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May 21, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:51
Episode 535 Scott Adams: Persuasion Lesson on Nuclear Energy, Plus Reframing Headlines
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Hello everybody!
It's time for an action-packed coffee with Scott Adams.
Sometimes they don't have that much action, but this one?
Full of action.
And you know what the first action is?
I think you do. I think you do.
Drew, Mark, Sharona...
Grab your cups, your mugs.
Bruce, Beth, get ready.
It's time. If you've got a cup or a mug or a glass, possibly a stein or a chalice or a tankard, maybe you've got a thermos or a flask, fill it with your favorite liquid and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Mmm! Delicious.
I've got a whole bunch of things to talk about today.
It's a fun news day.
Let's get to it.
Let's start with the most important issue of the day.
And I think you would agree this is the most important issue.
I got my copy of Trump Space Force.
Now, this is from Chuck Dixon, Timothy Lim, and Brett Smith.
Trump Space Force.
Now, I may be biased because there's a character in there that looks a lot like me.
Wait, does that look like me?
Yeah, kind of looks like me.
Strangely enough, in the age of Trump Space Force, people still wear glasses.
Seems like we could have solved that by then, but it makes it more fun this way.
All right. Let's talk about Joe Biden's strategy.
Is it working? You know Joe Biden's strategy, right?
His strategy is to be boring and not get on television?
Well, so far, Biden's strategy of not being seen by people is working really well because he's leading the polls.
At least for the Democrats.
And he's also leading in matchup, conceptual matchups against Trump.
So if I were Biden, I would go with that.
I would just crawl into a big old hole and pull a rock over the top of the hole and just hide there until Election Day.
Because the less he talks, the better he does.
But man, when he starts talking...
That's going to be fun.
Anyway, I just wanted to note that Joe Biden's continued lack of being in public is working really well for him.
I've got a question for you.
So we keep watching in the press that old NADS, Jerry Nadler, keeps trying to get Trump's taxes.
Have you ever considered...
What would happen if there's nothing interesting in his taxes?
I don't know if anybody's actually considered that.
Because you think to yourself, well, he wouldn't be trying so hard to hide his taxes unless there was something in there.
But wasn't the president trying pretty hard to discourage the investigation by Mueller, and then the Mueller investigation comes out and doesn't find any collusion?
So the fact that the president is discouraging investigation of anything, we now know that he will discourage investigations that are a waste of time, but could kick up some negative stuff about him.
His taxes are a perfect example.
Now, having watched the Mueller report come out and watched that almost nobody read it, Most of the government never even read it.
And still they decided that they had an opinion on it, and they weren't even the same opinions.
People read it and said, well, I guess he's exonerated.
Other people read it and said, wait a minute, this is clear grounds for impeachment.
Do you think that if we ever see Trump's tax returns, that it would be any different from the...
From the Mueller report. It would not.
No matter what those taxes say, the Democrats will say, look, look, there's proof of God knows what.
And no matter what those taxes say, Republicans will say, there's nothing there.
If there had been anything there, the IRS would have caught it, or that's business as normal, or it's telling us nothing.
But I think the most interesting thing we might find It's very likely that Trump's tax returns will show that he made maybe less money than he would like us to think, which would completely destroy the allegations that he was somehow profiting from Russia or whatever.
And the tax returns that come after that might even be more interesting, because I suspect I'm not sure, but I suspect that Trump revenues are down during the presidency.
I would expect that for every person who has a reason to do extra business with the Trump organization, there's probably at least two people who say, I don't feel good about this.
So I wouldn't be surprised about that at all.
All right. There was a new study that says 60% of all male managers are, quote, uncomfortable working around women.
A 32% increase over last year.
I don't know if the Brett Kavanaugh stuff made a difference or what it was this past year, but imagine that.
60% of male managers don't want to be caught alone with a woman.
Even for just business.
Not a business lunch, not a private meeting.
They're just uncomfortable with it.
So this is a case of it may be that the...
I don't know if you could say that the cure for the Me Too, the cure might not be worse than the crime, because the crime is so bad, but it's not good.
And it was predictable.
I predicted that when the Me Too thing first started, I said, you're going to see a great decrease in male mentoring and opportunities for women.
It looks like something like that is starting to form.
Alright, next topic.
Tucker, it was last night or the night before, he was talking about the question of whether there is such a thing as white privilege.
So Tucker was questioning whether that's real or just our impression.
And I think that's the wrong framing.
The wrong framing is to say, is there white privilege or is there not white privilege?
I think that gets you to a divisive place, because you just argue about, well, this evidence, that evidence, nobody's going to agree on that.
Here's a more productive framing.
Does everybody have a path to success?
Could be different paths.
The path that a white person might take might be different than what an Asian American might take, which might be different.
From what an African-American would take to success.
So do they all have some kind of path that is clear?
Is there a way to walk down that path?
And I would say that each group has their own unique advantages and disadvantages.
But it's far more productive to say, does everybody have a path?
Because if they do, That's pretty good.
And maybe we could widen the paths.
Maybe we could add additional paths.
But if everybody has a path, that's a pretty good world.
And let me give a specific example.
As a white person, my path is quite clear.
I can interact with other white people who will like me because I'm white, I suppose.
It's normal for people to have more contacts within the group that they associate with.
So I probably know lots of people who could help me, could give me a job, could do business with me.
So I've got plenty of path as a white guy.
If I were a black guy, I would also have paths, but they would be different, because I wouldn't have as many contacts with the rich white guy world, probably.
But I could make them.
Nothing would stop me from making them.
It might be a little harder, but I could do that.
However, I would have another path, which is to go to big companies who need to rebalance their, or find balance in their diversification.
And there are a lot of them. So there are lots of places you could go where being black would be an advantage.
Because there are big companies who are saying, please, please, please come work for us.
We want qualified black employees because we need to work on our diversification.
And it really, really does matter to these big companies.
So that's an advantage I don't have.
And indeed, I've told the story.
I lost two jobs for being white.
This was many years ago.
But I was told directly from my bosses.
And again, direct language.
This is not my interpretation.
They told me in direct language that they couldn't promote me anymore because I was white and male, and these corporations, one was a bank, one was a phone company, needed to work on their diversification.
And the managers were being graded on whether they were doing that well or not, and promoting me would work against my manager's interests.
And they told me that directly, in clear language, can't promote you because you're white and male.
Did I go cry?
I did not. I mean, I didn't like it, obviously.
Obviously, I didn't like it.
It ruined two careers.
But I also lived in a country where I have plenty of path.
So I just got off that path that didn't work for me so well, was a great path for women, was a great path for minorities of every type.
They were being courted actively.
So I got off of that path because that was my wrong path.
And then I got on...
A path which was to do something artistic and use my connections, my talents and everything.
So I had plenty of opportunity.
I just had to change paths.
So I think that's just more a better way to look at opportunity is does everybody have a path?
It might be a different one.
All right. I saw that Trump criticized Fox News for having a town hall with Pete Buttigieg.
And I really enjoyed that.
Because one of the criticisms against Trump is that he has too much control over Fox News and that they're operating like a PR organ for Trump.
Now, I don't think Trump was bothered even a little bit.
Just a guess.
I'm just speculating I'm not a mind reader, so I could easily be wrong.
But my guess is that Trump did not care too much about whether Pete Buttigieg had a town hall on Fox.
But by criticizing Fox News for giving attention to the other side, it's really good for his brand.
Because it acts against the criticism that Fox News does whatever he wants, and it acts against the criticism that they're joined at the hip.
So it was actually a very clever thing for Trump to do, to criticize...
His friends at Fox News for doing this because it's of no consequence.
There's nobody at Fox News who took it seriously, I'm sure.
Again, I'm not mind-reading, but I can't imagine anybody took it too seriously.
So it works against the rumor that he has Fox News under his control.
At the same time, it wasn't really a criticism anybody's going to take seriously.
So I thought that was a good play in terms of persuasion.
All right, we've got...
We've got more boring lawyer news.
So the criticisms against Trump often boil down to boring lawyer news.
For example, Nadler is maybe going to hold lawyer McGann in contempt.
Lawyer news.
Or there's something about Jay Sekulow telling McGann, no, telling Cohen something.
It's a lawyer who talked to a lawyer and they disagree about what was said.
Lawyers talking to lawyers.
Don't care. All right.
There's a new study showing that CBD, a component of marijuana, But without the getting high part, where they take the getting high part and then the marijuana and just leave the medicinal CBD part, apparently is really, really effective, like really effective in reducing heroin cravings.
So they tested a legal CBD product, one that's in a package and sold by a real company, and they found there was a tremendous difference.
Yeah, they take the THC out Tremendous difference in heroin cravings.
That's a big deal. That's a really big deal.
Somebody's saying that it's a hoax because of the placebo effect, but they had a control group.
So the control group found no differences.
The CBD group saw differences.
And I don't even know if it matters if it was a placebo.
Does it? Does it matter if it was a placebo?
Because it would work just as well as a placebo.
But I suspect it was real.
All right. Representative Matt Gaetz says the secret unreleased transcripts from Papadopoulos are going to be real interesting and show there was an illegal conspiracy.
Well, not an illegal conspiracy, but the Papadopoulos information will tell us something exciting.
About how the deep state was really doing something bad, creating the investigation about Russian collusion.
I'm not sure I totally believe that.
But we'll see.
And here's why I say I don't totally believe it.
It's not that I think Matt Gaetz is not credible, because I think so far, I don't believe he's said anything in public that I'm aware of.
That was questionable. So I think he's credible so far.
But when you talk about what George Papadopoulos did or did not say in some conversation, I think it's going to be ambiguous.
And Gates even mentioned that people are going to say, well, maybe Papadopoulos knew he was under investigation.
So when he claimed that he was not involved in any collusion, maybe he already knew he was being watched, which is possible.
But as Gates points out, somebody having a private conversation, insisting that they are innocent, is evidence that should have been presented to the The FISA court, which was not.
And apparently the FISA court application requires that you show evidence on both sides, that you not be a partisan, that you show any exculpatory information.
But how exculpatory this is?
These secret recordings and transcripts of Papadopoulos are, I would say they may not be as exculpatory as you want them to be, but probably a little bit exculpatory, and there will be a real reason, or there will be a real question about why they were not included.
I think that'll be interesting.
So we're back to another news story, changing topics slightly, about the About the meanings of words and who said what words.
So apparently Loretta Lynch has gone on record saying that she never told Comey to call the Hillary Clinton email investigation a quote a matter.
So now it's being reported that Loretta Lynch or Comey lied because Comey says Loretta Lynch said call it a matter not an investigation.
Loretta Lynch says I never said anything like that.
So here's what Loretta Lynch says she said, that she says is different from telling Comey to call it a matter.
Listen to this. When the director, talking about Comey, so this is Loretta Lynn saying this, and she's talking about the director being Comey.
When the director of Comey asked me how to best handle that, I said, quote, what I have been saying is that we have received a referral and we are working on the matter, working on the issue, or we have all the resources we need to handle the matter, handle the issue. So that was the suggestion that I made to him.
Loretta Lynch never told Comey to say matter.
Now, when you read what Loretta Lynch says, and then you read or hear what Comey said she said, are they that far apart?
Because it's being reported as, you know, one of them lied or the other one lied because they have opposite stories.
But are these opposite stories?
Because they don't look like opposite stories to me.
The headline says opposite stories.
But when you read the details, it looks a lot like what Comey said, but not exactly.
So if your boss says to you, well, I'll tell you the way I handle it is X. What does that tell you to do?
It tells you to handle it the way your boss handles it, right?
So if your boss is saying, well, I, the boss, use the word matter.
I call it an issue. It's an issue.
It's a matter. That's how I handle it.
Is that different from telling your underling to use the same language?
Now, Comey says it was more direct.
He used this word. That sounds...
That sounds exactly...
Let me block this person.
That sounds to me like two people have slightly different memories, maybe one is shading a little bit, but I'm not sure that what we have here is a smoking gun with some kind of...
I just don't know that that's much new news.
Let's talk about Iran. So, you know, President Trump tweeted, he warned Iran to stop threatening the U.S. or it would face its, quote, official end.
So when President Trump says Iran will reach its official end, what does that mean?
Well, I interpret it to mean the regime.
Iran, very cleverly, decided to interpret it as meaning the end of Iran.
Meaning, you know, Iranian people.
And so here was their response.
And the way that they responded, I think, is interesting, all right?
So Iran has responded, quote, goaded by the B team.
Now, the B team, we're assuming means John Bolton and people who are the hawks within the administration.
So Iran has decided to label the hawks within the administration as the B team.
Good persuasion.
Good persuasion.
Because they're trying to make a distinction between smart Mr.
Trump. They didn't say this, but they're making a distinction.
If the B team is telling Trump to get serious, they're accusing his advisors of having bad advice.
This is important, because they did not say, big old Trump is an idiot.
Now, they may have said that in other ways, in other times, but that's important.
They made a clear distinction between your advisors and the leader.
Watch why that's important as I continue.
They said that Trump hopes to achieve what Alexander...
Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and other aggressors fail to do.
So they're trying to recast Trump's statement that Iran would officially end, which obviously meant the administration running Iran, not the people.
Iran has tried to recast that as, oh, you know, others have tried to destroy Iran, but they did not succeed.
To which I say, how many leaderships has Iran gone through since Alexander the Great?
I would say that there's been a lot of changes of leadership, probably.
So I don't know how they can claim that Iran has always been here when they have a newish leadership that overthrew the Shah.
All right, and then they went on and said, this is the Iranian response to Trump, Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone.
And then they say, hashtag economic terrorism and genocidal taunts won't, quote, end Iran.
So that was the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif.
And then he said later, try respect.
It works.
Try respect.
It works.
Here's what's interesting.
So I've talked about how President Trump has continuously done the same framing with North Korea, with China, with Russia, which is to treat the leaders with respect and to offer to talk to them, having no boundaries about conversation.
Which is probably the smartest thing this president has brought to the presidency, is he'll talk to anyone.
That's by far.
Historians are going to say, okay, that was the best thing he ever did.
He brought that respect the leader, negotiate as hard as you need to with the country, but show respect for the leader or else you don't get anywhere.
So what do the Iranians say?
Try respect. It works.
That is not the kind of language you use if you're looking for a war.
That is the sort of language you use if you're looking for a negotiated settlement.
Now, they might be looking for a negotiated settlement while they continue to do things that fund terrorists, so you have to be careful about what that means.
But it's a pretty clear signal that they would rather show some respect and maybe talk.
So I'm interpreting this as the Iranian regime Keeping the door open to a conversation.
It sounds like the doorway to that conversation involves the president showing explicit respect for the administration.
I don't know if this president can show enough respect because he's been pretty clear that he'd like that administration to go away, which is something he's not necessarily saying about North Korea, Russia, or China.
So, if there's any thought that that regime is going to last, and I'm sure Israel would not be too happy about that thought, we're going to find out soon, because if the president shows respect for the regime, it might be a signal he wants to talk, and he's not talking about regime change.
If he does not show respect, they've shown a great opening.
Basically, Iran said, what we need to talk is to show respect.
And that seems like an invitation.
I don't know if it's genuine, but you have to at least consider that at least they're open to a conversation under a certain set of conditions, which I imagine we can't meet because it would probably mean taking the economic sanctions off.
So I don't see that happening.
But it's interesting that they're not acting warlike.
That means something. All right.
There's a study that says Trump has made America less racist.
I'll just let that sink in for a moment.
That's right. There's a study in which apparently 2,500 people have been studied over time, the same 2,500 people.
So that they can track just that group and how their feelings about race and other stuff, I guess, changes over time.
What they discovered is that within this group, that their level of, let's say, prejudice about their level of anti-black and anti-Hispanic feelings is Actually, it didn't change much at all under Obama.
It didn't change in a statistical way.
But under the Trump administration, it plunged.
So when Trump became president, and for the time he's been president, that group of 2,500 people became substantially, substantially, it was a pretty big difference, substantially less anti-black and less anti-Hispanic.
Now, How do you explain that?
I don't know how to explain it.
The first thing you have to ask yourself is, is this some kind of reproducible study?
Is this something that would stand up to other polls?
And the answer is, who knows?
But because it sort of agrees with my impressions of the world, I give it more credibility than it deserves.
So, keep in mind that this kind of study is always a little sketchy, and apparently there was a similar study about Brexit that had the same effect.
Somebody was prompting me in the comments.
But let's just talk about some of the reasons that that would not be a surprising result.
Because it isn't surprising to me, if it's true, and if it held up with other polls, etc., it would not surprise me at all, and here's why.
We're watching two different movies.
The Democrats and the Republicans are just not seeing the same movie.
To Democrats, this would be surprising because in their movie, the president keeps doing all these secret racist whistles to his base.
So from their point of view, they certainly should see the president's base getting more racist because he keeps telling them to be more racist and it's okay with my secret racist whistle.
So they should be surprised at this result of this study if it holds out to be true.
But that's not what I see.
I'm not in that movie.
Here's the movie I'm in.
See if you're in the same movie.
The movie I'm in is that there are some racists like the KKK, etc., who are somewhat irrelevant.
I don't really think about them too much.
They're a small group. I don't identify with them.
They're just not part of my consciousness.
But the thing that the president has brought is this whole, Americans are Americans, and we're a group, and we're going to protect each other from other countries, and that's the group.
And he is consistently, in my movie...
Done and said things which are consistent with that.
So he has consistently tried to protect the border and consistently said that it helps protect jobs at the low end.
The low end often means Hispanic and black workers.
You know, far too often.
That's the case. And then he did prison reform.
He's had, obviously, plenty of black advisors and black appointees and black friends.
So I think that the Republicans are watching a movie in which the president is actively, aggressively, unambiguously leading his team away from racism.
And here's the cool part.
It's probably the least anti-gay Republican administration of all time.
Not probably. It is definitely the most pro-gay, pro-LGBT administration, because Trump's always been that way.
I heard on Morning Joe something that made my head almost explode.
I don't know when he said it.
But Morning Joe was making the case that before President Trump ran for office, That everyone knew he was pro-LGBTQ, and everyone knew he wasn't a racist.
This is probably blowing your mind, because I thought, is this some deep fake thing where they're putting words into Morning Joe's mouth?
I thought, I'm not really hearing that, am I? So Morning Joe said everyone who knew Trump knew he wasn't anti-gay and wasn't a racist.
But Morning Joe says, this is Joe Scarborough, says, this is his interpretation of what happened.
He says that the president started pretending he was a racist to win the election.
Is your head exploding yet?
Nothing like that happened.
Not in my movie.
In my movie, the press tried to paint the president as a racist because it was good for their team.
I didn't see anything like that.
In my movie, the president didn't go from totally not being a racist and totally not being anti-LGBTQ To becoming suddenly the opposite or pretending to be the opposite.
I didn't see that.
I didn't see anything like that.
So that made my head spin when even Morning Joe is saying that in his heart he's not a racist and he's not anti-LGBTQ because he never was.
He's just pretending to be that way.
Oh my God!
Oh my God, he's just pretending to be that way?
No, he's not.
When he says he's going to be tough on immigration, he's being tough on people who are not already in this country.
But when he's talking about people in this country, he starts talking about prison reform because it's this country.
All right. So that's one reason.
What if the reason that there's less racism is that Trump is a good leader And has convinced the GOP to be less racist because their frame should be Americans versus the world.
And he's very clear.
Everybody's an American if you're a citizen.
It doesn't matter what color you are, doesn't care about your gender, sexual orientation, doesn't care.
It's just America.
That's it. That's his frame.
So you would expect that somebody who makes that frame so aggressively would convince his own side to adopt it a little bit, and they would become...
Less prejudice over time.
Likewise, if you hear a weird noise in the background, my dog is dreaming.
She's barking in her sleep.
Snickers, stop barking. She's over there in the chair, sleep barking.
But at the same time, you can imagine that the Democrats, who believe their movie and they believe that the GOP is becoming more racist, might compensate for By trying to be extra non-racist to draw some comparisons between what they think mean old President Trump is doing and what they see as a good world.
So in a weird way, the Democrats movie may have convinced Democrats to act less racist as some sort of response to what they imagined in their movie was the country moving the other way.
While at the same time, The other movie, Trump was convincing his base to be far less racist because he was changing the frame to, look, American, that's it.
There's no deeper conversation.
American, yes.
American, no. If you're American, yes.
I don't give a damn what you are.
If you're obeying the law, you're A+. There's no other grade.
If you're an American, you're obeying the law, you're great.
You would expect that to make a difference over time.
All right. As other people have said, the study focused on the degree of anti-black and anti-Hispanic bigotry.
It did not ask, is there more bigotry against white people?
Because I think that probably would have been up.
Don't know, but I think it would probably be up.
They did not ask if there's more bigotry against Asian Americans because they've been so successful.
Probably, yes.
Might be a little more of that.
They did not ask if there is more violence, more racist violence.
Could be. It would not surprise me at all if the Democrat movie that says the president is a racist and tries to frame everything as a racist, this or that, it would not surprise me if that created more Crazy people doing racist stuff, you know, mass shootings, etc.
Wouldn't surprise me at all, but it would still be compatible with normal people not having those views.
So crazy people can be triggered at the same time.
And it may be that Obama was racially divisive, and that anything but Obama would have shown a decrease.
So I've said before that bigotry has decreased pretty much every year of my life.
Apparently it didn't decrease under Obama.
Which surprises me. I thought it would have, but it didn't.
And it could be that anybody who wasn't Obama may have reduced people's worrying about race.
So there's a lot of reasons.
We don't know the list. 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 Know the key variables.
I'm going to do that for you.
If you saw my spreadsheet, I won't show it to you here because you can look at it, 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 Adams 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 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 this 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.
Alright, 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 can 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, and 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 nuclear.
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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