The Jordan Harbinger Show - 273: Scott Adams | How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) is the creator of comic strip Dilbert, a talent stacker extraordinaire, and bestselling author. His latest book, Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America, is out now. What We Discuss with Scott Adams: Why the term “loserthink” isn't about being uninformed — it's about unproductive thinking. Mental models we use that sometimes fail us, and thinking traps that we fall into when we're looking to interpret communication, evaluate facts or evidence, and form opinions. How to evaluate fake news and see why the business models of many media outlets have been redesigned to keep us engaged at the expense of accuracy and truth. When and how to dial down our ego so we can clarify our thinking, and also when and how we can use our ego as a tool to move forward. Ways to evaluate and poke holes in bad arguments, and strengthen our own methods of thinking and arguing. And much more… Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/273 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! On No Dumb Questions, a science guy from the deep south (Destin of Smarter Every Day) and a humanities guy from the wild west (Matt Whitman of The Ten Minute Bible Hour) discuss deep questions with varying levels of maturity. Give No Dumb Questions a listen here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled in.

to far-right conspiracies. An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiruality podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. I just want to help you see the Matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave and help you become a better thinker as well. And today on the show, Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, he's been on the show before and he tends to pop up in random places I saw Kanye West talking about him once online.

That was an interesting morning. His new book is called Loser Think, How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America. The book and our conversation today is about certain mental models we use that sometimes fail us and thinking traps that we fall into when we're looking to interpret communication, evaluate facts, or evidence, and form opinions. And today we'll learn how to evaluate fake news and see why the business model of many media outlets has actually been redesigned to keep us engaged at the expense of accuracy and truth. We'll also learn when and how to dial down our ego so we can clarify our thinking, and also when and how we can use our ego as a tool to move forward.

It's not always our enemy. And we'll discover some ways to evaluate and poke holes in bad arguments and strengthen our own methods of thinking and arguing. If you're wondering how I get guests for the show, well, I've got a great network, and I'm teaching you how to build networks for personal and professional reasons over at our free course six-minute networking. I created that. There's no sort of weird catch. There's nothing to buy.

It's just a free course on networking for business or personal relationships. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course and check that out there, and I'd love to hear what you think. By the way, most of the guests on the show actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter, so come join us and you'll be in great company. All right, here's Scott Adams. So, Loser Think, the news, great title. by the way. I'm sure that's one of those where people think, ah, I do that. I'm going to pick that up. I think everybody has a different idea of what I mean by it. So I usually have to explain that what I mean is not the person is a loser, but rather the technique of thinking about things in a certain way can take you down a

losing path. So I try to show the bad examples and then how to fix it. I was just using your example of, or your idea to, hey, take a photo of this page of the book when someone engages in loser think. show them the page that it's from, and it will take emotion out of the equation. I will tell you, it definitely worked for me to take a motion out of the equation, but it did receive some emotion in return in the form of somebody who doubled down in their loser-think and decided that I was just being an ass. People don't like to be shown that they're wrong, but you have to admit that showing them a printed book that somebody thought was worth publishing

gives it a little bit of unearned credibility. Yeah. Well, it's better than saying here's everything that's wrong with your thoughts. And then they go, well, I don't like you. So now I'm going to poke holes. And that is just like, you should read this page and find out what is objectively wrong with your line of reasoning. Yeah. And if you're doing it on Twitter, normally you can't fit like a half a page of explanation in there. So you just, hey, look at this, this photo. Here's an image because I didn't feel like typing out all the reasons that you're wrong. Yeah. So loser think isn't about being uninformed. It's about unproductive thinking, right? Yeah, specifically where it comes from is people are not necessarily exposed to the different fields and domains where people think in certain ways. So, for example, if you, let's say you went to college, you got a four-year degree, but it was in art history, would you have the same tools to compare things and, you know, figure out what things will cost over time and to know whether you've got a rational comparison compared to, say, someone who studied economics or somebody who went through law school or, you know, perhaps an engineer, just examples, a scientist. So there are some fields where people learn how to think productively. And the problem is if you don't study that stuff, you think you can do it. Because you think

your common sense is all you need. And you can see in five minutes on Twitter that that's clearly not the case. Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't know if you knew this, but the listeners often do. I studied economics and have a law degree and was a practicing lawyer. And I still have trouble parsing arguments really quickly. I have to look at things and read them, which is actually what you're supposed to go figure, what you're supposed to do as an attorney. A lot of people think, well, I'm a lawyer and I can just tell you that this is wrong because I have all this stuff memorized, and that's not how it works at all. So you're actually a perfect example of the talent stack idea, the fact, if you put together the right combination of skills, you've got something that's like a superpower. I use you as my example. I can't think of many things that would be more useful in the modern world than a knowledge of economics,

law and now what you're doing here, communication from the technology to the whole process of it, that's a really powerful stack. And it also gives you the ability to look in different windows. So I like to use the house analogy. You know, when I was 19 and somebody said, hey, tell me what's in that house. I would walk up to the bathroom window and look in and say, oh, looks like this house is a big old bathroom. That's the only window I could see. But then I studied economics. I became trained hypnotist. I learned communication skills as part of my job. I just started stacking things so I can see in more windows. And that's what I'm trying to help people with, with Looser Think. I love the idea of the windows. I'm trying to think of an example here. But if you look at somebody

who says, well, this problem is clearly this, because from a soil science standpoint, all of these things are horribly, horribly wrong. And it's like, well, maybe we're looking at this from a human flourishing standpoint where these people don't have electricity. So, like, yes, it's bad for the soil, but what's really bad for these people who live there is the fact that they don't have clean water because they don't have electricity. That sounds sort of close to what I call the one variable problem. If you're talking about a complicated thing, whether it's climate change or the economy or world events, and somebody boils it down to that one thing that matters, you can ignore everything they say. Because if your worldview is down to, well, it's just this one.

thing. If you understand this one thing, you know everything you need to know. That person probably doesn't have a wide base of understanding of the world. The one variable tell is the one that I look for the most often is like, well, it doesn't look like you've looked into this or you don't have the tools to look into this productively. Yeah, so we really do need a set of skills and diverse thinking, like a broad set of skills and diverse thinking. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily have that. I certainly, even with my broad set of skills and diverse thinking, realize even more that it's pretty not impossible, but very, very difficult to be sure about something. And that certainty is dangerous, because if you look on social media, people are sure about

everything. Yeah, if you have certainty about a complicated issue, that should be a little signal that maybe you should back that up a little bit. Maybe you should have a little less certainty, a little more humility, and that's something I talk about as well. Now, it's important to note that you don't have to get a degree in every field to get the basics of how how people think in different ways. For example, if I ask somebody on Twitter, hey, is this president or that president doing a good job or did a good job? People have a firm opinion. But if I asked a scientist, they might say, compared to what? Because the scientist, the economist, the business person, a lot of other domains would say, well, you can't really tell anything until you've compared

it to something that is a sensible comparison. And presidents, you can't really compare one to the one that was, you know, the last one because it was a whole different situation. The only valid comparison would be if you magically had another president in exactly the same situation at the same time doing the job in parallel, that you can see which one was getting better results. But of course, you can't. So if you have certainty that your president has done a good job or a bad job, I'm not sure that certainty is warranted. I mean, there's some big things you can look at and say, well, he didn't break the economy. He didn't start a war. But after the big stuff, it gets really subjective after that.

Yeah, that's a good point. And also with economics, I think a lot of people don't realize these things are, they come in decade or multi-decade long cycles. So people will go, oh, well, look, how good it was at this one period in time, this two-year period. And it's like, well, is that from the current administration, the previous administration, or one that came so far before that, that we built infrastructure for whatever we're enjoying now? So the perfect example is people will say, hey, President Trump is.

doing great things with the economy, it's never been better. His critics will say, well, Obama got the base going. And in fact, if you look at the percentages, you know, Obama increased things faster than Trump did. Now, if you don't have a background in economics or business, you'd say, huh, pretty good point. That last president increased things by a bigger percentage. That must be better. If you do have a degree in economics, or at least if you've been exposed to a little bit of how to think about this stuff, you'd say, coming off a near depression, when everything's at the lowest level, you would normally expect a big percentage gains. Because, for example, the people who are out of work are fully trained. So the moment the company said, the factory says, hey, we got a job for you.

You walk right in, you're fully trained, you're ready to go. So the first gains should be the easy ones. Once you get to the end of an improvement, you've got the really hardcore, hard-to-employee people, and we're down to 3.5% unemployment. if you're in that group, maybe you're just between jobs, but it's far more likely you have a hard time getting employed because you're not trained for the jobs that are available. So if you can make any kind of economic gain under the hardest of conditions, which is when you're reaching a top, that's worth a lot more than big percentage gains when you're getting the easy stuff coming off the bottom. Now, having said that, I always credit Obama for being probably

the right personality and the right time because everybody was panicked about the economy. And he was that calm, smart, professorial person who said, we got this, we'll do this, we'll do a few things, we got this. And I do think he was sort of perfect for the situation. If you'd thrown a President Trump into that situation, maybe you got problems. Because he's, you know, he's a little more unpredictable and people maybe are not as comfortable. But he came in when the economy was already solid. Thank you, Obama. And once the economy is solid, what would the people who study finance, business, economics, risk management, what would they say you should do? Take a little more chance. Who's a better personality

to give a little more flavor, a little more chance, a little more, maybe a more upside potential with some risk? The right time to do it is when the economy is strong. And we saw Trump come in and do the riskiest thing you've seen a president do, which has challenged China on trade. And it's worked down fine because the economy was strong enough. It just sort of absorbed that a little bit of a shock. People thought it would be a bigger shock. So when you're looking at situations like this, a little bit of economics background completely changes what you think about it, whereas the music majors and the art majors

are looking at the percentages and saying, oh, no, Obama had a bigger percentage gain than Trump. He must be the good one. Yeah, it is easy to look at stats and get confused, especially when those statistics are designed to, not every statistic, but many are designed to trick you into thinking what the person telling you those stats wants you to think in the first place. If I want to show that the economy is better under a certain administration, I will pick the figures out that are the most favorable. Look at the unemployment rate right now. Look at the amount of disposable income people have. Well, that looks good. So I guess we have a great economy. Someone also go, look at the amount of crime or look at the amount of the sheer numbers of unemployed people as a relative person. I mean, you can just pick anything that you want. And so people who have high levels of certainty in very, very complex situations, especially if they're not trained in those fields, that's what you would call loser think, right? Yeah. And people who have experience like I do, which is for years in my day job in corporate America, I was supposed to do financial

projections. And people who see it from the outside say, oh, these experts are making these projections. I guess that's pretty reliable. They're experts. They're making projections. But if you've done it for a living, you know it goes like this. So, boss, how do you want these numbers to come out? Well, I'd like it to show that this is a good idea because we've already bought the equipment. Okay, I can make that happen. I go back to my desk and sure enough, these numbers look great. And then you take that to your boss's boss and you go forward. Now, that doesn't mean it was a bad decision. saying that if you have experience rigging numbers, you don't really trust anybody else's numbers from that point on. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like people who create commercials probably

read a lot of reviews about products before they buy anything. Probably. So loser think as a word, it's mockery, right? That's kind of not. Is that up for debate at all? It sounds mocking. It is mocking, and that's intentional. Because if you can label somebody's behavior as loser think, Putting a word on things gives it power that it doesn't have as a concept that has to be explained. The best example I give to that in Loser Think is that when Elon Musk wanted to explain to his staff what they should and should not do corporate behavior-wise, he simplified it by saying, don't do anything that would appear in a Dilbert cartoon. Now, the beauty of that is, everybody kind of knows what that is without having to have a thousand

examples. You know it when you see it's like, ah, that could have been in a Dilbert cartoon. cartoon. So that was a handy thing he could do based on the fact that there was one word that everybody understood. So by introducing Loser Think, I'm kind of collecting a bunch of bad thinking technique so that people can mock it more easily. Right. So mocking or mockery is useful because basically it shames unwanted behavior. Mockery is one of the most powerful forces in civilization. Nobody wants to be mocked in public because it reduces their power, their influence, their ability to mate. I mean, it's just most basic human things.

You don't want to be mocked. You want to be the good one in the room. So it's a weapon. It's a tool. And I hope people use it. Yeah, not just calling someone a moron, of course, but showing them how and why they're thinking is wrong is more powerful. It's easy to insult people, but it's also really transparent because then it kind of goes,

oh, yeah, that guy's a moron. Why? I don't know, but it was funny for five seconds. So it really doesn't persuade as much. Yeah, with Luzer Think, you want to be able to show people. what they're doing wrong, but I've tried to keep as simple. So, for example, it's something you could hear once and say, oh, that makes sense. One example would be the concept of sunk costs. If you're an economics person, you know that money you've already spent, that's called the sunk amount,

shouldn't affect your future decisions. Now, anybody who studies economics just understands that as just a rule of the universe. It's already gone. That money can't be brought back. So the decision you make today about continuing with the project, should never say, well, we've already put this much money into it. We don't want to waste it. It's gone. The economist knows it's gone and can't come back. Now, the power of that is that you hear that for the first time, like you're explaining somebody who never heard the concept of some cost. They don't need to go read a book about it. Well, you hear it once, and it becomes part of who you are. You're like, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, these concepts, these fallacies and these different models of thinking are something that I've

got plenty of notes on here that I want to dive into soon as well. And this show is largely about freeing people from what you call mental prisons. I want people to question everything. I want people to, especially questions the things they already think they know and the things that they believe, because those are the most dangerous paradigms that you have are things that you already, quote, unquote, know to be true and turn down not to necessarily always be the case. Yeah, that's why one of the things I recommend is that you keep either a mental list or even

write it down of when you got a prediction wrong. Because we're always going through life with either formal or at least casual predictions about what's going to happen next. When you're wrong, take note of that. The way we're wired is we forget our mistakes and we remember our accomplishments, you know, except for the bad mistakes, I suppose. But it's really easy to make a prediction, be wrong, and then immediately wash that in your memory bank so it's not part of who you are anymore. And I say keep it, you know, value it because that told you something. There was something wrong with your mental models, your ability to predict that got that wrong. So make a point of remembering when you get it wrong.

You mentioned the business model of the news has changed. Let's talk about this because this affects everyone's thinking and makes it less accurate, whereas people think they're becoming more accurate because they're becoming more, quote, unquote, informed. But they're just learning these negative patterns of thought. It kind of reminds me of Malcolm Gladrow wrote about this, the Friends Principle, where we think we can read emotions really well because we've all seen, friends, except for their emotions are completely overblown, exaggerated, fake. And so we think that's what people look like when they're surprised.

It's just this caricature of a surprise person. News is doing this for us becoming more informed and having critical thinking. We think we're working on this skill, but really we're just going, oh, this bottle of Tylenol got recalled. Maybe all of the Tylenol is poisoned and the government is out to get us and it's from the Chinese secret intelligence services are poisoning all of our Tylenol. So it just results in us being ridiculous and being more uninformed or less informed than we ever were with the TV off.

Yeah, the big problem that made everything bad in the news world is when technology got us to the point where we could measure with great specificity, real precision, what works better than another thing to get attention and get clicks. And once you could measure it, it was done because there was only one way that was going to go. People have responsibility to their stockholders, their bones. Ownesses depend on profits, not informing people. Like, there's no metric that says, well, you're the head of the news network.

How many people did you make smarter? Nobody's measuring that. So a truism of the business world, and again, this is, if you have experience in the business world, this is just obvious, not so obvious if you've not been in it. And that is that what is measured is what is managed. That rule, if you don't remember anything else about the practice of management, you can actually go pretty far. That's like half an MBA, I just told you right there, right?

If you can measure it, then you'll probably manage to it. If there's no way to measure it, you're just not going to. So the thing they could measure is how excited people got because they clicked. And once they could figure that out, they could say, well, let's try this slight variation. And they could just A-B-test it. That's what it's called A-B-testing, until they can figure out the very best way to light your hair on fire. and that's usually with something that's closer to fake news and rumor mongering that it is to factual stuff. Yeah, you see headlines now, even in, I hate using air quotes, but I'm going to do it again.

Even in reputable sources, you'll read a headline. And if you ever see comment sections, people will be annoyed that this headline is totally misleading. And it'll be like, one third of kids getting no nutrition at school. And you're just thinking, oh, my God, they're not feeding kids at school. And the truth is they're just not getting like enough folate in their beans. And it's like, wait, what the hell are, this isn't news. This isn't a news story. Some beans and some schools don't have enough folate.

And it's a complete non-issue because you get it from like, I don't know, some other multivitamin that you take in the morning. Yeah, that's what I call the 48-hour problem, which is most of our news gets overturned 48 hours later. Yeah. Because the first version, and indeed, the reason that it became news at all is that it was unbelievable. And there's actually some science behind that. The news that really gets your attention is the stuff that's not true, usually. I mean, there are exceptions. And the reason that gets

your attention is because in the real world, this couldn't really happen. So people are like, what? Somebody ate a baby on live TV? I can hardly believe it. And 48 hours later, well, they didn't eat a baby. They were talking about babies. Well, they ate their lunch. And you find down. Your whole worldview just disappeared in 48 hours. And I would say that's almost universally true of anything in politics today. The 48 hours later, the other side is going to say, here's the context you left out, and it really will be important context. So we should follow this 48-hour rule in what, not get all upset or not get turned upside down or not react within 48 hours? Just wait for the next 48 hours. Well, you know, if you're in the news business, you have to cover the

news, but for the citizens watching it, just reserve judgment for 48 hours. And especially if bullets are flying anywhere. As soon as bullets are flying, the truth just goes right out the window. When the whole Syria withdrawal thing came out, I predicted in advance, you know, to my periscope people, okay, okay, here's what's going to happen. You're going to see fake deaths. You're going to see fake babies dead. And you're going to see claims of, you know, nerve gas, used. You know, it's all the basics. Because if you're the group that might get wiped out by a superior military force, you're going to use every tool, right? There's no rules in wars like this. So, of course, they're going to try to influence things with fake news that makes their side look good,

which is not to say those things don't really happen. Kids got killed. Probably there was weapons we wish had not been used. But I don't necessarily trust the stories. Those might be manufactured. So the individual anecdotes might not be true. Although, to be fair, I have a friend in Syria right now, right there, who's managing some humanitarian stuff, and it's ugly. I don't know if they're using nerve gas, but you wouldn't want to be hanging out in Western Syria or Eastern Syria. That's practically my mantra. I don't want to be hanging out in Syria, just generally, yeah. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Scott Adams. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show, and to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you

just heard from our amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of all the key takeaways from Scott Adams. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com. Subscribe to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Scott Adams. How does the 48-hour rule benefit all of us and not just politicians and celebrities? Because, of course, in the example in the book, it's like, this person did this.

I'm not Kardashian. I'm not running for president. Why should I care about whether this is going to blow over in 48 hours? Well, we all get locked into our first opinion. Being humans, if you form an opinion, you just don't like to ever modify it. I mean, we do sometimes, but it's rare. So if you hold off for 48 hours, chances are you'll get to form an opinion that's based on something a little closer to the proper context, at least. So if you want to be an informed citizen and play a productive role, wait 48 hours on the big stuff. Yeah, otherwise. So it sounds like what you're saying is because if we get an opinion right away based on this one bit of information that may be overturned in 48 hours, we have to work that much harder to overturn our previous league. What do you call it when

cement hardens. Like it's, uh, you're sort of locked in. Right, you lock in. It's like coagulated by that point. Your opinion has clotted and it's harder to shake it loose. And that's not good if you want to have an equal chance of getting all the proper incorrect information into your system. Right. And one of the techniques that I recommend, and it seems incredibly obvious, except people don't do it, which is you just have to sample the other side's new source. Oh yeah. It doesn't matter which side you're on. If you're mostly CNN, you have to watch a little Fox News to get their side of it. Whether you think it's true or not, you got to hear what they're saying and vice versa. So I have a little rule that I talk about in Luzer Think, which is that if both sides, the left and the right

news business, if they say a fact is a fact, well, it's probably a fact. It might not be, but probably. But if one side says it's a fact and the other side says it's not, and they're looking at exactly the same observation, it's probably not. And probably meaning 90% chance it's not true. Although I suppose if the news business is engaged in getting us all worked up over nothing and then they both agree on something, it's probably still exaggerated, right? Well, yeah, you never know how much is exaggerated when you're sort of on the outside. But yeah, at least if you can get them both to agree, it's a fact, that's something. Right, yeah. Maybe there is a hurricane coming, pack your stuff and get out of there. Whether or not it's going to

be as severe as they all say, I don't really want to find out by being the first person to get blown off the roof of my house. A lot of people think they can read minds and see what other people are thinking. Now, they don't frame it like that. They don't say, I can read minds. I know what you're thinking. They just go, that son of a bitch, he is doing this, this, this, and this, and is racist on top of all that. It happens to me literally every day. It does happen to you a lot on Twitter. It happened to me this morning, and I took a picture of my own book, the section on don't be a mind reader and tweeted to him. I don't think it helped in his case.

No. A hard case. But I think in this case, somebody was saying on Twitter that my real motive was lying to people to make money about politics. It's working. You have a really nice house. I must have been lying really good. Yeah.

To which I say, talking about politics costs me a third of my income and it's not coming back. How so? Just from losing speaking gigs or something like that? Yeah, speaking gigs, licensing. just my normal business decreasing. If I put out a Dilber book today, 40% of the country is going to say, I don't like that guy because he said something about politics I didn't like. Yeah, so it's economically not working out for you to be such a loudmouth on Twitter.

I'm not Periscope. Yeah, that is correct. I made a conscious choice that there are only a few people in the country, probably just a few, maybe a handful, who would be willing to say something deeply unpopular and take the blowback. if they believed it to be true. And I have, as I like to refer to it, FU money, meaning that I can lose the third of my income and I'll still have a good life. So there are many people in that situation. So your average wage earner is not going to be honest in public. They're going to say

what keeps their job, keeps their family together, keeps their social situation. I made a choice that the most useful thing I can do is to be the most honest, because that's the big gap. Nobody has that. And so I quite often will disagree with the side that I'm more associated with, because I've said lots of good things about President Trump's skill set, but I have plenty of my own criticisms. He could do more on health care, blah, blah, blah. So I'm trying to be as objective as possible because that was just a big void in the public discourse, trying to be credible by not having a financial incentive, not running for office,

trying to remove as much as I can from the obvious biases. I don't even vote. And the reason I don't vote is that I know that the process of just pulling that lever would bias me in a way. Also, you live in California, so it really doesn't matter for you. Yeah, there's no point at all, unless you just want to show solidarity with one side or the other. We're sort of predetermined. If you want your vote to matter, move to Michigan, Iowa, Florida, some of these other ones, if you want your vote to matter. I know that's a really cynical perspective, and maybe I shouldn't have that, but, you know. You just made me wonder.

I wonder if there are just a few key battleground states where if one side can convince, you know, 200,000 people to move there within the next four years before the next election, they could control the country. You know, that's interesting, right? Like, hey, look, we're building all these subdivisions, some rich guy billionaire. I'm building all these houses, and I just don't know. what I'm going to do with them. Look, I will give them to you. But you have to come to all these meetings we have about becoming a smarter, more educated citizen that just so happens to be all

about all the policies that I want to foster in the country. That's actually not a bad idea and probably cheaper than all of the media that they spend trying to convince people of these same policies. This is probably a really horrible line of thought. Someone's going to... Somebody's going to do this. Yeah, someone's going to do this. Maybe we should change the subject. I think that's really interesting. There's got to be, you know, it's just not that far-fetched of an idea. You hear about this happening in regimes that are less free. For example, when I lived in Serbia, there was a lot of chatter about how Slobodan Milosevic, the dictator who's been deposed, he moved a ton of Chinese people over, and one of the conspiracy theories, among what, they love

conspiracy theories in Eastern Europe and the Balkans especially, one of the ideas was these people came over on his behest, on his invitation so that they could just vote for everything that he wanted. And they all live in these big blocks in one part of town. And that may or may not be true, but it's kind of hard to imagine why a country like that would take a ton of Chinese people in the 90s. It just doesn't make any sense otherwise. Well, let me refer also to something from my book. There's one problem that we all have, and I certainly fall into this all the time. And the best you can do is be aware that it could happen. I call it the last. of imagination problem. So if you see a set of facts and you say to yourself, there's only one way

I could explain this set of facts. It might be that the problem is your lack of imagination, because there might be several explanations. You just can't imagine them. To your example, your explanation seems quite reasonable. That's not my explanation, to be honest. It's the it's the narrative that you get from people in the street, but there could be a billion other reasons that maybe they needed more people to work certain jobs. And these Chinese people were highly trained in that area as they moved. Yeah, I tell the story in the book about my car is perpetually dirty. And if somebody had to figure out why, they would say, well, you know, he seems to have the money, the free time, nobody likes a dirty car. So maybe it's some kind of political

statement, like he doesn't want to waste water because he's in California or something like that. But no matter how many hypotheses they came up with for why my car is perpetually unwashed, they would probably never come up with the real one, because the real one is too weird. The real answer is that I have a fear of public instructions, meaning, you know, an ATM, a self-checkout, or most of our car washes, you know, have an element where you've got to do something yourself. And I'm sure that I'll go into this car wash. I'll interpret some instruction a little too literally. It'll be trapped sideways in the car wash, and they'll have to dismantle the entire building, and the story will be idiot, cartoonist, destroys scarwash. And I'm thinking about all these things.

And at the same time, I know that it's irrational. I can't turn it off, right? We're irrational creatures. And so I just say, I'll get a wash tomorrow. And then I just don't do it. So my point is, if anybody looked at this set of facts, the only thing they would never even think of is the true one. I have a weird, irrational fear of public instructions. That is highly unusual and a little weird.

Yeah. So I thought you were going to say, I park under a mulberry tree. and so every time I get my car washed, it's just dirty in five minutes anyways. So, you know, that would have been a far better explanation than the real one. Yeah, it's hard to believe. So when I say things like, just to be clear, because I realize how that might have sounded, when all these Chinese people moved to Serbia and I said it doesn't make a sense. Otherwise, that's what I'm hearing from other people.

Not my suspicions are that this happened. It, to me, sounds like a conspiracy theory and probably is. Dictators usually don't care how people vote anyways. So the idea that you'd import a bunch of people in to vote for you seems like an unnecessary move, honestly. Yeah, to me, it just sounded like some kind of a labor reason. Sure. Cheap labor, trained labor, something. Exactly, yeah.

People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling. I love this from the book because it explains so much of what's going on in public discourse. If you have no good argument, just say, well, you're saying that because you're a racist, or you're saying that because you're uneducated. There's a million ways to do that instead if you're saying here's all these reasons that you're actually wrong. Yeah, the classic examples, of course, are the abortion question. So if your definition of life is that it starts this time versus that time, you're trying to win an argument by simply defining what the

terms mean. That's not how you argue. You can't win by definitions, but people do that all the time. Now, if you look at the situation with President Trump's famous Ukrainian phone call, people on one side say he's digging for dirt. Now, if that's where you start and you accept that definition of what was happening, he was digging for dirt, the conclusion is built into the definition. Digging for dirt's no good. But if you say, well, it's a part of an investigation and it's just his job to make sure there's no foreign interference, then you come to a different conclusion. But there was no argument in between. I just sort of defined it my way. versus defining it the other way. So always be aware of people trying to win an argument by how they define words. People don't usually try to win through, is it semantic arguments when they have facts

and logic on their side? Because as you've stated, we usually like to lead with our strongest argument. And so labeling someone else are saying, well, define this particular word, that's usually not your strongest argument. So if you're leading with that, it's not a sure thing that you're full of it, but it's definitely not a good sign that you've got a lot more ammo in your quiver. Yeah, the word thinkers are the lowest level of debaters. If criticism depends on applying labels instead of cause and effect reasoning, you're probably engaged in loser think. I really like that.

So if you're sitting around thinking of why someone's a big, mean jerk or nasty person or a moron or a racist or whatever, instead of saying, here's where you're wrong about everything, it's a weaker argument. And I like that line of thought because even if someone is racist, it's better to deconstruct everything that they say and show that it's wrong for a totally different reason other than that they're a terrible person. Right. Absolutely.

It's a stronger reason. Plus, no one, very few people, I should say, not nobody, but very few people are going to go, dang it, they're right. I'm a racist. I wasn't going to say anything, but here we are. They're going to say, I'm not racist. It's just that here's all these things that sound really racist. But I have different, look, I have economic facts to back up my ridiculous claims that are

just based mostly on my racism and rationalizing all my racist beliefs. So you're reminding me of another key part of the book, which is the laundry list persuasion. I was just dealing with that this morning on Twitter. The laundry list is when somebody will say, I believe this and this person's bad or ineffective, and here are my 10 reasons. I'm sure there's an exception to this, but in my long life, when people have 10 reasons for something, that's a sign of no argument at all. Now, if you say that, oh, you've given me 10 reasons, therefore you have no argument at all,

they're going to go crazy and say, what do you mean I have no argument at all? I have 10 reasons. I just gave them to you. But my experience has been that if somebody has at least one good reason and it's strong, they'll lead with their one good reason. If they know that none of their reasons are strong individually, they'll put them together and try to sell them as a package. But if you say, well, what is your one best reason?

I was doing that this morning. Oh, yeah. Can you pick out your one best one? And then I say, would you agree that if I can debunk your top best, strongest point that we don't really need to talk about the other nine, that you'll go back and maybe reassess your confidence of your opinion. And so I was doing that this morning. And I predict, because this is always the pattern, the person will resist because they won't give you the best one. Because they look at their list, this is how I imagine, you know, this is my imagination. I'm not there.

But I think they look at their list and go, all right, I'm going to pick the best one. You know, they don't look that strong when you put it that way. Yeah, when they're all individuals, They look a little flimsy. So I always remind people that 10 times zero is still zero. So if you can't sell any one of them, it doesn't matter how many there are. Opinions based on experience versus projection. So I like this concept because all sides typically believe they have the right facts and the other side is delusional.

And when I read that, I went, crap, that's totally, I usually think that way too. And there must be some element of human nature where we're naturally inclined to think that I'm trying not to believe everything I think, but it's really hard because it's already in my brain. And so questioning something that my brain comes up with is not second nature at all. I then have to go, well, wait, I thought of that, but why? Well, I saw it on TV. Okay, so it wasn't my original. It wasn't like my genius that came up with this.

I heard this crap from my dad when I was 15, and I just still believe it. He probably read it in the Wall Street Journal. Or who knows? Maybe not even that. He heard it from a guy in a restaurant. So the problem here is that being right and being wrong feel exactly the same to everyone. And if it didn't, everybody would just agree on everything important. Right.

One of the great levels of awareness you go through in your life is that when you have an opinion and somebody else has a different one, of course you think, well, I'm right and that person's wrong. But you at least allow that maybe it could be the other way around. You're not going to act that way, but at least intellectually, you know, well, they could be right and I can be wrong. I just don't feel that that's true. the one you don't think about is you're both wrong. And once you learn how subjective reality is, you start to see everybody is wrong all the time, just in different ways and about different things.

And that also helps your maintain your humility. Because if I had to, you know, sort of bet on a lot of complicated debates, and you said, all right, you've got to place your bet. Is this one right or this one right? I think I would usually put it on both wrong, meaning at least both of them are leaving out some context that the other one is including. And that's what I call the half-pinion. You know, usually a debate is somebody saying, this will cost too much. And the other one's saying, look at all these benefits. And I'm saying, well, those are two halves of an opinion. Maybe you could like have a baby who would know that the costs and the benefits have to be compared. And you should do the one, you know, follow whichever is bigger. So the half opinion, I like this too. I wrote this

down. It's basically considering only the costs or only the benefits of a specific plan. So we say we can't do this, it's too expensive. I think that was your example. And then it's like, yeah, but children are our future. And it's like, well, you're not disagreeing on anything. You're just saying that education is expensive and children are future. You probably both agree on this. It's just that the one person, their half opinion, kind of sort of maybe, because we don't know,

means it's too expensive, therefore shouldn't be done. But then that means that they're arguing that children aren't worth educating. I mean, you really have to, like, fill in all these blanks with your imagination, which is not really how you get to an agreement of any kind. And weirdly, it's nobody's job to do that. Like, people are advocates. They're not judges for the most part. Right. So you could tell people, you know, you need to include the other half of the argument to be credible.

And you're usually going to get, well, you racist. Right. Yeah. Nobody says, yeah, that's a good point. I should include the cost and the benefits. People don't do that. Yeah, the idea of being an advocate versus a judge, I think that. bears, we could explain that a little. So as a lawyer, I'm an advocate. If I'm in court, I'm arguing

for one side of an opinion. I realize there are other arguments and they might be valid, but I'm supposed to minimize them, work around them, hopefully not ridicule them. That's kind of the weakest form of arguing against someone's opinions. But the judge is supposed to go, I know exactly what you're doing, and I'm going to discard this and this, and these other things are emotionally valid, but completely irrelevant to the argument. And then they spend six days going over what really happen in this case. And then they asked 12 people to decide on very discrete set of facts in a criminal trial. The jury then goes, did this person mean to do this when they did it? You be the judge because the judge shouldn't even be the judge. We don't do that when we watch the news.

We don't go, whoa, there's a lot of facts here. Let's get some from multiple sources, run it through the gamut of logical argument. You argue for this side, you argue for that side. And then 12 people who are supposed to be impartial should then sit around for the next three days and think about whether or not that's correct. We just go, sounds right. Yeah, just the fact that the legal system exists, and I would say is sensationalally successful, you know, lots of mistakes and, you know, imperfections. But the American legal system is like the eighth wonder of the world. I mean, it's just amazing. It's what makes this country the powerhouse it is, I think. But look at what, look what it takes to get it almost right. Like you said, you need the judge, the jury, the, the

advocates. I mean, it takes a lot to take the subjectivity end of this stuff. And in our daily lives, we don't do anything like that. No. And it's because it's inefficient. And we're not involved to go, well, I need a six-day deliberation on whether or not this mattress commercial is really telling me the truth. It's just not going to happen. You know, like, wow, this phone looks really cool. I want it because it'll make me cool among my friends. Let me think of all the reasons why I now need it, not like, let me bring this out to my board of directors among my friends and figure out whether I need this. Dialing down the ego is a really good exercise here. It reduces this unwarranted certainty that we all have in our own opinions. The practical that we can include in the worksheet

here is journaling when we are certain about a political outcome or a prediction. You kind of mentioned this earlier in the show. Journal out these predictions and then note when we're wrong. Yeah, you don't have to write them down. You can just tell your friends because your friends will remind you when you're wrong. It's coming back. So I say take your personal predictions and put them into the world. Put them on Twitter, write them down, tell a friend, and really note when you're wrong, because that's what gives you at least the ability to say, oh, okay, maybe I'm not right all the time. This idea of dialing your ego up and down has to do with treating your ego like a tool as opposed to who you are. I think most people go through life thinking that their

ego is sort of a core part of who they are and they're trying to protect it. Don't let me get hurt. So your ego is just protecting you from embarrassment, protecting you from pain, protecting you from discomfort. It's more productive to see your ego as your enemy, and something you should turn into a tool, not an identity. And what I mean by that is there are times when dialing your ego up is the best thing you could do. Let's say before going into a sport competition, before taking a test, before doing a job interview, you don't want to have too much ego. That can be wrong too. But there's plenty of science that shows that if you can build your confidence up to a certain level, you'll just perform better. So it's good to be able to crank it up when you can before I go into anything important. I might actually play a little loop in my head that says,

I'm good at this. This will be great. Everybody will like this. Even if it's not true, you're just dialing your ego up for effect. But you don't want to keep it there. You want to be able to dial it down just as easily when you're in some complicated conversation and you think, well, I think I know the right thing to do here, but it could be wrong. And so I keep that loop playing when I'm in a debate with somebody who's disagreeing with me. Just continuously, I'm saying, but this time it might be, you know, the problem might be in my end. So I'm looking for that.

I'm trying to find where the problem is in my end. And that gives you at least a little bit of protection against your ego, making claims that are ridiculous just to protect your argument. Yeah. And I find this even just as a full grown-ass man, I often have to go, am I holding onto this because I want to be right? Well, I'm married, so of course, this happens to me all the time. Am I holding onto this because I want to be right?

Or is this person actually saying something that I should listen to? But maybe they're delivering it in a way that isn't great. Or maybe I just, this is a touchy subject for me. And so I don't want to admit that I was wrong. And this happens, this is in my email inbox every day because the show fans are really vocal. And they'll go, you know, you said this and I disagree with you. And I love the show, but this, I really disagree. And here's why.

And I have no problem with that. But if that exact same point were made and someone goes, I thought you were smarter than that. Clearly, you're just another moron who believes XYZ. I'm going to go, ooh, I know I'm now I'm going to dig in my heels, but they might be equally right. You know, they might be equally correct on that point. I just threw my pen across the room. That's how strongly I feel about those. Choosing ego over effectiveness is classic loser thing.

That's the, I don't know, is that your like button on the end of the chapter there? Yeah, I mean, I had a job opportunity once back in my corporate. days where a high executive of the bank offered me the job to be his personal gopher. So I would just run around and do little projects and stuff. And it was kind of a low-end job. And it would have been less prestigious than the job I already had, which was managing a small group. So I didn't want to go from being a manager to a gopher. But he said, you know, you realize this will give you exposure and, you know, you'll meet the right people. And I said, yeah, but I like my job where it is, not this gopher job. So I turned.

He was a senior vice president of the bank. He called me and he said, you're a fucking idiot. And I was like, ooh, I'm glad I turned that down. I don't want to work for this guy. My buddy takes the job and very soon he was one of the youngest senior vice presidents of the bank. Because I was a fucking idiot because I took my ego and I said, no, I'm not going to take a step down. I don't want to take a step down.

I think the pay wasn't any different, but it was an ego step down. But the guy who took the ego step down knew that it was a step down, knew that it was a step to get to the place he wanted to be. He met the right people. He impressed them. He was the senior vice president. Youngest one the bank ever produced. Wow, yeah.

Because he networked, met with everyone, got in the room and all their meetings or whatever. Sure, he was the note taker, but that's how you get in the room. Yeah, so your ego can just kill you if you're letting it make your decisions. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Scott Adams. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us in The Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Scott Adams. People have problems comparing things. That's something I really took away from this book. And I love this because I never really put my, never really wrap my.

mind around this, but you're right. People will say, oh, man, did you see that family guy episode where they made fun of this and this and this and it's very persuasive because it's hilarious and they've got songs and it's well done and Seth MacFarlane is like a genius in all these different areas. But again, we don't necessarily have a common language when we're comparing things. Like, look, we'll put Seth McFarlane aside, but somebody on Twitter might say, or on the internet or on a show like this might make a really persuasive sounding argument. And I might try to counter that. But if we're talking about something that neither of us have formal training, and we don't have a common language, and we don't realize that comparing things is actually a learned skill. You can't just weigh them in your mind

and sort of generally rationalize why one is better than the other. Your brain's just picking the option it prefers and then figuring all these reasons based on what you already have in the tank. It's not using the right measuring stick for the tool necessarily, or for the job necessarily. I mentioned I'm a trained hypnotist. One of the things you learn is that the basic nature of humans is that you make decisions and then you rationalize them after the effect, at least for important stuff to have some emotional content. We're rational enough on little stuff like figuring out how to use the remote control. But on the big stuff, we think backwards.

We make decisions based on how it feels. And then we explain why we did it later. And that's just a ridiculous explanation usually. I'd love to hear your strategy on how to spot fake news. There's kind of a how-to in the book on what you should be looking for. to decide whether something is fake or not? Yeah, one of the best, I guess, best advice I ever heard was from Scott Alexander, and that's a pen name, a blogger, we don't know his real name.

But he pointed out that often when you hear a story that is too amazing to be true, it's because it's not true. And later you're going to find it out. And not only is that dynamic fairly common, but it's almost universal, Meaning that if you see something that your first reaction is, ah, my hair's on fire, I can't believe somebody did something so crazy and amazing. 48 hours later, you're going to find out that it didn't happen at all. Right.

Now, if you use that, this sounds too ridiculous to be true. If you use that as your standard, you're going to be right about 80% of the time. But if you say, hey, it's in the news. This is the news source I watch. I always watch this news source, whether it's the left of the right news. And you say, well, they're reporting it. like it's a fact, it's probably true. You're going to be wrong about 80% of the time. And specifically, I'm just talking about the stories where as soon as you hear it, you go,

ah, that can't be true, probably isn't. That's technique number one. The other thing is make sure that both the left and the right press are reporting it the same, because if they are, it's probably a fact. If only one of them is, and it doesn't matter which one, that's the other thing, then it probably is not. You'll probably learn later that it's not a fact. So those are the big ones. And if you keep those rules in mind, and wait 48 hours, of course, don't make a quick decision. You'll be in good shape. Also, you've got the 20-year rule, and I thought this was kind of interesting.

I wanted to know what this is, and of course how this benefits all of us and not just politicians or celebrities or people going into the Supreme Court, for example. Yeah, the 20-year rule, I just made up. I mean, it's your book, so a lot of it's just made up by you, right? Where do manners come from? somebody makes them up, right? There's some point where somebody says, you know, I watch people act, and when they act this way, I kind of like it. It works better for society. I guess this is a rule now. So I'm making up a new one because the environment has changed and we need a new rule. And what happened was

social media and our ability to find somebody's mistakes on film or recorded from 20 years ago just didn't exist before, at least not in any kind of common way. So we now have the two. tools to hate somebody for something they did decades ago when they were literally a different person. Because you're not the same as you were 20 years ago. No, for sure not. I'm not the same as I was at 19. You didn't want to know me when I was 19. I mean, trust me, I was not a good person. Now, most people improve throughout most of their life. If you have a, what I'd call the ideal life arc, you start as a selfish little baby who can't do anything but take. You know, You get to the point where you can help society.

Maybe you're a parent. You're raising a kid. You're paying your taxes, but you're also taking a little. And then maybe you get to the point where you've taken all you need. You've made your money. And you're at the end of your life, you're in full, you know, give back mode. Like that would be the perfect situation. What was I talking about?

What was your question? I was going to, we're talking about the 20-year rule. Oh, 20-year-roll. I was getting distracted because you said you wouldn't want to know me when I was 19. And I was like, Scott Adams is 39? What the hell? I realize you're probably talking more about me 20 years ago than you 20 years. Well, all of us.

So the point is that we were not the same people we were 20 years ago. And so I have somewhat arbitrarily picked 20 years and said, I don't care what I find out about you or anybody else. If it was 20 years ago, it doesn't count. Now, you have to throw in some exceptions, you know, pedophilia or something. Yeah, sure. But we're not really dealing with that for most situations. So if I see, for example, some governor who wore blackface 30 years ago, certainly don't, you know, I don't endorse it or approve of it, but I also don't count it.

Is that person the same person they were? Would they wear that today? Probably not. I'd rather judge people about what they've done recently. And I do apply this to the left, the right, my enemies, my friends. It's a rule I try to be pretty consistent with. And you never needed this rule before because everything I did in high school that was, a dumb-ass thing, there's no record. Worse case scenario, there's an uncredible witness who says something. Right, right. And then they say, well, they're a liar. Well, we were all drunk at the time, but I'm pretty sure that he did this thing that was really horrible. Where were you? I don't remember that either. I just remember this general thing. Yeah, and I worry about that now, because having a son who's three months old, I'm like, whole life can be every dumb thing you do.

You might even record it yourself. And then what? It's in the cloud, man. My late stepson, lost his first job because he was on the job for a week and somebody produced a Snapchat video where he was in the wrong place and that was it, fired. Oh, man. For something that he didn't even do. Somebody else filmed it and put it on social media. And it wasn't that bad. I don't need to get into details, but the employer didn't want to be associated with it.

Jeez. Yeah, that's, it's scary because now your actions can be policed, which is, look, if your actions can be policed in real time, that's scary enough. The fact that somebody might police something you did, taking it out of context, and then putting it in the 20 years from now context, is pretty bad. I mean, there were things that I did 10 years ago and even five years ago where I go, oh, that was like kind of tasteless. It was a little gauche given what we're, the climate we're in now.

And I should be accountable for that if it hurt someone. But if it didn't hurt someone and it was 20 years ago and now I'm trying to get a job and I can't, that really sucks. And it's bad for society because you're sort of, imputing the intention that somebody had 20 years ago in a totally different scenario and context into what they're doing now. And with few exceptions, namely like certain violent crime, maybe pedophilia, whatever example you want to go for. If someone murdered their neighbor 20 years ago, yeah, maybe I don't necessarily want them working in my company. But if somebody got too drunk at a party

20 years ago and said something obnoxious, I would like to think that maybe could forgive that person by now at this point. I would say forgiveness is a great thing and I'm a big fan of it, but that's not even necessary because if somebody did something 20 years ago, that person doesn't exist anymore. They don't exist. They literally don't exist. So the new person is, you know, whatever they're doing, you can judge them by. I prefer judging people by how they respond to their mistakes than by their mistakes. But yeah, that old person doesn't exist. Let's ignore them. You've got this concept called the magic question. And this was great. Because I can see the solving a lot of arguments that probably never even needed to happen in the first place.

So the most common thing, if you're arguing, especially if you're arguing on social media, is somebody will mischaracterize your opinion into something stupid and then criticize it. But they're not really criticizing your opinion. They're criticizing their stupid version of your opinion. Happened to me 15 times this morning, and that's not a joke. 15 times this morning. Somebody mischaracterized me on Twitter and then criticize their own illusion. If I say to them, because I've got lots of experience with this, if I say to them, you have mischaracterized me, they'll just insist that they haven't. And you can never go anywhere with that. So instead, I go this way. Name something that you think I believe that you don't think is true.

In other words, name a specific thing you think I think that you believe is different from what you think. And people will be almost instantly stumped because they've been mischaracterizing your opinion. But when they have to reconstruct it from its point, parts. Tell me anything, any fact you believe, any opinion you have that you think is different from mine, they'll try a few things and realize they can't find a difference. It's a powerful thing. And I find that people will eventually back off when they realize they can't find anything that they think as different when you... Let me give an example. This begs for an example. So let's say you said taxes should change this way or that, and somebody mischaracterizes

and says, well, you don't care about poor people, you think it's all about the rich. And then, of course, that wasn't my opinion. Maybe I thought it was good for the economy or something like that. So then I'll say, tell me something that you think I believe that's different from what you believe. And then they'll say, well, you think rich people are the only people who are important. And then I'll say, no, I don't believe that. Try again.

Try something that you think is different from what I believe. And people will actually exhaust themselves trying to find something that's different. and eventually they'll just give up. Because often the mischaracterization is all they have to debate against you. If they don't mischaracterize your point, they don't have anything. And so once you've erased the mischaracterization, one assumption at a time, it just evaporates. So the question is, and we'll put this in the worksheet, which is available in the show notes. The question is, let me see if I can get this, tell me something you think I believe that's different from what you believe.

Yeah, either a fact or an assumption. or an opinion. So just say, what do you believe that's different from me? Give me a real concrete example, and people will generally fail at that. Or they will continually suggest things that you say, no, I agree the same thing as you. I have the same opinion on that particular little detail. I mean, but people do disagree on fundamental things. Like they might say, you don't believe that communism is a great way to redistribute wealth or that rich people are too rich and should give away their wealth. You don't believe this. And you go. go, correct, I don't believe that.

That's not a good idea. Yeah, and usually that's not the kind of debate you get on social media. If reasonable people debate, now let's say if you and I had a debate on something where we really disagreed. Because you have a background in economics and a background in the law, I can almost guarantee that you have all of the tools to figure out which assumptions differ and then kind of drill down, well, do you believe this fact, that fact, what's your source? you and I would end up at a point where the only disagreement was maybe about a priority.

And then you'd say, oh, well, you think this is a little more important than that. In your life, I could see why that would be more important. And it wouldn't be an actual disagreement, just a slight preference about priority. But people who don't have that kind of framework, they've not been exposed to the critical thinking skills, are just going to mischaracterize your opinion and then talk to the mischaracterization. Yeah, I see that a lot, actually. I get accused of all kinds of things online, and it's always mystifying because I'll say something like, somebody wrote to me and says, oh, you have a nice car, I can never get one of those, you know, screw these rich A-holes. And I was like, you know, that mindset's really not going to help you get ahead in life. And she was like, well, what do you mean? And she was actually quite reasonable, but somebody else came in and was like, oh, yeah, that's classic, you know, some rich A-hole is going to then convince you that what you have is good enough. And it's It's like, whoa, that's for sure not what I'm saying.

It's literally the opposite of what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you should always believe that you can get ahead because I wasn't born with a freaking Tesla in my garage or whatever, right? Like, I worked really hard and got that and you can do the same thing. And the fact that you don't believe that you can is never going to serve you. And so the person is just like, oh, you just want to keep people down like us because we're the ones that do all the real work. And it's like, where are, what planet are you on where I'm trying to keep you, I would

love for everyone in this conversational thread to have whatever car they ever wanted to buy. In closing, there's one thing that I really want to get before we go, because there's so much, are these rhetorical devices, I guess? I don't know what you even call these argumentation techniques in the book. I have not labeled them such, but I would say they're tools for better debate. Yeah. I mean, look, there's never been a better time to live. A lot of times we misinterpret communication, and one of the main things, and we touched on this earlier, is the mind reading. And you're technique to call out the mind reading is important because I see that we see this all the time even if we don't recognize it.

Teach us how to spot mind reading and then sort of expose it for what it is. So first of all, here's another example of where putting a label on something can consolidate a concept that people were being bothered by, but until you have a word for it, you don't have as much power to manipulate it. So by simply saying that when people make assumptions about what you're thinking, feeling, we're believing, and it's wrong, I just call it mind reading. Now, they're not thinking it that way. They're thinking, oh, you probably think the way I do. So therefore, if I were in your situation, I would think that way. That's usually a mistake because we're not the same. And the way

you think and the way I think are probably different in a lot of ways. And you can't tell in advance where that will be. So I find that simply calling out that somebody is trying to assume what you're thinking will make it go away. They might persist a little bit, but I'm sure you're you're thinking that, and they quickly find themselves in the absurd situation of trying to be the better source of what you're thinking. Now, most people will back down when they realize, I'm having an argument about what's in your head with you. I think I'm losing, because you probably know what's in your head with greater accuracy. Now, of course, they might accuse you of lying, et cetera, but that's a different story. So whenever anybody tries to impute an argument

that's not there, we have to call out, hey, look, you're trying to, what do you say? Do you literally say now you're just trying to read my mind? Yeah, I just say I don't deal with mind readers or mind reading noted. You know, if it's on social media, I'll just say mind reader noted and just leave it. Because there's nothing else to say. If somebody has based an argument on an incorrect assumption of what you're thinking, you're the only expert on that. And once you've said it's inaccurate, ballot? We see this a lot. I recently, I said something that I thought was really innocuous.

And I said, be careful a lot of people base their identity around being a victim or something like this. And then someone said, you know, that's what white supremacists say because saying identity can also mean race. And we all know that this is a dog whistle for you being a racist. And I was just like, I just sat there and blinked for a while because I have, that was a a logical leap of epic proportions. I mean, that's evil-can-eval jumping the Grand Canyon in terms of logic to take that common and make it somehow about me being a racist. I literally still don't even

quite understand how she got there. That's mind-reading and then, I don't know, plugging a few things in in addition to that, but that was epic mind-reading. Sometimes on social media, it's not about the person they're arguing with. It's about the show. Sure. It's about the lifestyle of being a troll and making your point, using it. anybody as your foil to make your point. So there's always some of that. They're being advocates, but the invisible secret racist dog whistle. I keep telling myself, you know, I'm not going to discount that. But I need to meet at least one person who can hear it, who's not on the side who's accusing. Because I've never met a single person who said, yeah, you know, when XYZ is using

that language, I know what he means. We're on the same team with our whatever racist thoughts. I've never met anybody who had that thought. So it's the most ridiculous claim. I'm sure there's somebody somewhere in the country is saying, ah, I'm picking up on the secret whistle. But I never met one. Seems like there can't be too many of them. The whistle is usually really not secret at all.

Like if you look at somebody like who is a David Duke or somebody who's like an avowed racist, he's not going, well, you know, sometimes ABCD if you catch my drift. He's saying like, no, these people are inferior to these people because. skin color. I mean, it's like, if it's a dog whistle, you better bring earplugs because it's pretty loud. It's more like a bullhorn that's not even at a set frequency. I mean, there's no big secret here. I don't think. And you're right, the dog whistle seems to always be something that the other side says about your comments. What was the example? DeSantis said, oh, my opponent is a smart guy, is very articulate. And someone said, oh, that's

a dog whistle. It's a racist thing because being articulate is a racist comment. And it's like, If we put ourselves in his shoes, it just doesn't make tactical sense at all for him to come out. It would be the dumbest political thing if he had done it intentionally, which is the statement. I actually asked online, and I've asked people in person, had you ever heard that the word articulate is considered a backhanded insult to African America? I'd never heard that until your book. Swear to God. You'd never heard of that. Never heard of that in my life. All right. So then you perfectly understand my next point.

If like me, you've known it forever, and other people have just been exposed to that as being an insult, wouldn't you assume that other people thought it to? It's like if you had asked me before you told me that, say, make a bet as worldly as you are, you know, where you live, your background and everything, I got to put my money on it. Does Jordan know that this word is an insult to African Americans? I would have bet a thousand dollars that you would have known that. Yeah, I had no idea. But my experience is that maybe half of the public has ever heard of that. I'm probably closer to most African-American people have heard it. But among the people outside of that group, maybe half have ever heard it. So if you see somebody using that word, you might ask yourself why they're using it.

It's a good question. You say, are you one of those people who knows what that word means? Or are you one of the people who don't? And you can't really read DeSantis's mind. But like you said, you don't get to the point where you're running for a governor of a major state. and winning, as it turned out, while thinking that that would be a good strategy. It's like, I'll throw in some blatant racism. I think that'll work really well. Right, that'll give me the 0.01% of the, like, redneck vote that's going to jive with that.

While costing you 99% of the vote. Right. Yeah, no, it makes me feel sheltered that I didn't know that. Like, after you wrote about it in the book, I thought, oh, I see probably the implication is here. A lot of African-American people are accused of being inarticulate. So when he said this person is articulate, then it came across as highlighting this other stereotype that's negative. But I had never heard that. And I grew up in Detroit, so I'm a little bit ashamed that I'd never heard of that. But I also, when I heard that went, who would possibly think that this person saying this is racist?

And the answer is a hell of a lot of people probably more than don't. And I just happened to be in this weird minority that grew up watching too much television. I've never heard that before. Yeah. Yeah. In sports, I see a version of it, too, especially in sports. tennis. You used to watch a lot of tennis. And you'd watch the commentators who, I'm guessing, are probably not racists, right? Just probably not, you know. But when they're talking about the

white tennis players, they'll say stuff like, you know, he works art, he's, you know, he's good tactician, good strategist, stuff like that. And then they'll talk about the black athlete, and they'll say he's very athletic. And every time I hear that, I go, I don't know. I don't know, that feels like a backhanded compliment, because there's some words that seem reserved for some groups that as soon as I hear them, I go, I don't know, is it a coincidence that you keep using that word for the black athletes? And so I would raise that question as well. It's like, when you say the white guy is good as strategy and the black athletes athletic, sounds racist to my ears, but is the person saying it thinking that? Maybe not, because in each case I've heard it used,

you look at the athlete and you go, yeah, that guy can run pretty fast or, you know, they're athletic. So that was a tough one for me. I'm on the fence about whether that's as bad as it sounds to my ear. I think because a lot of racism is then unconscious or bias, I should say, is unconscious, but is that the same thing as saying, hey, don't hire that guy, you know? You know what I mean? Like, that seems a lot more harmful. And so I think we give some other things a pass, but then now we're into this different

sort of question that I feel unqualified to answer, which is which one is worse and is one better just because it seems more harmless in the time. Let's call them all bad and be on the right side of this. I think that's a good place to stop. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks to Scott for coming on the show today. After we talked here, I heard this clever term that we were discussing post-show. Confuseopoly. It's when a company like a phone, internet, or a cable provider comes up with a price structure that's so confusing that we actually have no idea what we're getting for the money. I thought this was a brilliant term. Confuseopoly.

It's so apt. People who have facts and logic on their side tend to show their work. That's one of the main messages from the book, Loser Think. I love this because if you have facts and logic on your side, you can show how you came to your conclusion.

If you don't, you're going to hide the ball, you're going to try to confuse the issue. So if you see people doing that, it tends to mean, or it can mean, that they don't actually have facts or logic on their side. They're trying to throw other things into the works to either confuse the issue

or to get you emotionally involved in their arguments. We often can't tell the difference between genius and stupidity when it comes to complex arguments and situations. We're often just guessing about how to interpret situations based on our own view of facts, including bias and emotions. So this episode is important for those reasons. A big thank you to Scott. The book, Loser Think, will be linked in the show notes. There's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. There are also worksheets for each episode, including this one, so you can review. view what you've learned here from Scott Adams at Jordan Harbinger.com in the show notes.

We also now have transcripts for each episode, and those can be found in the show notes as well. We're teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, the problem with kicking the can down the road, we're not able to make up for lost time when it comes to relationships and networking. The number one mistake I see people make is postponing this process, not digging the well before you get thirsty. Once you need relationships, you are too late. When you need to leverage people, you're too late to go buddy up with them.

That's why it feels weird to go and do it when you haven't done it for a while, because you know you've done screwed it up. Procrastination leads to stagnation when it comes to your personal and business relationships, and don't let that happen to you. These drills, they take a few minutes a day. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. It's not fluff. It's a foundational process here.

It's crucial. You can find it all for free at Jordan Harbinger.com. By the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course. They've participated in the newsletter, so come join us and you'll be in smart company. Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and or follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with Podcast One, and this episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, Jason DeFilippo, edited by Jace Sanderson.

Show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own, and yes, I'm a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer. So do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting,

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