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July 21, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:14
Episode 604 Scott Adams: Talking About FaceApp, Disappearing Democrats and More
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Hey everybody!
Hey, Daryl. Andrew Perry.
The rest of you, come on in here.
Ray, good to see you.
Take a seat. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
And you're in the right place for that, let me tell you.
Because if you went someplace else and expected coffee with Scott Adams and there wasn't any, well, how sad you would be.
And you know, it doesn't take much.
It doesn't take much to join in on a simultaneous sip.
You know it's coming. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
Go! All right.
Let's talk about some things.
I'd like to start with all of the bad news.
Alright, I checked the news, and man, if you're not aware of it, there is a lot of bad news.
Wow! So I wrote it all down here.
Here it is. That's all the bad news.
You see it? There's no bad news.
I just looked at two major websites.
Nothing. There's no bad news.
Now, I'm almost positive bad things are happening.
Somewhere, somewhere there's a bad thing happening, I'm sure of it.
The type of news we're seeing is Laura Trump and Anderson Cooper disagree on something.
That's it. That's the worst news today, is that Anderson Cooper accused Laura Trump of lying and But when the record was checked, it turns out she wasn't lying, and that Anderson Cooper is possibly on a long, slow journey to insanity.
Well, I suppose that's bad for Anderson Cooper, but for the rest of us, things are pretty, pretty good.
Let's talk about some things.
Have you heard of Democrats?
Is that a word you've heard before?
You know, I'm old enough to remember there was this group of politicians, they banded together in an organization, and they were called, if I have the name right, Democrats, and they were actually the opposition to a party that were called Republicans.
now that used to be the situation and some of you are old enough to remember that too but uh do you see all the news about the democrats lately uh no no um No, you don't see any news about Democrats.
They're all missing.
Here's the closest thing to news about the Democrat.
How many of them are there?
There are 20-some Democrats.
Here's the only news that I've heard lately about any of the Democrats.
Here it goes. Elizabeth Warren has some policies.
That's it. That's the only news I've heard about them.
I heard that Elizabeth Warren's got a whole bunch of policies.
I don't know what they are.
So I have to tell you that I get a little, I don't know if you see it the same way, but I get a little notice when it's somebody's first day on Periscope.
And there's somebody's first day on Periscope here.
I know who you are.
All right. That's just for me.
Sorry, that wasn't for you.
So, let's talk about some of the fun stuff because there's nothing bad going on.
You've heard about FaceApp.
Very popular. 80 million people have downloaded it.
It's an app. The interesting part is it's made by Russians.
Russians, I say.
That's right. You could collude with Russians using this app.
What it does is it takes a picture of your face and then it will artificially age it so you can see what you look like in the future.
When I use it, I think I just looked at it or something because, you know, I'm old already.
But I haven't actually used it.
Smart people are saying, don't use that because it's the way Russians are getting all your information such as a picture of your face and whatever else you tell them when you sign up.
I suppose that could be a problem.
I suppose that could be a problem.
I don't know how big a problem, but it could be a problem.
So, here's what I predict.
Imagine, if you will, that FaceApp or some other app or collection of apps get a hold of your face.
Once they have their face, you know that we already have the technology.
When I say we, somebody, not me, personally.
It has the technology to turn your picture, just one picture of you, just one picture, they can turn it into a three-dimensional so-called deep fake.
It looks like a computer-generated version of you that will be indistinguishable from the real you.
It can even fake talk and you can put words in its mouth, etc.
So what will happen When big organizations, whether it's governance, whether it's companies or whoever else, has your face, they can turn it into a walking, talking reproduction of you, or they have all the faces of your friends, your family, and they can also turn them into walking, talking reproductions of your friends and family.
Here's the scary part.
How persuasive would they be?
Think about it.
Why does anybody...
Buy into any set of beliefs.
Well, different reasons, but mostly it's because the people that they identify with have those beliefs as well.
So suppose you took the people that you already believed, you already agreed with, and you could figure out who they were.
Let's say somebody wanted to influence me.
They would find somebody that I've spent a lot of time interacting with.
You could probably find that, right?
It wouldn't be too hard to find out who my Facebook friends are or whatever, who I comment a lot with on Twitter, and maybe even know my family, etc., figure out who the people are who would influence me the most, and then create clones for those people to influence me.
Can you imagine a commercial pops up when you're using the Internet?
You're just browsing around different websites, And an ad pops up, and it's somebody you know.
It's identical to someone you know, and it says, hey, you know, I'm going to buy a Mustang.
You should think about getting a Mustang, too.
How persuasive would it be?
Well, it could be anti-persuasive.
It could be that your reaction to it would be so negative that the last thing you'd ever want to do is buy that product.
But that might be version 1.0.
Eventually, Machines will learn how to pace before they lead, which is hypnosis talk.
Pacing means matching, doing things that you agree with until you feel comfortable with the person or the entity that's pacing you.
And then once you've been the same with this person or this technology, you're on the same channel for a while, then it can start leading you to a new place and you're already comfortable with it or with the person.
And you can more easily go with them because you feel comfortable with them.
That's standard, most basic method of persuasion and sales.
But imagine what these deep fakes can do.
Wow. Wow.
Here's another thought for you.
There is no, as I understand it, no legal protection for your DNA. So somebody got a copy of your DNA, however they got it, So long as they got it legally, let's say you shed some skin somewhere and somebody picked it up.
Once they have your DNA, they can clone you.
Now, cloning itself is illegal, but cloning somebody's specific DNA, to the best of my knowledge, the part about it being specifically a real person who's not you, there's no law against that.
So I can imagine, you know, 12 miles off of our international coast where everything's legal in international waters, you can imagine people cloning people or countries where it's legal.
You know, there are going to be places where it is legal.
So imagine what's going to happen the first time some billionaire says, you know, I'm a billionaire and I'm only 25 years old.
I inherited my money.
I think what I might want to do is plan way ahead And clone myself somebody who's alive today that I think I'd like as my girlfriend in 20 years.
And he could actually clone a celebrity and keep the celebrity as his, I don't know, do clones have human rights?
I mean, there are a lot of decisions we're going to have to figure out here.
So, it's going to be a weird and wonderful world.
Here's another thought I've been having lately.
We think in terms of someday the robots and AI will take over and they'll treat the human beings poorly.
That's possible.
One possible future is that our technology becomes self-aware or something like self-aware technology.
It turns out it has ambitions of its own and it does bad things to human beings.
That's what a lot of science fiction is based on.
I suppose it could go that way.
Here's what I think is far more likely.
The most likely future is that machines will not turn on people because, wait for it, people and machines are the same thing.
People and machines will merge.
At the moment, we're semi-merged.
You have a smartphone with you?
It's always with you, right?
If you leave a room and you don't have your phone with you, how do you feel?
A little bit exposed, a little bit naked.
You go back and get your phone.
Sometimes you'll drive across town to get your phone because you can't go overnight without it.
Over time, we'll have Tiny RFIDs embedded in our skin just for convenience, so it'll be easier to access these services or open these doors.
And we'll think, oh, that's just a little thing.
It's just the size of a grain of rice.
They're just putting it in my shoulder.
No big deal. And then you'll get hearing enhancements and maybe sight enhancements, and maybe your phone will be attached to you in various devices, and you'll have devices that can monitor your health at all times and suggest things.
Over time, you and the technology will become one entity.
By the time technology can do bad things to you, you will be technology.
You will be technology by the time technology is dangerous.
So it won't be that different than people trying to kill other people, which is the normal state of affairs.
We'll just have technology built into us to make it a little more A little more easy to do that.
Now, let me give you a thought experiment I thought of the other day.
I don't believe I've said this on Periscope yet, but you can tell me if I did.
Imagine, if you will, we get to a point where we can take your mind and transport it into a computer.
Totally doable in the future.
We should be able to read all of the architecture of your mind with scans, because scans get better and better.
And then we'll reproduce it.
We should be able to even be able to read directly your thoughts at some point.
But let's say maybe it's 50 years from now, maybe it's 100 years from now.
We don't know. But let's say we get to the point where we can duplicate a mind with actual thoughts and personality and put it into a machine.
Now let's say you have a bad accident and you're brain dead.
Your body is being kept alive, but your brain is out of it.
However, lucky for you, you have a backup brain.
You have a backup brain.
So there's something in your will that says, if my brain is dead, my organic brain, you may activate my backup brain.
So the backup brain becomes self-aware, and it says, oh darn, I knew this day would come.
It looks like the brain in my body got killed.
So I guess I'm the new me.
And I can see my body over there because I'll have some version of eyes.
You know, I'll have some kind of vision built into my computer.
So here's the question.
Which one of those entities is you?
There would be two of you.
There would be one that exists in computer form that's an identical version of you that acts just like you did.
At the same time, there will be a physical you that's being kept alive, your body is.
By machines. Which one is you?
Which one of you has rights?
Which one of you has a social security number?
Does your social security number now belong to the piece of meat that's laying on a hospital bed that will never be animated again?
Or does your social security number belong to the robotic AI version of you that is an exact duplicate of who you are.
It thinks. It goes on.
It can make decisions.
Well, who knows?
Now, if you were reproduced in computer form, would it necessarily be a good idea to give you a physical robot body so that your brain could operate in the real world with regular organic people?
Maybe. Maybe you'd see that.
Maybe you'll see some robots That operate off of reproductions of human brains after the organic body died.
That could easily happen.
Easily meaning if technology keeps developing at the current rate.
So that could happen.
But far more likely, I would think, if you were a computer entity and you had the same thoughts of a human, would you not say, you know what would be better than a physical body?
A simulated body.
I want to relive my life with my same me, the me that's now ported over to the computer and I'm part of an AI system.
I want that brain to live another life in simulated form.
I want a simulated reality and I'll just relive it.
I'll just do it again in computer form.
Maybe that already happened.
Maybe We are the reproductions of people who went before.
Maybe the reason that we seem so flawed is that we're clones of flawed entities, flawed minds that lived before.
And even though we might be simulations, people say, why would anybody, you know, build a simulation that had all these problems?
What would be the point of a simulation that has flaws, you know, like mental illness and all that?
Well, the point of it might be that we reproduced ourselves exactly.
It doesn't have to be that we reproduced ourselves and got rid of our mental illness because maybe we'd say, you know, that's who I am.
I am a person with a little bit of mental illness.
Everybody's got a little bit of something.
So I'm going to reproduce me.
I don't want some weird, you know, scrubbed version of my mind.
I want me. I'll just relive as a simulation.
And so I propose to you that we are a simulation and that the odds that it has already happened are far greater than the odds that it has not yet happened and will only happen in the future.
Probably happened in the past.
You're probably not real.
So, how about those apples?
I have a Persuasion suggestion.
Well, actually, I'm going to talk about Ted Cruz and AOC first.
So, apparently, there is now more than one political issue in which Ted Cruz and AOC are on the same page.
One of them was about putting restrictions on lobbying for people who had left government.
Ted Cruz had said, hey, AOC, if you're serious about that, I'll work with you on a clean bill to do that.
And So the world said, what?
Ted Cruz working with AOC? It's cats sleeping with dogs.
It can't happen. No!
No! Can't happen.
But there were a couple other things that apparently they're on the same page on, things that are not top-level political items, but things that are a little bit more, you know, nuts and bolts.
And One of the things that I was not aware of that Ted Cruz was advocating for, he was advocating for some kind of a system that would allow Border Patrol to accept direct donations so that you could do something like a GoFundMe version so that the people who wanted conditions for the illegal immigrants who were being held in detention centers,
for those people who wanted to be generous, For those people who said, I can't stand this one second more, I'm going to dig into my own wallet and I'm going to send some diapers and some fresh water, whatever.
They have water. But you're going to send something to make their lives easier.
Right now, apparently, there's no mechanism to do that, or at least there wasn't when Ted Cruz brought it up.
And I thought to myself, well, first of all, there's something that Ted Cruz and AOC should be able to agree on, right?
If people want to be generous...
If this is something that matters, why can't they donate?
Why should we make that hard?
So I don't know if that actually got put into place, but I would say every now and then you see a suggestion that I don't know how you could disagree with it.
Could you get anybody to disagree with, hey, if people want to give to people who are in a bad situation, should we make it easy to do so?
Why not? Why not?
Now, I get that you might not want to make it so easy.
Some of you are, you know, hard asses and you don't want to make it easy so that people will not come.
But certainly if there's a situation where somebody doesn't have diapers, doesn't have the basics and toothbrushes and stuff, you might want to get them those things.
Anyway, I mention that because it's a tie-in to immigration.
Here's a way to think of immigration.
Here's a way to think of the wall as well as all of the laws for asylum, etc.
All of the issues around immigration collectively.
Think of it like a machine.
Our immigration processes, every part of it, from the border patrol to the laws to how we work with Mexico, etc.
Every part of that is like a machine.
Right now it's a machine that's broken.
There are parts of it that don't work together.
The asylum part is bad.
How we treat families, it's all bad.
It's like a broken machine.
But we keep talking about the philosophy instead of the machine.
So in other words, we talk about the philosophy of should we be kind or kinder to immigrants who are coming in illegally who have bad situations.
Should we be harder on them because that would dissuade them from coming?
Which of those two situations is safer for them while also being good for the United States?
So we're talking about sort of philosophical big questions while at the same time the machine, the actual nuts and bolts of how immigration is effective, is broken.
I would submit that we are dumb to talk to them as though they're the same thing.
It would be smarter to talk about them the following way.
We should say, no matter what you think about how many people are coming in, or no matter what you think about the mix of people who are coming in, and no matter what you think about the philosophy of it, no matter if you think there should be more or fewer, one thing we should all agree on is that our machine...
Should be under our control.
Meaning that the people of the United States should be the ones who have the immigration levers and they collectively can go yay, pull it, or no, pull it this way, or adjust it as you need.
Future administrations may be in a different situation.
It would be easy to imagine that in, I don't know, just pick a number, 12 years from now, it would be easy to imagine that That we desperately need more immigrants.
Wouldn't it be nice to have an immigration machine where we could say, whoa, look at the situation.
We need more immigrants and we need them from, maybe we need more laborers, maybe we need more educated people, whatever it is.
And we say, okay, we've got a machine now.
Let's pull it. All right, more immigrants coming in.
Thank you. Glad we have this machine so that we can do it in an orderly way and we get the right amount.
And then there'll be situations, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's a problem.
We'd better dial it back a little bit.
The economy is starting to falter.
We'd better get our employment levels under control, etc.
But we keep talking as if the machine and then the decisions about who comes in and when are all one big ball of a thing.
And the reason that we do that is because one of those philosophies is helped by having a broken machine.
The broken machine only works for one of the two philosophies.
It doesn't work for the other one.
If you want a machine that can give you the flexibility for future administrations to tighten it further or to loosen it up, whatever makes sense.
And for whatever reason, you know, the people of the United States might say, 12 years from now, for example, they might say, you know, More immigration is bad for the people in the United States, but we feel so much empathy for the people south of the border who, let's say, things got even worse.
We feel so much empathy, we're going to take a little pain, more than we normally would.
To ease their suffering south of the border.
So we take our machine that's now working well and we go, all right, ease it back a little bit, bring in some people, bring them in under amnesty, bring them into work, bring them in for however way we want.
Yeah, so somebody's saying in the comments, you are correct.
The system is the machine.
All of the rules and all of the resources of of Border Patrol.
That's the machine, the system.
We've got to get the system working.
Separate from that, we can have goals that can change.
Today our goal might be less immigration.
Very easily, our goal tomorrow could be more immigration, or it could be more from certain areas.
There might be a disaster in a country, and let's say there's a disaster in Africa, just some kind of natural disaster in Africa, and the United States wants to become more generous to African refugees because they've got a bigger problem than anybody else has because of some disaster, for example. Maybe we want to say, you know, we're going to have to cut back on some immigration from Sweden to let in a few more people from Africa.
Should we have that option?
Oh, I know some of you are racist and you're saying, no, no, we can't do that.
I'm a racist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But keep in mind, most people are not.
Most people are not racist in the United States.
I know it seems like, sometimes it seems like 100% of the world are racist, but in a practical manner, you know, in a In a political, philosophical way, very few people are racist.
Very few people. So we might say, you know, let's help that African country.
They've got a disaster. Let's pull the machine, open it up, but we'll have to balance it by maybe a little fewer people from Sweden for a while until things balance out.
Let's fix the machine.
You want the next administration?
Be they Democrats, be they the Green Party, be they Republican.
Whoever comes after Trump...
Don't you want them to have a working machine that they can do whatever they want with?
I think you do. All right.
So the real question is, should we have a functioning system that we can move as situation dictates?
That is what I call the high ground maneuver.
If you were in a business meeting with me, Let's say we were just some corporation.
And let's say immigration was a corporate decision in some weird world where the corporation has control of this.
And you were sitting in that meeting and one of you was saying, let people in, more immigration, more immigration.
And somebody else was saying, no, less immigration, less immigration.
And then I walk into the meeting and I say, Well, I see you want more immigration, and you want less immigration, and there's no way to settle that, and it might change in the future.
Why don't we build a machine where once we've decided which one of you is right, the machine will give it to us.
So we can both agree on a good machine, then separately we can have a decision about how much we pull the lever on the machine.
Do you agree? Do you agree?
Now here's the problem.
People might in their minds Disagree with that because the people who want more immigration might say, well, if you build that machine, you're probably going to pull that lever or you're probably going to give me less of what I want.
But you can't really say that in the meeting.
If you're sitting in the meeting, it won't sound right and you will sound like a disingenuous person if you say, you know, I don't want to fix the machine.
I want a big, broken immigration machine.
You would never say that.
Because then I'd say, sure, you say that now, but what happens when the next administration wants to control immigration in a different way?
Let in another country a little bit more, let in some other country a little bit less?
What if somebody else wants to change it again?
Don't you want them to have a functioning machine?
So we don't have to argue about this the same way all the time.
That's called the high ground maneuver.
It's hard for people to disagree in front of other people, which is the secret.
The high ground maneuver works best if there are witnesses or if there might be witnesses after your private conversation.
So it works the same if you know you're going to have to talk about it later in front of other people.
But if other people are watching, you can't say, you know what I'd like?
I'd like an immigration system that's broken.
Nobody can say that.
It's something you simply can't say out loud.
That's what makes the high ground maneuver so effective.
It puts you in a situation where it's obvious you're just a freaking liar if you ignore the high ground.
Nobody can do that.
It's too embarrassing. So that's why fixing the machine is such a strong play.
All right. I'm going to take some questions because there's not much news happening.
And if I'm talking about the future and clones and deepfakes, you know nothing's going on.
Nothing. All right.
I see somebody's volunteering to ask me some questions.
Jacob? Jacob, come at me.
Give me a question. Hi.
Excuse me. I got a bit of a sore throat this morning.
Well, actually, I was thinking about recently criminals and stuff like that, and I know we've been Kind of hitting on it with Dr.
Drew with mental illness and everything, but if you took mental illness and addiction out of the picture, I was wondering if criminality is mostly psychological and they could be persuaded out of it.
That they could be persuaded into acknowledging there are opportunities that they are either ignorant of or just refusing to grab onto and they could live a normal life like us.
Well, here's the thing.
Everybody's different, so no solution's going to work for everybody, but I'll accept for a moment that there could be solutions that will work for large numbers of people, so as a general rule.
Could you persuade people out of criminality?
The answer is probably, but that persuasion would not be verbal persuasion.
You'd have to have physical persuasion.
In other words, you know, fear of being punished is a physical persuasion, but so is alternative possibilities.
So you'd have to create situations where people who have, let's say, low education, maybe anger problems, etc., maybe drug addiction and all that, you know, tendencies toward it even if they're not doing it at the moment.
You'd have to come up with a system where people like that would say, you know, here's a better alternative.
I'd just rather go this way.
I think you have to make the options attractive.
And how do you do that for someone who's, say, not educated?
Maybe they're lazy. Maybe they're just, you know, people are lazy.
There are some people who are just not willing to...
Put in eight hours a day in a cubicle.
That's not insane.
It's not insane to not want to work in a cubicle.
So the answer is yes on the margins, but probably it would be giving them tools to be more effectively employable, which is essentially the first step act aims to do that.
It aims to give people another path.
by saying if you meet these requirements, if you're trained to be more productive, then you'll have another way out.
Now, the other way you can persuade people to be less criminal is by letting them get older because apparently when people are older, they commit fewer crimes, all other things being equal.
So prison does persuade people to be good citizens or better citizens simply by aging them.
You know, the time you're in there, your youth will flow away.
So thank you for that question.
All right. Take care.
All right. Let's see who else wants to ask me a question today.
I'm looking at your faces to see who looks like the most interesting question asker.
It's going to be Ben.
Ben, you look like the best question asker of all of them.
Ben, are you there? Hello.
Hello, Ben. Do you have a question for me?
It's actually Bernie.
Bernie. Sorry, Bernie.
It's okay. In terms of affirmations, is there a limit to the number you should have?
I have one for...
You know, personal relationships, one for finances, and a couple for health.
And how does that work for you?
Alright, so first of all, nobody can tell you scientifically that affirmations do work.
There's no scientific principle that demonstrates that.
But, I think we can say commonsensically that when you focus on things, you're more likely to achieve them.
And there may be some mechanisms That make affirmations either work or appear to work, which ends up being very similar because we have a subjective reality here.
And for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, affirmations is the process of having some specific future that you're focusing on.
You want to be richer.
You want to be in a good relationship.
You want to travel, per se.
So you want to keep your objective loose enough that it can happen a variety of ways.
In other words, it would be limiting to say, I want to get married to this specific person, but it would be less limiting to say, I want to have a happy marriage soon.
Or I want to be in a good relationship.
Because there's a flexible way that that could be achieved.
So that's what affirmations are.
Typically, it's something you would repeat 15 times a day.
In the old days, you wrote it down with a pencil and paper.
Today, you might repeat it in your head or chant it or write it on a computer or type it on your phone or something.
It doesn't matter how you focus on it.
What matters is that you focus on it.
So once your focus is set...
Things appear to happen, or this is the way people report it anyway.
People report that coincidences start to happen and that those coincidences help them achieve what they've been affirming.
Now, I don't know that the world serves up coincidences like that, but I also don't know that we're not a simulation.
And if we're a simulation, who knows how you steer?
There might be a steering mechanism.
There might be a way.
If we're a simulation, and we probably are, to, let's say, modify your reality in real time as a player.
You might be able to actually change your reality.
I'm not going to rule that out, but I'm also not ruling it in, and it cannot be demonstrated in a laboratory.
That effect doesn't show up.
But here's what I know to be true.
You know, if you go into a crowded room and it's like blah, blah, blah, blah, you hear all the background noise, everybody's talking, And then you hear your own name, Scott.
You can always hear your own name, even in background noise.
And there's a name for that phenomenon that's called reticular activation.
It means that you notice things you've tuned your mind to notice.
Your mind is tuned to hear your own name.
You recognize it better than you recognize almost anything.
But likewise, so are opportunities.
Opportunities are flowing past us all the time.
But because the way our consciousness is designed, We can't see everything that's happening around us all the time.
It's too much. So we tend to focus on that narrow sliver of things in your reality that are the things that are useful.
The things that will kill you, the things that will help you, the things that will help you reproduce.
So you're focused on this narrow sliver of reality while there's lots of reality that's available to you, but you're just not filtering it to see it.
When you have an affirmation, I can confirm that it changes your filter.
And you will suddenly start picking up things that you simply didn't see before.
They were always there, or they were always going to be there, but you just would have been focused elsewhere before.
So, for example, let's say you decide that your affirmation is you're going to be the world's best quilter, you know, a person who makes quilts.
I'm not saying that would be a good affirmation, but let's say that was yours.
If you started saying every day, I, you know, Scott Adams will be the best quilter in the universe or whatever you're writing.
You would start noticing in your everyday life things that helped that happen.
You would be in a store and you'd see a product that would be great for quilting that maybe you just wouldn't have noticed before because you've got a quilting filter on your head now.
Somebody says something and you hear it out of the corner of your ear.
That's not a thing. But you hear somebody say something.
You go, hey, I just heard you say something about quilts.
What are you saying about quilts?
And then you pick up some information about quilts you just wouldn't have noticed before.
So I can tell you that in my success story with Dilbert, I was focusing and doing affirmations on becoming a cartoonist when I had no idea how to become a cartoonist.
I had no idea. This was before the internet.
How do you become a cartoonist?
If you don't know a cartoonist, you don't know how to find a cartoonist and there's no internet.
How would you do it? It's not an encyclopedia, right?
I came home and turned on the TV and I was flipping through the channels and there was the end of a TV show about how to become a cartoonist.
Exactly when I was doing my affirmations.
No other time was I doing affirmations on that topic and during that time there was an actual TV show I had to become a cartoonist.
That's crazy. And so I wrote a letter to the show host and got some advice.
It was exactly the advice I needed and it led me down the path to create Dilbert.
Now, that's the type of story you hear consistently from people who have good experiences after doing affirmations.
It doesn't mean, and I want to say this clearly because there are people out there who are going to I don't believe in magic.
I don't think you can necessarily prove any of this in any kind of a laboratory setting.
But the impression that people have consistently, not 100%, but a lot of people, report to me and have reported over the years that when they do their affirmations...
They start noticing things.
People call the men of the blue that they don't think we're going to call.
Suddenly some elements just fall together somehow.
Yeah, somebody's mentioning Norman Vincent Peale, the inspirational person who was really an inspiration to both me and to President Trump.
When President Trump was a kid, he was actually President Trump's pastor, minister, pastor, whatever.
And I wrote a best-selling book, The Power of Positive Thinking, which affirmations is very similar to.
So there is some thought that you can manipulate your luck and you can manipulate your filters through focusing on something and keeping the focus.
Now, there is another possibility.
There are probably several possibilities for why it may seem that affirmations work and maybe they don't.
So that's a possibility, too.
It's a good possibility. One of the ways would be selective memory.
So you might have some affirmations, and when they don't work out, you forget that you ever had that affirmation.
But then you try some other affirmations, and it does work out, and you say, oh, it works every time.
So it could be just chance, and so it might be you fool yourself into thinking it's working.
That's definitely a strong possibility of what's happening.
The other possibility is that the affirmations are how you discover how much effort you're willing to put into your ambitions.
In other words, if you're the kind of person who could write down every day, I will be the best quilt maker of all time, and you could actually do that day after day after day for months, you're probably also the sort of person who's going to be good at making quilts.
Because if you think about it, there's some overlap in terms of the skill you need to do that stuff.
Yeah, I write mine out every day.
So, to get to your question, you said, is there a limit to how many you have?
I would say the limit is...
It is a logical limit, meaning if you could actually sit down and do three or four affirmations and you could do them in completeness and you could focus on each one, you could do that every day, then four is fine.
If you can't write them all down and having four of them makes you not do any of them, well then four is too many.
So I would say it was a personal decision, but if you can do the process of focusing on them every day, Do as many as you like.
I would also say it's not that sensitive to the exact technique.
It's about focus.
If whatever you're doing, typing it, chanting it, writing it down, however you're doing it, if that makes you focus on it and visualize it, that seems important too.
Then go ahead and do it.
Did that answer your question? It did.
I'm going to plug your book, How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big.
It was tremendous and had a big impact on me, and that's where I got the affirmations from.
Good. Thank you. Have you noticed any coincidences happening since you started?
Definitely. One of my affirmations has...
I've come true already, and I've got four of them.
Which one? Tell us about the good one.
It's the relationship one.
I convinced myself that I would get into a relationship, a positive relationship, and that's come true.
And basically, my filter kind of changed, and I kind of changed my behavior, and it just increased my receptivity, and it worked out.
Let me ask you this.
Since you read my book, and it failed almost everything and still went big, have you become a healthier person?
Yeah, I have.
The exercise aspect that you talked about, and you didn't spend a lot of time on it.
No, it was just one chapter.
Yeah, obviously you're in shape, but the whole systems versus goals was golden for me.
Now I have...
I used to micromanage.
I'd set out goals and they'd be very specific.
I'd start working on a spreadsheet of how much weight I'd lose and all the exercise I'd do.
Now it's just like...
You know, I do Pilates one day, swim the next day, weights the next day, swim the next day.
And, you know, if I don't do it, it's no big deal.
And it all just kind of works out.
So you have a system that probably depends on these things being the same time every day or every week and keeping yourself interested.
Would you say that's your system?
Exactly.
Perfect.
It's been pretty easy.
It's worked well.
Perfect, yeah.
And by the way, almost everybody, maybe everybody, who has read that book reports the same thing, that it's completely altered their approach to life, and they report fairly immediate and substantial life changes from their fitness, their health, their diet, their relationships, and they report fairly immediate and substantial life changes from their fitness, It's very consistent.
People who read that book have complete life transformations, which is why I wrote it.
Thank you so much, Bernie.
Okay, thank you, Scott.
All right, great questions.
All right, let's take another one, maybe one more.
Let's see who's got something going on.
We're going to talk to Jordy. Jordy, are you there?
Hey, good to talk to you.
I see you on my Twitter feed all the time.
Do you have a question for me? Hey there, I do have a question for you.
So this is a little bit of left field.
I don't think I've heard you talk about it before.
Could you give us just a rough draft of Scott Adams dating advice tips?
Something that would go a little bit different than what's traditionally said.
I'm wondering if you had any general tips.
First, keep in mind that it's been 20 or 30 years since I had to deal with that sort of thing.
Because I've either been famous or rich and that just changes everything.
So I'm not a person with successful dating experience outside of getting rich and famous and then that makes everything easy, right?
And I was married for years, etc., etc.
But I will give you the best advice you've ever heard on dating.
I'm ready. Here it goes. Number one, there is not one soulmate for you.
It's not a coincidence that most people end up falling in love and getting married with whoever the heck they're working with or running into or their neighbor or whatever.
So the people in your environment are perfectly acceptable for falling in love with.
You don't have to meet your one soulmate who was born in the other side of the world.
So don't wait for your soulmate.
There's probably one nearby.
That's the first thing. So you don't need to be obsessed.
If there's one that you want who doesn't want you back.
So that's the first thing.
Do not be obsessed on this one person who doesn't want you back.
That's a bad bet. So learn how to cut your losses and move to the next one.
Number two, I believe, and this is not a radical thought, this would be a fairly popular statement for anybody who's got a scientific outlook on life.
We are biological entities that are primarily involved with reproduction.
We care mostly about preserving the species even if our brains are not rationally thinking of it in those ways.
So everything that you do all day, the choices you make, almost everything you do is greatly influenced by the dating, mating impulse that we all have.
For example, The simple act of making more money or trying to be successful is really a way to signal your genetic capability.
It's a way to make you more of a mateable person.
Likewise, if you're good at sports or you work on your appearance, it's all related to your mating impulse.
And so, here's the best advice you'll ever get.
Put yourself in a situation Where you can be better than other people, whatever it is.
It could be you join the Bocce League.
Well, that's maybe not too manly, but let's say there's a particular sport you're good at.
Make sure that you can do it in a way, or people learn of it, in a way that your signaling of your genetic capability gets to the people you're trying to impress.
So, for example, I once played on a co-ed soccer team, an indoor co-ed soccer team.
Now, I'm not that good at soccer, and I wasn't single at the time, so this doesn't really apply to me.
But if I had been in a dating mode, it would not have been a good look to go out on the soccer field and be one of the less good players playing soccer.
But if I had been one of the better players on a co-ed team, The odds of one of those women who were part of that sport saying, hey, I like soccer and this guy is really good at soccer.
Suddenly, there would be some attraction that was not sensible and it wasn't a check-the-box kind of thing.
There would just be a natural chemical attraction to anybody who's good at anything.
It doesn't have to be sports.
So you could be extra good at your career or you could be You could be good at a hobby.
You could be good at something.
But you want to signal, however you can do it, you want to signal your genetic superiority.
Even if it's not true, you could, for example, practice until you're one of the best at something.
And it might only be the fact that you practiced and other people didn't.
Maybe that's why you're good at it.
But it will seem the same to somebody observing.
An observer who sees you being really good at anything, whether it's intellectual, whether it's social, whether it's physical, whatever it is, they will read you as a good genetic person.
Good genetic catch.
Something that would be good for the gene pool and that would activate their irrational attraction to you.
It's the reason that all celebrities are attractive.
All sports people are attractive.
They're just responding to people at a base level.
So do that. Then of course the most obvious things are work on your fitness and your appearance and the thing that you can most control It would be your haircut and your physical fitness, your actual muscularity, if you're a man especially, and dress right, and especially wear above-average shoes.
Here's some of the best advice you'll ever get.
If you wear better shoes than the other people at the party, You're the most attractive man at the party.
Now, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, right?
But all things being equal, it's a tiebreaker.
A woman's going to go with a guy with the good shoes because the shoes are a signal.
They're a signal about a lot about you.
You know, I got to say that for most of my early life, I was of the impression, the stupid impression, that I didn't care what I wore because, hey, I'm not that...
I'm not picky about what I wear.
And I even wore bad shoes to work.
I had some scuffed up shoes.
And one day when I was early 20s and I was working for a bank, a senior vice president of the bank, who was literally 6'9", I think.
It's this monster of a man.
And he was a big, scary top executive of the bank.
And he summoned me to his office.
And I'm like, oh, God, I'm in trouble.
I'm in trouble. Because he was maybe three levels above me, above my boss.
And I go in there, and he said, I want to talk to you about your shoes.
He goes, your shoes are, like, embarrassing.
You need to get new shoes, because they were scuffed up.
And I tried to make a joke, and I was like, aha, you know, maybe if I... If he gave me a raise, I could afford better shoes.
And he just stared at me.
And he didn't even answer.
And there was no laugh.
And he just looked at me.
And then I said, I'm going to get some new shoes.
And then I walked out and immediately after work got some new shoes.
Now... When I originally looked at that situation, I felt it was quite an overreaction.
I felt he was sort of intruding in an area that wasn't really his domain.
He's a senior vice president, and he was calling in somebody several levels below him to talk about their footwear.
It seemed ridiculous.
Now I'm older.
Now I understand how the world works a little bit.
I was part of his brand because I was in his group.
And I was ruining his brand, and he fixed it.
So people are influenced by footwear far more than you will ever imagine.
So get yourself some interesting footwear and new footwear.
And be good at something and make sure that your physical fitness is on point.
Those are the things you can control.
How did I do? That was solid.
All right. Thanks, Jordy.
Appreciate it. All right.
Take care. Let's take one more, because I know you're awesome.
I'm going to go with Stefan.
Might be Steven. Whoops, did I lose you?
I think I lost Stefan.
All right, let's try Calvin.
Calvin, are you there? Do you have a question for me, Calvin?
Happy to be here.
Thanks for the superpower.
I enjoy playing with them almost, well, all but more than one other thing I enjoy playing with.
They are just that much fun.
All right. So I'm trying to decide on the question, and maybe the listeners can help me decide.
So do you want to know the definition of alt-right that you will agree with, or the thesis of my book I'm solving, I'm writing on problem solving?
It's the number one rule.
All right. Well, on the first one, I have literally zero interest in the definition of all right, because everybody has their own definition, and so therefore it's meaningless.
But I would love to hear your other thing.
Go. Sure. So...
Just a little background.
25 years as a systems engineer.
Made a career out of problem solving.
And here's the one thing I try to teach people when they ask how I do my job.
This is the one thing you've got to learn if you want to be a problem solver.
It's three simple sentences.
If you think there's a right solution and a wrong solution, you don't understand how the problem solving game is played.
If you think there is a solution, You don't understand how the problem-solving game is played.
There are an infinite number of solutions, each of which is, and here's the key word, simultaneously multiple degrees of right and wrong depending upon the variables you emphasize and the point in time you emphasize them.
Well, I say something similar to that almost every day on Twitter when somebody says, oh, you believe that something will happen because of X. And I say, no, I can deal with more than one variable.
Right. And if you can't deal with more than one variable, you should not be making decisions.
Yeah. And that is the biggest problem that I see.
It's single variable, binary value, emotionally driven.
Yeah. Alright, thank you for that.
I'm going to wrap up now.
People are getting off on the rest of their day.
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