3889 When Facts Don't Matter | Scott Adams and Stefan Molyneux
"Scott Adams was one of the earliest public figures to predict Trump’s win, doing so a week after Nate Silver put Trump’s odds at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog. The mainstream media regarded Trump as a novelty and a sideshow. But Adams recognized in Trump a level of persuasion you only see once in a generation.""Trump triggered massive cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias on both the left and the right. We’re hardwired to respond to emotion, not reason. We might listen to 10 percent of a speech—a hand gesture here, a phrase there—and if the right buttons are pushed, we decide we agree with the speaker and invent reasons to justify that decision after the fact. The point isn’t whether Trump was right or wrong, good or bad. Win Bigly goes beyond politics to look at persuasion tools that can work in any setting—the same ones Adams saw in Steve Jobs when he invested in Apple decades ago."Scott Adams is the creator of the widely popular Dilbert comic strip that is published daily in thousands of newspapers across the world, he is the author of many bestselling books including “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life” and "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter." Adams is also a trained hypnotist and an expert in the field of persuasion. Order "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life" now at: http://www.fdrurl.com/Scott-Adams-Still-Win-BigOrder "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter" now at: http://www.fdrurl.com/Scott-Adams-Win-BiglyBlog: http://blog.dilbert.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/scottadamssaysYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, here with a good friend Scott Adams, the creator of the, I'm sure you know it, wildly popular Dilbert comic strip, published daily in thousands of newspapers around the world.
A trained hypnotist.
Do not stare at him for more than eight seconds, even via webcam.
He's an expert also in the field of persuasion, and the author of many best-selling books, including How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, kind of the story of my life, and the brand-spanking new...
Released, win bigly, persuasion in a world where facts don't matter.
The blog is great, blog.dilbert.com and twitter.com forward slash Scott, two Ts, Scott Adams says.
Scott, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me.
Now, I read this book.
I just flew out to California, and I read the book on the plane.
And it's very good in that I find myself agreeing with it enormously, which I have to be careful of, because that's like the seductive siren.
That's like the Natasha come hither with a bit of leg and a swinging purse.
That's why you have to be careful.
And then I find myself, like, almost in the plane.
I'm like making sort of incomprehensible sounds that make your passengers recoil, because there are points where, you know, your perspective and mine deviate significantly, which we can talk about.
But that to me is the mark of a good book because it teaches you to be wary of agreement and also to be wary of disagreement, which hopefully helps polish a more sensible perspective.
So thanks for that.
So let's talk about...
Of course, the title, Persuasion, is really the key.
And Persuasion, in my mind, Scott, I had to really separate from the old enemy of philosophy known as sophistry.
And so tell me a little bit about Persuasion as a whole and why it's so important in our current social universe.
Well, Persuasion is everywhere, from sales to branding to marketing to negotiating.
To running for office, to understanding how somebody is succeeding when you think they shouldn't, to really every part of your business and personal life.
There's nothing that is free of persuasion unless it's, you know, let's say an engineering problem or math.
I guess those would be the things.
But if humans are involved, somebody is getting persuaded either intentionally or accidentally.
And if you don't understand the world on that level, you're missing the show.
Right. And it sort of reminds me of a book I read years ago about the development of Ethernet, the network protocol.
And the guy who built Ethernet ended up making a fortune retiring a teaching, and he invited...
His students from his graduate course over to his house.
And of course, it's got this big, beautiful mansion.
They all come over and they say, wow, this place is beautiful.
You've got a pool and everything.
I wish I'd invented Ethernet.
And he's like, are you kidding me? I don't have this house because I invented Ethernet.
Because so many people had different protocols.
I have this house because I spent like five years crisscrossing the country, convincing people to adopt it.
And people think that there's this flash of inspiration that leads to success.
But that's... The necessary but not sufficient first step in actually getting people to accept what it is that you're doing or even be interested.
Yeah, success is mostly about changing people's minds.
You know, I always say, people come to me and say, I have this great idea, you know, can you help me get my idea into the marketplace so that I'll be rich for my idea?
And I always say the same thing. The value of a great idea, a great idea, a really, really great idea, the economic value is zero.
And nothing's going to change that.
And the reason is because everybody has their own idea.
And nobody has a shortage of great ideas, at least the way they see it.
So it's not the idea, it's the execution.
And a lot of the execution comes down to persuasion.
Why do you think people find it so hard to be persuasive?
Like, every time I go in my show and I ask for donations, I get this blowback.
Oh, you're e-begging. It's like a humiliating position to say, hey, can you support me in what it is that I'm doing?
It seems that we have both this thirst, because, you know, we want to survive biologically and reproduce.
We have this thirst to persuade others.
But at the same time, we're really nervous about it a lot of times.
It seems like contradictory.
If it's so helpful, Darwinianly speaking...
Why aren't we better at it?
Why don't we do it more? Why don't we accept its value?
Well, I think people have an ethic barrier, ethical barrier.
They say, if I'm persuading somebody, are they making a decision based on the facts, which would sound ethical, right?
So the point of persuasion usually is that the facts alone aren't enough to make your case, because we don't call it persuasion if the facts make the case and somebody says, oh, Okay, this is a lower price for the same item.
I'll pay the lower price. But most things don't fall into that category.
Most things require a little bit of psychological tweaking because the facts don't tell the whole story.
So people are uncomfortable doing what they might think in their own mind is manipulating.
The way I like to put it is, if you have a leader, for example, who is influencing you, persuading you towards something that's a greater good, you say, that person's a leader.
Sure, all the facts weren't exactly right, the priorities weren't really the way I would have talked about it, but at least we're heading in the right direction.
That person's a leader. But if that person is trying to take you someplace that's only good for the person persuading, and it's bad for you, and it might be bad for society, then you say, well, that person's a con man, or I'll de-sexualize it, de-sexistize it, a con person. So really, it's all about the intention of the persuader that makes it either good or bad.
It's just a tool. And it's interesting.
I had this thought when I was reading your book.
I'll sort of share it with you and let me know what you think.
Because I come out of the sort of world of Aristotelian objective reality, get your facts and your arguments in order, and that's how the world works.
And I had this funny thought while I was reading your book, Scott, that...
What if people who are really good at persuasion convince rational people that all they need to do is get their facts, evidence, and so on in order, and so to have them scurry around gathering facts and polishing their arguments in order to take them out of the social equation?
You know, like it's like when you want to rob a house, you throw the piece of drugged meat to one side and it's like, argh!
I'm going to go up and eat the drug meat, and then you get to rob the house.
Like, what if this whole just have facts, reason, and evidence is just a way of, in a sense, emasculating debaters in the world and paving the way for sophists to take over?
Well, you know, you see religion does a good job of taking the, you know, letting people run around and try to gather their facts, but it doesn't matter because, you know, religion has a big emotional appeal, and that's going to overwhelm any facts that anybody gathers.
So I think, yeah, I've never thought of it as a diversion before, but when you look at how President Trump tweets, often there's a factual gap, shall we say, which causes everybody to scurry around talking about all the things that are not terribly persuasive or important.
Meanwhile, what we're thinking about is where he wants our minds to be.
And he's focused our minds on whatever he thinks is a priority, and that is persuasive.
Well, this is another thing, too, that came out of the book that I found surprising.
Well, my interpretation of the book, let's be honest about it, which is that there's this idea that you have to be liked in order to succeed, and you have to be correct and right in order to convince people.
And... That's a tough one for me to let go of, man.
That is my childhood teddy bear that I don't want to let go of.
It's my binky.
So tell me a little bit about intentional errors in communication that raise the profile of your topic and also the fact that you really don't have to be liked.
To be persuasive. I think it was Apple's relationship to Steve Jobs.
You know, the reality distortion field was not just praise.
It was also maddening for people who thought they had better ideas but lacked that will and execution to get their way.
You don't have to be liked. You don't even have to be right.
Kind of a chilling thought.
I would push that idea even further and say that the best persuaders are almost always generating an oversized amount of hate on the people who didn't want to be persuaded.
So generally there are two populations when somebody is persuading.
Some of them want to go in that direction and they're just looking for a good reason, a little push, and they feel good about it.
But others are so dead set that they don't want to go in that direction.
When they feel something persuasive, they get really angry and try to explain it away with this person's a monster, for example, or there's something else going on.
So when you see these oversized reactions, Such as people going outside to literally scream at the sky because it's the one-year anniversary of the election.
Those oversized reactions are actually the outcome of good persuasion.
When I say good, I mean effective.
You can use your own judgment about where it's heading.
But I can't think of an exception.
If you find somebody who's very persuasive, the haters come out in big numbers.
And it's, of course, they feel this persuasion.
And for a lot of people, being persuaded feels like you're losing free will, you're losing your identity, you're losing what it is to be human.
It feels almost like somebody's possessing you with some sort of demonic force.
So we have very little resistance.
to this kind of persuasion other than, you know, stuff that makes us look crazy, like the aforementioned screaming at the sky.
And do you think that if people, you know, through your book and through other kinds of research, if they figure out how persuasion works, do you think it gives you any kind of immunity or do you just get to watch it happen without being able to change it?
Well, you know, I would love to buy into the idea that I've learned enough about persuasion that I'm now somehow immune.
I can see it coming.
But in so many ways, we see that people who do understand the method are still just as persuaded.
So, for example, I like to use the example of when people price something at $9.99, it's obvious that they're trying to not say $10.
100% of the people who look at that say, oh, it's about $10, but they didn't say $10.
It still works, even though you can see the mechanism transparently.
And I think that that is generally true.
I offer some maybe hope, and that's as far as I could go here, that if you understood what causes cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias as well, that you could recognize the triggers.
And you might, might, just a hypothesis, be able to pick out which one of you got triggered.
So, for example, in the election, I've argued that people who are Trump supporters Got the future they expected and wanted, and it felt consistent with how they saw the world.
So even if it was a little bit of a surprise that he got elected, it all fit their worldview.
That, of course, he should get elected.
You know, that's why we supported him.
The people who were surprised, and really surprised, probably got triggered.
So when you see them take on a whole new movie in their heads, as I say, and in their world a monster got elected and it's the sign of the end times, Chances are, if you were to be objective, one side saw their worldview break and the other did not.
That alone should tell you which side is triggered.
And then you would also look for the oversized reaction.
So the people on the Trump side are just sort of happy in what I would call a normal way.
They're sort of normally happy.
The people who are angry look to observers as actually crazy.
Now, they're not. They're not organically crazy in a real way, but they have an experience that is making them react in an oversized emotional way.
The trigger plus the oversized emotion probably is going to tell you who's in cognitive dissonance, but there's no 100% here.
You could be the one who's in it.
One part I found satisfying in your book, Scott, was your talk about business experience.
You know, I have, to some people's minds, superpowers as a sort of podcaster and so on, because I have business experience.
And when you have business experience, you're interested in, of course, you know, persuading people.
You need to actually ask questions.
For the sale rather than beat around the bush.
You need to make sure that you're providing value.
You understand that if you buy someone a coffee, it sets up reciprocity.
If you give stuff away for free, it creates a sense of reciprocity and so on.
So when you were talking about Trump's high-end business strategy, it looks crazy to political pundits, but they don't have business experience.
The extreme ask that ends up with the compromise.
And you also talked about this, I thought, very interestingly in a periscope, which I would recommend Scott's Periscope so highly.
With Comey and the letter about Hillary that came out where he seemed to be exonerating her ahead of time.
He thought it might have just been a position research paper in his own mind and so on.
How do you think Trump's business experience, which is becoming increasingly rare in American politics or just a bunch of lawyers and old hacks and so on, how do you think his business experience gives him or helps him with this persuasive power?
Well, I think if you're in the field of business, especially if you're negotiating a lot, and that was his brand, so he's tuned into that, that you understand the psychology of business, and that gives you sort of a leg up.
Some of the examples I like to give are what I call the new CEO move that he and Pence used.
Before inauguration, they were already traveling around and talking to Ford and Carrier and saying, keep those jobs here.
And what you heard was, my goodness, he hasn't even started the job and he's hit the ground running and he's trying to claw back jobs.
It's all about jobs and he's going to bring them back.
Now the reality, if you were to dig into the details, not much changed because of those.
It didn't really make much difference in terms of how many jobs stayed in the United States.
But our minds went to, this guy will do anything.
He's on the ground.
He's trying to make it happen.
And that changes how you think about the whole idea of bringing jobs back to America.
It becomes a bigger priority.
Then other companies say, hey, these companies got a lot of attention and they got a lot of good publicity and it made them really loved in the United States.
Maybe we should consider this too.
So I think that he gets ahead of the reality and brings the reality with him, very much like the power of positive thinking.
Which is a popular book written by the pastor of his church when he was a kid.
Norman Vincent Peale taught him how, and taught lots of people, including me, how to think your way into a better situation by moving people's minds ahead of reality.
You saw him do it again recently when he was interviewed just the other day about the state of the economy.
So instead of doing what regular presidents would do, you know, somebody who was a lawyer by training, They might have said, we got 3% GDP. That's really good.
But what he said was, we got 3% GDP. Without the hurricanes, it probably would have been 4.
I think we're going to have 4.
We're looking toward 4. He took your mind from 3, that sounds pretty good, to 4, I think that's going to happen.
And what does that do to investors?
Investors say, hey, he's looking at 4%.
Let's invest now.
And that investing is what causes the 4%.
He is literally thinking us into the future and manifesting the future.
Because in an economy, as long as you don't have a resource shortage, and we don't, it's how you think about the future that makes the economy work.
He understands that at an organic level, whereas a lawyer might just say, well, here's the facts, and then people stay in the present, and they don't manifest that better economic situation.
And it does work.
I mean, a very influential essay that I read in my 20s was this woman who was very famous at fundraising and making these big galas.
And she did raise a lot of money for charity.
And she said, well, you act like it's going to happen.
Next thing you know, it's happening. You know, you call people up and say...
Oh, I'm throwing this big gala.
All these great people are going to be there.
Do you want in? And they're like, well, sure.
And then she just builds that consensus one by one.
Next thing you know, what she talked about at the beginning has actually come to pass.
Believe in it, you know, the build it and they will come stuff.
I mean, it has limits to me epistemologically, but it is a really powerful thing because people are drawn to certainty.
Most people fundamentally don't have good reasons for what they believe.
And so they're drawn to the surface, to the appearance of things.
And as you point out, here's a quote from the book, people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.
Yeah, and we're also like moths.
You know, we're attracted to the flame.
So where there's energy, we just want to go there.
It's just more fun. I think there's just something basic about us.
You know, if you're a cave person and there's a fire, you're going to walk toward the fire because, hey, we can cook our meat, we can stay warm, we can throw it at enemies, whatever fire is good for.
And Trump did a very unusual thing in his campaign.
From the very beginning, he kept telling us it was about energy.
It was about a high-energy campaign.
And in fact, he contrasted that with low-energy Jeb Bush.
And when he was talking about this stuff, I don't think people understood How persuasive that is, that you're the energy person.
People like energy. They walk toward it just reflexively.
Right. And I remember being very frustrated about this when I was a debater in college.
And I made some wonderful speech.
And there was a guy I was opposing who made some cutting comment about my boldness.
And everybody started laughing.
And I was like, no, he's not right.
He's just made a terrible joke.
Don't follow him.
He's a sophist. And I was like, but he even had annoyance.
The annoyance of the audience following the person who just made a good joke rather than a good argument actually makes that person more likable because he's given them the dopamine rush of humor.
And it makes you less likable, or me in this case, because I'm sitting there skewing saying, well, this is not fair.
I had better arguments. He just made a dumb joke.
Why are you? And then you don't like the audience, and they reciprocate.
And it's like, man, that's annoying.
I mean, I shouldn't have studied logic.
I should have studied comedy.
That's how you're going to win these things.
Yeah, and your opponent there took all of their energy and focused it on, you know, the least important part of your presentation.
So that was not a mistake.
No, it wasn't. And that's the Rosie O'Donnell moment where I felt was a real pivot.
We'll talk about some of the despair or, I guess, concerns you had later, particularly around Pussygate.
But the Rosie O'Donnell moment, it's an amazing thing.
Shame is an incredibly powerful social weapon unless you don't believe in it.
It's sort of like voodoo. You know, if you believe in voodoo and someone's sticking a pin into your, ah, oh, pain, you know, the doom, despair, disaster.
But if you don't believe in voodoo, it's like, well, they're just going to hurt themselves with that pin.
What does it do to me, right? And shame is one of these kinds of things as well.
When Megyn Kelly tried to shame him and humiliate him and, in a sense, bully him, and he's just like, I don't have time for political correctness.
We've got a world to save. And it was only Rosie O'Donnell, which ties into everyone's, you know, media obsession with these celebrity spats and so on.
And it's like... If he refuses to be shamed, the sword that looks like fiery and powerful just kind of wilts like overcooked spaghetti and fails, and that's an amazing thing.
Yeah, and there's something else going on with that strategy-wise.
If you're a tennis player, for example, a famous thing that tennis players do is if you have a really good player who's playing like a lesser one, and you should probably beat that person.
The stronger player will go after the strength of the weaker player, won't go after the bad backhand.
Because if you can break down their strength, they have nothing left, and it's just a walk.
So what was the biggest problem that Republicans have in general, and Trump in particular, is this whole political correctness thing that could be just continually driven at them.
You're not politically correct, therefore you can't be president.
In that very episode that you mentioned, the Rosie O'Donnell moment, he went after their strongest point and brushed it off the table.
That was step one, because that's what allowed him to become president, is that he took their strongest case and just brushed it away.
And then the rest was the details, as it turns out.
Right. So where I feel that you're harshing on my gig, so to speak, is when you start talking about the human brain, use the quote, the human brain is not capable of comprehending truth at a deep level.
Now, I need to bring this up.
Obviously, people are going to read this and say, stay Why didn't you bring this up?
And it's a fair point because, of course, that's my philosophy thing is trying to aim at that as significantly as possible.
But make the case for this approach to understanding the human mind and how it operates relative to reality.
Well, so I start with what I'd call the hypnotist's view of the world.
The normal view of the world is that we're rational creatures 90% of the time.
And we all recognize that, oh, 10% of the time we get a little crazy, but it's mostly other people.
Doesn't happen to me so much.
The hypnotist reverses that completely and says, we are an irrational species who rationalizes after the fact.
And by the way, science largely backs that up.
You know, there are a number of studies showing that the reason and logic and facts don't really change people's minds the way we assume they should.
But people are really great at rationalizing why they did the irrational thing that they did.
So once you understand that's the normal way the world works, and by the way, you can't even be a hypnotist unless you understand that, because nothing else would make sense, then you ask yourself, well, how could we be in this situation?
How could we have built these great civilizations and gotten to this point where we're the ruling species if we're not rational?
Well, here's the thing.
Evolution didn't care if you understood.
It only cared if you made more of yourself.
The bar for evolution is really low.
Did you make more of yourself?
Success. Did you not?
You failed. And we were able to make more of ourselves.
Even though you and I could have a complete disagreement on, let's say, this point, right?
Or you could have a different religion, which is like living in a different reality.
You could think that the President of the United States is a monster ready to destroy the world.
I could think he's a populist who's got some policies you don't like, but he's basically harmless.
So we're living in completely different interpretations of reality, and I would argue that that's the normal case, not the exception.
And once you understand it as normal, It changes how you see everything and do everything.
And I go further and say that you can predict the future better by assuming that people are irrational than you can if you believe they're rational.
And I set that as my test.
And it was the reason that I predicted so publicly and consistently, at least until Pussygate anyway, that President Trump or candidate Trump would become president.
Because I believe that this notion of people as irrational and easily persuaded Would be more predictive than any set of facts and fact checking you could put together.
So let's talk about the pussy gay moment, which was I mean, you could see it coming when I think it was Anderson Cooper or someone was asking Trump, have you ever behaved disrespectfully towards women and so on?
You could see this whole machinery getting set up in motion.
And then when it when it came out, of course, Trump, people who liked Trump, people who wanted Trump in or people who predicted and had sort of public public reputations on the line was like, oh, big Body Blow.
What was that like for you?
Because again, you had sacrificed your speaking gigs.
You point out 75% of your so-called friends had turned out to be not even frenemies, but sometimes even outright bullies abandoned you.
And so you had a whole lot riding on all of this.
That moment where you saw the Billy Bush tape, what was that like for you and how did you recover?
I felt my stomach just fall out through my feet.
I didn't think in that moment that that was recoverable.
I think I had the same impression that everybody did, that sure, he's taken a lot of blows and brushed them off, but surely this one, this one you don't get out of.
Now, so I was devastated, partly on a personal level, because like you said, I'd sacrificed a lot.
And the only hope I had from the beginning was that I might be right.
If you're right, it fixes a lot of problems.
If you're wrong and you're also a jerk, well, then you're just the jerk who is wrong.
And that's what I was looking at when Pussygate came out.
Now, in retrospect, and of course, I warn people that you could fit a lot of theories to the past.
You know, there's probably lots of them you could put back there.
But I'll tell you my favorite.
During the summer before the election, the persuasion on the Clinton side had turned into this dark meme.
They used the word dark a lot.
And they were saying, he's Hillary.
He's going to blow up the world.
He's the most dangerous person you've ever met.
A little context.
He had also told us before he ran that he was no angel.
He'd used those very words.
Never set himself up as a moral authority.
Never tried to sell himself as a role model.
Never came out of his lips.
Not once. And so when this came out, a few things happened.
One, we said, okay, he wasn't lying about not being an angel.
Everybody thought there were things like this, you know, maybe not these specific things, but everybody knew there was going to be something, you know, in his past that they didn't like and had decided that that was, you know, baked into the cake already.
But the other thing that I don't think anybody noticed is that we took people's minds out of this dark monster dictator creature That was the persuasion on the left and turned it into a flawed, normal human male who said some stuff he shouldn't have said, you know, certainly on tape, and also did some things he shouldn't have done, assuming that the reporting on this is accurate, even in his own words, I suppose.
So I think it humanized him in a way that might have had the, you know, the weird effect Of detracting from he's a superhuman monster coming to get you.
He's the boogeyman. No, he's just the guy who says some dumb things and does some dumb things regarding women.
And these, you know, I think men just said, well, I've done some bad things too.
You know, if you're going to look at my whole life, if you're going to look at my teens, you're going to look at my early twenties, I'm not so clean either.
You know, so I think a lot of people saw him as more human and it didn't hurt him as much as it should.
Well, I think it's to some degree as well.
My sort of take on that at the time was, first of all, if you're going to talk about grabbing pussies, then it's going to highlight everything Bill Clinton did.
So that raised that specter in ways that otherwise may not have been raised.
But the other thing, Scott, I thought was that...
In the politically correct world, there's a standard of perfection that everyone is expected to achieve.
Absolutely no problematic statements, no microaggressions, no macroaggressions.
We have to be perfect, and any deviation is cause for damnation.
But the Christian worldview, and of course, you know, significant majority of Americans are Christians.
In the Christian worldview, we all sin.
We're all flawed.
We're all immoral.
We're all tainted by original sin or the temptations of the devil.
And it's how you handle temptation that matters.
So what mattered was not that he said this coarse statement, not even that everybody overreacted on the left saying that this somehow meant he had done it other than saying this, but how he handled it.
And he said, like, I hate that I said it.
I hate, you know, I'm not a perfect person.
I'm always striving to become better.
Now, when you deviate from the platonic standard of perfection, which is unachievable anyway, it's an excuse for the left to blast you.
But in the Christian worldview, well, of course he sinned.
You know, let he who was without sin cast the first stone.
And the redemption story, the sort of Han Solo story, is very powerful.
Yeah, I was going to make the same point, that we're all primed...
For this movie type of plot where the flawed person becomes better over time.
It's not a movie unless the main character changes.
And of course we want him or her to change into a better version of the character.
And so we were watching somebody who had some real problematic things in his past that were genuine.
I don't think even his supporters looked at some of his past deeds and said, you know, Trump University.
Yeah. Not so happy about that.
Or discrimination in the 70s.
You can't explain that away.
But if you look at the arc of his life, the ideal life is you start selfish and imperfect, and you at least get better.
If you're moving in the right direction, That's something that people can get behind.
Because we're... I said this in the book as well.
People are far more influenced by the direction of things than they are by, you know, where they are at the moment or where they used to be.
If the direction is good, people can get on board.
And he was delivering something for the country that he said in his own words, I'm trying to do for the country what I've done for myself.
Which kind of takes away the selfish stuff because he's, you know, reached an age...
Where he actually wanted to give something back, or so it seems.
Now, I'm not even going to frame this one as a question, just to, you know, if you want to get comfortable.
But I sort of wanted to try and explain to myself in a way that makes sense about this, you know, we can't perceive reality thing.
And the thing that drove me nuts about the book, which is good, which is that so much of the stuff that you talk about human beings are 90% irrational.
We have these ex post facto justifications for the crazy impulses we have.
We're emotionally driven and we dial up the rationality afterwards and try and backstamp it and so on.
I've done entire presentations on that, but it really bothered me that you said it.
It's like, damn you for agreeing with me about how irrational we are.
That's irrational of me, but that's okay because I'm in the 90%.
But what happened for me, and the way I sort of understood it, was that that's my experience of the world as well.
People are pretty nuts. And if you approach them with reason, they tend to get – they dial up the nuttiness in many ways.
And so your book dovetails with some of the stuff that I've talked about and so on.
But I have hope. And the way that I sort of framed it in my own head is, yeah, we got a lot of anti-rational elements in society at the moment.
You know, this whole subjectivist, relativistic, post-modernistic stuff.
We've got really, really bad government schools that don't teach people how to reason from first principles and don't respect empiricism and so on.
Higher education is a swamp of subjectivism and relativism and class hatred and race hatred.
It's just a mess. So the way I sort of looked at it was you're dealing empirically and rationally with the state of humanity as it stands, and I'm sort of saying, but we can be better.
We can get there. We can become more rational.
So it's sort of like we're... You and I are stuck on a desert island and the only thing there is to eat is crabs and coconuts.
We're on the sea diet, right? Crabs and coconuts.
And you're like, Steph, what we got to do, man?
We got to trap the coconuts and we got to figure out how to climb these damn trees.
We got to trap the crabs and figure out how to climb the trees to get the coconuts.
And you're entirely right.
That's the environment that we're in.
That's all we have to eat. And this is the world that we live in.
And this is a state of humanity as it stands.
And part of me is saying, okay, let's get that...
Wilson Ball and get out of the island and see if we can get somewhere else.
And so I think that in terms of how we deal with the world as it stands, I find it hard to disagree with you because I've made the same case myself.
I still think that there's a way to get human beings to be more rational.
But as I've said, it's a multi-generational process.
And that's just, again, that's not a big question there.
That's just sort of how I understood where we stood.
Yes, the problem is that even as people are becoming more rational, and I would observe that people are.
In other words, we have the scientific process now where we didn't have hundreds of years ago, and people are more rational.
But our environment is also becoming more complicated to the point where our brains can't handle it.
Take, for example, The proposed tax cut plan from President Trump and the Republicans.
I've tried to look at that with my big old rational brain, my degree in economics, my years of financial analysis for corporate jobs, my MBA. I put all of my brainpower into that and I said, are my taxes going to go up or down?
I don't know.
I don't know. And so I'm being asked as a citizen, To have an opinion on that.
And I ask other citizens, you know, when you see the experts say, well, the average person in this category will find that their taxes either go up or down.
And I say, can you even tell, person, are you average?
Are you average in that context?
Because you can't even tell if your taxes are going up or down.
Based on what the experts tell you, you have no nothing to hold on to here.
So you retreat to bias whenever you're completely confused.
So the Republicans will say less taxes.
That's good. And the left will say must be good for the rich people.
That's bad. So, you know, unfortunately, the only way the Republicans will sell this plan is if they make it confusing enough.
That there are enough people, just enough people, who think, huh, I think that could be good for me.
And they may succeed, or at least on the business taxes part of it, and maybe not all of it, but they have made it sufficiently complicated that you really don't know.
So they just got to get just enough people to to surrender to the confusion and back off to it.
Well, I'd like I'd like lower taxes.
You know, sign me up.
I can project my desires into that.
And so once more, the the the white doves of hope are being released.
And there's Scott Adams in a duck blind with a 22 to pull.
And of course, even if you like the plan before it goes into the grim machinery of legislative processes, who knows what the hell is going to come out the other side.
But it's going to make sausages look like sirloin.
Now, this process that you went through, which I found is a beautiful example of cognitive dissonance and how things that shouldn't make sense work really well, was the change in your support of various candidates.
Let's put it that way.
And the fact that you openly say, hey, I'm about to bump into you and pick your pocket.
See that pocket with the wallet in it?
Gonna bump into you, gonna pick your pocket.
And people are like, hey man, he stole my wallet!
And so... Step people through, because this is, of course, what people have heard about, a lot of flip-flopping and so on.
Step people through the process of Trump to Hillary to Johnson to Trump to, I don't know, Marvin the Martian, I think, was thrown in the mix at some point.
So what was the process?
And I was really, really struck by how dangerous it became for you.
I wasn't quite aware of where you were in the Nazi pantheon for people.
Yeah. So I started out writing about just the topic of persuasion, but that was very heavily biased toward Trump because he had the good game.
So I was writing more about what he was doing right.
That made people say, you're a Trump supporter, and where I live in Northern California, that's physically dangerous.
So I did lose the majority of my friends.
My Facebook feed is very lonely right now.
There were people not far from where I live who were literally being beaten leaving Trump rallies just for being on that side.
And so there were times I would not be able to speak if I thought I was overheard, etc.
So it got so dangerous that people online and social media were calling me Joseph Goebbels or Goebbels, however you pronounce it, Hitler's main PR person.
And if you're being called Hitler or Hitler's henchman, And people are believing it not in an exaggerated way, but they believe this candidate that you seem to be supporting is actually going to bring Hitler-like policies to the world.
You do have moral authority to physically kill that person.
Yeah, so once people thought they had moral authority to kill Hitler or his henchmen, and I think that people were actually starting to think it was okay to punch a Nazi, for example.
You would see that on social media.
I backed, I publicly said I endorsed Clinton for my safety.
And even though that's not a real reason, and even though people recognized it wasn't a political statement, it was just the sort of thing that people say in public for whatever purpose, it was good enough.
People said, all right, we'll go bother other people.
And so the pressure almost immediately came off me.
And it wasn't until the pussy gay thing Actually, it wasn't until Clinton said that she wanted to increase the death tax to what would have been effectively a 75% tax on every new dollar I earned.
Because most of that would have been taxed at 50% and then another 50% when I died.
And that was just, it felt like confiscation.
That was one topic I could understand.
There was no complexity to it.
I was earning money just to give it away.
And I couldn't live with that.
So for a few weeks, I endorsed candidate Trump for that reason alone.
And I also hated the bullying.
The amount of bullying I was getting online because the Trump haters was just through the roof.
It was just insane. And I have sort of a trigger for bullies.
I always have. It's just the one thing that sets me off like nothing else.
And I tend to get aggressive in those situations instead of defensive.
So I just said, well, screw it.
I don't want to have my money stolen on my deathbed and I don't like these bullies.
I'll support the president or the candidate Trump for president.
And it wasn't until Pussygate that I said, OK, I'm going to temporarily back Johnson.
Because as far as I know, he only touches himself, and that seemed like a far safer endorsement.
But that didn't last.
Once the Pussy Gates story came down in priority a little bit in people's minds, toward the end I switched back to Trump and fully endorsed him before the election day.
It's funny, I can't think of an election cycle for someone like yourself where both death and taxes are so viscerally present in the entire equation.
It's one thing to have a death tax, it's another thing to have it possibly over the next month.
That is a challenge to stay.
Now let's talk a little bit about...
Climate science. I find this a fascinating topic, and I have been openly talking about it for years as a skeptic.
To me, the whole point of science is skepticism.
In my former incarnation as a software entrepreneur, I worked in the environmental field.
I created environmental modeling.
I know at a very deep technical level how...
Garbage in, garbage out.
You can easily tweak whatever you want to get whatever results you want.
In fact, that was sort of the purpose of the program.
The program that I wrote was to figure out how to optimize and minimize pollution in the air, ground, and water.
So you're working on climate science at the moment.
And what is the approach that you're taking that people most need to hear about?
So I think that you can separate the climate change question into different categories that have different credibility.
So the basic science of if you add CO2 to the air, all other things being equal, is it going to get warmer?
That's probably pretty solid.
My guess is, not being a scientist, that that's the sort of thing by its nature that you could test pretty well.
And have, you know, a lot of consensus and they'd probably be right.
The second part is the models, the science models.
So can you predict with these complicated models how things will turn out in the future?
Here, I think a reasonable person, especially anyone who's been involved with modeling the future, as I have, has much less credibility in any kind of long range model.
Because we don't have examples of long-range models doing very well in the past in any realm, except maybe physics, right?
And physics is really more about math, so it's hard to get wrong if you've got your physics laws in place.
But then the third part that I add to the discussion, which doesn't get added enough, is there's the economic models.
So after you're done with a science model that says, hey, things might go up in this range, We don't know how accurate that is, but let's say it's directionally true.
Let's say it's going up and increasing temperature at any rate could be a problem.
That seems also reasonable, even if we don't know exactly the rate.
But the last part is the economic model, which is what happens.
Long-range economic models have zero credibility, and we're asked to make gigantic Decisions based on, ultimately, an economic model.
Because that's the one that tells you, hey, we're going to lose a trillion dollars and these types of losses could lead to loss of life and happiness and everything else.
And so I would put forward the idea that nobody has made a long-range economic model that ever worked.
So there is no credibility in that part of the decision.
But the proponents of climate science like to sort of gloss over the economic part because that seems to them obvious.
In other words, there's so many bad things from warming that it should just be obvious that you don't want to do it.
But here's the problem. And I use this example of me buying solar panels for my house.
I may have said this in public before, but the day that I built the house and I was offered to put solar panels on it or not.
And the proposition was, if you put these on, it'll cost you a big bunch of money, but you'll get it back in however many years, 10 years or whatever it was.
And so I went ahead and did it.
But when I did it, I knew it was a poor financial decision, even though I would get all that money back.
I did it to help the world be a greener place because people watch what I do.
And I thought it was good for society to go as green as possible.
But what I knew is that the cost of solar panels was dropping so quickly that had I simply waited three years, I would have far more efficient panels at a far lower price and still have them paid off maybe even earlier than the first decision.
So doing the right thing at the wrong time is also the wrong decision.
So with climate change, the longer we wait, If we were, for example, to focus on keeping our economy strong, and that might include doing some things that are not the best for the climate, we're going to have more tools in a couple of years because we'll have more money, we'll have new technology, we'll understand it better, there might be some breakthroughs.
We're already seeing some giant devices that literally will scrub the air.
Even today at this point, I think there was a, I may have the numbers wrong, but directionally this will be about right, That it might cost something like a trillion and a half dollars to use the current technology to build these giant air scrubbers to clean the air enough to make a difference.
Now, a trillion and a half, it turns out, is a bargain, right?
If the scientists are right, and it's going to cost this much in terms of destruction, a trillion and a half is a bargain.
And maybe three years from now, the cost of those same devices Might be half.
So if you wait three years, do you get to the same point at the same time at half the price?
These are completely unknowable, but in a situation where there's a lot of question about what to do and the technology is moving quickly toward a solution, probably waiting, if I had to guess, if I had to put my own money on it, I'd say, all right, if we wait five years and then if we still need to go hard at it, it, we're going to get there faster than if we start today.
And we'll get there a lot cheaper, maybe a half the price, maybe a quarter of the price if we wait five years for the next technology and the smarter approach.
It's unknowable, but I would bet in terms of waiting.
Well, it's like that old science fiction story about the slow spaceship that goes at sublight speeds to Alpha Centauri or whatever, or I think it was even further and takes forever to get there.
And then by the time they get there, you know, like four years after they left, they invented fast and light travel.
So they've been zipping around forever.
They just couldn't find them. And it's, you know, one of these things.
And it sort of reminds me, too, this question of environmentalism.
Well, first of all, the environmentalists should just be focusing on the national debt because the national debt is consumption of scarce resources at the expense of the future.
And so they should be focused on eliminating deficits and debt in – well, certainly eliminating deficits in order to reduce consumption.
Well.
Please, go ahead.
Who pays off the deficit?
Isn't it the rich? Because they're the only ones with money.
So isn't the deficit a stealth tax on the wealthy?
It depends how the deficit or the debt in the long run is paid off, whether it's monetized, in which case it's going to be a tax on the poor because the rich will be able to evade the inflationary aspects of monetization.
If they end up just paying, well, yeah, then they'll try and tax the rich, but the rich will flee to friendlier locations and so on.
So at least right now, if you were to eliminate the deficit, it would reduce our footprint on nature.
But there's this great story about This econ professor who was interviewed about electric cars.
And he went through the whole argument, you know, well, electric cars, you know, it's really, you know, it's a lot of natural fossil fuels that are used in the production of electricity and, you know, even to create the batteries and ship them across from Japan where they're made.
It's so environmentally destructive.
And you're much better off, at least with current technology, having a gas, regular old gas fuel car and so on.
And then, of course, you know, the interviewer walked him out to his car...
Which was an electric car.
And he said, well, you just made this whole damn case about not having an electric car.
And he's like, well, yeah, but otherwise no one will talk to me in the faculty.
The social pressure is such that, you know, even with all these arguments, well, you still want to be liked, and everybody thinks that you need them, so therefore my arguments don't matter, even to myself.
It's a pretty wild statement.
But in business, there's a phrase that we used to use all the time, the stupid rich.
Because there are some products that are going to be overpriced, but the stupid rich will want them.
And that's what allows you to bring down the price.
So in the case of solar panels, I was quite cognizant of the fact that I was the stupid rich and people were watching.
So I did it for a social reason.
It was not an economic decision.
Well, and of course, by being one of the, quote, stupid rich, you've helped to drive down the price sooner.
So instead of it being three years to half price, it might only be, you know, two years and 11 months and so on.
So let's close off with, I think, your magnum opus, which you've touched on repeatedly in books and talks and periscopes and so on.
The questionable value of goals versus other ways of achieving predictability, happiness, and sustainability of joy in your life.
Because we're told, and of course we're kind of programmed, you know, you've got a math test Friday.
Your goal is to pass it. You know, you've got to get this degree.
You've got to get this promotion. You're going to buy this house.
Everything we do is like a series of dopamine drops in the future which has us forever racing to the next thing to be happy for the next 15 minutes.
You seem to have taken a somewhat different approach.
I wonder if you can help the audience understand what it is.
Yeah, so goals are not useless.
So in the case of being in a human design contest, such as a test you're taking in school or a bowling contest, the goal is to win and it's an artificial situation.
And yeah, go ahead and make that your goal.
Go ahead and try to win.
But for life, the arc of your life, I recommend systems.
A system, in the way I talk about it, is something that you're doing on a regular basis That will increase your odds in a lot of different ways, not some specific one goal, but gives you lots of more options.
So, for example, just going to college is a good system.
You don't know exactly what your job will be when you get out, and you probably shouldn't be too specific unless you're a doctor or you're actually studying for a very specific thing.
But for most of us, we don't know what the future looks like.
We're just building our skill set to be available for lots of different things.
The easiest way to understand this is what I call the skill stack, where you're stacking together a bunch of things you're learning on a regular basis.
You're always taking a class, you're always studying, you're always learning, but they're things that fit together well.
They're not just a bunch of things you learn, they're things that work together well.
Our very best example of this is my favorite example, President Trump.
If you were to look at any one of his skills, you'd say, well, he's not the best public speaker in the world, but he's real good.
He's not the funniest person in the world, and being funny does help you bond with the audience, but he's pretty funny.
And you can go right down the line.
He's good at simplifying marketing.
He can speak in public.
He knows how to work the camera.
He's quick on camera.
He's not the smartest guy you've ever met, but he's really smart.
He's not the best businessman you've ever met.
But he's really pretty good.
You put all of that together and you can go from builder of homes to reality TV star to president of the United States without practice.
And by the way, this is one of the things that identifies somebody who's a master persuader and especially somebody who's built a good talent stack.
They can cross fields in ways that you don't think should be possible.
Steve Jobs, you know, Biggest tech company in the world, didn't have a tech background, but he had a set of talents that really worked well together.
And he ended up working in operating systems and movies and creating lots of really cool things.
And how do you think Trump has been doing since you typed out the famous landslide tweet of election night?
What are your thoughts about what you thought versus what has occurred?
So I predicted prior to Inauguration Day that we would see the arc of, hey, he's Hitler, and then when he didn't do enough Hitler stuff, you know, just by lack of Hitler stuff, that by the summer people would say, all right, well, Hitler was too much, but he's certainly incompetent, and his incompetence will be its own problem, and there's chaos in incompetence.
And we saw that over the summer.
I predicted this all year in advance, exactly the way it's played out so far.
And the third part of the prediction is that he would have created a body of work That at least for the Republicans and the people who supported him would say, yes, that is stuff that got done.
This is heading in the right direction.
So we have a weird situation now where we're just starting to transition to that.
And I saw it even in the news today.
The news was about how the Chinese social media is saying they actually absolutely love him.
They're just loving him over there.
And his Asian trip is a big success.
So one of the biggest things people worried about How will foreign countries perceive our crazy president?
Is this going to be a big problem?
Will they not want to work with us?
Well, guess what? Israel loves them.
Saudi Arabia loves them.
They might even be changing to a more moderate form of Islam, in part, we don't know, but in part because of his influence.
We see Asia loving him.
We see him having the right kind of pressure on North Korea.
So internationally, He might be, and it's too early to say, but based on early indications, he could easily be the most popular president we've ever had overseas, no matter what's happening domestically.
So that was a worry that may be going away.
We see the economy doing well.
Okay, 75% of that was because of Obama giving us a strong base.
And by the way, I give him high marks for that stuff.
But at least 25% Is the optimism and the way that the president has talked up the economy, causing people to feel confident and invest.
So the economy is doing great.
Jobs are doing great. He is moving companies back, even if it's not big numbers.
It makes us feel that way.
And that helps the overall mission.
We see he got the court appointees that he wanted.
So let's see. He's doing well on international.
Oh, immigration is down by 50%.
He may or may not build much of a wall, but we're looking at the prototypes, and there will certainly be some wall.
Healthcare has so far been a failure, but I think people put that on Congress, and probably should, because it was the one time he didn't act actively.
On healthcare, he said, whatever you give me, you Republicans, I'm going to sign it.
Just give me anything I can sign, and they couldn't perform.
So, you can see where he's directly involved, the things that he can control.
ISIS is practically an afterthought now.
He can control that.
He can control the international relations, the trade deals, the TPPs, the climate accords.
All of those things he handled, at least in a way that his people say, yes, that's exactly what I wanted.
I wanted fewer regulations, etc.
Now, the left is still in this bubble of cognitive dissonance where they can't see Any of the things I just said.
You can actually list them in front of them, and I swear to God, You could hand him a piece of paper that had a whole list of Trump accomplishments that nobody would argue that they're accurate.
All they would see is a whole list of Russian words that they couldn't understand, but which was vaguely sinister and dangerous no matter what, man.
Yeah, I was going to say they would literally see a blank sheet of paper, but yours was way better.
They would see Russian writing and say, ah, I think there's something.
Now, who knows how this Russian stuff will play out?
I'm not the one who can say there's never been anything there.
There's nothing to be discovered.
Who knows? But there's nothing yet, at least that directly implicates the president.
So he's on the border of entering us into what I would call a golden age.
We may be entering the best period America has ever experienced by a lot.
Because if we're looking at four plus GDP, moderation in Islam, maybe some movement on North Korea, which was actually in the news today, he's actually hinted That there's something happening in North Korea, at least a little bit of movement.
We don't know that that means anything yet.
But I think North Korea and maybe healthcare are the two last things he has in front of him, that if he can make either of those change, we're looking at a golden age.
Can you imagine living to see a timeline wherein Donald Trump, the American president, has far better relationships with the theocracy in Saudi Arabia and the communist dictatorship in China than he has with the mayor of London?
It's completely mad.
All right. Well, Scott, I really, really appreciate your time and I really do want to recommend this book.
There is nothing about it that won't spark thoughtful consideration and hopefully not deranged powerlust and powermongering.
Use it for good. Use persuasion for good.
He tells you how to do it. I tell you how to do it right.
Anyway. So I just wanted to point out that Scott's blog is fantastic.
Of course, he regularly has me jonesing for caffeine with his Periscope.
So blog.dilbert.com and twitter.com forward slash Scott Adams says.
And there's, of course, S-C-O-T-T-A-D-A-M-S-S-A-Y-S. And Scott, the Twitter is the best place for people to get your regular caffeine eruptions through Periscope.
Is that right? Yes, follow Twitter and you'll see my Periscopes come up.
All right, so please check out the book.
We'll put the links to the book below as well as How to Fail at Almost Everything.
The book is Win Bigly, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.
I really, really appreciate the book and thanks so much for your time today.
