Jeffrey Sachs

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.

[1] Experts on experts.

[2] I'm Dan Shepard.

[3] Hi, Dan.

[4] I just mispronounce the name of our own thing.

[5] You said experts on experts.

[6] That's okay.

[7] We're not perfect.

[8] We're not perfect.

[9] We're far from it.

[10] You know who is perfect?

[11] Jeff Sachs.

[12] Boy, oh, boy, is this guy fascinating.

[13] He was one of these folks that afterwards, Monica and I were like, is he the smartest person we've ever talked to?

[14] And also his resume was like 45 pages long.

[15] Couldn't be read, to be honest.

[16] Yeah, just at the end we're like, Like, what a comprehensive view of everything.

[17] History, the economy, everything.

[18] And he made us kind of rethink some things.

[19] He's got us on the ropes a little bit.

[20] That we had thought we were permanent staples on.

[21] Yeah.

[22] We haven't made any big declarations.

[23] We haven't, certainly the gears are turning.

[24] Yeah.

[25] So Jeffrey is an American economist, a liberal and academic, a public policy analyst and former director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of university professor.

[26] He is known as one of the world's leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty.

[27] He has written many books, A New Foreign Policy, Building the New American Economy, the Age of Sustainable Development, and his new book, The Ages of Globalization, Geography, Technology, and Institutions gives you a full comprehensive view of all this stuff.

[28] So, please check out his book and please enjoy Jeff Sachs.

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[32] He's an armchair expert.

[33] Mr. Sacks, how are you?

[34] I doing all right.

[35] Hanging in there.

[36] Thanks a lot.

[37] Good to be with you.

[38] So we're from the same area.

[39] I just found that out.

[40] Do you know where Oak Park is?

[41] Oh, yes.

[42] been ticketed in Oak Park.

[43] There you go.

[44] So have I. Near 10 mile and Woodward.

[45] Yes.

[46] Yeah.

[47] Yeah.

[48] And they have their own, if I recall correctly, because when I got pulled over and ticketed, they were in an ambulance that they had converted into a police vehicle.

[49] So I was so confused as they were following me on my scooter.

[50] With the sirens blurring, I'm like, it's an ambulance.

[51] I'll go around, go.

[52] And then there was there was three Oak Park police inside.

[53] It was very confusing.

[54] And I think Kristen is from Huntington Woods, which is exactly the next door of Oak Park, right across from the golf course, actually.

[55] Yeah.

[56] So you were born there and then you stayed until you went off to Harvard?

[57] Exactly.

[58] Yeah.

[59] So I grew up 17 years there and then went off and yeah, but fond memories.

[60] It was a nice place to grow up, actually.

[61] Yeah.

[62] And now what was the driving force between I'm going to put my head down and I'm going to get myself into Harvard?

[63] What?

[64] where did that come from?

[65] Ah, who knew?

[66] You know, it wasn't a long premeditated thing.

[67] It just seemed like a good thing to try after high school.

[68] I lucked out because it worked for me, and I ended up staying at Harvard for 30 years.

[69] Yeah.

[70] College, that master's, PhD, postdoc professorship, and thought we were there, you know, for life.

[71] But then we moved to New York in 2002.

[72] Well, I've interviewed quite a few experts at this point, and, you know, there's varying levels of daunting biographies, and yours was literally, it's just too much for me to wrap my head around.

[73] I can only compare it to a guy we just interviewed who runs the Rockefeller Foundation, where I was like, you just, you can't, you can't have lived this many lifetimes at your age.

[74] I don't really understand.

[75] If anything, you guys all should be focusing on time management books.

[76] That's what you should.

[77] So you were with Raj, Rush.

[78] Yes, yes, yeah.

[79] Yeah, yeah.

[80] And another Michigander, by the way.

[81] That's right.

[82] They produce some good people.

[83] Of course.

[84] It's an amazing place for generating all sorts of amazing people.

[85] But Raj is great, and he has had many incarnations of continuing to rise in influence and smarts, and it's great that he's at Rockefeller.

[86] Yeah, it really is.

[87] What drew you to economics?

[88] That's an interesting question.

[89] Please say you wanted to get rich.

[90] That's the only thing I'd be able to identify with.

[91] Well, that was the one thing I never figured out, so I never really aimed for.

[92] But, you know, I was in high school in Oak Park, Michigan, and I had a pen pal when it was not email.

[93] And I wrote letters for years to somebody that I had met on a trip that my parents took us to Moscow, actually, in 1970.

[94] So it was kind of amazing 50 years ago.

[95] I met this young man. We began corresponding to pen pal.

[96] He was in East Berlin, and I went East Berlin, you know, behind the Iron Curtain and behind the wall.

[97] Oh, wow.

[98] And spent two weeks there right after high school.

[99] And it was completely, oh, my God, what's going on?

[100] And he told me, you know, socialism is great and capitalism is evil.

[101] And the fact is I had no idea.

[102] I didn't understand anything about our society, our system, much less, you know, comparisons in the rest of the world.

[103] And it was funny because at the end of this day, in those days, in the communist period, you had to change a certain amount of money per day.

[104] So I had changed $7 per day or something into East German Marx.

[105] There was nothing to do with it.

[106] And you go to a store, which is the only place you're allowed to shop.

[107] So it's special kind of tourist currency.

[108] And there was nothing there that I wanted.

[109] But there were some books on a bookshelf.

[110] Dialectical and historical materialism.

[111] Marxist economics and so on.

[112] So I threw them in a backpack, read them during the rest of the summer and said, oh, whoa, this is even more confusing.

[113] And basically got to Harvard that fall saying, I want to figure this out.

[114] Yeah.

[115] Started in economics.

[116] And that was 48 years ago.

[117] And I have not gotten tired of it.

[118] It's a pretty interesting subject.

[119] Yeah.

[120] What a gift in life to get interested in something and it just doesn't let up.

[121] Yeah.

[122] Yeah.

[123] You know, for me, it was really, really that formative moment.

[124] Of course, I was curious about a number of things, but it was that formative moment.

[125] Which place is better?

[126] Is that right?

[127] What are they saying about us?

[128] And how do you understand this?

[129] So I started on that 48 years ago.

[130] I'm still on that question, basically.

[131] I know a little bit more than I did then.

[132] And it's been quite an adventure.

[133] But it still is really my driving question, you know, what makes society work?

[134] What makes for a good society?

[135] How do we get our head around that.

[136] What should we be doing?

[137] And it's a question that just doesn't stop, actually.

[138] Now, have you read any of the Yuval Harari books?

[139] I read one of them, the first one.

[140] Sapiens?

[141] Yeah.

[142] Yeah, so the most recent one, the name escapes me, but I read it.

[143] He talks a lot about there was basically two narratives you could adopt in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, either communism or capitalism.

[144] It was a war of those two stories.

[145] And I'm curious after 48 years of thinking, about it and having actually experienced Moscow in the 70s and then East Berlin, you know, his conclusion, which of course I happen to agree with is you just can't run an economy with a centralized decision making.

[146] So just fundamentally it kind of proved to not be effective.

[147] Is that your conclusion?

[148] Well, yeah, not only that, I played a pretty central role in dismantling the central planning after 1989.

[149] I was the main advisor to the first Polish solidarity government.

[150] And I actually wrote overnight, kind of in an all -nighter one night, the plan to get out of a centrally planned economy.

[151] Oh, wow.

[152] Yeah, no, it was actually one of the most unusual and amazing, literally, assignments of my life.

[153] I was advising Lech -Voenza's top deputies in the Solidarity Movement in this crucial revolutionary few weeks in the summer of 1989.

[154] And I had some ideas about how to end the central planning and went to see this incredibly brave, brilliant freedom fighter named Yatsa Kurohn, who was one of the top solidarity leaders in Poland.

[155] And we talked, and he didn't speak English.

[156] So there was a friend of mine translating, and he was, chain smoking and had his whiskey alongside, and it was several intense hours, really among the most amazing hours of my whole life, where I was explaining what I thought, and he kept pounding the table saying, tak, Rosamimim, which means, yes, I understand, yes, I understand.

[157] And then at the end of it, sometime around midnight, in his little smoke -filled flat, he said, okay, now you have to write up the plan.

[158] you're right what you say but it has to be how Poland rejoins Europe that was the idea and I said okay Mr. Coran it'll be my pleasure I'm going to go home and within two weeks I promise you know I'm going to get it to you he said no tomorrow morning I need it for Lefoenza and I said really he said tomorrow morning I need it now and the translator was the business manager of the first non -communist new newspaper that had just been allowed to start up as part of this revolution, the Gazette v. Borecha.

[159] So we went in the middle of the night to what was a kindergarten room that had been taken over as the newsroom because it was a startup in the middle of the revolution.

[160] And there was literally a board over the sink and a new IBM computer in the first generation of this.

[161] And from 1230 midnight till 6 a .m., I typed out a plan for ending the central planning and converting to a market economy.

[162] And it actually became the basis of Poland's plan.

[163] Did your ego at any point say, my God, I'm going to be the Alexander Hamilton of Poland.

[164] Did it cross your mind that you were doing some founding father's work?

[165] You know, it was so unbelievably amazing those weeks.

[166] It's the kind of thing in life that you remember every day, every moment, because it was so intense.

[167] And it just happened.

[168] My wife's from Prague, so she had grown up in the communist period.

[169] They had escaped in a dramatic escape, like one reads about that was their real family life.

[170] here I was now in the middle of this revolution, and I had come into this exactly trying to understand these issues as a kid, you know, behind the Berlin Wall.

[171] What had happened was that the Polish government, even before the 1989 revolution, had asked me for help because they had gone bankrupt and they owed debt.

[172] And that was my specialty at the time was helping countries out of a debt crisis, basically by not paying, by the way, that was the solution.

[173] So negotiating debt relief.

[174] And I told them early in 1989 that I couldn't really help them because Lech Valenzha was my hero and he was under house arrest and, you know, I really wanted to help.

[175] And if ever he got out of house arrest and there was some way to help Poland.

[176] Of course, in my heart, I would love to do so.

[177] And they called me back a month later saying we're going to end martial law.

[178] Lech Valenzis going to come out.

[179] Now will you come to Poland?

[180] And I got to Poland in April.

[181] And then by happenstance, my idea was to help solidarity and to help Poland.

[182] But then it became the revolution, the end of the communist era.

[183] And by the way, I love Gorbachev because I watched very close up this extremely civilized man peacefully end the Cold War.

[184] Yeah.

[185] And from the U .S. side, Reagan is given.

[186] and so much credit and so forth, but it was actually the unbelievable dignity and decency of Gorbachev that made this possible.

[187] But in any event, long story short, suddenly I found myself in the middle of a revolution.

[188] There's no way in life that one plans a moment like that, but there I was for several weeks.

[189] And it was life changing for me and amazing every single moment.

[190] Okay.

[191] Do you have any American friends?

[192] Because so far you've got a rush, pen pal, a Czech wife, a Polish translator your buddies with.

[193] I'm very curious about this pattern of your life.

[194] This is very intriguing.

[195] Look, as Michiganers, you know, we're the salt of the earth, right?

[196] We come from the heartland.

[197] So I feel that lots of American friends, but the truth is I went into economics because I was curious about the world.

[198] And starting in 1976, actually, 72, was this first experience of visiting my pen pal.

[199] 76.

[200] I graduated college.

[201] And I began traveling.

[202] And I haven't stopped until about four months ago.

[203] This is the longest stretch that I have been in one place in my life in more than 40 years because I became an international economics specialist, compare, contrast, understand the world, study, trade, and financial flow.

[204] and so on.

[205] And so until March of this year, I was in an airport almost every other day for the last couple of years.

[206] And then in March, you know, the agony, oh my God, do I take this last trip or not.

[207] I was supposed to have been today just leaving Rome for London.

[208] I think it was today.

[209] Every day was plotted out from March, April, and May. So I think I read you've been to 120 countries.

[210] That's on a date because it's closer to about 140 at this point.

[211] Oh, my goodness.

[212] Yeah, yeah.

[213] It's very relevant that at a young age, you had such an instrumental role in such a humongous project that it probably informed you rightly or wrongly that you could have a gigantic impact on the world as an individual.

[214] I would imagine that would be a very empowering experience where you could think, yeah, man, I can affect some change on a global level.

[215] Yeah, it's nice of you to say it.

[216] There's, you know, an element that is, I had that feeling, but partly from my dad, you know, he, he was a lawyer in Michigan.

[217] Labor lawyer?

[218] He was a labor lawyer, represented the AFL -CIO and teachers and the firemen and so forth and wonderful person.

[219] And he came from a poor family, went to University of Michigan, came out of law school and got to a law firm in Detroit, downtown Detroit, and he was a kid.

[220] And the head of the AFL -CIO in Michigan at that point, wanted to challenge the way that the state legislature was apportioned, you know, the gerrymandering and so on.

[221] And everybody thought it was impossible to take the case.

[222] And this labor giant named Gus Scholl, who was the head of the state, FLCIO, and a real labor act of, you know, great labor leader, because Michigan was the heart of the industrial movement, came to my dad's firm.

[223] And there was my dad, I think, 24, 25 or something.

[224] And he got this case fighting what became called reapportionment.

[225] And let's see, when he was 32 or 33, he's going to the U .S. Supreme Court and all of that.

[226] And I grew up watching that in amazement, of course.

[227] Yeah, he was modeling some pretty powerful behavior.

[228] Yeah, and so I got to see what it meant to do something remarkable early on.

[229] And then life is, as you know, can't plan this stuff.

[230] As I'm sure you know very well with all the great things.

[231] you're doing.

[232] And when I was not quite 31, actually 30, I somehow stumbled into helping Bolivia in the middle of one of the highest inflations in history.

[233] It had reached about 60 ,000 percent annual inflation rate.

[234] Oh, is that worse than Germany pre -World War II?

[235] It wasn't quite like it didn't reach that, but it was on its way to that.

[236] And some students of who were from Bolivia, who had been to Harvard and went back and became politicians, came back to Harvard one week and wanted to find some help.

[237] And so they advertised in the economics department, please come to a workshop on Bolivia.

[238] And I was, I think, one of two people who showed up.

[239] Yeah, it's not a super sexy invite.

[240] Yeah, no, no. At some moment, somebody said something, and I stood up.

[241] I said, it's not really like that.

[242] And I went to the blackboard.

[243] I drew a line on the chalk.

[244] And somebody in the back of the room said, okay, if you're so smart, you come to Bolivia.

[245] And I laughed.

[246] You want to know the truth?

[247] Because it was the life changer for me. Well, I knew Bolivia was somewhere in the Western Hemisphere, but I didn't know where.

[248] I wasn't sure whether it was in Central America or South.

[249] I really didn't know, which is unbelievable.

[250] I only know because I'm an ex -cocaine addict.

[251] There you go, exactly.

[252] So I ended up going and ended up helping them to cancel their debts, as I mentioned, and that's why Poland called.

[253] And, you know, one thing leads to another.

[254] But it meant that early on in my career, which is little unusual for academia, I was out in the world doing things as well as writing my papers and teaching.

[255] It wasn't exactly normal.

[256] And it wasn't exactly prized, I would say, by the way, because even kind of my senior supervisor said to me, you know, when are you going to get back to your real work and so on, which was writing articles.

[257] And I came to, especially kind of modeled on my dad as an activist, also, I just had the sense I wanted to do things real in the world.

[258] But I knew and I do believe that academia also should help you do a better job in the practical.

[259] side.

[260] So I've tried to do one foot on each side basically for the last 35 years.

[261] And it's a pretty interesting, rewarding approach, I find.

[262] Yeah.

[263] Okay.

[264] So I'm going to try to get into some kind of bigger concepts.

[265] And I have some questions within there.

[266] But I guess before we go down that road, I guess I'm wondering, in the 70s, 80s, 90s, you had these two options, capitalism, right?

[267] And now emerging seems to be this hybrid of socialism that exists in some Europe.

[268] countries.

[269] I think there's a lot of confusion in this country about what socialism is.

[270] I'm wondering where you stand today.

[271] If you had to say, I'm a capitalist or I'm a capitalist with caveats, am I a capitalist with lots of restrictions and a lot of governance?

[272] Where are you at right now as far as an economic model that you think is sustainable?

[273] Because I know one of your big commitments is growing the economy globally in a sustainable, responsible manner.

[274] You know, you could probably sense I can be pretty stubborn guy in some ways.

[275] I was going to call you high on the disagreeability metric, which I love.

[276] We are, too.

[277] I'm not getting that sense.

[278] Well, he got up at the fucking Bolivianese, like, no, let me show you how it is.

[279] That's disagreeability.

[280] That's a great quality.

[281] So in 1976, after my first foray, you know, into trying to understand the world by visiting East Berlin, I went to Sweden to Stockholm, and Stockholm's a great place, an amazing, sparkling and, you know, really special place.

[282] But they have what became famously called the middle way between capitalism and communism.

[283] And the term that they have used for it, and by that point it was basically a half century old, is social democracy.

[284] and the main party that kept power for most of the time was the Social Democratic Party.

[285] So I got there in 76 and, whoa, that's interesting.

[286] Okay, I've seen one.

[287] I've seen the other.

[288] I spent four years in college understanding this debate, but this is really something.

[289] This is quite interesting.

[290] So I became a Social Democrat in 1976.

[291] And I pretty much held that view all the way since then.

[292] And the idea of social democracy is it's a market economy.

[293] It's mainly private companies, but it's decency.

[294] You know, everybody gets a chance and everybody gets health care, everybody gets education, and so on.

[295] Really quick, can I just ask so that people are following along is, am I writing to say that in that paradigm, you're basically circling some industries that you've decided shouldn't be for profit?

[296] Well, for example, health care, you say that is a public service.

[297] That is what in economics, we call it a merit good, meaning everyone should have it.

[298] If you're poor or you're rich, you got it.

[299] It's part of your human rights.

[300] So we have one thing in this country, which is the fire department.

[301] Doesn't matter if your dead ass broke, your house is on fire.

[302] You call.

[303] We've decided everyone should have access to people putting their house out.

[304] That's correct.

[305] And we have some in the health side.

[306] We have Medicare for everybody over six.

[307] and so forth.

[308] But in the social democracies, and they became strongest in Northern Europe, especially Scandinavia, which is three countries, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, they went a long way to, you pay a lot of taxes, and then you get a lot of public services.

[309] And the public services you get start from family leave time that both the mom and the dad get up to a year of paid leave and then guaranteed childcare and then quality education and everybody gets health care and everybody gets basically free or very low cost higher education if you qualify to either get into the vocational or university system and so on.

[310] So their ideas pay a lot of tax and get a lot of benefits and the society is not completely equal and there are some billionaires and they're millionaires, but it's definitely much more equal and much more egalitarian in the ethic than in America.

[311] I knew, for instance, one guy who's very successful international businessman, and it really stuck with me because it's such an unusual story that in America we could barely understand.

[312] But he was head of a major global Fortune 500 company, one of the biggest, actually, terrific businessman, lots of Harvard Business School cases written about his leadership and so on.

[313] And then when he retired or finished the CEO, he got a severance package, which was several tens of millions of dollars.

[314] Okay.

[315] In the U .S., you'd say, well, okay, that's normal.

[316] You know, that's what a severance package for a top CEO is.

[317] This guy got excoriated in Sweden.

[318] He didn't do anything wrong.

[319] No one accused him of wrongdoing.

[320] he was attacked.

[321] You could not believe it.

[322] He was told this is completely indecent.

[323] Who the hell do you think you are to take severance payments like this?

[324] We don't accept this.

[325] And he had to return the package, basically.

[326] Wow.

[327] Oh, my goodness.

[328] And face kind of a shame in Sweden.

[329] So it's more than just the law and the structure.

[330] It's kind of the ethic that is really different.

[331] It's the culture, yeah, what's your personal feeling on that?

[332] Because I kind of go, So, huh, I don't love that story.

[333] Yeah.

[334] Where are you at personally on it?

[335] I think it's pretty good because if it's between celebrating the gazillionaires as the greatest thing and they can do whatever they want.

[336] Or saying, come on, we're all in this together.

[337] I'm much more in the second camp.

[338] Yeah.

[339] But I'll tell you a story that, you know, has that twinge, which was I was in an airport.

[340] that's almost my normal life, except for the last weird few months.

[341] And I was running in Oslo to catch a connection.

[342] And I fly business class.

[343] And so I was running with my ticket and I ran to the line.

[344] There was a long line to board.

[345] And I, where's business class?

[346] And the guy looked at me. This was Oslo, Norway.

[347] We just looked at me. One of the people in line, he said, we are boarding the Norwegian.

[348] way back of the line.

[349] And so, you know, there was no business class boarding.

[350] This was one class boarding.

[351] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[352] Yeah, and so that is the ethic of social democracy.

[353] But the truth is it's led to the most decent societies that I know of because I've seen almost all of the world and by population well over 90 % of the world's population in the countries that I visited.

[354] So almost every big one and every, you know, inhabited continent, I haven't been to Antarctica yet, but I've seen a lot.

[355] And what Scandinavia has achieved in decency in quality of life is just extraordinary.

[356] It's democratic.

[357] It's peaceful.

[358] People are happy.

[359] I produce with other editors' World Happiness Report each year, which is based on Gallup survey data asking people how they feel about their lives.

[360] And these countries, the people feel really good about their life.

[361] Yeah, they routinely win that, don't they?

[362] Yeah, their life expectancy is very high.

[363] It's peaceful.

[364] It's really impressive.

[365] It was funny for me because in Eastern Europe, when I was working on dismantling communism, I became known as a kind of right winger.

[366] Well, there's the free market guy, you know, there's the capitalist guy.

[367] Yeah.

[368] It's weird.

[369] I was not that.

[370] I was a social Democrat then, said so in interviews.

[371] But first, there wasn't a lot of nuance in understanding that there's a middle way.

[372] And second, when you're at one extreme, then you basically say, go the other way.

[373] So I was preaching markets in Eastern Europe.

[374] And oh, that seems very right -wing free market.

[375] But here I preach government.

[376] And they say, oh, you're a left -wing, you know, radical.

[377] You're a man without a country.

[378] Exactly.

[379] So as the economist Milton Friedman once said, if you're in the middle of the road, you get hit by traffic coming in both directions.

[380] Oh, God.

[381] I feel that way in my political views.

[382] I feel like I'm the only centrist in the world left.

[383] Just both sides hate my guts.

[384] I have a quick question.

[385] Are there any examples of social democracies where it's as diverse as it is in the United States?

[386] Great.

[387] question.

[388] Because I can see a lot of people going, yeah, that would work in Scandinavia.

[389] You have this homogenous population.

[390] They have good natural resources.

[391] They're set up to kind of win.

[392] There's less maybe underlying social issues.

[393] Yeah.

[394] So it is really right in history that that kind of social homogeneity, everybody speaks one language, same religion.

[395] Basically, they were all farmers.

[396] They weren't really set up to win, interestingly.

[397] They were pretty late.

[398] developers.

[399] They were pretty poor until the end of the 19th century.

[400] And actually, the way social democracy emerged was after three decades of a lot of labor strikes, general strikes, strife on happiness.

[401] It was not a happy place.

[402] But then they figured out we want social peace because we really are in this together.

[403] In Sweden, they made an agreement in 1937, famous agreement, to make social peace.

[404] And that's when social democracy really took hold.

[405] So it's not that it was fated to be the case.

[406] They had to invent it.

[407] But what is true is it came more naturally.

[408] You know, they felt we're all in this together.

[409] America is so divided.

[410] The truth is, I think, our greatest strength is our diversity.

[411] It's what makes America really special.

[412] It's what has allowed America to attract the greatest talent in the world and people coming poor, but with phenomenal talents or people coming, like the great scientists that were the refugees from Hitler in the 30s that helped make America so dominant in science and technology afterwards.

[413] But it's also, you know, our weak spot because this is a country that was founded on slavery, founded on genocide of native populations, and there's a deep, deep, deep streak of cruelty in American history, as well as this incredible glory and achievement that I think diversity is our greatest calling card.

[414] But when you look at it, it's absolutely correct that that diversity means we don't have the feeling that we're all in this together.

[415] Yeah, there's so much in -group, out -group within the U .S. Exactly.

[416] But, you know, the problem in what I say as an economist is, come on, even if you're thinking in those ways, let me explain to you how it works so well.

[417] for everybody to have that common system.

[418] So I'm constantly asked, well, that's Sweden, that can't apply.

[419] And by the way, when you do the work that I do, which is seeing that something works and then trying to apply it somewhere else, the first line for anything and everything is, well, that won't work here.

[420] And the truth is a lot can work here.

[421] And a lot of, you know, things can really be learned.

[422] doesn't come naturally.

[423] And in our country, you're in it on your own approach.

[424] You know, this is a country I often say where it was founded on the principle.

[425] You don't have to like your neighbor.

[426] And you're not expected to.

[427] They just have to leave you alone.

[428] You leave them alone.

[429] But the truth is, if we liked our neighbor a little bit, we'd actually have better lives.

[430] That's my conclusion.

[431] Yeah.

[432] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[433] there.

[434] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[435] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[436] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[437] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[438] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[439] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[440] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[441] Prime members can listen early and add free on Amazon Music.

[442] What's up guys?

[443] It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, Sue Good, and I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[444] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[445] And I don't mean just friends.

[446] I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox.

[447] The list goes on.

[448] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[449] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[450] Test add one thought.

[451] We have a very, with Bernie's campaign.

[452] I've been an admirer Bernie Sanders, and I was his advisor in this election.

[453] campaign.

[454] I was his advisor in 2016 on foreign policy issues.

[455] He calls himself a democratic socialist, and the phrase I use is social democracy.

[456] And just to say, and we don't have to go any more into it, there's lots of verbiage around and lots of claims and the game that Trump was going to play, oh, Bernie Sanders, that's Venezuela.

[457] That's what socialism is.

[458] The label problem is a real problem for thinking.

[459] It's a real problem for any serious grown -up discussion.

[460] And you can't do it on Twitter, actually.

[461] It's because you need more than 140 characters to say it.

[462] But Bernie, from my point of view, is a social Democrat, whatever phrase he uses in the sense that what he likes and promotes is actually what Scandinavian and much of Europe already has.

[463] And he's saying it can work here.

[464] And it actually even works in Canada, which is a diverse country, but it has national health care.

[465] And that's my feeling.

[466] And so I just wanted to mention that there are lots of labels.

[467] But if we got beyond the labels, we get actually to more sensible politics.

[468] Well, yeah, again, I think one of the problems we suffer from on all topics now is this kind of binary thinking, right?

[469] It's this or it's that.

[470] And then the nuances completely evaporated.

[471] and the middle ground is apparently too hard to comprehend.

[472] So, yeah, the label feels like a shortcut to understanding, like, well, that's Venezuela.

[473] And you feel, oh, I get it.

[474] But no, you don't get it because there's nothing nuance about that.

[475] If you're on one side screaming Sweden and he's screaming Venezuela, it's like, well, surely neither of you are correct in some capacity.

[476] No, no, it makes it really tough.

[477] And by the way, I also had another eye opener in the last day because I wrote something saying our politics is so tribal, we can't agree on this stuff.

[478] And somebody very, oh, what a nice letter I got email immediately.

[479] I'm from this reservation.

[480] And don't use the word tribal.

[481] This is offensive to Native Americans.

[482] And the truth is, it is offensive.

[483] And I wrote back, oh, that's not what I meant.

[484] I meant this.

[485] And I explained it.

[486] And we had a lovely exchange.

[487] And as soon as I was done with the exchange, somebody emailed me and said, thank you for calling it tribal.

[488] This is exactly the turn to help me understand.

[489] Anyway, it was ironic, but...

[490] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[491] Okay, so you've written a new book, The Ages of Globalization, Geography, Technology, and Institutions.

[492] And what's great about this is you kind of map these big waves in technology and how they reshape the world and how the economics of that change.

[493] And I'm talking from using horses to the industrial.

[494] revolution, right?

[495] You kind of cover all these big waves in the history of mankind.

[496] And we've been a species for 150 ,000 years till now.

[497] I don't know how many people kind of grasp that, A, this is a very new experiment on the geological calendar.

[498] What a great book to give that kind of context of like, we didn't inherit any truths.

[499] This is an experiment.

[500] It's evolving.

[501] We're learning.

[502] We're going to change.

[503] We're going to get better, and it's going to take some decisive action?

[504] It is the case.

[505] You know, I wrote it in part because we say we're new to globalization, but we've always been global as soon as we spread out, starting around 50 ,000 years ago.

[506] We reached almost every part of the world from this dispersal from Africa, our common home.

[507] But what is also true is how huge changes change the way we live.

[508] and interact in quite fundamental ways, and we're obviously in that moment now as well.

[509] So when I studied economics and have written about it, for me in the last 250 years, the steam engine is the decisive moment of change.

[510] It created the industrial era.

[511] For the first time, we had energy from this lump of coal that could move things, and it ended up moving railroads.

[512] It ended up moving ocean steamers.

[513] And earlier, the horse was like that, this incredible invention of domesticating the horse on the grasslands of Central Asia.

[514] And that made empires possible, which were not possible before that.

[515] We know that as soon as the horse became domesticated, there were huge shifts of population in Europe and the spread of the Indo -European languages, which is the broad family group where English fits in.

[516] Things change.

[517] change because of these fundamentals.

[518] And I think the digital age is of that caliber of fundamental change.

[519] It's been going on now for 90 years, actually, you know, the idea that our reality at some level is a sequence of zeros and ones that can be read by a computer and transmitted and that information can be packaged that way was an idea of one of the greatest geniuses of any era, Alan Turing, in 1936, and we're kind of living out this unbelievable idea that he had of what was called a universal computing machine.

[520] And step by step, we're seeing that.

[521] And I think that this is changing the world in as fundamental a way as the steam engine did or as the ocean navigation to the Americas did between Europe and the Americas after Colombia.

[522] and so forth.

[523] And it's changing geopolitics.

[524] This is our first global pandemic online.

[525] After all, you know, and it really is making so many changes.

[526] In a way, of course, I didn't write the book for the pandemic.

[527] It didn't exist until the last week of going to print.

[528] And I said, I got to get a preface in here to mention that this is part of our globalization story.

[529] But it was literally the last hours that that reality came true, but what I was very conscious of is how our world is fundamentally changing in ways that are not unlike fundamental changes with the steam engine or the invention of the alphabet, which was an invention by the Phoenicians and the Greeks, and changed how we think literally, because we had books that could then actually develop philosophy and the ideas that became core to our civilization.

[530] Well, that's what fascinates me as someone who majored in Anthro is just that we're using these global shared platforms, say Facebook's probably the easiest to point out.

[531] And it's giving us the architecture of communicating.

[532] It leads us on how to interact with it.

[533] And now we're sharing globally a kind of culture that would have never or would have taken centuries to develop, we're all plugged into this thing.

[534] And I think there's a lot of people that are critical of that.

[535] I'm not even in the judgment business on this.

[536] I'm just in the fascinated business on it.

[537] Like, you know, fuck, there are whatever numbers you believe on Facebook, you're looking at two billion people maybe that share a thought process, a language, and interaction.

[538] It's very fascinating.

[539] But by the way, you know, it is also absolutely the deepest truth of history, every technological breakthrough has the good side and the bad side.

[540] There just is almost no case.

[541] I mean, I'm sure we could think of maybe some medicines and so on that basically are in one direction.

[542] But the steam engine, okay, phenomenal thing, mobilizing fossil fuel, coal, oil and gas.

[543] Okay, then you find out a century later, it's going to change the climate.

[544] Then you find out two centuries later, it's going to destroy the climate if we don't get this under control.

[545] Or the horse, okay, now we can move around, now we can do things.

[546] Oh, we can go kill people a thousand kilometers away.

[547] Isn't that wonderful?

[548] And one of the things that I cite in the book is a wonderful statement by Adam Smith, the creator of modern economics from a modern meaning starting in 1776.

[549] But he wrote that the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to the Americas by Columbus and from Europe to Asia by Vasco da Gama, he said those are the two most significant events in the history of mankind.

[550] You know, he said it united the whole world together.

[551] But then he said, this should be so positive, but we can already see in the two centuries since that moment, or almost three centuries by the time he wrote, that it was completely devastating for the native inhabitants because they were subjugated by the European conquerors.

[552] And what Smith didn't understand fully also was they were also killed off by the pathogens that were brought by the viruses and by the other pathogens that were brought by the Europeans.

[553] But everything has two sides.

[554] So here we are with this new technology.

[555] It's amazing to me. You can do telemedicine.

[556] You can do education anywhere.

[557] You can do e -governance anywhere.

[558] You can make an app to help stop the epidemic and so on.

[559] And you can spy.

[560] You can do surveillance.

[561] You can end privacy.

[562] Infiltrate an election.

[563] Yeah, you can do cyber warfare.

[564] You can make fake news.

[565] You can disrupt societies.

[566] I didn't get it for a long time.

[567] I'm still trying to accept it.

[568] I'm kind of of the school.

[569] I want the final victory of the good, you know?

[570] I want things to just be good.

[571] Yeah.

[572] And nothing in history is like that, by the way.

[573] Everything is you got a struggle.

[574] And every generation.

[575] and it's okay, are we going to go the good way or are we going to go the bad way?

[576] Yeah, now my own pet peeve about this is I feel like we've lost the appetite for that or we've lost the acceptance of that, that there's going to be some shittiness that comes along with all this goodness.

[577] I think of the stuff that happened in New York City with...

[578] Robert Moses.

[579] Yes, Moses.

[580] I'm reading this book on Moses.

[581] And I just think how impossible all that would be today.

[582] And I'm not making a claim again, whether it should or shouldn't.

[583] I'm just saying you don't have New York City with expressways and subways and all this stuff in an error of Twitter.

[584] It just wouldn't have happened.

[585] We're at this weird inflection point where it's like there's some ugly side to progress.

[586] And I don't know that we have the appetite anymore for it or the acceptance of it.

[587] And I just wonder, could any of these huge public work projects ever happen in our future because everyone does have a voice now, which is, again, a great part of social media.

[588] Yeah.

[589] And by the way, when it comes to Moses, thank God, Jane Jacobs, stopped him from building the subway through Greenwich Village, because that was a social activism to say, enough highway here.

[590] But I take the point, and it is that kind of balance.

[591] What can you get done?

[592] What gets stopped by everything?

[593] It is a big question for me. I read, I feel almost addicted to it.

[594] I read a news story.

[595] Then I read the comment on and on the comment stream.

[596] And it's all, who can be snarkier, who can be nastier, who's got the great.

[597] put down, there's very little wisdom and almost no honest problem solving in it.

[598] And no interest in the compromise, the solution.

[599] Not at all.

[600] Yes, that's what's frustrating.

[601] Entering the whole fray going, I don't want to compromise.

[602] That's not solution.

[603] I find it very interesting.

[604] I write a lot of op -eds and I get a lot of hate mail.

[605] Sure.

[606] If it's really, really, really vulgar, I just leave it aside.

[607] But if it's just really nasty, sometimes I write back.

[608] And then it's quite interesting the reaction because sometimes people are kind of snapped to, oh my God, thank you for writing.

[609] I never thought you'd write.

[610] I'm so happy to hear from you.

[611] And then they say, and by the way, I love your work.

[612] You love my work.

[613] You just wrote me the nastiest imaginable thing.

[614] But then sometimes I had an interchange a few days ago that I found very interesting.

[615] I wrote a anti -Trump column, which I do regularly with frequency, pretty much on a daily basis, because I think he's the worst president in American history after a very careful study.

[616] And that says a lot.

[617] You know, somebody wrote to me, how dare you and you left this East Coast, blah, blah, blah.

[618] Okay.

[619] So kind of typical, but I thought there was an element of in the nastiness, something rather interesting and intelligent.

[620] I wrote back to the guy, and then came a really intelligent, but also very snarky response to me. And then it went on for three or four more rounds.

[621] And then it turned out he's a pretty senior executive in pharmaceutical industry.

[622] And each round was less obnoxious, first of all, and a lot of intelligent comments.

[623] So I wrote back finally saying, I don't really understand.

[624] what we're arguing about.

[625] Surely we agree that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist, psychopathic, blah, blah, blah.

[626] So what are we really arguing about?

[627] And he wrote back and said, of course he is.

[628] I agree with you completely.

[629] But so is everybody in politics.

[630] So his complaint to me wasn't actually my characterization.

[631] It was a deeper cynicism.

[632] And that was interesting.

[633] It took about 10 rounds to understand that.

[634] But the truth is my biggest weakness, quote unquote, I mean, it's not my biggest weakness, but I'm not cynical.

[635] I just, I want to solve it.

[636] I want to find the answer.

[637] I don't like the cynicism.

[638] I don't like the snark.

[639] I want to try to solve the thing.

[640] And if we're just shouting, we're not going to solve it.

[641] But can I say the thing that I've increasingly understood more and more about the appeal of Trump?

[642] And I can be sympathetic to it is I understand the thought process of, yeah, he's all those things.

[643] I concede that.

[644] But on the world stage, there's all these players that aren't going to play by the rules of a compassionate, democratic, progressive point of view, right?

[645] You've got Iran, you've got maybe China and the trade relations.

[646] I can see where someone would go, it's going to take an unevolved approach to handle some of these problems.

[647] That argument at least fundamentally makes sense to me. Did you know what I'm saying?

[648] I do.

[649] It's very funny.

[650] because, oh, my God, what was the character's name in House of Cards?

[651] Yes, who, of course, ironic.

[652] Underwood?

[653] Frank Underwood?

[654] Frank Underwood.

[655] Frank Underwood.

[656] Okay, so, look, I watched House of Cards for the first few seasons.

[657] Of course, it's this completely malignant, vile, evil personality.

[658] And then comes a moment where he's negotiating with this evil Russian autocrat.

[659] Autocrat.

[660] And I felt this horrible sense, oh, thank God we have Underwood.

[661] You know.

[662] Yes.

[663] Yes.

[664] Okay.

[665] Having said that, I do not agree with Trump.

[666] The guy is creating havoc globally.

[667] He's not creating order and he's not defending America's interest.

[668] So I can't abide by that.

[669] But I understand the sentiment that you're saying because I had exactly that sentiment in that context.

[670] but the truth of the matter is it's another very heavy truth.

[671] And again, I've studied it and written about it and watched it close up, and it weighs really heavily on me. And we shouldn't fool around to think that we have things kind of under control globally and that we're going to avoid disaster.

[672] And I wrote a book about Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the after math and the partial nuclear test ban treaty in 1963.

[673] And one of the things you learned from the deep history of the Cold War, if you really pay attention, is how many times we came just so close to ending the world.

[674] And the closest was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which actually came just within the miracle hair's breadth of ending the world because a Soviet submarine commander who was about to launch a nuclear weapon was outvoted two to one on a submarine in the waters of the Caribbean that was about to launch because the U .S. was dropping depth charges and he thought that he was under attack, not just being demanded to surface.

[675] And we know ex post that if it had launched, then the U .S. protocol was all out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

[676] End of the world.

[677] Okay.

[678] And there were so many potentials for accidents.

[679] Well, anyway, I'm turning it so heavily because I don't want a Trump in this circumstance.

[680] It's too damn dangerous, period.

[681] Yeah, yeah.

[682] That's really my overwhelming.

[683] I don't know if you know John Mulhaney's schick about a horse in the hospital.

[684] There's a horse loose in the hospital.

[685] in his comedy routine.

[686] I have not heard that.

[687] It's complete genius.

[688] A horse.

[689] And you can imagine what the analogy is.

[690] But he talks about at one point that the horse and some crazy nuclear -armed rhinoceros start arguing with each other.

[691] And the horse and the rhinoceros are saying, who's crazier?

[692] And that's what I feel when we have Trump and this international counterparts.

[693] This segues beautifully into it, something I would love for you to detail for us because I think people underestimate how much interwoven economies safeguard us against real -life threat, military threat, existential crises.

[694] The safest road for us is to all be so interwoven, these disputes have to be solved diplomatically, because everyone's economic interests are so aligned that that is potentially the greater safety net than any kind of military solution.

[695] Do you agree with that as someone who studies globalization?

[696] Well, yes and no, you're raising a really deep idea that has been around since 1794 when Emmanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, wrote an essay, which is one of most important short essays ever written in modern history called perpetual peace.

[697] And he asked the question in 1794, how do we make peace on earth?

[698] And his answer was, we have interconnected republics where we're not at the mercy of a crazy prince or king or monarch and where we're interconnected in commerce.

[699] And so the idea of a kind of commercial piece or democratic piece that's based a bit on the politics of the country and second on the interconnectedness is a theme of modern history.

[700] And there's a very, very famous, important episode about this idea that was written, I think it was 1908 was the first date of publication.

[701] it could have been 1910, a book called The Illusion of War.

[702] And the book was written by a man named Norman Angel.

[703] And Norman Angel had a hypothesis.

[704] And it's like what you said.

[705] And he said it the following way.

[706] He said, we're in 1910.

[707] We have a global economy.

[708] He was writing for the British, the British Empire ruled the world.

[709] He said, we're so interconnected.

[710] War is completely irrational.

[711] And he explained in this book that if you, go to war, even if you win, you lose.

[712] There's no way to win an economic gain from war.

[713] So he wrote the book, and it was a bestseller, and four years later came World War I. And World War I was arguably the pivotal break of modern civilization.

[714] It led to World War II.

[715] It changed.

[716] everything in global society and fundamental ways, it was the ultimate shit show, losing a generation, millions dead, horrible, horrible things.

[717] And Norman Angel afterwards, actually writing in the 1930s, said, you see, I told you, I said you can't win with war.

[718] So you didn't believe me when I wrote the first book.

[719] Now you know, no more war because it's doomed to fail.

[720] Well, poor Norman Angel, he got the Nobel Prize for his efforts, and a few years after his second book came the Second World War.

[721] You know, the truth is, the argument is right that war is so unbelievably destructive and the modern world makes it impossible to gain from war.

[722] And we've seen it in Vietnam.

[723] We saw it in Iraq.

[724] We've seen it in Syria.

[725] We've seen it in Syria.

[726] We've seen in Libya.

[727] We've seen it in Afghanistan in U .S.-led wars.

[728] It's true, but the goddamn thing is it doesn't stop us from making the wars.

[729] So it's not right to say, well, it's so miserable that therefore we can't because we're dumb as a species.

[730] We have one side of us that is absolutely able to just stumble into self -annihilation.

[731] This is what really bothers me. The logic is right, but the conclusion doesn't follow.

[732] Yeah, and I guess I don't know how aware everyone is that we are stuck in this cycle of reaction from World War I. So track it really quickly.

[733] There's an act of terrorism.

[734] They assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

[735] It causes World War I. The war reparations of World War I on Germany caused the rise of Hitler.

[736] Then we get World War II.

[737] Then we get We get Russia.

[738] We get the Cold War.

[739] Then we get Vietnam.

[740] Then we get Afghanistan being used as a pawn in this Cold War, which gives rise to the terrorism that we're literally just saw.

[741] So it's like it's A to B to C. And we're literally still in it a hundred and some odd years later of reacting to this one act of terrorism is boggling.

[742] You know, when the Versailles Treaty ended World War I, it was portrayed that World War I was the war to end all war.

[743] That's what Woodrow Wilson claimed.

[744] But it's been said that the peace treaty was the peace to end all peace.

[745] That it actually solved nothing.

[746] And one of the really striking things, for example, and I've again in my career seen it very up close in a lot of ways.

[747] Britain, under Churchill, actually in the first decade of the 20th century, one of Churchill's insights was to move the British Navy from coal to oil.

[748] And he knew that the dreadnots, the giant battleships, would be far more efficient and powerful with oil as the fuel rather than coal.

[749] And at the end of World War I, Britain being the imperial dominant power and an incredibly cynical empire, made the peace treaty to give Britain control over the Middle East and especially over Iraq, modern day Iraq.

[750] And France, very cynical, wanted control over modern day Lebanon.

[751] and Britain wanted the mandate in Palestine, in part, to be able to take a pipeline from the Iraq oil through Haifa Port, which is now in Israel, to provide guaranteed oil for the British Navy.

[752] So geopolitics and the geography was that the Middle East was basically our filling station.

[753] Now, the U .S. got this message also, and Saudi Arabia, was the best friend.

[754] It was created, actually, in a way by the British Empire in the 1920s.

[755] The House of Saude was promoted to make Saudi Arabia.

[756] And then Roosevelt, towards the end of World War II, solidified this relationship with Saudi Arabia because that was going to be the oil superpower and so on.

[757] All these wars that we've been fighting have a legacy in the Versailles Treaty.

[758] That's crazy.

[759] And, you know, the Iraq war really started in modern times in the early 1920s with Britain bombing Iraq to take over the Iraqi oil.

[760] The reason that Iran is in this, oh, such a complicated, horrible situation of Iran looked at from the U .S. point of view as U .S. evil, we've got it so wrong, so mistake.

[761] in 1953, again, as a legacy of the Versailles Treaty and the cynicism of it, Britain had taken over Iran's oil.

[762] And then the Iranians, starting in 1951 with a democratically elected prime minister named Mossadegh, said, hey, isn't that our oil actually under our sand?

[763] And the British said, no, why would you have that idea?

[764] That has nothing to do with you.

[765] That's obviously British oil.

[766] And so the British MI6 and the CIA got together in a project Ajax and over through Mossadegh.

[767] And it was so unbelievably cynical, you know, like the sign saying, how did our oil get under their sand?

[768] It became our oil again.

[769] And we put in place a police state under the Shah of Iran.

[770] Yeah.

[771] Stay tuned.

[772] more armchair expert, if you dare.

[773] People are looking at like the extremist, the militant, religious faction that ended up coming to power, they were the only option against imperialism.

[774] We don't want to admit that.

[775] Like, we, we gave.

[776] Yeah, for us, the history starts with the hostage taking in 1979, not the longer history.

[777] For the Iranians, understand what this is about.

[778] And we should be both honoring and working.

[779] together with other civilizations and instead we have this incredible drumbeat of propaganda every day the mollas and this and so forth and it just it's not right it seems that the trajectory of globalization a little bit i guess i'm going to get critical a little bit is the kind of hegemonic societies decide they don't want to do some bit of labor and then they outsource this bit of labor to a developing country and then the developing country standard of living rises, and then slowly they don't want to do that labor anymore.

[780] So then they outsource that to another developing, right?

[781] So if you look at this pattern, I guess it went from us to China and then from China, now they move some of their stuff to Vietnam, and then now Vietnam's moving some of their stuff to, I guess, the subcontinent, right?

[782] This is all like what's happening?

[783] So I guess my question is, what's the end game of that?

[784] When everyone's risen and no one wants to do that work, who the fuck's doing that work?

[785] Is that where AI steps in?

[786] If you just chart this, we could have to import Martians to do this labor?

[787] No one wants to do.

[788] How do we do this?

[789] You know, your description is pretty good of how this process works.

[790] But the answer is that there is an arrow of progress if it's done peacefully.

[791] And it actually isn't that we're literally outsourcing the same worst work all the time.

[792] Right.

[793] So the nature of work itself changes dramatically over time because 200 years ago when the steam engine was first starting the industrialization process, about 90 % of humanity was in subsistence farming.

[794] So what would we be doing?

[795] We'd be out in pretty backbreaking labor.

[796] And that is step by step going away almost every place.

[797] it is replaced by machines in the end.

[798] And the work that is transmitted becomes a different kind of work, for example, call centers became one stepping stone.

[799] Cutting fabric was for a long time a major stepping stone of development.

[800] Sweatshops are nothing to idealize.

[801] Nobody should suffer abuses of dangerous work conditions and so on.

[802] but the act of labor -intensive production in the apparel industry actually provided the stepping stone jobs that enabled, say, a Hong Kong to become eventually a financial center and so on.

[803] Over time, there really is progress because machines can do better what humans do in grudge.

[804] The end story, in my view, should be that we are all beneficiaries of, the well -being that can come from the peaceful, proper use of technology.

[805] So I really like electricity, for example.

[806] I'm a great fan of all the things that electricity can bring.

[807] I've worked in a lot of villages that have not had electricity.

[808] Life is hell.

[809] You can't keep food safe.

[810] You can't run a clinic.

[811] You can't do so many basic things.

[812] So my work in development economics is to help a place that doesn't have electricity, get electricity, and that is a stepping stone out of extreme poverty.

[813] And I have, you know, spent a lot of time in rural subsistence agriculture villages.

[814] By the way, anyone that ever tells, you know, the poor or poor because they're lazy doesn't know anything about reality because the poor work so damn hard compared to us.

[815] Oh, yeah.

[816] Because it's backbreaking.

[817] And I spent, oh, I was filming something actually about development and was with a lady probably 70 years old who was weeding a half a hectare field in Africa.

[818] And so there I was, you know, shirt sleeves rolled up and I was doing my weeding also.

[819] And after an hour, I was, oh, my God.

[820] God, the sun is so damn hot.

[821] My neck is killing me. Are we done filming?

[822] You know, can we stop?

[823] Yeah.

[824] We had enough footage to make it look like I worked all day.

[825] And then, you know, after a bit more, we ended and I said goodbye.

[826] And there was this woman continuing to weed.

[827] And she was going to do the same thing the next day and the next day and the next day.

[828] And we don't want this for people.

[829] This is not what life is about.

[830] The idea really is that technology is not a zero -sum game.

[831] It is a way to a better life.

[832] And so you ask the question, how can this be enjoyed by everybody and what are the paths to doing that?

[833] And I want to take some shortcuts, as it were, in the sense of using development aid or direct transfers or open -source technology so that poor countries get that stepping stone faster because they need it.

[834] I only learned this from reading those Lyndon B. Johnson books, but electrification of the U .S., the market would not have solved that crisis.

[835] They were not going to run power out to these farms.

[836] It was never going to happen.

[837] And they compare in that book the amount of hours spent washing the clothes, ironing the clothes, all the things that electricity, those people had literally a third of the time that people with electricity.

[838] And the market wouldn't have fixed that.

[839] We intervened.

[840] You needed rural electrification, which was part of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s.

[841] And that was the stepping stone to productivity, to rising incomes.

[842] All of this involves change that also can be difficult because when you mechanize agriculture, agricultural workers lose their job.

[843] They go to the cities.

[844] Okay, then you have another issue.

[845] How are you going to create decent jobs?

[846] So what is the one logical end of that story that I'm a big believer in, is that as we get better and better at doing things, we actually can also take some more leisure time.

[847] It's not only a matter of the grunge work.

[848] And when I'm told that the computers are going to do all the work, yes, thank you.

[849] At least, you know, I have no moral dilemma about that.

[850] Do it.

[851] Except I don't want Jeff Bezos to own all the computers.

[852] I want us to all own a piece of the action and then to benefit from that technology.

[853] So there is a distributional issue.

[854] It's a paradox, you know, actually quite interesting.

[855] You know, the dystopic view is, well, the machines are going to do everything.

[856] There will be no jobs for us.

[857] And there will be mass unemployment and mass suffering.

[858] And Jeffrey Bezos, who's now at $140 billion, will be at X trillion dollars, and that'll be that.

[859] And then there's another utopian view, which I hold, which is, oh, the machines can do everything.

[860] We can go have a cup of coffee.

[861] Isn't that wonderful?

[862] Your machine will talk to my machine.

[863] We can go relax and enjoy ourselves and still benefit from all of this.

[864] But in order for that to be the case, it has to be that we own enough of the action, everybody, UBI, University of Basic Income, Redistribution, the skills that remain are high enough paid, whatever it is, and there are many paths to that, that the society is both efficient and fair.

[865] And we're stuck in that because in the U .S., it's partly ideology and partly just goddamn political power of the wealthy who vote themselves tax cuts and all the rest, as opposed to those social democracies that I like, where people are taxed and then you share the benefits, we have to make that choice.

[866] Yeah.

[867] Okay, as you know, the pendulum swings and it swings globally.

[868] And I think we started seeing, I guess maybe it was about seven years ago where there was a huge, pretty consistent swing all around the globe towards nationalism.

[869] I guess you could also call it kind of these populist movements.

[870] What do you think is the force that made that pendulum swing, both with Brexit and then numerous other global?

[871] nationalist movements.

[872] Two things that are important.

[873] One is kind of pure contagion, meaning if it starts in some places, it propagates.

[874] You gave a good example of that, you know, okay, there's some nasty guy.

[875] We better have a nasty guy also.

[876] Oh, now there are two of them.

[877] Oh, we better have a nasty guy.

[878] We better have a nasty guy.

[879] And so you get a kind of propagation of this.

[880] But it's also a little bit more contrived.

[881] You look at who's the Trump of Latin America, is Bolsonaro.

[882] He's really Trump -like in Brazil.

[883] Trump helped to put him in power, not only indirectly as a kind of model that Bolsonaro said, I will be, you know, with the president of the United States, but actually mechanically that Bannon helped with the campaign, that some of the financing, some of the technical support was elect that guy.

[884] And Boris Johnson in Britain, who's the populace, you know, there's a Trump Johnson linkage.

[885] These are subtle and I don't mean to make it so mechanical, but there is a kind of contagion that just happens and it can get out of control.

[886] It happens in different ways also.

[887] Why does it happen?

[888] Well, one answer is everyone else does it.

[889] I'm not going to be the only stupid guy to pay my taxes.

[890] And so you just end up with.

[891] the pendulum swinging under the self -reinforcement.

[892] But there's another issue, definitely, which is, I'd say two more issues, if I could.

[893] You know, one is change per se hits different people differently, not only by who they are, what they know, what their job is, but even personality.

[894] There is in the so -called big five personality categories, which psychologists use.

[895] One of the big five is openness to change.

[896] Some of us, I'm one of them.

[897] I like change.

[898] Hey, cool.

[899] This is a new technology.

[900] How does it work?

[901] Explain it to me. And other people say, shit, I like the way it is.

[902] Don't bother me. This change, I really resent this change.

[903] Well, again, in defense of those people, as you pointed out, many people are on the short end of the stick when change happens.

[904] They're in a town in Ohio where they got left out.

[905] I was going to add that as another category.

[906] which is, you know, really direct differential effect.

[907] But even before we go there, some people are pretty comfortable with change, others not.

[908] It happens.

[909] This is just a fact statement.

[910] States where the personality tests literally show more resistance to change.

[911] Those are more red states.

[912] It's correlated also.

[913] People move.

[914] They move to big cities if they like change.

[915] And if they don't want change, they are in smaller towns often.

[916] So that's the second thing.

[917] Again, cause and effect is always hard.

[918] Are people where they're living because they don't like change?

[919] Good point.

[920] Or if you're in New York or Los Angeles and you don't like change.

[921] How what the hell are you doing?

[922] You're going to be driven crazy in one day.

[923] Yeah.

[924] But then the third thing is there really is a differential impact.

[925] But that's what's weird about American politics in my view.

[926] Maybe it's not weird, but it's important to understand.

[927] a lot of Trump's vote in the swing states are working class jobs that were hard hit by globalization.

[928] So jobs that were lost to China, jobs that were lost to Mexico.

[929] And Trump appealed to them.

[930] And he appealed to them on the grounds, I'm going to fight China or I'm going to fight Mexico and so forth.

[931] As an economist, I can tell you, and I've studied that issue for almost half a century now.

[932] And it's not the right approach.

[933] The right approach is to say, look, that change did leave you behind.

[934] It made a lot of people better off.

[935] And we should make sure that we're in a society where you're benefiting too, but not to stop the change.

[936] Because if we stop the change, we don't get the general progress, but we don't want to leave you behind also.

[937] Ah, back to social democracy.

[938] which says, get the change, but share it with everybody.

[939] Yeah.

[940] We don't have that in our politics as a gut instinct.

[941] So Trump played the anti -China card.

[942] They took your jobs.

[943] They're evil.

[944] Whereas I would say, no, China's catching up.

[945] And yes, we benefit because we buy a lot of the products from China, low cost and so forth.

[946] But some people are left behind.

[947] What are we going to do is that job training, free tuition, free health care?

[948] what should we do, solve the problem, but not by stopping the trade, but by solving the problem.

[949] It's just not right to say the solution to the problem of Akron, Ohio is bash China.

[950] No, the solution is make sure we're all in this together in the U .S. because we're so damn rich, we could make sure Akron, Ohio has decent jobs, strong university, new technologies, job retraining, free health care, and so on.

[951] That would be an approach, I understand.

[952] That's not China's fault.

[953] That's our internal fault.

[954] I would be remiss if I didn't say, and Monica will agree.

[955] You're kind of swaying me in some directions that I normally wouldn't be in.

[956] Let's keep going.

[957] But I will say when he was on 60 Minutes, I'm like, he doesn't know what the fuck he's.

[958] He can't even pay for the first thing on his list.

[959] and he's got five more things.

[960] Healthcare in and of itself is maybe unpayable or it could be paid, but it's going to be, you know, it's trillions of dollars.

[961] Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

[962] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[963] Yeah.

[964] And now when you get to college and debt forgiveness, I mean, you're talking about $100 trillion that really he's just not showing the other side of the ledger.

[965] And as an economist, did that not bother you?

[966] I was like, he's way out on a limb.

[967] Maybe if he would have just started with one thing, I could have got behind it.

[968] like, let's tackle health care.

[969] Maybe I'm there.

[970] It felt like a lot.

[971] We were watching it.

[972] We watched it together.

[973] And we're both liberal.

[974] But I'm just like, this is a fantasy.

[975] What's he talking about?

[976] He's just listed $100 trillion with the stuff.

[977] And the money doesn't exist for that.

[978] Okay.

[979] So the answer is if you do it right and think about it right, it does exist.

[980] And not only does it exist, a lot of countries actually do it, including my faves that I already talked about.

[981] Yeah.

[982] Because Denmark already does it or Sweden already does it or the Netherlands does it and so on.

[983] But the truth is we don't get to those answers very well the way we discuss things in a campaign or in our society.

[984] And take health care, for example, I think Bernie tried very hard to make this point and does continue to make this point and it's right.

[985] Could we afford Medicare for all?

[986] Almost every rich country in Europe spends between 8 % and 12 % of the national income on health care all in.

[987] We spend 18 % of health care all in.

[988] Why?

[989] You know why?

[990] Simple.

[991] Every thing that happens, whether it's a day in the hospital, getting your appendix out, getting a cat scan.

[992] is 50 % more expensive than it is in Europe.

[993] And where does that money go?

[994] Well, I can tell you in New York City, for example, in the not -for -profit system, the heads of the hospitals are making $5 million or more, not -for -profit, because we've kind of got a rigged monopolistic system that does great, whether it's private or even so -called.

[995] not -for -profit.

[996] Not -for -profit just means the profits get paid in salaries, not in dividends, or not in shares.

[997] We have an overpriced health care system.

[998] Then you come along and says, we need Medicare for all.

[999] And if we had it and it was done right, we wouldn't get down to 12 % of GDP.

[1000] We'd probably get to 14 % of GDP from 18 % of GDP.

[1001] What would happen?

[1002] Well, the drug companies would stop gouging us.

[1003] The cost of a hospital day would be at a Medicare reimbursement rate.

[1004] There wouldn't be super profits in these private companies.

[1005] The managers of hospitals would make $200 ,000 or $300 ,000 a year, not $5 million a year.

[1006] They wouldn't like it at all.

[1007] That's for sure.

[1008] But most of America would like it a lot.

[1009] By the way, to digress, I once had just an eyelash caught in my eye when I was walking in Stockholm, and it was hurting like hell, and we walked by a hospital, and we stopped inside, and they looked at it and plucked the thing out in a waiting room, and I said, how much does it cost?

[1010] Here's my hospital car, blah, blah.

[1011] Mr. Sachs, this is for free.

[1012] We don't charge for things like this.

[1013] Thank you.

[1014] Go on your way.

[1015] Wow, I like that.

[1016] There was no co -pay, no deductible, no charging my insurance company, no nothing, because that's the civilized normal way to do it.

[1017] Okay, what's the conclusion?

[1018] We would save probably about a trillion dollars a year doing what Bernie wants, not spend more, less.

[1019] The amount going through government would go up.

[1020] The amount going from our pockets would go down way more than we would be paying to government.

[1021] So our net bills would go way, way down.

[1022] So he was charged, oh, you're going to bankrupt us because government's going to spend more.

[1023] And he kept saying, yeah, but do you understand you don't have any insurance premiums?

[1024] You have no co -pays.

[1025] You have no out of pockets.

[1026] You have nothing left.

[1027] It's going to save you money.

[1028] I said when he launched that in an event in Vermont, I said, can we afford Medicare for all?

[1029] We can't afford not having it.

[1030] We're going broke by our overpriced health care system.

[1031] So then you go one by one, this stuff is payable, or we're going to pay for it through the wazoo in absolutely devastating climate crises or other things.

[1032] but the truth is it would be nice in a campaign to sort all of this out and i did say and i always do say present a budget that shows how to do this because it can be done that's kind of my macro thing which is what does the budget look like how's it going to be paid for and all the rest but the answer is it doesn't worry me in that we need to do these things yeah it's not too expensive to have a fair society.

[1033] It's true that Amazon doesn't get off with tax -free income anymore in my vision of things.

[1034] It's true that Bezos doesn't end up with $140 billion in his bank account anymore.

[1035] It's true that the head of the not -for -profit health system doesn't take home $5 million next year.

[1036] There are some, quote, losers, but I've done a careful study.

[1037] You don't really need $140 billion to live decently.

[1038] Yeah.

[1039] Okay.

[1040] I'm already panicked because there were so many other things I want to talk.

[1041] You're so fascinating.

[1042] And man, I mean, one of the things I just wanted to talk to you about is like, you know, acknowledging that the economy is a story, that money, currency is a story, value is a story.

[1043] We agree to it and it works.

[1044] I mean, you can look at it during the Civil War when we decide to not have our currency linked to a hard asset like gold.

[1045] At that time that was so controversial, and what it ultimately did was it made growth kind of infinite and it made wealth kind of infinite when you decoupled it from a finite resource yet there's another voice in my head that says this is kind of just like gold like we all agree to it the really the only detrimental thing to an economy is that we stop believing in it right as long as we believe in the story the story can perpetuate and the only thing that really collapses economy is when people stop believing in it and in that way it's one of the trippiest concepts out there that it's all in your mind it's all theoretical like you keep trying to couple it to these these hard tangible things but honestly it's not that well but it's a lot of subtle questions but let me say the following we can't imagine life just being better and it just is better out of nothing it could be better because we stop fighting each other or we get the pandemic under control or we invent a new technology.

[1046] But money or how we call it won't change that by itself.

[1047] So imagining money as a social convention doesn't make wealth in the sense of changing material life in a meaningful way by itself, a dramatic change.

[1048] But on the other side, believing in money as a social condition.

[1049] is a very right observation in that we have these green pieces of paper.

[1050] And we work like crazy or actually give up things we really like for paper.

[1051] And it is because we know that we can use it for something else and get something that we want from it.

[1052] So in this sense, money is a social convention.

[1053] And it is also true that sometimes that social convention collapses.

[1054] I got to get out of this because no one's taking it.

[1055] why aren't they taking it?

[1056] Because no one's taking it.

[1057] Because no one's taking it.

[1058] So you become a self -fulfilling run on the currency.

[1059] And I worked on places that there was a kind of panicked run on the currency.

[1060] And our currency, as you wisely and rightly say, doesn't have backing to it.

[1061] It's called a fiat money.

[1062] The dollar is fiat.

[1063] You can't exchange it for gold.

[1064] And we really haven't been on the gold standard since 1933, 33, 34, when FDR took us off the gold standard in the Great Depression.

[1065] And yet money works.

[1066] It's also true if you print too much of it, you can have inflation.

[1067] I've seen that, worked on those issues.

[1068] And it's also true and really weird that you can just kind of conjure wealth out of nothing if you tap your heels three times and say, I believe in Bitcoin, I believe in Bitcoin, I believe in Bitcoin.

[1069] and Bitcoin has nothing behind it.

[1070] It doesn't have the U .S. Treasury behind it.

[1071] It's nothing.

[1072] Actually, it really is nothing.

[1073] Yes, not even, you don't even get that piece of paper.

[1074] Yeah, and it's worth it's worth, I don't know what it is right now, but 100 billion plus of people that hold this stuff and they hold it because they believe other people hold it.

[1075] It doesn't make our life any better, by the way.

[1076] In fact, In a very subtle way, it takes away from those of us who are holding those green pieces of paper because somebody can use that Bitcoin to actually buy something that I want to buy with the piece of paper that I have.

[1077] I say, no, you don't have George Washington on your Bitcoin.

[1078] You stay away.

[1079] It's my money.

[1080] And they say, no, it's Bitcoin.

[1081] It's worth this amount.

[1082] And I say, hell, it's not worth anything.

[1083] Yes, it is.

[1084] It trades for $10 ,000.

[1085] Why?

[1086] Well, I don't know.

[1087] because someone else will take $10 ,000 for it.

[1088] And all of the cryptocurrencies are that example.

[1089] They're not there because there's some great technology for transactions.

[1090] That's how they were marketed at the beginning.

[1091] Bullshit.

[1092] No one uses them for transactions except freely illicit transactions.

[1093] Yeah, yeah, drugs.

[1094] Yeah, exactly.

[1095] They use them basically as speculative, I'm going to get rich.

[1096] And God damn it, you tell them, it's got nothing behind it.

[1097] There's no reason.

[1098] And yet, it's worth $10 ,000.

[1099] bucks.

[1100] I didn't check it today, but it has kept some value.

[1101] And that is the example of what you're saying.

[1102] But don't expect an economy to deliver well -being on imagination alone.

[1103] Because what makes the well -being is that we have physical things or the technologies or the know -how.

[1104] And that's really different.

[1105] I have a question real quick.

[1106] I have to ask.

[1107] It's a very basic question.

[1108] When we talk about different presidents and their economies, there's always this follow -up point of, well, the economy is cyclical.

[1109] It doesn't really matter what the president is doing.

[1110] The economy is cyclical.

[1111] And I always butt up against that, except, of course, when Trump has a pretty good economy, I'm like, well, no, that is not going to do it.

[1112] She and I've had some arguments.

[1113] She's like, that's Obama's economy.

[1114] I'm like, sure, but how long is it Obama's, like, what's the cutoff date for you?

[1115] It's actually Trump's economy.

[1116] Yeah, how much truth is there in that?

[1117] So you can look and understand things by looking below the surface of the indicators and try to judge whether the economic life is really delivering for the longer term what you want.

[1118] So for a long time, I worked in countries like Peru or Venezuela or Bolivia, which I mentioned, and so on.

[1119] they had populist leaders who said, I can make you rich.

[1120] They took measures, you know, spent a lot of money, people felt good, and I would look at it.

[1121] And with a trained eye, you could say, you know, you really are spending against the future and you're going to run out of money.

[1122] And I remember when I was advising Bolivia in the 1980s, Peru was a radical leftist government at the time.

[1123] and they had what I regarded.

[1124] They called it heterodox theory, and I regarded as nonsense theory.

[1125] But they were booming for the moment.

[1126] And I said, yeah, you're booming now, but you're running out of dollars that is backing your currency.

[1127] And when you run out, what are you going to do?

[1128] No, no, Mr. Sachs, you know, we've got this and that.

[1129] And they ran out of dollars.

[1130] And they went into a hyperinflation into a complete collapse.

[1131] And then I was asked to help the next government stop the hyperinflation.

[1132] And so if you've got a trained eye, you look ahead.

[1133] And Trump didn't do anything smart, in my view, to make the economy do well.

[1134] I gave him no credit, not because the unemployment rate wasn't lower and so on, but I asked two things.

[1135] You know, one is he wanted to boost employment by deregulating all of the anti -pollution control and getting the fracking going everywhere and so on.

[1136] And you know what?

[1137] There was industry then and people making money.

[1138] But I looked at it and said, shit, you know, that makes climate change worse.

[1139] This is not viable.

[1140] This is not sustainable.

[1141] Almost all of that, by the way, is going bankrupt right now in the COVID response because oil prices collapsed and fracking is going bankrupt and so forth.

[1142] But I looked at it from an environmental point of view and said, oh, okay, yeah, you can deregulate.

[1143] You can even book it as more profits.

[1144] You can even hire.

[1145] people in oil rigs, but are we really doing something we want to wreck the climate?

[1146] And the answer is no, so you're not creating something of value.

[1147] You know, another example, the tax cut.

[1148] So we gave a tax cut to the rich in 2017.

[1149] And it didn't create a miracle as it was advertised because all of this miracle stuff of supply side economics and stuff is bullshit.

[1150] You know, it's all hype.

[1151] But in any event, it created a little bit more because if you put a trillion dollars in the pockets of businesses, they'll do something with it.

[1152] Partly buyback shares, but partly spend more money or take more salaries, buy more yachts, whatever.

[1153] That's Trump economy.

[1154] If I give away a trillion dollars or two trillion dollars on public debt, I can create a little bit of apparent boom and even a little bit more employment.

[1155] but now the budget deficit is at least 1 % of national income higher that's going to start rising sharply and the society's a lot less fair than it was and we're going to turn around and this guy is going to say now we have to cut benefits for the poor because we got a big budget deficit and sure enough right on track he did that and so forth so I know and this was the question you asked I've lived through a lot of business cycles now and Since my field is macroeconomics, I see, you know, the booms, the bust, the booms, the bus, the booms, the bus.

[1156] And we do have that also.

[1157] So up until COVID, people are saying, oh, miracle economy, stock markets high, high unemployment rate low.

[1158] Look, you got to give Trump credit for that.

[1159] And I was saying, eh, first of all, the guy is such a nasty, negative guy doing so much damage on many, many things.

[1160] I cannot.

[1161] But even on the economy, it's basically what I saw in Latin America that said, okay, I have many ways to run down our country against the future that makes things look okay in the short term.

[1162] But I'm not impressed by that.

[1163] You know, the old marshmallow test of does the four -year -old wait for the second marshmallow by taking the time, Trump definitely would Never wait for the marshmallow, I'm sure, as a four -year -old.

[1164] He might not hear the whole setup.

[1165] He might just start eating.

[1166] He would grab it and probably grab the bag.

[1167] It'd be digested by the time he learned there was a second marshmallow.

[1168] You know, that is what we were living through even before COVID.

[1169] But now what we're living through is a guy that doesn't have the attention span or knowledge to stop the epidemic itself and a depression.

[1170] and I think we're ending up in the worst of both worlds from the way this guy runs things.

[1171] Well, Dr. Sacks, Mr. Sacks, Jeff Sacks.

[1172] My God, I mean, you're one of these.

[1173] We've had a few of them.

[1174] Dr. Eric Topal, Adam Grant.

[1175] We've had a few where we're like, oh, we could probably do five hours.

[1176] Yeah, so many questions.

[1177] I certainly think we could do two hours on COVID.

[1178] Let's go back for a few minutes on that sometime soon.

[1179] Yeah.

[1180] What a pleasure.

[1181] What a pleasure.

[1182] This was such a great experience talking to you.

[1183] Yeah.

[1184] So please, everybody, get a sense of the context we live in, read the ages of globalization, geography, technology, and institutions.

[1185] Jeff knows more than all of us.

[1186] So let's give them a listen.

[1187] Thank you so much for taking the time.

[1188] Hey, so great to be with you and look forward to the next time.

[1189] Thanks a lot.

[1190] Okay, thank you so much.

[1191] Take care.

[1192] Be safe.

[1193] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1194] Note to the listener, we are going to be distracted.

[1195] bit during this fact check occasionally there is a gentleman outside the window a mirror i don't know 12 feet outside the window monica yeah i would say 12 13 he's high up in a tree he's wielding a chainsaw he's got straps all over him straps all over the trees and he is given this tree what for it's really precarious for a lot of reasons it feels like he could fall it feels like the tree could fall on us now probably more dangerous is the gentleman up in the show oh there it goes whoa wow wow wow He just got rid of a big, big hung.

[1196] Okay.

[1197] I like that he's wearing pink.

[1198] He seems to have gotten the dress memo that I've applied this summer.

[1199] It's not what you expect to see your gruff tree trimmer in a nice pink colored shirt.

[1200] No. Okay.

[1201] And I have a question about trees.

[1202] Yeah, please.

[1203] You know, when you're a kid, when you draw trees and you always draw that little knot circle in the middle of it.

[1204] And I'm staring at one right now.

[1205] What are those called, and what are they?

[1206] I think they're generally where a branch has been cut off.

[1207] Oh, really?

[1208] And it leaves that, well, in this case, it looks like a butthole to be dead on this.

[1209] Yeah, this one right here.

[1210] It's not a cute one.

[1211] No, no, it looks atrophied and necrotic.

[1212] It's kind of acute.

[1213] Yeah, I think that's what's going on when you see that.

[1214] Oh, all right.

[1215] Those are just limbs that have come off.

[1216] So you're just seeing the inside of the tree, the circles, the layers.

[1217] That's right.

[1218] Oh, God.

[1219] All right, so he's about to take down a limb that's certainly aiming directly at the window in front of us.

[1220] Wait, should we move for real?

[1221] I don't know.

[1222] This could be really exciting.

[1223] I really don't want to die right on.

[1224] Well, I don't think we would die.

[1225] I think if this fell right on us, we would for sure die.

[1226] Yeah, there'd be shattered glass.

[1227] There'd be a lot of sounds of woodbreaking, both from the tree and the window frame.

[1228] You're very trusting.

[1229] Look at, he's all, he's all scatty wampas.

[1230] All right, well, there's no way this will be entertaining for us to walk you through, step by, step just if you hear it a loud crash and then some screaming and then you don't hear from us again and then rob puts this out we loved you we loved you and don't don't shed a tear for us it's been an amazing ride that's right but this is a little bit or mind -ha frequency illusion why is that because yesterday we transformed this backyard into a race stadium yes for father's day would you call the stadiums a stadium generally involves a structure a built structure, right?

[1231] Okay, sure.

[1232] It's just a track, yeah.

[1233] We decorated it for Father's Day, and it was really fun.

[1234] Was it fun?

[1235] It looked like so much work.

[1236] What a revelation.

[1237] To turn the corner and see the whole backyard done up in checkered flags and balloons, race balloons, there was a full spread, the full fucking spread from Houston's.

[1238] There was ribs, chicken sandwich.

[1239] It was so decadent.

[1240] We moved your lazy boys up.

[1241] over so you could sit in your lazy boys while racing the remote control cars.

[1242] It was really decadent.

[1243] And, you know, quite often, I just, neither of us felt like we deserved it.

[1244] Because really, Eric and I were the recipients of this.

[1245] Yeah, the dads.

[1246] Yeah, my God, did you guys really pull out all the stops?

[1247] It was really fun.

[1248] But Bader Mindhaff frequency illusion, we had the idea to tie one of the checkered flags across from the house to the tree.

[1249] And it was complicated, to say the least.

[1250] We had to go inside to get a ladder and we were like, there's no way someone can climb a tree like this.

[1251] And now this man has done it.

[1252] What timing?

[1253] Before anyone thinks we're pulling down a healthy tree.

[1254] This thing is, well, it's dead.

[1255] It's not doing well.

[1256] I know.

[1257] I have some ethic, not with this specifically, but you know, in my new house, I have these two big trees that you and many people have implored me. They're taking up your whole backyard in all of your visibility.

[1258] And I feel really unethical about it.

[1259] I haven't decided if I'm going to do it or not.

[1260] You can recognize how sweet trees are.

[1261] And then also they've grown for so long.

[1262] It's like to tear down for my visual aesthetics, my stupid human visual aesthetics, to tear down a 5 ,000 -year -old tree.

[1263] Well, the one in your yard is probably about 40 years old, but yeah.

[1264] Oh, he's so tall.

[1265] He is so tall.

[1266] But I think it might be from a family of tree.

[1267] that really gets up there quick.

[1268] Okay, well, he touches this guy, so I think he's five -thous.

[1269] The neighborhood's like 100 years old, so maybe it's 100 years old.

[1270] It looks very out of place.

[1271] It doesn't match any of the rest of the flora.

[1272] But it kind of looks like...

[1273] Dr. Seuss?

[1274] Dr. Seuss, thank you.

[1275] Yeah, it's got a real Seussian look to it.

[1276] Okay, Jeff Sacks.

[1277] Jeffrey Sacks.

[1278] Oh, man. What a guy.

[1279] What a guy.

[1280] We've referenced him on one other fact check after we first recorded with him because he was on our mind because he's so fascinating and just making us think about rewiring some of our systems i just love someone that in the middle of a conversation that maybe would have started with jihadists and then talk about the history of fundamentalism and then talk about the empowerment of puppet uh politicians to support oil interests and why do we have oil interests oh because the british navy converted from coal to oil and blankier like the fact that that guy has that comprehensive of a knowledge of the root cause of every single thing we're dealing with currently is fascinating yeah i know is it must be frustrating to him a little bit of course that he can see like a plus b then plus c yeah and he's like why can't you all understand take take a minute out and learn about this and then you'll understand why we're here so you said you've you referenced yvall's second book because you were talking about communism but you had forgot the name and it's homo day Homer Deus.

[1281] Yep.

[1282] He talks about how Adam Smith references the discovery of the sea routes from Europe to America by Columbus and Europe to Asia by Vasco da Gama.

[1283] It's in a bigger context.

[1284] He references that.

[1285] But I just thought it was maybe fair to say now that, you know, there's a lot of controversy around like he didn't really discover America.

[1286] In that it was already discovered by Native Americans.

[1287] Right.

[1288] Yeah.

[1289] And I'll just read this little section.

[1290] During four separate trips that started with one in 1492, Columbus landed on various Caribbean islands that are now the Bahamas, as well as the island later called Hispaniola.

[1291] He also explored the Central and South American coast, but he didn't reach North America, which, of course, was already inhabited by Native Americans, and he never thought he had found a new continent.

[1292] You may also remember that it is believed that Norse explorer Leif Erickson reached Canada, perhaps 500 years before Columbus was born, and there are some who believe that Phoenician sailors, crossed the Atlantic much earlier than that.

[1293] There's like a big NPR on it too.

[1294] There's a lot of stuff in here to research if people are interested.

[1295] They say the Vikings got to the Hudson Bay, right?

[1296] Yeah, there's a lot of the stuff of the Vikings as well.

[1297] Okay, so he talks about John Mullaney's horse in a hospital, and I wanted to like really get in it with him, but we didn't have time.

[1298] There was too much to talk about with him.

[1299] But that special is called Kid Gorgeous.

[1300] It's on Netflix.

[1301] It's amazing.

[1302] I love John Mullaney so much.

[1303] He's in your top three.

[1304] I want everyone to go watch this so that they can hear him say it, because obviously him saying it is the most effective.

[1305] But I will read how it goes.

[1306] He said, here's how I try to look at it.

[1307] And this is just me. This guy being the president, it's like there's a horse loose in a hospital.

[1308] It's like there's a horse loose in a hospital.

[1309] I think eventually everything's going to be okay, but I have no idea what's going to happen next.

[1310] and neither do any of you.

[1311] And neither do your parents because there's a horse loose in the hospital.

[1312] It's never happened before.

[1313] No one knows what the horse is going to do next.

[1314] Least of all the horse.

[1315] He's never been in a hospital.

[1316] He's never been in a hospital before.

[1317] He's as confused as you are.

[1318] There are no experts.

[1319] They try to find experts on the news.

[1320] They're like, we're joined now by a man that once saw a bird in the airport.

[1321] Get out of here with that shit.

[1322] We've all seen a bird in the airport.

[1323] This is a horse loose.

[1324] in a hospital.

[1325] When a horse is loose in a hospital, you've got to stay updated.

[1326] So all day long, you walk around, what the horse do?

[1327] The updates, they're not always bad.

[1328] Sometimes they're just odd.

[1329] It'll be like, the horse use the elevator?

[1330] I didn't know he knew how to do that.

[1331] The creepiest days are when you don't hear from the horse at all.

[1332] You're down in the operating room like, hey, has anyone heard?

[1333] Those are the quiet days when people are like, it looks like the horse has finally calmed down.

[1334] And then 10 seconds later, the horse is like, I'm going to run towards the baby incubators and smash them with my hooves.

[1335] I've got nice hooves and a long tail.

[1336] I'm a horse.

[1337] And then you go to brunch with people and they're like, there shouldn't be a horse in the hospital.

[1338] And it's like, we're well past that.

[1339] Then other people are like, if there's going to be a horse in the hospital, I'm going to say the N -word on TV.

[1340] And those don't match up at all.

[1341] And then for a second, it seemed like maybe we could survive the horse.

[1342] And then 5 ,000 miles away, a hippo was like, I have a nuclear bomb and I'm going to blow up the hospital.

[1343] And before we could say anything, the horse was like, if you even fucking look at the hospital, I will stomp you to death with my hooves, I dare you to do it.

[1344] I want you to do it.

[1345] So I can stomp you with my hooves.

[1346] I'm so fucking crazy.

[1347] You think you're fucking crazy?

[1348] I'm a fucking hippopotamus.

[1349] I live in a fucking lake of mud.

[1350] I'm fucking crazy.

[1351] And all of us are like, okay, okay.

[1352] Like poor Andy Cohen at those goddamn reunions.

[1353] Okay.

[1354] And then for a second, we were like, maybe the horse catcher will catch the horse.

[1355] And then the horse is like, I have fired the horse catcher.

[1356] He can do that.

[1357] That shouldn't be allowed no matter who the horse is.

[1358] I don't remember that in Hamilton.

[1359] Let me have some other stuff too.

[1360] But it's amazing.

[1361] It's so funny.

[1362] The horse doesn't have any.

[1363] At least of all the horse.

[1364] At least of all the horse.

[1365] Oh, he is so funny.

[1366] I wonder how many animals he tried before he said horse in a hospital.

[1367] Is it because they're both eight?

[1368] There's something about it that's magic Horse in a hospital Linguistically it is It does work the best That's cool that Sacks was hip to Malaney's shit I know Yeah guys you gotta get on board With John Mullaney if you aren't already I'm sure you all are but I could do better I could do better I like him But I haven't really like really focus Set down commit some time To start appreciating Malini He's one of mine Because he's handsomer than me I wonder if that has anything to do with it He is very handsome Oh yeah and he's well put together.

[1369] He dresses really nice.

[1370] Yeah, he does.

[1371] Threatened by that maybe.

[1372] He's really smart.

[1373] Oh, yeah, yeah, smart.

[1374] Dresses well.

[1375] Well, we would like to have you on John Mullaney.

[1376] Absolutely.

[1377] Just saying that out loud.

[1378] We'd like you to do your horse in the hospital routine in its entirety.

[1379] We would love it.

[1380] Okay.

[1381] So he mentions the Big Five personality traits.

[1382] I think we may have talked about this on a previous episode, but we'll go through it again.

[1383] Yeah.

[1384] The one that comes up so often on this show is disagreeability.

[1385] That's right.

[1386] Yeah.

[1387] The five broad personality traits described by the theory are extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

[1388] Neuroticism?

[1389] Mm -hmm.

[1390] Was that just how neurotic you are?

[1391] Is there a test you can take for these?

[1392] Oh, there is.

[1393] Yeah, there is.

[1394] Neuroticism is one of the big five higher order personality traits in the study of psychology.

[1395] Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than average to be moody and to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration.

[1396] envy jealousy guilt oh all the emotions depressed mood and loneliness i'm a hundred on whatever the scale is what do you think i am okay let's really find out what the scale is okay okay okay one is disagree and then five is agree okay this is tricky because you're some of these things a lot okay you're also none of some of these things uh -huh so i guess i give you i think three dash seven i'd rate you fairly low on neurotic Okay.

[1397] I don't feel high on that scale, but you never know what you really are.

[1398] Yeah.

[1399] No, I wouldn't say you're moody.

[1400] I don't think so.

[1401] No, you're pretty constant.

[1402] I think I'm very high on it, though.

[1403] Okay.

[1404] And then he mentioned how different personality traits kind of correlate to your state, which is interesting.

[1405] And then I read an article in time.

[1406] I did like this huge study on this.

[1407] The top scores on extroversion were the folks of Wisconsin.

[1408] What?

[1409] Yeah.

[1410] That's counter to what I would have guessed.

[1411] It says, picture the fans at a Packers game, even a losing Packers game.

[1412] Oh, okay.

[1413] The lowest score went to the temperamentally snowbound folks of Vermont.

[1414] Oh, they're the least extroverted.

[1415] Uh -huh.

[1416] Uh -huh.

[1417] Utah is the most agreeable place in the country.

[1418] Oh.

[1419] And Washington, D .C. is the least.

[1420] Oh, well, that town built on descent.

[1421] Uh -huh.

[1422] For conscientiousness, South Carolina What?

[1423] What does consciousness entail?

[1424] I associate that would just mean thoughtful.

[1425] A person scoring high in conscientiousness usually has a high level of self -discipline.

[1426] These individuals prefer to follow a plan rather than act spontaneously.

[1427] Oh, okay, okay.

[1428] So South Carolina.

[1429] They love their plans.

[1430] For conscientiousness, South Carolina takes the finishing their homework on time prize, while the independent -minded yanks of Maine, who prefer to do things their own way and in their own time.

[1431] A .k .a. Willie -nilly.

[1432] Come and last.

[1433] Okay.

[1434] West Virginia is the dark horse winner as the country's most neurotic state.

[1435] Really?

[1436] In parentheses.

[1437] Maybe it was the divorce from Virginia in 1863.

[1438] The least neurotic, Utah wins again.

[1439] Utah, the top of the heap.

[1440] Washington, D .C. the price for the most open place, even if their low agreeableness score means they have no idea what to do with all of the ideas they tolerate.

[1441] Uh -huh.

[1442] North Dakotans, meantime, prefer things predictable and familiar finishing last on openness.

[1443] Oh, okay.

[1444] Interesting, right?

[1445] That is a stereotype you get with tiny communities, right?

[1446] Yeah.

[1447] Less open -minded?

[1448] I think so.

[1449] Okay, so this is just a little more on the test.

[1450] Each of those categories is defined by more specific personality descriptors such as curiosity and a preference for novelty, that's openness, self -discipline and dependability, conscientiousness, sociability and gregariousness, extraversion, compassion and cooperativeness, agreeableness, and anxiety and anger, neuroticism.

[1451] The inventory gets at the precise mix of those qualities in any one person by asking subjects to respond to a one to five scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with 44 statements including, I see myself as someone who can be tense or can be reserved or has an active imagination or is talkative.

[1452] There turned out to be a whole lot of Americans willing to sit still for that kind of in -depth prying.

[1453] Oh, we're all so interested in ourselves.

[1454] Yeah.

[1455] Endless patience for a test that has to do with us.

[1456] Regions that score lower on openness and higher on the friendly and conventional scale have the lowest rates of emigration.

[1457] If you're traditional and friendly and value family life, what's the point of moving?

[1458] away.

[1459] Right.

[1460] Interesting.

[1461] Okay.

[1462] He said not -for -profit hospital CEOs make around $5 million.

[1463] 13 organizations pay their top earner between $5 million and $21 .6 million.

[1464] That's as much like Bob Eiger made to run the biggest media company in the world.

[1465] That's interesting.

[1466] 61 organizations pay their top exec between $1 to $5 million and only $8.

[1467] Pay their top earner less than $1 million.

[1468] And that article has said proving it can be done.

[1469] He said Bitcoin's worth $10 ,000, but he didn't check that day.

[1470] Uh -huh.

[1471] Today, it's $9 ,555 .75.

[1472] Okay.

[1473] Today on June 22nd.

[1474] It's a mental hurdle.

[1475] I don't know that I'll ever get over in my lifetime.

[1476] Even with admitting that the paper dollar is a story as well.

[1477] Yeah.

[1478] It's just interesting.

[1479] The cryptocurrency.

[1480] I agree.

[1481] I think I was too old when it came into Vogue to believe in.

[1482] I'm too old, too.

[1483] I'm really old, too.

[1484] You're very old in some ways.

[1485] All right.

[1486] Oh, I love you.

[1487] Love you.

[1488] Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[1489] You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[1490] Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.