David Bloomberg examines manipulation as strategic social influence—from quid pro quo favors to political meta-thinking, where opponents like Trump or DeSantis are treated as predictable systems rather than individuals. He highlights Republicans’ pragmatic shifts, such as Mitch McConnell’s 2016 filibuster stance vs. 2020 Barrett approval, contrasting with Democrats’ moral consistency demands. Evolutionarily efficient but error-prone, this layered thinking distorts nuanced issues like COVID policies or Supreme Court picks, prioritizing power over authenticity. The episode warns of its dangers while urging mindfulness to cut through manipulation’s noise. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, here today again with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
Good.
How are you?
Pretty good.
So, reminder at the top of the podcast that if you want to argue, complain, compliment, tell your own story about a thing, whatever you want to do, let us know something about some content we have on this podcast.
You can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And other than that, we're going to get right into our topic today, which is manipulation.
And attached to it is a thing that I call meta-thinking.
And we're going to explain all that as we go.
So, manipulation fits right into your wheelhouse, David.
Not that you manipulate me or everyone else, but that you intake a lot of content and have a lot of experience with different situations where people do this manipulation on survivor.
And you mentioned poker as well, of course, that people manipulate other people in poker.
So go ahead and just kind of give your first thoughts, first take on manipulation.
Well, I was going to ask you when you asked how I was, I was going to ask you, do you really want to know how I am?
Or are you asking just to manipulate me into feeling better about it?
But I thought that would be jumping the gun.
And so if you want to jump the gun, David, you go ahead.
We're free form on here.
I have a very loose set of rules and jumping a gun is not among the no-nos here.
So unlike my other podcast, where I have a very tight set of rules.
Very exact, precise set of rules.
And of course, the order of the rules I've learned as I watch is very important.
Yes.
Yes.
Now, one of those rules is, and of course, for people who may not have heard the previous podcasts, it is a podcast about survivor.
And it talks about why each player lost.
And the first rule, and I always say the most important rule, is to scheme and plot.
And that's where manipulation comes in, because if you are scheming and plotting, you are also manipulating people.
And the person who wins at the end, they're not always the best schemer and plotter because there are other rules along the way about things you have to do, but they're usually pretty good at it.
And they're usually good at manipulating the other players to get what they want.
And it's interesting that you're talking to me this week because I don't know exactly when this podcast will go out.
But as we're talking, there's a player who was just voted out.
And in the podcast, we discussed, we don't understand why she trusted this other guy.
He has stabbed her in the back.
He has voted out her allies.
We don't know why she trusts him so much.
And normally we do the podcast after the interviews, but because of Thanksgiving holiday, things got jumbled up.
After our podcast went out, her interviews came in and she said, I don't know why I trusted him so much, but I did.
He could have told me to jump off a cliff.
I would have done it.
I just, I know he was doing these things, but there's something about him.
And so basically, in the context of the game, he is a masterful manipulator.
He is getting people to do what they want.
And he even had a checklist on the show, like number one, do this.
Number two, do this.
Number three, do this, in order to blindside her.
And it was all about manipulation.
How do you get people to do what you want them to do?
And it was, you know, and that's what a lot of good survivor is actually about.
Right.
So I just want to start for my end on, I'll do my definition of manipulation in my head.
Everyone should have their own definition of everything in their own head.
And this is mine.
Manipulation really is the use of social power by one person over another person.
And I guess that seems a little redundant because.
power itself is the ability to influence another person's decision.
So the fact that you might have any power at all insinuates that you have some ability to manipulate itself.
But manipulation would then be the exertion of that power.
But I also look at it sort of as social cause and effect.
Like you need to accomplish a thing and then you need other people's help to do it.
And which, by the way, in our society, everyone sort of has an idea, even if they haven't voiced it, that you generally need everyone else's cooperation.
And this is sort of wrapped up in a lot of ideas like the social fabric and the community.
And everything that you want to accomplish generally is something that you need other people's participation in accomplishing.
And so when I look at this, I immediately think to myself that everyone is manipulating in these tiny little ways.
Everyone is sort of pulling at other people to help them with their thing.
And by the way, David, I manipulated you into being here today.
I used coercive tactics.
I asked you very nicely.
I offered my time to help you with things.
And so everyone is doing this.
And, you know, we're also for most of this manipulation, it takes the form of what would, in contracts, would be called quid pro quo, which is sort of a you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
And so when you have, when you're friendly with a person, you've sort of laid down the social framework by which you could manipulate that person into helping you with the thing.
And by the way, in order to make sure that framework stays in place, they might be in turn manipulating you to help them with the thing.
And so this is how all of society really works is these very tiny little threads of manipulation, everyone kind of doing things.
And we're all friendly about it.
We're all very nice and charming with each other because that makes it easier.
And then we have a thing where we say, okay, well, you know, that's, that's fine, but not everyone is manipulative.
Like we, we say that we describe some people as being manipulative.
That person is manipulative.
And that's generally seen, of course, as a negative property for a person to have.
You should stay away from that person because they're manipulative.
So I think we should sort of draw the line here as to where we think manipulative is different than just everyday manipulation.
Because I think that's important too, that we have, because when we look at people and we think that everyone is manipulative or everyone is manipulating, it might come to the idea, as soon as you slur the line between these two things, it might make it seem okay to be manipulative.
And it might also seem that no one is manipulating if only some people are manipulative.
So the fact that we have these two terms that are very closely aligned and almost exactly the same to describe kind of two different things is the first thing I want to pick apart.
what do you think about this this who um i feel like manipulative is kind of like pornography You know it when you see it.
I don't know that you can make a definition easily because, like you said, everybody manipulates a little bit, but some people are manipulative.
Yeah.
And it's like if a guy flirts with a woman at the bar to try and get her to buy him a drink, he may be manipulating her.
If he does it with five girls, then he's manipulative.
Perhaps.
You know, and so I mean, everybody, I won't say everybody.
I guess it's possible there's somebody who doesn't, but almost everybody in one way or another, like you said, manipulates others around them, sometimes for good, sometimes for not good.
And it's all done in different ways.
And, you know, sometimes you can manipulate people by being nice.
Sometimes you can manipulate people by being not so nice, by threatening them, by, you know, the carrot or the stick.
There's just so many different ways.
I feel like manipulative describes the people who more use the carrot a lot rather than the stick, but they have a lot of carrots and they keep doing it over and over again.
And that's how they get their way in life or in business or in whatever.
Right.
I think that you're on something a little bit when you think about, you know, you describe, although we know there's more than two motivational tactics, we kind of divide them into carrots and sticks.
When we describe someone as being manipulative, we are sort of describing the people who are using a lot of carrots.
We don't usually look at people who are using a lot of threats as being manipulative.
We generally think that, at least I think, that if they were better at being manipulative, they wouldn't need to threaten anyone.
Right.
Right.
That's a sort of a tactic of last resort, if you will.
They really need to get something done and they don't have a lot of time or they're out of other options and they're just going to straight up threaten to get it done.
It's the con man versus the mugger.
Yeah.
You know, they both want your money.
The con man will manipulate you by words and other deeds to get you to give him his money.
The mugger is going to wave a gun in your face and say, give me your money.
Yeah.
I don't have time for all that manipulation stuff.
Right.
This gun is manipulative enough.
Give me your money.
When I think of someone who I describe as manipulative, I feel like the model in my head of the blank person that I feel is manipulative has a selfishness to them that they are, in essence, if I'm looking at manipulation in general, the everyday manipulations that happen, and that's maybe a sort of a quid pro quo.
When I think of a manipulative person, it's a person that's taking a lot more than they're ever giving in that exchange.
They're not really that interested in giving anything up.
They're only interested in taking.
And it might seem like they're giving something, but it's usually something of very little value.
But what they're taking usually has quite a bit more.
And that relationship becomes very one-sided in that way.
And I think that's an important property of this too, is that you're looking at a person that is extremely selfish when they are manipulative.
And I think that's important to remember.
So, I think now maybe is a good time to introduce the way that I look at this in that there's a concept that I call meta thinking.
So, there aren't a lot of articles about this because it's not really, I mean, it's not really a hard thing.
It's not part of hard sciences.
There's metacognition, which is somewhat related, I guess, which is kind of your own knowledge of your thoughts.
And this is sort of maybe sort of tangentially related to that, and maybe part of it.
But really, when I look at a thing and I think of it as meta-thinking, I think of it as you're giving up on some level of social authenticity in order to engage in strategic manipulation of a person.
And it's almost like you're thinking of them less as a person and more as like a puzzle to be solved or like a black box device that has a given set of inputs and it has some outputs that you're looking to get.
And you just need to tweak the right inputs to get the right output.
And so, when I'm thinking of this, one of the first things I think of is experiences from my past when I was young.
This primarily happened among people who were young, teenagers, when you had one of them, and I'll just use a teenage boy as an example.
A teenage boy liked a teenage girl.
And what was very common among my friend group, I'm not going to name any names and, you know, or admit to this behavior myself, but you know, when a boy liked a girl, instead of just getting to know that girl and finding out whether that girl really liked that boy or not, the boy might very well try to find out what that girl likes so that they can adopt those properties or those things and thereby try to get the girl to like them by the other way around,
finding out what they liked and then becoming that person rather than just showing that person their true selves and doing this.
And this is, you know, when you're teenagers, this is all the, it's ridiculous because it's all the surface level stuff anyway.
Oh, she likes this band.
So I'm going to go listen to this band and, you know, you know, play this band.
You know, she'll know that I like that, you know, and it's all really, really ridiculous surface level stuff.
But to me, that's all meta thinking as soon as you're doing it.
As soon as you're, you're essentially in that moment, the teenage boy is trying to trick the teenage girl into liking her by just saying, oh, you like that?
Well, I'll become that.
And then you like that.
And of course, it's ridiculous because as soon as you become that, what do you do then?
What you're going to continue to pretend to be this other person you're not?
I mean, teenagers haven't thought this stuff through, right?
It's, you know, but what do you think about this, this concept?
Is this something that makes sense to you?
Or is it, am I off in left field that sometimes I really am?
Well, first, what you're describing is the well-known documentary, Greece.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think Greece too is probably a better example when he has to adopt all the things and buy the motorcycle.
And I don't know.
Maybe no one watches it.
I don't remember.
Probably no one ever watched that.
Yeah, I have to admit.
Right.
But no, when you mentioned that this was going to be part of the topic, I started thinking about thinking.
About thinking.
And so we've gotten to levels of like meta-meta thinking or meta-squared thinking or something.
But it goes all the way up, David.
I promise you.
Yes.
Yes.
Keep going up.
Yes.
And that's exactly it, because it can keep going up in certain situations where not the one you're talking about, but in other situations where you're trying to think of, okay, what is that person thinking?
How can I react?
But what if my reaction is what they're expecting?
And that's not going to happen in your normal everyday situation, but it could happen in the two areas that you mentioned earlier, which are games like Survivor and poker.
Right.
There's even a term for it in poker, leveling.
Right.
Where, okay, I'm playing you.
I believe you're a good player.
So you know what I would do in this situation.
But aha, I know that you know that.
So I'm going to do something different.
But I now have to think another level up because you know that I know that you know that I know.
Yeah.
And, you know, it just gets to ridiculous levels.
So you can level yourself, basically.
You could just so overthink.
Outthink yourself.
Yeah.
Right.
And it's especially interesting when this happens against players who aren't that good.
And you're thinking, aha, when they act like this, they must be doing it for this reason.
And no, they're just doing it for the most basic reason.
They're betting big because they have a good hand.
They're not trying to bluff you.
They're just betting big because they have a good hand.
And you're thinking, aha, they must be putting that big bet there because they don't want me to call.
So I'll show them.
And you show them by giving them all your money.
And so, you know, it happens there in games like survivor.
It happens more along the lines of, okay, what would this person probably don't get to as many levels in part because you haven't eaten and your brain isn't working real well on survivor, but they can think like, okay, I know what this person wants in order to move forward.
Therefore, that's what I will tell them.
You know, they want a solid, trustworthy ally.
I'll give them that.
They want someone who they can bounce ideas off of.
I'll give them that, at least for now.
And some of them can be that, you know, different ways to different people, as long as the other people don't talk.
And that's sometimes the downfall of a survivor player is when the people you've made deals with talk to each other and compare notes.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, one thing I was thinking about when I was thinking about meta-thinking is that there is a concept that we talk about a lot.
I mean, generally that Royal Weed, you and I don't talk about a lot, but reverse psychology is an interesting example of sort of two people both engaging in meta-thinking about generally the same thing.
So in reverse psychology, you have a situation where one person has usually they have they come to the conclusion that let's call them Mark.
I pick on Mark a lot.
I don't know anyone named Mark, so it's easy.
Mark and Jim.
Mark has decided that Jim is working against him.
So Mark has decided that in engaging meta thinking, Mark has decided that everything Jim says is against my interest.
So he's going to do the opposite of whatever Jim says.
But then Jim engages in meta thinking too, realizes that this is what Mark's doing and starts giving Mark the opposite advice as what he would normally give in order to get the result that Jim really wants in this scenario.
And so reverse psychology is a really interesting example of this is that, yeah, you have both parties doing this thing.
And, you know, as soon as Mark then engages is, oh, he's doing reverse psychology.
I can go back to the, and then you start getting your levels that you're getting in poker, where you're starting to outthink the outthinker and go on down the chain.
And of course, classically, the best movie where this was ever done was The Princess Bride, Sean Wallace's character in the scene that everyone remembers is the scene with the poison get put in the glasses, and he's got to decide which one has the poison, which one doesn't.
And he starts doing the endless thinking on down the line.
Well, you would think that I would think that you would think that I would think.
If there's anyone left in the world that hasn't watched that, really.
Really, you should.
Everyone should.
It's top five movies of all time, in my opinion.
It's amazing.
But of course, this leads us straight to meta thinking in another context, which is that we have people who are attempting to use meta-thinking in our world, and it's leading to very terrible conclusions, which is that they've come to think that entire sections of the political world or the media itself is working against their interests.
And so they are then trying to outthink that entity that they somehow see as a one-body thing.
You know, so you have people in our world now who are just saying, oh, that's the mainstream media.
I don't need to listen to anything from the mainstream media because all of the mainstream media is working against my interest.
So I'm going to do whatever they're not saying.
And all of our polarization on our world is in part people trying to think this way about the political parties and the politicians.
That idea was a Trump idea.
I want to oppose it just because it was a Trump idea.
I'm not going to evaluate it separately to see whether the idea is any good.
You know, Trump put that legislation in.
So obviously it's bad.
And we get the same thing here.
Trudeau put that in.
That's a Trudeau idea.
You know, I oppose Trudeau, therefore I have to oppose all of Trudeau's ideas.
And this level of meta-thinking, it can be useful mostly because it's efficient.
It allows you to come to a conclusion much quicker than you would if you had to really, really dig down and think about all the things.
But that efficiency comes at a cost, which is a really a greater error level.
And so for the really important stuff, I think we need to realize that we're doing this and perhaps stop doing it for those important things.
What's your thoughts on this whole thing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, it's interesting that you bring this up because just maybe an hour before we're recording this, someone liked one of my tweets and I didn't recognize it.
I thought, well, you know, I didn't recognize the text in it.
So I clicked on it and it was a tweet of a cartoon that I did back in May of 2020.
And it was related to COVID and masks.
And it shows a guy listening to Trump saying, I'm not wearing a mask.
And listening to InfoWars, don't wear a mask.
It's a deep state elitist plot.
And watching a guy who has a Confederate flag in the background saying, don't wear a mask.
They want us to be slaves.
So there's the irony there.
A blonde woman who could be one of several different right-wing blonde women.
Don't wear a mask.
It's emasculating.
Someone from Q, don't wear a mask.
It robs precious bodily fluids.
And then that same guy is walking and there's a sign and it just says, please wear a mask.
And he screams, nobody tells me what to do.
And I thought, two and a half years ago, this cartoon, we already saw it then.
And, you know, I mean, nothing's changed, really.
But it goes to your point, really, that when people in this cartoon that the guy wanted to believe were telling him what to do, well, then it was gospel.
But heaven forbid anyone asked something else, and then it was horrendous.
Yeah.
And, you know, we've seen a lot of that in the last few years.
I mean, we've probably seen a lot of that more than the last few years, but it's especially seemingly been coming out in the last few years.
And yeah, it's it just depends who is saying it.
You know, if we had a different president when COVID hit, how would things have been different?
You know, if that president had immediately said we, you know, everybody should wear a mask.
And if that president was a different Republican, would people have been like, oh, yeah, that makes sense?
Because in other countries, they do.
In Asian countries, they wear masks all the time.
I recently saw an article about Mexico.
They're all wearing masks, you know, and it depends where you are.
And it got turned into a political issue where it never should have been.
Right.
And I certainly didn't mean to, you know, just tangent everything onto masks or anything, but it is an interesting point where how did this health measure get turned into such a heavy political issue?
Yeah.
And there's a, there's a, sorry, no, it's going to break you off there, but there's, there's a, you're right that this is a, this is an example of meta thinking.
And it's, it's, um, this meta thinking in the political sphere has led to a level of absolutism on almost every side that you have to pick a side and that anyone who hasn't picked a side just doesn't have enough info, or is you know?
It's a it's difficult to say, because it's so hard to say find anyone who hasn't picked a side.
But once you've picked a side, what seems to be happening pretty clearly is that you have to side with everything that side says, which is, of course then, tribalism.
Right, and you know, all this is working into a meta thinking, and meta thinking is just, it's like a system that's making thinking more efficient for you, I would say, easier.
I don't know that it's more efficient.
Well, I think that you use less time and energy to come to a conclusion.
Right yeah, I think it's there not evolutionarily, because it helped us come, you know, and it, the efficiency that it gave us, was more important than the fewer times that it led to the wrong conclusion at the time.
Right yeah, because we didn't have mass media to tell us all that.
You know, it wasn't possible that we all got it wrong all at once and then all drank the kool-aid all at once.
Right right now, so it's maybe more so possible.
Yeah right, and that's why you'll see like uh, certain spiders some of them are poisonous, some mimic the poisonous ones uh, in their, the way they look right, and you know if you were uh sorry, should be venomous, should be using the right term, that's right, the uh back in the uh days when we were hunter-gatherers, or even before then, if you saw a spider with a certain marking, you avoided it.
You would learn to avoid it.
Yeah right, yeah well, you would learn quickly in some cases because, you know, learn from some person's experience.
You weren't there to yeah, you weren't gonna sit there and grab it and examine it under a prehistoric microscope, You know, so yes, there is that already kind of like you said, evolutionarily in our makeup.
Yeah.
You know, and that's it's just already there.
If you hear a noise out in the jungle, you aren't going to stick around to see what it is.
You, you know, you run first, ask questions later, type of thing, right?
And, you know, which probably leads to all the different ghost shows that we have now, but that's a whole different topic.
And so there's a lot of that baked in.
And so that's why I say it makes it easy.
For me, efficient suggests, and maybe this is just my own definition that I'm coming off with off the top of my head right now.
Efficient means getting to the correct conclusion more quickly.
And I don't think, you know, this way of thinking gets you to the correct conclusion.
It gets you to a conclusion.
Yeah.
And so that's why, like, anyone who follows me on Twitter, where I'm at David Bloomberg for now, until, you know, Elon Musk goes even crazier, you will see where my political views lie.
But if Biden says something stupid or the director of the CDC says something stupid on Twitter, I mean, they're not going to read my response, but I'm still going to point out, you know, hey, this is stupid and you're doing it for political reasons only.
Right.
And you should stop it.
Whereas some people, I especially see it on the Trump side.
I can't say it's only on the Trump side for sure, but Trump had dinner with a white supremacist and an anti-Semitic guy.
And it took a week almost for any Republican to say anything negative about it.
Yeah.
And even then, you don't have the Republican leadership saying anything about it.
You don't have the run-of-the-mill Republicans, just your few who are like, oh, I want to separate myself from that.
I think probably all of politics is some level of meta-thinking in this way.
You would think about, I mean, really, pandering is also this, you know, in this meta-thinking category, pandering in general.
I mean, me as a lowly podcaster who, you know, in some respects, I might think, well, if I say something, it will have some effect on the audience and I should then not say that thing.
That's also some level of meta-thinking, right?
And this is on a much grander scale.
This is what all politicians are doing.
They'll say, oh, well, I should avoid talking about this or I should avoid making a definitive statement on that.
Or, oh, I should definitely come to this conclusion about this one particular thing because of that.
And almost all of those considerations, I mean, that's all meta thinking, but no one needed me to tell them that there aren't any authentic politicians, really.
And we're to the point now where we don't even expect them to be.
And in some circles, we congratulate them on how inauthentic they are.
Congrats, you were able to pull that off really well.
And yeah.
And I think that's one of the things wrong with democracy in general.
I don't know how you could ever avoid it, but it's there.
And it's definitely something that we have to contend with.
Yeah.
Because all the politicians are attempting to manipulate us pretty much all the time that they're ever in communication with us.
Yeah.
I was just listening to an interview with a former politician.
He was a former right-wing politician, part of the Tea Party.
And he now has formed an organization, an anti-Trump, anti-MAGA organization.
And he has come forward and said, look, I was wrong.
Now, he's still conservative, but his organization, like backed Mark Kelly, a Democrat in Arizona, backed the opponent to Lauren Boebert, who almost won, backed a Democratic senatorial candidate in Ohio, I believe.
And so in this interview, he said, you would have to be crazy to run for office right now because everything you've done since eighth grade will be found out and ripped apart.
Your whole life is ripped apart.
You know, so nobody who is sane, basically, runs for office anymore.
There have to have been some eighth graders who, you know, have been planning to run for president since the eighth grade that, you know, worked hard at making sure they were spotless.
Covered the entire time.
Yeah, covered up their social media profile.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, that's a very overgeneral situation.
Your point is very well put is that our microscope for these things and our ability to find all the other things is increasing year by year.
And this problem isn't going away.
We're going to get more and more of those details as we go.
We're going to get all the pictures of candidates picking their nose in the 12th grade gym class because there was a camera there too, and it's still on file somewhere.
I mean, that's all those things are going to come out.
And I think that we're going to have to be, eventually as a society, be more forgiving of those things.
We're going to, in order to save our society, we have to be okay with some of our people being less than absolutely perfect because they're not perfect.
We have become that way in certain cases.
I mean, the life that Donald Trump led, cheating on his wives, multiple wives, prostitutes, all that, just a few election cycles earlier would have been disqualifying.
You know, you're old enough to remember Gary Hart, as am I.
I actually don't remember Gary Hart.
Oh, well, I forget your.
So Gary Hart was a Democratic candidate for president in the primaries a number of years ago.
And there were rumors that he was cheating on his wife.
And he told the media, I am not cheating on my wife.
You have a camera.
Follow me around anywhere and you will see it.
And they did.
And they followed him to a boat where he had a young bikini clad girl sitting on his lap in a very compromising position, as I recall it.
Some of those details may be off, but suddenly he was no longer a candidate.
Now, he was stupid in more ways than one, knowing that the media was after him and knowing that he was doing this.
He couldn't keep it in his pants for just long enough to be elected.
But now fast forward to Trump and all these things.
And he has the evangelical vote.
Evangelists are backing him, despite his very non-Christian behavior.
And why did they do it?
There's a number of theories that I've heard, including some related to blackmail material on a high-level evangelical who endorsed him early.
Again, from another interview that that was suggested.
But I think the main reason was they knew he'd put in the judges that they wanted.
They wanted pro-life judges, anti-abortion judges.
Wanted pro-prayer in school judges.
They wanted all these different things.
And that trumped everything, so to speak.
Yeah, I think you're right.
In that situation, they were giving up on one thing in order to get another thing.
They were looking to manipulate to accomplish a different goal than merely having a president in office that they didn't have to hold their nose for.
Right.
That's that was essentially it.
They got what they wanted.
They were goal-driven.
I think I had another episode about this.
They were interested in their goals, and it was only their goals that they were interested in.
We sometimes hold them point out their hypocrisy in other aspects, but they don't really care about that hypocrisy.
They only care about the goals.
Right.
And now I was just reading other articles about evangelicals are dropping Trump.
They're like, oh, it was the final straw.
It wasn't the final straw.
They got what they wanted.
Yeah.
They don't need him anymore.
And they have DeSantis coming up, who is like an earlier, you know, a larval stage of Trump and will do the same thing.
I mean, they already have a solid majority in the Supreme Court.
And if they back DeSantis or someone like him, they'll get the same thing without having to deal with the ickiness of Trump.
You know, while at the same time, on the, you know, in the Democratic Party, a few years earlier, you had a senator who used to be a Saturday Night Live comedian who got in trouble for doing some things that were inappropriate with a woman, but he was also a comedian at the time, not a senator.
I'm not excusing it by any means, but what he did caused the party to make him resign.
Trump did much worse than that on any given day and was elected president.
I mean, it's possible what you're pointing out is almost like the people on the right in the United States have come to this conclusion already that they have to be forgiving on some points in order to get what they want, that they're already meta-thinking in this way.
They're already thinking around this problem and they're not as worried about all of the little social factors and being authentic.
They have already reached that level.
They're perhaps even advanced on it, right?
And that the on the left, the moral, though, those moral values are tripping people up more often.
Whether you want to say that's good or bad depends on your measure, because if it's about getting the result you want, probably the right is winning in that.
Yeah.
And I think it happens frequently.
The Democrats in the Senate here in the U.S., they're like, oh, well, we can't change the filibuster rules.
You know, that would be bad.
We can only do it for these specific things that have historically been done.
And then they'll say, well, because if we do it, then the Republicans will do it when they're in charge.
The Republicans will do it whenever the hell they want.
Yeah.
You know, they don't have a moral compass in that regard.
When they held up.
They're clearly not worried about consistency.
Right.
And when they held up the Senate seat that should have gone to Obama that was left open for a year, because McConnell said, oh, well, traditionally, you know, as a president is on their way out.
You said Senate seat, but I think you meant.
I'm sorry.
Supreme Court.
Supreme Court seat.
Yeah.
Yes.
Thank you.
Yeah.
You know, and McConnell said, well, traditionally on their way out, they don't do that, which is baloney.
He made that up out of whole cloth.
Yeah.
And then another senator, and I don't remember which one, said, was asked on a TV show: well, if this happens under the next president who's a Republican, will you take the same stance?
He said, absolutely.
You can replay this interview.
So what happens?
Fast forward to the end of Trump's term.
Three weeks before Trump's done.
Uh-huh.
They need to have a replacement.
Ruth Better Ginsburg dies.
Exactly.
And McConnell pushes it through.
The other senator who had said, absolutely, you can quote me on it, ignored it.
Yeah, some TV stations did replay that.
And he went, eh, oh well, there's nothing you can do about it.
Yeah.
And that's how we got Amy, whatever Barrett.
Amy Coney Barrett.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, she's only there because the Republicans didn't care about consistency, didn't care about how they looked.
They cared about power.
So they manipulated the system to bring it back to bring it back to that topic.
I appreciate that.
So we can maybe close this off.
So, yeah, manipulation is something that we all do in closing.
Being manipulative is generally seen as more selfish and negative.
Try not to be manipulative.
I think that's probably best.
And try to just understand when you're engaging in meta-thinking.
Metacognition is when you are aware of your thoughts and you should probably focus on that as well.
I think, I mean, mindfulness is one of these practices that attempts to get people to do that.
I think everyone should be engaging that at all times to understand how you come to your own conclusions.
Everyone should try to do that, but understand when you're just slurring past all the little details and jumping to the conclusion using meta-thinking, because you have a much greater failure rate for all the things you think about and all the conclusions you come to if you're doing that.
And we need everyone, not just me and you in this conversation, everyone in the world to come to better conclusions, really.
Yeah.
Thank you for manipulating me to come on to this podcast.
I believe you said, no, David, I'm going to do this podcast without you.
And I said, no, no, you can't.
You can't do it.
Yes.
And so it was that old reverse psychology that got me.
Yeah.
Well, now that I use that trick, it's out of the bag.