March 28, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:44
3634 Why The Fake News Media Keeps Losing | Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
Order Gorilla Mindset Now: http://www.fdrurl.com/gorilla-mindsetOrder Silenced Now: http://www.fdrurl.com/silenced-movieOn Sunday March 26th, 2016, 60 Minutes did a highly rated expose on Fake News: "The phrase 'fake news' has been used by Trump to discredit responsible reporting that he dislikes. But 60 Minutes’ investigation looks at truly fake news created by con-artists."While examining websites which create admittedly fictional hoax stories and Russian bots which can inflate social media statistics - Scott Pelley took aim at lawyer Mike Cernovich, in a segment which only further demonstrated the mainstream media's dishonesty. Mike Cernovich is a lawyer, filmmaker and the bestselling author of “Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms” and “MAGA Mindset: How to Make You and America Great Again.” Cernovich is also the producer of the film documentary “Silenced. Our War On Free Speech.”Follow Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CernovichRead Danger and Play: http://www.dangerandplay.comFollow Mike on Periscope: https://www.periscope.tv/CernovichFollow Mike on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DangerAndPlayOrder Gorilla Mindset: http://www.fdrurl.com/gorilla-mindsetOrder MAGA Mindset: http://www.fdrurl.com/MAGAFreedomain 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
In the new Freedom Aid Radio episode entitled Hail the Conquering Hero, we're talking with Mike Cernovec back from cloying and giving as good as he got in the lion's den of 60 minutes.
He is a lawyer, filmmaker, and the best-selling author of Guerrilla Mindset, How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions to Live Life on Your Terms, and MAGA Mindset, How to Make You and America Great Again and...
Also, the producer of the film documentary Silenced Our War on Free Speech, which is just now available on Amazon.
You should go and check it out.
You can follow Mike on Twitter, twitter.com slash Cernovich, C-E-R-N-O-V-I-C-H. Read his excellent blog, which was again featured on TV for millions of people just last night, dangerandplay.com.
And follow Mike on Periscope, of course, at periscope.tv slash Cernovich.
So, hey, what's new?
How was your weekend?
I broke my rule.
I said, never do television.
Turn down all media.
I broke the rule and I went on.
So it was 60 minutes, of course.
And how long ago did they contact you?
And what was your thought process that led you to sit across from Scott Pelley and Filet Him Alive verbally?
Right.
A couple months ago, they had contacted a friend of mine and were talking on background about what is this new media kind of stuff?
What are memes?
And then they go, well, we'd like to talk to Cernovich, but we can't find out how to contact him.
He doesn't answer calls or emails.
So he goes, OK, well, I'll put you guys in touch.
So I told the two producers who were younger, I go, well, I'll talk to you on background.
And by that, for those of you who don't know listening, on background means I talk to them.
They don't quote me.
And it's more of a free consultation for me than anything.
Sure, I'll give you 20, 30 minutes, and I'll tell you why.
I'd rather go on Stefan Molyneux.
I'd rather go on Rubin Report.
Why I would rather go on Paul Joseph Watson.
Why I don't even care about old media because it's irrelevant.
So I talked to him on background about it for quite a bit.
And then we sort of lost touch or whatever.
And then they said they were going to do a segment and they wanted me to be on it and they wanted to interview me.
And I go, eh.
And they said, well, what if we fly out to California?
I go, well, if you're going to come to me and you're going to bring a crew, sure, at 60 minutes, I'll break my rule.
Because I turned down The Daily Show.
I've turned down a lot of media.
And I go, okay, this is the one time I'll break my exception and do edited, i.e.
non-live television.
Right, right.
And what was the, I mean, just because they're coming to you, was there any other reason?
Would you do sort of want to run the parallel experiment of what's called alternative media versus mainstream media?
I mean, what was the decision process that tipped you over to doing it?
Well, sure, there's a lot of layers, a lot of it from practical to psychological.
One is that, okay, I've been on TV, I've done a lot of different things, and I know that it converts poorly to web traffic, to Twitter followers, to book sales, to film sales, to everything.
And I always tell people I'm a very unabashed capitalist in that.
I believe I write good books, and I very much want people to buy my books, and that's that, so I don't have any shame about that.
So for me, I'm thinking, if I go on TV and I take four or five hours, I'm not going to sell any books.
I'm not going to get any new Twitter followers.
Nobody new is going to discover me.
That's just a whole waste of my day.
There's a waste.
Plus, they're going to lie about me just trying to make me look bad.
So why would I go dance like a puppet for them?
So I have a very strong bias against media.
However...
You're writing a book, The Art of the Argument, right?
Yes.
I thought I heard that in the last time.
Just finish the third draft.
I'm very pleased with it.
Excellent.
I can't wait to help you with that.
So I'm also writing a book, Audacity, How to Go From Nobody to Somebody or Somewhere Thereabouts.
And I'm talking about brand building, how to build an online brand, how to build a platform, how to create a message, how to get noticed online, how to believe in yourself more, how to become more courageous, which, as you've noticed, is the number one virtue.
And I thought, well, Cernovich, you're writing a book on media and marketing and public relations and branding and 60 Minutes is saying, we want to destroy your life and destroy your reputation.
How could you say no to that?
Right.
So I had to go into there.
And then I also wanted to deal with the full panoply of emotions, which is, as you know, one of the most interesting journeys is asking yourself, Well, why do I care?
Like yesterday, I had adrenaline all day before the show.
And I thought, well, why?
Why do you care?
Why are you having these feelings?
Who cares if they put you on there and they paint you as a monster?
How will your life change?
Will your daughter not smile at you?
Will your dog not love you?
Will your wife not love you?
Will your friends forsake you?
So it's an interesting psychological experiment to ask yourself, why does the media have this kind of power, even on somebody like me, who's off the grid?
Why would I have any adrenaline rush?
Why would I even care at all?
So it's worthy to test yourself to explore these emotions and also become more in touch with the human condition.
Why are we controlled by the sentiments of other people in any context?
Our family who maybe don't have our best interests in mind and other people who don't have our interests in mind.
So that was it.
And then another aspect is I thought, this is like a heavyweight fight, man.
And my website is Danger and Play.
So in that regard, there was a strong, I don't want to teach the younger viewers to live by the YOLO component because I am 39 and it's a calculated risk, strategic risk.
But there was a component of, hey man, you only live once.
They want the fight.
I'm going to go in there for a heavyweight fight.
Well, and of course, there was a time when if you went on the media and they savaged you, your life would kind of not be over, that sort of overdramatic, but kind of never be the same, like what they did to people like Joseph McCarthy, what they did to Nixon, what they did to a whole bunch of other people.
If they get you in their sights and they're relentless in their opposition to you, in the past where, you know, even early days of the internet, early days even of YouTube, I would say argued just up until a couple of years ago, You really didn't have a chance to fight back.
You know, maybe you could threaten them and you could get some sort of correction that would be in two-point squinto vision down at the bottom of some newspaper a couple of weeks later.
But now we have a chance to take them on in a pretty even match.
And I think that equivalency has helped a lot in terms of making these kinds of decisions.
Yeah, that's actually another great point, which is the old adage was don't go to war with people who buy ink by the barrel.
You see how the expression goes.
Something like that.
And that was old media.
Sure, you didn't want to get into war with the press because they could go to war with you.
But I had a full media strategy locked and loaded.
Even before the segment aired, I had produced an excerpt of the transcript and said, watch me call them out to create hype for it, to create anticipation, and to also kind of signal to people, hey, I have my own public relations strategy.
If you think I'm just going to wait for the segment to appear and cross my arms and go away...
No way.
I have my own strategies planned.
And I had a full battle plan because I thought they were going to completely lie about me, do that trick where they take a question from here and an answer from there and splice them out of order.
But they didn't do anything like that to me.
So they may have called me nonsense and they may have called me, say that I traffic in lies.
I don't care because they accurately depicted the questions he asked and the answers I gave them.
So I had actually no problem with it.
I go, hey man, this is Fine by me.
I don't mind being hit hard as long as it's fair.
But there was a contingency plan if they had selectively edited me.
Right.
Some of the decisions, I'm no producer, some of the decisions, Mike, seemed a bit odd to me.
So, to me, when you were talking about, like, the question that came up about the Parkinson's diagnosis that the doctor came up, but then they referred to him as an anesthesiologist, but of course he said that he'd had some experience with this and knew the symptoms and so on.
And these kinds of remote diagnoses go on all the time.
It's just when it's, again, it's a Democrat candidate that everybody says, Homer, My God, you never...
But to me, I was really, really surprised, and maybe you were too when you saw it, that they would show Hillary Clinton falling like a sack of potatoes into that van.
That, to me, was a really surprising moment, because there are some people who haven't seen that, right?
Some people who don't move in the same kind of circles that we do.
So you're saying, well, her health is an issue, and then they're showing her falling into a van...
That seems like an odd choice to me, almost like the visuals were complimenting what you were saying, even though the editing seemed to want to compliment what they were saying.
Yeah, so this is a very weird realization I had during that interview.
And this is going to be...
I'm going to blow your mind right now.
But I'm actually...
I don't want to say that I pity them because they are the adversary, but I honestly think that a lot of these people in media...
People are not actually liars.
They are really just delusional.
They thought that hurt me.
When I went to sit down to interview with Scott Pelley, I hadn't even prepared to talk about Hillary's health.
Thankfully, I lived it for those months and remembered it.
But I thought, wait a minute, you guys think you're going to nail me to the cross on Hillary's health?
Because most people are going to watch that and say, well, maybe she didn't have Parkinson's, but clearly it was something.
And why should we trust them when it says it's pneumonia?
You know, who really knows?
People don't get tied up on, well, is it Parkinson's or is it a post-stroke disorder or is it a post-concussion disorder?
People just know she doesn't look well.
She doesn't look healthy.
And they really thought they had me on that.
And it's such a weird thing because, and you mentioned this in the earlier podcast, they really, they do live in a bubble where everybody, Hillary goes, oh yeah, I'm healthy.
I'm in great health.
And nobody's saying, hey, have you seen the coughing fit?
Did you know that she broke her elbow in 2009?
Did you see her falling down the stairs going into Air Force One in 2012?
Did you read the emails about how she's forgetful by Uma?
They don't have anybody actually in the newsroom saying, whoa, did you read the WikiLeaks?
Here's Uma saying she's often confused.
Here's other people talking about she just woke up from a nap.
Here's other people saying how she has to sleep in.
Here's other people talking about how she's an alcoholic, drinks too much.
They don't have any of that.
So in their world, they take...
Hillary Clinton did their word, and they really thought that they'd nail me with that.
It would be what Scott Adams, or I would call a persuasion, fail.
In their minds, the movie in their head, they thought, man, we got Cernovich good.
She doesn't have Parkinson's.
How does he really know this?
We have him good.
And then they run that thing, and 75% of people who are going to watch that are going to think, I want the exchange.
Well, and of course, if they have an issue, they should bring it up with the doctor, not with the person who's reporting on what the doctor said.
That's, to me, kind of cowardly, and they don't want to do that because they don't want the information that the doctor has coming out to the mainstream audience.
Because, again, it makes them look negligent, like they're dodging the real reporting that they should be doing.
So let's talk a little bit about preparation.
You know, Hamlet, to me, nails it.
You know, the readiness is all.
You were there with Scott Pellet for an hour.
They trimmed it down to, you know, a minute or two.
How much did you prepare for that hour?
What was the focus?
What was the process that you went through?
Because everyone sees you in the ring and they're like, wow, he's really fast.
He jabs.
He bobs like a butterfly and stings like a bee.
How much preparation goes into that?
Yeah, the whole week I just dug up.
I read every hater article about me.
I read everybody, even the articles about me where people said things.
I'm like, wait, I know for a fact they never even said that.
Even the stuff that people fabricated about me.
I read it, and then I imagined a questioner asking me that question.
I imagined somebody putting me on the spot and saying, explain yourself.
Every time I walked my dog, every time I had free time, so hours a day I was preparing on how to respond.
And then I also did research on fake news stories that the media had got wrong.
And then in my own head I rehearsed, because you know, you did acting.
In my own head I rehearsed.
I said, okay, they're going to say, Is fake news bad for America?
And I'm going to say, yes, fake news, like saying that weapons of mass destruction is terrible for America.
And yes, it is fake news to say that Russia is hacking the power grid.
This is a big threat.
Because I knew what they were going to ask.
And I had prepared for that all the time.
So, in fact, the preparation I had done in my own head was far more brutal than the interview I walked into.
I trained way harder For the event that I thought, because I dug up everything that even, you know, the weird conspiracy theories about me are just unbelievable.
I was even prepared to address everything.
Things I said, things I never even didn't say, the conspiracy theories about me.
And then I go in and they go, well, you claimed that Hillary Clinton had Parkinson's.
And I thought, oh man, you're running into a machine gun right now.
Now, when I see people sort of in the crosshairs of the mainstream media, Mike, in general, they're doing a lot of dodging, a lot of weaving, a lot of backing down, a lot of defensive stuff.
And their major goal seems to be, don't get a mortal wound.
A flesh wound is okay, but just don't get a mortal wound.
You're pivoting and you're turning it around.
Of course, the famous one that people have memed and will be famous, I think, long after we're pushing up the daisies, is when Scott was saying, well, she had pneumonia!
Right.
And now, so what was that moment for you?
And step us through that particular process, because that was a great pivot.
Yeah, so Pelley is saying, you're fake news, and he's repeating it multiple times.
You're fake news, no.
She had pneumonia.
And I said, well, how do you know?
And he said, the campaign said she had it.
I said, why would you trust the campaign?
And he goes, whoa.
And what they didn't show is he dropped his glasses after that.
He was so rattled and shaken that he dropped his glasses.
So people noticed he was nervously chewing on his glasses.
But he actually ended up dropping.
So I said, why would you trust the campaign?
He said, well, that's not the point.
The point is you never interviewed her.
And then I said, well, the point is that I would never trust Hillary Clinton.
And you guys don't trust Trump.
So my tips to people on public speaking in general would be that you notice that if you watch that clip, there is a pause there.
People are afraid when they do public speaking with silence.
That's when you trip over your words.
That's when they get you to gotcha moments.
So if you watch that clip, you can see me say, well, I'm not, because I was paused.
Okay, I wasn't sure what I was going to say.
So rather than just jibber-jabber, I said, I'm not going to take the Clinton campaign on the word about anything.
So that would be a tip for people just in life in general is don't be afraid of slowing down.
Don't be afraid even of there being silenced.
Because it'd be better to have an awkward silence than to say something that you would regret.
Well, the question, like, so he's saying, well, we're responsible, honest, professional, blah, blah, all these adjectives, and no proof or anything, of course, right?
So when you say, why would you trust Hillary Clinton's campaign?
That is foundational to the question of what is news, what is truth, what is propaganda.
And then when he said, that's not the point, Boom.
Holy, everything after that to me was just a massive deflation on the part of Mr.
Pelle because that is the point.
That is exactly the point.
You say authoritatively she had pneumonia.
Now that's a positive claim.
Now you could say, of course, it's tough to disprove a negative, right?
So you can say, how do you go and prove that she doesn't have Parkinson's?
Okay, so that's a fuzzy area.
But when he authoritatively says she had pneumonia, that is as positive a claim as saying that she has Parkinson's.
And at least there was a doctor who said, I've got experience.
Here are the signs.
Here's my reasoning and so on.
And in your article, which they showed on the screen, they showed the article saying, hey, critique this and have a look at it.
So you're always saying to people, be skeptical.
But then when he makes that positive claim, she had pneumonia, Well, how do you know?
And then, oh, wait, listen, campaign.
So it is, why would you believe the campaign?
Because that's the entire reason you're making this positive certain claim, like it's, the sun is going to rise tomorrow, there's gravity, and the moon is a different size from Jupiter, right?
Then he makes the positive claim, but he's just been told it, and he believes.
So then when he says, that's not the point, that was just like, wow, what a back-off, what a vaporization of the position.
Right.
And that would be, you know, as the great Scott Adams would say, I made a high ground maneuver.
So he wanted to drag me into the weeds, as you say.
Drag me into the weeds, but was it pneumonia?
Rather, was it Parkinson's?
So rather than to get in the weeds of what was it, I took the high ground position, which is why would you trust the campaign?
And then he's done.
Headshot.
What's he going to say from there?
Well, we don't trust the campaign.
Well, wait a minute.
You just told me that you're repeating them.
So for him right there, there is nowhere...
That he can go with that.
And you mentioned there was another point in the video where I said, well, finding truth is hard.
That's epistemic humility, which is a lot of people don't understand that because I put on a show or whatever, and I'm theatrical, that I live with a great deal of epistemic humility.
And that is why I'm, even though I'm not politically conservative, I'm philosophically conservative, like, hey, before we import people from an entirely different culture, maybe we don't know what is going to happen.
Hey, before we go bomb Iraq, In Afghanistan, maybe we're not, maybe one was going to happen.
Let's have a little bit of epistemic humility.
Let's question why we believe what we believe or why we know or why we think we know what we know.
Because we're all riddled with all these cognitive biases and all kinds of stuff going on.
And he again said, well, finding the truth is easy.
And I'm thinking, oh man, that's another, like, show that to your philosophy classes, right?
Finding truth is easy.
I just ask questions.
That was another high ground position.
And he defined his ability to find truth as verifying information, which is just a synonym argument.
It's a tautology, you know?
I mean, it's like, of course finding truth is verifying information.
That's the whole question.
Just saying that you can find truth by verifying information is exactly the same as saying, well, I can find truth because I can find truth.
Woo, look at me.
I'm a philosophical genius.
And seeing that lack of humility, because not only did he say that it was easy to find, but he does it all the time.
Now, right after he said he trusted Hillary Clinton's campaign on the pneumonia story, then he claims that he finds truth all the time, which leads everyone with any understanding to recognize that when he says he finds truth all the time, it means he believes those on the left all the time.
And he makes that synonymous with finding truth.
And has no cognitive dissonance about any of that.
Says it perfectly glibly.
Doesn't seem to be like, well, wait a minute.
You know, because whenever we advance a certain kind of bullshit, every now and then there's a, I mean, not that I do it, right?
But when I was younger and I was saying stuff, I know something's not quite right with what I'm saying.
And I'd have a little trip and a little falter.
And that would be, you know, an impetus for me to go back and say, okay, how did I get here?
Because, you know, but he's just like, boom, certainty.
Well, I do it all the time.
And it's like, but you just didn't do it with regards to pneumonia.
Do you notice that or not?
Yeah, and that is another thing, too, and that's why he didn't want to get in the process of it, which is, and this got cut from the segment, they go, well, who told you that?
And I go, a doctor.
And they said, well, who is that doctor?
And I go, well, who are these doctors that go on CNN, right?
We can play that game all day.
Who is a doctor in New Republic who said Trump has syphilis?
Who are the 1,000 psychologists who said Trump has syphilis?
Borderline personality disorder, narcissism, sociopathism, who are those factors, right?
We can go, we can play this game all day.
The truth is that, and this would be me telling the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth.
The truth is that we never saw her medical records.
She never submitted to an independent medical examination.
No doctor outside of her campaign knows what she had or had going on.
So people could say, Cernovich, you never proved beyond...
A certain standard of proof that she had Parkinson's, that would be a fair critique.
If somebody said that to me, I would say, I have no problem with you making that claim.
But to claim that Cernovich, not only did you not prove she has Parkinson's, but she had pneumonia, and that's why you're wrong.
See, that was what I mean by the attack is, if he had said, Cernovich, you didn't prove your claim because you didn't submit enough evidence, that would be a strong counterargument.
But to say, Cernovich, you didn't prove your claim because she actually had pneumonia, Because we were told that by the campaign, you completely have lost the battle.
And going in, you know, just to talk a little bit about the setup, which I thought was pretty funny.
So, you know, everybody, this goes to preparation too, is new suit, new tie, had to learn how to tie a double windsor, haven't worn a tie, you know, forever.
Pocket square socks, you know, Shauna, I made sure she had everything set up.
I even made sure we had the poster framed and everything because I said, hey, if the crew is going to be here because they sent a crew out to my house, I want the poster on.
So then I'm thinking, you've got to show them for television.
You've got to dress for your audience.
And this is a message everybody has to learn in life is that if I'm on your show, I'm a little bit more professional.
If I'm on a Periscope, you know, anything goes.
I don't really care.
If I'm going to go on 60 Minutes, it's going to be national television.
They're not going to get Periscope coverage.
So when I walked in, When I walked up, they were staying at the Ritz Carlton in a big, glamorous suite.
And I walked in, and Scott Pelley comes up.
He goes, hey, how are you?
And I go, hey.
And I shook his hand, and he shook my hand.
And then he disappeared.
We're supposed to do this segment right away.
And I said, okay.
And they go, well, we need you to wait for a little bit longer because Scott wasn't wearing a tie.
He saw your tie, and they had to go find one in the lobby.
So that's right away they realized, okay, maybe they didn't quite know what they were getting into.
They thought I was going in lines then, but maybe I was the gorilla and they were in my den, right?
So then I walk in and one of the producers comes up to me and goes, he goes, hey man, don't go Kissinger on me.
And I go, don't, what do you mean?
He goes, well, you know, Henry Kissinger did this interview and he just wasn't himself.
He came off very lawyerly, It was very proper.
Don't pull a Kissinger on us.
We want to see the you that is on Periscope.
We want to see that.
And I'm like, okay.
It's really, really important to take strategic advice from your opponent.
You know, Mike, if you and I ever end up boxing, if you could just keep thumping yourself in the face, that would make my job a whole lot easier.
I could just have a smoke and then watch you punch yourself out.
God.
Yeah.
He gave me this huge pep talk.
And then I said, well, if I had any doubt before about it being in ambush, which of course I never doubted, I knew it was.
I go, well, there it is.
And I go, oh, yeah, don't worry.
I'll be authentic.
So they're thinking I'm going to throw up double middle fingers and call people cucks and everything.
And that is another thing that they don't really understand is just because I don't put on hair and makeup Like all the Fox people or TV people do and read from a script.
They think that because I don't do that, then there must not be a lot of thought and research that goes behind what I do.
Like I said, like I was telling somebody, I go, are these people like, this is what I read for fun.
I've always wanted to read it.
I started reading in college and then I moved and I lost a book.
So I'm thinking, do these morons not realize that I read philosophy books for fun and And they think that everything I do is random and shows the sign of a guy who doesn't know what he's doing.
The opposite is true, which is that people like a less fabricated message.
Just like you, you do a podcast every day, man.
That's what people want.
People don't want you getting on there, putting makeup, being boring, at least not younger audiences.
They want to have a real connection with the message.
So right away, I shocked them because They wanted to create one image.
So it's an optics war, which is another point of preparation.
So much preparation went into this because I thought, what are the optics?
What is the story that they want to tell?
Well, the story the media wanted to tell was, here's this guy.
He's very scary.
He's a nasty, evil troll.
He's lying about people all the time.
We should probably arrest him or institutionalize him.
That's the story they wanted to tell.
So then on my own head, I say, well, what optics can you...
So rather than play defense, I'm a good guy, right?
Which is where most people go wrong is they let the enemy set the frame, the opponent set the frame.
I said, well, what image can I present that will completely destroy the image you're trying to set?
And I go, okay, here I am.
I'm going to make sure my hair is perfectly done, not too short.
You know, just like I tell guys, not too short, not too long, well kept enough.
Double wins are not in the tie, the press suit, everything was set.
So they couldn't present me to be a monster, they couldn't present me to be some kind of angry troll, and they couldn't present me like the person in the previous segment, who you'll notice Pelly didn't have a tie on for, who had on that brown, you know, just Henley shirt, which is, again, perfectly fine.
I'm not saying people have to dress up for everything, but that was the messaging, the optics that I wanted to get out to contrast with their optics.
Right.
And there was an interesting moment, too, as well, where they were, I can't remember if this was in the extras or the sort of post-show little segments that they do, where they show you waiting while Scott Pellet is ruffling through some papers.
And again, I can't, for the life of me, Mike, understand why a producer would make that decision because it makes them look woefully unprepared.
Like if I'm interviewing someone and I have to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on, hang on, let me check some facts here, let me check some facts.
It shows that I'm going in unprepared.
And as, you know, you've pointed out that they said, oh, you're getting all this money from ads.
They hadn't even checked that.
It's this overconfidence.
It's your weakness stuff.
Well, because they steamroll people.
That's the whole point is...
I knew that it was a great interview at the end when the producers, who for the most part were quite nice.
I think if people noticed I haven't been going on the warpath or raging about them, I feel that given the environment, given the atmosphere, that that was quite a reasonable piece.
They can call me nonsense, but that's their perspective.
And that's where I think you and I are different from the left.
We don't cry if you call us nonsense.
We're not...
Triggered, oh my god, how dare you?
We're actually these improper people.
We just figured out, you know, there's a guy out there in the world who disagrees with us.
And that person who disagrees with us happens to be on TV. Fine, we're going to get our own message out and then we'll let the reader decide.
We'll let the viewer decide.
So after we had finished recording, the people came out and everybody's cheeks were flushed.
It was like they'd been at a sporting event.
Because the full time, the full time he would come after me, I would go after him.
We had, you know, that picture I posted on either Twitter or Medium or Danger in Play, Shauna had took it because she watched the whole thing.
And he's completely, completely reeled back at some point that I'd made, which I couldn't remember, because I did go quite hard on him about the Rolling Stone Ray post, the Washington Post, Russian Power Grid.
I might have brought out the Prop or Not story.
I brought up the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
I brought up the Kuwaiti A woman saying babies are being thrown out of the incubators.
So I brought up all those hoaxes.
And I could tell that most people don't do that.
And that's where your mindset comes into play.
When I went there, in my own head, I sincerely believed I was there to interview him.
Now that might be delusional.
That might be crazy.
But when I went there, I thought, they're not interviewing me.
I'm here and I get to interview Scott Pelley using his money, his camera crew.
They're resources.
I get to interview this guy on my show.
What a fantastic opportunity that I have.
And when you make those kind of mindset shifts in your head, unconsciously, you become more confident.
And then when they ask you questions, you're thinking, well, I'm going to ask you questions, too.
And we'll have a back and forth banter debate.
That's why they should show the whole video, because that would get a lot of views.
It would.
And, I mean, I view my own show from 500 years in the future.
I mean, how am I going to be visible 500 years in the future?
That's how deep I want to go.
I mean, it's all a matter of perspective.
Now, when you are being sort of, I guess you could say needles, right?
So we go back to the guerrilla mindset, right?
So how to control your thoughts and emotions to live life on your terms.
A great book.
What is the approach that you take to avoid what they try to do, which is sort of passive-aggressively provoke a response where you look less in control and that creates a sort of sophistic view that you're random and they're professional, that you're unstable and they're stable.
So what is the mindset that helps keep the passion without looking crazy, if that makes any sense?
Yeah, so there are two things I do.
One is I do I read hater articles and hater tweets, and as I read them, I smile.
So I imagine, you know, the George Soros bloggers at Media Matters calling me a neo-Nazi white supremacist, lying about me, fabricating things.
So usually when you read something bad, unconsciously your facial expressions change.
You might become disconcerted.
You might think, well, I didn't really say that, right?
So right away, I rewire this kind of process unconsciously.
So I'll read hater articles on me.
I'm like, man, this guy's hilarious.
I can't believe...
I can't believe they're actually saying this about me.
These people are ludicrous, right?
So once you physically do that and you get used to smiling while you're under attack, and I think it even showed a couple of times in the video where I smiled a couple of times.
So probably people are like, why don't you ever smile while you're on a Molyneux show?
And I'm like, well, because I'm not under attack.
He's not trying to ruin me.
If you're trying to ruin me, I'd smile more.
So that is actual training that you can do is just read the worst about you, imagine the worst about you, and then rather letting your body passively accept Whatever biofeedback you have, you rewire that feedback and then you just kind of smile about it and you think, oh, these guys.
I knew they were going to say that.
You're just kind of laughing.
That was one.
Two is breath control is everything.
I do the Wemhoff breathing.
I do the cold showers.
I go into a plunge pool, this refrigerated water.
And once you can control your breathing, then when, you know, if you think about what a panic attack is, I'm out of breath.
I can't believe what's going on.
My thoughts are running out of control.
There's a link between your thoughts.
And of course, you're breathing.
So what I would do during the interview is, if I'd pause, then I would fill in my stomach, and I'm sure you've got to do this in acting.
I would fill in my stomach with as much air as possible.
I'm doing it right now.
As I'm talking, I'm pushing my stomach out, and I'm filling it with air.
And then if you're doing that even when you're under pressure, because you're hyperoxygenated, because you have enough breath control, Then your mind doesn't believe that you're under pressure, that you have any kind of anxiety.
Right.
The deeper you breathe, the more centered you tend to be.
And that's a very powerful thing to do.
Now, the one thing that I did notice came out later when you started talking about the challenges of truth.
It's a great point.
People on the right or people, I guess you could say, for smaller government, government in general, like ordering people around and just saying, well, we're going to spend money on this, we're going to tax this, we're going to pass these laws, is very arrogant.
It's the idea that all these little ants, I'm going to put them in their maze and they're going to do what I want them to do.
And I think with Scott versus yourself, the difference I got was between arrogance and humility.
And that, to me, came across in so many different levels.
Like when Scott says, well, yes, we made mistakes, but of course, but then we put out retractions and we put out corrections.
That's not solving the problem.
That's not fundamentally solving the problem.
Putting Band-Aid on continual wounds doesn't prevent those wounds from happening again if you haven't solved the problem.
And I don't know where he is politically.
I assume he's somewhat on the left, just because he's sort of mainstream media and it's kind of tough to survive in that arena if you're not.
But that arrogance of, well, I know the truth and I know what's best and I know what's real and I know what's fake and I know what's good for America and I know what's bad for America and so on.
That kind of arrogance versus what you said, which is the honest statement of, hey, truth is really, really hard.
And I think people get that.
And I think for younger people in particular, I was trying to view this as sort of like sort of half my age kind of thing.
And, you know, Scott Pelley, I mean, you know, you're 10, rested, relaxed, looking fit and healthy.
And, you know, Scott Pelley is sort of like the Crypt Keeper coughing up a hairball of challenge from time to time.
And the skepticism that you had towards his arrogance or his supposed authority, I think is going to resonate with the young people.
Because young people looking at society saying, man, things are messed up.
And anybody who's over the age of 40 who's confident is almost certainly part of the problem.
Yeah, I remember I was very angry at one point in my life because I thought that I knew everything about the world.
And then the housing bubble popped up.
I saw friends of mine pleading bankruptcy.
I saw human suffering in the world that I had never seen.
People losing their jobs.
It didn't even affect me personally that I didn't own a house, but I saw the carnage that it caused on people, which made me just weep for humanity.
That was because of the lie that they had been told.
Hey, buy a house.
Property never goes down.
You can't have a housing bubble.
You always need people to buy houses.
That was one of my big kind of quote-unquote red pill moments, where Democrats, Republicans, The bankers, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, everybody in media had said, hey man, there's no housing bubble.
And then it crashes, people's lives are ruined, and you don't have anybody say, wow, we got it wrong.
This is also something, too, that didn't happen after the Trump election.
Nobody had said, oh wow, Trump won, we all said this wouldn't happen.
Let's go and recreate what had happened and figure out what went wrong.
So with me...
When I saw the housing bubble collapse, and I didn't think that was going to happen, I went through and just said, hey, what else is a lie?
And I analyzed everything in my life, and that's where I developed the epistemic humility, realized, man, like, especially, too, when I hold my daughter, I think, like, all right, it's one thing because my own is as adults.
I can say, you know what?
Here's what I think you should do.
You got to do it.
In a way, that might be a cop-out to some.
I don't think it is because you have to take responsibility, but some people might say, Certainly you should provide stronger leadership and tell people what to do.
No.
But at least you're an adult.
So if I give you bad advice and you take it, hey man, sorry for you, but you're a rational creature.
But now you hold a child and you think, what would I teach this person about the world?
What would I teach this girl about how to find meaning in the world?
How to balance your quest for meaning with suffering?
How much do you let a child suffer because that leads to growth?
How do you prevent this child from getting involved with popular culture and degeneracy and debasement?
And you really realize, man, I don't know that much.
I know a little bit on how to live your life.
But I don't know that much, and I sure don't know enough about how to tell the whole world how I have to live.
And I sure don't know that if we let in millions of people from another country, what's going to happen.
And I sure don't know if we invade Iraq, which happened, what would happen.
And I sure don't know what would happen if we got in World War III with Russia, which is why I think it's a bad idea.
And that's where, you know, like you and I have talked about before, I'm not a conservative like Ted Cruz or I'm a constitutional conservative, whatever that even means.
But I am very much like a Burkean conservative in that you would say, you know what, a little bit of epistemic humility, a little bit of, hey, maybe we don't know what's going to happen if we mess with things.
Maybe we ought to chill out just a little bit and try to figure things out.
Maybe that is needed.
But with Pelley and the left...
There's just complete and total arrogance, such to the point that even when they're wrong, they don't go through and examine the processes that led them to be wrong.
Right.
Let's close with this, because I think, for me, this was a very powerful crystallization of something I've been thinking about for a while.
So when I was, I don't know, maybe 11 or 12 years old, I read some short story, and, you know, if people know it, let me know in the comments below.
I'd love to reread it.
And the short story went something like this, and I think you were a big example of this yesterday.
So there's this Teenager is this guy.
He wants to be a swimmer.
He wants to be a big, successful swimmer.
And he goes to the nice beach to swim.
You know, the water's calm and it's beautiful and it's sandy and all that.
But there are bullies there.
And they make fun of him and they push him.
They throw rocks at him and they basically push him off the beach.
And then what he has to do is he goes to the rocky beach with the pounding surf and the sharp rocks and it's just, it's a mess.
But that's where he trains and he hates it.
He just hates it.
And then the race comes, and he wins by an insane amount.
Why?
Because he was pushed out, because he was pushed into the harsher climate for training, and he got stronger.
That which he hated propelled him to success.
That which he feared, the bullies, actually helped him.
You know, it's a weird kind of way.
Like, I've given up trying to figure out whether things are good or bad, and sometimes I don't know.
You know, it's like what they say.
There was some Chinese guy asked a little while back ago, like, well, what do you think of the French Revolution hundreds of years ago?
He's like, eh, it's too early to tell.
And they think, I think the mainstream media think that we're just like cowboys out here, no practice, no professionalism, no nothing, right?
But the reality is, like, people like you and I and other people, like, we built significant influence in society from nothing.
Me from a car, you from Periscopes, and you've got a cell phone that you're running your show from.
But we do a lot of it.
We do a lot of it very contentiously.
We get involved in a lot of online stuff that's very volatile.
We, you know, interview and are taken apart sometimes by experts.
We're ambushed on a regular basis.
So we're kind of in the rocky, pounding surf area, and these guys are like lazily swimming through the azure perfect waters of a calm beach.
I think that they're underestimating how strong and how competent we've become by not being in the mainstream media.
Because they're the professionals and we're the amateurs.
And I think those two kind of worlds collided a little bit yesterday.
Yeah, ironically, BuzzFeed, of all places, I was their number one trending article.
And the piece said just that.
They tried to shade me by calling me a troll and, you know, the usual spin.
But the thesis of the article was Scott Pelley had no idea what he was about to get into.
He had no idea how I was able to flip the interview on him and how we were able to say, look, you trust the campaign.
You take them at their word.
They were, again, completely unprepared because they look at us as barbarians, but they don't realize it takes a lot of intelligence to do what you do.
It takes a lot of intelligence to figure out, well, how do you do a video?
How do you edit it?
How do you upload it?
How do you How do you put on graphics?
How do you get anybody even care enough to read it?
How do you do this for a year when you don't even have an audience where your video count is 10 videos?
Yeah, I'm going through this on my own YouTube.
I'm like, oh my god, I only got 5,000 views on this.
This is terrible.
I want to quit YouTube because it's not big enough yet, right?
So how do you push through the self-doubt and the frustrations and the wants and needs for instant gratification?
It takes a lot to do that.
What they have is they got a resume and it's all been given to them.
They had a resume.
They worked their way up the ranks.
The corporation's giving them infrastructure.
You and I, we don't have a budget to fly out five people to the Ritz-Carlton, $5,000 a night.
That was just for the tweet.
That wasn't even the people in the rooms and everything.
So you're exactly right.
They have no idea what they're up against.
A few of the younger people do.
But most of the people like Anderson Cooper, Scott Pelley, they have no idea what they're up against.
I'm quite glad that people think of me as just some troll on Twitter.
Continue to underestimate us.
It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
So I hope that everyone will go and pick up a copy of Guerrilla Mindset.
We'll put a link directly to it below.
Seeing somebody lecture you on controlling your emotions, on remaining strong in the face of conflict and opposition, and standing for your principles and your values in...
Situations of significant provocation.
It's one thing to read it in a book and for some guy to type it, but to see it live in action I hope is going to give people the sense of how much you live, what it is that you talk about, and the authenticity and what you write about and what you talk about comes from living it for real.
So, Mike, thanks so much for what you did.
I mean, it was a beautiful thing to see.
Thanks, of course, for being on the show and being a good friend.
So please, I want to remind everyone, twitter.com slash Cernovich, dangerandplay.com and periscope.tv. Mike's fantastic periscopes at periscope.tv slash Cernovich.
Thanks so much for your time, brother, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
Okay.
Thanks for tuning in, but before I leave, this is true now.
I can say this with all authority.
I've done it all.
I would rather go on Stefan Molyneux out of my own selfish interests.
Not just because he's a friend.
Stefan Molyneux has more influence than 60 Minutes.
