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June 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:01
Episode 33 - Hate versus Ideas and the Illusion Driving Hate
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Hey, is anybody here?
If you're here early, come on in quietly.
Get your coffee ready because you know what's happening.
You know what's coming. It's going to be the best simultaneous sip of the entire week.
Are you ready? Raise your mug.
Best one of the week.
Here it comes. Good stuff.
Well, well, well. Has anything been happening lately?
Yes. Lots of things been happening lately.
But I wanted to talk to you about the Party of Hate.
You may know that recently I gave a nickname to the Democratic Party.
I called them the Party of Hate.
Because it seemed that they didn't have ideas, but they had a lot of hate.
And we've never seen this more clearly than with Kanye's tweeting and the reaction to it.
Now, have you noticed that there's a very clear pattern that is merged?
And it might have something to do with the parties in power versus the party that's out of power.
So I'm not going to say there's anything about the individuals that's broken.
It may just be that the out-of-power party acts differently.
But it's become very clear that the Republicans have become a party of ideas.
Ideas include the Second Amendment, what to do about immigration, how to renegotiate deals, that sort of thing.
It's ideas. The Democrats have become the party of, I hate that guy.
You know, that woman did something once.
That person, I think they're thinking a bad thought.
I believe in their mind they have terrible ideas.
I think they're a bigot.
I think they're discriminating.
I think they're a racist. I think they're a misogynist.
So the left has become the party of hating people.
Mostly on the right.
The right has become a party of let's have better ideas and maybe we can make things work.
And oh my god is it clear now.
It's super clear at this point.
So watch how often you see that.
Now I wanted to talk about the illusions That cause the people on the left to hate the people on the right.
And you're seeing on Twitter especially, I'm seeing people say to Kanye essentially, Kanye, I'm paraphrasing, how could you possibly like Donald Trump?
Because he must be a racist, and the reason he must be a racist, and a lot of them are using the same reasoning, he must be racist because all of the racists vote for him.
You know what's wrong with that thinking?
Well, everything, right?
I mean, there's no rational connection between the fact that a subset of group vote for Trump.
That doesn't mean he agrees with them.
That means they find some benefit.
Now, obviously, the main benefit that racists get in supporting Trump is that he's tough on immigration.
They like tight immigration for racist reasons.
Regular Republicans who are not racists like tight immigration because of crime and economics.
Those are two different reasons to like the same president.
It's not really hard to understand.
But here's what blows up their model.
The people saying Trump must be racist because all of the racists seem to vote for him.
What happens when the rappers start to vote for him?
Does that make President Trump a rapper?
I mean, the logic breaks down immediately.
You know, the very moment that you say the people who vote for him determine who he is, that logic doesn't work.
Because what happens if, you know, what happened if all...
Yeah, it's a bad analogy.
But the point is, the racists do like the president.
That's just a fact.
There's no reason to avoid that fact.
But they like him for very clearly different reasons.
They want fewer brown people in the country.
So I left a response to John Legend's tweet.
So John Legend is one of the people who's speaking out about, essentially, Kanye, how could you embrace this horrible monster Trump?
And I left a comment to his tweet.
I don't know if you'll see it.
There were a lot of comments. But I said that I've personally spent...
Now, most of you know I'm not a Republican and not a conservative.
But I've spent the last, what, two and a half years essentially embedded with Republicans and conservatives.
So probably at least 80% of all of my political conversation is with Trump supporters because that's the way the world works, right?
People like to talk with people who agree with them.
And after two and a half years...
I have not one experience, and this is people, you know, because I'm talking social media as well as every other kind of way of communicating.
So I'm talking about people from all over the country, not my neighborhood, but all over the country.
Not once in two and a half years did I hear a Trump supporter say something that sounded dog-whistle-y, pro-racist.
I've never even heard them sort of frame it that way.
But the people on the left are pretty sure that in a private conversation, Republicans are actually racist.
That if nobody's looking and they're talking to each other like, you know, we're totally racist here.
And I believe they think that that's actually what's happening in a private conversation is that, yeah, we're all racist, blah, blah, blah.
Now, there are racists.
And it appears that most of them are voting Republican.
Again, because immigration favors them for racist reasons.
Other Republicans like it for crime and economic reasons.
So, now watch.
So I'm seeing people say, so here's a comment going by that says, bullshit.
Which part? So you could actually, you don't have to just say, I'm crazy, or you could say bullshit.
You have a lot of characters here, so you could say, I don't believe, for example, that regular Republicans are not racist.
You could just say that.
Tell me what it is, idea-wise, that you disagree with.
Because when you say bullshit...
What you're really saying is that there's something wrong with me.
Do you see the point?
My starting point is that the left are making personal judgments about people and the right are talking about ideas.
So watch how people treat me to see examples of that.
Now keep in mind, I'm completely open to the left's ideas.
I'm actually inviting them.
So, you know, give me your ideas right now.
You met with Duke.
and So somebody is concerned that I have interacted with people who they believe are bad people.
Let me confirm that I have definitely interacted with people that you think are bad people.
So, you don't have to wonder if that's true.
I can confirm that over the course of my life, I have made it a point to be open to good people, bad people, ideas I like, ideas I don't like.
And it's both on the left and the right.
So I will go as far left or as far right to get an opinion and to hear what they have to say.
And when I'm making business decisions, or usually business decisions, I don't look at somebody I may have a common business interest with and say, tell me all of your views because if I find one I don't like, I can't do business with you.
I get that people do that.
And if it was outrageous, I probably would.
But I don't make that kind of judgment because I don't think it helps anybody.
Now keep in mind that I'm a special case.
So I'm going to make an argument for me being a special case.
That's always dangerous, right?
Everybody thinks there's a special case.
Here's what makes me special.
I'm very persuasive.
If I attended, let me say this so it can't be taken out of context and turned into a meme, so I'm going to make a tortured sentence to make it hard for somebody to take it out of context, right?
So bear with me. If somebody like me, let's say not me, but a person who was persuasive and non-racist, you know, not me, I'm talking about another person, If that person attended a KKK meeting, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, if a non-racist who was very persuasive spent time with a bunch of KKK people, what is the most likely outcome?
Is the outcome that the KKK would convert the non-racist to a racist, or that the hypothetical persuasive non-racist might have an impact on the racist?
Maybe not that day, but plant some seeds that would sort of move them toward a better position.
So my view is, If you hate the people I talk to, do an interview with, go on their TV show, go on their podcast, if you hate them, you should enjoy that I'm associating with them.
Unless you hate my ideas.
If you hate my ideas, then maybe you think that they're being promoted.
But I'm a special case because I'm Switzerland when it comes to people's good and bad views.
I will associate with people with good views.
I will associate with people who have very despicable views.
Generally speaking, they will be familiar with my opinion of their views when I'm done with it.
So, you should not be concerned if I talk to somebody that you think is odious.
you should say to yourself, "Oh, contact with that cartoonist guy may have made that person a little less odious." Spread the persuasion truth.
All right.
So you're watching the character assassination that's taking place against me in the media.
So have you noticed that if you saw, there were probably maybe ten media articles that directly talked about me being involved with some part of the Kanye-Kandis news story.
And in those 10 or so major articles that I saw, how many of them gave attention to Kanye and Candace's ideas?
Think about it. Of all the articles you saw that talked about Kanye's tweet, you know, saying good things about Candace, did they say, well, let's describe Candace's ideas.
So Candace says, this is Candace Owens I'm talking about, Candace says this and that, and that's different from what the left believes, and here's why she says it.
How many of them did that?
And wasn't that really from the beginning it was the only point?
Now, what they did was they smeared her by just saying, she's in the party with all the racists.
She's alright. She's making common cause with whatever.
They went completely personal and made her point.
So if Candace Owens had not already made her point as strongly as it could be made, her critics really did make it for her.
By attacking her personally, instead of even dealing with the idea.
Never really even grappled with the point.
Now, what about me?
I've been talking about freeing from the mental prison, similar to what both of them are talking about.
When they talked about me, Did they say, and Adams' point that he's trying to express is this, we either agree with it or we don't, or here's what the critics say, whatever.
That would be fair. Did you see that?
You didn't see that. What you saw is they started sorting through my ancient scat to find, you know, a nut.
And they came up with quite a few things that out of context sound terrible.
By the way, I'll blog up my response to the personal attacks just so you can see them in context if you care.
You'll be... I think you would be very surprised...
Let me tell you, you would be very surprised to see my responses, if you haven't already heard them, to the accusations.
Because if you look at the accusations against me by themselves, you would say to yourself, okay, I don't see how there's any ambiguity about that.
Let me give you an example.
This is just a fake example.
So if my critic says, Scott is a serial killer and everybody knows it, somebody who reads that goes, well, that's pretty unambiguous.
What exactly would be your response to being a serial killer?
And then you find out that the real reason is that it's breakfast cereal, that I eat a lot of it.
You know, you would be amazed at how different the real story is from what you see in the headlines.
I mean, I'm just mind-bogglingly amazed at how different they are.
All right. So people saying liberalism is a mental disorder.
Please stop saying that.
Because that doesn't help.
That actually is their philosophy.
So the liberal philosophy is that there's something wrong with the people on the other side.
If you say there's something wrong with those liberals, they're idiots or whatever, you've sort of bought into their model.
You have a president who's bringing a whole bunch of ideas, which you could like and you could dislike some of them.
You could like his effectiveness or think it isn't enough in other areas.
But talking about people is not what Kanye would suggest.
It's certainly not what I would suggest.
You have an opportunity to rise above.
The left is defining itself by its hatred of individuals for their ideas.
They're not saying, I dislike your idea.
They're saying, I dislike you.
They're saying, you're a deplorable.
They're not saying that people have these ideas that we don't like.
They're saying, you're deplorable.
Rise above it.
Now, I have no idea if rising above it is a good political technique.
I suppose those could be separate, right?
But as a human, as a human being, try to rise above it.
Let the politics sort out any way they will.
Now, let me amplify a point I made.
I saw somebody on the right Using the phrase that I believe Candace Owens has used a number of times, and I criticized it.
So let me clarify my criticism.
If you're on the right and you're trying to make the point that African-American voters should leave the Democrat stronghold and maybe consider Republican policies, if that's your point, It is sort of nuclear persuasion to say that the left is in the Democrat plantation.
I ain't even saying the words.
I really don't like even the words coming out of my mouth.
And here's why. The point of what Candace is talking about, the point of what Kanye is talking about, the point of what I'm talking about is that if you focus on the past, Which essentially doesn't exist, except in our minds.
You come to different conclusions than if you say, what do we have right now?
What's our current situation?
And how do we get from the current situation to even better?
That's a productive mindset.
And even though reference to the Democrat plantation is...
And so here's giving credit to Candace.
This is a direct...
Request to stop thinking in the past and move to the future.
So the content of the message is exactly correct.
It's very productive.
It's good for everybody to think about the future, think about the present, and kind of leave all the dead bodies in the past.
But, here's the problem with using those two words, Democrat Plantation.
Those two words take your mind to the past.
The point of those words is to help you get out of that and bring you to the future.
But as a persuasion lesson, let me tell you that you don't want to take people's minds to the past if your message is focused on the current.
If your message is, let's figure out today, you want to bring their minds to today and let them not even think about it.
And here's the principle there.
Truth becomes whatever you think about the most.
We are not a rational species.
A rational species might hear that statement, don't be in the Democrat plantation, you can be a Republican.
A rational person would hear that and say, oh, I get the point.
People are locked in.
You'd like them to be more free-thinking.
Yes, I see your point.
But we're not really a rational species.
And so it's more productive to understand that when you communicate.
And as soon as you take people's minds to a thought, that thought becomes more real.
And more powerful simply because, and here's the important point, simply because you spend time thinking about it.
Your brain accepts as truth the things you spend the most time thinking about true.
So you're taking their minds to the past when you do that.
And it's even hard for me to talk about how you shouldn't do it, because in doing it I take your minds to the past, but I don't know a way around that.
So just think of this in general.
It's a general rule.
Don't just say things that are true and that the other side might even recognize as true.
Don't say things that are true.
Say things that bring their minds to the productive place.
What's the productive place?
The productive place is what do we do today?
Like, what are your ideas?
So you saw me try to use the same approach with Black Lives Matter and with Colin Kaepernick.
I've blogged about both of them.
I've periscoped about both of them.
For those of you who don't know, I am pro-Kaepernick, pro, at least, Hawk Newsome, who's a leader of Black Lives Matter in Greater New York.
I'm pro those two individuals because of the effectiveness of their, let's say, advocacy.
So they're very effective at bringing attention to an issue that's important.
But the next part is missing, which is, okay, how can we actually make a difference?
What would be a law that we could vote on?
What would be a thing that I could do tomorrow that would help whatever it is that's bothering you?
So my approach to the...
And by the way, I supported Colin Kaepernick for being so effective, so being really good at surfacing an issue, putting skin in the game, taking a personal risk, there's a lot of good.
That's slightly different than the question of whether the kneelers should have continued kneeling.
I saw last night, oh, damn it, I can't remember his name.
But on the news last night, I was watching a Fox News sports person characterizing the whole NFL kneeling situation.
And maybe somebody can help remind me who it is.
I'll describe him. And it's awkward to describe him because he's African American and he's bald.
And it feels like that's the wrong way to describe people.
But the point of it is, he was also brilliant.
Is that who it was? So it was last night, he was a Fox News guy.
Was it Jason Whitlock?
I hope that's the right name, to give him credit.
Because he was talking about the kneelers, and here was his framing for the situation.
He goes, what the kneelers don't seem to get is that the NFL is a TV show.
And the TV show gets to say what's on TV. If it's a TV show about sports, you don't get to do a cooking class on the field because it's about sports.
If it were a TV show about politics, you couldn't play football.
Like if Hannity came in and said, you know, I usually talk about politics, but today I'm just going to play ping pong on the air.
Well, the people who own the TV show Would say, that's not the TV show.
This is a sports TV show.
So what was brilliant about, and I hope it's Jason Whitlock so I can give him credit, it was the best framing of that situation I've seen yet, from his perspective, right?
The other perspective would be a different framing.
But for the conservative framing, to call the whole NFL sport experience a TV show, It just takes it completely out of the realm of politics and into the realm of business.
It's like, okay, remember, a TV show is like a job.
If you're not doing the TV show, you're not doing the job!
So it was brilliant framing.
Anyway, so I agree with that point of view that there's a point when the protest goes to a level that it changes the TV show.
And then at that point, the people who own the TV show, they get a say.
When Colin was doing it by himself, He was making a point, and I thought that was an appropriate, inappropriate thing to do.
In other words, he was doing the wrong thing on the wrong TV show, but that's what made it work.
That's why we paid attention.
As soon as it became everybody every week, it became the TV show.
That was different. All right.
I think I may have lost my whole point on that, but...
How would you reframe the democratic plantation?
Well, I would do it the way you saw Kanye do it.
He called it a mental prison.
So the mental prison says that's what you're in today.
So right now, at this very moment, your thinking is in a mental prison.
And then the best part is that Kanye said, watch me break out.
Here's your mental prison.
Here's me. Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
We'll see. I have to do this backwards.
Here's your mental prison.
Here's Kanye.
All right, that's all here and now.
We're watching Kanye's jailbreak, you know, like right in front of us.
Yeah, and you're watching the guards of the jail trying to claw him back.
It's like, my God, Kanye, no, don't say that.
What is wrong with you?
Have you gone insane?
Come back to prison.
So I think the mental prison, I don't like the prison analogy because that's problematic.
But at least it's now.
And that part's an improvement.
Why not refer to the progressives as a cult?
Why? Let me tell you the rule of persuasion that's so obvious that when you hear it, and then I tell you how people are not using the most obvious Element of persuasion.
It'll blow your mind.
Most, as you know, politics is divided mostly into two sides, two teams.
Both teams pretend they're trying to convince the other side, but they're not really.
They're only talking to each other.
They're solidifying their own side.
So you're not really seeing people make anything like Can you think of an example where somebody on one side was making a legitimate effort to persuade the other side?
They don't really frame it that way, do they?
The language people use is so directed at their own side that they end up pacing themselves.
This is the biggest mistake you could make in persuasion.
Somebody said Hawk Newsome.
So what made Hawk Newsome rise to prominence, at least people on the right and Trump supporters noticing how effective he was, is that he broke that rule.
He paced the people he was trying to persuade, the Trump supporters.
He said, yeah, I hear what you're saying.
And as soon as he said that, all the Trump supporters said, oh, okay.
What do you have to say now?
If you missed that, there's the famous video of Hawk Newsom protesting originally a bunch of Trump supporters who were having a free speech rally.
They called him up on stage, and it looked like it was going to be a whole shit show.
If you didn't know anything about the people involved, you'd say, oh God, this doesn't look good.
There's going to be a riot here.
And then what did Hawk Newsom do?
He paced the audience.
He said as clearly as possible, I totally hear you.
I hear you. And then he spoke it back so that we knew he actually heard it.
And when he was done doing that, the entire crowd just went, oh, alright.
You heard us. Now you talk.
It was like this amazing moment in American politics.
Dave Rubin does that?
Yes, he does.
I haven't watched Jordan Peterson work enough to know if he does that, but I'll bet he does.
I've seen him enough to know that he would know to do that.
So he would be smart enough to use persuasion and communication the way it should be used.
So without seeing him do it, I'm sure he does.
Joe Rogan?
Maybe. I mean, he's the type of personality who would...
Yeah, I think I can think of examples where I've seen him do that.
You're right. But consider how rare it is.
Right? Diamond and Silk are on Capitol Hill today.
Is that true? Yeah, you know what else is a terrible argument?
Here's the worst argument that the right makes.
Would you like to hear all the bad arguments on the right?
Here's another bad one.
Same reason. When somebody says, hey, what about all those KKK people voting for Trump?
And then somebody on the right will say, but what about 75 years ago the KKK was Democrats?
To which I say, it's not 75 years ago.
It's not an argument to say that different people did different things.
That's not an argument about today.
Nobody cares that different people did different things and those different people are all dead.
That's no argument about today.
So stop saying that.
Just accept that it's true that the racists do support the Republicans, but they do it for their own reasons, which is they're racists, and they would like less immigration.
If regular Republicans like immigration control for economic and crime reasons, how about just embrace that?
How about embrace they can like Trump for a different reason?
Why is that a bad argument?
Because here's the thing, everybody recognizes those things as true or true enough, right?
Is it time for me to go full-blown persuasion?
Thank you.
How would you know?
I mean, how would you know if I did?
I'm just looking at your comments right now.
*Sigh* Alright. Have you seen Hotep Jesus?
Yeah, I just recently started following him.
So Hotab Jesus, keep in mind that he's an entertainer who talks about politics.
My brief watching of one of his periscopes tells me his talent stack is very well put together.
So I like to put it in those.
He has a number of talents that fit well together, but I'm going to give him a little more attention and watch his act.
But it seems like he can do a lot of things.
He just has a lot of game in a lot of different areas and they come together really well.
Somebody believes I have superpowers.
Let me ask you this.
Candace Owens just tweeted a plantation analogy.
Yeah, I think I saw that this morning.
So my suggestion to her...
Well, let me clarify this.
I've talked about persuasion being a case of two parts.
One is get people's attention, and then you apply your persuasion technique.
So the getting attention part can be messy.
And it's still work.
So getting attention can be messy and still work.
You see that Donald Trump does that.
Candace got a lot of attention and brought a lot of energy to her points of view by calling it a Democrat plantation.
That part is really good.
So stirring up a little trouble, being a little controversial, using a provocative analogy, that is good.
But You want to make sure that you can quickly progress to what are we doing now?
What's next? What's tomorrow?
You just don't want to get locked in.
Persuasion equals manipulation.
Yeah, let me answer that question that wasn't a question.
So people always ask me, what's the difference between persuading and manipulating?
And the simple answer is intention.
If I persuade you to buy a product which is actually good for you, let's say if you didn't have a smartphone and I tried to sell you one and it was an iPhone and it was a good phone and it made you happy, well I'm persuading you but you're better off with it.
I got your money, you got a phone, everybody wins.
If I persuade you to vote for President Trump, President Trump gets in office.
In the optimistic world, he denuclearizes North Korea.
Everybody wins. So manipulation is where I convince you to do something that isn't good for you.
So that's where I draw the line.
Persuasion is either a win-win.
Well, typically if you do it ethically, it's a win-win.
Manipulation is a win for the manipulator and a loss for the person being manipulated.
That's how I define it.
And keep in mind, you don't want to get lost in word thinking.
I'm just telling you my view of where you draw the line.
I did not see Sebastian Gorka on Dave Rubin's show.
I saw some Twitter activity about it, though.
though apparently he was quite effective.
Ends justify the means with manipulation, though.
Here's what...
You know, I'm always talking about these mental traps.
And the ends justify the means people use as, well, therefore, you shouldn't be doing what you're doing.
But there are plenty of ethical situations where the ends justify the means.
So that statement, oh, you're saying the ends justify the means, Or, as I like to say, are you saying the ends justify the means?
What? Are the ends justifying the means?
If you're doing a cost-benefit analysis, which is the only way you should make decisions, well, these are the costs, these are the benefits, the ends, if you do it right, where your benefits exceed your costs, Kind of are always going to justify the means.
That's what thinking is.
The thinking, you know, that if you're doing it right, a normal thinking, rational person is making decisions in which the ends do justify the means.
You've got a good outcome, and the means might be you spend some money, you spend some time, maybe you embarrassed somebody, maybe, you know, there are costs.
Maybe you lied.
Now, I wouldn't lie for a small gain.
Right? That would be a case of, oh, okay, in that case the ends do not justify the means.
Because if you only got a small benefit, but you lied to get it, well, that lie is not free.
Okay? So in that case, the cost did not exceed the benefits.
You shouldn't have made the decision.
But let's say a lie...
Prevented nuclear war.
Could happen.
We live in a world in which nations are lying to each other.
A lie could prevent a nuclear war.
Just use the extreme example.
In that case, would the ends justify the means?
Yes! Yes!
Because the lie was just talk and nuclear war is you exploding in a giant fireball of radiation and fire.
Those are not equal.
So when people say, you know, oh, you're saying the ends justify the means?
They always do, if you do it right.
If the ends don't justify the means, well, what the hell were you going after those means for?
What were you going after those ends for?
What was the point of going after the ends if it was going to cost just as much to get them as the benefit?
So think in terms of cost-benefit analysis.
Don't think of bumper stickers.
A bumper sticker is, the ends justify the means.
But a thinking person says, alright, there are things I don't like about this, but this is a pretty big benefit.
That's worth it.
Do you buy into the new QAnon conspiracy?
QAnon is horoscope.
So your horoscope will look like it is correct quite often.
What do you think of it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission?
Yeah, that's another bumper sticker.
So people say, well, it's easier to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission.
Let me give you my general answer to that.
It kinda depends.
There's no doubt that there are some situations in which it's better just to do it and get in trouble and deal with it.
Certainly that's true.
Let me give you the best example of where it's better to ask for forgiveness.
Uber, the company, when they first started, they actually didn't really know That there would be so many regulations and laws and cab medallions and all that stuff that would make it really impossible to do their business.
If Uber had been stopped by all those rules that said, no, it's actually illegal.
You can't even do this.
It's literally illegal.
If that had stopped Uber, there would be no Uber.
But instead, they just went ahead and did it anyway.
Got big enough, got successful enough, got enough goodwill, changed the world enough that by the time the lawmakers and the law enforcers caught up with them, it was sort of too late.
They had already succeeded to the point where you just couldn't put the genie back in the bottle easily.
They had funding, by then they had lawyers, by then they had lobbyists.
So they got too big too quickly and that was probably the best example ever of it's better to do it first and ask for forgiveness later because they broke some rules.
But you wouldn't have Uber without it.
You just wouldn't. And there are a number of other companies that you'll see there was something similar in their origin story where they just did something you weren't supposed to do and then they just figured it out.
They just figured out how to deal with it after the fact.
Will calling Kim Jong-un honorable work?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. Calling Kim Jong-un honorable is solid, solid persuasion because it helps to solidify him into a keeping your promise kind of a model.
So there's actually research, Robert Cialdini talks about this in his book, Influence, That if you can just get people to repeat something out loud, it becomes true to them.
And it's so ridiculous that the examples are kind of mind-boggling.
I think the example was, if you go to people randomly and say, can you write a report?
This is just a study.
Can you write a paragraph supporting climate science or whatever the topic was?
And they would pick people who already agreed with it, what they were going to write, and then some people who did not agree with it, but just went along and said, all right, I'll write a paragraph in support of the thing I don't really agree with, because I understand this is just a study.
All right, so I'll just do what you say.
And they would follow up with the people who wrote an opinion that wasn't their real opinion.
And a year later, a lot of them had moved to the opinion that they wrote in Just because they'd sort of bought into it a little bit.
You know, the process of writing a fake opinion about something actually caused them to buy into it.
So calling Kim Jong-un honorable to the extent that that reinforces what he's telling people, what he'd like you to believe, the image he wants to portray, is actually really effective because it locks him in a little bit.
You know, there's a psychological lock-in effect Of the president calling the other party honorable.
It actually makes them more honorable.
That's like a real thing. President Trump actually causes Kim Jong-un to act a little more honorable by labeling him that way.
that's a real thing I'm just reading your comments here When will you analyze Kanye's tweet persuasion?
Well, I don't know if it's...
Yeah, there may be some tweets that are worth looking at the details.
But I'll tell you, if you look at his...
I'm not sure which variables I'm seeing quite yet, but there have been a few of his tweets recently that look very Trumpian.
All right.
I'll talk more about that in the future, probably.
Oh, you know, I watched back the Periscope I did yesterday with Joel Pollack from... I watched back the Periscope I did yesterday with Joel He's the editor-at-large at Breitbart, and editor-at-large at Breitbart, senior editor-at-large.
I think. But I played it back myself, because he said a lot of things, and I wanted to just remind myself of all the stuff he said.
And I had this weird experience, because I'm talking, and he's talking in this periscope, but every time he talked, it sounded brilliant, like really well-informed, and he understood all the issues in their proper context.
And every time I talked, it sounded like a dumb guy.
And I don't think I would have noticed how uninformed I am if I were not contrasted that immediately with somebody who knew so much.
And by the way, I know Joel, and this isn't the only topic that he knows that much about.
He kind of knows this much about everything important.
So that was a fascinating experience.
Did you notice also...
That the best part, well you probably didn't notice, but what made that so effective, not only was that Joel is a great communicator and he knows the topic, but we didn't have a time limit.
I'm cheating now because he gave me a time limit and I exceeded it by a lot.
So when we first said, let's do this, I said, ah, five, ten minutes, because he had some stuff to get to in the morning.
And I don't know how long we went, 22 minutes or something.
So because there was no limit to how long we could go, I could make sure that I'd at least asked all my questions and he was generous enough to stay longer than I told him he would have to.
But I feel like we got a good sense of the situation because we were not limited to a three-minute block on CNN.
That's the typical situation.
I'm not sure what you're saying.
That's really the power of the podcast, by the way, and the power of the Periscope, is that they go as long as they should go.
Thank you.
People saying they liked my questions.
Did you notice how dangerous it was?
Did anybody sense the danger in the questions I was asking about Iran?
Just interested in that.
Was there anybody watching who was thinking, oh shit, Scott, don't ask that question.
You don't even want to act like Iran could be rational, because that's dangerous.
So some people were picking up the danger.
I've often said that one of the dividing lines between good art and boring art is that the audience should sense danger.
It's one of those thoughts that when you first hear it, it doesn't really ring as true.
You're like, eh, I don't know.
I like art that doesn't project any feeling of danger.
But when you see how often it is that the thing you're interested in is either the artist or somebody the artist is talking about or impacting is in some danger.
And when you watch me work, you'll quite often see, oh, shoot, he's going to get in trouble for that.
Like, oh, God, I think newspapers are going to drop him.
Oh, I don't think he can say that.
So artists like Kanye, you know, he's the universal example.
He understands that if you, the audience, don't feel some danger, not only for him, he put himself in a dangerous situation this week, but it's also dangerous for other people.
Because Kanye is affecting a big population of people who are literally thinking differently today.
I mean, whatever you want to say about Kanye, whether you're a critic or a lover, there's one thing I think we'd all agree on.
Today, we're thinking differently than we did last week.
Not completely. We're not all thinking the same way, differently.
But there's definitely a shift.
And Kanye did that.
He did it intentionally.
He did it skillfully.
And it looks like it might stick.
We'll see. Now, if two weeks from now, it all turns into other news stories, maybe it won't be as big as I think.
But I think he's planted a seed that doesn't have any chance of not growing.
It's just too true.
There's sort of a truth to what he's doing that's going to be hard to extinguish.
All right. Update on Iran prediction.
My Iran prediction is that we have, you know, based on listening to Joel's explanation, that we have a flawed deal that probably could become a better deal without Iran feeling like they really lost too much.
So there probably is a deal to be made.
Whether or not the conditions are right, the talent is there, we'll see.
Here's what you should look for.
If you're trying to handicap what's going to happen with Iran, let me tell you what to look for.
You want to look for the same tell that you might have seen with North Korea and with Russia.
You want to see the president start to frame this as, if you go down this path, it's really, really bad, but we'll help you a lot if you go down this path.
This path is sunshine and rainbows.
This path is really, really bad.
So if you start seeing the president making a case for the positive thing that Iran could be working toward, then you're probably seeing a potential breakthrough.
That doesn't mean it'll happen, but you would have to at least, I would say that's the minimum, I think Iran is too proud, too capable, too smart to simply bend to just pressure.
I think they need a little bit of a, you know, there's something good on the other end as well.
Because you look at what North Korea is doing.
North Korea is going from a maybe dying in a fireball of fire and fury to, if you check back in three years, If I could bet on the economy of one country, if you could place your money just betting how one country will do in their economy, I might put a little money on North Korea.
Today, there's no way to do that, but conceptually, the base that North Korea is at right now, if you check back in three years, it's going to be a lot higher, assuming that they denuclearize.
If they don't, there won't be anything left.
Economically, there won't be anything left.
I'm not saying there'll be a war.
If you could bet, I would bet on them being smart enough to take the enormous economic gain that is just theirs to be had.
Iran doesn't have that yet.
Iran has, we can push you around, or we could push you around.
That's sort of the proposition for Iran right now.
They need to see a safety valve, an escape hatch, an off-ramp.
They need to see a way to get to a good thing if they're going to give up anything.
I think we've done it for today.
Bye.
Thank you.
Yeah, Chance the Rapper's weighing in.
You think Kanye's support of Trump is temporary?
Well, you know, probably not.
It would be hard to walk that back.
Unless, I suppose, if he did something specific.
But I just don't see it happen.
So what Kanye has done, just summarizing, is he's taken the left's view that the problem is people instead of ideas, and he just blew that up.
And he said, I can like this guy even if I don't agree with every idea.
It's a big deal.
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