Making Sense with Sam Harris - #188 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

Sam Harris and Paul Bloom speak about the virtues of President Trump, the campaign prospects of Bloomberg and Sanders, the asymmetrical norms of the Democratic and Republican parties, the marginal role that parents play in the development of their children, wealth inequality and the breakdown of the nuclear family, whether Paul should take LSD, the deplatforming of Peter Singer, 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, and I am once again with my friend, Paul Bloom. Paul, thank you for joining me. Hey, Sam. Good to talk to you. We've been making a habit of this. This is fun. This is a lot of fun. And I just want to... I'm Paul Bloom. Everybody knows who you are, but I'm Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University. And I want to sort of start by continuing a conversation we were having, you know, just now and we've been having over the last little while.

Well, I'm going to try to get you to say something nice about Trump. And I figured out the way to do it. Put it this way. Are you ready for it? Yeah, well, I'm bracing myself because this is a heavy lift emotionally and ethically, spiritually. Well, I'm not, I'll reassure you, I'm not going to ask you to say anything like he's a decent person or he has any positive moral qualities.

It's a different line. So here's how it goes. Imagine a competition that starts off with a lot of people, a thousand, a hundred, gradually whittles down to a dozen. And these aren't extremely motivated people. They're accomplished. Some of them have extremely strong records of success and they're seeking after probably the most sought after prize in the world. And they have a competition that lasts a year, at least many, many months. This is seeming vaguely familiar. It's vaguely familiar. That's right. Not a hypothetical.

Not a hypothetical. Sometimes they battle independently, but there's a lot of face-to-face confrontations where they're in a room and a million people are watching them. Yeah. And it's a zero-sum game. It can only be one winner. And after a long, savage battle, this guy who actually had never competed before, who had no reasonable qualifications for it, wins. So as you've twigged on, I'm talking about Republican primaries, and I'm talking about Trump winning. Now, I'm less impressed that he primaries, and I'm talking about Trump winning. Now, I'm less impressed that he won the election.

Once you get to an election in this country, it's a coin toss. You know, half the people are going to vote for the Republican, half for the Democrat, and you're fighting for the smidgen of undecideds. But doesn't it say something extraordinary about him that he won? I can give you some of what you're asking for, I think. about him that he won. I can give you some of what you're asking for, I think. Yes, he clearly has an understanding of television that his opponents didn't have, even though they were all professional politicians. And some of them are just anti-charismatic. I mean, he was up against Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, people who didn't have a stage presence and couldn't be trained to have one, apparently. And you add to that his experience as a showman, really, as a reality TV impresario, mostly. Again, I go back to my evil Chauncey Gardner thesis, which is the responsibility for his success really isn't

in him. It's more in the environment. It's in the electorate's relationship to fame and having seen someone on television so much. He was, in fact, one of the most famous people on earth, even though he was kind of a Rodney Dangerfield character in the business community. But he's one of the most recognizable people, more so than his opponents. But that's the environment. I mean, I guess I should remind people, not everyone knows the reference because I'm old, but Chauncey Gardner was this character in the Jersey Kosinski novel, Being There, which became that film starring Peter Sellers. And he was a gardener who happened to be a moron, but he was overheard saying aphoristic things like, in the spring, new flowers always bloom, or something like that. And this was mistaken

for political wisdom. And then through the course of events, he winds up being an advisor to the president. But so in that case, it's totally clear winds up being an advisor to the president. But so in that case, it's totally clear that the audience is in on the joke. They realize he's a moron, albeit a wholly well-intentioned one. And it's all of the projection and misapprehension and confusion in the environment that winds up promoting him to a position of power. And when I look at Trump, when I look at the things that he's done that have been so successful, like, you know, chanting Locker up at his rallies, right? Now, was that a brilliant act of political persuasion? Was he playing 4D chess with the

electorate? Or did it just happen to work given the political attitudes and moral attitudes of 40% of America. And I think it's the latter. I mean, I think he literally could have said almost anything ugly and authoritarian and sexist. He could have said, and I'm just going to now spitball from the ugliest part of my male imagination, he could have said, I wouldn't want to see her naked, I'll tell you that. Keep your clothes on, Hillary. Then people would be chanting, keep your clothes on, right? I think he actually did say, he was talking about her,

I think going to the bathroom at some point in one of the debates and the crowd went wild at the very thought of it. Maybe I've repressed that moment. Yeah. I don't see Locker up as a brilliant political move. I don't even see it as a move. It's more of him that allows him to show up as a kind of super stimulus to 40% of America. I mean, there's something so cartoonish about him, and he has the power of a cartoon. I know you've got me on another anti-Trump rant here. So I once said he was like a golem that had been conjured by every bad thing that had ever been said about America. It's like the physical manifestation of everyone's external judgments of just what the ugly American is like. But it is something like that. I mean, if you took professional wrestling and McDonald's french fries and the NRA and infomercials about bogus products that don't work and you just mix them all together and you stick them in the back of a tacky white limousine, and you drive it around Central Park 500 times, you open the door,

out would step Donald Trump. He's the confection of all of that American crap. And for whatever reason, that apotheosis of all that is wrong with us, all that is just self-regarding and obtuse, that works for 40% of America at this moment in American history. So it's a kind of perverse power. He's got the whatever, you know, that, what was the, I don't really follow the Avengers movies, but the, what was that glove with all the stones that Josh Brolin was trying to get? Yeah. Thanos. Yeah, Thanos with his glove. I mean, glove with all the stones that Josh Brolin was trying to get? Yeah. Thanos. Yeah, Thanos with his glove.

I mean, he's got the stones of fucking hypocrisy and narcissism. And, you know, he's working on the banality of evil. And eventually he will have all the power in the universe when everything goes wrong. So I have really failed in my quest to get you to say something nice about it. Is that what you were hoping for? It has backfired horrendously. So here's your counter-analysis as I see it. My analysis is he has some skills in that he knows what to say to enrage many people,

including you and me, and to delight so many others. Face-to-face in a debate, ho-go, he'll be savage and cruel and comic and funny in a way that other people can't. And in a whole places, other people won't go. And these abilities, these dark abilities are a large part of why he's president now. I think your analysis is more like, I can't reiterate your beautiful description, but somehow he spawned, I can't reiterate your beautiful description, but somehow he spawned. Somehow he was born and he developed. And now you have this creature with this disgusting, degrading manner, which bizarrely is strangely appealing.

And he gets no credit for it. It's just the way he is. Maybe I'll give you a little more than you have any right to expect. I can imagine. In fact, I'd be surprised if this weren't true. I can imagine that behind closed doors, I would be surprised at how he shows up. I bet he's got some level of emotional intelligence and charisma that if only given now that he's ruler of the free world, because I've never met him, I've never seen him in person, I would imagine that the person I see on television and on stage is not the whole person. Something has to explain the fact that behind closed doors, he manages to keep anyone on his

team for more than a day and a half. Though often not much longer than that. Yes, that's true. But yeah, I agree. I don't think when he's sitting by himself, he's reading Dickens and writing poetry. Wouldn't that be amazing? That would be something. But I imagine that a lot of what we see is a show and it's a very, very good show and it's quite entertaining. And I think that he might, in his personal life, actually just kind of tone it down and become more of a recognizable human being. But there's something else, which is a very backhanded compliment. I think he's very good at being cruel.

I think he's a very effective sadist. I feel that a lot of his vicious attacks on people, of which they number in the hundreds, if not the thousands by now, have really hurt people, have really damaged people. And I think he has the bully's understanding of what will make their victim cry. his attacks on people, the fact that it deranges their lives and often causes them to have to get security or move from where they're living. I mean, really, they're effective in really screwing people over massively. Again, that's not a sign of how cutting his or clever his names are for people or anything else he's actually tweeting. It's just the fact that he's the leader of a mob. He's got a dangerous personality cult behind him. And

we live in an environment where if you have anything like that kind of social presence, you can just direct your mob to dox people and otherwise screw them over online. And he does that. I mean, he does it totally recklessly. You know, eventually someone's going to get killed because of one of his tweets and there'll be no recourse. He's got to know that what he does is dangerous on Twitter. I guess part of what's driving me is almost a version of the argument from design, where if you see something complicated, and in this case successful, you say it's unlikely to be random. So, you know, if we were theists, we might say,

I guess God decided that Trump was this man and gave him this great fortune. But we're not theists. So I think what we should look for is some ability, something going on that has caused him to do these extremely low probability things. I mean, he's the distillation of the American grotesque. That has caused him to do these extremely low probability things. money, money, money, money, right? And it's just the crassness of American bullshit, if you played it with gold, that's Trump. And yet, through amazing happenstance, he managed to move it all the way into the Oval Office. And now it's there. And the juxtaposition between who he is, really, and the moral and political seriousness of trying to steer human history at this moment is an insane juxtaposition. And, you know, half of the country wants to see every

institution destabilized anyway. I mean, the other thing is the lack of regard, the lack of respect, the lack of trust in institutions now is an all-time low. And that is, I mean, he is the personification of that change of attitude. I mean, he is the personification of that change of attitude. I mean, he's ushered it in to some degree. It also was the explanation for the fact that he was able to take the stage in the first place, I would say. Yeah. I'll just say, I agree with a lot of that. I'll just say one thing, which is that I'm sure you've had friends, I have friends too, who said they predicted this. And some of them did predict it. I sure as hell didn't. And I bet you didn't. So whatever happened, it wasn't obvious it was going to happen. Look, so question, you and I were talking before about

the Democratic debate. And so can I get you to say something nice about Sanders? What do you think of Sanders? I should remind people, our last podcast was recorded just before the Democratic debate in Las Vegas, where Bloomberg made his first appearance. And I believe I was appropriately cautious in my expectations for Bloomberg. We were both cautious. Neither one of us said, Bloomberg's going to really rip it up up there and do very well. No. So I was certainly worried about that. I don't know that I thought his performance was as bad as it has been said since. It was definitely bad, but it's being viewed as just catastrophic. It could have been worse. Yeah, no doubt. Imagine, way worse it could have been. But he did very, very poorly. He could have burst into tears. He could have cried. He could have shat himself. There's a whole some, which he could have, but he did very, very poorly. He could have burst into tears. He could have cried. He could have, you know, shat himself.

There's a whole list of options which could have been worse. But once you get beyond the sort of, he did very poorly. And he did poorly in a way that I think, unfortunately, matched up with the negative view many people have of him. The truth is, there just may not be good answers to some of those challenges, right? So that could explain it. But he did seem kind of blindsided by much of what Warren was giving him. I imagined he would have practiced and practiced and practiced and worked with people and do the thing that these politicians do, which is come up with a joke or a way to distract it or a way to honestly apologize. And he seemed as if these challenges about the sexual harassment

issues, about stop and frisk, he was hearing them for the first time. Right, right. There was a New Yorker article that gave some color to what those NDAs probably conceal. It sounds like he's going to release a few of them, but I don't know whether there's more, but it just sounds like he clearly is from the madman era of sexual impropriety. And so the kinds of things he said, again, there's no allegation for anything he's done in the Me Too sense, which is certainly good and compares favorably with the president who's trailing, I think, 19 allegations of sexual assault. This is utterly asymmetric warfare here. The fact that we have to concern ourselves with Bloomberg's bad jokes, where the president has managed to get off scot-free. I mean, we're now recording this on the day that Harvey Weinstein was just found guilty of some degree of rape,

and it wasn't the highest charge on which he was indicted, but he's still facing, it seems, a lot of jail time for what happened today. And Trump is a character like Weinstein, if these allegations about him are true, or at least damn close. We're not talking about bad jokes. So it's crazy that the Democrats are... The debate was, as many of us tweeted, like a circular firing squad. I mean, basically, everyone was quickly rendering everyone else unelectable. And that's what I'm worried about on our side, that we could just get to the general election with whoever the candidate is. This is somebody who has to function by ethics and political norms that don't translate at all across the aisle,

and yet there's no way of transcending this basic asymmetry. So let's take this one step up. Isn't this the stupidest way to choose a leader? Yeah. To have a debate? I mean, you know, it's what people do. People like seeing fighting, but debates demonstrate the ability to memorize good lines, to be good at interrupting, to be very fast on your feet, you know, to be savage in a certain way. I've heard people say, we really want a good debater to come out from this sequence of Democratic debates so they could be a good debater against Trump.

And it seems ridiculous. What a terrible way to choose a leader. And it seems ridiculous. What a terrible way to choose a leader. You know, I tend to have a libertarian streak, but I got to say, if I was in charge, I would, you know, ban debates at the political stage. No more debates. People should speak, should get interviewed. They should be discussed, discuss their policies and everything.

But this mano a mano, you know, demonstration of your basically combat ability is so grossly unrelated to what you'd want in a president. No, I agree. We don't do that for anything else we value. You're looking for a swim coach. You don't have to debate other swim coaches. You don't have university presidents debated out. Only for this. The problem with debates, which I've long worried about, is that the way to win a debate is to get a big laugh at your opponent's expense.

If you can do that, you have won no matter what else happens in the debate. It does reward any kind of comic timing or a semblance of comic timing, given the lackluster performances of the kinds of people who tend to find themselves on those stages. But yeah, if you can get off a good line, you win. So it has no relationship to your qualifications for the office. I think there's one thing. So you asked me about Sanders, and I think that's something I should clarify because

I noticed some comments in response to the last podcast. So I believe I said last time around that I thought Sanders is unelectable, which I noticed provoked some howls of displeasure. And I think I also wondered whether or not it might be preferable to have a billionaire self-fund his campaign, i.e. Bloomberg, and then be beholden to no one. And that that might be better than the normal situation where politicians perpetually have their hands out and get entangled with special interests. And I remember you countered that in the case of Bernie, we're talking about small donations, not special

interests. And then I further said that I wondered whether this just made him beholden to the leftist mob. And so some people interpreted this as my expressing a preference for aristocracy or oligarchy over democracy. So I think I should clarify that. My paramount concern here is that we get Trump out of office, for reasons that I have not been shy about stating. And so my concern with Bernie being captured by his audience is that he may be unable, I think he's frankly unable, to tack to the middle in a credible way in the general election. And therefore, I think he's just bound to lose to Trump. I mean, I know we have polls that show him beating Trump in some key states, but in the

last few days, this has changed a little bit. But up until a few days ago, he has not experienced the extremely uncharitable vetting that he's going to get hour by hour in the general election. And so, I mean, we're now seeing videos of him, his recent trip to the Soviet Union, where their cultural institutions and their subways seem so much better than our own. It was at the height of the Cold War. We're seeing articles where, you know, he's blaming us for the hostage crisis in Iran and blaming Carter as a warmonger. You can find him looking completely out to lunch with respect to our foreign enemies. And he also can't say how he's going to pay for anything. And as the price tag

for his promises goes up into the tens of trillions of dollars, I mean, literally, the 60 Minutes interview last night suggested that he was about to cut a check for a minimum of $30 trillion over the next 10 years, but it was probably more like $50 trillion and could give absolutely no account, no credible account of how he could pay for this. And this is just the beginning. This is like the first 48 hours of him looking like he's going to be the candidate. I'm just worried that he's actually unelectable. That's saying nothing about my attitude toward democracy or even, you know, Sanders himself. It's just, I'm just worried that promoting him is guaranteeing four

more years of Trump. I think some of that might be true. I mean, one thing to realize is if we choose any other name, Warren, Biden, Mayor Pete, we could play the same game, right? You could easily list all sorts of problems this person has. Not to the same degree. No, I don't see it. Bloomberg, I think, functions by a different physics because whatever his flaws are, Trump's much worse on exactly those points. And then you just have to sort of pick your billionaire. Yeah, but a lot of Democrats might refuse to play the game, pick your billionaire and just stay. Yeah, that's the real liability with Bloomberg. With Mayor Pete or Klobuchar, I think... Oh, God, don't get me...

I mean, I don't know if you know this, but Mayor Pete is gay. I don't know if you've been following the news. He's gay and he's married. Let me rethink this, my whole political calculus. And I actually think that that is going to be a pretty serious liability, more than Sanders' Judaism, which I think will actually cut into him a bit. Yeah, I think that Judaism is a non-issue, or close to it. I think we touched that last time.

I think that wouldn't be a fatal issue, and I don't know about the homophobia variable, but the branding issue, I mean, just the word socialism, whatever he may mean by it, I think it's fatal. It's literally like running as a pedophile, where you have to then say, no, no, no, it's not pedophile as you say. I know you've seen pedophiles in the movies, but the moment you're having to explain this word, you're losing.

Maybe millennials and Gen Z are kind of out of touch with actually awful associations with the concept of socialism, but they are. When they think socialism, they think Denmark. And Bernie's honest. He says, when I say socialism, I mean Denmark. And Denmark, there are arguments as to whether this could extend to the American model, but that's what he's talking about. But the truth is, when you look at his history, it's not so clear. If you go back far enough, he's looking pretty red, right? I think that's fair enough, but you got to...

So one of the things you mentioned was this comment on the Iran crisis with the hostage and everything, and you got it exactly right. But what is this, 40 years ago? Right. It's a long time. But he would need some credible account for how he's changed and take him on the issue of Israel, right? account for how he's changed and take him on the issue of Israel, right? It's like he has the sort of self-hating, masochistic, moral confusion around the politics there. He's got genuine

anti-Semites and theocrats in his inner circle. I mean, someone like Linda Sarsour, right, who are advising him on these issues and literally functioning as his surrogates in certain cases. He celebrates these people on social media. I mean, Linda Sarsour, this is like having, you know, Farrakhan as one of your advisors. I mean, it's just completely clueless about the moral and political asymmetries here. So you're making a moral case. Let me shift it to political case. Do you think this is going to hurt him? Well, it certainly should hurt him. And I think

it would hurt him. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think in the general election, I mean, people will be completely freaked out by the idea that someone like Linda Sarsour could have conceivably wind up in somebody's cabinet. This is every bit as bad as anything Trump is capable of, right? It's just, it's nuts. Let me offer a different perspective on something you said. You said, you know, it doesn't seem like he's going to be able to adequately move towards the center. And I think you're right. But I think the advantage of Sanders to say, Mayor Pete doesn't have and Biden, well, Biden might have, but the advantage of Sanders is he might actually take away Trump voters. He may take away people who voted for Trump because they feel that they hate the system. They feel screwed. They feel capitalism has

left them, you know, they've been left out of everything good about America. And I think Sanders could take Trump voters away in a way that a lot of other people on the stage would not be able to. Yeah, I don't really, I mean, I guess it's conceivable, but then those are some pretty confused voters. And I don't know how many of them there could conceivably be. I mean, I think Warren, I mean, just the amount of daylight there is between Warren and Sanders around just the word socialism and the fact that she can just say she's a capitalist and she's not tempted to brand herself as a socialist, even though her economic policies are, in many cases, indistinguishable from his,

I think that's a crucial difference. And she's not going to get it, but... You know, Sonny, I agree with you. I can't explain what happened. I don't think anybody can, but I always thought Warren in some way strictly dominated Sanders. Everything Sanders did, she did better. She had a lot of his good ideas, but she didn't brand herself asze. She's very personable face to face. And then for some reason, some combination of sexism or bad luck or I don't know. Well, she did one stupid thing, which I don't think Sanders has done. I mean, she got pulled into the wokeness to a degree that Sanders hasn't. I mean, Sanders is just still just hitting the point of class warfare relentlessly, and which, you know, Warren hits as well. But Warren got pulled into the intersectional mishigas. I mean, she's literally tweeted at one point, I think the tweet was like, black cis and trans women are the backbone of our democracy. I believe that's verbatim, right? So

there's some charitable gloss you can put on that, but the fact that that gets summarized in everyone's brain as black trans women are the backbone of our democracy, all 17 of them, there's just no reason for her to do that, right? She's pandering to a constituency so small, for her to do that, right? She's pandering to a constituency so small, it's so short-sighted, and it seems calculated to alienate half of America. But that's not, I remember the tweets you're talking about, but that's not what happened to her. I mean... Well, no, but I do think that's a fatal flaw in her campaign. I don't know, I don't actually know what happened to her in terms of what caused her to lose her momentum this time in this last round.

If she were ahead right now and we were talking about her as the front runner, I'd be worried that she's also unelectable for reasons that are slightly different than Sanders, but just as concerning. So who is electable? I think if Bloomberg could complete a string of sane and seemingly honest sentences in defense of his record, I think... You think all those Elizabeth Warren voters and Bernie Sanders voters would move to Bloomberg? Everyone who doesn't want Trump will eventually have to move to whoever is in the general election for the Democrats. And I just think once there's a single candidate, any of them stands a chance of solidifying everyone's understandable concern

about Trump. I think if you can't energize half of America around just that single variable, just getting this guy out of office, then it's hopeless. But I think things change once there's just one of them. The moderates are split between Biden and Klobuchar and Buttigieg and Bloomberg. And if it could magically be Klobuchar, I think, you know, she stands a chance. It's just like everyone would just reset. She does stand a chance. You know the person I miss? I miss Cory Booker. I've never met him. I've heard great things about him.

He seems like a gracious, intelligent, broad-minded person. He seems genuinely likable in a way I don't find any of these people. And also, what he says makes sense, and he seems rational and pragmatic and all good things. makes sense and he seems rational and pragmatic and all good things. Yeah. And I could never figure out why he didn't translate better on stage or on television. So much of this is just the way people speak. And now we're back to the debates and how crappy they are. Yeah. It's a performance. But I really do think it's got to be possible to back foot Trump in a debate. It's not too much to hope back foot Trump in a debate. It's not too much to hope that in the general election he could be consequentially embarrassed.

I think the best person to do that, again, it's just awful that Bloomberg doesn't have more natural gifts in this regard, because if he had a great stage presence, he has the perfect biography to go after Trump from. Yeah. And I've been kind of ragging on him the last episode in this one, too. But, you know, one thing about Bloomberg is he actually does a lot of good. He gives a lot of money to charity. He gives, you know, over, I think, a billion dollars to Johns Hopkins, money for regarding working on climate change and gun control and helping other Democrats.

regarding working on climate change and gun control and helping other Democrats. He's, you know, unlike Trump, he's a massively generous person. No, I know. I mean, that's why the juxtaposition is so invidious. But Sam, speaking of juxtapositions, do parents matter? Oh, yeah. So we got a question about this. We agreed to do sudden transition. So this is, by the way, from Proxima Ratio. And that's the name of... On Twitter?

Yes. The name of one of Sam's 30 million Twitter followers. And he raised the question, and there's been a bit of discussion online about the idea of whether or not parenting matters. Yeah. And this could have been seeded by our friend Steve Pinker circulating a Boston Globe article about a meta-analysis of all of the studies that have interrogated this question, whether parental influence really determines anything in the space of how kids grow into adulthood. This thesis was brought to the world's attention, I think, mostly by Judith Rich Harris. Did you know her? She's passed away, unfortunately. I actually, I edit a journal, Behavioral Brain Sciences, where we publish controversial and theoretically interesting things, and then dozens and dozens of people write commentaries on it. And I contacted her after her book and asked whether she would contribute to our journal, which we usually don't make invitations,

but this was an exception. And she was very nice, but she said her health would not allow it. Yeah. So her thesis was that for virtually everything we care about, the human mind, the human personality, human ability is basically 50% genetic, more or less, and then 50% environment. But environment, crucially, from the point of view of mom and dad, doesn't seem to be anything they're doing. It seems to be the influence of peer group and other... 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 on the Waking Up app.

The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.