Making Sense with Sam Harris - #185 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

Sam Harris and Paul Bloom speak about "Trump Derangement Syndrome," inequality, the relationship between wealth and happiness, the downside of fame, psychological impediments to noticing progress, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. Thank you. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay. I have Paul Bloom back. Paul, good to hear you. Good to be back. We have a couple of messes to clean up, or at least one mess to clean up from the last round where we, I haven't gone back to listen to exactly what we said, but I got the sense that we disparaged Pee Wee Herman somehow, or at least minimized his...

That was the least of my intentions. but we diminished his stature or assumed that he was invisible or had disappeared into obscurity in some way because we haven't been paying attention to his career. But someone pointed out, and I quickly confirmed, that the man is selling out very large auditoriums with his latest act. I mean, he has quite a career. He's out there making a fair amount of noise. So it seems we were wrong about Paul Reubens. Well, good to know. Good to know. As I was walking to the studio 10 minutes ago, I saw that Al Franken is coming to New Haven. So, you know, I think he had somewhat of a blow to his reputation, but maybe redemption is more common than we had expected.

Maybe cancellation is rarely permanent. That's good to know. Anyway, so no hard feelings, Paul Rubens? Absolutely no hard feelings towards Paul Rubens. And the other thing, this is the other thing that I just had in my mind to mention based on the last conversation. We started by talking about Kobe's death

and the death of everyone else involved in that helicopter crash. Because we recorded our last conversation the day after that happened. And I didn't know this at the time, but finding out about it is an interesting ethical question. So we didn't touch on this. so we didn't touch on this. I believe it is in fact true that TMZ, the kind of paparazzi-inspired website, announced Kobe's death before the family even knew about it. That was the way the information came out. And I'm wondering just what you think about this, the ethics of that. I mean, the interesting thing from my point of view is is given that I've taken such a strong position against the advertising model and what that has done to digital media, this seems to me to be another symptom of it. I mean, the race to publish

is really directly incentivized by the kind of winner-take-all effects of clickbait journalism and with different incentives that there wouldn't be the same kind of sense of time pressure to publish. I was just wondering what you thought about that. Because many people think, well, why does it matter? The tragedy is you've lost your husband, your father. This is a 20-megaton catastrophe. However you look at it, does it really matter that you heard about it on Twitter because TMZ tweeted it and not through some sober channel? But it seems to me to matter a lot. I'm wondering what you as a psychologist- Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I don't have any special expertise on this as a psychologist, just sort of common sense and decency. If somebody's

father, daughter, wife, whatever dies, you want to be told in a sober, controlled circumstance. You don't want to find it as a hashtag. And I think for the most part, news sources are often particularly well-behaved in this way, but some of them aren't. And there is a sort of Darwinian battle for clicks and for attention. And so some don't play by the rules. And I think in some way, there's a question of what should be legally allowed, which I actually think a lot. But there's also the question of what's sort of morally atrocious. And something could be, you know, you wouldn't want the law to punish them, but you want to also say that's kind of despicable.

Yeah. No, it really is hard to imagine the editorial call here when you have every reason to believe that this information is minutes old and that the family probably doesn't know anything about it and you're racing to publish. It's just something has gotten away from you there. And again, it's the incentives at your back, no doubt, but it's a symptom of our digital ecosystem at the moment. And definitely at the moment. I mean, we're both old enough to remember when there were newspapers,

and rushing to get it out, re-rushing to get it out the next day. Yeah. And for the last long while, it's been a matter of minutes or seconds. And so that kind of changes everything. Okay, so now we're talking in the immediate aftermath of the Trump impeachment acquittal and the high drama of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union address and Mitt Romney breaking from the herd and voting to impeach. What do you think about all of this?

Do you have a hot take on the politics of this? I have the observations everyone else has, which is, if anything, Trump is becoming more and more unhinged, more and more confident in his abilities to do whatever he pleases. And so, you know, I think things are going to get worse and worse and worse until, you know, I hope with the next election they get better. And it is true that the Democrats are responding in kind.

And people have said, oh, this doesn't work. You know, Trump makes fun of your appearance. You make fun of Trump's appearance. You're just descending to his level. But the thing is, the history of battling Trump is nothing works. The high road doesn't work. The low road doesn't work. That's what is so strange about him and this moment politically, because nothing works. And I'm trying to understand why this is the case. I mean, it almost seems like a supernatural phenomenon, right? Because I can't map it onto any normal experience. It's like the obelisk in 2001, right? I mean, it's the superficial version of that. That was like a infinite profundity somehow that never had to be explained, right?

This is just the singularity at the heart of the cosmos. And Trump is like the inverse of all of that. So it's like there's no depth. It's all surface. And yet the surface is engineered in a way so as to reflect the worst in everyone. This is what's so bizarre about Trump and the response to him. He has a capacity to tarnish the reputation of everyone who comes into his orbit, right? And this is, again, whether it's a supporter or a critic. And I mean, for supporters,

this is very obvious. I mean, the effect is astonishing. You have serious people with real reputations. I mean, politicians and soldiers and business people who have lifetimes of real accomplishment who achieve levels of personal hypocrisy and political cowardice in propping him up and in covering for his lies and in pretending not to notice his lies and just pretending that he's normal that, I mean, we've never seen before. But then the flip side of it is that all of his critics are also diminished by how they respond to this. And, you know, the case with Pelosi, I think, is an example of this. I mean, many people are obviously celebrating what she did, but I think it does also diminish her, right?

I mean, she's just, she is left behaving in a way that a congressperson shouldn't behave, right? And she's demeaning the office of the presidency because of its current occupant. And there's just something so strange about this, this term of disparagement that Trump supporters use, Trump derangement syndrome, you know, everyone has TDS. There's something to that because he is a kind of super stimulus, right? I mean, the reaction to him is exaggerated because it's out of proportion to his qualities as a person. It's out of proportion to the bad things he's done and the bad things he aspires to do, because he's not actually evil, right? I mean, he's not as scary as he might be, and yet somehow he gets an even bigger reaction

than someone would if they were just truly scary, right? So it's almost like his smallness as a person is invoking a bigger reaction than you would ordinarily feel. And I feel it myself. I mean, I feel it personally. I mean, I've said this. I find him more despicable than I found Osama bin Laden, right? And that's strange. This is psychologically true because with Osama bin Laden, it's just obvious to me that he could have been a mensch in some sense. He's making serious sacrifices for ideas that he deeply believes in. He's committed to a cause greater than himself. I don't doubt that he had real ethical connections to the people in his life that he cared about. I mean, he's a real person, right? And in some ways, he's a kind of a moral hero in a very bad game, right? And so therefore, he's kind of prototypically evil when viewed from my game. But he's a person of actual substance.

He's just committed to the wrong ends. Whereas Trump is the negation of all of those things, and yet he's president of the United States. And the perversity of that juxtaposition is just fucking crazy-making. And that's how you get this outsized reaction, or at least that's my interpretation of it. So there's some people, I agree with all of that, but there's some people who have made contact with Trump and haven't been degraded. It's a very small list. I'm thinking of- Who's on that list? Well, there's quite a bit of conservative writers who, when Trump came into power, they sort of said, this guy clashes with all of our principles.

Right. The never Trumpers. The never Trumpers, like Jonah Goldberg, for instance. David Frum. Yeah. And they said, even though this is going to get me kicked off Fox News, I'm going to lose some revenue. I'm going to lose some fans. I'm going to sort of stand up for what I believe. And, you know, they paid a sort of financial and sort of professional price for it. And now we have, you know, Mitt Romney. And my feelings about Mitt Romney have always been complicated. I don't think he's quite the sort of choir boy

as people like to think of him as when he was running for president. He was pretty rough and tumble. But I have nothing but admiration for him standing up against Trump this time. So what do you think? Do you think would you put Romney as an exception? Yeah. Well, I mean, first, I should apologize for all the bad things I've said about Romney in the past, because I went fairly hard against Romney and his Mormonism when he was the candidate in 2012. And I'm sure at least once or twice mentioned that he must be wearing magic underpants and

that we did not need a president who believed what he believed. And yeah, my concerns about his religious beliefs and the inflexibility of mind that you would imagine he would have given those beliefs to assume the presidency is a religious dogmatist of the first order, Mike Pence, who in another context would trip all of the switches in me that would worry about theocracy in the US. So I went after Romney for his religiosity in the past, and I've noticed the same things about him that everyone has noticed, that he was clearly a political opportunist in many ways. And there was something truly humiliating about his seeking to be secretary of state under Trump after all that had gone down between him and Trump. I mean, that was almost a Shakespearean level of cravenness at the time or attachment to political power. Still, if you want the full Shakespeare, go for Ted Cruz.

Oh, yeah, Ted Cruz, yes. That was brutal, yes. Personal deep humiliation by Trump, and then he has to go back and beg him for various things and champion him. And it says something about how difficult politics is. Well, also, worse still, it was finally commemorated in the shot of him working the phone banks for Trump. I don't know if you saw that photograph. Oh, I have seen that, yeah. So it's just awful, right? I mean, just where does one go to get a spine in the game of politics?

But now Romney, going back to this, did redeem himself to some extent. Yeah, that was all by way of my saying that, yeah, in this moment, though it's hard to imagine that it's a political price that matters, it is very real for him. I mean, he's someone now who's being vilified by his colleagues and his political tribe, and probably worse. I mean, he probably has the maniacs in Trump's base sending him death threats, some of which are credible. And I mean, it's just the people who go against Trump have stories to tell about what that's like when the mob turns on you. So yeah, I just have nothing but respect for how he's comporting himself in this moment. And I certainly don't underestimate that it's, in his world, a real sacrifice. So let me switch gears for us and say something nice about Trump.

And it's sincerely nice about Trump. How surprising. Yes. And it's something from Tyler Cowen. So Cowen is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. And he has a little piece, I think, in Bloomberg News or something, where he talks about the best orators of the last decade. And he lists two of them. He thinks Barack Obama's a third, maybe a distant third. One is Greta Thunberg, who is an extremely unusual, very powerful speaker, this unusual

porosity and great moral seriousness, the sort of juxtaposition between her being seemingly sort of a young woman and talking with such seriousness and gravity. But Thunberg's second, Trump is first. And Trump is an extraordinary orator. Well, extraordinary in scare quotes, but yeah, I mean, so... I don't mean to, obviously, I don't mean this as sort of like, oh, I, I, I don't mean as a moral, as a moral good. I mean, in terms of skill. No, well, what can be ascribed to skill? I still stand by my, my evil Chauncey Gardner interpretation here.

I think there's, there's far less method to his madness than, than actual madness that just happens to work in this context for whatever reason. But, and I certainly share your respect for Tyler Cowen, but I don't agree here. I think there's no advantage to him, or at least I don't see the advantage in him being incoherent. For him to contradict himself over the course of five minutes is not fourth-level chess.

It's just a mistake, right? And it's just the fact that he pays no price for that mistake, whereas you and I would pay a very high price in the context of a conversation like this. He's managed to select an audience that doesn't care about contradictions, right? They're not going to hold him to the letter of any utterance because they don't. I mean, why they don't, it's still a mystery to me. I don't actually have a, I don't think I have an adequate theory of mind for the people, and there are tens of millions of them, who do not care when he says A, in direct contradiction to B, or vice versa over the course of two minutes. And it may be on a topic that they

profess to care about, and yet they don't care that you can't actually follow both of those paths through his mind or any apparent reality. A while ago, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt used the term bullshit as a technical term. And he says, there's people who tell the truth, then there's people who lie, but then there's bullshitters who are simply indifferent to the truth. And that was coined before Trump, you know, ascended. But it works well for him. I think you're holding Trump to sort of a standard that his audience doesn't. He's seen as an entertainer, a showman. I mean, so let me just say, so just to give a sense of what I'm talking about, Cowan points out his speech is highly repetitive, slow and ponderous.

I have a soft spot for slow and ponderous because I am that, but highly repetitive. So when I watch him being highly repetitive, I see neurological injury manifest, right? I see someone who is in a visibly, audibly, in a holding pattern because they can't get to the next thought, right? And worse, what I see with him, and I've commented on this before, I see with him to a unique degree, I've never seen it this bad in any other person. I see him being prompted by and anchored to accidents in his utterances that he then is committed to shoring up. And the way I tried to illustrate this in the past, and it's still, I can't think of another way, but it's almost like he's speaking in verse, but this is extemporaneous. And he doesn't know how he's speaking in verse, but he's, you know, this is extemporaneous and he doesn't know how he's going to complete the rhyme, but he's held to it.

So he'll just say something like, there was once a man from Spokane, right? And he doesn't know where he's going after this, right? But he's got Spokane. He landed on Spokane and then he has to get to something that rhymes there. From immigrants, we get too much cocaine. Yeah, yeah. And he'll land on that something that rhymes there. From immigrants, we get too much cocaine. Yeah, yeah. And he'll land on that. And that is the message, right?

And it's born of a process, back to Frankfurt here, he's just bullshitting. To remind people of this brilliant distinction that Frankfurt made between a bullshitter and a liar, a liar is someone who is fully aware of the logical expectations of his audience. He's fully aware of what reality is and the departures he's introducing from it in his speech. And he's having to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces in where they fit in real time. So he knows that you're expecting coherence. He knows what you know about the world, and he's engineering his lies so as to go undetected. A bullshitter is just talking. He's not wasting any of the cognitive overhead to track what reality is or what your expectations are of, you know, his fit to it. And he's just creating a mood with the way he speaks and bloviating and

confabulating. And that's what Trump is doing to a degree that is truly unsurpassed. And in any other walk of life, he would immediately be recognized as a con man and a fraud and a bullshitter and someone who can't be trusted and certainly someone who can't be given significant responsibility. And yet it works in this country at this time in the presidency. So, yes, it's true that he's incredibly effective for the people he's apparently effective for, but I do not understand it.

I think there's some sort of genius behind it. I don't think he himself is a genius, but I think everything you're saying, there is the feeling that he has no idea what he's going to say next. He could drift everywhere. He could find himself, get some laughter from the crowd and seize on that. And it's so different from the standard Polish presentations one gets from a typical politician. I mean, to some extent, I've listened to some of Jordan Peterson, and Jordan Peterson is a thousand times more articulate and smoother and clearer. But you get somewhat of the same feeling. It's hilarious you said that because I've actually said the same point about talking in verse and completing the rhyme.

of the greatest opposition with him, that there is a quality where he's not doing the reality testing that I would want him to do. It just sounds good what he's saying. But if you actually bring him up short and say, okay, what do you actually mean by God or faith or whatever it is in the sentence, then it goes into the ditch. So there is that, just kind of being carried away by the sound of your own voice. But with Trump, it is so bereft of content, right? It's at the level of a fourth grader, and it's repetitive at the level of a fourth grader. I mean, no fourth grader repeats himself as much as Trump does. But you can hear the Trump derangement syndrome, and this is back to my point. It's like, I stand by everything that I'm saying about Trump now. But the fact that I'm saying it, the fact that it's taking up this much of our conversation is, even for the people who will agree with me, certainly many of them think, you know, this guy is living rent-free in your brain.

And this is bad for you, and it's bad for us us and it's bad for conversation. And there's something true about that. I mean, I think we have to, you know, I don't know how we respond to that fact politically over the next nine months, but there is something, you know, I really have had to pick my moments with Trump and just ignore him for many podcasts running because it's boring to criticize him ultimately. But I'll add one thing to my blast of Trump love, then we can leave it alone. Yes. Which is, you know, other presidents have phrases

that they're known for, you know, the soft bigotry of low expectations or a lot of Kennedy's lines. And they were typically written by professionals. But somehow I think these phrases we're going to remember, like fake news, drain the swamp, make America great again, make Mexico pay for it. The things which people know by heart and he could start them and the audience will finish them. These seem to be coming from Trump's mind.

And there's so little to respect about him, but he has some abilities, some really extraordinary abilities. really extraordinary abilities. Well, he has a, I mean, one ability is, again, this is a, whether you call this an ability or a symptom, that's debatable, but he is utterly shameless, right? He's scandal-proof within his own mind. He just cannot be derailed by being shown to be at odds with himself or with reality or, that, again, is one of these crazy-making things that he's just, he can lie 16,000 times and never pay a penalty for it. Well, you're talking substance, and I agree with that. But I'm thinking about style. And thinking about the analogy, I was listening to a podcast by Jordan Peterson,

which I don't do, but I just wanted to listen to what he sounds like, what his book talk is. And there's something about it where you don't want to shut it off. You have no idea where it's going. And Peterson does something which Trump doesn't, which he displays genuine curiosity and interest and energy, a range of emotions you don't normally hear in this kind of talk. And there's something about it. He's a very good speaker, but there's a kind of free associative meandering, somewhat confabulatory thing going on in that there's not a rigorously honest reality testing.

And again, I like Jordan a lot. So this is something I've said to his face and on stage. And so this is not me saying anything behind his back that I haven't actually said to him, both in private and in public. And it's just, on some level, it's a different... I mean, he has an account for why this is a feature, not a bug. He thinks that my slavish attachment to reality testing and logic is something that is a symptom of my own rigidity and lack of awareness of certain truths that can be, you know, bivalenced or, you know, however, I'm not just making up words and putting

them in his mouth, but he's more comfortable with paradox and a mythopoetic take on reality than I am, certainly. But none of that is, I mean, it would be amazing to know that behind closed doors, Trump is very different. Everything I've said about Trump, and this is amazing, this has gone on much longer than I anticipated, but- More Trump derangement syndrome. everything I've said about Trump and my, you know, evil Chauncey Gardner thesis is readily disconfirmable. I mean, it could be disconfirmable in a matter of 15 seconds. I mean, he would just have to say something that I would imagine he's incapable of saying. If he just, for a paragraph, was tenfold more articulate than I've ever seen him be and said, this is the way I talk with my friends behind closed doors, but, you know, this is the way I talk with my friends behind closed doors, but this is the way I talk on stage. And then show me both versions.

I would realize he actually is a genius who has calculated his effect on his audience. Then I'd be prepared to believe anything. He could be reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius behind closed doors and talking for hours about them insightfully. But I know exactly what he's doing behind closed doors, or at hours about them and insightfully, but I know exactly what he's doing behind closed doors, or at least I think I do, right? He's just watching Fox and Friends and shrieking at people. And, you know, the reports of what he's like behind closed doors certainly substantiate that. Anyway. Okay. We're going to pivot to something here which is really adjacent to this topic and related to...

Actually, it was synchronous that you mentioned Harry Frankfurt because he has also written about inequality. And wealth inequality is something that has been very much on my mind. And it is really a pressing issue in our politics now, and arguably the most pressing issue on the Democratic side. I don't know what you think of the prospects of our nominating someone like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the general election, but the concern about wealth inequality would be the reason why that would happen. Yeah.

Putting aside the specifics of who's going to be next president, I think people think in a very confused way about inequality. I think for the most part, people think they're very concerned about wealth inequality, but they aren't really. And this actually comes from Frankfurt, who wrote a book on the topic. So Frankfurt says, this isn't exactly his example. This is the idea. Jeff Bezos, compare Jeff Bezos to your average person with $10 million. They have a hugely unequal amount of wealth, way more than your average extremely poor

person and rich person. They have an extraordinary, by many magnitudes, different in wealth. But nobody worries about that. Nobody said, oh my God, such inequality. Right. Except for the person with $10 million. Yes. The person with $10 million might feel it. He feels the sting of proximity to business. Yes. This is true. But in general, it's not the biggest problem in the world. So I think, and this is Frankfurt's argument, and I've developed this in both technical papers and casual papers. When people say they're worried about inequality, they're typically worried about

one of two other things and a few other possibilities. One is poverty. You know, poverty is terrible. And we tend to worry about poverty, justifiably so. We want to, you know, a world in which everybody was, you know, well off, can afford food and healthcare and recreation, would be a wonderful world. And if we were in that world, and some people made 10 times as much or 100 times as much, I think we would worry a lot less. So there's poverty. And then the second factor is unfairness.

So there's a lot of laboratory experiments finding that even young kids get very upset at unequal divisions. But these are always cases where at unequal divisions. But these are always cases where the unequal divisions are arbitrary. If you switch it a bit, so to say one person works harder than another and then makes more money, the kids are happy with the unequal divisions, and they get annoyed when the divisions are equal. And the same thing for adults. Regardless of the society, people actually want unequal societies. If you offer them total equality, they'll reject it. They want unequal societies so long as the inequality is

calibrated to natural gifts or effort or some sort of thing that doesn't seem unfair. Not many people are that upset that J.K. Rowling is so rich. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having

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