Sam Harris' Dissection Of Donald Trump (from Joe Rogan Experience #804)

Hello freak bitches. People are really reluctant to give up fun shit like lying and driving their car fast. Those two things, people are going to have a hard time with you actually getting into their mind, seeing their actual mind and being able to do that so we can know without a doubt whether or not someone's guilty or innocent. My question to you is if you could get inside someone's mind and it was like that really super suggestive guy that you were talking about earlier that just confessed all the horrific demonic possession stuff and eating babies, what if it's like getting into that guy's mind? What if you can't tell? Well the case that worries me and this is perhaps an inept segue to politics but the way we're in people's minds, you get someone talking long enough, you know their minds. They can only conceal what they're about only so well. Maybe you can because you're a super smart wizard type dude but Jamie, I don't know if he's a mind reader. But the question is will people care? We don't even need a lie detector if you have someone who's openly lying, who just gets caught in lies again and again. You can see it too, you feel it right? But people don't seem to care right, at least in a political process. I'm thinking in this case of Trump where you have someone who is in some cases lying or just changing his mind in such an incoherent way that it's the functional equivalent of lying. It's someone who becomes totally unpredictable. He has a stance that is A on Tuesday and it's B on Wednesday and when the discrepancy is pointed out he tells you to go fuck yourself. There is no accountability to his own states of consciousness that he's going to be held to and the people who love him don't seem to care. They actually, as far as I can tell, I don't know so many of these people personally but based on social media and seeing the few articles where someone has explained why they love Trump, people view this as a kind of this sort of this dishonesty, what is on, in my view, both dishonesty and a kind of theatrical hucksterism. A person who's pretending to be many things that he probably isn't, they see it as a new kind of authenticity. He's just letting it rip. He doesn't care what is true. He doesn't care what your expectations for coherence are. He's just going to tell you to fuck yourself every which way and this is the new way of being honest. This is the new form of integrity. It's amazing to watch. I'm someone who actually I remember on my own podcast, I think I was talking to Paul Bloom, this Yale psychologist who's great and we got into politics and this is at least a year ago but at that point I said, there's no way we're going to be talking about Trump in a year. I mean, this is going to completely flame out and I don't tend to make predictions but this was a clear moment that I remember of making a prediction which is now obviously false. But I just couldn't imagine it. Before we're going to find this compelling enough for him to be on the cusp of getting elected, it is terrifying. Have you talked this issue to death on your podcast? I guess we kind of have. I think this is how everybody feels. Everybody feels like you're supposed to be with their person, whether it's Bernie or whether it's for Hillary or whether you're a Trump supporter, whatever it is. You have to be all in. If you look at the choices that were given, none of these could really be described as ideal. No, no. Hillary Clinton, you could want a woman in the White House and you want to show everyone that a woman can do that job just as well as a man and she's got the most experience and she certainly has the most experience dealing with foreign governments and she certainly has the most experience in politics. She can make an easy, but she's also involved in two criminal investigations. She had an observer in her bathroom and there's all this squirrely stuff going on. She's terrible in many ways. She was anti-gay marriage until like 2013. Then wouldn't admit the change of mind either. She's a politician. She's probably a brilliant woman, but she's also set in her ways and a politician and a politician to the end. Part of being a politician is being a fucking huckster. You got to be able to get those people to see your side and the way you do that is to talk like this. You can't talk like a normal person. She needs a speech coach. They all do. He's terrible too. Trump's not even good at it and he kicks their asses. No, but her voice. She has a kind of, to use the sexist trope, she has a shrill for it. When you get her in front of a mic and there's a crowd and she thinks she's talking over the crowd, which she doesn't have to do because she's in front of a mic, the sound you get is just, she's yelling when she doesn't need to yell. Someone has to teach her how to dial that back. What you just did is called mansplaining. No, I'm explaining to the men in her crew who should talk some sense into her, but she's a bad candidate. I have no doubt that she's very smart and she's well-informed and she's qualified and she is absolutely who I will vote for given the choices. But I totally understand people's reservations with her. She's a liar. She's an opportunist. She is just almost preternaturally inauthentic. She will just focus group every third sentence and you feel that from her. This is all true and yet I also believe the people who say, I've never met her, but people who know her and have met her say that behind closed doors, one on one, she's incredibly impressive and great. But that doesn't translate into her candidacy. She probably thinks she has to do it old school. The way she's doing it. The thing is, when you look at the ... What worries me is I went out on Facebook the other day and I've said very little about this, but I've made enough noises of the sort that I just made that people understand that I'm for Clinton despite all my reservations about her. What I got on my own Facebook page, which you have to assume is filtered by the people who are following me on Facebook and already like me in some sense, just like a thousand comments of pure pain. No one loves Hillary. No one said, oh, thank God someone's smart is for Hillary. It was all just Bernie people and Trump people flaming me for the most tepid possible endorsement of Clinton. All I said was, listen, I understand Clinton's a liar and she's an opportunist and I completely get your reservations about her, but at least she's a grownup. She's going to be the candidate. It's not going to be Sanders. Now is the moment to put your political idealism behind you if you're a Sanders person and recognize that there is a vast difference between Clinton and Trump. No she's not going to change the system, but she's also not going to run civilization off a cliff. I forget how I said it on Facebook, but it really was a lesser of two evils argument. It's amazing to see how energized and passionate people are in defense of Trump and Sanders and there's almost none of that for Clinton. People are just sheepishly saying that they're just divulging that they will vote for Clinton, but they are maybe somewhere that I haven't noticed someone absolutely loves Clinton, but it's just she does not have her defenders the way these guys do. Have you seen the man enough to vote for her campaign? No. You know, you guys with like hipster dudes with tattoos and beards that are going to vote for Hillary? No. I hope it's fake because it's so brilliant. I hope it's not real. Is it fake? Thank God. Is it? Thank God. It's so good though because it's not that fake. It's pretty good. Like you could almost see. So wait a minute. I mean, this is not bad for her, right? This is no, no, no. It's not bad for her. It's funny that someone would like make a joke political ad, you know, that you have to be man enough to vote for Hillary. Like there's guys out there that would buy that. They would, they would like, I'm not enough, bro. They'd do it. It's a scary time because it doesn't seem like anybody that you would want to be president wants to be president. And so we're left with, all right, what do you pick? It's like as if we're going to play the Super Bowl with three of the shittiest teams we could find. We're just going to go get some drunk high school kids, get some inmates with club feet. We're just going to throw whoever, we're going to have the worst game ever. And this is what this game is. This is not a good game. This is not a game where you've got like a John F. Kennedy versus a Lyndon Johnson or it's not, it's not like, like powerful characters. It's Trump, I guess is a really powerful character, but in more ways like a showman character. Yeah. But he's doing, he's putting on a great show and he's going to win probably because he's putting on such a great show and people like a great show. I do think I'm now among the people who think something new, we're witnessing something new with Trump. It's not just the same old thing where the process is so onerous that it's selecting for the kind of narcissist or thick skin person who is willing to submit to the process and then there are many, most of the good people who just aren't going to put up with this. I mean, yes, there's that too, but there's something, it's a moment among the electorate where it's like, it's an anti, there's enough of an anti-establishment mood and vote now is happening with Sanders too, where people just want to jam a stick in the wheel of the system just to see what happens. It's just like, the main gripe against Hillary really is that she's politics as usual. She's not going to change the system, right? People want to change the system, but they're not really thinking about the implications of radically changing the system. And in the case of Trump, here is someone who is advertising his lack of qualifications for the office in every way that he can. There is no, I'm not even bothered by his racism or his misogyny or his demagoguery or his bullying. I mean, all of that I'm willing to guess is an act, right? He's decided that that's somehow pandering to his base and he's actually, in truth, he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. I'm willing to believe that. I don't know why I would think that's plausible, but I have a hunch that he's far more liberal than he seems and it's just pandering. But the thing that can't be true is there's no way he's actually brilliant and well-informed about all the issues and is saying the things he's saying. He's not pretending to be as uninformed and as incoherent and as irresponsible as he's seeming. Because you wouldn't withhold information that would make you a better leader. Well, it's just, yeah. And it's just, well, it's just the vacuousness of his speech. He'll say the same thing three times in a row and it was meaningless the first time. He'll say, it's going to be amazing. It's going to be very, very amazing. Trust me, it's going to be so amazing. And he does this with everything. If you look at the transcripts of his speeches and the fact that he can't, he has never, so far as I've seen, he has never once strung together a string of sentences that was even interesting. But he's never, he just, there's never a moment where I say, oh, this guy is smarter and better informed than I realized. That moment never comes. I keep expecting to see that happen. And it's a little bit like, imagine you have an urn, right? And you just keep pulling things out of it and all you pull out of it is junk, right? You pull chicken bones and broken marbles and gum. And it's still possible that if you root around in that urn long enough, you're going to find the hope diamond. I mean, in each round that you pull something out, that really has no logical implication for the next thing you might pull out of the urn. But minds aren't like that. When I see what this guy says, he does not say anything that a well-informed intelligent person would say. And it's just, and ideas are connected, right? So you can't, you can't fake this stuff. You can't fake being this uninformed and you can't fake being really well-informed. And he's just, I mean, we just look at one policy that he wants, the rounding up of illegal aliens, right? Round up 11 million illegal aliens. Now this gets stated as, yeah, we're going to round them up and send them back to Mexico. And what worries me is no one seems to care that if you just look at the implications of doing this, it is, this one policy claim alone is so impractical and unethical. It's just, what are we talking about here? You're talking like your gardener, your housekeeper, the person who works at the car wash, the person who picks the vegetables, who you buy in the market is going to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night by the Gestapo and get sent back to, the vast majority of these people are law-abiding people who are just working at jobs that Americans by and large don't want to do. And many of them have kids who are American citizens, right? Everyone's got kids under the age of 10 who are American citizens and what you're going to send that person back to Mexico. And you're going to do this by the hundreds of thousands and millions. It's just that one point alone held in isolation from all of the other things he said, the crazy things like climate change, as a hoax, concocted by the Chinese to destroy our manufacturing base and the fact that he likes Putin, I mean, everything else he said, right? This one policy claim alone should be enough to disqualify a person's candidacy. It's so crazy the moment you look at it. And yet no one seems to care. In fact, it's just more energizing to the people who already like him. I know that he said that he wanted to build a wall, but I didn't know that he said that he wanted to get rid of the illegal aliens in here. Round them up and round them up. And do what with them? Send them back to their country. That is so crazy. It's such a crazy idea and it's so brutal. The idea that, I mean, it's like a subhuman thing. The only reason why people would come to America is because they felt like it would make their life better. So people take a big risk. There's not an easy way to do it if you're poor, you don't have any qualifications for any unusual job, I mean, and you're trying to get across to Mexico. But everybody who does it does it because they want to improve their life. And the idea that one group of people shouldn't be able to do it, one group should, just because they were born on the right side of some strange line that is only a couple hundred years old. But actually, I'll go further in meeting him in the middle. So I think we should be able to defend our borders. I don't have a good argument for having a porous border that we can't figure out how to defend and we don't know who's coming into the country. So I think building the wall is almost certainly a stupid idea among as many stupid ideas. But I think it would be great to know who's coming in the country and have a purely legal process by which that happened. I mean, ultimately, that's got to be the goal, right? And we are imperfectly doing that. And so I don't have an argument for open borders or porous borders. But the question is, what do you do with 11 or 12 million people who are already here doing jobs we want them to do that help our society and the vast majority of them are law abiding people who, as you say, are just trying to have better lives? The idea that you're going to break up families and send people back by the millions and the idea that you're going to devote your law enforcement resources to doing this when you have real terrorism and real crime to deal with is just pure insanity, right? And also totally unethical. And yet he doesn't get any points docked for this aspiration. I mean, it's just it's one of the things around which people are rallying. But the climate change thing is also insane and dangerous. Well, he was a birther. Right. Yeah, right. He was one of the original birthers. He was saying that Obama's birth certificate was bullshit. He was born in Kenya, right? Wasn't he one of those guys? Oh, yeah, he was. He was. I would love it if. He was self-funding that for a while. I would love if he got into office and just said, listen, folks, I am nothing like this person I pretended to be to win the presidency. I just wanted to show you that he could be manipulated and get it together. And he just punked all of- I'm going to hire some people who actually know how to run things. Well, see, the smart people who are voting for him think, and this is, I think, an actual crazy position, but they think that he is just pandering to the idiots who he needs to pander to to get into office. So he's not disavowing the white supremacist vote with the alacrity that you would if you were a decent human being and you found out that David Duke supported you because he needs to- he just needs those votes. And he knows that most of the people in his base aren't going to care and he can just kind of move on in the news cycle. And he's doing this on all these issues where smart people see that he looks like a buffoon and the people who don't like him are treating him as a comic figure who, he can't really believe that stuff. He's not really- he's too sophisticated to really believe that stuff, so he's just pandering. I mean, one is that people aren't seeing if that's true just how unethical and weird that is, right? The guy has no compunction about lying and demonizing people. It's like, let's say he thinks that Clinton really isn't guilty, Bill Clinton isn't really guilty of a rape, right? And now he's calling him a rapist, right? Now at the time, he was saying he wasn't a rapist and he's just being defamed and this is outrageous. He was taking the side of a friend who he invited to his wedding. But now he's calling him a rapist, right? A sexual predator who's harmed women's rights more than anyone. So which is true, right? So there's no version of the truth here that makes Trump look at all acceptable as a person. It's like either he knew he was a rapist and was defending him because he was just cozying up to power at that point, right? Didn't care that he's a rapist. Or now he knows he's still the guy who thinks he wasn't a rapist, but now he's just for purely opportunistic reasons. He's willing to call a guy a rapist who he knows isn't. They're both horrible, right? And it's not like this new evidence has come forward in the intervening years that would have changed his mind about what happened in Clinton's presidency. But I think people think that he's got to be much more sophisticated than he is. And that if he got into office, he would just be a totally sober and presidential person. There's just no reason to believe that. I mean, if he thinks climate change is a hoax and that we should pull out of the Paris Accords and we should ramp up coal production and bring back the coal jobs, I mean, this is what he's saying, right? There's no reason to think he doesn't believe this at this point. That's just, it is a disastrous thing for a president to think. The only fascinating versions of this that I've been hearing from people that I respect are that the idea that he is like the political version of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. He's going to come down and smash it and it's going to be so chaotic that they're going to be forced to reform the system and people are going to respond in turn. Like the way people are responding against factory farming and more people are going vegan, like that kind of a thing. They're going to see it and they're going to respond in turn. That is such a ... So he's going to toss the apple cart up in the air. He's just going to fuck this whole goofy system up and then we'll be able to rebuild after Trump has dismantled all the different special interest groups and lobbyists and all the people that we really would like to get out of the system. We really don't like the fact that there's such insane amounts of influence that big corporations and lobbyists have had on the way laws get passed. This might be the way to do it. You have some wild man. Everyone's fired. You're fired. You're fired, Jetson. It's like a character. He's coming in, his hair's plastic, he's all fired up. He's a billionaire. He made all his own money, sort of. Dad gave him some money, but he turned into a lot of money. Point being, he doesn't need anybody's money. The truth is he's probably lying about the amount of money he has too. He's a baller for sure though, at the very least. He's got to be worth some cash. Yeah. I mean, there could be a big difference between what he's claiming and what is in fact true, but he's a ... There are many pieces here. People assume that because he's a successful businessman, he must understand the economy, which has no necessary connection there. There's a lot of rich people who are totally confused about economics. Most economists don't have a lot of money, so there's no real connection there. What you're describing is a kind of just random ... Let's just smash the window and then see what happens. I'm going to light a fire to this place and see what happens. It's almost any process by which you would change the system is more intelligent than that. It's also not valuing how much harm one bad president could do. I haven't tested this, but I'm imagining that even Trump supporters would answer this question the way I would hope, which is, if I had a crystal ball that could tell you ... It can't tell you who's going to be president, but it tells you how it works out for the next president. If I look in this crystal ball and it says the next president of the United States is a disaster. It's like the worst president we've ever had. Just think of failures of governance and the toxic influence of narcissism and hubris that comes along just once every thousand years. Just a disaster. I think you know, even if you're a Trump supporter, which candidate that was. Only Trump is likely to screw things up that badly. Clinton is going to be almost perfectly predictable. She's going to be a politician. She's going to be basically centrist on foreign policy and domestic policy. She's going to be liberal on social issues. She is not going to try to dismantle NATO and get into a war with North Korea or get into an alliance with Putin. She's not going to do something insane. So alliance with Putin. He said basically only favorable things about Putin. They're holies. They're tight. Hopefully we'll see pictures with both of them on horseback shirtless. I think Donald will probably keep his shirt on. I hope I keep his shirt on. I don't see him as being the shirtless guy. When you just look at the landscape between Bernie and Hillary and him, to me it looks like the last gasps of a dying system. But that's scary. Representative government system. Yeah, it is scary. A lot of people are saying things like that, but they're not hearing just how nihilistic that is if true. There's so much stuff we have to get right. And the only tool to get it right is having your mind actually understand what's going on in the world and how to manipulate the world in the direction you want it to go. So you have to understand whether or not climate change is true, your beliefs about it have to be representative of that truth. Let's say I'm mistaken and there is no human cause climate change is not a problem and every moment spent thinking about it, worrying about it, correcting for it is just a waste of time that's just throwing out the wealth of the world. That would be a terrible thing. So it really matters who's right about that. And the fact that we have a president or a candidate who is coming in saying this is all bullshit in defiance of all of the science is ... But it's on every other point. It's a bit of a problem. He doesn't know anything about ... I guarantee you he doesn't know anything about it. He doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam or which countries are Sunni predominantly and which are Shia predominantly. And I'm sure he's going to do ... I don't know when he's going to cram for this final exam. I'm sure before one of those debates he's going to get ... Someone's going to sit down with him and give him some bullet points he's got to have in his head. But his head is just not in this game. It's never been in this game. It's obvious from everything he says. And that is something you can't say about Clinton. For all of her flaws as a person. I don't care how much you hate her as a person. She understands what's going on in the world. And that difference is so enormous. Forget about all the other character flaws of this guy who is just obviously going to ... I mean he's ... But are we attached too much to this idea of one person being the figurehead? If we all ... If we all ... If we all woke up today. If everybody woke up and there was just no government. It was nothing. We're all just like, what happened? I don't know. But we've got to figure out how to run this thing. We had no previous understanding of government. Would you think anybody would say we need one dude to just run this whole giant continent filled with 300 million people? Most likely if we woke up and we had technology like we have today. We had the ability to communicate like we have today with social media and whatever. We would probably say we need to figure this out amongst each other and find the people that are the most qualified for each one of these positions and start running our government that way. Well that's what we're attempting to do. But it's just ... And I totally agree with you that it is astonishing that out of a nation of 300 million people these are the choices. You would think ... Starting from your zero set point of just now we're going to reboot civilization. You would think that if you had this kind of process each candidate would be more impressive than the next. You'd be like I can't believe ... Each person who came to the podium would be so impressive. Like looking at LeBron James. Oh yeah. It'd be like the Dunk contest for the NBA. It'd be like oh my God. Just when you thought you saw the best Dunk in your life the next guy comes along. Exactly. And it would be that on every topic. You'd be talking about the science of climate change. You'd be talking about the actual dynamics of the war on terror. Topics that seem to have no relationship where you'd have to be ... You'd be amazed that anyone could be an expert in all of them. You would find someone who was an expert, a functional expert in all of them. A jeopardy winner dude. Yeah. But someone who's also ethically wise. Who wasn't obviously an asshole. And who had a mature relationship to changing his or her mind. This whole bit about flip-flopping and not being ... Someone who could honestly represent changes of mind across a political career. It's nowhere written that it's a good thing to believe today what you believed 20 years ago. You do that on every topic. It means basically you haven't been in dialogue with the world. But there's something ... It's so taboo to change your mind that either you have to lie about it or you have to pretend it was always that way. It's just a ... The system is broken in that respect but given the choices. When you have a choice between someone who is, for all her flaws, been in the game for long enough to be really well-informed and capable of compromise and capable of not just breaking the entire machine. And you have someone who's just ... He just kind of stepped off the set of his reality TV show and then lied about everything and elbowed his way onto your television set and never left because CNN couldn't figure out how to give the mic to someone else. It's amazing. Well, he's a product of attention because they realize that there's a heated race. The heated race, this guy was really famous. And in the heated race, this guy would say some crazy stuff and so they would tune into him. So everybody had to tune into him. And because of him saying crazy stuff, he accelerated the amount they were talking about him. So they were constantly talking about him and barely talking about other people. But he's created a wormhole in our political process now where there's nothing so crazy that could disqualify him among the people who like him. So he can just keep ... Nuclear bombs of craziness that the press can't ignore that every time they think, okay, this is the crazy thing he said that's going to harm his candidacy, so let's shine a light on it. It just helps him. He could get on Twitter right now and say, you know who I'd like to fuck? I'd like to fuck Nicki Minaj. And it would work for him. It would work for him. You would see a tweet storm of a billion people who say, I'd like to fuck Nicki Minaj too. Go get her. It's insanity. That's where we are. But in a sense, we do admit that this is a fucked up system. It's not ideal. It should definitely be reworked. And it's so hard to rework. Wouldn't the best way to rework it? A Trump asteroid just slams right into the White House. Boom. Blows the whole thing sky high. Who knows what terrible things have to happen, but maybe that would be enough. The thing is, we have those. Those asteroids are coming anyway. So when you look at ... 9-11 was an asteroid, right? So it's like a super bug that becomes a pandemic. These are things that are coming, and we need people who are in touch with reality to deal with them. So the moment someone advertises not only their ignorance, but the fact that they don't care that they're ignorant, and they do this again and again, they keep doubling down, that person is like ... If you put that person at the helm, what you have done is basically put chaos at the helm. This person's going to believe whatever he believes, regardless of the information coming in and regardless of the consequences. That's just ... I mean, it's worse than having no one in charge, because you've put the power in this person's hands. So this person is ... Everything has to go through this node in the network that is just like an information scrambling device, right? So no matter how good the information is coming in, you've got a bottleneck here which just screws up the signal, right? That's what you're doing if you're hiring someone like this who ... I mean, yeah, in the best case, what you stated earlier would in fact be true, which he'll get into the Oval Office, and even he will be scared of the prospect that he's now running a better part of human civilization, and he will hire the best people, or some semblance of the best people he can get access to and say, tell me how to not screw this up. And that will be ... And then it'll essentially be business as usual, right, insofar as you've hired the best people will be people who are deeply in this game already, right? He'll defer to the generals when it comes time to make war. Being really pragmatic about how they pick politicians and how they push certain people and decide not to push others. Do you think that something like Trump completely changes how they move forward now? They realize that this can happen? Like, now that you see that people are so goofy, we're so WWE'd out that you can get this guy. This is where we're at. We've got a guy, I told him the wall just got 10 foot higher. Yeah! Everybody gets crazy. Like, how could you say that? Once they realize that that's possible, how long before you get some motivational speaker type dudes? How long before they start jumping in there? Tony Robbins for president. That's what we have. I mean, this is way worse than Tony Robbins for president. Oh yeah, way, way worse. Tony Robbins, a positive dude. But I'd vote for him. No, Tony Robbins. Very positive guy. That's not what I mean. But that sort of ability to excite people. Like, if we're going to get one of those motivational speaker dudes like, well, those guys wears a lot of yoga pants and he's going to be the next president. He's going to get us in shape. It's going to be a reality show. America's a reality show. Oh, we're there. We're awesome. We're the best. Did you see this press conference he held? I think it was yesterday? No, it did not. No, it was a very funny moment where there was one journalist, I didn't recognize who it was, so Trump was being very combative with the press pool and he was basically shouting them down, not answering any of the questions. One journalist, just aghast, said, is this what it's going to be like when you're president? Is this what it's going to be like to be in the White House press corps and deal with you? He said, yes, this is exactly what it's going to be like. But you could just see that the journalists, they turn the camera on the room of journalists and they are astonished by what is happening here. They don't know, they're participating in this process. In some sense, they have created this process. But not all of you, just many of you. Sorry, fine. Enough of us. Is this what you did? Is this what it's going to be like covering you with your president? Yeah, it is. We're going to have this kind of confrontation. Yeah, it is going to be like this, David. If the press writes false stories like they did with this, because half of you are amazed that I raised all of this money. If the press writes false stories like they did where I wanted to keep a low profile, I didn't want the credit for raising all this money for the vets. I wasn't looking for the credit. And by the way, more money is coming in. I wasn't looking for the credit. But I had no choice but to do this because the press was saying I didn't raise any money for them. Not only did I raise it, much of it was given a long time ago. And there is a vetting process and I think you understand that. But when I raise almost $6 million and probably in the end we'll raise more than six because more is going to come in and is coming in. But when I raise $5.6 million as of today, more is coming in. And this is going to phenomenal groups and I have many of these people vetting the people that are getting the money. You played the moment I was referring to. Here is a case where he's probably almost certainly lying about his history of giving to veterans affairs. And he gave money very recently after people started fishing around to see if he actually had given the money that he claimed to have given to veterans. But I mean this is what's difficult about this is that I mean the press is highly imperfect and also partisan and there are false stories and there are exaggerations and they screw people over. And there are reasons to not trust the press from time to time. But in this case you have someone who there is no amount of fact checking and disconfirmation of his statements that forces him to ever acknowledge anything that he's done wrong and the lack of acknowledgment that he pays no price for it among the people who like him. And so the press is powerless. But the net result of a press conference like this if you are a Trump's follower is he just showed how biased and petty the press pool is. And the press do need to just be beaten up by a strong man who's not going to stand for their bullshit. But it's a ... I mean ... It's unbecoming at the very least. That kind of communication. It's kind of unbecoming of the person that we expect. And that's pretty mild. Compared to his parodying of the disabled reporter who he ... I mean you saw that bit where he did like a cerebral palsy imitation at one of his speeches. Yeah. He was interviewed by ... I don't happen to know who the reporter was. Oh yeah. He was making fun of somebody with cerebral palsy. He's done so many things that you would think would be fundamentally canceling of a person's political aspirations. Like you caught Marco Rubio pretending to be just goofing on someone's cerebral palsy at one of his campaign events. Oh it's so true. Just be the end. Right? One of the things that sunk Ted Cruz was just that video with him with his family, the outtakes. I didn't see that. Oh you didn't see it? It's a gem. It's spectacular. It's him with his mom and he's like, my mom prays for me. Often for hours every day. And she's like ... She looks at me like, what the fuck are you talking about? Hours every day? No I don't. He can't even say that. And so they have all these really awkward moments like, okay I'm going to go in for a hug and I'm going to say I love you. It's all like weirdly mapped out. And that got online and people were like, oh Christ. Okay. I see that this is a bad game. Like you're not even good at this game. You're terrible at this game. He was objectively terrible at this game. Well that's Trump's competition. The thing about Cruz that never even got out, which was the reason to be scared about a Cruz presidency, was his level of religious craziness. No one was even pushing on that because there wasn't just enough to push on before he even got to that door. You have to hold on to those weapons. But I mean had Cruz been the nominee, it would have been all about religion. What's odd is that that's not a handicap in 2016. You can have that and people consider it an asset. Well the one thing that's surprising and actually hopeful in Trump's candidacy is the fact that he has dissected out the religious social conservative component of the Republican Party. So evangelicals for the most part were going for Trump over Cruz when it was pretty clear to them that Trump was just pretending to be religious. So Trump gave one speech at Liberty University where he spoke. He said Corinthians 2 and that's not the way any Bible reader would speak about 2 Corinthians. How would you say it? 2 Corinthians. That's how you would say it? Yeah. So he said Corinthians 2 as though this is something he just opened every night before he went to sleep. It was clear to them that he is just miming the language or impersonating a person of faith. But they don't care really as long as he does it. And that is, if you're going to look for a silver lining to this, it shows that it's not, they just want a space where their religious convictions are not under attack and they don't really care that the person in charge share them. If you pretend to share them, that's good enough. And that's better than actually caring that this person really believed in the rapture or anything else that is quite obviously crazy. So I don't think any Christian who is voting for Trump thinks, I mean they'll say, I'm not going to judge another man's faith. Or who am I to say what's really in his heart? They'll say that. But he's just given, if you've been paying attention to who he's been and if you just look at how he talks about these things, I don't think he's fooling any Christian. So I think they're willing to vote for someone, now for other reasons that are fairly depressing in their own right, they're willing to vote for someone who doesn't really play the game the way they do. You have to believe in God to be president in 2016, right? Wouldn't you say that? You have to pretend to believe in God. But I think with Trump, I think the pretense is obvious enough that I don't think he's fooling the better part of the people who are voting for him. Who would say they care about a person of faith being in the White House. So if anything, he might be, one thing he might be breaking is the barrier on having an atheist president because I think he, you know, it's just nobody thinks he is a person of faith. I don't think anyone really thinks that. So he might be our first atheist president. He would help us in that regard as well. Another Trump meteor right into the White House. I'm starting to sound like a Trump supporter. Occasionally an asteroid does something good. Who would be the ideal president? I mean, like what kind of a person? I mean, it would probably be a person who doesn't seek attention. Could be a person that... Well, I don't think it could be that. I mean, the process is even an optimized process will be, will require enough sacrifice of what ordinary people want most of the time that it will be an unusual personality who has to get promoted. I mean, you will be on some metric be, I mean, it's almost by definition narcissistic to think that you should be in this role, right? Right. Who are you to think that you should be running civilization at this moment in human history? And for you to be honest, for you to honestly stand at the podium and say, I'm the guy, you know, or the woman, like I am the most qualified. I should be doing this, right? I can help. If you're going to scrutinize the kind of personality that could give rise to those opinions, it's not... Yeah, there are some dials you would probably want to change, tweak if you had to be married to this person or it's not an optimal personality. So there's going to be, there's a kind of pathology of power seeking that might be just intrinsic to it. But you want someone who is actually wise ethically. I mean, just try to map that onto Trump, right? Imagine someone saying, the thing I like about Trump is that he is so deeply ethical and wise, right? It's just, it does not. I mean, it's like saying it's because his hair looks so natural. I mean, there's just no, it is the antithesis of what he is, right? The thing I like about Trump is that he is so well-informed about the way the world works and where he's not informed, he recognizes his ignorance so quickly and he remedies it as fast as possible. He seeks out the best experts, defers to them. And he's just, he's as mindful of the limits of his knowledge as he is about his expertise and his expertise is vast, right? You'd want to be able to say that about a president. You could not begin to say that about Trump, right? You could probably say that, honestly, you could probably say that about Clinton, right? For Hillary? Yeah, for all her defects, she's very knowledgeable and I'm sure she will just try, where she doesn't feel like she's got the knowledge, she's going to try to go to the source of the knowledge, right? Just grab the best experts she can find. I think she will be as aware as you or I would be of the consequences of not knowing what's going on, right? She's just going to want to find out what's going on. Whereas this, I mean, all Trump has advertised about himself is that he thinks that bluster and banality and bullying will win in every situation. It's just like, it's just attitude. The guy is winging it. I mean, it could not be more obvious that this guy is winging it on every level. I mean, it's like, it's just, it is, there'd be no way for him to signal the fact that he's winging it more clearly than he is with everything he's doing and yet there's no penalty. Do you think it's possible that in this age of information, the way we can communicate with each other, that we're going to experience these cycles, these waves, these in and outs, these high and low tides of really smart presidents and really stupid presidents and we just, people revolt and it's just, it's so easy to stay alive. There's plenty of stupid people out there and so they're only willing to vote for other dumb folks. So the other dumb folks get into position. They send out the frequency that only the dummies here and everybody else is going, what the fuck is everybody voting for this guy for? What is happening? And then it makes the smart people rebound in four years and challenge themselves anew because they need some sort of an enemy to rally against to reach their full potential. And then without the low tide, you cannot have the high tides, Sam Harris. Hopefully that's not an analogy that applies to the maintenance of civilization. The smell. Yeah. Yeah. At the very least, it's a wake up call for the political establishment. This silly game that you've been running of two candidates just doesn't work. Someone can co-opt your candidacy, get in there, throw the fucking monkey wrench into the gear system and guess what? Trump's running for president now. He's the head, I mean, he's the head guy for the Republicans. How is that even possible? They don't know. I mean, what's amazing, it is a wake, if nothing else, it is a total wake up call for the Republicans. I mean, they are just- It's June. A guest, yeah. It's June. It's a decided lockdown. So we have July, August, September, October, November. We're that close. But he's not someone who has been, who's aligned with the Republican platform in most ways, right? So it's like he's been, truth is virtually no one knows what his policies are because he keeps changing his position on things like taxation. Actually, he's said, he's talked on both sides of core issue, core Republican issues. But I mean, in many ways, he's left of Hillary, right? He's left of Hillary in terms of being an isolationist. I mean, his relationship to war is but both extremes. Like he's like, no, we're just going to get out of the world's business, right? We're going to be isolationist, which is deeply anti Republican. But I'm going to be the maniac who you're never going to know who I'm going to bomb next, right? We're going to wipe out ISIS. We're just straight away, right? Not a man left standing. And I'm not going to take any shit from anyone, including China and North Korea. So he's that, but we're going to pull back in a huge way and not be in anyone's business, right? He said both of those things. It's way too interesting. We don't want politics to be this interesting. And November is going to be, if the polls are close and watching those debates and waiting for a swing in the polls as a result, it's just going to be way too interesting. It's going to be like watching the Super Bowl, those first debates. It's going to be a hundred million people watching those debates. I have a prediction. I think it's entirely possible that this whole thing was a plot that didn't work out. I think he probably came out of the gate saying crazy shit, thinking he would tank the Republican Party and get his friend Hillary Clinton into the White House. No, that wasn't it. Well, she didn't get the memo. He kept trying to insult her, kept trying to make stuff up about Mexicans, and it just kept making them get better and better. And now he's stuck. He can't pull out. That would be a great moment. That would change the system. Well, we're going to have to go through something like this in order for us to realize that this is crazy, that a guy can just do this, can just not really have any interest in politics. But if he pulled out, then he should get the Nobel Prize for everything. If he pulls out at this point and says, listen, I took you to the precipice here just because I wanted you to recognize how unstable this situation is. You guys could elect a demagogue who is actually an incoherent demagogue. I haven't even been playing an incoherent authoritarian. I'm, on one hand, very liberal and tolerant. And on the other hand, I'm like getting ready to be Hitler. And you guys can't figure out who I am. And yet you're still prepared to vote for me. Right. I mean, yeah, for him to do a post-mortem on his punking of the culture, that would be the best thing to ever happen. But I don't think that's what's happening. Do we need someone like this so that we realize how silly this whole thing is? Do we need someone like this? No, no. I think it's a qualified person to deal with all of the other hassles and dangers that are coming our way that have nothing to do with what we do. Right. But that person's not there. Even if we were doing everything perfectly, there would still be this tsunami of risk and hassle and waste and just all the rest of the world's chaos that is coming our way. Even if we had our house in order in every respect, we still have terrorism and global climate change. You've got China and India and what are they doing in terms of complying with climate goals. You have all the things we've been talking about, the virtual certainty that there's going to be a pandemic. We're not talking about bioterrorism. We're talking about just the sheer fact that in 1918 there was a killer flu and there's going to be another killer flu. There's just no way there's not going to be another killer flu. And we need people, smart people to optimize the system to deal with these kinds of things. And if we're promoting religious maniacs and crazy narcissists and liars and ignoramuses, and only those people, how could this end well? This is just a weird year for heavyweight boxing. They have those weird years for heavyweight boxing where Tony Tubbs is a champ. Or you could be the heavyweight champion. They went through a period of time in the early 80s where Tyson came around. It was a series of these champs that were sort of like journeyman fighters. And then Tyson came along. Maybe that's what it is. But only with heavyweights, right? Yeah, mostly with heavyweights. Yeah, the lighterweights, they were always bad ass. But I think that maybe that's what's going on. Maybe we need to have this bad season, get the season out of our way, realize the danger of having an inept person in office, whether it's a liar or a dude who hates money or Trump, whoever it is, just go through it and realize how silly it is that we have it set up this way still.