Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. And I am once again with my friend Paul Bloom. Paul, thank you for joining me.

Hey Sam, good to talk to you. We've been making a habit of this. This is fun. This is a lot of fun and I just want to...

I'm Paul Bloom. Everybody knows who you are but I'm Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology at Yale University.

And I want to sort of start by continuing in conversation we were having just now and we've been having over last little while.

Well I'm going to try to get you to say something nice about Trump. And I figure out the way to do it. Put it this way.

Are you ready for it? Yeah, I want to brace myself because this is a heavy lift emotionally and ethically spiritually.

Well, I'll reassure you. I'm not going to ask you to say anything like he's a decent person or he has any positive moral qualities.

It's a different line. So here's how it goes. Imagine a competition that starts off with a lot of people, a thousand, a hundred, gradually whittles down to a dozen.

And these aren't extremely motivated people. They're accomplished. Some of them have extremely strong records of success.

And they're seeking after probably the most sought after prize in the world. And they have a competition at last, a year, at least many, many months.

This is seeming vaguely familiar. It's vaguely familiar. That's right. Not hypothetical.

Not hypothetical. Sometimes they battle independently. But there's a lot of face-to-face confrontations where there are no room and a million people are watching them.

And it's a zero-sum game. It can only be one winner. And after a long, savage battle, this guy who actually had never competed before, who had no reasonable qualifications for it, wins.

So as you've tweaked on, I'm talking about the Republican primaries. And I'm talking about Trump winning.

Now, I'm less impressed that he won the election. Once you get to an election in this country, it's a coin toss. You know, to have to be a vote for the Republican, have for the Democrat, and you're fighting for the smidgen of undecideds.

But doesn't it say something extraordinary about him that he won?

I can give you some of what you're asking for, I think. Yes, he clearly has an understanding of television that his opponents didn't have, even though they're all...

They were all professional politicians. And some of them are just anti-charismatic. He was up against Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, people who didn't have a stage presence and couldn't be trained to have one, apparently.

And you add to that his experience as a showman, really, as a reality TV, in Prasario, mostly.

Again, I go back to my evil trancey gardener thesis, which is the responsibility for his success really isn't in him. It's more in the environment.

It's in the electorate's relationship to fame and having seen someone on television so much. He was, in fact, one of the most famous people on Earth, even though he was kind of a Rodney Dangerfield character in the business community.

But he's one of the most recognizable people more so than his opponents. But that's the environment. I guess I should remind people not even knows the reference because I'm old.

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