Conversion from TDS

 

The linked post is the second tweet in a thread by @JoshuaLisec. Its on-screen text is:

You first met me as the guy Scott Adams talked out of being a liberal.

I had a real case of the TDS, but the Great Influencer cured it safely and effectively.

Here is that case study: June 14th, 2019.

The attached video (~10:37) is an excerpt from Coffee with Scott Adams Episode 565 (June 14, 2019). Exact spoken transcript (cleaned from auto-captions for readability, original wording preserved):

Scott Adams: I can hear you. Tell me how to pronounce your last name properly.

Joshua Lisec: Lisec. Lisec.

Scott: Okay, Joshua Lisec. Now you responded to my request to talk to somebody who once had Trump Derangement Syndrome, but maybe I helped talk you out of it or maybe you came out of it yourself. Does that accurately describe you?

Joshua: That does, yes.

Scott: And how bad did you have it? And tell me what is your political leaning. Do you naturally lean left or right? Would you label yourself?

Joshua: Yeah, I would say I'm center-left, a reasonable liberal. Yes, we do exist.

Scott: All right, so you had terrible thoughts about Trump. Could you summarize what terribleness you thought were the problems in particular?

Joshua: Yes, and I can even give some context. About a year prior to the 2016 election I had been a listener of Sam Harris's podcast, and of course that left-wing ecosystem, kind of the intellectuals of the left, were predicting that this guy was going to be opening concentration camps and deporting the millions of illegal immigrants and starting World War III, and he was this sexist, racist, bigot, homophobe — all these things that were hallucinated. Now, looking back, that's what was happening, but at the time I was fully convinced: well, these smart people are saying these terrible things are going to happen, they seem pretty confident, so why would I believe otherwise?

Scott: Would you say that it was the group thinking that influenced you more than your own critical thoughts about the facts?

Joshua: Definitely yes. Like a lot of people, as a busy person I don't necessarily have hours on end to do all the research and the deep-diving myself, so I would look at these commentators, podcasters, so-called journalists whose opinions I respected. It's a perfectly reasonable shortcut because we can't think through every topic to the bottom. You have to rely on people to give you the cliff notes.

Scott: All right, so what was it that changed? How did you come out of it? Give us the brief journey there.

Joshua: Reflecting on it, I think there are three specific things that happened that were like cracks in the other movie screen that I was watching — the two movies on one screen. So there were some cracks on my screen.

The first crack actually was how Sam Harris, after the 2016 election for unrelated reasons, was kind of dragged through the reputation mud by establishment left-wing commentators, intellectuals, and media. And I personally knew this guy: Sam Harris isn't a bigot or an Islamophobe or anything like that. So I saw the same people that were saying Trump is evil, they were saying Sam Harris is evil.

Scott: That's really interesting. So once you saw that the same treatment could be applied to somebody you did know about and you felt confident, that made you doubt the same treatment they were giving to Trump who you didn't know as much about.

Joshua: Yes. That was the first crack — they're turning on Sam Harris, especially like Vox and that whole disaster.

The second one: a far-left friend of mine posted on Facebook an article in Rolling Stone. This is I think maybe a little over a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, before my son was born. The headline was something that just sounded terrible, something to the effect of "Trump rolls back child labor laws." Oh no, this evil terrible person, sweatshops — you can just see the sweatshops in your head, right? And everyone's sharing it, thousands of shares, "this man's evil, hashtag impeach now."

I go and I read the article. The article is about how the Trump Administration is instituting a new labor rule which allows blue-collar employers to hire 16-, 17-year-old high school graduates to work at their companies as apprentices. I read that and I say I completely agree with that, totally on board with that. And yet the headline was so far removed from that. It was a hyper-exaggeration. That was the second crack. I said to my wife, "How many of these 'Trump rolls back child labor laws' headlines have we seen that if we had just clicked and read the story, we would completely agree with it?"

Scott: What's the third thing?

Joshua: The third thing was you. This was a little over a year ago, before the hoax funnel. You had this drawing on your whiteboard and you used the various media hoaxes or exaggerations or lies about President Trump. You said don't start with the big one, start with this little one and work your way through it. It looked like a wind tunnel. Work your way through the hoax tunnel and you realize maybe there are legitimate reasons to vote for someone else — in my case I'm kind of on the Andrew Yang bandwagon for 2020 — but there are legitimate reasons to like President Trump's results in his administration, and there are reasons to maybe not approve, but these are not any of those reasons.

Scott: What's unusual about your journey is that it involved reason and actually learning, which is so rare. I think it helped a lot that you said you were sort of moderate left-leaning. Your appreciation for Andrew Yang sort of speaks to that. Yang is half a Republican. I don't know how he can get elected because he's only half one side and half the other. Did you get any pushback from your friends who presumably remain Trump haters?

Joshua: Well, whenever I bring up something like they maybe shared a headline — "oh you hear about what Trump did today" — and I'll say well I looked into that story actually, I read the headline and the article, and actually it was ABC... and then just as you predicted in the hoax funnel, they just hop: "okay well maybe that thing isn't true but this other thing." It's just like hopping from one thing to another. And maybe they'll get to the point where it's something that like okay, I actually agree I'm not a fan of President Trump for those reasons.

Scott: Did you see the video clips of the times that President Trump used the same mocking expression as he was blamed for mocking the reporter who had the handicap with his arm? Have you seen the compilation clips to show he does that all the time with other people?

Joshua: Not until I think it was on your timeline.

Scott: Yeah, so the news funnel completely protects people who are the Trump haters from seeing the exculpatory video. They just never see it. And so you can kind of understand why people are fooled. Now you had the ability to start with a Sam Harris who I would say is actually not really political in a way, wouldn't you say?

Joshua: Yeah. And I think that the type of people he was having on his podcast had some sort of either political affiliation or they were economists, commentators, technologists, and for their own reasons they had fears about possibly being an existential risk, like Eric Weinstein I think that was his phrase, existential risk.

Scott: Even when I disagree with Sam Harris I appreciate that he's trying to get there through some kind of process of reason and facts and discovery and learning. He's trying to get to places through rational processes. Unfortunately he lives in an irrational world so that's going to have a limited effect on people's minds.

Joshua, thank you so much. And I'm sorry about my mix-up yesterday, my technical error that delayed this till today, but this is fascinating. Is there anything else you want to add?

Joshua: Yeah, I just saw a comment in here I want to respond to. Somebody asked "is he an artist or an engineer?" As you would probably expect, just like Andrew Yang I am both. I'm an entrepreneur, I own my own business, I'm a real estate investor as well, but my main business is as a ghostwriter. So it's creativity, it's writing. I own a creative business in addition to another enterprise, so a little bit of both.

Scott: Want to give your company a plug? What's the name of your business?

Joshua: Sure. It's Entrepreneurs Wordsmith, entrepreneurswordsmith.com is my business. I've ghostwritten 40 full-length books since 2011, so we're celebrating eight years this month.