202: Shane Snow | Cognitive Self-Defense Against Intellectual Dishonesty

Transcript for Shane Snow | Cognitive Self-Defense Against Intellectual Dishonesty (Episode 202)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:03] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer Jason DeFillippo. Discourse and debate are more effective in both democracy and in business when we learned to be honest with ourselves and curb the subtle behaviors that get in the way of trading real ideas. Healthy discourse and debate are what make us better. Iron sharpens iron and when we argue with one another in the right way, we get smarter, we hone our ideas. We make our country and our company and our family a better place to live, but often things don't work out so smoothly, but it's not because having different ideas is bad. It's because too often discussion of our different ideas falls victim to a thing called intellectual dishonesty. And today we'll go over types of cognitive bias, logical fallacy, and sneaky tricks we see people using politics on television, especially on news programs and even at work or in our own family. These intellectually dishonest tricks of the trade can confuse the issue, distract us from the real conversation, and are ultimately used to control the way we think and behave. Shane Snow did a deep dive on this subject and I think you'll really come away with an idea on how to spot people being intellectually dishonest before they get a chance to get inside our heads, manipulate us, and attempt to control the way that we think. Think of this episode as a primer on cognitive self-defense. I really enjoyed this one and I think you will also.

[00:01:25] Six-Minute Networking is our course that teaches you how to network and create great relationships, manage them. I've got a lot of great friends like Shane because of these skills. This course is free. It's over at jordanharbinger.com/course. In the meantime, here's Shane snow.

[00:01:40] I want to talk about intellectual dishonesty. You emailed me or I emailed you a while ago to check-in or something and you were like, "Hey, I wrote a new post," and like everyone does when somebody says, "Read my new post," I first archived it without looking. And then I was like, "Eh, that's not a cool move. Shane's your friend. Click on this and then read like the beginning and skim it." And I read the beginning and skimmed it and went, "Way, way wait. I love this topic." I read the whole thing. Took me like an hour and a half.

Shane Snow: [00:02:07] Sorry about that. It was long.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:08] Yeah, it's a mega-post. That's one of the reasons I was like, "Dammit." But then I read it and I read it again and I thought this is so good. I need to talk more about this because intellectual honesty is a concept that is -- first of all new for most people. At first, when I heard intellectual dishonesty, I thought that just means you're lying but it's not quite that simple.

Shane Snow: [00:02:32] Yeah, I mean, in the post, I have a sort of pie chart type diagram where I basically, if you break down what intellectual dishonesty is there's blatant lying and that's a portion of the shared pie. And then the rest of the things that are not blatant lying but they're not being fully honest. It's like saying things that don't make sense as if they make sense, knowing that they don't make sense. Engaging in conversations where you're answering the question or you're using some tricky tactic to avoid telling truth. Those are examples of being dishonest, but it's shaded differently than blatant lying. And I think that's why it's such an interesting topic is that happens so much in day-to-day life in business, any kind of debate that we have. But all you got to do is turn on CNN and see that any of the panels that they have or they're asking people to defend a viewpoint, often they're not actually defending the viewpoint. They're using these sorts of tricky tactics, rhetorical tactics to avoid having to get out the truth or avoid having to address the truth. And I think there's a big problem. So yeah, that's what got me interested in seeing so much of that, starting to see that thing happen in all these different areas of my life. And realizing that for me, what I like to do is I like to break down things and yeah, take all the parts and put them on the table and then sort of see how they work. So I wanted to break down honesty and dishonesty and then that's kind of, that was the start of this thing that you read.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:55] Yeah, it makes sense to me because first of all -- I used to watch whenever in cable a million years ago -- I'd watch these panel shows and you see them in airports and it's one person's yelling and the other person goes, “Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom,” and then the moderator who's not doing their job is like just yelling at both or not saying anything. And it's kind of smugly sitting back watching the chaos.

Shane Snow: [00:04:15] Or they're like, “Well, it looks like time's up.” Commercial break. And she hasn't resolved anything. It ends on this point that's like really bizarre or sketchy or whatever it is. And yeah, it's not actually helping people with information to learn.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:27] More from Chris Matthews yelling at Tucker Carlson and John Stewart right after this. It's like who gives a crap, right? Yeah. And I didn't realize why I didn't like them. I thought it was just the yelling and the unproductive conversation, but there was more to it in the article, your mega-post, which we'll link in the show notes, the mega-post really details why I didn't like it. And it's because if I say something like -- well actually let's go into examples here in a second because this is why people get annoyed with public discourse, not just that it seems unproductive because no one's listening, but because people are listening and they decide, “Eh, I'm not going to address that or be fair about it. I'm going to switch to my talking points or whatever and get my agenda across.” And that's a big problem because we need collaboration and you bring this across in the article really well. You say we need people who think differently. We need people who are going to put their heads together. So cognitive diversity, cognitive friction, and be willing to change, which is intellectual humility, which is a whole probably different show that we should do.

Shane Snow: [00:05:24] Such an important thing. I mean, anyone who's listening to this can infer intellectual humility means being humble, but really that's about being willing to revise your viewpoint when you should. So taking new information, actually listening to it, respecting it, and then deciding should I change? And that's missing from a lot of these debates and public discourse as well.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:42] Yeah. Nobody's really going into this thinking, “I could be persuaded by the other side.” And Sam Harris, I don't know if you've ever listened to. He's stopped debating people, at least in certain subject areas other than his show. And he phrased this better than I will, but it was basically like, “Why should I get on a plane at my own expense and fly somewhere and talk to somebody who has no intention of actually listening to anything I'm going to say has no intention of actually changing their mind just so that I can sort of freely entertain their audience of people who no matter how many good points I bring across are just going to say, ‘Sam Harris got destroyed by so-and-so.’”

Shane Snow: [00:06:21] Right. And that’s the point of most debates in forums like that. And I think honestly when you and I are having a regular debate in real life about something important to us, most of the time the point of the debate is to convince the other person or the audience that you're right. And so you'll do that at all costs. That's where a lot of this intellectual dishonesty comes in is. Sam Harris's debating whoever the host that's hosting him and their job is to prove that he's wrong and that they're right, even at the expense of getting at the truth or exploring things that you ought to explore if you're being honest. And the best kind of debate is a debate where you're trying to explore the mountain range and possibilities and get somewhere that both of you couldn't get on your own.

[00:06:59] That's not usually what happens. And sometimes it's because people are deliberately -- people who are hosts of these shows. Tucker Carson is a great example, he knows what he's doing. He's smart enough to know that he can get around anything you say. And often as he's tricking tactics, but often we do this subconsciously automatically because we're trying to protect our own identity, which is really attached, really linked to what we think, what we feel, what we've decided is true. What we've grown up with has led us to do intellectually dishonest things when we debate. And that's part of why I was so interested in exploring this topic is seeing myself do this when I really badly want to be the kind of person who learns and who changes, who can listen and be open-minded. But I will fight dirty sort of rhetorically when my point of view is being threatened and that's not good.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:47] It's not good. And when I catch myself doing it, I feel a twinge of shame. Someone writes in and I reply and they're like, “I'm surprised that you replied this way because blah blah blah.” And then I have to think, “Am I replying this way because this person pissed me off or am I replying this way because I'm right. And then sometimes I have this moment where I'm like, "Let me boomerang that email for two days," so that I'm calm when I read it again. And a half the time I have to reply and go, "So I thought about what you said and I see your point." And it's just like you're just eating humble pie the whole time. But it's better than doing that one publicly or two just going, “Shoot, I already committed to telling this person they're freaking jerk. So now I have to double down on that and lose this person as a fan forever in front of an audience of thousands because otherwise, it means something about me that I'm wrong. It's hard. So I get it.

Shane Snow: [00:08:34] Spoiler alert. One of the biggest things you can do to exercise more intellectual humility is to put a gap between the thing that happens and your reaction to it. So you have time to calm down and think and, and actually consider things rather. But you know, time is often our enemy when we're having hard conversations.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:51] It is, especially in a format like cable TV and news. So that's sort of uniquely suited to intellectual dishonesty and BS, which is why we're better off if we actually hold ourselves to a higher standard of what truth actually is. Because then we can actually decide that we want to get there, not just look good on crossfire. I'm sure that shows not so on anymore, but if it were it,

Shane Snow: [00:09:12] You know, it originally was canceled because John Stewart showed up on the show and call them out on being dishonest and that went viral that format.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:21] I remember that. Was that one where Tucker wearing a bow tie and then said, “You're ruining America,” basically.

Shane Snow: [00:09:26] Yep. Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:27] Which is also kind of a little bit --

Shane Snow: [00:09:29] You know, he actually feels shitty about that too. It came back for a brief stint, but it didn't work out because they're actually at that point when it came back, it was more of a recognition that he’s just having a fight about these things is actually not that productive. So it turns out that most of -- again talking about cable political panels or whatever -- most of those debates still they're more subtly kind of shitty than crossfire was, which actually to his credit owned the fact that we're just going to fight and not get along.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:59] Yes. Yeah, I'm completely with you there. It hasn't gotten rid of the format. I mean we see this in public discourse. You see it in families arguing, couples arguing. I'd love to outline some examples of intellectual dishonesty. I mean, one you mentioned earlier dodging the question. I've got a whole list of your – well, your list of ways that people dodge questions and it turns out there's a whole lot of ways you can dodge questions that are really interesting. Also answering something that wasn't asked. That's kind of a famous one and we'll outline some of that as well. What are some other really common examples? And we don't have to get into the details because I did outline your whole list and we'll get to it in a bit here.

Shane Snow: [00:10:37] Well, you know, the details we should really get into is why we're letting so many immigrants into America.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:43] Nice. You just did it.

Shane Snow: [00:10:44] So I just say it. So I took a word -- you asked me a question. Yes. And I took a word from that question, a keyword that I zeroed in on. And then I talked about what I wanted to talk about. And this is a classic dodge. This is something they teach you actually in PR training, which is even worse. It's a classic dodge if you don't want to actually address the question. You want to address the issue. Maybe you're on shaky ground and because you have a different point you want to make, you can make it sound like you're answering the question by simply using some of the keywords from another question.

[00:11:13] By the way, personally, I think that there's a lot of immigration problems we should solve, but letting immigrants, I mean, isn't the problem.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:19] Your fiancee is an immigrant.

Shane Snow: [00:11:21] Exactly. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:21] I assume you didn't see that as a problem.

Shane Snow: [00:11:22] But yeah, that's an example. So the details --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:26] You'd still be a virgin if you didn't know.

Shane Snow: [00:11:30] The details are though if it's intellectually dishonest to pretend like you are having a conversation with someone like you're answering a question and then not actually answer it. That's one of those ways is to switch the topic.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:43] That's really good and you named these different types of topics and we'll get to that in a second. I did a little cheat sheet here because they are very cool. Did you make all of those?

Shane Snow: [00:11:50] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:51] I'm very proud of you for that.

Shane Snow: [00:11:52] Thanks.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:54] The intellectual dishonesty often hinges on what you call a technicality. It's you haven't exactly set a bald-faced lie. We kind of hinted at that in the intro here, but what you're seeing really it's not quite above board, so it's like these half-truths or like quarter-truth, third-truths. I think intellectual honesty has to mean going after the truth regardless of whether or not it sort of jives with my own personal beliefs, which is not easy.

Shane Snow: [00:12:19] Yeah, it's not easy and it gets back to what I had said that protecting your own ego and identity is often this subconscious factor in these conversations. But yeah, it's intellectually honest if you are trying to find the truth. You don't have to be correct. You don't have to use good logic, but if you're trying, you're being honest about it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:37] That's an important point because there are logical fallacies which we've talked about on the show and which we'll get into later after the types of dodging and deception because this is really important. People will often be intellectually dishonest inadvertently by some sort of false analogy or other fallacy, and it doesn't mean that they're a jerk that's trying to ruin America or the family or their relationship or their friendship. It just means that they believe in argument because they haven't quite scrutinized the logical flow of that argument maybe.

Shane Snow: [00:13:07] Right. Sometimes it happens because you don't get logical fallacies. You don't know that it's slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy that you saying, “Shane, if you marry an immigrant, then what are we suddenly going to be all speaking Spanish in this country and the no one will be able to communicate like that.” That is a logical fallacy. It's a slippery slope that just because my fiancee speaks Spanish, that it's going to be a problem. Some people don't know that that's a fallacy. So part of this is education. But in a lot of cases, when we do it, when smart people or well-meaning people do it, it's not because you're evil, it's not because you actually don't care about the truth, but it's because the thing that you've already decided is so important to you and often connected to who you are as a, as your identity, that you're going to be willing to believe things that you wouldn't normally believe. So if for whatever reason, and maybe the immigration analogy isn't the perfect one for this, but if for whatever reason the immigration thing was like a sticking point between us, we have different points of view. Each of us would be more likely to believe the BS of our own slippery slope fallacy in the course of argument because we want the thing we believe to be true.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:09] Right. And the reason that this is important in general, just by the way, of course, is that we can't make any progress if we're not actually trying to become more honest. So there's a difference between trying to win a debate on TV so that you look good and it's a completely polar goal post. Then trying to find the truth of the situation. They might overlap sometimes like you might be able to look good because you're telling the truth, but often you're just going to look good because you're playing identity politics or the group that you're a member of thinks you championed them well. You fought well, even if you fought dirty. Rarely do we actually have a nice alignment of, “Well, we wanted to get to the truth and it turns out that Shane was right and I was wrong.”

Shane Snow: [00:14:54] Yeah. When sometimes this happens because you believe in an underlying truth and so you'll use a dishonest or a subtly intellectually dishonest tactic or lying that you know isn't quite true, but because you don't have all the information because you think the underlying thing is true. So for example, it was Obama who I personally really like, and he's an example of a rare politician, very rarely did this or does this, but when he talked about a recent, the midterms in North Carolina he talked about the percentage of black people versus white people that voted in this midterm. And it was something like 80 percent – the details are wrong. It doesn't really matter. He made a tweet about this, but the thing was, is that tweet, that statistic only held up for one County. It didn't pull up for the whole state.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:41] Gotcha.

Shane Snow: [00:15:42] And he either didn't know that and was given that stat or he knew that, but he wanted this step to help people understand the issue that he believed was true. Then you didn't have the rest of the data, but that's not the entire truth. Had he said, “This is only true of this county, but I'm convinced that this is, we'll see that this will be true of the rest of the state.” That would be fully honest.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:05] There are a lot of ways in which you can -- it's almost hard to be intellectually honest because in order to do so -- not only do you have to do a lot more work -- you also have to admit that maybe there's a place in which you could have gotten something wrong. And in a climate or environment where other people are really not going to do any of that. It's hard because if you say, "Hey, look, I'm 90 percent sure this is correct," and I say, "I'm 100 percent sure that you're in any it." Well, maybe I don't have this emotional reaction, but if I say, “Well, I'm 100 percent sure that you're wrong.” A lot of people are going to go, “Well, Shane is 90 percent sure, Jordan is a hundred percent sure. I guess I'm just going to go with Jordan.” Meanwhile, I could be 1 percent sure I could've just made that shit up on the way from the bathroom to the studio, but I just decided I want you to be wrong because that then my fans would think I'm really smart.

Shane Snow: [00:16:49] Yeah. That's another example of intellectual dishonesty actually is the delivery, the posturing you use when delivering an argument. That makes it appear like you're more confident or that you are --  and so just sort of like Trump card. It's like that's a Trump card. It's like saying at work when you're talking about what we should do and someone's like, “I have 30 years of experience so my plan is better.” That doesn't make your plan better. We should listen to you because you have probably some good things to say but like those two things don't quite connect. And it gets used as a Trump card. And so people do that all the time. So I think what you're getting at a couple of things. One is if we really want to make progress, everyone has to be more honest. And then same thing with intellectual humility. If we really want to make progress, everyone has to be willing to change their minds. So some of us talking about this sort of thing, learning about this, trying to be more mindful of this, that helps. But also part of the challenge is helping other people be more honest or calling them out when they're not having a good framework for doing that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:44] I like this. There's a lot of logical fallacy. I just bought thanks to your article, there was a set of flashcards and two posters that are not yours. They're from some --

Shane Snow: [00:17:55] Yourfallacy.is or something.

Shane Snow: [00:17:56] Yeah, and it's great because it shows cognitive bias. They're all on these cards and all on these posters and then logical fallacies and it's like, which one are you doing at the time? So I plan on putting those up in my studio because often when I'm having these types of conversations, I'll go, that sounds like that one where you make up an argument, you re-characterize their argument and it's wrong, and then you point to that, “Oh yeah, the strawman.” But I don't have it like at the top of my head. And you get so good at calling people on their crap. If you know all these logical fallacies, it's kind of like a superpower. It's like knowing karate somehow.

Shane Snow: [00:18:29] And you can use it against people who are being deliberate by being like, "Hey, that's the strawman fallacy. So let's get back to the real thing." And also knowing it, it can help you with people who are well-meaning, who don't realize what they've done. You'd be like, “Hey, bro, you know, that's actually a misleading statistic. You know, this doesn't represent the whole thing. You want to clarify that?” And he'd be like, “Oh, well I think I should do that.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:49] Or they go, “How does it not represent the whole thing?” “Well, you just picked one sample out of the whole nation in one area. How can you be sure that it represents the whole nation.” And they'll pause and go do that, “Yeah, I mean I guess it's different for each place.’ “So is it possible that the opposite statistic is true in New York versus where you live in Florida?” “I guess, it is possible.” Like you can sort of see the gears turning, and I know this because I think like everyone has parents or family that does this and they don't really care about -- you're just having a conversation at Chili's, right? The stakes are low. So you can kind of get people to go, “Oh, all right, maybe this isn't the case.”

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:19:29] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Shane Snow. We'll be right back.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:33] This episode is sponsored in part by HostGator.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:19:36] Who are you? What's your story? Where are you telling that story? Relying on the free options offered by social media is like writing the chapters of your life in the sand. When the tide turns, as it did when MySpace recently last 12 years of user data, these chapters will wash away. Gone forever. Wouldn't it be nice if you were in complete control of your own archive of memories safely away from the fickle tides of someone else's incompetence? Get your own website with a guiding hand of HostGator and you can be. HostGator has outlasted your favorite social media sites of yesteryear and is likely to outlast the ones you consider unstoppable today, but even if HostGator were to go extinct tomorrow, your website's data remains yours to transfer forever as you see fit. This is why we recommend HostGator for creating and maintaining your best possible online presence. You don't have to know the first thing about programming or design in order to custom craft your own mobile-friendly website. Thanks to HostGator's simple drag and drop builder. Choose from hundreds of themes to effortlessly switch up your presentation as you see fit or run it all on WordPress with one-easy click. Gauge your site's performance with analytics that don't take a cryptographer to decode. Stay engage with your audience across the entire social media landscape, accept payments directly from customers and trumpet your presence to the world's most used search engines with HostGator's arsenal of tools at your disposal. HostGator’s 99.9 percent uptime guarantee and around-the-clock support ensure your website is available to the eyes of the world every day and night of the year. Got a tight budget. No worries. As long as you're a new user you get to try any HostGator package for up to 62 percent off the normal price, just for hearing the sound of my voice. And if you're not completely satisfied with everything HostGator has to offer, you've got 45 days to cancel for a refund of every last penny. Check out hostgator.com/jordan right now to sign up. That's hostgator.com/jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:30] This episode is also sponsored by Eight Sleep. Jason, I heard we're finally getting these.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:21:35] They're on the way. I cannot wait.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:37] So Eight sleep, This Pod, essentially this is epic, this thing. It's like a science fiction mattress. It's called The Pod by Eight Sleep. It's a high tech bed designed specifically to help you achieve optimal sleep fitness. I know that sounds cornball but Time Magazine called Eight one of the best inventions of last year. The important part is it combines dynamic temperature regulation, aka each side of the dang bed changes temperature depending on what each person likes. So my wife right now who's always warm because she's pregnant, crank that thing down a couple of notches. Me, you know I like to wake up in the middle of the night, feel toasty. It'll make you feel warmer. It'll change temperature dynamically throughout the night. That's why it's called dynamic temperature regulation. It learns your sleep habits. It adjusts the temperature automatically throughout the night, which I just, I know I'm repeating myself but that blows my mind because that means if you like to bed, cool, your other partner likes it warm and that changes in the middle of the night. Like, oh you wake up and you're too hot. The bed, we'll learn that in change. You don't have to wake up in a sweat or freezing. It will fix it automatically cause it's fricking measuring your body temperature. I don’t know, I'm just geeking out over this. It's got to be insanely comfortable. It's going to help you wake up rested because that sort of basal temperature stuff turns out to be pretty important. Jason.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:22:52] Try the pod for 100 nights and if you don't love it, they'll refund your purchase and arrange a free pickup. They already sold out of their first batch, so they're going fast. For a limited time, get $150 off your purchase when you go to eightsleep.com/jordan. That's E-I-G-H-T-sleep.com/jordan.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:23:06] Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Shane Snow. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com/deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes in your podcast player as they are released so you don't miss a single thing. Now, back to our show with Shane Snow.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:45] Let's talk about the types of dodging.

Shane Snow: [00:23:47] Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:47] Because this is probably one of the funniest stuff of your article. Yeah. Types of dodging questions. The first one is creatively named the Hillareach.

Shane Snow: [00:23:57] Oh yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:57] Yes, because it's and. Look, I know people are going to go, “How dare you?” These are named after people that do them a lot, that are in popular culture.

Shane Snow: [00:24:05] Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:05] It doesn't mean that she invented it. She's the only person that does it, et cetera.

Shane Snow: [00:24:09] She may not even be the most prominent example of it, but when I wrote this too, I tried to pick people who were on TV pretty recently doing these things and also just to make it memorable.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:19] Sure. Hillareach.

Shane Snow: [00:24:20] And I also tried to -- there's an example, a lot of this is through, I read about this through the lens of politics, but politics isn't even the most relevant place for us to have these conversations in many ways because most of the time we're not doing politics. We may watch or we may hear or whatever. Most of the time this has to do with our relationships has to do with work.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:41] Yeah. Let's take our political hats off because when I don't want his people to be like, “Hillary should've won. She had the popular vote.” Okay, cool, whatever. Don't care for the purposes of this. Or if somebody -- we have the Trumpstorm and the Trumpnesiac are two of them, it's like, it doesn't mean that everyone here hates Donald Trump. Like calm down. These are things that this person does. In fact, if you're really a Trump fan, you should look at these and go, isn't he so smart? He uses these great techniques. You could do whatever you want.

Shane Snow: [00:25:09] But you should scrutinize even people that you support.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:12] I think especially people --

Shane Snow: [00:25:13] Scrutinizing their behavior and the way they talk and how that's not being productive is and admitting that actually is very helpful. So the Hillareach, that's kind of the classic politician’s dodge. It's where you get asked a question and you kind of say the minimum that you need to in order to get people to feel like you answered the question, but then you just go on to the thing that you really want to talk about. So I forget the actual example that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:37] It was something with Legos.

Shane Snow: [00:25:38] Oh yes. So it's the examples. What was the question that was being asked is “What's your policy on Legos?” And she did the Hillareach, would be, “You know, Legos are a complicated issue, but what we should really be talking about is the war in Afghanistan.” And it's similar to that one where you take the keyword, you're actually in a little less intellectually dishonest because you're sort of addressing it, but you don't really want to answer the question. You don't want to talk about that, so you will blur through it. This happens so much in relationships too, “Where were you on Friday?” and you're like, “Oh, I went out with some friends, but really did you hear about what happened on Saturday morning with this thing,” or whatever and it's like you don't want to talk about what you were up to last night.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:18] Sure, yeah, that makes sense. “This person had a lot of projects that failed.” “You know, a lot of people have had projects that failed, but one thing that we can't let fail is this latest initiative from me and Shane. It's going to be amazing.” It's like, “Ah, okay.” You didn't dodge the question entirely, but you went and pulled into the driveway and just steered right back onto the road and went towards your agenda and then we can't really have that. It's not productive.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:43] The next one is the Hannittack for Sean Hannity. Is this the same thing as, whataboutism? Is it like you basically turn it around in your opponent?

Shane Snow: [00:26:51] Yeah. Someone asks you a question and instead of answering the question, you attack someone, either the person or their allies or someone that you are painting as their ally for the same thing. So in this case, “What do you think about Legos?” And then he'll attack the makers of Legos or will attack you for liking Legos or whatever it is and not actually answer what he thinks about Legos.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:12] Right. I think the example was, “Legos are terrible. I think we all know they're terrible. But where was Obama when all this Lego stuff was going on? How many years did Obama have to take care of the Lego problem?”

Shane Snow: [00:27:23] And you'll notice that actually a lot of those hosts that do that kind of thing, they don't like being asked questions. They don't like being on the receiving end of those questions and they will turn it around into the attack because they're used to having the power. And a lot of this actually is about power dynamics. If you're the one with more power or more perceived power, you can get away with this stuff. If you're the one with less power, just turning it back around and attacking is a harder thing to do. So you'll resort to other dodges.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:47] Sure. It works really well if you control the form. I try not to do that. Of course, the show's not really adversarial, but if it were, I could get somebody who's brilliant in here -- not that you aren't, just, for example, I can't get somebody else who's brilliant. How's that? -- In here and I could probably do all kinds of stuff that they would never put up with or their house.

Shane Snow: [00:28:05] Yes. Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:06] Because you're essentially in a studio on my show, there's this little bit of decorum where you're like, “Well I'm not going to push him on this because it's embarrassing.” You wouldn't do that if I were in front of your audience in your studio. You'd be like, “Wait a minute. That doesn't make any freaking sense. What are you doing?” So it's really easy for somebody who's controlling it -- if shit gets really bad, just goes cut to commercial, and producers are like, “Boom, dump it.” And then they'd go, “Oh, good thing that wasn't live. Let's cut out the part where he just spanked me on that argument. And just put the Lego commercial over top of it. Put some Folgers coffee in there. Then fade back in as I'm letting him have it.” So he thinks he won--

Shane Snow: [00:28:43] And let’s also put up the title card in the lower third that says, “Hannity destroys activist over false views or whatever.” Like that's fighting dirty too.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:51] Yes, exactly. Yeah. When you control the lower third, man -- lower third for those of you that don't know is the little bar that comes over the screen where it says my name on it. Or like Jordan harbinger, The Jordan Harbinger Show at Jordan Harbinger, ESPN and it animates and fades out. That's the lower third. And you can put things on there on a news program that's like when it becomes the YouTube thumbnail is like dumb millennial gets owned by Jordan. There's a picture of you mid-laugh with your hat on that just makes you look like a 12-year-old bro.

Shane Snow: [00:29:20] Can you please put that lower third on the video for this. Can you produce it?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:25] Jen, go ahead and throw that on there. That'll be the thumbnail for this.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:29] The next one is the Conword. This is Kellyanne Conway. I have to say politics aside, no matter what side of the fence you're on -- I can't believe that she's not the most infuriating person to watch on television because she will never talk about anything substantive ever. I've never seen it and I've looked, and I'm not saying she's a bad person, I think she's really good.

Shane Snow: [00:29:52] The master at this tech.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:53] She is the best I've ever seen at not getting it -- like you think that Mohammed Ali was good at dodging punches, Kellyanne Conway could do this with no gloves, no hands, hands behind her back, and dodge anything.

Shane Snow: [00:30:07] I think there's a lot of ways you could sort of characterize what's the foot there. One could be she was really bad person because she never answered questions. That's super dishonest. Another could be her job is to avoid answering questions and she is the best at this. And part of it too is the system is set up in a way that we don't punish people for that. You almost can't fault someone for being good at this kind of dodging because we have created this system that allows you to do that and that asks you to do that almost. So, you know, that's like a lot of what PR and crisis communication and these sort of cable formats are all about. Her technique that she is the best at for dodging is the thing that I did at the first where she'll zero in on a keyword and then instead of answering your question, she will answer a question using that keyword or talking about something using that keyword and anyone who's not paying attention will be like, “Wow, she gave a great answer.”

[00:31:01] So if you say, “What's your policy on Legos?” She'd say, “You know what we really need to let go of is this insane policy of letting murderers go free after -- "

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:11] Let go off.

Shane Snow: [00:31:12] Yeah exactly.

Shane Snow: [00:31:12] What we need to go off is that -- yeah.

Shane Snow: [00:31:15] And it's often funny too, which is not helpful, but that's part of why it works.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:20] Well, a lot of the people that do this really well, including her, will often not just playoff one word, they turn it into what bumper sticker or like a what might seem like a knockout punch for an argument that wasn't made. So it'll be, “You know, what we need to let go of is the idea that America is in first we need to put America first, Shane. That's what we need to do. We need to put America -- " and everyone like who kind of came in at the end of that sentence is like, “Yeah, what are we talking about again? I guess she's right. I like America.”

Shane Snow: [00:31:53] Yeah. Then they took off their hats and say let go my taxes or whatever.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:56] Yeah. Right. But it makes sense to just turn off of that one word and it's like, “Wait, wait. We were talking about Legos and suddenly it's like, ‘Hey, nobody cares. Now we're talking about America patriotism.’” “Slow clap, cut to commercial.” She's done. She ran out of time.

Shane Snow: [00:32:11] And a good debate will stick to one topic and this is a classic way of derailing that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:15] Oh, interesting. So she can just sort of, or anybody who's using the Conword to skip off on one word can turn the whole thing, derailed the whole thing.

Shane Snow: [00:32:23] Into a debate about something else. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:25] And that's more comfortable because if you don't want to talk about, “How are we going to pay for all this?” “You know what we're paying right now in the dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” Something feelings about this, this other topic that people are passionate about. It's like, “Well, wait, you still didn't answer how we're going to pay for all this or whatever.”

[00:32:42] The Colbert Retort is one that I really like.

Shane Snow: [00:32:45] Yeah. So this has to do with actually, you know what I just said that sometimes being funny is a really great dodge. So Stephen Colbert's character, when he's on the Colbert Report, he was this obnoxious guy. And when you'd watch him do interviews or debates, usually he's the one asking the questions. Usually, he's the one making fun of them and trying to get them to be entertaining. But whenever someone would ask him a question, he was great at not asking the question by making a joke. He's an incredible comedian. So yeah, I'm trying to remember exactly what I put with the Legos, but it's like, “What's your policy on Legos?” Stephen Colbert in character would say, “My policy on Legos is never walked around barefoot at night in the dark because I've stepped on at least three Legos and that's how my last marriage ended or whatever.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:26 And then everyone was like, “Ha, ha, ha, ha.” Right and then no answer. I'm not going to go no, but seriously – Legos.

Shane Snow: [00:33:34] You see this a lot and then you get the cheer right. In a political debate or an argument, someone answers in a funny way without answering the question, they get the cheer, they get the laugh, and then they move on.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:43] You see this a lot. In fact, we sell this a lot in 2016 where it was, “I'm backed into a corner. Let me make fun of Rosie O'Donnell or call someone fat or like make a really inappropriate remark that gets a rise out of everything.” I mean, even I'm sitting there going, “Oh man, he just did that. That was ridiculous. Oh, wait a minute, we're not talking about that topic anymore.” “Oh, that was the whole point.” And I think a lot of people understand this intuitively. If you don't believe me, go to a high school where somebody who gets bullied and then the bully gets called out on being a dumb ass or not knowing the answer to a math problem and then goes, “Oh yeah, your mom's so fat and dah, dah, dah.” And the whole class like, “Yeah, Tommy made fun of Shelley again. What an idiot? He's an idiot.” Then he learned that right then and people learn that right then. Bullies especially learn right then. All they have to do is go straight to the throat ad hominem style and a lot of people will lose track of the conversation.

Shane Snow: [00:34:36] This is maybe a good part to point out that a lot of times we'll do that one or any of these because we don't feel confident in our answer. We either don't know the answer or we know that we're wrong in a way or we feel unmatched and often people will use humor as a way to depressurize tense situations where they do feel uncomfortable, unconfident. We don't just do this in a dishonest way. We do this in general. Like things are uncomfortable. So you make a joke to relieve the tension. And I think that's where the intellectual humility thing intersects with this is if you're in a situation where that's going to be a reaction because you're unmatched. You don't know the answer or whatever. You're in a corner dodging the question by making a joke. It feels like the thing, the natural thing to do, but the better thing to do is to say, “I don't have a good answer for that yet.” Or, “I don't know the answer to that right now. Can I have some time to come back to that?” That's really hard to do. But that’s like adding that gap between. And I think the word yet becomes really powerful because it lets you off the hook of having to be perfect, but it also makes you still confident that you're not losing all of your face. You're saying, “I will come up with an answer. I will get back to you with an answer. But I don't know yet.” I think that's, that's an important thing to, if you can have that ability to do that, then you don't have to resort to some of these tricky dodge tactics.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:01] Perfect. Well, good. I appreciate that. We were taught that in law school if a judge asks you something and you don't know the answer or a client for that matter, you don't go, “Wells, spitball off my ego. You know, I'm going to have to research that. I don't actually know the answer to that right now.” Nobody wants to hear an answer that's wrong and certainly, nobody wants to hear an answer. That is not what, like if the judge asks you a question and you turn it into a joke, obviously that is a terrible idea, but if you zero in on a word and then twist it around, you've got about 10 seconds before you start really pissing someone off. They've seen this before. Judges or lawyers, in general, are trained in argument and logic. They might not say, “Hey, that's the strawman fallacy, but they will not suffer this BS for very long.

Shane Snow: [00:36:50] Interesting because in most of the time in real life, there's not that judge character to call you up. We have to self-police this. Even Anderson Cooper, I love Anderson Cooper, but he's extensively that judge, but he's not really able to play that role when he's moderating these panels. But it's interesting that that's an example of where it, it actually does kind of work because you have someone who's there to zero in on when people are being tricky.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:37:12] Right, exactly. And look, even if a judge misses it, you could just rephrase the question and ask in a different way. And if they say, “Answer dude,” which is the objection to it, a question that you're asking again, you can then just see clarification. It's going to be really hard to dodge something in court. That's why you see people who are lying about something say, “I don't know. I don't recall,” because that's the safest way to say, “I don't want to tell you this right now,” without saying that, because you can't get away with that either. “I don't know.” Well, you kind of hit a dead end on that one. That's why when somebody like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos goes into a deposition and says, “I don't know 600-plus times,” you know that they are lying. Because nobody doesn't know that much about their own business, for example.

[00:37:56] Anyway, moving, right. Oh, actually that leads nicely into the next one, which is the Trumpnesiac. Pretend you never even heard of this thing that is being asked.

Shane Snow: [00:38:04] Yeah. Classic. You know, there's an honest way to do this and a dishonest way to do this. If you don't know or you need more time to think through an answer saying that, I don't know yet, but I will get back to you or I want some time to think through this because I'm not satisfied with the answer that I have right now. That's fine. That's being honest. But I have amnesia suddenly, “No one's ever heard of Legos. What are Legos? I don't know what Legos are. I have no one else in the world had ever heard of Legos.” That's the Trumpnesiac. It is insisting that you have no idea what this thing is. So, therefore, we shouldn't be talking about it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:35] Particularly dangerous when people can audit things that you've said. So if you're on the board of a company or as you see now in politics, people get called out on this because -- “I've never even heard of Michael Avenatti or whatever.” And then it's like, “Well if we go back to a tweet three months ago and a news conference. There's you with that person sitting there or talking about him saying he's a great guy. I love him. We just, we golf all the time.” So you can get busted on that. It's harder to do if it's just two friends, but still, maybe the stakes are lower, but people know, right. People know that you, of course, remember this.

[00:39:09] The opposite of that is you call the Trumpstorm, which is -- well, explain what that is because I didn't --

Shane Snow: [00:39:16] It's where you overwhelm people with information so that they either forget what the question was or it's not worth it to proceed. This happens a lot of interviews. I think I actually do this sometimes where --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:28] I know that I do this.

Shane Snow: [00:39:29] I start rambling on the answer to a question and then suddenly I'm way over here. And sometimes that's because that's where the conversation takes it. But sometimes it's because I'm not totally satisfied with this answer and I'm sort of BS-ing my way through it. And then I ended up over here where I'm pretty good at talking about this and great. But yeah, the Trumpstorm is -- you asked Trump about Legos and he starts talking about Benghazi and Hillary's emails, and his election map and this and that. And it's like, what are we talking about at this point? And you just, you give up.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:59] To be fair. This isn't unique to Donald Trump's kind of thing. He's popularized it lately, but I think you're right in an interview, this happens. I'll do it a lot where I'll start to ramble and go off on a tangent, a good host for me, it took me years to realize that if somebody was doing this one, they're not doing it on purpose most of the time, but two, I then have to go, all right, mental note. Go back to my original question because this isn't the answer to that question. This is this person flailing in the water and I really do want to nail this question down and I have chosen not to air certain interviews because the person can't actually answer certain questions, but I'm keeping track of that. Whereas like five years ago, six years ago, I would've gone, “Wow, that was pretty cool.” And then you listen again and you go, “Crap, that guy didn't answer any of my questions.” But it takes a lot of work. The person who's interviewing or doing the moderating has to track this manually. And it's hard.

Shane Snow: [00:40:55] Yeah. And in a real conversation, this happened to me in a work setting not terribly long ago where I asked a question in kind of an exec meeting and the answer that was given was this scattershot answer about all these other things. And I had to gently, because this was a friendly group, kind of bring it back and be like, “Okay, the question that I really want to know the answer to is this,” and his second scattershot answer and then a little more firmly in the next time. And that was clearly because the person didn't have an answer.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:25] Right.

Shane Snow: [00:41:25] And sometimes, yeah, like doing that in a tactful way can be hard, but that's really important. It doesn't just happen in politics.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:32] Did you ever watch Colombo movies when you were a kid?

Shane Snow: [00:41:34] Like I remember my dad watching it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:36] Yeah, that me too. I could probably make it for like 20 minutes of it. Yeah. But one of the things that he did that he was good at, and I remember seeing this as I got older or maybe somebody just told me about it, but his thing was he would go back to the scene or to the suspect like 40 times and ask them these seemingly very trivial questions. So you walked past the desk, you tore off the printer paper with your left hand and you went back in your office. Yeah, that's it. “Lieutenant Colombo, why this? This is ridiculous.” And then he's like, so you walked in the door with your left hand. What he did is he never went. You're not telling me the truth. He would go, “I'm a little slow. Explain it to me again. Can you clarify this for me?” So I tried to pull the Colombo card. If somebody is dodging the question because I go, “Sorry, I haven't had my coffee today. I am still not getting it. What exactly did you say the policy was going to? How exactly where we're going to go for this? I either didn't hear it, I had a brain fart or something. How are we going to pay for this?” And you can just see when you ask enough and you're putting the blame on yourself. “But here I am, it's my show port helped me on. I'm useless as a host. Just explain it to me clearly. Speak slowly, explain like I'm five,” and then you find out they have no freaking idea the answer to your question, but it's not their fault. It's all you.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:42:55] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Shane Snow. We'll be right back after this.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:01] This episode is sponsored in part by Better Help if there's something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals, which I think is probably most of us Better Help online counseling is there for you. And here's the truth. I know they're trying to make this sound like, “Oh, well it's sort of life coach.” Therapy is for sane people. The people who are really disturbed and aren't trying to help themselves. That's a lost cause. Let's not worry about them. We're talking about the gal who's a little stressed out at work and things, is this normal? Somebody who's going through relationship issues and things like, “Oh, well I'll be fine. I just need to call my mom a couple of times a week and get through it.” This is for sane people and for people who think they might be going a little bit insane. I'm a huge fan of therapy for either case and Better Help offers licensed professional counselors who specialize in issues like depression, stress, anxiety, sleeping relationships, family stuff. All that is in the mix here and these are specialists. It's not like, “Oh yeah, one day I've read about it. I've read a chapter about this and a therapy book back in school.” There are so many people on calls, so you're not limited by just the therapists in your town or who's got an appointment available when you need it or who's got freaking parking in your neighborhood. This is going to be nationwide, so it's going to be very, very helpful to find somebody who you click with. Connect with your professional counselor. It's safe, it's private. It's all, of course, it's all confidential. It's really convenient because you're texting, you're doing a video chat on your phone, you're doing phone calls. You don't have to drive across town during your lunch hour and tell your boss, “Oh, I have a meeting. Sorry.” And they think you're going and interviewing for something else. Just because you want to get therapy at no additional charge to switch therapists, which I think is great. It's really affordable. Jason, I know you've been checking these guys out as well.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:44:44] Yeah, I've got a great therapist in Tennessee. He's a Yogi and a licensed therapist. So I've been going through my anxiety issues with him and he's helped me immensely. And also for our listeners, you can get 10 percent off your first month with discount code JORDAN. So get started today. Go to betterhelp.com/jordan. All you got to do is you simply fill out a little questionnaire they have and they're going to assess your needs and get you matched with a counselor you'll love. And I got my counselor in under eight hours, but they guarantee 24 hours. And I was talking to my guy within a day. It's fantastic. Go to betterhelp.com/jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:17] This episode is also sponsored by Blue Diamond Almonds.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:45:20] Okay. You're on your way to work listening to your favorite podcast. What snacks do you have? Craving something sweet, maybe something spicy, maybe even spicy and salty. Go get some Blue Diamond Almonds and find your new favorite almond. They have great flavors like honey roasted, sriracha, and wasabi and soy sauce flavored almonds. Blue Diamond Almonds isn't your usual boring snack and it's better than whatever you're snacking on. Now, there's so good and almonds are a superfood, so don't deny your cravings. Eat them. Blue Diamond Almonds crave victoriously.

[00:45:53] Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com/deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. And if you're checking out the show on the Overcast player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Shane Snow.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:21] Aren't some of these, and I know people are going to say, “Oh well the Hillareach, the Hanittack, the Conword, the Colbert Retort. These are just ad hominem attacks.” Isn't this an ad hominem fallacy itself to name these things after these people?

Shane Snow: [00:46:35] It's interesting I thought about that and in the second version of the post itself, I updated it to add a little note about that. And ad hominem is where you are making an argument and you're attacking someone personally as a way to discredit their thought or idea. And it's a fallacy because the person and the idea are separate things. So just because you invalidate this person's personal life doesn't mean that the thing that they think is completely invalid, that idea needs to stand or fall on its own.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:04] So, in other words, just to throw an example out there, you say something like, “Well, you know, it is wrong for you to have gone into my wallet and taken out my cash.” And then I'll say, "Well, isn't it true that you used to do heroin?" And you're like, “Well, okay, yeah, but that has nothing to do with the fact that you robbed me.”

Shane Snow: [00:47:25] Yeah, yeah. Or, “I think that we should, I don't know. We should get Medicare for all.” And they're like, “But you had an affair with your wife. Don't listen to that guy.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:34] You had an affair with your wife. Cool. That’s the best kind of affair.

Shane Snow: [00:47:37] But it's like that sort of thing. That's what an ad hominem attack is. Naming these dodges after real people who do them isn't the same thing as an ad hominem attack. It's because one, they actually do these things pretty consistently.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:51] On camera.

Shane Snow: [00:47:51] On camera.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:52] In public.

Shane Snow: [00:47:55] It's not nice of me, but it's not also dishonest of me.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:59] Right. So your example that you gave in the article, I think is, “Look, if you called the fried chicken greasy,” not really an ad hominem attack. Granted, fried chicken is not a person. But nobody who's being honest is going to say, ”Fried chicken is not greasy. How dare you?” It just is.

Shane Snow: [00:48:18] My favorite example of this was when we invented the electric chair. The state of New York amended the electric chair. They asked Thomas Edison for his scientific advice on this thing and he helped them develop it because he was trying to discredit his rival, George Westinghouse, who they were in this war for market share or whatever. And he said, “You know, electricity is really dangerous if it's Westinghouse's electricity. So that's what you should use for the electric chair. Also, I heard that the word for being killed with electricity is to be Westinghouse. It's kind of like the inventor of the guillotine, Mr. Guillotin, they named his invention after him. So you should name the electric chair and die from electricity to be Westinghouse.” Which is pretty amazing. It's an example like he was attacking Westinghouse and all sorts of fronts. But that's my favorite example of naming someone after something. In this case, it was a dishonest name to name someone, but it's like calling Colonel Sanders the chicken man. Like yeah, he's the chicken man.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:49:16] And like a private company, he might go, “Fine, I don't love it when you tell me the chicken man. But it is kind of funny and true.” There's something called a fallacy fallacy, which I wasn't going to cover it because it seems too meta, but this is a really interesting point because I'll be saying something – someone will go, “That's a strawman.” I'll go, “Wait, is it?” And then we're sitting there talking about logical fallacies and then if you just kind of wipe that all off the table, you go, “Yeah, but I was still right.” So we can sit there and debate like which logical flow chart might look like if we drew it out. But what I'm saying is this is correct or just because what you said includes a fallacy doesn't mean that it's wrong.

Shane Snow: [00:49:57] Yeah, just right, exactly. Just because what you said didn't make the path that you took to get somewhere didn't make sense, doesn't mean that that thing doesn't make sense. So there's not another path to get there to validate that. There's also a thing, it's sort of a dodge, that if we're having a debate and I say, “That's a fallacy, I accuse you of a fallacy. So you're wrong.” That's the fallacy. Fallacy. But also just because I say it's a fallacy doesn't mean it's a fallacy. So that can actually be used as a tricky debate tactic as well.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:26] Right. The whole, your fallacy or your logical fallacies, which is cool because you can point people to their logical fallacies. It's like, “Well that's cool, but you also have to tell people how you're getting to your answer.” You can't just be like, “Oh, you called me an a-hole. Therefore everything you said is now wrong because you had used the ad hominem fallacy against me.” It's like, “Well, no.”

Shane Snow: [00:50:48] You have the back up to the point before then and then try again.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:50] Or you are an a-hole and I'm also right. You just happen to also be an a-hole. So there's only one intellectually honest way to dodge a question, like you said, which is just to say, “I don't know or I don't want to answer it.”

Shane Snow: [00:51:03] Yup. Right. Yup.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:04] Okay.

Shane Snow: [00:51:04] And that's okay. I mean it's not satisfying sometimes, but that's okay. And from an honesty standpoint.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:09] So logical fallacy I think we've defined further or defined earlier, which is a logical fallacy is just logic. That doesn't make sense when you scrutinize it and they're dishonest because they take something that doesn't make sense and they pretend essentially that it makes sense.

Shane Snow: [00:51:23] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:23] But it's often does it done as an accident? And I see this all the time. I think we all do it a lot. So it sort of depends on your intent when you're using logical fallacies. Are you doing it to obfuscate or obscure the fact that you might be wrong and to follow your agenda or are you doing it because it sounded really good and you just haven't thought about it hard enough and so you're repeating it? One is clearly more forgivable than the next.

Shane Snow: [00:51:46] I think there's probably three categories of usage of logical fallacies. One is you're being intellectually dishonest. You know what you're doing. Two is you're lying to yourself and that's because you really want whatever it is to be true. And so you're willing to believe the thing that doesn't make sense. And three is you don't know. It's a fallacy and basically, you're ignorant to it and that's the most forgivable. The second one is totally human. And then the third one, your piece of shit.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:11] Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. ad hominem, right? So some other logical fallacies I'd love to go over because they ad hominine basically insulting the person. Got it. False analogies I think are really interesting.

Shane Snow: [00:52:25] Yeah. That one's a tricky one because analogies are really useful ways for us to help each other understand things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:31] I use them all the time.

Shane Snow: [00:52:33] Yeah, the show. So you know saying I feel like crap is an analogy that helps you understand how I feel. Maybe it's better for me to say I feel sad or I feel frustrated or whatever, but, and analogy is very important for helping us to understand and learn things. False analogy is when the under scrutiny, the analogy does not hold up and there's a lot of ways that this can happen, but often it's you're overblowing something or you're, you're just equating to things that aren't true. Different people who study fallacies or write about them, teach them, have different versions of this and they'll call them different names. But one that you hear a lot is, “If we could fucking land a man on the moon, why can't we invent toilets that never clog or whatever?” Like those are two different things. That analogy is not good. The argument underlying that you could make another way without a fallacy saying, “We have really advanced technology and we have not advanced the toilet technology in a long time. So my argument is that we should be able to make some progress on this piece of technology.” That's a better argument. I bet you don't even need an analogy for that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:36] Right. It's not that we can't figure out how to make sure I make this, make a joke about that all the time. I'll go to an airport, you know the stupid infrared faucets.

Shane Snow: [00:53:45] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:45] And I'm like, “Where's the Elon Musk? You know, we're trying to get to Mars and this stupid faucet turns on for like one second. One second. One second. So shooting out five, 500 times. But I can't get the water to come or it turns off and won't turn back on. What the hell?” But it's not like we've had our finest scientific minds on this infrared rise. They probably made it in the 90s they've changed the shape of it twice and that's it. Nobody cares. So the analogy itself doesn't make a lot of sense.

Shane Snow: [00:54:11] It’s not helpful.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:12] Yeah. It's not helpful. Yeah.

Shane Snow: [00:54:13] And I think that's maybe the bigger point is false analogies are bad, but often analogies themselves aren't helpful because they're not helping you identify what is the actual problem that we're talking about, what's underlying this. So if an analogy helps you understand the problem, if it's accurate, great, but it can only help you understand at a certain level. And so that's where I think a lot of public discourse, a lot of political debate goes really wrong, are people use analogies that are so dramatic or funny or whatever that suddenly people hear this are locked into thinking that the problem that you're really talking about is equal to this thing, and that is really toxic for getting anywhere. It's just trying to prove that you're right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:54] Appeal to authority is probably one of the most common where, and it makes sense because we'll say, “Oh, well, you know, in fact, somebody told me this a long time ago, I was talking about how multilevel marketing is usually going to lose you money. And there are statistics and numbers that show that something like 98.8 something percent of people that invest in an MLM loses money and somebody.” This is years ago, even before the current administration, they go, “Well, Donald Trump,” when he was just known as a wealthy guy, they asked him and he said if he had to make his fortune all over again, he would do direct sales. And it's like, wait a minute, first of all, direct sales is not multilevel marketing. One's a subset of the other may be If you're lucky. Two, so what? So a guy who's not involved in this business said, by the way, was compensated to say add-in like end way then -- said, “If he had to do it all over again, he would choose this method of business.” Why is that credible in the lease?

Shane Snow: [00:55:53] When you, when you hold that under a microscope, it doesn't make sense of where this happens a lot is with quotations from famous people. You know, Gandhi said that you need to obey the speed limit or whatever. Just because Gandhi said it, even though he's a great dude and then maybe that's just my opinion actually.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:10] A lot of people don't think so.

Shane Snow: [00:56:11] Even though many people think Gandhi is a great dude and he's an authority figure, it doesn't mean that everything he says is true. The person and the idea are separate things. And you could say that if you have two authority figures and one has more experience and expertise and all that, and you hold them together, you're more likely to get the right answer from the higher authority like God is a higher authority than your boss at Domino's pizza. So if the two of them have a conflict, pick God or whatever, like that's fine. But really the fallacy is that you can't equate just because it came from some source that that means it's true. And actually, that's where data is interesting, right? Because data is a much more reliable way to get to something. But it's not just authority that people use us on. We use this on nature or we use this on age and history. Just because something's old doesn't mean it's the best way to do something. Just because something's natural doesn't mean it's the best way to do something. There are lots of counterexamples of old things and natural things and authorities that are wrong about things or that are worse than things before. That's a fallacy just cause it's connecting to things that shouldn't necessarily be connected. Even if you could say that there's more of a predictive chance that something that comes from an authority is true, it doesn't make it true.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:22] Right, and that's, hand in hand with appeals to age, like you mentioned before, “I have 30 years of experience, my plan is better.” “Well that may be true but one thing doesn't necessarily cause the other 100 percent of the time,” but you're throwing that out there because you want me to agree with you.

Shane Snow: [00:57:37] Something in between these two things is why the idea is actually better. And in there is all this intellectual territory to explore that you just skip over by appealing to authority.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:46] Appeal to emotion is one that we see a lot now as well, where somebody just decides, “Screw it, I've kind of lost this.” I don't think it's conscious thought, but they screw it. “I'm losing this. I'm just going to get really upset, get really angry, start crying, whatever it is.”

Shane Snow: [00:57:59] Yeah, it's a, it's a dirty way to win an argument that if it just, if you tip the scales because someone's got an emotional, then you're not really using logic to weigh whether this thing is right or wrong.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:58:11] One of my favorites recently is something called sloganeering where just because what you say sounds catchy doesn't make it true, and this is, I've been loving just kind of dismantling the self-help BS that I see out there. So Instagram has a ton of this, but so do all these self-help guru people -- I'm trying to find a more colorful word, but I'm going to not do that. They have these bumper stickers where they're like, “The strongest force in the human personality is the need to stay consistent with how we define ourselves.” Wow. There's a lot of really powerful sounding words in there. What does it mean? It could mean nothing.

Shane Snow: [00:58:49] It could mean nothing and it's also really absolute sounding.

Shane Snow: [00:58:52] Yeah, right. Yeah. “The secret to an extraordinary life is to demand more from yourself than anyone else could possibly expect. Raise your standards.” Is that the secret to an extraordinary life? Let's define extraordinary. There are so many things that just don't have any sort of definition in there, but when you read it, you go, “Yeah,” and then you just forget it immediately because it's meaningless. But you like the effect that that slogan has on you.

Shane Snow: [00:59:16] If it has alliteration or rhyme and is saying something as if it's an absolute truth, that's a tip-off.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:23] “If something scares you, move towards it.” That's a classic example of a really bad idea. You know, “What I'm really scared of?” “Well, I didn't mean that I meant something that scares you in a certain kind of way.” “Okay. Well, why didn't you say that?” “Well, it doesn't fit in my Instagram picture with me sitting in a Ferrari.”

Shane Snow: [00:59:38] A lot of them are also these juxtapositions. Like if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:43] That's a good one. Very good.

Shane Snow: [00:59:46] And that's actually probably pretty good advice in many cases, but it's not absolute advice. It's sloganeering. In some cases actually taking the time to plan means that you're going to fail. Like as shark being another example, once again, “Shark coming at you, if you fail to plan, when you see the shark then you might've swum away in time.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:08] I mean, these things are sort of rooted. Some of them, most of them may be in a bit of wisdom, but they're so vague because they're designed to sound good and be memorable. And if you ever go to a self-help seminar of any kind, have you ever done one of those things? Anything?

Shane Snow: [01:00:23] I've ended up at things.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:25] So the, half the time they can only speak almost exclusively in these slogans. So when people leave, they're just like, “Wow, that was amazing. There are so many things. I have so many notes.” But then you go, “Hey, what did you learn?” And they're like, “Well if you fail to plan, plan to fail.” And it's like they don't even know what they learned. They just feel good about having heard that or they clap because it's like, “Wow that sounded so clever.” And it's like, well was there any beef in that burger or did that person just answer the other person's really well-rounded argument with a cool rhyming slang. And if that's what's going on, you need to kind of back up and “Go, wait a minute. Was that the answer to the question or did it just sound kind of cool?”

Shane Snow: [01:01:04] Yeah. So the example that I used in this post that I really liked is that it almost went wrong. It’s again, Obama at one of the debates when he was running for president the first time, someone asks one of the other guys who was well-known to believe in aliens. Like, “So what's your thing about aliens or whatever?” And the guy that gave this kind of kooky answer, you obviously didn't win the election. And then the host was like, “Okay, Mr. Obama, do you believe in alien life?” And he said, “I don’t know. All I know is that there's a lot of people on this planet that need help,” and everyone cheers. And it's funny and it's like, “Okay.” But then he went on to actually like address it because he said, “I don't know the answer to this.” It ended up being okay, but if you just said, “I believe there's a lot of people on this planet that need help or whatever,” you get them to laugh, you're getting the meme, but you're not actually answering the question. So that's an example of a dodge potentially. But there's also the sloganeering thing because you dodge using a clever statement that made people feel satisfied.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:06] Sure Okay, this makes sense. And people often employ fallacies to support their viewpoints because of what is called motivated reasoning. And you mentioned that before. “Look, I want to be right about this because my platform is based on this and my nonprofit is based on this or my agendas based on this. So I'm going to use fallacies and let those slide while maybe mercilessly calling out the other side for doing the same thing.” And so we have to be careful of our own motivated reasoning that might happen when we're arguing about something.

Shane Snow: [01:02:36] Really human thing. Yeah. Really human thing. I think for me this has been an interesting exercise in trying to change my outlook on life to one of seeing myself as the kind of person who is continually learning and growing and unlearning and that being my goal. So therefore that making it okay for me to decide that something I believed before wasn't true because that will help me to not have this motivated reasoning. But until I sort of thinking of myself more as that kind of person that that's what I'm about is the learning and growth, then it was a lot easier to -- I was accused early in my writing career of doing this thing called shooting the barn. It's where your target practicing. You go to the barn and you shoot a bunch of holes in the barn and then you draw the target around where you shot.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:23] Oh, interesting. I like that. Yeah.

Shane Snow: [01:03:25] And I think that was a habit bad habit that I had early in my, my career as a researcher and writer. And it was because I was motivated to find a certain answer. And when I change my thing is, “Oh no, am I motivated by finding the right answer and by unlearning and learning.” And that's okay because that's part of my identity. It made it easier to go down a path, realize it was wrong, and then go down another path.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:48] Right. So if your identity is I just want to find the truth of the matter, or I want to get down to brass tacks and figure out what the actual cause of X, Y, Z is. That's better than I'm a good researcher who understands things deeply because then one you can't really be wrong because then it screws with your identity.

Shane Snow: [01:04:03] Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:04:04] But on the other one, you, it's fine if you're wrong, you shouldn't be wrong. “Hey, great. I'm wrong, which means I uncovered something I didn't know before which enhances my expertise. Therefore I'm, I'm just as good at finding the truth. Because look, I found the truth. Turns out it was wrong.” That's a better target for you to have than to be, “I'm right all the time.”

Shane Snow: [01:04:24] It's kind of like how every season of Lost. You found out at the end of the season that the show is really about something else. The show has annoyed a lot of people. But it's kind of like that. It's like we keep getting bigger and better because the lens is changing and that's part of the fun rather than, “Oh no, I'm not going to watch this show anymore. I'm done. Because the lens had changed.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:04:43] So the next section of your article is deception. And there's a lot to this. I mean there's exaggerating, there's hiding and denying conflict of interest in whatever you're arguing for. You know, you're working for the big tobacco company, but you've got a scientific study that shows smoking is not harmful, whatever. Inflating credentials, that sort of self-explanatory. Claiming the jury is still out on established facts which is kind of climate change denial 101, “Hey, there's this weird fringe of like “scientists” that are kind of not sure about this. But then you look at their work and it's like, “Well I didn't really study that. I studied this and yeah.” So it's like --

Shane Snow: [01:05:22] This happens in business all the time when someone doesn't want -- it's like, “Okay, data says that we should make this decision.” And someone says, “Well, we don't have enough data yet,” but you do. That kind of thing happened a lot in my business where are pretty sure we should do something, but someone will bring up, “Well, you know, we're not entirely 100 percent sure and sometimes you can never get to 100 percent sure because in business or in life you're trying to make a good prediction and then you have to go down the path in order to find out, whether it's the right path. But using that as a way to get out of talking about the truth or what you should do or denying the truth, saying the jury is still out as a way to refute that 90 percent of the data is in, that's dishonest.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:11] Of course, and claiming an issue is settled when it's not as kind of the converse of that. It goes hand in hand with assuming facts, not in evidence where someone might go, “Everyone knows that Shane Snow doesn't pay his taxes,” so people that are watching or listening might go, “Well, I didn't know that, but if everyone else knows, then I guess I'm just the one person who didn't know that,” and it's like, “Wait a minute. That's a trick designed to get you to think that you're the only one who maybe didn't know that,” or you just go, “Oh yeah, I knew that.”

Shane Snow: [01:06:39] As a lawyer, there's no way you could get away with that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:41] You could never get away with that. If you go to in front of a jury -- you wouldn't even get there. The judge would never allow you to do that. The judge would be like, “Whoa.”

Shane Snow: [01:06:49] This is not how the judge was asleep. The other lawyer would say, “Hey, that is not it.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:53] Yeah. It would be an objection immediately and then it would be stricken from the record. The jury would be instructed to forget that they even heard that. If you do that too much during a trial, you get a mistrial because you're deliberately trying to do things to persuade the jury that is not allowed in court because it's unfair.

Shane Snow: [01:07:12] Yeah. Yeah. You know, the assuming things are settled when they're not, are saying talking like they are -- one of the ways this happens in everyday life is when people say things like, “We all agreed that X and so now we're going to do this.” When everyone didn't agree or a lot of people agreed, but it actually isn't settled but you're using this as a way to move on without having to include other viewpoints. This is a way that inclusion goes badly or it doesn't happen. The other thing I'd say on that one is right now an egregious example of that is the Mueller report comes out and the line says, “This does not exonerate the president,” and the president says, “I've been totally exonerated. Let's move on.” Be honest about that. There's a lot of complexity there, but saying it's so hard that this is done and it's over when it clearly said it's not, that is completely dishonest.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:04] Yeah, of course. And we saw Bill Clinton do similar fudging the definition of words where he's like, “Well it depends on what your definition of is.”

Shane Snow: [01:08:10] Jury's still out on the word is.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:12] Yeah. It's like, “Nah, I'm pretty sure that only in this case where you don't want to admit that you had sexual misconduct. Is there any sort of question about what's going on right?” Being vague, deliberately misrepresenting or misinterpreting or skewing data is really common. I'm just blowing through these because I feel like the audience is pretty smart. Being deliberately vague. We've all seen this happen. Misinterpreting data happens all the time and this is particularly dangerous. I think it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who said something like, “There are $21 trillion unaccounted for by the Pentagon or in accounting errors and Medicaid is only $64 trillion for the whole country. We could have had one-third of Medicaid all paid for and done if the Pentagon would just learn how to account better.” And it's like hold the hell on, that's not what that 21 trillion figure means. That's not what that 64 trillion figure means. And you can't just plug these two simple-sounding things together and be like, wash your hands of the idea that this -- if you'd just plug that into that, it would've been fine. It's like that's not how this was.

Shane Snow: [01:09:15] Yeah. Like if your math teacher would not grade you correct on that. The reason that this happens in debate and why it works is because people don't check. These things happen in real-time. We're not adding space to actually look at it. And the unfortunate thing is once an idea gets lodged in your brain, it's a lot harder to dislodge it than it is to lodge it. So it's like people that have heard that first thing, when they hear that they attracting the correction that the New York Times prints about, “Hey, these numbers are totally misleading.” It's too late. People already believe that. Well, there's something there then.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:09:52] And then of course it mutates, right? Because someone who hears that goes, “Oh, one-third of the Medicaid budget has been wasted by the Defense Department.” And then you hear, “Oh, the defense department,” and then there's some knucklehead with the conspiracy theory goes, “The Defense Department is deliberately losing money so that poor people die,” or like, “Have to get their medical care from joining the army. That's how,” and then it just turns into this thing. And if you just sort of backtrack, you go, “Oh, so somebody misspoke or like didn't bother to look up the full facts and now…the Pentagon's trying to convince poor people to join the army. Otherwise, they’ll die.”

Shane Snow: [01:10:30] And then we're not making progress. So we're talking about the wrong things. My favorite example, this is my fun example, my personal life is I started a startup company about 10 years ago. Couple of years in, we raised a couple of million dollars from investors and I gave an interview to Business Insider, I think it was someone like that. I don't want to malign them if it wasn't them. It was some business blog like that. And I talked about in that interview how my bank account got down to like 42 cents right before we raised money and I was running on credit cards and the headline that they printed was, “Shane Snow starts out with 42 cents is now a millionaire.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:11:05] Oh man. And you're like, first of all--.

Shane Snow: [01:11:07] Neither of those things are true.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:11:08] Neither of those things are true. Yeah, unfortunately. Right? Like I like that story, but unfortunately, I still only have 42 cents.

Shane Snow: [01:11:15] That's maybe an example of a mistake versus the deception.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:11:18] No, it's fine. But I feel like the deception, somebody who's in charge of writing the article or the headline was like, “You know, what? This sounds pretty good. This is click-baiting enough.” One that I really liked that I'd love for you to explain as rejecting facts as mere opinion. That's more popular now than ever and it's really annoying. Dr. Drew and I've brought this example up on the show, Dr. Drew Pinsky said he will go and give talks at colleges. This is a medical doctor with like 30 years of clinical experience is a well-known, well-spoken, very, very smart guy. He'll go give a talk to like incoming freshmen at Dartmouth or whatever and someone will go and stand up and raise their hand go, “I disagree with you on blah blah blah blah blah, STD sexually transmitted disease or substance abuse thing,” and he'll just kind of pause and take a deep breath because, in his head, he's going, “I have 30 years of experience. I am a doctor. You're an incoming freshman who is yet to take a single college-level biology course and you disagree with my actual medical scientifically validated opinion based on facts because you just don't like the sound of it or something.”

Shane Snow: [01:12:26] Oh that's so interesting because it's almost an example of the appeal to authority or experience then. Just because he has, that doesn't mean he's right, but all that experience, what that includes underneath all that is he has the scientific data to back up things. I could see a college student who knows their fallacies being like, “Well just because you are like some muckety-muck doesn't mean,” but Dr. Drew is drawing from actual facts.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:55] What he could do also is say, “Fine, I'm not going to play the doctor card Jordan, please go to pub med, which is where they keep medical stuff. Look up this study that shows that what I'm saying is correct and has nothing to this guy who is stating this opinion. Let's Google that on any website and it shows up on like the truth about vaccines.co.uk,” and it's like, “Okay, you're just wrong.”

Shane Snow: [01:13:19] This is a troubling thing about the world now is this whole alternative facts thing. You hear people who are frustrated with finding the actual truth and what facts are facts and people throw up their hands and say, “There's no such thing as facts anymore. Facts are all opinions. That's not true.” That itself is a fallacy and it's tough because it's hard to dig down to the truth, but that's what all this is about. It does not help for us to be dishonest on the way to getting to the truth by saying that facts are opinions or that's just my opinion is that that's not true. That doesn't help us get to the truth.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:13:53] Exactly. Yeah, and I think, look, in the worksheet, we're going to craft some scripts for you from the piece, how to get discussions back on track. You've got a lot of literal scripts where it's like, look, if you spot a fallacy and the discussion that you're seeing with somebody or if somebody's being deceptive by accident or deliberately, here's what you say to back things up and one game that I encourage everyone to play after the show now is when you're watching the news on TV cable especially, or when you're reading something or when you're watching someone give a talk or debate of any kind, try to spot the deception, try to spot the logical fallacies, and try to spot a lot of what we discussed here today. The intellectual dishonesty. It doesn't mean they're a bad person. It doesn't mean they're doing it on purpose, but looking for these weaknesses in the argument will make you so much smarter in every area of your life. It's really, really great to be able to do this because it makes you better at arguing and it makes you better at seeing through things that might not be true or might even be designed to trick you in the first place.

Shane Snow: [01:14:54] That's good for everyone.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:14:55] Shane, thank you very much.

Shane Snow: [01:14:56] Thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:14:58] I also want to do some YouTube only content, Shane, so of course if you're listening to this as a podcast, go to our YouTube channel, jordanharbinger.com/youtube. We'll forward you to the channel. There'll be a, there'll be a YouTube only video with some dirty debating techniques and how to get around those from Shane.

[01:15:18] Great big thank you to Shane Snow. We'll link to that mega-post where he talks about intellectual dishonesty here in the show notes. Coming away from the show. You should have a nice little primer here on when and how to spot people who are trying to mislead you. Some of this is not deliberate, of course, but most of the time, much of the time I should say it is, and so when we're able to spot that from TV pundits, politicians and things like that, we come away better equipped to defend ourselves and figure out how our ideas stack up to theirs, whether or whether they're even projecting their ideas or not. We'll also be able to spot our own arguments when we're doing things wrong, when we're being intellectually dishonest, when we're switching to those ad hominem attacks or rationalizations or strawman arguments, it's a really a great skill set to have. I've sort of become a little bit obsessed with this lately, having bought these posters and a deck of cards and logical fallacies and cognitive bias, and so when I go through this deck of cards, when I hear an argument, I know something's wrong, but I can't think of the fallacy. I will shuffle through that deck and find it and it's helped me become a much better arguer an understand or have arguments as well.

[01:16:24] If you want to know how I managed to book all of these great folks and manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits, I'll teach you those tiny habits in those systems for free in Six-Minute networking. That's a free course at jordanharbinger.com/course. And I know you think you'll do it later, but you got to dig the well before you're thirsty. Once you need relationships, you are too late. This stuff takes six minutes a day, hence the name. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. It is not fluff. It is crucial and it's at jordanharbinger.com/course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Shane Snow. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at jordanharbinger.com/youtube.

[01:17:03] This show is produced in association with PodcastOne and this episode was co-produced by Jason “Survivor Bias” DeFillippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty. I'm your host Jordan Harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time.

[01:17:33] This podcast today is sponsored by another podcast called Disgraceland. Disgraceland, great title, I am jealous. It's hosted by Jake Brennan. Disgraceland is a true-crime podcast about musicians specifically -- getting away with murder, behaving really badly. Each episode traces the most insane criminal stories surrounding our most interesting and infamous Popstars -- Jerry Lee Lewis’ fifth wife dead, Sam Cooke at 3:00 a.m. in city motel dead, Sid and Nancy dead. Why? Because musicians are freaking crazy because crazy things happen to them. We love those things and those people and we let them get away with it. Johnny Cash, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, the Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels run security -- all that is on Disgraceland. If you love true crime and you love music, I think you'll love Disgraceland so you can listen to that at Apple Podcasts, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you're listening to this show.