Sept. 29, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:50
3433 How Donald Trump Won the Election | 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 objectives of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton going into the first presidential debate, the optics of Clinton's collapse on 9/11, why Scott changed his endorsement from Clinton to Trump, the danger of supporting Donald Trump, spotting cognitive dissonance, stopping ISIS with persuasion and how the presidential election will play out through November. 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
Now, if you don't know him, please crawl out from under the rock you've been living under.
He is the creator of the wildly popular Dilbert comic strip published daily in thousands of newspapers across the world.
He is also the author of many best-selling and, I dare say, prescient books, including How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big...
Kind of the story of my life.
He is also a trained hypnotist, so don't look too deeply into his eyes during this video, and an expert in the field of persuasion and, of course, Dilbert.com.
We'll link, of course, below.
You need to check it out for the great comics.
And also, his blog is absolutely mind-blowing and fascinating reading.
Scott, thank you so much for coming back.
Thanks so much for having me.
So...
The debate.
The debate.
The clash of the titans, what happened on Monday night.
You have shared some of your thoughts, of course, on your blog and on Twitter and other places, but I wonder if you could sort of synthesize what you thought was going on, because it was kind of a frustrating debate, I think, for a lot of people.
Yeah, so what I saw was that Clinton seemed to win quite handily in traditional debate terms.
So she had the better facts and, you know, she put Trump on the defensive in the second part.
And you could argue that the questions were favorable to her because they mentioned Trump's past scandalous behavior without mentioning much of her past scandalous behavior.
So on all those levels, Clinton just won handily.
But as we're starting to digest the thing, you know, a little time passes.
There are these things that are trickling into people's minds that are really fascinating.
One of them is that during the entire debate, Trump referred to Clinton as Secretary Clinton.
She referred to him as sexist, racist, crazy.
So basically, first of all, you have a full reversal.
He's the one acting presidential, she's the one with the insults.
Forget about the facts and whether or not Anything she claimed about him is true or not true.
None of that really matters.
It's all about how we perceive it, how we feel, what we're sensing.
And to me, the one and only thing that Trump had to accomplish was he had to accomplish not looking like a crazy, racist person who was going to blow up the world with nuclear weapons.
And if you look at his demeanor, it looked presidential enough.
Because remember, we're sort of grading on a curve.
Because we've seen Trump enough that Trump acting relatively uncrazy looks normal in sort of the Trump framework, right?
So he looked completely normal that way.
He looked like a fairly standard politician in terms of his demeanor.
And he held back on his most provocative attacks that he could have used.
You know, things about Clinton's personal life.
And he even said that in case we missed it, which is the funny part.
I think he was worried that we would miss the fact that he had gone an entire debate acting presidential, so he told us.
He said, I could have said these things and I chose not to.
And he gave a good reason.
There was someone he respected in the audience, Chelsea Clinton.
So, I think he accomplished the only thing he needed to do to win the election, but he definitely lost the debate.
Now, because there are three debates, and because he's a gamer, he's not going to do as poorly in the next two.
And he's going to be ready for the birther question and ready for the gotcha questions.
And he'll have briefer answers.
He'll dismiss them as unimportant as they are.
And he'll do much better.
And in our minds, we're going to see this fellow go from, wow, that was a terrible first debate, to just sort of less terrible the second time.
And you know what everybody's going to say?
Wow, well, okay, that was a lot better.
By the third debate, Clinton is going to be exactly the same as she was in the first one, or worse, but he's going to be a lot better.
And suddenly he's going to look a lot presidential.
Well, and that's the arc, I think, that gets people really, really excited.
There's no sports movie that starts with the sports guy already at the top.
You know, it's always Rocky.
You know, he's like a break-your-knuckles kind of thug.
And then he has this arc.
And we love that arc of redemption because, of course, a lot of people feel like that's hopefully the sort of future story of their lives.
But I think what I had to keep reminding myself, Scott, was that...
The people who are already supporting Trump, that's not his target audience in the debate.
Because, you know, if you've already got the sale, you stop selling.
The people who are resolutely against Trump, no matter what, like the Never Trumpers on either side of the aisle, well, they're not really his audience either.
The audience is the undecideds.
And I think remembering that can really help you understand what target he was trying to hit during that debate.
So one of those undecided people stopped me in the gym yesterday.
said, "What do you think of the debate?" And she told me that her biggest fear of Trump is that he's a crazy guy and he'll say something to another head of state that will start a war.
And I just started running through the reasoning.
I said, "You know, you watched him the entire debate acting like a normal person.
You saw that he thinks that nuclear weapons are the biggest problem to humanity as opposed to Hillary who thinks it's the second biggest problem after climate change." And whether it is or not, I'm not making that argument.
I'm just saying that, you know, he's going for full peace, right?
He's making his play that he's the most peaceful person.
But then I said this.
Did you see Trump meeting with Netanyahu?
And afterwards, Netanyahu said, yeah, I could work with both of these leaders, Clinton and Trump.
He met with both of them.
So Netanyahu is a pretty smart guy.
He doesn't seem to be worried about Trump.
The president of Mexico met Trump.
Nobody got into a slap fight.
Everything looked pretty good.
And how about Putin?
Who's Putin going to get along with better?
Trump, who he already says he kind of likes, or Clinton, who thinks that Putin is the devil and wants to tell us all and therefore embarrass a guy who's got a nuclear arsenal and is going to need to fix any perceptions of his weakness that she creates.
So, If you actually look at what he's done, and then you project a little more and say to yourself, okay, imagine the leaders of China, who are mostly coming from engineering fields, a hyper-rational group of leaders, who are running the biggest country in the world quite successfully by any objective measure.
Do you think that Trump is going to walk in and they're going to say, well, we haven't done any homework on you.
We don't know what kind of a person you are, because it's not like there's any news coverage we could refer to And, oh my God, did you just say that?
Have you insulted all of China?
Do we need to launch a nuclear strike?
Nothing like that can happen in the real world.
In the real world, China knows exactly what they're getting, and they know what's talk and what isn't.
They know how to negotiate, and they even have experience with Trump.
He's been negotiating with important Chinese people for a long time.
Okay, so this is sort of a life lesson that I learned many, many, many years ago.
I was reading this article, and it was just funny, you know, you just consume stuff, and every now and then this lightning bolt hits you and changes the course of your life.
And this, I think, is directly relevant to Trump.
And the article was about, it doesn't really matter her name, but there was this woman in Canada who was really, really big on just getting charitable events going, and she'd raised hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
And the way that she did it was really fascinating.
You know what she said, Scott?
She said, "You just act like it's gonna happen, and it happens." You know, so you just say, "Listen, there's gonna be this big gala, everyone's gonna be there, it's gonna be black tie, there's gonna be the Timmy Dorsey Orchestra resurrected from the dead." And she would just start selling tickets saying about all of this incredible stuff, and she had nothing.
She had like a date on a napkin or something like that.
Oh, it's going to be at this beautiful venue and there's going to be doves in the rough.
Like, she would come up and then because she said it was going to happen, by golly, it happened.
So, and this was a big lesson for me because...
You know, as a sort of good old raised Protestant kind of guy, it's like, well, you have to have all your ducks in a row and you have to have everything ready before you can sail.
And no, you build the plane as it's taking off.
It's just a weird thing that actually completely and totally works because people are drawn towards stuff that's happening and they make it happen if you just sail ahead with confidence.
Yeah, I mean, you basically describe leadership.
Yeah, and Trump is doing that.
He's doing everything that he would be doing if he were president.
He goes to the floods in Louisiana.
He goes to meet with Mexico.
He meets with Netanyahu.
I mean, how is this not, it's not even like an audition.
He's just, hey, put the camera on me.
I'm already making the movie.
Yeah, he's already performing the job in some ways.
If you look at I would argue that he's changed the GOP attitude toward gay rights and the entire LGBTQ community and made them happy about it.
I mean, I don't see anybody in the GOP complaining about him phrasing or basically framing the GOP as the protector of that community.
People embrace that because I think they like that kind of self-image.
So he's already made some pretty significant changes in the way we're thinking about stuff, the way we think about border control, the way we think about a lot.
He's changed way more than politics.
He's changed the way we're thinking about the world.
Now, let's turn a little bit to Hillary's health.
Now, of course, neither of us be doctors, but nonetheless, we have eyes and judgment.
And I think the poll has come out that I think about a third of Americans think her health is fine.
And that debate seems to have really switched.
The one thing that, you know, I'm sort of objective reason and evidence-based philosophy guy, so I find myself kind of smashing up against your facts don't matter, perception is everything perception, but, you know, I'm willing to take it for a spin because I've actually done a whole presentation called The Death of Reason about how facts don't matter.
But how do you think this perception of Hillary's health is going to play into what goes down over the next couple of weeks?
As I said about Trump, he had one thing to prove, which is looking presidential.
I think Clinton had one thing to prove at the debate, which is looking healthy.
Now, my observation after the debate is that people who support her think she looked healthy and people who don't think she didn't.
I don't know how objective I am anymore, but to my eyes, my untrained eyes, not a doctor, her eyes looked sleepy and it looked like there was something going on, either pharmaceutical or otherwise.
But it could be just, you know, she's sick and she's tired.
So I think she didn't make that a sale.
I think that one of the things that humans are really exquisitely good at is detecting good health in other humans.
Even if it doesn't bubble up to our conscious mind.
Because our most basic human desire, the thing we've evolved to do, is reproduce effectively.
And reproduce with people who can give us better genes.
And so to that purpose, we identify beauty and symmetry.
We see it as good health.
And I think we're exquisite at detecting bad health in people we've seen a lot.
So a parent can tell a kid is sick, their own kid, far quicker than you could tell someone else's kid is sick.
So we've seen Hillary Clinton enough that I think the public looked at her and said, Well, she did stand for 90 minutes, and you've got to give her credit for that.
No matter what you say about Clinton, you can say anything you want to say bad about Clinton.
She is one spunky motherfucker.
I mean, she does have the guts to get where she is.
So you can't take that away from her.
But, that said, she didn't look healthy to my untrained eyes.
And I think other people have the same perception.
Even if we're all wrong, she looked...
A little less healthy than you would want for your president.
Right.
This is just that, again, I don't know where my biases lie.
And I've sort of tried to be objective, but, you know, recognizing that there's always a slant.
This sort of cocky grin that she had throughout large portions of the...
I guess it's supposed to represent that she's really confident, that she's amused by this buffoon on the other side of the debate stage and so on.
But given the seriousness of some of the issues that were being talked about, I felt that it was sort of skating very high on the, well, isn't this all just very silly, you know, like Oscar Wilde at the Nuremberg trials kind of stuff.
And it just struck me as something that would be provocative to people who understand the gravity of the election that's coming up.
But I guess this was a strategy that she wanted to pursue, that it made her look confident, didn't seem that way to me.
Well, a couple of points on that.
Number one, People have the same reaction to Trump's face and persona, and I hear that specifically.
They say, I just can't stand listening to him or looking at him.
So if you're on one of the candidates' side, the other one looks hideous to you, because that's just how our minds are wired.
That said, I think people had told Clinton to look friendlier and warmer, and that translates to smiling more.
But not everybody has a natural smile.
There are family members of mine, who will not be named, who in family photos, they look natural in every context except on a photograph.
Some people just don't have natural smiles.
So she might be suffering from that.
But she also has, and this is just conjecture, right?
So put this in context of just me saying, hey, this might be one of the things.
People that age often have Botox.
Because it makes them look better.
Nothing wrong with that.
I'm not criticizing that at all.
But one of the effects is it might make your eyes less expressive or your mouth smile unnaturally.
Or worse, and this is the worst case scenario, if your eyes don't match your smile, because let's say if your crow's feet have Botox, and I'm not saying she had, I'm just using an example, science shows that if your smile doesn't match your eyes, you just look like sort of a crazy maniac But you look disingenuous.
You look like your smile is not genuine.
And people, again, we are very face-oriented as a species.
The smallest little change or something unusual in the face just really cues us really hard.
So I think people were seeing that.
Her smile looked a little too much for the camera.
Maybe it was a little unnatural.
Maybe there was some Botox thing going on.
But you're right.
It was startling.
I saw it as Almost unnatural.
It didn't look like a human emotion, but I think that might have to do with something going on cosmetically.
You talked or wrote in your blog about the optics of her appearing to collapse into a van like, you know, a sack of cement falling off a bus on 9-11 while she, of course, was at some of the memorial services for 9-11.
And I remember that hit me really hard.
I did a video that did very well just that very day.
But I couldn't articulate it, and I think you articulated what that meant for Americans in particular, that event occurring on that day.
So 9-11 is the single biggest emotional connection we have to, you know, risk and violence and attacks on the homeland, and the whole military, you know, protect the homeland kind of set of thoughts in our head.
And when you pair all that With someone who wants to be commander-in-chief and literally just collapses because it was 78 degrees out and she hadn't had a drink of water.
No matter what the story is behind it.
It doesn't matter what the real story is.
The optics of that are pairing the worst possible two things you could pair together for someone who wants to become the next president of the United States.
So, I largely declared the election over at that point.
I don't think she can win after that.
There was a video floating around.
We'll link to it below.
I'm going to give my tiny impression of it.
Let me just get my sort of bug eyes out.
I know it's coming.
I know it's coming.
Why am I not 50 points ahead?
Or something like that.
Sorry about your ears.
RIP headphone users.
But that was going out to some union officials.
I don't know if it was supposed to ever be out.
And she made a mistake.
My father was a small business and she corrected herself.
A small businessman.
Why not do another take?
Why don't people say, you know, maybe dial it back 50 or so?
I remember as a theater director, I'd say that to the actors, you know, do what you were doing, but 5% of that, because actors always think that if you go big, then everyone gets the emotion, but you just kind of look a little unhinged.
Let me go into fully irresponsible territory, things you shouldn't say in public, but I'm going to protect myself a little bit by putting this in the context of persuasion, right?
So I'm going to talk in terms of how we perceive this.
I don't know the real facts.
So I'm not claiming a set of facts.
I'm just saying how we perceive it.
Let me ask you this question.
You've probably seen people who have acted like that, which is their voice is high, and they speak almost out of character and a little more angry than you think they ought to.
And in what situation do you see that?
For someone who you know doesn't normally talk like that, under what circumstances in your normal life do you see that happen?
Sorry, go ahead.
I'll lead the witness because you're probably going to get there anyway.
It's basically when people are drinking.
Name any other situation you can think of where someone who normally talks in a regular voice for some fairly extended period, which is the length of the interview, talked in a higher, sort of angrier, almost a little uncontrolled voice.
It looked to me drunk.
Now, I'm not saying she was.
I'm saying that people watching that...
What other interpretation would you put on it?
And then to your point, why didn't the director say, cut, let's do this again, less crazy.
Give me one other explanation how that couldn't happen.
And the only one I can think of is she couldn't do it that day.
Meaning she couldn't.
There was something happening with her physically that didn't allow you to do another take that was better than the first one.
Well, that certainly could be the case.
Another possibility or what I sort of drew out of that particular video, Scott, was that she may not have people around her who are pushing back on her performance, who are saying, no, you need to do that again.
You need to do that better.
And, you know, I mean, when I do a take of a video, I'll share it with some people sometimes and get some feedback.
And that kind of feedback is important.
Now, we know that Trump is getting that kind of feedback and people are saying X, Y, and Z to him.
And I think he's incorporating some of it into what he's doing.
But she has, you know, had reports of a somewhat legendary temper.
And I wonder if there's just, you know, she's maybe terrorized people or has lower quality people around her who aren't pushing back on her performance.
And that, to me, is even worse than the possibility she might have been sozzled to the nines because that means that she's kind of rudderless.
Like if that kind of stuff can get out, and this was a fundraising, as far as I understand it, a whip up the troops kind of speech.
If that kind of stuff can get out, it means that she's surrounded by yes people or people who don't want to push back.
I think one of the biggest under-reported stories is the disappearance of Huma Aberdeen or a close confidant for many years.
And we don't know exactly the nature of their how much of a confidant she was.
But my guess is she was one of the closest.
And if one of your closest is taken out of the game, which is one of Trump's I guess the Trump side, if you could say that.
One of their biggest victories is taking out one of the key players on her side.
So if you were the videographer, probably you can't tell the next president of the United States your take was so bad, we don't want to put this on television.
So you need somebody on the campaign to say that.
And I see the same thing.
I can't understand how that could get on the air if there were adults in the room who saw it.
There's no way they didn't have the same impression you and I did.
Now, of course, there are those out there who accuse you of being an unbelievable flip-flopper.
I mean, you're against Hillary, then you're for Hillary, now you're flip-flopping back.
Now, I get all of it is like dodging sniper fire from Social Justice Warriors, so I can understand a little zig and a little zag in your path.
But I wonder if you can take people through your somewhat sideways journey of endorsements to where you sit now and why.
So my starting point is that I don't know how to defeat ISIS.
And I'm pretty sure you don't either and nobody watching this does.
I don't know how to negotiate a trade policy or what should be in it.
Neither do you.
Neither does any voter.
I don't know what tax policy is going to raise every vote.
I can tell which ones are good for me sometimes, but I don't know what's going to be best for the economy and therefore better for me in the long run.
Just by the way, for everyone out there, it's not minimum wage policy.
So just go ahead.
So most of the big topics of the debate, I just don't know who would be the better president or what would be the better policies.
I am not psychic, and my record in the past of predicting who would do a good job as president has been terrible.
So I was trying to enter this election cycle by writing about it while being on the sidelines, but it became very dangerous because I was writing about Trump's powers of persuasion, and I was praising that.
And in that context, I appeared to be a Trump supporter, which garnered a lot of death threats and other threats.
Some of them veiled.
I mean, if enough people refer to you as a Nazi henchman, as Joseph Goebbels, there's no way you can't see that as an invitation to violence.
Now, maybe not by the person saying it, but somebody's making it safe for someone else to do it.
So, under that scenario, and especially living in California, where it literally is dangerous to be a Trump supporter, I would never go in public with a Trump hat, for example.
That would just be suicide.
In fact, you don't see them.
You don't see California's wearing, at least where I am.
I literally have never seen one.
I've never seen one person wearing a Trump hat in public anywhere I live, because it would be very dangerous.
So I switched my endorsement to Hillary Clinton and I told everybody publicly I was doing it for my personal safety.
Amazingly, that totally worked in the sense that the death threats and the comparison to Hitler immediately decreased.
Not to zero, but from 10 to like a 2.
So I was actually a lot safer.
Then, Clinton announced her plans for the estate tax.
65% It's a confiscation tax on people at the highest levels, not a level I'm at.
But it would also increase the rates substantially at the levels that I am at.
The net effect of that is that today, a dollar that I earn today will get taxed at about 50% by the various government entities.
I don't have any exotic tax avoidance schemes in my life.
And then when I die, if I've got some leftover, let's say it's the dollar I made today as part of what's left over, It would be taxed again at around 50%.
So the dollar I earn today, I get to keep 25%.
And guess what?
I wasn't going to spend most of that on me anyway.
That was going to go to someone else.
Ideally, loved ones and charities and good causes.
So under those conditions, I can't possibly support someone who supports taking 75% of the dollar I earn today.
I mean, it's actually the work I make today.
75% of it.
Now, some people have said, At what point do you call it confiscation?
What tax rate?
Is it just a tax rate?
And when is it confiscation?
And let me put the question to you.
Anytime anybody wants to take 75% of your money, that's a fucking confiscation.
If you're taking 75% of someone else's money, well, you can call that a tax if you want.
But if it's my money, there's nobody you can put in my situation.
Where 75% of their taxes, your money might be taken by the government, who says that's a tax.
Because that doesn't feel like a tax.
Well, it's, you know, the numbers are fairly simple, I would say, Scott, that 100% is pure slavery.
100% confiscation is pure slavery.
So three quarters of the way to pure enslavement does not strike me as just another tax.
Yeah, that's where I am.
So I switched.
And that has brought back just a wave of the social justice warriors.
And the funny thing is, it's almost all ad hominem personal attacks, which I did not see so much.
I don't see it as much on the other side.
Maybe it's there, I just don't see it.
But the typical comment I get on Twitter is, you're a stupid, ugly old man who's never had a good idea.
And your comic strip sucks.
And that's it.
There's no because I disagree with you on tax rates, or perhaps you and I have a different opinion on how the estate tax should be managed.
Nothing like that.
It's all personal.
Well, I mean, I don't want to go off on a rant here to quote Dennis Miller, but very briefly, I believe that the left had better arguments in days gone by when they didn't have control of the media, of Hollywood, of academia, of everything except you, me, and a couple other people who come on the show sometimes, it seems.
They actually had to make really, really good arguments when they were the underdogs.
Now they've ascended to the ring of power and the control of so much of the media.
And, of course, because they're importing voters rather than making arguments.
You know, if you can just put your finger on the scale, well, you don't need to be that efficient a business person.
So the left has gotten lazy.
The left has just gotten lazy.
And this racism argument, this sexism, misogynistic, homophobic, whatever phobic you want to talk about, they're just lazy.
It's been decades since they've had to make a compelling argument because they control the media.
They go after people who challenge them.
They try to destroy their lives.
They try to kill their source of income.
They try to drive them crazy.
So they haven't had to make good arguments.
And now, with the rise of more muscular, let's say, republicanism pushing back hard, I think that they're out of shape when it comes to making arguments, which is why you get all of this low-rent sniping at people.
But they also have the problem of success.
The problem with success is it gets rid of your last goal.
You don't have the same objective once you've succeeded.
I would argue that the left has been amazingly successful, and here I'm going to be fully complimentary, in making society more equal, have equal opportunity, more respect for everybody.
If you look at the Caitlyn Jenner situation, there's more respect for that situation than you ever would have seen 10 years ago, right?
And there's just more respect for the LGBTQ community, for every ethnic group.
We're just a more respectful society, and they have succeeded in that, the left has.
But where do you go from equal?
Once you achieve roughly equal, that was your primary argument.
Hey, let's make everything equal.
Now, we're not there.
I'm not going to claim everything's equal.
Everybody has the same experience in the world.
I'm not making that argument.
But when you get close...
Your best argument is gone.
Because it goes from a big argument.
Hey, let's end slavery.
The biggest thing you could possibly...
The biggest, meatiest, best argument you could possibly take.
To, let's have civil rights.
Still huge.
Big, big, big.
But when you get down to, was this individual discriminated?
Or did this person have enough job experience?
It's hard to tell.
Then the big argument becomes smaller.
Well, and this is why causes that end up being funded by the government never know when to stop.
You know, I don't contribute to a lot of, I don't know, let's get rid of leprosy or polio or things that in the West are mostly taken care of.
Because if they send me all these big flyers, I'm like, well, you know, cancer and heart disease seems a little bit more relevant to me.
So when you have sort of private voluntary funding of causes, when those causes are big and meaty and everybody wants to get involved in them, they do great work.
And then they're supposed to taper off.
You know, they're supposed to taper off.
But when they start getting money from the government, they just go way past the middle of the pendulum.
And then it becomes, well, we don't want equality of opportunity.
We now want equality of outcome.
And that, of course, is impossible to achieve because there's genetics involved, there's life choices involved, there's culture involved, and you can't possibly get equality of outcome.
But once you start aiming at that, most people would not voluntarily fund equality of outcome, but governments will fund it.
And, And so you get, you know, feminists now pushing way past equality and wanting more female supremacy and not caring that there are more women than men in colleges and not caring that there are more men than women getting harmed in industrial accidents or workplace accidents and so on.
So this is the problem.
When the government starts funding causes, they go way past the midpoints and just become way too activist.
And I think that turns from something which people sympathize with to something that they view, I think rightly so, as pretty destructive.
Well, anytime you hear the word fairness in your argument, you should just run away.
Because as I often say, the fairness is something that was invented so that idiots and children could have something to argue about.
Because the world is not designed as fair.
You know, fairness is not an objective quality of reality.
It's purely subjective.
So as long as the moment you allow yourself to believe there is something called fairness, you can't get to a solution.
Because you're going to be in this...
This mental frame that is just purely imaginary.
Let's talk about tells, because you've written quite a bit about this, tells for cognitive dissonance.
I wonder if you can help maybe civilize and raise the standard of conversation in the world by helping people to understand tells and what they mean about people's state of mind.
Well, when I talk about a tell, I'm, of course, borrowing from poker.
When somebody shows that they've got good cards, that's sort of a tell.
In persuasion, you should see it best in Twitter, when people start their tweets with wow or lol or omg.
So basically what you're saying is, and then they just completely misrepresent your argument.
Yeah, they start with the word so.
So you're saying that aliens have colonized the world.
Anything that happens after so, if that's the first word in the sentence, you can just ignore it because it's just something hallucinated or made up.
So, when I see those tells, I call them out on Twitter and I retweet them so other people can see the pattern.
It's a little easier if you've been looking at them for a while.
But usually, now, there's nothing that's 100% here, right?
So people use those words in common ways that are also not cognitive dissonance.
But if you see OMG and then there's no reason, or nothing like Look at this link for the counter argument or your assumption does not include this data or something like that.
Well, then they're just using language and it doesn't mean anything.
But if somebody says, LOL, OMG, this guy, then there's probably, it's probably and almost certainly, I would say, high likelihood, 80% or so, that what you've done is you've actually persuaded them in some way and they don't like it.
And so what happens when You feel persuaded, but you're not going to change.
Like the argument is good on the other side, but you don't want to accept it.
You hallucinate.
That's called cognitive dissonance.
And I'm not saying that figuratively.
You actually hallucinate that somebody said something they didn't.
So when somebody says so, they're usually then explaining something you did not say, because the only thing they have to argue against is the thing you didn't say, because they're agreeing with the thing you said.
I would say that if you look on the internet, you would find lots of people accusing me of being a sexist, for example.
But if you put me in the same room and say, point by point, do you agree with this point, this point, this point?
We would agree on every point.
There's almost nothing about feminism that I don't agree with in terms of its structure or its primary goals.
I'm completely on the page.
But if I say something that's persuasive and it's not exactly what you like...
You suddenly imagine that I'm Hitler or sexist or something, and then you have to go from there.
Well, you call it the tell, I call it the valley girl test.
Because to me, if I'm reading a message and it instantly gets translated into valley girl speak in my head, that's my telling, LOL, oh my God, is this what you actually said?
Like, I can't believe it.
You know, if it's coming across like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless...
Thank you.
Thank you.
...an argument because people think somehow that, you know, straw man arguments somehow work.
And maybe they do until people can identify what is critical thinking and what isn't.
Now, there'll always be people who won't bother with critical thinking and will just spray their random nonsense of syllables all over the place.
But I do want people to start getting into the habit of knowing what is an actual argument and what isn't so that they can end up interacting with people who have the capacity to think.
...between the straw man...
Where somebody is intentionally misstating your argument so that they have a better way to debate it.
So you might see that in a debate situation.
And in those cases, somebody is intentionally saying, oh, I'm going to weaken their argument by restating it in this way.
That's not what you see on Twitter.
What you see on Twitter is someone who actually hallucinates that you said something different than what you said.
That's a completely different thing.
And people conflate the two and say, oh, it's a It's a straw man argument, but it's not.
It's actually a hallucination.
And the comeback that I've been testing, which is working really well, is when somebody does these, so you're saying something ridiculous that I didn't say.
I always just say, your hallucination is noted.
And then I just walk away.
And it turns out that it works really well.
As soon as you engage, you lose, right?
Don't engage with people who can't think.
I have to get that in reverse calligraphy on my forehead, so I brush my teeth every morning.
I see it in the mirror.
Do not engage with people who can't think.
There is...
Something which goes on all the time on the internet, too, which is, you know, the argument from catastrophe.
And that, to me, it indicates a significant failure of imagination and understanding of economics and history and so on.
And it sort of goes something like this.
I hate the welfare state.
Morally, intellectually, we don't have to get into a debate about it, but I think it's incredibly destructive.
Private charity is fantastic.
Government charity creates dependence and creates dysfunction and isolates people from communities and societies and destroys the family.
Anyway, it's a whole bunch of things, right?
So when I put these arguments out, Scott, what I get is, oh, so, hang on, maybe I'll do it in the Valley Girl because that's the filter.
Oh, so what you're saying is that you want poor people to die in the street?
Is that what you're saying?
And, of course, this is not an argument, right?
I mean, the reality is that when the money runs out and the welfare stops, as it's going to do with $20 trillion in debt and hundreds of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities, money's going to run out.
People will have adapted to an environment that can't possibly continue that's going to be incredibly destructive.
And the analogy to me is sort of like this.
You know, in the past, particularly in the South, of course, the slaves picked the cotton and picked the vegetables and picked the fruits and, you know, made food available for everyone.
So it's sort of like saying, well, I really want to end slavery, and then people think, Oh, so what you're saying is you, like, totally want people that starve to death and nobody's going to have any food and then society's over and we can't...
And it's like, no, if you end slavery, you open up massive opportunities for other things.
Like, if you were to say...
I'll finish in a sec.
Thanks for your patience.
If you were to say to someone, I want to end slavery, and they'd say, oh, well, like, who's going to pick the food?
Who's going to, like, we're going to starve to death?
And then you said, okay, here's how it's going to work.
A couple of decades after we end slavery, there's really cool things going to happen.
These giant robot machines that run on crushed prehistoric tree juice are going to go rolling across the landscape and giant mechanical robot arms and wheels...
I'm going to pick the fruit and pick the cotton and automate it.
And right now, like 90% of people involved in farming, but within a century or so, it's only going to be about 2% because these giant robots that run on crushed tree juice are going to solve everything.
People would say to you, you're completely insane!
And because they think you're insane, they won't let go of slavery, which means you never get to the future which you could have otherwise had.
And this is why I always push back.
The argument from catastrophe is not an argument.
It simply shows that you don't have trust in the ingenuity of human beings to solve problems in the future.
This reminds me of what I call the Adam's Law of Slow-Moving Disasters.
And I use this quite often.
And it's the observation that when humans can see a problem coming from far away...
We always solve it.
So we thought we were going to run out of food because of population, but we just got better at birth control and making food.
We thought we were going to run out of oil in the 70s, but we got better at energy control and we got better mileage and we can find shale.
And now there's too much oil.
I mean, we have too much.
The year 2000 problem was going to blow up the world, but we saw it come and we fixed it.
It was no big deal.
And you can just go right down the line.
ISIS probably will be solved.
Because we've got time, we see it coming.
So people forget that the solutions are always the thing you don't see now.
Sort of by definition, there are these surprise innovations that are the thing that drives society.
Society never goes in a straight line.
Because if it did, everybody would know where it's heading and that would basically change it.
So the I think?
The Adams Law of slow-moving disasters, you can use that yourself for your many, many arguments.
I like that.
And I think that's where some free market solutions and voluntary solutions are in play.
When I sort of look at, I mean, one of the big slow-moving disasters is, you know, as you've probably heard of it, called the demographic winter, you know, changes in demographies in Western cultures in particular.
That is a slow-moving disaster, but the free market is not able to deal with it because it's kind of a government-enforced program of immigration and subsidies and welfare and so on.
I'm not entirely positive that that particular problem is going to be solved over time, but it is something people need to keep an eye on.
Well, let me go to your point about we're all going to run out of money.
If we deal with that as just, hey, we better lower our taxes or lower government spending, you probably can't get there.
What you need is some huge step function, such as innovation in the way we pay for housing, the way food is distributed, the way we find work.
For example, maybe you could get rid of most of unemployment if it were easy for an unemployed guy in San Francisco to find a job in some other state and get there, which is actually beyond the capability of most low-skill workers with no money, right?
They can't really get to another state.
So you can imagine a whole bunch of ways that robots can build our houses so that they're energy efficient and the cities are efficient so you don't need to own your own car.
Life is so good you don't need to spend all your day on the internet masturbating or whatever you're doing.
In other words, you can build a life that's awesome and amazing, better than anything we have now, that could cost a fraction of what it costs them now.
And people would have jobs if they could find them and get to them.
It's all solvable stuff.
And, you know, maybe robots will make everything easy for us.
So, to me, the future has nothing to do with taxes and lowering government spending.
We have to do that stuff, but within parameters, it's not going to change the world.
The big stuff is the stuff you don't see coming.
It's the innovations.
Let's talk a little bit about ISIS.
You have written something that, and again, please, people, go subscribe to Scott's blog.
It's fantastic stuff.
I find it titillating and shocking and annoying in equal measure, which I think is the mark of somebody who's challenging your thinking processes.
But you've talked about, you know, I always feel like I have to pay five bucks to Mike Cernovich every time I use this word, but you talk about the mindset of ISIS and how to contain a sort of radicalized ideology without military force.
I am absolutely convinced military force is not going to solve the problem.
Military force is, to a large degree, responsible for the continuation or escalation of the problem of radicalism.
And so the idea of containing a mindset I find fascinating.
I want you to break that out for people.
So first of all, military force is persuasion.
Because rarely does anybody try to kill all the souls, all the people on the other side.
You're trying to kill enough of them You persuade the rest of them that fighting is a bad idea, right?
So everything military is persuasion by its nature, but it's not enough.
And as you noted with ISIS in particular, they found a way to capitalize on military losses by using it to help recruiting.
So I think you'd have to separate two solutions.
There's the people within ISIS caliphate, you know, physically there, and then there's the lone wolves and the people around the world.
And you would have to attack them separately.
For ISIS, I blogged today that Turkey is finishing up their wall in the north.
It'll put a pretty solid border wall on one side.
You see Saudi Arabia building their wall across the border with Iraq.
I'm sure Israel has some kind of strong border.
Iran and Jordan is also building a wall.
So that pretty much fences in ISIS. So if you were going to persuade them to change...
The best way to do that would be to...
Hold on.
I'm going to turn off my phone.
I'm a terrible interview.
You would persuade them by first creating a border around the country so that nobody can get out, and then you would control the communication in and out, and then you would be in a position to persuade.
Now, the persuasion might be Telling the rest of the outside world, hey, ISIS is just doing its own thing here, but really perhaps what's happening is the military is just eradicating them.
Once the press isn't there, once they can't communicate, we would have free reign to do whatever horrible things need to be done.
Now, hopefully we would be filtering out the women and young children who are purely innocent, but the young men who are ambiguously ISIS or not would have a big problem there.
But that's the only way you can contain an idea that is effectively a virus.
It's like a virus that has a human host.
If you let those people out, or you let their ideas out, it spreads.
So first you contain ISIS, put a wall around it physically, cut off communications, and then you've contained that.
But then the rest of the world, you know, the lone wolves and the people who are self-radicalizing and the cells that have already gotten out.
You continue hunting down the cells as they're active, and apparently we're pretty good at that now.
And For the rest, you do some kind of A-B testing on persuasion.
And you could probably hook people up to sensors and brain scans and say, how about this message?
Did that activate your emotional part of your brain?
Because that's all we care about.
Nobody's going to be persuaded by facts.
Did you know if you do this that X people are going to die?
And they'll say, well, yeah, that's the point.
Well, did you know that your religion does not have the scientific backing that you would expect?
Well, I want to kill you.
I mean, you can't really get there with facts, right?
So you A-B test persuasion, you see if the part of the brain that influences people emotionally lights up with one technique versus another, and then you just improve until you can do it flawlessly.
Right.
Let me take a run through your persuasion matrix here, because one of the things that's kind of driving me nuts, and it does every election, and every election, Scott, I promise myself not to get bothered.
I know it's going to happen, but it happens anyway.
And this is sort of class baiting.
Like, if I hear one more goddamn person on the left say, we're going to make the rich pay their fair share...
Again, head will explode and it'll be played back in slow motion like a philosophy dissolving scanners moment.
Because the degree of taxes paid by the super rich is unbelievable.
The top one-tenth of 1% of families in America pay almost 40% of the taxes.
60% of families in America get way more out of the government than they pay in taxes.
45% don't pay any federal income tax.
So there is already highly progressive verging somewhere between socialism and communism in terms of pillaging the rich and handing out the rewards to buy the votes of the poor.
And I have, of course, had the debates where I bring these facts.
These facts to the table.
And I will report that, as per your theories, they're stunningly ineffective.
And so when it comes to helping people to understand that, I don't know, 0.1% paying 40%, that seems like a little bit more than their fair share.
How would you try and get pushback against this kind of class-baiting stuff without facts?
I hate myself even for saying it, but it does seem to be how things work.
Well, remember, you used the word fair in this, and if you're saying, hey, how can it be fair that I'm paying, you know, 40% of the taxes and it's only a small group?
Well, that sounds reasonable until somebody says, but you're living in a mansion, you've got 15 jets, and these people are literally starving and can't get an education.
How is that fair?
And the answer is, fair is, you know, created for idiots and children to have conversations.
There's a There is no such thing as fairness.
The world doesn't have any.
It's not a quality of nature.
So, yeah, fairness will never get you there.
What you do is you've got to find some argument that appeals to everyone's self-interest at the same time.
Now, people do make some headway in saying that if the rich don't invest and build companies, you have no place to work.
And I think people feel that.
That's a logical point, but you also feel that because you go to work.
And there is an employer, and it's so easy to imagine, well, if they weren't there, I would be commuting to an empty field and starving to death.
So that level of you see it affecting your own life works a little better.
But I don't think you can get there intellectually at all.
You've got to bring it down to the, in your life, can you imagine these rich people gone?
And by the way, now you don't have an iPhone.
Now you don't have a company to go to.
But in general, the rich are pretty nimble and pretty good at avoiding things.
So what's going to happen is, of course, the income tax originally was only supposed to affect 1% to 2% of the population, and now it's considerably expanded beyond that.
But the rich are going to keep away from it.
So here's the way I would approach that.
Using something I call the high ground approach, you take it to a level where everybody will agree, not at the level where everybody disagrees about what's fair.
And I would say that Bill Gates has done that.
So in other words, his take is, why are you asking the government how much they're taking?
What the hell are you doing, rich guy?
Like, what are you, rich guy, doing to make the world better?
Bill Gates has given away all of his money and working tirelessly to help Africa, etc.
Now, if you said to me, do you want to tax Bill Gates more?
I would say, that would be crazy.
Because you'd be taking his money that is so effectively applied and moving it to the government where you know it won't be.
How is anybody better at that?
It's not better for the poors.
And everybody gets that, right?
Nobody disagrees with that.
So if you can make the case that the rich do have a greater responsibility but giving their money down the rat hole of the government is the worst way to get rid of it, I think you could make an argument that the rich need to do more and they should do more.
But they should do it intelligently.
They should find ways to innovate the way the Gates Foundation does.
They're not just throwing money in Africa and say, hey, do something.
They're A-B testing and they're figuring out, okay, this is a really good lever.
If we put money on this one, it makes a big difference.
Let's test it small.
Hey, it worked in a small test.
Let's test it big now.
So that kind of approach, both in being rational with how you're approaching it and getting rich people on the right side.
I mean, rich people should say, Stop taxing us so we can help.
That's the better argument.
Because look at me.
I'm the perfect example.
As I've said, every dollar I make for the rest of my life will be spent by someone else.
The one and only control I have over that dollar is where it goes.
I can decide who gets it.
And so in my life, I've invested in several medical startups that needed money from rich people.
The government wasn't going to fund them.
It needed a rich individual who had too much money to say, I will give you some money.
Now, if any one of those three or four medical startups succeeds, it's a big freaking deal for a lot of people.
Most people are poor, or most people are not rich.
So I am directly helping, in the most vigorous way I can, society.
Of everybody, not just rich people.
But please, just let me do it.
Now, if I'm not doing a good job at that, well, maybe the government needs to step in or something, because I do think rich people need to do more.
There's no argument at that point.
But could we do it a little more intelligently?
I think we could.
Well, of course, if you invest badly, the market will tell you very quickly by taking your money and putting it someplace other than your pocket.
So you get that kind of feedback from intelligent investments or not, that sort of market thing.
Rich people can invest unintelligently, meaning that all the startups they invest in fail, but it creates all this economic opportunity.
Because even as it's failing, people are getting paid and vendors are providing goods and stuff.
And then, you know, if one in 20 of them works out and it's a big deal, people get jobs and they get new devices and life is better.
So the rich people don't have to be even good at it.
They just have their head in the right place and sort of marching in the same general direction of north and good things happen because money and energy...
Produces good things as long as they're generally in the right direction.
Well, and failures are enormously positive for other people who haven't failed or who haven't tried.
So if like 50 people have tried to start some business in some area and then 51, the 51st person comes along, all 50 have failed, he'll do his market research and say, whoa, there's no market for that.
I better go somewhere else.
So even your failure is helping to point other capital or scarce resources into a better direction.
All right, let me ask you the last big giant question.
Save the best for last.
Now, just a mild pump for a series that I've done called Gene Wars.
I've sort of been trying to answer why societies as a whole throughout the world tend to fall along this left-right paradigm.
And again, I mean, there's lots of exceptions and so on.
But there does seem to be this left-right paradigm that shows up throughout history in a wide variety of different cultures and societies.
If you roughly accept that this tends to be a pattern through, I guess you could say throughout human societies, what are your thoughts about what might be the cause for it?
Why does it tend to go under this left-right paradigm?
You've got conservatives and liberals, classical liberals and socialists.
There is this left-right collectivist, individualist, small government, big government, more religious, less religious kind of paradigm that goes on in the world.
Do you have any thoughts as to why this kind of pattern might be occurring regularly?
Yeah.
I think different people are gullible in different ways.
Wait, wait.
If you could give me a cynical answer for once, just for once, Scott, I would be thrilled.
You know, my view is that we're all living in our own private movie anyway, and that there probably isn't an objective reality that we have access to, even if it exists.
So, given that we all have our own movie, we also have different risk profiles, for example, and And I think that people are also fooled in different ways.
In other words, they're gullible in different ways.
So if you say, for example, and I'll get in trouble here, but if your gullibility involves a supreme being, that comes with it a certain set of beliefs that are sort of prepackaged for you.
You know, you don't have to buy into them, but if you buy into the supreme being concept, there's a good chance that you're going to go in one direction.
If you buy into the fact that government can solve all your problems, you go in a different direction.
So both of these things might be absurd to the other.
But I think people are born with some natural inclination to be, let's say, gullible to one type of argument or another.
And that's probably hard-coded into us.
My guess is that as long as gullibility is not uniform across people, there will be at least two camps all the time.
Right.
Now, I guess one last comment from you.
And many people don't realize they look at Scott's headphones and they think it's just, you know, but no, it's actually a time traveling device, which is the only way to explain the accuracy of his predictions over this election cycle.
And of course, you have other predictions that are great as well.
But it was back in 2003.
You sort of predicted the rise of ISIS and all this kind of stuff in a book that you were writing, and it's eerie.
And this is why you have an annoying amount of credibility with me, and I just have to be honest about that, because people who are accurate in their predictions, you have to give credence to them, which is why I'm a big fan of Austrian economics, but that's perhaps a topic for another time.
We've got, what, five, six weeks left in this election cycle.
Give me some Johnny Carson style predictions.
What is going to be going down for the next month and a half?
You're going to see Trump do better in the next two debates.
You'll probably see at least one or more Hillary health events.
The event could be as much or as little as she just disappears for several days without an explanation.
You're going to see Trump acting more presidential in general with, of course, his Trumpian slip-ups of talking about this universe and stuff like that.
But I think people are used to that now.
We just got used to it.
It doesn't have the same impact it used to have.
And I think Trump will win in the landslide in the electoral college.
So I think there's going to be...
You know, a much bigger hidden shy Trump voter effect than people imagine.
Well, I think there's real truth in that.
I think that there are a lot of people who, like yourself, find it either socially, and again, most people don't, of course, have as high a profile as you do, Scott, but they don't want to say it to their family.
They don't want to say it to their friends.
They don't want to say it at work.
They're like, oh yeah, Trump!
Worst guy ever!
And it's like, get into the voting booth.
They're like, oh yeah.
Nobody can see me, right?
And I think that hidden support, hidden enthusiasm, because it is so politically incorrect, I think that what they've done is scared people out from public support, and therefore they think they've won.
But if you've just driven that support underground, it means you can't measure it anymore.
Yeah, and to your earlier story about the fundraiser who would just say, hey, it's going to be a big party, everybody come, and then they would because, hey, it's going to be a big party.
Trump supporters seem to be Preparing for the world's biggest party on election night, where Clinton supporters appear to be preparing for a wake or maybe some kind of a funeral.
And that's a big deal.
I think people are going to say, I want to be where the fun is.
I want to be where the energy is.
I want to be part of this thing.
I think that'll affect the election.
People, I think, guaranteed don't want more of the same.
Most people don't want more of the same.
And I think they're willing to roll the dice than go with what's continued.
So thanks a million.
Always a great pleasure to chat, Scott.
Please, please, please, everyone, go to Dilbert.com.
Go and subscribe to Scott's blog.
Follow him on Twitter.
Follow him blindly.
Follow him like a sightless lemming.
because you'll get to a very interesting and good place.
And I really want to thank you for it.
You've got a great gig as a cartoonist, and I know that you've taken some hits, in fact, a lot of hits, in your public speaking career for the perspectives that you're putting out there.
I really, really respect people who plant themselves, tell the truth as they see it, and damn the consequences, and do so in a sensible way that's not totally self-destructive.
So I really appreciate the information and insights that you're sharing with the world, and urge, urge, urge people to go and follow what Scott is doing in...
It is really revolutionary stuff and thanks so much for the time today.
