Scott Adams joins Dave Rubin to dissect his new book Loser Think, detailing how societal rejection cost him 30% of his income and friendships while he championed Trump's unique persuasion toolkit. Adams critiques cognitive errors like mind-reading and the simulation hypothesis, arguing that while human nature is constant, history's variables prevent exact repetition. He analyzes AOC as a hyperbolic force forcing engagement on climate and nuclear energy, concluding that her extreme tactics serve a productive role in expanding the political conversation despite their intensity. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.