Joe Rogan & Sam Harris on Universal Basic Income

Hello freak bitches. Take precedent over the actual environment that we need to sustain ourselves. Let's not forget there are real human beings in coal country who have spent generations working in this industry, take great pride in it, and we've got to think about what we do. But it's only, the numbers here are surprising and also little reported, it's only 75,000 coal jobs we're talking about in the country and there's something like 500,000 clean tech jobs just in California alone. I mean the numbers are completely out of whack. No, I think the clean tech industry offers an enormous amount of promise, but 75,000 families is not nothing. And when we're talking about... But then give them money. Right, but they don't want to end up. They want to work. This goes to the question of meaning and what are we going to do? Because the precipice we're getting to is virtually everyone is going to be in the position of these coal miners when we're talking about... And that's a good thing. That's the thing. I mean, why can't they figure out that they just want to learn new languages and spend more time with their kids and play frisbee and have fun? We need a new ethic and politics that decouples a person's claim on existence from doing profitable work that someone will pay you for. It says a lot of that work is going away. I mean, we could view it as an opportunity and it is actually something that it does dovetail with this hobby horse that you and I have been on for a while about the power of meditation and what it can do to a human mind and the way you view the world and your role. Well, what are your thoughts on universal basic income? Because bring it back to that with this rise of the machines. If we do have things automated, I mean, some ridiculous number of people make their living driving cars and driving trucks. Now, when those jobs are gone, I think it's millions of people, right? Yeah, no. And I think in the States, it's the most common job for white men, I think. Something like nine million white men are driving trucks and cars. The problem with that is most people are like, fuck white men. Tired of white men. We're the patriarchy. This is Trump's base. Yeah. No, it's these, I think universal basic income, there are reasons to worry that it's not a perfect solution because you do want, you want to incentivize the things you want to incentivize. And you need to just understand the consequences of any system you would put in place. But there's just no question that viewed as an opportunity, this is the greatest opportunity in human history. We're talking about canceling the need for dangerous, boring, repetitive work and freeing up humanity to do interesting, creative, fun things. Now, how could that be bad? Well, give us a little time and we'll show you how we can make it bad. And it'll be bad if it leads to just extraordinary wealth inequality that we don't have the political or ethical will to fix. And because if we have a culture of people who think, I don't want any handouts and I certainly don't want my neighbor to get any handouts, I don't want to pay any taxes so that he can be a lazy bum. If that's the, if we have this, you know, hangover from, from Calvinism, you know, that makes it impossible to talk creatively and reasonably about what has changed. Yeah, it could be a very painful bottleneck we have to pass through until we get to something that is, that is much better or a hell of a lot worse depending on where the technology goes. And I think at a certain point, the, the wealth inequality will be obviously unsustainable. I mean, you can't have multiple trillionaires walking around living in compounds with razor wire and just moving everywhere with, you know, by private jet. And then, you know, massive levels of unemployment in a society like ours. I mean, a certain point where the richest people will realize that enough is enough. We have to spread this wealth because otherwise people are just going to show up at our compounds with, with their AR 15s or their pitchforks. And, you know, that the society will not sustain it. I mean, you can't, you, there has to be some level of wealth inequality that is unsustainable. That people, people will not tolerate. And you begin to look more and more like a banana republic until you become a banana republic. But now we're talking about, you know, the US or, or the developed world where all the wealth is. So redistribution is the end game. And that's that, but that's a toxic concept for half of the country right now. Where the idea of the welfare state, the idea of perpetuating that and spreading it across the board. Yeah. But these are. So yeah, I mean, whatever the solution is for coal mining, we should not be hostage for the coal miners. We should not be hostage to the idea that they need jobs so that whatever job they were doing and are still qualified to do that job has to continue to exist no matter what, no matter what the environmental consequences, no matter what the health consequences, no matter how it closes the door to good things that we want. We don't do that with anything. We didn't do that with, you know, the people who are making buggy whips or, or anything else. Slavery. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just there's no, at a certain point, we move on and we make progress and we don't let that progress get rolled back. And when you're talking about developing technology that produces energy that doesn't have any of these negative effects, you know, whether it's global climate change or just pollution, of course, we have to move in that direction. And the other thing that's crazy is that we're not talking honestly about how dirty tech is subsidized. I mean, you have the oil people say, well, solar is all subsidized, right? This is, you know, it's just this a government handout that's giving us the solar industry. Well, one, that's not even that you have to produce an argument as to why that's a bad thing. This is something we should want the government to do. The government needs to incentivize new industries that the market can't incentivize now if they are industries that are just intrinsically good and are going to lead to the betterment of humanity. But carbon is massively subsidized. We don't have I mean, if we actually had the coal producers and the petroleum producers pay for the consequences of carbon and pollution, it would be much more expensive than it is. Right. So it's already subsidized. So we should. I mean, we need a carbon tax clearly. We need to the tax code should incentivize what we want to incentivize. With.