Episode 106 - The Children in Cages

Date: 2018-06-16 | Duration: 52:37

Topics

Kids in cages, bad…and nobody has a viable alternative? Fraudulent, but deeply effective persuasion Lacks factual accuracy Untrue, misleading Out of context Could be solved tomorrow Why is so effective? Cause facts don’t matter Cognitive dissonance example: anti-Trump laundry lists Their initial gigantic fears about President Trump didn’t manifest But they’re the “smart ones” in the conversation So new fears are needed to replace the faded ones If you can’t find a sufficiently big fear, you need lots of little ones George Lakoff’s dilemma Highly qualified cognitive expert He sees and understands… President Trump is using skill and experience consistently But 99% of his side believe it’s all just luck George’s problem? Facts don’t matter

Transcript

[0:08]

Doo-doo-doo bum bum bum. Hey everybody, it’s the weekend, unless you’re watching this on replay and then it might be any time at all. Those of you who are getting here early, the advantage of being early is a simultaneous sip. A lot of people come late and they say to themselves, “Something’s missing. I like the Periscope, but I feel an emptiness.” That’s because they weren’t here for the simultaneous sip. Grab your beverage and get ready, because here it comes—the simultaneous sip. That’s good coffee.

So the whole darn world is blowing up about the children who are being kept in cages. When you hear something as bad as that, children being kept in cages, you say to yourself, “This is a problem.”

[1:11]

When I talk about the children kept in cages, of course, I’m not talking about the illegal immigrants. The children kept in cages are the anti-Trumpers. Have you noticed that the anti-Trumpers seem to be in sort of a weird mental cage that they can’t get out of? In their little mental cage, there’s all kinds of stuff happening that isn’t really happening anywhere else except in the cage. For example, if you’re in the Democrats’ little mental cage, you might see that the Trump administration is putting children coming across the border in cages. Their news is telling them something like that is happening.

[2:13]

Nobody is delighted that parents and children are separated at the border. In some cases, if they come through the normal entry points, that doesn’t happen, but in many cases, it is happening. When I say “children in cages” and when I talk about the Democrats who are the anti-Trumpers, the reason I call them children is that there’s a way children think, and it goes like this:

“Mom, I don’t think I need to go to school.” And the parents, being complicated thinkers, say, “No, school is unpleasant, but you have to do it because your life will be better if you go to school.” And the child says, “But I don’t like school.” And the parent says, “Wait a minute, you’re

[3:15]

only looking at part of the equation. You’re looking at the child part where you don’t like school. That’s just part of it. I know you don’t like school, but the bigger picture is if you go to school, your life will be better.” And the child says, “But I don’t like school.”

That’s child thinking: an inability to see the whole picture. They just see their little part. So when you see people arguing about the children being ripped from their parents—nobody likes that. Is there any Trump supporter who says, “Yeah, let’s take children from parents”? There might be, but I hope I never meet that person. The Trump supporters are saying, “There’s a bigger picture.” Taking children from parents is terrible; we all agree on that part. But what exactly is the

[4:18]

alternative? Do you put both the parents and the adults in some kind of facility? No, that’s worse because then the kids get abused, etc. Do you just let them go? Well, that’s worse too, because it would encourage all kinds of families to come up here thinking, “We just have to bring the kid and we can all just go free.” So that doesn’t work. There’s the option of sending them back immediately, just pushing them over the border and closing the door again, but that doesn’t work. They’ll just come back, or they’ll be subject to other crimes once they’re pushed back across the border. You can’t let them go, and you can’t put them together in confinement. What exactly is the alternative? When you see the anti-Trumpers talking about the children in cages, just be aware that

[5:19]

they are the children in the cages. They’re in a little mental cage like children because they can’t suggest an alternative to the thing they’re complaining about. Now, the Trump administration, being in this situation—the parents, the Jeff Sessions, the Trumps, etc.—acting like parents are saying, “We also hate separating children from parents, and the moment we come up with a better plan, we’re going to do that. We’re going to be all over it. We just need that better plan, and we’ve got some comprehensive immigration reform stuff that you could sign tomorrow and it would end this right away.”

Even if you don’t like what they’re doing, that is the parental approach. The anti-Trumpers, at least on

[6:21]

this topic, are taking the child approach. The child approach is that all you’re looking at is the part you care about and you just ignore any other considerations, as a child does.

But that said, this attack on the Trump team is really, really good. You know that I like to separate the technique of persuasion from the ethics of it. Not because ethics don’t count—Sam Harris, they do count—but they can be looked at individually. There are the tools, and then there is whether the tools were used for good or bad. Both are important, but you can separate them for analysis. In this case, the anti-Trumpers who are using this “children in cages” approach—although it is completely fraudulent and lacking in factual accuracy for the most

[7:23]

part, especially if they’re using the old photographs from 2014—is still really effective.

What is the key takeaway in terms of why this completely fraudulent approach is effective? Because facts don’t matter to persuasion. It just doesn’t matter. The poor Trump supporters are left arguing facts; it’s the losing position. The people arguing the facts are losing all over the place because the Trump supporters say, “Wait a minute, that photo you’re showing is old,” or “They can get in at the approved border places,” or “It’s only six weeks and we’re putting them in good facilities, they’re not in danger,” and “We don’t really have any alternatives.” Fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.

[8:24]

Total value in terms of persuasion? Zero. Zero. No persuasive power. It just persuades the people who were already persuaded.

The people on the other side are writing to me, and here’s what I was getting yesterday: “Stop. Remember you said in your tweet two years ago that if Trump ever did anything slightly Hitler-ish, you would switch sides and be against him? So what do you call putting children in cages? Hitler-ish, right? Have you switched sides yet?”

There’s absolutely nothing I can do to that attack because it’s not based on facts. If I present facts, I don’t have any defense. Facts are useless in

[9:24]

this case. It’s not just this case; it’s really every case. Facts are just not persuasive anywhere, anytime.

You could argue that the people who are doing this persuasion—which is deeply effective, though fraudulent—are doing it for a higher good; they’re trying to create a situation that’s better for the children. But it doesn’t feel that way. I do believe people want what’s right for the children, but it feels like it’s more about Trump than the children, doesn’t it? I don’t want to be a mind-reader and say that I can tell what’s in their mind, but I’ll just put that out there. Does it look to you like the driving force is to save the children? It doesn’t feel like that because if the driving

[10:28]

thing was to save the children, wouldn’t they have alternative suggestions such as, “Hey, let me take some of those children, I’ll take them into my house,” or “Let’s start a GoFundMe to create some more nice facilities for the children that maybe have the parents nearby,” or “Can’t we pass some legislation tomorrow to put more funding into these facilities so the parents and the children can be at least close to each other?” Those would look like caring about the children.

But when you take the child’s view—which is, “There’s only one variable: children in cages”—you’re not really trying to solve the problem. You’re not really caring about the children. It’s just an attack you’re using on the President. Again, I’m not a mind reader, so people could be

[11:29]

only caring about the children, but if they were, it feels like they would act differently.

“Did you do internment camps?” Yeah, I suppose they are in internment camps. It’s sort of “word thinking” what you call them. They’re either detention centers, or processing centers, or jail, or cages. Those words don’t change what it is.

“It’s child abuse.” Probably is. It is child abuse. It is child abuse by the parents who brought them here and put them in that situation, which is sort of the point of what Jeff Sessions is saying. I’m not a big Jeff Sessions fan, by the way, in case you’re wondering, but given that no one is presenting him

[12:33]

with functional options, I have to ask what people’s motives are. Well, we don’t really have to ask, do we?

“It’s against international law.” Would it be against international law to just push them back across the border? That would be legal, right? Would there be any law violated if somebody comes across, they’re detained as a family, and you just open the fence back up and say, “Nope, we’re done”? That’s legal. I think you’re right then; it might be some kind of violation of international law, but as far as I know, it’s because they don’t have a better option for the children that also protects the border, which is something they’re not going to sacrifice.

[13:41]

I felt exhausted last week from all the news. We’re watching the OIG report break the world into their two movies again. Some say there’s nothing there; some say there’s everything there. Of course, there’s enough in there for everybody to draw their own conclusions.

The one thing that I’ve told you consistently is that whenever a situation is complicated, those are the ones that are easy to break into two movies. The simpler the situation, the easier it is to see that it’s just a difference of opinion. But when you have complicated situations, people can just craft that complicated situation into whatever they want to see. You see that with anything from trade agreements to immigration. They’re complicated enough that people can see whatever they

[14:42]

want.

I’ve been tweeting for the last day or so examples of what I call the “laundry list tell” for cognitive dissonance. Have some of you seen that? I think I’m up to four or five I’ve tweeted. What that is is the anti-Trumpers who will list quite often five things; for some reason, they think five is about the right number. People have asked me for a little bit more explanation of why that’s a tell for cognitive dissonance.

The first thing I should say is I’m not relying on science for this. As far as I know, there’s no scientific study that would support what I’m going to tell you right now. This is experiential; it’s observational. The reason I’m showing you examples is so you can look for it yourself and reach your own opinion. I’ll tell you my thinking and you

[15:45]

can bounce that against whatever other thinking you think is relevant.

My thinking is that the people who have decided they dislike the President started with big reasons in the beginning. The big reason was: “My God, he’s going to blow up the world in a nuclear fireball,” or “He’s going to destroy the economy,” or “He’s going to round up gay people and put them in camps.” The initial complaints about the President were just these enormous, gigantic complaints.

It’s now been 520 days of the presidency, and he has made nuclear war far less likely in North Korea. Certainly, he’s been great for the economy, or at least he hasn’t broken it; even if you’re a critic, he hasn’t broken it. ISIS is being beaten back. So all of the big stuff

[16:45]

that people had in their heads as “these are the reasons we hate Trump”—the big, big things—they just don’t work anymore. The big things have been falsified by experience and by observation, but they haven’t changed in their opposition. They’ve defined themselves as part of the opposition, and they’ve defined themselves as the “smart ones” in the conversation. They can’t change that; that’s their identity.

They need to change what it is they’re saying about the President because it now looks ridiculous to say he’s going to start a nuclear war with North Korea or he’s bad for the economy. It just doesn’t work anymore. So when pressed to say why they resist, they go with whatever they have left. They say, “You’re supporting a con man.” That’s the first thing in their list. Now, if that

[17:48]

was enough, they’d be done. For example, if they said, “You’re supporting somebody who’s going to kill us all in a nuclear war,” that’s such a big point that if it were true and the facts seemed to support it, you’d be done. One and done. “He’s going to destroy the world; I don’t even need to tell you anything else.”

But if all you have left is “he’s a con man,” as soon as you write it in your tweet, you have a bit of self-realization: “Well, that’s not very big.” Somebody could easily say that “con man” is similar to leadership; it’s about convincing people to do something. We haven’t seen him con us into doing anything terrible yet, like blowing up the world or ruining the economy. The conning he’s doing seems to be good for the economy and good for world peace.

[18:48]

But he’s a con man. As soon as they say it, they realize it’s not enough. So they say, “He’s a con man and he’s a liar.” But as soon as they say the “liar” thing, they realize all politicians are liars. “Well, he might lie more than other politicians.” Well, we’re not seeing exactly where the lies are hurting anything—again: North Korea, economy, ISIS. “But I know he’s lying and I don’t like that.”

So now I’ve got “con man” and I’ve got “lying.” Those two don’t seem to be enough, but I can compensate by adding some more. I’m going to add, “He’s a cult of personality.” Yeah: con man, liar, and a cult of personality. As soon as they say it, they think to themselves, “Oh yeah, that was kind of true

[19:50]

of Obama too. It certainly would have been true of Hillary.” “But he’s slightly more of that, I think, a little bit more.” But that’s not very persuasive. It just says that people like him. It’s almost a compliment.

“I want it to be worse.” I’ve got con man—that didn’t mean much. I got a liar—that doesn’t seem to make any difference. I’ve got cult of personality—that’s practically a compliment. Three things isn’t enough, so I’d better add Russian collusion. Russian collusion! He’s a con man, a liar, cult of personality, and Russian collusion. But Mueller hasn’t really given us much on the Russian collusion, and people are starting to not talk about it anymore. It seems to me that if there was something big in Russian collusion, it probably would have leaked because everything big leaks. Not enough.

[20:53]

All right, what do I have so far? I got four things: con man, liar, cult of personality, Russia thing. All four of them don’t seem to mean much compared to a great economy and peace with North Korea. I don’t have much. I’m going to need a fifth thing. Fifth thing: “Children in cages!” Children in cages! Suck on that!

“What if the children in cages were a photograph from the Obama era?” Doesn’t matter. “Maybe the children in cages thing isn’t as big as it should be because I don’t really have a better way to handle it myself, but when you look at all the other things—my God, man, are you blind? Look at all the things you’ve got: your liar, your con man, your cult of personality, your Russia, your

[21:53]

children in cages… BAM, Hitler!”

That’s why the laundry list is a tell for cognitive dissonance. You can almost see the thought process in the tweet. It’s like, “Yeah, he’s this.” Well, that wasn’t much. “Yeah, he’s this.” Still not much. By the time you reach five, it becomes obvious to the person writing the tweet that there’s nothing there. It’s not going to get better with six or seven because if you keep going, it just starts looking ridiculous.

I saw somebody do the laundry list that had maybe fifteen items on it. If you look at it like that, I think there were several items that were just duplicates because they ran out of reasons. They had to do something about taxes twice because the list wasn’t long enough.

[22:53]

They already said taxes, but how can they reword the taxes thing again? They end up criticizing low taxes as one of their worst attacks.

The Human Rights Council issue at the UN? I don’t know what that means. Gas prices? Yeah, maybe that’ll be next.

“Are Trump’s lists cognitive dissonance too?” Well, here is the

[23:54]

difference. When Trump does a list of his accomplishments, he says stuff like: “economy is good,” “North Korea,” “ISIS,” “cutting regulations.” You look at that and you say, “Those are actually big things,” and those are the things that his supporters wanted him to do. A list of accomplishments is fair game, right? But look at the difference in the list. Trump’s lists are enormous, world-changing things that he’s at least done the way his supporters wanted him to do. The entire laundry list of the critics is stuff that even they don’t think is convincing. If they thought their list was convincing, they could stop at one or two.

“Tariff fairness?” I’m not sure what that comment was about, but it’s probably something good.

“Does George Lakoff have cognitive dissonance?” Some of you saw the article and a tweet from George Lakoff. He is a UC Berkeley professor and a linguistics expert. He’s one of the few people who were actually qualified to have an opinion on Trump, in the sense that he understands persuasion and the cognitive element. What’s funny is that Lakoff is trying to warn his own side. He’s yelling as loudly as he can to the anti-Trumpers: “Hey, it’s not luck! Stop saying it’s luck! It’s not luck, it’s evil” (in Lakoff’s opinion), “but it’s skill.” Here’s what

[25:56]

he’s doing: “Here are the skills I’m describing. You can see him consistently using them. You can see that these are real persuasive skills.”

Of course, Lakoff would use words like “propaganda” to make Trump sound as bad as possible. The reason—and this is the funny part—that Lakoff is an expert on persuasion (at least his version of it, the linguistic part), means he is a genuine expert. Of course, he went to UC Berkeley because he

[26:57]

was a professor there; that makes him brilliant as well.

But here’s his problem: he still thinks facts matter. He knows they don’t matter to persuasion because he observed it, he’s watching it, and he’s calling it out. But he can’t leave the “facts matter” field. If he doesn’t, he can’t convince anybody of anything. So he’s sort of trapped in his own little child cage. As long as he’s wed to the idea that facts matter, he’s in trouble.

Because the facts matter and because he knows what he’s talking about, he can see that Trump is not an idiot. He

[27:59]

sees him using techniques which are the high-end, most effective techniques. He uses them consistently enough that it’s not chance. Lakoff knows a fact that ninety-nine percent of the people who are anti-Trump don’t believe is true: they believe that Trump is an idiot and that nothing he’s doing has any intelligence to it. Lakoff is at a far higher level of understanding, except that his fear is distorting the obvious good things that are happening—the economy, North Korea—into “the end of the world” and “society is falling apart,” even though the opposite of that is happening right in front of him. But at least he’s way ahead of the people on his side because he

[29:00]

understands the tools that Trump is using.

He just can’t sell that to his own side. He’s completely handicapped by the fact that his side has bought into the movie in which Trump is only lucky. Do you know the Chauncey Gardiner reference from the movie Being There? It’s a very old movie in which the main character becomes President of the United States because people can’t tell the difference between a simpleton and a genius. They just confuse the two. “We don’t understand what he’s doing, but it turned out to work, so he must be a genius.” Once they decide he is a genius, everything he does looks genius-y to the people who have been fooled. You see a number of people, like Sam Harris, making that specific reference to Chauncey Gardiner and that

[30:04]

he is the Chauncey Gardiner president.

The fun part about that is that point of view has sort of a fuse on it. You can start with that point of view and say, “Well, he got this by luck.” But the luck hypothesis, once you leave the movie script world into the real world where odds matter, gets harder to maintain. The longer Trump goes getting things done that at least his supporters wanted him to do, the harder it is to attribute it to luck.

Who is Lakoff? An expert on linguistics, professor at UC Berkeley, and a prominent voice in the cognitive field.

“Democrats are picking an

[31:15]

anti-Asian bent.” I have not noticed that, but I’d be open to examples.

Michael Pollan said the ego is a controlled substance. There you go. Watch how many people start coming to that realization. There’s a natural enlightenment that comes once you realize the “two movie” reality. Once you realize that people are literally observing and interpreting their world in completely different ways, then you’re free to start realizing that your ego is not who you are. It’s just a tool that you can use. Part of that is the humility of knowing that you could be in the wrong movie. Once you understand that you could be in the wrong movie, or your movie might not be the one that predicts the best, then

[32:16]

you can say, “Oh, my ego is not helping me out here because my ego kept telling me I’m right, but then I observe that I’m wrong.” Once you see that your ego is not helping you—it’s only hurting you when it’s telling you incorrect stuff—then you can use it as a tool. You can ramp it up when you need some confidence, and you can ramp it down when you think it’s just fooling you.

How much of this boils down to fashion? Probably a lot. Fashion in the sense that people like to be on the fashionable side of history. Fashion is something you usually attribute to the young. As soon as you hear the word fashion, your mind goes to young models and teens and people who

[33:17]

care about fashion. You’re not thinking about the 45-year-old dad in his khakis and sandals. Fashion is a good way to talk about it because the Left have become the children in the argument. Their opinions of the world are best described as young.

If your opinion is that something is bad but you don’t have any concept of what the alternatives are, that’s a child’s frame of the world. You see that on pretty much everything. They take the child’s frame. The adult frame is: “This is going to be hard for all of us. It’s not going to be fun; it’s going to hurt, but it gets us to a better place. So yes, we’re going to do something tough, but it’s because of the long run.” That’s an adult frame.

If you look at

[34:20]

some videos recently of President Trump from however many years ago—he was doing an interview before he was President and before he was even the candidate—he was saying, “If we don’t do something about North Korea now, it’s going to be harder and worse in the future, so we’ve got to go hard now.” That’s an adult frame: you have to take some pain now because it’ll be better than later. The child frame is that you take the pleasure now, you let the children do what they want, you just give everybody money, and you don’t worry about what happens after that. It’s the long run versus short run thinking that is typified by children versus adults.

1999 is when Trump said that in an interview. What happened with the global

[35:25]

warming lawsuit? Good question. Remember there was a lawsuit in which the judge had asked the climate change proponents and opponents to make their cases? It feels like we just stopped hearing about that. I’d love to know how that worked out. They might be in some kind of delay.

“It’s hard for most people to delay gratification.” It is, but wouldn’t you agree that it’s something you get better at as you get older? The five-year-old can’t delay any gratification. A teenager can do it sometimes. A twenty-something can do it once in a while. But by the time you’re my

[36:27]

age, there’s no point in delaying it because you don’t have much time left, right? I may be moving to the other side of the curve pretty quickly.

Let me switch topics. Let me tease you that there’s something interesting happening in the urban development world. I’m going to update you on that maybe in the next few weeks relative to Bill Pulte’s urban blight project, where he’s tearing down homes and getting rid of the crime and other bad influences that those abandoned buildings have. But now the next part is: what do you do with it? That’s where the fun is going to happen. I’ll just give you a teaser for it—nothing bigger yet, but just a teaser.

You probably saw that

[37:27]

Elon Musk’s Boring Company—B-O-R-I-N-G, Boring—which creates tunnels, has agreed or got the contract to make a tunnel in Chicago. Chicago has, I believe Bill Pulte said, something like 7,000 buildings that are candidates for the blight authority method—tearing them down quickly. It turns out that one of the big problems when you remove a bunch of buildings is that they have basements that are just holes in the ground, and you need to fill them in with dirt. Bill tweeted yesterday, “Hey, what are you going to do with all that dirt, Elon Musk, when you build those tunnels?”

We’ve already talked about the fact that Elon has developed technology to

[38:29]

turn that dirt into bricks, and that might be one of the great uses for the Chicago dirt. But the other use is just to pair up with the blight authority and start filling in the basements that need to be filled in. If you’re going to rebuild, I don’t know if you always want to fill in the basement, but I’m assuming people know more than I do about this stuff.

There’s a really good example of where you’ve got two private citizens who are doing something for Chicago that’s really substantial. It’s the basis for what can reduce crime, make it easier to get a job, and make it easier to go to school, because once you get rid of the blight and the crime, everything gets easier. We may be in a world—and I’ve said this before, so fact-check me on this, or rather, give me your

[39:30]

opinion on this—here is my opinion.

Having a President who is a famous entrepreneur, who didn’t just do one kind of business—he did golf courses, licensing, TV, and now he’s the President—he’s a very entrepreneurial figure. Even if you say his casinos didn’t work and he had bankruptcy, that’s very typical of the entrepreneurial arc. It’s not unusual for entrepreneurs to lose a lot before they make it big. Do you think that having an entrepreneurial President is causing the citizens to be more

[40:31]

entrepreneurial, and specifically entrepreneurial in a way that has a public good?

That’s what you see in the blight authority. It’s what you’re seeing with Elon Musk. Some of the things you see out of Sam Altman’s Y Combinator. You see Y Combinator working on projects which are clearly for the public good. They’re also trying to make money, but the headspace is very much public good. I’m seeing a number of you say yes. I find myself drawn to helping in a way that I never have before, and it feels like there’s something permissive about the Trump presidency. Permissive in an entrepreneurial way—that if you’ve got a good idea and the energy, you might be able to do it.

Take, for example, Kim Kardashian, who

[41:33]

is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our age. If you look at what Kim Kardashian has done in a variety of fields, including making a fortune in video games, she’s hugely entrepreneurial. The whole family seems to be pretty entrepreneurial. So she takes this idea to the President and says, “I have this idea about letting Alice Johnson out of prison and pardoning her.” One of the most famous entrepreneurs in the world takes an idea to one of the other most famous entrepreneurs in the world, President Trump, and what does he say? “Sounds good to me.” What do you expect when two entrepreneurs at that level have a

[42:36]

conversation? Something good may happen.

That’s the sort of thing where you see somebody just have an idea, they bring it to the President, and the President says, “I like it; I can work with that.” I feel like we’ve seen that a number of times, haven’t we? The President said, “Bring me an idea.” In healthcare, he said, “I’ll sign it, just bring me something that works.” That’s the entrepreneurial approach: “Bring me good ideas and I’ll help you make them work.” Likewise, he said to the NFL kneelers, “If you’ve got some ideas of people who need pardons, bring them to me.”

It’s a permissive, entrepreneurial world. We’re cutting regulations, and we’re just setting an example. When the President talked to Kim

[43:38]

Jong-un and showed him the video, it was an entrepreneurial pitch: “Hey, you can have condos on the beach. Your economy can be zipping.”

I feel like that’s one of the most underrated elements of this presidency—that his example and watching him jazz-improvise a lot of things is a very entrepreneurial approach. Instead of the lawyerly approach: “Well, we’ve got to get this taken care of before we can move to this, and then we’ll have to do this in order, never do things out of order, make sure you’ve covered all the bases.” With the lawyer approach we’ve had so many times, Trump just wades into the situation, shakes the box, and says, “How about this?” A little A/B testing while we’re working. “I’ll tweet this, see what happens. Fix it, tweet it. Fix it, tweet it.” He’s

[44:42]

carving the turkey right in front of us based on what’s happening, feedback, and the variables that are immediately in the vicinity. Someday, historians are going to say, “Why can’t we get more of that?”

“Shake the box.” I didn’t have much to say today, so I think I’m going to sign off. Is there any other topic that I haven’t covered that you’d like me to?

“Summer of Love.” Yeah. Has anybody noticed the Summer of Love bond weasels? Somebody asked me where you can buy a bond weasel; right now there’s not a webpage for that.

“Best reply to people freaking out about the children in prisons.”

[45:46]

The best reply is that you agree with them. First, pace them. Children being separated from their parents and put in prison is the worst. It’s the worst. First, agree, because you do agree. There’s nobody here who says, “Oh, I’d like to put children in prison.” So first agree, and then say, “So what should we do?” If they say, “Don’t put

[46:47]

them in prison,” you say, “Yeah, I’m with you, but what should we do instead?” And then walk them through the options: Send them both back immediately? Put the families, adults and children, in the same place? Or “catch and release,” where they just melt into the landscape, which is the same as just not having a border because anybody could come with a child and then just melt into the landscape.

Agree on the emotional part. Here’s the mistake: what you can’t do, and what would not be effective, is challenging them on the facts. You certainly could point out that the pictures they saw of the cages were from 2014—that’s fair—but generally speaking, the facts aren’t going to win

[47:47]

you the day on this conversation. You want to first agree with them emotionally: “Yeah, children taken away from parents, that’s very bad. Let’s not do that.” And then guide them toward describing their solution. You’re going to find that they run out of words and change the subject, and then you have won.

Somebody said, “I’ve been trying this; they don’t respond at all.” I just told you that’s what would happen. You’re going to make them silent. They will just sit there, or they will find a reason to leave or change the subject or tell you something else bad about President Trump. But that is your victory. Once they change the subject, you’ve done what you can do.

[48:53]

Victory is sometimes silent. It’s the cognitive brain freeze once you ask them to describe the alternative and they realize they don’t have one. But you can’t tell them they don’t have an alternative; help them walk through them as healthfully as you can, and they will come to the conclusion themselves. You can help people talk themselves out of their opinion, but it’s very rare that in a single conversation you’re going to change somebody’s mind. Even with my considerable persuasive experience, that’s rare. I almost never see it.

By the way, speaking of Patreon, I started the Patreon account. You can find it at my same name as Twitter and Periscope: Scott Adams Says. A lot of people are donating their dollar, and I’m using that

[49:55]

to pay for the translation of my Periscopes into podcasts. You can see them on the Dilbert.com site; just go to the blog page and there’s a little menu for the podcast.

I’m also having them translated into YouTube form. This is a bit of work because you have to download them and translate them and it takes about an hour, but they’re putting them on YouTube by request. Not just because it’s another big platform, but because you can play YouTube in the background of your device. Apparently, Periscopes only play in the foreground, so you can’t use your phone at the same time for other stuff, but the podcasts and the YouTubes will play in the background. That’s what I’m using the Patreon donations for. The reason I’m taking donations—when, in fact, I’m quite rich—is because I don’t get paid for this. If people want to

[50:57]

expand this knowing that I don’t get paid for it, they can contribute to Patreon, and then Patreon will expand it in ways that people like to consume it. Putting it on YouTube also gives me a platform that might protect the content in case Periscope ever goes away.

Somebody said you could get my entire library onto YouTube in two days. You’d have to download and convert each file, add a description—it’s not that easy, but it’ll be done in a day or two.

“You can background the Periscope on iOS now.” I don’t think that’s the case, but I’ll test that.

[51:59]

People are saying, “Yes, you can,” and others say, “Nope.” I’ll test it; it could be something that a new operating system allows. Having it on YouTube will just give people better options for finding it and interacting with it. It’s a new update on Periscope? That’s good to know.

All right, that’s it for me for today, and I’ll talk to you later.