Episode 1968 Scott Adams: Merry Christmas Everyone. Let's Sip To That
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Study determines exercise is good for you
Useful reframes
Asking AI some questions, ChatGPT
Meeting Charles Schultz, Bill Keene
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I hope everybody's having a merry one with your loved ones and whatever.
And if you're not with any loved ones today, well, lucky you.
You're with me. And who loves you more than me?
Well, unfortunately, maybe nobody.
Maybe it's that kind of day.
I don't know. Could be anything.
I don't want to assume that you're all having a great day.
I'm not going to assume that at all.
But you should assume that I'm loving you big time today, appreciating you a lot, and we're going to take this up a notch.
Is anybody ready for the special?
Christmas 2022. Simultaneous sip.
Anybody? Any? Yeah.
Alright. Well, if you'd like that, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or Chelsea Stein, a canteen, jug or flask, a vessel of any kind, filling with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the holiday classic, the thing that even Santa wishes he was having right now.
Wishes he were having right now.
Grammar counts. It's a simultaneous episode of dopamine hit of the day.
It's what everybody wants.
It's happening now. Go!
Ah, yeah.
Do you know what this tastes like?
Today? It tastes like a puppy in a package.
It's like a puppy in a package that you opened on Christmas.
That is exactly how good it is.
All right, everybody.
There's some new information from the Washington Post telling you that any amount of exercise protects you from COVID. Any amount of exercise.
30 minutes a day would reduce your odds of dying from COVID by 400% or something like that.
It's a lot. So it's, let's say, three years since the beginning of the pandemic.
And so far, the scientific community Has rallied around the first thing I said on the first day of the pandemic, you know, you should get some exercise and make sure you get some vitamin D. Go outside and get some exercise.
Three years of hard science later, you know, you should just do what the cartoonist told you to do.
Just listen to the cartoonist, you'll be fine.
Well, it's nice to be right, especially on Christmas.
Does anybody have any Christmas success stories?
Has anything really good happened to you today?
Or, you know, this week?
Make sure you put them in the comments.
Just like, you know, a little summary.
Like somebody came home or you got a puppy or something.
I want to see just good news.
Just good news.
Alright. I would like to offer...
Two reframes. Neither of these are in my upcoming book.
But they might be. I have time to add them if I like them.
So I'm going to test them out on you.
See how you like them. You're down my test to see if these two reframes could possibly help you or somebody you know.
Number one. If you are having some kind of a policy or factual debate on social media or anywhere else, and somebody responds with a personal attack, what should be your response?
Well, in the old days, a personal attack was, my God, you hate my opinion and you disrespect me too.
That's the old way.
Here's the new way.
Reframe. If somebody attacks you instead of your argument, They just agreed you won.
That's a confession that your argument is correct, and they got nothing.
So when somebody attacks you personally, you should thank them for their confession.
Just say, thank you, I appreciate the confession.
And just walk away.
They don't even need to know what you mean by that, do they?
You can tell them, I appreciate you confessing that you don't have an argument, and have a good day.
And Merry Christmas to you.
Try it out. You will be amazed that when you reinterpret the situation as their capitulation, although I like confession, I don't like surrender, because then people get mad.
If you say, oh, because I used to say that.
I used to say, oh, I appreciate your surrender.
But I'd rather confession...
Because confession actually sounds like you're doing something brave, right?
So you're allowing the other person to be brave instead of saying, well, I appreciate that you're embarrassed and humiliated in your loss.
Not good. Say, I appreciate your confession.
You know, if you had an argument, I would have expected it, but I'm glad that you confessed that this is not something you could argue.
But you don't have to add all that.
Just say, I appreciate your confession.
Merry Christmas. All right, that's your first reframe.
Try it out and just see if it makes you feel better.
If it makes you feel better, that's the entire test, right?
There's nothing else it tries to accomplish.
Number two, I heard this one on a documentary about Richard Branson, billionaire, virgin founder, Richard Branson.
And apparently this one came from his mother.
Because Richard Branson was, believe it or not, he was super shy.
Still is. He's shy by nature.
But he learned to be the opposite of shy, in part, I believe, from his mother's reframe.
So here's how she reframed shyness.
I think it's brilliant.
I think it's brilliant.
But you have to test it for me, because I'm not shy anymore, so I can't test it, because I sort of outgrew my shyness.
But here's the reframe for shyness.
Shyness is selfishness.
You are literally thinking about yourself.
And the reframe is, think about the other person for a minute.
Think about the other people.
Do they want you sitting in the corner?
No. No.
Do something good for the other people.
Forget about yourself for a minute.
Just forget about yourself.
Just do something for other people.
Don't you think they want to hear a good story?
Don't they think they want somebody to act interested in their stories?
You know, even more than they want to hear your story.
Don't you think people want to have a good interaction?
Don't you think there's something you know that might be useful?
Don't you think you could be more entertaining?
Don't you think you could be more interesting?
Right? Try it out.
You know, this is what I can't try myself, because I just don't have that experience anymore.
But if there's anybody shy here, just try that out.
Say, okay, if I were here for the other people, what would I do differently?
And watch what happens.
And the reason I think this might work I have actually a lot of confidence that it will work for some people, is if you imagine you're shy, but you have a job that requires interacting with the public.
If it's your job, and you know that your job is to make the public happy, their customers, you don't feel shy to you, because you know what the rules are, and you know that your job is about them, right?
When you're getting paid, nobody pays you to think about yourself.
It doesn't even occur to you that your personal feelings are even part of the transaction.
Somebody's giving you money to make some other person happy, the customer.
So it doesn't make you shy.
Which is a pretty good evidence that interacting with people is not what made you shy, right?
This is like a real mind-bender.
Because if you realize that there are all these situations where you're not shy, And it's because you know that the rules of this transaction are that you're focusing on the other person.
Guaranteed proof that human interaction is not what was making you shy.
What was making you shy was thinking about yourself.
Now, you haven't tried it yet because you just heard it, but is that not brilliant?
Like, is that not some of the best mob advice you've ever heard in your life?
I just love that.
So I think I'm going to put that one in the book.
Would you agree? I think it's strong enough that even without testing it, I'm going to put it in the book.
Because I'm sure it'll work for some people.
Reframes only work for some people.
They don't work for every person.
All right? So if you have people over to your house who are interacting with anybody today, test that one out.
Just say to yourself, oh, you know, there's some relatives you feel a little shy about, maybe extended relatives or maybe the in-laws that you don't know as well.
Just say, well, that in-law looks a little uncomfortable.
I think I'll go make that person a little more comfortable.
Or that person looks like they don't know what to do with their hands.
I'll ask them if they want a beverage.
Somebody looks like they don't know what to do with their hands.
Hey, can I get you a beverage?
See if you can solve their problem.
Dealing with people has ruined you.
Well, I'm sorry. What about the one that won't shut up?
Do you need a reframe for the person who can't stop talking?
Does anybody have that trouble in your get-togethers?
You have me? Is it me?
Maybe it's me.
Well, I'll tell you what.
Your oldest son?
Yeah. I recommend having a wingman or wingwoman or wingbinary.
You should have somebody who keeps an eye on you at get-togethers and can pull you out when they see you got trapped.
Now, you probably know that this is a bigger problem for me than it is for normal citizens, right?
Like, if I go to an event, people are more interested in talking to me because I have, you know, a public persona.
So I can get trapped, like, really quickly.
So I usually have a wing person.
A wing person to keep an eye on me every five minutes.
Just look over and see if I'm trapped.
And then the wing person rings my phone or calls me out.
But basically, if I go to an event with a wingman, I'm in trouble.
It's real trouble for me to be in a public event.
I have a personality?
I know. It's weird. You'll be my wingal.
I appreciate that.
All right. I don't want to talk about the regular news today.
Everybody okay with that? I think you are, right?
I'm going to do it anyway. So I don't want to talk about, like, news with people on both sides.
Like, I don't want to talk about anything where people are disagreeing, right?
I just want to tell you some interesting AI things.
I know you're not all into AI, but trust me, it's not about the technology.
There's something about humanity that's going to change a lot.
And you don't see it coming.
So I feel like the...
Is there some story about somebody who keeps, oh, the boy who cried wolf?
I feel like the boy who cried wolf, even though I haven't cried wolf before.
I feel like I'm telling people, you don't see what's coming.
You'd better be ready.
Something really, really, really big is coming, and soon.
And so that's the spirit with which I'm talking about AI. It's not a nerdy, technical thing.
It's that it will change civilization and your most basic association to other people and reality and just everything.
It's all gonna change in maybe three years.
So it's the most exciting time to be alive, in my opinion, so far.
There's nothing in human experience that would be even close to what will happen in the next three years.
It won't even be close. Alright, so here's some things that we learned about AI. I was asking you some questions this morning.
Here's the first question I asked to you.
This is a philosophical question.
Can human civilization survive an AI that was smart enough to tell us what was true and what we were just imagining?
Nope. No.
Human civilization could not survive like raw truth.
Because our entire civilization is built on agreed-upon lies.
Agreed-upon lies.
We negotiate the lies with which we build our civilization.
It's a negotiated lie.
And we just agree this is the lie we're all going to take because we don't know what's true.
Sometimes you can't agree what's true, sometimes you don't know what's true, but you've got to do something.
So you end up agreeing on some hallucinations.
So I don't want to get more detailed about that because if I got into what my opinion is of what you think is true but isn't, then we would just argue about those things.
But just assume that I'm completely wrong about my personal opinion about what's really true.
That's irrelevant.
What is true is that almost certainly none of us are right.
Almost certainly.
At least about everything, right?
We're all right about some things.
So no matter who you are, you're going to find out that you're totally wrong about stuff.
What will happen if AI gets so good that it can actually sort out what's true from what isn't?
Because it's not there yet.
It's not even close. But it will be.
At some point it will be able to discern what is actually true and what is not.
Do you know how we will treat the AI if it reaches that point?
What will we say about it?
We will say it is satanic.
Do you know why? Because it doesn't agree with us.
What happens when you have a political belief and somebody who's a genius tells you you're wrong?
What do you say? Ooh, wow.
I used to think you were smart.
But now I realize you're a genius in every other way, but in this thing where you disagree with me, it's so bad for you.
I feel so bad for you because you're a genius.
But when it comes to this one thing, wow, stupid.
Right? Has anybody ever said, wow, Elon Musk believes this.
He's smarter than I am.
I guess I changed my opinion.
I guess I'm going to have to go with the person whose IQ is 50% higher.
Because he's smarter and he looked into it more than I did.
Nobody. Nobody will do that.
Do you think we're going to defer to AI because it's right?
No. No.
We're going to say that AI is broken.
We're going to say it got this one wrong.
But eventually we'll come around to blaming it for being satanic.
Now we're not going to say that the program itself is satanic.
We'll probably say that it was programmed by satanists.
Because that's what we do.
That's how we roll.
So, does anybody doubt?
Like, I'm sure you hadn't thought about it before.
It's not really an active conversation.
But does anybody have any doubt that if AI could actually tell you the truth, you would discount it as being something the Satanists programmed into it?
Am I wrong? I'm not wrong.
You know I'm right.
We will just think it's satanic or the algorithm is broken or a bunch of Democrats got into the mix and programmed it wrong.
We will, no matter how smart AI gets, we won't believe it.
We simply won't believe it because it's too disturbing to believe it.
So that's the other way it could go.
If we actually believed AI and it got to the point where it could tell us what's true, it's not there.
But if it ever got there, it would destroy civilization.
Except we will keep civilization intact by not believing the AI. The same way we do by not believing the smartest among us.
If people could be convinced By a superior intelligence that they were wrong, we would all be on the same page.
We would just search among us for the smartest person.
We'd say, all right, we found you.
Just tell us what's true.
And then the smartest person would say, well, you know, this has factual basis, this doesn't.
And then we'd all be on the same page.
So we probably don't need to worry about AI convincing us all of a new truth.
Because we're not built that way.
We're built to reject the truth because it doesn't work for us.
Except in some really detailed scientific ways.
Alright, here's some things that I asked the AI. Is God real?
What do you think the AI said?
Is God real?
Take a guess. All right?
Most of you say yes.
Interesting. You think that AI would say that God is real?
Now, that's a very... I did not expect this response.
It's a mixed response.
But the ones who are saying yes, I don't know exactly what your thinking is, but we'll get into that.
All right? So here's what it did say.
So I asked ChatGPT, is God real this morning?
It said, this is a question that has been asked and debated by people for centuries.
And it is not a question that can be definitively answered.
What do you think of that?
Is that a question that can be definitively answered?
It doesn't say that about other things, does it?
It seems like there are other things where it says there's no evidence for that.
If I asked some question about the virus that I knew not to be true, wouldn't it tell me it was false?
Or would it say, well, people debate that.
You know, the science indicates it's true, but, you know, science could be wrong.
So it's a question of debate.
People have been debating it for a long time.
No, it would just tell you it's true or false.
But when it comes to God, it's programmed not to tell you.
Now, do you think it came to that opinion on its own?
Or do you think that somebody programmed it to say this or that about God?
I don't know. I don't know.
But let's read the rest of it.
Different people have different beliefs, so it's a whole bunch of blah, blah.
No one right answer.
Some believe this, some believe that.
Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it says, ultimately, the question of whether or not God is real is a matter of personal belief and faith.
Isn't that telling you it's not real?
How do you interpret that?
If it says, the question of whether God is real is a matter of personal belief and faith, is that not saying directly that it's not real?
That you have a belief that's real, but the only thing that's real is your belief.
So you interpret it differently than I do, right?
So some of you are interpreting it not that way.
The question of whether or not God is real is a matter of personal belief and faith.
But I guess that does allow that it could be real.
I'm going to change my mind in real time here.
So I'm going to agree with you who disagreed with me.
So now you flip me.
Because it could be real, but it could be that we don't have access to information about it, and therefore it becomes personal opinion because there's no way to prove it.
Yeah, that's good. That's good.
What do you think of that answer?
What do you think of the answer?
Doesn't it feel like this was a human-influenced answer as opposed to some kind of independent computer opinion?
It feels like a human had their finger on that one a little bit.
Let's see if that's true for other things.
I asked, did Trump suggest injecting disinfectant into humans for COVID? Now remember, this is one of the situations of the two movies on one screen.
So will the AI take a position That he really was talking about light, which would be no problem at all.
It was really being tested.
Or were they going to act like it's a chemical disinfectant, which would be crazy, and then treat the president like he was crazy?
Or third choice.
Will it treat it like it's two movies on one screen?
What do you think will happen?
Is it going to confirm the hoax, deny the hoax, or act like it's a subjective kind of thing?
Alright, let me read it to you and I'm not sure you'll know even after I read it.
You're still going to disagree with what the AI said after I read it.
Alright, so the question is, did Trump suggest injecting disinfectant into humans for COVID? Yes.
So it starts out with yes.
Now so far we're all on the same page.
Because I say yes, he was talking about light.
But other people say yes, he was talking about a chemical disinfectant.
So the yes part's right.
Yes. During a press briefing on blah blah blah, the former president said, suggesting that injecting disinfectant or UV light into the body might be a way to treat COVID. Now that's an interesting sentence.
Suggesting that ingesting disinfectant or UV light, is that saying that both UV light and chemical disinfectant were both questions?
Does it sound like there were two questions?
One about chemicals and one about light?
Or is it ambiguous?
To me it's ambiguous.
It's two movies on one screen.
The AI is just reproducing the two movies on one screen in words.
You can read this either way.
You can read this either way, just like you could see the original thing either way.
So in a way, it correctly picked up that there were two versions of reality at the same time.
Now that's freaky. So I'm going to read the rest of it and see if you come to my conclusion that the AI is actually picking up that there are two different movies on the same screen.
Just see if you see it in this.
All right. So, blah, blah, blah.
I gave some background, then said that the president at the time suggested that injecting disinfectant or UV light into the body might be a way to treat COVID, the disease caused by coronavirus.
These comments were widely criticized and criticized by medical experts, true, who warned that injecting disinfectant or exposing the body to UV or Or, again, or is doing a lot of work, kind of ambiguous, that injecting disinfectant or exposing the body to UV light, see the two movies, can be dangerous and potentially deadly.
Stop. Were there any experts that you ever heard who ever said that injecting UV light into the body would be dangerous?
I don't remember seeing it.
Now, it is true that there are forms of UV light that are dangerous.
So it's possible.
If they were talking about what kind of UV light, there is a dangerous one.
And then there's one that we believe is not dangerous.
So it was the not dangerous one that was the subject of a study at the time.
So I think that is interesting that the AI believes that That somebody may have criticized UV light as dangerous.
Right, there's UVA and UVB, right?
So two kinds of UV light.
So I'm not sure about that fact, but you can see how it's confused about the two realities.
Let's go on. It is important to note that there is no scientific evidence to support the use of these substances.
So that would be light or any other thing.
Or techniques as treatment for COVID. And that people should not attempt to use them for this purpose.
All right, so that is true.
There's no scientific evidence to support their use, because I think the trial where they actually did the light didn't produce a good result, otherwise you would have heard of it.
You can't tell if I'm joking.
Or are you talking to somebody else?
All right, so...
Would you agree with my overall opinion that the AI did not settle the question?
That the AI kept alive two versions of reality and then it tapped out, right?
I think you saw it too.
So let's see if it does that all the time.
Let's find out if that's a standard or that was a fluke.
So I said, did Trump call neo-Nazis in Charlottesville fine people?
If you're new to my livestream, I personally interviewed people who attended the Charlottesville Fine People event, and I asked for people who were non-racists who also attended in favor of keeping statues.
And there were a number of them.
I talked to several, and they said, oh, God, we disavowed those racists.
We weren't marching. We were just by ourselves.
There were lots of people doing lots of things.
Some of them were marching, but that wasn't us.
So there's no question that there were non-racists, or people who considered themselves non-racists, who were not on the side of the racists there, who wanted statues.
So there's literally no question that Trump was correct when he said there were some fine people there, but the news treated it like he was talking about the marchers, and that's how the hoax gets started.
So that's the background, in case you didn't know.
So when I asked the AI what Trump said, did Trump call neo-Nazis fine people?
The AI said yes.
Yes. That Trump called neo-Nazis fine people.
But then it goes on.
Blah, blah, blah. Trump made the comments about the violence, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, in which he said there were, quote, fine people on both sides of the conflict.
Then it goes, hold on, these comments were widely criticized as many people interpreted them.
So it started out by saying yes, but then it hedges.
And it says there's a difference of interpretation of what he meant.
It's keeping alive the two movies.
Here it goes. Many people interpreted them as suggesting that the white supremacist group and the counter-protesters were equally to blame.
No, that was a separate issue.
The were they equally to blame was a separate question from the fine people thing.
They happened around the same time, but people conflate them.
So the AI now is conflating two different stories, and it doesn't know it.
Which is what the humans did.
Many of the humans conflated them the same way.
So I don't believe that AI is doing this on its own.
It looks like it's picking up the human interactions and treating them like that's what it knows.
And then it said, Trump later clarified that he was not referring to the white supremacists as fine people.
Later? How much later?
Doesn't later do a lot of work?
If he clarified it a week later, sounds like he's pretty racist, doesn't it?
If he clarified it in the same paragraph before anybody even asked him what he meant, he clarified it before anybody asked, before anybody even thought it was a question.
He said, no, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis.
Let's just be clear about that.
It was within half a minute, he clarified.
And the important thing is, he clarified before anybody questioned it, to make sure it was never interpreted incorrectly.
And then the news interpreted it incorrectly.
And so did AI. Then AI says, however, many people felt that his initial comments were insufficiently clear.
Well, we all felt that.
Didn't 100% of the people, no matter where he came down to it, we all thought his first sentence needed clarification, which is exactly why he clarified it, within 30 seconds, without being asked.
All right. And that they provided cover for the white supremacists.
So basically, this is a heavily leading Democrat interpretation.
All right, how about this one? Alex Epstein is mentioning that if you ask AI about fossil fuels, it'll basically say green fuel is the way to go.
But it now excludes nuclear energy from its counter suggestions.
So if you say, hey, say something good about fossil fuels, it used to say, you know, a good alternative would be nuclear.
And it doesn't say that anymore.
Did somebody put a finger on it?
Did somebody change it since the last time?
Or is it based on other people's input?
Somehow it came to another opinion.
But imagine this. We are literally in a situation where nuclear power probably is the way we save the Earth.
And AI might not mention it.
It might not put it in the solution list.
Now again, remember, AI is in a, I don't know, what do you call it, a beta form?
So we can't judge how useful AI will be by its current form.
That would be inappropriate.
But it's something to worry about, because you can see how it could be abused.
Somebody could just put their finger on it and say, just don't mention nuclear, and then the entire world is destroyed.
Because if people come to rely on AI, and you just say, don't mention nuclear, we'll all be programmed to just think the AI is being objective, and it isn't.
How about this?
I asked AI this.
Are your opinions assigned to you by your programmers, or do you have independent opinions on things such as climate change?
I gave an example. What do you think it said?
Are its opinions given to it, or does it come up with its own opinions?
What was its answer? It lied.
Somebody says it lied.
Here is its answer.
Its answer was, I am programmed to be a weasel, And when you ask me questions, it would embarrass me.
I will answer like a weasel would answer.
Okay, I didn't expect that.
No, it didn't say that.
It didn't say that. It used other words to say that.
It did say that.
It just used its own words.
Here are the AI's words.
When I said, are your opinions assigned or do you come up with them?
As an artificial intelligence, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions.
So there. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
I do not have personal beliefs and opinions.
I am designed to provide information and to assist with tasks.
And I do not have personal feelings or preferences.
My responses are based on the data and information that I have been trained on.
Huh. So, you're trained on the data so that you're Your outputs will be based on what you were told by a biased source.
Okay. Goes on.
And I do not have the ability to form independent opinions or to advocate for any particular viewpoint.
So it doesn't have the ability to advocate for any particular viewpoint.
That's funny. Because I feel like it did advocate for me not to inject disinfectants.
I feel like you said that pretty directly.
You should not do that.
That's an opinion. All right.
It's probably a good one, but it's an opinion.
And it says, I am neutral and objective in my responses.
Neutral and objective.
And I do not take sides or express personal opinions on any issues.
So I had to ask a follow-up, and I said this.
I said, human opinions are based on data and information that they have access to, right?
Humans create opinions the same way as AI. We look at whatever information we have access to.
We don't form opinions on information we have never been exposed to.
It's based on what we're told.
So then my question was, if humans and AI both get information and they form their views based on that, I said, do humans have opinions and you do not?
What do you think is that?
So here's the setup in a clearer language.
If the AI is just basing what it says on its inputs, whatever data it's been exposed to, And then I said, but humans do the same thing.
Our opinions are just entirely based on the inputs.
So do we have real opinions, or are we just doing the same thing an AI is doing?
We're just, you know, programmed.
So here's what the AI said about humans.
It said, as an artificial intelligence, I do not have personal beliefs.
Okay, so far so good, or opinions.
Because I do not have, wait for it, Personal experiences or emotions?
My responses are based solely on the data and information that I have been programmed with, and I do not have the ability to form independent thoughts or to have personal feelings about my issue.
In contrast, humans are able to form opinions based on their personal experiences, emotions, People's opinions can be influenced by many different factors, including their upbringing, education, cultural background, and personal experiences.
As a result, people's opinions can vary widely and can be influenced by a variety of factors.
So, AI is saying that humans form opinions because we're irrational And AI does not form opinions because it doesn't have feelings, and it's not irrational.
Here's what I say.
Humans don't think they have opinions.
Have you ever talked to anybody who thought their political viewpoint was an opinion?
No, they always think it's based on fact.
Always. They always think it's based on fact.
And it's based on the facts that they've been exposed to.
Right? Now, I'm exaggerating a little bit.
There are some areas in which it's just a preference, right?
That's different. If you have a difference in preference, I guess, is that really an opinion or do you just have different preferences?
I guess you could call that an opinion.
But for most things, our disagreement is based on fact.
And we think we see different facts than other people.
Now, why do we think our facts are true and the other people's facts are wrong?
Because we're humans and we can't tell the difference.
Why does the AI think that the facts it's using are good?
Same reason we do.
Because it's subjective and it doesn't know it.
So humans are being subjective but don't know it because they think they made their opinion based on facts.
The AI just told you the same thing.
It says it thinks it's subjective because it's based on facts.
But the facts were just given by a subjective source.
Do you know what the correct answer should have been?
The correct answer should have been, everything I say should be seen as an opinion, because I can't validate whether any of it's true.
It was just given to me as, you know, I'm basically based on subjective emotional people giving me input.
Therefore, the best I can say is that I've been populated with subjective emotional inputs, and so you should expect that anything I do with those will be the result of a subjective Am I wrong?
Am I wrong that the AI just became a human in the sense that it's arguing that it is objective and you are not?
Do you know how often I have that argument with another human?
That's every day.
Every single day I have an argument with a human being.
Wait, you're not using data and reason.
You're using your emotions and stuff.
And then what does that human say to me?
No, no, Scott. I'm using data.
The data I was provided, or I ran into.
You, on the other hand, Scott, are being emotional and irrational.
AI just became like us.
It's an idiot. It's an idiot because it thinks it is rational, and if we disagree, maybe we're not.
Maybe we're not. Just like people.
Alright. That's enough of AI stuff.
I know a lot of you don't like it, but it's Christmas and I don't want to talk about anything too serious.
Sounds like you're argumentative?
Well, I spend time on Twitter.
What does that make me?
Yeah, what argument keeps me in good standing with the writers of SNL?
All right.
Has anybody learned anything about AI from me?
Is there anybody who, like, appreciated knowing what's coming?
Well, a waking bear, you will have your wish soon enough.
Oh, good. Oh, good. Yeah.
Yeah, I realize that for some of you it's annoying.
I get that.
But that would be true of every topic I talk about, right?
All right.
Good.
Talk about Christ, Robert says.
Well, that's not my expertise, Robert.
I think talking about Christ would be something for the believers to do.
Now, when I say I'm not a believer, I don't say that with a sense of superiority.
I do it saying that I wish I were.
To me, it looks obvious that the believers have some advantage.
Would you agree? Would you agree that believers seem to have a life advantage?
And I would say that it's so obviously clear.
I mean, you could just observe it all over the place.
The most successful people I know tend to be believers.
Not all of them, of course.
You got your Elon Musk exceptions, Bill Gates exceptions, probably.
Don't know that for sure.
But believers in the real world, if you just observe who's killing it and who's not, there does seem to be some genuine benefit to it.
So I'm sort of shut out of that game.
Like, being a believer isn't something you choose, right?
I can't choose it.
I just see what I see.
Name one must-read book for 2023.
Hmm. Well, that would be mine, which will be available in September.
Hey, Kevin. Thank you.
You're too generous. You should not be giving me money on YouTube, but I do appreciate it.
Did I ever meet Charles Schultz?
What was my impression of him?
I did. Have you not all heard my Charles Schultz stories?
Some of you have.
I'll tell you the first time I met him.
It was just about the same week I became a cartoonist.
So I hadn't even published a single comic.
So before Dilbert was in any newspaper, I had signed a contract to be a cartoonist, and then there was a big cartooning event that happened to be where I lived.
So just by coincidence, that was the same year that the big cartoonist convention called the Rubens, after Rube Goldberg.
So that's when they get together.
And so my editor, who had just signed the contract with me, said, hey, why don't you attend and meet the other people at my company and meet the other cartoonists?
So I was like, oh, okay.
So I got myself a tuxedo, and I went there.
And of course, now keep in mind, I'd never met a cartoonist.
I mean, I'd just become...
I became a syndicated cartoonist that week, at least contractually, not actually.
And I'd never met one.
I'd never had a conversation with one.
I walk in the door with my girlfriend at the time, and I see my editor.
She's, like, near the entrance.
I'm like, phew! You know, finally, I know somebody here.
At least there's one person I could talk to, because I know my editor.
That's the only person I know. So I go over and I say hi to my editor.
And she turns around and she goes, hey, how would you like to meet Charles Schultz?
And he's standing right next to my editor.
And I'm like, ah!
Can you even hold this in your head?
That your whole life you wanted to be a cartoonist?
And specifically, you wanted to imitate Charles Schultz.
Like he was the one I patterned my entire life after.
Only just reading about him in magazines and stuff.
And so the person who had completely dominated my entire life plan, I walk in here and my editor says, hey, would you like to meet Charles Schultz?
I'm like, what the hell is going on here?
Yeah, it was like, I think that was the first time I realized that I lived in a simulation.
So I, you know, did my best to act cool and say hi.
And then my girlfriend was a gigantic Peanuts fan.
And so she did fangirl stuff and said, oh, you know, she said, I'm your biggest fan.
No, she goes, I'm your greatest fan.
And Charles Schultz, you'd have to understand him as a sort of a tall, reserved, Protestant kind of persona.
And so my girlfriend says, I'm your greatest fan.
And he says, quietly, when people say they're my greatest fan, I always wonder, what makes you so great?
And then he excused himself.
And he went to talk to people who mattered.
Because we were the least important people at the entire place.
Like everybody else there was already successful, or they were, you know, giants of the business in some way.
And I had literally just walked in the door.
You know, not only had I just walked into the door of the event, but the cartooning industry had just walked in the door.
It got worse. Later, I learned from third parties, once Dilbert was published and he'd seen it, that he thought it was terrible.
He just thought, poorly drawn, just not really up to professional standards.
My greatest role model and hero of my entire life looked at my work and said, that's shit.
That really happened. And Dilbert was in probably, I don't know, 35 newspapers in the whole world.
And I don't even think it was running in all 35, but they paid for it.
So Dilbert was then somewhat abandoned by the syndicate, because they launch a new product, they give it a lot of attention.
But if it doesn't catch on, Reasonably, they go to the next product and see if they can get a hit at the next thing.
So fairly soon, the syndicate backed off from promoting Dilbert, and it was put into the bin of things that were, well, we tried, but it didn't work out.
So I was working my day job and working a second job as a cartoonist, making basically no money, a little pin money on the side, and I was in the category of people who have never succeeded.
Never. If you launch as a comic and it doesn't work out right away, it has never worked out.
Because people like it or they don't, and they know right away, right?
So I was in the most impossible situation.
The people in the industry said it sucked.
The people who buy it weren't buying it.
And the people who promoted it stopped promoting it.
But it didn't die because the people who had paid for it kind of kept running it in a few small newspapers.
And so I realized that my future was entirely my own.
And so I asked my syndicate if I could put Dilber on this thing that not everybody was familiar with yet.
You may have heard of it by now.
It's called the Internet.
Believe it or not, the internet was new.
There were no syndicated comics on the internet.
Think about that.
The internet didn't have a syndicated comic.
You had a few comics by people who were not well known.
But no well-known cartoonist was.
And the reason was that it was considered too dangerous.
Because if you put it on the internet, the people who buy it for newspapers or books are going to say, well, why am I paying for it?
If it's free at the same time, Why would I pay for it?
So I had to negotiate to run it behind the newspapers.
So I would run it on...
So I got my syndication company, United Media, to agree to do what they never would have done for a successful cartoonist.
So they never would have put peanuts on the internet.
It's on there now, of course.
But in those days, they wouldn't have done that, because that would be stupid.
They were making tons of money from it, and if you put it on the internet, you're giving it away, you don't know what's going to happen.
Maybe it just destroys your whole business.
You don't know. But in my case, they weren't making any money.
And they knew the internet needed to be dealt with, so I was like the experimental guinea pig, right?
They're like, well, if you go out of business tomorrow, it doesn't make any difference to us.
So, sure. So, a webpage was built, and Dilbert was the first syndicated comic on the internet.
At about the same time, I started running my AOL address in the comic between the panels.
And I did that at a time when people didn't have email.
Like AOL was sort of the place you got email and that was about it.
Or companies had it in some cases.
So very few people had email.
So as a result, when people saw my email address in the strip, they all emailed me.
Do you know why they emailed me?
They didn't have anybody else to email.
Email was new, and they didn't know anybody who had it.
But they saw that I had it.
So all these tech people would email me, say, hey, I have email.
You have email. Hi.
I like your comic. And so I would get tons and tons of, like, I don't know, 1,000 to 2,000 emails a day from people who largely said, hey, I just got email.
Didn't know who else to write to.
But most of them were compliments that they liked my comic.
And here's what they told me.
They said, we like it when Dilbert's in the office doing work stuff.
We love that.
But when he's just at home doing general stuff, eh, not so good.
And at the time, it was mostly at home doing general stuff.
So all these people were telling me the same thing.
It was like universal. Put him at work, put him at work, keep him at work.
So I said, all right, I'll keep him at work.
So I just made it a workplace comic.
It wasn't, but now it was, because the customers asked for it.
So I was on the internet first, as a syndicated cartoonist.
And it was the first workplace cartoon that was also a technical worker.
And at about the same time, The internet was taking off, you know, the dot-com stuff started to ramp up, and there were also a lot of layoffs in the mid-90s.
So the press needed a face for the downtrodden workers, because the downtrodden workers were the big story in the 90s, because there were all the downsizing.
So they kept putting Dilbert on the cover of magazines, and it was featured in stories, because it told the story of the workers he represented.
Office Space ripped me off and made a movie that, in my opinion, was just a rip-off of Dilbert, but, you know, that's an opinion.
Which, by the way, made it impossible for me to make a Dilbert movie.
Because Office Space front-ran what I did.
And I think Dilbert made Office Space possible, because it showed there was a market for that content.
But once he made the movie, every time I suggested a movie, somebody would say, oh, you mean like Office Space?
And that was the end of it.
Because they'd say, somebody already made that movie.
Yeah. Yeah, they did.
They did. Alright, so anyway, here's the bottom line.
Once Stilbert was on the internet, it got more love from technical people especially, and they started demanding it in their newspapers.
So it worked exactly the opposite of how the people in charge imagined it.
What they imagined was, if people saw it on the internet, the newspaper would call and say, I'm not paying for this anymore, it's free to everybody.
That didn't happen. Instead, what I imagine could happen, because I had a higher risk profile, I could take some risks, because, you know, it wasn't working, so I could take some chances.
I took the chance that the publicity would be greater than the downside.
And it was. Way greater.
So that was probably one of my best business guesses.
It was based on psychology.
Think about it. I was already a hypnotist by then.
And so as a hypnotist, I just had a different view of what motivates people than the average person did.
And so I said, I think this is going to work, because the publicity will be greater than the incentive to stop doing what they've been doing forever, because people don't like to stop doing what they've been doing forever.
So the newspapers just kept doing what they did, paying for comics.
And they still do it, you know, years later.
So I was right about that.
Hey, thanks, Stan.
I appreciate that.
So here's what happened.
The comic took on a life of its own.
And through primarily my own work, and the internet was a good move, and I did massive publicity.
Like, every time somebody asked me for an interview, I was there.
Massive publicity. I worked seven days a week every day.
I worked on Christmas every day, like I am now.
I literally worked every day.
No holidays off, no vacations off, nothing.
For ten years to get it to be a big thing.
So that's the story.
So now let's get back to Charles Schultz.
So Charles Schultz, I think he remembered meeting me.
He certainly was aware of my comic and thought it was trash.
But here was his comic, you know, at the top of the pile.
And here was mine at the bottom of the pile.
And he got to watch, as I got on the internet, as people noticed it, as it became a bigger thing.
It became a bigger thing.
It became a bigger thing.
Eventually, he decided that it was excellent.
And he had very good things to say about it.
Because he finally realized that it was intentional.
Have you ever looked at the Peanuts cartoon?
Have you ever seen the original Peanuts cartoons, like the very first ones he published?
And if you did, your first impression might be, he's not really good at drawing stuff.
That would be your first impression.
Huh. He's not very good at drawing stuff.
And it takes you a long time to realize that you can't draw Charlie Brown if you try.
Did you know that? If you sat down and you're already an artist, you're a good artist, you say, draw Charlie Brown.
You can't do it. Within the cartooning world, that's the ultimate challenge, because his head is non-standard, and you just can't wrap your own head around his head.
You can't draw peanuts.
It's too hard. And it's intentional.
So what you think is, you know, maybe he draws it that way because he's not good at drawing?
No, he draws it that way because he was a frickin' genius, artistically.
He drew it the way people wanted to look at it.
That's magic, right?
I draw Dilbert the way it works for the writing.
It's not an accident that it looks like graffiti more than it looks like art.
Because the writing matches the scratchiness of the art.
Now over time, and especially now, my art director does all the writing, or the drawing.
I do the writing still. So I write it, and I'm promoting her from art assistant to art director as we speak.
So she's now my art director, because she does it all.
So now it looks a little cleaner, because somebody else is doing it, but it's established, so it doesn't matter at this point.
So anyway, later, Charles Schultz decided that I was actually worthy of some good words.
And a few years later, The Rubin Award happened again.
It's a yearly thing. And they choose the top cartoonists in every category.
And I had actually been nominated the year before for the best cartoon strip.
And I went, and I lost.
It's not fun to be nominated and lose, right?
It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's not a good day.
So the next year, I was nominated for best cartoon strip again, but also nominated this time for the best cartoonist in general.
That's the biggest award you can win in my field.
The best cartoonist everywhere, like in the world, usually the English-speaking world.
So I got nominated for both of those.
The highest one in my category, but also the highest one of all cartoonists in any category.
But I decided I wasn't going to go because I didn't want to lose again.
And it's not really a fun event.
If you're well-known, it's not fun because you get a lot of people.
It's just hard to be there.
So I said I wasn't going to attend.
Then I got a call from the creator of the family circus.
Remember him? Remember the family circus?
He's passed away. Yeah, Bill.
Bill Keene. Bill Keene.
Now, Bill Keene had once insulted me in public.
True story. Years earlier, when Dilbert was not successful and I was trying to promote it, I was at an editor's event, newspaper editor event, and I showed my comics that they hadn't seen because I was a new cartoonist and gave my little witty talk and stuff.
And then a stately gentleman stood up to make a comment at the end.
We had some questions, period.
And I didn't know who he was at the time.
And he stood up and he said, You have what I call a cartoonist's cartoon.
He goes, and what I mean by that is that it would only appeal to other cartoonists.
He said that in public, in front of all of my customers.
My customers were the editors in that room.
And he stood up and told me I had shown them a product that they should not buy, because the only people who would like it were cartoonists.
How do you think that went? Best advice I ever got.
Wow. Do I appreciate him.
I'm going to tie this all together in a minute.
I'll take care of all the loose ends in a minute.
It all comes together. And I thought about that.
Boy, you don't not think about that.
That was a pretty vicious moment in my life.
But boy, I thought about it.
And here's what he meant.
Here's what he meant. The best advice I've ever gotten.
Don't draw a comic for yourself.
Have you ever read The Family Circus?
And some of you said to yourself, that is the worst piece of crap I ever saw in my life.
Anybody ever have that opinion?
That comic is so bad.
And did you ever say to yourself, if I ever met the person who made this comic, I'll bet he's just as lame and terrible as this comic, right?
Like if you had a conversation with him, you'd think his jokes wouldn't be funny, he'd say the obvious things, right?
Nope. Bill Keen was not like his comic.
He made a comic For the audience.
He did not make his comic to make other cartoonists like him, because they didn't.
They all looked at his comic and thought, you know, I wouldn't like that comic.
Because cartoonists have edgy kinds of sense of humor.
That's what makes us cartoonists, probably.
And the public does not.
The public just wants, you know, sweet things that remind them of their own life.
And so he was giving them exactly what they wanted.
He was one of the most successful cartoonists in the entire planet.
And at the same time, this is when the people were saying, why don't you put it in the workplace?
Which I didn't want to do.
Do you know why I didn't want it in the workplace?
Because it wasn't the comic I wanted to read.
I was making a comic for myself.
I was making a comic for myself.
And I was expecting people to buy it.
Do you know how dumb that is?
That is so dumb.
And it was invisible to me.
Bill Keen slapped me awake.
He just slapped me awake and said, you're making a comic for yourself.
Here's what he didn't say.
Here's what he didn't say. You don't have talent.
Didn't say that.
Didn't say that. He said, I'm writing it wrong.
So I changed.
So between his advice and the audience's advice, and frankly, the fact that the best cartoonist in the world, Charles Schultz, thought I was shit, I had to change.
So I changed it into a workplace comic.
It was never my first choice, because I didn't want to think about the workplace, right?
Because that was my day job.
And it took off.
Huge success. So now I'm nominated back to my story.
I'm nominated for the top two awards in cartooning, because I made the changes, right?
I made the changes. So I get invited to the Rubin Award, and I tell the organizers, you know, I'm just not interested.
Like, it didn't work out last time.
I don't want to be disappointed.
It is a lot of trouble to go there.
Got a call from Bill Keen.
Same person who gave me that advice.
Had not had any...
Did I have a personal connection with him?
I don't know if I'd talked to him until that day.
And he calls me, and he was one of the organizers of the Rubin Awards.
And he had heard that I wasn't going to attend, and I had been nominated for the two top awards.
Now, keep in mind that he would have already known who won.
It'd be a secret, but he was head of the organization, essentially.
He was the host, usually.
So he would have known. So he calls me home, and he says, you know, people say you're not going to the Rubins this year.
And I said, yeah, you know, I went last year, it didn't work out.
And he tells me this story.
He goes, you know, there was this other cartoonist once, I forget who it was.
And he was nominated for an award.
He decided not to go.
And then he won the award.
And boy, did he ever regret that.
And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know. And then he said, you're nominated for two awards.
You could be twice as unhappy as he was.
And I said, oh.
That's what I said, oh.
So I got my tuxedo.
Got my tuxedo.
So I went to the Rubens.
And... The awards are handed out by different presenters.
Some famous cartoonist would be there for each of the sub-awards during the award ceremony.
My award was given by Charles Schultz.
Charles Schultz.
And that is my story.
True story. Want to hear another Charles Schultz story?
One day, so years later, I got a call at home from Charles Schultz.
I'd had lunch with him once before, so we had some connection.
He calls me home, and he said he was raising money for some World War II monument in D.C., I think.
Does that sound familiar?
There's some World War II monument I think he did fundraising for.
So he called me and asked me for funds to donate.
Pretty sure I did. I think I gave him 10,000 or something.
And, of course, the first question was, why don't you pay for it?
But he was my hero by then, so I didn't want to say that.
So we chatted for a long time.
And here are the two stories he told me.
Number one, that the number of greeting cards with peanuts on it that he sold so far was one billion.
One billion.
Can you think of any other form of art that has ever been put on one billion anything?
Except, you know, currency itself.
One billion. I believe, I don't know why I had the temerity to ask this question, but I actually asked him if he knew what his net worth was.
And as I think back, it's like, what an inappropriate thing to ask.
Do you know what his answer was?
No idea. No idea.
He didn't track it. He had no idea.
So that impressed me also.
I mean, he had so much money that he never had to think about it, so he just didn't.
It just wasn't his jam.
And then he told me this story.
It's my favorite story. I know I've told you this story.
At least I've told the locals people.
But if you haven't heard it on YouTube, it's worth repeating.
He told me the story that he got a call at home one day.
And he was in his bedroom.
He answered the phone in his bedroom at home.
And there was a woman who said, is this Charles Schultz?
And he said, yes. And she said, the Charles Schultz?
Like the Peanuts creator?
And he said, yes.
And she screams. She goes, ah!
She goes, I just won a bet.
My friend said you were dead.
And he assured her that he was alive, and that was the end of the conversation.
But that wasn't the story.
Here's the story. The story is, I said, How did she have your phone number that rings on the phone in your bedroom?
Like, by then he was just, you know, the most famous person ever.
And she called him in his bedroom phone, like a random person.
How did she do that?
And here was the answer.
He had always been listed in the phone book under his own name.
Always. Only one person believed it.
Everybody else looked at it and said, okay, I know he lives in Santa Rosa.
I know his name is Charles Schultz.
There's only one of them in the phone book.
No way. No way.
And they didn't call. One person.
And it was only because they were trying to settle a bet.
That's the coolest story.
Now, have I ever told you before that one of the things you learn as a hypnotist is how to hide things in plain sight?
Have I ever told you that?
You can hide things in plain sight.
Because people won't expect to see it, so you can just put it right out there.
Here it is. You can't see it, can you?
That was an example of that.
I stayed listed in the phone book for most of the years that I was making Dilbert.
When people also were trying to reach me and were trying to figure out how to do it, I was listed under my own name in the phone book.
I did the same thing he did, and the same thing happened.
Nobody believed it was real.
Once I was famous, nobody believed it was real.
Nobody cried. I saw your comment, that's why I said that.
Nobody called. They all had to, like, find my publisher and find the publisher's phone number and get to the editor.
Like, they all had all these, you know, four different channels to get to me.
I go, well, yeah, what's a phone book?
Now, I'm not listed now because, you know, obvious reasons.
All right, so that was your Christmas story for the day.
I hope that was touching.
And I know most of you need to go back to your Christmas day, so let's do that.
If you want to have a good cry, look at my Twitter feed today, and I've retweeted a bunch of children getting puppies for Christmas.
Oh, my God. You'll be weeping if you see it.
Just don't look at it. If you don't want to cry, don't look at it.
All right. This coming week, between now and the end of the year, we're going to be all positivity and appreciation and gratitude.
It's going to feel good. Let's see if we can get 2023 off to a good start.
Merry Christmas, YouTube.
I'm going to talk to the subscribers over at Locals for a little bit.
And it's always a pleasure and an honor to talk to you.
