Scott Adams's Blog, page 260

The Presidential Persuasion Pardon

I don’t expect this to happen. So consider it a thought experiment in persuasion.

Let’s say Donald Trump promises that when he gets elected President he will pardon Hillary Clinton of any future convictions regarding her email server situation. I’m sure he could come up with a plausible reason for the promise, such as healing and uniting the country and whatnot. And let’s say he makes the promise often and convincingly, so you start to think he means it. Maybe he even puts it in writing and has it notarized. That gives him a piece of paper to wave around when he talks about it. Trump likes to keep his persuasion visual, as in “The wall,” because visual persuasion (including imagined images) is the strongest.

The news would go nuts over the pardon idea because it is funny. Social media would erupt for the same reason. Trump likes to control the news cycle, so it works on that level. But that isn’t reason enough to do it.

A promise of a presidential pardon also makes everyone “think past the sale” and imagine Trump as president and Clinton as a convicted criminal. Trump likes to use that particular persuasion trick a lot. So it works on that dimension too.

But the biggest potential benefit for Trump would be in how Clinton acted after his promise of a pardon. Obviously she would brush it off as ridiculous and continue saying there is no risk of prosecution.

But there is a risk. My non-lawyer understanding (based on listening to a well-informed lawyer on C-SPAN) is that the simple existence of the server is a serious crime because it had no other use but secrecy. The classifications of the emails (the issue you hear on the news) is a total misdirection from the real problem. But let’s say the risk to Clinton is not 100%. Let’s put it at 30% just for discussion.

In the Moist Robot* world of persuasion, a 30% risk of prosecution would start to weigh on Clinton’s subconscious. The likely outcome – assuming she believed Trump’s pardon offer was legitimate – would be to start subconsciously sabotaging her own campaign so she can get the pardon. 

I know you don’t believe that. 

But keep in mind that people are more influenced by the threat of loss than the potential for gain. Clinton wants to be president but her desire to avoid prosecution is probably higher. In any event, the subconscious has a way of steering you away from danger whether you like it or not.

The way such a thing would play out in the real world is that Clinton would start making normal-looking “mistakes” that doom her candidacy. The mistakes would not be intentional, per se. They would be the result of her own brain sabotaging her campaign as a way of protecting her.

Obviously science has never tested the exact situation I am describing. So I can’t know for sure how things would play out. But generally speaking, your brain will steer you away from danger in clever ways even if you don’t want it to. All Trump would need to do is provide a safe harbor and Clinton would start drifting toward it without any conscious effort.

As I said above, I don’t expect Trump to promise a pardon. But if he does, expect to see a lot of “mistakes” in the Clinton campaign soon after.

For the benefit of new readers, I’m a trained hypnotists and a student of persuasion. My interest is in Trump’s persuasion skills, not his policies.

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*To better understand the Moist Robot view of the world, in which humans have a UIX that can be programmed, see my book.

Derailing the Trump Train

Donald Trump has made some big mistakes lately. On top of that, his opponents improved their game. As a result, he finds himself in an enormous hole of disapproval, especially with women. If you have been reading my Master Persuader series, you might be interested in why Trump’s persuasion suddenly stopped working. 

It’s more interesting than you think.

I’ll ignore politics and policies as usual and focus on Trump’s persuasion game. I think we all agree that Trump says plenty of untrue things about reality. Even his supporters agree on that. (They just don’t care.)

So here are Trump’s big persuasion errors so far:

1. The Nazi salute.

2. The David Duke disavowal that wasn’t fast enough.

3. Saying women who break future abortion laws should be punished.

You might want me to include on his list of errors his unflattering tweet of Cruz’ wife compared to his wife. But that ploy was more of a mixed result than a complete fail. As obnoxious as it was, it was strong persuasion technique to showcase his mating prowess. You don’t want to believe that works, but it does.

Trump’s aggressive – and personal – attack also sent a signal to stay away from his family, which could pay dividends later. And more generally, he showed a willingness to strike back harder than he is struck, as has been his pattern. That gives pause to the enemy. And of course he sucked all the energy out of the room for another two weeks, consistent with his strategy. I bet most of his supporters found the tweet funny, which is a bonding emotion.

The downside to the wife tweet is that it was one more drip in what was starting to look like a rainstorm of sexist behavior. So on that level, it was a bad idea. Viewed in isolation, the wife tweet was more persuasion than mistake. But viewed in the context of Trump’s problem with women voters, it was a net mistake. But not a big one.

Let’s talk about the big ones.

The Nazi Salute

When Trump asked his rally audience to raise their arms and promise to vote for him, critics compared it to the Nazi salute. On the level of reason and logic, this comparison is ridiculous. People also raise their hands to take the pledge to be citizens of this country. 

But logic and reason don’t matter. Here again, confirmation bias is what counts. Trump’s policies on immigration had already created an irrational analogy in people’s heads that he was the next Hitler. Literally. So in that context, asking supporters to raise their hands was a persuasion mistake.

How did the Master Persuader make such a simple mistake? Easily. Trump is the only person on earth who is 100% positive he is not the next Hitler. The thought probably never occurred to him. All he was doing was using a standard influencer technique. The technique involves asking people to do simple things (such as raising a hand) to prime them for doing something bigger, such as showing up to vote. The technique is A+. But the context made it poison. And Trump had a blind spot to it because – I presume – he doesn’t see himself as Adolph Hitler.

The key learning here is that Trump was not bested in this situation by reason and logic, which had been the weapons of choice for his opposition until now. And by opposition, I mean all the people he obliterated earlier in the election cycle. 

Reason and logic are bad weapons. I might have mentioned that before. But an irrational analogy to Hitler, mostly fueled by social media, got real traction.

The David Duke Disavowal That Wasn’t Fast Enough

By now you all know that Trump was slow to answer a question about disavowing David Duke’s endorsement. Trump said he had trouble hearing the question. Pundits and opponents said he was trying to avoid offending racists because there are plenty of them in his base. Therefore, Trump is a racist too, they conclude.

Trump had disavowed David Duke before and after that interview, and every time he has been asked the questions since then. That should end all doubts. But facts and reason never matter. What did matter is that this too-slow disavowal coupled with confirmation bias fit the narrative of Trump as Hitler.

I don’t have a hypothesis on why Trump was slow to disavow. But I can tell you from experience, having done hundreds of satellite interviews, that sometimes you do not hear the question. And sometimes you’re just tired and you say dumb things. Or he could have been trying to avoid offending racists because they vote. In any event, it was an error.

Saying women who break future abortion laws should be punished

Trump is running as a non-politician. That’s part of his appeal. He says he’ll get good advisors and figure out “common sense” solutions when he gets in office. This is similar to how any CEO would operate when jumping to an unfamiliar industry, which happens all the time.

Here’s a little thought experiment. Think of any unusually successful person in any field other than politics. Now ask yourself if that person was experienced in the field before succeeding.

Zuckerberg? Nope.

Gates? Nope.

Jobs? Nope.

Me? Nope.

Entrepreneurs learn as they go, and Trump is an entrepreneur. He’s transparent about that. Trump also says he gets his information on the big topics from watching the experts on the news. That’s how a lot of voters get their information too, and it doesn’t stop any of us from being sure we know what is best for the country.

So it should be no big surprise to anyone that Trump is light on policy knowledge. And when Chris Matthews asked Trump the ultimate gottcha question of all time, Trump stumbled.

And by stumbled, I mean Matthews badgered Trump out of the third dimension of persuasion – where Trump was using misdirection and ambiguity – to the second dimension of policy details. And then Trump made the biggest mistake I have ever seen on live television.

He tried to use common sense.

In case you missed it, the gottcha question involved a hypothetical future in which abortion is illegal and a woman chooses to get one anyway. Matthews asked Trump if that woman should be “punished.”

Trump tried to avoid the question until it got too awkward to do so. Then he applied common sense to fill in the hole that experienced politicians would have filled with knowledge. Trump reasoned that anyone who violates a law must be punished. That reasoning probably works in every situation except abortion.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but under current state laws about abortion, a woman can abort a perfectly healthy baby a week before it would be due and only the doctor performing the crime would be punished. Trump didn’t know that. Neither did I until this topic arose. Among my friends, I can’t find anyone else who knew it either, male or female. So we shouldn’t be surprised that a citizen-politician didn’t know that non-punishment of the woman is the standard. And as soon as Trump was informed, he immediately adjusted to fit the standard.

In a world of reason and logic, Trump got new information and immediately adjusted. That’s exactly what you’d want from a citizen-politician who is learning as he goes. But reason and logic don’t count.

What does count is that that Trump’s knowledge gap about abortion was seen as one more bit of evidence (confirmation bias) that Trump is anti-woman.

Summary

Trump’s tweet about Cruz’ wife compared to his own was viewed as sexist because it reduced women to their looks. But that’s also what made the tweet funny. There is nothing funny about comparing two people with different levels of attractiveness until you factor in the galactic inappropriateness of a presidential candidate bringing up the topic in the first place. The shock is the engineered part of the joke.

I’ll say that again because I’m a professional humorist. The intended joke of Trump’s tweet about Cruz’s wife compared to his own was its inappropriateness. If you remove that one element it loses its humor. And obviously it was designed for a laugh. It wasn’t a policy proposal.

And the tweet makes even more sense when you consider it was a response to the pro-Cruz commercial showing Melania scantily clad. Trump didn’t start that fight, but he certainly ended it. Don’t expect any more Melania attacks from the Cruz camp.

We know from Trump’s many statements about Melania that he respects her intelligence. Trump also has a long history of promoting women to executive positions. So we know Trump does not have a one-dimensional view of women. He does, however, consider physical appearance to be an important feature of the real world, because it is. He has always been transparent about that.

The big test of sexism is whether you can reverse the genders of the people involved and get the same outcome. If you can, sexism probably isn’t the issue. And Trump’s tweet about Cruz’ wife is totally reversible. Imagine your favorite female comedian running for office. If she’s married to George Clooney, and someone mocks her husband’s shirtless movie roles, you can certainly imagine a response like Trump’s tweet in which she humorously showcases her mating success compared to her rival. People would think it was hilarious if men were the target.

In Trump’s case, confirmation bias caused folks to see this as one more drip in the rainstorm of his sexist behavior. If logic and reason mattered, people would have seen Trump’s tweet as an attempt at humor that is inappropriate by design. That’s why it is funny to some. But on the field of persuasion, it was one more piece of confirmation bias that Trump has a woman problem.

If you are keeping score, Trump wins when he plays 3D chess (using persuasion) against his 2D opponents who are trying to showcase their judgment, knowledge, and experience. But Trump has trouble when his opponents bring their irrational game to his 3D playing field. The public’s response to the “wives tweet” happened entirely on the 3D playing field of emotion and confirmation bias, and Trump was outnumbered. He recently admitted it was a mistake.

Likewise, Trump’s association with the Nazi salute makes no sense in the 2D world where people raise their hands for all sorts of reasons. But the public took that fight to Trump’s irrational 3D domain and had a field day with it. When the fight is Trump versus one 2D opponent, Trump wins. When the contest is the public (via social media) versus Trump it is a 3D battle all the way, and Trump is badly outnumbered.

As I explained above, Trump failed on the abortion penalty question because he was forced out of his 3D world of persuasion and into the 2D world of common sense. In the world of common sense, people involved in any kind of crime are subject to punishment. But American society has decided that abortion is an exception (which I do not debate) and so Trump failed.

Now here’s where I failed in my analysis of Trump. My analogy of Trump’s campaign is that he was bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight. I predicted he would torch all of his opponents because he had better tools for the fight.

That part was right. One-on-one, Trump will win every time.

Where I was wrong was forgetting that social media runs the world now. And social media has no 2D game at all. It is pure emotion. And it is not on Trump’s side.

So I will update my description of Trump bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight by saying I forgot the audience have their own torches. Collectively, those torches are bigger than Trump’s flamethrower. And the audience left their seats and attacked, using pure emotion, persuasion, and repetition. Trump is surrounded and outnumbered. 

Let’s call it his third act. In movie terms, this is the hero’s deepest hole. It looks to the audience that he can’t climb out. Trump has been branded a sexist Hitler and left to die at the bottom of the hole. There is no solution, we think.

But Trump already started climbing. You don’t see it yet because he is operating entirely in the third dimension. I’ll help you see it. Notice that each of these examples have big problems on the 2D playing field but play well as persuasion.

1. Trump says we should pull U.S. military out of Japan and let them take care of defense themselves. Was Hitler known for removing troops from occupied countries?

2. Trump says we should pull our military out of South Korea and let the South Koreans and China handle North Korea. I don’t believe Hitler was in favor of removing troops from occupied countries.

3. Trump says we should do less with Nato. I don’t even understand that position, but I’m sure Hitler was never in favor of less military.

4. Trump is opposed to abortion. Supporters of abortion dehumanize fetuses under a certain age so the public supports abortion laws. That’s similar to how Hitler dehumanized groups of people so the public would support genocide. Trump is the anti-Hitler in this case, supporting life for people of all ethnicities, and even potential life.

5. Trump admitted he was wrong to tweet about Cruz’ wife. This is the first time we have seen him admit wrong. Trump’s opponents are afraid (in the third dimension) that he can’t be shamed into acting appropriately. He just showed that he can.

6. Trump reversed his position on punishing women for illegal abortions within hours. People worried that no amount of public shame or condemnation could control Trump, which is a dangerous situation. Trump showed he can be shamed into changing his position in real time. It happened right before our eyes.

But all of these things are minor compared to what Trump needs to get out of the hole. To get all the way out, he needs one thing. And he already set the table for that one thing to happen.

Trump needs Megyn Kelly to interview him.

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If you think this blog post is too long, you should see my book. It’s even worse. 

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These two strangers need to get together and work it out.

Shame Shaming

Most civilized people agree that so-called “fat-shaming” has no place in our modern world. The unwritten rules of polite society say that a person’s appearance is out of bounds for criticism. That feels right to me.

But we can still shame people for being stupid, evil, or lazy. The thinking here – as far as I can tell – is that people don’t have a lot of choice about their appearance, but they can control their actions and their knowledge. We can criticize people’s choices, but not their genetic makeup.

But there’s one problem with that rule. I’ve never seen a dumb person become smart, an evil person become good, or a lazy person become ambitious. I’m sure it happens to some degree, but generally speaking, it isn’t a thing.

We have some control over our intelligence, ambition, and character, but not much. On the whole, dumb people stay dumb, lazy people stay lazy, and sociopaths (for example) stay evil. Biology is hard to overcome.

My moist robot filter on the world says free will is an illusion. That means nothing is worthy of shame because no one is actually choosing anything. All decisions happen the way they have to happen given the chemistry of a given situation. The laws of physics do not change based on our wants. (As far as I know.)

I was born ambitious. I have no memory of being any other way. Consistent with that observation, I have met lazy people who seem to have been born that way. Does my genetic luck with ambition give me the right to shame the people born without it? I don’t think so. I just got lucky on that one dimension.

I’m also short, bald, and near-sighted. People try shaming me for that stuff on a regular basis. But it doesn’t work because I lost all sense of shame some time ago. In my world view, shame is nothing but a filter some people put on their own observations. 

Next time someone tries to shame you, just remember you’re listening to a moist robot with no free will. It takes the sting out of it.

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I might be on CNN today with Jake Tapper but these things tend to get rescheduled based on breaking new. Follow me on Twitter for updates, or just wait for the clip. @ScottAdamsSays

Trump and Abortion

I’ll start by reminding readers that my policy preferences don’t align with Donald Trump’s policies, or with anyone else’s except in some minor cases that are mostly coincidence. In the case of abortion rights, I defer to the better-informed views of women. I like having the right to vote on every issue, but as a practical matter, men add nothing to the abortion discussion unless those men are doctors, scientists or philosophers. Women have this issue covered. So I support whatever the female majority wants to do with abortion. 

I tell you my non-opinion on abortion because the messenger is always part of the message. You wouldn’t be able to appreciate the rest of this post without knowing my starting position.

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You probably know by now that Trump suggested on live TV that law-breakers should be punished. On the surface, that seems like an obvious statement about accountability. But as it turns out, that general statement doesn’t work for the question of abortion, so all hell broke loose and Trump immediately backtracked and stated that if abortions were made illegal, only the doctors performing abortions should be charged with a crime. 

A woman seeking an abortion is already paying a steep emotional and physical penalty, so her role is part victim, part perpetrator. Society – and now Trump – have chosen to focus on the victim part. 

But Trump and other pro-lifers believe that if abortion becomes illegal – as they hope it does – it makes sense to punish the doctors who perform it. The thinking here is that you can’t have a law with no punishment, so punishing doctors (and not patients) at least satisfies the requirement of a functional law.

But let me test an assumption here. Do we really need penalties for every law?

Suicide was illegal in this country until 1968. And obviously we don’t punish dead people. So that was an example of a law with no penalty. So why did that law exist?

I assume suicide was illegal because lawmakers wanted to send a message about the value of life. We could do the same thing with abortion. Imagine a world in which abortion is illegal but there are no penalties on the books for either the doctors or patients. In that case, all you have is a statement from the government that life is valuable. I want that from my government. But I still want citizens to make the hard choices on their own.

As a general principle, we all might be better off if our government always took the side of maximizing human life while leaving room for private citizens to make tough choices as needed. A law without penalties does that.

This is different from the situations in which laws have penalties but the justice system collectively ignores them. That sends a mixed message and it also comes with a risk that police can change their minds tomorrow and start enforcing. 

Let me give you another example in which you might want something to be illegal but with no penalties on the books. Doctor-assisted dying in the case of terminally ill patients just became legal in California, and I was part of the push to legalize it. But I would be equally happy (perhaps happier) if doctor-assisted suicide were illegal nationwide but no penalties were on the books. That would keep our government on the side of promoting life at all times while giving citizens the freedom to make the hard choices. That feels like a clean solution to me.

In my opinion, governments should always be pro-life because governments are not human beings. I don’t want to see any life-and-death decisions about humans coming from robots, corporate entities, or artificial government structures. Humans have to make decisions about human life, period. We don’t leave that up to software or bureaucracies.

An exception to that rule would be war, in which a Commander in Chief sends humans to die for the greater good. But even here we see that the structure of government defaults to a human – the Commander in Chief – the minute that life is on the line. And most people prefer that situation.

Likewise, in states with capital punishment, juries of human beings make the hard decision about life and death. We don’t leave that to a government rule or software.

I’ll say it again: Governments should always favor human life, even in the gray areas. But human beings often need the freedom to make hard choices about life. If the government makes abortion and doctor-assisted dying illegal, it sends a message about the priorities of government to protect life. But by being silent on penalties for those things, government would also allow citizens and their doctors to make the hard decisions.

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Okay, you probably came here to see my Master Persuader opinion on Trump’s abortion controversy. To me it looked like a mistake, not a clever ploy. Chris Matthews asked a devious gottcha question and it worked. Trump walked right into it. 

But keep in mind that Trump had no winning hand to play for abortion. He could either offend his base and not get nominated or he could poison his chances in the general election. He had two losing options. So what did he do?

He chose ambiguity and chaos. At least he is consistent that way.

In other words, he moved the topic to where he has home field advantage. He chose an extreme view (holding women legally accountable) and sucked all of the energy out of the room. But this too appears to be a losing hand because it worsens his reputation with women. 

In movies, just when you think things can’t get any worse for the hero, things do get a lot worse. That just happened for Trump. No candidate for president can survive being labelled a sexist and a racist.

I have predicted the so-called third act for Trump since 2015. If he solves the third act, he wins the general election in a landslide.

Seems impossible, doesn’t it?

It certainly would be impossible for anyone but a Master Persuader. I’ll blog more on this topic in the coming weeks. But for now I’ll just say that if I were in Trump’s position I could easily solve it. And I’m not nearly as persuasive as Trump. So I like his odds, even though it looks impossible to you.

Using Persuasion to Solve Everything

Persuasion is a learned skill. It involves a well-understood set of science-tested tools. For whatever reason, Donald Trump is bristling with talent for persuasion and Hillary Clinton has none (that I can detect) except for basic political skills and her gender identity. Persuasion is not the only talent you want in a president, so I won’t try to oversell it. But let’s see what kinds of issues are susceptible to a president’s powers of persuasion.

I can think of two types of problems that can be solved with persuasion:

1. The Economy

2. Terrorism

Economies need two things in order to function. They need resources, and they need an optimistic mindset. Optimists with access to resources invest in new ventures, and they spend for consumption. That’s all you need for a robust economy, so long as you have an educated citizenry, no natural disasters, no big wars, and the government stays out of your way.

I realize that sounds like an oversimplification of economics, but it isn’t. If you have optimism and resources, (and no huge outside problems) almost everything else takes care of itself in time. Capitalism does the rest.

To a large extent, the mood of citizens determines the future of the economy. In the United States of 2016, resources are plenty. All that matters is how we use those resources. And that depends on our collective psychology. In other words, the entire economy can be persuaded.

Obviously you don’t want too much optimism in an economy. That gives you housing bubbles and stock bubbles. A properly persuasive president would move citizens to the middle of the optimism range where things work well.

A President of the United States also has to cajole Congress to get things done. And a president needs to negotiate with other countries over trade deals. Both situations require persuasion in all its forms. Hillary Clinton has the political-form of persuasion (old school) and Trump as president would have all of that plus a range of extra persuasion skills on top.

Here I remind you that persuasion is not the only talent you want in a president. But on this one dimension, Trump is in a league of his own. The odds are good that a President Trump could move the economy more than could a President Clinton because of persuasion skills alone. But to the extent that Trump is more unpredictable than Clinton, you would have to accept some risk for his greater persuasiveness.

Now let’s talk about terrorism.

ISIS, and terrorism in general, are persuasion problems masquerading as military problems. You can’t bomb an idea. (We know because we keep trying.) Somehow we have to change the psychology of terrorists before they get nukes, and biological weapons, and their own drones. Psychology is the domain of persuasion. And persuasion is the only way out. Trump has those skills whereas Clinton (so far) has not demonstrated any mastery of persuasion.

But again, persuasion is not the only skill that matters. Trump is less predictable than Clinton (and intentionally so for the sake of negotiating, he says) so you have to count that as extra risk. The reality might be that Trump’s intentional lack of predictability makes him a better negotiator on the world stage. But we don’t know that to be true, so for now it counts as a risk.

Let me give you an example of how persuasion could be used in the service of ending terrorism. I will play off of yesterday’s blog post in which I suggested we treat terrorism as a medical (mental) problem.

As things stand, a terrorist can kill hundreds of innocent people while feeling he is doing something noble for his cause. If your future looks like nothing but bad times ahead, dying now as a martyr feels like a good deal. It gives you purpose, feeds your ego, and makes you immortal in a way. Terrorists feel – in a word – important. So the psychology favors terrorism. It has a real pay-off for the terrorist in terms of ego.

But suppose we (the victims) stop acting as though we are at war with a capable foe and start treating them with the sympathy we accord to any sick person. That changes the frame. An enemy needs you to act like an enemy or it ruins the entire game.

Obviously we need to maintain all the military and defense systems we have in place, and improve them over time. But the way we talk about terrorism can change to a framework of mental health. A persuasive president with a good linguistic kill shot for terrorists could change the game.

Trump famously suggested that we target the families of terrorists. Suppose we target them for shame instead of violence. Imagine a scene in which a terrorist does something bad and we know his name, so we can identify his family.

Now imagine a fully-briefed President Trump talking about the losers in that terrorist’s family, by name. That’s world news. It would get back to them. Imagine Trump talking about how many cousins have inbred in that family. Imagine Trump humiliating the terrorist’s family in ways that only Trump can. Ordinary insults would have no impact. But the weapons-grade humiliation that Trump wields can definitely leave a mark. It might take some testing to find the most humiliating approach, but some form of persuasion would have a permanent impact on the family’s reputation, even coming from an enemy like Trump. He’s that good. (Or that evil, depending on your point of view.)

The most likely outcome of a Trump presidency is that it looks a lot like other presidencies. Our political system has a way of constraining options. But we also know the current approach to terror is not working. The only option for stopping it is to change the psychology. And only one candidate has those tools.

Again – and I can’t say it too often – Trump adds risk in terms of unpredictability. But if you have tried all of the non-risky paths and they don’t work, it is sensible to increase your risk to introduce new solutions.

I’ll remind you here that my political views do not align with Trump’s or any of the other candidates. My interest is in Trump’s persuasion skills.

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If you found things you don’t like in this blog, imagine how many you would find in my book.

The Elbonian Zombie Virus

This is a thought experiment.

Imagine that the tiny nation of Elbonia suffers a Zombie Virus outbreak. Luckily, the virus does not spread easily, but prolonged personal contact with an infected zombie increases the odds of transmission. Once infected, the Elbonian becomes a zombie killer. As it turns out, most people are immune to the virus. Over 99% of the public have no risk of catching it. But 1% is far too many zombie killers.

Imagine we have no way to detect this Elbonian Zombie Virus infection before symptoms occur. And let’s say that the problem started in Elbonia and so far has not gone beyond its borders. There is no cure for the Elbonian Zombie Virus. So what would world health organizations do?

For starters, they would quarantine the entire nation of Elbonia to limit the damage. This is obviously unfair to all uninfected Elbonians but it is also the only practical way to protect the rest of the world. Once the quarantine is in place, the professionals can get to work on a cure.

Now here’s the interesting part. What is the functional difference between the Elbonian Zombie Virus and radical islamic terrorism? In both cases they are spread by prolonged personal contact. In both cases you have no way to identify infected people until there are symptoms. In both cases the “virus” is deadly to both the person infected and those around them.

As we often hear from political pundits, you can’t bomb an idea. And we can see for ourselves that war doesn’t eliminate the “virus” of radical Islamic terrorism. I suggest we start treating terrorism as a medical condition – specifically, like a virus that creates a mental health problem.

In earlier times, people believed mental problems were not health problems in the same way cancer is. Today we recognize that the brain is just another body part that responds to treatment. Sometimes the treatment involves counseling, sometimes drugs, sometimes lifestyle changes. We have lots of buttons we can push to see what works.

I’m fairly certain that the idea virus of radical islamic terror can also respond to mental health treatments, once we figure out the best approach. Here I am talking about using the science of persuasion, along with the tools of the mental health profession, to cure terrorism.

Is that possible, you ask? Absolutely. Generally speaking, a professional persuader with enough time can convince almost anyone of almost anything. But we haven’t tried this approach because our government has decided that terrorism is a criminal and military problem. It isn’t. It is a mental health issue. If we reframe terrorism as a mental health emergency, that frees us to approach it with medical tools and methods more appropriate to the problem.

As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The United States has tools for war and tools for diplomacy. It has no tools for treating a massive mental health issue in a distant land. But we could build those tools.

All we need to do is change our “frame” for terrorism and start treating it as a medical problem. Trump already started that process by suggesting we quarantine the United States from all Muslim immigration – which seems terribly unfair – just to avoid contact with the 1% who might be infected with the radical islamic terror virus. Trump is approaching the problem as if it were a medical emergency. First you quarantine, then you solve.

Trump also says we need to figure out why the terrorists hate us. That tells you he sees it as a mental health problem, although he hasn’t used those words. In our country, thoughts of suicide and mass murder, along with delusions of virgins in the afterlife, would be considered a mental problem and treated as such.

I have no idea whether Trump’s impressive skills at persuasion can stop radical islamic terrorism. But I do know he has the right tools for the job. We can see that already during the campaign.

Clinton’s tool box for fighting terrorism only has weapons and diplomats in it. As president, Trump would have all of that plus persuasion. 

Here I pause to tell new readers that I don’t endorse Trump. And my personal views do not line up with any of the candidates on any of the issues except by coincidence in a few places.

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If you think this blog post is ridiculous, you should see my book.

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My best tweet of the year was this one:

Pundits say Trump has destroyed the Republican party. I say that’s one party down, one to go. The job is only half done. #trump

The Sarcasm Tell (With an Absurd Absolute)

This post won’t mean much to you unless you have been following my Master Persuader series. Today I will teach you to spot The Sarcasm Tell. When you see the tell it means you won the argument. But it won’t feel that way to you because cognitive dissonance will cause your opponent to reinterpret the world in some bizarre new way in order to avoid the appearance of being dumb. The form of the tell is this:

1. You make a reasonable argument.

2. The other person runs out of reasonable objections (and has thus been persuaded).

3. Other person is “struck dumb” for a second. Eyes stay open. Mouth stays shut. Cognitive dissonance is setting in.

4. Other person restates your opinion as an absurd absolute and adds sarcasm.

The absurd absolute by itself is a tell, but you usually see it paired with sarcasm to hide the trick. 

Here’s an example.

You: People aren’t saving enough for retirement.

Other: Yes they are.

You: Here’s a link to 25 prestigious publications that have independently reached the same conclusion. They cite their sources.

Other: Ohhhh, because those publications have never been wrong. I get it. Ha ha! You just lost all credibility.

The “never” part is the absurd absolute.

If you want to see the effect in person, study my blog post from yesterday and try out some of those points on a Trump hater. Then report back to me. It will freak you out when you see it.

Who’s Afraid of Donald Trump?

For new readers:

I have already disavowed Donald Trump for being scary. And by that I mean he scares my fellow citizens, which I find unacceptable. 

My policy views don’t line up with any of the candidates’ positions, including Trump’s. I don’t vote and I am not a member of a political party. I try to avoid identifying with any political label because doing so would make me biased and less credible.

My interest in Trump is his persuasion skills. I have never seen better.

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A Donald Trump presidency might offer a once-in-a-lifetime chance to fire the government of the United States. 

Whatever that means. 

If you support Trump, you probably think it means he will remove the influence of big money and make common-sense decisions based on good advice. That sounds like a good thing. 

If you are anti-Trump, you probably fear he will acquire too much control and become a crazy racist dictator who declares war on China. For the record, I think that would be a bad thing.

So how would you assess the risk/reward of a Trump presidency? I’ll help you put the question in context, then you decide.

Sizing the Risk

As President of the United States, Trump would be both powerful and unpredictable. Trump often says he is intentionally unpredictable because it gives him an advantage in negotiating. The combination of power and unpredictability should scare you. And apparently it does scare a lot of people. As risks go, it doesn’t get much bigger.

But as I learned in school, you can’t compare something to nothing. You need to compare the risk of a Trump presidency to the alternatives. And that alternative is probably a Clinton presidency that is not too different from the current presidency.

So how risky would “more of the same” be?

Budget-wise, we are probably on the road to ruin. The more-of-the-same president is unlikely to stop the special interests and big money players from bloating the budget to the point of crushing debt.

Nor would we have any reason to expect the economy to have any extra zip under a more-of-the-same scenario. So no matter how bad you think Trump might be for the economy, the more-of-the-same alternative is probably a pathway to crushing debts and financial doom.

And once the economy dies, we all die. So as risks go, “more of the same” might be the highest risk of all. The only way we would escape economic doom under the more-of-the-same scenario is for some unpredictable future event to change our direction in a positive way. Is that likely?

Trump, on the other hand, is an unpredictable future event that can change just about anything, as we have already learned. So in terms of economic risk, Clinton is a path to probable budget doom whereas Trump can go either way. 

As far as I can tell, homeland security seems effective under President Obama, at least in terms of preventing Belgium-sized attacks. But we have a growing risk from terrorists disguised as immigrants from the middle east. There’s no way to assess that risk because we don’t know how well the vetting process in this country works. But if we assume the people doing the vetting are no more competent than your coworkers, reach your own conclusions about that risk.

Trump adds risk to the world by suggesting a temporary end to Muslim immigration. That rubs a billion people the wrong way. It might spark violence and it might worsen the country’s reputation. The tradeoff for that risk is (Trump hopes) a lower risk of terrorists reaching our soil. 

How do you balance those risks?

If you think Trump is a racist, his proposal of a Muslim immigration ban looks like the beginning of something terrible. But if you believe Trump is totally transparent about sacrificing “political correctness” for national security, it just looks like aggressive risk management. 

Your Psychic Abilities

If you are sure you know how a Trump presidency would play out, ask yourself how often you have been right about this sort of thing in the past. Humans are notoriously terrible at predicting the future. Consider the fact that almost no human can pick stocks that will outperform the index no matter how much information is available. That should give you some humility.

Some of you are not aware that financial advice is mostly a scam. Experts can’t pick winning stocks any better than a monkey with a dart board. I learned that fact when I got my B.A. in economics. I learned it a second time when I got my MBA at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. And I learned it a third time when I ignored everything I learned in school and tried to pick stocks.

But now I’m fairly sure I can’t pick stocks.

If you can pick winning stocks year after year, then you might have some unusual ability to see the future. If I ever meet you, I will take seriously your predictions about a Trump presidency. And I also want some stock tips.

Okay, okay. I realize stocks and humans are different. But ask yourself how often you thought a relationship would go one way and it went the other. And look around at your fellow citizens who are divorced or unhappy in their relationships. How good are we at predicting the future of other people?

Have you ever been involved in hiring? I have. I’ve hired lots of people for lots of things over the years. I have also partnered with lots of folks for lots of things. And I can assure you I was surprised most of those times. No matter how much information I think I have, people still surprise me. 

Now look around at your idiot coworkers and ask yourself how well your boss makes hiring decisions.

If you get a chance, ask the smartest venture capitalist or angel investor how they spot a winning startup. The answer is that they are all guessing. No one knows what the future holds.

Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We are also terrible at knowing we can’t do it. Ask yourself if you are the rare exception.

Rising Racial Tensions

A Trump presidency might raise racial tensions and increase the odds of violence. I think most observers would agree that Trump is gaming the primary process by doing the dog-whistle racism strategy. He is transparent about being flexible in how he wins, so long as he wins. Here Trump appears to be making a conscious decision to increase the risks of racial tensions in order to protect the homeland, both economically and physically.

Is that moral? Definitely not. Is it a good tradeoff in terms of risk? We don’t know. Ask Belgium.

Bad Role Model

Some say Trump is a bad role model for our children, with his rude language, his insults, his political incorrectness, and his inability to admit wrong. 

Other people say that if your kid is using Trump as a role model, you have failed as a parent. 

Trump isn’t running as a role model for your kids. He hasn’t even tried to make that case. Apparently that is a low priority for him. He’s more about national security and the economy. So while it is fair to ding Trump for the role model problem, you have to ask yourself where “role model for my kid” lands on your list of national priorities.

Trump Talks Crazy so He Must be Crazy

Trump talks crazy. He says water is dry and up is down except when it is up. His budget is nonsense and his policies seem to shift on a daily basis.

That sounds unstable.

But Trump also has nearly seventy years of track record that says he isn’t crazy or unstable in any way. The man has never had a drug or a drink. He has been appropriately hesitant to go to war and he has never stabbed anyone in the belt buckle.

How many people change their character when they get to seventy? None, unless they have mental problems. The smart money says Trump is whatever he has always been.

And what he has always been is a guy who wrote a book on how to be unpredictable to win negotiations. He’s doing just that, and completely transparent about it. He says he is stirring up controversy to get free television time. And we observe that to be true.

Trump might have suddenly turned crazy at the same time that acting crazy was exactly the right strategy to win the Republican primary. But you have to ask yourself how big of a coincidence that would be.

And Trump has already shown he can pretend to be presidential on command. That tells you he presents whatever vision of himself gets the best result.

Trump is a Con Artist and a Narcissist

What you call a con artist, Trump calls negotiating. I call it persuasion. And we all call it politics. It’s all the same thing. Trump just does it better than his opponents.

And that’s exactly the skill he is offering to the country. The president’s job is to persuade people. He needs to persuade Congress, voters, and the rest of the world about all sorts of things. He needs to negotiate, cajole, and lead.

You can call persuasion manipulation. You can call negotiating conning. But don’t lose sight of the fact we ask our president to do exactly those things.

But what about Trump’s narcissism? Is that a risk?

Maybe. But I have trouble seeing how he could feed his ego without doing a good job as president. Trump is proposing we staple his reputation to the reputation of the country. I can’t see a scenario in which he screws the country and thinks it will work out well for him personally. That would be more crazy than narcissistic. 

Those Business Failures

Trump had a number of bankruptcies and failed businesses. By way of context, I have over thirty business failures on my record. Far more if you count Dilbert licensees. A typical startup has about a 10% chance of making it. Trump is entrepreneurial by nature, so you should expect a high number of failures. The number of failures don’t tell you anything.

To judge Trump’s business skill, look for how he managed his personal risk. And apparently he did that well. The bankruptcies protected his personal assets, and his license deals probably pay him a guaranteed advance no matter how well the licensee does. In other words, he made good deals that gave him a big upside but not much downside. 

You might have seen estimates from experts saying Trump would be richer if he had simply put his inheritance millions into a stock index fund. But I believe those calculations ignore what he spends, gives to ex-wives, etc. I wouldn’t trust them.

When to Accept Higher Risk

Generally speaking, you want to avoid risks (such as Trump) when things are going well, and you want to invite the right kind of risk when things are not. For example, if you think the budget of the United States will reverse course and balance itself before we are broke, you probably don’t want the extra risk of a Trump presidency. Likewise, if you think there is no real risk from having porous borders, you don’t want the risks of a Trump presidency.

But if you think the government is broken, and you want to send a wrecking ball to Washington D.C., Trump offers that possibility. We just don’t know what else he offers because we can’t see the future.

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If this blog post seems too long, you would hate my book. It is even longer than this.

Sleeper Persuasion with a Trigger

The other day I explained to you that Trump was using “stamina” as a linguistic kill shot against Hillary Clinton. The genius of it – persuasion-wise – is that every normal candidate has some low-energy days. Everyone gets hoarse from too much speech-making. Everyone takes bathroom breaks, and other kinds of breaks. Trump knew that voters would see “evidence” of Clinton’s lack of stamina even when there was no evidence. That’s how confirmation bias works. 

And sure enough, Clinton took a few days off from campaigning and people were primed to make “stamina” comments all over my Twitter feed. That’s what I call sleeper persuasion. You put the suggestion out in the world and wait for a trigger to activate it. The trigger can be real or imagined (confirmation bias). Either way, it works.

Likewise, Trump chose border security as his signature issue in part because there was a 100% chance voters would see another terror attack somewhere during the election cycle. Any attack would serve as a trigger to activate the persuasion. Unfortunately, ISIS has provided three triggers already in the past year, with Belgium being the latest. 

If you’re paying attention to the news, you know that Trump just doubled-down on waterboarding (and maybe worse) because of the Belgium attack. And the world just shrugged it off this time. Every time something blows up, Trump starts looking less crazy. That’s sleeper persuasion with a trigger.

I recognize this method of persuasion because I sometimes use it. In 2004 I wrote my sequel to God’s Debris called The Religion War. In that novella, set in the near future, a Caliphate forms in the Middle East and starts using small, hobby-sized drones in terror attacks around the world. In the book, the drone attacks are impossible to stop with normal means. The proposed solution in the story – from a military dictator coincidentally named Cruz – is to wall up the Caliphate, cut off communication, and wipe out every living thing inside the walls. (This is not my personal recommendation. It is fiction designed to predict.)

My strategy for that book was to write what I expected to someday happen and use that as my trigger for book sales later. I figured back in 2004 that there was a 100% chance that terrorists would someday use hobby-sized drones for attacks. When they do, the persuasion trigger will be activated and people will wonder what else I said in that book.

Just to be clear, I prefer selling zero books and having zero terror attacks. But that isn’t realistic. Terror wasn’t going to stop no matter how many books I write.

At the risk of spoiling the story, a Master Persuader enters the picture and attempts to avert genocide in the Caliphate. But the Master Persuader does not resemble Trump, in case you were worried.

To summarize Sleeper Persuasion with a Trigger:

1. Predict something you think is likely to happen in the future even if others think it is not likely. 

2. Associate a product with the prediction. In my case, the product is my book. In Trump’s case, the product is Trump as a candidate.

3. Wait for the trigger to happen, or for confirmation bias to make people think the trigger happened.

4. Remind people that you predicted whatever is happening.

You might wonder what happens when one of your sleeper predictions turns out to be wrong. The answer is that people won’t remember, or won’t care. And unless you put a deadline on your prediction, you can always say it will happen later.

Most of my Trump predictions have been accurate, but if Trump had crashed and burned in September you would have already forgotten I made a dumb prediction. I saw a big upside potential for predicting Trump’s rise and no real downside. So I jumped on it. And I had the advantage of recognizing his persuasion tools so I could see his potential early. I liked my odds.

Regular readers might remember I went out on a limb some time ago and said terrorism thrives because of a lack of mating opportunities for young Muslim men. The powerful men in that culture have multiple wives and many of the rest have none. Some men, I explained, are willing to die because life does not offer them any realistic mating opportunities. That suggestion was met with the type of bad reaction you might expect. But that’s okay because it was designed as Sleeper Persuasion with a Trigger. I was willing to wait until evidence piled up on my side.

Since my first writing on that topic we learned that ISIS is using captive women as sex slaves to recruit fighters. And check out this clip of Steve Harvey on Family Feud asking what men would do for sex. “Kill” was the second-highest vote-getter. It’s funny until you realize the men answering the survey were serious. 

The Belgium Analogy

Regular readers know I have been waging a battle in this blog against analogies. The problem with analogies is that people use them in place of reason. For example, the biggest analogy going around lately is that Trump is the next Hitler.

And by now you know that arguing why Trump is NOT like Hitler changes no one’s mind. Analogies are not part of reason, but they are higher than reason on the influence stack. So how do you kill a bad analogy if you can’t use reason?

Two ways. The first is to appeal to identity because that is higher up the influence stack. So, for example, Trump could say some version of “We’re Americans, and the instinct for freedom is in your DNA. Have some confidence in our constitution and in our people that a dictatorship can never happen on our shores.”

Some version of that might work. But it comes with risk. Headlines the next day would be a picture of Trump next to a picture of Hitler, and Trump’s hypothetical quote “I’M NOT HITLER.” That would make things worse because the visual would overwhelm the words. So there might be no clean way in this case to appeal to identity as a way of destroying an analogy.

The other way to neutralize a bad analogy is with an equally bad analogy that cancels out the first one. For example, as of today, the Trump=Hitler analogy is partly neutralized by Belgium=USA-with-porous-borders.

Trump’s largest obstacle to the White House is the idea that he is a racist, despite the fact he has not mentioned race in any negative way. (He mentions countries and religions only.) The Belgium analogy goes a long way toward solving for that. No one in the United States wants to be the future Belgium.

But I also predicted Trump would go on a love offensive to counteract the accusations of racism. He has always used the word love a lot, but usually referring to his supporters or America in general. Now he has started using the love word to refer to protesters and Latinos. You’ll see more of it. Why? Because it works. And it works because your experience tells you real racists can’t publicly proclaim their love for groups they hate. They might be able to do it once, with fingers crossed, just to get elected. But no racist can publicly and frequently profess love for someone he hates. It would be transparent if he tried. So Trump simply has to keep saying love until you believe it. It is nothing but a numbers game now. Love, love, love. He already started.

Love is the answer, but the attack in Belgium reduced Trump’s third act problem by half. 

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If you have any friends who won’t take your excellent advice about life, trying giving them my book. It will take the pressure off you.