 One to ten, on a scale of one to ten, how much flak have you gotten since Trump got elected? Because before, when you were predicting the Trump thing, it was a dumpster fire, your Twitter feed. And then afterwards, I would imagine there's some sense of, okay, you were right, but most of that's probably more like FU, I don't care that you were right. Well, a tremendous amount of the Twitter traffic were apparently professional trolls, because the moment he got elected, they just all went away. And it seems like they would have stayed around a little bit if they were just normal people to say, well, see what you've done and that sort of thing. But I would say it went down 80% after election, at least on Twitter. But in terms of the impact on my life, I would say my number of friends is probably down 75%. That's a lot. Since I started writing about it. So that you're down to one friend now. Yeah, just one friend and he's on the watch list right now. Yeah, right. Wow. I've noticed that a lot of people have mentioned that they've lost friends because of the political situation. And I think that's kind of a shame. I've got plenty of friends on both sides of the camp. They're probably not people I would want to have over at the same time, all of them. Some of them would be totally fine. There's only a few in each camp that I think are completely insufferable when they start talking about politics. And this has been a particularly divisive election, particularly divisive administration in general. And one thing that your book when bigly focuses on is the persuasion aspect of the current administration or of Donald Trump specifically. But during the show, I would love if possible, it probably isn't. I'm going to try anyway to divorce the persuasion concepts from the man himself. Because I don't want people to go, this is about Trump click, right? I want people to go, okay, maybe I hate Trump or maybe I love him. But in the meantime, I'm going to learn something about persuasion. I don't know how feasible that is. I think we've already triggered a lot of people just by mentioning this. But for the rest of the people who are actually still listening, I think we might be able to learn something. Because I learned something, I learned a lot from the book, devoured it in one plane ride and went away thinking, okay, I'm not really qualified to say whether this is all accurate or not, but it's certainly interesting. Yeah, we can do that. Let's proceed. I'll try to detrump it as much as possible. Yeah, it might be tricky. You did mention your career and your income took a huge gap. I don't know if it's a gap, but what's a proper term for this? Nose dive maybe? It's a tricky hit. Yeah, a severe hit. What now? I guess now you write a book and then you try to make up for the little stop-loss here. I don't think the book will make up for the annihilation of my speaking career. I lost a big corporate license deal and probably we'll never get another licensing deal for Dilbert going forward. Because of that? Because of writing about the election, yes. Poor Dilbert. I mean, he's an innocent cartoon and now he's going to be exposed left and right. Well, so far the comic itself is fine because newspapers are a little bit immune to the left-right battle. They try to serve both, so I'm fine in newspapers, but that's the only solid place. Really? It seems strange to me that someone would go, hey, we were going to put your cartoon on a mug, but now we just can't do it because it reminds us too much of the president. Yeah, there are some people who just can't shake that association. Wow. Well, I guess if you had to do it all over again, what would you do? Would you do it exactly as you had or would you maybe sell the Dilbert stuff to a trust or something like that or move some IP around or maybe you'd be Adam Scott on Twitter instead of Scott Adams? You know, I think I'm actually attracted to trouble. It's been sort of a lifetime problem with me. I think, well, what's the most dangerous thing I could do? And then I think, well, that sounds good. Usually I talk myself out of it. In this case, I probably would have talked myself into it again because I did enjoy, I guess, the fight of it, the intellectual fight of it. But there was something bigger I thought happening during the election. I thought that it would change how people thought about their place in the world. It seemed like a far bigger thing than just one person's persuasion. Sure, because when I think dangerous, I think cartoonist. Well, you know, cartoonists do get killed. That's true. Oh, actually, you know what, that's very true, especially in the last few years. Yeah, the Charlie Hebdo guys. Yeah, and what was the other one, the drama, Mohammed Contest? The film, I guess it was, was that a filmmaker? Showmaker, yeah. Yeah, adjacent artists in general. Now it's not as safe as it was before. You say that you're in no political camp and you're more of an observer. And that's fair. It's hard to say that when you read the book because it is about one side, it is about the president's persuasion of power. And so a lot of folks might really not believe that. But to those folks, I kind of want to say it doesn't really matter whether or not that's true, in my opinion. I think looking at persuasion as a skill set, it kind of doesn't matter who we're learning from if that person is effective. I think it would be, there's probably no persuasion class anywhere, rhetoric class especially, anywhere on the planet that doesn't say, all right, we don't condone this, but here's a bunch of Hitler speeches and these were undoubtedly effective for negative results. And I think to omit that kind of case study is to just kind of plug our ears and sing la la la and hope that it goes away. Yeah, unfortunately, there are effective people that we don't like. And if you're just looking at the tools and you can hold your nose and say, what can I learn? Then you can learn. You mentioned that when you're a member of a group, you'll find their views more sympathetic. So of course, I have to ask you, is the book then a reflection of, well, you know, secretly I am a Trump supporter. So of course all of these things look like persuasion because they worked on me. Well, I describe myself politically as left to Bernie except with a preference for the things that might actually work. In other words, philosophically, I want free education, free healthcare and all those things. I don't know how to get there, but I think maybe America could, at least have a plan to get there eventually. So politically, I'm not on the Republican side, but in terms of the first word you used was in their camp. But as soon as you said that, I thought to myself, well, I am sort of in their camp because I do represent a point of view which they like and I do appreciate that group because they are the ones who supported me for two years whereas the other group attacked me viciously for two years. So I have a strong preference for the people which is different than the policies or the politician. It seems strange to me and I know how I started with let's not talk about Trump but now I've only done that, but I promise at one point I won't abandon that. You're not the first person who couldn't avoid it. Yeah, I know, right? It's like there's this huge magnetic force. It really is and we'll talk about that in a little bit as well. I think that it is interesting that we find that when someone strongly disagrees with a certain side's perspectives, they then start to disagree. And this goes for any person. This is not just from this election or just pro or anti-Trump. People then go, I don't like that you're even saying that this is a possibility therefore I'm going to attack you. Because it seemed to me always a little bit nonsensical to come after somebody who says I'm predicting a Trump win for better or for worse or somebody who also maybe in Silicon Valley would say things like don't keep talking about Trump, you're going to get him elected. Nobody went to that guy and said, you shut up, we'll talk about whatever we want. They all went, oh, okay, that's a good idea. And I had the same problem on this show when I interviewed Roger Stone. People went, I'm unsubscribing because he shouldn't be allowed to talk. And I thought, who made these decisions about who I'm allowed to talk to or about? And I think that's a weird problem that you have faced more than anybody. Let me bail you out. Let's talk about Colin Kaepernick's persuasion because I'm a big Kaepernick fan. There we go. So when I say fan has nothing to do with football, it doesn't even have anything to do with the specific policies he's pushing. Although the topic is important, of course. But persuasion-wise, Colin Kaepernick nailed it. I mean, he raised consciousness, the entire country is talking about the thing that he started. He stayed within the law. He didn't break any laws. He offended our sensibilities in exactly the right way for a protest. And now my image of the America that I want to live in is that I don't want a flag that I'm not allowed to burn. That's not a flag that has the same value to me. I'm offended when somebody burns it because it's just an emotional reaction. But I don't want to live in a country that has a flag I can't burn. And so Colin Kaepernick, I think persuasion-wise, it's like the Nobel Prize of persuasion. The entire country is talking about his thing. He broke no law. He hurt no people. And he had skin in the game. That's as good as it gets. Yeah, that's true, right? He's not in jail. He doesn't have any... Well, I don't know if he got a fine from the owner as it's hard to say. But if he did, it's going to be a drop in the bucket compared to whatever next contract he's going to end up with or the one he already has. Well, he doesn't have a contract now, so that's a problem. Well, I guess I don't know. I would say that that shows you, one, how much I follow sports versus other items on the agenda. But I don't think he's going to be suffering through this any more than... Well, I don't know. Actually, what do you think is going to happen in this situation? You're pretty good at predicting things so far. I think he's suffered quite a bit. I mean, the huge portion of the country will never forgive him. Oh, that's true. And that just will never go away. I don't think there's anything he can do to fix that. Well, he's good, so I just gave him big props for persuasion. So maybe he has more game than we know. But at this moment, I'd say he put his skin in the game for something he cared about. And it's going to cost him forever, probably. Do you think that it's politically, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the word, beneficial to then alienate certain people like he has done while then, of course, using that same platform to draw many, many people that much closer to him? For example, I didn't care about this at all. He was a name on a jersey and nothing more. Now he's been elevated a few tiers up as somebody who's an influencer in a way that actually matters. There are plenty of people who say, I'm not watching football anymore and screw this guy. It's almost a worthwhile trade-off, in my opinion, but I'm wondering what you think about that sort of thing. Well, it's certainly worthwhile in the sense that he raised the issue that he wanted to raise and he took the bullet. I mean, he knew that this was going to cost him and he did it anyway. So that I have to respect. Is that where you kind of fell on the Trump prediction scale as well? Because it sounds easy to say and that's why I wrote about Trump on my blog and it's like people are going to go, this guy wrote about Trump on a blog. The other guy took a knee in front of the whole country. It's not the same thing. Well, no, I certainly would never compare myself to any of those individuals. I took some risk with what I was doing, but I did think and I still think that if you look at the way people talk about the election, the word persuasion is now common. You know, you didn't see that in other elections. You see people referring to a phrase that I'm credited online for being the first to say, which is this 3D, 4D chess analogy. So it's become common to think that the way the president operates is through a persuasion filter and he's got some technique there and it's not just all random. And that's what I wanted people to know. I wanted to sort of, it wasn't about Trump so much as, you know, opening a hole in the universe to look through to a deeper truth. And the main thing I always talk about is the two movies on one screen. The number of times we're looking at exactly the same information. There's no data difference. We're smart. We're looking at it and we just come to different conclusions. I was just reading Scientific America on the plane the other day and they had a fascinating study where they were trying to figure out, what's up with these science deniers? Oh, yeah. Tell me about that. I would love to hear about that. So number one, I don't believe there's any such thing as a science denier. I've never met anybody who thought science was a bad idea. There are people who looked at the same stuff and came to different conclusions. And if you don't like the conclusion that they came to, doesn't agree with the majority, you've got a problem. But here's the study in Scientific America that tells you the two movies on one screen vividly. They wanted to find out if denying science had something to do with simply not understanding science. So the first thing you would test is, well, is it just the dumb people? And sure enough, they would find that there were plenty of dumb people who disagreed with the scientists. But they also found that across the entire knowledge scale, to the most unknowledgeable about science, no facts changed their minds. In other words, the data was never part of the decision to begin with. So the fact that some people are saying no and some people are saying yes is almost certainly because they align with the political side. At least in most cases, there have to be some independent minds there somewhere. But in general, people just vote their side and then they figure out why they did it after the fact. I could not agree more. When we had Shaquille O'Neal on the show, he mentioned that he was just joking when he said that the earth was flat. And I got a lot of email, mostly tweets, because you know how they go on Twitter, saying, no, no, no, the earth really is flat. This is the Freemasons are forcing him to say that he was joking because this, that, and the other thing. And every single person that I engaged with, because I was genuinely curious, there are really flat earthers out there. I want to know what these people are about. Universally, they were religious and they were part of a certain church that said the earth is flat and there's the firmament and that's what the angels live above that. And then all of the other, and I throw this in air quotes, science, then somehow has to be squeezed into that, that sort of perspective and that sort of perspective says, no, above the sky is the firmament and above the firmament is heaven. Everything else has to fall into that and that means the earth has to be flat. Well, I think I found my new religion because I like to keep it simple. Yeah, there you go. Earth is flat, angels up there, done. Yeah, angels up there, bad stuff down there. Just don't dig too far and we're good to go. Yeah. Tell me about, and I'd love to hear about 3D and 4D chess as a result of this conversation as well, so don't let me forget about that, but let's talk about the types of persuader. You go through that early in the book, Win Bigly, what are the different types of persuaders? What are we dealing with on a daily basis? So I try to help people figure out the different powers that different persuaders have and so it seemed to me that I'm what I call a commercial persuader and by that I mean I use persuasion for my job. It's part of how I write, it's part of how I make cartoons, it's part of how I write books and so I'm a commercial grade persuader. Above me would be cognitive scientists, people who actually study this for a living. So as I say in Win Bigly, if a cognitive scientist says, hey, this chapter's wrong, believe the scientist, not me. You know, I'm a commercial grade, they're a science grade and then above that I put what I call the master persuaders. These are people who have all the tools of persuasion but they bring something else, either a high-risk appetite or there's something about their personality that's just gigantic. In this case, Trump has both. So there are people like Steve Jobs, for example, where there's something about his willpower, his, again, appetite for risk and other things that just normal people don't have but they're above and beyond the tools of persuasion but you put them together and they're insanely powerful. So the things that we see master persuaders do are maybe not yet explained by science then, is that what you're saying? Or are there things that scientists have not studied since they're are rung above on the ladder? Let me give you some examples. Sure. So no, I don't think it's so much a case that science hasn't discovered what master persuaders can do. An example would be a master persuader says something that they know is not true and they're going to take a lot of flack for it but in the meantime, they're going to get attention for something that they want attention for. Ordinary people can't do that because they say, I'm not going to go in public and say something that I know isn't true. But a master persuader, sometimes they say, well, you know, it's for a greater good, perhaps, we hope, right? So I'll shade this. I'll use a little hyperbole. It doesn't really matter in the long run. What matters is where we're heading and I think that's a good place to go. So there's something about the personality that's able to do what other people would say, I just can't do that. Right, so it's almost, like you said, a high appetite for risk and or something that makes them almost immune to the social consequences or ignorance in a way that makes them just not care at all. Yeah, immune to shame is a big deal. If you look at my arc, you know, transitioning from cartoonist to guy who was writing about persuasion and stuff, that was a risky transition. And we see the risk and all the friction it caused, all the, you know, the cost to my main business, the, you know, the attacks that I got online and everything. But I'm at a point in my life where I like the risk and I'm not, I'm almost immune to shame. You know, it's sort of a learned behavior. We'll see about that when this comes out. Yeah, it's still early. But the, it is a learned skill to be immune to other people's opinions and just sort of brush it off and move on. Well, let's talk about that. How do we learn that skill? Because there are plenty of people that have nothing to be ashamed of but do have unpopular views that would love to know how they make that happen. Number one way is to be embarrassed a whole bunch of times and then look back a month later and say, oh, my day today is exactly like it would have been if that had never happened. Right, the real life consequences were I was embarrassed temporarily and nothing more. Yeah, I took the Dale Carnegie course. I may have mentioned that last time we talked, but a small part of the course is they actually have you embarrass yourself intentionally in front of the class. I don't remember that and I've taken a lot of Dale Carnegie. Maybe they rewrote the curriculum after at a certain point. Maybe nobody would take it after that. Yeah. But I found that really, really helpful. And it even helps with things like public speaking because you're thinking, oh, what's everybody thinking of me? And the Dale Carnegie course just lets you just let go and just act natural. And that's the safest thing you can do. So it's the worrying that causes the problem. You think, well, I'd better worry about this because this is a potential problem. But the only problem was the worrying. Once you get rid of that, it solves itself. So essentially we can go back and maybe journal sometimes where we felt really embarrassed and then examine the lasting consequences thereof and find that there really aren't any. Well, yeah. It's an ongoing process. And one of the things I've got going for me is that I'm old. Right? So I'm 60. I didn't notice. So the number of times that you've been embarrassed presumably is far fewer than the number of times I have. You'd be surprised. But yeah, maybe that's true. Especially recently, you've been racking them up I see online, I think. Whether you've done so intentionally or not. And I think a lot of people have it out for you and this is probably not going to help. What do you think? Oh, yeah. I think my popularity will plunge to a new low. But with books, books are not really sold to people who want to learn something. Well, let me modify that a little bit. People buy books to hear their own opinion expressed better. All right? At least political books. Right. My book has information in it about persuasion. But still, people are going to say, well, you're talking about this topic and I'm on the other side, so I'm not even going to listen to the persuasion. So what I expect is it will be a polarizing book, but it may not be bad for sales because you're better off exciting a small group of people who actually act than to be pretty good to a bunch of people. That's the Hollywood model. The Hollywood model is if you're testing a pilot for a show and everybody who's in the test audience says, yeah, that's good. I'd watch that show. That's pretty good. That means nothing. You want 10% of those people to walk out and say, good lord, this is the best show I've ever seen. Tell me when this is on. Can I get a copy of the tape? So you need excitement from a small number that predicts success better than a lot of people saying, yeah, that's pretty good. So this book will, and I can back you up on this, this will certainly polarize a lot of people. People who support the current administration are going to go, yeah, this is amazing. I'd never noticed all this stuff. It's so enlightening. Now I've got to go rewatch all this video. I'm going to be looking at him differently. And I will say that even now, having read this and not necessarily by any stretch falling into one of the mainstream political camps, that it's become at least, and I'll give you this, it's become very much a lot more interesting to watch the president speak because now I can look for the persuasion things instead of just saying, oh, what sweet, what fresh hell is this now with the climate thing or whatever. And I wish that we had a book about this for pretty much anybody that we had to watch that we didn't necessarily like for the next several period, for the next period of several years. And I will say also that the examples in the book, they're going to ruffle some feathers and I can see a review in, I think some of your best media that's going to sell a lot of this book are going to be people that just skewer the crap out of it, whether they do a good job at that or not. I think you're going to have a lot of rebuttal pieces from some of those reviews online and you should just warm up that keyboard and have a replacement ready because you're going to be doing a lot of typing, I think. It's going to be really challenging for reviewers, I think. I think they're going to have a tough time for it for the same reason the public will. They're going to try to separate the politics and their view of things from the actual book. I'm going on The Morning Joe Show when I do my tour. Wow, they're starting at an expert level. I'm going into the lion's den. I can't wait, that'll be fun. Yeah, that should be interesting. I often wonder though how many journalists that interview you read the stuff that you put out before they do the interview or if they just get five bullet points from an intern and then try to wing it. Well, in the case of a book, it's actually rare for somebody to read the book. So you're actually in rare territory having consumed it before I got here. I would say no more than one in eight or ten, maybe. It seems like that would be a huge advantage if you want to debate somebody about a book that they've written that you might want to go ahead and read it first or at least part of it. Well, it certainly gives me some freedom. Yeah. It's like, as I said in the book, you wouldn't know that. Yeah, exactly. Well, all right, people don't use facts to make decisions. That was one of the major points in the book. Tell us why that's true because a lot of people go, nope, all my decisions are fact-based and I am empirical and that's what's good about my decisions. Is there all based on facts? Yeah, everybody thinks that. But I think there was a recent study, I wish I could quote it, but something like 98% of people just won't change no matter what facts you give them on politics. People will change on things they don't care about. So if you were to imagine this on the graph, the more they cared about it, the less likely they're going to change, which seems backwards, right? The more emotion that they have into it, I guess that's the better way to say it. The more emotion, the more likely their mental processes are short-circuited. Right, because of all the fallacies, confirmation bias, some cost fallacy, there's a lot of emotional investment in anything that you are, I'm trying not to say there's a lot of emotional investment in things that you're emotionally invested in because that's circular, but things that you feel strongly about by definition, you're investing more and more emotion in that, which would make you more and more wrong in the past if you change your mind moving forward, which is why we see as remarkable people who do things like leave the Amish and join the, what do we call it? I guess the real world, I would say, the rest of the world, we find that amazing or somebody that shakes off severe issues growing up in the middle of rural Africa or something like that and becomes some sort of tech entrepreneur, those stories are amazing because of the amount of investment that somebody has in a certain way of life or a certain set of thoughts, religion, or otherwise. Let me give you a little example that's a current one. So after the Vegas shooting, there's lots of talk about the security guard, Jesus Campos, and where was he, and a lot of people came up with conspiracy theories and they were so sure their conspiracy theory was right that this security guard must have been somehow connected with the shooter that when they produced the actual picture of him and then people compared it to, I guess, an older picture which they knew was actually him and they said, they put him side by side on Twitter and they said, clearly not the same guy. They've replaced him with a body double and I looked at the pictures and I'm not, I don't buy into the conspiracy theories and therefore I have no emotional investment. I simply didn't think that was the thing. I look at those pictures and I think that's exactly the same guy. It could not be more obvious. I'm looking at him like two pictures next to each other, clearly the same guy, but other people, honest, smart, completely normal people who can hold jobs, looked at those pictures and said, oh my God, this one on the left is a whole different person. And when you see that starkly, you're actually standing in the room with somebody who's looking at the same simple thing and they're seeing it differently. It's amazing. It just tells you how powerful this is and that was only with just a little bit of mental investment in their prior opinion and they still couldn't shake it. With a photograph that could not have been clearer in my opinion. Do you think we're evolved to see that way? We actually had a brain scientist on the show earlier and I can't remember which brain scientist it was, but she was saying that one of the things they're studying right now are a lot of these police shootings and they're thinking that the police are actually seeing dangerous weapons because their brain is painting a completely different picture and she thinks that with more advanced brain imaging in the next 10, 20 years, we're going to be able to see that people who make grave mistakes like that based on negative stereotypes, maybe of the race or ethnicity of the person that they're involved with, they're actually seeing something completely different than we're seeing on a video, which is why it looks so bad on the video because we look and we say, how did you think that guy was armed and running towards you when he was unarmed and running away from you? And if we one day get to the day where we can replay what they saw in their brain, somehow, we'll see exactly what they said, which is he was running towards me and he had a gun in his hand. You've probably seen the famous video of the people passing a ball around and then the monkey joins the circle. Yeah, this guy in a gorilla suit or something walks by slowly? He actually joins the circle for a moment. Oh, really? And because you've been asked to count the number of passes that they pass back and forth, people don't see a man in a gorilla suit joining a small group of, I don't know, five people in a circle. And after they tell you and then you watch it, you think I was blind to a giant monkey on screen and I didn't even see it. I thought it was a fake video where it played twice and one had the bear or the monkey or the gorilla, whatever it was, and one didn't, so I actually rewound it and rewatched it and then I reloaded it from an incognito tab and Chrome thinking, oh, it knows that I'm back because there's no way that I miss this and we can link to that video in the show notes for people that haven't run this test on themselves. You will be shocked. Well, I guess we've ruined it now, right? But show a friend who's not looking for that because now, of course, you'll say, how did you miss this in Knuckleheads? If you show it to somebody who's not aware of what the test is testing, you will find that they miss it almost 100% of the time. So stop me if I've told this story before last time we talked, but I was once a bank teller here in San Francisco and I got robbed at gunpoint. During the middle of the day? During the middle of the day. So it was a bank robbery? Bank robbery, which actually is very common. Most of the local branches get robbed on a regular basis, but you don't even know it if you're in the lobby of the bank. It's usually just a quiet transaction. Give me your money. They do. The guy leaves. Anyway, so I got robbed twice at gunpoint when I was a bank teller. When I was in my 20s. Oh, my God. And, of course, the FBI and police or whoever it is comes by and they say, give us the description. So I described him and keep in mind that he was right in front of me. He was at my window, the bank teller window, and I had a good look at him. And I said, oh yeah, he's about my size. He's about 5'8". He's had salt and pepper hair and he was sort of bald and he hadn't shaved for a while and he had a long trench coat. And I had a really good image. In fact, I still have it in my head, a perfect image of that guy. So I get a call from my boss and he goes, they're wondering if you really pulled the secret alarm which activates the camera, it tells you where the camera is supposed to be looking, you know, at what point they're supposed to be looking. And they said, they can't find that guy on the video when they play it back. So I actually went to the top secret FBI headquarters. You know, it wasn't headquarters. But the place that they look at the tapes and they said, you know, is this guy on the tape the guy who robbed you? That's not even close. The guy on the tape was, he looked like 35, like a young Clint Eastwood with this big bushy brown mustache, full head of hair and a sport jacket. Could not have been further from the guy that I clearly saw. And then they played it backwards in slow motion and I watched that complete stranger rob me. All right. So there was no ambiguity when you saw it on tape. He actually was robbing me. But my memory was an entirely different person. And, you know, the FBI said, yeah, don't even worry about it. That's actually kind of normal. Who did you think that robbed you? I mean, did you pick that guy out of a movie? Was it just somewhere stored in the memory banks from a TV show you saw as a kid? Who knows? Because, you know, you're under duress and then your brain just doesn't act normally. Right. And then you convince yourself you saw something you didn't see. Right. When you're trying to theoretically fight or flight, fight for your life, it's not going, your brain's not saying, you're going to be important for you to remember exactly what this person looks like for later. Your brain's thinking, how do I get out of here without getting shot in the head by this crazy person? And then there was a second one. The second time I got robbed, he actually put the gun up to my nose. So I actually took out a gun and held it right up to my face and said he would, you know, shoot me if I didn't give him money, which is really scary because you're pulling the silent alarm while you're looking down the barrel of the gun. Right. And he knows it. Right. It's a really scary situation. I was dumb to have even pulled the alarm. I should have just, you know, given him my own wallet and said, hey, take away again. But I gave him the money and eventually I got asked to be part of a lineup, picking a guy out of a lineup. And I recognized him immediately, but he was also the only one smiling. And so, and the other people in the room because he'd robbed several banks, several witnesses. We all picked the same guy. And I always wondered after that day, was it because he was the only one smiling? Huh. So he just stood out. You didn't necessarily pick him. He was going out of his way to look like he wasn't worried. And the others were actors. So they were looking, they were trying to act like a guilty guy and he was the only one who wasn't. So I always wondered, did I really recognize him? Or did that cue me that he must be the guy? How interesting. I'll never know. So if you're in a lineup, try to just look like everybody else in the lineup. Don't try to look like you're relaxed. I'm hoping to avoid that lineup situation. Yeah, right. So why is this concept important that humans use emotion instead of facts to make decisions? What impact does this have on us? This is a concept we teach at our boot camps and our live programs quite a bit. But I'm curious as to what you would say about this. So I call this the hypnotist point of view. So I'm a trained hypnotist. And one of the things that you sort of have to believe in order to even do hypnosis and understand it and work with it is that people are rational about 90% of the time. 10% of the time on the little stuff they don't care about what they can do fine. But the common view of the world is exactly the opposite of that. The common view is that we are rational, 90% of the time, and about 10% of the time we get emotional and things go crazy. If you use those two filters on life and say, okay, which one is explaining things better? The irrational filter just wins every time. That doesn't mean it's true because we may live in the universe where we're just fooled about everything. But certainly as a filter to predict things, it's very true. Just look at the fact that two people can look at the same data with the same IQs, same backgrounds, and just see different things. Actually, literally see different things like we were just talking. That's completely irrational behavior and it's the norm. It's not the exception. One of the concepts in Winn-Bigly is that things we think about all the time rise a couple of rungs up on the ladder of importance in our minds. You gave a lot of really interesting examples of this and the way that Trump uses these examples to persuade. Can we explain and give some examples of this because that explains a lot of why a lot of these facts and assertions and things like that come out of his mouth seemingly for no reason. And a lot of us just smack our foreheads and think, you didn't Google this before you got up on a podium in front of the media? So I'll quote Dr. Carmen Simon, expert on memory. She's been on the show, yeah. And she teaches and writes about the fact that if you don't have a little bit of wrongness, people won't remember it. So if everything looks the same, your brain just falls asleep. It's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, more of that because your brain can't remember everything, right? It's very selective. And so there's something about President Trump's natural style, which I think he is intentionally elevated for these purposes, that everything seems to violate something that you didn't think should have been violated. He either acts in a way that you say, no president should act that way, or he states something that you think that couldn't possibly be true, or he uses a word that shouldn't be used in that context. There's just something about it that's not normal. And he does that so consistently, it would be hard to think that that's completely accidental. Although I do imagine there are plenty of times where there's a small error and he just doesn't care. So some of it is not caring to make it exactly as how people expect. But the net effect of it is you can't turn away. If you tweet something, you just say, oh, that's more interesting than whatever else I was doing. Let's talk about that. And then it becomes part of your brain's architecture. How can we use this concept in our own lives if we're not the president of the free world here? What do we do in our daily lives to maybe capitalize on the fact that, look, I want people to think this is important. How do I get it wrong but not so wrong I lose credibility? Well, there's probably, there must be infinite ways to do something slightly wrong. So I guess it would depend on the specific situation. But if you're using hyperbole and let's say, let's use the classic example, let's say, well, for example, in this interview, I'm happy to see that at least 50 or 60 people have showed up in the audience to watch us. And I'm really happy about that. Million, million and a half, yeah. Now, when if that ever gets fact checked and we find out that it's two. And they're both my parents. Yeah. That would never, that would be, it's a little too far-fetched. Who's going to believe that anyway? But by the time somebody finds out that that fact was an exaggeration, they still have it in their head and they've lived with it. Well, I guess there were a lot of people at that thing. And even the corrected information just doesn't have as much impact we don't like to change our mind that much. So we can always use hyperbole and then just realize, because people think, why would he say that? Of course, he's going to get caught on that. And what you're saying is, yeah, but it doesn't matter if it's caught on that because the effect happens in the moment. It doesn't matter that later on down the line, it doesn't look accurate. Well, he also uses the trick where he makes you think past the sale quite a bit. So there was a recent tweet where he said something like, I can't imagine the Democrats if they voted against us, how would they live with themselves in the future? And it makes you think about, well, could they live with themselves? Would that be hard in the future? What would that be like if he didn't vote for this? That seems like an exaggeration. I think those Democrats would be fine because it's the way they voted. I'm sure they like that. So you're talking to yourself about this future where they've got a problem and you've already thought past, did they make that vote? So he's making them think about their bad future, which is strong persuasion. What types of things can we learn from cognitive dissonance? This is one of the things that you start the book with. It's a concept we discuss a lot on the show. Can we define it and then talk about why it makes us irrational? So the Scott's definition of cognitive dissonance without all the science in it is that if there's something that violates your expectations or your self-image or just the way you think the world is supposed to be, especially if it involves you, that's the biggest trick. Or if there's something about you that you would have to change. For example, if you found yourself doing something stupid but you believe you're a very smart person, instead of saying, well, I guess I was wrong. I must be stupid after all. It's far more likely you'd say, well, I had a good reason in this particular case. I didn't get sleep or whatever it was. Well, in that case, I would actually be the reason. So a terrible example. But the point is that we spontaneously come up with a reason why everything was fine and our original opinion was just great. So essentially we rationalize past opinions or behaviors in order to make them line up with pre-existing beliefs. Yeah, but rationalizing is almost too weak because cognitive dissonance can give you a full-blown hallucination in which you're seeing stuff you don't know that. Well, the example I gave of the people who saw the two photographs of the security guard, the people who were deeply invested in how brilliant they were, because they had figured out this conspiracy that somehow the government had not told the people on their way ahead of it. If their self-image is, I could not be wrong about this. I get this sort of stuff right all the time. And then they're clearly wrong. There's a photograph right in front of them. That might cause them to hallucinate that they see the photo differently. So essentially the rationalization or the hallucination gets us kind of back to zero. If we get some evidence in our face that says you're so wrong about this, we have to kind of reset our expectations. We either have to change our entire identity the way that we see ourselves or we have to go, what, those photos? That's ridiculous. That's not the same guy. And that's just an easier calculation for our brains to make. Is that what you're saying? Yes. So it's the easiest thing your brain can do is to say I was right all along instead of rework your entire history and your self-image and everything else. Let me tie this to something fun. Sure. I know I've talked about the idea that we're a simulated universe and that some creatures built us to believe we're real. The idea here, and by the way, they're credible people for your listeners who believe this. Yeah, I think Elon Musk is one of them. Am I wrong about that? I believe I heard that. Yeah. So it's not a they're scientific scientists and philosophers who think this is worth a look. And the idea is that as soon as one species is smart enough to create a simulation that also thinks it's real, they'll probably make more than one. And they might make thousands of them. Maybe it's a game that kids can do. They can all make their own civilizations. So the odds are that it's very unlikely that we're an original species when there will be so many copies. So if we're a copy, then we're programmed, meaning that there's trying to conserve resources as all programmers do. It is unlikely that they would build a universe that had everything in it just in case somebody sought. That would not be any way to program anything. You would only do it as needed. But here's the fun part. You would also want to make sure that every person's experience was as easy to program as possible. So if you believed that we had had lunch yesterday, and I believed we didn't, and we get together when we realize we have different beliefs about this, one of us has to change. And it's much easier instead of having us rewrite our history and all that and all the things that was connected to for one of us to say, oh, now suddenly I'm spontaneously hallucinating that it was somebody who looked like you and yeah, I got that confused. But none of that might be true. In a simulated universe, the programmer is just trying to reconcile the problems without creating a permanent history that's objective. So this is kind of like all eight levels or eight worlds of Mario Brothers do not exist inside the TV at one time. The only thing that exists is the frames you're looking at on the screen while you're playing. And if somebody else is playing Mario Brothers at the exact same time, they're playing their entire, they're playing their own game. It doesn't have to reconcile with whatever you're doing at home in your living room with whatever they're doing at home in their living room. Well, bringing that to the human example, there are people who believe they're living in a country where a Hitler-like person is taken over and everything's going to go to hell soon and there are people who think, oh, we're on the cusp of a golden age and stock markets up. Those are completely different movies. And the fascinating thing is that until something violates one of them, until somebody sees something that you just can't explain away, the program doesn't need to reconcile them. We can just both live and procreate and there was never any reason that we needed to reconcile them. How do we spot cognitive dissonance and then maybe short-circuit it? Is it possible? I think the best you can do is to figure out who got triggered, at least more likely got triggered. So if I, if you'll allow me to use the election example, people who supported Trump were optimistic he would get elected. They knew lots of people who voted for him. So when he got elected, there was nothing necessarily that I can see that would have triggered any kind of cognitive dissonance. But if you were positive this monster could never be elected and then he was, you have to rewrite your whole idea of the world you're living in. So it is far more likely that if, if members of those two groups disagree, it's more likely that the one who has an obvious trigger for cognitive dissonance is the one in it. That doesn't guarantee it because I suppose you could also be invisible to your own trigger, right? You know, the whole point of cognitive dissonance is that when you're in it you can't see it. But maybe, and this is really speculation on my part, maybe you could find the trigger and say, well in this case I had a trigger or the other person had a trigger and that might give you a hint. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I thought for sure this is going to be a trouncing of the nth degree and then when that didn't happen I remember waking up and going I clearly live in a bubble where only I only see people who have similar opinions to me. I need to fix that because this is so wildly wrong. I really thought it was going to be like over before I even felt tight, you know, the whole long evening, right? I thought, I'm going to be in bed as soon as I'm done with dinner because it's not even going to be close and we're going to wake up with what we all thought was going to happen. Now, based on your earlier comment the fact that you are not strongly aligned with any particular group allowed you to reinterpret your situation fairly rationally. I mean, what you just said sounds totally rational to me. It's like, oh, I just realized I was in a bubble. Yeah, I just went, holy California, I got to travel more or something. But you realize that 40% of the country said Russia. Right. Yeah. It had to be Russia or there are way more racist than we ever imagined. You know, so everybody came up with their own story about why they were wrong. Yeah, the racism thing made me quite sad because it sort of, there were a lot of people that said anybody this person is racist and I just thought like, I don't know if we want to run headlong down that track just yet. That seems pretty, it's maybe I'm delusional again, but I really don't want to think those types of negative things about the country that we live in. I don't want to bury my head in the sand if those things are true. But I also don't want to assume that people with different political beliefs are stupid or racist or really want to see the world burn. Although some of my friends who voted for both either party, we're certainly in that camp too. I don't want to always assume the worst about somebody who disagrees with me because I think that is a toxic mindset to have. Yeah, and both sides do, in fact, assume the worst. I think Republicans think that, you know, that the people on the left are just crazy or selfish and the left thinks there are a bunch of races and science deniers. And I'm sure that's true of the extremes on both groups, but it certainly misses, you know, 85% of both groups. In Wynn Bigley, you have some tells that you talk about with rationalizations, things like looking at cognitive dissonance and saying, all right, if we have a certain rationalization that is just beyond absurd, that's a tell. And there was also different tells, the variety of tells that people have were also good indicators. Can you flash that out for us? Yeah, my favorite one is, on Twitter, you'll see somebody start the sentence with, so, and then they'll misinterpret what you said as a, what I call, you know, a crazy absolute, you know, it's an absurd absolute. So if you say, for example, I'm in favor of, you know, guns, then somebody will say, so, you're in favor of giving a toddler a loaded gun in a crib. Great, you idiot. And you think to yourself, how could anybody have interpreted that as giving, you know, that extreme absurd absolute. But the person, I used to think that the person who would say such a thing is just a bad debater. Right, they just have logical fallacies they can't quite get a grab on. Yeah, they're just saying whatever they need to say because that's the other side. But I now see that as they hit cognitive distance because whatever I said must have erased all of their good reasons. They actually had to reinterpret what I said until it didn't make sense so they could still be right. And when you watch somebody reinterpret what you say as an extreme absolute, it's like every time. So look for words like, every time, oh, are you saying, every time this happens, are you saying that not one single time you've ever seen this. As soon as you see that, you know that they've accepted your argument, but, you know, at least it makes sense to them, but they can't live in that world so they've got to rewrite their, their personal history. That sounds like me arguing with my wife. I know she's right, so I have to think of the most extreme situation in which she would be wrong and that's the one I'm going to bring up in the car in the way here. Yeah, she's very familiar with that. Jen, you know all about that? Yes. Yes, she knows all about that. One of the tells that someone is engaged or indulging in cognitive dissonance was that there are one person explains it this way and another person explains it that way and there's a hundred different explanations and they all kind of lead to the one conclusion. Right. So right after the election, CNN published some long list of all the different reasons that people got it wrong and Trump actually won and they're all different and, you know, if you see that many different reasons for something, it means that nobody knows the reason which means that maybe they don't want to accept the reason. So, yeah, that's a red flag when you see lots of different explanations and everybody's looking at the same data. That's the thing. If everybody were looking at different information then different explanations make sense but if they're looking at the same stuff and they've had the same brains and they've got 24 different reasons to explain it, probably none of them are right. But can't there be multiple explanations for the same phenomenon or for the same result? Well, there are multiple variables so you could have a situation where, you know, lots of things were 2% of the answer. Sure. But when you're trying to sell it as the reason, you know, it would be reasonable to say, okay, well, there were a whole bunch of things and maybe this was 2% and this was 1%. Had somebody said that, I would say, oh, that's a reasonable person who is not in cognitive dissonance at all. But when you look into it and there are so many different things and you say, well, the reason is sexism. Right, Hillary ran a bad campaign on sexism and racism. Those could all be right though, right? Well, they could all be 1%, 2% of the problem and they're all complicated because it could work both ways in some cases and, you know, yeah. So if anybody says the complicated version likes, well, there are many variables. We can't suss it out. What I said was that persuasion would be a better predictor and then it did in fact predict a number of things along the way as well as the final result. But I still present that all the humility that I can muster as what I call a filter. That is to say, it seems to be that we don't really have a good sense of reality. Nobody does. We all have movies in our heads that are our personal reality. So the experiment was if you pick this variable, does it help you predict better than other filters in the world? So it doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean there's even an objective reality necessarily. But we can observe because I predicted publicly and I said, I predict this and then you can see if it was true and they were good predictions. Right, because there's a lot of folks out there that go, all right, guy gets lucky predicting a Trump win now I got a friggin' book in front of me? Come on, man, you're giving yourself too much credit. And it sounds like what you're saying is maybe we'll never know. I always make fun of the fact that somebody becomes a millionaire or they start a company, everything goes right and then the first thing they do is write a book. It's like, hey, well, everything I did must be the right thing to do. And of course, there's just no logic to that. Some people were going to succeed. You know, it was a thousand variables. Every one of them had to line up to make this happen. So you should be cautious of someone who writes a book and said I succeeded and therefore you should do it this way. So I try to write books that say here's a process you can try it yourself. It doesn't cost you anything to make your own decision. Is that called survivorship bias? Is that the fallacy that is involved with that? I always mix these things up. I think that's what it is and what I mean by that is an example that I see all the time is when we go to these entrepreneur events. Right now we're at the Nasdaq Entrepreneur Center and there's a lot of events here and sometimes you'll hear someone say you know, I'd like to think the talks here are better but sometimes you'll hear entrepreneurs say things like you know, just follow your passion. But the problem is when Mark Cuban or somebody says something like that he can say that and we see it because he's on Shark Tank. There's a lot of other people who believe the same thing and they live in the basement on their mom's couch because that's not good advice but it sounds really good and it certainly sounds better than be in the right place at the right time, work really hard. Here's how you manage a team of talented employees. Here's how you recruit those employees. Here's how you outsource manufacturing to China in a cost-effective way. Yeah, and then nobody wants to admit that luck is a gigantic factor. So the way I dealt with luck in my own career is I tried lots and lots of stuff and I waited for something to catch on but you never know which one in advance you never really know which one's going to work. I think we had somebody on the show in the past and Jason you're going to have to look this up and maybe we'll have to record a make good but he talked about the role of luck and how when he was doing studies of entrepreneurs and things like that, we all minimize the role that luck plays in anything that actually gives us an advantage because as a culture we don't look at things that are considered lucky and say this is a good thing to have on my side because we don't believe in magic and things like that it's a very western concept whereas if we do look at luck and we go, wow, I am so lucky that I started this podcast and that I had learned good work ethic from my father and I stuck with it off from my law job, that was actually lucky and then I kept doing this and now I'm in this great place and interviewing all these great writers and things like that, that looks like luck if you've really examined all these right things that fell into place but it's much nicer for me, my ego to say actually you know I just had a really good vision and I stuck to it because I'm very tenacious and I'm a hard worker and all these other things happen to me but I persevered anyway and no, luck of course not I earned all of this there's also a weird connection between perceived luck and your attitude so there actually were studies Dr. Richard Wiseman studied whether people had luck and he found that you can fake luck meaning that if you say to yourself I'm lucky, something good's going to happen it turns out it changes your perceptual abilities it sets your filter differently so if you expect luck even if you're just talking yourself into it you're more likely to notice something or even maybe do something a little bit differently so it's sort of a way of programming yourself to notice luck that was going to happen no matter what you just wouldn't have noticed before Is that called the reticular activation system? Yes, that's one of the names for you it's your ability to for example, pick out your name in a crowd when everything else is just crowd noise once you set your focus on something you just start noticing those things which matter to that focus and that's fairly well documented Why do you hate analogies so much? I use analogies all the time on the show to teach and illustrate concepts and I'll often get an email Scott, Adam says that analogies if you use those, you've already lost probably nothing is more misunderstood than my view of analogies so let me see if I can for the first time ever clearly explain what I mean analogies for explaining a new concept are excellent so I'm not saying analogies are bad all the time I'm saying that nobody ever won an argument with an analogy so nobody ever said well you've got a mustache, Hitler had a mustache apparently you're going to invade Poland so that's the sort of way people try to win an argument with an analogy but if you're trying to say if you're trying to describe a zebra to someone who'd never seen it you'd say well it's like a horse and it would get you there faster so analogies are an excellent way to describe a new concept but you're never going to win an argument with an analogy because you're arguing about something that you've set up that isn't what you're actually arguing about every analogy gives the opponent infinite ammunition to attack because the analogy is imperfect by its design that's what an analogy is it's not the thing it's something that just has something in common with the thing so you know that your opponent who is not going to be swayed at all is going to say well look at all the problems with that analogy ABC it's completely different because of this you can never get to the end of that path so analogies are useless there's so much in Win Bigly that has to do with persuasion and things like the power of slogans the power of color association the power of contrast I'd like to wrap with the concept of strategic ambiguity because as soon as I heard that I went oh my god I think I see this all the time and I think I use this all the time and never knew what that was called can we talk about why this is so effective well first of all what is it and why is it so effective so strategic ambiguity the way I use it in this context is when you present let's say a politician says I want to do this or that it's stated in a way that everybody gets to hear what they wanted to hear so for example when well we don't want to use Trump examples but we can we can use it I just don't want people to go this is all BS because we're talking about somebody I don't like because then the whole thing is lost but I think Trump's examples are perfect for this because he's the one using it and it's what the book is about so there are people who think that he is super tough on immigration because he's a racist so in other words they are racist themselves and they probably think hey this is great we found one of our own but there are people who are not racist just regular Republicans who don't see anything like that they just say border control is just normal business for protecting the country so their frame is completely different but both of them can see in the way that the president talks their own message now some are going to call that the secret racist dog whistle but I would say that the secret whistle is present anytime there's ambiguity anytime there's any lack of clarity people are putting their own interpretation on it if it happens to be a topic of racism then people hear the magic whistle if it's some other topic then they just get a different opinion about what the person said but since we're kind of locked into our previous opinions of the world any ambiguity it lets you see whatever you want to see so basically our mind fills in the blanks and if we're strategic about our ambiguity we're doing we're saying or doing something deliberately so that other people's minds will fill in the blanks yeah take my example of writing about president Trump's persuasion but not backing him on policies so that that's ambiguous because people don't expect you to say anything positive about the side you're not on even if you're talking about a narrow part of that right it just doesn't fit with people's idea that you need to be on the left of the right so it gives people on the left a reason to like me because I say I'm left to Bernie you know but only with practical plans and people say oh I'm left to Bernie too so I can like him but other people can say oh you wrote about this guy I don't like so I hate him so I've created this strategic well I've created ambiguity it wasn't strategic in this case maybe a little too late but it does allow me a little wiggle room so if somebody says my god you've aligned with this monster I can say read everything I've said my policies are completely policy preferences are completely different so I have at least that ambiguity working for me Scott is there anything else that you want to communicate to the AOC audience I know we've gone an hour in change now and I want to make sure that we're respectful of your time well whenever I mess that question I immediately go blank that's like the go blank yeah that's the idea strategic blank ability but if I were to let me summarize some of what I call the strongest techniques alright we talked about making people think past the sale that's a strongest technique but it's not like the strongest among the strongest would be contrast right the ability to set up you know this thing is horrible and this thing is great and that's something you see the best politicians do they don't just say hey you know we can improve my idea is good that doesn't create contrast you want to say Obamacare is the worst thing in the world is falling apart everybody's going to die and I've got this plan that's the best thing in the world is going to give everybody healthy so if we can abstract from the politics and the facts persuasion wise the greater the contrast the better you can you can make the persuasion how is that different from just hyperbole because it sounds like just hyperbole this is the best and this is terrible how is the power of contrast different of course it seems like hyperbole fits into a larger circle that is in this case you're using hyperbole to create the contrast is there another way that we could do this that that might seem maybe a little bit less right on the nose I mean I think everybody knows that we can just exaggerate in two different directions yeah well let me give you kind of an easy one let's say you wanted to attract a mate and you weren't using just online dating which I suppose everybody would just do now but if you put yourself in a situation where there's something that you can do well compared to the other people then people are going to say oh in this narrow field of whatever we're doing here it's a sport or whatever it is this one person is good so that kind of contrast makes you look like you're genetically advantaged in some way at least you're good at this one thing and that just triggers people automatically to say oh I guess I need to mate with somebody who's got good genes to do this thing that's why I started podcasting right Jen worked really good at something super nerdy like podcasting and all the ladies will come well that was good until I showed up and then your contrast went to hell for the record that's not true but it totally makes sense right that somebody who's really good at dancing would maybe do better in a mating scenario where dancing is involved well but for the contrast you don't want that person who's a dancer to go where all the good dancers are so you have to go to the dance club where everyone else stands on the wall and you're the one that's down on the dance floor I have a friend who shall remain nameless he's fairly well known but he took up dancing a really high level of dancing where you go to the club and people form a circle because they go oh my goodness this is somebody who's semi professional so he actually bought he hired dancing coaches and everything so when he goes to the club the contrast between what he's doing and what everyone else is doing is so shocking that he becomes everybody's friend and it's this amazing social experience and he did it through entirely the power of contrast Scott, thank you so much the book Win Bigly out October 31st so by the time you listen to this you can go and buy it and you will never look at television the same way because you can look at these examples and look if you're anti-trump or you're super pro-trump this will be interesting to you for different reasons I would imagine but it will cause you to look at behavior differently and I think that's the win I think that's the big win I think that's the unity the universe itself thank you very much