The Ledger, every show

“My bosses, in both cases, they called me in and said, you know, we can't really promote white males anymore. Because we don't have enough diversity, and we just got in trouble.”

“Hypnotists turn it around, and they say, no, we are rationalizers. We are people who make decisions for reasons we don't understand, and then we explain them to ourselves after the fact, so that we are rationalizing irrational species who can be rational 10% o…”

“There's a sanitized version that we feed to children in the service of brainwashing them into good citizens, which I think we should probably continue doing.”

“I would say half of the news is representing some kind of mass hysteria for one side or the other.”

“If you go to business school, rule number one is that you have to listen to the customer and you have to give them what they want. But that's the basic, you know, thing that a business person will do. That's kind of the opposite of what an artist normally does…”

“The only way you could know if a president did a good or bad job, I mean, short of, you know, being treasonous or something ridiculous that's obvious on its face, but you really couldn't tell If a Democrat had been elected, if the economy would be doing even b…”

“At some point, watching either a two D or even a virtual reality lesson will be so superior to anything you could do in a classroom that the classroom just won't make sense anymore.”

“What we think we're doing is picking the simplest explanation. What we're actually doing is defining our own preferred explanation as the simple one.”

“Well, I think what you'll find out is that the person who has the simplest explanation is almost always the least informed. Which is a problem. Because the part of what makes you think your explanation is right and simple is that you don't know the nuance of t…”

“So, if you point out how many times experts all agreed, and then were all wrong, you can start working on somebody's confidence, and at least introduce the idea That the majority doesn't mean they're right, and that there are plenty of times in history that th…”

“You can't really do a proper story about something unless you have a face. You need a person, you need a personality to give a story a face.”

“That was the big change, is that I combined my business skills, my MBA, my degree in economics, with the art, and it was those, that combination, I call it a skill stack, when you put together skills that are complementary, and that's really what made the diff…”

“The main thing that you learn in media training is almost laughable, which is, you don't have to answer the questions.”

“And one thing that they almost all have in common is that they're based on a misrepresentation or a misunderstanding of my opinion. It's actually very rare for somebody to criticize my opinion as accurately understood.”

“Something like 20% of the public can have extraordinary phenomena, as we call it. Hypnotists use that word phenomena, and it means that you can see or feel things that aren't actually there. The rest of the people, the 80%, can also be influenced or hypnotized…”

“I'm kind of expecting that influential individuals and entities will start blessing certain sets of topics.”

“So that's the question I've been testing online, and it's really effective, because what I've noticed is that virtually everybody who seems to be disagreeing with me online is actually disagreeing with a misinterpretation of my opinion. And so when I ask peopl…”

“What you find when people are undisciplined into thinking, and you see this wildly on social media, is that people will judge a thing without comparing it to anything, except their imagined perfect state. But usually the other alternative is nothing like a per…”

“Technique number two is to put your disagreement in the form of questions as opposed to statements whenever you can. So you might say to somebody, what would it look like if your idea played out for the next 10 years? And get them to actually explain what the …”

“I literally use them for practice because if somebody makes a certain kind of criticism, I can often count on other people in the future making a similar one. So I see if I can shut it down with a comment. I see if there's some fact that would change the mind.”