All Episodes
Previous Next
June 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:39
Episode 71 - How to Spot Cognitive Dissonance in the Media
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, guess what time it is?
Yes, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Those of you who are lucky enough to be watching this instead of any kind of a royal wedding or Something depressing like a school shooting?
It's time for the best part of the day.
Time for some good news.
Time for some freshly brewed warm beverage.
coffee preferred.
But it's time for the Simultaneous Sip.
Oh, yeah.
So, let's talk about the whack-a-mole style of calling somebody anything.
But we're going to use President Trump as our example today.
And I'm going to teach you a few more ways to spot cognitive dissonance.
If you're new to this, cognitive dissonance is when a person's brain misfires because a thing that they thought to be true, and they were sure it was true, Turns out to be false.
And instead of saying, oh, I guess I was stupid, misinformed, and ignorant, people don't do that.
Instead, they rewrite The reality to something strange so that they can still be right.
But how do you determine when someone is doing that, which is their brain is temporarily scrambled in cognitive dissonance, versus just somebody who's wrong?
Because they would look the same, right?
Somebody who's wrong and somebody whose brain is scrambled, they would both just look wrong.
Not exactly. There are some ways to tell.
For example, in my book, Win Bigly, I talk about the so-tell, S-O, so.
When people respond to you with so, what you're saying is, followed by, and the second part is important, the so by itself doesn't tell you that much, but it's the second part.
Where they turn what you said that was reasonable into an absolute, a ridiculous absolute, in order to refute you.
That's cognitive dissonance.
Because they've run out of argument.
So they have to rewrite what you said to have a new thing to argue about.
You see it all the time. So here's an example.
If you say, for example, I believe that prison reform would be good for everybody.
Good for the prisoners, good for the public.
Let's say you made that argument and somebody was disagreeing with you.
And you've made good points.
I don't know what the good points are in this argument.
I don't know too much about it.
But let's just say you had demolished the other person's argument who was, for example, opposed to prison reform.
That person, once having their argument destroyed, would say something like this.
So, you're saying we should just let everybody get away with murder.
Right? That's the so tell argument.
Tell like being a hint or a clue, the tell, for cognitive dissonance.
The absurd absolute is that they've changed a reasonable idea of prison reform into, so you say just let the criminals go free and murder is okay, right?
So you're in favor of murder now.
So when you see that, that's a person who's lost badly but can't quite wrap their head around the fact they lost, so they've invented a whole new world in which you said something crazy so that they can still be right.
But there's a more generic form of this that's a little harder to recognize, and I'm going to teach you how.
I learned this in hypnosis class many years ago when I was learning to be a hypnotist.
I heard the following story.
Now, I don't know if this story is true.
It was presented as true, but it's a good example of cognitive dissonance.
Even if the story isn't true, it tells the right point.
And the story goes that the greatest hypnotist in the world, Milton Erickson, I had hypnotized one of his regular subjects that he hypnotized a lot and had given her a post-hypnotic suggestion that during a dinner that a group were having later,
it was a formal, you know, kind of a nice dinner at somebody's house, that she would, during the middle of the dinner, She would take out her shoe and put it on the middle of the table for no reason.
That was just a post-hypnotic suggestion.
Now, it is reported that during the meal, she did, in fact, take off her shoe and put it in the middle of the table.
And when the other guests said, why are you putting your shoe on the table?
Because they were not in on the hypnosis.
They didn't know why she was doing it.
She looked at them.
And knowing that she had been hypnotized, and knowing that she had been hypnotized to put her shoe on the table, this is important.
She knew both of those things.
This was not a hypnosis where she had amnesia.
She knew she had been hypnotized to put her shoe on the table.
So she puts her shoe on the table, and then people say, why are you putting your shoe on the table?
And she says...
Well, I've got a flower vase at home that's sort of in the shape of a shoe.
And I wanted to see how the flowers would look in it.
And she takes the flowers from the arrangement and puts them in her shoe.
Now, from that point on, she swore to anybody who would ask, no, yes, yes, I understand that the best hypnotist in the world hypnotized me, and he told me to put my shoe on the table.
But... That's not why I did it.
Why I did it is because I have this vase that looks like a shoe, and I wanted to see what it would look like.
Perfectly rational. So, clearly, if you're looking at this from the outside and you hear the story, you say to yourself, that's not what's going on there.
This is a person whose brain is temporarily scrambled, and they're just doing a quick rewrite to try to make it make sense again.
But to anybody observing, it's ridiculous.
So what you look for is a reason that would only make sense to the person saying it.
So if you back somebody into a corner in your argument, and the thing that they say is something that no one else would think makes sense, especially if it's kind of a word salad, meaning that it's a bunch of words that go together, and you think to yourself, well, I recognize all those words, And I hear them in a sentence and the grammar is okay, but none of those words make any sense.
That's a tell for cognitive dissonance.
And ideally it's not you, it's the other person.
But I want to give you some examples of that.
So there was a great trigger for cognitive dissonance this week, and you can see who fell for it and who didn't.
The trigger was when President Trump referred to the MS-13 gang members as animals, and that quote was taken out of context, and most of the major publications said, he's calling immigrants animals.
Now, when people like me pushed back and said, ah, that's not what happened, you just took that out of context, then a number of outlets, AP, CNN, etc., they either corrected or revised their reporting to reflect the correct context.
So those were people, the AP, let's say, the AP was not experiencing cognitive dissonance.
Because when the error was pointed out, and it was clear that the context was gang members when he played the question and then the answer, the AP just said, oh, damn, that's a pretty bad mistake we just made there.
Let's issue a correction.
So that's what it looks like when you're not in cognitive dissonance.
But let me read you some examples of some people who didn't do so well.
So here's Tim Alberta.
This is on Twitter.
He calls himself the chief political correspondent for Politico Mag.
And he says, awful lot of reporters screwed up regarding Trump's animals remarks.
So far that's just a fact.
A lot of people screwed up. And then he says, it's the result of a media climate that feeds on outrage and speed and retweets.
That's a fair statement.
But here's the fun part.
But it's also the result of Trump's own history of using racially charged language and the total erosion of any benefit of the doubt.
Now, there's definitely an erosion of benefit of the doubt.
That part's true. But here he's saying that even though the reporters were wrong, They were kind of right.
Not right because of the thing they were talking about, but right because it fit into sort of a pattern.
So his pattern of awfulness and racism is clear, and therefore, it's not such a big mistake, because it fit into the pattern anyway.
I call this the whack-a-mole persuasion, meaning that if there's a specific thing you're talking about, which somebody says, hey, President Trump said in Charlottesville that the white supremacists were fine people, and you say, well, that's not true.
He was talking about people who were pro-statue and anti-statue, and he said there are good people on both sides.
He wasn't talking about Antifa and the racists being on two sides.
That would be crazy.
Nobody's going to call the people marching against Jews.
Nobody's going to say they're fine people when your own family, you're Jewish, and when Israel loves you, and you're You know, there's nothing about that that is even a little bit sensible.
So you can explain that to somebody and they could say, okay, all right, well, okay, I did get fooled on the Charlottesville thing, but what about all the other stuff?
You know, what about the time he said immigrants were animals?
And then you say, well, no, that was also a mistake.
He didn't say immigrants are animals.
He said MS-13 are animals.
And then they say, yeah, but look at the pattern.
And you can go from one thing to another, and you can debunk each one, and they will still say, sure, you debunked that one, and that one, and that one.
And you also debunked that one, that one, that one, and that one.
But there's so many more.
The pattern is clear.
So I'm going to talk about patterns in a moment and show you how easily you can be fooled, but I want to give you the best example of cognitive dissonance you can see.
This is from Jonathan Wiseman, who is...
What is he? He's with the New York Times.
And he says, so Jonathan Weissman, New York Times, he goes, as someone who edited a story on his comments, talking about Trump's comments about animals, I listened to them live.
I read the transcript.
Occam's razor. Don't overthink this.
The real problem was that our president speaks in non-sequitur gibberish.
There was no direct linguistic link between MS-13 and his animal remarks.
So in other words, he's doubling down on the president not talking about MS-13 as the animals, but rather immigrants.
But look for the word salad.
So keep in mind that the person saying this is an editor at the New York Times.
So without knowing much about him, I can say the following is true.
If he and I took an IQ test, he would outscore me.
You don't become the editor of the New York Times unless you're pretty freaking smart.
He knows how to write.
Probably he's one of the best writer-editors in the world because he has a job in which you need to be one of the best writers and editors in the world.
So on all those levels, he's a level above me.
So this is not some kind of generic insult about this man's intelligence.
I believe his intelligence is very high, but cognitive dissonance does not discriminate by intelligence.
There is no protection by being intelligent.
And now I'm going to read it again and just look for the word salad.
This is a person who knows how to edit and speak very clearly.
Let's see if he did it.
Someone who edited this story and blah, blah, blah.
And let's get to the good part here.
He goes, Occam's razor.
Don't overthink this.
Now we learned in hypnosis class that people say exactly what they mean even if they didn't mean to say it.
That takes a little more explanation.
But for example, if somebody has a secret sexual desire to be whipped...
The hypnotist will teach you, okay, you can determine that that person has that secret preference without ever talking about that.
Because you'll find that they use the word whip in casual conversation more than another person.
So you might say, how would you like dessert?
And that person would say, that'd be great.
Do you have any whipped cream? Do you like the basketball tournament?
He goes, yeah, it looks like the Warriors really whipped the Rockets.
So if you listen to language, people are primed by their preferences to use a kind of language that reveals some things about them.
So when somebody says, don't overthink this, what does that mean?
What does it mean exactly to overthink it?
He is literally saying...
Stop thinking. Don't overthink it.
In other words, don't think too much.
In order to agree with him, he's asking you to think less.
Now that's not what he intends to say.
He's using literary language to say don't overthink it.
It's simpler than you think.
But the hypnotist says, yeah, that's what he'll tell you he says, and that's what the words say.
But it's also revealing quite often when somebody tells you to stop thinking.
He goes, the real problem was that our president speaks in non-sequitur gibberish.
There was no direct linguistic link between MS-13 and his animal remark.
No direct linguistic link.
It was literally the answer to the question.
Somebody said blah blah blah question about MS-13.
Trump's answer to that question about MS-13 was blah blah blah they're animals.
Now you could say that's not a direct linguistic link.
I don't know what that means, but it was an answer to the question.
So for someone who is an expert on words and language, very high IQ, to somehow miss That it was just an answer to a question.
And to try to hide that with this word salad of saying there was no direct linguistic link.
He speaks in non sequitur gibberish.
So this is like a really clear tell for cognitive dissonance.
So this is someone whose job it is to know the difference between truth and reality.
He got it wrong this time.
And rather than rewrite his personal history to say, oh geez, I got that one wrong.
I guess I got fooled.
He doubled down.
Now here's the interesting thing.
He says that Occam's razor is that it was the simple explanation.
And what he's saying is something that another gentleman also says.
Um... That what you're seeing is it was easy to think he was talking in a racist way because of all the other patterns of his racism.
Now here's the problem with Occam's razor.
Occam's razor says, at least in the language version, not the science version, which is slightly different, but the way we use it in common language, Occam's razor, is that whatever is the simplest explanation for something is correct.
So Jonathan is saying the simplest explanation for the president using the word animals is that he's a racist and that it's just sort of a weird coincidence and people are trying too hard to say that it was an answer to a question.
Now here's my thing about, or my point about Occam's razor.
Everyone thinks their own explanation is the simple one.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but generally speaking, I think that my explanation is always the simple one.
Let me give you an example.
With the question of President Trump being a racist and saying that immigrants are animals, which he didn't say, the argument is that if you look at the whole context, all of these different racist things he's done, that's really the clear picture, and that's as simple as it can be.
If somebody has 25 different examples of doing things that sound racist, what is the simplest explanation?
The simplest explanation is they're a racist.
Occam's razor, right?
Well, here's another way to look at this.
If somebody that you had just been introduced to did something that he was falsely accused of being a racist and people bought into it, let's say that nobody caught on to it like the animals thing, and people just bought into it.
What would they think for the next 25 things that person did that were ambiguous?
Would they think to themselves, oh, look, there's 25 ambiguous things plus this one thing we believe in?
No. They would say all the 25 things are true, and if you looked at any one of them, they'd say, yeah, that one isn't so much true, but you have to look at all of them.
Unfortunately, the way confirmation bias works is that once you're convinced, getting 25 examples that prove your point is very simple.
So the simplest explanation of why there are so many stories of President Trump doing bad things is he's a racist monster.
That's pretty simple. Here's another one.
It's confirmation bias.
And his enemies are branding him.
Is that complicated?
Well, it is complicated if you start looking at all the examples.
But it's very simple to know how you got so many examples.
Because once you get it going, all the other examples are just confirmation bias.
Let's talk about patterns.
It took me a while to get here, but this is what I wanted to talk about, actually.
People are under the impression That patterns tell them things.
And that patterns are a form of thinking.
If you can see a pattern of behavior, you know something useful.
But here's the problem with using patterns for thinking.
Patterns are not very reliable.
Let me just give you an example.
Anything out of context could look like a pattern, but you don't know that if you put the proper context on it, it wouldn't be.
So, for example, it looked like when President Trump said, those MS-13 people are animals, or I'm paraphrasing, when people didn't hear the gang member part and they just heard the animals part, they said, Aha!
It fits the pattern.
That's part of his pattern of behavior.
But it wasn't.
It was just something taken out of context.
There's also a chance.
There are things called statistical clusters.
So, for example, if my small town had twice as many cases of esophageal cancer than other towns around here, you would leap to the conclusion, ah, there's something happening in my town that's causing everybody to have this certain kind of cancer.
Chance gets you that too, because things are not perfectly distributed.
There'll just be some people, some places by chance that have more of some stuff.
So chance fools you.
Having things out of context fools you.
How about analogies?
Here's an analogy.
During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese built a lot of tunnels.
So they lived underground in tunnels.
But it didn't help them that much because when we found the tunnels, meaning the U.S. soldiers, they would go in there with flamethrowers and dogs and whatever and they would kill them in their tunnels.
Elon Musk is building this hyperloop using these boring things which create big tunnels.
So what is to stop the US government from going in there with flamethrowers and dogs and killing all the people who are trying to commute?
Well, it's a perfect analogy.
If bad things happen in tunnels, And this is a tunnel.
Why wouldn't the bad things happen there?
So this is my ridiculous example, but it's the same as calling any modern leader Hiller or Mussolini.
These kinds of gross analogies are ridiculous.
So analogies are not sensible, they're not logic, they're not based on reason.
They're just things that remind you of other things.
So if analogies are fitting into your pattern of behavior, such as people used to say, look at the way Trump's face looks when he speaks.
It looks like Mussolini.
It's fitting the pattern.
It's fitting the pattern.
His chin. He's got a chin just like Mussolini.
Confirmation bias will make anything look like a pattern.
Once you think you see the pattern, it's all you see.
It's all you see. Confirmation bias.
Then there's shenanigans. You've got people in the news making up stuff to say, look at all the examples of the badness this person did.
Huffington Post, somebody tweeted around an older article in which they had, I think, 16 examples of why President Trump is a racist.
And I started reading the first four, and they were ridiculous, because they were literally about other people.
And I thought, wow, this is just shenanigans.
Somebody is just putting something together to give you the idea that there's a pattern.
Now, there's also just imaginary patterns.
We just imagine things that aren't there for a variety of reasons.
Some of them overlap these other reasons.
But sometimes we just imagine patterns where there are none.
And then there are real patterns.
But here's the thing.
The whole reason we care about patterns is because we think they predict.
So if somebody is doing the same thing, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you say, oh, tomorrow's going to be like that because we've got a pattern.
But here's the problem.
Sometimes patterns predict.
But lots of times, the pattern is the opposite of what's going to happen, and there's a reason for that.
Take Nixon goes to China.
The reason that Nixon could go visit China was because his long history and pattern of being tough on communism predicted that he wouldn't.
So by doing the thing that he wasn't supposed to do, he found success.
If we were to look at the pattern of people running for president who did not have prior experience in politics, we would say, well, the pattern is there's no way you're going to get a President Trump.
Patterns, even when they're real ones, even if you get all the facts right, you think they predict, But they don't.
This is what we're seeing with the North Korea situation.
People are saying, my God, how can you be so dumb as to think that this time things will go right in North Korea?
Don't you know that they always promise things and get concessions and then change their mind?
Because they have done that in the past.
But the likelihood of them getting away with it again is far, far less It's the pattern itself that makes it unlikely that the pattern is predictive.
Because everybody noticed the pattern.
Do you think John Bolton hasn't noticed?
You know, he hasn't noticed that there's a pattern, that North Korea sometimes changes its mind.
And we're seeing the U.S. play to this difference right now by saying, how about giving us some of your nuclear capabilities?
Not all of it. You know, we'll give you a little bit.
We'll promise you some security.
But give us some of the nuclear capability just to make sure that you're not jacking us around.
Now that's not maybe the full answer, but it's part of addressing why the pattern will break.
So when you see people arguing that, yeah, you have disproven my one example I gave you, but look at the pattern.
These people are sometimes...
Just mistaken. Sometimes just don't have a good point.
But lots of times it's a cognitive dissonance escape hatch.
I could tell you that I could sit in a room with anybody who accuses the president of being a racist.
I could take their top 12 reasons and debunk them so easily that it would be almost entertaining.
It would be as easy as the Trump calling people animals things.
And I've done some of those.
But we have a whack-a-mole problem.
Because no matter how many times you say, well, that one's not real.
Well, sure, that one's not real.
But look at the pattern.
And you say, well, let's look at another one.
That one's not real. That one's not real.
That one's not real. That one's not real.
So I've shown you that 12, the first 12 that we talked about of your 25 reasons are complete BS. What do you say to that?
Easy. Easy.
You haven't talked about the other 12, and we know those are all real.
Alright, let's talk about the other 12.
Debunk all 12.
Now what do you say?
And I'll tell you what you say.
After you have debunked every single thing that they thought was the pattern, they'll say something like this.
Occam's Razor. Don't overthink it, Scott.
Look how long it took you for your tortured explanation of why all 25 things are coincidence.
It does take a long time, but I'm not the one who made the list 25 items long a bullshit.
I wasn't the one who made the complexity.
I'm just talking about somebody else's complexity, which they've built out of mostly imagination and confirmation bias and chance and shenanigans and etc.
Yeah, someone is saying here, the human brain tries to create order out of random events.
Now, you're seeing some people push back.
People are saying, bullshit!
You know, you're trying, Scott, your pretzel logic, you're trying so hard.
So I've made a claim that I can debunk All but one example of the president's past racist behavior.
There's one that I can't debunk.
And that's the housing discrimination case from, I don't know, the 70s or whatever.
Now, my view is...
That whether or not he did a racist thing in 1970, whatever, whether or not he knew about it, it was a bad thing.
You can't explain that one away, etc.
But very few of us are who we were 50 years ago.
So if the question is, who is he today?
I don't know that that tells you a lot.
Because there are very few people who would want to defend their 20-something year old self.
Very few of us would want to defend our younger self.
I wouldn't. And I wouldn't ask anybody else to.
So if you're 70, I apply what I call the 20-year rule.
If you were accused of some bad behavior 20 years ago, I say, you know, if you paid for it, if you changed your mind, you know, is it the whole point of society and human life and everything that we care about?
Isn't the point to get better?
Isn't the point to get rid of your rough edges?
Isn't the point to become more open-minded, more accepting, more loving?
Isn't the point to go from your worst self to a better self?
So if you're saying somebody did something awful last week, I'm going to say, well, that's probably who they still are.
Last week isn't that long ago.
But if you tell me somebody did a housing discrimination thing 45 years ago, really just trying to make money.
It wasn't so much about race or anything.
They were just trying to maximize their income.
It's still deplorable.
We have to disavow it.
We all have to be on the same side of this.
Housing discrimination has no place in the world.
But, it was 45 years ago.
I absolutely disavow anybody who did that 50 years ago.
But today, somebody's saying, the Central Park Five.
What about the Central Park Five?
That's a clear indication that he's a racist, in which race was never mentioned.
It was about crime.
He talked about crime.
He said he was tough on crime.
Have we noticed that the president is tough on crime all the time?
He is. He is tough on crime all the time.
Doesn't matter who's doing the crime.
So when you say, what about that Central Park Five?
You are falling for shenanigans.
You're falling for confirmation bias.
And maybe some of it is out of context if you don't know the whole story.
Was he personally responsible for the housing discrimination?
Yeah, so somebody's saying that case, I think it was in the 70s.
Was Trump personally aware of that the people who worked for his company were involved in some housing racial discrimination?
We don't know, but I would argue that it doesn't matter.
Because who we are 45 years later, now how long would that be?
That'd be like 45 years later.
I don't know how old he was. I think he was in the late 20s or something.
It's not really a good indication of who we were.
You remember Bob Byrd?
I think he was in the KKK before he was in Congress.
Why was that okay?
Because it was a long time ago.
That's actually a good enough reason for me.
If you don't allow...
I'm not a believer, as you know.
I don't conform to any religion.
But I'm a big fan of the Christian idea of forgiveness.
Okay, you were a turd.
Do we hold that against you forever?
It's okay to say somebody was a turd and they got better.
I'm okay with that.
Now, if you have examples that are as bad as the housing discrimination that fall within the last 20 years for anybody, whether it's President Trump or anybody else, I'd say, let's talk about that.
That's not that long ago.
But 45 years ago?
I think we can let that go.
And by the way, I do say the same thing about Hillary Clinton.
So during the election, people were saying, what about Whitewater and stuff like that?
To which I say, too long ago, even if bad stuff happened, that's not who anybody is today.
Did he ever apologize to those young men?
Did he ever apologize to anybody?
If President Trump was an apologizer and he simply neglected to apologize whenever black people were involved, You could put that in your confirmation bias to mean something, and it probably would.
But if he's a person who doesn't apologize, somebody saying that Hillary Clinton said black people should heal and call them super predators, to which I say, same standard.
That was more than 20 years ago, I'm pretty sure.
And I would hold her to the same standard, which is people said a lot of screwed up things a long time ago, but we're trying to get better.
That's the point. Yeah.
You've seen me on here, some of you, with my buddy, Hawk Newsome, who's in Black Lives Matter.
Now, if I were to judge him by any mistakes that he's admitted to, just the mistakes he's admitted to from his past...
I could not be his friend.
I couldn't talk to him.
I couldn't have a productive conversation with him.
But I don't. I don't judge people by who they were.
And I wouldn't want to be judged by who I was.
I would prefer to be judged by who I am.
She said, deplorables in 2016.
Yeah, so the deplorables comment was current, and you could rightfully put more weight on that, I think.
All right, I'm just looking at your comments right now.
Give me a sense, was this useful?
Do you think it would help you find any cognitive dissonance in the wild?
Look for the word salad.
When somebody is good at speaking, And normally they can be clear and concise, but in this moment they can't.
That's a... Oh, people like this one.
Good. So what I'm going to be doing, maybe it'll be a chapter, I'm updating Winn Bigley, my book, so when the paperback comes out it'll have a bonus chapter in it.
And I think I'm going to go through each of the whack-a-mole examples of why the president is a horrible person.
And just so that there's one place that you can link to or point to and say, all right, yes, I hear your 16 examples.
Here are the 16 reasons why this is confirmation bias.
I will tell you that it will be more entertaining than persuasive because you can't get out of the trap that there are so many of them.
That statement, but there are so many of them.
That is an inescapable trap for the people who are in it.
So if there were 25 examples that people hold in their head of the bad things President Trump said, and if I debunked all 25 of them, At the end of it, do you think they would say, well, that was pretty good.
I didn't think that could happen, but there it was right in front of me.
I had 25 reasons that you just showed me that all 25 are objectively not what I thought they were.
I'm done with that. Nobody will say that.
People are not wired that way.
They will say, yeah, but what about number 12?
And you'll say, were you listening?
We already covered number 12.
I already showed you why that's not real.
And they'll say, sure, number 12.
What about seven? We just talked about seven.
We just talked about it.
I just showed you.
It was taken into context.
You agreed. You agreed.
And that person will say, sure.
Seven? Right.
But what about all the other ones?
We just talked about all of them.
We just talked about every single one on the list.
Were you not listening to me?
And the person will say...
I love your pretzel logic.
Keep twisting yourself into a pretzel, Scott, trying to explain all this.
Why don't you just stop overthinking it?
That's what you're going to get.
So at least you'll know when you've won the argument.
You won't change many minds, if any, but you'll have fun doing it.
How do you change the minds?
You don't really. I don't think you can change any minds by talking about the details.
It's just fun and useful and I think it should be documented all in one place, so I'm going to do it.
But primarily for interest and education and entertainment.
To change people's minds, oddly, you would probably have to work on something that had nothing to do with the topic.
In other words, if the president simply went on to two successful terms in which he just did a good job and everybody was happy about it, eventually people would say, you know, that whole racism thing, maybe that was a little overblown.
If you work on it directly and say, here's my example.
And, you know, I refute it and I debunk this.
You can't get very far.
But if you change their general opinion of the person, they will rewrite their own history.
That's sort of an important concept that I said quickly, so I'm going to say it again.
If you're trying to change people's minds who decided that the president's a giant racist, talking about their actual examples of why they think it probably will never change their mind.
They will just be in this cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias bubble, and they can't get out.
But if he can, on his own, through his good presidenting, let's say, just hypothetically, let's say he denuclearized North Korea, the economy was the best it's ever been, these are possible.
I'm not saying that either of these will actually happen, but we're on the cusp of all this being possible.
And let's say this is far less likely, let's say you got some kind of a good result with Iran and the Middle East.
At the end of eight years, the people who had been calling them a racist for eight years would...
Maybe not have as many reasons that are current.
It would start to sound like it's aging stuff.
And they would talk themselves into rewriting their own memory of how racist he was.
Because they want to like him because he did all these good things.
hypothetically.
All right.
Somebody's saying Juan Williams has the worst confirmation bias I've ever seen.
Well, you can't really judge that.
So you're talking about Juan Williams who appears on The Five on Fox News and you see him punditing around in other places and writer.
I would say this.
I'm going to give Juan Williams a compliment.
And it's a pretty big one.
Now, I would say I don't agree with him too often on his opinions, but he is paid to be the sort of loyal opposition.
I mean, his job is to be the contrarian, the more left-leaning person on the table.
So it's kind of his job to always disagree, and that's not always going to be unawkward.
So it's hard to sort out what does he really believe versus what is his job, you know, doing the best job to present the other side of the issue.
There's a little difference there.
But here's my compliment, Juan.
I've talked about this a lot, how ego If people think that their ego is who they are, that's a loser strategy.
But if you think of your ego as just a tool that you can ramp up and ramp down when you need it, just whenever it's useful, then you have sort of a superpower.
Juan Williams is a perfect example of that.
Love or hate what he says.
Love or hate his opinions.
But here's what we can say for sure.
He takes a job in which he's very well paid.
It's sort of a dream job.
You know, he probably reads some articles and shows up for an hour and then goes home.
I mean, it's a pretty darn good job.
And the reason he can do that is that it seems to me, you know, I'm not inside his head, but it seems to me he uses ego like a tool.
If he was his ego, he wouldn't do that job.
If he said, who I am, I can't be sitting with these people who have these other opinions.
I can't be sitting here being mocked by people who I disagree with and sometimes they're even wrong.
It would be a horrible situation and you would give up the easiest, best money you ever had because of your ego.
What does Juan do?
Here's my compliment. He's operating at a higher level.
He is clearly comfortable in the abuse.
He's comfortable when he's on the offense.
He's comfortable on the defense.
Have you ever seen him look uncomfortable?
You don't! Because apparently his ego is a tool.
It's not something that controls him.
That gave him a superpower and you can see that so easily that he's used that capability to great effect.
Well, you talk about the spy in the Trump campaign.
Well... You know, there's not much complexity to that story and there's not much fun about it.
Meaning that if we don't know who it is, there's not much you can say except that it was there.
And I'm not sure we should know who it is.
Because there's a pretty good argument that says you can't give up your sources because then you don't get sources.
So I think there's a reasonable argument on both sides that makes it not interesting.
But, what do all of you say about the, I'd say the proposition, that we now know what happened, and this is one version of events.
I think this is the Judge Napolitano, I think this might be his version.
Well, let's just say it's my version, because some other people have this version.
That Brennan and Clapper and Comey And Strzok, etc.
were involved in an actual effort to either prevent Trump from getting elected or to remove him once he was elected.
And that they worked with both British assets and Russian assets to try to make that happen.
Do all of you watching this believe that that is now fact?
That there was something that looked very much like, I don't know what the legal word would be.
I think it's not technically treason, because you have to be at war to activate treason.
But a conspiracy, yeah.
So, yeah, look at all the people who are saying yes, a conspiracy.
Yeah, I think treason is a technical word that requires you to be in a state of war and that the treason would have to be on behalf of the enemy that you're at war with.
So to the extent that they did not, let's say, collude with North Korea or ISIS or something, it's not treason technically.
Yeah.
Now, here's the fascinating thing.
Most of you are consumers of news from the right.
Probably, I'm guessing that the majority of you watching this Periscope are Fox News, Breitbart type consumers and less CNN, MSNBC consumers.
But I'll bet if you asked the people who all believe that Trump was in on this collusion thing with Russia, I'll bet if you asked them right now, they would be almost unaware Of this thing that you all consider to be true.
I don't know that's true, but I'll bet if you just stopped a typical, let's say, Hillary voter and said, what do you think about the fact that we now know, I don't know if we know this, but the proposition is that Brennan, Clapper, and Comey were all in on it and it was a conspiracy to try to overthrow the government through these weasel means.
If you said to the typical Clinton voter that that's now Let's say that these are facts in the public domain.
What would they say? I mean that's a real question.
What would they say? Because I don't know if I've...
I've encountered anybody who's sort of in that bubble and presented them with that argument and said, okay, you know, this is now a demonstrated fact, right?
That these guys were all in on a thing and it's pretty obvious they made up the dossier and that there were shenanigans to try to initiate a legal...
There were some... Some weasel methods to initiate a legal process which could have kicked up some crimes because, you know, it's easy to make anybody look like a criminal.
Yeah, I don't think that they've even heard the story, do you?
As much as I've sampled, I sampled CNN more than MSNBC, but as much as I've sampled, have you ever seen that story on CNN? Yeah, it's a whole different world, right?
I don't think they know the story.
Clapper said that they did it to protect Trump from Russia.
Yeah.
So I'd love to see that happen.
I'd love to see a...
I want to see the interview on the street in which somebody puts the microphone in front of the Hillary sport and say, so what do you make of the news that, you know, Clapper and Brennan and Comey were all in on this thing?
What would they say?
Would they say, who?
I think they'd say that, right?
Wouldn't they say, who?
I don't think they know anything about the story.
Yeah, somebody's saying that even we can't.
So that's true. So part of the problem is that if you ask me to explain it in enough detail that somebody really wanted to understand it in all this detail, I don't know if I can do it.
Because of the legal stuff.
There are all these gaps in my knowledge where, alright, and then somebody did something because this would spark somebody to do something else in the legal domain.
And I'm thinking, well, maybe.
I don't know. Is that the way it works?
So I'm not entirely sure that I can explain it all.
Well, I am entirely sure that I can't explain it all.
Let's put it that way. Yeah, and it's kind of amazing that both Brennan and Clapper are being paid by networks.
It's hard to believe that they're still being paid.
But I guess it would be embarrassing to...
You know, actually, that's interesting.
If either of those two just stopped appearing, people would ask why.
Say, hey, why did you stop paying those two guys?
Is there a story there?
Anything we need to know?
All right. Yeah, I've read Andrew McCarthy's, and he does a great job of explaining it.
It's just that if you're not a lawyer and you're not immersed in the details, it would be hard to read it and then reproduce it for anybody else in a meaningful way.
Now, let's be fair here, okay?
So let me be at least attempt to be unbiased.
So what I've said about Brennan and Clapper and Comey looks to you like a pattern of behavior that is unambiguously a conspiracy.
I will tell you that based on what I've seen, it does look exactly like a conspiracy.
But... Do you know what else looks exactly like a conspiracy?
A bunch of coincidences and some confirmation bias and a few things taken out of context.
Some patterns I imagine, some shenanigans from people who are on my side, you know, convincing me.
So, it is true that the pattern looks very clear to us.
Is it therefore also true that it's true?
Can't tell. You really can't tell.
I would say at this point, in a world where you can see the people you don't agree with believing things that are ridiculous.
If you believe that that only applies to other people, then you don't understand how any of this works.
These are universal truths.
We're all susceptible to exactly the same mental pitfalls.
It doesn't matter how informed you are.
It doesn't matter how smart you are.
It doesn't matter how much you know about persuasion.
You can be suckered in just as easily.
You want me to hide the mic cable under my shirt?
You know, the only reason I don't is because of length.
Because I'm connected way over there to my iPad.
And if it's under my shirt, I can't move as far.
So there's a reason for it.
All right.
That's all I got to say for today.
And I am out of here for now.
▲
Export Selection