#185 — A Conversation with Paul Bloom

That was the least of my intentions.

Nothing mean spirited, but we diminished his stature or assumed that he was invisible or had disappeared into obscurity in some way because we haven't been paying attention to his career. But someone pointed out, and I quickly confirmed, that the man is selling out very large auditoriums with his latest act. He has quite a career. He's out there making a fair amount of noise. So it seems we were wrong about Paul Rubin's.

Well, good to know.

Good to know.

And as I was walking to the studio ten minutes ago, I saw that Al Franken is coming to New Haven. So I think he had somewhat of a blow to his reputation. But maybe redemption is more common than we had expected.

Maybe cancellation is rarely permanent. That's good to know. Anyway, so no hard feelings, Paul Rubins.

Absolutely no hard feelings towards Paul Rubins.

And the other thing. So the other thing that I just had in my mind to mention, based on the last conversation we started by talking about Kobe's death and the death of everyone else involved in that helicopter crash, because we recorded our last conversation the day after that happened, and I didn't know this at the time, but finding out about it is an interesting ethical question. So we didn't touch on this. I believe it is, in fact, true that TMZ, the kind of paparazzi inspired website, announced Kobe's death before the family even knew about it. That was the way the information came out. And I'm wondering just what you think about the ethics of that. The interesting thing from my point of view is, given that I've taken such a strong position against the advertising model and what that has done to digital media, this seems to me to be another symptom of it. I mean, the race to publish is really directly incentivized by the kind of winner take all effects of clickbait journalism and with different incentives that there wouldn't be the same kind of sense of time pressure to publish. I was just wondering what you thought about that, because many people think, well, why does it matter? The tragedy is you've lost your husband, your father. This is a 20 megaton catastrophe. However you look at it, does it really matter that you heard about it on Twitter? Because TMZ tweeted it and not through some sober channel, but it seems to me to matter a lot. I'm wondering what you, as a psychologist.

Yeah, I agree with mean, I don't have any special expertise on this as a psychologist, just sort of common sense and decency. If somebody's father, daughter, wife, whatever, dies, you want to be told in a sober, controlled circumstance. You don't want to find it as a hashtag. I think, for the most part, news sources are often particularly well behaved in this way, but some of them aren't. And there is a sort of darwinian battle for clicks and for attention. And so some don't play by the rules. And I think in some way there's a question of what should be legally allowed, which I actually think a lot. But there's also the question of what's sort of morally atrocious and something could be you wouldn't want the law to punish them, but you want to also say, that's kind of despicable.

Yeah. No, it really is hard to imagine the editorial call here when you have every reason to believe that this information is minutes old and that the family probably doesn't know anything about it and you're racing to publish. It's just something has gotten away from you there. And again, it's the incentives at your back, no doubt, but it's a symptom of our digital ecosystem at the moment.

And definitely at the moment. I mean, we're both old enough to remember when there were newspapers and rushing to get it out would be rushing to get it out the next day. Yeah. For the last long while, it's been a matter of minutes or seconds.

Right.

So that kind of changes everything.

Okay, so now we're talking in the immediate aftermath of the Trump impeachment acquittal and the high drama of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the union address and Mitt Romney breaking from the herd and voting to impeach. What do you think about all of this? Do you have a hot take on the politics of this?

I have the observations everyone else has, which is, if anything, Trump is becoming more and more unhinged, more and more confident in his abilities to do whatever he.

Know.

I think things are going to get worse and worse and worse until, I hope with the next election, they get better. And it is true that the Democrats are responding in kind. And people have said, oh, this doesn't know. Trump makes fun of your appearance. You make fun of Trump's appearance. You're just descending to his level. But the thing is, the history of battling Trump is nothing works. The high road doesn't work. The low road doesn't work.

That's what is so strange about him and this moment politically, because nothing works. And I'm trying to understand why this is the case. I mean, it almost seems like a supernatural phenomenon, right? Because I can't map it on to any normal experience. It's. It's like the, the obelisk in 2001, right? I mean, it's an, it's, it's, it's the superficial version of that that was like an infinite profundity somehow that never had to be explained, right? This is just the singularity that at the heart of the cosmos. And Trump is like the inverse of all of that. So it's like there's no depth. It's all surface. And yet the surface is engineered in a way so as to reflect the worst in everyone. This is what's so bizarre about Trump and the response to him. He has a capacity to tarnish the reputation of everyone who comes into his orbit, right? And this is, again, whether it's a supporter or a critic, and for supporters, this is very obvious. I mean, the effect is astonishing. You have serious people with real reputations, I mean, politicians and soldiers and business people who have lifetimes of real accomplishment, who achieve levels of personal hypocrisy and political cowardice in propping him up and in covering for his lies and in pretending not to notice his lies, in just pretending that he's normal, that we've never seen before. But then the flip side of it is that all of his critics are also diminished by how they respond to, you know, the case with Pelosi, I think, is an example of this. I mean, many people are obviously celebrating what she did, but I think it does also diminish her. Right? I mean, she's just, she is left behaving in a way that a congressperson shouldn't behave, right? And she's demeaning the office of the presidency because of its current occupant. And there's just something so strange about this, this term of disparagement that Trump supporters use. Trump derangement syndrome. Everyone has tds. There's something to that. Because he is a kind of superstimulus, right? I mean, the reaction to him is exaggerated because it's out of proportion to his qualities as a person. It's out of proportion to the bad things he's done and the bad things he aspires to do, because he's not actually evil, right? He's not as scary as he might be, and yet somehow he gets an even bigger reaction than someone would if they were just truly scary. Right? So it's almost like his smallness as a person is invoking a bigger reaction than you would ordinarily feel. And I feel it myself. I feel it personally. I may have said this. I find him more despicable than I found Osama bin Laden. Right? And that's strange. This is psychologically true, because with Osama bin Laden, it's just obvious to me that he could have been a mensch in some sense, right? He's making serious sacrifices for ideas that he deeply believes in. He's committed to a cause greater than himself.