#188 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I try to get my friend Prof. Paul Bloom to say nice things about Donald Trump. It's a difficult task, and a heavy lift emotionally and ethically spiritually, but it's a good one politically and politically, and it's one that's not going to get any easier once you know what to say about the man in charge of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. And it's not that he's a decent person, or that he has any positive moral qualities, it's that he s a moron who happens to be the most powerful man in the world, and that he won the presidential election by playing 4d chess with the electorate. But is that a brilliant act of political persuasion? Or did he just happen to work given the political attitudes and moral attitudes of 40% of the electorate? And did he happen given the attitudes and attitudes of the ugliest, most authoritarian, sexist, and sexist part of the Ugliest part of my male imagination? And I'm just gonna say that he could have said ugly and authoritarian and sexist things that could have been the most ugly and sexist he could possibly have said, and yet he did it anyway. And I don't think I've ever heard of a better way to do it than that, and I'm not even remotely close to the best I've heard of it. -- -- at least not by anyone who could do it, at least in my humble opinion -- is it possible to be a good thing? -- and that's the kind of thing, right? -- I think so. -- I'm making sense of it! -- make sense? -- by -- making sense -- by my friend, Prof. -- by me, Dr. Paul Blakeney -- let me know what you think of it? -- and I'll let you know if you agree or disagree with me -- or don't? -- or do you agree with me? -- make sense, please tell me what you would like to know more about it? I'll be listening to it, making sense? I mean, do you think so? -- can you have any thoughts on it, or would you agree? -- do you have an opinion on it? or not? -- are you interested in it, and would you want to help me know more? -- please let me help me out? -- if you're interested?
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris and i'm once again with my friend paul
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bloom paul thank you for joining me hey sam good to talk to you we've been making a habit of this
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this is fun this is a lot of fun and and i just want to i'm paul bloom everybody knows who you are
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but i'm paul bloom professor of psychology at yale university and i want to sort of start by
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continuing a conversation we were having you know just just now and we've been having over the last
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little while where i'm going to try to get you to say something nice about trump
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and i figured out the way to do it put it this way are you ready for it yeah well i'm bracing myself
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because this is a heavy lift emotionally and ethically spiritually i'm not i'll reassure you
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i'm not going to ask you to say anything like he's a decent person or he has any positive moral
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qualities it's a different line so here's how it goes imagine a competition that starts off with a
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lot of people a thousand a hundred gradually whittles down to a dozen and these aren't extremely
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motivated people they're accomplished some of them have extremely strong records of success
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and they're seeking after probably the most sought after prize in the world and they have a
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competition that lasts a year at least many many months this is seeming vaguely familiar and it's
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vaguely familiar that's right hypothetical not a hypothetical sometimes they they battle independently
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but there's a lot of face-to-face confrontations where they're in a room and a million people are
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watching them yeah and it's a zero-sum game can only be one winner yeah and after a long savage
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battle this guy who actually had never competed before who had no no no reasonable qualifications
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for it wins so as you've twigged on i'm talking about the republican primaries and i'm talking about
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trump winning now i'm less impressed that he won the election once you get to an election in this
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country it's a coin toss you know half the people are going to vote for the republican half for the
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democrat and you're fighting for the smidgen of undecideds but doesn't it say something extraordinary
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about him that he won i can give you some of what you're asking for i think yes he he clearly has
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an understanding of television that his opponents didn't have even though they're all they were all
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professional politicians and some of them are just anti-charismatic i mean he was up against ted
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cruz and jeb bush people who didn't have a stage presence and couldn't be trained to have one
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apparently and you add to that his experience as a showman really you know as a reality tv
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impresario mostly again i go back to my evil chauncey gardner thesis which is the responsibility
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for his success really isn't in him it's more in the environment it's in the electorate's
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relationship to fame and having seen someone on television so much he was in fact one of the most
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famous people on earth even though he was kind of a rodney dangerfield character in the business
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community but he's one of the most recognizable people more so than his opponents but that's the
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environment i mean i guess i should remind people not everyone knows the reference because i'm old
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but chauncey gardner was this character in the jersey kosinski novel being there which became that film
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starring peter sellers and he was a gardener who happened to be a moron but he was overheard
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saying aphoristic things like in the spring new flowers always bloom or something like that and this
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was mistaken for political wisdom and then through the course of events he winds up being an advisor
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to the president but so in that case it's totally clear that the audience is in on the joke they
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realize he's a moron albeit a wholly well-intentioned one and it's all of the projection
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and misapprehension and confusion in the environment that winds up promoting him to a position of power
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and when i look at trump when i look at the things that he's done that have been so successful like
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you know chanting locker up at his rallies right now was that a brilliant act of political persuasion
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was he playing 4d chess with the electorate or did it just happen to work given the political
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attitudes and moral attitudes of 40 percent of america and i think it's the latter i mean i think
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he literally could have said almost anything ugly and authoritarian and sexist he could have said
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and i'm just gonna now spitball from the ugliest part of my male imagination he could have said
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i wouldn't want to see her naked i'll tell you that you know keep your clothes on hillary then people
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would be chanting keep your clothes on right i think he actually did say he was talking about her
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i think going to the bathroom at some point and one of the debates and and you know the crowd went
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wild at the very thought of it maybe i've repressed that moment yeah i don't see locker up as a brilliant
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political move i don't even see it as a move it's more of him that allows him to show up as a kind of
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super stimulus to 40 of america i mean there's something so cartoonish about him and it and he has
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the power of a cartoon and now you've got me on another anti-trump rant here this is but so i once
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said he was like a golem that had been conjured by every bad thing that had ever been said about
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america it's like the physical manifestation of everyone's external judgments of just what the
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ugly american is like but it is something like that i mean if you took professional wrestling and
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mcdonald's french fries and the nra and infomercials about bogus products that don't work and you just
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mix them all together and you stick them in the back of a tacky white limousine and you drive it around
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central park 500 times you open the door out would step donald trump he's the confection of all of that
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american crap and for whatever reason that apotheosis of all that is wrong with us all that is
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just self-regarding and obtuse that works for 40 of america at this moment in american history
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so it's a kind of perverse power he's got the whatever you know that uh what was the i don't really
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follow the avengers movies but the um what was that glove with all the stones that josh brolin was
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trying to get yeah thanos yeah thanos up with his glove i mean he's got the stones of fucking
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hypocrisy and narcissism and you know he's working on the banality of evil and eventually he will have
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all the power in the universe when everything goes wrong so i have really failed in my quest to get
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is that what you were hoping for it has backfired horrendously so here's your counter analysis as i
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see it my analysis is he has some skills in that he knows what to say to enrage many people including
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you and me and to delight so many others face to face in a debate ho go he'll be savage and cruel
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and comic and funny in a way that other people can't and in the whole places other people won't go
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and these abilities these these dark abilities are a large part of why he's president now i think your
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analysis is more like i can't i can't reiterate your your beautiful description but somehow he spawned
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somehow he was born and he developed and now you have this creature with this this disgusting
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degrading manner which bizarrely is strangely appealing and he gets no credit for it it's just the way he is
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maybe i'll give you a little more than you have any right to expect i can imagine in fact i'd be
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surprised if this weren't true i can imagine that behind closed doors i would be surprised at how he
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shows up i bet he's got some level of of emotional intelligence and charisma that if only given now that
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he's ruler of the free world because i've never met him i've never seen him in person i would imagine that
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the person i see on television and on stage is not the whole person something has to explain
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the fact that behind closed doors he manages to keep anyone on his team for more than a day and a half
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though often not much longer than yes that's true but but yeah i i i think i agree i don't think
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you know i don't think when he's sitting by himself you know he's he's reading dickens and and
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writing poetry wouldn't that be amazing that would be something but but i imagine that a lot of what
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we see is a show and and it's a very very good show and it's it's quite entertaining and and i think
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that that he might in his personal life actually just kind of tone it down and become more of a
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recognizable human being but there's something else which is a very backhanded compliment i think he's
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very good at being cruel i think he's a very effective sadist i feel that a lot of his vicious
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attacks on people of which they number in the hundreds if not the thousands by now have really
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hurt people have really damaged people and i think he he has the the bullet the bully's understanding of
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where of of what will make their victim cry he's definitely a bully but again the effectiveness of his
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attacks on people the fact that it deranges their lives and you know often causes them to have to
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get security or move from where they're living i mean really they're effective in really screwing
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people over massively again that's not a sign of how cutting his or clever his names are for people or
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anything else he's actually tweeting it's just the fact that he's the leader of a a mob he's got a
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dangerous personality cult behind him and we live in an environment where if you have anything like
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that kind of social presence you can just direct your mob to dox people and otherwise screw them
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over online and he does that i mean he does it totally recklessly you know eventually someone's
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going to get killed because of one of his tweets and there'll be no recourse he's got to know that what
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he does is dangerous on twitter i guess part of what's driving me is is almost a version of the
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argument from design where if you see something complicated and in this case successful you say
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it's unlikely to be random so you know if if we were theists we might say i guess god decided that
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trump was his man and and and gave him this great fortune but we're not theists so i think what we
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should look for is some abilities something something going on that has caused him to do these extremely
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low probability things but he i mean he's the distillation of the american grotesque in a way
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that is you know we have not seen before and we saw its manifestation on reality tv for yeah more than
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a decade his theme song was i think it was money money money money right and it's just the crassness
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of american bullshit if you played it with gold that's trump and yet through amazing happenstance
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he managed to move it all the way into the oval office and now it's there and the juxtaposition
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between who he is really and the moral and political seriousness of trying to steer human history
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at this moment is an insane juxtaposition and you know half of the country wants to see every
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institution destabilized anyway i mean the other thing is the lack of regard the lack of respect the
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lack of trust in institutions now is an all-time low and that is i mean he is the personification of
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that change of attitude i mean he's ushered it in to some degree it also was the explanation for the
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fact that he was able to take the stage in the first place i would say yeah i'll just say i i i i agree
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with a lot of that i'll just say one thing which is that i'm sure you've had friends i have friends too
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who said they predicted this and some of them did predict it i sure as hell didn't and and i i bet
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you didn't so whatever happened it wasn't obvious it was going to happen look so question you and i
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were talking before about the democratic debate and so can i get you to say something nice about
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sanders what do you think of sanders i should remind people our last podcast was recorded just
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before the democratic debate in las vegas where bloomberg made his first appearance and i believe
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i was appropriately cautious in my um my expectations for bloomberg we were both cautious neither one of
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us said bloomberg's gonna really rip it up up there and do very well no so i was certainly worried about
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that i am i don't know that i thought his performance was as bad as it has been said since
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it was definitely bad but you know it's being viewed as just catastrophic it could it could have
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been worse yeah no imagine ways which it could have but he but he did very very poorly he could
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have burst into tears he could have cried he could have you know shat himself there's a whole list of
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options which could have been worse yeah but but once you get beyond the sort of he did very poorly and
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and he did poorly in a way that i think unfortunately matched up with the negative view many people have of
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the truth is there just may not be good answers to some of those challenges right so that could
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explain it but he did seem kind of blindsided by much of what warren would imagine he would have
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practiced and practiced and practiced and worked with people and do the thing that these politicians
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do which is come up with a joke or a way to distract it or a way to honestly apologize and he seemed as
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if he these challenges about the sexual harassment issues about stop and friskly was hearing them for the
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first time right right there was a new yorker article that gave some color to what those ndas
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probably conceal it sounds like he's going to release a few of them but i don't know whether
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there's more but it just sounds like he clearly is from the madmen era of you know sexual impropriety
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and so the kinds of things he said again there's no allegation for anything he's done in the me too
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sense which is certainly good and compares favorably with the president who's trailing i think 19
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allegations of sexual assault this is utterly asymmetric warfare here the fact that we have to
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concern ourselves with bloomberg's bad jokes where the president is managed to get off scot-free i mean
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we're now recording this on the day that harvey weinstein was just found guilty of some degree of
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rape and it wasn't the highest charge on which he was indicted but he's still facing it seems a lot
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of jail time for what happened today and trump is a character like weinstein if these allegations about
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him are true or at least damn close we're not talking about bad jokes so it's crazy that the democrats are
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the debate was as many of us tweeted like a circular firing squad i mean basically everyone
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was quickly rendering everyone else unelectable and that's what i'm worried about on our side that we
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could just get to the general election with whoever the candidate is this is somebody who has to function
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by ethics and political norms that don't translate at all across the aisle and yet there's no way of
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transcending this basic asymmetry so so let's take this one step up isn't this the stupidest way to
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choose a leader yeah have a debate i mean you know it's it's what people do people like seeing fighting
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but debates demonstrate the ability to memorize good lines to be good at interrupting to be very fast on
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your feet you know to be to be savage in a certain way i've heard people say we really want a good
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debater to come out from this this sequence of democratic debates so they could be a good debater
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against trump and it seems ridiculous what a terrible way to choose a leader you know i i i tend i tend to
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have a libertarian streak but i gotta say if if i was in charge i would i would you know ban debates
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at the political stage no more debates people should be should speak should get interviewed they should
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be discussed discuss their policies and everything but this mano a mano you know demonstration of your
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of your basically combat ability is so grossly unrelated to what you'd want in a president
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no i agree we don't do that for anything else we value you're looking for a swim coach you don't have
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them debate other swim coaches you don't have university presidents debated out only for this
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the problem with debates which i've long worried about is that the way to win a debate is to get a big
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laugh at your opponent's expense if you can do that you have won no matter what else happens in the debate
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it does reward any kind of comic timing or you know a semblance of comic timing given the lackluster
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performances of the kinds of people who tend to find themselves on those stages but yeah if you can
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get off a good line you win so it has no relationship to your qualifications for the office i think there's
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one thing so you asked me about sanders and i think there's something i should clarify because i noticed
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some comments in response to the last podcast so i believe i said last time around that i thought
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sanders is unelectable which i noticed provoked some howls of displeasure and i think i also wondered
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whether or not it might be preferable to have a billionaire self-fund his campaign you know i.e.
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Bloomberg and then be beholden to no one and that that might be better than the normal situation
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where politicians perpetually have their hands out and get entangled with special interests and i
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remember you countered that in the case of bernie we're talking about small donations not special
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interests and then i further said that i wondered whether this just made him beholden to the leftist
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mob and so some people interpreted this as my expressing a preference for aristocracy or oligarchy
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over democracy so i think i should clarify that my paramount concern here is that we get trump out
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of office for reasons that i have not been shy about stating and so my concern with bernie being
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captured by his audience is that he may be unable i think he's frankly unable to tack to the middle
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in a credible way in the general election and therefore i think he's just bound to lose to trump
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i mean i know we have polls that show him beating trump in some key states but in the last few days
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this has changed a little bit but you know up until a few days ago he has not experienced the
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extremely uncharitable vetting that he's going to get hour by hour in the general election and so
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i mean we're now seeing videos of him his recent trip to the soviet union where you know their
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cultural institutions and their subways seem so much better than our own is at the height of the cold war
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we're seeing articles where you know he's blaming us for the hostage crisis in iran and blaming
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carter as a warmonger you can find him looking completely out to lunch with respect to our foreign
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enemies and he also can't say how he's going to pay for anything and as the price tag for his promises
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goes up into the tens of trillions of dollars i mean literally he the 60 minutes interview last night
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suggested that he was you know about to cut a check for a minimum of 30 trillion dollars over
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the next 10 years but it was probably more like 50 trillion dollars and could give absolutely no
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account no credible account of how he could pay for this and this is just the beginning it's like the
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first 48 hours of him looking like he's going to be the candidate i'm just worried that he's actually
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unelectable that's saying nothing about my attitude toward democracy or even you know sanders
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himself it's just i'm just worried that promoting him is guaranteeing four more years of trump
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i think some of that might might be true i mean one thing to realize is if we choose any other name
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warren biden mayor pete we could play the same game right we could you could easily list all sorts of
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problems this person has not to the same degree no i don't i don't see it well bloomberg i think
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functions by a different physics because he whatever his flaws are trump's much worse on exactly
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those points and then you just have to sort of pick your billionaire yeah but a lot of democrats
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might refuse to play right pick your billionaire and just stay yeah that's the real liability with
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bloomberg with mayor pete or um klobuchar i think you oh god i don't don't get me i mean i don't know
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if you know this but mayor pete is gay i don't know if you've been following the news oh he's gay
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let me rethink this and my whole political calculus actually and i actually think that that is going to be
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a pretty serious liability more more than sanders judaism which i think will actually cut into him
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a bit yeah i think the judaism is a non-issue or close to i think we touched that last time i think
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it's yeah that wouldn't be a fatal issue and i i don't know about the homophobia variable but the
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branding issue i mean just the word socialism whatever he may mean by it i think it's fatal it's
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literally like running as a pedophile where you have to then say no no no it's not pedophile as you
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know you say i know you've seen pedophiles in the movies but the moment you're having to explain
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this word you're losing maybe millennials and uh gen z are kind of out of touch with
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actually awful associations with the concept of socialism but they they are when they think
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socialism they think denmark and and and bernie's honest he says when i say socialism i mean denmark
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and you know denmark there are arguments as to whether this could extend to the american model but
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but that's what he's talking about but the truth is when you look at his history it's not so clear
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if you go back far enough he's looking pretty red right i think that's fair enough but you got it so
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one of the things you mentioned was this comment on the iran crisis with the hostage and everything
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and you got it exactly right but what is this 40 years ago right it's a long time but he would need
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some credible account for how he's changed and take him on the issue of israel right it's like he has
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the sort of self-hating masochistic moral confusion around the politics there he's got genuine anti-semites
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and theocrats in his inner circle i mean like someone like linda sarsour right who are advising
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him on these issues and literally functioning as his surrogates in certain cases he celebrates these
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people on social media i mean linda sarsour this is like having you know farrakhan as one of your
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advisors i mean it's just completely clueless about the the moral and political asymmetries here so so
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you're making you're making a moral case let me shift it to political case do you think this is
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going to hurt him well it certainly should hurt him and i think it would hurt him yeah oh yeah i mean
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i think in the general election i mean people will be completely freaked out by the idea that someone
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like linda sarsour could have conceivably wind up in somebody's cabinet this is every bit as bad as
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anything trump is capable of right it's just it's nuts let me offer a different perspective on something
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you said you said you know it doesn't seem like he's going to be able to adequately move towards
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the center and i think you're right but i think the advantage of sanders that say mayor pete doesn't
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have and biden well biden might have but the advantage of sanders is he might actually take away trump
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voters he may take away people who voted for trump because they feel that they they hate the system
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they feel screwed they they feel capitalism has has left them you know they've been left out of of
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everything good about america and i think i think sanders could could take trump voters away in a way
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that a lot of other people on the stage would not be able to yeah i don't i don't really i mean i guess
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i guess it's conceivable but then those are some pretty confused voters and i don't know how many of
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them there could conceivably be i mean i think warren i mean just the amount of daylight there is
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between warren and sanders around the just the word socialism and the fact that she can just say
00:25:07.780
she's a capitalist and you know she's not tempted to brand herself as a socialist even though her
00:25:13.060
economic policies are in many cases indistinguishable from his i think that's a crucial difference and
00:25:18.540
you know she's not going to get it but you know something i i agree with it i with you i'm not
00:25:23.160
i i can't explain what happened i don't think anybody can but i always thought warren in some
00:25:27.840
way strictly dominated sanders like everything sanders did she did better she she had you know
00:25:33.780
a lot of his good ideas but she didn't brand herself as a socialist she's incredibly wonky and
00:25:39.120
smart i mean you may disagree with her but she's but she's she's very into weeds she's very personable
00:25:45.680
face to face and then for some reason some combination of sexism or bad luck or or
00:25:52.600
i don't know well she did one stupid thing which i don't think sanders has done i mean she
00:25:59.080
got pulled into the wokeness to a degree that sanders hasn't i mean sanders is just still just
00:26:04.860
hitting the point of class warfare yeah relentlessly and which you know warren hits as well but warren
00:26:11.280
got pulled into the intersectional mishigas i mean she's literally tweeted at one point i think the tweet
00:26:18.720
was like black cis and trans women are the backbone of our democracy i believe that's verbatim right so
00:26:26.940
there's some charitable gloss you can put on that but the fact that that gets summarized in everyone's
00:26:32.100
brain as black trans women are the backbone of our democracy all 17 of them there's just no reason for
00:26:40.240
her to do that right she's pandering to a constituency so small it's so short-sighted and
00:26:47.360
seems calculated to alienate half of america but but that's not i i remember the tweet you're talking
00:26:52.900
about but that's not what happened to her i mean well no but i do think that's a fatal flaw in her
00:26:59.480
campaign i don't know i don't actually know what happened to her in terms of what caused her to lose
00:27:04.380
her momentum this time in this last round if she were ahead right now and we were talking about her
00:27:10.400
as the front runner i'd be worried that she's also unelectable for reasons that are slightly different
00:27:16.320
than sanders but you know just as concerning so who is electable i think if bloomberg could complete
00:27:24.680
a string of sane and seemingly honest sentences in defense of his record i think you think all those
00:27:32.700
elizabeth warren voters would and bernie sanders voters move to bloomberg everyone who doesn't want
00:27:38.360
trump will eventually have to move to whoever is in the general election for the democrats and i just
00:27:44.560
think once there's a single candidate you know any of them stands a chance of solidifying everyone's
00:27:52.180
understandable concern about trump i think if you can't energize half of america around just that
00:27:59.540
single variable just getting this guy out of office then it's hopeless but i think things change
00:28:06.060
once there's just one of them the moderates are split between biden and klobuchar and yeah and
00:28:12.180
buddhich and bloomberg and if it could magically be klobuchar i think yeah you know that she stands a
00:28:19.300
chance it's just like everyone would just reset she does stand a chance you know the person i miss
00:28:23.820
i miss cory booker i i've i've never met him i've heard great things about him and he seems like
00:28:29.340
yeah a gracious intelligent broad-minded person he's uh yeah he seems you know genuinely likable in a way
00:28:36.260
i don't find any of these people and and also what he says makes sense and he seems rational and
00:28:42.460
pragmatic and all good things yeah and i could never figure out why he didn't translate better on
00:28:49.000
stage or on i mean yeah so much of this is just the way people speak and and now we're back to the
00:28:54.460
debates and and how crappy they are yeah it's a performance but i really do think it's got to be
00:29:00.860
possible to back foot trump in a debate it's not too much to hope that in the general election he could
00:29:08.140
be consequentially embarrassed i think the best person to do that again it's just awful that bloomberg
00:29:15.220
doesn't have more natural gifts in this regard because if he had a great stage presence he has
00:29:22.500
the perfect biography to go after trump from yeah and and and i've been kind of ragging on him the
00:29:29.240
last episode in this one too but you know what i think about bloomberg is he actually does a lot of
00:29:33.340
good he gives a lot of money to charity he gives you know over i think a billion dollars to johns
00:29:38.380
hopkins money for regarding uh working on climate change and gun control and helping other democrats
00:29:45.220
he's he's you know a mass unlike trump uh he's a massively generous person no i know i mean that
00:29:51.380
that's why the juxtaposition is so um invidious but sam speak speaking of juxtapositions do parents
00:29:58.460
matter oh yeah so we we got a question about this yeah we agree we agree to do sudden transitions so
00:30:04.420
this is this is by the way from proxima ratio and that's the name of on twitter yes my name of one of
00:30:11.100
sam's 30 million twitter followers and and he raised the question and there's been a bit of
00:30:16.080
discussion online about the idea of whether or not parenting matters yes and this could have been
00:30:22.480
seeded by our friend steve pinker circulating a boston globe article about a meta-analysis of all of
00:30:30.500
the studies that have interrogated this question whether parental influence really determines anything
00:30:37.600
in the space of how kids grow into adulthood this thesis was brought to the world's attention i think
00:30:44.660
mostly by judith rich harris did you know her i did she's she's passed away uh yeah unfortunately
00:30:51.300
i actually um i edit a journal behavioral brain sciences where we we publish controversial and
00:30:58.000
theoretically interesting things and then dozens and dozens of people write commentaries on it and i
00:31:03.220
i contacted her after her book and asked whether she would contribute to our journal which we usually
00:31:08.760
don't make invitations but this was an exception and she was very nice but she said her health would
00:31:13.080
not would not allow it yeah so her thesis was that for virtually everything we care about the human
00:31:19.900
mind the human personality human ability is basically 50 genetic more or less and then 50 environment but
00:31:28.880
that environment crucially from the point of view of mom and dad doesn't seem to be anything they're
00:31:35.620
doing it seems to be the influence of peer group and other if you'd like to continue listening to this
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