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So that-, the media, and especially the Fake News, can ruin lives fairly easily. And, obviously, the-, the news organizations, they have some responsibility not to do that. But there are-, there is a legitimate case to be
made that a lot of the errors
are probably accidental or, in many cases, the bias that they put into the articles are based on their own misconceptions. In other words, they-, they have a starting bias and then-, then that’s how they see the world. Confirmation bias kicks in and
that’s all they can say. So, some of it is probably honest. You know the result is Fake News. But I think, in a lot of cases, the people writing it don’t know it’s fake. They’re seeing what they see.

I think the only way you can deal with that is — and I’d love to say this — is that whenever there’s an article in which humans are mentioned, like real people, whose lives can be influenced, that there should be some obligation for a response
that maybe they wait a day or two. You know, you can’t do everything at the same time, but just give them a dedicated little box at the bottom to say, “What do you think of this article?” that is linked to some of these blogs that they can respond.
And I think you’d have a different picture of people if you let them respond to this sort of fake-newsy, biased reporting.

One of the challenges about describing Fake News is the issue that you’ve raised, which is: I’ve talked to people who genuinely believe the things they’re doing. They’re not trying to spread lies; it’s more of a perceptual error, or a bias
error. So maybe talk about how your “two movies” kind of metaphor would relate to Fake News. So, in other words, they don’t think it’s Fake News — they actually think it’s true news.

A lot of what we see as Fake News is stuff that’s wrong. But the person who is writing it thinks it’s true. And I refer to this as the “two movies playing on one screen.” So if you took a bunch of anti-Trumpers, and a bunch of Trump supporters,
and put them in the same theater and said, “Watch this movie,” and when they left, if that movie was about Trump, they would come out with completely different ideas of what they had just watched, even though they’d watched exactly the same thing.
And unless you study persuasion — and it helps to actually be a trained hypnotist, as I am — you don’t realize how powerful is the ability to change somebody’s perception of something they’re looking at with their own
eyes, listening to with
their own ears, in real time. My best example of this is — to give you an idea of how the “two movie” thing can be real — is there’s something called the “McGurk Effect.” And until you see it — and you could just Google this, just Google �
��McGurk Effect”, and it will blow your mind, it’s a real short clip — and it shows a person saying, “Bah bah bah” — just B-A-H — “Bah bah bah.” And then they have the person fake their lips like they’re saying the
letter “F,” and
your ears start hearing “Fah.” And it’s not what’s happening.

So, right in the moment, you can watch your own powers of perception completely
rewritten in real time, and you can do it a hundred times and you’ll get the same effect. In other words, you can’t even get over it. Even knowing how it’s done doesn’
t help a bit. And so, when you see how powerful is our ability to rewrite or to
create a movie in our head, and then live with that movie, you never see the world the same again.

So Fake News is, probably most of it anyway, people who are just living in a different movie and seeing different things and then confirmation bias makes them say, “Yeah, there’s another piece of evidence for my side…yeah, there’s another one…,�
�� even though other people could look at it and just say, “What the hell are
you talking about?” You know, “I don’t see it.”

Is there a way to solve the problem of Fake News?

I don’t think there’s any way to solve Fake News in the sense that there will always be people writing things and putting their spin on it. Sometimes they would be bad actors who are doing it intentionally and sometimes they’ll
just be under the
wrong impression. But neither of those things is easy to fix. The best thing you can do is make sure that the response is connected. You know, on the Internet, there’s no excuse to have the response disconnected from the original article. That should
be basic journalism rule. You know, there should be a rule as clear and universal as, you know, “Are you speaking on the record, or off the record?” You know, some kind of rule that says, “If I write an article and you’re the subject of it, we’
re going to give you a link at the bottom to your rebuttal.” That would be-, that would be probably as good as you can get.

How do we as humans find out what is true?

I wonder sometimes if there is a truth that is accessible to us, without getting too deep. Let me just make a general statement that I don’t think humans evolved to understand truth and to perceive the reality accurately. Evolution only cared that you
reproduced. So, as long as you could reproduce, evolution was happy. Right? That was all you needed to do.

So you could believe that you reincarnated from a seventeenth century monk. I could believe that my prophet flew to heaven on a winged horse. But we both go to the grocery store. We’re standing next to each other. We buy food. We eat.
The fact that we�
�re living in different realities doesn’t matter as much as you’d imagine. And so-, and so when I think, “How do people find truth,” you know, “How did they really know what is really true?” The first thing I have to say is, “I don’t know
if it’s a thing.” Like, I don’t know if we can ever know it’s true. We’re just not designed-, we’re not the right instrument for that. Humans are the wrong tool for finding truth. Now, you probably say, “Well, science makes up for that.”
And within the limited realm of science — which isn’t most of our experience, you know — you can get closer to the truth over time for sure. But you can never really know if you’re all the way there.

And I think that leads to a misconception a lot of people have about you, which
is that, when you say that it isn’t necessarily what is true, but it’s what
people believe, that doesn’t mean you advocate lying.

When I talk about persuasion, I talk about it as a tool. Now, a tool can either
be good or bad — it just depends how you’re using it. People often say, “Well, then, you’re in favor of manipulation and evil and you don’t care about what’s true
and what’s not true.” And, of course, that’s not the case. I care what’s true, because if you walk into-, if you walk in front of a truck, that’s the truth and it’s going to kill you. Right? But in terms of decision-making, people don’t use
the truth the way you imagine they would or should. So, that’s the point. In decision-making, we ignore it. It would be great if we didn’t. If you want my
opinion, I’d love if only the truth was, you know, the thing that we knew and
cared about and
that was driving our decisions. It’s just an observation that we don’t.

And we’re more concerned with how we feel than what’s actually true.

I think people decide what is true based largely on how they feel. So, if you feel something is true, it’s hard to talk you out of it. And once you have a feelings-based reality, it’s going to take a lot of persuasion to get somebody off of that.

‘Cause you once said that how we would define ourselves as people would be our preferences.

I’ve said that if you’re trying to figure out what a human is, you know, it’s not your arms or legs, because you can lose those and still be the person. It’s not even how you used to think. It’s not even your DNA, except
in a scientific sense.
But what kind of defines a person is your-, is your preferences, at the moment.
So, the things you would prefer to do, the way you would handle things, the way
you see it — that’s sort of who you are.

You were talking about journalists and media, and whether they’re acting in good faith, or why they have a particular bias. How can we tell when someone isn’t acting in good faith, and they are deliberately lying or trying to mislead? Where are the �
�tells” of someone acting in that way?

It’s always going to be hard to figure out which people in the media are intentionally telling an untruth, or intentionally biased, versus someone who just can’t tell the difference. If you’re looking for clues, one thing I’d look for is to see
if they’ve ever crossed to the other side. Have they ever taken the other-, the other position and said, “Well, I’m usually, you know, agreeing with Republicans, but on this, you know, I’m pretty hard on the left.” So, if you don’t see
somebody at least occasionally crossing over, you’re going to have to ask yourself, “Why is that?” I mean, you know, that’s kind of rare that you don’t at least find something on the other side that is useful. So, that’s probably the biggest �
��tell.” You know, can somebody cross over and feel okay about it and make a case on the other side, or were they just always on one side?

Could you talk about framing the narrative, and what that means, and how important that is for persuasion?

In persuasion, there’s a thing called, “framing.” So, it’s-, it’s how
you think about a situation — and people can frame things very differently — and skilled persuaders are especially good at it. So, it’s something I’m trained to do,
which is, especially, if you’re new to like a new story. Whoever gets there first and says, “Well, here’s my interpretation,” they framed it. They’ve given you a way to think about it. It’s tough to get that out of your head. So, your first
impression of how to think about a story is really super sticky. So, going first makes a big difference. I started doing a lot of live streaming on Periscope and, when there’s a big story, I can be live to the world within minutes. I just pick up my
phone and I’m on live to the world, and the framing that I put on things — I’m quite aware of the fact that because I’m both persuasive by training and I’m first, that my framing is exceptionally sticky — and I see it sometimes expressed on
TV, and I think to myself, “That looks like something I said,” but you can never be sure where influence is carried.

If you were making a documentary on Fake News, and you wanted to persuade people that the mainstream media has engaged in a fair amount of lies and deception and unconscious bias, how would you frame the narrative of the documentary?

One of the things I don’t think you need to convince anybody anymore is that the media is biased. I think there used to be a day, maybe when I was a kid, when people said, “Well, the news is at least trying not to be biased — they’re at least
trying.” But now, nobody believes that. What they do believe — which is weirder and maybe worse — is that they believe that only the other side is biased. And that’s a tough one to crack. So, how do you convince somebody that their own side is
feeding them garbage and has for a long time? I found that you can even — [DOG COUGHS] — sorry, Fake News does this to my dog. As soon as I say, “CNN,” she starts coughing. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

But, it’s really hard to get people off of their belief that their side is the “right” side. They can certainly see all the bias on the other side. That’s just big and glowing. What I like to do is literally switch back and forth between the
major networks. So, going between Fox News and CNN, when there’s breaking news, and watching what they say about it. Now, the facts will be the same. They pretty much have the same facts — but watch what they decide to talk about, what emphasis they
put — and watching that is just mind-boggling. If you-, if you rapidly switch
back-and-forth, when there’s breaking news, that’s the best time to do it.

Do you think there’s any danger that, now that there’s so many — for instance, you just being able to pop onto Periscope and reach thousands of people — that that will encourage demagoguery and people that will, you know,
not be in good faith,
but they’re outside the mainstream, you know, gaining a lot of power…do you
think there’s a danger?

One of the most important and underreported shifts in much of the world, and especially in the United States, is that we started as a republic. You know, that’s the way we were formed — in which we would elect some smart people, send them off to
Washington on their horse, they’d make some good decisions, and then we’d all be happy. But today, social media is the government — we don’t recognize as such — but it’s very unusual now for our elected officials to do something that the
majority doesn’t favor, and the majority is expressed through social media. That’s how the majority gets formed. So, today, I think the government is the
best persuaders. I mean, the people who know how to use persuasion and are invested in the topic.

If they do a good job persuading, the idea itself travels. So, the politicians end up being recipients of what social media told them is okay to say. And if they get out of that box, they can’t get re-elected, because the whole deal is: you’ve got to
be popular. I think in the old days, they could get away with saying, “Well, I know some people don’t like it. But I made a good decision on your behalf.” I don’t think that works anymore. I think social media decides that the consensus — the
majority — needs to get what it wants. And so, that’s a big change, and it puts the power in the hands of the people who are persuasive.

Would you offer any critiques of what’s called the “New Media?” So people-, like, people on the left and right, so people like Mike, people like the Young Turks, you know, alternative media outlets…do you think, you know…what kind of critiques
would you offer?

Well, today, almost anybody can be in the news business just by turning on their phone or their iPad and live streaming. It doesn’t take much to set up a podcast, so it puts a lot of people in the position of looking like news, but
they don’t have
necessarily the same sources — the same resources, for the most part — they’re talking about the news that they saw somewhere else. There are some exceptions where a lot of the new media now actually has better sources than the mainstream media.
But that’s still the exception.

So, I think the problem is that if you’ve-, you’ve got a podcast, and you’re trying to fill minutes, and you don’t have access to the base source
information and you’ve got to talk about something — you’re going to get really speculative.
Because you’ve got to fill the time. So, I think that’s the danger — is the speculation — because the speculation starts to look real to the audience
if you speculate enough.


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