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 um watched it because I was gonna have Nikki Klein on my podcast, and I did, but I was wanting to watch other interviews with her, sort of preparing it as sense.
And I thought that was an absolutely fascinating conversation, and particular one very specific moment where you asked her about whether or not Keith had had any background in hypnotism because you'd perceive that he'd done some things that seemed to correlate with their knowledge of hypnotism.
And I always wanted to ask you what it was that you saw or perceived that 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 uh you know be a justifiable use of your time for an hour or some like fast.
So they asked that question.
Well, you know, it I I believe that his uh partner was a trained hymnist.
And so there would be a lot of uh you know cross-follidation of skills.
So I think 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 out, 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 built up too much of an organization around you know why what you could imagine was a thin amount of content, but maybe it wasn't, maybe it was actually deeper than I knew.
But uh just the fact that they were so effective in getting people to change in a whole variety of ways, you know, seemed like it was like a little bit beyond a cult and maybe a little closer to just super persuasive leader.
And not to say that Maxium wasn't cult one way or the other in this conversation necessarily.
We can get it out if you want, but how does one actually start a cult?
I don't know.
Like a bona fide cult.
Yeah, you haven't thought about it?
Well I like the way you asked it as how somebody started what because it's so hard to avoid that question and not act like you haven't been thinking about starting cult.
I thought about it.
Did you buy my first answer?
How would I know?
Yeah, no, I didn't buy a minute.
Was there any credibility in that at all?
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.
Well, first of all, I I would define a cult as something that's better for the leader than it is for the people.
So like the United States government.
Hey, that don't bring us there yet.
So I I would say it's not a cult if the leader is you know transparent about let's say you selling a book or you know, being doing live streams that are monetized, and if the if the main benefit looks like it's to the people who were receiving the content, that seems like whatever is the opposite of a cult.
I mean, I I mostly teach the people who follow me on social media how to determine what is you know BS and what is real.
So theoretically, they would be applying these same rules to me.
Uh I hope because I I think I passed most of them.
And uh so if you're transparently helping people and they say you're helping me, uh, that's probably not a cult.
If if you have to, you know, burn your clothes and wear a robe and you know uh pledge all of your money to the cult leader, that's probably a cult.
And if they 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 uh I'm close to the opposite of a cult by the by that definition.
But to answer your question, how would you start a cult?
Uh I I hate avoiding questions.
You don't have to answer if you don't know if they're uncomfortable, so I'm not gonna avoid it.
I'm just guessing, but I'm uh 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 gonna talk to this guy, and next thing the room is full, and then everybody says, Oh, this is so good.
You know, they get their friends, and yeah, I imagine they start organically.
Now, maybe there's some exception to that, but um, it feels like it's probably just an organic thing because people feel like they're getting some value out of it.
Do you think that in most cases cult leaders intend to start a cult or they just realize that it's happen like it's happening, you know?
Well, uh, I'm only guessing, but my guess is that Naxium started as an actual business.
And in my opinion, they stayed a business, but there was a little cult of personality around the leader.
So next year it wasn't a cult, I would I would say I would say they were a business with some unusual characteristics, but you know, they weren't taking everybody's clothes and money, and you know, it wasn't quite like that.
For sure.
Have you ever been in a cult?
Oh, here's a good question.
Um that again, that would be definitional, but I would say no.
Yeah.
It's hard to know because if you 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 icult like characters this characteristic.
Yeah, that's the definition thing.
I didn't want to do the obvious, like, well, you know, I went to church when I was a kid or something like that.
Sure, sure.
Uh, you know, because they let me keep my clothes and my money.
Uh and I could still talk to other people.
So I've never been in any organization that told me not to talk to other people.
Yeah.
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.
Um, 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 the doctrine and the dogma uh was so intense that it behaved somewhat like a cult sometimes in terms of alienating people or shaming or guilting people,
where 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 gonna do Bible studies, like there were moments where you felt like you were like God was on the other side of the dry drywall, and if he you know, if you listen, you could hear him yelling at you, right?
Wow.
Well, that's uh that's a good experience.
I mean, obviously, humans are built for that experience because people get it from so many different realms.
Some some get it from nature, some get it from any variety of religious belief.
So we're we're wired, we're wired for that experience.
Do you think that people on average are more inclined to subscribe to someone else's vision or always sort of prefer their own?
Well, you know, the hypnotist take on this is that um our most of our opinions are assigned, right?
You know, if you if you're born in a deeply Islamic country, you're probably gonna be Islamic, and you're probably gonna think that you would have chosen it even if you hadn't been born there.
You know, we we talk ourselves into, well, you know, obviously I made up my own mind at some point, but I I think everybody's uh 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, and especially if it helps out uh helps our pocket books.
So yeah, I 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 on behalf or as an outcome of what their beliefs are, their opinions are?
Yes, absurdly.
Yes, you can do it absurdly, so which is the way all life is.
We 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 a 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 a 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 gonna act as though, as if I have a choice, but I I'm gonna 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.
You know, chemistry is chemistry, electricity is electricity.
There, there's no part of you that nobody has found is 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 for anything like that.
And indeed, all the evidence is the opposite.
In fact, uh the part of your brain that makes decisions doesn't even activate until after decisions made.
And that's been tested for years.
Something that hypnotists learn on day one, that people are not rational, they are rationalizers.
There are 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.
Right.
But they would have reasons whether they were good or bad.
So there's gonna be reasons.
What first sparked your interest in hypnotism?
When I was a kid, my mother got hypnotized to deliver um my younger sister.
And she reported that she felt no pain and she was essentially awake, you know, she remembers the whole thing, but didn't feel pain.
Now, my family doctor was also a hypnotist, and he was he was there to deliver the baby.
So honestly, as an adult, I don't know how much of that was true.
You know, did she forget?
Maybe she had an epidural and just forgot.
I don't know.
Yeah, anything'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.
Yeah, it was just a little thing with one instructor, and we would meet a couple times a week for a number of months.
And I learned hypnosis, and it's the I think the one the first or second most valuable thing I've learned, you know, outside of reading and writing in the basics.
The other was the Dale Garney D course that teaches you how to deal with people.
But once you once you learn hypnosis, almost everything you see that would be ridiculous and absurd and confusing, it all makes sense.
Yeah, 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.
Right.
But if you assume that they're rationalizers and somebody assigned their opinion, well, it makes perfect sense.
You know, on Twitter, for example, uh I just saw the most absurd-looking opinions, several of them today, which is normal.
If I used to while looking at my feed before this podcast, no names.
Uh that's okay.
But when you look at them, you just think, okay, this couldn't be a product of free will or thinking or anything like that.
These are obviously assigned opinions, and the way they describe the opinions is so, you know, uh so classic to be the like the the main uh let's say narrative on one side.
So you can pretty much identify that people on both sides.
It's not it's not something that's one side of the political spectrum.
But uh, we're rationalizers.
Once you realize that, everything else starts Making sense.
That's how you didn't.
Well, yeah, it's it's it's fascinating.
And I don't just I don't disagree at all.
I just I never thought of it like that.
So you've reframed my perspective on the on the matter.
Well, there you go.
Very that's very interesting.
So is there a way to transcend well?
I guess my first question I wanted to ask is would you say that everyone is operating in some state of hypnosis?
No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't put it in those terms because it 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, uh 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 to for some effect, right?
So we're 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.
That'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 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, yeah, it's 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 Rate, um, 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 that I can use hypnosis technique basically to make sure that it's powerful.
I mean a little bit more about that as someone who's a layman and not intimately familiar with 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 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?
And how do you do it without fucking somebody up?
Well, the risk from hypnosis is basically zero because people don't do things they don't want to do.
So the the perfect use for hypnosis would be let's say somebody wanted to uh lose their fear of flying.
That could work because they don't want to be afraid of flying.
There, there's no counter um force.
If somebody comes in and says, can you use hypnosis on me to quit smoking or to quit uh 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 uh 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, 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 that the same 30% or so.
I'm just making up a number of this 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, yeah.
If you're familiar with that world, uh 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 the bottom where they're wanting to quit uh far exceeds you know the the traction of the drink.
So you can only you can only help people who have dual forces, you know, once they've decided.
Uh, But I think I did answer the actual question.
Was it uh can you remind me what the question was?
I think it went too far.
I can't remember.
I was listening intently, and I well try to the limit let me let me give you the uh the big mind-blowing answer.
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 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.
I'm not surprised.
I was not surprised by that fact, but I was surprised that we were there already.
Okay.
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.
So once you really have a thought, it just makes sense.
Yeah.
But what what 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.
What you you're only one short leap from realizing that's how humans are built as well.
That 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 your what forms your thoughts, and then your thoughts form your actions.
So once you know that, you'd 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.
Well, let's take some climate change, right?
Let me use a better one that's also in the book.
When nuclear energy was considered dirty and risky, people a lot of people said, no, no, I don't want that dirty, risky and clear energy.
As soon as smart people reframed it, and I was part of this project, uh, 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 the version um 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 had problems.
RBMK reactors can't have meltdowns.
Yeah.
So the so the Gen 3 just haven't had them.
Generate generation four almost can't have them, right?
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, so a little more complicated than people want to spend time too.
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.
Uh the most successful reframe by far was um I didn't even know it would affect other people.
Um 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 alcoholic problem.
I just, you know, it wasn't wasn't helping me really uh 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 To yourself.
Yeah, 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.
There's a added 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 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 right.
Like everything you're to set.
Yeah.
Well, I'll I'll give you a here's one that you know is it's uh only referenced in the book as an old one.
The customer is always right.
Now that's absurd.
The customer's not always trust me, I know I'm a small business owner, they're mostly wrong.
Right.
Yeah, and I you I use the example of uh I heard a story from a McDonald's employee.
Uh there's a senior citizen at the drive up who uh was told that McDonald's has an app and he was kind of worked up about it.
He says, Why does McDonald's have an app?
Uh are you planning on building an airport?
Now, that doesn't exactly make sense.
I guess he knew there were apps for airports.
Uh but if you uh argued with the person, you get a bad result.
Because they're not really complaining about anything.
They're they're just having an interaction.
If you say that the uh if you say the customer is always right, you serve them their hamburgers and you say, I know, that's weird, huh?
You know, I don't know.
You just sort of agree with them, and everybody goes away happy.
So the customer is always right.
It's like a classic reframe that's very, very effective for fixing your business, because then they just want to go there, but it doesn't make sense.
And that that's the uh nature of reframes.
They don't have to make sense.
It's better if they do, but they don't have to.
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 uh not unintentionally necessarily, but been unaware that I was doing reframes on myself.
So for example, I started a small advertising business in 2001, and I'd been two years into my first job out of college, and it was like a dead end job.
I there's 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 for I'm seeing just making 45,000 a year and something in my 40s or 50, you know.
And so that was uh maybe an example of how I sort of dealt with or reframe my perspective on, you know, whether or not I can quit my own my job.
I've actually got a few reframes uh in that domain.
One of them is that uh risky things are safe and safe things are risky.
Now that's not true.
I and sometimes risky things are technically it's not, but right, right.
Well, but if you keep it in your mind, they 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 but your example was your risk was probably you know a little setback in money, a lot of time, maybe your ego, you know, those things were at risk.
Those are the things you want to risk.
So though those things feel the scariest, but uh 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.
Yeah, 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 they almost, you know, have a crib death, they don't they don't last very long at all.
But sometimes things have a take on a life of their own.
And uh 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 you know six people the first time.
And then I thought, oh, that's fun.
And I did it again.
So that was a case where you know 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 get a ritual or get more ammo or something.
So a lot of projects are like that.
You don't know how you're gonna do it.
I'll give you an example of the writing of my book.
So the writing of my book started as it 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 I thought of a title, uh that it 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's canceled me, but back when I had one.
Um, 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 a 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 I could fix this to make it even better.
So I'm looking for fuel, which is a dopamine hit, basically.
Yeah, because by the way, this is interesting.
Did you know that you can't move without dopamine?
This is one of the biggest things.
But it makes sense.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
So dopamine is associated not only with how you feel.
Aldova, like the movie The Awakenings, right?
As a blank go fit.
You 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 the whole the whole process of writing a book is I take, you know, 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 uh, you know, 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 uh acquisition process.
So even anything like going to the gym and getting a workout, no matter how painful the workout is, you're gonna get a dopamine hit when you're done.
You know, that you feel good and yeah, I mean your body feels better.
So the the dopamine reframe is the ultimate for getting you off the couch, getting you moving, getting you to do to do the thing.
You mentioned how people make decisions emotionally and then rationalize later.
Um 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, and not to bring up something controversial for the sake of it, but you have all these Germans, they love Hitler.
Uh 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 where I was brought up.
Like as soon as I realized how right, and I'm not saying that's necessarily true, but it's 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?
Well, that's a really big question.
The the glib answer is that people don't.
Generally speaking, you can't change somebody from a major opinion.
It's it's kind of rare.
And that's why politics is so weird.
They're 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 uh free yourself from the risk of cognitive dissonance.
Now, cognitive dissonance is a thing that um 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, you know, 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 um, 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 uh uh 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, uh, try some social things that you know are gonna go poorly.
Or you can't ask somebody on a date, they're probably not gonna say yes.
You know, just just shower yourself with embarrassment until it doesn't hurt anymore.
Because you can get used to anything.
Yeah, 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.
And uh to me, it was a Tuesday.
It just I just didn't feel it.
I thought you did it on purpose because you were so for a cavalier about it.
Like, oh fuck it.
Oh, look deal anymore, fuck it.
No, you know, at age 65, it, you know, I was looking for desperately looking for a retirement plan.
I wasn't thinking this would be it, but it worked.
And when I say retirement, I mean only doing work that I like to do.
Right.
That's that's right.
All retirement.
So that's that's where I'm at now.
I'm doing only comics that I like, which you can still see by subscription on Twitter and uh X, I mean, and uh on the locals platform, just subscription.
And because it's subscription, I can go wild and you know, do I think it works.
Anyway, so the quick answer to your question, I I digressed, is don't put yourself in a position where you have to um 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.
And that's the nature of the shower, 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.
And I let me uh let me interrupt you right there.
When was the last time that happened?
Last time that happened.
Uh about being completely wrong about something.
Um you believed for a long period of time, yeah.
Uh well, this morning I apologized for believing uh the science of something that Dr. Jordan Peterson did retweet at tweeted.
So I saw his tweet, you know, something about uh meat eaters had amazing health uh benefits if they were just doing the meat diet.
Okay, for granted.
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 uh 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.
You know, with some people answering.
So immediately upon finding that, actually it took a few days until I remembered, but I I said, Oh, I was completely wrong.
I'm an idiot, should have looked.
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.
Thank you.
Well, if I believe it is, it's you it's more likely to be real.
No, no, that's what we always believed.
Right.
So here's the argument against it.
And I don't know if I believe the argument against it, but it's blowing my mind.
Right.
The argument is that the way the placebo effect was created, or at least discovered, is a you let's say you have a new pill, and then some of the people, the the fake bill, and then you see what they do.
The person with the real pull, real pill uh 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 of 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.
Now, for years and years, everybody believed that.
Right.
You know what's wrong with the study?
It's not out of it.
The people that took the pill and got better didn't know that they had the real pills, so they they could have gotten worse.
No, but uh when I tell you, you're gonna be mad that nobody ever said this before.
Okay.
Most people don't stay the same when it comes to health.
They might get worse, might get worse.
Most people might get better at all.
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.
Unless unless you're talking about MK Ultra.
Those results have all been hitting.
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 a 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 their apartment study.
But what if the result was the same?
That would mean that the placebo effect has never been real, and every study that that just did the fake pill to the real pill was misleading you because uh 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 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 how would that tie in to this new approach to whether or not placebo's 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 I don't know whatever, right?
Yeah, I wouldn't use the placebo analogy.
I would just say that it'd be more, I think more akin to uh mass murders.
You know, if if the news has a big mass murderer, 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 uh, you know, whipping app.
Uh if Tic Tac 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 all happy about it.
Uh, there's only one thing that can happen.
Because children, especially, are super Susceptible to persuasion because they they haven't been fooled enough times yet to know that the real world is mostly fraud.
Um I hate to say that, but it's true.
And uh they can be easily convinced.
So I don't think there's a mystery to it.
Uh if you can make up anything, you um 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 they'll say, I saw it myself.
I mean, there's no doubt about this person had a soul, lion walked by, soul is going.
Yeah.
So people will believe anything if they've been exposed to the idea.
And this is why uh, this is why the best um 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 uh this candidate is known for this bad behavior, you're gonna see that behavior and every suggestion of everything they've ever done for their whole life because you've been exposed to it.
If nobody never mentioned it, probably wouldn't even notice.
You know, 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 it.
Even when the pattern isn't really there, even when the pattern is there.
Sort of like a confirmation bias is what fits in the pattern.
Right.
That's fascinating.
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 Burke and the Fountainhead was this character who had no regard for what anyone else thought of him.
And that's an incredibly empowering philosophy, uh, 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 calendar 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?
Yeah, uh, my favorite reframe for this, uh, I couldn't use the actual words in the book.
Uh do you mind some uh go ahead on cursing?
Are we okay with cursing?
Go ahead.
I already dropped the F bomb.
All right.
So uh I have a college uh friend who introduced me to uh a philosophy he'd learned from a fireman, a fireman he knew.
And it was called the fuck you philosophy.
And it goes like this.
Scott, I don't like what you're doing for X, Y, or Z. And then in my mind, but not out loud, I say, yeah, well, fuck you.
Now you say to yourself That's our fucking self, how in the world does that help?
Like, like what am I hypnotizing myself by that stupid simple thought?
And the answer is yes.
That's exactly why you know you're hypnotizing yourself.
You're using an F bomb on yourself.
Don't say it out loud, and you just think, why do I care?
Fuck you.
Yeah, this is a perfect reframe of or reframe example where the logic is just missing.
There's no there's no logic to it.
You you simply it's an attitude.
It's just an attitude.
Well, it but it's words.
See, the words are programmed you.
You know, attitude isn't enough.
You need to actually put it in a word, and then it forms actual structures in your head.
Emotional getting you a little waste, but you need the words.
So that yeah, that's a clean example.
In the book, I say, go you fudge.
That was as close as I can get to the same idea.
Yeah, so more to that point.
Uh another reframe is that the ego, your ego is not who you are.
We like to think, oh, the thing that makes me not want to be embarrassed, that's me.
Uh I'm the person who doesn't want to be embarrassed.
That's sort of a lie.
It's just this little part of you that's your ego that doesn't want to be embarrassed.
Your hands and your arms and your legs don't care.
And most of your brain is busy doing some middles.
There's this one little piece of your brain that's job is to keep you uh safe.
And so it tells you you're special.
Let me give you the reframe.
If somebody said, hey, can you do me a favor and carry this priceless piece of art uh across the street to the museum?
And you'd be like, okay, is it going to be wrapped in anything?
No, it's just across the street.
It's a priceless piece of art, just put it in your hands, walk across the street.
Well, you'd probably be panicked.
Like, you know, something could happen and a bird could crap on.
But if I said, can you take this potato across the street?
You'd say, why?
Well, it doesn't matter.
Just take this potato.
You wouldn't care if you dropped it.
You wouldn't care if a bird grapped on it, because it's just a potato.
If you can learn to think of yourself more like the potato than the priceless art, then you can move your ego out of the way.
I'm already worthless.
Just say on the potato.
Well, even people who have a low opinion of themselves have huge ego defenses still.
Right.
It's just always that.
You have you have to treat your ego as your enemy, not your identity.
Right.
Yeah, if if the thing is screaming, protect yourself, you know, 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.
And then you would do it.
You'd find that work.
Are some of the accomplishments that 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 um 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, the uh 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 there's a grandiose form, and I 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 that's the positive form of narcissism.
And then they say it and I feel good.
Uh the bad part is where you're just trying to destroy people.
That's the bad kind.
So, yeah, the 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, and say, Well, I don't want to be one of those.
Right.
Why 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.
In which if you do it right, you're also a benefit to at least one other person.
That's right.
So let's scale this macro before we wrap up.
How 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?
Well, here's a reframe that might help you uh feel better.
Okay.
I I've been around longer than you have, you know, I grew up in the 60s and 70s.
And this isn't my first uh like crisis.
America just goes through one crisis after another.
And in the current, you know, news media landscape, their business is to make you panic.
They can only get money if you're clicking things because you're afraid or angry that somebody else is going to ruin something that'll hurt you.
So fear and anger are the currency of media.
So if you're feeling afraid and you're feeling angry, it's probably not real.
It's literally an illusion.
I've had that feeling that let's say I started with uh there's gonna be a nuclear attack.
So we we built a bomb shelter in my house.
Didn't happen.
When was that?
That there's a Vietnam War, and then all the protests.
And remember, all the adults said all these hippies will never turn into good citizens.
The future is dead because uh all the kids are useless drug addicts now, and their long hair and their rock and roll.
Nothing like that happened.
Turned out to be one of the most productive generations of all time.
We're now they raised the millennials.
Yeah.
We're now talking about right, new generations as being the worthless ones.
It's like, well, but Plato did that.
Yeah, right.
All those other times, all those other times we were wrong, but we got this one right.
So it's the same thing with the crises, you know, climate change to corruption in the government.
Do you think there's more corruption in the government than there was now than there was in Abe Lincoln's time?
No.
No, Abe Lincoln.
I think, but I think the government's more powerful now than it was then.
And that's why corruption is more dangerous.
But what's more powerful?
The media?
The government, I think the government is more powerful today than it was 100%.
Well, it's bigger.
So wherever you wherever you have a big complicated thing where money's involved and lots of people and lots of time, uh, corruption is guaranteed.
You just don't know when 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 they'll just cycle from one, you know, the ozone, the you know, Chinese.
I remember that Japan was gonna eat our economy.
Do you remember when our economy disappeared and Japan took it?
Didn't happen.
And I'll bet you every single thing you're worrying about today won't 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 Adams 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.
Uh, 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 with 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 to make more food.
Uh, we're we're definitely gonna run out of oil in the 70s, and there's nothing you can do about it, and 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 learn to frack.
And then we build solar power and you know, other forms.
So there's almost nothing that you can see years in advance, like to think the 2000, um, the year 2000 problem.
Yeah, the computers were all gonna 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 they were the dates were embedded in too many parts of the 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.
Um, 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 that's your climate change situation.
Somebody makes money selling the solution, so you're gonna 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?
I'm gonna say no.
Okay, okay.
And by the way, this is I'm teasing, by the way.
Yeah, I know, but this is a media lesson for the rest of you.
There was no way to answer that question right unless I said no first.
Like you don't hold the no.
Yeah, I saw Vivek.
Well, if we did that, like, oh, he's considering it.
Yeah, I saw Vivek made made this mistake the other day, which is rare.
He doesn't make mistakes.
But he he left his no a little too long, and then it made it sound like a yes.
I forget what the topic was.
But you say 9-11 thing.
It was a 9-11, was an inside job thing on CNN.
Is that what you're thinking of?
Oh, I think it was, yes.
Yeah.
I mean he eventually said it in direct words, whatever whatever you need to say.
But say it first.
If you say it first, you're in the clear every time.
If you wait, oh, you're dead.
So where can people find you and follow you and engage with you?
Where do you want people to interact with you?
Well, if it's these days, you want to buy my new book, reframe your brain, which literally is changing people's lives.
See, if you look at the reviewers, they're just crazy.
Crazy good.
Um, and you can find me on Twitter at Scott Adams Says 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.
Thanks, man.
I really enjoyed it, and I appreciate your time.
I know it's valuable, and you got a lot of things to do, and this was awesome.
