[continued from previous message]

Good example is all that Russian stuff with Trump. Most of that, that the audience sees, is a lot of speculation. But there’s so much of it that people
literally say — and it makes me laugh when you hear it — “Well, there’s so much smoke.
There must be fire.” But the people saying that are making the smoke and they
don’t see the fire. So, you know, speculation is…there’s a danger in [that] the new media probably brings more speculation than you would see otherwise.

Could you talk about the way in which, if you sat down for an interview — well, this interview is going to be edited — sat down for a mainstream media interview, and you’re interviewed for two, three, four hours and they cut it down to, like,
thirty seconds, a minute, five minutes…that experience versus, you know, going on a Periscope with somebody like Mike and interviewing for an hour and it’s all out there immediately and there’s no filter.

One of the biggest, best, most positive things that’s happening in the world is that when you take the news media out of the, you know, “I’ve got a half
an hour to do this,” or, “…five minutes to do this,” and you put it into the world of
podcasts and live streaming — where there’s no end, you can just talk as long as you want — you start to break free from the power of the editors to take something you’ve said, carve it up and take it into context and change its meaning. But most
of that change happens because of just editing choices — they just want to make it smaller — and it just changes the meaning when you take out the nuance. Some of it probably is just bad actors doing bad things, but I would say for the bigger-,
bigger outlets, that’s probably more that they’re just trying to make it fit the time. But it does change the meaning of what the person said. It can make you go from looking smart to stupid, because the thing you said that they put on the air doesn�
�t make sense without the part that they cut out. That is a big problem. But the new media’s solving that by not having an end to any of their segments. We’ll talk until we’ve told the whole story.

With social media, there’s been a lot of stories about how they censor these new voices that are on the right, especially, and how that maybe ties into the mainstream, who seem to also favor a side. It seems to favor the left side more, right? Maybe
that’s a confirmation bias thing as well, but maybe you can speak to that a little bit.

So, the good news is that anybody can have a voice and, if they do a good job, they can build an audience on social media and get their version of the truth out. On the bad side, the people who own the various social media companies tend to be left-
leaning, and it’s at least the impression of the people on the right — and I’ll be careful with my words — it’s their impression that they’re being ‘shadowbanned,’ as it’s called. In other words, that their tweets don’t show up where
they should. People who are following them become automatically unfollowed. The
other story doesn’t show very high up in the feed, and that sort of thing. Now, depending who you talk to, that phenomenon has either been not demonstrated to be true, or
totally demonstrated to be true. Right? I will just tell you that my own brother follows me on Twitter, and only me. He has an account that only does that, and he got automatically unfollowed from my account — and also on Periscope — at the same time.
Now that-, that wasn’t an accident. So, I don’t know what Twitter’s official explanation for that is, but, you know, I’m pretty sure that something’s happening there. Whether Twitter management is behind it, or it’s something happening in
the bowels of the organization — or if it’s just some kind of weird glitch in the algorithm — it does seem to be happening. Now, what I don’t know is if there’s somebody on the left who got unfollowed too, like, I don’t see that. So, I gotta
be careful. I have to be careful in saying that I can only see the stuff I can see. That’s the stuff I know, but I don’t want to over-interpret it now.

If it’s true that the right is being consistently shadowbanned, and their messages are being diminished, the funny thing about that is that the most persuasive, powerful, best communicators are also all on the right. So, there’s this weird
coincidental balance, where the best persuaders are on the right, and the people who can shadowban them — if it’s happening — are on the left. So, there is a little bit of a balance there, and maybe that’s good. You know, maybe the world is
better with a little bit of balance. I think we’re rapidly heading toward a place where the big social media companies will just have to be regulated, because the public will-, will simply rely on them too much. They’ll be too important to the
outcomes of society. And if society doesn’t trust them, that’s a big problem. So I don’t think you want to regulate totally in that way. But here’s my prediction: I think that at least-, at least the algorithm — the code that says what is
displayed where — probably will have to get audited by the government on a regular basis, or somebody that they, you know, select to do that. I think that
has to happen, actually.

Why do you call people on the right better at persuasion? What makes them better at persuasion? How would you rate the mainstream media’s ability to persuade?

For some reason, the people on the right are better Persuaders. And if-, if you
ask me, “Why is that?” I actually don’t know. It’s actually sort of a question that-, it’s an open question to me. It’s simply an observation that — at least
during the entire Trump cycle — the people who understood persuasion, they knew its ways, they-, they tended to be on the right. Now, could be that because Trump is so persuasive himself, that he attracted voices that understood that, and that those
voices were more credible, because they kept being right and that probably raised your profile. So, there’s probably an observational thing to it — meaning that I may notice the voices on the right because of Trump, and because
they got more
attention. But during the campaign, the Clinton campaign was absolutely terrible at persuasion until the final summer before the election — when Bernie dropped out — and then, suddenly — and I’m guessing that probably there were some advisers
working for Bernie who went over to the Clinton team then — they went full weapons-grade after that, and their persuasion got first-rate. So, until then, the right just owned the persuasion. But, by the summer of 2016, the left was full weapons-grade.

How much do you think facts matter when it comes to persuasion?

A lot of people ask me how important facts are when it comes to persuasion. Now, if you have the facts, and they can be verified and people can check, they’re very persuasive. But it turns out that, in many cases, we don’t have the facts and, in many
more cases, the facts are less persuasive than a well-crafted non-fact. Now, I want to be very careful: I’m not in favor of lying. I love a world where people don’t have to lie — that it’s not necessary. I’m simply making a
statement that
people can lie and still be persuasive.

Now, how ethical that is has a lot to do with, you know, what’s the-, what’s the outcome, and do the ends justify the means? I would say in some cases, yes, I would lie to a terrorist to save your life. But I wouldn’t lie to my best friend to save
a dollar. Right? So, it really does matter what is the topic. And if they’re on the extremes. I think you could go either way.

Do you consider spinning-, do you think that’s lying? Would you distinguish those?

I think there’s a difference between being “factually inaccurate” and “spinning.” But the outcome can be very similar. In other words, in both cases you may have influenced toward an outcome. So, I’m not sure that spinning is more honest or
ethical, or honorable. But they’re different. That’s the only thing you can
say about them.

Going back to the “two movies/one screen” analogy…I don’t know what we can do to make people look at the same movie and come out and, “Oh, everyone’s talking about the same movie,” but how do we get them to at least come out of the theater
and talk to each other about what they saw and not hate each other?

It’s really hard to solve for the fact that people are in the same theater, but watching two movies on the same screen, because they’re so invested in their movie that even if you showed them solid evidence that their movie was wrong, they would say,
“Well, your evidence is wrong.” Or, “Well, I’ll change my movie a little bit, but it’s still basically the same movie.”

So, the only thing you can do is work on them over time with lots of evidence. So, if somebody thinks, “Hey, this Russia thing is real!” all you need is a
bunch of outcomes that show it’s not. One probably isn’t enough. Several is
probably good.
But, beyond that, sometimes you need what I call a “fake because” — in other words, people sometimes just need a reason to go to the other side. A reason to change their mind. And the reason — and this is the weird part, and
this is well
understood in the field of persuasion — the reason doesn’t have to be real.
Sometimes people are just ready. You know, it’s the weight of things that have happened before, but they still need a trigger. They need a thing to tell their siblings. It�
�s like, “Here’s why I changed my mind. It was this thing.”

Hurricane Harvey might be that thing, because it just took us all out of our old movies and said, “All right. I don’t care what the movie was on your screen or mine. Right now we’re worried about the people, you know, who are damaged by Harvey. We�
�re on the same side. We don’t care about race or anything — we don’t care. We’re just-, we’re on the same team.” So, something like that can just shake what you were thinking. It just gives you an excuse to say, “Well,
you know, I thought
maybe Trump was a monster, but he handled that Harvey thing well. He had enough
empathy.” I’m just saying that hypothetically, this can happen. And that might be the “because” that they needed to switch.

How do we as human beings develop confirmation bias, and is that something that
is maybe understood by mainstream forces, and maybe they use that to get an early [in] with people?

So, when I talk about confirmation bias, I think people reflexively say, “How
can I get rid of that? How can I have less of that?” The bad news is that I don’t think confirmation bias is a bug in our software. Confirmation bias is the software. We�
�re designed by evolution that way. And what I mean by “designed” is that: Imagine if your brain had to reinterpret your whole environment every time you get new information. It’s just more efficient to say, “Well, I was right before. I’m still
right,” because you don’t want to re-, you know, re-juggle your entire world view every few minutes — as new information is coming in — and people
like to stick with what they got. It’s just easier to use less-, less resources, you know, fewer
resources. It’s probably just how we evolved. And so, I don’t think you can
get rid of it. You can, however, learn to notice if there’s a trigger. So, if
you’re in a situation where somebody has a trigger, and you don’t, the odds
are — if you�
��ve identified the trigger correctly — that you’re more likely closer to the truth. But, you can never know.

But why is one person-, why do they grow up, you know…one person may be liberal, one person may be more libertarian, or something like that. Where does
that begin? How does it develop?

There’s some science that suggests there might be some kind of genetic bias toward being conservative or liberal, and I’m going to say that sounds right to me. So without-, without blessing the science, I’ll just say that it “smells right to me.�
� But, beyond that, you’ve got the social pressure. You’ve got the, “How old are you?” that probably makes a big difference. And you’ve got, “What
are your friends saying?”, you know, “What are you seeing on social media?” So, it’s a
whole bunch of things. But, I think, a little bit genetic, and a whole bunch of
social.

We’re asking this, you know, before you go on your book tour. So, I was just gonna ask what you anticipate the media’s response and reaction to you will be as you go on that tour?

So, when I go on my book tour for Win Bigly, I can tell you with fair certainty
what’s going to happen: The people who are inclined to like me are going to say, “This is the best book you’ve ever written, Scott.” The people who are pretty sure
they hate me, because I’ve said things that they didn’t like in politics — or any other thing I’ve said — are going to interpret the book as something I didn’t mean and didn’t say. So, in other words, most of the criticisms will not be
about what’s in the book. I would say — I’ll go even further: Close to one hundred percent, but at least ninety percent, of the criticisms which I will inevitably get, will be based on somebody’s belief of what’s in my soul — that they
imagine they could read my mind — or something I didn’t say that they think
is implied. Or some weight they think I’ve given to something that I really haven’t — maybe I just didn’t talk about it — so, almost all of the critics will be
criticizing, essentially, a hallucination of what they think they saw. And I say something like that, and I’m completely aware that anybody who is not trained in persuasion hearing this will say, “Oh that’s convenient, you author, you, that’s
sort of an author thing to say, you know, to protect you when you get criticized.” And I have no defense against that. I’m just telling you that any person trained in persuasion would agree that if they can’t find something wrong with it, they will
imagine there’s something wrong with it. And that will be good enough.

There’s a thing on Twitter that people say, and they’ll quote a tweet and say “the mask slips” when someone tweets something inflammatory. How do we know when it’s “someone’s mask is slipping” or whether, perhaps, they just do something
out of character, for instance? Is there persuasion or confirmation bias coming
into play with that?

Well, sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re seeing somebody acting out of character or they have, you know, let the “mask slip” and you’re peering into their soul. My caution to that is: You’re not good at peering into souls. You just think
you are. Everybody thinks they’re good at it. Everybody’s wrong. We’re all terrible at it. So, until you’ve seen, like, a body of evidence that somebody has changed their view in some way, or it is revealing a new view, you
need to wait for a
few data points. You know, the first data point that looks like it’s out-of-bounds is almost certainly nothing. You know, you need a few.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)