Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have an extra special guest,
Speaker 1: and what can I say about Scott Adams, the creator
Speaker 1: of Dilbert. We had a we don't even begin. We
Speaker 1: had a wide ranging conversation about everything from persuasion and
Speaker 1: communication skills to cartooning and writing books. Uh. He and
Speaker 1: I have been on the opposite side of the Trump phenomena,
Speaker 1: and I have to say we actually had a very
Speaker 1: fascinating and civil conversation about what makes Trump so unique
Speaker 1: and different than everybody else, how he's disrupting politics, how
Speaker 1: he has one big lee coincidentally, the name of of
Speaker 1: the most recent book Scott wrote. Uh. And Scott admits
Speaker 1: to being to the left of Bernie Sanders, which I
Speaker 1: think would surprise a lot of the people who criticize
Speaker 1: is him on Twitter and elsewhere. We had a fascinating
Speaker 1: conversation be shorn state till the very ends. To listen
Speaker 1: to that, because really it's quite intriguing, and if I
Speaker 1: had another hour, I probably could have um continued the
Speaker 1: conversation for that much longer. So with no further ado,
Speaker 1: my conversation with Scott Adams. My extra special guest this
Speaker 1: week is Scott Adams. He is best known as the
Speaker 1: creator of the comic strip Dilbert, which appears in over
Speaker 1: two thousand newspapers worldwide in sixty five countries and twenty
Speaker 1: five languages. He is the author of numerous books, including Dilbert,
Speaker 1: Future and The Joy of Work. His most recent books
Speaker 1: are How to Fail At Everything and Still Succeed and
Speaker 1: When Bigley. He received the National Cartoonist Society Ruben Award
Speaker 1: and the Newspaper Comic Strip Award in Scott Adams, Welcome
Speaker 1: to Bloomberg. Thanks for having me. You seem to come
Speaker 1: out of a fairly typical corporate background. You worked in
Speaker 1: banking and technology. How did that road lead to the
Speaker 1: creation of Dilberg. Well, the corporate thing didn't work out
Speaker 1: for me. So I worked for eight and a half
Speaker 1: years at a big bank in San Francisco and eight
Speaker 1: and a half years at We're about eight years at
Speaker 1: the local phone company. But both of those careers ended
Speaker 1: for the same reason. Uh. In both cases, my boss
Speaker 1: called me into my office and said, Uh, it turns
Speaker 1: out the media just discovered that we have no diversity
Speaker 1: in management and and in each case, my boss said,
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you plainly, you can't be promoted
Speaker 1: here really, yeah, until things balance ound a little bit. Now,
Speaker 1: when I tell this story, people always say, stop being
Speaker 1: a victim and stop complaining. I'm not doing that. I'm
Speaker 1: telling you what happened. So how did each of those
Speaker 1: events lead you to exploring cartooning? You you have been
Speaker 1: drawing since what you're levin something like that. Yeah. When
Speaker 1: I was a little kid, like lots of little kids,
Speaker 1: I thought, hey, I think I'll grow up to be
Speaker 1: a cartoonist. That's one of the most commonly little kid
Speaker 1: you know dreams. You know, basketball player and cartoonists, the race,
Speaker 1: race car driver, yes, astronaut. And I thought I wanted
Speaker 1: to be Charles Schultz when I grew up. But by
Speaker 1: the time I reached probably age eleven twelve, I started
Speaker 1: to be able to reason, you know that, and suddenly
Speaker 1: the fantastical world of children started to fall away. You know,
Speaker 1: Santa Claus wasn't real, etcetera. But I started to think,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I want to be Charles Schiltz, the
Speaker 1: most famous cartoonist in the world. But they're around six
Speaker 1: billion people in the world, maybe back then and it
Speaker 1: was only one of him, and I thought, I'm not
Speaker 1: liking my odds. Maybe I should try to be a
Speaker 1: lawyer or a businessman or something. So I gave up
Speaker 1: an old cartooning thing and went to you know, traditional
Speaker 1: economics degree, business world. Kind of a lie. But when
Speaker 1: it didn't work out, I started to say, what can
Speaker 1: I do? There? Would not have a boss because because
Speaker 1: I noticed that the common element was having a boss,
Speaker 1: because my my success or lack of it in the
Speaker 1: corporate world didn't have anything to do with my ability
Speaker 1: or how hard I worked. It was entirely up to
Speaker 1: what a boss decided for the bosses and the company's
Speaker 1: own reasons. And I thought, well, I'd like to be
Speaker 1: free of that. So I I've tried a number of
Speaker 1: things over the years. Cartooning was the one that worked.
Speaker 1: And what I did was I tried to do things
Speaker 1: which would have a low risk. You know, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: die if it didn't work out, and I wouldn't be
Speaker 1: bankrupt if it didn't work out. I would just be
Speaker 1: tired or embarrassed. You know, those were the worst case scenarios.
Speaker 1: I saw the world as sort of a slot machine
Speaker 1: that you didn't have to put money into, meaning that
Speaker 1: I could just sit there and pull until I got
Speaker 1: a jackpot, and I could win every time if I
Speaker 1: was willing to sit there long enough and pull. So
Speaker 1: cartooning was one of those polls. It wasn't the only one.
Speaker 1: There were lots of them. I wrote about it and
Speaker 1: had it failed almost everything and still wouldn't big and uh,
Speaker 1: it just happened to be the one that worked. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about cartooning a little bit. Becaus in the beginning,
Speaker 1: you got a lot of rejection. You pulled the lever.
Speaker 1: You actually were debating, Hey, maybe I'm I've pulled long
Speaker 1: enough on cartooning and it's not working. But an inspirational
Speaker 1: letter from a fan kept you going. Tell my misstating that,
Speaker 1: am I overstating You're you're you're close, You're in the
Speaker 1: same zip code. Okay, let me tell you this story.
Speaker 1: One day I came home and I was flipping through
Speaker 1: the channels on TV, and there was a show on
Speaker 1: how to become a cartoonist of all things. I've never
Speaker 1: seen it before, but I missed most of the show,
Speaker 1: and so I wrote down from the closing credits the
Speaker 1: name of the host and figured out how to send
Speaker 1: him a snail mail letter, and I said, hey, I
Speaker 1: missed your show, but can you give me some tips
Speaker 1: how to become a cartoonist. And a few weeks later
Speaker 1: I got a two page handwritten letter from the host
Speaker 1: of the show, Jack Cassidy is his name, and he
Speaker 1: gave me some advice about what books to buy, what
Speaker 1: materials to use, and then he gave me this advice.
Speaker 1: He said, it's a really competitive industry and you're gonna
Speaker 1: get rejected a lot, but don't give up. A year
Speaker 1: goes by and one day I walk out into my
Speaker 1: mailbox and there's a letter from the same cartoonist, Jack Cassidy,
Speaker 1: who had given me the original advice, and he said
Speaker 1: he was cleaning his office and he came across my
Speaker 1: samples and the letter I'd sent him in the bottom
Speaker 1: of some pile, and he said he was just writing
Speaker 1: to make sure that I hadn't given up. And I thought,
Speaker 1: maybe you see something I don't see. So I decided
Speaker 1: to get out my materials and try again. And by
Speaker 1: then I had this idea for a character called Dilbert,
Speaker 1: who was roughly based on my work experience, and uh,
Speaker 1: sent it out to the major syndicates. Most of them
Speaker 1: rejected me. Once I thought I had all the rejections, Um,
Speaker 1: I put my materials back in the closet again. And
Speaker 1: then the phone rings a few weeks later, and it
Speaker 1: was Man who said she, uh, she worked for a
Speaker 1: company I never heard of, some company called United Media,
Speaker 1: and they said they saw my samples. I didn't know how,
Speaker 1: and it wanted to offer me a contract to be
Speaker 1: a syndicated cartoonist, the biggest break you could possibly have
Speaker 1: in cartooning. But I've never heard of this company. And
Speaker 1: so I said, um, I haven't heard of your company,
Speaker 1: this United Media company. I didn't send my samples to
Speaker 1: anybody with that name. So I'd feel more comfortable if
Speaker 1: you had some references, you know, is there somebody you've
Speaker 1: worked with before, a cartoonist who has been published in
Speaker 1: any way, you know, on a on a pamphlet or
Speaker 1: a greeting card, anything like that. And there was this
Speaker 1: long pause and then she said, yeah, we handled Peanuts
Speaker 1: and Garfield and a robot Man and Nancy. And when
Speaker 1: she got to about the twelfth name on the list,
Speaker 1: I realized my negotiating position have been compromised, and I
Speaker 1: got myself a lawyer and got a contract and and
Speaker 1: that's the rest. That's hilarious. UM. So let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about about that process of syndication. How does
Speaker 1: that work? What is the economics of syndication? What rights
Speaker 1: do you give up? What rights do you retain? Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, uh, the old syndicate was bought by
Speaker 1: the new syndicate, So it's the universal you click, Uh,
Speaker 1: is the syndicate now. And the way that works syndication uh,
Speaker 1: and it works for cartoonists and columnists is that once
Speaker 1: you do your contract with the syndication company, they do
Speaker 1: the marketing and the selling and the distribution, so that
Speaker 1: you can just concentrate on the creating. And depending on
Speaker 1: your your leverage, you might you might make a deal
Speaker 1: where you split the revenue fifty fifty, but they're picking
Speaker 1: up a lot of expenses. Um. And then as you
Speaker 1: get more successful, you might be able to negotiate a
Speaker 1: better mix than that that That seems pretty reasonable. Um.
Speaker 1: So you're working in corporate America for a big bank
Speaker 1: and a telco company. I've always thought Dilbert character was
Speaker 1: the man in the middle. He's got an incompetent boy
Speaker 1: boss above him. He's got lazy co workers adjacent to him.
Speaker 1: He's got aggressive salespeople who always promised the world and
Speaker 1: expect him to deliver um and then annoying um mentors
Speaker 1: and interns beneath him. What was the motivation for the experience,
Speaker 1: because some people have said, well, Scott Adams is obviously Dilbert,
Speaker 1: but you've kind of pushed back on that. Well, all
Speaker 1: of the characters are either some part of my own personality,
Speaker 1: usually not the full personality, because the cartoon characters work
Speaker 1: better if they have some distinguishing characteristic that's usually a
Speaker 1: flaw right, not fully fleshed out, but they are this
Speaker 1: key characteristic. So if you're looking to develop your own cartoon,
Speaker 1: what you want to look for is can you describe
Speaker 1: the character in a word or two? Garfield's a cat,
Speaker 1: you know, Dilbert is a nerd, you know, he's depending
Speaker 1: on what word you want to use, he's a he's
Speaker 1: an office worker. You know, Alice is angry while he
Speaker 1: is lazy. Dog Bird is scheming. So if you can't
Speaker 1: the Albonians, the Albonians are just the every other country,
Speaker 1: you know. I learned that trick that if you use
Speaker 1: any other country that's a real country, there's just nothing
Speaker 1: you can do humor wise, it's gonna come back. So
Speaker 1: I had to develop an imaginary country just to have
Speaker 1: somebody who's in another country doing foolish things. And and
Speaker 1: the fact that it's underwater. What what's the significance of
Speaker 1: that it's under mud? Sudden? The Albonians are always in
Speaker 1: waste deep mud. But that's never explained. Um. All right,
Speaker 1: so let's talk a little bit about how the strip
Speaker 1: has evolved over the years. You've gotten some pushback from
Speaker 1: other cartoonists, uh, including some people who I have to
Speaker 1: admit to being perplexed by this claim that you're basically
Speaker 1: excusing bad corporate behavior. I don't it that way. How
Speaker 1: do you how do you see? Do you? First of all,
Speaker 1: do you respond to other cartoonists slagging your work? And
Speaker 1: what do you think of the sort of um, I
Speaker 1: don't know, push back to the charming simplicity of the
Speaker 1: message of somebody stuck in the middle of a corporate
Speaker 1: drone type of workplace. Well, first of all, the the
Speaker 1: hierarchy in cartooning especially is that the people were very
Speaker 1: successful tend not to criticize other cartoonists. There's always punched
Speaker 1: up that's legit, and the people who are lower in
Speaker 1: the rank are pretty sure that everybody above them got
Speaker 1: there by luck or or the public doesn't understand how
Speaker 1: bad it is and they can't understand why it's successful.
Speaker 1: So the people who are not yet successful are just
Speaker 1: brutal right. The people who are peers or or above
Speaker 1: me and success cartooning are almost never that way. It's
Speaker 1: the rarest thing in the world. You also want to
Speaker 1: interrupt right here and say you have frequently just discussed
Speaker 1: the role of luck in everybody's life. Luck is so important.
Speaker 1: If this person didn't follow up, Cassidy didn't follow up
Speaker 1: with that email, that letter, pre email, who knows what
Speaker 1: might have might have happened. Yeah, luck is. Luck is
Speaker 1: always the big variable. But I think the mistake is
Speaker 1: thinking that you can't control luck. Now, you can't control actual,
Speaker 1: you know, random events, but you can certainly put yourself
Speaker 1: in places where more luck can happen. For the phrase
Speaker 1: luck is what preparation meets opportunities, there's that, Plus there's
Speaker 1: amount of energy. If you put more energy into the universe,
Speaker 1: if you if you try to start ten companies, you know,
Speaker 1: one after another. The odds of one of them working
Speaker 1: out by luck is pretty good. If you try one
Speaker 1: thing once and then you give up, your odds of
Speaker 1: finding luck are very low. So you can do a
Speaker 1: lot to go where the luck is. It's the reason
Speaker 1: I moved from upstate New York to San Francisco because
Speaker 1: there was just more happening, more opportunity, more chances for luck,
Speaker 1: and much better weather, much better weather, to say the least.
Speaker 1: Have have you ever considered dramatically shifting the way Dilbert's
Speaker 1: life has progressed. You've introduced new characters, you've introduced new
Speaker 1: plot lines, but he seems to be pretty consistently Dilbert
Speaker 1: all the way through. Well, actually, um, I did make
Speaker 1: one big change early in the strip. The first several years,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really about the workplace. He was a guy
Speaker 1: who had a job, but it was about things he
Speaker 1: did with his dog and things he did at home.
Speaker 1: And it was just about the time that email was
Speaker 1: just becoming a thing. And I had email early because
Speaker 1: I it was something we did at work, so I
Speaker 1: got it before most of the public and the few
Speaker 1: people who got on email didn't have anybody to email,
Speaker 1: so they didn't have anybody to send a message to.
Speaker 1: But I started publishing my email and the comic strip,
Speaker 1: and then people all over the country would say, hey,
Speaker 1: I got somebody to write to. I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you what I like about your strip and what I
Speaker 1: don't like, and insistently they said, we love it when
Speaker 1: he's at work doing workplace stuff. Oh, I don't like
Speaker 1: it as much when he's at home. So because my
Speaker 1: background is an m b A And an economics degree
Speaker 1: and not art, I did not have any artistic integrity
Speaker 1: to lose because I didn't start with any And I said,
Speaker 1: what's the point of making art that the audience doesn't
Speaker 1: want to see? So I gave the audience what they
Speaker 1: wanted more workplace and that that's when it all took off.
Speaker 1: Do you do you ever get specific ideas from people
Speaker 1: who shoot you an email and saying hey, this happened
Speaker 1: at my job. Yeah. Most of what I write is
Speaker 1: based on other people's suggestions, So I used to get
Speaker 1: get those suggestions by email. Before that it was from
Speaker 1: my own experience. And today, every every week or two
Speaker 1: I'll just send down a tweet and say, hey, what's
Speaker 1: bothering you about your job, and I'll get hundreds of responses,
Speaker 1: and usually that writes my my week of Dilbert right there,
Speaker 1: that that that's absolutely astonishing. So I have to ring up.
Speaker 1: Very early in the cycle, before the Republican nomination in
Speaker 1: was wrapped up, you had identified Trump as having a
Speaker 1: different approach to messaging, that he was basically steamrolling not
Speaker 1: only the rest of the nominees of Republicans, and you
Speaker 1: said he would win the Republican nomination, but you also
Speaker 1: said he's likely to win the whole shebang at a
Speaker 1: at a point in history where that was just a
Speaker 1: wild forecast, and it turned out you were correct. So
Speaker 1: tell us what did you see in that so many
Speaker 1: other people completely missed just by chance. I have a
Speaker 1: weird combination of skills and experience that gave me a
Speaker 1: different filter on the situation. One as I grew up
Speaker 1: in New York, upstate, but it's close enough to get
Speaker 1: sort of the New York sensibility. So that helped me
Speaker 1: understand when Trump was serious and when he was kidding,
Speaker 1: which seems to be a huge problem with people. Literally
Speaker 1: can't tell when he's just sort of kidding or he's
Speaker 1: using hyperbole to get a point. The famous line is
Speaker 1: take him seriously, but not literally. Right. Uh. The other
Speaker 1: thing I have going for me is a business background,
Speaker 1: and so I could understand, for example, when he uses
Speaker 1: hyperbole to tell you the economy is doing better than
Speaker 1: it's ever been, it's going to be the greatest thing.
Speaker 1: He understands that the economy is a psychology engine. We
Speaker 1: don't have a shortage of materials, we don't have a
Speaker 1: resource problem, we have a psychology problem. And he was
Speaker 1: looking to fix it directly. Now, I also have a
Speaker 1: background as a trained hypnotist, so I could recognize. And
Speaker 1: I've also been studying the ways of persuasion in general
Speaker 1: for decades. So when I was watching the President work
Speaker 1: on the campaign trail, I was saying, the techniques of
Speaker 1: persuasion used at the highest level I've ever seen in public,
Speaker 1: and and to me, it looked like he was bringing
Speaker 1: a flamethrower to a stick fight. And and I thought
Speaker 1: it was actually an easy prediction. You know, It's funny.
Speaker 1: New Yorkers kind of know him as a goofball businessman,
Speaker 1: want to be. He's not a huge Developer's not this,
Speaker 1: He's not that. But He's been an incredibly successful person
Speaker 1: at managing and manipulating the media, and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people completely missed that skill set. There are
Speaker 1: few better than Donald Trump at dominating the news cycle,
Speaker 1: even when he says something that's not true and everybody
Speaker 1: rushes to correct him. The next day, all we're talking
Speaker 1: about is is still Donald Trump? Yeah? And you saw
Speaker 1: that right from the start at the first Republican debate
Speaker 1: when he was asked the very first question, Megan Kelly
Speaker 1: s m is incredibly toxic, damaging, career ending, campaign ending
Speaker 1: question for anyone or anyone else about his bad statements
Speaker 1: about women. And instead of apologizing like somebody might do,
Speaker 1: or or avoiding the question in the normal way that
Speaker 1: people do it, he's he He interrupts her with only
Speaker 1: Rosie O'Donnell. Now, first of all, completely not true, but
Speaker 1: didn't matter. It didn't because he took all of the
Speaker 1: energy out of the question, which was lethal, and he
Speaker 1: moved it to his answer, which was so much fun
Speaker 1: and so provocative and so enjoyed by his bass especially
Speaker 1: because they have the feeling about Rosie o'donald that I said,
Speaker 1: oh my goodness, he just sucked all of the energy
Speaker 1: out of the problem and put it into something that
Speaker 1: people can't stop talking about while forgetting the question. And
Speaker 1: I literally stood up and walked towards the television like
Speaker 1: my I had a tingle on my arms, and I thought,
Speaker 1: I think I just saw the future. How to win
Speaker 1: Bigley by dominating the news cycle and sucking all the
Speaker 1: oxygen out of the room. Now that the the actual
Speaker 1: subtitle of the book is UH Persuasion in a World
Speaker 1: where Facts Don't Matter. When I first wrote that and
Speaker 1: when I first started saying facts don't matter back into fifteen,
Speaker 1: people just rejected that. Just ridiculous. Now you see those words,
Speaker 1: those exact words, the facts don't matter, and they're talking
Speaker 1: about in terms of our opinions, not the real world.
Speaker 1: And the real world if you walk in front of
Speaker 1: a bossity hit you, that matters, physics matters, facts don't.
Speaker 1: But your decision about what to do that day might
Speaker 1: it might not be driven by facts. It's about your emotion,
Speaker 1: how you feel everything else. So now I would say
Speaker 1: that that's common way of thinking that and I predicted
Speaker 1: in as well, and this isn't win big Ley, that
Speaker 1: Trump would do more than win the presidency. I said
Speaker 1: he would tear the fabric of reality apart and that
Speaker 1: we would see see ourselves and how we fit into
Speaker 1: the universe completely differently because of the experience. And you're
Speaker 1: watching the fact checkers say, um, he got seven thousand
Speaker 1: things wrong in the past twenty four hours. Why is
Speaker 1: nobody acting differently because of this? Well, because the facts
Speaker 1: don't matter, you know, as long as he's persuading us
Speaker 1: in a direction that people feel comfortable going better. Economy
Speaker 1: beat ices, you know, have good news in North Korea,
Speaker 1: people are okay with it. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: the book How to fail Out At Almost Everything and
Speaker 1: Still When Big, because there are some really fascinating ideas
Speaker 1: in that book, one of which is, don't have goals,
Speaker 1: have a system. I I was intrigued by that. Explain
Speaker 1: the thought process there. Yeah, So the distinction there is
Speaker 1: a goal is you've you've got a very specific idea
Speaker 1: what you want, but a system is something you do
Speaker 1: every day that gets you to a better place, but
Speaker 1: you don't know exactly how it's going to turn out.
Speaker 1: So an example would be if you go to college
Speaker 1: and get a degree, you might not know exactly where
Speaker 1: that's going to lead, but there's a virtually a guarantee
Speaker 1: that you'll have more options to do whatever you want.
Speaker 1: And in the book you use the example, don't set
Speaker 1: a goal of losing twenty pounds, set a goal of
Speaker 1: eating more healthy well or even more specifically well. Uh,
Speaker 1: using the top pick of diet, I say, make it
Speaker 1: a lifelong practice to increase what you know about nutrition,
Speaker 1: to understand that this is better than that you know.
Speaker 1: To to understand, for example, that if you have a
Speaker 1: choice between a plain white potato and pasta, that the
Speaker 1: pasta has a better glyciamic index. So if you if
Speaker 1: you like them the same, if the pasta, you're going
Speaker 1: to be better off. That's just one example, but you
Speaker 1: could learn almost forever about nutrition so that you always
Speaker 1: have an option of the healthier versus the less healthy choice.
Speaker 1: I tell people to make it a habit to practice
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to get the best flavor
Speaker 1: and the things that are good for them. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about the combination of mediocre skills, which I'm also amused by.
Speaker 1: How do a series of mediocre skills add up to
Speaker 1: something that's very successful. Yeah, this is the idea of
Speaker 1: the talent stack. So a talent stack is where instead
Speaker 1: of becoming uh, the one best person in the world,
Speaker 1: that is of a skill which only works for a
Speaker 1: few people. So if your Tiger Woods learned to golf
Speaker 1: and you know, just ride that horse as hard as
Speaker 1: you can. But for most of us, we don't have
Speaker 1: a Tiger Woods level skill at anything. But what we
Speaker 1: do have is the ability to put together a stack
Speaker 1: of talents in which we're pretty good, maybe top of
Speaker 1: compared to the rest of the world, just because the
Speaker 1: rest of the world isn't practicing those skills in the
Speaker 1: first place, and if you combine them right, you get
Speaker 1: a very powerful package. For example, UM, as a cartoonist,
Speaker 1: it's no secret that I'm not very good at drawing,
Speaker 1: and you would think that's pretty important to being a cartoonist.
Speaker 1: You should be a pretty good artist, but I'm not.
Speaker 1: I can, however, draw better than most people. Likewise, I'm
Speaker 1: not the best writer in the world, but I can
Speaker 1: write better than most people. I'm not the funniest guy
Speaker 1: in the room, but I'm funnier than most people. I
Speaker 1: don't know the most about business, but I know a lot,
Speaker 1: so it gives me a topic to write about. So
Speaker 1: I probably have a dozen or so modest skills which
Speaker 1: happened to sum up to something that's commercially extraordinary. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about your process. I love to write in
Speaker 1: the morning. I feel like it's a fresh reboot. You
Speaker 1: shake the a sketch screen empty and you begin clean.
Speaker 1: You also like to write in the mornings, but for
Speaker 1: a different reason. Explain why you enjoy the mornings. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's part of my system as well. There are
Speaker 1: some things you can do in certain energy states that
Speaker 1: you can't do in others. So in the morning, my
Speaker 1: brain is at its very best. So between four and
Speaker 1: ten in the morning, I'm absolutely the most creative, most productive,
Speaker 1: best concentration. By noon, I'm a little burned out and
Speaker 1: it's a perfect time to go to the gym because
Speaker 1: I don't want to think too hard, but my body
Speaker 1: is in perfect shape. And then by evening I'm ready
Speaker 1: to do, you know, more fun stuff. So I try
Speaker 1: to match my energy state to the task, which is
Speaker 1: something you can only do if you don't have a boss.
Speaker 1: Most of the time, if your boss is saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I want you to be here in the
Speaker 1: meeting from eight to ten, you don't get to say
Speaker 1: you know, boss, that was the only time I was
Speaker 1: going to do something useful and you just took it
Speaker 1: from me. So that's a big, big incentive to find
Speaker 1: a way that to control your own schedule because, and
Speaker 1: I often say this, happiness is not caused by whether
Speaker 1: you can get the stuff you want. Happiness is caused
Speaker 1: as even more by getting the stuff when you want it.
Speaker 1: It's not what you have because we live in a
Speaker 1: world where you can often get you know, what you need,
Speaker 1: but you can't often get it when you need it.
Speaker 1: You can't often sleep when you're tired, eat when you're hungry,
Speaker 1: exercise when you have the energy, and right when your
Speaker 1: brain is is the best. So to the extent that
Speaker 1: you can develop a system so that your energy is
Speaker 1: always right for the task, your way ahead. So let's
Speaker 1: talk a little about the happiness ratio. I love that
Speaker 1: concept of having a certain so you and I will
Speaker 1: disagree about certain things. The ability to self focus your
Speaker 1: thoughts on happy ideas and create a sort of self
Speaker 1: awareness of positivity. Am I overstating that is an important aspect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can. You can manage your own brain like you
Speaker 1: can manage shelf space. So if you don't manage your brain.
Speaker 1: It's going to think about whatever it thinks about, and
Speaker 1: for most of us, that will drift off to negative thoughts.
Speaker 1: There's something that happened in the past, there's something bad
Speaker 1: that might happen tomorrow. But if you tell yourself, well,
Speaker 1: let me think about what could you go right? Let
Speaker 1: me think about what I appreciate, Let me think about
Speaker 1: who I'm in love with, let me think about that.
Speaker 1: You can you can just use up the shelf space
Speaker 1: and the more happy thoughts to negative thoughts gives you
Speaker 1: a better racial and that affects your whole outlook. Right, So,
Speaker 1: so assuming that the things you think are just the
Speaker 1: things you think is sort of a losing strategy. A
Speaker 1: better system is to manage what you're thinking because you
Speaker 1: can make yourself think about other topics for sure. You
Speaker 1: have that control. And if you do that, your body
Speaker 1: will respond, your health will respond, your you know, every
Speaker 1: part of your your immune system will be stronger because
Speaker 1: we know that negativity works against all that stuff. So
Speaker 1: let me push. I'm with you on this. You and
Speaker 1: I are completely sympatico on the happy thought ratio. There
Speaker 1: are other ways to phrase that, but we're in the
Speaker 1: same camp there. I have to push back a little
Speaker 1: bit on the daily affirmations, which look to me like
Speaker 1: survivorship bias, meaning well, the ones that don't work out
Speaker 1: we don't really focus on. But hey, I used to
Speaker 1: say affirmations about Dilbert, and Dilbert worked out. Therefore, so
Speaker 1: how do you separate the daily affirmations that work from
Speaker 1: the ones that don't? Or am I just being, you know,
Speaker 1: a stick in the mud. It might not matter which
Speaker 1: is which is the interesting I'm not sure if I'll
Speaker 1: be able to expand on it completely. But what we're
Speaker 1: talking about is the practice of writing down what you
Speaker 1: want uh every day, so you might say I Scott
Speaker 1: Adams will be a famous cartoonist. Now that works against
Speaker 1: the system's way of of working, because it's better to
Speaker 1: have a system that could get you lots of different outcomes.
Speaker 1: So if you're doing an affirmation, it's probably better to
Speaker 1: say I'll be wealthy than to say I'll be rich
Speaker 1: in a specific way, because you want to leave open
Speaker 1: the options. Now, the idea here is that there's there's
Speaker 1: something about focusing that gives you a better result, and
Speaker 1: the repeating it or the writing it down every day
Speaker 1: for consistency, according to Bob and so, yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: just the process of doing that sort of reprograms you
Speaker 1: into a better collector of information, meaning that you can
Speaker 1: tune your brain to notice things you wouldn't notice. You know, how,
Speaker 1: you're in a crowd sometimes you'll hear people say background noise,
Speaker 1: Scott Well and like you can pick your name out
Speaker 1: of a crowd without trying. So whatever you tune your
Speaker 1: brain to, you notice things that are useful. So part
Speaker 1: of what might be good about affirmations is that by
Speaker 1: concentrating on it is sort of allows you to see
Speaker 1: the world. It expands your your perception. And by the way,
Speaker 1: there's a science behind that, the availability bias. You go
Speaker 1: out and get a jeep and suddenly you see jeeps
Speaker 1: everywhere because you're familiar with it. Yeah, but beyond that,
Speaker 1: there's also been studies to show that if you approach
Speaker 1: the world as an optimist and you you just sort
Speaker 1: of keep optimistic thoughts in your head, that you actually
Speaker 1: increase your perception. And this can be shown that um,
Speaker 1: you'll you'll notice things that other people wouldn't notice. Let
Speaker 1: me give an example. So part of the test was
Speaker 1: this was Wiseman was the guy who did this test.
Speaker 1: Dr Wiseman, and he showed people uh the same copy
Speaker 1: of a newspaper, but they were divided into two groups.
Speaker 1: One group consider themselves lucky and another group considered themselves unlucky.
Speaker 1: Self evaluated, self evaluate. Of course, there's no such thing
Speaker 1: as actual luck. Not in either those groups could perform
Speaker 1: better on randomized test. But he said, count up the
Speaker 1: number of photographs in these newspapers. And the people who
Speaker 1: were unlucky or considered themselves unlucky, counted the number, and
Speaker 1: on average they got the right number. Let's say it
Speaker 1: was forty two. The people who considered themselves lucky also
Speaker 1: got the right number on average, but they were done
Speaker 1: in seconds, whereas the other people took minutes. What was
Speaker 1: the difference in each of the newspapers that both groups
Speaker 1: saw on page two in big words and said, stop
Speaker 1: counting the photographs. There are forty two of them. Now,
Speaker 1: if you expect to be lucky, you're looking for luck
Speaker 1: because you expect it. So the people were looking for luck.
Speaker 1: It just had a broader perceptual plane, and they noticed
Speaker 1: that sentence the rather the other said, well, my task
Speaker 1: is to look at photographs. Where are the photographs? One? Two, three? Hi,
Speaker 1: shure him board what a boring day looks like? Another
Speaker 1: bad day for me? So your your outcome can actually
Speaker 1: change what you recognize as opportunities. That's fascinating. Can you
Speaker 1: stick around a little bit. I have a ton more questions.
Speaker 1: We have been speaking with Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure to come
Speaker 1: back and listen to the podcast Astras, where we keep
Speaker 1: the tape rolling and continue to discuss all sorts of things,
Speaker 1: ranging from cartooning to how to win bigly in political battles.
Speaker 1: We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us
Speaker 1: at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can
Speaker 1: find that at iTunes, Overcast, SoundCloud, Bloomberg dot com, wherever
Speaker 1: your finer podcasts are sold. Check out my daily column
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Ridolts. I'm Barry Retults. You're listening to
Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, Scott.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for doing this. I've been looking
Speaker 1: forward to having this conversation for a while. I have
Speaker 1: so many questions. I have to start by saying, how
Speaker 1: annoyed I am. I have most of your books, and
Speaker 1: including various Dilbert collections, but um, the early Dilbert Scott
Speaker 1: Adams corporate books as opposed to Dilbert collections, and we
Speaker 1: moved about three years ago and we're mostly impact. And
Speaker 1: I went through a bunch of boxes of books in
Speaker 1: the basement and over the weekend and I could not
Speaker 1: find anything that's making me well, that's why I write more.
Speaker 1: There you go. So I just count on you to
Speaker 1: lose the old ones. And you, speaking of writing more,
Speaker 1: you have win bigley out this month in paperback. Is
Speaker 1: that is that right? That's right for those people who
Speaker 1: wanted to wait for the cheaper version. So let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about uh politics. And by the way,
Speaker 1: your email is still public, so for angry people, don't
Speaker 1: email me. You cannot email Scott um about whatever. But
Speaker 1: you got a ton of pushback on a lot of
Speaker 1: things that you wrote about Trump, even though many of
Speaker 1: those things have come to pass and that your forecasts
Speaker 1: and expectations have proven out. How do you how do
Speaker 1: you deal with that sort of um pushback? Is it
Speaker 1: just that people can't see what they don't want to see,
Speaker 1: or yeah I would. I should say first of all
Speaker 1: that I'm not a Republican. I'm not a conservative. I
Speaker 1: consider myself left of Bernie. So when I was talking
Speaker 1: about Trump. When I was talking about Trump, I was
Speaker 1: talking about his technique, and I think there are some
Speaker 1: unique things he brings, such as the way he can
Speaker 1: he can talk an economy up uh, and the way
Speaker 1: he could talk to North Korea, for example. So I
Speaker 1: was really trying to find the positive, and I trusted
Speaker 1: the rest of the media to find the negative. You know,
Speaker 1: that's their job. They do a really good job of it.
Speaker 1: Some would say too good a job at it um.
Speaker 1: And having been in the public for a long time
Speaker 1: with Dilbert, I'm used to withering criticism on a daily basis,
Speaker 1: and you do kind of get used to it. Thick
Speaker 1: skin develops after you're coming up on is it twenty
Speaker 1: five years? Is that right? Thirty years of Dilbert Um?
Speaker 1: But what what is different when I talk about politics
Speaker 1: is that recently, just in the last year or so,
Speaker 1: I've discontinued appearing in public for actually security reasons. Come
Speaker 1: on that. Yeah, that's true, it's literally, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: dangerous for me to be in a big crowd these days,
Speaker 1: because you don't know. It only takes one not in
Speaker 1: the crowd to ruin your day, as we've seen recently
Speaker 1: what's taking place in Pittsburgh and what's taken place with
Speaker 1: mail bombs and god knows what else. Um, but let
Speaker 1: me let me, let me kind of put a frame
Speaker 1: on that. Here's here's my observation of why the world
Speaker 1: looks crazier. And it all came. It all started when
Speaker 1: the technology allowed us to measure for the first time
Speaker 1: exactly how the news was being received by the audience.
Speaker 1: So as soon as you could tell that this headline
Speaker 1: got you more clicks than that line, this approach got
Speaker 1: you more than the others, the fiduciary responsibility of management
Speaker 1: of people in the media and the press was to
Speaker 1: follow the clicks. You've got to go where the profit
Speaker 1: is because you're a public company in most cases, and
Speaker 1: the shareholders require that the BuzzFeed model. So yeah there,
Speaker 1: and you can't really avoid that and still stay in business.
Speaker 1: So once you got that, you you had a press which,
Speaker 1: through no fault of their own, no bad intentions, just
Speaker 1: following the clicks had to go where the the emotional
Speaker 1: centers of the brain were most stimulated, because that's what
Speaker 1: makes people click, makes them act. And so the news
Speaker 1: went from even attempting to give an unbiased view of
Speaker 1: the world to not really trying to do that at all,
Speaker 1: um but rather trying to give a view that they know,
Speaker 1: their their their base, whoever's watching them already will interact
Speaker 1: with will like. So once you get in that situation,
Speaker 1: it has to get worse because the business model won't change.
Speaker 1: You know that there's nothing that's going to replace the
Speaker 1: model where you make a lot of money by getting
Speaker 1: people to click. So any calls for people to be
Speaker 1: more civil are missing a basic understanding of how the
Speaker 1: world works. People are not going to be nicer because
Speaker 1: they know they ought to. They they are, Their opinions
Speaker 1: are coming from what they read, what other people say,
Speaker 1: how they feel about stuff, and the business model is
Speaker 1: now designed to keep them permanently in fight or flight mode.
Speaker 1: You know, I literally have a column. We're recording this
Speaker 1: the day. The column should be out in about fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1: How to have a financial debate without mailing pipe bombs
Speaker 1: to each other? Because if you believe the founding fathers
Speaker 1: and if you believe um the marketplace of ideas, we
Speaker 1: should be able to debate these things, not with our
Speaker 1: Danny Konaman system one emotional fight or flight response, more
Speaker 1: coolly and and actually have a debate about the merits
Speaker 1: of these issues. But it sounds like, at least in
Speaker 1: the public political sphere, we don't get past that immediate
Speaker 1: response very often, do we. Yeah, we've developed two separate worlds.
Speaker 1: I call it two movies on one screen. So the
Speaker 1: people on opposite sides believe they're looking at the facts
Speaker 1: and making a perfectly objective opinion based on what they
Speaker 1: see as the facts. Trouble is, the other side thinks
Speaker 1: exact actually the same thing, and they're looking at for
Speaker 1: the most part, the same facts. There are some differences
Speaker 1: about the different silos. You know, we'll have a little
Speaker 1: bit of different information. For example, one silo does not
Speaker 1: like George Soros, the other silo doesn't talk about it,
Speaker 1: So those things are different. But for the most part
Speaker 1: we're looking at the same information and having completely different conclusions.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about that, because there's a couple issues
Speaker 1: here and I want to unpack them. But you raise
Speaker 1: like a really interesting question to me. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: I'm in New York, pretty middle of the road guy
Speaker 1: working in finance, Jewish background. I have never felt oppressed
Speaker 1: or discriminated against, but clearly within the little bubble that's
Speaker 1: my world, Um, I'm not discriminated against. And even go
Speaker 1: back fifth ye or a hundred years, the reason firms
Speaker 1: like Goldman Sachs came about, or some of the bigger
Speaker 1: freed Frank or Kholer or some of the big your
Speaker 1: law farms came about was because Jews couldn't get hired
Speaker 1: at the waspy farms and so they created their own.
Speaker 1: So I was fortunate to be born into part of
Speaker 1: the world where I don't really experience discrimination, although I
Speaker 1: certainly see it online and to me when I when
Speaker 1: I see the way George Soros name is used, it
Speaker 1: always seems to be a totem for a dog whistle
Speaker 1: for the anti Semites, for people you can name a
Speaker 1: million different financiers it used to be the Trilateral Commission,
Speaker 1: or go down the list of all the crazy different
Speaker 1: people who were pulling the levers of power behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: How do you respond when people say, hey, George Soros's
Speaker 1: dog whistle uh to anti Semites. He's a billionaire, he's Jewish. Therefore,
Speaker 1: wink wink, nudge, nudge, we're gonna let people know exactly
Speaker 1: what we're saying. Well, let me tell you the experiment
Speaker 1: I've been running on Twitter recently. Um, I couldn't understand
Speaker 1: what all the complaints about sorrows were about. And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's just because I've not exposed myself to it. If
Speaker 1: I if I read the right link, if I read
Speaker 1: the right stuff, I would maybe have an opinion. So
Speaker 1: I asked people, can you tell me in summary what
Speaker 1: the problem is? And people couldn't do it, not even close.
Speaker 1: But they would say, oh, but if you look at
Speaker 1: this link, look at this interview, watched this video. Most
Speaker 1: of the video links were too an edited video he
Speaker 1: did for sixty minutes in which it's taken out of
Speaker 1: context to make it look like he really enjoyed the Holocaust. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm exaggerating a little bit that that's essentially how it's
Speaker 1: being portrayed, or that he was a Nazi collaborator. If
Speaker 1: you see the whole clip without the editing, it doesn't
Speaker 1: look like that. So part of it is that people
Speaker 1: are looking at the wrong video, and they threw no
Speaker 1: fault of their own. They believe it's it's the full story.
Speaker 1: So it starts with that, just uh, some editing hub.
Speaker 1: But then you go, okay, but what's he doing now?
Speaker 1: I get why you don't like what he did when
Speaker 1: he was fourteen, even if you have the wrong information,
Speaker 1: but what you complain now? And people will send me
Speaker 1: these long, rambling articles in which there's mind reading written
Speaker 1: into the article. In other words, the author will say,
Speaker 1: and then George Soros wants to destroy the fill in
Speaker 1: the blank, you know, destroy our republic, destroy Israel. He
Speaker 1: wants to destroy something. And I'm thinking to myself, I'll
Speaker 1: bet he never said that. I'll bet there's no quote
Speaker 1: of him saying I want to destroy you know, whatever
Speaker 1: they love. But everybody is sure they've seen it, They've
Speaker 1: seen enough information, uh that they have that opinion. So
Speaker 1: then I asked a simple question, Okay, you don't like
Speaker 1: well organizations he's funding, because those organizations are doing things
Speaker 1: which you you think are destructive to the United States,
Speaker 1: to Israel or whatever you're complaining about. And I say,
Speaker 1: can you tell me the percentage of the budget of
Speaker 1: those people he's fun day and then give me an
Speaker 1: idea what bad things they're doing, so I know if
Speaker 1: he's like the big reason that some bad stuff is happening.
Speaker 1: Nobody has that list, or at least nobody I can
Speaker 1: find it can forward it to me in a consumable form.
Speaker 1: I'll get endless a word salad descriptions about the bad
Speaker 1: things he's funding to destroy the world, But nobody seems
Speaker 1: to be able to actually describe it in any coherent way.
Speaker 1: So I can't even form an opinion about whether he's
Speaker 1: something I should be opposed to or in favor of.
Speaker 1: I literally can't even form an opinion. So what I'm
Speaker 1: observing is a mass hysteria kind of reaction. And and
Speaker 1: part of the way that you can tell it's um
Speaker 1: it's not based on the fact is that it's limited
Speaker 1: to one silo right the people on the left. It's
Speaker 1: invisible to him, it's just not even a question. But
Speaker 1: it's so far along to the people like Ken McCarthy
Speaker 1: is the guy teed up to replace Paul Ryan. He
Speaker 1: tweeted something about Soros funding the caravan coming from Guatemality,
Speaker 1: United States. When it reaches that level, it makes you
Speaker 1: stop and say, what's going on here? And to me,
Speaker 1: the common thread through all of at least on the right,
Speaker 1: I find the left and the right are it's not identical,
Speaker 1: and the crazy is different in different ways. And I'm
Speaker 1: very anti anti PC culture. The left tends to embrace
Speaker 1: that the right has something unique which the left doesn't.
Speaker 1: Fox News is a very different animal than CNN or MSNBC.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to say every media outlet has a bias,
Speaker 1: there's no I don't think anybody could disagree with that.
Speaker 1: But Fox News behaves like it's a wholly owned subsidiary
Speaker 1: and that's a quantitative difference from everything else. Agree or disagree, Well,
Speaker 1: let me put it in this frame. It's my observation
Speaker 1: that the side this out of power is craziest while
Speaker 1: they're out of power. So, while Obama was in power,
Speaker 1: Fox News was talking about birtherism, Donald Trump was talking
Speaker 1: about uranium one, etcetera. UM and GA email server go
Speaker 1: down the whole list. So so you know, nobody's innocent
Speaker 1: of pushing stories that you know don't pass all the
Speaker 1: fact checking. But at the moment, because Trump is in office,
Speaker 1: it seems obvious to be that Fox has the advantage
Speaker 1: that they can talk about real things like, oh, the
Speaker 1: economy is doing well and North Korea and it's going well, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So why why don't they They did a lot of
Speaker 1: time on other I'm always back and forth the two
Speaker 1: of them. So I'm giving nobody a pass here. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying that, in a relative craziness scale, the one
Speaker 1: whose ount of power will act crazier while they're out
Speaker 1: of power until they get back in power. Because Fox
Speaker 1: News can talk about real things that are good things,
Speaker 1: and they've got a factual basis for that. If you're
Speaker 1: anti Trump, say cy An n MSNBC, you talk about
Speaker 1: things like, well, I think if we saw his tax returns,
Speaker 1: there'd be a problem. Or I think when Muller is done,
Speaker 1: we'll find something we don't know that we don't like
Speaker 1: about Russia and Trump. Or I think he's going to
Speaker 1: say something in the future that will blow up the world.
Speaker 1: Or I think this violence that happened is because something
Speaker 1: he said, although we should probably talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: those sorts of things separately, um because I think it
Speaker 1: deserves its own topic. So I think that you see
Speaker 1: a lot of mind reading imaginary Trump derangement syndrome on
Speaker 1: the left because he's in power and he's changing their
Speaker 1: world in the way they don't like. If if Trump, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, left office and you know, just saying Nancy
Speaker 1: Pelosi took over the presidency in a few years, it
Speaker 1: would just reverse and Fox News making up stuff and
Speaker 1: seeing then it would be reporting more facts. We clearly
Speaker 1: saw Obama derangement syndrome, and before that, we clearly saw
Speaker 1: a Bush arrangement syndrome. There's there's no doubt. I'm fond
Speaker 1: of pointing out that the death so called deficit hawks,
Speaker 1: the people who concerned about deficit spending, is directly a
Speaker 1: function of who's in power. Of course, so when George
Speaker 1: Bush is in in the office, the Democrats are saying,
Speaker 1: what do you mean you want a big tax cut
Speaker 1: that's not funded and a war of choice that's going
Speaker 1: to cause brillions of dollars. Then the Democrats come into
Speaker 1: the office and we have to rescue the banks, and
Speaker 1: we need a stimulus and we need this, and now
Speaker 1: the Republicans are talking about it, and then that reverses.
Speaker 1: Now Trump is in office and we have a big
Speaker 1: tax cut, and the deficit has gone up it's always
Speaker 1: a function of who's out of power. But the question
Speaker 1: that I raise is is there a qualitative difference to
Speaker 1: that derangement syndrome UM between each side or are you
Speaker 1: suggesting it's just strictly who's ever out of power is
Speaker 1: angry and they say and do things that are are crazy.
Speaker 1: The two biggest variables are who's in an antipower and
Speaker 1: then the personality of the person in the office. Is
Speaker 1: there is there something about them that's special. Trump is
Speaker 1: special in you know, lots of ways. So he tweaks
Speaker 1: people's feelings harder than anybody's ever tweaked feeling UM. So
Speaker 1: you should expect that every everything that's a normal bias
Speaker 1: becomes a super bias in this situation. And that's what
Speaker 1: we see. So we're recording this about a week before
Speaker 1: the mid terms. What do you think happens any thoughts?
Speaker 1: You're not a political analyst, but you have some insight
Speaker 1: into how both sides communicate. Sometimes they're more effective, sometimes
Speaker 1: they're less effective. What what do you think is the
Speaker 1: outcome here? So I think it's tough for people in
Speaker 1: my position to call individual races because it probably has
Speaker 1: more to do with the matchups, and no, I mean
Speaker 1: generally who takes the House, who takes the Senate, what
Speaker 1: happens in the governorships. So in general, you need to
Speaker 1: know a lot of the details to make a good
Speaker 1: overall prediction. So I'll stick with what I feel comfortable with. Uh,
Speaker 1: it looks like Republicans are heading for an historic turnout,
Speaker 1: like a jaw dropping amount of turnout, and I think
Speaker 1: they're holding their keeping their powder dry. I think Republicans have,
Speaker 1: as a characteristic, if I can generalize, they like to
Speaker 1: act more than they like to talk. And so I
Speaker 1: think you're gonna be surprised the way people were surprised
Speaker 1: about the election in twent sixteen the Republicans turn out.
Speaker 1: And then the other prediction is that it's going to
Speaker 1: be closer than people imagined a year ago. I think
Speaker 1: it could. Uh, this will be the most extreme. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure I want to call this a prediction, but
Speaker 1: if things go the way that the world has been
Speaker 1: going for the last couple of years, it almost seems
Speaker 1: like whatever is the best movie plot is what happens
Speaker 1: that would that would result in almost a deadlock in
Speaker 1: the house, meaning would be so close that there's something
Speaker 1: about it, one of the one of the somebody who
Speaker 1: got elected. Maybe there's some doubt about the vote. I
Speaker 1: think we're not going to get a clean outcome. It's
Speaker 1: possible that Will will have something that's so close to
Speaker 1: even that there will be enough things in doubt that
Speaker 1: we wonder who we even won. I will I will
Speaker 1: concur by saying if under normal circumstances in a mid
Speaker 1: term election, the party out of power usually gain seats
Speaker 1: both in the House and at the state assembly level.
Speaker 1: But if anybody can steal defeat from the Joseph victory,
Speaker 1: the Democrats know how to do that. That said, by
Speaker 1: the time this broadcast, the results are probably in, and
Speaker 1: I'm guessing the Democrats take the House. I have no
Speaker 1: idea what happens in the Senate, but like like you said,
Speaker 1: this is very tough to do. Neither of us are
Speaker 1: political analysts, and we don't really know, um what the
Speaker 1: out come is. But I'm I'm intrigued by your perspective
Speaker 1: of the communication that takes place and how people are influenced. UM.
Speaker 1: I would imagine the Democrats should be more motivated to
Speaker 1: come out and vote only because the Republicans got what
Speaker 1: they want they got their task cut, they got Kavanaugh,
Speaker 1: they shouldn't be as motivated. But who can tell your
Speaker 1: your your position is he is a great motivator, and
Speaker 1: therefore they're going to come out and vote. Well. There's
Speaker 1: also there a number of other influences. One is that
Speaker 1: people are more motivated by a fear of loss than
Speaker 1: they are motivated by, hey, I might guess something. The
Speaker 1: Democrats are trying to guess something, and the Republicans are
Speaker 1: trying to prevent losing what they've already gotten. Those are
Speaker 1: different motivations, and usually the person who's trying to prevent
Speaker 1: a loss is going to get off the couch before
Speaker 1: the person who was like, well, if I vote something
Speaker 1: good might happen. That's a lesser motivation, classic risk aversion, right,
Speaker 1: And so there's that UM, but I also think the
Speaker 1: Democrats might be more transparent about how much UM. Let's
Speaker 1: see how much energy they have on their side. You
Speaker 1: can see them dancing in the streets, you can see
Speaker 1: them talking, you can see them registering people that apparently
Speaker 1: record rates. But the Republicans are sleepers and and this
Speaker 1: is weird, but I think you might see a repeat
Speaker 1: of six just because Republicans enjoyed it so much the
Speaker 1: first time. In other words, they saw the model where
Speaker 1: while we didn't talk about it, but we showed up
Speaker 1: and voted, you saw what happens. Well, the argument is they,
Speaker 1: but they if you look at total votes cast, Trump
Speaker 1: got less votes than Hillary did in the presidential election
Speaker 1: and the GOP got less votes than the Democrats did
Speaker 1: in Congress. However, they got the right votes in the
Speaker 1: right states for the electoral college and for the individual
Speaker 1: congress people. Yeah, that that obviously makes a huge difference,
Speaker 1: and you can't discount that. But there's there's a big
Speaker 1: energy issue too, and uh that might be the energy
Speaker 1: might be the difference between that one or two percent
Speaker 1: in either direction. And that's really all that's in play.
Speaker 1: People that people have largely made up their minds, but
Speaker 1: they there there may be one who were going to vote,
Speaker 1: but it's raining, or you know, they don't have a babysitter,
Speaker 1: and how hard are you going to try? So you
Speaker 1: think you think the Republicans are more motivated than the
Speaker 1: Democrats realize. I think it's a big sleeper and and
Speaker 1: they're going to break some records that that is quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: You mentioned something earlier. By the way, I love that
Speaker 1: you and I disagree about a lot of things and
Speaker 1: can actually engage in a civil debate, where online it
Speaker 1: seems so few people can do that. Well, if people
Speaker 1: were polite online like they are in person, online would
Speaker 1: be fine too. Well. That that's the the um the
Speaker 1: automobile pedestrian disagreement, when people yell stuff from the safety
Speaker 1: of their stealing glass enclosure that you would never say
Speaker 1: walking down the street, and online seems to be that
Speaker 1: indulgence of id seems to be encouraged when you're online
Speaker 1: people people forget that you're not dealing with the robot,
Speaker 1: You're dealing with a human being on the other side.
Speaker 1: It's very easy to lose sight of that when you're
Speaker 1: just punching something into a little Twitter square and hitting tweet. Yeah. Probably,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty times a day at minimum, somebody will
Speaker 1: come onto my Twitter feed and say some version of
Speaker 1: your cartoons are terrible. You're an idiot, And that's all
Speaker 1: they'll say. There's nothing else, And I think to myself,
Speaker 1: what exactly was your motivation there? It had to just
Speaker 1: feel good, So I think they just get a little
Speaker 1: charge and being able to hurt somebody they don't know
Speaker 1: that they've got a problem with that. That's doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like it's a positive or healthy way to deal with
Speaker 1: a disagreement. I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I
Speaker 1: made a resolution this year to try and be nicer
Speaker 1: on Twitter. And you would be shocked at how often
Speaker 1: somebody says something that is you know, there's a legitimate
Speaker 1: point there, but it's lost in the obnoxiousness and the anger.
Speaker 1: And when you just respond with a factual statement about well,
Speaker 1: here's the data source I used and this was the
Speaker 1: basis of that, the person will then turn around and say, oh,
Speaker 1: thanks for that. By the way, I love Masson's in business.
Speaker 1: Keep doing what you're doing. I'm like, wait a second,
Speaker 1: you were just a total jerk. And I learned that
Speaker 1: a long time ago, and it's easy to get caught
Speaker 1: up in the emotion and forget these are real people
Speaker 1: you're dealing with. Yeah, I might have different people following
Speaker 1: me because I've never it's pretty rare that I can
Speaker 1: send them better information and have them say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you changed my mind. Usually it's uh, you know, your
Speaker 1: link is crazy and you're crazy, and they don't say
Speaker 1: they've changed their mind. They said, oh I like the
Speaker 1: radio show, like they still haven't walked back whatever whatever
Speaker 1: data point. You know. I love when people tell me, well,
Speaker 1: you didn't inflation, and just that I can't inflation, and
Speaker 1: just height, it's just the guy's height, what are you
Speaker 1: talking about? So so that's sort of you know, you
Speaker 1: get sort of stuff. I do get the Uh it's
Speaker 1: not that uncommon to get somebody who will insult me
Speaker 1: while complimenting me, you know, and you'll say, yeah, I
Speaker 1: love your show, you're crazy about this. Uh yeah, So
Speaker 1: I don't know if I should block them because they've
Speaker 1: got these weird, uh insulting ways to be my friend.
Speaker 1: And are you familiar with the soft block? We were
Speaker 1: just discussing this in the office the other day. The
Speaker 1: mute soft block is if somebody's following you, I shouldn't Well,
Speaker 1: normally I would say I wouldn't reveal this because this
Speaker 1: is a secret trick. But the old joke is if
Speaker 1: you want to hide something, bury it in the back
Speaker 1: of a podcast, nobody'll hear it. Um. So someone's following
Speaker 1: you and you don't want to block them, but you're
Speaker 1: tired of their crap, So you block and then immediately
Speaker 1: unblocked them, and what that does is it makes them
Speaker 1: unfollow you, and then you mute them, and so now
Speaker 1: you don't see their stuff. They're no longer getting your stuff,
Speaker 1: but they don't know they've been unfollowed, and everybody's life
Speaker 1: just goes on their separate paths with let's just agree
Speaker 1: to divorce and move forward. It's the Twitter case of
Speaker 1: an amicable divorce. You've changed my life. So I have
Speaker 1: to give credit to um my partner Josh Brown, who
Speaker 1: claims to have invented this in two thousand and ten.
Speaker 1: I discovered it independently five years later. I'm like, this
Speaker 1: is a very effective technique too, because once you block somebody,
Speaker 1: then it's like, ah, that idiot's got atoms blocked riddles,
Speaker 1: she's a jerky blocked me. So instead block, but you
Speaker 1: have to do it immediately so they can't see it.
Speaker 1: It's blocked, unblocked, and then mute and we all just
Speaker 1: move along with our lives. That's brilliant. I've been calling
Speaker 1: people Nazis and them locking him. That's funny. So so
Speaker 1: let's talk about Nazis for a second. Or actually, more specifically,
Speaker 1: you said the situation with Pittsburgh and some of the
Speaker 1: more incendiary rhet rhetoric is different than some of the
Speaker 1: other stuff, Um, what were you thinking along? Yeah, just
Speaker 1: in the sense it requires a little more expansive context.
Speaker 1: The first thing I'd say is that if you're looking
Speaker 1: at the president's rhetoric and saying how is that affecting people?
Speaker 1: There are different filters to view that. If you're looking
Speaker 1: at it a legal filter or a social filter. Even
Speaker 1: his enemies agree that you can't blame the talker for
Speaker 1: the person who did the bad act. Hey, you're the
Speaker 1: guy with the gun. You know, crazy is crazy. But
Speaker 1: if you've viewed it through a science lens and you've
Speaker 1: got millions of people listening to a message, are some
Speaker 1: of them going to be influenced in ways that are
Speaker 1: unproductive and dangerous? In the answer is yes, just about
Speaker 1: every time. Now, President Trump is surely the type of
Speaker 1: personality that could trigger people on the fringes, but I
Speaker 1: would say most presidents probably are. Probably most presidents have
Speaker 1: triggered people for their own reasons, uh to do things. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're looking at somebody who has triggered too, in
Speaker 1: the case of the synagogue shooting to attack people who
Speaker 1: the president clearly favors. I mean, he's been good to Israel,
Speaker 1: his family is Jewish, his daughter married someone who is
Speaker 1: Jewish and converted to Judy, his advisors. You know, you
Speaker 1: can go round down and the shooter actively disliked Trump,
Speaker 1: but he's still being Trump is still being blamed for
Speaker 1: raising the temperature. And what about what about the mail bomber?
Speaker 1: How do you define that guy? Just um? Mental illness.
Speaker 1: You know, it's always the problem to to say that
Speaker 1: we should change all of our behavior because there are
Speaker 1: some mentally deranged people who are going to take it wrong.
Speaker 1: So well, all presidents say things that might affect some
Speaker 1: of the people the extreme fringe. Trump seems to be
Speaker 1: much more incendiary than Obama or Bush or Clinton. I
Speaker 1: think that's right, and I don't think that we should
Speaker 1: ignore that, and then the president should do whatever he
Speaker 1: needs to do with that. Um, but let's also size it.
Speaker 1: I did a Twitter poll, which of course is deeply unscientific,
Speaker 1: but I asked, what do you think causes people to
Speaker 1: act more violently the president's rhetoric or fake news, video
Speaker 1: games or music. And what you find is that the
Speaker 1: president is in is in the same range, at least
Speaker 1: in people's opinions with music and video games, which I
Speaker 1: also believe do trigger people. If you're looking at a
Speaker 1: huge population and you know, if a hundred million people
Speaker 1: are playing a video game where somebody gets shot, somebody's
Speaker 1: gonna shoose somebody. It's just the question is is the
Speaker 1: video game or you take a hundred million people and
Speaker 1: statistically there's going to be one crazy it's in that
Speaker 1: it's the price of free speech. But you want to
Speaker 1: size it. Fake news can kill millions. I mean, fake
Speaker 1: news is a serious So how do you define fake news?
Speaker 1: And two ways? And now the reason I'm going to
Speaker 1: tee up this question very specifically, there's an inherent bias
Speaker 1: in all media operations, from the New York Times to
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal, um and people entities on the
Speaker 1: far extreme. What what is your definition of fake news?
Speaker 1: So for me, fake news would be inaccurate news that
Speaker 1: especially the kind of that they should have known or
Speaker 1: should have corrected. But that's kind of rare. There isn't
Speaker 1: that much of the like. Seriously, fake news the other
Speaker 1: kind is worse because it's changing how we're thinking about things.
Speaker 1: So if if you talk uh consistently about let's say Russia,
Speaker 1: it will rise in people's minds in importance. That may
Speaker 1: be good, but it may be bad. So the media
Speaker 1: is change raaging the importance and the priority and how
Speaker 1: we how we rank things, the focus of perception. By
Speaker 1: the way, I meant to tell you, I know you're
Speaker 1: a big fan of Bob Geldini, who wrote Influence and Persuasion.
Speaker 1: It was fun reading his stuff and then reading your
Speaker 1: stuff because clearly he has influenced you. Yes, he's influenced
Speaker 1: me a great deal, which makes sense. He wrote a
Speaker 1: book called Influence. Um, uh yeah, he's probably one of
Speaker 1: my biggest influences. And uh, you know we've we've we've
Speaker 1: have brief connection on Twitter exchange some professional compliments. So
Speaker 1: the concept of re prioritizing and focusing comes from um
Speaker 1: influence comes from his book. You're saying what the media
Speaker 1: does fake news not so much false statements of fact,
Speaker 1: but changing or re prioritizing the subjects were discussing, right,
Speaker 1: And then there's a hybrid, which is the worst case
Speaker 1: in my opinion, this is the worst fake news maybe
Speaker 1: we'll ever see short of actually starting a war. And
Speaker 1: that was what I called the Charlottesville hoax. Now the way,
Speaker 1: this is what and it goes like this. When the
Speaker 1: President said they were fine people on both sides, the
Speaker 1: frame that should have been reported was both sides of
Speaker 1: the statue question. People want statues, people want them to
Speaker 1: come down. There are fine people on both sides of that,
Speaker 1: even if you disagree with their position. But because the
Speaker 1: news had framed it as Antifa against the white supremacist,
Speaker 1: they reported it as both sides being white supremacist and Antifa.
Speaker 1: And then they said, well, the president is calling the
Speaker 1: white supremacist find people, so now I have to go back. Yeah, now,
Speaker 1: let me finish. Finish now. In order to believe that,
Speaker 1: you would have to believe that he called the Antifa
Speaker 1: demonstrators find people. Also because he said on both sides,
Speaker 1: that didn't happen. Second of all, there is no world
Speaker 1: in which the President of the United States got in
Speaker 1: front of the public and decided to side with the
Speaker 1: white supremacists by calling them find people. In no world
Speaker 1: was that possible or did it happen. Indeed, when they
Speaker 1: asked him for clarification, he condemned the white supremacist. He
Speaker 1: clearly was not supporting them, and anybody who could have
Speaker 1: seen this subjectively should have known that. But you can
Speaker 1: turn on CNN almost any day of the week and
Speaker 1: there will be a pundit who will say, well, he
Speaker 1: called the white supremacists find people, and nobody calls him
Speaker 1: on it. Nobody says, wait, wait, that was ambiguous. Obviously
Speaker 1: he wasn't saying white supremacists or find people, because those
Speaker 1: white supremacists, for God's sakes, they were marching against it
Speaker 1: was an anti Semitic demonstration. You know, his daughter's Jewish,
Speaker 1: his you know his his family is Jewish, He's pro Israel.
Speaker 1: Israel loves him very very much so, by the way,
Speaker 1: right more than any president amongst the Orthodox Jews. I
Speaker 1: think his approval rating is like in the United States,
Speaker 1: very very so. To think that he got in front
Speaker 1: of the public and made a choice to say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this will work out well for me. I'll
Speaker 1: throw in with the white supremacist. That absolutely did not happen,
Speaker 1: but is reported as fact by c AN, n MSNBC,
Speaker 1: And I would say that that one event crystallized all
Speaker 1: the things that people worried about the president and put
Speaker 1: it into fact. So he and so and so that event,
Speaker 1: more than anything else, is ripping the fabric of the
Speaker 1: country apart. And it's despicable and it's bordering on intentional.
Speaker 1: So I have to now go back and rewatch that
Speaker 1: video because I didn't see it live. I just saw
Speaker 1: the clips. However, now if you if you see the video,
Speaker 1: that won't clear it up. You have to wait for
Speaker 1: him to him to explain what he meant that he
Speaker 1: was disavowing them, and then you have to understand that
Speaker 1: the context was always two sides of the statue debate.
Speaker 1: That's what the whole event was about. I'll watch the
Speaker 1: whole thing. Part of the problem is that we bring
Speaker 1: past statements to what we do. So the whole birth
Speaker 1: or contra vercy very much looks like it's a racist
Speaker 1: trope and he was key in that. Wait a minute,
Speaker 1: why do I agree that people are perceiving it that way?
Speaker 1: But are you saying that the facts support that as
Speaker 1: being a racist attack. The first African American president clearly
Speaker 1: born in Hawaii, Clearly tons of evidence that that's where
Speaker 1: he's from. Somehow he's a Muslim where somehow he's a
Speaker 1: non US citizen. Well, the I don't think the president
Speaker 1: was bringing up the Muslim part. I believe the president
Speaker 1: was using a common attack that he uses for everybody.
Speaker 1: He said, Ted cruising in the United States. He said,
Speaker 1: Ted Cruz was a Canadian. Well, he was born in Canada,
Speaker 1: but to American parents and your duels. So you see
Speaker 1: that the president uses every available attack against every opponent
Speaker 1: without exception. If he can say it, if he can
Speaker 1: throw it against the wall, and he thinks that will
Speaker 1: influence three voters, He's gonna throw wrote that against the wall,
Speaker 1: he said. He said that Ted Cruz's father might have
Speaker 1: been involved in killing Kennedy. Now you don't believe he
Speaker 1: believed that, right, nobody believes. So let me throw another
Speaker 1: one at you, which I think is fascinating. Jon Stewart
Speaker 1: of The Daily Show there was an episode where he
Speaker 1: attacks Trump. I think it was for how he cut pizza,
Speaker 1: something idiotic, and Trump tweets John Leebowitz, also known as
Speaker 1: Jon Stewart. Now I interpreted that as, Hey, everybody in
Speaker 1: Hollywood and everybody on TV changes their name. You're bringing
Speaker 1: up a very Jewish name that sounds like a dog
Speaker 1: whistle to the anti Semites. Tell me why that's wrong.
Speaker 1: It sounds to me like he was calling him a phony.
Speaker 1: In other words, he wasn't he wasn't true to his
Speaker 1: own heritage like everybody else in show business. Right. But
Speaker 1: the fact that don't get caught up in the logic
Speaker 1: of the fact of it. It was something he could
Speaker 1: say to make him dealing. And he just throws everything.
Speaker 1: He opens the cannon fodder and that's it. Whatever you
Speaker 1: can throw, he throws. Yeah, if you if you see
Speaker 1: him going easy on opponents who happened to be white males,
Speaker 1: let me know, because I haven't noticed that. He well,
Speaker 1: low energy Jeb and lion ted and what do you
Speaker 1: call Rubio tiny Marco or something like that. He but
Speaker 1: it seems like it's not religious or racial. It seems
Speaker 1: that cry and chuck. I mean, you know, if if
Speaker 1: you are someone who insults everybody with every tool that
Speaker 1: you have at your disposal all the time, if you're
Speaker 1: picking out that one example and say, well, he's this
Speaker 1: one's black, so it must be racist. That is not
Speaker 1: based in fact just machine guns everybody in that Your
Speaker 1: bias is showing through in that. So I have my
Speaker 1: favorite questions. I asked all my guests, but I have
Speaker 1: one more question. I have to get to you because
Speaker 1: people are I see why you are um annoyed by
Speaker 1: the tweet streams that come at you. You said earlier
Speaker 1: you're to the left of Bernie. Correct, How do you
Speaker 1: define left right? That you're to the left of Bernie
Speaker 1: sand Bernie Sanders right, Bernie? All right, So let me
Speaker 1: give you some examples on abortion. Conservatives would like the limited,
Speaker 1: Liberals like, you know, more of it with certain conditions.
Speaker 1: I'm left to that, which is I say that men
Speaker 1: and me in particular should abstain from the decision and
Speaker 1: just support women. And the reason is that women bear
Speaker 1: the greatest responsibility for childbirth and child rearing, and as
Speaker 1: a general standard, the people who take on the biggest responsibility,
Speaker 1: especially for something so important, should have the greatest say,
Speaker 1: that's a pretty progressive perspective. And and my and to
Speaker 1: think that men should have somehow an equal say in
Speaker 1: what women do with their bodies as a law is
Speaker 1: ridiculous because first of all, it assumes that men are
Speaker 1: adding something to the to the quality of the decision.
Speaker 1: Nothing like that's happening. We're not adding to the quality
Speaker 1: of the decision. But what society needs is a decision,
Speaker 1: because it's life and death because it's one of our
Speaker 1: biggest issues. You need it. You need an outcome that's
Speaker 1: credible so that even the people who don't like it say, yeah,
Speaker 1: but the way you got there, that's a good. At
Speaker 1: least at least it's credible, even though I don't like it.
Speaker 1: Give us another example, because I'm fascinated by this, let's
Speaker 1: take um reparations. Conservatives don't like it. Even most liberals
Speaker 1: would not be in favor because they feel like, I
Speaker 1: don't want to pay for something it wasn't my fault. UM.
Speaker 1: I say, we should at least consider solve one of
Speaker 1: our biggest social problems to have a one percent tax
Speaker 1: on just i'm sorry, attacks on just the top one percent,
Speaker 1: so that would include people like me, and it would
Speaker 1: be a twenty five year let's say, one generation tax
Speaker 1: only to make college and trade training free for African
Speaker 1: Americans for one generation, so that we could say, look,
Speaker 1: we recognize there was something bad, we can do something
Speaker 1: about it. Now. Well, here's what's ushle. The top one
Speaker 1: percent also have nothing. Most of them have nothing to
Speaker 1: do with slavery. Their their ancestors weren't involved at all.
Speaker 1: But what's different is the top one percent, if they
Speaker 1: can make a big difference in what's in the let's say,
Speaker 1: the most disadvantaged part of society. If you can flip
Speaker 1: somebody from being unemployed to employed, that is a huge
Speaker 1: boost to the economy. And who benefits from that the
Speaker 1: top one percent. We we live in in a society
Speaker 1: where the top one percent gets most of the game.
Speaker 1: Give us one more example, and then I'll go jump
Speaker 1: to my favorite questions. Oh Scott Scott socialist. Yeah, let's
Speaker 1: take healthcare. Healthcare. The conservatives say, let the market work
Speaker 1: it out more or less. Liberals say, let the government,
Speaker 1: you know handle. I say the government should be more involved,
Speaker 1: which is that we should be creating a portfolio, meaning
Speaker 1: just a conceptual portfolio of startups that could lower the
Speaker 1: cost of healthcare in the future. So if the president said, look,
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you a running list of companies that,
Speaker 1: if they did well, your healthcare costs would go down.
Speaker 1: So the government, I think, could be more involved than
Speaker 1: just being single pair. They could be directly involved in
Speaker 1: boosting that part of the uh the startup um world
Speaker 1: that will directly help things. Scott Adam Jewelry fascinating and
Speaker 1: complex individual and and I've enjoyed our conversation. Let's jump
Speaker 1: to our speed round. I'll try and get through as
Speaker 1: many of these questions as quickly as possible. Tell us
Speaker 1: the most important thing we don't know about you? Wow,
Speaker 1: I live such a public life that has a very
Speaker 1: small category things you don't know about me. I'm learning
Speaker 1: to play the drums because I think it will be
Speaker 1: good for my brain as I reached my older years.
Speaker 1: Um with you, it's just adding to that that talent stack. Um.
Speaker 1: Who are some of your early mentors. Obviously this Cassidy
Speaker 1: gentleman Jack Casty, as I mentioned before, my college roommate
Speaker 1: Mike Chorley. Weirdly, I got into college without knowing much
Speaker 1: about the world, and he sort of taught me what
Speaker 1: it was like to be a functioning person. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then my first editor, Sarah Gillespie, who's the one who
Speaker 1: called me and offered me the first contract. Any specific
Speaker 1: cartoonists that influenced the way you approached Dilbert, Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: you mentioned Charles Sergio Arigonis, who does who did the
Speaker 1: little characters in the margins of Mad Magazine? They were fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Gary Larson, of course I stole his technique of drawing
Speaker 1: characters that don't have next uh, and probably those are
Speaker 1: the big ones. Yeah, I would say Schultz and Gary Larson. Uh.
Speaker 1: Favorite books we mentioned Bob Sheldini. What are some of
Speaker 1: your favorite books, be they fiction on fiction, cartoonists, related,
Speaker 1: or other. Oh Man Impossible to Ignore is good, teaches
Speaker 1: you how to uh do memorable presentations and slide shows
Speaker 1: and stuff by Dr Carmen Simon. Um. I'm reading Sapiens now.
Speaker 1: I like it so far, so I'm pretty sure I'm
Speaker 1: gonna like the rest of you will find the second book,
Speaker 1: Homo dais to be very very dark. Um, where this
Speaker 1: one isn't very dark. Well, okay, I'm just maybe I'll
Speaker 1: stay away from that one. Um. And then, as we
Speaker 1: mentioned Childini's book Influence and then his follow up book,
Speaker 1: his newer one, pre Suasion, those I would consider absolute
Speaker 1: fundamental reading for anybody in the business world. If you
Speaker 1: haven't read those books, you're you're disadvantaged this period. And
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that about many books. And then then
Speaker 1: my books Win Bigley and how to Win It almost
Speaker 1: Everything and still win big would be I consider fundamental
Speaker 1: reading on persuasion. But what are you excited about right now?
Speaker 1: Right now working with Bill Palty on something called the
Speaker 1: UM the blight authority blight meaning b L I g
Speaker 1: h T, the rundown inner cities areas. Why he's he's
Speaker 1: doing with his nonprofit is helping cities clear out big
Speaker 1: contiguous areas. Uh. And then I'm helping him try to
Speaker 1: figure out, you know, can we attract some ideas because
Speaker 1: ideas are the bigger problem than money. Nobody knows what
Speaker 1: to do, so we're trying to come up with some
Speaker 1: ideas to help the inner cities and productively use that space.
Speaker 1: Tell us about a time you failed and what you
Speaker 1: learned from the experience. Wow. Um, you mentioned the restaurant
Speaker 1: in How to Fail at Everything and Still Win. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought that was interesting. So almost everything I've failed
Speaker 1: at UM was something I chose that would teach me
Speaker 1: something along the way. So, Uh, the first time I
Speaker 1: gave a corporate speech when I was paid way too
Speaker 1: much to give a speech, when Dilbert was just taking off,
Speaker 1: and you know, the speaking requests come in and I
Speaker 1: didn't know how to be a public speaker, but I
Speaker 1: took the deal. I did really really poorly. And then
Speaker 1: they paid me, and I thought, wait a minute, I
Speaker 1: did really, really poorly, in my opinion, and then they
Speaker 1: paid me. So I thought, well, maybe I should do
Speaker 1: more of this, and maybe I could get good at it,
Speaker 1: and eventually I was one of the top corporate speakers
Speaker 1: in America. What do you do for fun? Well, my
Speaker 1: girlfriend Christina and I spend a lot of time together,
Speaker 1: and um, mostly it's whatever couples do you know, go
Speaker 1: out to dinner? Travel sounds like fun. Uh. Someone comes
Speaker 1: to you a millennial, recent college grad and they're interested
Speaker 1: in becoming a cartoonist. What sort of advice would you
Speaker 1: give them? Well, I would tell them, first of all,
Speaker 1: develop their talent stack, so I would tell them to
Speaker 1: concentrate on writing even more than the art. I would
Speaker 1: tell them to create online and see if they can
Speaker 1: build an audience. I would tell them to change their
Speaker 1: art based on what the audience is telling them is
Speaker 1: working or not. I would tell them to know exactly
Speaker 1: who they're targeting their art at, too, and not try
Speaker 1: to be a generic Oh everybody will love this, because
Speaker 1: that's kind of rare these days. But rather to say,
Speaker 1: as I did, this is a comic for the workplace.
Speaker 1: This is a comic for pet owners, This is a
Speaker 1: comic for single people. Whatever it is, it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: Final question, what do you know about the world of
Speaker 1: cartoonists today? You wish you knew thirty years ago when
Speaker 1: you were first starting Tilbert, I did not know that.
Speaker 1: The main thing you have to get right is that
Speaker 1: the reader looks at your comic and says, oh, that
Speaker 1: happened to me too. If you don't get that part right,
Speaker 1: you don't have anything. Now. There was a day when
Speaker 1: that wasn't true. The old style of humor was or
Speaker 1: more absurdist and more generic. But in today's world people
Speaker 1: just have to say, oh, that's me, or they don't care. Fascinating.
Speaker 1: We have been speaking with Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look Up
Speaker 1: an Inch or Down an Inch on Apple iTunes and
Speaker 1: you could see any of the approximately two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty such conversations we've had previously. We love your comments,
Speaker 1: feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot net. You can check out my daily
Speaker 1: column at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. You could follow
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Rioults. I would be remiss if
Speaker 1: I did not thank the crack staff that helps put
Speaker 1: this together each week. Medina Parwanna is my producer. Adica
Speaker 1: Valbron is our project manager. Taylor Riggs is our booker.
Speaker 1: Michael Batnick is our head of research. I'm Barry Riholts.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.