#185 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, we discuss the death of Kobe Bryant and the ethics of publishing the news about it before the family even knew about it, and the question of whether or not it was ethical to reveal it to the family before they even knew it. We also discuss why it matters that Kobe Bryant's death was revealed to the public before they knew it was publicly available, and whether that's a good or bad thing. And of course, we talk about the helicopter crash that killed Kobe s father, Kobe Bryant, and his family, and what we should do in the wake of such a tragedy. And, as always, there's some good ol' fashioned journalism ethics talk about what it really means to be ethical in the digital age, and how to deal with people who don't do what they're supposed to do in order to get the most out of their time and money. And we have a special guest on the show this week, Dr. Paul Blumberg, a psychologist, to talk about ethics and ethics in the world of journalism, and why we should be worried about what we learn about it from it from the tragedy of Kobe's death. We also talk about Kobe's wife, Kobe's daughter and the media s reaction to the news coverage of the crash, and Kobe's widow's reaction to it. Thanks to our sponsor, Sysyllt, for letting us know that Kobe's father's death wasn't covered by the media, and that it's okay to be a little bit late in the news cycle, which is a day after Kobe's passing away. Make sense, folks! Thanks also to SYSYS, for making sense, for helping us cover Kobe Bryant s death, and for the right to know the truth about Kobe s death and the family's response to the crash. Sam Harris, for being kind enough to share his story, and all the details of Kobe s story, of course. -- Thank you, Sam Harris -- -- and for being a good friend of the podcast, for sharing it with us, and so much more! -- Sam, too, Sam Harris -- making sense? -- we love you, too much, Sam, for your support, again, and good to be kind, good to hear it, too good to know that it s okay, right? Thank you for listening? -- -- thank you, Sarah, Sarah?
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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a free account and we grant 100 of those requests no questions asked okay i have paul bloom back
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paul good to hear you good to be back we have a couple of messes to clean up or at least one mess
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to clean up from the last round where we um i haven't gone back to listen to exactly what we said
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but i got the sense that we disparaged peewee herman somehow or at least uh minimized that was the least
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of my intentions nothing mean spirited but we had we um diminished his stature or assumed that that he
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was invisible or you know had had disappeared into obscurity in some way because we haven't been
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paying attention to his career but someone pointed out and i quickly confirmed that the man is is
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selling out very large auditoriums with his latest act i mean he's he has quite a career he's out there
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making a fair amount of noise so it seems we were wrong about paul rubens well good to know good to
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know as as i was walking to the studio 10 minutes ago i saw that al franken is coming to uh to new
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haven so you know i think he had uh somewhat of a blow to his reputation but maybe uh maybe redemption
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is more common than we had expected maybe cancellation is rarely permanent that's good to know anyway so uh
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no hard feelings paul rubens absolutely absolutely no hard feelings towards paul rubens and the other
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thing i this is the other thing that that i just had in my mind to mention based on the last
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conversation we we started by talking about kobe's death and you know the death of everyone else
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involved in that that helicopter crash and because we recorded our last conversation the day after that
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happened and i didn't know this at the time but finding out about it is an interesting ethical question
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so we we didn't touch on this i believe it is in fact true that tmz the kind of paparazzi
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inspired website announced kobe's death before the family even knew about it that was the way the
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information came out and i'm wondering just what you think about this the ethics of that i mean the
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interesting thing from my point of view is given that i've taken such a strong position against
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the advertising model and what that has done to digital media that this seems to me to be another
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symptom of it i mean the race to publish is really directly incentivized by the kind of winner-take-all
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effects of clickbait journalism and with different incentives that there wouldn't be the same kind of
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sense of time pressure to publish i was just wondering what you thought about that and because
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many people think well why does it matter you know if the tragedy is you know you've lost your
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husband your your father this is a 20 megaton catastrophe however you look at it does it really
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matter that you heard about it on twitter because tmz tweeted it and not you know through some sober
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channel but it seems to me to matter a lot i'm wondering what you as a psychologist yeah i i agree with
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you i mean i don't have any special expertise on this as a psychologist just sort of common sense and
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and decency if somebody's you know father daughter you know wife whatever dies you want to be told in
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a sober control circumstance you don't want to you know find it as a hashtag yeah and and i i think you
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know for the most part news sources are often particularly well behaved in this way but some of them
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aren't and and there is a sort of darwinian battle for clicks and for attention and so so some don't
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play by the rules and you know i i think in some way there's there's a question of what should be
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legally allowed which i actually think a lot but there's also the question of what's sort of morally
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atrocious and something could be you know you wouldn't want a law to punish them but you want to also
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say that's kind of despicable yeah no it really is hard to imagine the the editorial call here when
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you when you have every reason to believe that you know this information is minutes old and that the
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family probably doesn't know anything about it and you're racing to publish it's it's just something
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something has gotten away from you there and again it's the the incentives at your back no doubt but
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that's a symptom of of our uh digital ecosystem at the moment and definitely at the moment i mean
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we're both old enough to remember when there were newspapers and you know rushing to get it out we
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rushing to get out the next day yeah and and for the last long while it's been a matter of minutes or
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seconds right and uh and so so that that kind of changes everything okay so now we're talking in the
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immediate aftermath of the trump impeachment acquittal and the um the high drama of nancy pelosi tearing up
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the state of the union address and mit romney breaking from the herd and voting um to impeach what
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do you think about all of this do you have a hot take on on the politics of this i i have the observations
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everyone else has which is if anything trump is becoming more and more unhinged more and more
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confident in his abilities to um to do whatever he pleases and uh and so you know i think things are
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going to get worse and worse and worse until you know i hope with the next election they get better
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and it is true that the democrats are responding in kind and people have said oh this doesn't work
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you know trump makes fun of your appearance you make fun of trump's appearance you're just descending
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to his level but the thing is the history of battling trump is nothing works the high road doesn't
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work the low road doesn't work that's what is so strange about him and and this moment politically
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because it nothing works and i'm trying to understand why this is the case i mean it almost seems like a
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a supernatural phenomenon right because i can't map it on to any normal experience it's just like the
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the obelisk in 2001 right i mean it's an it's it's the superficial version of that that was like a
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infinite profundity somehow that never had to be explained right this is just the singularity that
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at the heart of the cosmos and trump is like the inverse of all of that so it's like there's no
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depth it's all surface and yet the surface is engineered in a way so as to reflect the worst in
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everyone this is what's so bizarre about trump and the response to him and it's it's he has a capacity
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to tarnish the reputation of everyone who comes into his orbit right and this is again whether it's a
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supporter or a critic and i mean for supporters it's this is very obvious i mean the effect is
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astonishing you have serious people with real reputations i mean see politicians and soldiers
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and business people who have lifetimes of real accomplishment who achieve levels of personal
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hypocrisy and political cowardice in propping him up and in covering for his lives and in pretending not to
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notice his lies and just pretending that he's normal that i mean we've never seen before but then
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the flip side of it is that all of his critics are also diminished by how they respond to this
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and you know the case with pelosi i think is an example of this i mean many people are obviously
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celebrating what she did but i think it does also diminish her right i mean she's just she is left
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behaving in a way that a congressperson shouldn't behave right and and she's demeaning the office
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of the presidency because of its current occupant and there's just something so strange about this
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this uh term of disparagement that trump supporters use trump derangement syndrome you know everyone has tds
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there's something to that because he he is a kind of super stimulus right i mean the re the reaction to
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him is is exaggerated because it's out of proportion to his qualities as a person it's out of proportion
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to the bad things he's done and the bad things he aspires to do because he's not actually evil right i
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mean he's not or he's not he's not as scary as he might be and yet somehow he gets an even bigger
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reaction than someone would if they were just truly scary right so it's almost like his smallness as a
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person is invoking a bigger reaction than you would ordinarily feel and i feel it myself and i feel it
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personally i mean i've said this i find him more despicable than i found osama bin laden right and that's
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that's strange this is psychologically true because with osama bin laden it's just obvious to me that he
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could have been a mensch in some sense right i mean he's he's making serious sacrifices for
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ideas that he deeply believes in he's committed to a cause greater than himself i don't doubt that he had
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real ethical connections to the people in his life that he cared about i mean he's a real person right and
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and in some ways he's a kind of a moral hero in a very bad game right and so therefore he's kind of
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prototypically evil when viewed from my game but he's a a person of actual substance he's just
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committed to the wrong ends whereas trump is the negation of all of those things and yet he's president
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of the united states and that's and that the perversity of that juxtaposition is just
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fucking crazy making and that's how you get this outsized reaction at least that's my interpretation of
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it so there's some people i agree with all of that but there's some people who have made contact with
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trump and haven't been degraded it's a very small list i think who's on that list well there's quite
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a bit of conservative writers who who when trump came into power they sort of said this guy clashes
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with all of our principles right and even never the never trumpers like uh jonah goldberg for instance
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david from yeah yeah and and they said even though this is going to get me kicked off fox news i'm
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going to lose some revenue i'm going to lose some fans i'm going to sort of stand up for what i believe
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and you know they paid a sort of financial and and sort of professional price for it and and now we
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have you know mit romney and my feelings about mit romney have always been complicated i don't think
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he's a he's quite the sort of choir boy as people like to think of him as when he was running for
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president he was he was pretty rough and tumble but i have nothing but admiration for him standing
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up against trump this time so what do you think do you think do you think would you put romney as
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as an exception yeah well i mean first i should apologize for all the bad things i've said about
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romney in the past because i i went fairly hard against romney and his mormonism when he was when he
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was the candidate in 2012 and i'm sure at least once or twice mentioned that he he must be wearing magic
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underpants and and that we did not need a a president who believed what he believed and
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and yeah my concerns about his his religious beliefs and you know kind of the the inflexibility of
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mind that you would imagine he would have given those beliefs i view those as valid concerns in any
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president and it is a it's painfully ironic to me that in all of my hopes that trump would be impeached
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the person waiting to assume the presidency is a religious dogmatist of the first order mike pence
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who in another context would trip all of the switches in me that would worry about theocracy in
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in the u.s so i went after romney for his religiosity in the past and i've noticed the same things about
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him that everyone has noticed that he's it was clearly a political opportunist in many ways and and
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there was something truly humiliating about his seeking to be secretary of state under trump after
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all that had gone down between him and trump i mean that was almost a a shakespearean level of
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cravenness at the time or you know attachment to political power still still if you want the full
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shakespeare go for ted cruz oh yeah ted cruz yes you know that was that was brutal yes personal deep
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humiliation by trump and then he has to go back and beg him for various things and champion him well
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well it says something about how difficult politics is well also we're still at it all it was finally
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commemorated in the shot of him working the phone banks for trump i don't know if you saw that
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photograph oh i have seen that yeah so it's just awful right i mean just where does one go to get a
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spine in the game but now but now romney going yeah yeah so it did redeem himself to some extent yeah
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that was all by way of my saying that yeah in this moment though it's hard to imagine
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that it's a political price that matters it is it's very real for him i mean he's he's someone now
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who's who's being vilified by his colleagues and and his political tribe and probably worse i mean he
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probably has the the maniacs in trump's base sending him death threats and you know some of which are
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credible and i mean it's just the people who go against trump have stories to tell about what
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that's like when the mob turns on you so yeah i just i have nothing but respect for how he's
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comporting himself in in this moment and and i certainly don't underestimate that it's in his
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world a real sacrifice so so let me switch gears for us and yeah say something nice about trump
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it's sincerely how surprising yes and it's something from tyler cowan so cowan
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one of my favorite writers and thinkers he has a a little a little piece i think in a
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bloomberg news or something where he just he talks about the best orators of the last decade
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and he lists two of them discuss he thinks barack obama's a third maybe a distant third
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one is greta thunberg who is an extremely unusual very powerful speaker this unusual porosity and great
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moral seriousness that the sort of juxtaposition between her being seeming like sort of a young
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woman and talking with such seriousness and gravity but but thunberg's second trump is first and yeah
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well the trump is an extraordinary orator well extraordinary in scare quotes but yeah i mean so
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i don't mean that obviously i don't mean this is sort of like oh i i and i don't mean as a moral as a
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moral good i mean in terms of skill no well what what can be ascribed to skill i still stand by my
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my evil chauncey gardner interpretation here i i think there's there's far less method to his madness
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than than actual madness that just happens to work in this context for whatever reason but and i i
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certainly share your respect for tyler cowan but i i don't agree here i think he's
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there's no advantage to him or at least i don't see the advantage in him being incoherent
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for him to contradict himself over the course of five minutes is not fourth level chess it's just
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a mistake right and and it's just the fact that he pays no price for that mistake whereas you and i
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would pay a very high price in in the context of a conversation like this he's managed to select
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an audience that doesn't care about contradictions right they don't they're not going to hold him to
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the letter of any utterance because they don't i mean why they don't i it's still a mystery to me i
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don't actually have a i don't think i have an adequate theory of mind for the the people and there
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are you know tens of millions of them who do not care when he says a indirect contradiction to b or vice
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versa over the course of you know two minutes and and it may be on a topic that they profess to care
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about and yet they don't care that you know you can't actually follow both of those paths through
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his mind or any apparent reality a while ago the philosopher harry frankfurt you know used the term
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bullshit as a technical term yeah and he says you know you know there's people tell the truth then
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there's people who lie but then there's bullshitters who are simply indifferent to the truth and and that
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that was coined before trump you know ascended but but it works it works well for him i think you're
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holding trump to sort of a standard that his audience doesn't he's he's seen as an entertainer
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a showman i mean so let me just say so just to give a sense of what i'm talking about cowan points out
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his speech is highly repetitive slow and ponderous i i have a soft spot for slow and ponderous because i i am
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that but highly repetitive like so when i watch him being highly repetitive i see neurological injury
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manifest right i see someone who is in a visibly audibly in a holding pattern because they can't
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get to the next thought right and and worse what i what i see with him and i've commented on this before
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i see with him to a unique degree and i've never seen it this bad in any other person i see him
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being prompted by and anchored to accidents in his utterances that he then is committed to shoring up
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and i mean the way i tried to illustrate this in the past and it's still i don't know i can't think of
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him another way but it's almost like he's speaking in verse but he's you know this is extemporaneous
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and he doesn't know what how he's going to complete the rhyme but he's he's held to it so
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he'll just say something like there was once a man from spokane right and he doesn't know where
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he's going after this right but he's got spokane he landed on spokane and then he has to get to
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something that rhymes there from immigrants we get too much cocaine yeah yeah and he'll land on that
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and that is the message right and it's born of a process back to frankfurt here he's just bullshitting
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to remind people of you know this brilliant distinction that frankfurt made between a
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bullshitter and a liar a liar is someone who is fully aware of the logical expectations of his audience
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he's fully aware of what reality is and the departures he's introducing from it in his speech
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and he's having to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces in where they fit in real time right so he knows that
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you're expecting coherence he knows what you know about the world and he's engineering his lies so as
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to go undetected a bullshitter is just talking he's not wasting any of the cognitive overhead to track
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what reality is or what your expectations are of you know his fit to it and he's just creating a mood
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with the way he speaks and bloviating and confabulating and that's what trump is doing to
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a degree that is truly unsurpassed and in any other walk of life he would immediately be recognized as a
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con man and a fraud and a bullshitter and someone who can't be trusted and certainly someone who can't
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be given significant responsibility and yet it works in this country at this time in the presidency so
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yes it's true that he's incredibly effective for the people he's apparently effective for but i do
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not understand it i think there's some sort of genius behind it i don't think he himself is a
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genius but i think everything you're saying there is the feeling that you he has no idea what he's going
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to say next he could drift everywhere he could find himself get some laughter from the crowd and seize
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on that and it's so different from the standard polish presentations one gets from from a typical
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politician i mean to some extent i've listened some of jordan peterson and jordan peterson is a thousand
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times more articulate yeah and and smoother and clearer well well you get somewhat of you get somewhat
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of the same feeling it's hilarious you said that because i've actually said the same point about talking in
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verse and completing the rhyme i've said about jordan too and in my moments of the greatest
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opposition with him that there there is a quality where he's not doing the reality testing that i
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would want him to do it just sounds good what he's saying and if you but if you actually bring him up
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short and say okay what do you actually mean by you know god or faith or whatever it is in the sentence
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then it goes into the ditch so there is that just kind of being carried away by the sound of your own
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voice but with trump it is so bereft of content right it's so it's at the level of a fourth grader
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and it's and it's repetitive at the level of a fourth grader i mean no no fourth grader repeats himself
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as much yeah as trump does but you can hear you can hear the trump derangement syndrome and this is this
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back to my point it's like i i stand by everything that i'm saying about trump now but the fact that i'm
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saying it the fact that it's taking up this much of our conversation is even for the people who will
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agree with me certainly many of them think you know this guy is living rent free in your brain
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and this is bad for you and it's bad for us and it's bad for conversation and it's and there's
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there's something true about that i mean i think we have to you know i don't know how we respond to
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that fact politically over the next nine months but there is something you know i really have had to
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pick my moments with trump and just ignore him for yeah many podcasts running because it's boring
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to criticize him ultimately but i'll add i'll add one thing to my blast of trump love then we can
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leave it alone yes which is you know other presidents have have phrases that they're known for
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you know the soft bigotry of low expectations or a lot of kennedy's lines and they were typically
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written by professionals but somehow i think these phrases we're going to remember like fake news
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drain the swamp make america great again make mexico pay for it the things which you do it sort of
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which people know by heart and he could start them and the audience will finish them these seem to be
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coming from trump's mind and it is it is there's so little to respect about him but he has some
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abilities some really extraordinary abilities well he has a i mean one ability is again this is a whether
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you call this an ability or a a symptom that's debatable but he is utterly shameless right he's
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scandal proof within his own mind he just cannot be derailed by being shown to be at odds with himself
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or with reality or and that again it's one of these crazy making things that he's just he can lie 16 000
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times and never pay a penalty for it well you're talking substance and and i agree with that but
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i'm thinking about style and and think about the analogy i was listening to a podcast by jordan
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peterson which i don't do but i just wanted to listen to what he sounds like what his book talk
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is and there's something about it where you don't want to shut it off if you have no idea where it's
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going and peterson does something which trump doesn't which he displays genuine curiosity and interest
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and energy a range of emotions you don't normally hear in this kind of talk and there's something
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about it he's a very good speaker but there's a kind of free associative meandering somewhat
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confabulatory thing going on in that there's not a rigorously honest reality testing and again i you
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know i i like jordan a lot so it's you know this is something i've said to his face and on stage and
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so it's you know this is not me saying anything behind his back that i haven't actually said to him both
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in private and in public and it's just on some level it's a different i mean he has an account
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for why this is a feature not a bug you know he thinks that you know my slavish attachment to reality
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testing and logic is something that is a symptom of my own you know rigidity and lack of awareness of
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certain truths that can be you know bivalenced or you know however i'm just making up words that that
00:24:51.860
and putting them in his mouth but he's more comfortable with paradox and a mythopoetic take
00:24:57.380
on reality than i am certainly but none of that i mean it would be amazing to know that behind closed
00:25:04.900
doors trump is very different everything i've said about trump and this is amazing this has gone on much
00:25:10.820
longer than i anticipated but more trump derangement syndrome yeah no it is true i i've let me cop to it
00:25:17.460
but i i think it's i would add that i think it's warranted everything i've said about trump and my you
00:25:23.140
know evil chauncey gardner thesis is readily disconfirmable i mean it could be disconfirmable
00:25:29.060
in a matter of 15 seconds i mean he would just have to say something that i would imagine he's incapable of
00:25:35.140
saying if he just for a paragraph was tenfold more articulate than i've ever seen him be
00:25:42.420
and said this is the way i talk with my friends behind closed doors but you know this is the way
00:25:46.260
i talk on stage and then show me both versions i would realize he actually is a genius who has
00:25:52.340
has calculated his effect on his audience you know then i'd be prepared to believe anything he could be
00:25:57.940
reading the meditations of marcus aurelius behind closed doors and talking for hours about them and
00:26:03.140
insightfully but i know exactly what he's doing behind closed doors or at least i think i do right
00:26:08.660
he's just watching fox and friends and shrieking at people and you know the reports of what he's
00:26:15.060
like behind closed doors certainly substantiate that anyway okay we're we're going to pivot to something
00:26:20.980
here which is really um adjacent to this topic and related to actually so you it was synchronous that
00:26:29.540
you you mentioned harry frankfurt because he has also written about inequality and wealth inequality
00:26:36.900
is something that is has been very much on my mind and it is really a pressing issue in our politics
00:26:44.020
now and and arguably the most pressing issue on the democratic side i don't know what you think of
00:26:50.500
the prospects of our nominating someone like bernie sanders or elizabeth warren in the general election
00:26:56.580
but a concern about wealth inequality would be the reason why that would happen yeah i i you know
00:27:03.140
putting aside the specifics of who's going to be next president i think people think in a very
00:27:08.660
confused way about inequality i think for the most part people think they're very concerned about wealth
00:27:16.900
inequality but they aren't really and and this actually comes from frankfurt who wrote a book on
00:27:21.940
a topic so frankfurt you know it says this isn't exactly his example this is the idea jeff bezos
00:27:27.700
compare compare jeff bezos to your average person with 10 million dollars they have a hugely unequal
00:27:33.780
amount of wealth way more than than you know at your average extremely poor person and rich person
00:27:39.300
even extraordinarily by by many magnitudes different than wealth but nobody worries about
00:27:44.580
that nobody said oh my god such inequality right except for the person with 10 million dollars
00:27:50.020
yes he feels the sting of proximity to bezos yes this is this is true yeah but in general it's not
00:27:56.020
the biggest problem in the world so i think and this is frankfurt's argument and i've developed this
00:28:01.540
in both technical papers and sort of casual papers when people say they're worried about inequality
00:28:06.660
they're typically worried about one of two other things and a few other possibilities one is poverty
00:28:11.860
you know poverty is terrible and and we tend to worry about poverty justifiably so we want to you know
00:28:20.260
a world in which everybody was you know well off can afford food and health care and recreation would be a
00:28:27.140
wonderful world and if we were in that world and some people made 10 times as much or 100 times as much
00:28:32.340
i think we would worry a lot less so there's poverty and then the second factor is unfairness
00:28:36.900
so there's a lot of laboratory experiments finding that even young kids get very upset at unequal
00:28:43.220
divisions but these are always cases where the unequal divisions are arbitrary if you switch it a
00:28:49.460
bit so let's say one person works harder than another and then makes more money the kids are happy with
00:28:54.820
the unequal divisions and they get an annoyed when the divisions are equal and the same thing for for
00:29:00.580
adults for regardless of the society people actually want unequal societies if you offer them total
00:29:06.660
equality they'll reject it they want unequal societies so long as the unequal the inequality is
00:29:12.820
calibrated to natural gifts or effort or or some sort of thing that doesn't seem unfair not many
00:29:25.780
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