Making Sense - Sam Harris - #87 — Triggered

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:46.400 Today I am speaking to Scott Adams.

00:00:49.580 Scott was the most requested defender of our Commander-in-Chief.

00:00:55.680 He, quite happily, was willing to come on the podcast, and we had a very civil and enjoyable

00:01:03.120 conversation.

00:01:04.520 If anyone was triggered, it was me.

00:01:08.220 Scott certainly sounded like the meditator.

00:01:11.920 I am perpetually triggered by our president, but I really enjoyed it, and I'll let you be

00:01:19.380 the judge of whether Scott answered all the questions I put to him.

00:01:24.820 I think there were moments where he might have hypnotized me, and I just moved on to

00:01:29.460 other topics.

00:01:31.520 But anyway, thank you, Scott, for coming on.

00:01:33.460 It was a worthy experiment to try to talk about all this.

00:01:37.260 Scott, if you don't know him, though many of you surely do, is the creator of Dilbert,

00:01:42.480 one of the most popular comic strips of all time.

00:01:46.380 And he's done this full-time since 1995.

00:01:50.840 Before that, he worked for 16 years at various companies from which he has mined all this

00:01:56.100 material for Dilbert.

00:01:57.860 And he's written best-selling books about Dilbert, and all his cartoons have been wrapped

00:02:04.260 up.

00:02:04.480 But he's also written a book that I have been reading, which we really didn't talk

00:02:09.220 about at all in this interview, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

00:02:14.340 And this is a book that is filled with life advice, and it is good advice insofar as I've

00:02:19.700 read it thus far.

00:02:20.940 And he has another book coming out, which really is the substance of our conversation, but that

00:02:25.340 book is not out yet.

00:02:26.600 It'll be out in October.

00:02:28.540 You can pre-order it on Amazon.

00:02:30.260 The title is Win Bigly, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.

00:02:36.340 And Scott and I gave it a good hard try to converge on questions about persuasion with

00:02:44.540 respect to Trump and just how much facts matter.

00:02:49.700 We probably have a different view of some crucial facts.

00:02:53.640 I think we care about things, or at least weight our preferences a little differently here.

00:03:00.060 It's hard for me to explain, honestly, how we still see the situation as differently

00:03:06.620 as we appear to.

00:03:08.180 But this really was an attempt, on my part, to see the world through the eyes of someone

00:03:15.240 who is a Trump supporter, at least to the degree that Scott is.

00:03:20.700 And again, even that isn't totally clear to me.

00:03:23.600 I may have been hypnotized, Scott.

00:03:25.360 But, uh, so, uh, listen, this was fun and I hope you enjoy it.

00:03:31.200 I now give you Scott Adams.

00:03:39.140 I am here with Scott Adams.

00:03:40.960 Scott, thanks for coming on the podcast.

00:03:43.380 Thank you for having me.

00:03:44.360 Now, you are a very interesting guy who has written a very interesting book that I will

00:03:50.840 have properly described in the intro to the show.

00:03:53.920 And I'll link to it on my website, obviously, and people can get it there.

00:03:57.980 We're not really going to get into your life or your other work unless it becomes relevant

00:04:03.720 to the political discussion we're planning to have.

00:04:05.920 But I'll just tell our listeners that I've been reading your book that the title is How

00:04:09.680 to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

00:04:12.520 And it's very interesting.

00:04:14.180 It's very, it's very useful and surprising.

00:04:17.520 And our conversation will not do it justice at all today.

00:04:21.400 But I encourage people to get the book because you give a lot of good advice about how to get

00:04:25.760 what you want out of life.

00:04:27.080 I haven't finished it yet, but it's thus far, it's advice that I agree with.

00:04:31.500 I just, I just want to heap some praise on you before we move on to other topics.

00:04:35.680 Thank you.

00:04:35.940 Let me just put some context on that.

00:04:38.480 The book you're talking about is essentially how to program yourself to be more successful

00:04:43.420 in whatever way you want.

00:04:45.000 But the new one that's already available for pre-order is about how to persuade other people.

00:04:50.860 It's called Win Bigly, and it'll be out in October.

00:04:54.820 Oh, cool.

00:04:55.060 So now that is a book I'm sure we will be getting some preview of in this conversation,

00:05:00.560 because that obviously relates to what we're going to be talking about.

00:05:04.000 And I'll put a link to that as well on my blog.

00:05:07.260 Okay, so let me just set up this conversation so that everyone understands the context.

00:05:11.760 As our listeners will be quite aware, I've been attacking Trump really since before the

00:05:18.040 election.

00:05:18.880 So it's safe to say I'm not a fan.

00:05:21.220 I'm sure I'll have some more impertinent things to say about El Presidente over the course of

00:05:26.860 this next hour.

00:05:28.000 But I've encountered a fair amount of criticism from people in my audience who like Trump or at

00:05:34.700 the very least feel that he was the best choice we had for president in 2016.

00:05:40.100 And many of these people have been complaining that I've created an echo chamber here on the

00:05:45.340 podcast because I've only been talking to Trump's detractors.

00:05:49.140 And I certainly can see how they might think that, although I've pointed out that the people

00:05:54.620 I've been speaking with who criticize Trump have been Republicans for the most part.

00:05:58.900 So the idea that these conversations have been an expression of political partisanship

00:06:03.580 doesn't make any sense.

00:06:05.140 There's really zero partisanship coming from someone like David Frum or Anne Applebaum or

00:06:10.000 me, for that matter, on this topic.

00:06:11.660 Because, you know, for instance, none of what I've said about Trump would apply to Mitt

00:06:16.000 Romney. And I've also never been shy about pointing out all the terrible things about

00:06:20.460 Hillary Clinton. So if it's been an echo chamber, it hasn't been a left-wing one.

00:06:26.460 But in the meantime, I've been asking Trump supporters for months who I should bring on

00:06:31.240 the podcast to represent the other side of the story and to help me recover from this much

00:06:36.220 diagnosed Trump derangement syndrome, which many people say I have.

00:06:40.500 And I appear to have a whopping case of it.

00:06:42.920 And you are the person who has been most often recommended to me.

00:06:47.120 So I just would congratulate you on that score.

00:06:50.520 Well, thank you. It's a lot of pressure on me, but OK.

00:06:53.700 So I want to say one other thing at the outset, just to set the table here, because I've been

00:06:57.740 seeing a few crazy comments online from obviously Trump supporters anticipating this podcast and

00:07:06.320 wondering whether or not I would be fair to you.

00:07:09.260 And so I just want to tell you how I view conversations like this and also tell our

00:07:14.640 listeners. And I'm telling you now something that I tell most of our guests.

00:07:18.900 I don't think I've ever left it in an interview.

00:07:21.860 And this is certainly something I tell any guest with whom I'm likely to disagree.

00:07:26.040 I don't do gotcha interviews.

00:07:29.140 My goal is never to get you to say something that makes you look bad.

00:07:34.820 In fact, if at any point in this conversation you put your foot in your mouth or I put my

00:07:40.300 foot in there, you should feel free to take it out and we'll cut that part out.

00:07:44.400 And this could apply to a whole section of the conversation.

00:07:47.140 So if we get onto a topic for five minutes and then you say at the end, you know what,

00:07:52.480 that whole bit we just did on racism or whatever, I'm worried about how that's going to make

00:07:56.600 me look. Well, then we will just cut it.

00:07:58.340 So, you know, we can edit as we go if need be, because my goal is always, and again,

00:08:04.680 this doesn't just apply to you, this applies to anyone who comes on this podcast.

00:08:08.420 My goal is always to be dealing with the best version of the other person's case.

00:08:13.180 I want you to be happy with what you've said on the podcast.

00:08:16.460 So this is the opposite of a gotcha interview.

00:08:18.220 And I don't think many people understand that.

00:08:21.240 And having been on the other side of literally hundreds of interviews at this point,

00:08:25.420 as I know you have, I think we both can say that almost no one operates this way.

00:08:32.160 Journalists deliberately don't because they want to reserve the right to catch you saying

00:08:36.880 something embarrassing.

00:08:38.980 It's a completely perverse ethic that seems to have been enshrined in journalism, where

00:08:43.520 if you say something is off the record before you say it, well, then they will generally keep

00:08:48.880 it off the record.

00:08:49.560 But if you say that about something you regret saying just two seconds ago, something that

00:08:54.100 didn't come out right, then they won't let you take it off the record after the fact.

00:08:58.260 This has always struck me as a less than ethical way to deal with people and their ideas.

00:09:03.600 Yeah, I agree.

00:09:04.700 But wouldn't worry about me because like you, I've done a few of these.

00:09:10.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:10.940 I just want you to know that.

00:09:12.100 I want our listeners to know that.

00:09:13.340 I guess the other thing I should say set up is that, you know, while I think you and

00:09:18.940 I will disagree about a lot here, I don't view this as a debate.

00:09:23.620 I mean, I consider myself genuinely persuadable on certain points and genuinely ignorant of

00:09:29.160 other points.

00:09:30.080 Now, it's true that there's some things where I don't really see how you could conceivably

00:09:35.600 change my mind.

00:09:36.480 I mean, if you're going to argue that Trump doesn't lie, for instance, that's going to

00:09:40.060 be a very difficult thing to sell to me.

00:09:42.040 But I genuinely count myself ignorant of how people find him appealing.

00:09:49.040 So I view part of your job in this conversation as really educating me on how that is possible.

00:09:56.380 I guess to start, what I'd like to do is just to have you clearly state what your view is

00:10:02.420 of Trump, because it hasn't been entirely clear to me how much you actually support him

00:10:06.800 beyond just admiring his talent as a persuader.

00:10:09.960 Much of what I've seen you say about him is more in the vein of explaining how Trump got

00:10:15.200 elected.

00:10:16.060 And it's not really an argument that his election was a good thing or that he's a good person

00:10:20.720 or that he's likely to be a good president.

00:10:22.460 So just what is your view of Trump at this point?

00:10:26.000 Well, I should tell your listeners, first of all, that I have a background as a trained

00:10:30.640 hypnotist, and I've been studying the field of persuasion all of my adult life as part of

00:10:36.120 my job.

00:10:36.560 It's part of what a writer does, part of what a cartoonist needs.

00:10:39.900 So when I saw Trump enter the race, I noticed fairly quickly he had the strongest set of

00:10:46.980 persuasion skills I've ever seen.

00:10:49.260 He has what I call a skill stack, a complementary set of skills that if you looked at any one

00:10:56.740 of those skills, you'd say, well, that's good.

00:10:58.800 That's better than most people.

00:10:59.880 But that's not any world-class particular special skill.

00:11:04.260 But when you put them together, they're insanely effective, as we can see, because he's president.

00:11:10.260 He made it against all odds.

00:11:12.400 And my view on the politics of it is that my political preferences didn't align with either side in the election.

00:11:22.200 I consider myself an ultra-liberal on social stuff, meaning that even liberals don't recognize me because I'm more liberal than liberals.

00:11:33.580 I could give you some examples of that to fill that in if you want.

00:11:36.860 And 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.

00:11:54.960 So generally, I don't have a firm position on the big international stuff and on the smaller local stuff, the domestic stuff.

00:12:04.800 I'm in favor of people doing whatever they want to do as long as it doesn't affect me.

00:12:11.000 So, again, I should say that I haven't seen everything or read everything you've said on this topic.

00:12:17.820 I'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.

00:12:25.000 But 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.

00:12:36.400 I mean, I would say bad things, but certainly dishonest things because you admire his talent as a persuader.

00:12:42.320 But 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.

00:12:56.580 So where does your appreciation of the artistry grade into actually thinking he is good and liable to do good things?

00:13:07.800 The 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.

00:13:29.240 So what he can do is probably different from what a regular politician can do, both on the upside and the downside, I would think.

00:13:36.840 So I'm not discounting that there's greater risk with a President Trump than some vanilla president.

00:13:44.920 But I think his supporters have said explicitly and often, we'll take the risk, we'll take the chaos.

00:13:52.460 That's the price of change.

00:13:55.560 So there's a lot of that that his supporters accept.

00:14:00.800 And I see my role in this as clarifying.

00:14:05.280 And if they like that choice, if that's a risk profile that they appreciate, then at least they can see it a little more clearly.

00:14:12.720 Now, let me speak about the lying part, because I think that's probably central to your problem.

00:14:19.140 Would you say that's true?

00:14:20.100 Yeah.

00:14:20.180 So here's how I frame that.

00:14:23.120 It 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.

00:14:34.440 And you would agree with that, right?

00:14:36.000 So I think we're starting from the same factual starting point.

00:14:40.320 It understates it for me, but yes, I'm with you.

00:14:43.280 Now, 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.

00:14:52.620 But 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.

00:14:59.420 And here's the part that I put on top of this that I think is helpful.

00:15:03.520 When 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.

00:15:18.980 I guess that's the best way to put it.

00:15:22.000 It's not as useful as it should be because it doesn't change people's minds.

00:15:27.440 And the job of politics is often to change people's minds, their hearts, their emotions, what they care about, what their priorities are.

00:15:34.560 So 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.

00:15:56.300 So there is an emotional and directional truth to what he does that's independent from the facts being completely wrong.

00:16:05.640 So, 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.

00:16:17.020 But 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.

00:16:31.520 So, in other words, what he said was technically, specifically, factually incorrect, as far as we can tell, you know, unless something new comes around.

00:16:40.500 But 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.

00:16:52.100 And what you see in persuasion is something called pacing and leading, and it's a very important concept in persuasion.

00:17:00.500 The pacing part is where you become compatible with the other person or persons you're trying to influence.

00:17:06.920 You're trying to match them in some way that's important.

00:17:11.040 And if you match them long enough, called pacing, eventually they will let you lead because you are one of them.

00:17:17.780 They're comfortable with you. They agree with you. They feel the same way you feel.

00:17:21.900 They trust you emotionally. And that's the way people need to trust you.

00:17:27.840 Because trusting somebody factually is sort of a non-starter.

00:17:33.380 It 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.

00:17:44.200 I trust that you have more information than I do.

00:17:46.900 I trust that if you have to pivot because it doesn't work out, you'll do that.

00:17:51.160 Because you and I are emotionally on the same page.

00:17:53.560 We want generally the same thing.

00:17:55.440 Similarly with, take immigration.

00:17:59.500 Now, 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.

00:18:11.960 It brings with it some amount of crime that we wish we didn't have.

00:18:15.480 And it brings with it some risk of terrorists slipping in, which we wish we didn't have.

00:18:21.420 And those things scare us.

00:18:23.120 And we would like to have less of it.

00:18:25.000 Now, that's the emotional truth that is common to both sides of the conversation, right?

00:18:31.200 That everybody would like less of those things.

00:18:33.300 Now, 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?

00:18:48.140 Now, 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.

00:18:58.640 It would be cruel, second of all.

00:19:00.920 It would be, you know, it would cause riots in the streets.

00:19:03.800 It would cause a civil war, practically.

00:19:05.940 I mean, that's such a big, hard to do, you know, bad thing.

00:19:11.000 But when I heard it, I said to myself, and I said publicly a lot of times, he doesn't mean that.

00:19:16.280 But he's taken a big first offer that gives him lots of room to negotiate back.

00:19:21.940 So 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.

00:19:31.400 You know, after coming into the country, they committed additional crimes. 0.98

00:19:34.300 And 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.

00:19:43.960 And, you know, three of them have been in a, you know, serious gang violence situations.

00:19:48.980 So, of course, you want to deport those guys.

00:19:51.500 But 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.

00:19:59.240 But what are they doing in the room?

00:20:01.480 So let's say those two guys get shipped back, too, because they're just sort of in that gray area and they're so deeply into the gray.

00:20:08.280 They're, you know, dark gray.

00:20:09.760 Well, you don't have any proof.

00:20:11.180 Now, when people see that story, and I'm sure that kind of story is going to be, you know, trickling out in different ways.

00:20:16.800 And 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.

00:20:25.760 And they say to themselves, well, I wish we wouldn't deport people who we haven't seen for sure committed additional crime.

00:20:35.540 But that's not so bad compared to what I thought was going to happen.

00:20:39.240 So you see that process in a number of ways. 0.99

00:20:43.320 You 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. 0.83

00:20:54.140 And a lot of people said, oh, my God, you can't do that. 0.97

00:20:57.420 That's going too far.

00:20:58.820 There are lots of plenty of good practical reasons why you don't do those things that he became president.

00:21:05.080 And what did he do?

00:21:06.160 He got pretty tough on ISIS, and I would argue that civilian casualties probably have gone up because of that extra toughness.

00:21:15.420 But 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.

00:21:26.100 So we see this pattern, which he has broadcasted for decades.

00:21:30.880 He 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.

00:21:47.460 So 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.

00:22:01.800 So that's what his supporters believe.

00:22:31.780 Sure enough, it's happening, you know, just as I predicted.

00:22:33.940 Okay, well, there's a lot in there that strikes me as fairly strange ethically.

00:22:41.780 For 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.

00:22:56.380 It's just an unambiguously good technique that his fans recognize.

00:23:01.600 Let me interrupt you.

00:23:02.980 I would never say he doesn't pay a penalty.

00:23:05.780 This is a technique which absolutely, by its design, has a penalty.

00:23:10.980 So, 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.

00:23:19.160 I guess I'm emphasizing something else here.

00:23:20.580 It's not so much the lying part or the failing, the reality testing part.

00:23:25.620 It's more like if I'm going to say to you, you know what I think we should do?

00:23:29.420 I mean, let's just say this on the podcast.

00:23:31.100 You know, I think we should round up those 12 million people and deport them. 1.00

00:23:35.220 If I commit to that position, that's my position.

00:23:37.800 Well, 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.

00:23:48.780 I mean, it gets much worse than what you describe.

00:23:50.980 It'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.

00:23:58.100 It's the mom of, you know, an eight-year-old kid who is an American citizen, right?

00:24:05.020 You know, so you have these just families broken apart.

00:24:08.180 And so if I'm going to pretend to be so callous as to happily absorb those facts, like, yeah, send them all back.

00:24:16.620 You know, they don't belong here in the first place. 0.84

00:24:18.500 Or if I'm going to take the ISIS case, I'm going to say, yeah, we'll torture their kids. 1.00

00:24:22.480 We'll kill their kids. 1.00

00:24:23.340 Doesn't matter. 1.00

00:24:23.920 Whatever works, right?

00:24:24.800 If 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?

00:24:41.920 It's like in these two cases, a nearly psychopathic ethics that I'm advertising as my strong suit, right?

00:24:49.800 So how this becomes attractive to people, how this resonates with their values.

00:24:55.660 I mean, I get what you said about people are worried about immigration.

00:24:58.420 They're worried about jihadism.

00:25:00.000 You know, I share those concerns.

00:25:02.200 But 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?

00:25:11.060 These are the things that get pointed out in 30 seconds whenever he opens his mouth on a topic like this.

00:25:17.280 I don't understand how that works for him with anyone.

00:25:21.780 Let me give you a little thought experiment here.

00:25:25.240 We've got people who are on the far right.

00:25:26.980 We've got people on the left.

00:25:28.860 In 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?

00:25:37.700 Which would be a preferred world for you?

00:25:39.680 Well, I don't know.

00:25:41.280 Now things have gotten so crazy on the left that that is actually a genuinely hard question to answer.

00:25:47.880 But I think, you know, moving everyone toward the middle, certainly on most points, would be a very good thing.

00:25:54.360 So 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.

00:26:14.180 When was the last time you heard anybody on the right complaining about that?

00:26:18.980 Because 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.

00:26:27.700 And the right says, oh, OK, we're you know, we didn't get nearly what we asked for.

00:26:34.860 But our leader, who we trust, who we love, has backed off of that.

00:26:39.580 And we're going to kind of go with that because he's doing some good things that we like.

00:26:43.100 And we don't like the alternative either. 0.57

00:26:45.680 So 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. 0.97

00:27:01.140 You saw it right. 0.95

00:27:02.200 And, you know, we can observe it with our own eyes.

00:27:05.060 We don't see the right saying, no, no, I hate President Trump.

00:27:08.860 He's got to round up those undocumented people, like you said, early in the campaign or else I am bailing on him. 1.00

00:27:15.660 None of that happened.

00:27:16.740 He paced them and then he leaded he led them toward a reasonable situation, which I would say we're in.

00:27:24.560 Well, I don't know that I would notice if they were complaining about it.

00:27:28.020 I got to think I'm kind of an echo chamber, but you might notice it more than I would.

00:27:33.000 I promise you I would notice it because I'm totally you know, I've got one foot in both sides.

00:27:37.500 And and the number of people who are talking about that, even just talking about rounding up everybody and sending them back, just stopped.

00:27:46.180 It's completely done.

00:27:47.920 And by the way, that that's a big deal.

00:27:50.580 I 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.

00:27:58.900 I don't know. I mean, there's so much other chaos for people to be complaining about and worrying about.

00:28:04.640 But I take a related point here, which which you could be making, which is that there is something else going on.

00:28:10.460 There 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.

00:28:19.560 And so they will they will kind of run roughshod over their own stated principles.

00:28:24.740 And 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.

00:28:38.760 And 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.

00:28:47.860 And 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.

00:28:55.740 Yeah, there are two concepts that people need to understand to have any idea what has happened in the past two years.

00:29:01.420 One is confirmation bias. I'm sure you've talked about this a number of times on your podcast and your books,

00:29:06.440 which is the tendency for humans to see all evidence as supporting their side, even if it doesn't.

00:29:13.400 All right. We're we're we're all in confirmation bias pretty much all the time.

00:29:18.920 Nobody's immune from it. Nobody's smart enough to see past it. It's just the human condition.

00:29:23.120 The other part that people have to understand is this thing called cognitive dissonance, which I'm sure you've also talked about.

00:29:30.520 And 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.

00:29:48.400 We 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.

00:30:03.160 So 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.

00:30:15.480 Now, that creates no trigger for cognitive dissonance because everything was consistent.

00:30:22.640 I thought I was pretty smart. I thought I could predict what was going to happen.

00:30:26.720 I did predict what was going to happen. But for a lot of the country, they they thought this was an impossible outcome.

00:30:33.760 They'd been in their echo chambers and they saw there was just no way this could happen.

00:30:38.960 There are people who have never even met a Trump supporter, much less imagined he could be elected.

00:30:44.580 They looked at the polls. They saw it was 90, 98 percent likely that Hillary Clinton would win.

00:30:49.520 And then the results didn't go that way. That's a perfect trigger for cognitive dissonance.

00:30:55.580 And I described that election as a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb.

00:31:01.100 And 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.

00:31:12.660 So 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.

00:31:24.060 In one of the movies, we had just elected Hitler or something like it.

00:31:29.700 And people were taking to the streets to say, oh, my God, you know, the world is going to be on fire.

00:31:35.380 And another half of the country were saying, hey, we got a guy who's probably going to be pretty good on jobs.

00:31:40.640 And, you know, maybe he'll tighten up the borders and, you know, do some business like systems in government that we like.

00:31:48.760 And that's all they saw. And the other side saw something completely different, an entirely different movie.

00:31:55.160 Now, 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.

00:32:08.460 We would first of all, there would be huge protests because people thought that some Hitler character had been elected.

00:32:13.940 But 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.

00:32:28.100 That the Hitler illusion would start to dissipate and that it would eventually give way by summer. 0.65

00:32:34.140 That was my prediction. And it has largely, you know, that the Hitler stuff is largely dissipated or lack of confirming evidence.

00:32:42.020 And it was replaced with, well, he's not Hitler, but he's definitely incompetent. 0.98

00:32:47.380 He is so incompetent. There is chaos in the White House. They can't get anything done. 0.99

00:32:51.960 And I predicted that by the end of the summer, he would, in fact, get things done.

00:32:59.620 But but the criticisms don't stop because that's just not the way it works.

00:33:05.320 People don't change positions like that.

00:33:07.020 They simply change the reasons that they oppose him.

00:33:10.980 And I predicted that the reasons would change from, you know, he's Hitler to he's incompetent to.

00:33:17.660 All right. He did get a lot of things done.

00:33:20.120 And there were the things he said he was going to get done.

00:33:22.400 And they they do match Republican positions.

00:33:26.020 But we don't like it. All right.

00:33:28.180 He is competent. He does get things done.

00:33:30.480 He's effective. But we don't like what he's doing.

00:33:32.980 So I think that's where you where it's going to be by year end.

00:33:35.580 And it seems to be heading that way.

00:33:38.000 One thing I want to point out, which just strikes me as a strange emphasis that I've heard from you here.

00:33:43.160 But I've also heard this just quite frequently from other Trump supporters.

00:33:46.780 So I just want to flag it. I don't know what if much turns on it.

00:33:50.980 But 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.

00:34:01.560 So everyone was just blindsided by the fact that he won.

00:34:04.540 And this put them into this the other movie theater where they're seeing just civilization unravel.

00:34:11.180 I mean, for me, it was never a matter of being sure that Hillary Clinton was going to win.

00:34:15.460 In fact, the last poll I looked at that I thought was actually informative.

00:34:20.560 You know, Trump had a 20 or 25 percent chance of winning.

00:34:23.920 And I, you know, I'm statistically educated.

00:34:26.880 I know how often a 20 percent chance of winning comes up.

00:34:29.960 It's not a tiny probability.

00:34:31.580 So it's not the surprise that is worth emphasizing here.

00:34:35.780 It's the horror at the fact that we have elected someone so obviously wrong for the job.

00:34:41.580 This two movies analysis still works whether you predicted anything or whether anyone else predicted anything.

00:34:47.660 Even if everyone thought it was a it was a horse race until the last second and there was a 50 percent chance of either candidate winning.

00:34:56.640 I mean, I think you would have the exact same outcome in terms of a repudiation of this of this choice that our nation made.

00:35:03.880 But Sam, let me ask you this.

00:35:05.600 At what point in the process did you decide that he was incompetent to be president?

00:35:12.380 That is a great question.

00:35:13.560 That is I love that question.

00:35:14.960 That that is my favorite question ever asked of me on this podcast.

00:35:17.840 I guess let's focus on the master persuader idea, because here's the movie I'm in.

00:35:23.160 All right.

00:35:24.600 You've said that Trump is the greatest persuader you've ever seen.

00:35:29.060 I think you actually wrote.

00:35:30.320 I think I saw this in a blog post of yours that you wrote that if Steve Jobs was a 10, Trump is a 15.

00:35:36.780 I think I have that right.

00:35:37.820 OK, so here's the movie I'm in.

00:35:39.820 And this predates this election by at least a decade.

00:35:45.020 I find Trump one of the least persuasive people on Earth. 0.57

00:35:50.200 I mean, long before he ran for president, he struck me as nothing more than an odious con man. 0.99

00:35:57.480 He strikes me as an absolutely despicable person. 0.94

00:36:01.340 But wait a minute. 0.93

00:36:02.400 Wait a minute.

00:36:02.800 Can I can I get a clarification?

00:36:04.780 When you said he was an odious con man, did you mean that he was good at being conning people or bad at conning people?

00:36:11.940 Well, he was clearly conning some people.

00:36:15.000 I'm saying that he's not conning me.

00:36:17.040 And so the question is that the mismatch.

00:36:19.440 Can I interrupt you again?

00:36:21.100 Yeah, yeah.

00:36:21.380 This is really important.

00:36:22.180 He was conning, apparently, according to your frame of things in prior to the election.

00:36:30.120 It 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.

00:36:42.520 Yeah, but that was it.

00:36:43.780 He was a reality TV star who I mean, I viewed him.

00:36:47.160 Actually, I viewed him.

00:36:48.500 I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about him, but I assumed that most people were in on the joke.

00:36:54.600 Right.

00:36:54.880 That he was a kind of punchline.

00:36:57.140 It was like a punchline lived over the course of a profitable life.

00:37:01.420 But he was this was not somebody who was as he was billing himself to be a truly great businessman or anything else.

00:37:08.400 Yeah.

00:37:08.660 So there's an important point here that I don't want to lose by going too far past it.

00:37:14.340 Your your understanding of him at the time was that he could con some people.

00:37:20.780 And 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.

00:37:28.640 Would that would that accurately state your opinion?

00:37:30.860 Well, yeah, but the things he was trying to do bore no relationship to becoming president or becoming somebody who's actually shouldering significant responsibility.

00:37:41.980 No, I agree with that.

00:37:42.920 But we're just talking about the tools of persuasion.

00:37:45.200 And 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.

00:37:56.160 Just a different word for essentially the same set of tools.

00:37:59.100 It has more to do with the intention, I guess.

00:38:01.300 But 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.

00:38:09.120 I can see that he must be persuading somebody and he fully persuaded half the country to become president.

00:38:15.200 But there is never a moment where I find him persuasive.

00:38:21.060 When I look at him, I see a man.

00:38:24.000 I mean, it's really uncanny.

00:38:26.120 It's like a it's I see a man without any inner life.

00:38:29.880 I 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. 0.99

00:38:39.860 I 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. 0.98

00:38:55.420 I mean, it's like that barely overstates it. 0.97

00:38:57.940 It'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.

00:39:08.920 Well, it would be like that, right?

00:39:11.380 Yeah.

00:39:13.520 Yeah, we've gone full exorcist on this.

00:39:15.460 So 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.

00:39:25.120 You know, how do you tell that you're in it versus somebody else is in it?

00:39:28.580 Did I just give you one of my tells?

00:39:30.340 Yeah, you did.

00:39:31.540 The most the most classic one is to imagine that you can know somebody's inner mental processes.

00:39:38.660 So if you imagine that in his mind, he's thinking this or in his mind, he's hollowed out or in his mind, there's no depth.

00:39:47.220 If you imagine that those are in there, I would say that is entirely imaginary and almost certainly a tell for cognitive dissonance.

00:39:53.720 Well, no, but it's not.

00:39:54.740 By the way, hold up.

00:39:55.500 Let me finish the thought.

00:39:56.680 Sure.

00:39:56.860 And the trigger.

00:39:58.620 So what I look for for confirmation is there's got to be a trigger and then the second thing, which is the tell.

00:40:03.920 So I just described the tell, which is describing some of these inner thoughts that you couldn't possibly know.

00:40:08.660 And I mean, nobody could.

00:40:11.060 And the trigger you also described very clearly. 0.95

00:40:14.580 The trigger was there's something about his manner, the way he speaks that bugs the fuck out of you. 0.93

00:40:20.340 And that's your trigger. 0.94

00:40:22.240 You're just misinterpreting a couple of things here.

00:40:23.760 It's not it's not the way he speaks.

00:40:26.580 And it's not that I'm engaged in a mind reading exercise.

00:40:30.320 It's based entirely on what he says.

00:40:33.000 It's that it is actually the thoughts that come out of his mouth.

00:40:36.440 It's not how he says it.

00:40:37.640 It's what he says.

00:40:38.960 But wait, you said two things that are in contradiction now.

00:40:41.840 You said that he's a con man and how he has been, but that the things he said are a good reflection of what he's thinking.

00:40:49.280 You kind of have to pick one. 0.96

00:40:51.260 Well, no, it's just that he is a a liar who will lie whenever it suits his interest. 0.84

00:40:58.180 And 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. 0.52

00:41:06.740 I think I think there are you have to break that into two categories, the things you're calling the lies, maybe three.

00:41:14.820 There are some things which probably he thinks are right and he just gets wrong, which would be typical of any.

00:41:20.320 I'll forgive him many of those things.

00:41:22.100 Yeah, 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.

00:41:31.480 And then there's another category, which is the hardest for anybody to understand.

00:41:36.760 And and I'm not sure I'll be able to sell this to anybody here.

00:41:39.560 But 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.

00:41:53.560 They won't matter to decisions and they won't matter to the outcome.

00:41:56.560 Now, 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.

00:42:13.740 They all seem to be either trivial and he just doesn't care.

00:42:18.500 And, you know, there's no point in apologizing because that's bad persuasion, too, in many cases or or they're emotionally correct.

00:42:27.400 So 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.

00:42:39.740 That is what I use to predict the outcome that got us exactly where we are.

00:42:45.560 And my starting point was everybody can can hindcast. 0.53

00:42:49.860 Everybody can say, oh, the way he won was here's my reason.

00:42:54.340 CNN listed, I think, I don't know, 24 different reasons why the surprising result of his election happened.

00:43:02.120 And they're all different reasons.

00:43:04.400 So, 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.

00:43:14.220 That's why we have, you know, trials and lawyers and all of their stories sound good and the jury has to sort it out.

00:43:20.380 But 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.

00:43:34.180 And not only did he win it big, but, you know, he won in the the electoral college.

00:43:39.700 He won the only way that it mattered.

00:43:42.320 He played the only game that they were playing and he won.

00:43:45.660 Now, some people will say, well, he lost the popular vote.

00:43:48.260 And I would say, you're right.

00:43:50.280 He did lose the game that he wasn't playing.

00:43:53.320 He never played that game.

00:43:55.480 So if you look at the predictions and if you see that they seem to be hitting all the the right notes,

00:44:02.840 that 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.

00:44:12.200 There are lots of different explanations of how things work in the past.

00:44:15.720 But, 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.

00:44:29.560 I mean, so, for instance, I think he is someone who is so morbidly selfish.

00:44:35.300 And again, this is not me with a crystal ball.

00:44:37.120 This 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.

00:44:43.220 He'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.

00:44:53.180 There's there's no sense at all that he has the public good in mind when he's acting.

00:44:58.480 So 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.

00:45:11.500 I think all of his lies have harmed our society.

00:45:14.300 I 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.

00:45:23.120 I think that has done immense harm to the world, frankly.

00:45:27.340 In in what in what quantitative way is it?

00:45:30.400 Would the stock would the stock market be at even higher record levels?

00:45:34.480 The stock market is the wrong metric here.

00:45:37.020 I mean, well, would would ISIS be reconstituting if he if he'd been a little more forthcoming?

00:45:42.500 Would would North Korea have not have launched that last new what exactly would be the evidence? 0.64

00:45:48.260 That's the something he said has actually harmed the fabric of society.

00:45:52.160 The fact that all of us are talking about politics, the fact that politics is so much a part of our lives now is toxic.

00:46:00.600 It's a sign that something is wrong with our society.

00:46:04.100 If things were good, we would not be talking about politics.

00:46:07.700 Right.

00:46:08.320 And we're talking we're talking about politics 10 times more than we ever have in the lifetime of any person hearing this podcast.

00:46:15.860 I could list 100 other bad things, but that's one symptom.

00:46:19.580 It's a very good thing.

00:46:21.200 And I'll tell you why.

00:46:22.560 So, 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.

00:46:33.360 I mean, I have never seen such joy and happiness coming out of that segment of the public.

00:46:37.840 But again, that's that's an amoral claim.

00:46:39.740 I 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. 0.85

00:46:48.620 I mean, it's just like you get nothing with that claim.

00:46:51.280 Did you go full Hitler analogy?

00:46:53.160 I went full Hitler analogy, conscious of how it would be received.

00:46:56.880 Can I declare victory at this point?

00:46:59.280 No, no.

00:47:00.040 I think that's actually a bad meme.

00:47:01.900 Was it that Godwin's law?

00:47:02.940 I think it's a bad meme that we have to quash somehow.

00:47:05.040 No, 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.

00:47:15.360 Like nobody uses an analogy if they have a reason because a reason is way better than an analogy.

00:47:21.240 No, no, no.

00:47:21.680 Well, OK, well, that's interesting.

00:47:23.540 I think I disagree with that, too.

00:47:24.980 But let's move on.

00:47:26.260 Analogies are tools of communication.

00:47:27.800 If 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.

00:47:38.100 It's only bad if it's a bad analogy, but nothing hinges on that.

00:47:41.820 No, because all analogies are approximations by design.

00:47:45.500 So you're not talking about the same topic.

00:47:48.560 Anyway, we could talk about analogies some more.

00:47:51.080 Sure.

00:47:51.240 I agree that analogies are excellent for explaining a concept for the first time.

00:47:56.040 So if you say a zebra, if you've never heard of a zebra, it's like a horse, but imagine it has some stripes on it.

00:48:01.440 So, you know, there are lots of cases where that's good.

00:48:04.760 That gets me a long way to a zebra.

00:48:06.280 Yeah.

00:48:07.020 Right.

00:48:07.560 But it doesn't make a zebra a horse.

00:48:09.640 Right.

00:48:09.980 And never can.

00:48:11.100 Right.

00:48:11.540 So that's my only point.

00:48:12.940 So back to the whether it's bad that we're all talking about politics.

00:48:16.140 I'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.

00:48:31.360 You'll see lots of people talking now about cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, persuasion.

00:48:37.100 These are important concepts for people's happiness and understanding of their condition that we never had before.

00:48:44.220 And 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.

00:48:54.240 I mean, he changed everything, but that he would rip a hole in the fabric of reality and let us peek through.

00:49:00.200 And 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.

00:49:09.480 We know what the reason is.

00:49:10.600 It's confirmation bias.

00:49:11.820 It's cognitive dissonance.

00:49:12.880 And that, uh, and that that's, you know, that understanding goes a lot further than, Hey, your facts are wrong.

00:49:22.280 You lied about this.

00:49:23.460 You didn't pass my fact checking.

00:49:25.380 You 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.

00:49:40.140 Yeah, 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.

00:49:47.460 I would say, sure, that's great.

00:49:49.880 We should, but we can't because we're not built that way.

00:49:52.980 We humans don't have that capacity in general.

00:49:55.700 Yeah, we can in very constrained ways like science, but in general, no.

00:49:59.920 Okay, 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.

00:50:07.380 And that's actually the topic in some measure of your first book or your last book that I've been reading.

00:50:11.900 And if we have time, I'd love to touch that.

00:50:14.280 But I just want to come back.

00:50:15.660 I mean, again, I'm, I have this creeping feeling of confusion or bewilderment that I want you to sort out for me.

00:50:22.260 And it comes down to this two movie analogy because I don't see how they are actually different movies.

00:50:29.160 I get that in the other theater, the fans of Trump don't care about certain things that are appearing on the screen.

00:50:38.280 And 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.

00:50:46.300 And I want to take you back just to what you said before when I went full exorcist on you.

00:50:51.060 Well, can I, can I, can I interrupt?

00:50:53.200 Because I think there have been some news reports recently that said that Trump, Trump supporters know exactly what's true and what isn't.

00:51:03.140 And there isn't that much difference between the two sides.

00:51:05.980 I'll give you an example of like, this is what the kind of thing that's in my movie.

00:51:09.200 There's literally a hundred things I can mention here, but I'll just mention a couple.

00:51:12.660 So 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?

00:51:22.580 So 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.

00:51:31.620 And as unseemly.

00:51:33.560 Well, hold on.

00:51:34.180 Now you understood that to be a license deal, right?

00:51:36.900 Well, 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.

00:51:44.440 If he only found out about it after the fact, that's not the kind of thing you would defend.

00:51:49.320 It'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.

00:51:57.620 I 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.

00:52:08.840 But what you're describing is a totally unethical person, right?

00:52:13.060 I mean, this is the problem.

00:52:14.060 So I'll just give you a little more.

00:52:15.580 And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.

00:52:45.580 I mean, this is the problem.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 19, 2017

#87 — Triggered

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