Nov. 24, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:00:03
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| You should definitely be sampling both sides of the news. | ||
| If you're not looking at Fox News and CNN, you don't know what's happening. | ||
| Hey, this is the Rubin Report, and according to the paperwork, I'm still Dave Rubin. | ||
| Just a quick reminder, guys, to subscribe to the channel and click that bell over there. | ||
| YouTube's really been crushing us on the recommended videos, so it's most likely the only way you'll get to see our clips. | ||
| All right, then. | ||
| Joining me today is the creator of the legendary Dilbert comic strip and the author of the new book, Loser Think, Scott Adams. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Third time, man. | ||
| I get better every time. | ||
| They say three times is the charm. | ||
| First off, before I ask you anything else, because you're a man of persuasion, how was my intro there in terms of persuasion? | ||
| Do you think I persuaded people to actually click the bell, to actually subscribe? | ||
| Was I heavy-handed enough? | ||
| Was I subtle enough? | ||
| You might need a little technique. | ||
| You need to tell them there's this shortage, all their friends are doing it, everybody's talking about it, you don't want to miss it. | ||
| Limited edition. | ||
| We might take that button away if you don't click it. | ||
| You might never be able to subscribe if you don't do it right now. | ||
| Those are crazy examples, but yeah, there's probably another level you could take that to. | ||
| There's probably another level. | ||
| I should be hiring you on Retainer or something to just deal with my YouTube problems and how to get people to subscribe and that sort of nonsense. | ||
| I need another job. | ||
| Somehow I really doubt you need another job. | ||
| I'm pretty busy right now with the book, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so we're gonna talk a lot about the book, but for anyone that just hasn't seen our interviews or for some reason has never come across Dilbert or is not watching you drink coffee on Twitter, let's just do the Scott Adams two-minute bio of sort of what got you into first the cartoon strip and then now being an author and sort of a de facto leader of the deplorables online in a weird way. | ||
| Wow, I don't know if I signed up for that. | ||
| How was that for a question? | ||
| Where would you like me to start? | ||
| Well, let's just recap the career quick. | ||
| For those who didn't see the other two interviews. | ||
| I was working my cubicle jobs for 16 years when I was a younger man, and those careers hit a glass ceiling in both cases. | ||
| I can tell this story now, I couldn't tell it at the time. | ||
| But in both cases, my boss called me into the office and said, We got caught with no diversity in senior management. | ||
| And so until further notice, you're a white male. | ||
| We can't promote you. | ||
| They said it directly. | ||
| It's not an interpretation. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So after the second company told me that, I left the first one for telling me that. | ||
| I went to the phone company. | ||
| They told me the same thing after I was there for a while. | ||
| And I said, I got to find a way to not have a boss. | ||
| And so I tried a few things. | ||
| Cartooning was one of them. | ||
| Short story long, I submitted materials to the major syndications. | ||
| One liked it enough to say yes. | ||
| So, cartooning begins. | ||
| That goes well. | ||
| Dilbert turned out okay. | ||
| It did okay. | ||
| Now, I like to give the context because it sounds like I went right to it and hit gold. | ||
| But I tried other things. | ||
| I tried to be a programmer. | ||
| I tried to write other things, etc. | ||
| This was just the thing that worked. | ||
| And then time goes by and there's this President Trump situation occurred, first candidate Trump, and I was not intending to make any kind of a pivot. | ||
| I just noticed he had some skills that I thought I could see that others couldn't. | ||
| Because I'm a trained hypnotist and I've been studying persuasion in all of its various forms. | ||
| So when I saw him, I thought, well, it'd be useful for the country to know that this isn't an accident that he's starting to get more attention. | ||
| He knows how to do this. | ||
| It's technique. | ||
| And so I started calling out. | ||
| Can I pause you there for one second? | ||
| Because that's when I first met you. | ||
| You weren't even a Trump supporter at the time. | ||
| You were just sort of talking about the techniques he was using, and just because of that, everyone said, oh, Scott Adams is mad guy, he's far right, all of that nonsense. | ||
| Not that you were supporting some of his policies, necessarily, but you were just saying, this is how he is doing these things. | ||
| This is how he is gaining a following and getting his message out. | ||
| Right, so I identify as left of Bernie. | ||
| You still do now? | ||
| I still do because socially, I could give you some examples, but socially I do. | ||
| But what I eventually saw in Trump is that he had a toolkit that I thought could just do stuff other people wouldn't do. | ||
| Take on China. | ||
| That's the toolkit you want. | ||
| Be the best cheerleader for the economy. | ||
| Literally get our psychology working in the right direction. | ||
| Hey, everything's good. | ||
| Everything's good. | ||
| Why don't you invest? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's the psychology of the economy. | ||
| I thought nobody's going to do that as well as him. | ||
| And likewise, North Korea. | ||
| I thought, who could have a meeting, well before it happened? | ||
| I had already written about it. | ||
| I said, who could have a meeting with Kim Jong-un and just turn this personal, maybe find a way in? | ||
| President Trump. | ||
| So I'm a supporter in terms of his toolkit, but it doesn't mean I agree with everything he does. | ||
| Yeah, that's a hard place to be in though, right? | ||
| Because people don't really care for that second part of that sentence. | ||
| It's an expensive place to be, let me tell you. | ||
| My income's down 30%, you know, they're just things I can't do because I'm associated with saying something too nice about his skill. | ||
| Can you talk about that a little bit more? | ||
| What kind of business things have dried up? | ||
| Or even personal friends? | ||
| I don't want to say specifically where you live, but you do live in California. | ||
| You live in a place that is maybe not so hospitable to some of these ideas. | ||
| Let's just say there was a rebuilding period where I had to make new friends. | ||
| A lot of them. | ||
| What phase of that building process are you in right now? | ||
| Well, you know, I'm living a very good life with my girlfriend, Christina. | ||
| We're quite happy with the way things are. | ||
| So I don't have a complaint there. | ||
| It's just an observation that socially it became very difficult to have the same friends. | ||
| What's that like? | ||
| Because I think everyone watching this has been through that to some degree. | ||
| My book is about that. | ||
| It's about what happens as you start sort of coming out of the political closet, that you sort of get thrown under the bus by people that you thought were your friends. | ||
| Next thing you know, there's this whole other crew that's welcoming you. | ||
| I mean, it really is sort of a flip on everything you know. | ||
| Yeah, only my most, let's say, honest friends were willing to say it to my face. | ||
| And that only happened a few times. | ||
| But mostly I just noticed that my Facebook feed started to get, it was getting emptier and emptier. | ||
| I'd be like, huh, really? | ||
| Only one picture was posted all this week by everybody I know? | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| And then you see that they've unfriended you. | ||
| And then you check their feeds and you see what their political leaning is, you put two plus two together, and here we are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How does your background in persuasion and magic and the cartoon and everything sort of fit your general demeanor? | ||
| I said to you right before we started that you're one of the few people that I now know that when I see them on Twitter, I don't like them less. | ||
| There are so many people that I know that And we all are not necessarily our best selves on Twitter and online in general, but I see so many people that I kind of respect or I know, and then I look at their Twitter and I'm like, ooh, what is going on here? | ||
| And I'm sure there's people that say that about me too, but you seem like you're pretty much the same in both worlds. | ||
| But to be fair, there are a lot of people who look at my Twitter and say, you're the worst person in the world. | ||
| I used to like your comic, but now I can never laugh again. | ||
| Just in general, I can never laugh again. | ||
| Boy, you've taken away their ability not just to laugh at you, but the whole thing. | ||
| Have you noticed that the humor has just completely changed? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As has been said, you can't make a movie, a funny movie, a funny TV show. | ||
| In fact, if you watch like an old Family Guy rerun, The whole time I'm sitting there thinking, you couldn't make that today. | ||
| Couldn't do that one, couldn't do that one, couldn't do that one. | ||
| But humor has become a reality and politics and it's very entertaining and thankfully we have the funniest president we've ever had. | ||
| So as a satirist, though, what do you make of the comedy side of this? | ||
| Because, you know, it's somebody like Seth MacFarlane who created Family Guy. | ||
| You know, they've said, I don't know that they're going through with it, but I remember a few months back they had said this thing where they're not going to do And it's like, well, the show did, you know, 25 years of gay jokes, and now gays are equal, so this might be the time to make gay jokes so you can, you know, further integrate people into society. | ||
| That's what Don Rickles did, right? | ||
| It brought us all together. | ||
| Or the Simpsons, you know, they were gonna take out Apu for a while, and then Hank Azaria, the greatest voiceover actor of all time, had to apologize for doing an Indian accent. | ||
| I mean, what do you make of, not just the content, but the people behind it? | ||
| I'm generally okay with the concept that society moves forward, and things that we used to laugh at, we didn't realize were cruel, and then maybe you grow up and say, oh, that was really meaner than it needed to be, or it wasn't really trying to do that. | ||
| So I'm okay with society evolving, but the trouble is, it evolved away all the things that were the normal joke materials. | ||
| Now, it didn't affect me with Dilbert, because when you're in a family newspaper, there's a cap on what you can do. | ||
| So I was always well in the family-friendly version, talking about the workplace. | ||
| So it didn't affect me much, but it certainly changed the landscape of humor, probably forever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you feel freer? | ||
| Because I think you said to me last time you were here that you've got some F.U. | ||
| money so that you can kind of be free enough to do what you want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I didn't think it would be as expensive as it was. | ||
| Maybe I would have thought it through. | ||
| But no, it won't change my lifestyle. | ||
| And I did recognize that I was in this unique position Where I had something to say that, in my opinion, was not biased. | ||
| It was just, hey, this is what I'm seeing. | ||
| There's a little good and there's a little bad here. | ||
| So I thought it was a unique niche. | ||
| Niche? | ||
| Niche? | ||
| I'll go with either one. | ||
| I'll take either one. | ||
| I shouldn't say words I never say out loud. | ||
| I would have said niche, personally, but I would accept niche. | ||
| As I look at your lovely decorations here, I think that you are probably right. | ||
| I'm better suited to figure out the correct pronunciation. | ||
| It feels like it fits somehow, I don't know. | ||
| What do you make of just sort of how, as a guy that, you know, you sort of came out of newspapers, as you said, that now you use all of this stuff in a different way? | ||
| You know, you sit in the morning. | ||
| Do you do it every morning? | ||
| You do it pretty much every morning, right? | ||
| You get on Twitter, what do you have your phone just like locked on something and you make yourself some coffee and you just kind of talk to the world. | ||
| That's a big transition from, you know, putting a cartoon in the paper and letting it be versus this fully interactive thing. | ||
| Yeah, the difference is, so yes, I do coffee with Scott Adams on the Periscope app every day and then it moves over to YouTube about an hour later on replay. | ||
| But I started doing it because I was just interested in the election and there were people to talk to and I had more to say and I didn't feel like writing it all down all the time because every day there'd be three new things to talk about. | ||
| And then it just grew. | ||
| I didn't really have any expectation, no plan. | ||
| I wasn't planning to even monetize it. | ||
| It just grew into a thing. | ||
| And now if I miss a day, because I do it on weekends too, holidays, because people are so addicted to having the simultaneous sip, as I call it, so I do a toast of coffee with the public. | ||
| And that they miss it. | ||
| And so now it's sort of a labor of love. | ||
| I would really, really miss it. | ||
| Like, this morning my Wi-Fi wasn't working so well, and I was like, I don't know if I could do it, but I got my hotspot working, and then it made me happy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You could have done it from here. | ||
| We wouldn't have let you. | ||
| Most work doesn't make you happy. | ||
| You know, you might like your job, but it doesn't make you happy. | ||
| Whereas doing the periscopes, It's just a joy every day. | ||
| Yeah, I actually did it one morning. | ||
| I did coffee with Dave and I did fully credit you with the coffee idea. | ||
| No one was talking with coffee before you. | ||
| But I did think that there was something nice about just starting the day just sort of unloading a couple thoughts. | ||
| Just that in and of itself I thought was kind of refreshing. | ||
| Yeah, and it has the unintended consequence that I often frame things before people wake up. | ||
| So if there's something that happens, say, in the afternoon, the pundits and people haven't had much time to deal with it, and sometimes I'm the first person they hear saying, well, the way to look at this is this is important and this isn't, and somewhat accidentally I became influential. | ||
| Do you think that's sort of your primary skill, like a sort of framing of the craziness? | ||
| And we're obviously going to get to the book in a little bit, but I think that's sort of what you're doing, is you're helping people frame through just like this endless onslaught of information. | ||
| So I often say I have one superpower. | ||
| So I've got one superpower and then a bunch of like supporting talents that I've tried to piece together over time. | ||
| The superpower is simplification. | ||
| I'm just a really good simplifier, which is what makes one a cartoonist. | ||
| Cartoon is by its definition the simplest thing you can put in this little panel. | ||
| So if you can simplify, you can frame. | ||
| Because it's taking down all the noise, focusing on the thing that mattered. | ||
| So I naturally have that skill as a simplifier. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of funny because that's almost the reverse of what everyone else is doing, and this sort of is what the book is about. | ||
| Like, everyone else is pretending they know everything about everything all day long. | ||
| You know, people who can't tie their shoes can tell you about climate change and, you know, the rest of it. | ||
| So it's like you're sort of doing the reverse of what seemingly most of the blue check Twitterati You should ignore anybody who has a sense of complete certainty about a complicated issue. | ||
| Unless they're a surgeon and it's their domain. | ||
| But if it's just a guy on Twitter talking about climate change or the trade with China, they don't know. | ||
| How do you figure out who you can listen to or make some sense out of? | ||
| I just sample everybody. | ||
| I find the only way to look at all the windows is you've got to like figure out what everybody's saying and then maybe you've got a little bit of a Ability to determine which one is more sensible, sometimes not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does the endless political part of this kind of make you crazy? | ||
| Like, in that everything is political now, right? | ||
| Like, you talk about politics a lot, pretty much every day, but you don't strike me as, like, a purely political creature. | ||
| Well, my interest is actually the psychological part of it. | ||
| I'm actually completely uninterested in politics, believe it or not, even though I'm, like, dealing with it every day. | ||
| I'm interested in the age of Trump because of what that does to our collective psychology. | ||
| And I think after he's out of office, I just don't know if I'd be interested. | ||
| It's not like I'm following California politics beyond the fires and the sidewalk poop. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So you think if things somehow reset to something that I don't know that I could be interested. | ||
| at least closer to the way things used to be, right? | ||
| Two old guys, the way things used to be, real boomers here. | ||
| You think that you might actually just kind of step away or something like that? | ||
| I don't know that I could be interested. | ||
| You know, if you imagine any one of the Democrats winning, I guess I'd be, you know, super interested | ||
| if it were one of the socialists because then I might have to get involved as a citizen | ||
| just to do something to stop what could be a cataclysmic problem. | ||
| But other than that, no, I just wouldn't be naturally interested. | ||
| So what do you make about what's going on with the Democrats right now, because as I said, I had you in originally before Trump was president, just at the beginning, and I think I said this to you last time you were here, the second time, one of the reasons I was not surprised at what happened at the election was because I heard you, and I was like, I think this guy's onto something. | ||
| So if you were kind of right about that, what do you make of the split between the socialists and then what I would say are the last vestiges of some sort of old school Democrat, which is basically kind of Biden limping along and whoever else could sort of be considered moderate there. | ||
| Well, you know, it's really interesting. | ||
| I've never said this out loud, so this will be just for you. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We're going to find out. | ||
| You do know we're recording this. | ||
| Shoot. | ||
| We're going to find out for the first time if the Democrats have kingmakers, because it looks like if you left it to the public, they would pick Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. | ||
| But anybody who's paying attention knows they can't win in the general. | ||
| And they also want to win. | ||
| So if they have kingmakers, you're going to see them emerge, but maybe a little closer to the nomination itself. | ||
| I don't know what that will look like, and I don't know if they exist. | ||
| Do they exist? | ||
| Are there money people who are just going to say, look, we got to win, and these two candidates aren't going to get it done, so give us a Buttigieg, give us a Tulsi Gabbard, give us a Klobuchar, give us something else. | ||
| Do you not sense that that's what they tried to do last time, in that Bernie probably had all the momentum, but they just cut him at the knees and then felt that Hillary was the right one? | ||
| So they already tried the Kingmaker thing? | ||
| And it would almost be too obvious now? | ||
| I mean, I think you're basically right. | ||
| That does seem like what's happening here. | ||
| They threw Biden in as the firewall, right? | ||
| I think Clinton was a special case, because I think she had her own support, and that was pretty deep. | ||
| But with that support, How does it work when she's not in it? | ||
| What does that look like? | ||
| Are they still as active to do something that would be Hillary-like without a Hillary? | ||
| That's what we're gonna find out. | ||
| So basically you're saying, if you're Trump, you're going, oh, please let it be Bernie or Warren, because you just think the numbers-wise, it's just like... Or Biden, or Biden. | ||
| I mean, I throw him in there as the unelectables. | ||
| The top three are by far the most unelectable in the general election. | ||
| And I feel like- So why Biden? | ||
| So I get you on the Bernie-Elizabeth thing. | ||
| If people have just had it with the woke thing and the far-left progressives, believe me, I hear ya. | ||
| But Biden at least seems like he would maybe bring some of the people that are just kind of fed up with Trump, keep some of the centrists. | ||
| But you think then all the woke people will just try to take him out or something like that? | ||
| Well, here's a question I've been asking. | ||
| I've been asking people even in public, have you ever met a Biden supporter? | ||
| Because you're laughing because you know you've never met one. | ||
| I've met a Warren supporter, a Biden. | ||
| You can go to the list, but Buttigieg, sure. | ||
| Haven't met, you know, Klobuchar, but that's because she's low in the polls, right? | ||
| But Biden's at the top of the polls. | ||
| In fact, top of the polls even in the general against Trump. | ||
| And I've never met one? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Or have I never met one who would admit it? | ||
| Well, I guess there's a certain set of people that are just like deeply unenthused who are just like, well, it's better than that. | ||
| So they don't run around with a Biden sign or something like that. | ||
| I have to think that People who are supporting him don't know who else is in the race, and they also haven't seen him on video recently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I don't want to be unkind, and when we first started seeing him, I actually said in public, let's be kind about this, because this won't last long. | ||
| The party will take care of it on their own, then we'll have a candidate with full capability. | ||
| But I feel, honestly, I feel bad for him. | ||
| Yeah, I do too. | ||
| But at the same time, I don't feel like I can pull a punch anymore if there's something that needs to be said. | ||
| In the beginning, I was going to say, just let this take care of itself. | ||
| We don't need to pile on. | ||
| Now, maybe we do. | ||
| Maybe we do need to pile on if we see a real problem. | ||
| I just don't think he's got the The mental capacity, especially if you fast forward four years, or God help us, eight years? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What would he be in eight years? | ||
| Well, it's ironic because I think a lot of people, and obviously you would not be a Biden supporter, but you are trying to be respectful of a guy just as a human being, but it does seem like something is degrading there. | ||
| He's not only a human being, but he's been a great servant of the public. | ||
| He's apparently well-liked on both sides. | ||
| I have a lot of good to say about him, but it's just not his time. | ||
| Do you think we're all too focused on politics? | ||
| As a guy that's not a pure political beast, but is, you know, framing it for a lot of people? | ||
| I wonder how many are focused. | ||
| You know, if you walk down on the sidewalk and you said, name a few people running for president on the Democrat side, how many could they even name? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Could they find Ukraine on the map, to use that example? | ||
| No, that I know they can't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I feel like you and I are, we're living this Twitterverse where it seems like it's the most important thing, but maybe it's not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does that, do you think, sometimes make it a little harder to judge what's actually going on? | ||
| Like, you know, before 2016, it was like, because we existed in that world, we could see something that other people couldn't see. | ||
| Now that world has sort of collided with mainstream in a bigger way, so it does make it harder to track some of these things. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Well, I think it's hard for all of us to see outside of our bubble. | ||
| So that's what we're going to talk about. | ||
| And so I don't imagine that I'm free from that. | ||
| The best I can do is use some technique to try to see the other bubbles as best I can. | ||
| So putting the effort in is the best you can do. | ||
| You just can't tell if you're seeing the whole field. | ||
| That's the trouble. | ||
| So speaking of the bubble, let's move it to the book. | ||
| Now, first off, the top title is Loser Think. | ||
| We'll get to the subtitle in just a sec. | ||
| But when you're titling a book, were you afraid to go, if I call this thing Loser Think, the average guy, and as you know, because I just wrote this thing and we're dealing with titles and all this stuff, it's like, you want them to see it and be able to grab it. | ||
| But did you think, oh, If we put this out there and it says, loser thing, people are going to be afraid because they think if they're going to touch it, that means they're a loser or something like that. | ||
| What's the persuasion level you were working with? | ||
| So yes, we thought about it. | ||
| Here, here's, I'll just talk it through. | ||
| This is how we thought about it. | ||
| Number one, I said, if I give it this title, will people ask me, why'd you give it this title? | ||
| Isn't that a mistake? | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| Bingo. | ||
| Everybody asked me that. | ||
| I just fell right into the trap. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, and that was anticipated that people would wonder about. | ||
| Two, because there exists the Dummies series of books and the Idiot's Guide, it's been proven that people will buy a book that says they're an idiot on it. | ||
| And lots of them. | ||
| The series, the Dummies and the Idiot's Guide books are enormous. | ||
| So clearly not. | ||
| But here's the other insight I had because of Dilbert. | ||
| When I wrote Dilbert, it was of course making fun of your boss most of the time. | ||
| But bosses kept buying my material. | ||
| And I would be like, why are you buying it? | ||
| In my head. | ||
| And they would say, this perfectly describes my boss. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Nobody thought it was them. | ||
| So we're primed to think this is about someone else. | ||
| So I believe most people are picking this up and saying one of two things. | ||
| They're saying, ha ha, this will be fun. | ||
| We'll mock all those people. | ||
| And it does if they want to see unproductive thinking techniques in the book. | ||
| And two, this would be a perfect gift for my brother-in-law. | ||
| And it'll be like a private joke that that's the title. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So the subtitle is How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America. | ||
| Now that makes a lot of sense to me, because that seems like pretty much everything that's happening at every level, at academia, at the political level, at the media level. | ||
| Do you mean it at sort of every level, like just across the board? | ||
| Well, it's certainly making everything worse. | ||
| And the problem is that everybody thinks they have this thing called common sense, and therefore they think they're arguing about politics or priorities or something, and often they're not. | ||
| They're just unproductively thinking so that the thing they're saying is actually nonsense. | ||
| It's not an opinion. | ||
| It's not a priority. | ||
| It's just sort of nonsense, because they don't know how to productively think. | ||
| So I thought, well, I'll try to make it accessible. | ||
| Instead of writing a, you know, how to do logic kind of book, which nobody's going to read, I'll just give you the friendly anecdote version that you could absorb pretty easily. | ||
| Alright, so if you're trapped in your bubble and it's becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, What's the first step to breaking out of your loser think? | ||
| Well, it's good to know what all the various parts of loser think are, and I go through them, like don't be a mind reader, don't predict the future with analogies, history doesn't predict, slippery slope isn't real, fairness... I want to go through a few of those. | ||
| Without detail, so it's good to know what those are, but beyond that, You should definitely be sampling both sides of the news. | ||
| If you're not looking at Fox News and CNN, you don't know what's happening. | ||
| Because I've tried doing that. | ||
| Try to pick a topic, and before you've heard what the other says, just consume one silo. | ||
| And then you go over to the other one and you're like, what? | ||
| I didn't know anybody was saying this. | ||
| Are you telling me these facts are real? | ||
| And it doesn't matter which way you're going. | ||
| They're completely different. | ||
| But is it almost impossible to break out of that? | ||
| I mean, we all talk about this all the time. | ||
| We're catering news to ourselves. | ||
| The algorithms are feeding us things that reinforce our thoughts already. | ||
| But is it almost impossible to break out of it? | ||
| Because in a weird way, psychologically, we don't wanna break out of it. | ||
| I know some people do. | ||
| But that most of us kinda, we just... | ||
| You know, to not sound corny, that's the safe space we find and we're good and we're reinforced and it's warm. | ||
| This is why I sort of sneak in the back door. | ||
| If I said to you, Dave, I'm going to get you to change teams, whatever your team is, Democrat, Republican, doesn't matter, you would immediately say, you know, you'd be like, everything you're shooting at me is bouncing off my force field. | ||
| But if I say, here's how you should think, In any situation, you wanna have something to compare something to, a very simple statement. | ||
| People will accept that, because that's just reasonable on its surface. | ||
| And then you take that through, all right, now apply this to your thinking. | ||
| So you can sometimes get people to talk themselves out of their position by giving them better tools, but you can't just say, change teams, because you're on the wrong team. | ||
| How much of this do you think is just base human psychology, just sort of the stuff we're born with, that certain people are just sort of more programmed To go to just things that reinforce their beliefs, and some people are just programmed to actually being a little bit more open. | ||
| Well, I think all of these things have a, you know, you're born with a certain set of gifts and intelligence, et cetera. | ||
| But in Loser Think, I talk about how the experience you've had across domains is what gives you better vision. | ||
| So, for example, if you'd never been exposed to economics, I've got a degree in economics, you wouldn't know how economists think. | ||
| So you might run into a concept like a sunk cost. | ||
| And if you've never been exposed to this, you might say, well, I have common sense. | ||
| And people would say, we've already spent all this money, so we better keep investing because I don't want to waste that money I already spent. | ||
| That's not sensible. | ||
| An economist would say, no, the money that's gone should not influence your next decision because it's gone. | ||
| Now, the first time you hear that, you say, oh, Yeah, like you don't need to read a book on it. | ||
| You just hear it. | ||
| And so I tried to make it as simple as that. | ||
| You just gotta hear it once and you say, oh, yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, so you don't think, so you think we all have sort of pre-programmed abilities to be flexible on some of these things, but you think that that can pretty much always be broken through at different levels? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, people are more or less locked in, more or less team players, more or less capable of Yeah. | ||
| Do you think the internet's changing that, just relative to the speed that we get information and the fact that you can now go out there and find roughly a gajillion voices in two minutes? | ||
| That might be able to help break some of your stuff? | ||
| I'll tell you the biggest problem, I think, and this is a brand new thought, is that we are, as humans, we're copiers. | ||
| We're imitators. | ||
| So if you wade into the internet, what kind of thinking style are you going to see? | ||
| The worst. | ||
| And people will imitate it. | ||
| So they'll say, for example, hey, your side did X. And what's the most common response? | ||
| Yes, I did, actually. | ||
| What did that help? | ||
| That helped nothing. | ||
| It wasn't even on the topic. | ||
| You didn't even talk about your topic. | ||
| But if they're going to do it, we have to do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So some of it is, of course, power and influence and persuasion and all that. | ||
| Nobody's trying to think. | ||
| So you have to be able to weed out, okay, was anybody even trying? | ||
| Or were they just persuading? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think most of us just don't want to try, though, at some level? | ||
| I mean, most people just kind of, they don't want to think about things that seriously because that brings up a lot of deep existential stuff. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Maybe there's lots of reasons. | ||
| We don't want to be wrong. | ||
| We don't like to be embarrassed. | ||
| We don't like to change our mind. | ||
| We don't want to disappoint the team. | ||
| And we're influenced by what we see, so we just join in and say, well, that's what my team's doing. | ||
| I guess I'll do some of that. | ||
| So you talk about some of the dumb ideas that are floating around so that thus create our own bubbles. | ||
| So I wanted to go through a couple of them because we hear these all the time and they sort of sound right but you don't quite think they are right. | ||
| We know when history will repeat itself and when it won't. | ||
| We hear this all the time. | ||
| History repeats. | ||
| Yes, history repeats itself. | ||
| And because it has a phrase, and we've heard the phrase, we give it weight. | ||
| Because the brain will say, well, it's a saying. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I've seen that on a bumper sticker, so there must be something about that. | ||
| But it's an illusion caused by the fact that we don't notice when history doesn't repeat. | ||
| Which is most of the time. | ||
| And why is it that history doesn't repeat? | ||
| Because it can't. | ||
| There's never two situations that are the same. | ||
| The variables should change. | ||
| And if nothing else has changed, you saw what went wrong the last time. | ||
| So you fix it this time. | ||
| So it's a complete illusion that we can predict the future because this time is like that last time. | ||
| The most you can do is say people are still selfish, Stupid, and all those things. | ||
| So if you put them in a situation where they can steal, well sure, they'll steal. | ||
| You know, not everybody, but if you have enough people introduced to a situation where you can steal something, somebody's gonna take a run at it. | ||
| But that's not really history repeating. | ||
| Right, so you would say, a better way to say it would be something like, themes repeat themselves? | ||
| Just because it's based in our nature, not the specific events? | ||
| I would even make it smaller than that. | ||
| I would say people are people. | ||
| So you know they're going to be selfish and all the qualities of people. | ||
| So any situation you put them in, you should say, well, let's look at cause and effect. | ||
| If I put that person where the free money is, I should expect money to be taken, but not because history repeats. | ||
| It's just a simple cause and effect. | ||
| So if it doesn't repeat itself, what would you say to all the history majors right now that are listening to this? | ||
| What would be the point of being a historian if not to have some sort of road map for the future? | ||
| Well, indeed, the history is what prevents it from repeating in some sense, because you know what didn't work. | ||
| So you might see history repeat when it works, So if something worked before, you might see somebody try to try it again. | ||
| But even, you take anything like North Korea. | ||
| What was the main thing people said when President Trump got elected was, well, talking to North Korea will never work, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And maybe it won't, but he got it further than anybody else. | ||
| He got it into a personal level. | ||
| It wasn't anything like history. | ||
| So no matter how many times history had repeated, you introduced this whole new variable of President Trump, and then history doesn't count anymore. | ||
| What do you make of that concept, that people who said one thing two years ago say the complete opposite? | ||
| And I don't mean that they've flipped all their beliefs, but that it's always a team thing. | ||
| It's like if Obama had gone to North Korea and talked to Kim Jong-un, a certain set of people, the Republicans in this case, would have been like, he's crazy, we can't talk to these people. | ||
| If Trump does it, we can do it. | ||
| You can flip that the other way. | ||
| I guess that goes to what you're saying about the team thing, but do you think people realize The sort of absurdity? | ||
| I'm not talking about evolving over a period of time with a certain set of opinions. | ||
| I'm talking about because the players are different that you just completely take an opposite side. | ||
| One of the great mysteries is you watch somebody who doesn't agree with you and they're doing that crazy thinking like you mentioned, and you watch them and you think to yourself, Is that real? | ||
| Do they really think that? | ||
| And I spend time doing that too, but one of the advantages I have is, having studied hypnosis, I understand people to be irrational most of the time. | ||
| And I understand them to be rationalizers, and I understand confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. | ||
| So my take is that most of the time they actually believe what they're saying, And because they can't see it. | ||
| They're the ones who are blinded to it, so it looks like it makes sense to them. | ||
| Do you think there's some reason, like an obvious sort of psychological reason that the people who seem most obsessed by politics on a day-to-day basis, and I'm not talking about like sort of the broad theme stuff, but as you said before, you're really sort of uninterested in politics, but the people that are obsessed with, you know, the nitty-gritty Excuse me, the nitty-gritty, what happened today, what happened tomorrow, or what's happening tomorrow. | ||
| There's a reason that they're so miserable, because it's like an untenable system that they're playing with all the time. | ||
| Well, you know, people are different, so it's probably all different reasons. | ||
| I do it for entertainment, and I think other people are drawn in for the fight. | ||
| They like the fight. | ||
| So, what's my fight today? | ||
| Ooh, there's a new headline. | ||
| Let me get into that fight. | ||
| There's definitely a, I don't know, dopamine or serotonin hit. | ||
| That people get just from making a good point. | ||
| It's like, ah, got that guy. | ||
| He said something bad about this celebrity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah, got him. | |
| Got him. | ||
| Somehow I think if this was a real fight, like involving weapons, they would be much more reserved. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I know I would. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Okay, let's plow through a couple of these others. | ||
| This is a good one because we hear some version of this all the time online. | ||
| We can tell the difference between evidence and coincidences. | ||
| Yeah, so we go through our life thinking that things matter. | ||
| Let me give a perfect example. | ||
| If you were a fiction writer, and you were writing a book, or even reading a book, and somebody put on a watch, you'd say to yourself, oh, later, Something's going on with the watch. | ||
| Pay attention to the watch because the author included that for a reason. | ||
| So it's easy for some people who have some experiences to imagine everything's connected. | ||
| Musicians, poets, artists. | ||
| They imagine a connected world because that's what they live in. | ||
| Whereas the economist, the scientist, the lawyer, if they're not advocating, would say, oh, you've got to look at all these coincidences individually and say, all right, is this real or just a coincidence? | ||
| So we are creatures who think coincidence matters, and if we don't really police ourselves We create a bubble by imagining our little coincidences are meaningful. | ||
| I give one example in the book. | ||
| I was walking home one day and I had bought some Sharpies, because I like them for a variety of reasons, and I took it out of my bag, literally was holding it in my hand, and Fox News was on, and Greg Guffield was on his show, and he says, I love Sharpies! | ||
| I really love Sharpies! | ||
| I'm like, seriously? | ||
| Wallets in my hand? | ||
| And how many times have you seen the TV show? | ||
| But Scott, there are no coincidences, I thought. | ||
| What could this mean? | ||
| So you're saying that's not the universe talking to you? | ||
| Because we've all had that moment, and you go, whoa, that has some meaning. | ||
| By the way, I've been on Gutfeld's show many times. | ||
| He loves Sharpies. | ||
| He does. | ||
| He's got like a whole thing of Sharpies. | ||
| There's Sharpies in all his drawers. | ||
| They're just filled up with Sharpies. | ||
| He and I could have a club of just people who love Sharpies. | ||
| But do you think truly that there's, do you think there's no chance that there's meaning in that sort of thing? | ||
| Like I know the Sharpie example's kind of simple, but you know when you're having some deep, deep thought, and then you're watching TV, and then suddenly a character says like exactly what you're thinking. | ||
| Now I get it, I get you're just talking about sort of law of averages also, like every now and again this is gonna happen, you're never gonna notice the ones when it doesn't happen, which is all day long, so I get that, but do you think that there is, There's no meaning or value to that? | ||
| Well, not the examples that we gave. | ||
| There are no meanings to those unless we're simulation and we're software and there's a little code reuse going on. | ||
| Maybe we'll end with that. | ||
| Let's end with the simulation stuff. | ||
| Let's stay with the book for now, but we'll go to simulation. | ||
| So short of that, it can mean something in a criminal situation. | ||
| So if somebody gets killed and their spouse has booked a flight out that morning, But what about just in a personal context? | ||
| maybe that means something. | ||
| So certainly in a political context, or I'm sorry, the legal context, | ||
| you have to track 'em down. | ||
| But what about just in a personal context? | ||
| Like if you find meaning in something that may be purely coincidental, | ||
| or however else you wanna describe it, ridiculous or whatever, | ||
| but if you personally find some meaning in it? | ||
| Here's my advice. | ||
| We're bombarded with coincidences all the time. | ||
| When they work in your favor, you should say, well, that means something. | ||
| That means I should write this book. | ||
| That's telling me that I'm going to get a check in the mail. | ||
| And if it looks like a coincidence that's telling you something bad's going to happen, you say, coincidence. | ||
| All right, seems fair enough. | ||
| The simplest explanation is usually true. | ||
| So people like to win arguments by saying, yours is complicated, but mine's the simple one. | ||
| And the problem is, first of all, the world sometimes is complicated. | ||
| So pick any major thing in the news, it's pretty complicated. | ||
| But the real problem is that we all think our explanation is the simple one. | ||
| So that's where the cognitive problem comes in. | ||
| My example I use is, how did the world get here? | ||
| Well, ask the creationist. | ||
| God did it. | ||
| Can't get any simpler than that. | ||
| God did it. | ||
| Ask the scientist who's the evolutionist. | ||
| How did it all get here? | ||
| Gradual change. | ||
| Big bang. | ||
| Simple. | ||
| Which one is the simple one? | ||
| Well, everybody thinks their explanation is the simple one. | ||
| Especially the one variable people who look at the complicated thing and say, well, one variable. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Simple. | ||
| It's that one variable. | ||
| So which was it? | ||
| God or Big Bang? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Simulation. | |
| Try to keep that away from me. | ||
| We will end with simulation then. | ||
| But sometimes we need some simple answers right? | ||
| In a complex world do you think? | ||
| Well, it helps if you can simplify, but you don't want to oversimplify, and then how do you know? | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| So every situation is a little bit different. | ||
| But certainly if you're looking at, let's say, climate change, and I don't want to get into that in any detail, but to just say, I'm shaking my head because I can barely say this out loud. | ||
| One of the things I hear the most from the skeptics is that the scientists forgot to account for the sun. | ||
| The sun. | ||
| Wait, they claim that the scientists forgot about the sun? | ||
| That they didn't account for solar flares or solar activity. | ||
| And I always say the same thing, which is, all right, it's your job to figure out why the Earth is warm. | ||
| You thought of the sun. | ||
| The sun might be in there. | ||
| You might have gotten something wrong, but it wasn't because you didn't look at it. | ||
| You thought of the sun. | ||
| So come up with a better skepticism. | ||
| Skepticism is fine. | ||
| But if you simplified it to, I think they forgot to look at the sun. | ||
| You're not helping. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny you bring up climate change, though, so without going too far down that rabbit hole, it reminds me of something like the Paris Accords, first when they got signed, and then when they got retracted, or whatever you wanna call it, by Trump, it was like, all these people, like, it all sounds good, we're gonna cut these emissions, we're gonna do this, we'll pay for this. | ||
| Like, it all kind of sounds good in a simple sense, if you don't think about it, and then we are now out of the Accords, from what I understand, we're actually exceeding many of the limitations that were originally signed, and there was no mechanism to force anyone to actually do anything, that it was literally just a piece of paper, but all these people were screaming about it, like it was the end of the world, and we see this with net neutrality. | ||
| It was the end of the world. | ||
| Is your internet still working? | ||
| Barely. | ||
| Oh, right, you had a Wi-Fi problem this morning. | ||
| But that basically, we sort of go from end of the world to end of the world to end of the world situations. | ||
| Yeah, we're locked into whatever is the scariest thing. | ||
| What's the scariest thing? | ||
| But with the example of the Paris Climate Accord, if you have, let's say, more experience in this world, Probably nothing gets solved with that meeting. | ||
| And we had an agreement and then everybody kept it. | ||
| That's sort of not the real world. | ||
| But that just makes a lot of people feel good, right? | ||
| Like when I've mentioned this and then people confront me about it and then I say to them, well what was in it? | ||
| Or was any country You know, actually, was there any mechanism to force countries to abide by it? | ||
| Or what has happened since we got out? | ||
| I mean, just basic questions. | ||
| And I'm not saying I'm an expert in this by any stretch, but just asking sort of the simple questions. | ||
| People that are screaming about it suddenly admit they know nothing about it. | ||
| I think they trusted their side too much because they've heard it's important. | ||
| They hear it on the news all the time. | ||
| Well, it must be important. | ||
| Do I need to know the details? | ||
| All the smart people just said it's important. | ||
| Generals and politicians, senators. | ||
| If they're all saying it's important and you're stuck in your silo and that's all you're hearing, It's reasonable to think it is, without you knowing all the details, but like you said, you can uncover that flaw so easily. | ||
| What do you do with people once you've sort of uncovered the flaw, and now they're kind of freaking out? | ||
| Because they don't want that to happen, right? | ||
| That's kind of scary. | ||
| Well, I do the method that you just described. | ||
| You do it in question form. | ||
| If you do it in statement form, it bounces off. | ||
| If you do it in question form, it's like, well, what was it about the climate agreement The Paris Climate Agreement that you thought was the good part. | ||
| What was the part that was really going to make a difference? | ||
| How would that affect China versus how would it affect the United States? | ||
| What would it do to employment? | ||
| What would it do to our economy? | ||
| So I just ask the questions and let people talk themselves out of it. | ||
| You can affect people's confidence in the short term and then they have to go back and re-engineer their thoughts and sometimes they might change. | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| Definitely not always. | ||
| You'll appreciate this. | ||
| A couple weeks ago, I was having a debate. | ||
| I was having a conversation with an old friend about the trans issue. | ||
| And I said, I'm completely fine with trans people, obviously. | ||
| I want everyone to be treated equally and with the same laws and with respect and all those things. | ||
| I said, all I'm saying is that we can't say that biology doesn't exist, that there is a difference between male and female. | ||
| That's all I said. | ||
| And he said to me, Dave, you're not thinking with quantum physics. | ||
| And I said, can you tell me a little bit about how quantum physics is related to this? | ||
| And he goes, now you're just trying to get me. | ||
| And I thought, that is just the perfect example of all of this. | ||
| He just had this idea that quantum physics has something to do, if I could just think in some other realm, then somehow biology of this world would actually have nothing to do with anything. | ||
| And then when I asked him about it, he didn't know anything about it. | ||
| You might be the best debater of all time, because you chased him into another dimension of reality. | ||
| He was like, oh no, this reality is not serving me well. | ||
| He just disappeared. | ||
| He was just a smoke. | ||
| Just gone. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Stay in your channel! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The worst advice you could ever give or ever get is stick to your day job, stay in your channel, stay in your lane. | ||
| And I hear this all the time, especially when I transition from cartooning. | ||
| And even before that, when I tried to transition from my cubicle life to cartooning, not a lot of support. | ||
| Not a lot of people saw that that would work out for me. | ||
| But if you imagine, what would the world look like if everybody took that advice? | ||
| Well, people making bicycles would never try to make an airplane, for one. | ||
| Steve Jobs wouldn't be inventing any companies and computers. | ||
| So you were right down the line, and people leaving their lane was all the good stuff. | ||
| Now, I also tell people to build their talent stacks, I call it. | ||
| So if you're good at this or a few things, leave your lane a little bit and pick up a few other skills. | ||
| You might get embarrassed, you might get tired, but boy are you going to be happy when you've got combined skills that are practically a superpower. | ||
| Is that another one of those things where it just sort of depends a little bit about how you're wired? | ||
| Like some people are just all in on one thing and that is how they can operate their best, and some people are a little more designed that they can Yeah, there's certainly a personal difference. | ||
| There are some people who just want to stay doing what they're doing and do the best they can. | ||
| kind of can't do it. Or are you saying that's always your job to kind of overcome it? | ||
| Yeah, there's certainly a personal difference. There are some people who just want to stay | ||
| doing what they're doing and do the best they can. And if you're Tiger Woods, that's a great | ||
| Tiger Woods doesn't also need to know accounting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, except maybe it would help him. | ||
| Somebody else is managing his money and that's never safe. | ||
| So, you can usually tell if you're in that situation. | ||
| Yeah, I need to just run on this horse as long as I can. | ||
| But for most of us, in just ordinary life, I can only be a high-end cartoonist because I assembled a bunch of pretty good skills that anybody could have done. | ||
| I draw like a drunken monkey, I like to say. | ||
| But it got better over time. | ||
| I got better tools, figured out how to do it. | ||
| I didn't have any experience writing humor, but I figured it out over time. | ||
| And I had some business experience, so I had sort of a canvas to write on. | ||
| So, I'm a perfect example. | ||
| A bunch of mediocre skills that just work pretty well together. | ||
| So I want to back up to something we started with here about your career because it does fit sort of loser thing. | ||
| The idea that a guy who I'm guessing you were probably decent at both of your day jobs when they told you, probably halfway decent, were you probably not totally in dereliction of your duties, fair to say? | ||
| I showed up on time. | ||
| Okay, you showed up on time. | ||
| So you were probably pretty decent at what you did. | ||
| The idea that they said, okay, well at two different jobs, you know, diversity, you're in effect a straight white male, like we're just, you're running out of room here. | ||
| That strikes me as like the worst sort of loser think of the day. | ||
| Like people have tricked everybody into thinking that that diversity matters. | ||
| You know, I surprise people when I tell them that I'm not I don't have a feeling about those times that you would expect. | ||
| I don't feel like society made a mistake. | ||
| Because sometimes you need to use a hammer, and sometimes you need to use a scalpel, and you have to know the difference. | ||
| In those days, when there was literally just no diversity in senior management of two major companies in the Bay Area, for the newspaper to get on them about it, and I think that's how it happened, the newspaper got on, Perfectly appropriate. | ||
| And for them to say, look, this is a sledgehammer situation, and today you're the nail. | ||
| I remember thinking of it as like, that's actually a pretty good societal goal. | ||
| And in fact, we're much closer to that reality, far better diversity. | ||
| I think we're better off. | ||
| I think it was good. | ||
| I just happened to be on the wrong side of the sledgehammer at that. | ||
| So while it was bad for me, I don't have An activist opinion that it shouldn't have happened because I think it got us to a better place. | ||
| That's interesting, but do you think that part of the problem is that we sort of take a sledgehammer to everything now? | ||
| So I don't fully agree with the premise there, but because I just think those things are bad no matter what. | ||
| It's just too against the individual for my personal taste, but I'll go with you. | ||
| Do you think that the problem now is that so much has changed? | ||
| We have diversity pretty much everywhere in many ways. | ||
| it benefits you, and I'm not talking about diversity of thought, I'm talking about diversity of your color and | ||
| gender and the rest of it, but we're still always hitting everything with a sledgehammer | ||
| now, and we don't go in with the sort of softer tools. | ||
| Yeah, I'm very much... | ||
| I guess my feeling is that if you've got slavery, you need your biggest weapon, the Civil War. | ||
| If you've got no civil rights, then you need the civil right movement marching the streets smaller than the nuclear weapon. | ||
| And I think we've gotten to the point where you're talking about things like institutional racism. | ||
| In which case, my preference is to teach strategy, because there does exist some amount of bias, etc., that will affect some amount of people. | ||
| But we now live in a world where everybody can find a place where the bias works for them. | ||
| There's no Fortune 500 company who doesn't want to hire a qualified Women, black person, gay, LGBTQ, you name it, they all want them. | ||
| If you walk in the door and you've got the right degree, you know, right experience, and you say, and also, you've got a job. | ||
| So if you're not teaching strategy, instead of worrying about this one place you can't get a job, leave there. | ||
| So how do you move then? | ||
| If you've succeeded using the hammer, it's hard to give up that hammer, right? | ||
| Well, in the political terms, going big is always good. | ||
| You want to be AOC if you're going to be the new politician. | ||
| It's like, what's the biggest thing I can say to set everybody's hair on fire? | ||
| And then if I need to back up... The world's ending in 12 years, don't forget it! | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty good. | ||
| Persuasion-wise, it's pretty good. | ||
| And then you shrink it back as you need it. | ||
| Try not to confuse the hyperbole and the politics with what's the right tool. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you think AOC is just like some other version of Trump? | ||
| Some like reverse version of Trump, just using those same things? | ||
| She is the real deal. | ||
| So I identified her early on. | ||
| People who have similar backgrounds. | ||
| Mike Cernovich, for example, almost identically at the same time. | ||
| We just said, uh-oh, watch out for this one. | ||
| This was before she was AOC. | ||
| She didn't even have the AOC name yet. | ||
| And sure enough, she was like a rocket and everybody could see it. | ||
| Now, I believe her backstory is that she was selected In kind of a, almost an American Idol fashion. | ||
| Yeah, people don't know there are YouTube videos that people can check this out. | ||
| They like basically picked her because she ticked off all the boxes. | ||
| So out of all the candidates, she was the strongest one. | ||
| So we should not be surprised that she performs better than a random person. | ||
| So as a guy though that likes or at the very least understands Trump's use of persuasion and go big, scale back. | ||
| Now watching AOC do it, and I'm guessing you probably agree with many less of her policies, are you worried that that's all politics will become? | ||
| Or has the ship already sailed? | ||
| Is that just where we are now? | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| Well, first of all, I would say she uses hyperbole the same way Trump did. | ||
| So when Trump was running for president and he was talking about rounding up 14 million illegals, I just said, that's not gonna happen. | ||
| So I never really took that seriously. | ||
| When she says we're gonna die in 12 years, I don't really take that seriously. | ||
| But are they persuading in the right direction? | ||
| Is it good to have tight border security that you can decide to open it up as much as you need or close it when you need to? | ||
| Yes, that would just be a good system. | ||
| No matter how many people you decide to let in. | ||
| Right, that's where the conversation is. | ||
| That's a separate question. | ||
| Similar with AOC, she's got an interest in climate change. | ||
| I think the scientists have made a case that CO2 warms things. | ||
| I know some people watching this will disagree, but most of the scientists say that. | ||
| Now, there's certainly questions about the predictions and what's going to happen in the future, and I would differ there. | ||
| But she is moving people in a way that they weren't moved before. | ||
| It probably is an issue worthy of movement. | ||
| Some of the crazy things I think she would have to pull back if she were a national candidate, and I think she would. | ||
| But is there just a general danger, we don't have to make this about her specifically, that if politics just becomes sort of people throwing out Just every theory without really knowing anything behind it. | ||
| So I guess I can't make that not really about her because I just don't think she's that bright. | ||
| I mean, I just don't. | ||
| I think she's being, you know, they selected her and now I think she's being manipulated and they took a sort of pretty girl who just likes getting up there and saying anything. | ||
| And that strikes me as actually dangerous. | ||
| Well, first of all, I completely disagree on her intelligence and capability. | ||
| Well, no, I'm not saying her capability is not good. | ||
| I think she's playing a role, so the capability is there. | ||
| But I think the actual intelligence behind it, I don't think is that great. | ||
| I think maybe we're talking about a different type of intelligence here? | ||
| Certainly she has the political intelligence, she has the psychological intelligence, social intelligence. | ||
| And she obviously knows more than most people about the topics because of her job. | ||
| But I would say that she's a productive part of the conversation. | ||
| Because you need somebody that strong on these big issues like climate change so that you know you're getting a good back and forth and it meets somewhere in the sensible middle. | ||
| So I think she's a productive Part of the conversation, even when I don't agree with her. | ||
| Let me give you a test. | ||
| Here's a test. | ||
| A very simple test to find out if she's smart or not. | ||
| The answer to climate change, even if you don't think it's a problem, is generation four nuclear, or at least being pro-nuclear. | ||
| If you see her never come out in favor of nuclear as part of... Ah, I like where you're going with this. | ||
| As part of the solution, then she has abandoned reason. | ||
| Because even the people on her side, Cory Booker, there's several of the people running for presidency... Most of them are not, though, right? | ||
| Most of them are not. | ||
| I think it's half and half or something, so I think three, I know, I can't remember, maybe Yang. | ||
| But some of the smartest people... Yeah, I think Yang is four. | ||
| I think. | ||
| We should confirm that. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| But some of the smartest people who are running as Democrats are already there, and really, that will tell you. | ||
| Is she just playing it for effect, or does she want to solve the problem? | ||
| All right, that's an interesting take. | ||
| I guess we'll see in the next couple months. | ||
| Well, I guess we'd ultimately find out depending on where Bernie falls against it, but I'm pretty sure Bernie's against most nuclear, right? | ||
| Bernie's against. | ||
| And she's now a Bernie surrogate, so maybe she's not as smart as you think. | ||
| Well, I understand she started with Bernie, and she's probably mostly influenced by him. | ||
| And Bernie, by the way, I have so much respect for Bernie while hating his policies. | ||
| Man, that guy's a force of nature. | ||
| He really changed the conversation. | ||
| I don't want it to go where he wants it to go. | ||
| But I love the fact that he's got to introduce this body of thought. | ||
| All right, all this sensible talk aside, let's shift for these last few minutes into the simulation, because I see this conversation happening a little bit here and there and on some other podcasts and things. | ||
| I don't know that we've really ever talked about it on this show before. | ||
| What do you mean the world could be a simulation? | ||
| What is all this crazy talk? | ||
| Let me say first of all that smart people also agree with us. | ||
| So Elon Musk, for example, has a similar view. | ||
| This comes from Nick Bostrom, a physicist. | ||
| So serious people, and in fact in Silicon Valley, near where I am, it's very common for people to believe this is true, but you don't talk about it too much. | ||
| You're going to find out why. | ||
| Private dinner parties. | ||
| You'll find out why people don't talk about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the idea is that our current world is approaching a place where we could create a software simulation of little creatures in a simulated world that are just software who would act and believe, if you can use that word, that they're real. | ||
| Now, maybe we're not quite there, but you could certainly imagine in your lifetime we'll be there easily, maybe 10 years, 20 years. | ||
| So the thinking is that if it ever happens, By any civilization, it'll happen lots of times. | ||
| And if it's such a good simulation, the creatures in the simulation will someday create their own simulation. | ||
| Now, what would you look for to find out if we're a software simulation who thinks we're real or an original species? | ||
| Well, here are some of the things you would do if it's software. | ||
| First thing you do is that you would not create all of the history. | ||
| You would create it on demand. | ||
| So, for example, if we discover a new planet, that would never be written until we see it. | ||
| Now, in physics, can we show that an observation causes a wave to collapse? | ||
| I don't know what I'm talking about right now, by the way. | ||
| I hope nobody's watching this, because when I get into physics, it gets all crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You had me till wave collapse. | ||
| But it's generally true that you needed a subjective, or a machine, observation of something. | ||
| Wait, you know what? | ||
| Pause for one second. | ||
| You have a little spit over here. | ||
| Let's just... Yeah, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, jump from wave collapse. | |
| So the idea is that even in physics, we know that you need an observer or a machine observer, I think, to collapse reality. | ||
| In other words, things don't exist except in probability on the quantum level, as if I know what I'm talking about here again, until somebody observes them. | ||
| So that's exactly how you would build software. | ||
| It doesn't exist until you see it. | ||
| You would also say, all right, you little software people can't get outside the reality that we define. | ||
| Because if you could, you could see what you're in. | ||
| Can you get to the edge of the universe? | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You'll never get there. | ||
| Because speed of light will keep you from ever doing it. | ||
| So you see all of these coincidences that are exactly compatible with how a software programmer would program a world. | ||
| Then you look at the odds. | ||
| The odds of being an original, when there will be so many copies, one in a trillion? | ||
| One in a million? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| Maybe it's one in three. | ||
| But the odds are certainly much favoring the simulation and not that we're an original species. | ||
| So basically that's the plot of the Matrix? | ||
| If we had to kind of whittle this into something here? | ||
| We're sort of the batteries for this. | ||
| In the Matrix, they're real people and they're also a simulation and they're sort of coexisting. | ||
| In this, we're just a simulation. | ||
| Would it matter? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, let's say we found out right now. | ||
| We're in it. | ||
| Like, let's say we became self-aware within the simulation. | ||
| Well, we're still in the simulation, no matter what. | ||
| I guess that could alter how we would deal with the simulations we would create going forward. | ||
| Well, let me ask you this. | ||
| And this is just for fun. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Don't anybody take this too seriously. | ||
| One of the things you might imagine is if somebody realized they're in a simulation, that they could hack it. | ||
| Who believes in the simulation? | ||
| Elon Musk, how's he doing? | ||
| I see what you're saying here. | ||
| He descended a rocket to Mars, for God's sakes. | ||
| He put a Tesla in space just because he could. | ||
| How am I doing? | ||
| Dilbert worked out okay. | ||
| I've got the best book that's ever been written, according to me. | ||
| Things are going really well with me. | ||
| So look for people who believe in the simulation and then say to yourself, how's it going? | ||
| And you're going to find a pattern that will blow your brain out. | ||
| So you're saying whether I believe in the simulation or not, I probably should just try to believe in it a little bit more. | ||
| The people who... You're saying if this is a simulation, that if I believe it's a simulation, this video will be monetized. | ||
| I think that's what you're saying. | ||
| Let's concentrate really hard. | ||
| Monetize, monetize. | ||
| Yes, I believe that you will find a way to vast monetization if you accept. | ||
| Accept, pray with me, the simulation. | ||
| That, Scott Adams, is how you end an interview on YouTube. | ||
| You guys can follow Scott at scottadamsays on the Twitter, whether this is a simulation or not. | ||
| And don't forget to share this video and all our videos with friends, family, and foes. | ||
| You can just click the little share thing right down there. | ||
| Thanks, everybody. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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