Sam Harris Debates Scott Adams: Is Trump Lying On Purpose? (AUDIO)

Famed atheist Sam Harris has an award-winning podcast called Waking Up. A little while ago Harris put out the call to his fans on Twitter asking for suggestions for a ‘smart‘ Trump supporter that would be good for him to talk with on the podcast.

Staunchly opposed to Trump himself, Harris wanted to speak with someone he respected. He also asked that they not be ‘conspiracy theorists‘ or ‘glorified trolls.’ This made it a pretty small pool of people for him to speak with and in the end, upon suggestion, he asked Dilbert creator Scott Adams to join the conversation. He accepted.

The conversation was quite interesting and as Harris himself points out, he was not sure if Adams actually supported anything that Trump does or if he just has a theory about him being persuasive. In some of the conversation they spoke about Trump’s lies. Both agreed he was a liar, but they had very different views of how and why he lies. Adams describes himself as extremely liberal on social issues and conservative economically, he even studied economics at college. When Harris told Adams he thought Trump was the least persuasive person to him and that he saw him as a lying conman, Adams had a different slant on the whole thing.

Adams made the interesting point that there are three types of lies.

He firstly claimed that there are occasions when people lie, but it is because they believe what they say to be true. So they are simply wrong.

Adams then said there is the type of lie, one that Trump often uses, and that was to lie as hyperbole – which is a sales technique of going in with a big offer first, so that a more moderate version can go ahead later.

The third type of lie Adams argued was that sometimes Trump did not care whether something was true or not.

Adams thinks Trump knows the difference between these types of lies and that he purposefully uses the latter two. Adams also points at the economy as a sign of his success.  He sees Trump’s success as that of a persuasive sales person.

This contrasted greatly with how Sam Harris sees the president. Harris listed one after the other of the terrible things Trump has done and how these show us what sort of person he is. He mentioned the Trump University scandal, the creepy way Trump would show up at Miss Universe contests in the hope of seeing the women get dressed, the failure to pay contractors, and so many other moral failings of Trump. The conversation became psychological when Harris described why he personally did not like him. Harris said:

“Long before he ran for president, he struck me as nothing more than an odious conman. He strikes me as an absolutely despicable person.”

This is where Adams started asking Harris if he thought Trump was successful at conning people and that conning was akin to persuading. Harris was adamant that he personally did not feel conned by Trump himself, but could see others were convinced by him. Harris put it like this:

“I can see that he must be persuading somebody. He fully persuaded half the country to become president. But there is never a moment when I find him persuasive. When I look at him, I see a man with — it is really uncanny– a man without an inner life. The most superficial man on Earth. A guy who has been totally hollowed out by greed, self regard, and delusion. The way he talks about himself… If I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window…”

While Adams did not defend the actual things Trump did, he somehow suggested that no one could truly know what is going on in anybody’s head.  Adams put it like this:

“You said he’s a con man, but then you said the things he says are a good reflection of what he is thinking. You kind of have to pick one.”

In some ways this conversation was an agreement that Trump has done some awful things, but it was more of a discussion and argument about whether Trump knows what he is doing and whether or not he lies the way he does on purpose, to achieve an end. Adams believes that Trump is an expert of persuasion. He believes Trump wrote a book about what and how he does it in “The Art of the Deal” and that this method has worked in the only way he has intended it to.

Listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReKIJvOJDrs

 

Featured image via YouTube.