Making Sense with Sam Harris - #92 — The Limits of Persuasion

Episode Date: August 16, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with David Pizarro and Tamler Sommers about free speech on campus, the Scott Adams podcast, the failings of the mainstream media, moral persuasion, moral certainty, the ethics of abortion, Buddhism, the illusion of the self, 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.

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 with the very bad wizards, David Pizarro and Tamler Summers. They have a podcast by that name, which I've been on, I think, twice.

We debated free will at great length. So if you're interested in that topic, you can listen to us there. And I recommend you listen to their podcast. They touch fascinating subjects and in quite the irreverent way. And they do fantastic movie reviews as well. David Pizarro is a professor of psychology at Cornell. He focuses on morality and moral judgment and the emotion of disgust.

And needless to say, all of that is incredibly relevant to this time and any other. And his partner in crime, Tamler Summers, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. And he focuses primarily on ethics and political philosophy and the philosophy of law. And he specializes in topics like free will and moral responsibility, punishment, revenge, honor. Again, fascinating and all too relevant. In this podcast, we essentially took questions from Twitter. we essentially took questions from Twitter. People had heard us on the Very Bad Wizards podcast and had topics they wanted us to address. We talk about free speech on campus. We do a fairly long post-mortem on my podcast with Scott Adams. So if you haven't heard that, you might listen to that

first. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead, especially if you're sick to death of hearing me talk about Trump. We talk about moral persuasion. And then we get into things like meditation and the sense in which the self may or may not be an illusion. Again, I encourage you to subscribe to their podcast because they are quite good. And now I bring you The Very Bad Wizards. I am here with The Very Bad Wizards, David Tamler.

Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Sam. I will have introduced you, and people may have heard our previous interviews on your show, but remind everyone where you are and what you guys tend to focus on when you're not causing trouble on your podcast. Well, I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. You are Tamler. And I am Tamler Summers, right.

University of Houston. You are Tamler. And I am Tamler Summers, right. And when I'm not podcasting on Very Bad Wizards with David, I am working on this book, which I've been working on for quite a while, for the last few years, that's coming out in the spring, in the early spring, called In Defense of Honor. And it's about honor and morality. Yeah, you like honor. That's something we could talk about. We can add that to the list of things. Yeah, I look forward to that. And I'm David Pizarro from Cornell University. When I'm not podcasting with Tamler and losing my cool on occasion, I do research on moral judgment and especially on the effects of emotion on judgment. So the emotion of disgust is something that maybe for the last 10 years I've been researching and how that can influence judgment, political judgment and moral and social judgment.

And then just trying to teach the young minds, trying to sucker them into getting PhDs. Our listeners want us to talk about the moral panic on campuses as one of the items. We went out on Twitter asking for topics. And I know you guys disagree with some people who think that it's a huge problem. And so I want to get into that because you guys are also on the front lines as professors. But first, let's just start with your podcast. Your podcast is fantastic. I'm a huge fan and I'm a fan, even though it seems every other time I tune in, you have

said something disparaging about me. That's Tamler trolling you. I wipe my hands clean of this one. I wipe my hands clean of this one. I think early on I was disparaging of certain remarks from your book, The Moral Landscape, on moral relativism. Since then, I think we've been very even-handed and balanced. And we don't even say anything about it. You would think that. I believe Tamler's watching a different movie.

It's an emotional truth, what I just said. Right. It's not a fact-based truth, maybe. Persuasive to somebody, nonetheless. Your podcast is great, and people should check it out, and we will provide a link or all the relevant links on my blog. But I'm just wondering, so your podcast, you're both professors full-time, and you have a fairly edgy podcast.

I mean, you guys, you get into topics and you express opinions that I would think could conceivably get you in trouble. with this first topic that has been suggested to us, this idea of a fundamental and spreading intolerance to free speech that's taking hold at the universities. Do you guys ever worry about what you're doing on the podcast with respect to your jobs? I mean, do you both have tenure? How do you think about your life at this point? Okay, well, I'll start by saying I think that at first it was what some people refer to, to use an analogy, if I may, refer to as security through obscurity. I was sort of convinced at first that nobody would be listening and therefore it would be perfectly okay. But I've been actually quite surprised as so as our listenership has grown, thanks to the many wonderful guests, including Sam, and as our audience has grown, I do not think, and Tam to know you in a way that the things that you say are in a context of conversations. And for lack of a better word, I think they get to know your character a little bit. And some of the crazy things we say, people really are good at taking it in context.

And I don't, maybe one or two emails. Specifically devoted to taking us out of context. That's right. One time I expressed the fear that we'd be taken out of context and that Twitter account started up. And I don't know. I think maybe one or two times we've had somebody email us with maybe some anger about what we've said. You mean from your own institutions? No.

No, no, no, no. From our listenership. From our own institutions, I genuinely think I mean, part of it is I haven't I haven't made it sort of anything that I talk about too much in my own institution, in part because of that worry. One of my points of evidence when I say that I think people exaggerate the degree to which there's a chilling effect or that people can't express their views if they don't toe the line with, you know, the progressive agenda or whatever. It's, you know, I think neither of us do that. I think, know maybe me even less than dave and i haven't heard one single not a single complaint from any colleague who listens to it from any person at my institution who listens to it and there are there are a bunch nobody has taken umbrage by a single thing that we've said.

And we've said some repugnant shit as, you know, that's part of our trademark. And I think it's for the reason that Dave says is, you know, people get to know us and they know, I think, that our hearts are in the right place. And so as long as they know that, they're going to allow you to be a little edgier or more inappropriate and not try to shut you down. And so this is one of the things that makes me think that these incidents are not as, it's not as widespread a phenomenon as it's portrayed by some in the media. But there's a relevant part there that we didn't answer, which is we both have tenure. But I think we got tenure after maybe a year of doing the podcast. When we started, I don't think we had tenure, but we do have tenure, just to add that.

Right. Okay. Are you guys as irreverent or edgy in the classroom, or is there a very big difference between your podcast persona and your professor hat? I teach a course, intro psychology, which is largely freshmen with about 800 students enrolled. For many of them, it's their first experience in a lecture course in college. And while I probably tone it down, I don't purposefully, I mean, part of it is your persona kind of changes depending on the situation. So we, we, it's more like we tone it, we, we raise it up a notch on the podcast sometimes, but, but largely I say crazy things in my class all the time. And I've had students who take delight in writing it down.

There was once somebody on Facebook who would quote me extensively why I got a Word document at the end of one semester from a student with a list of all the crazy things I had said. But usually, again, I think not on the first day, sort of you build yourself up. And always, I think, at least I try in an attempt to communicate something well. So if I drop an F-bomb, it's usually because I want somebody to remember something. I'll give an example. When I talk about evolutionary psychology, for instance, I remind students that if a claim is made that

natural selection costs something it has to be directly tied to the mechanism of survival and reproduction um or else or else it doesn't work through natural selection so i just remind people unless it leads to more fucking um it's it's not an evolutionary argument like adaptiveness and I say that in an attempt at well it's an attempt, much to the chagrin of my mother it's an attempt to solidify a principle maybe I'm just making it

it sounds a little post hoc to me you just want to laugh you've got 818 year olds in front of you it's your one moment of stand up for the day and Tamler, do you tone it down? I'm not drunk, usually, when I teach. So that's one difference. But every once in a while for the podcast, we put down a few.

Probably me, again, a little more frequently. I've done that once. Plus some other things, which I won't. Maybe a bunch. But anyway, so I think it's exactly what Dave said. You build up a little trust over the course of the semester, and they sort of get you and your, you know, like I'm somebody that likes to go up and approach the line. I get bored when everybody is talking and it's a little too, everyone's being too polite or dancing around certain topics. And I think that students like that.

And especially now when I think a lot of these students, at least at my institution, which is a public institution, and they're working jobs and they're stressed out taking five classes. and they're stressed out taking five classes and a lot of them have family issues that they're dealing with and anxiety issues that they're dealing with. It is nice to just have a place where people can not watch what they say and not feel like they have to walk on eggshells. So that's at least the kind of environment

that I try to build. And again, in classes, I have yet to find that to be a problem, even remotely, like not one single complaint, at least one that has reached me. Now we have to reconcile our worldviews because, and you know many of these principal experts, really. How do I square what you guys have just said with what Jonathan Haidt is saying and really canonizing in the heterodox academy, worrying about this creeping moral panic that is fundamentally antithetical to the core values of a university? I'm sure David knows Jonathan, but perhaps you do

too, Tamler. You guys really should have him on your podcast to talk about these things because I'd like to hear what he would say. But he's really worried about this. And then you have the cases of like Nicholas Christakis, who I'm sure at least David knows. Yale, you have Brett Weinstein, who at Evergreen University, which has gotten a lot of attention, and that just went fully off the rails. As far as I know, he's, I'm not even sure he, his family is back in town yet, based on safety concerns. And then you have the Rebecca Tuval incident, and I actually had lunch with her to talk about her experience not that long ago. So it's totally possible that you guys are right and that these are individual cases that suggest very little about the rest of what's going on on campuses. But take the first part. How do you think about how Haidt is describing this? It's a tough question because I think this is one of those cases where two things can be true. And one other thing, Tamler, I should say that, you see, your stepmom is Christina Hoff Summers, who is just this,

basically, as far as I can tell, she has a cult following on the right, you know, or center right for the way she's brought attention to this sort of issue. Yes, especially as it relates to gender. And yeah, and so, yes, this is a debate I have often. And certainly every Thanksgiving, you know, I'm pretty close to my stepmother. So we go back and forth. You know, it's funny, like if you listen to us talk about it, I think we can both concede a little bit of, and this is how I feel about height too, you know, I thought the coddling of the American mind

was, you know, one of those first sort of overhyped pieces that captured the attention and the imagination of everybody. And I think people aren't good at looking at a video like the Christakis video or the Evergreen State video, and they're bad cases. They're really bad. I mean, there's no denying it. If that was going on in every—or the Charles Murray thing, right? If that was going on in the universities, then people would be right to panic about this. things happen at the thousands and thousands of universities across the country where there's no stifling of speech, there's no chilling, there's none of that. Charles Murray successfully gave that same talk at 100 universities probably before Middlebury. And, you know, Evergreen State is a little bit of a whack job liberal arts college to begin with, you know. And for a while, this isn't true anymore,

but for a while, anytime there was an article written about this, it was Oberlin. Like, something happened in Oberlin. Because that's just what Oberlin is. It's been like that for 50 years, and it'll probably be like that for another 50 years. So I think it's important to separate what's legitimately wrong that's going on at these particular institutions for what is going on in, quote unquote, the American university, because I think those two things are different. But, you know, I understand like Haidt will kind of could concede some of that and say it is at these more privileged private institutions that this is occurring, but that's

still a significant worry. And, you know, I have some sympathy with that. Yeah. And, and just to make clear, I think that, that, um, there, Tamler and I disagree about this often. Um, although, although we share a lot of the sentiment, uh, you know, I think that it's important to separate arguments about frequency with arguments about importance. And, and I, I do think that there is a probably measurable chilling effect in that some professors are less willing to say some of the things that they used to say, or they think twice about it. And I do think there's probably a measurable difference in the average undergrad in the way that they think about a lot of these things.

And then we can separate whether the reaction of panic, which I think Tamler is responding to, is the right sort of reaction to the problem as it currently stands, which I agree is probably not. It does get overblown and it captures attention. But I nonetheless do worry about it. And I do think that we are creating an environment in which people pause before they say some things. But I always try to emphasize that there's a way in which a lot of this is actually progress. I do want people to pause before they say some things. And so if that's what's called chilling, then good. I think I mentioned this on one of our podcasts. I don't know if it made the final edit, but I did have a professor once tell me that he really felt like he couldn't tell the same jokes that he used to. And I said, like, what kind of jokes? And then he gave me an example, and it was a pretty racist joke. And I was like, good.

In his defense, he wasn't from the U.S. and he didn't think it was a racist joke. Right. You know, it hasn't stopped Dave from his, you know, constant stream of anti-Semitism. So, you know, it's I feel like I feel like that's the canary in the coal mine. The minute that gets squashed, I will announce to the world. First they came for the SSMIs. That's right. And I did nothing. I just want to add that I think sometimes, like, I think Dave's right that sometimes professors feel like they have to watch what they say.

But sometimes that's their fault, not the environment's fault. Like they've been reading too much of The Atlantic and too much, you know, whatever, the latest column on the Heterodox blog. And now they've convinced themselves that they can't say anything that might border on inappropriate. inappropriate. Sometimes you just have to man up and just say the thing that you want to say. And if there's any blowback from that, then you'll deal with it, you know? Or woman up. Or woman up. Yes. Or woman up. Sorry. Oh, God. Or woman up. Can you cut that? I'm going to get a big go at that. I can't believe you. That's a keeper. Yeah. So, no. So, I do think I was having this talk with a professor at a conference and he said, you know, I was in this faculty meeting and then, you know, an hour later, this faculty member tweeted out something. She didn't use my name, but something that I had said in the faculty meeting. So who cares? So what?

So maybe she'll tweet out something that you said at a faculty meeting. That doesn't mean you shouldn't say it. That's just life. It's life that when you say something, sometimes people will react in completely haywire and you have someone's career destroyed, or there's at least just a massive public shaming experience that follows precisely that pattern. A tweet sent from an otherwise private meeting, or what was that incident where the guy wore a shirt to a conference and he was just vilified endlessly for the insensitivity of his shirt. Again, we have these cases that get media attention and at minimum advertise how haywire this can go. So it's easy to see how this would propagate back and cause everyone to choose their words more carefully? I guess. It's easy, but it's not a full excuse.

Professors generally are smart enough to understand the difference between a widespread phenomenon and some cases that still, I think, can reasonably be called isolated. And like anything, like a terrorist attack, you don't want to overreact to it. You don't want to completely take away everybody's freedoms just because there was this one terrorist attack in Orlando. So, you know, that's... I will say that I think it's important to say that in many of the incidents that we've described,

these people were treated horribly and unfairly, and there's no lack of assholes who are causing people grief. But I always think that this is – the response to me is more important than the whatever growing number of undergraduates who are easily offended. I think that this is actually, what do we make of this? What do we do with this? And if it is anything like a trend, if it's not isolated incidents, and it is the beginnings of some zeitgeist changing, more so than ever, I think that the role of the professor is, I think we've failed our students if by the end of our classes, for instance, they still don't.

I think part of the training of, say, a seminar in mind is for students to come out of there comfortable with expressing opinions and not vilifying others who they disagree with. And I think that the response to any claims of alarm and these trends or whatever being dangerous ought to be met with open and clear conversation with our students and not with a response that it's just these students who are like completely progressive liberals on the left who are ruining things because of postmodernism. You know, I would want to talk to that student to, you know, bring him in, let them teach by example what it means to have a respectful disagreement. The issue with post modernism connects us to another item that many have suggested we talk about. And I think this is something that you slam me for on one of your podcasts, the conceptual penis hoax.

Is there a mess we need to clean up there? I don't think we slammed you on the podcast. Well, what happened is I was among the people who forwarded this hoax. I think I read a piece of their paper on my podcast and then retweeted it. And then many people have now judged it to have been a false hoax or at least a misfired hoax. I mean, we don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but I think you guys saw it as an example of skeptics not being nearly skeptical enough because they just practiced their own version of confirmation bias by spreading this thing, which in the end wasn't

what it seemed to be. Is that still how you think about it? Because I think the authors both defended themselves, right? And I think even Alan Sokol wrote a fairly appreciative piece about it, or at least a partially appreciative piece about it. I think what was like, and we had James Lindsay on our podcast and we talked at length. Yeah. And we talked at length about it. And I think that, not that I'm encouraging you to listen to it, but at the end of that, I was more disappointed with his response than ever. And I think it is a case where, yeah,

we were taking to task many in the, you know, whatever skeptic community, if you want to call it that. I don't know how you feel about the label, for falling prey to confirmation bias and our i think our point was just generally that this was you know published in a really low tier journal after being rejected from a mid-tier journal and i thought well what would be evidence of a good scholarship if not right that was a point that cut against from journals from an unranked journal. They were rejected from an unranked gender studies journal and got it published in a paper-published

not gender studies journal. It requires no defense of gender studies. I think we're all on record as saying this is spectacular bullshit coming out of some of these fields. But there's something about the arrogance and the quickness of mockery and

and this is something i want to talk to you this is your podcast so you can direct us but i did want to talk to you about the the in in this broader context of moral persuasion about the role of this mockery um and and i don't think i've been struck maybe, especially in the last few weeks or few months, as our audience has grown and we get more and more people interacting with us on Twitter. I don't know if it's just some belief that this is an effective way of convincing others of the truth. of the truth. But I found the authors, or at least the one author we talked to of the hooks, to be very dismissive and quite arrogant about the way that he presented his case in a way that Sokol himself was not. And I find, for instance, you to be very reasonable when you talk, but you have a wide army of people who aren't that way. And so I don't know how you feel about when you see, you probably get so many tweets that it's hard to keep up, but when you see people who sort of on your behalf are acting in ways

that I don't think that you would ever act. There are really two topics here. One is whether mockery is ever useful and persuasive to the people you're mocking, or whether, I think you guys have even more global doubts about whether just hard criticism is ever persuasive to the people you're criticizing, whether a frontal assault, atheist style on religious faith ever wins hearts and minds. I think that's something that at least Tamler has doubted in the past. Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by frontal assault, but... Then there's the issue of how one's fans or listeners or readers, in my case, represent me

in how they respond to people who criticize me or my podcast guests. And on that second point, for me, it's very clear. And with some frequency, I mean, I can't keep doing this, but with some frequency, I admonish my listeners not to be jerks. how much you hate what someone said on my podcast, no matter how wrong you think they are, you're not doing me any favors if you now just flame them on social media. I don't want a person's experience coming on the podcast to be that that was the worst thing they ever did in their lives because of how they were treated by a fairly large audience. In fact, I want it to be the opposite. I want everything that comes their way to be really smart and civil, no matter how hard-hitting it actually is

or no matter how critical it is of their position. It has to be civil and relevant. And so, yeah, I'm fairly clear about how I wish people would represent my audience. Right. But I have very little control over what people actually do apart from saying things like that periodically. I guess the, so, I mean, there's, right, you don't have control over what the people who are fans of yours do. And all you can do is model good behavior, you know, which I think you did.

and all you can do is model good behavior, which I think you did. I mean, you did win the Scott Adams almost to the point where it was heroic, the degree to which... We'll see if I can still model it now that we talk about it. There's some Christakis-level patience. But the question thatave alluded to before about

whether mockery is an effective tactic to change people's minds i think is a you know it's something that i think skeptics skeptics and sometimes atheists um i i guess maybe I just disagree with them because I don't have any great evidence on whether mockery changes minds or not. Certainly in my experience, mocking somebody, calling them stupid, calling them obviously irrational or whatever, it just makes people more defensive. It makes people dig their heels in more. And the way I think to change minds is to be respectful of their opinion and to really try to see the best side of it and to engage with it, even if you find it indefensible on some level, just as a purely practical, instrumental goal of changing somebody's mind, you know, in my experience as someone who's no stranger to mockery, that's not what I want to trot it out for. Mockery can be funny. It can get the people who already agree with you

to agree with you more and to be more proud of themselves for being on the right side of the view, but it doesn't change the minds of the people that you're mocking. I would just say that that assumption is pretty readily disconfirmable. I mean, it doesn't change some people's minds, I'll grant you that. It might not even change

most minds, and most minds, depending on what the belief system is, might just not be available for change, right? So there's nothing you're going to say on a podcast or in a book, however well-tempered, that's going to change the mind of a real jihadist or get him to question his faith. But I've been amazed to learn that some of the most hard-hitting stuff I put out there, the stuff I've said about Islam and the end of faith or in various YouTube videos, there, the stuff I've said about Islam and the end of faith or in various YouTube videos, has actually penetrated and reached even totally devout conservative people in communities in Pakistan, where the people are now closet atheists, based on what I or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens have said about their religion.

And obviously, those people themselves must be outliers. But you have to picture people at every point on the spectrum of credulity with respect to any ideology. And so there are the people who are fundamentalists and have never questioned the faith. And there are people who are halfway between that and being, you know, fairly just nominal adherents of the faith. And they can be tipped in either direction. And if they see something very hard-hitting but also obviously well thought out, directed at this thing that they have been told is so important and so beyond doubting, you don't know how many of those people you capture. And I can just say that, you know, having done this for more than a decade, there's personally a kind of an endless stream of confirmation that minds get changed through

confrontation with evidence and argument, however, actually disrespectful and hard hitting. And I, maybe some, there were some distinctions that came to mind as we continue to talk about this. And one is that I don't, at least what I know of the discussions that you've had, have instructed me as mockery. And I find even in instances of strong disagreement, I don't think that you are disrespectful. But I think that the question of whether mockery is effective may be just the wrong way for me to think about it, because it may very well be that you change some minds through mockery, but that isn't the way that I want to do it.

And maybe there are some tactics that just are so, I mean, there are some issues that are so important that you might adopt it by any means necessary approach, but I find it distasteful and disrespectful. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how we define mockery, but so for instance, the way I speak about Trump, right? Well, this is not everyone's cup of tea. Obviously, Trump supporters who are totally incorrigible hate what I say about Trump and they must be unreachable. But I got to think even there, it reaches somebody. And on certain points, there is just no other way to say it. fail to convey the feeling of moral opprobrium that seems to me just central to the response I'm having to Trump. To leave that off the table is to actually not communicate what I think about Trump and what I feel everyone has good reason to believe about him.

So I guess the respect side comes in where I can give a sympathetic construal of why someone didn't see it that way at first or maybe even doesn't see it that way now. And I can certainly sympathize with someone who hated Clinton and felt for their own reasons that Trump was probably a better choice. There is definitely a discussion to be had that can dignify the other side. And I spent a whole podcast running down Clinton with Andrew Sullivan, so I'm sympathetic with the other side. But to actually just focus on a specific example like Trump and Trump University, as I did with Scott Adams, and to not express just how despicable that was and how despicable it is not to find it despicable now. I was somewhat hamstrung in my conversation with Scott because I have to play host and debate partner, but kind of the host has to win.

At least I'm using it as a heuristic now that the host has to win in those moments and keep it civil at all costs. But to give him a pass on that, I feel is a moral failing in itself and an intellectual one. So, and to not communicate that is dishonest. I guess what you did with Scott Adams is, as I see it, different. You weren't mocking him. I'm not saying you shouldn't express your feelings or you should sugarcoat how you feel and what you believe about Donald Trump. But when you look at what you did with Scott Adams, you were very deliberately trying to see his perspective, trying to understand why he was defending the positions that he was defending. And I don't know, I see that more as an example, even though

he wasn't going to be persuaded either way. I see that as an example of more what I'm talking about than what you're talking about. And I think this is what doesn't happen with liberals and Trump voters, is they are dismissed in the basket of deplorables. They're just dismissed as this monolithic group of racist idiots who vote against their own interests constantly. And just to be clear, I'm highlighting not what I said to Scott or about Scott, but what I say about Trump. There's no way to sugarcoat it. I am being as disrespectful as you can possibly be about Trump. So imagine what I would have to say to Trump to his face if I ever met him to square with what I've said. I'm talking about a Trump voter and trying to convince a Trump voter to change their mind.

Say we get to the next election time and you're canvassing with the Trump voter, the way to change their mind both as a party and as an individual person isn't going to be, I don't think, to make fun of them because that's what was tried. And that's what seemed like almost a galvanizing, it had a kind of a galvanizing effect to the voters. But what do you think of something like the SNL sketches against Trump and Sean Spicer? against Trump and Sean Spicer. Yeah.

So I was going to get to another distinction about humor because there's not a clear line. And all I can do, I think, is point to the sort of attitude that somebody holds toward another human being where humor is actually a great way to satirize and to condemn. And by the way, I also agree with you that what I'm not saying is that there aren't cases of just sheer moral condemnation, that we shouldn't pull our punches. We should be very, very comfortable to say, I agree with you. I think Trump is somebody who I wouldn't have anything good to say about him. And I think so much of what he's doing is wrong and setting

the wrong example. And with humor, I think humor, there is often a line there. And I find that I can distinguish the kind of humor that I think is good satire for me in my reaction from stuff that just gets nasty in some way in the tone with which it's being done. And I think the power of humor is that it tells a truth in a way that disarms people. It doesn't bring their walls up, not always, but it has the power to do that. I think I've gotten so much more insight from people like Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. because they tell some pretty difficult truths in a funny way. I think, though, that it can get to a mean spirit, and then I just don't like it as much, but I don't like

that feeling that somebody is disrespecting. And I think when I said mockery, for instance, what I meant was somebody who is unwilling to engage. Um, and I found, I think in our James Lindsay interview about the hoax, I found an unwillingness to engage or just a stopping point at their willingness to talk about opposing views. That is what distressed me or what bothered me, I guess. I haven't listened to that, so I'll have to do that. So let's open it up to this larger issue of moral persuasion. persuasion. And this follows rather directly from what Scott Adams was claiming on my podcast, that Trump is this brilliant persuader and that persuasion is really not about facts and needn't be about facts. I mean, it's not a bad thing that it's not about facts. This is one thing that,

that it's not about facts. This is one thing that, again, in my role as host, I couldn't fully communicate how reprehensible I feel this position is. And I'm not saying anything about Scott that I wouldn't say to him.

It's just hard to kind of split the baby in real time when you're on your own show. And I say this now, fully aware that it will get back to Scott. But I just feel like this, he seemed totally comfortable. In fact, he seemed fairly jubilant about caring, not about what is true, but about what people can be led to believe. It just matters what people can

be led to believe. Don't you understand, Sam? That's the game we're all playing. That's what this life is about. It's about persuading people to get what you want out of life. And Trump is great at that. And that, as a kind of the linchpin of an ethical worldview, there's so much, where do I start? Everything is wrong with that. As a scientist, as a philosopher, as a journalist, as a compassionate person who just wants to have his or her beliefs track reality. I mean, whoever you are attempting to build a better society, I don't see how you can be comfortable with that as your starting point. And yet, he does have a point. I mean, the fact that one thing that was astonishing after our podcast was to see how differently our two respective audiences perceived it. I mean, my audience vilified him and his audience vilified me.

And it was clear that they thought he had destroyed me. What an embarrassment. You know, it was like career suicide for me to have someone as brilliant and as persuasive as Scott on my podcast to just, you know, do the Jedi mind trick on me. By the way, we've had some of your followers listen to our long podcast on free will and say, Sam destroyed you guys. And I always sort of laugh because I'm like, you know, I don't think that the destruction of it. I did destroy you guys. I was like, you know, I don't, I think that they,. I did destroy you guys. I was like, you know, I don't I think that they that was that was me. I have another account.

You have like an account with six followers. The Scott Adams interview, it's a it's a it's it's a funny thing to listen to. You get kind of disoriented. And and there was a kind of postmodern feel to it. There was a kind of postmodern critical theory kind of perspective that he seemed to be inhabiting with facts and reason-based arguments, or at least sort of objective reason- based arguments that could be independently evaluated just didn't play the role for him that it played that it plays for you and that it's, you know, mostly we think plays for for all of us. And there was a meta level as trying when, you know, when you two would debate,

say, the Russia investigation or climate change, and he would say, well, you know, when you two would debate, say, the Russia investigation or climate change, and he would say, well, you know, the Paris deal was a hoax and you weren't. But Trump said climate science was a hoax. And, you know, all of a sudden we're shifting terrain. And then you start to wonder, is Scott Adams treating this very debate as something to be like a vehicle for persuasion. Not of you. He probably knew that you weren't going to be persuaded. So he's not trying to win the argument or the debate in the sense that we understand that. He's trying to do what he says Trump is a master at doing, which is persuade people to appreciate Trump or to find something in him that they haven't found before. And then it was like, now I don't like how do you assess this this argument at all if he's not even trying to win the argument, as I understand winning arguments, you know? No, I think that's true. I think he's very sincere trying to win the argument as I understand winning arguments, you know?

No, I think that's true. I think he's very sincere about his insincerity. I think he's got this bad faith structure to his game, and he's fine with that. And I feel that there is an immense number of intellectual and ethical problems that follow from that. And we couldn't fully get into it, but it's a, I do find it very frustrating, but in his defense, the aftermath and just everything we see around us proves at least one part of his thesis, the two movies analogy. Our audiences, my audience and Adams' audience, were clearly watching different movies of that podcast and perceived it totally differently. And the question of moral persuasion, how do you bridge that gulf? can't get facts that would be morally salient in another context to matter to someone for the purpose of a political discussion. I mean, like when I, one point I made with him, which he didn't have a rebuttal. I mean, I think he basically agreed with me. You know, I said, listen, if I did any one of these things that I just named, that you're not disputing Trump has done,

if I did any one of these things, it would be the end of me. And for good reason. I mean, you would not come on this podcast if you had heard that I had a Trump University in my backstory, or if I had been, you know, barging into the dressing rooms of the beauty pageant contestants under my sway, or any of these things. And, you know, you would rightly recognize that I'm a schmuck who shouldn't be taken seriously. He does sort of split the difference here. And in other moments, he says, well, who am I to judge any of that? And I'm not the pope. And, you know, when he's talking about Trump, he's... Or he says, oh, he's lived more publicly than you, sort of implying who knows. Yeah, who knows. And I do wonder about someone who feels that he is in no position to judge the litany of abuses to morality and reason we see just pouring out of Trump's life. was that you shouldn't like we're not hiring him to model to be a model citizen good behavior where

it's like you want that dirty lawyer or as dave would say the jew lawyer to win your case for you god you don't character assassination you don't want the lawyer that's the most upstanding citizen when you're in a battle you know for your you know whether you're going to go to prison or not or for a lot of money there's so much to disagree uh with him about and but i'll tell you what i found the most distressing and and again i actually found him to be like an interesting, respectful dude when he was discussing. So this is this, but, but I, but I get, I reserve the right, as Sam, you were saying before, to just fundamentally disagree with him. And what I found the most distressing in his whole, in the whole interview was, as you point out, the amorality of his arguments. But another one, just the insistence on praising

Trump for his persuasive powers and unwillingness to talk about what he was persuading people about, that he was avoiding any discussion of content. So it's fine if you want to— Getting what he wants, and that's an intrinsic good. An intrinsic good. And it made made me think you know for some people this is an insult some people it might be a compliment but but i it was very anne randish and i was i i was struck by that being a a good in and of itself that that sort of you know we've reached 33rd level persuasive powers and so you got to admire the guy but if your persuasive powers are being used to not care about the the the future of the environment um or or to to discriminate against

people or whatever um how is that a good i mean but you couldn't get him to discuss that and it was always bringing it back to well this is just part of his masterful game, which is like, great, you might be a really, really great marksman, but if you're shooting people, I don't like you. And at this point he would tell me, well, I failed because of my use of analogy. But I think I found it, when it's all said and done, I found it almost monstrous to think of a president and endors of communication that is so, so dishonest that

more or less there's just every assumption now is that there's something false in what he said. Even if you're his fan, you have to bracket everything he says with this basic uncertainty about whether he means it and the cost of that to our society and to our politics. The downside of that is so obvious, but he clearly doesn't care about it. Your question about there are these two movies and the movies seem to be operating according to different principles, too, just in terms of what counts. You know, if the whole the media takes Trump literally, but not seriously, people take Trump seriously, not literally. And I guess that serious part on the Trump voters is that idea of kind of emotional trust or, you know, they trust him emotionally. And so when he goes off on some bullshit tweet storm, they know it's bullshit.

They know he's lying, but he has their emotional trust. I mean, I think that there is something right about that, at least as a descriptive explanation for what's going on. And I actually think that's mostly untrue. I mean, I think I want to call bullshit on that claim, too. I mean, for instance, when Trump gets up there and says, you know, my inauguration crowd was bigger than any that had ever been seen. I think most of his fans think that's true when he says it. And they think it's the fake news media out to get him that is disputing it. And if they ever come around to being convinced by the photos, which, you know, half of them probably think are doctored, they think, well, who gives a shit?

You know, he's great anyway. And so it's like there's. But why do they say he's great anyway? Because they trust him. They trust him. He's a fighter. He's a businessman. He's going to fight for their.

The way Scott views him is a very unusual way of viewing him. I think people are they think everyone's out to get him so that most of the criticism about him and most of the fact checking has to be purely malicious. And most of that is just a tissue of lies and conspiracy theories. And there's probably nothing untoward happening with Russia. And, you know, he's almost certainly this really good guy who's just getting hammered by the left-wing elite. But then when any one piece of this shifts into the certainty column where, okay, no, Trump clearly was lying there, then they have a piece of the Scott Adams view, which is, well, who cares? That's just for effect or that works. He did it because it works. Get used to it. But for the most part, I don't think that's not their first perception. The first perception is

he's just under attack. There's a siege. And it's driven not by how far from normal and ethical and professional and competent he is. It's driven based on just pure partisan rancor. I mean, competent he is. It's driven based on just pure partisan rancor. I mean, people like me are just unhappy to have lost an election. Yeah. No, I mean, I think you're right about that. I guess I didn't want to build too much on the psychology of the Trump voter as much as in terms of of getting people in that movie to sort of be able to talk and debate. There is something in this idea of building emotional trust, and one of the reasons why the fake news, liberal, skewed, biased media, all those charges seem so effective, they're very effective on convincing

Trump voters that he's being treated unfairly, as he loves to say, is because there is no trust right now for those kinds of institutions, you know, the establishment Republicans, the establishment Democrats, and the news media in general. And so, you know, that's, I think, the work that has to be done is building some of that trust back, because without that, there's no terrain to persuade people to revise their opinion of a man that they've put a lot of stake in. their opinion of a man that they've put a lot of stake in. A lot of these voters, they are really motivated to not look like they got played for a sucker, to not look like they've been conned. And so only somebody who they have a tremendous amount of trust in and also also i think some some degree of respect for is going to be able to make progress in in changing their minds about that because there's a lot of biases i i think i i think

you're being i don't i don't think that there is on that the liberal media has eroded trust and this is why the people um went for trump I think it's a much simpler story, which is he was saying shit a lot of people wanted to hear. They were voting in their self-interest for Trump because they really believed it. And one way to take Scott Adams' view is, and I agree with both of you, I don't think that Scott Adams represents

in any way the average Trump supporter. One way in which I think he's right is that Trump has persuaded a substantial portion of people that he is to be trusted. And I think that that is despite all of the evidence that he is not to be trusted. And so you say to yourself, well, how can people trust him despite all of this evidence that he's a liar, that he makes decisions based on self-interest, not even on principle? And I think it's because he has said a few things that he makes decisions based on self-interest, not even on principle. And I think it's because he has said a few things that people really, really wanted to hear.

And I don't think it's the liberal media has eroded trust and it needs to build it back up. I think it's just totally directional bias. Well, the thing is, though, it has, I mean, I can attest to the failings of the liberal media or the mainstream media on certain topics that are so reliable that I do have a window into how a right-wing Fox and Breitbart fan could view the editorial page of The New York Times or even just the news pages, because I've seen them commit errors of fact or to shade their discussion of facts so reliably on certain topics. I mean, the topics of, you know, the link between Islam and terrorism is one where I can just guarantee you I will find in an article some way in which political correctness is distorting the presentation of stark facts. There are whole articles in places like the New York Times talking about terrorist suicide bombings as though the motive were a mystery that is bound to remain impenetrable until

the end of time. And there's no mention of Islam. There's no mention of religion. There's just that you have generic words like extremism. And all of this, to someone who's been paying attention to this problem and is worried about the spread of specific ideas relative to jihadism, it's a very fishy way to describe what's going on. And so it is with something like gun control and gun safety. There'll be a shooting at a school and you'll have the response in the New York Times and you'll just see, you'll see positions

being articulated by people who know nothing about guns, who have never shot a gun, who don't, who get everything wrong. I mean, the names are wrong. I mean, we hear them on CNN talking about guns. They pronounce the names of gun manufacturers wrong. I mean, it's just the level of cluelessness is so obvious. about having to respond or feeling that you have to respond again and again and again to Trump's dishonesty and indiscretions because every time you do it, you are running the risk of making an error yourself, however small, which seems to put you on all fours with Breitbart or with Trump himself. Or it's just that there's something that erodes your credibility by just taking the time to be endlessly criticizing

someone like this for the same points. And so when you look at the New York Times now, there are days where the whole paper looks like the opinion page because they have to take a position against this guy. Yeah, it's... It's... It's a hard decision to make. whole paper looks like the opinion page because they have to take a position against this guy 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 of the making sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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