The Emotional Psyche of Decision-Making with Scott Adams
In this thought-provoking episode of One American Podcast, host Chase Geiser is joined by Scott Adams, the mastermind behind 'Dilbert', to unravel the intricacies of human decision-making. Delve deep into the emotional frameworks that guide our choices, from the dopamine-driven impulses that spur action to the profound shifts in ideologies we sometimes experience. Together, they explore the delicate balance between emotion and rationale, touching upon historical events to illustrate the power and peril of collective thought. This episode offers a nuanced perspective on the forces that shape our beliefs and actions.
So, I obviously am familiar with your work because of Dilbert, but I didn't really know who you were until I saw your interview with Nikki Klein a couple of years ago.
I watched it because I was going to have Nikki Klein on my podcast, and I did, but I was wanting to watch other interviews with her and sort of prepare and get a sense.
And I thought that was an absolutely fascinating conversation.
In particular, one very specific moment where you asked her about whether or not Keith had had any background in hypnotism because you perceived that he'd done some things that seemed to correlate with your knowledge of hypnotism.
I always wanted to ask you what it was that you saw or perceived that gave you that impression.
And so, I've been spending the last 18 months or so trying to build up a large enough Twitter following to be a justifiable use of your time for an hour or so podcast.
So, to ask that question, well, you know, I believe that his partner was a trained hypnotist.
And so, there would be a lot of cross-fallidation of skills.
So, I think he's probably at a base of skills.
And the weird thing is, I think even their biggest critics don't argue with the fact that his method was helping people and they enjoyed it.
So, that's a weird thing.
But basically, he was reframing and persuading, you know, changing people, how people saw their situation.
And it was more about the effectiveness of it that made me think he had some formal training because he was too good.
I mean, he built up too much of an organization around what you could imagine was a thin amount of content.
But maybe it wasn't.
Maybe it was actually deeper than I knew.
But just the fact that they were so effective in getting people to change in a whole variety of ways, it seemed like it was like a little bit beyond a cult and maybe a little closer to just a super persuasive leader.
I mean, I would have bought it if I didn't have any context as to who you are and your knowledge and skills, but I just can't imagine that somebody who's interested in things like reframing and psychology and persuasion hasn't considered, you know, how they can wrangle and influence people to do sort of their bidding.
So I would say it's not a cult if the leader is transparent about, let's say, you selling a book or doing live streams that are monetized.
And if the main benefit looks like it's to the people who are receiving the content, that seems like whatever is the opposite of a cult.
I mean, I mostly teach the people who follow me on social media how to determine what is BS and what is real.
So theoretically, they would be applying these same rules to me, I hope, because I think I passed Muslim.
And so if you're transparently helping people and they say you're helping me, that's probably not a cult.
If you have to burn your clothes and wear a robe and pledge all of your money to the cult leader, that's probably a cult.
And if they prevent you from talking to other people, that's definitely a cult.
In my case, I actively encourage people to follow as many different sources as possible to actually expose themselves to the outside as much as possible.
So I'm close to the opposite of a cult by that definition.
But to answer your question, how would you start a cult?
I hate avoiding questions.
You don't have to answer if they're uncomfortable.
I'm just guessing, but I imagine the way it happens is this way.
There's probably some charismatic person who has several friends that he talks to who really get excited about this person's vision.
And then they say, hey, my other friend, he should join me.
We're going to talk to this guy.
And next thing, the room is full.
And then everybody says, oh, this is so good.
They get their friends.
I imagine they started organically.
Now, maybe there's some exception to that, but it feels like it's probably just an organic thing because people feel like they're getting some value out of it.
It's hard to know because when people think of cults, they think of like the big ones, right?
They think of Scientology as an example, regardless of whether you think Scientology is a cult.
That's something that comes to mind, Jim Jones.
But there are really like thousands, right?
And I think it's more common than people think that they're involved in some sort of cult-like organization at some point in their life, whether it's their church or some group that they're in.
I think the organizations can take eye cult like characters, this character is.
I'm just curious because I had an experience where I joined a denomination of Christianity that probably doesn't fit the category of a cult, but it's about as close as you could get to one without being a cult.
The reason that I say that it wasn't a cult was because there was no sort of individual single leader.
It was just like a lay ministry type thing, but the doctrine and the dogma was so intense that it behaved somewhat like a cult sometimes in terms of alienating people or shaming or guilty people.
But at the same time, there was like an unreasonable amount of joy and ecstasy at certain moments, whether you were going on like a retreat or a camp type thing where you're going to do Bible studies.
Like there were moments where you felt like you were like God was on the other side of the drywall.
And if you, you know, if you listen, you could hear him yelling at you, right?
Well, you know, the hypnotist take on this is that most of our opinions are assigned, right?
You know, if you're born in a deeply Islamic country, you're probably going to be Islamic and you're probably going to think that you would have chosen it even if you hadn't been born there.
You know, we talk ourselves into, well, you know, obviously I made up my own mind at some point.
But I think everybody's basically they're open to different kinds of persuasion, but we're all being persuaded.
So while you might not be easily persuaded to change religions, we're all easily persuaded to do things that our personality is compatible with, especially if it helps our pocketbooks.
So yeah, I think mostly people are assigned their opinions, but they accept the ones that feel right and work for.
If that's the case, can you really hold anybody accountable for the things that they do on behalf or as an outcome of what their beliefs are, their opinions are?
Yes, you can do it absurdly, which is the way all life is.
We pretend that we have free will because if you didn't pretend we had free will, you couldn't have a justice system that made any sense.
So we pretend that somebody could have acted differently, even if their brain was exactly what it was, and all the situations and causes were the same, that they could have chosen differently.
There's no scientific, even hypothesis that would support that.
But if we lose that illusion, then you can't punish people.
You can't say, you can't condemn them.
Society would fall apart.
So I take the absurd but functional belief that I'm going to act as though, as if I have a choice, but I'm going to act as though it's a real thing and that people can choose just so society stays together.
But intellectually, I know it's nonsense.
And the reason I say that is the rules of physics don't stop at the outside of your skull.
Whatever it is that's happening in your brain is physics.
Chemistry is chemistry.
Electricity is electricity.
There's no part of you that nobody has found that's floating around you that's your free will that can make your brain do something different because the thing that's not physical made the physical thing different.
So there's no evidence of anything like that.
And indeed, all the evidence is the opposite.
In fact, the part of your brain that makes decisions doesn't even activate until after decision is made.
And that's been tested for years.
Something that hypnotists learn on day one, that people are not rational.
They are rationalizers.
They're people who imagine that they came up with an opinion and they imagine they have reasons for it, but that's purely imaginary.
Not to say that the reasons are always bad, but they would have reasons whether they were good or bad.
When I was a kid, my mother got hypnotized to deliver my younger sister.
And she reported that she felt no pain and she was essentially awake.
She remembers the whole thing, but didn't feel pain.
Now, my family doctor was also a hypnotist and he was there to deliver the baby.
So honestly, as an adult, I don't know how much of that was true.
Did she forget?
Maybe she had an epidural and just forgot.
I don't know.
I think it's possible.
But I was so impressed by that that when I was in my early 20s, I thought, you know, we'll sign up for a hypnosis school.
There was one in San Francisco.
It was just a little thing with one instructor and we would meet a couple of times a week for a number of months.
And I learned hypnosis.
I think the one, the first or second most valuable thing I've learned, you know, outside of reading and writing and the basics, the other was the Dale Garner D course that teaches you how to deal with people.
But once you learn hypnosis, almost everything you see that would be ridiculous and absurd and confusing, it all makes sense.
It basically is the thing that explains everything.
Because if you imagine that people are rational, then you can't really figure out why they're doing what they're doing.
No, I wouldn't put it in those terms because that sort of stretches the definition too far.
So it wouldn't help.
I consider hypnosis just part of the big persuasion package.
So advertising from marketing, advertising, just being nice to the people you're talking to.
They're all forms of persuasion.
So we're persuading all the time, even if we kid ourselves or we lie and say, no, I'm being genuine.
Nobody's being genuine.
We're all modifying our presentation for some effect, right?
So we're trying to persuade, even if the thing you're trying to persuade is that you don't modify your opinion for other people.
It's just another form of persuasion, right?
So we'd be kidding ourselves to say we're not always trying to persuade anybody who's around us.
We just don't think of it in those terms, but you're always doing it all the time.
So to imagine that something is a state of hypnosis and something is somebody practicing hypnosis is sort of the, it's more like the canvas of where we are all the time.
So I think of hypnosis where, for example, in my new book, Reframe Your Great, I use hypnosis technique to pick reframes that exist, you know, the good ones, I know the good ones, but also to create a few that didn't exist.
I can use hypnosis technique basically to make sure that it's powerful.
Tell me a little bit more about that as someone who's a layman and not intimately familiar with hypnosis.
And I'm a little bit familiar with what you mean by reframe because I did read some of the book or listen to it and I did read the description of the book.
So I understand the idea of there's no such thing as bad press, for example, as being a reframe, right?
How does hypnosis operate on a technical level to actually go in and do the right reframes in order to achieve the desired outcome?
Well, the risk from hypnosis is basically zero because people don't do things they don't want to do.
So the perfect use for hypnosis would be, let's say, somebody wanted to lose their fear of flying.
That could work because they don't want to be afraid of flying.
There's no counter force.
If somebody comes in and says, can you use hypnosis on me to quit smoking or to quit eating?
I would say, well, I could try.
You'll have about a 30% success rate and it'll be about the same success rate as every other thing you could have tried.
Like there's no advantage.
And the reason that the success rates are very similar, with the exception of chemical interventions, but the behavioral stuff only depends on, and this is a reframe actually, whether you want to quit or you've decided to quit.
That's actually one of the reframes in my book.
When you want to quit, you're sort of looking for something to help you make the decision, basically.
When you decide to quit, you're never going to pick up a cigarette.
That will be the last day that you smoke because the decision comes with it, whatever happens.
Like, you know, however much it hurts, however much I want it, I've decided.
If you say, I want to quit, the hypnotist can't help you.
So basically, the same 30% or so, I'm just making up a number that's in the ballpark.
About 30% of the people have decided when they go to the hypnotist and then they're just looking for some help.
If they decide it, any kind of help will get them over the top.
If they just want it, it's almost like what they need is for you to fix their decision, which is a little different thing.
And they kind of have to do that themselves.
Sort of like the alcoholic hitting bottom, if you're familiar with that world.
The alcoholic who knows they're having issues as an alcoholic, they want to quit, but not as much as they want the drink.
And it's not until they hit bottom where they're wanting to quit far exceeds the attraction of the drink.
So you can only help people who have dual forces once they've decided.
The coincidence of the fact that the large language model AIs became the sensation at the same time I was writing a book on reframes is everything.
Let me tie the two of them together.
Were you surprised that you could create something called artificial intelligence just looking at the patterns of words that people have written already and nothing else?
So hypnotists were not surprised because we know that people are not rational and we can observe that they seem to be using words as a substitute for thinking.
In other words, if the sentence makes sense, people will think that the thought makes sense and they're just different things.
Once you realize that something can be formed out of the combination and pattern of words that we would recognize as some form of intelligence, artificial intelligence, but it looks intelligent in terms of how it acts, you're only one short leap from realizing that's how humans are built as well.
That thing that we think is intelligence is really just word patterns and combinations, which is why it's so easy for the news to assign you an opinion because the news puts it in words.
The words go in your head, and words are actually what forms your thoughts, and then your thoughts form your actions.
So, once you know that, you understand how a reframe works.
So, a reframe takes some words that were around a topic that weren't working for whatever reason you weren't getting a result you wanted, and it gives you a new set of words, like global warming.
When nuclear energy was considered dirty and risky, people, a lot of people said, No, no, I don't want that dirty, risky nuclear energy.
As soon as smart people reframed it, and I was part of this project, as soon as smart people said, No, this is the greenest of all the green things, because not only is it green, by the way, the version that the third generation of nuclear is the only one you would build today, and they've never had a meltdown.
Now, people don't know that they know that the older generations have bad problems.
So, the so the gen 3 just haven't had them, generation 4 almost can't have them, right?
So, so it's way safer than it used to be, and they keep the waste on site now, which is a big improvement, et cetera.
So, the argument for nuclear is a little bit more than the average person can quite handle.
You know, it's a little more complicated than people want to spend time to.
But if you say nuclear energy is green, then 10% of the people who hear it will look into it and say, Yeah, you know, I see what you're saying.
90% will just hear nuclear is green, and that becomes their thought process.
So, repetition and having the right, you know, tight little sentence, all you have to do is repeat it.
So, a reframe can change your entire life by reading it once, as long as it sticks in your head.
I'll give you an example.
The most successful reframe by far was I didn't even know it would affect other people.
I said that alcohol is poison, and I said that I've used that as my own reframe to avoid drinking.
Now, I've never had an alcohol problem, I just you know, it wasn't helping me really to have a few drinks on the weekend.
So, just by saying alcohol is poison, those words, you know, poison is a negative word.
I'm pairing it with something.
If you repeat an association of a negative thing with the thing you want to stop, that's actually enough.
And the yeah, to yourself, and the which is a form of hypnosis.
So, instead of the hypnotist putting it into your head, you just put it in yourself by reading a sentence.
Now, could anything go terribly wrong because you read a reframe that didn't work?
I've never seen it, I don't think it's I don't think that's really a risk, but I'll tell you that the reframes that hit you and you go, Oh my, as soon as you read them, you'll repeat them in your head forever because they have an impact on you.
And effectively, you're creating you're changing the physical structure of your brain, which is what all thoughts and memories do, and you're actually modifying it with a sentence.
Now, take that back to AI.
If you know AI is intelligence formed by the right combination of words, and that's all it is, then you can see your own brain is similar to that because it is.
And if you put in the right combination of words, even if they don't make sense, and this is a key part of reframes, they don't even have to be logical, they can be rights like everything Yoda said, yeah.
Well, I'll give you, here's one that you know it's only referenced in the book as an old one: The customer is always right.
I don't know if this is a perfect example or not, but as you were talking about this and explaining this, I was sort of running through my head of maybe instances in my life where I've unintentionally or not unintentionally necessarily, but been unaware that I was doing reframes on myself.
So, for example, I started a small advertising business in 2016, and I'd been two years into my first job out of college, and it was like a dead-end job.
No upward mobility.
And I quit my job before my business was off the ground because I knew if I didn't quit, I would never do my business.
And I remember during that period of time, I kept telling myself internally there's nothing more dangerous than assuming no risk.
You know, like, if I don't take this risk, then the outcome is way more dangerous where I'm, you know, just making $45,000 a year until I'm in my 40s or 50s, you know.
And so that was maybe an example of how I sort of dealt with or reframe my perspective on, you know, whether or not I quit my job.
Well, but if you keep it in your mind, the key to this is that we're not good at assessing risk.
So don't do anything that might, you know, physically kill you or bankrupt you, right?
But your example was your risk was probably a little setback in money, a lot of time, maybe your ego, you know, those things were risk.
Those are the things you want to risk.
So those things feel the scariest.
But as you said, if you don't do those things, you're worse shape than if you do.
And now that one thing you do might not be the key.
That might not be the silver bullet.
But if you take that attitude to several projects, you know, and you do 10 different things, which I try to do, I try to do about 10 different new things a year.
Most of them don't work.
And they almost, you know, have a crib death.
They don't last very long at all.
But sometimes things have take on a life of their own.
And live streaming is like that for me.
I started live streaming just because it was this new thing called Periscope on Twitter years ago.
And I just turned it on and somebody showed up.
I think there were six people the first time.
And then I thought, oh, that's fun.
And I did it again.
So that was a case where something just started small and grew.
But you cannot predict where things are going or what will work.
Your best kit, your best scenario is just try a bunch of things that won't kill you and won't bankrupt you if they don't work.
But if they do work, they'll pick up their own energy.
So here's another reframe: one way to approach something is to know exactly what you would have to do from beginning to end.
But that's kind of rare in the complicated world.
Usually you just know a direction and you might know the first step.
And then you look for energy like a video game.
You know, the video games where you have to find some energy before you can continue.
You know, you get a refuel or get more ammo or something.
So a lot of projects are like that.
You don't know how you're going to do it.
I'll give you an example of the writing of my book.
So the writing of my book started as if you started thinking about the whole process, you would be overwhelmed because writing a book is really hard and unpleasant.
Like you're not going to enjoy the year that you write a book.
But here's how it happened.
I thought of a title that would be about reframes.
And I wrote it on my whiteboard and I just left it there for a while.
And then I talked to somebody I knew and said, what do you think of this idea?
And they said, oh, that's a good idea.
And then I got a little energy because somebody liked it.
Then they took it to my agent, book agent, who was canceled me, but back when they had one.
And they said, what do you think of this idea?
And he said, I think that'd be good.
You should write some of it up.
And so I wrote some of it up and then took it to a publisher.
The publisher said, Yeah, that's a good idea.
And now I'm all excited because I've had like a reader or an agent and the publisher say, Yeah, that's a good thing.
So I write a page and then I look at it.
I go, Ah, that's not bad.
You know, I could fix this to make it even better.
So I'm looking for fuel, which is a dopamine hit, basically.
You know, by the way, this is interesting.
Did you know that you can't move without dopamine?
You literally can't get off the couch unless there's some dopamine telling you that you're going to be rewarded or at least it won't hurt.
So, yeah, the whole process of writing a book is I take two steps forward.
And if I can find some dopamine, I can go further.
And if I can't, I don't.
Because I've had projects where I get to that first step and then nothing's happening.
Nobody's telling me it's good.
And I'm not feeling as good anymore.
And then I bail out because there's no dopamine.
So one of the best reframes is to see everything you do as a dopamine acquisition process.
So even anything like going to the gym and getting a workout, no matter how painful the workout is, you're going to get a dopamine hit when you're done.
You know, that you feel good and your body feels better.
So the dopamine reframe is the ultimate for getting you off the couch, getting you moving, getting you to do the thing.
You mentioned how people make decisions emotionally and then rationalize later.
And I wanted to ask you a little bit about the psychology, I guess, for lack of a better term, of how people have major shifts in any sort of ideal, right?
So something that for every emotional reason you want to hold on to, but you may abandon because the fact of the matter becomes so obvious at some point.
So a classic example, not to bring up something controversial for the sake of it, but you have all these Germans, they love Hitler.
Supposedly, they don't know that the death camps are occurring after the war.
They're shown pictures of all the brutality of the Holocaust.
And then it's like the narrative, at least, whether it's true or not today, is that they were so ashamed that none of them are anti-Semitic anymore, right?
That was the narrative anyway when I was brought up.
Like as soon as I realized that, right?
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And I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but this is kind of a piss poor example.
But how is it that people actually make a tremendous shift in an ideal or their ideals or their philosophy or religion or politics or whatever, despite the fact that it's so emotionally difficult to do that?
Generally speaking, you can't change somebody from a major opinion.
It's kind of rare.
And that's why politics is so weird.
They're fighting for the three people who could change their mind potentially.
Now, in order to be able to change your mind, you have to free yourself from the risk of cognitive dissonance.
Now, cognitive dissonance is a thing that makes you feel stupid when you're shown that you've been wrong about something for a long time.
And since you don't like to feel stupid and you're sure you're not, instead of saying, oh my goodness, you've just proven that I've been stupid all of my life, that this basic thing that you understand and I don't, how much smarter you must be than me.
I'm a dope.
People don't like to do that.
That's expensive in terms of your psychology.
Instead, they will imagine that something that didn't happen happened, such as, oh, you got that information from the worst source, or you're forgetting this other fact and it'd be something that's not even real.
So it's essentially a hallucination.
So people will hallucinate if you challenge their ego and who they think they are.
That's the risk.
They don't want to lose their self-impression.
But if you wanted to be a person who did not experience that, the things that I recommend are that you embarrass yourself as much as possible intentionally, like doing things you know you're not good at.
Try some social things that you know are going to go poorly.
Ask somebody on a date, they're probably not going to say yes.
Just shower yourself with embarrassment until it doesn't hurt anymore.
Because you can get used to anything.
I'm a perfect example of being embarrassed until I don't even feel anymore.
So by the time I got canceled worldwide, people were feeling bad for me.
I'm doing only comics that I like, which you can still see by subscription on Twitter and X and I'm the local's platform, just subscription.
And because it's subscription, I can go wild and do anything I want.
Anyway, so the quick answer to your question, I digressed, is don't put yourself in a position where you have to protect your ego.
So one of the things I do is whenever I'm shown wrong, let's say I got a fact wrong in my live stream, I make sure that I just throw myself, you know, onto the mercy of the court, totally wrong, 100% wrong.
Everybody have fun mocking me.
And then I just make it part of the show.
So if I can make my wrongness part of the show and also add content, here's why I was wrong.
I don't know if you were wrong too, but don't make this mistake.
That's the nature of the show, teaching people how to think through this stuff.
So because of that, I've removed the trigger for cognitive dissonance.
I have no ego to protect because I don't have anything wrapped up in being right about anything.
In fact, I'm thrilled when I find out that I've been wrong about something all my life because I feel like I learned something.
Last time that happened about being completely wrong about something that you believed for a long period of time, yeah.
Well, this morning, I apologized for believing the science of something that Dr. Jordan Peterson had retweeted, tweeted.
So I saw his tweet, you know, something about meat eaters had amazing health benefits if they were just doing the meat diet.
Well, because it came from him.
So I said, oh, the source looks good.
And I just assume he looked at the source and I didn't because I wouldn't know what I was looking at.
He could look at a study and know what's wrong with it in a way I couldn't.
So I basically delegated my fiduciary responsibility and was immediately bitten when I found out it wasn't so much a randomized controlled trial as it might have been a Facebook thing.
Right.
So people answering.
So immediately upon finding that, actually it took a few days until I remembered, but I said, oh, I was completely wrong.
I'm an idiot.
Should have looked here.
Here's why I got it wrong, as I just explained.
And if you can do that over and over again, then people will, oh, here's another one.
And I'm not sure I'm wrong about this yet, but I might be.
There's some evidence that the placebo effect isn't real.
I don't know if I believe the argument against it, but it's blowing my mind.
The argument is that the way the placebo effect was created, or at least discovered, is that you let's say you have a new pill and then some of the people, the fake pill, and then you see what they do.
The person with the real pill recovers maybe not all the way and maybe not everybody, but she got a big effect.
The people with the fake pill, they also got like a third as much effect.
And you see, wow, if you can get a third of the effect with a fake pill, there must be this psychological thing going on.
No, but when I tell you, you're going to be mad that nobody ever said this before.
Most people don't stay the same when it comes to health.
They might get worse.
Might get worse.
Most people might get better though.
So what they should have tested that they've never tested, and maybe nobody's ever tested, they've never tested the group that didn't know they were being studied for the condition.
But if you looked at the people who didn't even know you were studying them, and maybe somehow you asked the same questions, but you couched it as like it was maybe part of a bigger thing.
So they couldn't really figure out why you were testing.
A third of them would just get better because people get better.
And so if you compare the people who got better who didn't even know they were being studied to the people who took the placebo, the placebo people had the additional information that they were part of the study.
But what if the result was the same?
That would mean that the placebo effect has never been real.
And every study that just did the fake pill to the real pill was misleading you because, of course, some people just get better on their own.
So how does this tie into the it is mind-blowing and fascinating.
I'm curious to know, how does this tie into the belief that the trans phenomenon going on right now, especially among kids, is merely like a, I don't want to use the word placebo, but maybe that is actually what they're trying to say.
Like these kids think that they're trans because they're told that they've been trans or they're influenced to think they've been trans, allegedly.
Okay, I'm just, I'm not saying that for sure, but like, how would that tie in to this new approach to whether or not placebo is even real?
I mean, one could argue that a lot of this trans stuff happening among the youth is like a placebo thing because of your whatever, right?
I would just say that it'd be more, I think, more akin to mass murders.
You know, if the news has a big mass murder, you can guarantee there will be a copycat.
And if they do the new one, you can guarantee there'll be another one.
And if they keep doing it, you can guarantee.
And, you know, if nobody had ever done a mass murder and showed up on TV, there'd probably still be some, but not many.
So action has to follow a thought.
And if the thought is never there, you just never get the action.
So same thing with, you know, let's say TikTok is my favorite, you know, whipping app.
If TikTok is showing you a bunch of people who said, well, I wasn't sure about my gender, but then I made this decision and I'm a lot happy about it.
There's only one thing that could happen because children, especially, are super susceptible to persuasion because they haven't unfooled enough times yet to know that the real world is mostly fraud.
I hate to say that, but it's true.
And they can be easily convinced.
So I don't think there's a mystery to it.
If you can make up anything, you've seen in other countries, for example, there'll be some weird rumor that, I don't know, there's a lion that's stealing people's souls.
You know, you hear these stories, I'm making that one up.
But then the whole village will report, well, I know somebody whose soul was stolen.
You know, they'll say, I saw it myself.
I mean, there's no doubt about this person had a soul.
Lion walked by, soul was gone.
So people will believe anything if they've been exposed to the idea.
And this is why the best manipulating persuaders are good.
If they give you a frame, you'll start seeing things to attach to it because it's just the first thing you saw.
So if you say, this candidate is known for this bad behavior, you're going to see that behavior at every suggestion of everything they've ever done for their whole life because you've been exposed to it.
If nobody had ever mentioned it, probably wouldn't even notice.
You'd just say, oh, that person did a lot of different things.
You wouldn't see a pattern of anyway.
So people can influence you to see patterns simply by mentioning you.
So we were talking a little bit about, I guess, self-esteem, but protection of the ego, right?
And how people don't want to be humiliated or convinced that they're a moron, especially relative to other people.
One of the reasons that when I was a young man in high school, I was so attracted to Ayn Rand was because Howard Work in the fountainhead was this character who had no regard for what anyone else thought of him.
And that's an incredibly empowering philosophy, especially for somebody who's coming of age who struggles with self-esteem.
Because if you don't have this much regard for what other people think, then you're less vulnerable or susceptible to the feelings of guilt or shame that can be associated with humiliation or embarrassment.
So on the one hand, you mentioned exposing yourself to much as much humiliation or embarrassment as possible in order to sort of develop a talents to it.
Is there an inverse to that where it's not necessarily about exposing yourself to humiliation, but reframing your regard for what other people think at all?
Well, even people who have a low opinion of themselves have huge ego defenses still.
It's just always that you have to treat your ego as your enemy, not your identity.
Right?
If the thing is screaming, protect yourself, say you're right, even if you're not, if you're listening to that thing, you're not listening to a friend.
A friend would say, you know, it'd be easier just to say you got that wrong.
Are some of the accomplishments like the most the most impressive accomplishments of just humankind throughout history manifest from narcissism and ego?
Well, I don't know if it's, I'll use different words to agree with you that people like me, I consciously say to myself, if I can do things that are good for other people, that will feel good for me.
So is feeling good the same as ego?
Because I know I would have this deep sense of satisfaction whenever somebody says, you know, you said a thing that helped me in some way.
I just feel really good.
Is that ego?
And would you want that to go away?
I would argue that there are two kinds of narcissists when people get these confused.
There's a grandiose form, and I consider myself one of those.
So my, let's say, my nourishment, and always has been, is that I can do something that other people would say, yes, that was a good thing.
You made me happier.
So that's the positive form of narcissism.
And then they say it, and I feel good.
The bad part is where you're just trying to destroy people.
That's the bad kind.
So, yeah, the words that we use for things, you can see in this conversation, the words you use determine your actions.
So I'm saying, I don't know if that's ego, it's just something that feels good.
So I pursue a thing that feels good.
If you said, no, that's just for your ego, I say, well, I don't want to be one of the connotations.
Why would I do one of those ego chasing people?
So instead, chase the feeling.
Chase the feeling you get when you're a benefit to other people.
There's no better feeling except sex.
And in which you can do it right, you're also a benefit to at least one other person.
We've been talking a lot about the individual and how the individual operates.
How does this scale on a societal level over time?
One of the things that I've been personally struggling with is just constant sort of subtle humming dread that all society is doomed to entropy and corruption can't be turned around.
It just gets worse until it collapses and something else is born, like a phoenix type thing.
Right.
So given the nature of our psychology and how we operate as human beings, what is the inevitable outcome of any sort of civilization that we put together?
So wherever you have a big complicated thing where money is involved and lots of people and lots of time, corruption is guaranteed.
You just don't know when and who.
It's just guaranteed.
So the first thing is to know that the media is scaring you unnecessarily, as they have for every year of my life.
And they'll just cycle from one, you know, the ozone, the, you know, China's.
I remember that Japan was going to eat our economy.
Do you remember when our economy disappeared and Japan took it?
It didn't happen.
And I'll bet you every single thing you're worried about today won't happen in terms of the worst case scenario.
Everyone I would bet against.
And I even have a name for it.
I call it the Adam's Law of Slow Moving Disasters.
The ones you have to worry about are like the pandemic because you're sitting here one day and all of a sudden there's something on TV about people falling over in China, which never was real, which is weird.
And suddenly, you know, the world is on fire because they weren't prepared, you know, in some ways, little ways, yes, but not really.
So that we're not good at that.
But we're really good at, hey, population is growing so fast, we'll definitely run out of food and there's just nothing you can do about it.
And then we figured out how to make more food.
We're definitely going to run out of oil in the 70s and there's nothing you can do about it.
There's a finite amount.
I'm sorry.
You could try to argue it, but hold it, you know, keep your argument to yourself because we're just out of oil.
And then we learned to frack.
And then we built solar power and other forms.
So there's almost nothing that you can see years in advance.
I think the 2000, the year 2000 problem, yeah, computers were all going to break.
But we knew, you know, one or two years in advance.
And even like six months before that, it looked like it was dire.
And I kept saying in public, don't worry, because they know it's coming.
They know what to do.
And then sure enough, in those last few months, the people who are good at stuff figured out how to automatically find and change the dates, which was the hard part because the dates were embedded in too many parts of code.
But they just automated the search and replace, which I thought was kind of obvious in the first place, but I guess it was hard.
And it was no problem.
It was just a big dud.
So just keep in mind, everything you're worrying about today is one of those.
It's one of those things that the media made a big thing, usually because somebody could make money selling the solution to it.
That's your climate change situation.
Somebody makes money selling the solution.
So you're going to be scared to death about that forever.
So given that the media and journalists are incessantly lying to us to scare us and pitting us against each other and dividing us, should we just kill all of them?
Well, if it's these days, you want to buy my new book, Reframe Your Brain, which literally is changing people's lives.
If you look at the reviews, they're just crazy, crazy good.
And you can find me on Twitter at ScottAdamsays and on Locals, which is subscription service as my other comics that you don't get to see anywhere else and live streams and lots of other political content as well.
