Making Sense - Sam Harris - #183 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

The death of Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter in a helicopter crash on the morning of July 31st, 2014, left a world of grief and shock. In this episode, I speak with author and journalist Paul Bloom about Kobe Bryant s death and the impact it had on his family and the world, and how the death of a celebrity like this cuts through death denial and denial in a way that few other events do, and cuts through the numbness and numbness that comes with the grief that comes from losing a loved one in such a tragic accident. I also talk about how the loss of a child in an accident like this can have a profound impact on a person s life and how it can change the way we think about death and loss, especially when it's someone we care deeply about. This episode is a special episode of the Making Sense podcast, featuring a conversation I had with the author and writer Paul Bloom, who has written a book about Kobe s tragic loss, Kobe Bryant's tragic helicopter crash and his daughter's tragic death. I hope you ll join me in this conversation. Thanks to Paul Bloom for joining me in the first episode of The Making Sense Podcast, and for being kind enough to share his thoughts on the tragic loss of one of the greatest athletes of our time. Thank you, Paul Bloom. Make sense. -Sam Harris - Music by Ian Dorsch and John Singleton, produced by Ian McKirdy, courtesy of NPR, and edited by Mark Phillips, and produced by Matthew Boll, and written by Alex Blumberg, and the excellent editor and editor of The New York Times bestselling author of the excellent new book, "Making Sense" and the New York Sun's "Make Sense" is out on the podcast "Kobe Bryant" by Sam Harris, "Bryant's Death" by the late Kobe Bryant, "No Questions Asked" by Mark Halberstell, "The Other Way" by Kevin McLeod, is out in honor of Kobe's daughter, "A Better Thing" by Sarah, "Sister" is "The Real Thing" and "The Girl Who Was There's Not Here." -- in the new album "The Death is Not Here by Kobe's Death by Kobe Bryant?" by The New Edition's "The Man Who Didn't Die" by The Real Thing?" -- is out now on the internet?

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:48.520 a free account and we grant 100 of those requests no questions asked okay i am here with paul bloom

00:00:57.240 paul thanks for joining me hey sam thanks for having me so uh just a little preamble to um

00:01:03.480 set up this conversation i i have been thinking of late that i've been kind of getting boxed in

00:01:10.360 in my normal podcast format i mean i'm often having conversations with people where you know they've

00:01:17.280 written a book very likely and you know i've taken rather often taken the time to read it and this may

00:01:23.240 be the one conversation i ever have with them and so it really has to be you know focused on their

00:01:30.740 topic and fairly buttoned up and exhaustive and doesn't really allow me in most cases to just kind

00:01:38.980 of wander around and hit topics of interest and be a little more free form and conversational and

00:01:46.700 so i was thinking of starting a new track in the podcast where i can be more topical and kind of of

00:01:54.260 the moment and experimental and talk about work in progress and all the rest and i was thinking about

00:02:01.180 who i could do that with and you were the first person to come to mind and so and i you know as you

00:02:06.260 know i reached out to you and here you are so thank you for agreeing to do this well i i was i was

00:02:11.220 really thrilled to be invited to do this i i've always felt that our conversations go very well

00:02:15.940 and i think it's because you and i hit a certain sweet spot where we agree and disagree and in the

00:02:20.940 right measure making our conversation sort of productive but not us constantly saying to one

00:02:25.940 another oh you're right you know you're exactly right so this should be fun yeah yeah and uh so i

00:02:31.220 must apologize in advance i have a cold for our inaugural conversation and um if you catch it over

00:02:37.980 there at yale i think it will be due to an excess of empathy on your part my biggest weakness okay

00:02:44.520 well we have to begin on an unhappy note because we are speaking today in the aftermath of kobe bryant

00:02:51.720 dying in a helicopter crash along with his 13 year old daughter and i believe it's seven other people

00:02:57.960 we're speaking on on the monday after and you know the outpouring of grief and um just the kind of

00:03:06.300 the way the world seemed to stop around this event in my memory the the only thing i remember like it

00:03:12.280 was princess diana dying i don't know if that's uh what else compares to that but um how do you

00:03:19.580 perceive moments like this i mean this one is complicated by several other factors which we'll

00:03:25.820 go into but it's pretty uh breathtaking the way the death of a celebrity like this cuts through

00:03:34.260 death denial in a way that a few other events do it's really affecting i was in um in london on

00:03:41.020 sabbatical when princess diana was killed in this car crash and the outpouring of grief was extraordinary

00:03:48.560 the streets emptied out while people went to the funeral or watched it on tv people could talk about

00:03:54.000 nothing else and people were viscerally affected you'd you'd walk past people on the streets who were

00:04:00.260 weeping and and it's extraordinary i think when it comes to certain sources celebrities the amount

00:04:07.820 of personal contact people have it's it's a lot of people were more said that they were more affected

00:04:13.400 by her death than the death of their brother or or their their mother it's it's this powerful feeling

00:04:20.280 that and it's not only that she was beloved it's that she was some sort of i don't know fairy tale

00:04:26.620 character for them and and i think great athletes often fill a similar niche for us yeah and also his

00:04:34.840 13 year old daughter who looked like she was going to be a superstar basketball player in her own right

00:04:41.720 that was really devastating in fact it wasn't clear that she was on the helicopter at first so his death

00:04:50.260 was announced and then you saw all these images of him with his daughters circulating and then to find

00:04:57.120 out that she was also killed it was really um brutal i mean there's the familiarity component in the fact

00:05:03.480 that you've seen this person so much but this is an additional fact that it's just it pings the you know if

00:05:11.380 it can happen to them it can happen to anyone part of the brain in some way so that it makes life seem

00:05:16.840 especially precarious and you know again especially with a child involved and dying in an accident in

00:05:24.720 this way it's yeah you could have a you could have a taxonomy of deaths of people you don't know

00:05:29.240 on the one extreme is older people in their 70s in their 80s where you know it could be sad it could be

00:05:34.820 really affecting but in the end it's not a shock it doesn't seem particularly unjust then you get young

00:05:41.260 people and this is a case we're dealing with now and and that could be far more moving it seems so

00:05:47.020 arbitrary and and frightening and then you get children and children children are the worst you

00:05:53.680 know it is the worst when something like that happens to a kid you could look at any adult and

00:05:58.560 say good things and bad things about them and they have their friends and their enemies but you know

00:06:03.500 if there's one thing everybody agrees on it's that it's that kids shouldn't die and and it's it is if

00:06:10.400 you ever want an argument for the for the cruelty if there is a god of god it'd be the death of

00:06:15.860 children yeah it really is the the argument for which there is no rebuttal you know the the normal

00:06:21.920 arguments about free will and any kind of justice for a person's behavior while alive is obviously it

00:06:30.460 doesn't apply to kids so really it has become the perfect storm on social media because you know

00:06:39.100 immediately upon the announcement of his death it might have been before anyone realized his daughter

00:06:46.520 was involved there was this washington post writer felicia sonmez i'm not quite sure how to pronounce

00:06:54.340 that last name who tweeted a link to a 2016 daily beast article written by somebody else detailing the

00:07:02.380 never quite settled to everyone's satisfaction rape allegations against bryant and the response to that

00:07:10.500 was absolutely infernal she's actually just been put on administrative leave from the post and um this is

00:07:19.720 one of those moments where it landed with me i don't know if i'm representative of most people here i mean i i'm

00:07:26.220 i'm not a basketball fan i you know kobe really hasn't had much of a space in my brain and i was aware of

00:07:33.480 obviously these allegations against him and was still not aware of what i think about them i mean it's just obvious

00:07:39.180 they precede the me too moment had they come about now there's no way he would have not been canceled but you know

00:07:47.480 they predate everyone's heightened awareness of these issues and so she was you know re-promoting the scandal

00:07:55.100 in the immediate i mean to say the immediate aftermath of his death i mean it was like literally within

00:08:00.880 10 minutes or something it seemed an example of enormous bad taste given you know what his family

00:08:09.920 is now dealing with but it's it is an interesting question just what is appropriate to acknowledge

00:08:18.240 about a person when is too soon and what's the right way to play a moment like that it's just you

00:08:25.020 know again it struck i think almost everyone as fairly tactless and masochistic on her part but 0.99

00:08:31.840 i don't know where the line is and it's just interesting to see what social media has done to

00:08:37.440 us here because it's tempting to feel like you need to express an opinion at moments like this if you have

00:08:43.080 any public profile and you know she has is certainly reaping the results of having expressed hers

00:08:50.280 i don't know what the rules are here i don't think she knew either this conservative figure

00:08:57.140 roger scrutin he died recently and for the most part a lot of his friends and family and his fans

00:09:02.760 posted you know gentle stories about him and respect for him and expressed her sadness but there were many

00:09:09.360 people who said this guy said awful things and and maybe was an awful guy and so much you know so much

00:09:15.760 better the world is without him and i my own bias is that we should always err in favor of being kind

00:09:23.200 to the dead at least in the short term but you know there are different views on this i know christopher

00:09:28.420 hitchens famously your your friend hitch argued that that we should not be kind to the recently dead

00:09:35.320 if we think they were terrible we should be up front and say this yeah i'll just remind people that

00:09:40.740 he was on the news savaging jerry falwell at that point and then given that i shared his views of

00:09:47.240 falwell i really didn't feel much critical distance from that savaging but um i saw the other side of

00:09:54.560 that very equation when glenn greenwald wasted no time dancing on hitch's grave when he died and you

00:10:02.460 know it struck me as you know fairly craven given that you know this is the kind of thing he

00:10:07.960 wouldn't have fared well saying to hitch his face i mean in this case it just seemed like

00:10:12.960 the grief of kobe's family needed to be so paramount you're just imagining a his wife and her remaining

00:10:25.100 daughters dealing with the death of a husband father and a daughter as well and it's just that moment

00:10:35.040 to press the unresolved me too case against bryant which was again it's not so clear i mean you know

00:10:42.720 the infidelity part is clear and you can be as judgmental about that as you want but it's just

00:10:47.400 not really your place to judge if the marriage survived it right i mean who knows what the

00:10:53.160 understanding is or was between his wife and himself at that point it's like given that it's unsettled it

00:11:00.400 just i don't know it was kind of a self-immolation of a journalist i'm not sure that was the hill she

00:11:06.260 was uh right to want to die on so that's one way of looking at it which is the accusation was uncertain

00:11:11.680 and given that you shouldn't have brought it up but there may be other things going on if in that

00:11:18.720 case for instance if it was mike tyson who had actually you know done time for rape bringing you

00:11:24.180 know saying well there's a dead rapist now i people might have a different feeling about that well they're

00:11:30.400 that opens the other issue of just the kind of the moral significance of having done one's time

00:11:35.900 and this is actually something i want to talk to you about and we can get there when we get there but

00:11:40.540 what are the physics of redemption i mean we have someone do something awful let's say there's no

00:11:46.640 uncertainty about it you know we think it's awful they admit it was awful what constitutes an

00:11:53.000 appropriate readmission to our good graces how does somebody get their reputation back

00:11:59.260 when they've done something terrible and we and we have examples of this i mean there are

00:12:04.280 murderers who get out of prison who then become you know paradigmatic stories of you know moral

00:12:10.700 rehabilitation and then on the other end of the continuum we have people wanting to cancel someone

00:12:16.320 for all time for a few errant tweets that they unleashed as teenagers how do you think about that even in

00:12:22.740 the case where the previous moral infraction is quite clear it's it's a good question i'll say just

00:12:30.800 two things one thing is i think that one force in all of this that that we should acknowledge is

00:12:35.840 i think we we pull apart particularly famous people they're either good or evil they're either

00:12:41.680 princess diana or jeffrey epstein and if you know and there are forces that pull you to one end or

00:12:48.560 another the idea of saying okay this guy died and there was goodness and there was badness and he

00:12:53.800 has critics he has his friends is uncomfortable particularly over social media you have to take

00:12:58.560 one side or another as for redemption you know you're right there are all of these famous cases of

00:13:05.160 these uh these neo-nazis who became you know crusaders for to help minorities there's people who

00:13:10.560 murderers who have achieved in the eyes of others what you see as redemption but i'm trying to think of

00:13:17.800 this and i can't can you tell me one famous celebrity figure who was really uh used today's word

00:13:25.280 canceled and now is in everybody's good graces i don't know peewee herman yeah i mean well i i don't

00:13:33.320 know that anyone is paying attention to him now but yeah i think he did sort of come back and get

00:13:39.220 redeemed but you know kobe might have been i mean tyson is also an example of this but i mean both kobe

00:13:45.120 and tyson are examples of people who really more or less made it all the way back for most people i

00:13:53.680 mean i you know it's kobe to an enormous degree i mean he just his career most of his triumph was

00:14:01.000 still ahead of him you know as an athlete i could have that slightly wrong again i don't follow

00:14:05.980 basketball but i mean he was like 25 or 26 when that scandal broke and you know he died at 41 so

00:14:14.000 i mean i guess once you're tarnished you're always going to be tarnished in somebody's eyes but

00:14:18.220 that was a pretty solid example of yeah having put it behind him so so what did he do right in case

00:14:26.460 a practical advice for anybody listening to this or for you and me if we ever really get into trouble

00:14:31.840 what's the technique for for achieving public redemption well it sort of depends on what for

00:14:37.140 i think there's some unhappy data on the efficacy of a the rather trumpian tactic of never apologizing

00:14:46.160 right i mean there's some social science data suggesting apologies backfire yeah and in the

00:14:51.440 political scheme apologies they just i've seen apologies by people who have done inappropriate

00:14:56.180 things and their enemies just mock them and say we wanted more yeah yeah so it is interesting to

00:15:03.000 consider what constitutes a and what should constitute a acceptable apology i mean whether

00:15:09.460 it has strategic value in general i think in the case of something like accusations of rape are their

00:15:15.080 their own thing but i mean just take the infidelity part of it the crucially exculpatory thing

00:15:20.360 in the case of somebody like kobe bryant or you know like tiger woods is whether or not the wife

00:15:26.880 you know stands by your side right i mean that yeah it's a different outcome or the husband as the

00:15:33.620 case may be but yeah you know i again i didn't follow it so closely but i mean he just seemed to

00:15:38.760 have come all the way back and again it was pre me too it's hard to imagine it would have survived the

00:15:46.600 glare of the present moment i guess bill clinton is a sort of parallel case although yeah because

00:15:53.620 his infidelities and and the accusations of rape happened when he was when he was president and a lot

00:16:00.380 of people supported him at the time he was never he never really fell that much from grace but but i

00:16:06.320 think the fact he was supported by his family and i think there's sort of at least he tried to tell a

00:16:11.140 redemption story probably reasonably successful when he uh when when he dies people will be saying

00:16:16.460 wonderful things about him yeah that's another example where hitch was on the case i don't know

00:16:21.860 if you ever read his book yeah no one left to lie to the triangulations of william jefferson clinton

00:16:27.060 but um hitch went all in on the accusations of rape there and i must say it i mean it's been a long

00:16:34.000 time since i've looked at that book but i found it fairly persuasive and it reset my view of clinton

00:16:42.020 and whatever's true about the extreme accusations there that the utter dysfunction of his marriage

00:16:50.600 with hillary or whatever or the political liability of whatever deal they had cut in their marriage came 0.81

00:16:57.640 back in the 2016 election when she's on stage debating an opponent who was eminently cancelable

00:17:07.120 based on his own sexual transgressions and you know the legion accusations yeah that he was trailing

00:17:13.840 and and yet to that debate he brought you know bill clinton's accusers into the audience and you know

00:17:21.720 hillary couldn't say a word about any of this because of how she had conducted herself during the 0.73

00:17:27.480 time of you know her husband's presidency and when those accusations were surfacing how she just 1.00

00:17:32.300 excoriated these women as liars and gold diggers and i mean just she was so on the wrong side of 1.00

00:17:39.440 history there and so apparently dishonest in how she took his side and you know scheming in a 1.00

00:17:46.820 lady mcbeth sort of way i mean it's just everything lined up to just completely neutralize her at a moment 1.00

00:17:53.820 where she would have had an overwhelming political advantage yeah yeah it it is one of a set of ways

00:18:00.000 in which it would be better to have somebody running against trump at the time and but this is also an

00:18:04.340 example of something you and i have talked about before which is how our moral code now causes us to

00:18:10.600 reevaluate things in the past sometimes rightly sometimes wrongly you know if if if these things

00:18:16.740 about bill clinton came out and he was a president and it was now the ramifications would be far far worse

00:18:23.100 because we see it as as his behavior is as as inexcusable in a way that many people didn't back

00:18:29.280 then i think that is true on the left i mean every place left of center is a spot on the map that is

00:18:37.200 truly hostile to you know even a rumor of a rumor of an accusation of that kind but what do you make of

00:18:44.720 the fact that trump really suffers no such penalty i mean it seems like there's nothing no accusation of

00:18:52.180 that sort or any other sort that matters in his world i i make of it extreme despair it it is now

00:19:00.100 i i think it's apparent that there's no such thing as dirt on trump there is nothing he could say or do

00:19:06.440 that would cause his fans and a large majority of republican base to give up support for him i think

00:19:13.600 this is one case in which tribal loyalty dominates individual character and and in some way it's it's

00:19:21.380 entirely rational for people like you and me and you know roughly half of the country to to attack

00:19:28.680 trump and despise trump but by doing so it sets up a dynamic where anything new reported against trump

00:19:34.740 tribal loyalties kick in and you say you're attacking our guy and trump feeds off of that

00:19:40.560 so i mean look i i'm not i i don't want to come off like oh i would have predicted this all along

00:19:47.020 honestly i had thought that naively that american conservatives were actually conservative

00:19:54.740 in manners of propriety and sexuality and conduct in which case they would find trump honestly repellent

00:20:01.780 and this has been a rude awakening for me how they managed to put up with that guy

00:20:05.700 yeah not only put up with him celebrate him yeah it is an endless source of surprise that there's

00:20:11.940 any remaining capacity for surprise on this score it's just i mean just when i think he's crossed a

00:20:18.560 line that he's going to force people to defect it never happens so i mean these the the apocryphal

00:20:26.560 the the the legendary presumed tapes of him you know having bizarre sex acts with russian 0.97

00:20:33.420 prostitutes where he pees on them or has them pee on him or something these could come out be on 0.95

00:20:39.340 youtube and a front page in new york times i don't know what it would do with his support i don't know 0.96

00:20:43.660 whether whether it would cause it to to drop at all this reminds me of of other tapes that i

00:20:48.360 occasionally mention on this podcast the alleged uh apprentice the n the n-word yeah where he uses the

00:20:54.920 n-word with abandon and you know as i've said several times i know to a moral certainty that those

00:21:00.680 tapes exist i know people who have it directly from the mouth of mark burnett that they exist

00:21:06.760 and multiple people the one thing i would point out about that is that you know mark burnett is living

00:21:13.000 with the illusion that by not releasing those tapes he has done nothing presumably in his mind releasing

00:21:20.980 those tapes would be an extraordinary act you know that you would go off like a nuclear bomb and to

00:21:27.060 withhold those tapes is to take no action but i would i would say that the opposite is the case

00:21:33.060 he took an enormous action and you know act of responsibility to decide for a nation of you know

00:21:40.920 340 million people that no one could know about what this man is like behind closed doors when he had the

00:21:49.820 evidence of it and i remain somewhat hopeful this will never be confirmed or disconfirmed but i do think

00:21:56.840 that you know hearing those tapes would probably make a difference i mean it's one thing in the

00:22:02.040 abstract to know okay this is the kind of guy who probably uses the n-word without any you know

00:22:08.640 irony or or meta context you know just how he talks in private is to know that in the abstract but then

00:22:15.000 to actually hear it done over and over again with all the context and i think it would be kind of like

00:22:20.800 i don't know if you remember this the way the mark firman tapes played during the oj trial

00:22:25.320 that was the end of the end of the trial when we heard just what this guy's mind was like what do

00:22:32.260 you think i mean you think it would matter if we had you know hours of him speaking with abandon like a

00:22:37.940 member of the ku klux klan no if i if i had to guess i would say no i would say trump over and over

00:22:45.300 again trump says things and does things you know that the whole uh the whole access hollywood tape

00:22:51.380 i would have guessed in that simpler time that that would be the death of any politician

00:22:55.520 but it wasn't endless and you know you now there must be hours and hours of him saying things that

00:23:02.360 are grotesque and tweeting them in fact i actually think if if he got caught with those tapes in some

00:23:09.480 way it would be his brand you know it may be it may be more embarrassing for him if he spent you know

00:23:15.860 two hours you know rhapsodizing about how he likes you know japanese poetry and just really and he's

00:23:22.240 really he's really a cosmopolitan at heart then it's then people say what the hell right right yeah

00:23:26.860 a globalist but him saying n-word he's just he's a straight talking guy i don't know i mean there's

00:23:31.320 something there's just something so toxic about the word that i mean it has a a magical power that

00:23:37.840 you know i think no other word does in english i mean certainly in america and i mean i think

00:23:44.660 famously doesn't have the same kind of power in places like australia and you get the occasional

00:23:50.040 aussie who will use the word thinking well you know surely this is fair game to talk about the 0.99

00:23:55.220 use of the word in this context but i don't know unfortunately we will never hear those tapes

00:24:00.500 so let's go back to this the topic of moral redemption and i guess we could broaden it to moral

00:24:09.020 responsibility and forgiveness and there's also this concept of moral luck yeah which i have always

00:24:15.640 found fascinating it i think this phrase originates with um bernard williams yeah but you know thomas

00:24:22.520 nagel also wrote an essay and i think nagel's discussion of it is really the the one that i have in my head but

00:24:28.660 there's this feature of moral transgression and culpability and good and bad outcomes we have an

00:24:38.160 intuition that for a person to be truly responsible for their actions and to deserve the punishment or the

00:24:44.960 reward that comes to them it shouldn't be mostly much less entirely a matter of luck that their actions

00:24:54.040 occur in the first place right i mean it shouldn't just be this spin of a roulette wheel that gets you

00:25:00.300 put in prison with everyone thinking you deserve it or gets you celebrated as a as some kind of moral

00:25:06.980 hero but when you actually look at how events unfold there's a component of luck that you just can't

00:25:15.140 ever purge from the system and so i mean the example that comes to mind for me is a that of a drunk driver

00:25:22.000 who yeah winds up killing somebody's kid or otherwise you know causing tremendous suffering

00:25:27.940 and then you think of all the people who drive drunk who have no bad outcome they just get home safely

00:25:33.300 to their beds and sleep it off and the difference between those groups seems purely a matter of luck

00:25:42.080 and and if that example doesn't really land with people because you know most people are now

00:25:47.420 they're scrupulous enough not to drive drunk and they feel like well if you kill someone driving drunk you deserve

00:25:53.080 it well then think about texting yeah virtually everyone listening to us now will have at some point

00:26:01.520 behaved irresponsibly with their phone in their cars and some people you know more or less still committed

00:26:07.380 to doing that on a daily basis despite whatever admonishments come their way and you know texting while

00:26:14.240 driving is an unambiguously dangerous thing to do which most people get away with and yet some people

00:26:21.320 wind up killing people and go to prison for it so then the question is if the only difference between you

00:26:30.160 and the person who's now in prison for let's say 10 years for killing a child while you know glancing at

00:26:38.280 their at their phone and driving if the only difference is a matter of luck you know how do

00:26:44.000 we feel about the punishment aren't they on some level already punished enough i mean just think of

00:26:48.460 how ruined your life would be

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 28, 2020

#183 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

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