Scott Adams was the most requested defender of our Commander-in-Chief. He was willing to come on the podcast, and we had a very civil and enjoyable conversation. If anyone was triggered, it was me. Scott certainly sounded like the meditator. I am perpetually triggered by our president, but I really enjoyed it, and I'll let you be the judge of whether Scott answered all the questions I put to him. I think there may have been moments where he might have hypnotized me. But anyway, listen to the podcast and let me know what you thought of the conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for listening and Happy Listening! Sam Harris The Making Sense Podcast is made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we re doing here, please consider becoming one. You ll get access to access full episodes of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. There s no ad-free version of the show available on most major podcast directories, so you won t have to pay for the premium membership plans. And you ll get a much better idea of who we re listening to the show and what the show is all about. Subscribe to our premium version of Making Sense. Sam's blog post on the show here. Want to become a supporter? Subscribe at anchor.fm/makingsensepodcast You'll get 20% off of the premium edition of the making sense podcast, which includes ads, best selling books, best-priced at $99.99, limited edition hardcover hardcover edition of $99, $99 and $99 paperback edition, plus a limited hardcover copy of the paperback edition of his newest book, "Win Bigly: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Bigly, Oh, Oh Yeah, a Bigger than That's a Good Deal? and much more! And a free copy of his new book that comes out in October, too! You can preorder the book on Amazon Prime Day, coming out in September! Subscribe on Audible, coming soon! I'll send me a review on my blog post about the book I'm looking forward to that's coming out on my website, so I'll be giving you a review of the book, so that you can get a discount on the book and get a chance to review it on my site, too, too? And I'll get a copy of my book on that!
00:11:12.400And my view on the politics of it is that my political preferences didn't align with either side in the election.
00:11:22.200I consider myself an ultra-liberal on social stuff, meaning that even liberals don't recognize me because I'm more liberal than liberals.
00:11:33.580I could give you some examples of that to fill that in if you want.
00:11:36.860And then on the big stuff, you know, the international stuff, the how do you beat ISIS and what's the best thing to do in North Korea, my view is that none of us really know the answer to that because we don't have the information that government would have and we don't have the full context that they have.
00:11:54.960So generally, I don't have a firm position on the big international stuff and on the smaller local stuff, the domestic stuff.
00:12:04.800I'm in favor of people doing whatever they want to do as long as it doesn't affect me.
00:12:11.000So, again, I should say that I haven't seen everything or read everything you've said on this topic.
00:12:17.820I've read some of your blog posts and I've seen some of your Periscope videos, which you've been doing quite regularly about Trump.
00:12:25.000But it seems to me that you are sort of having it both ways here because you seem to delight in his ability to get away with doing at least questionable things.
00:12:36.400I mean, I would say bad things, but certainly dishonest things because you admire his talent as a persuader.
00:12:42.320But to my eye, very quickly begins to seem like a defense of the bad things he's doing or at least a denial that they are bad or a denial that he's doing any harm to our civil discourse and to our politics by lying to the degree that he does.
00:12:56.580So where does your appreciation of the artistry grade into actually thinking he is good and liable to do good things?
00:13:07.800The way I like to frame it is that I'm helping people see him clearly without the filter that the opposition is putting on him because he has a set of skills and a talent that we've never seen before, meaning that nothing like this has ever been in the political realm that we've seen.
00:13:29.240So what he can do is probably different from what a regular politician can do, both on the upside and the downside, I would think.
00:13:36.840So I'm not discounting that there's greater risk with a President Trump than some vanilla president.
00:13:44.920But I think his supporters have said explicitly and often, we'll take the risk, we'll take the chaos.
00:14:23.120It is unambiguously true, and it is clear to both his supporters and his critics, that he says things fairly frequently that do not pass the fact checks.
00:14:36.000So I think we're starting from the same factual starting point.
00:14:40.320It understates it for me, but yes, I'm with you.
00:14:43.280Now, obviously, his supporters would say, well, that one thing he said wasn't so wrong, so there'd be lots of disagreement in the gray areas.
00:14:52.620But there's no question that there are a lot of things he said that don't pass the fact checking, and everybody agrees with that.
00:14:59.420And here's the part that I put on top of this that I think is helpful.
00:15:03.520When you understand persuasion at the level that he does, and at the level that I've come to understand it through my own work over the years, the truth is not as useful.
00:15:18.980I guess that's the best way to put it.
00:15:22.000It's not as useful as it should be because it doesn't change people's minds.
00:15:27.440And the job of politics is often to change people's minds, their hearts, their emotions, what they care about, what their priorities are.
00:15:34.560So if you were to look at the types of things that the president has said that didn't pass the fact checking, and that's the way I'm going to prefer to say it, is they are almost always emotionally true, or they are emotionally compatible with what his supporters are already thinking.
00:15:56.300So there is an emotional and directional truth to what he does that's independent from the facts being completely wrong.
00:16:05.640So, for example, when he said there were Muslims dancing on the rooftops or in the streets after 9-11, that does not pass the fact checkers.
00:16:17.020But it is unambiguously true that his supporters and even his critics would say, I'm a little concerned that there are some people in the Muslim faith who are not as unhappy about 9-11 as they should have been.
00:16:31.520So, in other words, what he said was technically, specifically, factually incorrect, as far as we can tell, you know, unless something new comes around.
00:16:40.500But it still fit. It fit what we were thinking. It fit the general truth that we all accept as probably true, and I would think you would accept that as well.
00:16:52.100And what you see in persuasion is something called pacing and leading, and it's a very important concept in persuasion.
00:17:00.500The pacing part is where you become compatible with the other person or persons you're trying to influence.
00:17:06.920You're trying to match them in some way that's important.
00:17:11.040And if you match them long enough, called pacing, eventually they will let you lead because you are one of them.
00:17:17.780They're comfortable with you. They agree with you. They feel the same way you feel.
00:17:21.900They trust you emotionally. And that's the way people need to trust you.
00:17:27.840Because trusting somebody factually is sort of a non-starter.
00:17:33.380It doesn't help that much, right? But trusting somebody emotionally says, yeah, I can let you do things that even I don't think are right, but I know that you're heading in the right direction.
00:17:44.200I trust that you have more information than I do.
00:17:46.900I trust that if you have to pivot because it doesn't work out, you'll do that.
00:17:51.160Because you and I are emotionally on the same page.
00:17:59.500Now, one of the things that President Trump and before that candidate Trump was saying that was emotionally compatible with a lot of people is, hey, there's an immigration issue.
00:18:11.960It brings with it some amount of crime that we wish we didn't have.
00:18:15.480And it brings with it some risk of terrorists slipping in, which we wish we didn't have.
00:18:25.000Now, that's the emotional truth that is common to both sides of the conversation, right?
00:18:31.200That everybody would like less of those things.
00:18:33.300Now, the way he does it, of course, is with his typical hyperbole of coming in with the biggest first offer you've ever seen, which is, I'm going to ship back, you know, what was it, 12 million people who are undocumented in this country?
00:18:48.140Now, when you heard it, and when people on the other side heard it, they quite reasonably said, holy hell, there's no way you can do that, first of all.
00:19:00.920It would be, you know, it would cause riots in the streets.
00:19:03.800It would cause a civil war, practically.
00:19:05.940I mean, that's such a big, hard to do, you know, bad thing.
00:19:11.000But when I heard it, I said to myself, and I said publicly a lot of times, he doesn't mean that.
00:19:16.280But he's taken a big first offer that gives him lots of room to negotiate back.
00:19:21.940So now, as we watch him as president, and what he's doing is, you know, I guess ICE is rounding up a lot of people who have committed crimes while in the country.
00:19:31.400You know, after coming into the country, they committed additional crimes.
00:19:34.300And probably there are some cases, I think almost surely, some cases where ICE, let's say, breaks down a door and there's a room full of people.
00:19:43.960And, you know, three of them have been in a, you know, serious gang violence situations.
00:19:48.980So, of course, you want to deport those guys.
00:19:51.500But then there's a couple of guys who are just members of the gang who, you know, you don't have any proof they did anything that was another additional crime.
00:20:11.180Now, when people see that story, and I'm sure that kind of story is going to be, you know, trickling out in different ways.
00:20:16.800And people compare that, they contrast it to what they imagined could have happened, which is, you know, 12 million people rounded up and shipped home.
00:20:25.760And they say to themselves, well, I wish we wouldn't deport people who we haven't seen for sure committed additional crime.
00:20:35.540But that's not so bad compared to what I thought was going to happen.
00:20:39.240So you see that process in a number of ways.
00:20:43.320You saw that when he he talked about fighting ISIS, he said, we're going to we're going to go back to waterboarding and maybe we'll kill the families of the of the terrorists.
00:20:54.140And a lot of people said, oh, my God, you can't do that.
00:21:06.160He got pretty tough on ISIS, and I would argue that civilian casualties probably have gone up because of that extra toughness.
00:21:15.420But we're not, you know, we're not we're not seeing the big outcry because he's been successful, apparently, against ISIS on the battlefield.
00:21:26.100So we see this pattern, which he has broadcasted for decades.
00:21:30.880He actually wrote a book on it, The Art of the Deal, in which he talks explicitly about using hyperbole, you know, in other words, things that don't pass the fact checking and making big first offers to give him lots of room to negotiate toward the middle.
00:21:47.460So the thing that his supporters believe that his critics do not is that he is emotionally and intellectually on their side and that he will work out the details when he needs to.
00:22:01.800So that's what his supporters believe.
00:22:31.780Sure enough, it's happening, you know, just as I predicted.
00:22:33.940Okay, well, there's a lot in there that strikes me as fairly strange ethically.
00:22:41.780For instance, this idea that he's making this first offer that is extreme, that then he walks back to something more reasonable, and that this is a technique for which he pays no penalty.
00:22:56.380It's just an unambiguously good technique that his fans recognize.
00:23:02.980I would never say he doesn't pay a penalty.
00:23:05.780This is a technique which absolutely, by its design, has a penalty.
00:23:10.980So, in other words, he's saying, this is going to cost me because the fact checkers are going to be over me and blah, blah, blah, but I'm going to do it anyway.
00:23:20.580It's not so much the lying part or the failing, the reality testing part.
00:23:25.620It's more like if I'm going to say to you, you know what I think we should do?
00:23:29.420I mean, let's just say this on the podcast.
00:23:31.100You know, I think we should round up those 12 million people and deport them.
00:23:35.220If I commit to that position, that's my position.
00:23:37.800Well, when you unpack that position, that commits me to things which I really must have thought about or at least am pretending to have thought about, which are fairly unethical.
00:23:48.780I mean, it gets much worse than what you describe.
00:23:50.980It's not just the fellow gang member or the, you know, very close to being a gang member who gets deported along with the convicted killer.
00:23:58.100It's the mom of, you know, an eight-year-old kid who is an American citizen, right?
00:24:05.020You know, so you have these just families broken apart.
00:24:08.180And so if I'm going to pretend to be so callous as to happily absorb those facts, like, yeah, send them all back.
00:24:16.620You know, they don't belong here in the first place.
00:24:18.500Or if I'm going to take the ISIS case, I'm going to say, yeah, we'll torture their kids.
00:24:24.800If that's my opening negotiation, I am advertising a level of callousness and a level of unconcern for the reality of human suffering all around me that will follow upon my actions that, I mean, should I get what I ostensibly want?
00:24:41.920It's like in these two cases, a nearly psychopathic ethics that I'm advertising as my strong suit, right?
00:24:49.800So how this becomes attractive to people, how this resonates with their values.
00:24:55.660I mean, I get what you said about people are worried about immigration.
00:25:02.200But when you cross the line into this opening overture that has these extreme consequences on its face, I mean, you don't have to think deeply about this, right?
00:25:11.060These are the things that get pointed out in 30 seconds whenever he opens his mouth on a topic like this.
00:25:17.280I don't understand how that works for him with anyone.
00:25:21.780Let me give you a little thought experiment here.
00:25:25.240We've got people who are on the far right.
00:25:28.860In your perfect world, would it be better to move the people who are on the far right toward the middle or the people on the far left toward the middle?
00:25:37.700Which would be a preferred world for you?
00:25:41.280Now things have gotten so crazy on the left that that is actually a genuinely hard question to answer.
00:25:47.880But I think, you know, moving everyone toward the middle, certainly on most points, would be a very good thing.
00:25:54.360So what you've observed with President Trump, through his pacing and emotional compatibility with his base, is that prior to Inauguration Day, there were a lot of people in this country who were saying, yeah, yeah, round them all up, send all 12 million back tomorrow.
00:26:14.180When was the last time you heard anybody on the right complaining about that?
00:26:18.980Because what happened was immigration went down 50 to 70 percent or whatever the number is, just based on the fact that we would get tough on immigration.
00:26:27.700And the right says, oh, OK, we're you know, we didn't get nearly what we asked for.
00:26:34.860But our leader, who we trust, who we love, has backed off of that.
00:26:39.580And we're going to kind of go with that because he's doing some good things that we like.
00:26:43.100And we don't like the alternative either.
00:26:45.680So this this monster that we elected, this this this Hitler dictator, crazy guy, he managed to be the only person who could have and I would argue always intended to move the far right toward the middle.
00:27:16.740He paced them and then he leaded he led them toward a reasonable situation, which I would say we're in.
00:27:24.560Well, I don't know that I would notice if they were complaining about it.
00:27:28.020I got to think I'm kind of an echo chamber, but you might notice it more than I would.
00:27:33.000I promise you I would notice it because I'm totally you know, I've got one foot in both sides.
00:27:37.500And and the number of people who are talking about that, even just talking about rounding up everybody and sending them back, just stopped.
00:27:47.920And by the way, that that's a big deal.
00:27:50.580I mean, he he brought a lot of people to his position again, whether that was his intent or in fact, the effect of his actions.
00:27:58.900I don't know. I mean, there's so much other chaos for people to be complaining about and worrying about.
00:28:04.640But I take a related point here, which which you could be making, which is that there is something else going on.
00:28:10.460There is there is the fact that people will follow him onto terrain that is quite different from the terrain they claim to want to occupy.
00:28:19.560And so they will they will kind of run roughshod over their own stated principles.
00:28:24.740And I'm noticing this with with, you know, establishment Republicans who once they grabbed his coattails, it seems like they will are willing to follow him anywhere, even into something that looks like almost treasonous level of fandom of Vladimir Putin.
00:28:38.760And so I'm sure we'll talk about that. But I want to before we continue down this line, I want you to describe this analogy that you've made, which I think is very useful.
00:28:47.860And you have this two different movies analogy. And I just want to put that in play for listeners, because I think it's it's a good framing.
00:28:55.740Yeah, there are two concepts that people need to understand to have any idea what has happened in the past two years.
00:29:01.420One is confirmation bias. I'm sure you've talked about this a number of times on your podcast and your books,
00:29:06.440which is the tendency for humans to see all evidence as supporting their side, even if it doesn't.
00:29:13.400All right. We're we're we're all in confirmation bias pretty much all the time.
00:29:18.920Nobody's immune from it. Nobody's smart enough to see past it. It's just the human condition.
00:29:23.120The other part that people have to understand is this thing called cognitive dissonance, which I'm sure you've also talked about.
00:29:30.520And that's the idea that if if our mind is set toward a specific reality, especially if it involves ourselves, you know, some self image and then we find ourselves doing something or learning something that violates what we're sure had to be true.
00:29:48.400We just reinterpret what we just reinterpret what we saw and spontaneously create essentially an illusion, an imaginary world that explains all the things that wouldn't have been explained without that hallucination.
00:30:03.160So what happened was on November 8th, 2016, there were a handful of people, including me, who saw things going just the way they imagined they would go.
00:30:15.480Now, that creates no trigger for cognitive dissonance because everything was consistent.
00:30:22.640I thought I was pretty smart. I thought I could predict what was going to happen.
00:30:26.720I did predict what was going to happen. But for a lot of the country, they they thought this was an impossible outcome.
00:30:33.760They'd been in their echo chambers and they saw there was just no way this could happen.
00:30:38.960There are people who have never even met a Trump supporter, much less imagined he could be elected.
00:30:44.580They looked at the polls. They saw it was 90, 98 percent likely that Hillary Clinton would win.
00:30:49.520And then the results didn't go that way. That's a perfect trigger for cognitive dissonance.
00:30:55.580And I described that election as a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb.
00:31:01.100And what it did was it split the the United States and some extent the rest of the world into what I call two movies that are running simultaneously on one screen.
00:31:12.660So if you imagine we're all in the audience, but half of the audience is looking at the same screen that you and I are and half of them are seeing one movie and the other half are watching an entirely different movie.
00:31:24.060In one of the movies, we had just elected Hitler or something like it.
00:31:29.700And people were taking to the streets to say, oh, my God, you know, the world is going to be on fire.
00:31:35.380And another half of the country were saying, hey, we got a guy who's probably going to be pretty good on jobs.
00:31:40.640And, you know, maybe he'll tighten up the borders and, you know, do some business like systems in government that we like.
00:31:48.760And that's all they saw. And the other side saw something completely different, an entirely different movie.
00:31:55.160Now, I had predicted prior to the inauguration that because of that setup, which I could see coming from a mile away, that we would experience the following arc.
00:32:08.460We would first of all, there would be huge protests because people thought that some Hitler character had been elected.
00:32:13.940But after a few months of President Trump acting like a normal president who is using the normal mechanisms of power and is getting some stuff done and moderating his positions as presidents do.
00:32:28.100That the Hitler illusion would start to dissipate and that it would eventually give way by summer.
00:32:34.140That was my prediction. And it has largely, you know, that the Hitler stuff is largely dissipated or lack of confirming evidence.
00:32:42.020And it was replaced with, well, he's not Hitler, but he's definitely incompetent.
00:32:47.380He is so incompetent. There is chaos in the White House. They can't get anything done.
00:32:51.960And I predicted that by the end of the summer, he would, in fact, get things done.
00:32:59.620But but the criticisms don't stop because that's just not the way it works.
00:33:05.320People don't change positions like that.
00:33:07.020They simply change the reasons that they oppose him.
00:33:10.980And I predicted that the reasons would change from, you know, he's Hitler to he's incompetent to.
00:33:17.660All right. He did get a lot of things done.
00:33:20.120And there were the things he said he was going to get done.
00:33:22.400And they they do match Republican positions.
00:33:38.000One thing I want to point out, which just strikes me as a strange emphasis that I've heard from you here.
00:33:43.160But I've also heard this just quite frequently from other Trump supporters.
00:33:46.780So I just want to flag it. I don't know what if much turns on it.
00:33:50.980But so, for instance, in your description of what created the cognitive dissonance, you talk about the failure of people who don't like Trump to predict that he would win the election.
00:34:01.560So everyone was just blindsided by the fact that he won.
00:34:04.540And this put them into this the other movie theater where they're seeing just civilization unravel.
00:34:11.180I mean, for me, it was never a matter of being sure that Hillary Clinton was going to win.
00:34:15.460In fact, the last poll I looked at that I thought was actually informative.
00:34:20.560You know, Trump had a 20 or 25 percent chance of winning.
00:34:23.920And I, you know, I'm statistically educated.
00:34:26.880I know how often a 20 percent chance of winning comes up.
00:36:22.180He was conning, apparently, according to your frame of things in prior to the election.
00:36:30.120It seems probably to you that he was conning enough people to do the things he needed to do, which was, you know, build buildings and keep his fortune high and become a reality TV star and all that stuff.
00:37:08.660So there's an important point here that I don't want to lose by going too far past it.
00:37:14.340Your your understanding of him at the time was that he could con some people.
00:37:20.780And apparently it was enough of the right people he was conning, to use your word, to effectively do the things he was trying to do.
00:37:28.640Would that would that accurately state your opinion?
00:37:30.860Well, yeah, but the things he was trying to do bore no relationship to becoming president or becoming somebody who's actually shouldering significant responsibility.
00:37:42.920But we're just talking about the tools of persuasion.
00:37:45.200And and what you just said, if I heard it right, is that even early on, you realize he had the tools of persuasion, which you would characterize as a con man.
00:37:56.160Just a different word for essentially the same set of tools.
00:37:59.100It has more to do with the intention, I guess.
00:38:01.300But the crucial difference here, again, I'm just trying to describe what it's like to watch my movie as opposed to your movie or the movie watched by half the country.
00:38:09.120I can see that he must be persuading somebody and he fully persuaded half the country to become president.
00:38:15.200But there is never a moment where I find him persuasive.
00:38:26.120It's like a it's I see a man without any inner life.
00:38:29.880I see I see the most superficial person on Earth is like as a guy who's been totally hollowed out by greed and self-regard and just delusion.
00:38:39.860I mean, the way he talks about himself is so it's like I mean, if I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window.
00:38:55.420I mean, it's like that barely overstates it.
00:38:57.940It's like I mean, you remember that scene in the end of The Exorcist where the priest finally he's driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and then he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness.
00:39:13.520Yeah, we've gone full exorcist on this.
00:39:15.460So I'll tell you, one of the one of the things that I write about and periscope about is the triggers or the tells for cognitive dissonance.
00:39:25.120You know, how do you tell that you're in it versus somebody else is in it?
00:40:51.260Well, no, it's just that he is a a liar who will lie whenever it suits his interest.
00:40:58.180And even when it doesn't suit his interest, he will lie with a with a an alacrity that I have never seen before in a public person.
00:41:06.740I think I think there are you have to break that into two categories, the things you're calling the lies, maybe three.
00:41:14.820There are some things which probably he thinks are right and he just gets wrong, which would be typical of any.
00:41:20.320I'll forgive him many of those things.
00:41:22.100Yeah, there are some things which are clearly just hyperbole, which he knows are not exactly factual, but it works better to, you know, make the big first offer.
00:41:31.480And then there's another category, which is the hardest for anybody to understand.
00:41:36.760And and I'm not sure I'll be able to sell this to anybody here.
00:41:39.560But if you are a trained persuader, you have such a low regard for some types of facts that you just don't care if they're right or wrong because they really aren't ever going to matter to the outcome.
00:41:53.560They won't matter to decisions and they won't matter to the outcome.
00:41:56.560Now, I believe, having been watching him through this filter now for a couple of years, that he can definitely tell the difference between all those categories and that I haven't seen him tell the lie that that causes, you know, the country to be harmed in any way.
00:42:13.740They all seem to be either trivial and he just doesn't care.
00:42:18.500And, you know, there's no point in apologizing because that's bad persuasion, too, in many cases or or they're emotionally correct.
00:42:27.400So my filter on this, that he's actually a skilled persuader and he knows exactly what he's doing and those things which are clearly just mistakes tend to be trivial.
00:42:39.740That is what I use to predict the outcome that got us exactly where we are.
00:42:45.560And my starting point was everybody can can hindcast.
00:42:49.860Everybody can say, oh, the way he won was here's my reason.
00:42:54.340CNN listed, I think, I don't know, 24 different reasons why the surprising result of his election happened.
00:43:04.400So, as you know, confirmation bias, blah, blah, blah, allows you to explain what happened in the past with any number of stories and they all fit.
00:43:14.220That's why we have, you know, trials and lawyers and all of their stories sound good and the jury has to sort it out.
00:43:20.380But what I did early on is I said, I'm so sure that these tools are real and consistent and he knows what he's doing that I'm going to risk my entire fucking career to predict that he's going to win it all and win it big.
00:43:34.180And not only did he win it big, but, you know, he won in the the electoral college.
00:43:55.480So if you look at the predictions and if you see that they seem to be hitting all the the right notes,
00:44:02.840that is a little more persuasive than saying, well, I'm going to look at it in the past and apply these, you know, 25 different filters that all pretty much work.
00:44:12.200There are lots of different explanations of how things work in the past.
00:44:15.720But, Scott, the emphasis on him successfully persuading doesn't deal with the fact that what he would be persuading someone toward or the country toward may not be a good thing.
00:44:29.560I mean, so, for instance, I think he is someone who is so morbidly selfish.
00:44:35.300And again, this is not me with a crystal ball.
00:44:37.120This is me just looking at how he's lived his life, the kinds of things he's done, the kinds of things he says about himself.
00:44:43.220He's put himself first to such a pathological degree that I think he's capable of committing treason or something like treason without even noticing it.
00:44:53.180There's there's no sense at all that he has the public good in mind when he's acting.
00:44:58.480So the fact that he's a good persuader, even if I were going to grant you that and there's other there's one thing I want to flag here that you just said that I I think is manifestly not true, which is that none of his lies have harmed our society.
00:45:11.500I think all of his lies have harmed our society.
00:45:14.300I think the fact that we have a president who lies and everyone knows it and and and no one can really trust what he has said until the facts come out.
00:45:23.120I think that has done immense harm to the world, frankly.
00:45:27.340In in what in what quantitative way is it?
00:45:30.400Would the stock would the stock market be at even higher record levels?
00:45:34.480The stock market is the wrong metric here.
00:45:37.020I mean, well, would would ISIS be reconstituting if he if he'd been a little more forthcoming?
00:45:42.500Would would North Korea have not have launched that last new what exactly would be the evidence?
00:45:48.260That's the something he said has actually harmed the fabric of society.
00:45:52.160The fact that all of us are talking about politics, the fact that politics is so much a part of our lives now is toxic.
00:46:00.600It's a sign that something is wrong with our society.
00:46:04.100If things were good, we would not be talking about politics.
00:46:22.560So, first of all, the going back to the two movies on one screen, the the people on the right, the people who are supporting Trump are having the best two years of their lives.
00:46:33.360I mean, I have never seen such joy and happiness coming out of that segment of the public.
00:46:37.840But again, that's that's an amoral claim.
00:46:39.740I mean, you know that that would have been said of to take the extreme example, the burgeoning enthusiasm for the thousand year Reich in 1938.
00:46:48.620I mean, it's just like you get nothing with that claim.
00:47:02.940I think it's a bad meme that we have to quash somehow.
00:47:05.040No, I've actually been writing I write this in my new book that when somebody retreats to analogy, whether it's a Hitler analogy or not, it's because they've run out of reasons.
00:47:15.360Like nobody uses an analogy if they have a reason because a reason is way better than an analogy.
00:47:27.800If you're not getting what I'm saying, but I know you'll get this other test case that I think is actually isomorphic with what I'm talking about, well, then I go to the analogy.
00:47:38.100It's only bad if it's a bad analogy, but nothing hinges on that.
00:47:41.820No, because all analogies are approximations by design.
00:47:45.500So you're not talking about the same topic.
00:47:48.560Anyway, we could talk about analogies some more.
00:48:12.940So back to the whether it's bad that we're all talking about politics.
00:48:16.140I've actually been streaming and talking and blogging about this very point that we have collectively as a society learned more about each other, the nature of truth, reality, persuasion in particular.
00:48:31.360You'll see lots of people talking now about cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, persuasion.
00:48:37.100These are important concepts for people's happiness and understanding of their condition that we never had before.
00:48:44.220And in fact, before the election, I had said several times and publicly that what Trump was going to do was not just change politics, which he did.
00:48:54.240I mean, he changed everything, but that he would rip a hole in the fabric of reality and let us peek through.
00:49:00.200And that hole is what we're peeking through right now, which is that people can sit in the same theater watching a different movie and that there's a reason for it.
00:49:25.380You know, if you're, if you're locked in that smaller, less aware world where you think that people make decisions on logic and facts because you think they should, you're, you're missing the biggest part of life, which is that people don't.
00:49:40.140Yeah, I would agree with you if you said to me, Scott, I think we should use reason and facts and we should never depart from that.
00:49:49.880We should, but we can't because we're not built that way.
00:49:52.980We humans don't have that capacity in general.
00:49:55.700Yeah, we can in very constrained ways like science, but in general, no.
00:49:59.920Okay, well, let's plant a flag there because that's an interesting topic that is obviously bigger and deeper than this political topic and maybe we'll get to it.
00:50:07.380And that's actually the topic in some measure of your first book or your last book that I've been reading.
00:50:11.900And if we have time, I'd love to touch that.
00:50:15.660I mean, again, I'm, I have this creeping feeling of confusion or bewilderment that I want you to sort out for me.
00:50:22.260And it comes down to this two movie analogy because I don't see how they are actually different movies.
00:50:29.160I get that in the other theater, the fans of Trump don't care about certain things that are appearing on the screen.
00:50:38.280And I care very strongly about those things, but I don't get how they're actually not seeing these things or they're seeing them differently.
00:50:46.300And I want to take you back just to what you said before when I went full exorcist on you.
00:50:53.200Because I think there have been some news reports recently that said that Trump, Trump supporters know exactly what's true and what isn't.
00:51:03.140And there isn't that much difference between the two sides.
00:51:05.980I'll give you an example of like, this is what the kind of thing that's in my movie.
00:51:09.200There's literally a hundred things I can mention here, but I'll just mention a couple.
00:51:12.660So it just, it seems to me that everything you need to know about Trump's ethics were revealed in the whole Trump University scandal, right?
00:51:22.580So I mean, this is a guy who's having his employees pressure poor elderly people to max out their credit cards in exchange for fake knowledge.
00:51:34.180Now you understood that to be a license deal, right?
00:51:36.900Well, yeah, but I understand that to be the kind of thing that he would have to know enough about to know what he was doing.
00:51:44.440If he only found out about it after the fact, that's not the kind of thing you would defend.
00:51:49.320It's the kind of thing you would be mortified about and you would apologize for and you would pay reparations for if you're this rich guy who has all the money you claim to have.
00:51:57.620I mean, it's like, unless, unless you were a master persuader who knew that if you ever backed down from anything, people would expect you to back down in the future.
00:52:08.840But what you're describing is a totally unethical person, right?