some Trump supporters bowing to each other, that's just 1.00

00:21:51.960 getting a fistfight for trying to do that shit. 0.99

00:21:54.020 So, real Americans shake hands and the latte-sipping coastal elites namaste each other? 1.00

00:22:01.700 They do exactly namaste. 0.99

00:22:03.880 What could be more of a cosmopolitan tree-hugging bullshit than namaste? 0.98

00:22:08.880 What could be more of feet? 0.99

00:22:10.280 That's right.

00:22:11.120 That's right.

00:22:11.620 So, I don't know.

00:22:13.320 I mean, physical context is a human appetite.

00:22:16.040 I think we're learning this.

00:22:17.240 So, I might be too quick to say that the handshake will go away among any group, because people

00:22:23.840 like touching each other.

00:22:26.260 Not everybody.

00:22:27.260 You know, your mileage may vary.

00:22:29.000 But people like the contact, the hug, the kiss on both cheeks, the handshake.

00:22:33.520 It's a natural human expression of solidarity and friendship and love.

00:22:38.880 And shutting it down would be hard.

00:22:41.520 But I don't think things are going to go exactly the same.

00:22:44.340 And I can imagine some groups moving to other options, particularly if a threat of infection

00:22:49.840 lives on for next year or more than year.

00:22:53.680 Yeah.

00:22:53.780 Well, I got to think that once we have a vaccine, you know, assuming we get a vaccine that works

00:23:01.040 like a normal vaccine, that offers a hard reset where we just go back to who we used

00:23:08.040 to be, hopefully with a few durable changes, just in terms of our being poised to respond

00:23:15.020 better next time.

00:23:16.260 I think one thing we might get out of this, there's a phrase that the philosopher Nick

00:23:20.740 Bostrom uses in talking about how we could respond to various existential risks.

00:23:26.880 And I guess he would apply to the risk of pandemic as well, but we were talking about it in a different

00:23:32.280 context, but he has this phrase that, you know, one path of mitigating risk is developing

00:23:38.740 something which he calls turnkey totalitarianism, where you can just, you just know how on a

00:23:46.840 moment's notice to turn society into, you know, the maximally defensible project.

00:23:54.660 And that entails, you know, mass surveillance and, you know, in this case, you know, impeccable

00:24:00.140 social distancing and the abrogation of all the rights that we have come to expect.

00:24:06.840 And it's the temporary abrogation of these rights, but it's, you know, we've all signed

00:24:11.500 up to survive for this period of a fortnight or a month or six months or whatever it is where

00:24:16.700 we're going to go into lockdown.

00:24:18.100 I got to think this has been a dress rehearsal for something that could be quite a bit more

00:24:25.280 deadly and we can learn something from this and become truly adept at pivoting to the everyone

00:24:33.980 get into your spaceship and seal the airlock scenario.

00:24:37.840 Yeah.

00:24:38.320 I mean, the idea of the stickiness of this sort of response is interesting.

00:24:43.120 To some extent, we've seen that with 9-11 where, you know, our security theater at airport

00:24:48.060 is right now indistinguishable from that, like three months after 9-11 in many regards.

00:24:54.560 We just stuck, we just stuck with it.

00:24:57.280 We've shaken the etch-a-sketch pretty hard with respect to travel. 0.98

00:25:01.360 So who knows what's going to come back?

00:25:03.200 I mean, the airport's going to...

00:25:04.080 That's actually interesting.

00:25:05.100 You can imagine this kind of a restart where maybe, you know, maybe TSA is going to let

00:25:10.220 me carry my liquids on the plane because what the hell?

00:25:13.120 Like, we've gone through a lot.

00:25:14.520 Yeah.

00:25:15.380 And I don't know how much it is for habits.

00:25:16.940 And this is, you know, my prediction about handshaking and the like, you know, if two

00:25:22.280 months from now, we're kind of back into normal, I doubt it.

00:25:25.860 But if that were the case, we'd probably go back to our normal habits.

00:25:29.100 But if we go a long period of time, then I think our habits might change.

00:25:35.700 You know, you had somebody on your podcast, doctor.

00:25:38.960 I'm trying to think of positive implications of this event.

00:25:42.260 And if it were to turn out that, as you're saying now, that what we've learned from COVID

00:25:48.680 will prepare us for the big one, the one where 60% of people die and spreads like wildfire

00:25:56.080 and is species-threatening.

00:25:58.560 Then, you know, as horrible as this is to say, this was a godsend.

00:26:02.100 This was all to the good.

00:26:02.860 No, there is a—it's amazing that once you take consequentialism seriously, you're left—whatever

00:26:11.900 judgment you have about the negativity of a given experience or a given outcome, it always

00:26:19.860 has to be bracketed by your uncertainty around how things will look once you get further out

00:26:27.200 in time, right?

00:26:28.720 So this is—it's like, when do you actually do the math on whether something was bad?

00:26:33.660 You know, you know, Chernobyl.

00:26:34.680 Yeah.

00:26:35.120 Is it too early to say that Chernobyl was definitively a bad thing for the world?

00:26:40.920 Well, if something about Chernobyl leads us to become truly safe around the next generation 0.96

00:26:48.040 of, you know, nuclear reactors, which save us from the greater evil of climate change,

00:26:53.640 well, then Chernobyl was, again, another thing that actually we used to our advantage and 0.88

00:26:59.460 was a net good.

00:27:01.240 Or worse, if Chernobyl scared us away from nuclear power, thereby hastening climate change

00:27:08.360 because we lost a really important form of energy, it might have been, you know, a thousand

00:27:12.940 times worse than it looked.

00:27:14.440 Right.

00:27:14.800 And for reasons that no one is even thinking about, yeah.

00:27:18.020 Yeah.

00:27:18.340 There's a Taoist parable to this, which I won't repeat because it takes too long, but

00:27:24.140 basically it's about this farmer and something bad happens to him.

00:27:27.280 And he says, yeah, but, you know, and everybody says, oh, it's too bad.

00:27:29.520 He says, yeah, we'll see.

00:27:31.040 And then it turns out the bad thing turns out a good thing.

00:27:33.000 And I think this is the way the world works.

00:27:36.060 That's why it's so hard to be utilitarian.

00:27:38.300 I have a fun variant of a more R-rated variant of your question.

00:27:43.740 I've heard two people, two very smart people, argue about this and come to different conclusions.

00:27:47.680 Pretty soon, this is going to release and people are going to be dating and, you know, dating

00:27:53.700 or whatever euphemism you'll use.

00:27:56.060 Tinder will reactivate.

00:27:57.600 People will be hooking up.

00:27:59.060 Do you imagine a release of pent-up sexuality, I've never said that phrase before, that will

00:28:05.880 immediately throw everybody into the arms of strangers and this explosion of promiscuous 0.95

00:28:09.980 sex?

00:28:10.780 Or do you imagine a period of reticence where for a little while people kind of holding back

00:28:15.120 a little bit more, more cautious?

00:28:16.760 Yeah, I guess this could be very different in different age cohorts.

00:28:22.680 I think the, you know, people under 30 probably even now consider themselves more or less immune

00:28:31.000 to this thing or that the consequences of getting it will be trivial or extremely likely

00:28:35.900 to be trivial.

00:28:36.860 And that's true.

00:28:37.640 And that still seems to be sort of true, although you can find examples of people in their 20s

00:28:43.660 dying or being brought pretty close to death from this.

00:28:47.900 So it's not something that really anyone at any age should be eager to get.

00:28:51.880 But I think the perception could be very different there.

00:28:55.240 That's a good answer.

00:28:55.800 You know, as you get older, I mean, as you're, you know, you get into your 30s and 40s, I

00:29:01.180 have to think it's going to seem more like the AIDS crisis for people.

00:29:07.080 I mean, I think you're going to want some testing prior to hooking up. 0.96

00:29:12.420 Otherwise, you know, it just, it's going to seem like Russian roulette.

00:29:16.240 But the world after a vaccine and the world after, you know, in nearer terms, probably

00:29:22.980 the world after a truly effective antiviral treatment for COVID, I think those are very

00:29:29.620 different worlds than the one we're in or the one we'll be in when we stumble out of

00:29:34.020 our isolation with a regime of very arduous testing and tracing, keeping us safer than

00:29:43.420 we would otherwise be.

00:29:44.320 Though this may happen sooner than a vaccine where they could test you, you could turn

00:29:50.000 out to have the antibodies suggesting that you've had COVID and you'll be immune.

00:29:53.880 And then I think they were doing this in China or something on their, on your smartphone.

00:29:57.540 You can get a little, uh, you know, a little red flower or something, something glowing,

00:30:02.060 a little orange flashing light that you could happily hold up to people saying, I'm clean.

00:30:07.240 That person will be Axel Rose in wherever, wherever he is in China or elsewhere.

00:30:11.560 Or is that, is that really the, the, the, the sort of avatar of unfettered sexuality?

00:30:17.500 Probably Axel Rose 20 years ago, 30 years ago when I'm dating myself and Axel Rose.

00:30:23.760 He's there listening.

00:30:24.740 Some are saying, Whoa, okay.

00:30:26.540 I, I, I, your listeners will never forgive us if we don't mention Trump.

00:30:29.680 Is this going to, is this going to help Trump or hurt Trump come, come election time?

00:30:34.680 Well, there are so many things that are conspiring to help and hurt Trump that it's, it's hard

00:30:40.020 to analyze this in isolation, but it should have destroyed his presidency already.

00:30:45.780 I mean, I just think the level of incompetence and dishonesty on display should be something

00:30:50.380 that for those who, for whom he had a good reputation, his reputation should never recover

00:30:55.660 from what happened in the month of March and what we've since learned about the month of

00:31:00.540 February.

00:31:02.340 But I mean, so it's just, you know, he, he missed every opportunity to avoid distinguishing

00:31:07.100 our country as the country in which the contagion did the most damage.

00:31:12.000 I mean, that's, that's where we are.

00:31:13.740 We're, we're winning in the, in a very Trumpian sense now, and we should be tired of it, but

00:31:20.420 he is only going to get stronger as our response to this becomes more effective, right?

00:31:28.360 So he's now getting credit for, or will get credit if, you know, there's only 60,000 lives

00:31:34.800 lost or whatever the number will finally be.

00:31:37.880 He'll get credit for anything short of an absolute Holocaust, right? 0.99

00:31:43.780 You know, if there's 2 million lives lost because we come rushing out of our houses and

00:31:48.840 hit the exponential again in 50 states simultaneously and can't figure out how to get back in in

00:31:54.380 time, we've got nothing effective in terms of testing and we tip over into something horrific,

00:32:00.040 well then that could make him unelectable.

00:32:02.600 But I think anything short of this is the worst thing that's happened on American soil

00:32:08.480 in a century and a half, I think he looks like the guy who, however, ineptly solved the

00:32:16.000 problem.

00:32:16.460 He delivered the aid.

00:32:17.540 It's his name on the checks that are going out to people, however, belatedly.

00:32:21.780 And part of this makes sense in that everyone wants him to succeed on some level.

00:32:27.060 Everyone wants an effective remedy.

00:32:28.760 Everyone wants to put politics behind them in an emergency.

00:32:33.580 So the default is to give him mulligan after mulligan after mulligan just to try to get

00:32:39.980 things in the right place.

00:32:41.960 And he just benefits from that in a way that, you know, that Biden can't, right?

00:32:46.440 And so any criticism of him, as I've noticed, sounds to the ears of anyone who supports him

00:32:52.540 like mere partisanship, you know, however, however appropriately targeted it is to his

00:32:57.820 genuine mistakes.

00:32:58.880 So I do think he's, I'm very depressed by our political prospects.

00:33:04.020 And this is, couple that with the fact that Biden seems like he's in the twilight of some

00:33:10.520 twilight and can barely complete a sentence without advertising the threat of old age,

00:33:17.140 disease, and death to everyone listening. 0.88

00:33:19.020 I just think it's, it's a bad political season if you're hoping Trump is not going to be given

00:33:24.720 four more years to rampage through human history.

00:33:28.240 Yeah, you, I have a similar view.

00:33:30.580 I've been watching his press conferences out of a kind of masochistic delight and, you know,

00:33:35.300 he's endlessly preening, declaring victory, boasting.

00:33:39.920 And, and I try to see this from somebody who hasn't been otherwise following it.

00:33:43.780 And I think, wow, he's done really well.

00:33:46.940 And because I think things are going to go well, I'm kind of an optimist.

00:33:50.340 And I think that the governors and, and the people in charge and the CDC are doing pretty

00:33:55.120 rational planning for the future.

00:33:56.600 I think this is going to turn out not as bad as it could have.

00:33:59.860 And we're going to come out in the fall and Trump is going to be declaring victory over

00:34:04.180 and over again.

00:34:04.860 And then people, presumably Biden, will point out, and I'll be exactly right, that he, he

00:34:10.940 messed it up.

00:34:11.960 He was far too slow.

00:34:13.280 It was a disaster, but they're going to come off as, as nitpicking as, as, you know, saying,

00:34:19.160 you know, it's like, he'll say, I won the war.

00:34:22.280 And you're complaining that very early on, there were some missteps.

00:34:25.140 Well, I won the war.

00:34:26.800 Yeah.

00:34:27.240 And, and so, so I worry about that.

00:34:30.740 There's one question that came in from Twitter, which seems appropriately targeted to you.

00:34:36.640 What do you think about the impact on children of this whole ordeal?

00:34:42.460 I mean, you know, both the, I mean, I guess, you know, most relevantly, just the experience

00:34:46.980 of normal life being disrupted.

00:34:49.260 And what do you think about the impact on education?

00:34:53.380 Oh, it's a great question.

00:34:54.380 I'll talk, we'll talk a bit about the first, see if we get to the second, but we have a

00:34:59.760 mutual friend and he, he sent me some stuff that Freeman Dyson wrote about the blitz.

00:35:04.320 So in the blitz, you know, this, this, what a 60 day long barrage of bombs over London by

00:35:10.380 Germany and the kids, of course, were sent off to the country. 0.93

00:35:13.400 I think about half of them were sent off to the country.

00:35:15.960 Education was gone.

00:35:17.420 The kids in the country basically went feral and would just spend each day running around

00:35:21.040 in the woods.

00:35:21.580 And, and, and Dyson talks about this with great nostalgia and points out, Hey, we're

00:35:26.740 fine.

00:35:27.900 There's a lot of evidence suggesting that kids are alarmingly, strikingly, wonderfully

00:35:35.400 resilient.

00:35:36.880 There's certain things that are really awful for a kid.

00:35:39.920 I think the worst things turn around, you know, cruelty by parents and stuff like that

00:35:44.700 indifference.

00:35:45.940 But when it comes to this sort of thing, kids are great.

00:35:50.240 And so I have every reason to believe that at the end of all of this, there will be no,

00:35:55.760 you know, we won't have some sort of generation of the Corona traumatized, the Corona kids who,

00:36:00.420 you know, have to be under special medication and so on.

00:36:03.400 They'll be, they'll be fine.

00:36:05.080 Does pulling the brakes at a fourth hour of continuous FaceTiming with one's friends count

00:36:09.940 as cruelty?

00:36:10.460 Cause I'm sure there'll be some debate in my house about that.

00:36:13.320 Yeah.

00:36:13.520 Well, well, everything people so confidently said about screen time has gone out the window.

00:36:18.760 Yeah.

00:36:19.360 You know, and, and, and I think when it comes to implication, maybe we'll learn that we

00:36:23.180 worried a little bit too much about screen time and other things.

00:36:26.200 Yeah.

00:36:26.420 Maybe worried a little bit too much about that extra hour of school and so on.

00:36:30.700 So I'm really optimistic about the kids.

00:36:33.060 When it comes to education in general, I'll sort of shift from, from kids to, to, to college

00:36:39.640 kids and university kids.

00:36:41.260 So every university, every college I know has gone online and Yale has gone online and I'm

00:36:46.200 teaching online now.

00:36:48.040 And if you ask professors about this, what do you think of teaching online?

00:36:51.980 I've asked, talked to friends and so on.

00:36:53.600 We, we hate it.

00:36:54.540 How, how are you actually doing it?

00:36:56.160 What are the mechanics of it?

00:36:57.160 So, so the mechanics are twofold and this is, this is similar to what a lot of people

00:37:02.520 are doing for intro psych, which is what I teach.

00:37:05.300 The lecture component of the class has been replaced by online lectures.

00:37:09.680 I already had some up as part of a Coursera online system.

00:37:13.460 So I just tell my students which ones to take.

00:37:15.900 I refer them to, to some YouTube videos and some other things I've done and ask the lectures.

00:37:20.660 They watch the lectures online, but then we also have, have sections and we do that by

00:37:25.020 zoom and small groups.

00:37:26.180 Right.

00:37:27.160 Right.

00:37:27.620 And, you know, and so it's not the same.

00:37:31.060 It's really not the same.

00:37:32.080 The seminar is not the same.

00:37:33.680 The lectures are not the same and professors will complain about it justifiably so.

00:37:39.960 But I can't help but think there are some positive features of this.

00:37:43.360 It's not that bad.

00:37:44.960 For one thing, it's very egalitarian.

00:37:47.260 It's egalitarian at the level that you see everybody's faces at once, exactly the same

00:37:51.180 size.

00:37:51.600 You're not sort of trapped by the structure of a seminar room or the distance of a lecture

00:37:56.420 hall.

00:37:56.660 But it's also egalitarian in that you can take a Yale course and you don't have to be in

00:38:00.920 New Haven, Connecticut.

00:38:02.140 You could be anywhere.

00:38:04.120 And, you know, there was a big push for these MOOCs, these massive online courses many years

00:38:09.480 ago.

00:38:09.780 And I don't think that much came of it.

00:38:11.620 I don't think very few universities shifted to them and so on.

00:38:15.400 But having tasted this, I wonder whether it's going to change the way universities work.

00:38:20.700 I think maybe to the better, to some extent, where more stuff will be made online and more

00:38:25.440 stuff will be available to the 99% of humans who don't get to be, you know, close to a great

00:38:32.000 university or college.

00:38:33.740 But wasn't the issue with MOOCs, and again, I don't know this firsthand, but my sense was

00:38:38.520 always that the lesson learned was that it's just harder to be motivated in solitude interacting

00:38:45.940 with screen-based content and being asked to do a lot of hard work to get through a course.

00:38:52.540 There's something about physically showing up with other people, even if it's only the

00:38:56.120 ritual of moving your body from one place to another, that makes it easier to just actually

00:39:02.340 get the work done.

00:39:04.000 Is that...

00:39:04.640 So I think that's a true...

00:39:05.920 I think that's a correct observation.

00:39:07.520 You know, my office is right next to a large lecture hall on Yale campus.

00:39:12.540 And, you know, suppose Solomon Rushdie was coming to give a talk.

00:39:15.180 Oh, hell, I'd go see that.

00:39:16.520 I'd wait in line for that.

00:39:18.080 But if somebody told me, what are you doing?

00:39:20.000 On YouTube, there's the same talk.

00:39:21.720 Right.

00:39:22.200 Well, who wants to see it on YouTube?

00:39:23.840 Whatever.

00:39:24.160 I can see anything on YouTube.

00:39:25.000 Being in person matters a lot.

00:39:28.300 But in defense of the MOOCs, the experiment has never been properly done because you're

00:39:33.220 comparing kids who are at a university, say, or a college, and they have to take courses.

00:39:37.940 They signed up for them.

00:39:39.280 They get grades.

00:39:40.400 They have scholarships rests on them.

00:39:42.120 This is their career.

00:39:43.340 Versus people who are taking MOOCs, like they're picking up a paperback book they bought,

00:39:48.900 which is, you know, they look through it and then toss it aside if it's boring.

00:39:51.560 Right.

00:39:52.040 Right.

00:39:52.820 So the proper experiment would have a university course with the same requirements and grades

00:39:58.680 and commitment and exams.

00:40:00.460 But this time, it's run long distance.

00:40:02.080 It's a flipped classroom.

00:40:03.620 And I agree with you that the in-person matters.

00:40:06.500 And I think we're seeing this more generally.

00:40:08.660 I've been talking to a lot of friends over Zoom and having occasional drinks, regular drinks

00:40:12.780 with friends.

00:40:13.400 It's not the same.

00:40:14.260 You know, I'm not kissing them, but when I'm in person, we're not touching, but it's

00:40:20.000 not the same.

00:40:22.300 So I don't think that there'll be a full replacement.

00:40:25.080 I think something is lost.

00:40:26.160 But I also think that this might really transform higher education, maybe in a good way.

00:40:30.840 And I'm thinking about this more generally.

00:40:33.020 So now if I want to see my doctor, I'll FaceTime with him.

00:40:36.440 He sent her an email saying, you want to meet with me?

00:40:38.720 Here's how to do it.

00:40:39.400 We're doing it through FaceTime.

00:40:41.160 Here's the procedure.

00:40:41.860 And it occurs to me, for a lot of things, that's actually really efficient.

00:40:48.140 You know, some things he has, some things you got to touch, you got to touch the person,

00:40:51.360 so on.

00:40:51.960 But if I tell him, you know, look, I needed a, I'd like a renewal for this prescription.

00:40:57.280 He's going to talk to me.

00:40:58.720 And that could be done online.

00:41:00.700 Do you think there are many universities that might not survive a long hiatus here?

00:41:08.400 If this drags on into next year, I mean, I know there are.

00:41:12.060 Major ones have endowments that I would imagine make them bulletproof over a much longer time

00:41:17.820 span.

00:41:18.260 But is there talk about just the failure of colleges in the near term?

00:41:23.380 There's always been smaller colleges that are on the brink and that rely on tuition money,

00:41:28.020 and they don't have million or billion dollar endowments.

00:41:30.640 And we're going to lose a lot of those.

00:41:33.160 We don't know what's going to happen in the fall.

00:41:35.920 Enrollment's definitely going to go down for many of them.

00:41:39.200 Whatever endowments these colleges have been, you know, damaged by the financial downturn,

00:41:45.740 I think places are going to go broke.

00:41:47.900 And even, you know, and so nobody's going to cry for the Yales or the Princeton's and everything,

00:41:52.480 nor should they.

00:41:53.020 But, you know, but we have a hiring freeze.

00:41:56.020 We have a salary freeze.

00:41:57.520 And I know at Yale School of Management, the tenure faculty are actually devoting some of

00:42:02.940 their salaries and shifting it to help out untenured faculty and staff who might lose

00:42:06.740 their jobs.

00:42:07.220 So even at a higher level, so very, very rich places are hurting.

00:42:12.700 This is really going to damage the smaller and less financially flexible places.

00:42:19.260 So do you even at a place like Yale, untenured faculty are losing their jobs or at risk of

00:42:26.660 losing their jobs?

00:42:27.640 No, they wouldn't be at risk of losing their jobs.

00:42:30.120 This is, in some way, the School of Management works differently.

00:42:33.160 And I think the money might actually go to staff who may get laid off.

00:42:35.840 But the untenured faculty here are not going to lose their jobs.

00:42:39.700 They are, we're not going to tenure fewer people or anything like that.

00:42:42.700 That never happens.

00:42:44.340 But I think a lot of people who work for Yale are at risk.

00:42:48.220 I think the graduate program is going to be maybe taking fewer graduate students.

00:42:54.280 This has had all sorts of ramifications.

00:42:56.540 I mean, you know, I feel awkward saying this because, you know, I know people have lost their

00:43:00.420 jobs.

00:43:01.040 I know people who loved ones have gotten sick.

00:43:03.180 So, but I have students who have research projects and their research careers have been

00:43:07.700 set back by a year.

00:43:09.840 Yeah.

00:43:10.040 Or if they're lucky, a year.

00:43:13.300 It's just when you think about the economic environment into which people graduating now

00:43:19.660 or soon to graduate will be seeking to start their careers and how long it takes for us

00:43:25.460 to dig out from this, strangely to watch the stock market respond with, with a rally as it did

00:43:33.200 yesterday.

00:43:33.980 I think it went down again today, but yeah, you'd think there's been good news that decides,

00:43:40.020 you know, the winds of the economy have shifted.

00:43:42.320 But I mean, we're just at the very beginning of understanding how bad this is and will be

00:43:49.000 economically and it just seems like, you know, it could be years before people get back to

00:43:55.200 zero.

00:43:56.100 Certainly in some sectors, it's, I don't see how it could be anything other than years.

00:44:00.700 Yeah.

00:44:00.900 It could be, it could be devastating for people early in their careers for a lot of different

00:44:04.820 careers.

00:44:05.500 And, you know, more generally, I, you know, I've heard economists talk about it and nobody's

00:44:09.680 quite clear on what projections to make.

00:44:12.280 It's not like the great depression.

00:44:13.700 You know, everybody, all these people lost their jobs, but in some way, the jobs will

00:44:18.760 be waiting for them or waiting for somebody when, when lockdown ends, you know, you don't

00:44:24.080 expect this, this, this huge leap in unemployment to remain once this is over.

00:44:29.180 Yeah.

00:44:29.780 Except when you picture all of the small or smallish businesses that have failed in the

00:44:36.540 meantime, you turn the lights back on, but some significant percentage of restaurants

00:44:42.400 no longer exist, right?

00:44:44.720 You know, there's just space now available for rent as a restaurant, you know, to reboot

00:44:49.300 that is difficult.

00:44:51.080 You know, I don't know what the time course of that is, but.

00:44:53.500 Yeah.

00:44:54.020 And we talked before about, you know, how do you compare death to misery?

00:44:57.880 And, and each of these stories of a person losing their job, a business doesn't get started

00:45:02.100 up.

00:45:02.280 It's just misery.

00:45:03.300 You could spend your whole life trying to create something and have it dashed.

00:45:06.360 But I find myself struck by, by all of the small stories about, you know, women giving

00:45:12.040 birth without their partner being present.

00:45:15.520 Somebody's loved one dying and they can't be in a room with them.

00:45:18.380 Yeah.

00:45:18.820 That's without funerals.

00:45:19.480 Well, that one, that one's ubiquitous and that's really brutal.

00:45:23.120 I don't know if anyone, I'm sure in, in, in the context of some other pandemic or epidemic,

00:45:28.320 that's been a common experience, but that really is the, the experience now of people, anyone

00:45:34.760 who's going into a hospital, whether they're going to be there for weeks recovering or they're

00:45:40.160 going to die, it seems like it's the universal experience that they're waving goodbye to their

00:45:44.380 loved ones and hoping to see them at the end of all this.

00:45:48.000 I mean, this gets to the bigger question where a lot of my colleagues, a lot of people on social

00:45:52.060 media have been talking about what are the long-term psychological effects of this?

00:45:55.720 Will this cause a, you know, a sharp increase into depression and anxiety disorders?

00:46:00.980 Will it be sort of this collective trauma that a lot of people suffer from?

00:46:07.540 And I think the answer is yes, but not only yes, it gets complicated.

00:46:13.020 There there's, we also have psychological mechanisms that are protective against these

00:46:16.580 things.

00:46:16.860 I said kids are resilient, but adults could be resilient too.

00:46:20.840 But one thing that strikes me, which is kind of, I'm trying to struggle my way home to think

00:46:25.580 about this, there's a literature on how we deal with, with sort of collective disasters

00:46:31.540 like hurricane Katrina or the September 11 bombing or the blitz.

00:46:38.740 And the answer typically is Rebecca Solnit has a great book called a paradise built in hell,

00:46:44.760 where she talks about this is it brings people together.

00:46:48.140 It brings people together.

00:46:49.780 They work together.

00:46:50.620 It becomes rich and poor, black and white.

00:46:53.180 Everybody works together.

00:46:54.640 There's this, and there's a feeling of, of joy and bliss and a common purpose and a common

00:47:01.920 goal.

00:47:02.880 So, so you read about these cases and, and, and people talking back about what it was like

00:47:08.100 to be in a blitz, what it was like in these circumstances and saying, it was wondrous.

00:47:12.480 You know, we, we lost our house.

00:47:14.220 So-and-so died, but it was wondrous.

00:47:15.920 It was a moment in my life.

00:47:17.260 I can't recapture.

00:47:18.100 And you think, well, there's a bright side.

00:47:20.660 People will look back on the pandemic this way, but the cruel thing about the pandemic

00:47:25.100 is we can't get together.

00:47:27.260 Yeah.

00:47:27.440 We get together.

00:47:28.260 We're getting together now over Skype, but you look at every other case and there are

00:47:32.580 people physically together in large groups, helping out, working together.

00:47:37.700 And, and, and the cruelty of this pandemic is it, it, it blocks us from, I think, a process

00:47:45.740 that would leave us far more resilient to the suffering that would make us better.

00:47:50.540 Yeah.

00:47:50.700 I mean, putting your shoulder to the wheel here is synonymous with social distancing.

00:47:56.820 That is what you can do.

00:47:58.520 It is the opposite of bringing people together.

00:48:01.320 And, and if what I can do is, is, is help pull the rocks from people who have been crushed

00:48:07.700 by an earthquake and I work on it day and night, it's horrible, but it's also such a thing

00:48:11.860 to do.

00:48:12.340 But if what I could do is sit at home and, and bake bread and watch Netflix, it doesn't

00:48:17.940 scratch the same itch.

00:48:19.240 One thing that's interesting for me is the prospect of having one's perception of the

00:48:27.280 risk of contagion and its consequences permanently reset.

00:48:31.640 I really, I don't know if this is going to happen.

00:48:33.700 I do think that it's possible that once we have a vaccine, well, then the world essentially

00:48:39.700 goes back to where it was.

00:48:41.160 And you and I never really were worried about Ebola and we're not going to worry about it

00:48:45.220 now.

00:48:45.520 We're not going to worry about the next pandemic until it's sufficiently well advertised to

00:48:50.680 us that we're convinced we need to get back in our houses and hunker down.

00:48:55.040 So I could imagine a perfect reset there.

00:48:57.920 But currently if I'm looking at a, a video, you know, shot in the distant past of six months

00:49:05.800 ago and you just see normal social behavior, right?

00:49:09.720 You see a crowd of people shoulder to shoulder.

00:49:12.100 You see a politician wading into that crowd and shaking hands.

00:49:16.960 And, you know, I feel like I now have the agoraphobia module in my brain fully installed 0.97

00:49:23.560 where I think that just looks fucking crazy, right? 0.75

00:49:26.720 Like what are those people thinking? 0.95

00:49:29.560 Don't they know about aerosolized contagion?

00:49:32.880 That is the thing that is astonishing about the circumstances that this was not a maybe

00:49:38.540 this is something like this was more or less guaranteed to happen, right?

00:49:42.300 It's like we're open systems with respect to the rest of the world and it's novel viruses.

00:49:49.660 And once we solve this particular problem, we will be absolutely sure that the next one

00:49:54.920 is coming.

00:49:55.480 Now, whether it's coming in four years or 40 years, we don't know.

00:49:58.360 But this is like the next tornado arriving in Tornado Alley.

00:50:02.220 You can't pretend you don't know about tornadoes if you live in Kansas.

00:50:07.520 Yeah.

00:50:07.940 Yeah.

00:50:08.500 And there's two possibilities for what happens when you get hit by a tornado.

00:50:13.380 One is it's always the safest bet when somebody says, how will this transform us to answer

00:50:18.300 it won't.

00:50:19.280 We'll just go back to normal.

00:50:20.520 Yeah.

00:50:20.740 And, you know, and I think this is true for some aspects of this.

00:50:23.940 I hear people say this will give us increased respect for the value of science.

00:50:28.440 No, it won't.

00:50:29.580 No, it won't.

00:50:30.080 You know, the people who care about science will care and then others will forget about

00:50:33.800 about it.

00:50:34.760 Even anti-vaxxers will come back, I bet, after a little while.

00:50:37.920 You don't think we can quash that one for good?

00:50:39.980 Well, I was thinking of the one group at risk is probably anti-vaxxers.

00:50:44.420 It's just it is very hard to be an anti-vaxxer to say.

00:50:47.560 But but wait, but wait, I I just think the most natural answer is the safest answer is always

00:50:54.000 it won't change us.

00:50:55.080 My predictions about handshakes are fantasies.

00:50:57.300 You know, people shake hands because they always choke hands.

00:50:59.260 Why should this make a difference?

00:51:00.940 It's it's it's months.

00:51:02.240 It's a year.

00:51:02.720 It's not enough.

00:51:04.040 But but I have some sympathy for your kind of analysis to take it at an individual level.

00:51:11.860 You go for a nice walk around the neighborhood.

00:51:14.420 You know, every night you're all happy and everything.

00:51:16.840 And then one day you take a walk in the neighborhood and a vicious dog bites you and you're hospitalized.

00:51:22.060 You come back.

00:51:23.420 For the rest of your life, walking around the neighborhood is different.

00:51:26.600 Yeah, it's different.

00:51:27.480 It's fraught with anxiety.

00:51:29.560 Maybe, you know, you do you do therapies, you work on it, but it's always there.

00:51:34.180 And in fact, the next time the dog bites you, it comes back like wildfire.

00:51:38.540 And I wonder whether this touch with disease and contagion, I guess I'm saying that there's

00:51:45.220 some chance you're right.

00:51:46.000 This touch with disease and contagion will forever reconfigure us where, you know, right

00:51:51.440 now you're fine and then, you know, a couple of years later, someone loudly sneezes at

00:51:55.720 a party and everybody flinches.

00:51:57.840 We find ourselves washing our hands more often.

00:52:00.580 People with obsessive disorders get worse.

00:52:03.460 That has to be an irony of of anyone who's far along on that spectrum.

00:52:08.060 I mean, just this, you know, compulsive hand washing behavior is the order of the day now.

00:52:11.900 Yeah, it's like it's the introverts' revenge and also the obsessive washers' revenge.

00:52:17.900 I know a guy on, a friend of mine, and on Twitter he was saying, so this is another take on it,

00:52:22.480 saying that he's normally a very anxious person.

00:52:25.400 And I know him, and he self-medicates with marijuana and kind of, but he's basically an

00:52:29.680 anxious guy.

00:52:30.280 He says, this has been the least anxious period of his life because, A, everything he worried

00:52:36.380 about has happened, and, B, everyone else is sharing his feelings, his experience, too.

00:52:42.660 The consolations of I told you so.

00:52:44.960 That's exactly right.

00:52:46.040 That's exactly right.

00:52:46.720 The happiness of the paranoid person who finally sees the black helicopter circling his house

00:52:51.700 and says, see?

00:52:52.400 I see.

00:52:53.300 And, in fact, I mean, that's something which is just amazing.

00:52:56.600 I don't know if we talked about it last time or this time, but one of the things which

00:53:00.820 is unique about this is how shared it is.

00:53:03.940 How we, for the first time in my life, and maybe I will never experience this again, I

00:53:08.820 am experiencing something that everyone else in the world is, in different ways, but pretty

00:53:14.240 much the same.

00:53:15.600 Yeah, although I keep having to remind myself that, on the one hand, we're having a shared

00:53:22.160 experience.

00:53:22.760 Just take the United States, something like, I think it's 97% of us are under something

00:53:29.480 like lockdown orders, but they're very different experiences to be having in that context.

00:53:35.660 I mean, there are people like me who are extraordinarily fortunate to be, one, locked down in a condition

00:53:44.420 of relative comfort with family, who I'm experiencing the silver lining of, you know, lots of enforced

00:53:51.580 quality time, which we're all enjoying.

00:53:55.300 You know, there are people who are, even in my, in similar circumstances, but they're not

00:54:00.280 having a happy family life at all, right?

00:54:02.360 You know, they're figuring out how they can get divorced the moment the quarantine lifts. 1.00

00:54:07.080 But then they're, you know, just add all these other variables.

00:54:09.260 There are people like me who can continue working, and there are people who have just seen their

00:54:14.920 economic life completely implode, because, you know, work is synonymous with not being

00:54:20.500 locked down.

00:54:21.800 And then there's just every other permutation of this in other contexts, like, you know,

00:54:26.140 what's going to happen in the developing world where you can't even lock down, right?

00:54:30.320 And there's so much crowding and kind of hand-to-mouth economic necessity where it's just,

00:54:37.040 you know, you just have to try to keep living normally because there's not much of a health

00:54:42.260 system that you're going to crash in the first place, right?

00:54:44.680 So people are just going to get this virus, and you can try to avoid it, but it's more

00:54:49.140 or less hopeless.

00:54:50.160 So it's just the range of experiences under this common condition is impressive.

00:54:55.540 And we don't have shared fates here, and that's...

00:54:58.760 No, that's true.

00:55:00.440 I'm in Toronto now, and there's a lot of controversy about people.

00:55:03.820 People of wealth in Toronto typically have a summer cottage by the lake.

00:55:07.640 And so, because the mayors of these cottage communities are saying, don't come.

00:55:13.340 We don't want you to come.

00:55:14.640 You risk getting sick.

00:55:16.140 You risk infecting people.

00:55:17.220 We don't have the resources and everything like that.

00:55:19.100 And then, you know, but if you say, well, I pay taxes, and I bought this place.

00:55:22.260 So on the one hand, you have that.

00:55:23.640 On the other hand, you know, I could walk down, you know, Queen Street, where I'm at, and I

00:55:28.320 see clusters of homeless people.

00:55:30.620 And they're not obeying social distancing because they're homeless.

00:55:34.880 They don't have anybody, you know, they're protecting each other.

00:55:38.220 And they have no, you know.

00:55:39.460 And so, but I'd still say, you know, I read something in New York Times, and the headline

00:55:44.240 was something to the effect of, half of the world under lockdown.

00:55:49.180 And yes, we experience it very differently.

00:55:52.360 But still, when have you had an experience?

00:55:54.840 When have you thought about something and knew of some certainty that people in Kenya

00:55:59.760 and Tokyo and Saskatoon are thinking about the very same thing?

00:56:05.260 I can name those occasions, and they're impressively few.

00:56:09.240 But I think the first moment like that, that seemed like it was a truly a global moment where

00:56:15.160 everyone was paying attention to the same thing, or nearly everyone.

00:56:18.540 Strange to say it, that it was the first thing in my lifetime that seemed to rise to that level

00:56:25.120 was Princess Diana dying.

00:56:27.380 Oh, yes.

00:56:27.960 That was just an order of magnitude bigger than anything else that had happened in terms of its, you know, media coverage.

00:56:34.140 And then you had 9-11, and then you had Trump's election, and then you have, you know, a fair amount of Trump,

00:56:40.660 and then you have this.

00:56:41.380 And I don't know what, I'm sure there's something else on that list, but they're pretty few and far between these events.

00:56:48.280 But a lot of those things, I don't think they compare.

00:56:52.200 I think that, you know, when Trump was elected, there was probably a snapshot where the whole planet was going, 0.99

00:56:58.440 oh, fuck, you know, just for a moment. 0.98

00:57:00.980 But then two days later, you know, if you're, you know, a real estate agent in Beijing, 1.00

00:57:06.520 you're probably not thinking about Trump, you know, and you weren't thinking about 9-11.

00:57:09.700 But people in New York thought about 9-11, but how much did people in Nebraska two months later think about 9-11?

00:57:15.840 But now we're thinking about this all the time.

00:57:18.920 And so on the one hand, it's this enormous collective communal thing.

00:57:22.820 But on the other hand, we experience it alone.

00:57:25.940 And I'm worried that the aloneness is going to block any positivity that you might get from the shared experience.

00:57:34.540 But you're totally right.

00:57:35.700 People do, you know, and I don't want to diminish that.

00:57:38.340 You're very fortunate.

00:57:39.140 And I'm fortunate as well to be to be stuck with somebody I love.

00:57:43.180 There's a lot of people, even people who aren't having terrible experiences are stuck with people they hate.

00:57:47.740 And imagine being stuck in a place and imagine it's not a big place with somebody who hates you and you hate them.

00:57:53.060 Yeah, or just completely isolated, right?

00:57:55.140 I mean, the people who are isolated and are not well designed for isolation.

00:57:59.960 Okay, so let's go to a few more topics.

00:58:03.320 We had a bunch of topics from Twitter related to the election, the prospect of Bernie supporters refusing to vote for Biden.

00:58:12.820 We should touch that.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 16, 2020

#198 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

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