Making Sense with Sam Harris - #87 — Triggered

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

Sam Harris and Scott Adams debate the character and competence of President Trump. 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking to Scott Adams. Scott was the most requested defender of our commander-in-chief. He quite happily was willing to come on the podcast, and we had a very civil and enjoyable conversation.

If anyone was triggered, it was me. Scott certainly sounded like the meditator. I am perpetually triggered by our president, but I really enjoyed it. And I'll let you be the judge of whether Scott answered all the questions I put to him. I think there were moments where he might have hypnotized me, and I just moved on to other topics. But anyway, thank you, Scott, for coming on. It was a worthy experiment to try to talk about all this.

Scott, if you don't know him, though many of you surely do, is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular comic strips of all time. And he's done this full-time since 1995. Before that, he worked for 16 years at various companies from which he has mined all this material for Dilbert. And he's written best-selling books about Dilbert, and all his cartoons have been wrapped up. But he's also written a book that I have been reading, which we really didn't talk about at all in this interview, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. And this is a book that is filled with life advice, and it is good advice insofar as I've read it thus far. And he has another book coming out, which really is

the substance of our conversation, but that book is not out yet. It'll be out in October. You can pre-order it on Amazon. The title is Win Bigly, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. And Scott and I gave it a good hard try to converge on questions about persuasion with respect to Trump and just how much facts matter. We probably have a different view of some crucial facts. I think we care about things or at least weight our preferences a little differently here. It's hard for me to explain, honestly, how we still see the situation as differently as we appear to. But this really was an attempt on my part to see the world through the eyes of someone who is a Trump supporter, at least to the degree that Scott is. And again, even that isn't totally clear to me.

I may have been hypnotized, Scott. So listen, this was fun, and I hope you enjoy it. I now give you Scott Adams. I am here with Scott Adams. Scott, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Now, you are a very interesting guy who has written a very interesting book that I will have properly described in the intro to the show. And I'll link to it on my website, obviously,

and people can get it there. We're not really going to get into your life or your other work unless it becomes relevant to the political discussion we're planning to have. But I'll just tell our listeners that I've been reading your book. The title is How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. And it's very interesting. It's very useful and surprising. And our conversation will not do it justice at all today. But I encourage people to get the book because you give a lot of good advice about how to get what you want out of life. I haven't finished it yet, but thus far, it's advice that I agree with. I just want to heap some praise on you before we move on to other topics.

Thank you. Let me just put some context on that. The book you're talking about is essentially how to program yourself to be more successful in whatever way you want. But the new one that's already available for pre-order is about how to persuade other people. It's called Win Bigly, and it'll be out in October. Oh, cool. So now that is a book I'm sure we will be getting some preview of in this conversation, because that obviously relates to what we're going to be talking about. And I'll put a link to that as well on my blog. Okay, so let me just set up this conversation so that everyone understands the context. As our listeners will be quite aware, I've been attacking Trump really since before the election. So it's safe to say I'm not a fan. I'm sure I'll have some

more impertinent things to say about El Presidente over the course of this next hour. But I've encountered a fair amount of criticism from people in my audience who like Trump, or at the very least feel that he was the best choice we had for president in 2016. And many of these people have been complaining that I've created an echo chamber here on the podcast because I've only been talking to Trump's detractors. And I certainly can see how they might think that. Although I've pointed out that the people I've been speaking with who criticize Trump have been Republicans for the most part. So the idea that these conversations have been an expression of political partisanship doesn't make any sense. There's really zero

partisanship coming from someone like David Frum or Ann Applebaum, or me, for that matter, on this topic. Because, you know, for instance, none of what I've said about Trump would apply to Mitt Romney. And I've also never been shy about pointing out all the terrible things about Hillary Clinton. So if it's been an echo chamber, it hasn't been a left-wing one. But in the meantime, I've been asking Trump supporters for months who I should bring on the podcast to represent the other side of the story and to help me recover from this much-diagnosed Trump derangement syndrome, which many people say I have. And I appear to have a whopping case of it. And you are the person who has been most often

recommended to me. So I just would congratulate you on that score. Well, thank you. There's a lot of pressure on me, but OK. I want to say one other thing at the outset just to set the table here, because I've been seeing a few crazy comments online from obviously Trump supporters anticipating this podcast and wondering whether or not I would be fair to you. And so I just want to tell you how I view conversations like this and also tell our listeners. And I'm telling you now something that I tell most of our guests. I don't think I've ever left it in an interview. And this is certainly something I tell any guest with whom I'm likely to disagree, I don't do gotcha interviews. My goal is never to get you to say something that makes you look bad. In fact, if at any point in this conversation you put your foot in your mouth or I put my foot in there, you should feel free to take it out and we'll cut that part out. And

this could apply to a whole section of the conversation. So if we get onto a topic for five minutes and then you say at the end, you know what, that whole bit we just did on racism or whatever, I'm worried about how that's going to make me look. Well, then we'll just cut it. So we can edit as we go if need be. Because my goal is always, and again, this doesn't just apply to you, this applies to anyone who comes on this podcast. My goal is always to be dealing with the best version of the other person's case. I want you to be happy with what you've said on the podcast. So this is the opposite of a gotcha interview. And I don't think many people understand that.

And having been on the other side of literally hundreds of interviews at this point, as I know you have, I think we both can say that almost no one operates this way. Journalists deliberately don't because they want to reserve the right to catch you saying something embarrassing. It's a completely perverse ethic that seems to have been enshrined in journalism, where if you say something is off the record before you say it, well, then they will generally keep it off the record. But if you say that about something you regret saying just two seconds ago, something that didn't come out right, then they won't let you take it off the record after the fact. This has always struck me as a less than ethical way to deal with people and their ideas.

Yeah, I agree. But wouldn't worry about me because, like you, I've done a few of these. Yeah, yeah. I just want you to know that. I want our listeners to know that. I guess the other thing I should say, set up is that, you know, while I think you and I will disagree about a lot here, I don't view this as a debate. I mean, I consider myself genuinely persuadable on certain points and genuinely ignorant of other points. Now, it's true that there's some things where I don't really see how you could conceivably change my mind. I mean, if you're going to argue that Trump doesn't lie, for instance, that's going to be a very difficult thing to sell to me.

to be a very difficult thing to sell to me. But I genuinely count myself ignorant of how people find him appealing. So I view part of your job in this conversation as really educating me on how that is possible. I guess to start, what I'd like to do is just to have you clearly state what your view is of Trump, because it hasn't been entirely clear to me how much you actually support him beyond just admiring his talent as a persuader. Much of what I've seen you say about him is more in the vein of explaining how Trump got elected. And it's not really an argument that his election was a good thing or that he's a good person or that he's likely to be a good president. So just what is your view of Trump at this point? Well, I should tell your listeners, first of all, that I have a background as a trained hypnotist, and I've been studying the field of persuasion all of my adult life as part

of my job. It's part of what a writer does, part of what a cartoonist needs. So when I saw Trump enter the race, I noticed fairly quickly he had the strongest set of persuasion skills I've ever seen. He has what I call a skill stack, a complementary set of skills that if you looked at any one of those skills, you'd say, well, that's good. That's better than most people, but that's not any world-class particular special skill. But when you put them together, they're insanely effective, as we can see, because he's president.

He made it against all odds. And my view on the politics of it is that my political preferences didn't align with either side in the election. I consider myself an ultra-liberal on social stuff, meaning that even liberals don't recognize me because I'm more liberal than liberals. I could give you some examples of that to fill that in if you want. And then on the big stuff, the international stuff, the how do you beat ISIS and what's the best thing to do in North Korea? My view is that none of us really know the answer to that because we don't have the information that government would have and we don't have the full context that they have.

So generally, I don't have a firm position on the big international stuff and on the smaller local stuff, the domestic stuff. I'm in favor of people doing whatever they want to do as long as it doesn't affect me. So again, I should say that I haven't seen everything or read everything you've said on this topic. I've read some of your blog posts and I've seen some of your Periscope videos, which you've been doing quite regularly about Trump. But it seems to me that you are sort of having it both ways here because you seem to delight in his ability to get away with doing at least questionable things. I mean, I would say bad things, but certainly dishonest things because you admire his talent as a persuader. because you admire his talent as a persuader. But to my eye, very quickly begins to seem like a defense of the bad things he's doing, or at least a denial that they are bad, or a denial that he's doing any harm to our civil discourse and to our politics by lying to the degree that

he does. So where does your appreciation of the artistry grade into actually thinking he is good and liable to do good things? The way I like to frame it is that I'm helping people see him clearly without the filter that the opposition is putting on him. Because he has a set of skills and a talent that we've never seen before, meaning that nothing like this has ever been in the political realm that we've seen. So what he can do is probably different from what a regular politician can do, both on the upside and the downside, I would think. So I'm not discounting that there's greater risk with a President Trump than some vanilla president. But I think his supporters have said explicitly and often, we'll take the risk, we'll take the chaos, that's the price of change.

So there's a lot of that that his supporters accept. And I see my role in this as clarifying. And I see my role in this as clarifying. And if they like that choice, if that's a risk profile that they appreciate, then at least they can see it a little more clearly. Now, let me speak about the lying part, because I think that's probably central to your problem It is unambiguously true, and it is clear to both his supporters and his critics that he says things fairly frequently that do not pass the fact checks. And you would agree with that, right? So I think we're starting from the same factual starting point. It understates it for me, but yes, I'm with you. Now, obviously, his supporters would say, well, that one thing he said wasn't so wrong, so there'd be lots of disagreement in the gray areas. But there's no question that there are a lot of things he said that don't pass the fact checking, and everybody agrees with that. Here's the part that I put on top of this that I think is helpful. Here's the part that I put on top of this that I think is helpful.

When you understand persuasion at the level that he does and at the level that I've come to understand it through my own work over the years, the truth is not as useful as, I guess that's the best way to put it. It's not as useful as it should be because it doesn't change people's minds. And the job of politics is often to change people's minds, their hearts, their emotions, what they care about, what their priorities are. So if you were to look at the types of things that the president has said that didn't pass the fact-checking, and that's the way I'm going to prefer to say it, is they are almost always emotionally true, or they are emotionally compatible with what his supporters are already thinking. So there is an emotional and directional truth to what he does that's independent from the facts being completely wrong.

So for example, when he said there were Muslims dancing on the rooftops or in the streets after 9-11, that does not pass the fact checkers. But it is unambiguously true that his supporters and even his critics would say, I'm a little concerned that there's some people in the Muslim faith who are not as unhappy about 9-11 as they should have been. So in other words, what he said was technically, specifically, factually incorrect, as far as we can tell, unless something new comes around. But it still fit. It fit what we were thinking. It fit the general truth that we all accept is probably true. And I would think you would accept that as well. And what you see in persuasion is something called pacing and leading. And it's a very important concept in

persuasion. The pacing part is where you become compatible with the other person or persons you're trying to influence. You're trying to match them in some way that's important. And if you match them long enough, called pacing, eventually they will let you lead because you are one of them. They're comfortable with you. They agree with you. They feel the same way you feel. They trust you emotionally. And that's the way people need to trust you. Because trusting somebody factually is sort of a non-starter. It doesn't help that much, right? But trusting somebody emotionally says, yeah, I can let you do things that even I don't think are right, but I know that you're heading in the right direction. I trust that you have more information than I do. I trust that if you have to pivot because it doesn't work out, you'll do that because you and I are emotionally on the same page. We want generally the same thing. Similarly with take immigration. Now, one of the things that

President Trump and before that candidate Trump was saying that was emotionally compatible with a lot of people is, hey, there's an immigration issue. It brings with it some amount of crime that we wish we didn't have. And it brings with it some risk of terrorists slipping in, which we wish we didn't have. And those things scare us. And we would like to have less of it. which we wish we didn't have. And those things scare us and we would like to have less of it. Now that's the emotional truth that is common to both sides of the conversation, right? That everybody would like less of those things. Now, the way he does it, of course, is with his typical hyperbole of coming in with the biggest first offer you've ever seen, which is I'm going to ship back, what was it, 12 million people who

are undocumented in this country? Now, when you heard it, and when people on the other side heard it, they quite reasonably said, holy hell, there's no way you can do that, first of all. It would be cruel, second of all. It would cause riots in the streets. It would cause a civil war, practically. I mean, that's such a big, hard to do, bad thing. But when I heard it, I said to myself, and I said publicly a lot of times, he doesn't mean that. He's taken a big first offer that gives him lots of room to negotiate back. So now as we watch him as president, and what he's doing is, you know, I guess ICE is rounding up a lot of people who have committed crimes while in the country. You know, after coming into the country, they committed additional crimes. And probably there are some

cases, I think almost surely, some cases where ICE, let's say, breaks down a door and there's a room full of people and, you people and three of them have been in a serious gang violence situations. So of course you want to deport those guys. But then there's a couple of guys who are just members of the gang who, you know, you don't have any proof they did anything that was another additional crime, but what are they doing in the room? So let's say those two guys get shipped back too, because they're just sort of in that gray area and they're so deeply into the gray, they're dark gray. Well, you don't have any proof. Now, when people see that story, and I'm sure that kind of story is going to be trickling out in different ways, and people compare that,

they contrast it to what they imagined could have happened, which is 12 million people rounded up and shipped home. And they say to themselves, well, I wish we wouldn't deport people who we haven't seen for sure committed additional crime, but that's not so bad compared to what I thought was going to happen. So you see that process in a number of ways. You saw that when he talked about fighting ISIS, he said, we're going to go back to waterboarding and maybe we'll kill the families of the terrorists. And a lot of people said, no, oh my God, you can't do that, that's going too far.

There are lots of plenty of good practical reasons why you don't do those things, that he became president. And what did he do? He got pretty tough on ISIS. And I would argue that civilian casualties probably have gone up because of that extra toughness. But we're not seeing the big outcry because he's been successful, apparently, against ISIS on the battlefield. So we see this pattern, which he has broadcasted for decades. He actually wrote a book on it, The Art of the Deal, in which he talks explicitly about using hyperbole, in other words, things that don't pass the fact-checking, and making big first offers to give him lots of room to negotiate

toward the middle. So the thing that his supporters believe that his critics do not is that he is emotionally and intellectually on their side, and that he will work out the details when he needs to. So that's what his supporters believe. And I think we've seen a pretty unbroken pattern of exactly that happening. And I predicted this pattern long before he even got nominated because he has that skill set. He repeated that pattern often. And it was the only rational thing that I could see, unless you imagined he was actually literally insane, it was the only thing I could imagine would happen. And sure enough, it's happening just as I predicted.

Okay, well, there's a lot in there that strikes me as fairly strange ethically. For instance, this idea that he's making this first offer that is extreme, that then he walks back to something more reasonable, and that this is a technique for which he pays no penalty. It's just an unambiguously good technique that his fans recognize. Let me interrupt you. I would never say he doesn't pay a penalty. This is a technique which absolutely, by its design, has a penalty. So in other words, he's saying this is going to cost me because the fact checkers are going to be over me and blah, blah, blah. But I'm going to do it anyway. I guess I'm emphasizing something else here.

It's not so much the lying part or the failing the reality testing part. It's more like if I'm going to say to you, you know what I think we should do? I mean, let's just say this on the podcast. You know, I think we should round up those 12 million people and deport them. If I commit to that position, that's my position. Well, when you unpack that position, that commits me to things which I really must have thought about, or at least am pretending to have thought about, which are fairly unethical. I mean, it gets much worse than what you describe. It's not just the fellow gang member or the, you know, very close to being a gang member who gets deported along with the convicted killer. It's the mom of, you know,

an eight-year-old kid who is an American citizen. So you have these just families broken apart. And so if I'm going to pretend to be so callous as to happily absorb those facts, like, yeah, send them all back. They don't belong here in the first place. Or if I'm going to take the ISIS case, I'm going to say, yeah, we'll torture their kids, we'll kill their kids, doesn't matter, whatever works, right? If that's my opening negotiation, I am advertising a level of callousness and a level of unconcern for the reality of human suffering all around me that will follow upon my actions that, I mean, should I get what I ostensibly want. It's like in these two cases, a nearly psychopathic ethics that I'm advertising as my strong suit, right? So how this becomes attractive to people, how this resonates with their values. I mean, I get what you said about people are worried about immigration,

they're worried about jihadism. I share those concerns. But when you cross the line into this opening overture that has these extreme consequences on its face, I mean, you don't have to think deeply about this, right? These are the things that get pointed out in 30 seconds whenever he opens his mouth on a topic like this. I don't understand how that works for him with anyone. Let me give you a little thought experiment here. We've got people on the far right, we've got people on the left. In your perfect world, would it be better

to move the people who are on the far right toward the middle, or the people on the far left toward the middle? Which would be a preferred world for you? Oh, I don't know. Now things have gotten so crazy on the left that that is actually a genuinely hard question to answer. But I think, you know, moving everyone toward the middle, certainly on most points, would be a very good thing. his pacing and emotional compatibility with his base is that prior to inauguration day, there were a lot of people in this country who were saying, yeah, yeah, round them all up, send all 12 million back tomorrow. When was the last time you heard anybody on the right complaining about that? Because what happened was immigration went down 50 to 70% or whatever the number is, just based on the fact that we would get tough on immigration. And the right says, oh, OK, we're you know, we didn't get

nearly what we asked for. But our leader, who we trust, who we love, has backed off of that. And we're going to kind of go with that because he's doing some good things that we like. And we don't like the alternative either. So this monster that we elected, this Hitler dictator, crazy guy, he managed to be the only person who could have, and I would argue always intended, to move the far right toward the middle. You saw it right, We can observe it with our own eyes. We don't see the right saying, no, no, I hate President Trump. He's got to round up those undocumented people, like you said earlier in the campaign, or else I'm bailing on him. None of that happened. He paced them and then he led them toward a reasonable situation, which I would say we're in.

Well, I don't know that I would notice if they were complaining about it. I got to think I'm kind of an echo chamber, but you might notice it more than I would. I promise you I would notice it because I'm totally, you know, I've got one foot in both sides. And the number of people who are talking about that, even just talking about rounding up everybody and sending them back, just stopped. It's completely done. And by the way, that's a big deal. I mean, he brought a lot of people to his position. Again, whether that was his intent or, in fact, the effect of his actions, I don't know. I mean, there's so much other chaos for people to be complaining about and worrying about. But I take a related point here, which you could be making, which is that there is something else going on. There is the fact that people will follow him onto terrain that is quite different from the terrain they claim to want to occupy.

And so they will kind of run roughshod over their own stated principles. And I'm noticing this with establishment Republicans who, once they grabbed his coattails, it seems like they are willing to follow him you to describe this analogy that you've made, which I think is very useful. You have this two different movies analogy, and I just wanted to put that in play for listeners because I think it's a good framing. Yeah, there are two concepts that people need to understand to have any idea what has happened in the past two years. One is confirmation bias. I'm sure you've talked about this a number of times on your podcasts and your books, which is the tendency for humans to see all evidence as supporting their side, even if it doesn't. We're all in confirmation bias pretty much all the time. Nobody's immune from it. Nobody's smart enough to see past it. It's just the human condition. The other part that people have to understand is this thing called cognitive dissonance, which I'm sure you've also talked about. And that's the idea that if our mind is set toward a specific reality, especially if it

involves ourselves, some self-image, and then we find ourselves doing something or learning something that violates what we're sure had to be true, we just reinterpret what we saw and spontaneously create essentially an illusion, an imaginary world that explains all the things that wouldn't have been explained without that hallucination. So what happened was on November 8th, 2016, there were a handful of people, including me, who saw things going just the way they imagined they would go. Now that creates no trigger for cognitive dissonance because everything was consistent. I thought I was pretty smart. I thought I could predict what was going to happen. I did predict what was going to happen. But for a lot of the country, they thought this was an impossible outcome. They'd been in their echo chambers and they saw

there was just no way this could happen. There are people who have never even met a Trump supporter, much less imagined he could be elected. They looked at the polls. They saw it was 98% likely that Hillary Clinton would win. And then the results didn't go that way. That's a perfect trigger for cognitive dissonance. And I described that election as a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb. And what it did was it split the United States and to some extent the rest of the world into what I call two movies that are running simultaneously on one screen. So if you imagine we're all in the audience, but half of the audience is looking at the same screen that you and I are, and half of them are seeing one movie and the other half are watching an entirely different movie. In one of the movies, we had just elected Hitler or something like it.

And people were taking to the streets to say, oh, my God, you know, the world is going to be on fire. And another half of the country were saying, hey, we got a guy who's probably going to be pretty good on jobs. And, you know, maybe he'll tighten up the borders and do some business-like systems in government that we like. And that's all they saw. And the other side saw something completely different, an entirely different movie. Now, I had predicted prior to the inauguration that because of that setup, which I could see coming from a mile away, that we would experience the following arc. First of all, there would be huge protests because people thought that some Hitler character had been elected. But after a few months of President Trump acting like a normal president

who is using the normal mechanisms of power and is getting some stuff done and moderating his positions as presidents do, that the Hitler illusion would start to dissipate and that it would eventually give way by summer. That was my prediction. And it has largely, you know, that the Hitler stuff is largely dissipated for lack of confirming evidence. And it was replaced with, well, he's not Hitler, but he's definitely incompetent. He is so incompetent. There's chaos in the White House. They can't get anything done. And I predicted that by the end of the summer, he would, in fact,

get things done. But the criticisms don't stop because that's just not the way it works. People don't change positions like that. They simply change the reasons that they oppose him. And I predicted that the reasons would change from, you know, he's Hitler to he's incompetent to, all right, he did get a lot of things done and they were the things he said he was going to get done. And they do match, you do match Republican positions, but we don't like it. All right. He is competent. He does get things done. He's effective, but we don't like what he's doing. So I think that's where it's going to be by year end. And it seems to be heading that way. One thing I want to point out, which just strikes me as a

strange emphasis that I've heard from you here, but I've also heard this just quite frequently from other Trump supporters. So I just want to flag it. I don't know if much turns on it. So for instance, in your description of what created the cognitive dissonance, you talk about the failure of people who don't like Trump to predict that he would win the election. So everyone was just blindsided by the fact that he won. And this put them into this, the other movie theater, where they're seeing just civilization unravel. I mean, for me, it was never a matter of being sure that Hillary Clinton was going to win. In fact, the last poll I looked at that I thought was actually informative, you know, Trump had a 20 or 25% chance of winning. And I, you know, I'm statistically educated. I know how often a 20 percent chance of winning comes up. It's not a tiny probability. So it's not the surprise that is worth emphasizing here. It's the horror at the fact that we have elected someone so obviously wrong for the job. This two movies analysis still works, whether you predicted

anything or whether anyone else predicted anything, even if everyone thought it was a horse race until the last second, and there was a 50% chance of either candidate winning, I think you would have the exact same outcome in terms of a repudiation of this choice that our nation made. But Sam, let me ask you this. At what point in the process did you decide that he was incompetent to be president? That is a great question. I love that question. That is my favorite question ever asked of me on this podcast. I guess let's focus on the master persuader idea, because here's the movie I'm in, right?

You've said that Trump is the greatest persuader you, because here's the movie I'm in, right? You've said that Trump is the greatest persuader you've ever seen. I think you actually wrote, I think I saw this in a blog post of yours, that you wrote that if Steve Jobs was a 10, Trump is a 15. I think I have that right. Okay, so here's the movie I'm in. And this predates this election by at least a decade. I find Trump one of the least persuasive people on earth. Long before he ran for president, he struck me as nothing more than an odious con man. He strikes me as an absolutely despicable person. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. Can I get a clarification? When you said he was an odious con man, Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Can I get a clarification? Yeah. When you said he was an odious con man, did you mean that he was good at conning people or bad at conning people? Well, he was clearly conning some people. I'm saying that he's not conning me. And so the question is that the mismatch- Hold on. Hold on. Can I interrupt you again?

Yeah, yeah. Sure. Because this is really important. He was conning, apparently, according to your frame of things prior to the election. It seems probably to you that he was conning enough people to do the things he needed to do, which was build buildings and keep his fortune high and become a reality TV star and all that stuff. Yeah, but that was it. He was a reality TV star. I mean, I viewed, but that was it. He was a reality TV star who, I mean, I viewed him, actually, I viewed him, I mean, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about him, but I assumed that most people were in on the joke, right? That he was a kind of

punchline. It was like a punchline lived over the course of a profitable life. But he was, this was not somebody who was, as he was billing himself to be, a truly great businessman or anything else. Yeah. Sam, there's an important point here that I don't want to lose by going too far past it. Your understanding of him at the time was that he could con some people, and apparently it was enough of the right people he was conning, to use your word, to effectively do the things he was trying to do. Would that accurately state your opinion? Well, yeah, but the things he was trying to do bore no relationship to becoming president or

becoming somebody who's actually shouldering significant responsibility. No, I agree with that. But we're just talking about the tools of persuasion. And what you just said, if I heard it right, is that even early on, you realize he had the tools of persuasion, which you would characterize as a con man, just a different word for essentially the same set of tools. It has more to do with the intention, I guess. But the crucial difference here, again, I'm just trying to describe what it's like to watch my movie as opposed to your movie or the movie watched by half the country. I can see that he must be persuading somebody. I mean, he fully persuaded half the country to become president. But there is never a moment where I find him persuasive. When I look at him, I see a man. I mean, it's really uncanny. It's like a it's I

see a man without any inner life. I see I see the most superficial person on earth is like as a guy who's been totally hollowed out by greed and self-regard and just delusion. I mean, the way he talks about himself is so it's like I mean, if I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. I mean, it's like that barely overstates it. I mean, you remember that scene in the end of The Exorcist where the priest finally he's driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and then he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness. Well, it would be like that, right? Yeah. We've gone full exorcist on this. I'll tell you, one of the things that I write about and periscope about is the triggers or the tells for cognitive dissonance. How do you tell that you're in it versus somebody else is in it? Did I just give you one of my tells?

Yeah, you did. The most classic one is to imagine that you can know somebody's inner mental processes. So if you imagine that in his mind, he's thinking this, or in his mind, he's hollowed out, or in his mind, there's no depth in his mind he's hollowed out or in his mind there's no depth uh if you imagine that those are in there i would say that is entirely imaginary and almost certainly a tell for cognitive well no but it's not hold up let me finish the thought sure and the and the trigger so what i look for for confirmation is there's got to be a trigger and then the second thing which is the tell tell. So I just described the tell, which is describing some of these inner thoughts that you couldn't possibly know. I mean, nobody could. And the trigger, you also described very clearly. The trigger was there's

something about his manner, the way he speaks, that bugs the fuck out of you. And that's your trigger. You're just misinterpreting a couple of things here. It's not the way he speaks and it's not that I'm engaged in a mind reading exercise. It's based entirely on what he says. It's actually the thoughts that come out of his mouth. It's not how he says it. It's what he says. But wait, you said two things that are in contradiction now.

You said that he's a con man and always has been, but that the things he said are a good reflection of what he's thinking. You kind of have to pick one. Well, no, it's just that he is a liar who will lie whenever it suits his interest. And even when it doesn't suit his interest, he will lie with an alacrity that I have never seen before in a public person. I think there are, you have to break that into two categories, the things you're calling the lies, maybe three. There are some things which probably he thinks are right and he just gets wrong, which would be typical of any- I'll forgive him many of those things.

Right. There are some things which are clearly just hyperbole, which he knows are not exactly factual, but it works better to make the big first offer. And then there's another category, which is the hardest for anybody to understand. And I'm not sure I'll be able to sell this to anybody here. But if you are a trained persuader, you are a trained persuader, you have such a low regard for some types of facts that you just don't care if they're right or wrong, because they really aren't ever going to matter to the outcome. They won't matter to decisions and they won't matter to the outcome. Now, I believe, having been watching him through this filter now for a couple of years, that he can definitely tell the difference between all those categories. And that I haven't seen him tell the lie that causes the country to be harmed in any way. They all seem to be either trivial and he just doesn't care. And there's no point in apologizing because that's bad persuasion too, in many cases, or they're emotionally correct.

So my filter on this, that he's actually a skilled persuader and he knows exactly what he's doing, and those things which are clearly just mistakes tend to be trivial, that is what I use to predict the outcome that got us exactly where we are. that is what I used to predict the outcome that got us exactly where we are. And my starting point was everybody can hindcast. Everybody can say, oh, the way he won was, here's my reason. CNN listed, I think, I don't know, 24 different reasons why the surprising result of his election happened. And they're all different reasons. of his election happened. And they're all different reasons. So as you know, confirmation bias,

blah, blah, blah, allows you to explain what happened in the past with any number of stories and they all fit. That's why we have trials and lawyers and all of their stories sound good and the jury has to sort it out. But what I did early on is I said, I'm so sure that these tools are real and consistent, and he knows what he's doing, that I'm going to risk my entire fucking career to predict that he's going to win it all and win it big. And not only did he win it big, but he won in the electoral college. He won the only way that it mattered. He played the only game that they were playing, and he won. Now, some people will say, well, he lost the popular vote. And I would say, you're right. He did lose the game that he wasn't playing. He never played that game. So if you look at the predictions,

and if you see that they seem to be hitting all the right notes, that is a little more persuasive than saying, well, I'm going to look at it in the past and apply these 25 different filters that all pretty much work. There are lots of different explanations of how things work in the past. But Scott, the emphasis on him successfully persuading doesn't deal with the fact that what he would be persuading someone toward or the country toward may not be a good thing. I mean, so for instance, I think he is someone who is so morbidly selfish. And again, this is not me with a crystal ball. This is me just looking at how he's lived his

life, the kinds of things he's done, the kinds of things he says about himself, he's put himself first to such a pathological degree that I think he's capable of committing treason or something like treason without even noticing it. There's no sense at all that he has the public good in mind when he's acting. So the fact that he's a good persuader, even if I were going to grant you that, and there's one thing I want to flag here that you just said that I think is manifestly not true, which is that none of his lies have harmed our society. I think all of his lies have harmed our society. I think the fact that we have a president who lies and everyone knows it and no one can really trust what he has said until the facts come out, I think that has done immense harm to the world,

frankly. In what quantitative way is it? Would the stock market be at even higher record levels? The stock market is the wrong metric here. I mean- Well, would ISIS be reconstituting if he'd been a little more forthcoming? Would North Korea not have launched that last nuke? What exactly would be the evidence that something he said has actually harmed the fabric of society? The fact that all of us are talking about politics, the fact that politics is so much a part of our lives now is toxic. It's a sign that something is wrong with our society. If things were good, we would not be talking about politics, right? We're talking about politics 10 times more than we ever have in the lifetime of any person hearing this podcast. I could list a hundred other bad things,

but that's one symptom. It's a very good thing, and I'll tell you why. So first of all, going back to the two movies on one screen, the people on the right, the people who are supporting Trump, are having the best two years of their lives. I mean, I have never seen such joy and happiness coming out of that segment of the public. But again, that's an amoral claim. I mean, you know that that would have been said of, to take the extreme example, the burgeoning enthusiasm for the thousand year Reich in 1938. I mean, it's just like you get nothing with that claim. Did you go full Hitler analogy? I went full Hitler analogy conscious of how it would be received. Can I declare victory at this point?

No, no. I think that's actually a bad meme. Was it Godwin's Law? I think it's a bad meme that we have to quash somehow. I've actually been writing, I write this in my new book, that when somebody retreats to analogy, whether it's a Hitler analogy or not, it's because they've run out of reasons. Like nobody uses an analogy if they have a reason, because a reason is way better than an analogy.

No, no, no. Well, okay. Well, that's interesting. I think I disagree with that too, but let's move on. Analogies are tools of communication. If you're not getting what I'm saying, but I know you'll get this other test case that I think is actually isomorphic with what I'm talking about, well, then I go to the analogy. It's only bad if it's a bad analogy, but nothing hinges on this. No, because all analogies are approximations by design. So you're not talking about the same topic.

Anyway, we could talk about analogies some more. Sure. I agree that analogies are excellent for explaining a concept for the first time. So if you say a zebra, if you've never heard of a zebra, it's like a horse, but imagine it has some stripes on it.

So I don't, you know, there are lots of cases where that's good. That gets me a long way to a zebra. Yeah. Right. But it doesn't make a zebra a horse, right? And never can, right? So that's my only point. So back to the whether it's bad that we're all talking about politics. I've actually been screaming and talking and blogging about this very point that we have collectively as a society learned more about each other, the nature of truth, reality, persuasion in particular. You'll see lots of people talking now about cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, persuasion. These are important concepts for people's happiness and understanding of their condition that we never had before. And in fact, before the election, I had said several times publicly

that what Trump was going to do was not just change politics, which he did, I mean, he changed everything, but that he would rip a hole in the fabric of reality and let us peek through. And that hole is what we're peeking through right now, which is that people can sit in the same theater watching a different movie and that there's a reason for it. We know what the reason is. It's confirmation bias.

It's cognitive dissonance. And that understanding goes a lot further than, hey, your facts are wrong. You lied about this. You didn't pass my fact checking. If you're locked in that smaller, less aware world where you think that people make decisions on logic and facts because you think they should, you're missing the biggest part of life, which is that people don't. Yeah, I would agree with you. If you said to me, Scott, I think we should use reason and

facts and we should never depart from that. I would say, sure, that's great. We should, but we can't because we're not built that way. We humans don't have that capacity in general. We can in very constrained ways like science, but in general, no. Okay, well, let's plant a flag there because that's an interesting topic that is obviously bigger and deeper than this political topic. And maybe we'll get to it. And that's actually the topic, in some measure, of your first book or your last book that I've been reading. And if we have time, I want you to sort out for me. And it comes down to this two movie analogy, because I don't see how they are actually different movies. I get that in the other theater, the fans of Trump don't care about certain things that are appearing on the screen.

And I care very strongly about those things, but I don't get how they're actually not seeing these things or they're seeing them differently. And I want to take you back just to what you said before when I went full exorcist on you. Well, can I interrupt? Because I think there have been some news reports recently that said that Trump supporters know exactly what's true and what isn't, and there isn't that much difference between the two sides. I'll give you an example of like, this is what the kind of thing that's in my movie. There's literally a hundred things I can mention here, but I'll just mention a couple. So just,

it seems to me that everything you need to know about Trump's ethics were revealed in the whole Trump University scandal, right? So, I mean, this is a guy who's having his employees pressure poor elderly people to max out their credit cards in exchange for fake knowledge. And as unseemly... Well, hold on. Now, you understood that to be a license deal, right? Well, yeah, but I understand that to be the kind of thing that he would have to know enough about to know what he was doing. If he only found out about it after the fact, it's not the kind of thing you would defend. It's the kind of thing you would be mortified about and you would apologize for and you would pay reparations for if you're this rich guy who

has all the money you claim to have. I mean, it's like... Unless, unless you were a master persuader who knew that if you ever backed down from anything, people would expect you to back down in the future. But what you're describing is a totally unethical person. This is the problem. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with 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.