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And I thought that a lot more people would invite me on and say, “Can you explain your theory?” But, as soon as the election was over, people sort of retreated back to the idea that they were smart all along, and that there really was a reason that
they were right all along — even though they were totally wrong.

So I did expect a little more attention for being that right for that long. But
you know the media has its own-, its own agenda.

Well, that’s why I asked it, because it kind of segues into the whole subject
of Fake News, where, if you were real news, you would say, “Wow, son of a gun, this guy had it right so early. Why don’t we have him come on? Maybe his
explanation is a
good one. Maybe we should have him on our panels.” You wouldn’t think that you would be-, CNN would really want to know the truth and get you to come on and share your version of the truth.

Well, I have been invited on CNN and Fox News, and I’ll probably do a lot of other things in conjunction with a book tour — my book, Win Bigly. But it took awhile. And we’ve-, we’ve lived with our new president for awhile. And
so I’ll give my
explanation of how it happened. But it’s competing with — maybe, by now —
twenty, thirty, fifty different explanations of why it happened the way it did.

I find it fascinating that the people who are wrong on election season are still the people explaining what is happening in the world and what really is going on in Trumpland.

One of the most interesting results of the election was that the people who were wrong about everything from the very beginning — I mean as wrong as you could possibly be — are still on television and acting like, “Well, this time we got it right.�
� And I think the viewers can’t really tell the difference, because they sounded smart before and they sound smart now. And maybe they figure, “Well, this time they got it right.”

Yeah I’ve seen research that says that people respect certainty more than truth, and they’ll forgive you for being wrong, but they won’t forgive you for being nuanced and being uncertain.

One of the-, one of the elements of persuasion is that a simple explanation is powerful. So, anybody who has a simple explanation usually is the winner of the
persuasion contest. So, if you’re certain and you’re simple and you can communicate it
easily, and especially if there’s a visual element to it — that always helps — that’s going to be your most persuasive package.

Maybe that’s why people decided on the whole “Russia hacked the election”
theme?

The Russia hacking the election story — we’re still waiting for the details
to come out. But, as of this moment, it looks like it’s dissolving. And one of the interesting things about that, for me, is that it would be the next time
that all the
people who were wrong about everything are wrong again. And, once again, an enormous question in which they have to notice that half the country wasn’t wrong. Half the country has been right all the way through the process. And I don’t know how you
could ignore that forever — if you’re always on the wrong side of these things — and the other-, the other side is not. And you can measure it, you know. Trump got elected…or he didn’t. You know, it-, it’s measurable.

So, it’s hard for them to be credible going forward, unless they get a few right.

Or people just forget. One of my sort of “awakening” moments in life was when the financial crisis hit. I thought, well surely everybody in the media who said housing can never go down, and there’s no bubble, and Bear Stearns is fine…surely all
those people are going to be fired. And not only were they not fired, but nobody even held them accountable and said, “You guys got it all wrong.”

Yeah, it turns out that being wrong is not a big problem…if you’re-, if you’re a talking head pundit, or any kind of a public figure. People are so wrong, so often, that if you started holding it against people every time they were wrong, you just
couldn’t-, you couldn’t deal with people at all, because everybody is wrong
— a lot. I’m a little more forgiving about the people who were wrong, because I figured it could be me next time. And I’m also-, I have a little bit of humility about
all the times I’ve been wrong in the past, and I try to hold that in my head when I’m looking at a current topic, and say, “Okay…” — for something
that looks like this, you know, roughly speaking — “…how many times have I been wrong in
the past?” And there’s almost always-, there’s some example that I can say, “Okay, I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before.” So, I try to use that to help my bias. But, you know, we are biased humans and you can’t-, you can’t be
unbiased entirely.

Or there is a thing where, if you have any kind of platform, people say, “What’s your opinion on this?” And I’ll say, “Well I don’t have one.” “What do you mean? How can you not have an opinion on…” whatever.
“Because I’ve never
looked at it.” Why would I know about Saudi Arabia and Qatar, for example, and the relationship between that — two heads of state? I had no idea.

When people are asking me for my opinion on the big, complicated world affairs like, “What do we do with trade deals and how do we solve North Korea,” and, you know, “What do we do with ISIS? And what about tax rates?” I always have the same
answer, which is: I have no idea what is the right answer for those things, but
one thing I’m sure of is that the person I’m talking to — they don’t have any idea either. They might have a strong preference. But these things are, by their nature,
big and complicated, and our brains are really not designed for it to get the right answer on that stuff all the time. So, I usually default to, “Well, let’s see what the experts say. Make sure it makes a little bit of sense.” But it’s really
hard for me to get ahead of any of those big, complicated issues and say, “Here’s the answer. This is simple.” That’s just a huge illusion, that people have any kind of power to-, to know what’s right in complex situations.

How, then, would we know if the media or the news that we’re watching is true?

I probably have less belief in the news than the average person, because my experience is being part of the news. In other words, being a subject of the news. So, during the past couple of years — especially over the course of the
election — there
were a number of articles about me. So they were about me, personally, or about
my views, and I could look at them and I could see that they’re just completely wrong. Now, often you don’t have that opportunity. You can’t look at the news about a
world event and say, “Well that’s wrong. That news is just wrong.” But what is about you, and it’s about your inner thoughts, and somebody is reporting what I’m thinking, or even what I’m saying — incorrectly — I know that’s wrong. And
when you see how often that happens — really, any feature article about me will have maybe a handful to more complete factual inaccuracies — the regular
public never sees how many factual errors there are in ordinary reporting. And I’m an easy
story. If you want to know anything about me, just ask, and I will give the-, probably the correct answer, because it’s about me. But even those stories are just riddled with factual errors and, in many cases, fairly obvious bias built into the story
to create a narrative around something. So, it’s hard to trust the news when you’re part of the news, and when you see it from the ugly side.

Yeah, there’s even the Geller-Mann Effect, which is: You’re reading the newspaper. You read an article you know something about, and you go, “This is
completely wrong.” They got cause-and-effect backwards. And then you turn the
page, and now you�
�re reading something else, and go, “Well, that must be true, though.” And you forget that they completely got something that you understand wrong. Why would you believe the next story you’re reading?

I’ve lost faith in any kind of story that has anything to do with science, because you know that the illusion is that I — the non-scientist — am somehow judging the quality of the science. And I’m not doing that. I’m judging the credibility of
the reporting about the science, which is an entirely different thing, and the reporting tends to be terrible. They get cause-and-effect backwards, et cetera.
But my favorite example of this-, I want-, let’s call it a “prediction”: For years, we’
ve been seeing stories that drinking a small amount of wine is actually good for you. Maybe that’s true. I’m gonna give that a big, “Maybe that could be true.” In my opinion, there’s almost no chance that’s true. That has “fake news”
written all over it. It’s probably something like, the people who can drink moderately at all probably have friends, that’s why they’re drinking moderately. If you can do anything moderately, you’re probably a person who’s got your life under
control. So there are all these different variables. But no, I don’t believe for a moment that putting alcohol into your body — which is effectively poison — that a little bit of it is good for you. So when I see any other story about a scientific
breakthrough or a new scientific correlation, just a big red flag goes up and says, “Probably not…probably not.”

There are multiple layers, too. One is that the scientist doesn’t have an agenda. Even though a few of them have been caught hyping studies in their press releases, and then the press release becomes a basis for a story in scientific reporting.

Yeah, you’ve got so much bias. First, from the scientists themselves, because
they’re humans. You know, one of the things that drives me crazy is when people say the scientific method has, you know, driven out the bias, because we
get your peer
review and you need to repeat the studies. Yes, that’s true. But all the people doing this stuff are all humans and there’s no process that can get rid of all the bias in humans. You know, science is great. I’m a big fan. It does move truth in the
right direction over time. But how do you ever know, in this journey of science
on any topic, how do you know when it’s at the end, where they actually got the right answer, and that will never change…or you’re halfway there and you’ve got the
wrong answer, and someday it will change? You can’t tell, because when you’re in it, it looks the same.

And there’s actually a scientific method to try to control our biases. With journalism, there isn’t even a method.

At least science has a process. You know the scientific method is going to get you closer to truth than maybe anything that humans have invented yet. So, it’s the best we’ve got. Journalists don’t really have anything like that. There’s no-,
there’s no big penalty for being wrong about stuff. You know, you can keep your job. And without that standard, people are putting the same amount of credibility on science as they do on somebody reporting a story. Like, to the average person, a person
reporting a story is just as credible as the consensus of science, and they should not be.

Have you ever been — and I know you don’t consider yourself a ‘victim’ — but, in the colloquial understanding of the word, have you ever been a victim of Fake News?

I’ve had quite a bit of Fake News lobbed at me, and almost all of it takes the form of assuming that my inner soul is dark and broken and that, you know, I’m sitting in my secret lair, and thinking bad things about women and minorities. The truth,
for anyone who knows me personally, could not be further from any of that stuff. So, to actually see the Fake News about yourself, and have it actually affect your life, affect your career, affect what people — [DOG YIPS][Laughter] — apparently, this
is a very boring answer. My dog fell asleep in the middle of the interview —

It’s really quite an experience to have Fake News written about you, personally, and it’s happened to me a number of times, usually in the form of
somebody is imagining what’s in my dark soul, and they imagine I hate something, or I’m really
biased against something, or something happened in my childhood that made me this way. Almost always, that’s completely off-base. And until it happens to you, and you see it repeatedly, you can’t really understand how powerful the Fake News is —
how much it changes, you know, real people’s lives and how widespread it is.

What are some of the consequences that you had as a result of Fake News?

The Dilbert audience probably went from something like sixty percent male/forty
percent female in the early days, to — after a number of Fake News stories about me — probably ninety-four percent male now. So, women just read things that simply weren�
�t true — were taken out of context — and said, “Hey, this guy said something bad about us.” In every case that I’m aware of, [it] was taken out of context, or it wasn’t what I actually said, or was some misinterpretation of what I said. But
those are real life consequences. So, probably took, I don’t know, thirty percent of my income right off the top — Fake News did.

What was the Fake News?

Well, the Fake News was that I had said negative things about women — which, if you saw them in context, you would understand that they weren’t. But, out of context — whoa! — they sounded terrible. If I had-, if I thought somebody actually
thought the things that people said I thought, I would not like that person. But, of course, I didn’t say those things. Or, certainly, I didn’t mean those things. The words are easily taken out of context.

So, in other words, media still has mass influence over people.

People, like me, who live and die by the attention of the public, you know, that’s-, that’s my business model, is I have to make the public happy. But there are other people whose business model involves smearing other people who are in the public
eye.

So, every once in a while, I pop up on somebody’s radar screen. Some complete
stranger will write a detailed, long piece about me, and I won’t know about it until I read it, and it’ll just be riddled with errors, and I would certainly understand if
somebody was learning about me for the first time by one of these articles, that they would have an entirely wrong opinion about what’s going on.

Is that maybe a testament to the influence and the responsibility that journalism should have? It should be more responsible?

That’s sort of like “air is good”. Everybody should be responsible. I don’t know how to answer that question.

Wellit’s a massive obligation. You know that if you get published in The New York Times, you know that you could pretty much ruin a person’s life. That’s a little bit-, we should all be responsible, nice. If I’m rude to the barista at Starbucks,
that’s a bad thing — a bad human — but that person’s life is going to go on. But if I write an article about that person, especially in a large publication, that person’s life is never going to be the same.


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