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Oct. 20, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

01:50:55

Sidebar with Scott Adams - Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	No, I was three seconds early just to prove a point.
	No way, jerk.
	Geez, I just ran over my dog's paw with my rolly chair.
	How is everyone doing tonight?
	This is another good one.
	This is a good one because in my YouTube career, if we can call it that, my hobby that became life, I didn't know who Casey Neistat was.
	For the first two years of making YouTube videos.
	And then someone said, you're like the Canadian version of Casey Neistat for my family stuff.
	And I didn't know who Scott Adams was until shortly after the election.
	And then I started following Scott Adams.
	And I started liking what Scott Adams was like saying, I knew Dilbert.
	I mean, everyone has known Dilbert from childhood.
	But I had no idea that Scott had turned into or had gotten into what he had gotten into.
	And I've always had questions for Scott.
	We've had some back and forth on Twitter, and I've always had questions, so I've been looking forward to this happening for a long time, and it's finally happening, and I'm not going to waste too much time giving the intro.
	Standard intros, I hope we're simul-streaming on StreamYard.
	We should be.
	You know how it works.
	YouTube takes 30% of Super Chats.
	Thank you for the Super Chats.
	No legal advice, no medical advice, no undermining the fortification advice.
	There's Rumble rants on Rumble.
	Rumble takes 20%, so it's better for the creator.
	Yada, yada, yada.
	Be nice.
	Don't be rude, but we're all big boys and we can deal with it.
	Okay.
	I think we're just going to bring in...
	Robert's not yet in the back screen.
	He'll get here soon, but I want to make the most of the time I have with Scott because Lord knows when this will happen again.
	So with that said, I'm going to bring in Scott in the shortest amount of intro time ever.
	Let's bring him in.
	Scott, how you doing?
	Good, how are you?
	Very good.
	Now, does everyone hear...
	Do your mic check again?
	Does everybody hear me?
	No, I think...
	Let me see what everyone says in the chat about the audio.
	I think it's not good, Scott.
	Did you change something since we last spoke?
	Nope, I did not change anything.
	I've already moved all your voice from...
	Very low mic, it says.
	Is your mic plugged in?
	Yeah.
	Let's see.
	Let me make sure.
	Let's try it again.
	No, that's even worse, actually.
	We tested before, people.
	It was good before.
	Yeah, we can't hear you.
	We can't.
	Let's do this.
	We can't hear you.
	This was, by the way, product placement.
	We're going to talk about these books in the background soon.
	How about now?
	That's going to be good enough to do.
	Someone says try hitting it.
	Hold on, where is it?
	Anybody who's watched my live stream knows that I have a technical problem nearly every show, so I'd like to bring it to you.
	This is good enough.
	I can hear you, and you're sharp enough.
	Scott, for anybody who doesn't know you, and I think everybody watching already does, brief elevator pitch before I get into the childhood questions that I have some about professional development.
	Hypnosis in general, but before we even get there, elevator pitch as to who you are and what you're doing now.
	Well, I'm the creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip, but more lately, I've been talking about politics and persuasion.
	I'm also a trained hypnotist, and I've got a degree in economics and an MBA and a lot of business experience.
	So what I do is try to take those perspectives and put my unique window on headlines, and mostly politics.
	Okay.
	I mean, the Dilbert is an amazing thing.
	We'll get into it because I've read or I've listened to on Audible, Loser Think and Win Bigly.
	Loser Think was the first book I ever read from you and it was great and it had a good impact.
	But I remember reading something in Loser Think that led me to ask questions or question myself about your childhood.
	Where are you from?
	What was your childhood like?
	A relationship with your father, siblings growing up to have crafted you to who you are today?
	Well, interesting.
	We're going deep into the psychological well.
	I grew up in a very small town, Wyndham, New York, in the Catskill Mountains.
	And I was one of three kids.
	My parents were married and together the whole time we grew up.
	Father worked at the post office.
	My mother sold real estate at one point, worked in a factory at another point.
	And it was a real small-town experience because we had, I think, 40 people in my graduating class, which were mostly the same 40 I went to kindergarten with, you know, probably 35 of them.
	And it was the ultimate small-town experience.
	How much do you think that shaped, you know, I'm always curious what leads people to be free thinkers.
	And it's, you know, what part of life experience, biology, what is it combined with?
	But how much do you think that shaped your approach to life?
	I'll tell you one thing that's weird about me that I think is the answer to that question.
	I don't know my parents' religious beliefs.
	Name one other person who can't answer that question.
	Now, it's not that I didn't ask.
	You know, they've both passed now, so I can't ask them now.
	But my entire life...
	You know, they sent us to, you know, Methodist Sunday School and, you know, I rebelled at about the age of 11. But I took my argument to my mother and said, hey, I listened.
	You know, I did my several years of religious education.
	I'm not buying it.
	It's great for you.
	I'm glad you like it, but I just can't get there.
	And my mother listened to my argument and she said, okay.
	It was the last time I had any religious affiliation whatsoever.
	So I'm very pro-religion, by the way.
	I like to say that for the audience.
	Very pro-religion for the benefits it brings to people's lives.
	It doesn't work for me.
	It's just a personal thing.
	So now that I guess my suspicion that you had some traumatic experience or troubled relationship with your father is absolutely wrong, man.
	I don't know what it was in Loser Think that led me to say like...
	It was an interesting chapter.
	I don't remember which one it was, and I tried to listen to it to find it again today, but I came away thinking that, but I guess I'm totally wrong?
	Yeah, totally wrong.
	I'd love to know what it was that made you think that.
	I'm going to listen to the whole book again to find it, but I said, oh, damn, that's what I'm going to ask him, but okay.
	Yeah, my father just worked one job and usually two jobs, and he basically came home exhausted and would fall asleep in the easy chair, you know, with the TV on.
	Kind of the classic, you know, upbringing of the 60s, etc.
	So, no, we didn't have any issue.
	It was dinner together at 5 o 'clock every night, no exceptions.
	We didn't need smartphones or watches.
	It was just one thing you couldn't get wrong.
	Very simple rules where I grew up, which maybe also informed my simplicity kind of philosophy of everything.
	But everything was simplified.
	So it's like, you're going to be on time all the time.
	That's the end of that conversation.
	There's no such thing as not being on time in this house.
	And 5 o 'clock is the one you've got to make it to.
	Get to school, get to dinner, you're good.
	I'm going to bring this one up.
	Sorry, go ahead, Robert.
	Oh yeah, was it public schools?
	Yeah, public school.
	I guess we would be lower middle class or something like that.
	Drove used cars.
	I grew up in a house that my parents built themselves.
	And it was cinder blocks.
	They just started ordering parts when they were really young.
	It's like, if we get a brick a day, we can build our own house.
	It wasn't quite that, but it was almost that.
	I'm bringing this up, Scott, because we're going to have to get into this afterwards.
	It's from Peter Beamis.
	It says, hey, it's Mr. Get the Vax Midwood.
	I'm smarter than you and comply with the government to get your freedom back.
	Because hater, I say, I won't call that a hater.
	We are, you know, when you expose yourself to the public, you're going to have people who will disagree with things you've said, mischaracterize your position.
	I think Loser Think is a great book for everyone to read because Straw Manning was one of the elements in the book.
	But before we even get into that, because we're going to talk about it, unless you want to...
	You're going to need me to jump on this right away.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Do it, Scott.
	Can you put that comment back up there?
	Is that easy to do?
	Peter, can I speak to you directly?
	You fucking asshole.
	You've never listened to a thing I've ever said.
	Because your characterization of me could not be more asshole-ishly backwards.
	Number one, I don't care, Peter, if you live or die, get vaccinated.
	You can stick it in your arm, your ass, or shove it down your throat.
	You can do anything you want with the vax.
	I don't fucking care.
	I don't care about you.
	I don't care about anybody else getting vaccinated.
	I made my decision and I'm not sure it's right.
	Let me say that again.
	I made my decision.
	I'm not sure it's right.
	Because nobody can be sure.
	So if you're sure, Peter, you're a fucking idiot.
	You're a fucking idiot.
	If you're positive, you got it right.
	If you're a little bit uncertain, I'm with you.
	And I'll even admit that perhaps your decisions were the better ones.
	Very possible.
	We're all guessing here.
	Peter.
	And I don't need you to mischaracterize me.
	I'm anti-mandate, and I'm anti-making anybody do anything that involves sticking a needle and a drug in their body if they don't want it, right?
	I don't need you to be safer for me to feel okay.
	And I also don't need to minimize your risk in any way either.
	Because we do everything, you know, all day long we're doing things that risk the health and welfare of other people, right?
	You know, you get in the car, you're risking other people.
	Any decision is really risking other people if you're interacting in any way.
	So this is the biggest problem we have.
	And the reason I'm going off on it early is for some reason, nobody can understand this nuance.
	I got the vaccination, but I don't care if you do.
	I don't know why that's so hard to understand.
	It's like people just can't process that.
	Well, this is the issue.
	And, I mean, it's one where you built up an audience based on what, you know, taking certain positions, which are at first were adversarial or were pro-Trump-ish, and then people tend to pigeonhole you based on all your ideologies, based on who you supported in the past, things you said, and project going forward.
	And people, you know, who say if you're anti the establishment and you're anti the big government and all this, you have to not only...
	Be pro-choice, but you have to be anti-everything that they're putting forward.
	So if you give in or you comply with any one thing, you're just a tool of the government.
	And they do it to you.
	They do it to me when I went bowling one day and I showed my papers to go bowling with the kids because I made the decision that day that this was not the time to have the fight that I was going to have.
	You get called a coward, a shill, a bootlicker, whatever it is.
	And everyone on the internet, it's very easy to berate someone who's a public figure, but...
	The one that I don't understand is when we're calling each other cowards for our decision.
	Every decision is a risk management decision, i.e., basically you decide what you're most afraid of.
	You're either most afraid of the COVID or you're most afraid of the vaccination.
	Let's call it a shot, because I know your viewers are going to say, that's no vaccination.
	You're wrong again.
	Wrong again.
	I agree with that, by the way.
	It was an interesting modification to the definition in 2015, which seems to have turned the definition to more of a therapeutic than what had hitherto been accepted as a vaccine.
	Robert, you look like you have something you want to say here.
	Yeah, I'm definitely not for certain safety rules because they would definitely take away my driver's license for the safety of other human beings if that was the standard.
	One of my favorite quotes of yours is you said that anybody that claims certainty on any particular policy, that you should be inherently skeptical about that because you can just look into your own past and find you disagreeing with yourself.
	Which I thought that was very revelatory.
	And my brother's a professor of philosophy in that.
	I'm going to get it wrong.
	I can't say it.
	Epidemiology.
	What is it?
	Epidemiology.
	Oh, epistemology.
	I don't know why they have words with so many vowels in it.
	It's a problem.
	But at least it is for me.
	But I thought that was really revelatory.
	And then we'll get back to a lot of the fascinating biographical aspects.
	When did you sort of come on that understanding?
	Just the understanding that we don't know what we're talking about most of the time.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Or that we should never be so certain about anything given we've disagreed with ourselves over time.
	Yeah, I mean, anybody who's keeping track of their own predictions, which is, by the way, is a really good thing to do, I recommend it, is easy to forget how wrong you were.
	You know, because we remember the times we hit one right and then we forget the other ones.
	Now, fortunately, because, you know, I do this in public.
	People will always remind me of the ones I get wrong.
	I got that working for me.
	But I think the thing that informed me the most about the fragility of our perceptions was becoming a hypnotist.
	So when I take hypnosis classes to become a hypnotist in my 20s, the first thing you learn is sort of rule number one is that the world is backwards to the way you think it is.
	And the way you think it is is that people are rational.
	Oh, let's say they're rational 90% of the time.
	But maybe 10% of the time they get a little crazy, right?
	That's sort of the general way we think, "Ah, there you are, and you're 10%.
	You're acting irrational." That's not you.
	That's 90% of the time you're perfectly rational.
	Hypnotists turn that around and say that maybe 10% of the time you can figure out how to balance your checkbook.
	You can find your password on your computer where you hit it.
	You could do some rational things, but for all the big stuff...
	It's purely irrational, and then we rationalize it after the fact.
	So once you realize that we're a species of rationalizers, where we're just explaining why we did it, and we don't know why.
	I mean, also, I don't believe in free will.
	I think the rules of physics don't stop the outside of your skull.
	I think your brain also is just going to do what physics requires it to do in that moment.
	So I just see people as these big, mindless meat automatons.
	That try to explain why they did what they did, and they don't really know most of the time.
	So once you take that point of view, it's really easy to see the fragility of perception everywhere.
	I find that lesson valuable.
	I mean, like both...
	Both books.
	I was trying to find a paper copy.
	I realize I have everything on digital now.
	So I would put a computer screen behind me.
	But I have highlighted versions of both books.
	But one of the things I try to teach lawyers that are coming in is that my phraseology is, you refer to it as like moist robots, is that master is the motivation of reasoning.
	Reason is never going to be the master of motivation.
	So if you want to persuade an audience, if you want to improve your own reasoning, change your motivation.
	Theoretically, you can do that as a lawyer, but not many people achieve it or accomplish it very consistently.
	But it's critical perspective-wise because you won't be a good lawyer persuading people if you don't understand what actually persuades people.
	Was hypnosis your introduction to persuasion or was it a lifelong curiosity and interest?
	I don't think I really thought about it much as a field, you know, a thing that you could study and become good at it or recognize it in others.
	I didn't really see it in the texture of my reality until I took hypnosis, and I took that for different reasons.
	My mother gave birth to my younger sister under hypnosis, and the family doctor was hypnotist.
	And she reported that she felt no pain and took no drugs.
	And remembers, you know, she's not unconscious.
	Now, I don't know if any of that was true.
	You know, time goes by and you say, hmm, how much of that story was exactly true?
	And if they slipped her some drugs and she didn't know it.
	But anyway, it impressed me.
	And I said, I got to figure out what this superpower is about.
	And I thought it would give me like an advantage in life.
	And oh, my God, does it?
	It is the single most important thing I've ever learned because it informs everything you do.
	And the second would be the Dale Carnegie course.
	Those two things I count as the biggest out-of-college things you could learn.
	Okay, Scott.
	Now, I have my issues with what I think hypnosis is.
	And whenever I hear hypnosis, I think it is getting people in a state to get them to not be addicted to cigarettes or into a sort of autonomous state.
	I have always...
	If that's what hypnosis is...
	I have always thought hypnosis is fake.
	All of these shows are fake.
	People are not actually hypnotized.
	They just want to go along with it.
	They want to feel like they're having a connection with themselves.
	To someone who thinks hypnosis is total nonsense, convince me otherwise.
	I mean, what is it?
	And am I wrong in characterizing it that way?
	And why is it not total nonsense?
	Well, first of all, I use the word hypnosis sometimes more generically.
	As the things I've learned which you can apply to your persuasion in general.
	But if you're using it specifically to putting somebody in the trance, then I would describe that more as a coach and a player.
	Meaning that the hypnotized subject will never do anything that is beyond their moral or safety boundaries.
	You just can't get anybody to do that, which tells you right there what it is, right?
	It's not overcoming somebody's natural brain or something.
	So it's a cooperative effort.
	They have to be willing to do it.
	And the people who are most easily hypnotized tend to be strong-willed because they're not afraid of it.
	They're like, oh, this is how that works?
	Okay.
	Once you explain it, they're like, okay, I'll just take a ride on this, see what happens.
	So I would call it more like brain hacking.
	And let me give you the simplest example.
	You know how beer commercials, they used to have sexist commercials and put good-looking people in it because sex makes you think of beer, or they associate them, and then the goodness of one goes on to the other.
	Well, hypnosis is sort of like that.
	You're just taking small little associations and building on them.
	But you're also doing...
	Here's a little trick I shouldn't tell you, but it'll still work even if you get hypnotized.
	There is a magic trick.
	That gets you to the real thing.
	The magic trick is convincing somebody who you're trying to hypnotize that something you did caused something in them to change.
	So if you tell them, let's say, your eyes are getting heavy and you're starting to blink more often, which I'm sorry because many of your audience is going to be blinking more often now, but it'll wear off.
	Now, everybody blinks.
	So if you're working on that, say you're going to be blinking more often, you can feel it in your eyes, and people at first will be like, no, I'm not.
	I am not going to blink.
	I'll tell you what I'm not going to do.
	I'm not going to blink.
	Damn it.
	I blinked.
	Was that because of him?
	He's still talking about me blinking.
	Damn it.
	That's not.
	I'm not going to blink.
	Damn it.
	Now, the magic trick is that people have to blink.
	They're going to blink.
	And as soon as they're uncertain about whether you've caused that, If you can sell that, then you actually, it's almost like putting a key into the brain and the people go, okay, the things you're saying are now expressing themselves in my body.
	And they just open the channel.
	Now, I'm simplifying greatly because it's like a 45-minute process where you might be working on getting somebody's arm to levitate.
	So you do the same process.
	You'd say, in a moment, your arm will feel lighter.
	Now, most people are at least suggestible enough that they're going to say, I'm not so sure.
	I don't know, but I'm thinking about it.
	It could be lighter.
	Maybe it's a little bit lighter.
	Maybe it's just a little bit lighter.
	And then I say, it's lighter than your other arm.
	And then they're like, is it?
	Maybe.
	A little bit lighter.
	And then you say you're going to feel a little twitch.
	And maybe one of your fingers will twitch.
	Almost always you can get somebody to twitch.
	And they might not even know it.
	It might be involuntary.
	I don't know.
	There's always just some little movement.
	And then you call it out.
	You say, okay, the first twitch has already happened.
	Now, the person may not have even twitched.
	But they're like, did I?
	I think I just twitched.
	My goodness, my body is starting to respond to the hypnotist.
	So you just start small, convince them that the small changes are things you're causing, and then you can build on that.
	Until you say, you know, you can feel your hand in a bucket of water and they can feel it just like it's real.
	Now, by the way, only about 20% of the public can experience what they call the phenomenon.
	Or phenomena.
	The phenomena is where you see things that don't exist.
	You know, you have real, that kind of experience.
	80% can just be persuaded to change their frame, change their, you know, maybe be more relaxed in a certain situation.
	Learn to not be afraid of flying, that sort of thing.
	By the way, Robert, to your comment about changing people's motivation, one of the things hypnosis is no good for is quitting smoking and losing weight.
	The two things everybody thinks it's for.
	You can't do it.
	And the answer is, because you already got to it, Robert did.
	If somebody's motivation is they like to eat, I like to eat.
	I like to smoke.
	That's it.
	You're done.
	Your hypnosis is not going to work.
	But where it does work is about a third of the time, something like that.
	But everything else works about a third of the time, right?
	Like whatever diet, about a third of the time.
	However you're going to quit smoking, about a third of the time.
	So you hear people who say, yeah, it worked for me.
	And maybe it did.
	I mean, whatever they did, a third of the time.
	But the real secret there is that the third of the people who quit and lost weight or quit smoking, they had one thing in common.
	Do you know what it is?
	I was going to make a joke, but I should avoid the joke.
	No, you can do the joke.
	But think about it.
	What is it that the one-third has all in common with each other that they quit and nobody else did?
	I don't have the answer.
	They decided to quit.
	Right, yeah.
	The motivation was the right motivation.
	Yeah, and I'll make a further distinction that motivation...
	When it turns into decision, that's the only time it works.
	Like being motivated to quit really is everybody.
	You know, I've got a little motivation where I want to go to the hypnotist, but you have to decide.
	And I talk about that in terms of how to get rich or how to be successful.
	The best advice I ever heard was figure out what it costs and then pay it.
	What that means is, okay, what this means is you're going to work every day.
	12 hours a day, go to school, have a second job, not have a love life, whatever.
	But then you'll get what you want.
	So find out the price of success and then pay it.
	It's a decision.
	So when you think of the world in terms of things you want that are just thoughts, and then there's things you decide.
	And I use this technique so effectively because there are times when you're not sure that you can do something.
	Then just ask yourself if you decided.
	Because sometimes you haven't.
	But man, when you've decided, almost nothing can hold you back.
	You're going to push through.
	Yeah, that's what they say often about drug and alcohol rehab is similar.
	It's like you can't just send someone to rehab and that works.
	They have to want it and desire it.
	And that's always the key to whether or not they kick it or they don't, is their own desire, their own motivation.
	Yeah, and that hitting bottom, I think, is the decision point.
	That's when motivation becomes decision.
	Go ahead.
	I was going to say, for things that are pure compulsions, like eating, I can see there's more of a behavioral pattern that goes into it, but the cigarette smoking, it's an instantaneous thing.
	It's just a compulsion that you cave into, and then all the emotions that come in afterwards, the shame, the guilt, you've undone all the progress, and so you just get sucked back into that.
	Things that are pure compulsions, So that's when you need a brain hack.
	You need a little more aggressive hack there.
	So one way to approach it would be, I remember my mother's hypnotist, the family doctor, tried this.
	I don't think it worked, but the concept is solid.
	Yeah, every time she thought about smoking, He told her to think about smelling a full ashtray, like a disgusting ashtray.
	So what he was trying to do is just pair her compulsion to smoke with a negative, which should work over time for some people, right?
	It's not a magic bullet, but for some people that would work.
	Yeah, the key is the right one.
	When I was a kid and went into surgery, they told me my anesthesia just...
	Imagine I was tasting pizza, and all it did was ruin my appetite for pizza for about six years.
	But yeah, the key is the association.
	How much have you seen hypnosis become both more acceptable and in broader areas?
	I mean, for example, I utilize it when I can for witness preparation, because it can be very helpful for people.
	You do?
	Yeah.
	Because if you have someone that's not accustomed, if you have a professional witness, your experts, your police officers, people like that, they already know how to do it.
	It's natural.
	But for the ordinary person, fear kicks in.
	And hypnosis is effective at giving them a couple of safe places to go if something goes sideways in that courtroom.
	And they're much more effective because often their lack of preparation.
	Is misinterpreted as incredulous testimony by a jury.
	When in fact, that's not what's going on.
	It's that they are not professionals.
	And consequently, they don't respond the way a jury would like them to or anticipate they would.
	Being overprepared would look bad, too.
	Yes, exactly.
	And that's where hypnosis actually can walk between those two, if done effectively.
	Well, let me ask you this.
	You don't use it to get them to remember things, right?
	No.
	I do it to help them deal with the psychological stress of something that may happen at trial.
	That's a good use.
	I would certainly worry about any witness who had memory that they were giving to the court.
	You don't want to have them under hypnosis ever.
	That just ruins everything.
	Well, you see that with Saran Saran.
	I mean, even under hypnosis, he went in like six or seven different directions at different times.
	And if anything, it may have contaminated his memory rather than improve it.
	Now, that may also be a function of who was involved in that hypnosis process.
	They had some three-letter agency associations and what have you.
	How have you used hypnosis?
	Have you used it professionally or has it just been, you know, an interest of expanded personal subject matter understanding?
	Well, I don't have any cause to put somebody in what they call a trance, which really is just a relaxed state.
	You know, it's overselling it to call it a trance.
	But let me give you some examples of things you learn in hypnosis that then you take to the rest of your life.
	Have you noticed that the Dilbert comic, Dilbert doesn't have a last name.
	You ever notice that?
	And the boss, the character that appears in the strip more than any other character, because everybody interacts with the boss, the boss doesn't have any name.
	He doesn't have a first or last name.
	You don't know the business they're in.
	You don't know what they make, where they live.
	You don't know the, you know, all the identifiers are removed.
	And that's a hypnosis trick.
	And the trick goes like this.
	As soon as you give people details, you give them a reason not to identify with it.
	Right?
	So if I have this generic office worker, then it doesn't, you know, unfortunately, you can't get every, you know, ethnicity.
	That's just impossible with one character.
	But at least people who can relate to the job and the situation are going to say, oh, yeah, that's me.
	I'm in that job.
	But if I said his name is Dilbert, and then add any last name for which you recognize the ethnicity.
	Because automatically your brain goes to, oh, a German background or whatever it is.
	And then suddenly that's another reason not to relate to it.
	You're like, oh, well, I'm not really the same ethnicity.
	So it's not quite where I am.
	So hypnosis tells you to remove all the stuff that you can to allow the audience or the subject to put in their best version.
	So if you're hypnotizing somebody, the hypnosis version is...
	You say you're walking through the woods.
	It's a beautiful woods.
	You know, there are trees and branches.
	But here's what you don't say.
	And, you know, you're walking through beautiful woods and they're all oak trees.
	You're like, the person has already saw a different forest, right?
	And they're like, okay, it's oak trees now?
	And then you've lost them because you've lost that feeling that everything you say and they think is somehow connected.
	You're like, you're thinking a different tree than I am.
	So removing clues.
	To let people fill it in is a hypnosis trick.
	It's just one of many things that you end up putting into your regular life actions.
	I describe that in a criminal defense context as the book-to-movie problem.
	For the most part, a criminal defendant really can't testify to their benefit in their own case because if the jury's looking at them, they can project all these traits on them like they can a book character that doesn't have The kind of definition you get with the movie actor playing that role.
	And there's like two-thirds of book characters, people are unhappy with the movie version because they had a different version than that actor.
	And I found in focus groups, mock juries, and the rest, that as soon as they see the defendant testify, you lose more people than you gain.
	Because there was some trait they could project on them that's no longer present because there's more limited in traits.
	So that's fascinating.
	That's interesting.
	When I had briefly a Dilbert TV show animated on TV for a couple of half seasons, the biggest problem was that people heard his voice for the first time.
	And half of the people said, "Hey, yeah, that's pretty close to what I was hearing in my head." And the other half said, "There's no way I can watch this.
	You just ruined it for me." Because I had a whole different voice and I liked it.
	I liked the voice I had.
	The way you're describing hypnosis is sort of, it sounds more like persuasion.
	It sounds more like the techniques described in the book, Winning Minds, where you're just, yeah, how to speak effectively, how to convey a message in a way that's going to bring in as many people and not alienate anybody.
	And speaking of alienating, Eric, I'm going to bring up Erica M's chat here.
	Scott, I mean, look, I know people throw this around often with people, and it's going to be...
	A segue into another issue, which is strawmanning or reading minds, tactics of loser think described in your book.
	Comments excusing Scott of being a narcissist.
	Ask him if he is.
	So I guess the first question is, what is a narcissist, even in your understanding of it?
	And I suspect you get this pretty often, because anybody who speaks with conviction and confidence...
	Do I?
	I would imagine you do, just because anybody...
	I mean, Robert gets it all.
	What does that?
	It's speaking with confidence and...
	Speaking with confidence tends to get people to throw that out there, but also it's the internet.
	But you know what else causes that?
	The other thing that causes people to accuse me of that is that it's true.
	Like I'm a giant narcissist.
	Now, let me define my terms.
	And by the way, hi, Erica.
	So Erica always asks good questions.
	There are two kinds of narcissists at least.
	Now, this is where the whole confusion comes in.
	Because I've said at one point that narcissism wasn't real.
	And then people said, whoa, whoa, you idiot.
	You know, it's a major, you know, element of psychology.
	You know, there's tons of literature.
	There's lots of them.
	It's the realest thing there could ever be.
	And I kept saying, no, well, it's not real.
	It's not real in the sense that it's some kind of a mental problem because the person who has it is feeling pretty good.
	It might be your problem.
	And then here's the thing I ended up learning that I didn't know.
	So for anybody who said, Scott, you ignorant fool, you're pretty close on this one.
	To my critics, those who called me ignorant on this topic, you're pretty on point on this one.
	So here's what I learned.
	I'm half right.
	Meaning that one kind of narcissist is called the grandiose type.
	They're the ones who want to get attention and they feel they need to be in front of people and try to save the world.
	And we're fed, basically we're fueled by other people telling us, "Yeah, you did something good for the world." That's me.
	I don't apologize for that.
	Why should I?
	I like to think I've done a few things that were good for the world.
	You know, the books that I write lately are only for that purpose.
	You know, if I wanted to do something that's only good for me, it wouldn't be very rewarding.
	But, I mean, I have enough money.
	I could just go to the beach if I wanted to, but it doesn't feed me.
	It doesn't feed me, you know, in the way that I need to be fed psychologically.
	So, yes, I'm a gigantic narcissist, and you should be too.
	It's not a medical problem.
	It's some people have already taken care of their own needs and now I'm trying to expand the things that I can be useful for.
	I think the most biologically appropriate thing is that you take care of yourself entirely when you're young and you can't add much to the world.
	You're just barely making it through yourself.
	But as you accomplish things, as you get a little...
	Skill going, build some knowledge, have some resources.
	Then it's kind of time to expand your circle of benefit, right?
	First to your family, your friends, your community.
	If you're lucky, the country.
	Maybe the world.
	And so I almost exclusively persuade on things that could really change things.
	Nuclear power.
	I try to go for the big stuff.
	And trying to understand climate change in a way that...
	You know, people can agree on.
	Stuff like that.
	The second kind of narcissist is, let's say, a vulnerable narcissist.
	I think there are a few other words for it.
	And that's a whole different set of personality traits.
	These people are compulsive liars.
	They've got double lives.
	They only live to hurt you because that's how they feed themselves.
	They become the victim as well as hurting you.
	Like, I'm the victim, but I'm going to hurt you for making me the victim that I'm not really.
	So there's a long checklist that belongs to that other kind of narcissist, and I try not to be that one.
	But the other one?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, if I can do something that makes the world a little better, I'm all in.
	Now, what inspired you to leave?
	Like, I've known people that, you know, I grew up in a small town outside of a small-sized city.
	And some people never left.
	Some people did.
	And I was, you know, curious what led people to branch out.
	What led you to branch out from where you grew up?
	Well, I knew I didn't have much opportunity there.
	That was the obvious thing, so I had to leave.
	And, you know, my education, as I mentioned, was economics.
	And I thought of things in terms of risk management.
	You know, numbers.
	So you have to go where the energy is.
	So rule number one of success, you can't be successful where there's not much energy, meaning there just aren't many things happening.
	You know, you're not meeting people because nobody's doing anything.
	There aren't many of you.
	So the first thing I did was say, where's the most energy?
	And I went to the Bay Area.
	And I said, if I can't make it here with all of this energy...
	Like, I'm really not doing well.
	And I went to the industry that had the most energy at the time, which was banking, and it was Crocker Bank, and they were just putting in ATMs, this new thing that would replace tellers.
	And so they were the most technological and a good growing area.
	So I really just played the odds and went after where the most energy was.
	So go through your professional career briefly, because I'm more interested in Dilbert.
	How you started it, how you ended up turning it into what you turned it into.
	And what you just said earlier is that you've made enough money now that you don't have to worry about the cancellation side of things, losing contracts given the field that you were in, losing business.
	But that's why I really want to get with this.
	But explain the evolution of your professional career to creating Dilbert and to turning it into what you turned it into.
	So the rapid version is I worked first down to college for a big bank.
	For eight and a half years, I guess.
	And then later for a big phone company.
	So those were my corporate experiences.
	And when I left the bank, I said to myself, thank goodness, I'm not going to have to deal with all this crazy stuff, this management stuff, this terrible bureaucratic everything.
	I'm going to go to a company that doesn't have...
	Okay, that's exactly the same.
	You got there like two weeks in, you're like, the acronyms are different.
	But all the basic ways people relate are the same.
	And that was my realization, hey, maybe it's everywhere, right?
	If it's in these two completely different industries, maybe everybody.
	So I started drawing this little character on my whiteboard and putting him in presentations.
	He didn't have a name.
	He became Dilbert later.
	And I would notice that people would, if I did a presentation, for example, people would fax my presentation back.
	It was faxed back then.
	To other people, you know, I get phone calls from around the state.
	It's like, hey, I've got your, you know, your slide deck.
	Like, you weren't even there.
	But people are sending it around.
	So I knew that there was something there, like that people were enjoying the comics on some level.
	And so I had a Name the Nerd contest one day where I drew Dilber on my whiteboard in my cubicle.
	And I asked anybody who came by, I'd say, what do you think his name should be?
	Because I felt like that was the next step.
	He had to have a name.
	And people came in and they say, Poindexter, you know, because of nerd names, you know.
	And none of them, just nothing.
	You know, they just lay there.
	And then one day, my boss at the time came in, and he picks up the marker.
	And I can remember this so vividly.
	It's like one of the most striking moments of my life.
	Takes the top off.
	I can remember him taking the top off.
	And he goes, here's his name.
	And he writes, D-I-L-B-E-R-T.
	At that moment, I felt myself go through a tunnel toward a light.
	It was like the future.
	I saw the frickin' future.
	I can't explain this, and obviously it's a subjective experience.
	I'm not saying something magical happened, but I remember it.
	I saw the future.
	And all I can tell you is he didn't name him.
	He just told me what his name was.
	That was the feeling.
	Because as soon as he said it, I could see 20 years in the future.
	I saw my entire career in that moment go, boom, right down the tube.
	I swear to God, it felt like being pulled down like a tunnel toward a light.
	You hit the other side.
	You realize, yes, this is his name.
	This is where you're going.
	And all of a sudden, it's like a rubber band.
	You're back in the cubicle.
	I will never forget that experience.
	And that was the moment that I decided.
	Now, what were your cultural influences growing up in terms of like TV, books, movies, other cartoons, comic strips, etc.?
	Yeah, when I was maybe five years old, I got hooked on Peanuts comics.
	You know, the little books.
	My uncle had them.
	I was always hanging out there.
	And I couldn't read them because I couldn't read yet.
	And it was my reason to learn to read.
	You know, it was my motivation.
	It's like, ah, if I can learn to read, I'll know what these comics say.
	And I decided at about six years old that I wanted to do that for a living.
	But, you know, how many boys do that, especially boys?
	For some reason, boys more than girls probably tend to one.
	And when I was about, I don't know, 10 years old, I decided that I was going to be Charles Schultz and I would be a world-famous cartoonist.
	And when I was 11, I applied to an online...
	Famous artist school for young people.
	It was a correspondence class.
	And you filled out a little test where you did some drawings that they told you to do.
	And I sent it in.
	I thought, all right, this will be my big break.
	If I get into the famous artist school.
	But I got rejected.
	I was turned down.
	And the way they explained it to me, they said, you're only 11 years old.
	And to be a famous artist, you've got to be at least 12. That was their cutoff.
	And no way they're going to make an exception.
	So that was also about the time I reached what I'd call the age of reason.
	I suppose it's different for every person.
	I was a little early, maybe.
	And I thought, wait a minute.
	I want to be Charles Schultz.
	There are, let's say, 5 billion people in the world at that time.
	There's one of him, 5 billion people who would like to be him, but only one of him.
	You know, I'm going through this, I'm like, okay, maybe this is crazy.
	So maybe I'll try to be a lawyer.
	So that was my plan.
	So I decided to be a lawyer.
	And I thought I'd get an economics degree as my undergraduate, etc.
	So I just gave up on the cartooning, went the corporate path, got my degree, worked for the bank, worked for the phone company.
	And then the reason I left the bank is because they told me they couldn't promote me because I was white and male.
	Now, anybody hearing this story?
	What year was that in?
	Let's see, the first time was maybe mid-80s in San Francisco.
	And when I tell the story, I need to be careful.
	They told me this directly, and it was my boss.
	Called me at the office and said, I don't know how to tell you this.
	The word came down that we don't have enough diversity in senior management, and the only way we're going to get there is to stop promoting people like you.
	And I said, well, how long is this going to last?
	And my boss said, I don't know.
	How long has it been since slavery?
	We've got a lot of work to catch up to.
	So you're not going to do this overnight.
	So I realized I didn't have a career there.
	That's why I went to the phone company.
	And I immediately got on a management training course.
	I was identified as an up-and-comer.
	I was finishing my MBA at Berkeley at night.
	So it looked like I was checking all the boxes.
	And just before I got put in what they call the binder, You know, they had a physical binder of the people that they were trying to groom for senior management.
	And they said, you're going to be in the binder.
	I think you're a binder person.
	And before they put me in the binder, or maybe they already did, I couldn't remember, my boss called me in and said, I don't know how to tell you this.
	Word came down from senior management.
	We don't have any diversity in senior management.
	And they said, we can't promote any white males.
	We don't know when that's going to stop.
	And when I tell this story, people hear it and they say, God, that must have been a really bad day for you, Scott.
	But not entirely.
	Because I've got to tell you that the day that you learn that your efforts and your rewards are completely unrelated, you're free.
	You're free.
	So let's say I didn't do a lot of work after that.
	I showed up.
	And I started working on my side projects, because obviously the corporate world wasn't going to work out for me.
	And that's when I started putting some samples together of Dilbert, and he got a name in that process.
	And then I sent them out to the major syndicates.
	There were only, I think, five of them at the time that would do a contract to put you in newspapers.
	So the way it works if you're a syndicated cartoonist is you have one contract with a syndication company.
	And then they sell it to the newspapers.
	So it's just one deal for you and lots of deals for them.
	And then you share the money.
	So I submitted my cartoons that, you know, became named Dilbert.
	And the rejections started coming in.
	And I thought I had all the rejections.
	And I thought, well, you know, I tried.
	And I'd gotten some advice from a cartoonist named Jack Cassidy.
	And I'd written to him and said, hey, how do I become syndicated?
	And he wrote me a long letter and told me how.
	So I failed.
	I sent out some samples and it didn't work out.
	And then the second time I tried was because he sent me a second letter a year later, Jack Cassidy.
	And he said, I was cleaning my office and I just wanted to make sure he hadn't given up.
	Because he saw my letter from him sitting in the pile.
	Is his name Jack Cassidy?
	Jack Cassidy, yeah.
	Jack Cassidy, okay.
	I was hearing Jack Cassidy now.
	Okay, sorry.
	Well, that's actually, I was hearing the right thing.
	Just C was in the wrong spot.
	Sorry.
	There was a guy I grew up with.
	His last name was Cass, and his parents actually named him Jack.
	Oh, my goodness.
	True story.
	Anyway, so I get this letter from Jack, and I had not even talked to him in that year.
	Like, he got his advice, and I used it, but it didn't work out.
	And he said, I just want to make sure he hadn't given up.
	Because he thought he saw something in my work.
	And I had given up.
	So I sent him out to the major syndication companies.
	They all rejected me too.
	And I thought, well, I'm done now.
	I tried really hard.
	I did the best I could.
	Put all my stuff in the closet.
	And a month or two later, when I thought I was all done with this business, I get a phone call out of the blue.
	And it's a woman who says that she works for a company I'd never heard of.
	Some company called United Media.
	And I hadn't sent my samples to anybody with that name, so I was like, well, a little suspicious here.
	And she says, we've seen your samples.
	And I thought to myself, but how?
	And she said, we want to offer you a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist in newspapers.
	Well, of course, I don't know who this outfit is, right?
	This United Media outfit.
	So I said, well, you know, I'm flattered in the U.S., but I'm going to have to ask for some references.
	Because I haven't heard of your company.
	And I said, have you worked with any cartoonists that maybe I've heard of?
	Anybody who's been published?
	Maybe in a magazine or a pamphlet or something?
	And there was this long pause.
	And she said, yeah, we handle Peanuts and Garfield and Nancy and Roboman.
	When she got to the 12th name on the list, I think I was begging her to sign the contract at that point.
	No, actually, I did negotiate for a long time on that.
	I can't say that in front of lawyers.
	I got my lawyer on it, and we roughed him up pretty badly.
	Let me give one piece of advice to your viewers, like one takeaway that this would be so valuable to you.
	This was like the break of a lifetime, right?
	So they've offered me this.
	It's like...
	This doesn't come around twice.
	If you lose this deal because you asked for too much, you're the dumbest guy in the world.
	Here's the advice to your audience.
	I was hard to find.
	Finding a talented cartoonist is their problem.
	They've got a big problem because they can find one every year or two.
	That's it.
	So if they offer you a contract, they're really decided.
	Like, they're pretty far into it, but they don't want to let that on because, right, they want to keep them negotiating.
	But because I have, in fact, I was a professional contract negotiator for a while for the bank, because I know that.
	I know that the last thing they want to do is, you know, negotiate with me for a month and then have to just go find another cartoonist.
	They don't want to waste a month.
	So I knew I had a lot more leverage, and I pushed my lawyer, and he pushed me, and we got probably the best deal that they'd ever made up to that point.
	At least they said so.
	They were pretty unhappy about it.
	Now, you mentioned that you thought about being a lawyer.
	Where did that...
	I know you've listed it before as one of, I think, your 36 in one presentation back at Berkeley.
	The 36 failed careers you had was law career.
	I was curious, how did that, when did you decide, okay, that wasn't going to be your ultimate path?
	Well, I'll tell you why I decided it might be, because the only rich people in my small town were two lawyers and a doctor, and I didn't like blood.
	That was it.
	You know, the toughest thing, if you come from a small town, Is you don't know what kind of jobs there are.
	So if you said to me, hey, I want you to have a good job that makes a lot of money, I'd say, what's on that list?
	Doctor?
	Lawyer?
	I'm done.
	What else?
	I don't know.
	So I picked the one that was less blood.
	And what I did that decided, what changed my mind was I realized I don't like...
	I don't want to do a job where I have to make somebody else a loser.
	I only want win-win scenarios.
	So if I make a comic and I get paid for it and you laugh, we're both happy.
	So I only go for things where we're both happy.
	I just didn't want a life where my winning made somebody else unhappy, even if they had it coming.
	I didn't want to do that.
	Scott, before we get into the next question, I just want to show everyone that...
	This is how you're supposed to take humor to the Netflix employees who are boycotting outside.
	Viva, will you be auditioning for the role of Space Jew in Dave Chappelle's new sketch comedy series, When You Visit the States?
	This is from Bison17.
	And this is how you're supposed to deal with humor.
	Haha, that was contextually funny, and I appreciate it, and now we shall move on in life instead of trying to destroy somebody for their humor.
	But speaking of destroying people for their positions, Scott...
	I won't say your claim to fame, but your prominence on social media came for what you predicted in 2016.
	So for whatever your life experience was, your professional training, you saw something that people didn't see coming.
	You were right about it, despite all odds.
	And that victory, in some sense, was also a very big curse.
	How do you deal with it at a time where you're beloved and it's win-win for everybody?
	And then all of a sudden, you probably naively thought, if I predict this correctly, I'll be loved again by everybody.
	And then you quickly discover that you're going to be hated by a great many people.
	What was that turning on you like for someone who I suspect probably never, you had not anticipated that coming?
	Well, I guess the first question you have to answer is, did I predict it or did I help it happen?
	So that's a question that I don't know the answer to.
	But I'll tell you a sequence of events, and you can make your own decision.
	When Trump first was in the primaries, what was the biggest knock on him is that he wasn't serious, that he was a clown, and that he was just in it for the fun, and you can't take him, you know, he doesn't have the experience, blah, blah, blah.
	And that was a universally held opinion.
	Even people who liked him thought, well, I'm not even sure he's serious, but I sure like him.
	When I wrote a blog post that became super viral at the time called Clown Genius and I laid out the persuasion technique that he was using and predicted that he came to a stick fight with a flamethrower and the flamethrower is invisible and that people like me who have some hypnosis training persuasion background we can see it clearly and so for me it wasn't really That big of a prediction because I can see the flamethrower and
	I knew he was bringing it and I knew he wasn't going to turn it off until it was nothing but ashes.
	And sure enough, he just turned on the flamethrower and he never turned it off.
	Now, here's the part where I wonder if I influence things.
	I think I'm the first person who framed him as rational.
	I don't know it, but I think I am.
	You heard the reference many times about 4D chess and 3D chess.
	That came from me.
	That came from that black post.
	And think about how many people use that phrase, meaning that they bought into either by they were criticizing it or they had accepted it.
	And it became the conversation, is he?
	Is he clever or is he a clown?
	And I don't think that if I had framed him, if I hadn't framed him, I don't know that he could have made it to the next level.
	But I don't know.
	What was your social media presence at the time?
	And forgive me, I mean, I don't know, because I wasn't, actually, I was just introduced to you afterwards.
	But how big was your social media following?
	How much did your following grow contemporaneously with what you were writing about and covering for Trump?
	Like, were you big at the time, and so people were already listening?
	Or did people start listening because of what you were saying?
	I did not have a social media presence of any size.
	I may have opened an account.
	I think I had maybe, I don't know.
	A few hundred Twitter followers, and I wasn't sure what my password was.
	So it all happened, you know, really after that blog post came out, and I thought, oh, people want to hear what I have to say, so maybe I'll tweet some stuff.
	And next thing you know, hundreds of thousands of followers.
	And I really was supported by a number of people who kind of recognized what I was saying as something they wanted to promote as well.
	Because once people saw that there was a frame that could get Trump elected, they were very interested in it.
	And they needed that story, you know, the narrative that he's smart enough to get it done.
	I feel like I have to add this.
	Because people are going to say, why were you doing this?
	Like, why weren't you trying to stop this monster from destroying everything?
	Here's my view of presidents.
	There are no good ones, and there are no bad ones.
	By the time somebody gets to that level, you know...
	Biden might be an exception because of his mental capacity.
	But by the time anybody gets to that level, typically, they have some skill.
	So it's sort of a, you know, that's for sure.
	But there are some people whose personality and skill set is perfectly suited for some challenges and others for others.
	So I would say that, you know, maybe there was somebody better for health care than Trump.
	Maybe there was somebody better for race relations than Trump.
	But nobody would have been better on being hard on China.
	Nobody would have been better with North Korea.
	Nobody would be better on the border.
	And nobody would be better militarily.
	Nobody would be better in the Middle East.
	I predicted good things in the Middle East long before the Abraham Accords.
	In fact, I don't know if I've ever said this publicly before.
	Go on.
	Go on, sir.
	I'll give you a little scoop.
	In 2018, Trump invited me to the White House just to chat.
	You know, in the summers in August, it gets slow.
	So he was just sort of building support among people he knew might say good things about.
	So I was on that list.
	And I guess I think Ivanka and Jared had read my book, Win Bigly, which talked about Trump's persuasion skills and liked it.
	So that was the basis on which I got invited.
	And I'm sitting there chatting with the leader of the free world, which is the weirdest.
	There's nothing I will ever do that will match sitting in the Oval Office with no agenda.
	No agenda.
	We were just talking.
	And, you know, we just talked about a few things.
	And of course, you know, you don't talk about what you talked about with presidents, but I don't think you would mind this particular thing, right?
	And I was sitting there and I said, Am I crazy?
	Or is everything set up perfectly for some kind of a big Middle East peace deal?
	And he just got quiet.
	Unusual, right?
	Like, usually, he just got quiet.
	And I said, because what I'm seeing is, just by weird coincidence, the leaders over there, you know, from Saudi Arabia, Israel at the time, Netanyahu, etc., it seems like you have all these pragmatists, like dealmakers.
	So if you're all dealmakers, I think this might be the time.
	I think maybe you could do this.
	And, you know, then a few years later, the Abraham Accords came in and a lot of people didn't.
	And I wonder at the time if he was already working on it.
	Or I also wonder, did it help at all that there was at least one outside opinion that said, you know, I'm kind of seeing an opening here.
	Because, you know, Trump is the ultimate optimist.
	But even an optimist doesn't think you're going to get a peace deal in the Middle East, right?
	I mean, what kind of an optimist?
	And that's just crazy.
	But, you know, and I did talk to Trump about Norman Vincent Peale, who was his, actually his pastor or minister, whichever it is for that denomination.
	So he was exposed to the person who was famous for writing the most famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking.
	He was very famous in his day.
	We don't hear about him so much today.
	He was actually accused of being a hypnotist in his day because he was so persuasive.
	And does it help for an optimist to hear another optimist say, you know, maybe.
	I always wonder about that.
	Like, just how much optimism...
	Played a role in getting something done that nobody should have thought was possible.
	So all credit to, you know, Jared.
	Scott, I gotta bring it, because it's so classic.
	Humor is a great thing, a well-placed quip.
	Scott is such a narcissist, he thinks he's responsible for world peace.
	And people will confuse narcissism with contemplating all aspects of a situation.
	And someone looking for narcissism will look at the fact that he said, maybe I gave him the idea.
	Someone who's looking for not-narcissism will say, maybe he already had the idea.
	No, hold on.
	It's not like I gave him the idea, because everybody had the idea.
	No, I'm just saying that if you're an optimist and it's the most pessimistic situation in the world, just hearing another optimist maybe agree with you, it could help.
	I'm saying a quarter of one percent.
	That's all.
	It was just an interesting story.
	Yeah, I mean, that wouldn't surprise me at all.
	Especially a personality like Trump, the best way to get them to do something is to plant an idea in their head, and ideally they will then believe it's their own idea.
	And once they believe it's their own idea, it actually comes to fruition.
	Yeah, but just to be clear, they were obviously already thinking about it.
	Oh, yeah, no doubt.
	But I think Trump needed, I think one of his limitations in office was he had too few people who thought like that around him.
	That if he'd had a lot more people that were idea people, optimistic people, I think he would have got a lot more done.
	Basically, it's like life is a Dilbert comic and the insanity and inanity of bureaucracy.
	You put that on steroids and you have Washington, D.C. To try to be a sincere optimist in a world of the most intransigent...
	That docile bureaucracy imaginable is basically, it was like a form of torture.
	It must have been for Trump every day.
	Though he always sees the bright side of stuff.
	Fascinating personality.
	I've never met anybody as optimistic as him.
	Even in scenarios where it's like, okay, this probably isn't going to end well.
	And he'd be, yeah, probably not, but hey, we'll do this and this and we'll see what happens.
	It's just like, wow.
	Fascinating, fascinating personality.
	I want you to learn that that might not be entirely natural.
	It might be experiential based on his pastor being the world's most famous positive thinking person.
	And he did say that he picked up a lot from that.
	So yeah, that's a big part of the story.
	Have you ever met anybody like Trump in that sense?
	I mean, definitely had very unique persuasion skills, but also just the incredible...
	I mean, I've been around people that are deep optimists.
	I've never met anyone as optimistic as Trump is.
	I don't think I have either.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I think he tops my list as well.
	In fact, I'm having a tough time thinking of number two, Elon Musk.
	Yeah, Elon Musk would probably be a good close second.
	I'm going to go to Mars.
	I'm going to go to the moon.
	Probably set up a plan up there.
	Probably all going to work out.
	It's like, okay.
	The most awesome thing Elon Musk has ever said is that going to the moon is going to kill people.
	And we're going to do it anyway.
	Elon Musk is an optimist and then talks about the fact that AI might very well end civilization as we know it.
	An optimist and then also perhaps the most pessimistic person on earth or a realist.
	I don't know enough about AI.
	But Scott, get into this now because there was a turning of the tide.
	Did you foresee the general public turning on you in such a vicious and rapid manner that they did?
	You know, I'm not sure I ever really thought about it as it was happening.
	I mean, I felt it as it happened.
	But I can't say that I gave a lot of thought to where I would come out with this.
	I'll tell you my interest in Trump, and it kind of dovetails with the good, no good, or bad presidents.
	I thought the country needed to be, just the box needed to be shaken.
	I wanted to break everything in a productive way.
	I wanted to break everything in the government.
	Because one thing that Trump understands better than anybody...
	Is that you don't build before you destroy what's there, right?
	You got to take down what's there.
	And who could be better at that to just, like, lay bare as much?
	Now, of course, his supporters wanted even more, you know, wanted him to drain the swamp and the things that are largely impossible in any four-year term.
	But he definitely broke the system.
	I mean, everything is different now.
	And I think that's productive.
	It doesn't feel like it when everything's breaking and you're struggling to understand your world and everybody's fighting with each other.
	But think of what we know now that we didn't know before Trump.
	I said that when he came in, his persuasion skills would change more than politics.
	They would change how you actually viewed reality itself.
	And you can see that coming from a mile away if you have a certain skill set.
	And I think that happened.
	Because what does the public think about experts now?
	Think what that's going to do to every conversation from now on.
	What was the biggest thing about climate change?
	Now, without getting into an argument about climate change, it was, hey, the experts have spoken.
	Shut up.
	And there were a lot of people who said, no, how about I don't shut up?
	And the experts said, no, how about you do shut up?
	Because we're the experts.
	Now, where does that go after this COVID experience?
	I don't know.
	Do the experts look so cool anymore?
	Was it the CDC, Robert, or the FDA who tweeted out the horse dewormer thing?
	If you go through loser think and you identify all the bad ways to make a decision, we've basically lived through it on a massive worldwide scale over the last year.
	It's like, check, check, check.
	Misuse of models.
	It's like, boom.
	Everything you could do wrong, they've managed to do wrong.
	It's extraordinary to witness.
	Is it that they made more mistakes or was it just more visible?
	I think the transparency was unprecedented.
	Oh, I agree with that.
	I agree.
	And I agree that Trump has reshaped perception in ways that recreate reality or at least expose what may have always been there to a far greater number of people.
	There's so many examples of it.
	Take our view of China.
	I think that went from a bad view to an accurate view and one we really needed to get to.
	Trump did that.
	That was all Trump.
	Look at, when was the last time you worried that Kim Jong-un would lob a missile on you?
	Now, he's still testing stuff, and of course we're watching it, it's still news, but we're not really his enemy anymore, are we?
	No, that was really ingenious.
	I mean, how he went from, you know, Rocket Boy to, you know...
	Like this little insignificant figure that's desperate for...
	I mean, there's all the memes of him asking Trump to come back, please, because Brandon bad, that kind of stuff, which is surreal.
	When a North Korean guy's making fun of our president, that's probably a new sign.
	But that's probably from Trump, the net effect, because it's like he tries to imitate Trump in certain ways.
	I mean, that psychological dynamic was fast.
	If they would have just unleashed Trump...
	I think a lot more could have got done in the international space.
	They were so wanting to pull him back that now we have Russia and China working together and other things that might not have been there had we not had the insanity of our bureaucracy at the top.
	I think the genius that Trump brought to a lot of these things is he understands humans better than other people.
	His critics don't want to accept that.
	We can all agree that You know, we all have flaws.
	He's got a few.
	But, man, he knows human beings like nobody does.
	And I think he just saw that Kim Jong-un was sort of isolated.
	And when does he ever get to talk to another person like him?
	Now, when I say like him, I mean, you know, somebody who's bigger than life.
	You know, let's just limit it to that.
	And it just seemed to me that they should be friends.
	And sure enough, they became buddies.
	Well, I'm pulled up.
	I agree that the biggest change for me was learning the media lies.
	I mean, now I look back on it and I remember them demonizing Kim Jong-un.
	I remember the media depicting him as, you know, the threat to society, the world as we knew it.
	And I suspect at the time everyone knew what, what's the word, what a flaccid threat Kim Jong-un was.
	And I wondered back then if they were blowing up Kim Jong-un to ignore what they knew was the real threat, China, while China built up its economic power and its military power.
	And today, it's gone from ignoring China and focusing on Kim Jong-un to basically apologizing for China, depending on who you're talking to.
	Yeah, and I agree.
	It was revealed during the Trump era.
	Whether or not it was Trump, whether or not it all occurred at the same time with the internet and the democratization of information.
	Which explains why they want to come down on it.
	But yeah, it was a beautiful time to live through.
	The only question is, another chat earlier, Trump fast-tracked the establishments on steroids trying to suppress all of this and push us into the Let's Go Brandon era.
	So, Scott, mass psychosis, people living under a mass delusion.
	I mean, what do you think about that going on right now?
	And do you see it happening?
	And does it get worse before it gets better?
	Or, you know, where does it go from here?
	Well, you've probably all heard my analogy that we're living...
	It's like there are two movies playing on one screen.
	We're all looking at the screen, but we're seeing different movies.
	And I think that's just massively everywhere.
	We're just all wandering around in our own mass illusion.
	Well, actually, in our own individual illusions, but there's a lot of us.
	The ones that are obviously mass illusions...
	Or let's say, this is my prediction anyway, is the Havana Syndrome, the secret sonic weapon.
	Now, I think, and I've been making this claim, and nobody's refuted it yet, I think I'm the first public figure to say on day one, day one, mass hysteria.
	Because, I see it, Robert, you're shaking your head.
	Anybody who's studied mass hysterias should have seen this one on day one.
	Now, doesn't mean I'm right.
	Maybe we find out there's some weird secret weapon.
	But I don't think so.
	And I would place a pretty big bet we're not going to find that secret weapon.
	And I would argue also that anybody who's studied mass hysterias, as I have, and I know Robert has, you would spot it easily.
	Give us some examples of previous mass hysterias that people might be able to relate to or contextualize.
	McMartin preschool case is the famous one.
	I forget the year.
	Maybe, Robert, you can help me on the background of this.
	But there was a preschool in which some kids alleged that there was satanic rituals happening in the secret underground basement under the school, and at least two people involved with the school were part of it.
	And the police would bring in the kids individually and say, you know, did you see anything?
	And the kids would...
	You know, have these similar stories, or similar enough, and they were just horrific, you know, all kinds of debauchery and violent, awful things.
	And they actually went to trial.
	So the two people were taken to trial for this.
	And when all the evidence came in, there was actually not even a basement in the school.
	They didn't have a basement.
	And people were trying to figure out, why are all these people kids?
	Who didn't seem to be lying in the sense that they knew they were saying something wrong, how could they all have some similar satanic stories?
	And the answer is, for anybody who studied hypnosis, and I would have seen this on day one as well, it was how you asked the kids.
	If you say to the kids, is anything strange happening?
	And they go, not really.
	It should be sort of the end.
	Send them home.
	But if they say, no, not really, they say, Well, how about, you know, have any of the other kids said anything?
	I don't know.
	Because a lot of the other kids are telling us that something's happening in the secret room under the school.
	And pretty soon, you can make a kid that age tell you that they were molested by Satan in the secret basement or anything else.
	UFOs, probe me, you name it.
	If you ask the right questions of a kid of the right age, and they're in a certain situation where they think, I think they're looking for something.
	I think they're looking for me to say the story.
	And the distinction between imagination and reality is a little unclear at that age to begin with.
	So that's all it was.
	Essentially, the people who interviewed the kids talked them into false memories.
	And those who study this field know that that's easy to do.
	It's not even uncommon.
	Oh yeah, there were a lot of repressed memory cases of things that didn't happen.
	My favorite version of that is a case from during World War II.
	A Korean tourist was in a small New Hampshire town taking photos.
	And the whole town became convinced they were a Japanese spy.
	And the reason for it was a combination of events.
	One, that particular town had a disparate number of people who had died, of kids who had gone over and died in the war.
	That was the main thing.
	The secondary factor was they had never had any Asian tourist in the history of the town.
	And then it was photography.
	So those three things all of a sudden became they almost lynched somebody who was just there to take photos of a cute town.
	But there's so many versions of that.
	In the Cuban story, the Havana Center had that tattooed on it.
	And then you throw in State Department people who are prone to this kind of thing, in my experience.
	You get things like, I mean, when people wonder, why did Afghanistan fall the way it did?
	You get to meet some of these State Department bureaucrats that make decisions and give advice and write.
	Well, you saw that in management.
	In other words, you're incentivized to write bogus reports.
	It's whatever your boss wants to have.
	It doesn't matter whether it's true or accurate or whether the prediction has any credibility.
	Just give them what you want, and that's what gets you promoted.
	We have that on a whole different scale.
	It's just these people run our military, run our state department.
	It's terrifying at times when you think about it.
	It's comedic, but it's terrifying.
	Of course, the most famous mass hysteria was the Salem witch situation.
	I'm not sure exactly how many of those stories are even real, but the idea that people imagined witches and then they saw them everywhere.
	So it's such a common phenomenon.
	You just see it all the time.
	All right.
	Now, Scott, here's another question.
	I don't know how much time you have left for us, so I don't want to push it, but I'm going to push it anyhow.
	Okay.
	So here's another thing.
	You build a following.
	You build a following on your successful prediction, whether or not you participated in or just attended and predicted, doesn't matter.
	Outcome is the same.
	You build a following, and you have to carry that following forward.
	I presume you don't want to exactly step out of the world that you just built, but then the pressure comes from the crowd to give answers on everything and anything.
	The crowd is a big crowd.
	They all have their individual questions and concerns, and they come to you.
	Looking for answers on these.
	You either can or can't give the answers, or you do or do not give the answers they want.
	How do you deal with that?
	And what do you notice coming from the crowd when you are compelled to take positions on things or don't take the positions that your crowd wants you to take?
	Well, one of the things that protects me a little bit is I don't take certainty for most things.
	So I allow that I could be wrong, and I talk in terms of probability.
	So anybody who's paying attention, if they hear me talk in terms of probability and that sometimes I'm wrong and why I'm predicting it, they understand that I'm just working through how to think about things and helping them work through, you know, what looks real, what looks like BS, you know, what things matter, what things don't, what things to compare to.
	That's actually the thing I do best, is are you comparing the right two things?
	So I thought I carved out sort of a nonpartisan area.
	But if you say good things about a politician, well, you belong to that politician, I guess.
	So I could say, I could criticize Trump all day long, but if I ever said anything good about his skill, well, I'm just mega.
	A phrase I've literally never used.
	And I describe myself politically as left of Bernie.
	So I don't match up with all of Trump's...
	You know, preferences.
	Although I think he's more liberal than he lets on socially.
	So, yeah, and I have this strange characteristic that I don't get embarrassed or shamed easily.
	Maybe not at all.
	And, you know, being beat up as a cartoonist, you get criticized continuously.
	So I've seen more criticism of my work than most people, just because I'm a public figure.
	When I started getting brutal criticism for all the political stuff, I kind of enjoyed it.
	I kind of liked the fight.
	I kind of liked the energy.
	I liked being in the middle of it.
	So I don't like people being bored or neutral about me.
	I would rather have people being real excited and other people really hating me because it's just better energy.
	Now, if you could go back in time, because the financial consequences of deciding to speak out and contribute in the way you believed you could contribute was that a very lucrative speaking career disappeared overnight.
	Did you anticipate that happening?
	And if you could go back in time, would you, okay, maybe I stay under the radar, just have a nice life here in the Bay Area, do what I want to do.
	Rather than risk the consequence of sticking my neck out in ways that I think ultimately can help people think better about things and issues.
	You know, honestly, I guess I have enough career security or financial security.
	I never really worried about what it would do to me.
	I know that sounds weird, but it never was top of mind.
	I experienced it, and I didn't enjoy it as it was happening.
	But it was never an obstacle at all.
	The thing I thought about was...
	I want Trump to go in and break stuff.
	And I thought that was good for the country, maybe the world.
	And I got that.
	And I was happy with a lot of it.
	Some of it I didn't like, obviously.
	I was really thinking about that.
	I mean, I was just focused on what it would be for the country.
	And I didn't think that the country completely understood what the option was, you know, what the Trump option really was.
	So I felt that explaining it clearly was like a public service.
	And maybe this is the grandiose narcissist part, you know, bringing it back to that, is that doing something that I felt was useful was very rewarding.
	And I didn't need the money, so that was my reward.
	Right now, there was one good chat that I think I...
	They're all good chats.
	There was just one question that I wanted to...
	Oh, well, I brought it up earlier.
	I remember Scott apologized quicker than anyone for being wrong about the Covington kids.
	Scott isn't afraid to say that he's wrong.
	This is the one thing that is missing in public discourse is the willingness to admit you got something wrong.
	And everyone says, like, never apologize.
	Never bend the knee because yada, yada, yada.
	It gets weaponized.
	And they may be right, but an apology...
	Scott, I don't know if you feel the same way.
	An apology sometimes is more for you than for anybody else.
	Yeah, go for it.
	I think it depends on what job you have and what else is true about your personality.
	I wouldn't be able to pull off blatantly telling people that I was right when it's obvious I'm wrong.
	I just couldn't pull it off.
	Trump, good.
	Now, if you can pull that off...
	That it's a tool in your toolbox.
	And I think for somebody whose position really requires people to think that they're strong, you know, a leadership quality, maybe not apologizing is a good strategy depending on the topic, right?
	You can imagine there would be exceptions.
	But in my case, you know, my brand is more about thinking about things and predicting and seeing how we did.
	So for me to correct an error is just...
	Part of my content, you know, to show you, oh, here's how I was fooled.
	This was a cleverly edited video.
	And that's where we, it was the beginning of where we started to see what we call the Rupar videos, named after Rupar.
	Yeah, the guy from CNN.
	He is from CNN.
	You've been Rupar.
	Where is he from?
	Which publication?
	BuzzFeed?
	I forget.
	I'm going to go look it up right now.
	Yeah, Aaron Rupar.
	So I guess he has in the past tweeted some misleading videos that clipped off some stuff.
	He's a liar.
	Scott, you're being polite.
	He's Aaron Rupar.
	He is deliberately dishonest in everything he reports.
	It is Aaron Rupar's Substack.
	I'm going to sell him here.
	Journalist.
	Doesn't say where anymore.
	Okay.
	You've been Ruppard because everything that he tells you is out of context or misrepresented.
	It's unforgivable at this point, but sorry.
	I wouldn't go so far as to say everything because I do retweet some of his content sometimes.
	But that was before we knew how pernicious the video could be.
	Remember when you thought I saw it with my own eyes actually meant something?
	I saw the video.
	But then they had the...
	Trump said drinking bleach, which is a video edit problem.
	The fine people thing in Charlottesville is a video edit problem.
	They're all the same.
	You take the beginning or the end or both off a clip and it can reverse its meaning.
	We didn't know how easy that was until we saw it done over and over again.
	Why was China allowed to take over the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan?
	I'll say it out loud.
	No good answer, Robert.
	No good answer.
	Because China was smart.
	They made a good deal.
	That's a short answer.
	It's smarter than we were, but that's self-evident.
	I think the other thing is, it's interesting to watch that Trump was such an unprecedented, unparalleled figure.
	When I was betting on him, that was my big risk factor.
	I can't find anyone historically that fits Trump.
	We've never elected a president that had no public office.
	We had some generals who had never held elected office, but everybody held public office of some type until Trump.
	I think the other interesting thing is, I think a good number of people who thought Trump equaled chaos, Biden equals everything will be chill, are now having second thoughts because Trump has so redefined the position of the presidency, how people perceive not only that, but the country and other aspects.
	They're seeing what a dementia candidate looks like in the White House and thinking maybe the offensive tweeter guy would be fine with chaos that doesn't involve Afghanistan-style collapses, economic problems, supply chain issues, a pandemic that never ends, so on and so forth.
	It seems like Trump had such an effect that Biden can't be just another president like he could have been pre-Trump.
	That post-Trump...
	Everything's almost redefined.
	Well, you know, neither Biden nor Trump fit into any model we've seen before.
	But the interesting thing is that I remember also in 2018 when I talked to Trump, he asked me who I thought was going to be his competition.
	And I predicted Kamala Harris.
	And then I predicted her again after she lost the primaries.
	My boldest prediction.
	And very close, right?
	I don't know if I'm wrong yet.
	She is going to be president.
	If it was up to her, it would come true pretty soon.
	I But the funny thing is that Trump picked Biden like he knew in 2018 that he thought Biden was going to be his competition, which was prescient.
	And I thought to myself, I didn't pick Biden because he was too old.
	But Trump knew how he felt at his age.
	And he was thinking, well, I feel okay.
	You know, at a few years, I'll probably feel okay then, too.
	So I think he just had a better window into it, maybe, just that the age wouldn't be as big a problem.
	So, yeah, he was right on that.
	And he wasn't for candidacy purposes, but, I mean, even I've been a little startled at how bad Biden looks.
	I mean, not being able to, I mean, doing the staging, like...
	They don't even know how to do it.
	It's like kids who grew up watching West Wing as a TV show.
	And it's like, okay, we'll just create a fake White House.
	And he'll appear in front.
	It's like, don't you understand?
	We'll bring in the Instagram influencer.
	Now he's a bad memer.
	That guy, whatever, onto the phone.
	It's like one visual mistake after the next, after the next.
	And it...
	It seems like they have limits in their persuasion skill set.
	All they really have is a lot of institutional influence, corporate media, etc.
	But that's about...
	Their skill set seems very diminished.
	And that's why Biden is sinking like a rock.
	I'll tell you, one of the other things we're learning with Biden is it's not clear whoever runs the country, is it?
	Because that difference between is it coming from the boss or was the boss simply given one option that was good and one that was fake?
	Which is the way everybody manages every boss.
	Here, there are only two choices.
	This one is looking really good.
	This one, oh, this is dumb.
	You could choose this one.
	Yeah, you could choose this one.
	Which one was it?
	Was it when Rainier Wolfcastle was president?
	Who was it?
	Pick one of the five options.
	It's from Simpsons the movie.
	And he picks the one in the middle.
	It's like, nope, a little higher.
	He picks number five.
	He's like, nope, a little left.
	Then he picks number one.
	It's like, nope, higher still.
	So yeah, they give the options.
	I'm looking at Canada, and it's not because Trudeau is not a senile old man.
	And I'm saying that not because I'm not calling Joe Biden that.
	I'm just saying, Trudeau's not a senile old man.
	I don't think he has any more control over the situation than Joe Biden.
	So I don't think it's age, dementia, any of these things.
	I genuinely think there are, you know, bigger interests out there that these people are just figureheads and they know who they answer to.
	I think that we have, you know, something like 25 presidents, meaning that every topic has a president and that president tells, you know, the president and title what's going to happen because they're sort of the experts, you know, it's usually the expert who's also the same party, right?
	But basically it looks like the top guy or woman is Just getting a few choices and picks one.
	Now, I think Trump, I wasn't in the room, of course, but I feel like he might have been the exception.
	I feel like he might get two options and say, nope.
	Come back again.
	Or I think he might just say, nope, I told you what to do.
	Figure out how that works.
	So, don't know.
	I wasn't in the room.
	Do you think he'll bounce back in 2024?
	So here are the variables.
	Number one, health is just such a wild card at that age.
	Trump is not invulnerable, but he looks great.
	I mean, he looks great for his age.
	He looks younger.
	He's 75 and change.
	Joe Biden is 78. So there's either a two- to three-year difference between the two.
	So let that comparison sink in for everybody else.
	Sorry to cut you off, Scott.
	Yeah, and those are a few years matter at that age.
	So will he do it?
	He definitely wants to.
	If he runs, I think he's going to get the nomination.
	I don't know how they could keep it from him.
	If he picks, say, Ron DeSantis as his running mate, I think they win.
	I think they win.
	Yeah, he's now back to being the favorite in the betting markets in the UK.
	Fascinating to watch.
	Now, when did you decide to sort of launch your own show, do the morning news breakdown and the filter?
	What led into that idea?
	And how has that experience turned out for you?
	So somewhere toward the end of the election in 2016, I heard of this thing called Periscope, you know, Twitter's live streaming thing.
	And I held it up and, you know, just talked into it and said, hey, is anybody here?
	And like four people showed up.
	And I thought, oh, that was fun.
	So I did it again.
	And then I started on this A-B testing trial of, you know, well, what about this platform and what if I do this?
	So basically I A-B tested my way to what it is.
	And now it's a pretty big property.
	And this is some of the stuff I write about in my book, Kind of Failed Almost Everything and Still Went Big, that I try lots of stuff.
	I push lots of doors.
	Sometimes one opens.
	And if it opens, I'll like...
	Well, take a step inside.
	See what happens.
	So I have lots of potential things that could be big.
	I like to pick things that could grow to a large scale if you did everything right.
	And I've always got a few irons in the fire.
	Like it wasn't the only thing I was doing, but it was the one that worked recently.
	So you see it as a portfolio context, meaning it's one of the things that worked, but I tried lots of things that didn't work.
	Just that one did.
	Can you explain that, like, I found one of the best parts of your book is systems, not goals.
	And I found that, you know, simple but revelatory.
	It's something you can apply on a constant, continuous, everyday, accessible basis.
	I mean, that's the utility of the books is that they have such wide range, wide scope of applicability.
	People can apply it in business, personal, professional, whatever they want.
	But some of it's just very simple but very essential.
	And I know when we were building up our Locals page, that was my whole approach.
	I was like, what's a means by which we can provide interesting, informative content that people like?
	Because I want this platform to survive in an era where cancel culture and censorship is coming to try to quash and kill independent voices out there.
	When did you come on to that idea?
	When did it become almost that simple in your head?
	Which idea exactly?
	Systems rather than goals.
	Oh, you know, as I was writing the book, part of my motivation was to write a book for my now-deceased stepson.
	I wanted to capture all my wisdom.
	And I thought, well, I'll write it for everybody, stepson and sons and daughters.
	And so all of my life as a cartoonist, people said, hey, cartoon boy.
	You're pretty good at criticizing things, aren't you?
	That's easy.
	That's easy, cartoon boy.
	Now let's see you come up with a better idea instead of just criticizing.
	So I thought, that's actually a pretty good criticism, right?
	If you think you're smart enough to say what's wrong, you should at least have a clue of what the right direction is.
	Otherwise, your criticism is a little bit hollow.
	So as I started to write the book, I was just bringing together lots of thoughts.
	And I think I realized that while I was writing the book, that there was a way to frame it, that I could communicate it.
	It was something I knew in my bones, but had never put to words.
	And when I put it to words and saw it, I thought to myself, I think I've got something here.
	So that plus the talent stack idea, I'm lately convinced will be my legacy.
	And that Dilbert will be like an interesting thing they say about me.
	He was also a cartoonist.
	But I think those two ideas, the systems versus goals and the talent stack idea, because you see them in other books now.
	You see a lot of what was in How to Fail, my book, you see it rippling into other management books, which I love because it means it has some utility.
	Yeah, the systems versus goals, and Robert is, especially on the Locals page, but even in the broader context, like...
	Scott implements it perfectly and also pushes me to implement it.
	But now speaking of messages that have stuck with me from your books, I'm going to bring this chat up because I don't think this is a malicious or trolling chat.
	Scott, in 2020 you said curfews were effective and it was obvious.
	How?
	Could you explain?
	And then we're going to get into the one thing from LoserThink, which is mind reading and strawmanning in terms of flawed methods of thinking.
	So let's start with this one, Scott.
	I don't even know if you said it.
	I read it and I say it sounds a bit like a straw man or a mischaracterization.
	With all due respect to Benjamin, I don't think it's a malicious comment.
	Yeah, I have no idea what the reference is.
	Curfew to what?
	To fighting COVID.
	I mean, that's, I think, one of the idea.
	Oh, I think it was just the obvious that if you don't have physical contact with people, the spread will be slower.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess it's the ultimate irony.
	If you kill everybody, COVID will not spread.
	So, I mean, it's one of the reductios ad absurdum.
	Yeah, but let me be clear.
	That doesn't mean I'm in favor of it.
	There's lots of bad things you could do to make the virus spread less.
	What does it think?
	Oh, sorry.
	Go ahead, Robert.
	What have you experienced has been maybe the most surprising pushback?
	In other words, you're exploring ideas, trying to use examples to help people learn how to think better in order to improve their own lives.
	What pushback have you faced that's been the most surprising in that process?
	The most surprising thing is that almost nobody disagrees with what I say.
	They disagree with some weird version of what they think I said that wouldn't have made any sense, and I certainly wouldn't have said that.
	So the number of people who actually disagree with my actual thoughts is pretty low, because usually you can get down to just some difference in an assumption that isn't too offensive.
	When two economists talk, you end up quickly getting to, all right, why do you think that?
	What's your logic?
	Oh, different assumption.
	And then you're done.
	And there's like no disagreement, just a different assumption.
	Interesting.
	And the compilation of elements of LoserThink.
	Everyone should read LoserThink.
	I'm going to put links, Amazon links, affiliate links in the pinned comment after this.
	LoserThink was the first book I read for me, Scott.
	So it was the one that had the most impact because there's some overlap between the books.
	And once you read the first one and the other one sort of overlap, they're less impactful.
	But the elements of LoserThink, mind reading, strawmanning.
	Imputing intentions, confusing issues.
	Did you make a list of these things as you were experiencing social media?
	Or how did you get to these elements?
	The book almost wrote itself.
	Every day I'd go on Twitter and somebody would demonstrate some just insane behavior.
	And I'd say, well, there's a chapter.
	There's a chapter.
	You start to see patterns.
	You were mentioning the mind-reading thing, so just context for the audience.
	What that refers to is I would say a solid 30% of everything that people criticize me for is based on what they believe I'm thinking.
	Never accurately.
	Just never.
	And usually they're assuming I'm thinking in absolutes, and that's always wrong.
	I'm always thinking in statistics and likelihood.
	And sometimes they just believe I have the opposite opinion I do.
	Any kind of nuance just throws people into crazy land.
	I have to pick on the irony because it is funny.
	They think I'm thinking in absolutes and that's always wrong.
	Every single time.
	Every single time.
	But they're beautiful things.
	And when you go to social media and you see posts, you're doing this and you know it.
	And you know it is mind reading.
	The factual accusation is different.
	The strawmanning, like the first question, which was Peter Brimis, and I don't think anybody should hold hard feelings against Peter.
	It's a fun question, fun answer.
	But they're always, you know, maybe it's because of limited characters on Twitter that you have to summarily characterize, but this is just the way people discourse in public.
	And once you can identify it, you'll be able to navigate it much better.
	So, must reading.
	Are you working on a new book now?
	No, I have to take a lot of time off between books because I hate writing books.
	Have you tried it?
	Have you ever tried to write a book?
	I can't read a book, let alone write one.
	It's just a terrible time.
	I equate it to like, it's like suspended animation, like your life is on hold while you're writing because you have to go into a darkened room and you're just living with your little thoughts.
	And your world gets so small, you know, it shrinks down to the sentences you're working on.
	And it's just like a, it's going into some, like, sensory deprivation chamber, except for something that isn't fun.
	And, but, you know, the famous writer saying, I hate to write, but I love having written.
	So, you know, when you're holding it in your hand and it's a book, that feels really good.
	And if somebody likes it, well, that feels even better.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	So I take at least a year off between books to remind myself that life doesn't have to suck.
	Now, you've experienced all of California's changes.
	I mean, I remember going there in the early 90s.
	San Francisco was beautiful.
	It wasn't the 1970s city of Dirty Harry or anything like that.
	It was a beautiful city, just gorgeous amenities, great environment, really.
	And over about 2010 or so, I started advising clients to start, if they could move their business out of California, to move out because certain things were becoming politically predictable and where that was going to go.
	And some clients waited a little while and regretted waiting at all.
	But other people have to stay there.
	I have a client that's a medical doctor that's in the Bay Area and doesn't like the political shifts, but that's where their business is.
	That's where their life is.
	What have you experienced in this transition?
	And do you think you'll stay in California?
	What's your take on everything you've witnessed?
	Well, my antennae are up.
	So I'm looking, you know, is there someplace better to be?
	But, you know, you always have roots and other people involved and lots of preferences.
	But the biggest factor for me is that I built my house to survive anything.
	So I have my own water source, which you can't have.
	It's grandfathered in, so I got it with the property I got.
	I've got a fireproof house.
	I've got, you know, great security in it in case society breaks down.
	You don't want to come knocking on my door if society breaks down.
	And my house would stay the right temperature all year round without energy, right?
	If I lose energy, I'm not going to freeze and I'm not going to boil.
	So I very carefully picked, you know, low earthquake zone, no hurricane zone, no winter storms, to be the safest place I could possibly live.
	Now, financially, it's a mess, being in California.
	The weather's really nice.
	Really nice.
	And I can't imagine going somewhere where I had less of those survivalist resources.
	Like, that would make me feel uncomfortable.
	Now, how much has your social...
	How much did you get a reaction from friends and neighbors and community folks once you were no longer Dilbert the comic, but a public figure in a different way?
	In other words, particularly like the Bay Area.
	It at least has a political impression that it's the kind of place where suddenly if your politics are no longer likable, all of a sudden people that were lifelong friends suddenly...
	I mean, I ran into it.
	It's funny.
	It's all the things I've done over my legal career, all the crazy...
	Different people have represented from all across the political spectrum.
	Somehow defending Trump became the thing that people are like, you know, unfriend, unfriend, unfriend.
	You know, it's been crazy.
	And disproportionately, they live in Denver, they live in the Bay Area, they live in New England.
	How much have you had to experience that?
	Well, I think I lost 90% of my friend's social network, you know, permanently.
	You know, my best friend, I was the best man at his wedding.
	Years of friendship.
	Couldn't talk to him anymore.
	He couldn't turn off attack mode.
	He couldn't not talk about it.
	And he couldn't go deep.
	He couldn't not go deep on it.
	Every time.
	And I just had to basically ghost him.
	So he's just not part of my life anymore.
	And there were quite a few people like that.
	But one of the weird things that happens is similar to somebody told me once about losing their sex drive, and I thought, oh, that's terrible.
	And they said, no, it isn't, because I don't have one.
	I can't miss it.
	I don't want it.
	So the friends that I lost, I soon realized, might have been less friends and more alcoholics.
	Because all of our social get-togethers were around alcohol, and I usually imbibed.
	I don't drink anymore.
	But I realized that there was a lot of excuses for drinking, and that maybe it wasn't so much a friend network as a bunch of people who had a cover for functional alcoholism.
	It's very interesting.
	Sorry, that went dark.
	No, it's an interesting point.
	I'm only thinking about my own personal life and friends who I potentially no longer speak to also under similar context.
	So I'm going to read this.
	You are all amazing.
	How do you squeeze so much into your day?
	Barnes, trial, lawyer, prep, other, client, it's a lot there.
	I needed that just thinking about it.
	So what do you have planned for the future, Scott?
	I mean, it's an interesting thing.
	So it's not a question of boasting or whatever, not a question of narcissism.
	Finances, you don't have to worry about.
	But legacy, I presume, is more important to you than finances, unless I'm just projecting.
	But what do you have planned?
	Legacy is irrational because I'll be dead, right?
	True.
	It sort of implies that I won't be there to care about it.
	Or you'll be up above and you can see people reveling in your existence.
	I mean, that's what I presume happens after you die, so that's what I'm working for.
	Well, my death is going to be more interesting than most because I've given public approval to use my personality and my body of work to create an AI.
	And somebody's going to take me up on that.
	So I'm coming back.
	The rest of you quitters, you can just die and stay dead.
	I'm coming back.
	When did you first get involved in Locals?
	And what was some of the objectives and ideas in that respect?
	I mean, because my interest was here you had a platform that could present the kind of community.
	I mean, we remember this.
	My kids, other people, they don't remember this.
	But I mean, I remember when message boards first started.
	And they were a fascinating place where you could exchange ideas and they created their own little neighborhood and community.
	And this was, you know.
	There might be a troller, too, but it wasn't, like, dominant.
	I remember all of that in that Locals has that capacity to recreate community, a place to safely, securely put up audio content, podcast content, video content, also a place where people can interact with one another in a way without trolls, with some basic decency and a...
	Particularly an important place, a safe harbor for independent ideas in a growing big tech monopolistic censorship world.
	But what was your thought process about it and what has that experience been like?
	Sorry, I got sidetracked by this question.
	I was going to respond to it, Scott.
	I'm sorry, Robert.
	I knew this was going to be distracting.
	I shouldn't have done it.
	You're waving this red meat in front of me while I'm trying to listen to this question.
	Well, I think you answered the question.
	You've recognized your loser think when it's occurred.
	I think we might disagree with the framing of that initial part of the question, which might be strawmanning or mischaracterizing.
	I know what you said in the beginning.
	I don't think I agree with the premise.
	No, it's mind reading.
	It's riddled with fear-based assumptions.
	How much fear do you think I had?
	I mean, you're just reading my mind.
	Anyway, forget about it.
	Remind me your topic was?
	Oh, locals.
	And it was why do it and what's the experience been like?
	So Dave Rubin came to me with the idea when it was new.
	And I invested.
	So full disclosure, I have a tiny investment.
	I just wanted to feel some skin in the game, etc.
	And for me, it was risk management as well as a public good.
	I figured if I'm part of it, any bigger platform people, It has more chances of succeeding.
	And I wanted an alternative, you know, competitive alternative that wouldn't cancel me.
	But from the financial sort of the economist in me, if I get canceled now, I would just move everything to a subscription service and my income would go up maybe triple within a year.
	Because the rest of my business, let's say the Dilber business is ad-based and I've got partners and percentages are taken out, etc.
	But if I ever just said, you know, I'm not even going to put it in newspapers anymore.
	If you want to see it, it's going to be in locals.
	That's the only place you'll ever see it again.
	With my other content, my total audience would shrink by, I don't know, 80% because it's on a subscription service, maybe 90%.
	But my income would probably triple just because of the business model of subscriptions.
	That's why Substack is doing so well.
	Because if you have an audience you can bring there, it's a goldmine.
	It is fantastic that you have a broad audience on Twitter, but a lot are trolls.
	And I say trolls and bonafide trolls, just literally negative comment the second something comes up so they can be the first ones there.
	Some are people who just enjoy a free social media platform.
	Locals has the paid subscription.
	It's got the unpaid members and you can split up the content that way.
	But Locals, now I don't know the numbers.
	I just know that it's gotten big enough.
	But yeah, Twitter is becoming somewhat less relevant to people with Locals platforms.
	But you still reach a bigger portion of the world through Twitter.
	But Locals is great.
	It really is great.
	I feel like Twitter is a necessity for some kinds of businesses.
	Mine in particular.
	I am going to need to run here in a moment.
	Robert, go ahead.
	I think you got something.
	I recommend...
	It's interesting you said you originally wrote the book for your stepson because...
	That's who I give the book to.
	I give the book to my nephews, my kids, because I think it's just great, particularly if you're early in life, to figure out some basic cues to organize and understand how to self-improvement.
	I consider them self-improvement books, fundamentally.
	I think they're fantastic.
	And then I like all the micro lessons on Locals because those are great.
	Little three, four minute clips.
	Boom.
	Good idea.
	You can use every day.
	So I think you're doing fantastic work.
	And people always think I should disagree or whatnot.
	I think what you're doing is fantastic.
	And I think it's great.
	And people don't have to agree with the outcome.
	What you're teaching and training is important for everybody's self-edification and self-education and self-empowerment in the end for ordinary people.
	Because you could have had a much easier life reserving this for a privileged few.
	And I think what you've done is fantastic and my compliments to it.
	Thank you.
	I just want to mention the micro-lessons are these little two-minute videos I do to try to teach you a whole skill, a life skill, in two minutes.
	And there are about 180 of them.
	So imagine if you had 180 life skills that you got in two minutes apiece.
	It really is a superpower.
	So that's how I try to frame it.
	All right, Scott, before we go, where can everyone find you?
	I think they know, but give us your platforms.
	Well, Dilbert.com.
	For the comic.
	And at Scott Adams says.
	Just all together.
	Scott Adams says for Twitter.
	And that's all you need.
	You'll find the rest from there.
	Excellent.
	Okay.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you for the good comments, the bad comments, the discussion.
	Stick around, Scott.
	Robert will say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone else, see you Sunday.
	Hopefully Friday, Robert.
	I hopefully cross the border tomorrow.
	We'll see how it goes.

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