Sept. 2, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:13:20
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[dramatic music] | |
| 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? | ||
| You'll only know if we retweet them ourselves. | ||
|
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[MUSIC] | |
| My guest this week is an author and creator of the legendary Dilbert comic strip, | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I'm very excited to talk to you, but before we get into anything, you've also received the Rubin Award, which is for Outstanding Cartoonist. | ||
| They spell it the other way, though. | ||
| Coincidentally, yes. | ||
| Although it's not as prestigious as you might think, because they changed the rules some years ago that you couldn't win it more than once. | ||
| And there aren't that many cartoonists in the world. | ||
| So if you stay alive long enough, you got a good shot at a Rubin Award. | ||
| Then you're pretty much going to win one. | ||
| But you won it, what, back, that's over 15 years ago or something, right? | ||
| Which is amazing, because I'm so young. | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| All right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You used to be a regular working man. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Yeah, I worked in two big companies. | ||
| I worked in a big bank in a cubicle, and then I went to the phone company and worked in another cubicle. | ||
| Both of my careers ended the same way. | ||
| I keep forgetting I can say anything I want on here. | ||
| You can say absolutely anything you want. | ||
| Sort of censored or, you know, played down in my backstory. | ||
| Let's break you out of self-censorship right now. | ||
| I'll put it right out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And she said it wasn't discrimination per se in the normal sense. | ||
| It was that the, I guess, the local newspaper had discovered that there was no diversity in senior management. | ||
| And in order to reverse that, since the pipeline wasn't as good as it should have been | ||
| either, they pretty much just had to stop promoting people who look | ||
| like me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I said, "Well, how long is that going to last?" | ||
| And she said something like, "Well, it took 200 years to get here, | ||
| so it might take a while to reverse this." | ||
| I made up that part, but that was implied. | ||
| So I put my resume together and I left. | ||
| Went to Pacific Bell, started working there, got on the fast track. | ||
| I was identified as an up-and-comer who was ready for management. | ||
| And one day my boss called me into his office, And he said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the word has come down. | ||
| I can't promote white males. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it was the same reason. | ||
| It was the newspaper had discovered that they, too, had a problem with diversity as senior management. | ||
| So that was the point that, as I like to say, when you hear the story, you say to yourself, wow, that must have been a really bad day for you. | ||
| But it turns out that the moment you realize that your efforts and your outcomes are not related, it really frees up your schedule. | ||
| So suddenly I had time for hobbies, I wasn't coming in so early, I wasn't working so late. | ||
| I started looking for other things to do. | ||
| Things that I could control my own fate a little bit. | ||
| So one of the things I tried to do, and it's one of many things I've tried to do both before and after Dilbert, was to get a comic strip published. | ||
| Didn't know how to do that. | ||
| And, you know, how do you do that? | ||
| What's the process for getting a comic strip started? | ||
| This was pre-internet. | ||
| You couldn't find out anything. | ||
| Pre-internet! | ||
| Hard to believe that such a time existed. | ||
| It was a time. | ||
| But this is a true story. | ||
| This is sort of the amazing luck part that everybody has in their story at some point. | ||
| Any successful person, if you look at their story, it's like, I worked hard, I worked hard, I worked hard. | ||
| This really frickin' lucky thing happened. | ||
| And then something good happened. | ||
| So in my context there were lots of things that didn't work out for me, but I got real lucky this time. | ||
| And I came home, I was thinking to myself, how do I become a cartoonist? | ||
| And I was flipping through the channels on TV, and there was a TV show on how to become a cartoonist. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But I'd missed like 28 minutes of the half hour. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And that was the only reason he wrote. | ||
| And I had 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? | ||
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unidentified
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Sure. | |
| That would feel good. | ||
| I sent out my samples, and United Media, one of the big syndicates, called and offered me a contract. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I have two minds of that, all right? | ||
| There's my social mind, which says, yes, there was no diversity in two major companies. | ||
| That's not a long-term sustainable situation in this kind of a country. | ||
| So it had to be fixed. | ||
| And if you let it get fixed in its natural course of events, it would take too long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just would be, you know, untenable. | ||
| 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 it wasn't the worst thing in the world for me, and it worked out well, obviously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, I have two minds about it. | ||
| I think it was good for society, bad for me at that moment, but it worked out good for me in the long run. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think in 2016 if the same thing happened to sort of a middle management white guy, and they were told that now? | ||
| Do you think the reaction from the average person would be the same? | ||
| Do you think a normal corporate atmosphere, do you think they would say it in such sort of... I think everything changes with the times, right? | ||
| So the tool you need, you have to adjust it for the time. | ||
| If it's years ago and you've got slavery, you need a civil war. | ||
| You've got to go for the biggest, bluntest weapon you can. | ||
| If it's the 70s and you still don't have good representation in top jobs, you need something less blunt than a civil war. | ||
| But far more blunt than doing nothing and just hoping for things to change. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I was in favor of a sort of, you know, a punch in the nose, sort of, you know, to try to get things kick-started. | ||
| But now I think things have improved, right? | ||
| Nothing's fixed, you know, we haven't ended racism, we haven't ended sexism, right? | ||
| But there are pockets in which it really isn't a problem. | ||
| There are pockets where it's probably a huge problem. | ||
| But you can choose your pocket now. | ||
| So if you're somewhere where there's a huge problem, we do mostly have mobility. | ||
| You can quit that job. | ||
| You can find a place where you do have an advantage. | ||
| I saw a picture today that's running around Twitter of the Huffington Post editorial board. | ||
| It's 100% white women. | ||
| Oh yeah, I've seen that before. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There was an amazing bit of blindness that someone could tweet that publicly and be proud of it. | ||
| Now, I think we're all happy that women have all the opportunities. | ||
| I've literally never met anybody who thought differently about that topic. | ||
| So you believe women are equal before the commenters start going on and on, oh he hates women or something? | ||
| Well, I believe in equal opportunity. | ||
| I think every individual is different, but of course you have to have equal, you know, access, equal opportunity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So let's jump forward. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, it turns out that Dilbert was sort of the sum of all my frustrations from my corporate world, and it gave me an outlet for them. | ||
| I hadn't been thinking in terms of, gosh, I've got to make a comic about that until I actually started working on it. | ||
| But it was a handy outlet. | ||
| By personality, I'm excited by problems. | ||
| I'm excited by chaos. | ||
| Can I swear? | ||
| You can swear away. | ||
| I told you, no rules. | ||
| I wasn't kidding. | ||
| If things go to shit, suddenly I feel good. | ||
| Because there's always opportunity, right? | ||
| If things are broken, at the very least, there's a job for somebody who fixes broken stuff. | ||
| So every time something's broken, I think, ah, there's an opportunity here. | ||
| So I just love that situation. | ||
| That's probably a good segue to the Trump stuff, but I want to do some other stuff before we quite get there. | ||
| So I was doing a little research on you. | ||
| You're into hypnotism. | ||
| Well, I am a hypnotist. | ||
| You are a hypnotist. | ||
| I'm a trained, certified hypnotist. | ||
| Yeah, how did that come to be? | ||
| Well, the back story on that is that my mother gave birth to my younger sister while my mother was on hypnosis, while she was hypnotized. | ||
| My family doctor was a hypnotist. | ||
| And we hope he was a medical doctor, but I know he was at least a hypnotist. | ||
| Well, you all came out, right? | ||
| Yeah, we all came out. | ||
| And my mother reports that she felt no pain, did not have any drugs during childbirth, and was awake the whole time. | ||
| Now this is an unusual situation. | ||
| So even a well-hypnotized person, 20% at tops, could feel that kind of extreme phenomena. | ||
| But the other 80% can be deeply influenced. | ||
| And so when I heard that story, I was pretty young when I heard it. | ||
| I thought, what is the superpower and how can I get that? | ||
| It was part of my process of trying to accumulate skills that would layer well on whatever I was naturally good at. | ||
| I thought, wow, knowing how the human mind works, knowing how to influence it, knowing how to hypnotize people, It's got to work everywhere, right? | ||
| Where would that not be a good idea? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So do you practice it some? | ||
| I mean, do people come to you? | ||
| Does someone say, I have a smoking problem or, you know, I eat too much or something and you say, well, let me hypnotize you and get you out of this? | ||
| How do you use it, actually? | ||
| So I've since broadened what I call hypnosis to include anything in the field of persuasion, | ||
| influence, it could be advertising, in the dating realm, it's game theory | ||
| or whatever that's called. | ||
| So there are a million forms of it, but it's all about how to influence people | ||
| in the irrational sense. | ||
| Right, so you could be using some of the basics of hypnotism right now, but you're not putting, | ||
| so people think of hypnotism like I'm waiting for you to pull out the stop, you know, the watch | ||
| and put me to sleep, but you're saying there's sort of skills and lessons you learn in that | ||
| that you can apply, that you probably put into Dilbert and that you certainly are using on Twitter | ||
| 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. | ||
| The past life thing's not real? | ||
| Not real. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because I know a couple of people reading that Journey of Souls. | ||
| Do you know that Journey of Souls book? | ||
| I don't but... It's all about the past life regression and that whole thing. | ||
| I can tell you, as practice, I would run a little ad in a local rag to say, come in for $20, I will hypnotize you and show you your past lives. | ||
| And person after person came in, and sure enough, under hypnosis, they could remember their past lives. | ||
| And at the time, I thought, I was actually open-minded about it. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| I mean, how do you rule it out? | ||
| But after you do a few, you realize that none of them have lives that you haven't seen on television. | ||
| Like, nobody said, yeah, I was an Ethiopian, you know, something that you wouldn't know how their life was. | ||
| Everybody was an Egyptian princess, or a Viking, or a cowboy. | ||
| I think the most exotic one was a French serf. | ||
| You know, I'm thinking, uh, nobody's... Oh, and here's the other thing. | ||
| I had, you know, person after person come in and not one of them was Chinese in a prior life. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Now, do the math. | ||
| Do the math, right? | ||
| Right, math alone. | ||
| There's a lot of Chinese people. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Somebody was Chinese in a prior life, if there were such things as prior lives. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The whole thing just falls apart. | ||
| Wait, you don't think everyone, though, is like that, right? | ||
| 100% of the world are irrational pretty much all the time. | ||
| The times when you're not are trivial. | ||
| So, you know, if you're balancing your checkbook or trying to decide which object is heavier and how much, you know, you need to lift it. | ||
| That's probably a rational decision, but those are trivial in terms of our lives. | ||
| It's not going to affect the house you decide to live in, the job you take, the person you marry. | ||
| It's not going to affect, you know, even the way you dress most of the time. | ||
| It certainly won't affect your political choices. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right, right. | |
| So you would say those choices are done in an irrational manner for most people? | ||
| Buying a house? | ||
| I mean, people spend a lot of time trying to figure out what house to buy or what career to go into. | ||
| You think those are done through irrational choices? | ||
| Yeah, we make our decisions about people and things in the first few seconds, and then everything after that is a rationalization. | ||
| I'll give you perfect examples from my life. | ||
| A few prior relationships ago, we were looking for a house, looked at a bunch of them, we both didn't like them. | ||
| We drove up to the house we ended up buying, sat in the car without even going inside the house, | ||
| looked at each other and laughed, 'cause that was our house. | ||
| 'Cause that was it. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't know why, I mean, just had a look, had a feel, | ||
| but without even seeing the inside of the house, without knowing what we would pay or anything like that, | ||
| we had decided, and sure enough, we bought that house. | ||
| Likewise-- - Did it work out? | ||
| Yeah, it was great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In another relationship, we were looking for a car, with my ex-wife. | ||
| Looked at car after car, we pulled into one dealer, stood there, looked at the car and I just laughed. | ||
| Didn't know anything about the car. | ||
| Didn't know the specs, didn't know the mileage, didn't know anything. | ||
| I just knew that was going to be our car, sure enough. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, I'm saying that everybody's doing that, but I'm aware of it. | ||
| But you're aware of it. | ||
| Certainly, there are some things that would eliminate a car from your potential. | ||
| If you're looking for a truck, you're not going to buy a Prius. | ||
| So there's a little bit of common sense in there. | ||
| But when you get down to those final choices, that's all just how it feels. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| All right, should we go to politics? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This is where they want us. | ||
| This is where all the Trump frogs that are very excited that I'm talking to you. | ||
| This is what they want to see. | ||
| Did they fast forward to this? | ||
| Have they already put on Twitter the time? | ||
| Skip the first six minutes. | ||
| The good stuff is here. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| He had a job. | ||
| Okay, let's get to Trump. | ||
| All right, so let's talk about Trump a little bit. | ||
| So my sense of your support of Trump, please correct me if I'm wrong, is not that you love him or his policies per se. | ||
| Don't call it support. | ||
| I don't want to go too far with that word hanging out there, 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. | ||
| Is that a fair estimation? | ||
| And I'll backtrack the word support if necessary. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But they keep saying he's high energy. | ||
| Be alive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's hard for me to get on board. | ||
| Either of those choices, because really, 320 million people in the United States, and the best we could get is two 70-year-old racists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or bigots, depending which side you're looking at. | ||
| Yeah, we'll get into that. | ||
| And secondly, my political views don't really align closely with either one of them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that said, what I noticed last year was Trump had a an influencer's tool set. He had the skills of a hypnotist, | ||
| the skills of persuasion, that I immediately said "bing" fairly early on last year, | ||
| and said that's not normal. | ||
| What he's doing is technique that people don't understand. | ||
| He's just a better persuader. And so I'm a big fan of his persuasion talents, and I think people | ||
| need to understand that in context, and maybe not think of him as the crazy clown, because lots | ||
| of times there's intention there, and there's a lot of strategy, and he's playing the long | ||
| game in a lot of ways. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, plan might be overstating it because who knows in this kind of context how far in advance they really can plan or how much makes sense. | ||
| But definitely he is saying, how can I control the most energy? | ||
| So persuasion is about making somebody focus on your thing until they think it's important. | ||
| Because the human brain is so dumb that it thinks whatever it pays attention to the most is the best. | ||
| Or the worst, or the most important. | ||
| But anyway, in their minds, it's priority arises. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, as long as he doesn't make too many people think he's the worst, the attention alone is a positive, right? | ||
| So that's basically the heart of it, right? | ||
| That it's an attention game that he's using, and that's why it was so easy to dispatch the 16 others. | ||
| It's a pretty big toolbox. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it does look a little low energy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you don't even know why that's bad, and yet it feels sort of bad. | ||
| So now he's created, here's the second, the other part that's important. | ||
| He creates a trap for confirmation bias. | ||
| So that everything that Bush does, using his just as normal personality, makes you think, oh yeah. | ||
| And it just, so his label reinforces over time. | ||
| Same with Lyon, Ted Cruz. | ||
| Ted Cruz unfortunately has a little bit of a distrustful face. | ||
| Yeah, something's kind of slimy there. | ||
| Some people just have that face, right? | ||
| And because he's a politician, he's going to say things that aren't true. | ||
| Like all of them, right? | ||
| But because he got the tag, your confirmation bias will go to everything he says. | ||
| Wait, he's lying, he's lying. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that too is an engineered kill shot. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then she went full Trump this summer and said, forget about all my facts and policies. | ||
| I mean, she's not forgetting them, but she's not emphasizing them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You want to be real scared of this guy. | ||
| And here's the best part. | ||
| Trump was using fear as a persuasion technique, because fear is the best thing you can do, right? | ||
| You scare people, they have to fix that first. | ||
| You fix your fear first, then you work on the other stuff. | ||
| So he said, look at these terrorists coming in, look at the criminals crossing the border, look at the economy falling apart. | ||
| Now whether or not any of that's true, it generates fear. | ||
| Fear is real good for persuasion. | ||
| Then what did Clinton have? | ||
| She had her facts and her experience. | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then she ratcheted it up and said, no, the real fear is Trump. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because Trump is saying, maybe you've got a fear from a terrorist, but if you think about it, what are the odds that a terrorist is going to kill you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that fear is good fear. | ||
| It worked. | ||
| But it's not like a comprehensive fear that gets everybody. | ||
| And Clinton said, if Trump gets in the office, he's going to have his finger on the nuclear codes and you're all dead. | ||
| And suddenly she got all kinds of purchase and, you know, and her poll numbers started rising. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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? | ||
| They're both doing what I call A-B testing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Whether that's true or not. | ||
| Right, so they show you some bankruptcies, but they go, but wait a minute, he still has buildings everywhere, so whether it's true or not. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whether it is not. | ||
| You'll see it that way once you've decided. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And by the way, that's what the hypnotist learns. | ||
| The hypnotist learns that once you've decided, which is an irrational decision, that there is no such thing as data and rationed logic. | ||
| Just doesn't exist. | ||
| That you basically will then just go through life finding just the things that validate what you have presupposed way back when. | ||
| And let me prove that beyond any doubt. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But they're not. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And the answer is always the same. | ||
| You're an idiot. | ||
| But guess what? | ||
| They're thinking that. | ||
| They are too. | ||
| And they're having exactly the same thought with their set of confirmation bias, and they're so sure that they're right. | ||
| So basically you're saying you, Scott Adams, don't have any of the answers, right? | ||
| But you're just saying this is the game, so we have to deal with it in that reality. | ||
| Well, I have all the answers if you're talking about the political stuff. | ||
| You've got all the answers? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, let's get to—oh, yeah, wait. | ||
| Before we get to all the answers, that'll be a better thing to probably end with, all the answers to everything. | ||
| Maybe we'll wrap up the show. | ||
| I could end the show if we get all the answers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| But I'm curious. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Totally disagree. | ||
| Yeah, racist never loses its power. | ||
| Even now? | ||
| Because my feeling was they both were firing at each other and it didn't feel like it took anymore. | ||
| Oh no, it's taken. | ||
| It's taken big time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They prefer this approach. | ||
| It has nothing to do with that. | ||
| They think he's actually a racist. | ||
| They've literally been convinced. | ||
| So that's that subset of Clinton supporters. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's confirmation bias in action. | ||
| No, I guess that's the best example of it. | ||
| Someone calls you something bad and you go... So the Trump supporters believe either they're not racist or, you know, it's not a problem. | ||
| And so they imagine a world in which those insults are ineffective. | ||
| But they are totally effective. | ||
| It's the strongest sauce you could possibly put on this spaghetti. | ||
| Terrible analogy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was there, it was there. | |
| Yes, and it's the reason Clinton's using it, and I'm sure they've tested everything else and found out, wow, this is super. | ||
| But let me get back to the confirmation bias. | ||
| So look at the charge, and look at all the things that Trump is accused of, and we'll just pick any one out of the bunch. | ||
| Let's take the Judge Curiel thing, where he said that the judge couldn't be biased because in Trump's words, he was Mexican. | ||
| Now, you hear that, and even to my ears, that's like, hmm. | ||
| Yeah, the judge would be biased, not couldn't be biased, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right, okay. | ||
| So even to my ears, that's like, hmm, that's like a little red flag there. | ||
| Well, you back it up. | ||
| If you talk to someone who was born in this country and their parents came from Mexico, what do they call themselves? | ||
| Well, they're Americans, obviously. | ||
| They call themselves Americans. | ||
| But in casual conversation, they'd say, I'm Mexican. | ||
| Same way if you're Italian blood, but you're two generations away from Italy, people still say, yeah, I'm Italian. | ||
| It's understood you're also American. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he used the language the way people use language. | ||
| So far, he's not a racist. | ||
| He just used the language the way people do. | ||
| But he went further. | ||
| He said that because of that, you would be biased. | ||
| Now, you know who's biased? | ||
| Every fucking person in the world, every person in the world is biased. | ||
| There's no such thing as the unbiased person. | ||
| There's a reason that juries pick, that lawyers kick people off of juries because of their experience that is biased. | ||
| There's a reason that a judge can recuse himself or herself because they know they're biased. | ||
| So to imagine that someone who has, let's say, Mexican heritage And presumably their relatives are Mexican. | ||
| Maybe he's visited Mexico. | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| But at the very least, he's got a family influence. | ||
| What is more influential on your decision-making than your family and how you have to live with them for the rest of your life? | ||
| Imagine this judge ruling inexplicably favorably for Trump and then attending his next family reunion, right? | ||
| Now, remove Mexican. | ||
| It doesn't matter who it is. | ||
| If this guy does something that's unpopular with his family, that's a problem. | ||
| That's the perfect setup for a human. | ||
| Forget that he's a judge. | ||
| Forget his heritage. | ||
| Any human in that situation is almost guaranteed to be biased. | ||
| Now, the question is, he's a professional judge. | ||
| Can he see past that? | ||
| That's his job. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Of course, right? | ||
| But it's still smart for Trump to put that out there, because he's persuading. | ||
| It's a legal case, and both sides are trying to persuade as hard as they can. | ||
| So Trump is putting it out there. | ||
| He says, hey, you know, and he's also persuading the public in advance. | ||
| If I get a bad judgment, I'm going to say people in this situation can be biased. | ||
| If I get a good judgment, I'm happy. | ||
| I go away. | ||
| Well, he's not doing it as subtly as you just laid out, saying, well, this guy might be biased. | ||
| The way you calmly laid it out, he goes to the easier, but you're saying that's the whole point. | ||
| That's why he gets attention. | ||
| That's the whole point. | ||
| Yeah, he gets attention. | ||
| So it's the attention on it that makes it powerful. | ||
| So, if you were to pick this apart as a legal strategy, and pick the actual words, there actually isn't any racism there. | ||
| It is a comment about somebody who has a race, and in this case, has a cultural heritage, is that a better word? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But everybody is influenced by all of their influences, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Their family influences, their job they worked at, their background, all of that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Let me give you your example right back to you. | ||
| Let's say Trump is doing some business in Scotland, which he is. | ||
| Let's say the people in Scotland got really mad at him and formed a petition and the people in Scotland just hated him. | ||
| Yeah, I think they're doing this over that golf course, aren't they? | ||
| So let's say there was a, you know, a second-generation Scottish judge I think even Trump has some Scottish blood, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, wouldn't you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that not reasonable? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh no, in this case what I'm doing is giving the listeners an example of what confirmation bias looks like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you heard the Judge Curiel comment out of context, it does sound like a racist statement. | ||
| Once you put it in its proper context, that goes away. | ||
| And that's how confirmation bias looks. | ||
| It looks just like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| In a way, it seems kind of obvious. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't sense full Trump support, correct? | ||
| I would never support the use of support in terms of what I do. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I'm an admirer of his technique. | ||
| I, unlike many people, am very amused by his humor and his personality. | ||
| And by the way, before we were filming, you mentioned you have a New York background, as do I from upstate New York. | ||
| And I haven't talked to too many New York people about this, so I'm going to run this by you, this thought. | ||
| I went to SUNY Binghamton, by the way. | ||
| That was another piece of my New York life. | ||
| I was at Hartwick. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Oh my God, we're practically neighbors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There you go. | |
| Except the wrong times. | ||
| What was I talking about? | ||
| Upstate New York. | ||
| Oh, upstate New York. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I had to really work on that. | ||
| Also, there's an arrogance or a perceived arrogance of New Yorkers because we talk honestly about things we're good at. | ||
| We also talk honestly about the things we're bad at, but that kind of gets lost in California. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, it's like, oh, you have a big ego. | ||
| No, I said I'm good at these things. | ||
| Just like you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just like everybody. | ||
| We're all good at something. | ||
| We're bad at something. | ||
| How is that? | ||
| How is that terrible? | ||
| But the things that New Yorkers do is they say, man, I want to punch that guy in the nose. | ||
| He needs two bullets in the back of the head. | ||
| You know, I'll give him two in the chest, one in the head. | ||
| It's just normal New York talk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you see that out of context. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It really doesn't sound the same. | ||
| 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! | ||
| Yeah, I love that example. | ||
| And to that point, I'm going to steal something that I heard Dr. Laura say once. | ||
| I'm kind of, you know, maybe modifying the words a little bit, but I'll credit her for the thought. | ||
| And the thought is that you are what you do. | ||
| You're not what you think. | ||
| Because if we were judged by our thoughts, we would all be executed. | ||
| You know, you should be killed for just the things you're thinking. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's coming. | ||
| Yeah, you are what you do. | ||
| And more importantly, you are what you do recently. | ||
| Because if I'm judged by my past, I got some problems. | ||
| If you're judged by your past, you probably got some problems too. | ||
| We were all in our 20s once, right? | ||
| It's all bad stuff in the past. | ||
| The goal of life is to improve. | ||
| So if we're not improving, we've got a problem, right? | ||
| I think both Clinton and Trump have probably improved. | ||
| And I think that judging them, either one of them, by something that happened say 10 or more years ago is probably a bad bet. | ||
| Because we're all bad people 10 years ago compared to how we are now. | ||
| Because ideally we're all getting better, smarter, better informed. | ||
| Well the hope is, but people do obviously go the other way too. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So that's really fascinating. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But at that point, is there what? | ||
| That's not crazy at all. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, I get it. | ||
| He's using the tools you're talking about. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So he had to throw them under the bus. | ||
| Well, I would put it in these terms. | ||
| In hypnosis, there's something called pacing and leading. | ||
| Pacing is when you match your subject in any way. | ||
| You match their breathing, the way they talk, the way their posture. | ||
| Because if you do that long enough, people get comfortable with you, and then you can do what's called leading. | ||
| So then you can do something different and then people will start doing the thing that you're doing. | ||
| So you start by copying them until they learn to copy you subconsciously. | ||
| They're not doing it intentionally. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Not that they would have complained, necessarily. | ||
| But the Republican Party changed. | ||
| Trump changed them, and they can't go back. | ||
| He paced them until he led them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But it looks to the public like it's a flip-flop. | ||
| It's the opposite. | ||
| I'm sure it was intentional from the beginning. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, they're not done. | ||
| I mean, everything's a work in progress, right? | ||
| But I think Trump's support of the LGBT Whatever, a bunch of letters. | ||
| Community was both sincere and a higher priority than the wedding cakes. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| I think the wedding cakes will be okay and the weddings, I think the Republican Party will catch up in that sense. | ||
| 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. | ||
| and maybe still will. | ||
| I mean, I'm still predicting that he'll win in a landslide. | ||
| I know the polls don't look like that right now, but they're tightening as we're talking. | ||
| How much of that do you think is just that there's a certain fear of saying you're for Trump? | ||
| So people don't poll properly? | ||
| Probably a lot of it. | ||
| I know a lot of people who say that they won't say out loud that they support Trump. | ||
| Because since I said that I support Hillary Clinton for my personal safety, because I live in California where that's kind of important. | ||
| I've heard from people who say the same thing. | ||
| They say, oh my God, I can't say it at work, I can't say it to my family, I can't say it to my friends. | ||
| How many there are is the great mystery. | ||
| But I don't think they're being picked up in polling necessarily. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, first of all, I disavow the alt-right. | ||
| You see what I've done here? | ||
| I said you endorse Trump or something. | ||
| I'm putting you in the alt-right. | ||
| I disavow Trump. | ||
| I disavow everybody except Hillary Clinton because that's best for my personal safety. | ||
| I don't even know what the alt-right even is. | ||
| Isn't it like a grab bag of miscellaneous things that other people don't like? | ||
| That's pretty much what I described it as at the beginning of this episode. | ||
| If polite people don't like it, it's in. | ||
| So, I'm not sure how one, you know, can love that movement, but it certainly is having an impact. | ||
| Yeah, but it's using the techniques you're talking about, right? | ||
| Like, they're doing a lot of the lead stuff, they're upsetting people in power. | ||
| Everybody's using the techniques. | ||
| Some are using them better than others. | ||
| And yes, I would say that I've observed them intentionally trying to use the tools of persuasion, but both sides are doing that now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All communication has drawbacks, and I'm definitely informed by who's reading my tweets to keep them in a zone that makes sense for the followers. | ||
| But beyond that, I'm a big proponent of free speech, so I'm not going to mute myself totally. | ||
| I have what I lovingly recall, fuck you money. | ||
| So I don't have a boss. | ||
| I don't need to make other people happy. | ||
| If I have something that needs to be said, I can do that. | ||
| You don't have to tell me the number, but when did you realize you had fuck you money? | ||
| Ten years ago, probably. | ||
| All right, so let's do a little bit on Hillary, because we kind of danced around her a bit. | ||
| It's sort of all, it's all encompassing. | ||
| You talk Trump, you're sort of talking Hillary already. | ||
| We're just stuck in this thing. | ||
| What do you make of her? | ||
| Do you think, it seems just uninspiring to me, and I consider her as much of a liar as I consider Trump, and we're just screwed. | ||
| How's that for a lead? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, at this point in the race, if you're going to vote for the one who's not the liar... | ||
| Good luck! | ||
| Good luck! | ||
| 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? | ||
| But it's all about the gray thing in their skull. | ||
| Like, what about the world? | ||
| What about us? | ||
| Right, so was that the obvious outcome here? | ||
| 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? | ||
| No matter what. | ||
| Probably the gravity was sucking us to this place, yes. | ||
| The only unknown was whether Hillary would go as dark as she went. | ||
| By the way, the word dark probably came from Godzilla. | ||
| That's an engineered word. | ||
| That's a word that you don't hear in politics, which is designed to attract confirmation bias. | ||
| Hey, everything Trump is doing is dark now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dark, dark, dark. | |
| For people that missed the beginning of that clip, what's the guy's name again? | ||
| So that would be Robert Cialdini. | ||
| I'm just hypothesizing. | ||
| I don't have confirmation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That he's working on the Clinton campaign advising her in the persuasion arts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| In many ways, the world is going in the same direction in the sense that there's more of everything. | ||
| I mean, I think in the old days, more of something meant less of something else. | ||
| But now there are more places that you could speak with complete freedom, you know, online. | ||
| And then there are fewer places that you could do the same thing in corporate America or in other places. | ||
| So in some ways, there's more freedom than ever. | ||
| but in a whole lot of places and in troubling ways, there's less than ever. | ||
| I'm a little on the fence about how much of that is bad and how much of it is good. | ||
| Because I do think that words matter, and I think that there are places where civil conversation is more important than saying your mind, right? | ||
| Freedom of speech is overrated in some contexts, but you certainly have to have it to have an effective government and an effective country. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They'd start getting serious, and they would stop joking around. | ||
| Certainly, Trump would be doing some of that, right? | ||
| So there would be some moderation just because of the job. | ||
| Imagine, just imagine yourself. | ||
| No matter what you're thinking before you walk into the Oval Office, you walk into the Oval Office, you're in the White House. | ||
| There's no way that doesn't change your behavior. | ||
| It's real now. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| That's the biggest influence you could have. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, so basically they would just have to learn how to readjust. | ||
| Already have. | ||
| I mean, I think that process is done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you just have to see enough of him to say, okay, he's talking like, I'm going to say a New Yorker. | ||
| And we get that. | ||
| Once you get that that's his style, you're okay with 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. | ||
| Yeah, I would say that anonymity is essential in a free society. | ||
| You've got to be able to say some things anonymously. | ||
| But I also say that the cure for all the bad stuff is sunlight. | ||
| And the more the anonymous people say horrible things, the more the sunlight starts to, you know, erode it. | ||
| So I think you have to let it out before you can kill it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So to that point, would you, if someone was tweeting you all day and sending you awful Nazi memes or any of this... You mean my entire day? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So my policy is I just ignore them. | ||
| Occasionally I mute them, and on a very rare occasion, if they just won't stop, then I'll block them. | ||
| But I never amplify them, because I feel like, well, if I don't really pretend that they're here, then, unless they, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, they're not outside with pitchforks. | ||
| They're just doing it from the comfort of their own computer. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right, final thought. | ||
| You've already predicted it. | ||
| So you're predicting a Trump landslide. | ||
| Do you want to give me some percentages? | ||
| Do you want to put yourself out there to that? | ||
| I said from last year, 98% Trump landslide, and it hasn't changed. | ||
| What has changed is that he's had terrible weeks. | ||
| And if that week was the only thing that happened until the end, of course he would lose. | ||
| But that never stays the same. | ||
| The weeks are going to be up and down. | ||
| I think there are some big shocks to come. | ||
| I think that all the Trump shocks are baked in. | ||
| There's almost nothing you could hear about him, unless he was totally on a left field, that would make any difference, right? | ||
| But there's a whole bunch of stuff you could hear about Clinton, especially since she has government experience, right? | ||
| That makes her more vulnerable to a shock, because if you did it in the context of government, it seems worse. | ||
| So that alone, I think, almost guarantees a Trump victory. | ||
| Really, so basically that WikiLeaks could just drop something, because we know they're holding something. | ||
| Doesn't even have to be WikiLeaks. | ||
| Could be anything. | ||
| Could be anything. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Crazy in the most entertaining ways. | ||
| I have never had a more fun year of my life. | ||
| I gotta say, I wake up every day happy because the news is going to entertain me, and people are engaged. | ||
| Yeah, the engagement. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because he just loves it. | ||
| He loves that. | ||
| Well I think Clinton would do her thing and her lobbyists would write legislation and it would be like always. | ||
| But if you saw President Trump you'd think almost anything was possible. | ||
| So you'd say, I got an idea. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, good God. | ||
| We're hearing all this big thinking on one side. | ||
| And I feel like something's being unleashed in a good way, like a creative thing. | ||
| And we hope it's not some kind of race war. | ||
| You hope it's not World War III. | ||
| All right, well, for more on Scott and the Dilbert cartoon and his thoughts and blog and all that, you can check out blog.dilbert.com. |
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