Aug. 18, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:36:09
3383 Why Donald Trump Is Winning - Or Is He? | Scott Adams and Stefan Molyneux
On August 5th, 2015, Scott Adams predicted Donald Trump would become the next President of the United States. Scott Adams joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the thought process behind that early prediction, the power of persuasion, the difference between goal and systems thinking, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton - for his own safety, Donald Trump as a master persuader, Hillary Clinton upping her persuasion game and the possible solutions to problems facing the United States.Scott Adams is the creator of the widely popular Dilbert comic strip that is published daily in thousands of newspapers across the world, he is the author of many bestselling books including “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.” Adams is also a trained hypnotist and an expert in the field of persuasion. Order "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life" now at: http://www.fdrurl.com/Scott-Adams-Still-Win-BigBlog: http://blog.dilbert.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/scottadamssaysFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
We have on the line and on your very screen, Scott Adams.
You know him, of course, the creator of the wildly popular Dilbert comic strip that has been running for 30-odd years and is in over 2,000 newspapers across the world.
He is the author of many best-selling books, including the recent and, at least for me, highly recommended How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
Kind of the story of my life.
And he is an expert in the field of persuasion and a trained I'm a hypnotist, which, of course, I'm going to ask him not to do during this conversation.
Thanks so much, Scott, for taking the time today.
Oh, thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure.
So your work, I don't want to sum it up too quickly, but your work over time has, along with other influences, convinced me that the word reason is a bit too liberally applied in human interaction.
So I grew up, I think, like most people did, Being told that the way the world was where I lived was the result of careful and reasoned consideration and it was the best system and it's how things were supposed to work well.
And then as I sort of got older, I sort of began to realize that there was just this giant amount of historical inertia and corruption and mess and self-interest posing as sort of objective for the good of society stuff.
What was your process?
So did you even start off thinking that people were more rational than you believe them to be today?
Was there a process that transitioned you out of that perspective?
Oh, well, if you go way back to when I was a little kid, let's say I'm eight years old, in a quite literal sense, I started to wonder if I had been an alien experiment, left on this planet for observation among the irrational humans, to either pick up some intelligence to take back to my home planet, or I didn't know what.
But I knew that the people around me were just freaking crazy.
And I'll tell you the moment when it first struck me.
I was being forced to go to a Methodist Sunday school.
So my parents said, we're going to make you go to a church and you can decide later what you want to do.
And somewhere around the time that I was 11 years old and I learned about Jonah being swallowed by the whale and then being burped up sometime later perfectly healthy.
And I started thinking to myself, you know, Digestive juices, science, and if God wanted to send a message, surely there are better ways than eating people and burping them up later to make a point.
And so I sat my mother down, literally.
I called a meeting with my mother, and I said, I don't know how to tell you this, but all this stuff we're learning is totally made up.
None of this could be true.
It's ridiculous on the surface, and I feel I might be the only one who realizes this.
Because I was from a small town, and I actually thought I was the only one who realized it.
Like, literally.
And to her credit, my mother listened to my argument, and I said, I'm not going back.
I'm just done with this, because none of this is real.
And she listened to me, and she said, okay.
And that was the last conversation we ever had about religion.
11 years old.
But this is the thing, Scott.
Didn't they break the emergency back up?
It's an analogy.
Switch.
Switch.
You know, where they say, well, you see, being swallowed by a whale is an analogy for being consumed by materialism and falling into the body and not being involved.
Was there no sort of like, because that's the two layers generally to these belief systems.
One is, you know, the literal belief, which is, wow, that's kind of miraculous.
And the second is, if you don't believe that, you know, laws of physics and biology can be violated at whim, then it's like, no, no, no, it's an analogy.
It's like a story.
It's there to communicate an essential moral truth.
But you didn't have, I had that backup when I began to doubt this kind of stuff.
They broke the emergency backup.
It's an analogy screen, and that kept me going for a little while longer.
That didn't happen with you, right?
It didn't.
Not only that, but here's the strangest part of my story.
I did not know then, nor do I know now, what either of my parents' religious beliefs were.
No idea.
I don't even know if they thought God was real.
It's the weirdest upbringing I've ever heard of, because in most places that comes...
That stuff comes from your parents and you're trying to imprint it.
And my parents were vigorously doing the opposite.
They were trying to develop somebody who could think for themselves.
And my mother in particular was very big on that.
She would give me arbitrary choices like, do you want corn or beans for dinner?
And I would say, well, I like them both the same.
So I'll have one today, one tomorrow.
It doesn't really matter.
And she would stop everything, tools down, and she'd say, No, you live in a world where you have to make decisions.
You don't get a choice of not making a decision.
So I don't care if it's a right decision or wrong decision.
Doesn't matter what you think it is.
People make decisions.
Now tell me what you want, corn or beans.
And I would look at her confidently and I would say, corn.
And I'll tell you, it's a stupid little lesson, but it's one that has served me so well because I'm in so many situations where somebody just needs to make a decision.
And, you know, it'll be irrationality and craziness and I'll wait till things get quiet and I'll just say, corn.
We're doing corn.
And it's amazing how often people will say, well, that's good enough for me.
I'm in for corn.
Well, haven't you noticed?
I mean, of course, you've been an entrepreneur for at least since you left the corporate world and I guess on the side before then.
The first person to make the decision usually ends up in charge.
Because, you know, people are the differential.
Well, I don't want to impose my views on you.
But the first person, you don't have to slam your fist on the table.
But the first person who just confidently makes a decision just kind of pulls people along in his wake.
And to be an entrepreneur, usually you just have to be the first person at the table to make a clear and commanding decision.
And that's nine times out of ten going to put you at the front of the pack.
Yeah, and I'll tell you also harking back to your question, your first question there.
The other way that I realized that people were irrational and the other way I learned to act more confident than I ever could be is by taking a course in hypnosis.
So I took an actual class in my 20s to learn how to be a hypnotist.
And the first thing you have to learn before you can even use the tools is that people are irrational all the time.
And that we live in a world where we have a movie inside our heads My movie is different than yours.
In your movie, maybe the prophet flew to heaven on a winged horse.
In my movie, maybe I'm the third reincarnation of a Buddha.
But we're in Safeway, you know, the grocery store buying groceries, standing next to each other.
And our movies don't conflict.
I buy groceries, you buy groceries.
We both go home.
So hypnosis taught me that people can have completely wrong and different movies in their head.
And still operate effectively in the same world.
And that, you know, what we thought was an objective world is probably just an impression.
And if you think that people are rational, you can't hypnotize them.
Because the tools that you need to use almost require you to accept that people are never rational at all.
It's just, if you push this button in the human interface, the human will change.
The brain will adapt to whatever...
What impulse you gave it as opposed to some kind of magical mind, free will, soul floating in the ether that's guiding your decisions?
Well, we have, of course, this identification, partly out of religion, that...
What is human about us is the opposite of what is an animal.
I remember with my daughter when she was younger, trying to explain to her that we were animals.
She's like, no, we're people.
Because we are so vastly different in our cognitive capacities, it's not just a difference of degree.
It feels like a real difference of kind.
I think what people forget, I was an entrepreneur in the software field for many years.
What you do is you build something that is a proof of concept.
That's 80% of what it should do.
It's a hodgepodge.
You're just layering things on together.
And then if you get funding, they give you the money to throw it all out and build it properly from scratch so it's upgradable and modular and so on.
Now, we've never had that opportunity as human beings to take evolution and say, okay, well, if we want to design rational human beings, how would we do it?
Because we're just layered.
You've got your amoeba brain.
You've got your lizard brain.
You've got your monkey brain.
And then we've got this thing sitting on top, like a guru on top of a snowy mountain, which is sort of the post-monkey beta expansion pack that is still kind of buggy as hell.
And it seems to me that some of what you talk about, Scott, is reaching past what we think of as human and getting to the animal within, which has evolved, as you point out.
Our brain has evolved not to process reason and evidence, but to keep us alive.
And a lot of time, that means conformity with the irrational beliefs of the tribe.
Yeah, so the whole rational movie that we have playing that we're rational and other people are the irrational ones, that's the great illusion of life, that you're okay.
But other people are just nuts.
When you know that every one of those people thinks the same thing about you, that alone should tip you off.
But yeah, like you said, we didn't evolve with any need for being rational.
Evolution only cares if you survived.
The notion that people have about survival of the fittest was always wrong in the first place.
We now know that evolution wasn't about The fittest, it was about whatever didn't die.
Maybe you were just in a place that didn't have predators.
You just had a lucky advantage for a few millennia, and that was good enough.
So the fact that we're alive and thrive and build stuff and the stuff works furthers our impression that we're making rational decisions, but we're probably just pattern-recognizing machines who recognize patterns incorrectly nine out of ten times But we've somehow managed to build a system that's okay with that.
Because capitalism is a system in which things fail nine out of ten times.
And every person involved in those failures is sure that they're on the winning team.
You know, right until they're not.
So, weirdly, capitalism requires a healthy dose of irrational exuberance to cause activity that causes people to have jobs until the company folds.
But at least they got paid until then, which...
It gives them money to buy products so that other companies can stay alive longer.
So a whole bunch of people doing irrational things creates this good hole, and that's our lucky situation now is that capitalism sums up all the irrational acts into something that somehow accidentally makes money for all of us.
But things should fail.
I mean, they really – because most times we make mistakes in our lives.
I think there was some tennis player once, a woman, who said that the thrill of victory lasts 15 minutes.
You know, that's a lot of years of work for 15 minutes.
And so if you are going to save your happiness until you're successful, you're going to have a very scant amount of happiness in the world.
And this ties into something that you talk about in your book that – You must learn to enjoy and embrace failure because a lot of your life is going to be failure.
Even if you look at the sort of the greatest musicians or the greatest artists and so on, most of their art or most of their lives is not spent producing the great works that we know.
I mean, when was the last hit that Paul McCartney wrote and he's one of the best songwriters of all time.
So learning to recognize that you must enjoy the process and hanging your happiness on success is a recipe for virtual lifelong misery.
Yes, and I would go so far as to say that your example, you know, Paul McCartney, say the Rolling Stones, the fact that they can't produce hit after hit still tells you that the following things don't matter.
Skill, experience, connections, fame.
I could go down the list.
Is there any advantage that they don't have right now?
Opportunity.
I mean, if they wrote a song, almost every radio station, at least the sort of classic rock radio station, so they have amazing opportunity to get their music out.
Right.
So it's easy to be in the right place at the right time and imagine that it was skill that did it.
The analogy that I use, I give some talks on this topic, and I talk about how Having a goal and then reaching it, let's say you want to be a musician and you make that hit record, is a little like riding on horseback a full gallop with a bow and arrow through a forest in which you're trying to shoot an animal that's in the forest in the fog, the animal's moving back and forth and you only brought one arrow.
Now the odds of hitting that one animal riding on horseback with your bow and arrow are very low, but If enough idiots on horseback ride into enough forest and shoot enough arrows, one of them is going to hit a rabbit.
And when that victorious archer comes back and says, look at this, I hit a rabbit, people are going to say, what did you do to do it?
Like, what was your process?
What magic system do you have?
And you know what he's going to say?
He's going to say, well, it's a good thing I had a goal.
Like, I focus on my goal.
He's going to say...
He's going to say, I had a passion.
I had a passion for killing that rabbit.
Passion made a difference.
There was my experience.
I had connections.
That was what got me the bow and arrow.
And none of it is real.
None of it.
It's just somebody's going to hit the rabbit.
Somebody's going to be Warren Buffett.
If there wasn't Warren Buffett, somebody else is the second best investor in the world.
There has to be.
And some of it was luck, of course.
I mean, even Warren Buffett would tell you that.
But once you get lucky, then you have different access to resources and different connections and stuff so you can keep it going.
But almost everything you see as success is some form of luck, which is why I talk in the book that you mentioned about using systems versus goals, because a system is something you do every day to increase your odds of something lucky happening.
So it removes at least a little bit of the magical thinking that you can pick a specific goal in the future and hit that exact target, you know, 10 years from now, when that might not even be a good goal 10 years from now.
There might be hundreds of things that are better than that.
But a system just makes you more valuable as you go.
So lots of ways that luck can find you.
Well, they've done studies, actually, where they followed academics earlier on in their career.
And you're an academic who puts out a paper and it happens to meet the fancy of some reviewer and then he hands it out, happens to meet the fancy of people who are acting as referees on that paper.
And then you get published and it's a fairly prestigious journal.
And you use that, of course, as leverage to get into the next journal.
But it's all down to that first journal.
I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
People then create these scenarios in their mind which justify either success or failure.
So the guy who succeeds says, well, it was just perseverance and hard work and dedication and passion.
It's like, well, the other guy had exactly the same thing.
His career went in the opposite direction, out of chance.
And the other guy will probably set up some shadowy superstructure of bias in academia that prevents him from getting out where he goes.
And this ex post facto reasoning for what are kind of fortuitous dice rolls Seems to me a large chunk of human thought that pumps vanity or despair and I think gives really misleading cues to people who were looking to succeed.
Yeah, I think the worst of it was, do you remember years ago in Pursuit of Excellence, that book?
Yes.
Well, all the companies, they all go bankrupt within 10 years.
I can't remember that number, but it was some huge number.
Right, so a big part of that message was that the companies that were really progressive and good to their employees We're making tons of money, so it must be something about being good to your employees that makes you profitable.
But it only takes you about half a brain cell to say to yourself, which companies can afford to bring in the massage therapist to give shoulder rubs to their companies while they're working?
Is it the companies that aren't doing well?
No!
They're already successful.
That's why they can afford to do these things.
The causation is completely backwards.
You know, these little startups that are working in the garage, no one's rubbing their back, but, you know, the few that break out is because they were in the right place at the right time with the right people.
It wasn't because anybody gave them a back rub.
Well, I remember in the entrepreneurial field, if you just happened to have a bunch of young single people as your programmers, they could work a lot harder than a lot of the older people who had, you know, kids and responsibilities.
You've got to go pick people up at daycare, so...
And now it's true that we enjoyed our Nerf fights and stuff like that, but that was more a function of the demographics of the company rather than, well, you know, you start shooting Nerf guns at some guy who's rushing to pick up his kid from daycare and you're going to get the same level of productivity.
So, yeah, this reversal, of course, in effect, is very common in this kind of analysis because everybody wants to photocopy success, which seems to be virtually impossible, and the attempt to do it almost seems to guarantee failure.
Yeah, the other illusion is when you see a serial entrepreneur...
Who's on their third or fourth startup that have all gone well in some ways?
But back to your example, that usually means that the first one, or at least they haven't run out of money yet, maybe the second one after a pivot.
So something early on worked.
And once you've got that behind you, you've got a network of investors, you've got all these resources, so then your odds of your second one working go way up.
But it's not because you had this special quality, it's because it's your second one.
I mean, that's what makes it so much better.
Let's just dip into some of the differences between systems and goals.
You go into that quite a bit in your book, and I just want to make sure people understand the nomenclature.
A goal is something very specific that you say, I won't be happy unless I achieve this thing.
It might be a promotion to a specific job.
It might be earning a certain amount of money in a certain way.
It might be becoming a partner at your law firm, something like that.
The trouble with goals is There are several troubles.
One is that what are the odds that you pick the one goal that will make you happiest?
There are a lot of things in the world, and they could all make you happy.
But the point of picking a goal is that you put your blinders on intentionally, and you say, man, I want this one thing.
I'm going to block out my peripheral vision for a while and just focus on this one thing.
But meanwhile, everything's changing.
A hundred years ago, you could focus on one thing, and if you got it five years later...
Such as, let's say, clearing a field so you could grow more corn or something.
That made sense when you had the idea and probably still made sense when you got to the end of the process.
It was always a good idea.
A goal made sense in simple times.
But now if you look at the complexity of your life, look how much complexity there is just in your cell phone.
How much complexity there is in the decisions of which carrier to get.
Do I get insurance?
What kind of plan?
How many apps do I get?
So you have more complexity in your pocket today than a farmer had 200 years ago in his entire operation, and everything's changing by the minute.
So the odds of you picking a goal today that still makes sense five years from now went from really good to unlikely.
You could come up with a goal that would always make sense, but for most of our human types of goals, I want this promotion or buy this house or whatever, almost everything changes.
It wasn't long ago if you said to yourself, you know, I think I want to become a cab driver or start my own taxi company or create a limo service, and then, oops, here comes Uber.
Goodbye.
So in that environment, a goal makes you not look at other opportunities.
But you're also in a continuous state of failure until you reach your goal.
So every day that you haven't reached your goal is a day you didn't reach your goal.
You're not there.
You're feeling inadequate.
So there's a mental cost to it too.
So the alternative that I talk about is a system.
And I define the system this way.
So a system would be something you work at on a regular basis, ideally every day.
And all it is is designed to improve your odds of something really good happening.
But you don't know exactly what that will be because you've opened it up to lots of possibilities.
And I'll give you some examples.
My blogging, I don't get paid directly for blogging.
There's little ad income, but it's trivial.
But I knew that if I practiced in public, that's something I could be good at.
And if I weren't good at it, I'd just stop doing it and nobody really notices, right?
It was a low cost of failure.
But if I did things people liked, and right now people are passing my Trump blogging around and just getting a lot of attention, then good things would happen.
So, for example, my publisher might call and say, how about a book?
And that did happen, in part because of my blog.
I might give speaking offers because somebody sold my blog.
So there were a whole number of things that could happen, and most of them did, in one way or another.
But I didn't have a specific goal.
I just did something as well as I could in public.
Until people noticed and started giving me offers.
So you can come up with a system that makes sense in every realm, from your diet to your exercise to anything else.
I have my own systems.
I'm not saying that they're the ones that work for anybody else.
But if you always look for that quality, you're doing something on a regular basis that improves your odds of a lot of different things.
Fitness is a really good example.
I'm sort of a maniac about health and fitness.
And if you say, what's your goal of fitness?
Well, obviously I want to be healthy.
But there's this whole wide realm of things that are helped by fitness.
You know, it helps your social life.
It helps you in job opportunities.
You can stay up later, work harder.
I mean, there's just a million things you can do.
It's the trip you didn't miss, the thing you didn't have to avoid doing.
So fitness is a good system.
And it's one that I would say everybody should work on first.
Professionally, my particular goal in life over the past decade has been trying to become less dependent on the whims of other people.
I didn't want a TV show or something because then I'm dependent on more other people.
The systems versus the goals approach is that a lot of times when people set goals, they're fundamentally dependent on the whims of other people.
You want to become partner at a law firm?
Well, they've got to vote you to be partner in the law firm.
You want to go make a movie?
Well, you're dependent on financing and getting everyone together at the right time and so on.
What I like about the systems approach is it brings the locus of control much more within your own skin and you're less dependent upon the preferences of what we openly admit to be a largely irrational population to achieve happiness.
Yeah, you want to have the feeling that everything you're doing today is part of success.
So I'll give you an example.
I have a system where I try to go to the gym every day.
But there are days when you just can't make it happen.
And on those days, if I can, I still put on my exercise clothes.
I still drive all the way across town.
And about four days a year, literally, I do this.
I'll walk into my gym.
I've parked in the parking lot pretty far away.
I'll walk in.
I'll walk past the rock wall.
I'll stand in the middle of the gym and I'll look around and I'll say, nope.
And I literally don't do anything but turn around 180 degrees, walk back to my car, and drive home.
Completely successful.
Because even though I didn't exercise that day, exercising that day was never a goal.
What I had was a system which was trying to addict me to going to the gym every day.
In other words, I wanted a mental...
Impulse that was so strong, I would get all the way to the gym even on a day I knew I didn't want to exercise.
So I said, I drive home saying, damn, my system is rock solid because I'm going to get to the gym six out of seven days just by trying to do it seven.
So I never have a failure day.
I just have a day when I say, man, that system worked pretty well.
It got me all the way there and I didn't even, I knew I wasn't going to work out.
Well, and of course, let's back to corns and beans, right?
Corns are beans.
It's not a gym day, but I'm very explicitly going to make it not a gym day by going to the gym, saying no, and coming home.
There's a benefit to decisiveness quite often.
On your happiness point about wanting to not have to report to anybody else, first of all, I love it because there's so many ways you can achieve that state.
There's not one way to be independent, right?
I'm pretty independent, you're pretty independent, but we don't do the same stuff, except today, I guess.
And the other thing I read about in my book is if you're trying to chase happiness, as long as you've got your health working for you, and you've got a little money, you've got the basics, that the biggest factor in happiness I've discovered is that you can do what you want to do when you want to do it.
And of course, you know, Relationships are a big drag in that because it's hard to find two people who want to do the same thing at the same time.
But to the extent that you can find freedom from an employer and freedom from the types of relationships that would force you to do things you don't want when you don't want them, you almost always can get happiness out of that formula.
I mean, even the simplest thing, like maybe you like to eat pizza and I like to eat pizza, but how often are we both hungry at the same time and we haven't had pizza recently?
I mean, just the simplest thing.
It's hard to do what you want when you want to do it.
So I try to organize all of my systems toward largely the same thing that you just said, which is independence from other people's decisions.
Well, yeah, I generally found that the more control I had over my life, the better my life went.
So the degree to which we can become independent from inconstant others, you know, Friends, family, and other people that we choose is sort of a different matter.
But most people in their careers end up in organizations and environments.
They don't choose the culture.
They don't choose their bosses.
It's just where they land.
And most times or not, more times often than not, you're going to end up in a hole with no bottom, grabbing at the sides, pretending you have some sort of purchase and just, you know, falling forever.
And that just seems like a recipe for if you have the desire or the will to want to chart your own course.
But of course, that comes with that existential threat called responsibility.
Which means that if you're going to detach yourself from irrational others and chart your own course, then you get the glory, but you also get, when the failure happens, a distinct lack of people to blame.
Like when I do a solo show, sometimes they'll do half a million or more views, and sometimes they won't.
And who can I blame?
Well, if I write the script and I do the show, then it's entirely a mirror-placed situation, and that, I think, is the downside of that kind of independence, is a lack of blame-throwing.
What you just described is a perfect example of a goal versus a system.
Let's say you do your show and it doesn't get the response that you want.
You don't say, well, I had a goal.
It didn't work out.
I quit.
You're going to look at the show and you say, it probably didn't work because of this and you're going to try the new thing next time.
So if you do a show that fails and you know why, do you feel like that's a failure?
Absolutely not.
And sorry to interrupt, but there's also times when I do shows which I know have lower views because they have higher value for the values that I want to promote.
Like I'm very passionate about anti-spanking and reasoning with kids and so on.
So there'll be times when I'll do a show on that or have an expert on.
I know for a simple fact that it is not going to reach view counts, but let's say it does 100,000 views and let's say 10% of people make a different decision about their parenting.
Well, that's 10,000 families that I've managed to cut spanking down.
That, in a sense, is sort of why I do the other stuff, so I can have a direct impact on people's lives.
So, for me, it's lower views, but higher impact, and that's a trade-off I'm more than willing to make.
I assume you're, like me, at a point in your life where you found this natural evolution in your thinking from selfish to more of an outward benefit.
It's annoying, yeah.
It's really annoying, because I came out of the sort of Ayn Rand School virtue of selfishness stuff, And I found that once I felt I had enough value to offer the world and had enough material comfort to be able to do that, and you describe this in your book just beautifully.
I'm not going to try and pillage your words, but it's like there's this gravity well that pulls you towards wanting to benefit the world when you have achieved, you know, it's the old thing, you get the oxygen mask on your face and then you help the people around you.
And I'm definitely at that point where I'm willing to sacrifice material comfort I have this hypothesis that whenever we feel stress and let's say we're
not in imminent danger or don't have a health problem, That is when we're being incompatible with our biology.
And I think that we evolved with a certain set of imprinted needs, and as soon as you get out of alignment with that stuff, you start being unhappy.
So, for example, when you're in love and you're heading toward a relationship, that's very biologically compatible, and that's why you're so happy.
But if you were to make a whole bunch of money for yourself...
And you knew you could make a big difference in the world with the power and resources and time you've accumulated, and you didn't do it, I believe that that would cause stress at a biological level.
Because I think we're designed that the monkey that gets some food has to share it.
And if you're the monkey who can't hunt and can't get any food, then you take what you can get.
The monkey with the food, I think, is biologically designed to share it.
I think it's a need, and if they don't, it's going to be a stress.
Well, all of these emotions, of course, evolved at a time when saving was impossible.
Like this new idea that we can accumulate capital, we can stick it in a bank or buy gold or Bitcoin or whatever, the idea that we can actually take excess productivity and store it for the future is completely incompatible with all of our evolution because If you got a whole bunch of extra bananas, you know, stick them under a bush, you come back a week later.
So if you're hoarding and not sharing, that doesn't make any sense, I think, in terms of how our desires evolved.
And of course, in general, biologically, for human beings in the past, before sort of the modern capitalist environment ended, Monkeys as well.
Men, of course, are designed to go out and get excess resources because generally they're giving them to pregnant and breastfeeding women so that the kids have enough to eat.
Because there's, I think, some calculations that if you're a bachelor, you can live on 10% to 20% the money that you'll need or the resources that you need if you get married and have a family.
So yeah, males in particular are designed to gather resources, which you can't save.
I mean, if you're the monkey who, you know, I don't know, Eats a boar, half a boar, and saves the rest.
Well, you know, in three days it's full of flies and maggots and you can't eat it.
Then you're kind of an asshole monkey planet, you know, because you might as well share.
You can't keep it.
And I think that those emotions are still very strong within us.
I've defined failure as dying rich.
Right.
If you die rich, you know, unless it was like a sudden death, you fucked up.
I mean, you fucked up.
Because, you know, we didn't need you.
So, you know, I don't want to die penniless, but, you know, keeping it isn't really the plan.
I can't tell you how many arguments I've been in over my, let's say, the successful part of my career, once I had excess resources, for people who would just berate me for being generous with other people.
Or for, you know, let's say...
Getting into a deal in which I intentionally gave the other person a really good deal.
Now, lots of times it's just, you know, there's a psychic reason to it or, you know, there's more business to it than other people can see.
But it bothers people who have never got in a position of having excess resources to watch anybody else be generous with them.
It's almost like a pain by association.
And it's hard to explain.
No, no.
If you got rich, you know, the way I did...
You start feeling differently immediately.
The most striking part of that was as soon as I got the first big publishing checks where I said to myself, hey, I don't really have to work if I don't want to.
And I'd been thinking, I really would love to buy a big sports car.
Because when you don't have any money, you want to buy a sports car because people who have them have money and you want to have money.
So I guess that's what you need.
But as soon as I could afford any car I wanted, I didn't even want any car.
I saw a car as a giant pain in the ass.
When I thought I could have a summer house or something, I thought to myself, two houses?
Twice the work?
Just these things didn't make any sense to me.
But if you tell me I could spend a year of my life writing a book that maybe will help some people because there's some ideas in there they haven't heard before, then I'm motivated.
That wakes me up.
For me, at least, Scott, it's hard.
I grew up dirt poor, and it's hard to change that mentality.
But strangely enough, that doesn't have an effect on my generosity towards others.
But for myself, I'm so used to counting pennies and so on.
I just had to pick up a computer for doing these sorts of video recordings as a backup.
And I go to the computer store, and I'm like...
Do you have an open box item?
Because, you know, that might save me a tiny bit of money.
And they give me an open box item, and is anything missing?
No.
So I get it home, and of course, there's no power cords.
I have to take it back.
But it's hard to change that, and it's also hard as a parent as well, because there's a lot of studies that show that, you know, the rags to riches to rags, you know, they call it shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, that the first generation grows up poor, works hard, the second generation grows You don't have the excuse of we can't afford it when your kid wants something,
and so you have to come up with some other way to say no in a way that makes sense and doesn't portray you as an ogre, but they grow up with the sense of abundance that I think blundens the focus and the energy that you need to change your situation.
So I do think that creating, in a sense, artificial scarcity within your own environment by being generous outside of it helps keep you lean and mean and hungry and helps you achieve even better things, which gives you more resources to cannon fire around the world.
Yeah, sort of on that same topic, I never want to not do my own laundry.
Now, I don't do my own laundry every day.
I do have some help doing the basic stuff.
But on the weekend or something, if I need something, I'm going to do my own laundry.
And part of it is just to stay connected with the world, because I don't need to be.
I just don't need to be connected to the world.
I could float away and create a little bubble life for myself.
But I don't want to feel that disconnect.
You have August 5th, 2015, a day that shall verily live in internet infamy.
You, of course, predicted that Donald Trump would become the next president of the United States.
Now, your focus on Trump, and please, everyone, just go to Scott's blog and read it.
It's like having an electric porcupine of brain-bristling electricity pushed into your frontal lobes.
It really is incredibly stimulating.
Right.
I've loved the comics for years, and it's great writing, and it's great insights.
Just let me finish this point, and then you can brush off my phrase.
This has cost you quite a bit, right?
I mean, you've had death threats.
You said your speaking gigs have dried up.
I mean, you don't endorse.
You actually have endorsed Hillary Clinton for reasons we'll get to.
You don't endorse.
You simply point out the power of the man's communication and persuasion skills, which, of course, if you were an enemy of Donald Trump, would be a pretty useful thing to do for his enemies.
But help me understand why the persuasion element of the political campaigns that are going on is so important for you to talk about and what it's cost you in your personal and professional life.
Well, starting with what it cost me, it's of course impossible to know what things would have happened, you know, if I hadn't done the Trump writing.
So, you know, I can't do a complete apples to apples comparison.
But I will tell you that my speaking requests...
I had been consistent for two decades and then just stopped at the same time I started writing about Trump and became sort of known for that.
And that makes sense, right?
Because if you're a corporate entity, you're an organizer, you're looking for a speaker, you don't really want somebody who's associated with a political party that at least half of your audience might not belong to.
So I don't even disagree with anybody not wanting to hire me under these circumstances.
It's just a fact.
I just point it out as a fact.
And then, you know, there are licensing opportunities, and probably, you know, half of the public who knows I'm writing about Trump will just automatically not want to buy my book or my calendar.
Now, there will be some people who are introduced to my work this way, and so there's an offset, but I would say it's mostly a deficit.
I'll tell you why I thought this was important.
When I first noticed Trump I had what I thought were commercial levels and now I think weapons grade levels, powers of persuasion.
I realized that first of all it would be interesting to write about.
That's always good if you're a writer.
But more importantly that it had opened up this little crack in the universe where I could write about all the stuff that I already knew but you couldn't communicate because it wasn't believable.
Right?
So, I like to write about the things which can't be communicated.
Like something you know, and something that's easy to explain, but it can't be communicated for any variety of reasons.
Let's say, for example, you know, you were my enemy and you didn't believe anything I said.
And then I said, look behind you, you know, you better duck.
There's a train coming.
You'd say, I'm not going to duck.
So, that would be an example of something that couldn't be communicated.
Because you wouldn't believe me, and therefore it just can't be communicated.
So, the stuff...
I'm talking about in terms of persuasion.
The part that couldn't be communicated is how powerful it is.
Because we think of ourselves as rational beings.
And so we think, ah yeah, there may be some idiots who are influenced by a lawn sign that says Trump, but doesn't give me any information.
I'm a rational person.
But it turns out that those lawn signs probably do make a difference.
It turns out that The big ad spending on TV, it does make a difference, even though there's no information that's accurate.
And even though the people know there's no information that's accurate, it still makes a difference.
So, this opportunity that I thought might never come along again, because people are focused on Trump and what he's doing, I said, I can get people to listen to me if I do this one trick.
It's a psychology trick, basically.
I said, I'm going to predict what he will do, Against all predictions.
And I'll tie it to this one primary variable, which is his persuasiveness.
And I was pretty confident that he would do well because of that.
And when he does well, people are going to start to notice that I called it and that I described it all the way.
And that would build up enough credibility in my writing that I could talk about this topic a little more freely and that people would get tremendous benefit out of knowing that they're not rational beings in a rational world.
Because it will make you terribly anxious and unhappy and stressed if everybody around you is acting in a way you can't understand.
And that's how people go through their life.
They're like, I just talked to so-and-so.
I tried to explain this simple thing.
It's so obvious.
And yet, the things that came out of their mouth made no sense at all.
And I don't know what's going on.
Now, if that's your experience, you're saying to yourself, it's a frustrating world, I can't sleep, everybody's crazy, but here's how you can relax.
You're just as crazy as those people.
They all think they're perfectly reasonable.
The minute you think you're exempt from that, your stress will go through the roof, because you're now into a biologically irrational area yourself, that you're the lone rational person on this big earth full of crazy people.
So first you have to accept that you're crazy.
And then you can accept that other people are and deal with them on the emotional level.
Let me give you a concrete example of how this can be useful.
I learned in hypnosis class that there is a personality type that disagrees with everything reflexively.
And you know that person, right?
And you can't deal with them.
Anything you ask them for, they just say no, and that's the end.
They'll fight to the death to just say no to you.
And my hypnotist explained that That the way you deal with them is you tell them the opposite of what you want.
And then they'll disagree with you and they'll never be able to leave their disagreement because they're so wed to it.
And so I thought, okay, life cannot be that simple.
That's so dumb.
I know that can't work.
But there was a guy at my day job, I was working at the phone company then, who reflexively said no to everything I asked him for.
And he was a bottleneck in my process.
I couldn't get anything done until he said yes.
And he said no every time.
And it was always because something was...
Too hard, too impractical, would take too long.
So the next time I went to him, I said, look, I need this feature implemented in the software.
That's your job to do it.
But I'm not even going to bother you with it because I already know it's impossible to do.
I mean, just on its face value, this will take too long.
There's no way we have this in the budget.
If you'll just give me the no, we can make this quick.
I'll take that back.
I'll tell my people.
They'll be disappointed, but I already understand it's a no.
Just give me the no.
And I swear to God, he sat there and said, whoa, whoa, whoa!
That was so quick.
Tell me a little bit more about what you need.
I go, well, it's a waste of your time.
I already know it can't be done, but all right.
You know, we want this and this, and you obviously can't have all of this.
Just forget it.
He's like, no, no, no.
This stuff's easy.
And he went on to tell me how easy it was, and then he went on to happily implement it.
And I'll tell you, my head blew up.
I said, are people irrational all the time?
And what would happen if I started acting like that was true?
Would I get a better result?
In other words, I could A-B test it.
I say, you know, let's act rational and test my result.
The person I'm talking to is really angry and thinks I'm a jerk.
That's my result.
Now act completely irrational and act like their emotional state is all that matters.
And then what result do I get?
And it's almost always better.
I mean, it's something you could test at home, but you'll be amazed how often dealing with somebody's emotional state makes all the difference.
Now, in June 5th, 2016, you endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Now, you live in California, as I understand it, and help me sort of help the listeners, me and the listeners, I guess, help understand that.
Transition point, because as far as I understood it, you never, of course, endorsed Donald Trump and you have openly stated you're not going to vote that your politics differ from both candidates and probably all candidates in the field, but you did end up endorsing Hillary Clinton.
And what was your process around that?
So that was also a persuasion technique.
I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my personal safety, which I say as often as I say that I endorse her.
I add the parenthetically for my personal safety.
Because it's clear to people in California, and I think in other places too, that even having any positive connection to Trump, whether you endorse him, or in my case I just say positive things about his powers of persuasion, people think you're a Nazi.
They think you're literally, and I'm using the word literally in the proper term, literally a second coming of Hitler.
Right.
And people started calling me Joseph Goebbels, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, Hitler's chief of propaganda.
Now, I was just trying to explain Trump's methods so that people would understand them and could use them themselves and make an educated decision if people ever make those.
But it was a dangerous situation because people said, ah, you're just a shill for Trump.
Even though I said, as you said, that I didn't agree with his policies.
So I reasoned correctly, as it turns out, that if I just said I endorse the other side, people wouldn't care why I joined their team.
And people almost never care why you're on their team, as long as you really are on their team.
And I really am endorsing her because I really don't want to die.
I don't want somebody to hit me.
I don't want somebody to, you know, not buy my products or something.
I don't want any of that to happen.
So I endorsed her for my personal safety.
And almost immediately, all of the comparisons, at least of me, to Joseph Goebbels stopped.
It went from a lot to nothing as soon as I endorsed Hillary Clinton.
So it worked exactly as I imagined it would in a persuasion way.
But from a rational standpoint, it's a complete insult to the Hillary Clinton followers. - Oh, yeah.
You would think so.
No, that is rationally what it is.
It's like, okay, you thugs are terrifying, so I'm going to endorse your thug leader so that I don't get thugged.
Yay, he's on our team!
What a great guy!
Anyway, sorry, I'm back to my childhood where everyone's crazy.
Yeah, they're not going so far as to say that's great.
They are going so far as to say, well, there are other people we should be attacking.
Mission accomplished.
Intimidation implant successful.
Intimidation succeeded.
And it doesn't seem to make any difference if I tell anybody why I'm doing it and that their intimidation succeeded.
I can be as honest as I want.
It's one of the odd things about persuasion is you can tell people what you're doing as you're doing it.
And I've tested this a lot.
It doesn't make any difference because persuasion works by association.
And when you have the association, you have it.
Well, I've done a presentation called The Death of Reason, which has countless examples of not just the innocuous ones that we know about, like confirmation bias and seeking out the echo chamber and so on.
But someone did a study where they had people read a moral position and then defend that moral position.
And they defended it most ably and positively and enthusiastically.
And then they had them turn the page.
And what happened was a new set of words was stuck with glue to the next page.
So when they turned back in some way that they couldn't detect...
They read the opposite of what they did.
So they went forward a few pages and then said, actually, can you go back and do that last one again?
They went back and it was the exact opposite moral position, which they argued fluently with no sense of disconnect, with no sense of, wait a minute, wasn't they just arguing the opposite of this?
And the vast majority of people is in sort of Milgram experiment style.
Just went back, and of course, I'm sure you know of the studies that show that when you bring contrary factual information to people, not only does it not undo their biases, it tends to strengthen their biases, and the labels matter.
If you say, oh, this is Trump's position, then people hate it, and if they say, oh, it's Hillary's position, then they love it.
I don't know if it's innate, and I'd sort of like to ask you this question because school is really terrible.
When I was back in the day, I went to a very sort of strict position.
Boarding school with sort of ancient enlightenment, learn how to reason or die kind of approach to things.
And I think that really helped, you know, it was a really old school, Lockean kind of approach to, and Humean skepticism, like the whole range of hammer you till you bleed reason kind of thing.
And I think that had some effect.
And, you know, with your mom, it sort of struck me that You just kind of needed permission to have that kind of independence of thought.
She didn't have to encourage you hugely.
You wanted it to begin with.
And I think that we are more rational in our inception, but I think that process is really undermined and corrupted through a variety of religious institutions, perhaps, certainly through government miseducation, which is just, I think, terrible for teaching people how to think.
Do you think that if we had a sort of more rational approach to teaching children, and we taught them how to think, to reason, to process evidence, how much of this do you think could be blunted?
None of it.
Take your time.
Go for a nuanced answer.
See, this is sort of the insight of hypnosis, is that nobody's rational at any time.
And yet, so I look at you, you're a hyper-rational person by brand and by design and by intention.
You mean just very rational, not necessarily just too much coffee, which could be the case as well.
Right.
But if I ask you this simple question, are rational people happier?
We would be if other people were rational.
That's what we're working towards.
So, if the goal of life is to be happy, and I'm not saying it is, but it's a reasonable assumption that people are just trying to be happy without hurting other people, being rational isn't your best solution.
So, you are a rational, irrational person, but you're irrational in the deepest possible way, in that you've sacrificed the primary purpose of life, which is happiness, On the altar of rationality and you don't even know when you're doing it or you don't because people can't.
We actually don't know when we're rational.
We tend to cherry pick the rational arguments that fit our model.
Well, okay.
I'll sort of push back on a few things there.
So, first of all, my life is generally very satisfying because I have that independence.
And I have that independence because I take the approach that I take to communicating information with the experts and the PowerPoints, I'm the one person on the planet who tries not to put people to sleep through PowerPoints, but I do get a sort of deep level of satisfaction about that, but for me, Scott, it's part of that larger mission.
Sorry, go ahead.
I would say that because you have freedom and power, you know, power of a source, you know, personal power, you can control your schedule and whatnot, that that probably is sufficient for happiness.
So you got that, but it wasn't because you're rational.
Well, that's a question which we don't have an alternative universe to compare to, but I think if I was more...
I'm conformist or traditional in my approach.
I think that I would not have achieved the independence because people want to fund what I do because they find what I do sort of stimulating and interesting and different.
So the degree to which I am rational is the degree to which I think I have achieved that independence.
Now, of course, there are other people who are not as rational or don't take that approach to achieve independence in a different way.
That's my particular market niche.
But the larger picture for me, and it goes back to that mission thing.
Because I've been studying philosophy for decades and, you know, I view it.
I do the introduction to Aristotle.
We did the fall of Rome recently and so on.
So I've got this long chain of history behind me that I just sort of feel part of a link of.
One of my ancestors was best friends with John Locke.
It's a good old family tradition to levitate in reason and attempt to elevate the masses.
And so because I sort of feel part of a much larger system of philosophy that I can add to and because The very reason or the very capacity I have to speak rationally against the powers that be and so on is the result of John Milton's Areopagitica and other arguments for freedom of speech that I've inherited.
I sort of feel, okay, well, the past gave me all of these great gifts.
And if I have the capacity and ability to pay that forward, to work to enhance the freedoms that I so want, It was so generously bestowed to me by the ancestors of the Western tradition.
That, to me, gives a great satisfaction.
And so some of the inconveniences, to put it mildly, of each day of doing that is, to me, like sunspots against the sun of the larger mission.
I think if you have a large enough mission, your happiness is much less dependent upon conformity in the moment, if that makes any sense.
I heard you say it feels good.
There you go.
It does feel good.
It does feel good.
And victory feels good.
But that's why you do it.
You do it because it feels good.
I mean, that's why we do everything.
We do everything to chase satisfaction and feel good.
I have also another, I don't know, I wouldn't call it a hypothesis.
Let's call it sort of a rule that hasn't been proven, which is that humans need a certain amount of happiness, pleasure, let's say.
Let's say pleasure.
Or they'll just kill themselves.
Like if they can't get their minimum pleasure.
And that explains why someone who's, let's say, in an inner city, in bad circumstances, might do heroin completely rationally.
Because the alternative is, I'd just rather be dead.
There's just nothing here for me.
So the fact that I don't do heroin and don't have a need for it has nothing to do with my willpower or knowledge about heroin.
It has nothing to do with that.
It has to do with the fact that I have other sources of pleasure.
You receive a pleasure...
From, you know, bringing this benefit to the masses and perhaps other people saying, hey, that was really a benefit.
You know, you've done something good there.
But those are the reasons.
I would argue that the logic of it is probably a far less component than even you imagine, even though the topic is logic, right?
Because as you're talking about, you know, the tradition from your family and stuff, these are all emotional reasons.
They're not reason reasons.
A reason would be, well, the goal is happiness, and I've studied it, and bringing this rational thought to people makes them happier.
But I think the studies would show the opposite.
I think the studies would show the people who believe in a bigger force are actually not just doing fine, but doing a little better.
I mean, I was anti-religion for years until I met...
I've never said this before, but there's one individual I met...
Whose use of religion, he was a Christian, born-again type, was so positive, the way he used it as a tool for happiness for himself and for others.
Like, I just completely changed.
I said, okay, now I see religion as a tool.
And the right person using the tool in the right way is actually pretty phenomenal.
I mean, he spent his weekends working with severely disabled kids because it was part of his, you know, what connected him to God.
Now, I don't have to say that's rational or makes sense.
But those disabled kids sure liked it, and he was one of the nicest humans I've ever met in my life.
I mean, he was a role model.
He was younger than me, and he was still a role model.
So, you know, you can't discount the irrational life.
Oh, I mean, I think that's very much a mirror of my experience, that I have been openly critical, if not downright hostile, to religiosity in the past.
But when I got out of the ideology and focused on my empirical experiences of people and the benevolence and positivity that I received from a lot of Christians in particular, although other religions as well, versus some of the prickly, defensive social justice warrior stuff that seems to float like a little bit of a noxious cloud around certain aspects of the atheist community, I just, you know, it came to me like the dinner table question.
For me, it sort of floats around in my head, which is, okay, I'm If I had to pick a random sampling of these two groups, and the only thing I knew, well, this person is a Christian, this person is an atheist, who would I prefer to sit next to at dinner and have a conversation with?
And I did find myself, you know, sort of dig deep in my heart of hearts saying, well, you know, I have a little bit more in common with the Christians in so far as I believe in a universal ethic and doing good things, good works, and so on, and skeptical of the size and power of the state, the one cancer.
Wait, I have to jump in.
Go on.
I feel like you might have something to say.
Please, please go ahead.
Let me defend my atheist brothers, even though I don't call myself an atheist.
I would say they have a moral code, and I don't think there's any difference there.
Well, the moral code for atheists generally is less universal than the Christians, in my experience, and I've got sort of some arguments in the show about this.
But the one thing that concerned me most about atheism was the degree to which it wanted state power to solve problems in society.
The Christians have conscience and good works and so on, and of course, God will punish the wrongdoers.
And in the absence of that, you know, in the absence of that kind of belief system, it seems that a lot of atheists will move more towards an expansion of state power.
Now, a person's religious beliefs has no impact on my paycheck, but if atheists prefer larger states, well, that starts to gouge into the good that I can do with my resources because the state's going to scoop it out and hand it to people it wants to buy the votes from.
So, as far as intrusiveness, I found the religious side less intrusive, at least from Christians, than at least some of the lefty atheist side.
I'm not aware of the correlation between atheist belief and love of bigger government.
Is that a demonstrated correlation?
Yes.
Of course, it's a bell curve, right?
So, I have to put the caveats that you put in all the time, Scott, around doesn't apply to all.
And, of course, Ayn Rand was both an atheist and a very small government libertarian and objectivist.
But, yeah, I'll send you the presentations where we go over at least the statistics that are available.
And in certain atheist communities, there's like 70 times more Democrats than small government types and so on.
So there's some correlation.
Again, tons of exceptions.
But if you had to choose, there would be that.
Yeah, just the overlap between Democrats and atheists.
That would make sense.
I can see that.
Are you convinced me with your rational logic?
Excellent.
Well, we'll talk five minutes after and see where you are, whether it sort of floated back to where it was.
So let's talk about some of the stuff that you've talked about with regards to Trump, because I was thinking, Scott, when you were talking about how Trump is such a great way to talk about persuasion, it's also partly because if you say, well, I really want to talk about persuasion, and now you've got to watch this half-hour speech, and then we'll analyze it afterwards, most people are like, ah, it's too much effort.
If they've already watched Trump at work and you can talk about what they've seen, already you have the empirical – we've both seen his speech in common to start talking about, and I think that helps a lot.
But you've talked about how Hillary would give these sort of, here's my exposition on my policies and so on, and put everyone to sleep and end up with a whole bunch of empty chairs, whereas Trump is sort of the passionate and I'm for you and really evoking us versus them mentality, outsiders versus Washington, the corruption, the media, and so on.
And you've seen a pivot in Hillary recently, though, and you think the guy you called, Godzilla, has joined her team and is giving her the capacity to raise Tokyo with her fire breath or something like that.
Yeah, let me give you the story arc from the beginning.
The most persuasive thing you can do is scare someone, because fear is the thing that people will act on first.
They'll run away from the bear before they'll eat something if they're hungry, before they'll take a nap, right?
It's their primal...
So Trump started out strong on the fear of persuasion.
And he said, you know, these scary terrorists are going to come into the country through immigration, people coming across the Mexican border.
And he got a really good pop on the scare of persuasion.
It was a strong theme.
Meanwhile, Clinton was going with her experience and her policies and her good judgment and all that.
But nobody cares about that stuff, because they don't understand the policies, and they're just not sophisticated enough to know who's got a better policy anyway.
But even the word racism, which they threw against Trump, even if people believed it, and I don't believe it's true, but even if people did believe it, it doesn't evoke that same kind of fear response for most people.
Yeah, and when they first started saying Trump's a racist, it just sounded like what you say to every Republican candidate.
So, you know, it was bouncing off of a little bit.
But the message started hardening and hardening, getting more energy on the social media, at least.
But sometime at about the point that Bernie Sanders stopped outperforming, and remember Bernie Sanders outperformed?
Everybody kept saying, what's up with Bernie Sanders?
He's just doing way better than we think.
Well, I suspect he had a good persuader on his team.
And this is just a guess, but I'm thinking that that persuader was either on the sidelines or on Bernie's team while Clinton was floundering.
At the time that Bernie dropped out, or it was clear he wasn't going to make it to the finish line, Clinton's persuasion game went from zero to weapons grade, just sort of instantly, which tells you that there was some new blood or new thinking, or at least they're listening to somebody new.
And I had whimsically named that person Godzilla, as in the Godzilla of persuasion, and I had just speculated without any benefit of confirmation that I could see the fingerprints of one particular persuader, whose name is Robert Cialdini, the author of the book Influence, and his new book is just going to drop in September called Pre-Suasion.
I had to set somebody up to be persuaded.
And I saw the fingerprint.
So especially when she started using the word dark.
Remember all the surrogates for Clinton started using the same adjective about Trump at the same time.
It was like watching an orc army stream out of Mordor, seeing everyone carrying this dark language all throughout.
No rational argument, but it's just like, ooh, I'm cold.
I'm in a cave.
That's bad.
So that was the tip-off to me, that they'd gone from typical political words, you know, like...
Just all the usual ones to a word you hadn't heard before.
And that was Trump's signature play.
He would come out with things like low energy that you just hadn't heard in this context before.
And that allows you to fill that word with your own confirmation bias.
So every time Trump does something, you say, well, that was a little dark.
He yelled at a baby.
That sounds dark.
It didn't matter what he did.
You could fill it in there.
Sorry to interrupt, but they had tried just before that.
They tried the angry one.
And Trump just embraced that like a baby with a mom.
Yes, I'm angry.
I've got a lot to be angry about.
And so the anger was considered to be righteous rather than destabilizing.
And he owned that and completely turned that around.
But the dark one is different.
Yeah, he owned the angry because they left him a high ground.
That's the big persuasion mistake.
And the high ground was, yes, you need an angry person.
So he owned it.
He amplified it.
That's just classic persuasion technique.
And he did it instantly.
So he knows how to do this.
Dark, there's no high ground.
You can't say, I'm the darkest of all.
And this was the tip-off and the fingerprint that told me that there's somebody of Cialdini's level, if not him, working on the Clinton campaign.
That dark...
Presuade you to use his own language.
Because once you hear dark, everything that comes after it gets painted with it.
And dark is an automatic negative word.
It's scary.
It's negative.
It's, you know, the bad guy wears the black hat, you know.
And you could even imagine there's like a little racism baked into it to remind you that they're saying that.
So it has all these great...
It's like a Rorschach test...
That anybody who hates Trump can read into that word.
So that's like weapons-grade persuasion.
Now, also, this is the sort of thing that would be A-B tested.
And I don't think it worked, you know, beyond the first few weeks, because you're not really hearing the word anymore.
So I think they tested it to see if it made a difference.
It probably didn't.
But the fact that it was engineered at all, it was like the Stuxnet virus of slogans.
I mean, this thing was deeply engineered.
And there's no way that a regular politician cooked that up.
Well, the other thing too, which I found fascinating about the dark transition in Clinton's language and the mainstream media's language, is that I also think it was partly an attempt to block his fear mongering.
Because if you say, well, this is a dark campaign, it's negative, it's hostile, and then he starts talking about trying to trigger that amygdala fight or flight response in people, They no longer say, well, he's right, there are scary things out there, I better have a strong leader, he looks bigger than Hillary, he looks stronger than Hillary, so I'll flock to him.
What happens is, ooh, he's dark, he's negative.
It actually blocks a lot of the fear-mongering or fear-implanting techniques that may have been used earlier in the campaign.
And see what the Clinton side did.
They were behind in the fear department because, you know, you're afraid of terrorists.
But the odds are any individual terrorist is not going to kill you.
I mean, it might do bad things and you might hate it, but it's probably not going to kill you.
But they made a story that Trump had his irrational, thin-skinned fingers on the nuclear button, and he was going to kill everybody.
So that's a far greater fear.
They took it from somebody might die somewhere, and that's bad, to you might frickin' die.
You, personally.
You might die if you elect this guy.
It's one step up from the Hitler argument to say Donald Trump will likely end all life on the planet, you know, turn it into a void of asteroid and smoky death.
I mean, that is, I don't know where you go from there in terms of escalation.
But that's the same thing that they talked about in the lead up to the Iraq war, right?
We don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud, that nuclear winter may emerge, that all life might end.
I mean, it really is that level of hysteria.
And the fact that people respond to it so viscerally, and now with the crazy stuff, which you can talk about in a sec, again, just shows, wow, it is really, you know, it's the old thing that Churchill said, that the best cure for democracy is five minutes conversation with the average voter, because it really works.
I've seen something this year that I've never seen before in prior contests, and other Republicans have been called, you know, Nazis and Hitler, you know, that's just typical.
But I see people talking about Trump, and their bodies are shaking.
Like, I'll do the Skype impression of somebody talking about Trump.
They go, but, but, but, he's crazy!
Like, they're actually, they turn red, and they're shaking.
I've never seen that before.
I mean, people used to say, yeah, Reagan's going to blow up the world and stuff, but they didn't really believe it.
This time, they actually believe it, in a real way.
Visceral sense.
They think they're in danger.
And that's some good persuasion.
Now, what would Trump do to thwart this attack?
Well, he's got two ways to go.
He can become less scary.
And you've seen the three things he's done recently, right?
So he did his speech on world affairs, and he's substantially dissatisfied.
He's taken it all the way from banning Muslims to banning countries of origin to extreme vetting, which turns out to be very similar to what we're already doing.
Then he did a speech on, I don't know what it was titled, but it was essentially, you know, race relations and inner cities and talking about what he would do for African Americans.
And that all sounded Because of its directness, instead of talking in what people would say, well, that's a dog whistle, or why do you keep ignoring the subject?
He talked about it as directly and as empathetically as a person can talk.
Now, people aren't going to believe him right away, but the talk was all right.
And then he also issued what I thought was kind of brilliant, was a tweet, and I guess it was on Facebook, a direct statement, About treating everybody equally and being on Team America and everybody's got to have the same rights.
Everybody's got to be safe.
Everybody's got to be treated equally.
It's weird that it took so long for us to hear that directly.
But when you do hear it directly, it takes away that little bit of doubt you had, which is how have we gone so long without him saying anything positive about minority communities?
For example, like what?
And the truth is he has.
He said lots of things, but they were, you know, a comment here, a sentence here, an answer to a question there.
He never once put it all in one place and say, look, this is the most unambiguous thing I can say.
I'm totally on your side.
If you're an American, I don't care what kind of American, any shape or form, if you're an American, I'm 100% on your side.
It was as clear as you could get.
Now, will anybody believe that?
The answer is no, not on day one, right?
Because the people have lined up, just as you were talking, the example, if you give people facts that contradict what they believe, they hard in their belief.
But this one's hard.
This one will chip away at it if he keeps at it.
So he can chip away at the scary just by saying the right things, even though people are going to say, yeah, but in the past he did the wrong things.
But at least he's saying the right things.
The other thing he can do is increase the scare for Clinton.
So instead of saying she's going to let some terrorists in, he could actually make that visual and say, here's a victim of a crime committed by one of the people that I didn't want to let into the country.
Or even show the crimes happening in Europe, or even showing them happening in Syria, or what was left of Syria, ISIS caliphate now.
So bringing the violence into a physical, here's the victim, here's what actually happened to him, that's what you're importing.
Now it's not an import of a terrorist act or two, because that's what people have in mind.
Now you're importing an entire field of thought that could end up with massive abuse to gays and women.
So he's ratcheted up the fear in that way.
But I think there's probably yet another way to go, which is, I think, the conspiracy theories, and most of it is that, about Hillary Clinton's health.
Could end up being part of the scare trifecta.
There are terrorists.
They also are coming in with their Sharia law ideas and anti-gay ideas and anti-women ideas.
But also, you may have a leader who's got some brain health problems.
So I wouldn't be surprised if in the next two months you see some references to the literal physical functioning of her brain and her body.
And trying to sow some doubts as to whether it's safe to have somebody who, you know, if she's having strokes, for example, or whatever it is, that could affect judgment before people know it affects judgment.
I mean, we know that if you haven't eaten or you're tired, you make totally different decisions than if you're well-fed and well-rested.
So what kind of decisions do you get from 70-year-old people?
We may have some medical problems.
So without knowing any actual facts of anybody's medical problems, it's a scary thought.
Well, and of course, this is what the left did to Reagan later on in his tenure.
And the thing, you know, I go over in my mind, for completely useless reasons, but I'll share it with you anyway, which is I have these speeches in my head that I want people to give.
I don't know if they ever will.
But something very briefly would be, you know, America has this system where the government takes money from one group and gives it to another group.
And let's just for the moment say that, you know, there's some benefit in that to some people.
Well, it's completely unsustainable at the moment.
And Trump is a guy who's probably signed multi-decade leases and so on.
Like, he really needs to think about the long term, whereas politicians are just about getting through the next five minutes in general, kicking the can down the road.
So, I think the case that he could make that I think would be positive is say, look, we have a very real danger of running out of money and it's not even a theoretical danger.
You know, mathematically, something that can continue simply won't continue.
So, we need to find ways to get people off-dependent and into the workforce.
They'll be happier.
Their kids will be happier.
Human capital will increase.
This is where we need to go as a society.
So, we need simplified taxes, lower regulations, more job creation, lower corporate taxes so that these guys can create jobs and all that.
We have to find some way because right now, The tilt, you know, that sort of lava thing that used to be called in the 70s, you know, this tilting thing.
All of the momentum is away from the workforce and into the dependent classes, is what Mitt Romney was talking about when he was saying, you know, half of America won't vote for us because they're already dependent on the state.
So if more people are fleeing productivity and into dependence, then you're going to end up with the parasites, in a sense, overcoming the host and dragging the entire republic down to its demise.
So we have to find some way.
America has to find some way to reverse that trend and get people off dependence and into the workforce so the people who are left who truly are dependent and can't work can get the help that they want.
Because when the government runs out of money, you see this in Venezuela, we've seen this in a variety of other places, not to mention the fall of the Soviet Union, where you've got old women trying to sell pencils in a tin cup on a street corner because their entire pensions have evaporated.
There's a real danger that America knows is coming and is not that far away, and there needs to be some proactive steps now to maintain the people who are still dependent on the state and may not be able to get off.
So let me surprise you by disagreeing with almost all that.
Please do.
Yeah, which is why this is fun, right?
I don't believe, because of the magnitude of the problem and the demographic situation, I don't believe that we can get enough jobs and earn enough money to make a difference.
Because things are just too expensive, and there are too many people, and there are not enough of them able-bodied enough to work.
You know, there are always going to be people too disabled, too young, too old, whatever.
So here's what I would suggest as the only way out.
And this is based on what I call the Adams Law of slow-moving disasters.
So what you describe is a perfect slow-moving disaster.
We keep spending money until we don't have any money.
Everybody sees it coming, and those are the type we always fix before they're too late.
We were going to run out of money.
We were going to run out of oil at one point, but we fixed that.
We were going to run out of food at one point, but we designed fertilizers and we fixed that.
Here's how we can – and this is a speech I'd like to see Trump give.
So I like this forum.
We'll do this speech we want him to give.
My criticism of the let's get more jobs is that that's just what everybody says, and they don't really have an idea to do that.
But I'm going to give you a concrete idea to make the difference.
This is me as president.
I'm going to say I'm going to give you a budget that looks a lot like the budgets you've had in the past – It's a budget which absolutely guarantees if we kept doing it, we would be out of money and we'd be bankrupt.
But we're also going to work as hard as possible to lower the cost of a good life.
And that means primarily stuff like housing.
You know, what's it cost to live in a good house?
What's it cost to get to work?
What's it cost to travel?
What's it cost for healthcare?
And if you look at all the giant changes that are possible in those areas, For example, you might not need to own your own car pretty soon.
It could be self-driving cars and carpooling is easy because it's on your phone.
Now you don't mind.
We could have robots building housing in the desert so that the cost of labor goes to nothing.
They're making their own materials out of the sand.
They're making bricks out of it in the desert.
We could drive the cost of a house down to $1,000 with robot labor.
We could drive the cost of healthcare substantially down doing what my healthcare provider does now.
I use Kaiser Permanente HMO. And what they do is they let me email my doctor so I don't have to go in.
I can send him a picture of a suspicious mole and he says, nope, don't need to come in.
Just don't worry about that.
So my costs, I've taken 30% of the cost out of the system just with email.
So there's so much more that can be done to drive the healthcare into...
Let's say your high-definition screen of your house, have a couple of nurse practitioners nearby.
So without me designing the system, I just want to draw a picture in your head that says healthcare doesn't need to go up forever, and if it's the government's task to make it go down, it could do it.
So I would say if you drive the cost of living down far enough, then everybody can work because now your minimum wage job is all you need because you didn't need much.
The cost of food and all your basics have gone down to if you can just work 20 hours a week helping out somebody, you've got all you need for a quality life.
So that's where I would head things.
Well, and that's the fantastic, whatever increases your purchasing power is going to be beneficial, but...
For me, a lot of what you're talking about there, Scott, is about getting government out of the way of things, right?
I mean, the government's takeover of the healthcare system is disastrous, you know, premiums are going through the roof.
So if you get government out of the way, you know, get rid of zoning stuff out in the desert and so on, and let people, more free market incentives in the healthcare system and so on, then yeah, for sure.
And I think the idea of sort of reducing regulations that some of what Trump is talking about And, of course, the immigration, which is carving out a lot of low-rent jobs out of the existing population, particularly among minorities, I think a lot of that stuff will help to produce that, and it is around just getting government out of the way so market incentives can drive that kind of behavior.
Yes and no.
So, yes, we need to get all of those obstacles out of the way, but I think government done properly could be the answer.
Now, government done as it's always done, of course, only makes things worse.
But if you could imagine, let me just give you an example.
Let's say you have President Trump, and he just says, hey, I've got to figure out how to make housing costs less.
And it's mostly about technology, and it's going to take somebody to really dig in, something smart.
So I'd like to ask Mark Cuban to work on this one project, to figure out how to make housing inexpensive.
Now, I'm not saying Mark Cuban's the right guy, or housing is the right first thing.
But in that case, Government was helpful.
They said, here's the priority, and I picked a guy to go study it as much as possible.
Now, if Mark Cuban comes back and says, the only way this works is if we pick an area in the desert that has no government regulation, then we can say yay or nay to that.
And then I'd also like to see a president say, I don't know if that's a good idea.
Let's build one and find out.
We'll build a town, or we'll build a neighborhood, and if that works, we'll take what we learned to build a town and then a city.
And we'll keep learning.
And the idea is the first two or three tries will not be successful.
And we're going to take that as a given.
But we're going to improve every time we do it until a normal person who's just a good person, a good American, wants to work but doesn't have the same financial opportunities, can lead not just a good life, but a freaking great life.
I mean, the best life I ever had was living in a college dorm that's the size of my kitchen with a roommate.
But because it had been...
The college had been engineered to put me in contact with people I wanted to be in contact with, doing something useful.
I had exercise.
I had food taken care of.
We can do that for adults.
It doesn't need to look like a college dorm.
But it's a kind of fallacy of central planning, isn't it, to say that, well, we'll get one guy, whoever he's, Mark Cuban or whoever, he's going to go and research it.
Just throw the market open and have 10,000 people all trying to figure out how to make it work the best.
The great thing about the free market is where there's an opportunity, the best minds, the most experienced people, the people with the best incentives, they're going to get rich.
Mark Cuban is going to get rich if he figures this one out.
Those incentives in play, I think, will give you an answer that's much more Well, let me disagree with you completely.
You may be familiar with that Y Combinator, somebody at Y Combinator is...
Doing kind of the open source build a new city project.
That was just in the headlines.
So their idea is very much what you said.
You're having the intelligence and the energy of the whole world participating.
So presumably there will be people who try to design the best sewer system, the best roads and whatever.
But there still had to be somebody who was the organizer.
Now right now it's a completely private enterprise and it's getting the attention that a private enterprise could get.
So suppose a President Trump or Clinton says, look, this is a priority.
I don't think the government needs to be in it, but every day I'm going to talk about this Y Combinator project because I think you all need to get involved so we can get the best people on it.
Let me know when you're done.
Now, that's an example where the government has made a gigantic difference because they set a priority and they aimed you at people in the private sector who are trying to get it done.
They have all the right incentives, like you mentioned.
What's wrong with that?
I don't know much about this project.
When you say it's open source, is there a profit motive involved?
Good question.
I think open source is like a hobbyist kind of thing, which is not to say that open source can't build wonderful things, but it doesn't have that efficiency matrix, that profit.
Profit is, is my stuff the most valuable use of my time and resources relative to everything else that could be done with my time and resources?
And without that, it seems like things languish.
Let me tell you why the private sector can't build, for example, affordable housing.
If you go to a new housing complex in California and you walk in, it is going to look great.
You're going to say, I can imagine myself living here.
Everything's great.
Then you move in and you realize there's no closets.
There's no closet space.
And there's no basement, even though it wouldn't take a lot of money to build a basement.
And it's not because of seismic issues.
That's a myth.
Those things don't exist in your house.
Because the builder knows that you don't notice the closet when you first look at the house.
That's something you notice later.
So the builder's incentive is to build a house that looks good in pictures and will sell it to you on your first impression.
That is the beginning and the end of their motive.
At least they want to have a good enough house that you don't sue them too badly later.
But they don't care if you have closet space.
They don't care if the neighborhood is set up so that you can meet your neighbors more easily or they wouldn't put, for example, a central place that you could share the vegetables you've grown in your garden.
They don't give a shit about any of that.
They only care that your first impression, your emotional, irrational decision is, oh, I've got to have this.
Yeah, that's a good countertop.
I love your granite.
You did a good job in the molding.
Oh, I've got to have it.
That's all they want.
And if you don't have a central person saying, we're going to design this for the benefit of the person living there, nobody's going to do it because there's no reason to.
There's no incentive to.
Well, now I'm afraid your inbox is doomed, Scott, and I'll defer this because whenever I hear stories about how the free market failure, right?
There's a market failure of some kind.
Yeah, it's possible, but generally every time I've looked into it, there's some Godzilla foot of government regulation or control or zoning or environmental requirements or something like that.
That's kind of bringing its Godzilla foot down on the Bambi head of market incentives.
So we'll leave this for now.
I don't even like agree to disagree.
That's always a cop-out.
But let me have a chance to look into why...
Houses in California are built the way they are.
And if there's market failure, I'll talk about it openly on the show.
If there isn't, I'll pepper you with facts that may influence that.
The one you want to look for is why homes are no longer built with basements.
Start with that.
I would be curious about that.
Because a basement will add to the cost of the house, perhaps, I'm just guessing here, but for a conversation.
Let's say it adds 15% to the cost, because digging a hole is not the hardest thing.
It will double your living space for 15% extra.
If the builder could convince you that was true, then you would buy it and be happy.
But it turns out that things like your property tax and how people compare real estate to say, this is my comp, they don't include basements usually unless they're finished basements.
So there are some stories written about that very thing.
That's where you want to start.
I will do that.
Now, to close up, I could talk all afternoon.
It's a really, really enjoyable chat.
But I wanted to talk about this Trump is crazy thing that seems to be the backup.
He's not only dark, which has sort of a sinister Machiavellian intent to it, but also completely random.
He is both dark and epileptic at the same time as far as light goes.
It's gotten to the point where I think the American Psychiatric Association has put out something to its members saying, will you please stop diagnosing Trump from afar?
We're really not allowed to do that because he's just some guy on TV. He's not in your office.
You don't know about his childhood, how long he was breastfed or whatever's going on.
But this idea that Trump has run this business empire for like 50 odd years and And he's got no history of mental illness.
He's got great kids.
He's got a stable family life at the moment.
And he's been with the same woman for, what, 17 years and so on.
But now he's just crazy.
This is like the new thing that is coming out.
And again, it seems like people find it believable, even though, again, the empirical evidence kind of leans against it.
So I was watching Dr.
Drew appearing on CNN. I think it was Don Lemon or somebody was asking him if Trump was actually narcissistic and essentially mentally unstable.
And Dr.
Drew, to his credit, basically said he might be a little narcissistic, but it could be the good kind, because that's what CEOs are.
In order to look good, they have to do a good job.
It's hard to fault somebody who wants to do a good job so they look good, too.
That's not the crime of the century, nor is it a mental problem.
Nor is it something that was often raised when Apple shareholders got together to talk about Steve Jobs.
He was just very effective at it, and he had that mind-bending willpower that drove the company to greatness.
Sorry, go ahead.
So Dr.
Duke, I think, disappointed CNN because he could not conclude, based on watching television, which is what we're all doing, that there was any mental problems that he could see.
Now, that doesn't mean he doesn't have mental problems.
He's just saying, you know, there's no signs of it that an actual doctor would recognize as such.
But the story has lots of legs, you know, the claim that he's a little crazy, because he feeds into the confirmation bias so willingly.
Now, some of that is an intentional provocation, because that's what gets him attention.
And so some of it is totally intentional.
But there are other times that it does look like an accident.
Like he just steps in it.
And some of that is just being unfiltered.
And some of it also...
I've not heard anybody talk about this, so let me talk about it.
Some of it has to do with his New York style of talking.
Now, I was raised in upstate New York, so it's not the city, but it's close enough that we have some regional characteristics in common.
And one of those regional characteristics, which I had to rinse from my personality when I moved to California, where it was no longer acceptable...
Our normal way we talked was in terms of violence.
So if I saw a baby crying, I'd say, I want to throw that baby out of the car.
Or I want to punch that guy in the face.
I feel like, shoot that guy.
Shoot this guy on Fifth Avenue.
So there are a whole lot of things that Trump says in the context of running for president you really shouldn't say.
And that's what everybody's responding to.
They're like, if I were in that job, I wouldn't say that.
I've got to tell you, if I had not moved to California, I would not know the difference.
It was funny, when you did those phrases, your accent came back a little bit, which you can hear back when you see it.
Maybe when it just slips into a full New York accent, you can just get with subtitles not to be taken literally.
Yeah, and when you look at the number of people who were debating the seriousness of some of his comments, which were clearly jokes, like his Second Amendment joke about Hillary Clinton...
Nobody who grew up in New York heard that and thought it was anything but in New York.
I'm exaggerating, of course, but I think if you grew up in New York, you were more likely to recognize that as just a normal New York talker where you talk about shooting people and killing people and punching them in the nose.
And it doesn't mean what it means in California.
If you say it in California, people think you mean it.
If you say it in New York, you're just talking.
Oh, this idea that he hates babies.
He's surrounded by a lot of grandchildren.
He's really bad at hating babies, if that's his goal.
He's the worst baby hater ever.
I think I'll make more.
So, yeah, this crazy thing, as you've pointed out, I mean, the guy's, what, 69?
I mean, it's not like people get some, assuming no brain disorder.
It's not like they get some personality switch.
I just got contacted by a guy I last knew when I was 12.
Steph, I knew him he was 12.
He sounds pretty much the same.
A little deeper, a little huskier.
But the cadence is the same.
The humor is still the same.
And it's like the constancy of personality is one of these things that is hard for people to understand.
The guy is 69.
He's not going to have some giant switch where he's just going to go crazy.
I mean, he's been in the public eye for 50 years.
This kind of cross-examination is not that new for him.
And the idea that he's just going to go nuts now, again, it's just one of these like throw sand in the face of reason and then get people to run screaming for no particular empirical evidence.
So my favorite part of the confirmation bias of that is what goes along with the fact that he must be crazy is the idea that he's not taking advice from people who are giving him good advice.
Despite the fact that we're bombarded with obvious examples of him taking advice.
I mean, you start with his haircut has changed substantially.
You know, and had never changed for years before that, and now it's blonder and better cut.
His makeup has changed, and clearly these are coming from other people, right?
I mean, he didn't look in the mirror and say, yeah, I look a little orange today, let's fix this.
This is coming from other people.
His use of the teleprompter, his softening of his position on immigration, all the way to extreme vetting, and I could go right down the line.
Here's even the best example.
When he He stepped in it a little bit, not a little bit, a lot, when he said that women should be punished for getting an illegal abortion.
Now, he was immediately corrected by the other side.
He was immediately corrected by his own side.
And what did he do?
Did he stay crazy and just stick with it?
No.
He corrected himself the very next day.
And all it was was he was under-informed.
And by the way, almost the entire world was under-informed on that question.
If you had popped that question to anybody who was not a politician and said, do you think a woman should be punished for breaking a law?
Almost everybody would say yes.
And then if you'd say, okay, but there's a reason in this case because it makes more sense to punish the doctor because the woman in this case might be more victim than perpetrator, you can say, okay, I get that.
This is a special case.
So I can hear that argument.
But the first time you hear it, You know, that's a bit of a trick question.
So, as a citizen politician, it's no surprise he missed it.
And I think that the goal of it, and of course, you've had a public presence longer than I have.
I'm sort of cooking it around 10 years, and you've been out in public longer.
But with the internet, it seems like there's this battle between authenticity and hysteria, in that I think that the best communicators, and Trump is Fantastic at this.
He doesn't seem to have that I'm wearing my human flesh suit moment that Hillary sometimes seems.
He's very authentic.
At least, you know, whether that's manipulation or not, no way to know.
But I think this authenticity where you don't self-censor, you speak your mind, you listen and respond in ways that are genuine and organic, and that's what gives you energy, and that's what gives you focus, and that's what gives you connection with people.
You know, we can't connect with a manipulation any more than you can hug a hologram.
But what happens is I think that when people set themselves against someone like Trump and attack everything he says and misinterpret his jokes and hammer back at him for every comment that he's ever made, what happens is I think they're trying to trap him into the, I'm going to try and manage my critics by picking my words.
That takes the connection out of the conversation.
That takes the spontaneity out of the conversation.
And that drains him, I think, of his biggest political capital, which is that he's a brilliant guy who can connect with the average person in a very visceral way.
Well, you have to reconcile that with the fact that they're all doing A-B testing the whole way.
So everything that doesn't work, he's looking to fix.
And he's done that a number of times.
I just gave you some examples on that.
So he does need to change, and he needs to adapt and be flexible the entire journey.
And that's always a little bit in conflict with saying whatever you want whenever you want to.
So there's a little balance there.
All right.
Well, listen, Scott, I'm really, really enjoying the conversation, but let's...
Let's do our own A-B testing and see how people are enjoying our chatting.
I think that they'll really respond positively.
Just wanted to remind people how to fail at almost everything and still win big.
Kind of the story of my life.
We didn't even get to the vocal challenges that you had, which I found fascinating.
Perhaps next time you need to read Scott's blog.
Very, very important.
Just sign up and subscribe.
There's almost going to be always something that is coming out.
You can find a blog.dilbert.com and, of course, the comics, which are still delightful after so many years, and I really applaud your creativity in that.
