Nov. 24, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| In case all of you in the good old US of A have missed the turkeys running around for | ||
| dear life this week, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. | ||
| Without even a close second, Thanksgiving is by far my favorite holiday of the year. | ||
| I find that focusing on the three F's, family, friends and food, usually brings out the best in just about everybody. | ||
| Between the tryptophan from the turkey, your booze of choice, and football in the background, all of us, at least in my experience, are just a little bit better on this day which we've set aside to give thanks for all the goodness in our lives. | ||
| Thanksgiving is the ultimate reminder of what it means to be American. | ||
| While most of us have the usual staples of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and cranberry sauce around the table, we also bring in traditions from our own cultures, ethnicities and nationalities. | ||
| This blending of flavors, languages and customs from all over the world is what makes Thanksgiving a uniquely American holiday. | ||
| No offense to Canadian Thanksgiving. | ||
| The melting pot that we've created here has given more freedom to more people from more walks of life than any other country in the history of the world. | ||
| Today, people still yearn to come to America to take part in our freedom, and pretty much nobody wants to leave America, no matter how often celebrities say they will. | ||
| This doesn't mean we're perfect or anywhere close to it, but it does mean that our tradition of freedom, based on and rooted in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, is a pretty good starting point for how to build a truly liberal and tolerant society. | ||
| While politics will undoubtedly be discussed around the Thanksgiving table this year, I'm going to do my best to try to veer the conversation always to what brings us together rather than what rips us apart. | ||
| Maybe your uncle is pro-life and you're pro-choice. | ||
| Maybe your sister voted for Hillary but you voted for Trump. | ||
| Maybe you want low taxes and your dad wants to redistribute wealth. | ||
| Whatever those differences are, they are actually the very reason that this country is so great. | ||
| We all get to have our own opinion and fight for what we believe. | ||
| But beyond just the ability to be tolerant of people who are different from us, it's more important that we can still learn from, live with, and even love people who think differently than we do. | ||
| I hope you have a wonderful day tomorrow filled with those three F's I mentioned earlier, friends, family and food, and maybe one more F if you get lucky. | ||
| Either way, let's give thanks tomorrow for all the goodness we have, but often forget to even acknowledge. | ||
| Happy Thanksgiving to you and all your loved ones. | ||
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[theme music] | |
| Joining me today is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, author of the new book, Winn Bigley, | ||
| and a guy who seems to make some pretty spot-on predictions, Scott Adams. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Before we begin, I gotta tell ya, I was looking at these blurbs on the back of this book. | ||
| How did you get these people? | ||
| William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Alexander the Great, Abe Lincoln? | ||
| And even this Scott Adams guy? | ||
| I mean, how in the world did you pull this off? | ||
| I stick with dead people because they can't complain later. | ||
| It's like, not one of them has complained that I've misquoted him. | ||
| Mark Twain, he said nothing about his quote. | ||
| So when I saw this, I thought immediately, there must be an estate for some of these people that monitor these types of things. | ||
| Do you even have to think about that? | ||
| Does the editor or the publisher go, Scott, you can't... Twain, come on! | ||
| Well, luckily my job is parody, and so I know those laws pretty well. | ||
| As long as it's obvious parody, you can do anything you want. | ||
| Yeah, so we checked right before you walked in. | ||
| We had you on the show September 1st of 2016, about two months before the election, and when I had you on, you were one of the only people that I thought basically was making sense of what was going on with Trump. | ||
| At the time, you didn't say you were a Trump supporter. | ||
| I think you actually said you were not a Trump supporter. | ||
| You had sort of said the thing about you were in a hostage situation with Hillary. | ||
| But, you know, basically you were saying, here's what Trump is doing. | ||
| I don't necessarily support it. | ||
| I think you, by the election time, you officially did support him, right? | ||
| Yeah, because of one issue, basically. | ||
| When Clinton came out with the estate tax plan, And I realized that I personally would pay roughly 75 cents on every dollar I would earn for the rest of my life, which would basically make me retire. | ||
| I wouldn't possibly work for that. | ||
| So that changed my mind. | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't going to jump into the estate tax, but I do find it one of the interesting things. | ||
| I don't stand to make a windfall from the estate tax, but I find it one of those things where it's like, | ||
| this money has been taxed for someone's entire life. | ||
| Your money that you earn through all your hard work has been taxed your whole life. | ||
| Hopefully you've made good investments in whatever else you've done. | ||
| And then at the end, the government just says, okay, we're gonna just basically take more than half of it | ||
| at that point, after we've already taken it the whole time. | ||
| The whole tax thing, there's no way to make it fair, 'cause there's always somebody who's gonna complain. | ||
| But some things just feel less fair, And that feels more like confiscation than tax. | ||
| Yeah, but I guess it's easy to be one of those people that just are like, well, I'm not involved in this, I don't stand to win anything, so why wouldn't I want to take the money from other people, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's the big problem with a democratic system. | ||
| People can vote other people's money into their pocket if there are enough of them voting. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so it's a little over a year ago that we had you on. | ||
| You're making some sense of the techniques that you're writing about in this book, about persuasion and what Trump is doing and all that. | ||
| Around that time, just like two months before the election, did you really think it was real? | ||
| I did really believe that he was going to win those weeks that we're talking about, and most of the time up to then. | ||
| The only time my confidence was really shaken was the same time everybody else was, after the Access Hollywood Pussy Gay thing dropped. | ||
| I don't think anybody thought that day that he could get out of that. | ||
| I haven't heard of one person who said, yeah, that didn't bother me at all. | ||
| But it was just amazing. | ||
| There was so much news that that whole cycle and so much more came after that, that even something that large didn't have the impact it would have had because it got lost and, you know, the enormity of it all. | ||
| Yeah, what does that tell you generally about truth right now? | ||
| Now, the subtitle of your book is Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. | ||
| Facts and truth have a little something to do with each other. | ||
| What does that actually tell you, that something like that could happen, regardless of whether you think it was just something he said, or locker room talk, or all that nonsense, but that things don't stick in a way they used to? | ||
| Let me give some context for people who are new to me. | ||
| In addition to cartooning and writing and stuff, I'm a trained hypnotist. | ||
| And I've been studying persuasion and all its forms for decades. | ||
| So I was looking at it through that filter. | ||
| And one of the things that hypnotists learn is that people are irrational pretty much all the time. | ||
| And they just rationalize their decisions and believe that it made sense all along. | ||
| And that's the normal way of things. | ||
| Until you get in that mindset, the whole world looks confusing. | ||
| You can't understand why you gave your good reasons and your facts and your logic and the person you're talking to didn't change their mind. | ||
| So my view on the election was that certainly by the time that the Access Hollywood tape dropped, probably almost every mind was made up. | ||
| They didn't know why. | ||
| But they had made up their minds for emotional, irrational, whatever reasons. | ||
| So it's tough to dislodge somebody. | ||
| You know, he would have had to murder somebody in public to change minds at that point, that late stage, because people were really hardened in their opinions by then. | ||
| Yeah, what does that tell you? | ||
| I mean, as we're taping this, this'll be up next week, so a little right before Thanksgiving, we're taping this on the, today's the 8th? | ||
|
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Is today the 8th? | |
| Does that sound right? | ||
| Okay, that sounds, you're good, you're a pro. | ||
| What does that tell you as I'm watching all these people on Twitter in the last day or so with this thank you Hillary hashtag and all this stuff and this continued worship of her, even though by every estimation she probably was the worst candidate in the history of American politics, that might be a bit of a, That would have been an overblown statement, but what does that say that they're still on this? | ||
| They're still on this thing that crumbled. | ||
| But consider that statement. | ||
| We consider it now a given that she was one of the worst candidates we've ever seen. | ||
| Prior to the election, and really maybe right up until election day, the general thought on both sides was this is one of the strongest candidates we've ever seen. | ||
| For everything from funding to experience to it was time for a woman. | ||
| People were, you know, emotionally and every other way, the world was ready for that. | ||
| So it's only after the fact that we've now reinterpreted what we saw as, wow, she was the worst candidate ever. | ||
| And I don't know if either one of those is true. | ||
| I think we had two candidates who had some real big pluses. | ||
| She had lots of pluses and some real big flaws in both cases. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that basically Trump From before the election, so during the process, until now, after a year of governing, basically, or 10 months or so of governing, has basically used this book. | ||
| I know he didn't have it, but you know what I mean? | ||
| Is this really what he has done from beat one that you saw before a lot of people did? | ||
| So you have to understand his entire life arc. | ||
| It starts with going to a church where his pastor was Norman Vincent Peale, the famous author who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. | ||
| And so that's the first place you probably learned persuasion, at least one corner of persuasion. | ||
| Because in his time, Norman Vincent Peale was actually accused of being a hypnotist. | ||
| He was that influential. | ||
| So that optimism, you see him using it all the time to make us think into the future. | ||
| When he talks about the GDP, he doesn't say, well, we got 3%. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| That's what a normal president would say. | ||
| He says, we got 3%, but without the hurricanes, I think it would have been 4%. | ||
| We probably got 4%. | ||
| I think we'll do better than that. | ||
| He's actually talking us into the future. | ||
| And if you consider how an economy works, unless you have shortages of stuff, and we're really in a great time because we don't have shortages of anything. | ||
| It's psychology that drives it. | ||
| So if people think we're heading to 4%, they're going to invest a little bit more this year to get ready for that, and that's what makes it 4%. | ||
| He's actually taking what he learned as a child and, you know, that persuasive thinking into the future and driving the economy that way. | ||
| And then if you look at his full range of, he knows how to sell, marketing, branding, nobody doubts any of those skills at this point, and then negotiating. | ||
| He wrote, literally, you know, authored with a co-author, a book on negotiating. | ||
| So he's seen persuasion from every angle, including design. | ||
| You know, he's the one who I believe came up with, or at least approved, the hats and Make America Great Again. | ||
| And I think people will look back at this for years and say that was the best branding we've ever seen. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting to me because you said the positive way he speaks, and then you gave some examples, but if you listen to just the general narrative out there, this is the most divisive president of all time, he says all these horrible things, what do you make of that portion of him, the Twitter portion that's fighting with people still all the time, doing things that, in my opinion, are below the office of the presidency? | ||
| And I say that as someone that I really did, the reason I wasn't surprised when Trump won It was because I actually sat down with you right before, and I listened, and I started seeing this stuff. | ||
| So I wasn't thoroughly, I was on Rogan, Joe Rogan, the day before the election, or maybe it was election day, actually, and I was like, yeah, I think it's possible. | ||
| Did I actually change your mind on that? | ||
| Well, I don't know that you fully changed my mind, but you made me aware of what was happening. | ||
| I think basically, before I sat down with you, I was sort of where I think a lot of people still are, which is, they're just grabbing for anything. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They have nothing that they're really basing any decisions on. | ||
| They see the tweets, they scream about the tweets. | ||
| Or they don't even have a chance to scream about the tweets because the media gets outraged before they can even process it. | ||
| And you sort of framed it in a way that basically said to me, there's something sensible about this. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think most people have kind of missed that. | ||
| One of the things that is deeply important for persuasion is first you have to get people's attention. | ||
| That's like phase one. | ||
| At this point, can anybody argue that he's the best we've ever seen at getting attention? | ||
| I think that one, even his biggest haters would say yeah, like the way he has dominated the media in every conversation, yes. | ||
| So step one, get attention. | ||
| And the way he does that is he operates in what I call a narrow band of wrongness. | ||
| Meaning that if this is appropriate behavior, He just takes it up to this band, you know, with the nicknames and the provocative things he says. | ||
| But he never goes up here, where you'd get impeached, you'd be put in the insane asylum and start a nuclear war. | ||
| If you look how long he's been doing this, and how consistently he stays in that narrow band of wrongness, which is persuasion perfection, because you can't look away, and then you're thinking about what he wants you to think about. | ||
| Now, consider also that he's also been meeting with a lot of world leaders at this point. | ||
| He doesn't do that in that context. | ||
| So it's clear that he can modify his behavior to get the effect he needs. | ||
| We didn't know that for sure. | ||
| I'll say other people didn't know that for sure, you know, when he was running. | ||
| It looked a little crazy and maybe out of control. | ||
| But now we've seen the fine control he puts on it. | ||
| You know, on Twitter, that narrow band of wrongness every time. | ||
| In real life, you can modulate. | ||
| Everything being equal, as a smart guy and a bright guy and an author and someone that cares about words and all of those things, putting Trump aside for a moment, would you prefer that we just had a president that was a little more within the common standards of decency or seemed to really appreciate, you know, I keep telling this story that I was in D.C. | ||
| a couple weeks ago and I went to all the monuments, I was reading all the Great things that Jefferson wrote and George Washington. | ||
| It's very different than when they look back and they put Trump's tweets next to all of it. | ||
| Well, I have mixed feelings. | ||
| For one, one of the things that the people on the left, let's say the anti-Trumpers, whoever they are, don't get is how entertaining he is to his base. | ||
| The people who actually like what he's got to offer find it amazingly entertaining and funny. | ||
| So the things that people are saying, "Oh, I can't believe you said that. | ||
| He's an affront to all civilization." | ||
| That's why it's funny. | ||
| It's funny because we know he does it intentionally. | ||
| We know the effect it'll have on a certain group of people. | ||
| And that's sort of the joke, that it has that effect. | ||
| Now, to answer your question, we were never offered somebody who had his talents | ||
| and his specific policies that appealed to a lot of people who voted for him | ||
| without the flaws. | ||
| Nobody offered the Trump without the tweets that make people angry. | ||
| And I would argue that probably 80% of the things that feel like they're over the line actually are functional. | ||
| And the 20% that may be... Functional? | ||
| How do you mean functional? | ||
| Gets attention. | ||
| Puts a nickname on somebody that actually takes them completely out of the primaries. | ||
| We saw that with Low Energy Jeb. | ||
| And I think the Crooked Hillary thing was quite effective. | ||
| But there are other things that are maybe just too far. | ||
| They're not so far he gets impeached, but they're not useful. | ||
| But they also don't seem to hurt him in the long run. | ||
| We've seen something we may never see again, which is a complete disconnect between approval ratings, which are terrible, and people's image of what the economy is doing. | ||
| For example, business confidence is great. | ||
| I don't think we'll ever see those disconnect again, and it's because of his style. | ||
| Does that also show you that people just don't care about polls anymore? | ||
| I mean, I saw a poll on Sunday on CNN and it said, you know, half Americans don't trust Trump. | ||
| And I thought, well, half Americans don't trust CNN. | ||
| I mean, that all of the, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like you guys threw all these numbers at us before. | ||
| You threw all this nonsense at us before. | ||
| And now you're still throwing nonsense. | ||
| I really almost trust none of it, and it makes it harder to siphon some truth out, but now the onus is on us. | ||
| I was just seeing a poll that was saying something about what people think, what leaders think of the President, and I'm thinking, how do we know what leaders of other countries think of the President? | ||
| What good is that poll? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Why is that even relevant in an odd way? | ||
| So if they fear us, certain countries, we want them to fear us, so they probably won't like the President, whether it was Trump or Obama or anyone else. | ||
| Well, I've been saying from the beginning, one of the big things that scared people about a President Trump was that, how are other leaders going to deal with this guy? | ||
| Are they going to be frightened? | ||
| Will they make the nukes just in case? | ||
| No problem so far. | ||
| It turns out that if you're the President of the United States and you have good table manners when you talk to other leaders, there's nothing that they would rather do than deal with you, because it's in their best interest and it works. | ||
| So I listened to you on Sam Harris' podcast, and Sam has obviously been here a bunch of times. | ||
| I find him to be one of the brightest and most thoughtful people that I know. | ||
| You guys obviously differ greatly on the Trump thing, probably more than anything else. | ||
| But when you hear him make a couple of those arguments, whichever one, you can pick any one, does any of it get to you? | ||
| Does any of it, you know, the moral center, just what's really going on, if things really escalated with North Korea, you can pick one out of the bag? | ||
| Well, for those who didn't hear my conversation with Sam on his podcast, I was not addressing the moral-ethical dimension because I figured people are on their own for that. | ||
| In other words, my moral center is not much different than everybody else's. | ||
| I have exactly the same preferences. | ||
| If you could do things without lying, without insulting people, of course I prefer that. | ||
| But nobody gave us that choice. | ||
| We didn't get that candidate. | ||
| We had only the choices that we had. | ||
| So, I think there's an illusion that Sam and I disagreed on the ethical-moral stuff. | ||
| I simply take the position that if a terrorist was holding your child and the only way I could save him is lying to the terrorist, I will lie to the terrorist to save your child. | ||
| I don't think. I take the position that if a terrorist was holding your child, and the only way I could save him is | ||
| lying to the terrorist, I will lie to the terrorist to save your child. | ||
| Now, if you wouldn't, I'm not sure that you can claim a moral high ground. | ||
| There are some situations such as beating ISIS, you know, having a good economy. | ||
| These are fantastically good things for human beings. | ||
| If the only way you could get there is bend some truths, then I'm a little bit more flexible about that. | ||
| But I don't think my moral look on this is any different than anybody else's. | ||
| Yeah, but what about just the concerns that Sam and others, like the people that are the real critics of, forget, we can put Sam aside, because people haven't listened to it. | ||
| It's not important. | ||
| But when you hear people say, well, Trump is so erratic and he's dealing with an erratic leader in North Korea and all of those things, you basically think that that's all just playing that other higher bar this way, and that in reality, we're still doing that? | ||
| Well, we could talk about North Korea separately, because that's really kind of, there's nothing like that. | ||
| That's sort of its own situation. | ||
| And at the moment, I think he's handling that right. | ||
| Well, let's talk about that. | ||
| Yeah, let's do it. | ||
| What do you think about North Korea? | ||
| So, for however many decades, we haven't really had any progress because they promise things and then they don't do them. | ||
| This is probably the first time that Little Rocket Man, shall we call him, is literally worried that he'll be dead in the next 30 days. | ||
| I don't think they've ever had that thought before, and that's got to help in the negotiations. | ||
| Now if you're thinking, but that might make him, you know, fire off a nuke, well that's the only way you could be sure you're dead. | ||
| So right now his only two choices are dead for sure, and I don't think he wants to pick that, or worrying about being dead unless he comes to the negotiating table, and there seems to be some, maybe a little bit of a hint of a movement there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But to your bigger question, what about all the other stuff that is problematic? | ||
| If you were to list all the things that people consider the criticisms of Trump on one column, and then all the things that people, even his critics, would say, okay, these things are going well. | ||
| You would find that the things that are going well are generally real, meaning that there is less ISIS. | ||
| Stocks are up. | ||
| He did appoint justices that at least his side likes. | ||
| Immigration is down by 50%. | ||
| These are real and measurable things, and they matter, and they're big. | ||
| If you look at the list of things that people are criticizing, it's, well, we think he might cause a problem. | ||
| We think this could go wrong. | ||
| We're concerned that people think about him this way. | ||
| We think that his supporters are, you know, more racist than they are. | ||
| Almost all of them would be legitimately classified as imaginary. | ||
| Now, that's not to say that there couldn't be bad things in the future. | ||
| But at the moment, they are purely imagined. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting, because I was on Sam's AMA podcast, and we discussed this, and I mentioned, or he brought up the interview with you, but that's what I said, too, basically. | ||
| I said, look, I didn't even vote for the guy. | ||
| I brought on many, the week before the election, I had Hillary Rosen, who's a progressive operative, basically, to come on and talk about why not to vote for him, but then I had people like you and others on, and tried to talk to everybody about it. | ||
| But I basically said that to Sam, which is, The things that he's actually been able to do are basically mainstream Republican things that if any other Republican would have done. | ||
| The things that he hasn't been able to do actually show the strength of our system because if you don't like his health care plan or the tax plan or whatever else, Congress is fighting him and that's the way the government's supposed to work. | ||
| And the other things, the tweets and all the other stuff, it's like... | ||
| Well, that's just nothing. | ||
| It's just stuff. | ||
| Take health care. | ||
| So if you were going to make a criticism about the president's performance, health care would be at the top of the list of criticisms. | ||
| And this illustrates what I call the two movies on one screen. | ||
| We're all looking at the same set of facts, and we're producing completely different movies in our minds about what's happening. | ||
| So some people say, well, he hasn't solved health care. | ||
| That's a failure. | ||
| But my observation is, what was the deadline for that? | ||
| Is there a time you're supposed to be done and that passed? | ||
| Because I don't see the deadline. | ||
| What I see is somebody who let the Republicans go first, fail hard because they were going to, | ||
| they didn't have a plan that was gonna be popular, scare the left while letting the right | ||
| fail as hard as they can, and then what's he do? | ||
| He says, well, maybe I'll talk to the Democrats. | ||
| Until he gets both of them in this situation, setting the table, he calls it. | ||
| He actually has a word for this. | ||
| This is not accidental. | ||
| You know, if your brand is negotiating and you do things that any objective person | ||
| who understands negotiating recognizes as correct technique, he's softening up both sides | ||
| and it's gonna take a while. | ||
| It might take Obamacare to fail a little harder. | ||
| It might take the public to see their costs going up in Obamacare. | ||
| That's not a good thing. | ||
| But it might be the only way you can get these two sides that are on such opposites somewhere in the middle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So has he failed? | ||
| I would say it's a process and it's probably the only way it could go. | ||
| How much, are you concerned at all that the people around him, this is one of the things I hear a lot, that the people around him, that for either certain things aren't staffed right now. | ||
| I don't have that much of a problem with that because I think the government should be a lot smaller as a general rule, but putting that aside, that people say, well, the intellectual acumen around him isn't that great. | ||
| Like you've got these players around him, these people that understand a lot of the things you're talking about, but not sort of like a serious group of like intellects around him. | ||
| In what department? | ||
| Does he really need help in the State Department? | ||
| Because the international stuff looks like it's going pretty well. | ||
| Does he need help in the economics? | ||
| Seems like it's going really well. | ||
| Does he need more help than General Mattis to beat ISIS? | ||
| Mattis is doing great. | ||
| Now, if you get down to the Department of Agriculture and the EPA and stuff, those are real arguments you can have about whether you've got the right horsepower there. | ||
| And I would listen to those arguments for sure. | ||
| But in terms of how much is staffed and whether there's enough staff, I'm still waiting for that to matter. | ||
| Well, it sort of goes to that other point of just the other things. | ||
| There's some literal things that have happened and some maybes and could issues. | ||
| Do you ever feel like you're stuck sort of acting as his counsel publicly or something? | ||
| I suddenly felt like I was like really grilling you on Trump and it was in an odd way because we're obviously gonna talk about your book too, but it's all intertwined. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny. | ||
| In my mind, it's always about persuasion and about a more effective way to see the world that does a better job of predicting. | ||
| You know, I guess it's now a year and a half ago, I said that he would do more than change politics. | ||
| And boy, has he changed politics. | ||
| But I said he would rip a hole in our reality to let us look through and see something completely different. | ||
| And he's done that, because didn't you used to think that facts mattered? | ||
| And didn't you think that if somebody said as many things as he said, that the fact checker said, oh no, that doesn't work. | ||
| That you couldn't possibly become president, and if you did, you couldn't possibly have a good economy, beat ISIS and all the other things he's doing. | ||
| None of it was true. | ||
| And if you were a trained persuader, you could see that early. | ||
| You could see that none of that would matter, because you could see that his persuasive skill was that strong. | ||
| Now, I have to jump in and just say one point. | ||
| Facts do matter to outcomes. | ||
| and all things being equal, we would love to get the accurate facts. | ||
| But usually when he's non-factual, he's persuading in the direction that we would like. | ||
| So if he says the number of deaths by a gun in Chicago were a thousand per day, | ||
| but it's really ten per day, we still need to fix that problem, and he made us focus on | ||
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it. | |
| The fact that it wasn't accurate, did it matter? | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| And I think he knows it, and I think it's conscious, and he calls it a hyperbole. | ||
| He has a name for it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, that was going to be my follow-up question. | ||
| Do you think he's really conscious of all of this stuff? | ||
| I guess I would feel better if I really thought he was conscious of all of it. | ||
| If I knew he was conscious of all of it, I guess I would feel better. | ||
| He's conscious. | ||
| And yet, at the same time, that would mean he intentionally... These are lies. | ||
| I mean, if he knows them and he's intentionally doing it, even if it's for all the reasons that you lay out here in the book, then it's an outright lie as opposed to just an exaggeration or hyperbole. | ||
| Well, I would say that you have to consider intention. | ||
| At this point, I don't see any scenario in which the good of the country and how he does personally are separated. | ||
| He has to do a good job for the country. | ||
| So if he's telling a lie that's good for him and bad for the country, that's just a frickin' lie. | ||
| Nobody's in favor of that. | ||
| But if he says, hey, we've got to fight extra hard to fix this problem that everybody wants fixed, and there's a little bit of an exaggeration in that, well, it's still the direction we do want to go. | ||
| So those situations, you can call it a lie. | ||
| You can call it someone who didn't pass the fact-checking. | ||
| He would call it hyperbole, because it's sort of an exaggerated truth, if you will. | ||
| In other words, directionally, it's true. | ||
| Just the details are wrong. | ||
| So as a guy that wrote one of the most popular, has written one of the most popular comic strips of all time, the whole purpose, I mean, I think of comic strips and of stand-up and everything else, is that you're getting to a kernel of truth at the end of that thing, right? | ||
| Like every time you, I assume, is that fair to say, that every time you ever wrote a strip that there's a kernel of truth at the end, right? | ||
| If you do it right, yes. | ||
| If you do it right. | ||
| So how can you also be the guy that's saying that it's okay to live in a facts don't matter place? | ||
| Like, facts and truth. | ||
| Some rope there, right? | ||
| I love that you asked that question because this is just a perfect way to make the point. | ||
| The comic strip is an exaggerated world. | ||
| It's just a crazy, you know, something that wouldn't actually happen in the real world. | ||
| But what people say about it is, that is just like my job. | ||
| So they're looking at something that's this crazy world, and they're still seeing the truth. | ||
| And so if you're a good cartoonist, you've made both of those things happen. | ||
| They shouldn't be together, you know? | ||
| And so that's a perfect example that I get to see every day, where people say, that's just like my office. | ||
| And I say, no, there were no aliens in your office. | ||
| You know, somebody's head exploded. | ||
| That didn't happen in your office. | ||
| You know, so stuff in the comics people regard as feeling real when they clearly are not. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Are you familiar with the term K-Fab? | ||
| It's the term that wrestlers use. | ||
| You know, that's the fakery. | ||
| Everyone knows it's fake. | ||
| We all know it's fake. | ||
| And yet you're eliciting real emotions from people that go there and pay you to do something fake and have a real emotion. | ||
| And I think there is some connection with that and what you're talking about. | ||
| And that Trump was kind of, you know, he was a fan of wrestling. | ||
| There's those clips of him, I think, at WrestleMania and taking out Vince McMahon and the rest of it. | ||
| So he is playing that game. | ||
| He has merged theater and politics like nobody's ever done. | ||
| and he just happens to be good at the theater stuff, and so he effectively merged them. | ||
| I don't think we'll ever see this again. | ||
| This is a very special situation. | ||
| And he has--I've probably said this before-- | ||
| but he has a talent stack of individual talents that he's a B+/A- at, but there's so many of them, | ||
| and they work so well together. | ||
| All of his persuasion stuff, his theater stuff, his public speaking, his intelligence, they're all high, but you'd say to yourself, wow, we've had smarter presidents, we've had better orators, orators, orators? | ||
| People who speak better than I do. | ||
| Either way, one way or another. | ||
| We've definitely had those. | ||
| But very few people have had that combination with business experience, with his ability to take criticism, even though people say he's thin-skinned. | ||
| You don't get into this game unless you know you can handle the criticism. | ||
| Do you think Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real mental disorder? | ||
| I'm starting to actually, I mean, I'm being slightly facetious here, but I'm actually starting to think that it's a real psychological condition. | ||
| Because I get into these conversations all the time with, you know, Fans and friends and family and whatever it is. | ||
| And I just try, I try my hardest to take the most rational, decent approach and what actually has happened, how is, you may not like Gorsuch, but that was just a mainstream, you know, that any mainstream Republican would have put this guy in. | ||
| Now, you may be a Democrat and that's upsetting to you, but it's not, it's not Hitler. | ||
| It's not Hitler. | ||
| So I've really tried to take some of the fangs out of these arguments, but I do find the level that people are obsessed with this stuff. | ||
| In all seriousness, this is a legitimate, fairly major mental health issue. | ||
| And you hear psychologists are actually dealing with people who are coming in crying and thinking that the world has exploded. | ||
| And there's actually a good reason for it. | ||
| So if you look at the result, it was a surprise to half of the country. | ||
| So the people who were Trump supporters, even if they weren't sure he was going to win, what they got was a world that made sense to them. | ||
| They thought all along he should win, and then when he did, even though it was surprising in the polls, their world was intact. | ||
| Everything that they thought about the world seemed to be about right. | ||
| They just thought other people were wrong. | ||
| But if you were on the side that knew he couldn't win, there's no way you were living in a country that this monster could possibly become our leader. | ||
| And then you woke up and he was? | ||
| That's a classic setup for cognitive dissonance. | ||
| It's where you have to rewrite the script in your head to make sense of this new information. | ||
| And here's what people don't do because we're all human. | ||
| So let me make this not a comment about just half the country. | ||
| It's a universal comment. | ||
| We rarely rewrite the script in their head to say, "You know, the best way to explain this is that I was a | ||
| fucking idiot for two years." | ||
| Right? Nobody does that. | ||
| And there's nothing wrong with that. That's normal. | ||
| I don't do it, you don't do it. Nobody does that. | ||
| So they have to come up with a new script that explains their situation. | ||
| And so I think they've come up with, my God, there are more racists in the country than we knew they voted this guy in. | ||
| And he must have had help from Russia, because there's no way this happens in a natural way, because my world wouldn't make sense if he could get elected just by having policies people like. | ||
| Couldn't happen. | ||
| So in that situation, these people are I hate to use triggered, but it's a specific use of cognitive dissonance. | ||
| Their world doesn't make sense, and they're trying to make sense of it, and it is an emotionally painful experience, which I have genuine sympathy for. | ||
| Yeah, so as a guy that, you know, deals in persuasion, for people that are watching this that are dealing with, because I get emails every day from people, I can't, my brother won't talk to me, my cousin won't talk to me, my wife won't talk to me, I've gotten emails from people that are having divorces over politics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What techniques would you tell someone to do if their spouse was suffering from this condition? | ||
| Well, let me tell you how strong this is. | ||
| I had postulated over the summer before the election that when Clinton's persuasion game went from very weak to non-existent, To suddenly just weapons grade when she started calling everything that Trump did dark. | ||
| That's the work of a real expert. | ||
| And I have some speculation about who that was. | ||
| But for our purposes today, just say it was super good persuasion that was not like anything she'd done before. | ||
| And that captured the thought that he's a monster, he's a racist, he's xenophobic. | ||
| Everything you want to put in that, that one word captured. | ||
| Had Clinton won, The bomb would have been diffused, because her side would have said, ah, we got what we wanted. | ||
| We avoided the monster. | ||
| The Trump people would have said, oh darn, we lost. | ||
| It wouldn't have thrown them for so much of a loop. | ||
| It wouldn't have thrown them for a loop where they sort of would have been used to losing. | ||
| It would have been consistent with the polls. | ||
| They wouldn't like it, but they wouldn't be thrown into cognitive dissonance because of it, right? | ||
| It would have seemed like a normal world. | ||
| But this thought that there was this monster under the bed, people lived with that as a real thing for months, | ||
| and then when it didn't go away, they had to continue living with it. | ||
| So that was the setup. | ||
| So to answer your question, how do you get out of it? | ||
| How do you cure it? | ||
| I had predicted way back before Inauguration Day that we would see the following cycle, | ||
| or story arc, if you will, that on Inauguration Day, it would be Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, | ||
| marches in the street, and we saw that. | ||
| And I said that after several months of him not doing Hitler things, people would say, all right, well, it's not as bad as we thought. | ||
| He's not a Hitler, but he's incompetent. | ||
| And there's chaos and he's just not going to do things right. | ||
| And maybe that's just as dangerous. | ||
| So that was the summer. | ||
| Remember, this was all forecast by me way ahead of time because you could see that this would have to happen, right? | ||
| And then I've predicted that by the end of the year, and we're getting close, people would start to say, well, he did get a lot of things done, so maybe he's effective, but we don't like what he's done. | ||
| Maybe it's not the justices they wanted and the policies they wanted. | ||
| But that part's just politics, right? | ||
| We can all deal with that part, right? | ||
| Well, the only way you're going to get rid of the illusion that he's a monster is by him doing non-monster stuff long enough that you just can't hold the illusion anymore. | ||
| And I think that what's coming, and this is the fun part, and this is really the basis for the prediction, is that every year at the end of the year, the news organizations, they sort of run out of real news, and they do the year-end roundups, and they're going to have to say, what did he do? | ||
| And that list is going to be really long, and it's going to be all the stuff you cared about minus health care, I think. | ||
| I'm not even sure taxes will happen, but the economy is so strong, I'm not even sure it's important anymore, right? | ||
| We'll probably get 4% with or without a tax change. | ||
| Maybe there'll be something with business taxes. | ||
| But at this point, I think the list of things that he's done that Republicans wanted is going to be so long, it would just be hard for people to hold in their heads that he wasn't effective. | ||
| And by next year, if we get something with health care, Maybe something with taxes. | ||
| It's gonna look like hard to hold the illusion anymore. | ||
| Where do you think the media fits in all of this now? | ||
| Because I think that you can very easily chalk up their ineptitude and obvious cheering at first for Bernie, but then ultimately for Hillary. | ||
| You can chalk that up to why so many of the Trump people, and I include myself in this, that I'm thrilled the way the media is crumbling. | ||
| I think it's phenomenal. | ||
| Just this past week, There was this idiotic thing with Trump in Japan, you saw this with the Prime Minister of Japan, and CNN tweets the video out, implying that he's being disrespectful by dumping the fish food in the koi pond or whatever. | ||
| What they don't show you is literally the second before that. | ||
| That's exactly what the Japanese Prime Minister did. | ||
| How do they keep doing this? | ||
| I mean, I cannot chalk this up to complete idiocy and ineptitude anymore. | ||
| How do they keep, how have they not fired? | ||
| I mean, CNN every day should be just firing people. | ||
| They should be throwing them off the roof of the Time Warner Center. | ||
| Well, unfortunately, the economics of the news business has changed. | ||
| It used to be you could have the three big networks and they could just deal with the facts as they knew them. | ||
| But now, I don't think you can make money that way, because people are looking to digest the news that they like and makes them feel good. | ||
| So you're always going to have media on the right and media on the left, and I don't think that middle May never be filled, because there's no way to make money in the middle. | ||
| Because if you go in the middle, both sides will say, well, half the time, you're just making stuff up. | ||
| Well, interestingly, I think the middle, whatever that middle is, I think it does sort of exist in this space. | ||
| The space that you're, even though you're not a creator on YouTube or whatever, it kind of exists in this land of Rogan and DeFranco and me and whoever, whatever that influence is, I think it sort of exists there. | ||
| Yeah, at the risk of complimenting you on your own show, you might be the closest thing, and the only thing I can think of, that's in the middle right now. | ||
| Like, easily identifiable as a legitimate attempt to be in the middle. | ||
| You know, other people have their spin on things, right? | ||
| But I don't even see others trying. | ||
| I only allow one compliment per year on the show of me, so that was it. | ||
| That's it, you're good. | ||
| I was waiting for someone to do it, we're already in November. | ||
| Yeah, and look, you had to go outside the TV model to even make this work. | ||
| But okay, so you are thrilled with the way the media is being destroyed, right? | ||
| I mean, is there any piece of you that misses that we get our news from three places and can make some factual sense together in any of that? | ||
| You know, I don't find any joy in that, because it's just something that's broken. | ||
| I can't get happy about that. | ||
| I'm not happy about anybody's destruction, but I understand your point. | ||
| It feels like if people are not doing their job, you want bad things to happen to them, but I can't quite get in that mindset. | ||
| I don't want to be hurt or anything like that, of course, but just the general The state of this nonsense. | ||
| That's why when people say to me about, well, Trump lies about this all the time. | ||
| Well, Hillary lied about this all the time. | ||
| Obama lied about if you like your doctor, you can keep him and the Syria red line. | ||
| It's just like, well, all of them lie. | ||
| They just all lied the same way. | ||
| They lied in a politician's way. | ||
| He lies in a new way. | ||
| I don't particularly like either one of them. | ||
| But there's a little bit of real politic here and I think that's where you sort of operate and just sort of, there's reality and then there's politics and they have a little bit overly sometimes. | ||
| The only way I could stake out a position that wasn't one of the crazy on the right or crazy on the left is by the persuasion filter. | ||
| It was sort of a step back from politics per se and that gave me a little bit of ability to be as objective as I can. | ||
| Nobody's completely objective. | ||
| But I just don't think that middle will be where you make all the money. | ||
| I mean, you're kind of alone here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I'm not making Dilbert money. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I should be working on a comic strip. | ||
| That would be your major advice, right? | ||
| Yeah, I tell everybody to start a comic strip. | ||
| Start a comic strip. | ||
| Quit your job right now. | ||
| Yeah, do you think it's kind of funny that you end up talking about politics so directly? | ||
| Because obviously, before we mentioned it, I mean, you were always sort of giving people a grain of truth more about their life and sort of the working world and all of that, but it was more social commentary. | ||
| But this is a lot of politics now. | ||
| You know, it's way closer than you think, because since the things I talk about are the, I would say, the illusions that we have, In the comic, I would write about the illusion that this three-hour meeting was better than the two-hour meeting. | ||
| That's just an illusion. | ||
| Yet, people buy into it. | ||
| It's a widespread practice. | ||
| And I just took that same mindset, which is, you understand that this isn't real, these things you're doing in the office. | ||
| These things don't help. | ||
| These don't make sense. | ||
| This new business policy just sounds good on paper, completely doesn't work. | ||
| It's really just the same analysis, I just took it to a different field. | ||
| I'm curious, has there been some kind of cost professionally or personally for you on this? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I think, to quote you, I'm pretty sure you said that you do have fuck you money. | ||
| I think that's what you said to me last time, so you may not care. | ||
| But I'm curious what the cost has been. | ||
| So, I think I've lost 75% of my friends. | ||
| I mean, do you mean that literally? | ||
| I mean that literally. | ||
| I don't know if you were just staking out a Trump position and then you were going to scale it back to 20%. | ||
| I mean, I haven't actually done the calculation, but it feels like that. | ||
| But really, I would say that's true. | ||
| I look at my Facebook feed and I literally thought Facebook wasn't working for a while. | ||
| Well, it's not working. | ||
| I actually thought, well, there must be some kind of major problem with Facebook. | ||
| I'm not seeing anything from all my friends here. | ||
| And then financially, a big part of an author's income is speaking. | ||
| And I can say this now that I have no speaking engagements lined up any time in the future, and have not for the past year. | ||
| Well, I was making anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 just to talk for an hour. | ||
| That went to zero, meaning I have nothing booked in the past year and nothing booked for the future year, and that's never happened any time in my professional career after the first five years when Dilbert became Well known. | ||
| Yeah, I find that particularly bizarre because A, you're not a hateful person or any of the things that people might say about you, but B, the things that you're talking about generally have come true. | ||
| So the worth of having you speak, there's still worth in having you speak, but I get it. | ||
| It's like, well, we're not gonna pay a Trump supporter. | ||
| Yeah, that's all it is. | ||
| And really, even the people who are making the decisions, Yeah, they understand the nuance, and if you tell them, well, it's not about the policies, they get that. | ||
| But their job is to make sure there's a big room full of people who don't feel bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they're not going to take a chance that the people in the room will have a different interpretation. | ||
| Right, that's interesting. | ||
| Was it mostly like corporate-type gigs, like that kind of thing? | ||
| It was almost entirely corporate and big organizations, yeah. | ||
| So that also shows you another symptom of what's happening in the world right now, right? | ||
| That someone who basically is just a moderate, decent guy who's saying some things and maybe is a supporter of a guy that's not popular in the popular sense of the word, You know, a corporation just doesn't want to put their butt on the line. | ||
| Yeah, but let me state that, as you said, I'm not going to be poor. | ||
| That isn't going to happen. | ||
| And I knew what I was getting into. | ||
| So, you and I, we're professionals, and so people watching might say, oh, that poor guy, he walked into the buzzsaw. | ||
| We see the buzzsaw. | ||
| We choose to walk into it because there's a bigger something there. | ||
| In this case, This was this weird special case where people's entire worldview was going to change. | ||
| I knew that when I saw Trump enter because he had that kind of effect. | ||
| And I thought it would be helpful to be sort of a guide to help people understand what they were seeing so that they could reinterpret their reality into something that was more functional and less Trump derangement syndrome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, as I said before, I mean, that's why You're good at what you do because I listened and that's why I wasn't crazed and that's why I think my audience even I have no idea which if I was to poll my entire audience which way they voted or you know whatever it is but I think that for most of them they were they didn't go off the deep end you know what I mean like they actually didn't go crazy and they've sort of when I try to keep my people dealing in reality which somehow is very special these days I didn't realize it was special but | ||
| But apparently it is. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how long it will take for the people who are screaming at the sky to effect some change, but I think the keys could be, and I'm not predicting that these will happen, but these would be the keys. | ||
| If President Trump did something useful in North Korea that really looked to people like, oh my god, I didn't see that coming, And something good happened with health care, which by the way, I think both of them are entirely possible. | ||
| I'm not sure what the odds are, but they seem very possible to me. | ||
| It would be hard a year from now To feel the same way about his presidency. | ||
| Assuming he doesn't do anything that's extra bad between now and then. | ||
| Is that also just the nature of basic human psychology? | ||
| That you can only scream for so much time? | ||
| Like, they've really dragged this screaming out, right? | ||
| But you can't do that forever, your brain will explode. | ||
| Well, my mother had a saying, and I don't know where it came from. | ||
| She said, you can get used to anything if you do it long enough, including hanging. | ||
| If you hang long enough, you just get used to it. | ||
| And I've predicted for a long time that as provocative as President Trump is, as long as he stays provocative in the same way, You will get used to it. | ||
| And I think you're starting to see that, but there's certainly a big segment of the population that is not close to getting used to it yet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you make of the Russia thing? | ||
| You know, I hate to say on camera, well, there's nothing there and there never will be anything there. | ||
| But at the moment, at this conversation, there's nothing that looks like it's a crime that's involving the president directly. | ||
| I'd be surprised if there is, but certainly if there is, it would be some kind of technical thing that the average person says, well, I didn't even know that was a crime. | ||
| So that's what happens when you get the special prosecutor in there, is they're looking for crimes now. | ||
| And at a certain level of money, power, influence, People are doing stuff that's going to violate some law or an ethical violation. | ||
| So if you look, you're going to find stuff. | ||
| My guess is there's more smoke than fire and that the smoke has been sort of generated by the coverage of it. | ||
| Yeah, well, every time they keep pushing more smoke out there, the smoke actually starts looking like it also has a lot to do with Hillary and the DNC. | ||
| So it's like, you all better be very careful what you ask for here, because this could take down all of you. | ||
| Well, and then the question I ask is, Russia is sort of a weird relationship with the United States. | ||
| You know, they're sort of frenemies, you know? | ||
| We want them on our side, but they seem to be doing stuff to bother us. | ||
| But we have fairly deep connections and have had for a long time. | ||
| So there are lots of people having lots of conversations at powerful levels, probably all the time. | ||
| But when you look at them and you look at them through a certain filter, you say, well, now it looks wrong. | ||
| Whereas maybe in a different time, we would just say, well, yeah, why wouldn't we be talking to someone who has so many interests that they overlap with ours? | ||
| Yeah, that does show the way things flip very easily. | ||
| Now it seems like the Democrats... I mean, look, if you took this thing to its... Let's pretend there was, you know, some legit reason for them to be talking about Russia. | ||
| Well, what are we really saying then? | ||
| Are we going to depose the President of the United States? | ||
| And you can't then put Pence in because he probably knew about it, so you can't have his guy in there. | ||
| And then what are you really saying? | ||
| Should we go down the line of succession? | ||
| Should, you know, Paul Ryan then be installed president? | ||
| And really, what are you saying? | ||
| Because then if they actually hacked our election and put the president in office, that's obviously an act of war. | ||
| So are you saying we should nuke Russia? | ||
| I mean, that's why it seems to me we've got, you know, Obama running around the whole country doing his $500,000 speeches, which I don't begrudge him, but with that shit-eating grin and everybody else is out there doing their thing, where if they knew The president was a Russian spy or colluded. | ||
| It's like they'd be out in the streets screaming about it, but they're not. | ||
| One of the things that really strikes me is that there are things that are alleged as, you know, traitorous, illegal activities, that if you had asked me, is this traitorous or illegal, I would have said, doesn't sound like it to me. | ||
| For example, if the Russians had some dirt on Hillary, And if they offered it to the campaign, if you had asked me without any of this news coverage in which we've all learned more about how this works, is it illegal to gather information from someone who has information? | ||
| I would say, how is it illegal to talk to people? | ||
| Why would it be illegal to know more if it's true? | ||
| Why would it be illegal to have true information? | ||
| That's an interesting distinction, though. | ||
| Let's pause there for a second. | ||
| So if the Russian government, let's say, had been falsifying information and passed it on to the Trump campaign, and then the Trump campaign used it, you would view that differently. | ||
| So the information itself has to be true. | ||
| Well, yes, I think people would view that differently, because that would look more like a... Well, either way, it looks like Russia is trying to influence things. | ||
| But, just because they're trying to influence things, does that mean that the person who would benefit from the information is forbidden from having it? | ||
| Now, this is where you have to be a lawyer to know whether or not that's illegal. | ||
| I look at it and go, okay, I can get the argument It might be unethical. | ||
| I can get the argument that we shouldn't do it. | ||
| I can get the argument that Russia shouldn't be meddling and we need to respond in some way. | ||
| But how is it illegal for a person to hear information? | ||
| In what world does the source of the information matter if it's actual information? | ||
| Well, that's why it's funny. | ||
| You saw when, what was it, about a month and a half ago when Trump Jr., the whole week was that Trump Jr. | ||
| met with the person who may have gotten some information from the Russians or whatever it was, and everyone was screaming about, you know, you can get opposition research but not from other countries, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then just in the last couple weeks, it came out that for sure the DNC was, you know, at least working at some level with either this Ukrainian guy or the Russians to make the dossier. | ||
| I mean, just... | ||
| It's like we don't even have to go into all of it, because it's just like, you're all dirty. | ||
| You're all dirty. | ||
| Yeah, and it's such a confusing area that the public doesn't have any idea what's going on now with Russia. | ||
| We know there's something about Russia, something about lawyers, you know, and if you were to ask the average person, I mean, you've probably seen these street interviews where somebody goes out and says, name the Vice President of the United States, and they're like, Mickey Mouse? | ||
| You know, they have no idea. | ||
| Imagine going out in the street and just grabbing a person and saying, can you sort out the Russia thing for me? | ||
| Can you tell me who did what? | ||
| They're gonna tell you that there's something about a Russian lawyer who put uranium on a hotel bed. | ||
| It's gonna be this mess of stuff that they've conflated in their minds. | ||
| The public has no idea what's going on. | ||
| Yeah, how do you figure out what news you believe and what you think is true and what you can actually trust? | ||
| Oh, I think every situation, you've got to look at it differently. | ||
| So the first sort, if I see it on either Fox or I see it on CNN, the first thing I do is go to the other one. | ||
| Do you have two TVs next to each other? | ||
| Well, I've got a clicker, so I can do that. | ||
| And I wait, because it's not going to be at the same time necessarily, but I wait. | ||
| Because my experience is that on a factual basis, they all pretty much get the facts | ||
| right. | ||
| It's the interpretation, it's the priority, it's how much attention they put, it's which | ||
| pundits come on and say what about it that is where all the bias happens. | ||
| So the first thing is do they both say it? | ||
| And if they do, I start feeling comfortable that maybe there's some truth to it. | ||
| But then all the spin comes, and almost all of that is non-factual spin. | ||
| So I kind of discount all of that from both sides. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think anyone's doing the persuasion game correctly on the other side? | ||
| So whoever might be your intellectual opponent that buys into all of the things, say, of | ||
| the modern Democratic Party. | ||
| Is there anyone that's kind of doing it right? | ||
| Even if you disagree with all of the conclusions or what they're trying to build in the future. | ||
| Let me say something that I know can make at least half of your listeners just flip out. | ||
| George Clooney has game. | ||
| Now, I don't think he can run because of the whole Hollywood-Weinstein connection, but in a recent interview I saw, I saw so much technique That I didn't know he had that much technique. | ||
| And he basically was setting himself up that if people begged, he would run. | ||
| Now, I don't know if you would agree, because once they did some polling, they might find out he has some issues. | ||
| But he has the charisma and he has the persuasion game that if he could bring a little bit of substance, he would actually be quite formidable. | ||
| I don't think he can beat Trump. | ||
| Well, he could probably really take a run at someone else, you know, a regular Republican. | ||
| Likewise, Mark Cuban. | ||
| He's definitely making some noise in this space, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, he did an interesting thing by saying that, you know, he could potentially be either a Republican or a Democrat, which was kind of clever because it allows both groups to see him until he commits as, well, maybe one of mine, you know. | ||
| But, I think somebody said that he would maybe run as a Republican, but the Republicans have a long memory, and there's no way he gets elected as a Republican. | ||
| But, could he be elected as a Democrat if he brought in some ideas that involve technology, for example, that would maybe get us to better health care? | ||
| A way to get to free college. | ||
| Because that's the part that Bernie was missing. | ||
| He had everything right, except the connecting tissues. | ||
| Like, how do you get there? | ||
| That you could afford it. | ||
| Technology could probably get there, or at least you could make a story that it could get there, and I think it would be believable, because I think we can. | ||
| I think Hubert could make that story. | ||
| I think he's got the charisma. | ||
| He's got the brains. | ||
| He might be able to pull it off. | ||
| But I don't know if he'll run as a Democrat. | ||
| So not that I have any love of sort of career politicians or people that have just been around politics a lot, but it's interesting you just went basically to all celebrities, even Cuban in effect really is a celebrity at this point. | ||
| Well I wouldn't charisma. | ||
| If there had been any standard politician with charisma, I would probably gravitate to him. | ||
| Van Jones is very good. | ||
| He would be high on my list of charismatic Democrat. | ||
| He agreed to do this show and then CNN wouldn't let him do it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So I don't know where that puts my feelings about him. | ||
| Or at least he said he would do it on Twitter and then they said no. | ||
| So maybe he was just playing me. | ||
| Sort of the public cred of yeah I'll do it and then leave it to my guys who will just say no. | ||
| I don't know the details but I find him credible. | ||
| Credible starting with a C. My guess is that he told you the truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if we can't have sort of regular politicians anymore, because that's really whether they're celebrities or just because you're saying these people don't exist in the world, it seems that the long term health of the system, it doesn't strike me as that great in that case, that we're just going to keep Living in a world where facts don't matter, we're going to keep sort of putting persuasion sort of ahead of... We've always been in that world. | ||
| It's not a new world. | ||
| It's just that we have a character in the president right now who takes it to a level where you can't miss it. | ||
| I think before you had the luxury of saying, well, my side is telling the truth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we don't even have that luxury anymore. | ||
| Even if you're pro-Trump, you know that the fact-checkers are not wrong every time. | ||
| You just don't think it matters because he's persuading in a direction that you like. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, to put a nice bow, then, on this whole conversation, since you've done a nice job, I think, persuading people in general, but I am upfront and admit you've helped persuade me in certain ways. | ||
| I want some predictions out of you, Adams. | ||
| Where's this all going? | ||
| Does this guy run again in what will be about three years now? | ||
| Does he step aside? | ||
| Do the Democrats finally wake up to some of this stuff? | ||
| Lay it out! | ||
| Give me something here. | ||
| I think you're going to see something good with health care, maybe by the summer. | ||
| I think that the economy will stay strong unless there's some surprise that we haven't seen, but straight line it looks like it's going to stay strong. | ||
| I think we'll hit 4% GDP. | ||
| I think that at the end of Trump's four years, Unless something new happens, it's going to look really | ||
| successful. | ||
| And if he's smart, he will at least consider going out on top, especially because age becomes | ||
| a little bit more of an issue at that point. | ||
| And for a brander, somebody who would like to go out and say, "Okay, I also have a company | ||
| with my name on it," it might make sense to go out on top. | ||
| But he's also a really competitive guy. | ||
| And so he might just want to take it to the next level, but I'm not sure that I'm rooting | ||
| for that because I think age has to matter in that job. | ||
| Yeah, and I suspect that even if everything you predict there is true and everything's going great and it looks like he could win again, I do think, you know, this is the guy who made The Apprentice. | ||
| And that it would be like he would just anoint his successor and then that person would have to do the job, whether it's Don Jr. | ||
| or whoever else it is, but that he would then step off as the king and not even risk, he already pulled off one major coup, so to speak, and not even risk the second one. | ||
| Yeah, it's gonna be tempting to keep the brand clean if he has a great four years and just go out with that. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Well, it's always a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| I feel that we should do this, you know, probably a little more than maybe once a year or so, and that way I can keep grading your predictions. | ||
| Is anyone tracking you? | ||
| Is there a blog devoted to, Adam said this, he got this one wrong, got this one right? | ||
| I think everyone should be. | ||
| They should drop what they're doing and just track my predictions. | ||
| Well, I have them in my book, Win Bigly, so you can see them there. | ||
| Yeah, we'll put the Amazon link right down below, and yeah, it's a pleasure as always. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And for more on Scott Adams, you can follow him on the Twitter, where he does a lot of morning periscopes. | ||
| Do you always have the coffee before you start? | ||
| I could never talk to people without the first sip. | ||
| I always have coffee before I talk to humans. | ||
| That's a good strategy. |
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