Scott Adams and Dave Rubin dissect the alt-right's rise as a reaction to political correctness, analyzing how Trump utilizes hypnosis-like "linguistic kill shots" and A-B testing to exploit human irrationality. They debate free speech paradoxes, noting Trump's potential moderation in the White House versus Clinton's vulnerability to shocks, with Adams predicting a 98% landslide victory. Ultimately, the conversation suggests that judging by recent actions rather than past mistakes is crucial for societal improvement, while warning that unleashed creativity must avoid triggering global conflict. [Automatically generated summary]
Suddenly it seems the entire country is talking about the alt-right,
so I guess it's our turn as well.
For those of you who are attuned to the wacky, wild underside of the internet, you know that the alt-right has existed for a couple years now, but it's only in the last few days that the mainstream has started talking about it.
Last week, Hillary Clinton attacked the alt-right in a big speech, which led to coverage in every newspaper and online outlet across the globe.
Hillary blamed Breitbart.com for mainstreaming racism, which she said was proven by Trump's embrace of the alt-right.
CNN and Fox News both aired clips from the Rubin Report in which Milo Yiannopoulos talked about the alt-right, explaining it as a counterculture movement uniting disaffected conservatives with mischievous internet meme makers.
The usual pundits suddenly were all experts on the alt-right, even though they didn't know what it was while it was growing right before their eyes this whole time.
Our outrage culture always needs some new outrage to be outraged about, and once Hillary mentioned the alt-right by name, it meant the movement had officially arrived.
The alt-right seems to take many different forms, depending on who you talk to.
Mainstream media, and pretty much the entire left, brand the alt-right as a white supremacist movement rallying around Donald Trump.
Their members hate blacks, they hate Jews, they hate Hispanics, and they want some sort of racially pure country to stop white genocide.
Mainstream Republicans see the alt-right as a group of loudmouthed, offensive racists who are tearing the conservative movement apart by throwing away traditional conservative ideals like small government and replacing them with a win-at-all-costs candidate.
Others say the alt-right is a grassroots movement born out of natural pushback to our increasingly political correct society.
I think if you mix some of those explanations together, you get what the alt-right really is.
But you have to add one more thing.
The internet.
The alt-right, whatever version of it you claim to be, was created right here on the internet.
And as something created by the internet, it is as amorphous as the internet itself.
What the alt-right really is, though, is a band of meme posters, anime avatars, and twitter eggs vying for attention from people in power.
They post Nazi memes, racist pictures, and offensive tweets with the express intent of getting powerful people to react, respond, and thus amplify their message.
They are keyboard warriors and professional trolls trying to get attention from the sold-out and corrupt media and political elite that we have.
The real alt-right isn't about one political ideology as much as it is a loosely linked group of people using the tools of the internet to upset the establishment.
Ironically, in some ways, this wrangling and mocking of the establishment is exactly what the Bernie revolution was supposed to be.
But while Hillary put Bernie's revolution on ice, she has now elevated the alt-right to mainstream status by giving a big speech about it.
The alt-right wants attention more than anything and they trolled her into giving them exactly what they want.
Let me back up here for a sec because I don't want to gloss over that whole white supremacist, hate the blacks, hate the Jews, kick out the Hispanics thing.
This portion of the alt-right absolutely does exist.
I see it on Twitter every single day.
You can pause this video right now and find thousands of images, including Nazi imagery,
racist caricatures of minorities, and plenty more.
Do a quick search on Twitter, a scan on Reddit, or a look at 4chan and you'll see some pretty
nasty stuff.
I don't like it, but you guys know my policy on free speech and free expression, so I choose
to ignore these images and ideas rather than amplify them.
The real question though is, do these truly hateful racist memes and tweets represent
a real movement of hate, or are they designed just to get attention?
I think it's some combination of both.
Some true racists mixed with a bunch of people who just want to mess with those in power.
How many of each of them are there?
We have no idea.
What we do know, though, is that these people wield very little real world power.
Do white supremacists exist?
Yeah.
Do black, Jew, and Hispanic haters exist?
Yeah, they do.
Do some people want to keep immigrants out because of racism?
Yes.
But the people who make up the alt-right aren't the ones with the power.
Instead, they are the ones trying to upset the people in power.
And as for Donald Trump, he has blacks and Jews and Hispanics on his campaign staff.
This doesn't mean there aren't racist supporters of Trump.
Of course there are, just as there are racist supporters of Hillary and everyone else to ever run for president, ever.
Trump's blunt language, which has attacked almost every group out there, often blurring the line between being politically incorrect and truly hateful, is just an extension of the tactics that the alt-right keyboard warriors are doing on their own.
Personally, I think that the regressive left is more of a threat to our democracy than the alt-right.
The regressive left, with its tactics of stifling debate and silencing critics, has gained mainstream traction in our media and in our universities.
These regressive, not progressive, ideas have become all too common on the left, and they've actually given birth to the natural response, the alt-right.
I know this firsthand not only from the emails that you guys send me, but also from all the students at UCLA who came up to me after my event with Milo Yiannopoulos a couple months ago to tell me that they're supporting Trump just because they can't take the culture of fear around speech anymore.
The alt-right, with its Trump frogs and photoshopped pictures of sick Hillary, is little more than a bunch of guys in their basements using outrage culture against itself.
Most of us are not part of the regressive left or the alt-right.
This is precisely why we must talk about ideas honestly and not let the extremes on either side control the debate.
As I've said many times before, Trump's wall might not be sensible or sound policy, but a wall in and of itself is not racist.
If we refuse to have a conversation about immigration without yelling racist at everyone who disagrees with us, then we'll leave the conversation to anyone who comes up with an easy answer.
Trump's wall is the easy answer to a complex immigration problem, and it's one of the reasons that the alt-right loves him.
The alt-right is the organic result of a politically correct society that refuses to engage in ideas in an honest way.
That doesn't mean the alt-right is right.
It just means that they're here, and to demonize them without understanding them doesn't stop them.
It actually strengthens them.
My guest this week is Scott Adams.
Scott is the creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip Dilbert, as well as a proponent of Donald Trump's tactics.
I don't know if he considers himself part of the alt-right, but I would consider him part of it as someone who's using internet culture to spread his ideas during this insane election cycle.
We're going to dive into his feelings about Donald Trump and much more.
Will the alt-right Twitter Nazis make memes of us in Nazi costumes after the interview?
Well, I'm very excited to talk to you, and we're going to definitely do the politics stuff and the Trump stuff and all that.
But first, for the people that probably know Dilbert but don't know much about you personally, you have a sort of interesting backstory of what kind of led you to becoming a cartoonist and everything.
My banking career ended when my boss called me in her office and told me in direct language, as directly as I'm going to tell you, that she couldn't promote me any time in the future because I'm a white male.
And I just figured out, well, that's what that must have been about.
And I wrote down the name of the host from the closing credits.
I wrote him a regular snail mail letter.
And I said, how do you become a cartoonist?
And he answered, two-page letter, said, buy this book, use these materials.
And he said, whatever happens, don't get discouraged because it's a real tough industry and, you
You'll get rejected a lot, but don't give up.
So I said, oh, this is great.
I bought the book, I got the materials, I put together some comics that were just single panel comics, sent them off to the major magazines, they were rejected.
I just thought, well, I tried, right?
It's the best you can do, is try.
So I put all my materials in a closet, and I forgot about it.
A year goes by and one day I walk out to the mailbox and there's a letter there from that same cartoonist who had sent me the original advice.
His name is Jack Cassidy.
And if he's watching this, hi Jack.
And he said that he was cleaning his office and he came across my letter that was in the bottom of a pile.
And he said that he was just writing to make sure that I hadn't given up.
And so I thought, well, maybe he knows something that I don't know.
Maybe he sees something that even the magazines didn't see in my work.
So I decided to raise my sights to try to become a syndicated cartoonist in newspapers all over the world, as opposed to just trying to get a comic in a magazine, because I figured if I got rejected at that, It would feel like progress, because I'd be getting rejected at a higher level, you know?
I mean, that's really just a great story of not just perseverance, but also that someone else that you didn't even know really dragged you back in when you were out, and also that your work before that, you hit that dead end of You know, you're not going any further here.
It happened to be because of your skin.
It's interesting, the way you describe it, you don't sound like you were, you sound like you sort of understood what they were doing, even though it was against, it wasn't working for you.
And it is also true that when someone who looks like me, a white male in 1979, gets fired from a job without doing a bad job, or in this case sort of encouraged to quit, I guess, I had lots of opportunities.
So if you're working for a company, you're a writer, you're a white woman, you got discriminated against, there is some place you can go where probably something like the opposite is going to happen.
So I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm just saying that in the world of 2016, You can leave where you are, you have mobility of sorts.
Nobody has perfect mobility, but you can move.
Right.
So you can control your own fate in a way that you couldn't in 1979.
Right, and it's funny because if we're talking about the same Huffington Post picture, it's a long table, all of women, and the woman who took the picture is saying, ah, look at our diversity here.
She means diversity in that there's a lot of women or something to that effect.
And she's actually showing you that it's different than just all white men, but it's not really diversity per se.
So now you, you get the cartoon out there and it starts taking off.
How much of it was rattling around, all the ideas of Dilbert, which is very much takes place obviously in the time of your life that you were working in the corporate atmosphere.
How much of those ideas were rattling around in you while you were doing it?
I mean, was that just your creative outlet to not go crazy?
So when I was learning hypnosis, of course I was doing the, you know, putting people in So called hypnosis trances and doing things like having them remember their past lives, which by the way is not real.
So what do you think that tells you about the human psyche, or the human condition, that people, you'd put them under hypnosis, which you believe is a good practice, and that ultimately they're, so you would say that that's then their subconscious?
It's not just their subconscious, it's the fact that the hypnotist has implanted the suggestion that they can retrieve their past memory, and so that's enough that they imagine that they are having actual memories.
The main thing you learn to practice hypnosis, to be a hypnotist, is you have to understand that people are irrational all the time about everything.
If you don't understand that, you can't even do it.
Because none of it would make sense for a rational person.
If you think people are affected by data and facts and good arguments, you can't even do hypnosis.
Yeah, so for the people that go to a gajillion houses and inspect every inch or that go to 27 car dealerships and all that, you would describe that as just sort of a different way of doing things.
You're sort of going to find a feeling that's going to appear, right?
And you've said some interesting things about your support of Hillary.
So, yeah, so correct me if I'm wrong, that it's not that you're necessarily supporting Trump, but you like the techniques, or you at least understand the techniques that he's using to get his message across.
And I think they're very much in line with some of the techniques that you just described to me.
Let me put it in my words and put the context here.
I don't think that anybody who's about 70 years old should get hired for a job that requires great mental agility, flexibility, high energy, and even staying alive, which is very important to do the job of a president.
So can you describe that part of it, that a lot of people will say "well,
he's just nuts" or "he says anything" and "it's just all crazy" and all that.
But what you're saying really is that there is a method to this madness.
He's not just walking up there every day and saying crazy things with no plan, that there's an actual plan and it's pulling some of the tools that you're talking about.
But if he had to mention one thing that's sort of a shining object, then it would be manipulating attention.
But he also manipulates attention away from things he doesn't want.
So my best example is during the first debate a year ago when Trump was asked about his comments about women in the past.
Now this was a trap that nobody can get out of, right?
You can't say, there's nothing you can say because now the media has made People's attention on these bad things.
So just focusing on it makes them seem higher priority.
And what does Trump say?
He goes, only Rosie O'Donnell.
And suddenly, all the energy sucked out of the question and went to this visual person who was disliked, at least by the base.
You know, the Republicans could be counted on to have an extreme reaction.
So it's a face.
Whenever you can put a face to something, a personality and a visual All the energy just sucks into the room.
And that was the moment I got out of my chair and said, wait a minute, this is not normal.
And then I watched to see if he could repeat it.
And he kept doing it and doing it.
Yeah.
And then by the time he was doing the low energy thing, I think I was the first person probably in the country who said, OK, that's not a random insult.
That's the end of Bush.
He's dead.
And the reason is that his what I call linguistic kill shots are not just insults.
That's what people thought in the first part.
These are engineered.
So look at low energy, how engineered this is.
He takes something that hasn't been used before in the political realm.
It's not the usual thing you say in politics.
So therefore he can imbue it with his own meaning.
It's his own thing.
Right.
Then he picks something that matches the physicality of the person.
That's another big trick.
Right.
Or something when you look at him, you say, "Yeah, that feels right."
Right.
Now here's the thing.
Before he said that, before he reframed Bush as being low energy, I think most people had
the same impression I did.
I looked at that guy and I said, "You know, he looks like a calm, seasoned executive.
He looks like he would be unruffled in even a nuclear war."
That's exactly the kind of executive I want running my country.
And then Bush says, "Low energy."
And every time you look at him after that, you go.
So is that really the genius of this, that he said, lie in Ted Cruz, and he calls her Crooked Hillary, when there's every evidence to believe that someone could call him those things and be just as truthful, if not more truthful, than he's being, right?
Because he's taken every position.
We can talk about some of the immigration stuff, but he's already scaling that back.
Well, it's important to pick the one that people are already sort of primed to believe, or there's something about his physicality that would make them easily believe it.
Trump, there's a lot of things you can say about him.
But what Clinton has finally jumped on that was sort of late in the process because she was fighting Bernie and that was a different fight.
But at this point, she's going with the racist, irrational racist thing.
I believe, I'm reasonably certain, that she has professionals working for her.
One in particular that I've nicknamed Godzilla.
Okay.
Godzilla is my pet name for Robert Cialdini, who wrote the book Influence, who would be considered the monster of persuasion.
If you were going to hire one person to persuade the world— This is the guy.
That's the guy.
And apparently he did consult on Obama's campaign.
So it would be surprising if he had not been asked, at least.
But I don't have confirmation of that.
But I do know that Clinton went from having no persuasion game at all, talking about facts and her experience and her policies, and realizing that that wasn't going to work.
I mean, she basically has a commercial out right now saying exactly that.
So, do you think there was a calculated—what does that say, then, I guess, about the Clinton campaign, that pretty much this all went down last week?
Like, this all seems to have come to a head last week, with the big speech calling him a racist, linking him to alt-right and Breitbart, and we'll get into all that.
Do you think there was really a sit-down where they said, man, the technique he's using is really working and we have to now shift you out of policy and all that stuff?
Or was it just, it's sort of low-hanging fruit to call someone a racist.
They're doing it to each other now.
It's just, oh, you're a racist, you're a racist.
It's become meaningless, I think, for the most part.
The word has become sort of meaningless.
But do you think there was a real calculated sit-down, like, the technique he's using is working, we better start playing ball this way?
It's a word from the technology world, where you're testing one technique, and then you measure how well it does, and then you test another.
And if that works better, you go with this one.
If this one works better, you try yet another one to see if that's even better, until you get the best one.
There's no doubt that they found out their other attacks weren't working.
I think there was a WikiLeaks saying that they thought attacking him on his business acumen wasn't working because people sort of had in their mind that he was good at that stuff.
Yeah, the trouble with the bankruptcy story is his name is on 500 entities.
And yeah, four of them didn't go well.
So that's actually more like a home run than a failure, you know, in an entrepreneurial sense.
So, yeah, I think that they tested until they found that the racist thing is the one that's stuck.
And because of the way he talks, his unfiltered method, and the policies that he's put out, they attract confirmation bias.
For those watching who don't know what confirmation bias is, it's a well-known mental phenomena where if you think something's true, you imagine every bit of evidence to support that.
If rational thinking and logic existed, there would only be one religion.
We would all just figure it out.
There would be mostly people all on one side in these political events.
Not every time it's about 50-50.
What are the odds of that, right?
Or, I asked the question once, where do all the smart people come out on this?
Like, if you polled only smart people, well-educated, really well-informed smart people, would they all have the same opinion?
No.
No!
If there was anything to logic and data and thinking, if thinking were a real thing, like we were really taking the right data and making the right decisions, people would mostly be on the same side in these political questions.
Even if it's 75-25, it would be overwhelmingly on one side.
So as someone that cares about thinking and critical thought and being smart and all of that stuff, this has to be a little depressing for you, right?
I mean, as you already said, the 70-year-old part and all that, and we've only selected just these two, but just the general discourse has to be kind of depressing, right?
Absolutely not, because remember, since my 20s, when I learned hypnosis, I've abandoned the idea that anyone is rational, including me.
So once you abandon that, the world becomes far less frustrating, not more.
So look at the world that the rest of you are living in.
And I feel sorry for you bastards living in this world.
Because you're looking at the people who are on the other side of a political debate and you're saying, why can't they see the logic, the rational arguments that are so clear to me?
So the racist word, we've talked about it a lot on this show, that one of my issues has been how the left has used the words of bigotry and racism and homophobia and all these things.
They've used them so much to smear their opponents that these words no longer have any meaning, really.
If you talk to the average Clinton supporter about what they think of Trump, and this is something I've not seen in any other election, you'll see the person who dislikes Trump physically shake.
I've seen people talk about him and their hands shake.
A lot of people.
I mean, this is not just a few observations.
It's common that people will spit and yell and shake.
And that's because the racist claim sticks.
It's not because they think his policies aren't as good.
My suspicion, though, is that the average person out there hears the word racist, sees the way these things have been overused, and the way we label everybody and goes, ah.
It actually, in a way, especially if you take the Trump supporters, every time you call them a racist, it actually, they like it, because they feel like you've lost the argument, so that's the word you're throwing out there.
I suppose the inherent problem with it in that case is that had this judge been white of Irish descent or Italian descent or some other European descent, you acknowledge he would have certain biases, but Trump would have never figured out a way to bring up his biases.
So in that case, if a Scottish judge who had Scottish parents was involved and he knew that the Scottish parents living in Scotland were really, really mad at Trump, would it be fair to say that the Scottish judge, who was really an American citizen with Scottish background, could be biased?
Yeah, so basically you're just, all you're doing really is just peeling back, you're showing the wizard behind the curtain here, more than anything else, right?
You're not defending the specifics of what he's doing.
Do you blame... I don't sense you have a lot of blame in general, but do you prescribe the symptom of Trump to just...
Everything that has transpired over the last 20 years, just our terrible media that doesn't challenge politicians, our discourse that's crumbled to the point of just yelling racism at everybody, our politicians who lie—I don't think Trump is any bigger of a liar than Hillary is.
I think she's probably a bigger liar, everything being equal.
But he lies in a more of a regular person way, and that makes people freak out.
She lies in more of a—like, it just all led up to him.
Well, you know, we don't live in a single variable world, so you needed everything to be the way it is, plus Trump, to get the result you have.
You can't remove one of the important variables, and there are lots of them.
But I think the key variable, and this is what I've been saying, is Trump's skill.
His skill at persuasion.
That is the story.
I don't think you could take a non-Trump, put him in the same world in 2016 and say, the world is crazy and the media is this.
I don't think you could drop Kanye West into there yet, although I've said he does have some really high persuasion skills, but he doesn't have some of the other stuff.
So yeah, I think it's a Trump-specific phenomenon.
And yet at the same time, I think a lot of people think you're one of the biggest Trump supporters out there, and it's really just because you're talking about his technique.
So when Trump talks in these ways that offend the world, I as a New Yorker say, that's not offensive talk, that's just talk.
That's just how I talk.
One of the things I had to learn to change when I moved to California is that when I talked like New York people talk, upstate or city, there's a bluntness that is offensive.
And by the way, I think this is purely a Trump mistake, meaning that there's, I don't think there's somebody telling him, wait, this stuff doesn't sound the same as soon as you leave the street, as soon as you leave your state.
Yeah, it's funny because I was just telling you, I visited New York for the last 10 days, I got back yesterday, and even though I lived there my whole life, one of the things that I really noticed about being in New York City for 10 days was the incredible racial mix, and every type of person on earth is in that city, on subways together, we're not killing each other.
We're pretty much just ignoring each other because everyone's going to live their lives.
And I thought there's something actually beautiful about that.
It doesn't matter, ultimately, if these people privately hate each other for racist reasons or anything, but they're all out there living their lives.
That's not to say there isn't any crime or any, you know, bad racism or something like that.
But I thought that was actually inspiring about New York, that we're told we live in a society that's so frayed and everything, and yet our best city has everybody And we're doing it!
So when people are judging, for example, Trump for his, let's say, his recent focus on African Americans, and say that's, in his mind, he's not thinking that, I say, you're on the wrong page.
What counts is what he's doing.
And what he was doing before wasn't as good, because he wasn't mentioning, you know, other groups in society, and now he is.
So he's gone from less good to good.
If doing the right thing doesn't count anymore, What the fuck?
So when they take something like the immigration thing, where he said, we're going to kick them all out day one, then he tempered it this past week, and then it sounds like he untempered it by saying, you know, first hour in office, it's going to start or something.
Those are all crazy comments.
Like, we're not getting rid of everybody.
Then the tempering actually, I thought, sounded somewhat sane.
And then the, I'm going to do it in the first hour sounds completely insane.
So I understand that, but is there anything that he could say, do you think, that would turn off his people?
Because immigration was their number one thing, and he pretty much, I mean, even Ann Coulter was acknowledging it, he backed off that because he was trying, I think, to become better, to become a more legitimate candidate.
It's a major, it's one of the biggest components of hypnosis is that idea.
What Trump is doing is pacing and leading the entire Republican Party.
What you think he's doing is that he's gone in and his ideas are a little different and somehow with his, you know, he's punched his way through the top.
That is not what he's doing.
He hollowed out the GOP and he's wearing it as a skin.
When he's done, the Republican Party will never be the same.
He has changed it, and he has improved it.
He got on stage at the Republican Convention and did a full-throated, what I thought was completely sincere, endorsement of doing more to help the LBGTQ community.
Peter Thiel spoke.
He meant it.
And what happened with all the Republicans?
As soon as he did that, You don't hear anybody complaining about that, right?
And on immigration, he paced them, he said what they needed to hear, until they said, Trump, Trump, Trump, he's our guy, I feel good with you.
Now he's in a position to lead.
All right.
The Democratic side, they were already there.
You know, they wanted something kinder and gentler.
And by the way, so do I. I want this to be dealt with in the most humane way that also makes sense for the country.
But he's, it's a little bit like, but slightly different than Nixon goes to China, you know.
Nixon was a hard ass about China, so when he went there, people believed him that he wasn't just selling out, he was still Nixon.
People believe that Trump is still Trump.
And if he sold them that he had their interests in mind, which he totally did, right, for his Republican base, he said, I hear you about this immigration.
I'm going to make it my top priority.
He paced them.
They trusted him.
They got on his side.
Trump, and nobody else, can soften that position.
No one else is in that position because of the way he did it.
Right, so you would say that, you know, I saw a lot of people that after Peter Thiel spoke, and Trump had that nice moment, actually, where he said the thing about LGBT Americans, and he got what I think was a pretty spontaneous applause break from the crowd of base Republicans, right?
You know, I saw that a lot of people after that were saying, well, still look what's in the party platform, and there's still stuff that's not great on marriage equality and a few other things.
But you would argue that's basically irrelevant at this point, because he's the head, he's the leader, and he's made the acknowledgment.
So is that the irony, the ultimate irony of Trump more than anything else, is that while these people get shaky when you're talking to them and angry and stammering and sweaty and all that stuff, that he actually became the Republican Yeah.
by basically being pro-gay marriage.
He's not gonna try to flip gay marriage.
He's for gay people to live equally, basically.
And at the same time, he's been running anti-war.
He certainly doesn't want a nation built, that's pretty obvious.
He wants people that we're giving things to to pay us, all of that stuff.
So he actually sort of killed the neocon part of it and killed the Christian conservatives.
Like he slayed them both on the way.
So he should have become the left's favorite Republican in a bizarre way.
What do you make of the alt-right that everybody's talking about right now?
Do you, I don't think you consider yourself part of it.
You're sort of a- I do not.
You're a parcel to it, or something like that, right?
You're a parcel to it.
Or something like that.
They're getting, I think, some of the techniques that they're doing of upsetting people in power with memes.
You have this nobody in the basement, they send out a Nazi meme to somebody important, that person retweets it, thus you're showing that you're upsetting them and you're changing the game from your basement.
Some of that seems like the stuff that you're talking about.
I'm curious because you've become so big on Twitter and you have your base on Twitter that absolutely loves you.
Do you ever find that they're leading you?
Do you ever find that you're about to tweet something and go...
Ah, this could upset them, or they'll get confused, or as someone that's a writer and that's able to get a thought out in a six-panel cartoon, that Twitter has some drawbacks when you're trying to really formulate a thought.
Because, you know, I think there was a point early on in the race where you could say Trump is lying way more than Clinton.
But I think that difference has been erased.
And the reason is that lying worked really, really well.
And so Clinton is sort of, as I said earlier, dispensed with the facts and she's more about he's a racist and misogynist.
And I don't think, as I've said, I think that's confirmation bias.
It's not a fact.
But the race has almost entirely, if you think about it, I've never seen this before, the race has gone from talking about policies and things in the world to almost entirely talking about this gray lump of matter in each of their heads.
Like, you know, is Hillary sick or lying or whatever?
Is Trump, you know, a crazy racist misogynist or whatever?
In a weird way, if you go back six months and you really saw what was going to happen here, and you look at Hillary and go, ah, Bernie actually, they were going to take him down no matter what, and if you saw what Trump was building, which as you said, you saw it a little earlier than most people, in a way this was the obvious, we were going to get to this, right?
Okay, so let's put Trump and Clinton aside for a second and I want to finish up with free speech because that's sort of in the thrust of everything that I do here,
and I know it's something that's obviously very important to you.
What do you make of the state of free speech in America in 2016
as a creator, as someone that puts thoughts out there?
And you do poke fun at a lot of our societal, nonsensical ways that we self-censor.
So, to that end, do you think—I'm bringing it back to Trump, unfortunately, here, but I have to for the purposes of that—do you think that once in office, if he became president, do you think he'd be able to have those conversations in that sort of space, where he's not doing all these tricks, but doing—I suspect your answer is yes.
Well, I think if you imagine a President Trump, I could see two things happening.
One is that everybody moderates once they get the job.
I remember back in my corporate days, you know, one of my co-workers would get promoted to an important level of responsibility, and their personality would just change overnight.
In fact, Cialdini even writes about this, the influence of your physical environment, in his new book, which I'll plug for him, Pre-Suasion.
Pre-persuasion will be the biggest book about persuasion the world's ever seen.
It'll be massive.
I got an early copy, so I saw it.
Yes, so Trump will moderate just because of the physical, you know, power of the office.
But also, he's also created in everybody's mind an expectation that he does things that other people don't.
So if you're, let's say, you know, the heads of China or Russia, and Trump says a crazy thing that people don't normally say, They're not going to say, oh my god, here comes the nukes.
They're going to say, that's what he does.
So we have to stop thinking that China is a bunch of idiots.
They're going to misconstrue what's happening over here.
It could not be more clear that Trump says things other people don't say.
So if he does more of it, people are going to say, well, there's more of it.
Yeah, I think it's interesting what you said about how in some ways it feels like we have less free speech, and in some ways it feels like we have more, because people have now used the internet to do this.
I'm a little caught between feeling that the internet side of it is good and bad, because so many people are doing it anonymously.
That I feel like they're exercising their right to free speech, but then it also comes with you say all kinds of things that you would never say in person.
I have no problem with what they say, as I say all the time on the show.
I don't like the Nazi memes and showing all these actual racist things about black people or whatever.
I wouldn't stop them from doing it, but still you would say that's a net good because at least there's the outlet.
Do you basically think that that's a good policy in this way?
Because otherwise I feel like we're just making their ideas bigger.
If every time, if I get outraged that they sent me something upsetting, and then I outrage somebody else by retweeting it, and, you know, then it becomes this never-ending thing.
I feel like I'm judging everyone individually, because every once in a while they'll say something that links to some data, and I'll look at that and say, that's data.
I mean, maybe I don't like their implication or where it heads or any of that, but data's data.
So those I tend to let stay, but if somebody just comes on and yells some racial stuff, then I usually just block them right away.
Well, I thoroughly enjoyed talking to you, and I'm glad we were able to talk about some of this stuff without sort of the craziness attached to it, because doesn't it feel like it's just crazy all the time, right?
Look what people learned about their government this year, about how the primaries work, you know, that they are rigged a little bit.
I mean, just the level of human engagement is off the chart, and I would go so far as to say that a President Trump would probably Because it just feels like he needs it.
And people are already sending me all these ideas for building the border wall with a light rail train on the top and businesses and casinos and making it an economic zone.