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May 21, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams

18:22

Episode 536 Scott Adams: Nuclear Persuasion

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	All right. I want to give you a little persuasion on nuclear energy.
	I'm going to give you a quick lesson on it.
	I saved this to the end, so I might edit this part out and make it a special little part on nuclear energy.
	So I'm going to act as though I'm starting a new periscope, even though I'm in the middle of a periscope, because I might edit this part out and make it its own thing.
	Okay, I'd like to talk about persuasion in the service of nuclear energy, trying to get the country to understand that nuclear energy is a practical and safe and probably the only solution.
	For climate change, if you're worried about it, and if you're not worried about climate change, it's still something you should do, because it's good for the world, it's good for poor people, it lowers the cost of energy, etc.
	So, I think we should drink to that.
	Pick up your mug, have a sip.
	Now, I'm going to give you some tips, because I sent out a tweet...
	In which I tweeted a little spreadsheet, and if you go to my Twitter feed, Scott Adams says, and you look at the pinned tweet, you can follow along if you have another device to watch this on.
	Otherwise, I'll give you the high points here.
	So, the idea was that I was trying to figure out the easiest way to convince the population of the United States, maybe the world, but focusing on the United States, So getting them to understand the question of nuclear energy, what's the risk, what's the payoff, what's good, what's bad, because it's a real complicated thing, and people who try to tiptoe into it will get overwhelmed with details.
	And I thought to myself, what I'm good at is simplifying.
	I used to do this for a living, make presentations about complicated things and try to simplify them so decision makers can We know the key variables.
	I'm going to do that for you.
	But basically, I showed a chart that showed the generations, generation 1, 2, 3, and 4 of nuclear.
	I showed how many plants have been built.
	I showed how many people have died from accidents.
	And you can see that generation 1 was terrible.
	You can see that generation 2 killed a bunch of people, but...
	Only with one accident, and it was the Chernobyl plant, which as it turns out, you would never build a plant like that.
	And none of the other Generation 2s had any deaths.
	So even Generation 2 had exactly one death-creating event, and nobody would ever build a plant like that, even if they were building a Generation 2 plant today.
	They wouldn't build it like Chernobyl.
	They wouldn't run it by Chernobyl.
	That was an outlier.
	Now remember, that's just Generation 2.
	Generation 3 is what people would build if they started today.
	So far, there are zero deaths from Generation 3 plants, but there aren't as many of them, and that's part of the context.
	And then Generation 4 is under development in Russia and China in particular.
	And that design would get you down to not even possible to have a big meltdown event.
	So that technology would make it impossible, even safer.
	But I want to show you...
	So the spreadsheet is pinned to my Twitter feed at the top.
	So if you go to Scott Adam Says, it's the top tweet.
	And you can see the details there.
	But I want to tell you what persuasion methods I used because I know a lot of you watch for that.
	All right. The first persuasion method I used was on myself to do this.
	This is one of the most important persuasion techniques you'll ever hear in your life.
	When I thought about putting this together, I said, oh my god, that's going to be a lot of work.
	I have so many other things to do that I want to do.
	How am I ever going to create this simplified chart to help people understand nuclear energy?
	And so I did what I recommend that you do when you find yourself in this, ah, it's too hard, how do I get started?
	I just got started.
	I did the bad version.
	If you can't You convince yourself to do something that's big and hard and you want to do it right, your alternative is to don't start, you know, don't do anything, or put in more energy than you want to.
	Don't do either of those things.
	Instead, find the smallest thing you're willing to do and then do it.
	Even if the smallest thing you're willing to do is to send somebody an email and say, hey, do you have some information?
	Once you start with the smallest thing, the next day you can say, well, I'll do one more small thing.
	You eventually find that you get yourself a little bit pregnant and you create some momentum simply by starting small.
	So I write more about this in my upcoming book, Loser Think, but the best persuasion you'll ever give yourself is start small and do the first little thing that you can do Don't imagine the whole thing that you have to do.
	So, when you look at my chart that I just told you I put on Twitter, you will notice it doesn't look very good.
	That it's not pretty.
	That's okay. Because people in the comments are saying, hey, this number should have an asterisk on it.
	You should include this fact, add this little context.
	That's great. They're telling me how to improve it.
	If you want advice on how to do something right, first, do it wrong.
	Works every time.
	If you want free advice on how to do something right, do it wrong in public.
	I do this all the time.
	You have to learn to have no shame.
	That's part of the process.
	But look at all the free advice I'm getting.
	Look at the comments on that.
	Now, this is an iterative process.
	All persuasion is if you do it right.
	If you don't understand this next point, everything else I tell you is useless.
	Almost. The next point is the important point.
	Remember this one, even if you forget all the other points.
	It's about iteration.
	Nobody is smart enough to know on the first try how to be the most persuasive.
	You try something, as I did, you see how people react, you fix it, you try again.
	Persuasion is an iterative process.
	If you're not thinking of it that way, you're not doing it right.
	It doesn't matter what else you do.
	If you're not thinking of it as an evolution where you get smarter and smarter based on feedback, you're just not doing it right.
	Here are the things that are included in my tweet, Persuasion, that you can see pinned to my Twitter feed on nuclear persuasion.
	You can see that iteration that I just mentioned is important.
	People will look at that and they'll say, for example...
	Hey, maybe you should have given it a blue background.
	Maybe it shouldn't be formatted this way.
	Maybe you should simplify.
	Maybe you should add a little bit. So it will probably improve over time.
	And as it does, I'll retweet it.
	It's visual as it exists because I pasted a spreadsheet into my tweet.
	A tweet without a visual gets far less traffic.
	So if you're trying to persuade people with a tweet, put a picture there.
	The current picture is a terrible picture.
	It's not attractive. It's just a spreadsheet.
	And it still works because it takes up more real estate.
	It tells you there's something more important because there's a picture.
	It draws people in.
	But it could be much better and it would iterate to a better picture.
	You want to keep people's attention.
	So it's not good enough that I get them to look at the spreadsheet.
	I've got to keep them there and spending time there.
	The more time they spend grappling with the data, even if the reason that I keep them there is that they're trying to understand it, whatever the reason, if I can keep them on there, the more time they spend thinking about it, the more important they will imagine it and the more they will remember it.
	So getting people to pay attention to it is important.
	So, I could have made my spreadsheet simpler, and then people would have spent less time on it.
	I could have made it more complicated, and then people would be discouraged from spending time on it.
	The sweet spot is that people say, hey, that looks simple enough that I could get the idea.
	And then they look at it and they go, oh, I get the idea, but I still kind of want to look at some other stuff here.
	There's enough there to keep them interested for half a minute, which is way better than keeping them interested for 10 seconds.
	So the level of complexity is part of your persuasion.
	You want a little bit to keep them there, but not too simple.
	You want repetition, and you'll see that if people retweet it, people will start seeing the same presentation more and more.
	The more they see it, the better.
	Simplicity, as I mentioned, it's got to be simple enough for people to read it and get the basic idea.
	And then those people go forth as advocates because they're now armed with some good context.
	So they can now talk about this topic in a way that they couldn't before.
	So I keep it simple so that the message can travel.
	It can spread into more brains, come out of more mouths.
	It's automatically more viral if it's simple, but not too simple.
	Contrast is the primary persuasion tool that I use.
	I first contrast generation 1 to 2 to 3 to 4.
	So the first message is, if you don't understand that the current nuclear technology is completely different from the early generations, you're not up to speed.
	All right. So I contrast not only...
	Generations of nuclear, so you can see the new stuff is good.
	I also contrast it to other ways that people die.
	So if you see that a few dozen people dying or one person dying from nuclear, you compare that to how many people died on bicycles, how many died in drowning in pools, how many died from automobile accidents.
	Most of the accidental deaths are big numbers.
	Bicycles, I think, are 2,500 a year.
	2,500 people a year die on bicycles.
	The biggest nuclear disaster was 39 people, and that was Chernobyl.
	And we would never build one like that again.
	And even Fukushima, the people who died were escaping it.
	They didn't die from the explosion itself.
	Alright, the other persuasion is, I started in my tweet, I said that there's bipartisan support.
	Now when you tell people that there's bipartisan support, you're saying, other smart people think this is a good idea.
	And that's a good thing.
	So if people think everyone else agrees, it biases them toward thinking, well, maybe I should agree.
	Everybody's on this team. I also called it bipartisan support so that people who are team players and would never cross to agree with the other team can still like this because their team likes it.
	So it's very important to say your team likes this because people may not go beyond that.
	For at least 80% of the country, if you say, hey, Democrats like this, the Democrats will say, well, then I like it.
	Same with Republicans.
	You just tell them that their team likes it and suddenly they like it.
	There have been plenty of studies to suggest that's true.
	So tell people their team likes it, because it's true.
	Not the entire team, but even AOC said she's open to If you have small errors, and I put errors in quotes because maybe an imperfection is not exactly an error, maybe something you could have clarified is not exactly an error, just something you could have done better.
	But if you leave some imperfections in your presentation, people will spend more time engaging.
	If those imperfections are not core to your message, you actually improve your persuasion by having errors.
	This is something that the president does to perfection.
	He will say something that's not quite exactly true.
	Maybe there's a fact check that you question.
	And by spending time questioning the small fact, you spend more time with the main message.
	And that's the win. You want people to spend more time with the main message, even if they're debating some trivial part of it.
	So that's good. Intentional small errors.
	Now, there are no intentional small errors in my graph that I put together.
	But, I am smart enough to know, because I've done this sort of thing for long enough, that there must be small imperfections, things that people will disagree with.
	So, I didn't engineer it in, but I knew it was there, and it's part of the persuasion.
	I tell people indirectly, I suggest that people who have seen this tweet, read the chart, and now have learned to understand the nuclear opportunity, I make sure that they believe that they're the smart ones.
	Because if you tell people, hey, look at this, in 30 seconds you're going to be smarter about a major topic, people like that.
	People like to feel smart.
	That's a real draw.
	So I give them an opportunity to feel smart.
	That's good persuasion.
	The hero opportunity.
	This is very important to making something viral.
	The reason I put it all in a tweet is the hope that other people would tweet it.
	So in order to be tweetable, it's helpful to create the hero opportunity.
	The hero opportunity is, for those of you who read my tweet, you say to yourself, hey, if I retweet this or send it to somebody I think could use it, I'm making the world a better place.
	I'm actually improving the world.
	And the person who receives this will probably thank me because I've cleared up this whole nuclear energy opportunity in a way that they've never seen before.
	So I could be a hero in a small way, but everybody likes that.
	Who doesn't like being a hero?
	And then I also said it was a no-brainer to consider nuclear.
	Now, when you say it's a no-brainer, you remove people from the critical thinking process.
	So it's a little bit unfair.
	But it's also true.
	In other words, I'm not lying.
	It is sort of a no-brainer once you see the facts laid out.
	I would say that that's why AOC can agree with the most Republican Republican.
	The reason that they can come to the same conclusion is because it's a no-brainer.
	The only people who are disagreeing are the people who haven't quite come up to speed with the fact that the newer technologies are as good as they are.
	Now, thank you to Mark Schneider, who is at SubSchneider, S-C-H-N-E-I-D-E-R, for his information to help me build this.
	And you should follow him on Twitter if you're not already.
	Now, also, I would say to Mark Schneider, you should use Interface by WinHub, my startup, to add a link on your webpage that people can contact you directly from that link, and it will open up the Interface by WinHub app that my company makes.
	And you could have a direct video call with Mark or schedule one, because that same link would let you schedule one.
	And he can help you out with some persuasion.
	He's already on the app, but I noticed that his webpage did not take the link that we provide and put it on the page so that somebody can contact him to schedule a phone call.
	And if any of you have any kind of Web page that you would like to do the same.
	Go to WenHub.com if you've already signed up to be an expert on the interface by WenHub app.
	So there are two things you need.
	The app, the mobile app that works on any mobile device.
	So if you have that, it's free.
	But you also want to go to the WenHub.com page, search for yourself, and that will give you the The link that you can put on your webpage, just add the link, and people can automatically be directed to a schedule or to catch you live, if you happen to be live, on the Interface app.
	And they can talk to you in person without exchanging any personal information.

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