The Tim Ferriss Show - #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert

Episode Date: September 22, 2015

Scott Adams (@scottadamssays) is a famous cartoonist and the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, which has been published in more than 2000 newspapers in 57 countries and in 19 languages. In my conversation with Scott, we cover topics ranging from the rise of Dilbert's success, to how he uses affirmations to impact stock market decisions, success with women, and building his career. We also talk about Scott’s interest in hypnosis and its role in Dilbert's success. Plus, we dive into his current fascination -- Donald Trump. You'll also find out more about: Goals vs. systems, and how he has used them to get what he wants in life His first ever Dilbert paycheck The six dimensions of humor How he got into the best shape of his life at age 58 and much, much more. It is a really fun conversation. Scott is one hell of a character and a hilarious guy. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Vimeo Pro, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. In fact, a bunch of my start-ups are already using Vimeo Pro. WealthFront uses it to explain how WealthFront works. TaskRabbit uses it to tell the company’s story. There are many other names who you would recognize among their customers (AirBnB, Etsy, etc.) Why do they use it? Vimeo Pro provides enterprise level video hosting for a fraction of the usual cost. Features include: Gorgeous high-quality playback with no ads Up to 20 GB of video storage every week Unlimited plays and views A fully customizable video player, which can include your company logo, custom outro, and more You get all this for just $199 per year (that’s only $17 per/mo.). There are no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. Try it risk-free for 30 days. Just go to Vimeo.com/business to check it out. If you like it, you can use the promo code “Tim” to get 25% off. This is a special discount just for you guys. This episode is also sponsored by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run… ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Would you tell me what you had for breakfast, please? I had my usual coffee and protein bar while staring out the window and wishing I'd eaten more calories. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

Me, Tim, Paris, show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.

So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time,

drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash

friday. That's tim.blog forward slash slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time.

So easy peasy. Again, that's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, my heterogeneous homo sapiens, homicidal tomcats. That doesn't make any sense. I was going to say homicidal homo sapiens, but heterogeneous. Why don't we say heterogeneous like erogenous sons? I don't know. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to the Tim Ferriss show. My job every episode is to deconstruct a world-class performer and to show you how they do what they do. What are the favorite books, the routines, the habits? How did they achieve the success they've achieved? Whether they are chess prodigies like Josh Waitzkin or actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, director like Jon Favreau, comedians, athletes, hedge fund managers. We've got everybody. Startup impresarios like Peter Thiel and so on. This time we have by request Scott Adams. Scott

Adams is a very famous cartoonist. He's the creator of the Dilbert comic strip and the author of several different books that are nonfiction. And he and I have a very wide-ranging conversation. We've met before, and we cover things such as his use of affirmations, written affirmations for the stock market, for success with women, for his career as a cartoonist. We talk about hypnosis, why he became interested in hypnosis, common misconceptions about hypnosis, and how he used different techniques or aspects of what he learned to make Dilbert popular, even the name itself he goes into. We talk about a current fascination of his, which I say which, which or who is Donald Trump and the negotiator-in-chief that he is campaigning to become, and why the political press misses a lot of the genius that perhaps the business press should catch. We talk about goals versus systems, so how he has approached his life with systems, in many cases, instead of goals.

And he and I, oddly, or perhaps not so coincidentally share a lot in common there. We talk about his first ever Dilbert check, the six dimensions of humor. So how can you engineer humor in say a comic strip or elsewhere? We talk about the most underrated comic book strips and comics in his opinion, how he got into the best shape of his life at 58 and much, much more. It's a really fun conversation. He is one hell of a character, a very hilarious guy, as you would hope. And the banter is, I found, a really good time. So I hope that comes across via audio. And without further ado, please enjoy Scott Adams and say hi to him. It is at Scott Adams Says on Twitter. So give a hello, give a thank you,

give him some feedback. And there you have it. Without further ado, it was a little premature, but here we go. Without further ado, Scott Adams. Please enjoy. Scott, my good man, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I am so excited to have you on because many of the guests who've been on this podcast are fans of yours. I'm a fan of your work and of you personally. And there are a few things I'd like to thank you for. The first is helping me to learn different languages because I bought the Dilbert Principle in many different languages, Chinese, Spanish, German, English, as a way to learn conversational languages, number one.

And then number two is for your tennis lesson, which was the first proper tennis lesson I've ever had. So right off the bat, I wanted to thank you for being very good at helping me to make progress in both of those areas. Oh, there's so much I can teach you, Tim. We're just getting started. Well, you know, the languages in tennis go a long way. I feel like, you know, have tennis racket and a few words will travel.

By the way, I got to tell you, the first time I saw one of my books translated into Portuguese, I think I had this strange sensation that I could speak the language because I knew what the word said. It was the coolest thing. That is actually really related because what I'll do is with these languages, if I learn, for instance, Japanese first, then I will use the Japanese and say a target language of Spanish to learn the Spanish. In other words, I already know what's in the book on some level, just like memorizing lines in a movie, but I will use the Japanese to help me learn the Spanish so that they're linked together. And that way I get to review previous languages while learning new languages. And I was so impressed with how you were able to teach me tennis, or at least get me up and running with the basics in such a very short period of time. And I feel like you're very

methodical in many different areas and you have methods that other people can use. And one of the specific behaviors that I'd love to hear you perhaps elaborate on just right off the bat is the idea of verbal or written affirmations. So Naval, one of our mutual friends was on this podcast and he was mentioning that at some point, at least based on his recollection, you had gone into your office at the time and gone into the bathroom and said to yourself in the mirror, I will be a successful cartoonist or something like that multiple times. I've also heard that you write things down, say 10, 15 times. Could you perhaps explain a bit of how you use affirmations if you do? You have accidentally given me the greatest beginning anecdote to a long explanation anybody ever did.

All right. True story. Just a few days ago, I was having dinner with Naval. And I'm just making conversation. I hadn't seen him in a while. And just randomly, because I knew I was coming on your podcast, I said, Naval, have you ever done the, you know, Tim Ferriss podcast? And he gets this weird expression in his face and he says, I just came from there. It was the most random thing any two people could have said to each other after not seeing for a while.

But that weird story is a story about coincidence, right? You know, there's no magic that happened there. It was just a strange coincidence. It probably wasn't even a coincidence because the fact that we both know you and, you know, there's something in the air. And maybe you bunch your interviews in a certain way or think about them a certain way. So I'm sure there's no real coincidence there. There's just something we didn't see underlying it all. So that's the backdrop for affirmations. Let me say first that what I'm saying is not my belief that if you say

your affirmations, something magical will happen and the universe will change in some non-science way. So I never made that claim, although often people have put that opinion in my mouth. What I have said is that I've used the technique and I got a certain experience, which I'll be happy to share, and that I tell the story. You can make of it what you will. I have several explanations for why there seems to be what I would call the appearance of an effect, which, by the way, would be amazing in itself. If you could give yourself a genuine feeling that you had a superpower, even if it wasn't real, as long as it didn't interfere with your job, nobody thought you were crazy, it'd be a cool feeling.

So even if it's not real in some sense of reality, it's still worth having, frankly. So I'm going to take as long as I want for for this and you can just cut me off it's a fun story from beginning to end i like a lot of people ask this is what uh this is what this format is for long form so please go go for it yeah all right so i'm in my 20s i was taking a course in hypnosis to learn how to become a professional hypnotist and get certified. In my class was a woman who was also interested in a lot of things that I thought were pretty out there, some new agey stuff. But we became friends and one day she said, you got to try this thing called affirmations. I read about it in a book and I don't remember the name of the book and so I can't tell you

here because she couldn't tell me. And she said, it works like this. All you do is you pick a goal and you write it down 15 times a day in some specific sentence form like, I, Scott Adams, will become an astronaut, for example. And you do that every day. And then it will seem as if the universe just starts spitting up opportunities. And it will look to you like these are coincidences. And whether they are or not is less relevant than the fact that they seem to pop up. So I, of course, being my rational self, you know, at this point, I haven't even decided if hypnosis is a real thing, right?

You know, I'm taking the course to find out, in part. And so I'm saying, you know, that seems like a terrible waste of time. There's no science behind that, blah, blah, blah. She convinced me, partly because she was a member of Mensa, that she wasn't dumb. Step one, that's good. And then secondly, it didn't cost me anything, right? It was a low investment for something to make her shut up. So I said, all right, I'm going to do this thing. So I picked as my goal that I would have an encounter with a woman who was well beyond my buying power, shall we say. This is pre-Dilbert, so post-Dilbert, you get to add a few points to your attractiveness scale. It's not fair,

but that's just the way it works. So let's say if I could modestly say I was a six, hoping to be a six and a half. Let's say she was a nine, just so you get a sense of the monumental task I set in front of myself. Secondly, I didn't know her. She was just somebody who worked in the company in a different department. So I'll shorten the story just to say lucky things happened. And against all odds, my affirmation came true. So I thought to myself, as everybody would in this situation, well, it's not really the affirmation that worked. That would be crazy, right?

Because even though it was a whole bunch of ridiculous coincidences that put us in the same place at the same time, I mean, you wouldn't believe the number of them, and I won't tell them here because there are just too many. But in the end, it was almost like we were fated to meet. I don't believe in that, but it just felt like that. That's the experience. So I said to myself, well, I guess I've misinterpreted this, and really what happened is I'm not a six and a half. Damn it. I must be her level.

Or maybe I'm a seven and a half, and maybe she's a nine, but she's got poor self-image, so she didn't know it. So maybe that's all that happened, right? So I said, well, I'm going to have to try something else. So I said, all right, I'll try an affirmation of I'll get rich in the stock market. Now, that's kind of a crazy thing to ask for, especially if you don't even have a stock brokerage account open. And if you don't have any money to invest, I think I was a poor banking person, a banker that was. And so I started doing that affirmation. And after about a week, I literally woke up in the middle of the night, sat straight up

in my bed with a thought firmly in my head that I should buy stock in Chrysler. Now, time, I don't remember the year, but if you went through the historical records, it was when Chrysler was flirting with completely going out of business. I don't know if they were officially bankrupt, but the government had pumped them up, and most observers were saying, you know, this is sort of the company that's circling the drain. So it didn't seem like a good idea,

but I tried to open my Schwab account anyway and pursue it just to see. We're still in A-B testing here to see if this is real. But the paperwork got mixed up and it took weeks to sort it out. I didn't get my account opened. In the meantime, the stock starts rising. I think it went up 10 or 20% in the time that I wasted trying to open my account. So I thought to myself, damn, I was kind of right. I picked a pretty good stock, but my timing's off. So I guess the affirmation thing wasn't really working. So I didn't buy that

stock. If you go back, you'll find out it continued to go up because it turns out Chrysler did a turnaround. It was one of the great business success stories of all time. I knew nothing about that except the headline news before I came up with this idea. In other words, there was no story I read. No analyst was ahead of it. It just came from nowhere or so it seemed. But I lost out because I didn't trust it, I guess. I didn't buy and it became kind of the story stock of the year.

So I tried it one more time. I said, I think I'll try to buy one more stock, and I did the affirmations. And one day, I pick up the newspaper, and I just had this feeling. And I opened it up, and back in the day when a company was going public, they would sometimes put a big notice in the newspaper. It was a company called Ask Computer, A-S-K, or Ask Software, I forget. But they were a new tech company back before tech was anything. And I said, hey, I'm going to invest in this company.

I just feel it. Put in some money. I think it went up, I don't know, 10% in a week or whatever it was. I thought, woo-woo, I'm a genius. I think I invested about $1,000, might have made $100, which was big money for a week of doing nothing. When you're not making enough money to save money, making $100 for nothing seemed like a big deal. So I'm thinking, man, I am so smart. I sold my stock, and that freaking stock went to the moon after I sold it.

And now I've got these three data points, right? And the only thing that stopped me from the two doing very well for me is that I didn't stay with them. So I said, well, it would be dumb if this thing actually has something to it to set another goal that's relatively modest. Right, yeah. So there was another thing I did first. Let me insert that before I went big. I also made a bet with somebody that I would take the GMATs, the test you take to get into a good school for your MBA. I'd taken them right after I'd finished my four-year degree, and I'd got, I think,

the 77th percentile, which is nowhere near enough to get into a school like Berkeley, which would make a difference in my career. So I made a bet with somebody who was going to take a prep course. They were going to try to raise their score from the 80s into something, perhaps the 90s, in order to get into a good school, again, like Berkeley. So I made a bet, and I don't know why I made this bet. It was just stupid in retrospect. I bet that I would raise my score from 77th percentile to whatever was her new best score. So I would beat not only her other score, which already beat me by over 10 points, I think,

or maybe she was in the high 80s, I think. But I thought I would beat her new score and I wasn't going to take a test preparation course. I was just going to take some practice tests on my own at home. So I did that, but I paired it with the affirmation. And then I also visualized, which is part of the process they tell you to do, very specifically what my score would look like on the exact document I knew I would get because I had taken this test before years earlier. And so I would imagine that in that little box where the cumulative score was, I would see the number 94. And so I just kept

focusing on 94 because I figured that would be close enough that if I got anywhere in that range, then I'm probably going to get into a good school if I want to. So we take the test. Every one of my practice tests, I got about the same as the first time I took it, somewhere in the high 70s percentile. I take the test, felt exactly the same as the first time I took it, somewhere in the high 70s percentile. I take the test, felt exactly the same as all the practice tests. I didn't feel like I was having a good day or anything. Weeks pass, the test shows up in the mail. I go to the mailbox, I open the mail, and I open that letter. And it's the same kind of format that I'd visualized, so I knew exactly what it looked like. And I looked down into the little box where for weeks

I had been visualizing the number 94 and i looked at it and the fucking thing said 94 all right this was after the stock market experience yeah uh yeah i'm getting my timing mixed up it was somewhere roughly in that period right so i literally sat there in my little uh-covered apartment in San Francisco in the Hays District. I sat in a chair, and I stared forward for hours. All night long, I would say to myself, I don't think I just saw that. Then I would reach over to my table and pick up the little report, and I would look at it again and I would make sure I was scouring the document and not reading like a date or a serial number or something, right?

And it was right. I'd put it down and then I would just repeat that process for hours. And at the end of it, I said, I think I'm going to set my sights higher. And it wasn't long after I decided to start the affirmation, my Scott Adams would become a famous cartoonist. So there were some years that passed in between and then some other affirmations, but that's essentially the path I took. So the odds of becoming a famous cartoonist, I think about 2,000 people submit packages to the big syndicates, the people who give you the big contract, your big break. They might pick a half dozen of them. Of those half dozen, most of them will not make it after a year or two.

So it's very rare. In fact, Dilbert was probably one of the – I think the biggest breakout or one of the biggest in 20 years. And just to look at the affirmations, I have a number of questions about this. And then I want to ask you about God's debris also because I think this is – maybe there's an interesting tie-in. Oh, if I could because I think your listeners want to hear this. I know it's rude to interrupt you here. No, no. Interrupt all you want.

The two other affirmations that are notable was I said that I would become a number one bestselling author before I'd ever written a book. And I'd never taken a class in writing except, I think, a two-day course in business writing. And the Dilbert Principle became the number one bestselling book. The next time I used it, because after that, pretty much everything I wanted, I got. Because with success, you don't need the affirmation so much because just everything starts being attracted to you automatically but there was a period and i know you're going to ask about this later where i lost my voice right couldn't speak for three and a half years that's the spasmodic dysphonia yeah yeah we'll talk about that later i think but uh that was the the next time i used affirmations and the affirmation was i scott Scott Adams, will speak perfectly. Now,

I realize I don't speak perfectly, but when we get to that story, you'll see that there's more to it. And if we were to look at just the mechanics of these affirmations, are you sitting down in the morning and writing down 15 lines, kind of like Bart Simpson on the chalkboard on a piece of paper. How exactly were you doing it? And then how do you explain it? Exactly. Yeah. I will start by saying, I'll tell you exactly how I did it, but then I'll also tell you that I'm positive the exact method doesn't matter. I think what matters is the degree of focus and the commitment you have to that focus, right? Because the last affirmation I mentioned was primarily done in my head while driving, but continuously for years, about three years. So the way I did it back in those times

was I used a pencil or a pen and a piece of paper, and I wrote the same sentence 15 times once a day, I think. I mean, there would be nothing wrong with doing it twice a day except it's twice as hard. So I don't think there's a reason that you should do it twice a day. I don't know if 15 is magic. I'm sure 10 would get you there. 20 might be better, but I doubt it. I don't think it matters. And by the way, these are the questions everybody asks me all the time. 20 might be better, but I doubt it. I don't think it matters.

And by the way, these are the questions everybody asks me all the time. Do you save the piece of paper? No. You don't save the paper. The paper is irrelevant. If you type it, I'm positive you'll get the same result. I don't know if this works. I mean, again, I'm not telling you that affirmations is a thing that actually happens as opposed to a perception that you have.

But I'm sure the perception at least would be the same if you were typing it as opposed to writing it. So I think all of the details don't matter. Here's why I think it seems to work, and there are several possibilities for that. One is something I learned long ago, and I forget who coined it, but have you ever heard the phrase reticular activation? I have. Yeah. So it's basically the idea that it's easy to hear your own name spoken in a crowd. All right. So you'll hear background noise. Tim Ferriss. And you're like, how did I hear that one thing in this whole bunch of crowd noise? So basically, your brain is incapable of processing everything in its environment or even coming close.

So the best it can do is set up these little filters, and the way it sets its filters is by what you pay attention to, right? It's what you spend the most energy on. It's how you focus your memory. That's how you set your filter. So your filter is automatically set for your name because that's just the thing that matters most to you. But you can use these affirmations, presumably, this is just a hypothesis, to focus your mind

and your memory on a very specific thing. And that would allow you to notice things in your environment that might have already been there. It's just that your filter was set to ignore and then you just tune it through this memory and repetition trick until it widens a little bit to allow some extra stuff in. Now, there's some science to back that. Dr. Richard Wiseman did some studies on luck, and he was trying to find out if people actually have real luck. Can they guess the future better than other people? And the answer, as you might guess, and I'm sure the people listening to this

podcast are all rationalists and skeptics, And you know that he found nothing, right? Nobody can guess random events better than other people. But he did another test, which I'll shorten here. But the idea was that people who expected to be lucky, the people who labeled themselves lucky and looked for luck everywhere, were a little bit better at finding it. In other words, just actually noticing it in the environment. So if your filter is tuned to this thought, hey, I think there's something out there lucky. little bit better at finding it. In other words, just actually noticing it in the environment. So if your filter is tuned to this thought, hey, I think there's something out there lucky. Let me look for it. Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo? There's Waldo. You're going to find a little bit more and more often than the guy who says, there was nothing to look for. I already know everything's

going to go wrong. I'll tell you tomorrow. Tomorrow's going to be me going wrong. Bad day, Eeyore. So that guy's just not looking for anything. So now let me give you an anecdote to tie that together. During the time I was telling myself I wanted to be a cartoonist, how do you do that? This was pre-internet. I didn't know where to search for it. I didn't know anybody. I came home and I noticed something I'd never seen before. Maybe it had always been there. I don't know. But I noticed a show, a TV show about how to become a cartoonist. And I wrote to the host of the show and asked him for some advice. He gave it to me, short story, even shorter. That set me on the road to know how to buy the book that I needed and submit my materials and that sort of thing.

Now, you could say, well, that was just a coincidence because maybe that show only aired once and I think it was on public TV, so it actually probably aired lots of times. But there might have been other things I would have noticed. It wasn't just that one thing I could have noticed. I might have noticed other things that would have sent me on a different path, but also toward this thing I'd been focusing on. Now, the other possibility, every rational person in the audience is screaming at their speaker right now, you idiot, this is selective memory. What's really happening is there are lots of times that you were focusing on things and doing

affirmations and you just you just freaking forgot those times it's a survivorship bias right right um i say absolutely that's completely possible right but i just told you my story and i can tell you that i don't have a memory in all of those years of trying it when it didn't work i do have plenty of memories of when it hadn't worked yet. Like I said, the voice problem took years. And I suppose if I were doing one in particular right now, that I could say it hadn't happened yet. So there's that. But there's also just the fact that it may be a self-identification thing. And what I mean by that is I have a view that we're mostly moist robots in the sense that the environment is programming us and we've got a little DNA that's like our operating system. But basically, you start with that and it can't vary a lot, right? Your DNA is a little bit of a window of how much your nature can change, but that's like

a computer, right? And then the environment programs it within its parameters. So you got that going on. So you got a person who's getting, you know, programmed by their environment, but they don't know that, right? They think they're making decisions and using their free will. So it could be that all that's happening is that a person who is willing to write down their goal 15 times a day has at their disposal, without necessarily knowing it, a subconscious

that is totally on their side. In other words, there's something in the subconscious that is overriding the conscious and saying, you know, Scott, we're going to do this thing. You haven't figured it out yet, all right? But I'm doing the affirmations, doing the affirmations. So what I'm suggesting is it's not the affirmations that are making something happen. This thing is going to happen because my subconscious already decided that I have these objectives, I have these goals, and I'm going to chew through a freaking wall to make these happen. And I have some capability, so I can chew.

I'm a good chewer. So maybe all that's happening is that a person like me who has a subconscious that's guiding him towards this very specific outcome is also the same person who's willing to write it down 15 times. So in other words, the causation is exactly backwards from how it looks. I'm already that person who's going to make this happen. And I'm also, by coincidence, a person who's so intent on it that I'll try anything. And one of those things just happens to be writing stuff down 15 times. Right. Well, it's like looking at parents who credit being good parents with buying books A, B, and C. And you're like, well, maybe it's just that the people who are predisposed to being good parents with buying books A, B, and C. And you're like, well, maybe it's just that the people who are predisposed to being good parents are the same people who are likely to buy a bunch of books and study.

Yeah, and maybe, just maybe, I've got three siblings who were raised in identical situations and we all turned out completely different. You just say that to anybody and watch them get the dough in the headlights look like, okay, you just changed everything I know about life. I will now erase that. Go on. But I do think that you bring up a couple of really important topics and I think opportunist, which I think perhaps the affirmations triggers, right? So, for instance, people might say, well, the people who go to Silicon Valley are more successful because they're driven.

They go to Silicon Valley, they build tech companies, and so on. I would argue there's probably more to that story. And one plausible explanation is people in Silicon Valley believe certain impossibles are possible, whereas they wouldn't be in a peer group elsewhere that would support that, right? So they're encouraged to try these things that would seem doomed to fail in many other parts of the world. And if you're able to achieve that in isolation by using these affirmations, then you have this sort of naive optimism that then provides you with this, like you said, selective attention and optimism where you'll write to the host of the TV show, right? It's kind of like the sixth sense and noticing the red doorknob. Or you buy a new car and then you go out and you see the new car everywhere. It's not

that everyone went out and bought the same car to be like you. It's that you're now noticing it. How did you decide to write God's Debris? What is the story behind that? Because when I pinged my audience to ask what they would like to know from you, many people are familiar with Dilbert. I would suspect a lot of people are probably not familiar with God's Debris, but the premise and everything about the book is really fascinating. Could you describe how that came about? Yeah. For the readers or the listeners not familiar with God's Debris, that's a non-humor, non-Dilbert book I wrote in 2001, I think. And it's essentially a conversation between a delivery man and the smartest person in the world that he meets by accident, he thinks.

And the challenge of the book was to write in the voice of someone who is allegedly the smartest person in the world, someone who literally knows everything. Now, the problem is since I don't know everything, how do you figure that out? So my writer solution was a version of Occam's Razor, sort of a bastardized version in which I simply had the alleged smartest person in the world say the things that seemed like the simplest explanations. And it turns out when you read the simplest explanation, even if it's not what you were already set to believe or already did believe, it's very compelling anyway. It's just one of those ways your brain is wired that simplicity looks compelling, i.e. Ronald Reagan, i.e. Donald Trump. Simplicity is always

compelling. But the larger part, the content of the book, and this won't mean as much to the people who haven't read it, but it'll mean a whole bunch to the people who have, you're probably wondering, how the hell does anybody think of those different ideas and have them fit together in the same book? That's one of the questions I get asked the most. And the answer is, you don't do it intentionally, right? That stuff does not happen because you had a plan. That book is the result of literally my lifetime up to that point, it was 40-ish years, I forget, and all the strange thoughts I'd had and one specific moment in my shower at which I realized, holy hell, these are all the same idea. And they have a theme which I can now weave them together into one grand idea, which if I put it in the voice of someone, not myself, and put it in the form of fiction, it will give the reader the same feeling that I had when the sense came to me in the shower, where

I got a full body tingle. I felt like maybe everything I knew was wrong. Not really, but I'm talking about a sensation, just a feeling. And I thought, is there any way to package that? Is there a way to write that down so somebody could get that feeling I had in the shower when I took things from left field, right field, and married orange with the number 12 and explained to you why it's all really the same thing? Could I make somebody have that experience? That's what I tried to do with the book. I used throughout it a lot of

techniques that I learned in hypnosis classes to strengthen the impact. And in the foreword, I give the reader plenty of clues that this is a thought experiment. It's not a typical novel. It's not a story like they're used to. And what were some of the techniques from hypnosis that you implemented? Oh, would that – if I told you, would it be a spoiler? That's okay. Well, if it gives away the plot line, I'm just curious, or maybe the broader question

is how have you incorporated, because I'm an uninformed when it comes to hypnosis. I don't know anything about it. So I'd be just very curious how you've implemented hypnosis into your life. I suppose it's a broader question. Yeah. So first of all, the way I use hypnosis is too broadly for the public. You know, most people are thinking of stage hypnotist and something they saw in a movie where somebody was programmed to kill the president or something. I'm not talking about any of that stuff or anything that involves a trance.

I'm talking about the science of persuasion, stuff that's science-tested and things that are pretty well-known and understood. So I'll give you one example. I'll just illustrate it. My challenge when I have a book that most of it is two people talking is that you will get bored. So I need to continually put you in the place of one of the characters. You can't be in the place of the smartest person in the world. Because by definition, you just can't get there, right? But you can be in the place of the person who's listening to it and not buying it.

There's no way you can buy it in its unfinished form, right? It's like somebody's – it's sort of like – what's the game that you doodle and people try to guess your doodle? Pictionary. Pictionary. So you need a certain amount of clues before anybody's going to get it, right? Nobody gets it on the first line. So that was the experience I was going for is that you get it. I completely lost my train of thought thinking about Pictionary because... We were talking about persuasion and hypnosis. Oh, okay. So, right. The method I used was whenever the world's smartest person said

something that I knew everyone reading it would think, oh, God, there's 10 obvious reasons why that's stupid. I would just have the person say, I think there's 10 obvious reasons why that's stupid. Now, I'm paraphrasing myself. But in other words, I make my character say the thing you just thought. So that's a little different than traditional fiction where I'm making the character lead you all the way. So this is a technique in hypnosis. You would call it pacing and leading. In persuasion, you'd have other names for it.

But the idea is I'm you, so I would match you in some way. If you were doing a standard induction, the way you would match somebody would be matching their breathing, matching their level of maybe anxiety or the way they talk. You might try to pick the same language type they use. If somebody uses angry words and war words, you'd start out using them. That's pacing. So you're matching them so they feel comfortable with you. They bond with you. They link to you. Your brains kind of become like psychologically linked. If one person pulls, the other one feels a tug. Just the way any relationship is, right?

Just the normal way any two people act when they're together. So all you're doing is setting up a thing where you're pacing and then that sets them up for the leading. Because the leading in this case is something so outrageously unexpected that without the leading, I could never take them to the new place. It's a lot like judo, actually, in so much as when you're connected to someone, first you have to tether with the hand grips. And then once you've done that, you try to lead your opponent into a pattern that you are leading like a dance so that you can control where they step with either foot.

And at that point, you can control it. You can control imbalancing, right? So you can, you can then do with them whatever you want once they've kind of entrained their stepping pattern, uh, to yours, which sounds pretty similar. Uh, do you know how much that makes me want to go wrestle somebody? It's amazing. Oh, the foot sweeps in judo are just beautiful. I mean, so elegant. You know, I've never heard of that explanation of judo, which instantly makes me interested in it, and I had no interest in it whatsoever before.

So, nicely done. Well, my pleasure. My pleasure. Judo is, especially if people search foot sweeps, judo foot sweeps on YouTube, for instance, it's just one of the most beautiful demonstrations of paired physics where one person is using an opponent's energy against them, but it can certainly, I think, have a lot of parallels in conversation and just human

interaction. How are you introduced to hypnosis? You took this class that you'd mentioned, but what sparked your interest? And for those people who are not familiar with hypnosis and have only seen the stage performers and so on, how do you sniff out someone who's truly a master at hypnosis? And maybe that's too broad. Maybe there are a bunch of different types. And how do you sniff of the charlatans that you shouldn't really pay much attention to did you uh did you read my uh blog on trump i'm not sure if you're asking it i don't know if you know i haven't i'm not i'm not leading in this case so that was the most accidentally um perfect question anybody ever asked so nicely done asked. So let me start at the beginning.

My mother delivered, gave birth to my little sister while under hypnosis and did not use any painkillers. She did not feel pain and she was awake the whole time. That's incredible. Now, just like I left a dramatic pause after that, but I forgot we're doing a podcast and everybody went to check their equipment. Sorry about that. But that had a huge impact on me. So it turns out our family doctor was a trained hypnotist and he handled the birth and he just offered her that option. Now, let me be quick to point out that there's sort of a rule of one in five in hypnosis, and that is that one in five people are able to go into a state that is that extreme.

In other words, somebody who could simply block pain or somebody who could see something that wasn't really in the room. Now, keep in mind that in all these cases, these people are completely aware and awake, and they can stop the sensation any way they want, anytime they want. But if you're giving birth, you're not going to be going out of your way to stop the sensation of stopping pain, right? So nobody's controlling you. It's more like a coach working with an elite player. The coach is not doing it. The coach is saying, hey, crossover dribble, go under your leg, left, jog right. So that had a huge impact on me. And so it got me interested in that and other things.

And so when I was in my 20s and I realized that a guy who works at a bank teller and drives a car which one girlfriend affectionately – she had a terrible name for it, but I can't say it on the air. Oh, sure. Of course you could say it. I realize there's a reason not because it's a profanity. I just can't say it on the air. Oh, sure. Of course you could say it. I realize there's a reason not because it's a profanity. I just can't say it. Okay, no problem.

Just to trade, I had a hand-me-down van from my mom, and the back seats were stolen, so all my coworkers started calling it the Molester Mobile. That was the nickname for my car. Okay, you went on the car. So anyway, I thought I need an edge career-wise, dating-wise, and if there's anything to this, at the very least, I'm terribly curious about what it is and what it isn't. And you figure your mother's not going to lie to you about childbirth. I mean, not something that became like a central story of your youth. It was kind of a big deal. It doesn't seem like the things you would have made up. So credibility was high, and I thought, well, let me check this thing out. But again, 20% of the people can have that

kind of experience. The family doctor, obviously, you become trained in quickly identifying who those people are, so he knew. But all the rest of the people can get substantial benefits. So unfortunately, I'm in the 80% that can't get those extreme benefits, but the stuff I can get is immense. And it includes the ability to craft a book the way I did. It includes a lot of technique I use for making Dilbert popular, for example. The reason Dilbert has no last name, the reason you don't know what town he lives in, you don't know the name of his company. And here's a first for a comic strip, I think.

The second main character is the boss in terms of time on screen, and he doesn't have any name at all and and that all that all all comes out of hypnosis training and what i do is i allow the the reader to imbue the characters with as much of what they love as they possibly can without giving them a a hard stop so in other words if i said uh this is uh dilbert goldberg all right allberg, all of the anti-Semites would say, well, I don't really relate to that Goldberg guy. Any name you give him, somebody is going to be a hater. So you're taking people out of the equation. As soon as you name him, maybe it's a name they've heard of. Or there's a reason why it's Dilbert and not Bob.

It's abert and not Bob. It's a pre-existing association. So all of that is just classic, well-understood hypnosis training. But again, I'm not hypnotizing the audience. I'm simply giving them a better product. So keep in mind that when I talk about hypnosis, I include things like negotiating, obviously, selling, marketing, but also design, product design. Sorry to pause you, but I'd just love to ask, because I think like most people, when I think hypnosis, I think trance for the purpose of overcoming pain, being as stiff as a board between two chairs, et cetera. How would you define hypnosis then in this case? Because I'm listening to what you're describing and I'm like, wow, okay, you have elements of like the narrative structure, storytelling, persuasion, negotiation. It covers

a lot of bases. So how do you define hypnosis? So the simplest, and I think everybody has, ends up with their own definition of it if they have any experience with it. Because I don't think there's any one definition everybody's going to agree with. For me, it is forming a connection with either one person or if you're doing it to a group, if you're trying to persuade a group, you're connecting to the group. You're getting this sort of pacing and leading thing going on. You're building trust. And then you're using usually words are sort of the programming language. If you will, linguistics are the user interface for this moist robot that we are.

So if you want to program your head, you pick words. If any of you saw a recent – it went viral recently. There was an article in The Onion, which was just this funny article about a couple who allegedly used their complete despair and hopelessness as the thing that bound them together. But it was the most masterfully written thing. I wish I could tell you the writer's name. But the choice of words puts you in a completely different mental state. It's just the most brilliant word choice in a piece of writing you'll see. And I try to do that too. So when I'm writing, and I don't know if you use the same method, I write in layers.

So there's first draft, second draft. But somewhere toward the end, the final layer, I look at every word I use and I say, is there a word that will work on an emotional level or a different level or just a more perfect level? Something that will make you perfect level, something that will make you remember it, something that will keep you awake. That means exactly the same thing. So here's an example. If I said to the audience, and I do this in front of crowds, so you at home can play along and shout out the answer, but I already know the answer.

I'm going to give you two words that mean about the same. You tell me out loud, and Tim, you can play along. Just say the one of the two words. They both mean about the same. That's the loud and tim you can play along just say the say the one of the two words they both mean about the same that's the funnier one which one is funnier pull or yank yank yeah and everybody everybody at home just said the same thing right so language does have that much specific control over the way you think. And so, you know, science and hypnosis was kind of a precursor to a lot of the studies that have borne out a lot of what hypnotists found by trial and error, that you can manipulate the brain by what people concentrate on, what words you put in there, what you make them focus on, you know, what you tie to their habits. There's just lots of ways that you can program the box.

Well, I mean, language is mind control, right? I mean, you can very easily make people think any number of things or feel any number of things by using this sort of symbology that we've created known as language. And I've just been so fascinated by that for so long. Do you find then is writing an indirect way of developing the skill sets that would make you a fast learner in hypnosis or does it not really pour over that cleanly? I would say that learning to be a writer, you're only going to maybe brush accidentally on the level that I'm even talking about. Got it. Like everybody knows, hey,

that's a good word, but you need to go to the next level. If you're saying to yourself, I am putting together a logical argument, and this word is the perfect word for my argument, because it means the best thing. Because remember in my example, yank and pull aren't really the same thing, are they? No, they're not. Right? Because you got a different sentence and that's why one was funnier, you know? But it also had a Y in it and had a K in it. So there are two levels of funniness built into the word.

So I will consciously make a choice to get rid of a more accurate word to put in a word that has more of a programming control, right? Because you want people to have an experience because that's what they're going to remember. They're not going to remember what word choice you used. This dovetails exactly into my loud defense of Donald Trump's methods, which I've been writing about all week on the internet. I've seen some of the fireworks. So please say more.

Let me draw a line for you that I'll say in advance. This is conspiracy talk, conspiracy theory talk. So you don't have to say it. None of the listeners have to tell me that. So it's just for fun. There is a connection between Donald Trump and me. There is an individual between us. That individual happens to be the father of hypnosis, Milton Erickson.

Milton Erickson. Milton Erickson, a name known only to people who study hypnosis usually or psychology. So he was a linguist who put a lot of this, I'm not sure if he was a linguist, but he put a lot of this stuff together, mostly by instinct, I think, in the beginning. One of his, and his school is the school of hypnosis that I ended up going to. It was a different school with a few differences, but basically I grew out of that. Also out of the Erickson School is a couple of people, John Grinder, I think. I hope I didn't get the name wrong, who developed NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, which is a way to use largely words as a programming language, that I don't buy into, but there's a core of it that comes from hypnosis, which matches pretty exactly with what scientific studies and current psychology would expect.

So there's a part of it that's real strong and powerful, but it's probably the minority of it. I mean most of it is people being stiff as boards between two chairs and, you know, that sort of stuff. Now, the best practicer, most famous practitioner of NLP, the person who got his inspiration from it, is Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins has been a business associate with Donald Trump. They work together on some kind of program about success. You can see their videos of them talking one after another. If you Google them, you see them standing together on Google images, etc. Now, I have no reason to believe that they ever had a conversation on the methods of persuasion. I think Trump is, first of all, a natural because he's been doing it for a long time.

But if you look at his recent work, that has Erickson's fingerprints all over it. Let me give you an example. And I wrote about this, so if you want to see the details, it's at Dilbert.com and my blog. But take the debate where he came in as the underprepared buffoon who was going to blow himself up. And Megyn Kelly of Fox News decided that, yes, that's exactly what was going to happen. And she started right out with the, did you say all these bad things about women, quote. Now, every other politician would have been smeared off the stage by that because it wouldn't matter what he said back, right?

It wouldn't matter what the response was because the question itself, like NLP, the question is the content. The logic of the answer, maybe somebody said, oh, that was taken out of context or whatever, which is what people usually say, and it usually is. I mean, that's actually usually true. But the public isn't going to hear that. They're just going to hear the feeling that they felt when Megyn Kelly said, that person's name bad to women. That's really like the beginning and the end of the thinking for, you know, let's say at least 20% of the

public, right? About the same 20% that can easily be hypnotized, coincidentally. So, but what did Trump do? As soon as that question came up, he semi-interrupted her and he said, only Rosie O'Donnell. That, my friends, is hypnosis. He took an anchor that everybody could visualize and his core audience already had a negative impression. Their negative impression of Rosie O'Donnell almost certainly was bigger, stronger, and visual and more important than whatever Megyn Kelly just said, which should have been a full house. I mean, she showed him four kings, and he beat her hand, and he did it without even trying. And he did it with a method which is well understood, right? It's a negotiating technique.

You throw down an anchor, you divert everybody. And so instead of becoming this sexist, which he could have been on day one, he became the straight talker. Yeah. And he admitted in the very next sentence that he had also said bad things about other women. He has some really interesting – Oh, but wait. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Wait. There's a better part. I think it's better. I'm ready. Now, I know you follow the headlines, so you know what happened next. Roger Ailes of Fox News weighed in to say like we're going to need to make peace right with donald trump because um you know this is getting out of hand and donald trump made peace with him how do you interpret that i'll tell you how i interpret it i i interpret it as

donald trump just bought fox news without paying a freaking penny because if he wants that if they want him to appear on his show that's up to, and he just proved he doesn't need him. So he's going to get all the press he wants without Fox News. If they want to get on the program and support the guy who's probably going to be the nominee, that's what I've predicted because of his hypnosis skills in particular, having nothing to do with his policies, by the way. I'll get to that. I'm not a fan of the policies, but I don't think he is either.

They're opening negotiating gambits as he does. So he effectively changed the debate, became the straight talker, took control of Fox News all in one day. And all of that is straight out of the hypnotist's playbook, although it's – he would call it persuasion. He might call it negotiating. He literally wrote the book, The Art of the Deal. Let me show you this again so you see the pattern. Some of you saw his immigration plan. That's like the most ridiculous thing in the world.

It's like, build a giant fence. Make Mexico pay for it, as if they want to do that. Round up 11 million Mexicans who have been in the country for a while and send them back. Change the Constitution to get rid of their birthright. All right, I'm saying it with my mocking voice, but then I'm going to reverse it around and tell you that if you evaluate him as a politician, which is what the political writers are all doing incorrectly right now, that's the most ridiculous bag of shit anybody ever proposed to the country because it has no chance of happening in that form, right?

It's just not going to happen. But he's not a politician. He's a businessman, and he's a hypnotist, and he just gave you an anchor. And his anchor is, look at what I'm going to do. Everybody get excited. Let's talk about changing the Constitution. Let's talk about the cost and the heartbreak and the misery that would cost these 11 million people. I'm proposing we kick out of the country.

Let's talk about how expensive that fence is. And then when he gets to negotiate with Congress, guess what he gives off? He gives it away because the only thing he wanted was the fence, right? The only thing he wanted was the fence. But can you say in your plan, I'm going to give everybody a free pass after we build the fence? No, because that makes immigration explode for the 10 years it takes you to build a fence. So you have to get there the way he got there, and it's the way a businessman would do it. You come in with this ridiculous first offer.

You'd make all the idiots in the media who think he's a politician, even though he screams that he's not. I mean, he wrote a book on this stuff. I think it was the number one bestseller, right? He could not be more clear or more honest about what he's doing as he does it. But it's still invisible because you're looking at him as a politician and saying, if his goal is to do this thing, it's a stupid goal. He's not going to kick out 11 million people. Nobody's going to go for that. That's not the game. It will never be the game. I almost guarantee you that if he gets approval to build the fence,

he'll probably get some Mexican funding, not completely, but it will be enough to say, look, nobody else was even going to ask for half. I got you half of this paid for. If he does that, people are going to wet their pants, right? And then he's going to say, I guarantee it. He's going to say, now this imagines he gets nominated and becomes president, so I guess I can't guarantee anything. But if it got to this situation, the likely outcome would be that he'd say, look, yeah, that 11 million people, yeah, I guess it would be hard to round them up. Why don't we say that if you stay in a jail for X number of years, you pay your taxes, you register, you do some useful things that will make an exception in your case just for practicality

because that's what a business person does. And by the way, I got my fence built. Now my brand, Brand America, is exclusive for the first time. And that's why you hired me. You hired me to be a brand manager. You didn't hire me to tell the truth on my first offer. You offered me to negotiate. He's literally running for the office of negotiator-in-chief and practicing his craft. And he's doing it with such brilliance that I've literally, I don't think I've ever seen anybody do it this well except, oh, I can think of one other person. Let's see.

There was Bill Clinton who also is good friends of Tony Robbins. I love the web. It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Yeah. And by the way, and so I'll say this at the end because I went on for a while. I'm not suggesting that there's a grand conspiracy there. It's a fact that all those things are connected. That doesn't mean that the influence is running through them in some one-way direction like I described.

If you use that as a possible one of your filters to explain what's going on with the Trump campaign. I just read in the news a writer saying, essentially, nobody understands why he's rising in the polls. And I'm saying, exactly. And you won't understand either. Yeah, I think it's also hard sometimes for people, particularly in the day-to-day news cycle, just the churn of constant noise with hours that need to be filled on TV and pages that need to be filled in newspapers, that you need attention, right? It's kind of like the Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, Alec Baldwin, you know, always be closing speech with the attention, interest, desire, action. You have to have the attention first, and Donald

Trump is very good at doing that. The other technique that I'd never seen, and he uses it all the time, but it doesn't seem to lose its efficacy. It's one of these sort of guilty until proven innocent approaches, or it's a retort, which is, he'll say, check your facts, next question. And so with any journalist, and it throws them off balance just enough because they're like, oh, shit. Like, did my researchers miss the one citation that refuted everything that I'm actually laying on this particular person? And so whether it's Matt Lauer or anyone else would be like, Matt, check your facts. Next question. And it's just they're as good as dead.

It's one of the most – it's brilliant in a way. And that's not to say that I would want Donald Trump running the country, but it's – I do admire the – so the ringmanship. Well, yeah. Let me weigh in on that for a moment. Look how many ways that could have been done incorrectly. Suppose he simply said, Matt, your facts are wrong. That's right. Totally doesn't work.

Totally different. Yeah, totally different. Check your facts is what I call the high ground maneuver, which I also write about. It's the same thing Jobs did when he explained the way antenna gate just by saying, all smartphones have problems. We're trying to make our customers happy. He made a national story go away in less than 30 seconds with those two sentences. He took the high ground and everybody

said, oh, wait a minute. We've been talking about you. Well, yeah, I guess that's just kind of normal when you think about smartphones. And I'm sure glad I have a smartphone. So I guess that's just normal. So what Trump did, if you said your facts are wrong, then he set the world, Matt Lauer against Donald Trump. And anybody who liked Matt Lauer better than Donald Trump, they're going to side with him. But instead he said, check your facts. He said, I'm a person with more information, which actually seems pretty consistent because it's his world, right? Like we're talking about his facts.

It's not Matt Lauer's facts. Matt Lauer is a guy who studied up 10 minutes before the interview. So you say that to me and I just laugh and say, okay, I don't know what the truth is here, Donald, but probably you're right. It's just brilliant. Yeah, it's really, really clever. I want to shift gears just for a second because I love this type of deconstruction and I'd love to chat a little bit about goals versus systems and just to hear you perhaps talk about some of how you think about your life in those terms or not. Yes. You want me to just jump right in and define those two things? Yes, please. That'd be very helpful. All right. So this was written in my book how to

fail and almost uh everything is still wind big and the idea is that if you have a goal um goal oriented approach to the world that that's an approach that made perfect sense 200 years ago if you were a farmer and you had a simple operation and you thought if you cleared another 10 acres before winter, you could grow more corn, you're almost certainly right. So clearing those 10 acres before winter was a perfectly good goal and it made perfect sense to pursue it. But now fast forward, all right? It's modern times. There's probably more technology, more complexity in your pocket right now, in your smartphone, than the farmer had in his entire operation. Today, if you're focused on one thing for more than a minute and a half, there's a good chance that that thing is no longer worth having. There are people going to school for degrees that won't mean anything even four years from now when they retire or when they get out of school.

So you've got people who are making plans with a clear focus in a world that no longer supports a clear path to anything. So what's the alternative in a world where you can't – if you can't predict the future and on top of that, even if you could predict it and you pick a goal and you marched right at it, when you got there, there's a really good chance that you would have said, you know, I didn't notice there were five other goals that were way better than this one because they emerged while you were focusing on your goal, right? So if you're not keeping your eye on the whole of it and if you're not playing the odds

and you're picking a moon shot as your way to go through life, you're going to feel like you're failing, not only if you miss the moon, but you're going to feel like a failure all the way to the moon because you haven't gotten the moon yet, and you're not quite sure if you're going to get there. So what's better than that? And by the way, I still recommend goals heartily for simple situations. So if you enter a bowling tournament, your goal is to win the bowling tournament, right? It's a simple situation. And usually when it's like a human-made construct, they are simplified and therefore a goal makes sense. Here's what may not make sense. Let's say you said, my goal is to get my boss's job. It's a pretty common goal, right? That's stupid because your boss's job is just one of the many things that could be

better than what you're doing now. And the chances are there's something way better than that. You know, your boss's boss's job, for example. You know, what are you doing about that? You know, how about some job in another company? How about a lateral move that gets you in a better place to go higher later? You know, so as soon as you focus, you've given yourself something to fail at and you've closed yourself out

from the other opportunities. All right, so what I write about instead is what I call a systems way of looking at the world in which you are continually looking at ways to improve your odds in some favorable area, some favorable focus, you know, without being too specific. So your area might be business or art or whatever it is.

So the hallmark of a good system is that even as things are failing, you're still improving your odds and your personal worth. So if, for example, I start up a company and it doesn't work, I would say, oh, I had a goal and I started that little startup and it failed and now I'm a failure. But if I started a company that was in a field that I already work and I'm, let's say, making all the contacts that I made through the startup, the networking, the things I learned made me more valuable in the things, maybe my day job or the next, the networking, the things I learned made me more valuable in the things, you know, maybe my day job or the next job I do, then I came out ahead.

So that's the system, right? Let me give you a kind of a non-business example of that. I had a friend in high school who wanted to have a girlfriend and I wanted to have a girlfriend, but he had kind of a systems approach and I had a goal approach. My goal approach is I'd pick out the prettiest looking girl in my class and I'd say, this girl must be my girlfriend. I will do everything I can to make this happen. I'd do my research and figure out who her friends were and where I could hang out. And it might take me months and at the end of it, it usually ended this way, right? She'd say, you know, one of two things.

Either she had a boyfriend, so I've, you know, wasted three months, or she'd say, I don't like you. Then I've wasted three months. But every once in a while, she'd say, you know, this didn't happen often, but once in a while, she'd say, I have a boyfriend and I don't like you. So that was my experience with my gold arm. So my friend – Even if I didn't have a boyfriend, right. Yeah. So my best story of rejection in seventh grade was asking the prettiest girl to dance the first time I ever asked somebody to slow dance.

And she said, you know, it's too hot. I'd rather not. And I said, perhaps if you took off your down winter jacket. And she said, um, and I'm also too tired. All right. So that was my dating experience in high school. That was a goal-oriented approach, right? So my friend Manuel, he had a different approach.

He had a systems approach. He would simply go wherever there were plenty of girls, and he would ask them in order of descending order of looks, will you be my girlfriend? Or some version of that. Of course, almost everybody said no. Now, you're probably thinking, oh, you're telling me the old story about keep trying, get back on the horse. I'm not telling you that story at all. I'm telling you he was learning a skill while I was wasting my time. That guy knows how to approach strangers. He knows what works, what doesn't. He's got a thicker skin. He also had a lot of girlfriends, so he was learning a lot that way as well. He was failing in a way that put him ahead no matter what happened. I was failing in a way that didn't put me ahead. It just made me feel like a loser and probably put me behind for the next time

I wanted to feel confident in front of someone else. So I could give you more examples from, say, fitness and diet because I know some people have asked about that. They would love to hear this, definitely. So a goal-oriented approach in, let's say, diet would be, I want to lose 10 pounds, and I'm going to do it with my willpower. I'm going to keep those cookies out of my mouth. I'm going to put the fork down.

I'm going to push away from the table. I'm just going to try harder because that's why. Now, everybody who's been alive for more than 10 minutes knows that that can work in the short run, but it just doesn't work in the long run. You need something else. You need a system. So here's a system that I've been using that has me in the best shape of my life at 58 and uses no willpower whatsoever. Whatever I want, whenever I want to, it's just that my system is education. I go out of my way, if I see an article that says, new thing discovered about the link between this food and what, most of that I can

ignore. But every once in a while, you see something that says, you know, you just eat more protein and less of those simple carbs, good things will happen. And you say, okay, I already knew that one. How deep does this knowledge thing go and how much difference does it make? Well, let me give you an example. Say you and I go to the salad bar and it's a terrible salad bar. All there is is a white potato, plain russet potato, and some plain pasta. And we're both trying to watch our weight. All right, what do you get?

Do you get the potato or the pasta? Now, I asked this question in live crowds, and it's about evenly split to half the people, but mostly people don't know. There's only a few people in the whole room who even know the answer, and the answer is actually really clear. It turns out that the white potato, as opposed to the sweet potatoes that are not bad, the white potato has a terrible glycemic index. The pasta probably should, but there's something about the way it processes that isn't fully understood that it just doesn't. So pasta isn't the best food in the world if you're looking to watch your weight, but if you had a choice of only those two, I pick the pasta, you pick the potato,

you're struggling with your willpower, I'm eating like crazy and having a good time because I've learned which foods I can eat like crazy and not stimulate cravings. So if I eat the simple carbs for lunch, I know I'm just going to be hungrier later. I've learned that sometimes sleep pretends to be the same feeling as hunger. So if I haven't slept, I say, oh, I'm not really hungry. Stop eating. I need to either take a nap or I could eat some peanuts because I've read and I've experienced this. I know it's true. They've eaten fat things. They have a lot of calories and that part's not great maybe if you're trying to watch your weight, but they have such a good impact on reducing your cravings because fat's good at doing that. you'll make up for it in the long run.

And by the way, it's full of protein and goodness and it's not bad to eat peanuts. So the other thing I do as a process to avoid using willpower is that it would be impossible for me, I think, to stop eating both the quantity that I want to eat, the food, because sometimes you just got to shovel a lot in your face. You just got to eat a lot. And sometimes you want to eat the thing you want to eat. So sometimes it's about the flavor and the taste, and sometimes it's, yeah, you just need a lot of food. So I allow myself to have a lot of food anytime I want.

I don't put any control on that. I just make sure that it's the kind of food you can eat forever and you're not regretting it. So it could be salads and yogurts and fruits and vegetables, mostly raw stuff. And if I think I'm overdoing it a little bit, I'll throw in some peanuts or some roasted creamed almonds or something. And you are a vegetarian, is that right? Or you have been? Mostly. that right or have you have been mostly you know i tried to introduce fish to my diet but i'm having a hard time with it because i can't i can't get past the the icky factor um that's just personal

i'd like to i just can't get past it so in my case i use zero willpower right and one by one i have picked off things which were problem cravings such such as Diet Coke. I was drinking somewhere between 10 and 20 a day, I think, of Diet Coke for years, 30 years probably. Now, if I said to myself, today's the day I'm going to go on a healthy eating diet, and Diet Coke was just one of the 45 things I was depriving myself of, it would be pretty tough. But instead, I say to myself, I'm going to eat everything I want all day long. I'm going to drink whatever I want as long as it's on the good list. There's just one thing I can't do today, just one thing. It still takes a little willpower but I noticed that after about a month or so,

two months really to be clean, the craving goes away and today, a couple of years later, I look at a Diet Coke and it's actually hard to wrap my head around the thought that I would want to put that in my body. It just looks like a little bunch of chemicals. So cravings can be completely managed if you isolate them and pick them out of the herd and don't put too much of a willpower burden on yourself at the same time. Now, the downside, of course, is that this takes several years instead of everybody wants to lose 10 pounds in a month. And I don't have any solution for you if that's what you want to do. Now, having said all this, I'll also say that everybody's different.

And my good friend and startup partner, Quinn Harker, he will run a marathon and go ride his bike and go for a swim after that. Iron Man. And for him, the challenge and the pain and the willpower is actually part of the attraction, right? So that's part of what brings it to him. So it's no surprise that his weight is perfect. Keep in mind that whatever you hear from me doesn't apply

to everybody. So the other part of the system is finding, experimenting continually, and I know you're into this, experimenting and trying to isolate one thing and saying, okay, I'll do this for a week. Did that make any difference in anything? Absolutely. I mean, the tracking, and I just wanted to underscore a few things. The first is that you have become better identifying alternate causes for, say, hunger, right?

You didn't sleep enough, et cetera. And for instance, many people who cut refined carbohydrates or starchy carbohydrates from their diet will feel like they want carbs, whereas in fact, they're just dehydrated because when you cut carbohydrates, you retain less water. So very simple fix for a lot of people is to put some sea salt or sprinkle a little salt into their drinking water, just into a few cups a day, which then eradicates these types of carb cravings. Branched chain amino acids can do the same thing sometimes. But just to touch on the goals versus systems. So I find for myself that I approach it in a very similar way.

And I'd love to ask you about your MBA program in a second. But when I decided I would not go to an MBA program, but I had fantasized about going to Stanford GSB, Graduate School of Business, for many, many, many years. And I always thought that was kind of where I was. I should have gone undergrad, many years. And I always thought that was kind of where I was. I should have gone undergrad, et cetera. And, uh, at the, at the end of it decided that I would take what that would have cost over two years and invest in startup investments. This was in 2007, right after the four hour work week had come out and decided that I, I would, I would invest based on the assumption that I would lose it all, but that I would try to optimize for skill acquisition. There you go.

There you go. Okay. And so when I make decisions these days, whether it's a TV show or the 4-Hour Chef and trying new distribution with Amazon, even if everything goes sideways, I try to stack the deck. And usually that's kind of the who, what, where, why, and when rundown like a journalist. I'll be like, who am I doing this? Let me optimize the people I'm interacting with so that I can acquire as many skills or abilities as possible. When and where, if I can be in novel environments, let me try to optimize for that, et cetera. So that I'll have this goal. And it's usually a big audacious goal of some type, even if that fails,

like the four-hour chef was boycotted by almost every retailer on the planet because it came out of Amazon Publishing. And I was prepared for that. And that then allowed me to do experiments with BitTorrent and so on. So I came out of it not entirely happy with missing the goal. Of course, I'm very competitive, but there were skills that then carried over to future projects. So I also view sort of my decisions in a very similar way. Not to say it's the only way, but I find having both to be very helpful for me. Yeah, I would kind of summarize that by saying that the product is always yourself. Right, right. I would kind of summarize that by saying that the product is always yourself. Right. As soon as you lose sight of that, then you're working a 14-hour day.

You're sacrificing your health. I mean, you probably did all those things too. But the path is to do less of that and take care of your health and maximize your instrument. What was the first time you were paid for Dilbert, like received payment for Dilbert? It was after being syndicated and then waiting several months for the accounting to work through the system. And that was probably 1989. 1989. I'm having trouble doing the math here.

Roughly how old were you at the time? Are we going to do math in public? I'm trying not to. That is a social... So you were like late 30s, I think. Is that right? Early 30s. Early 30s. And were you at Pac Bell at the time or had you already left? I was at Pac Bell and stayed there after Dilbert

was in newspapers for about eight years. Well, no, I stayed there for several years after Dilbert, but eight years in total. And was that purely to get the income from cartooning to a point where you could survive on that? Or were there other reasons that you stayed at that job for eight years? I'd hate to say skill acquisition, but that's really a big part of the answer. I was working in the technology lab in those years when the internet was new. Literally the first person I knew who heard the word Internet, you know, outside of my work friends. So we were learning things that I knew had, you know, a huge impact on my future, and I didn't want to kind of lose that foot in it. And that actually became critical for the success of Dilbert later because Dilbert became the first syndicated comic on the internet back when that seemed like a silly idea.

So someone was out. But when I say skills acquisition, I'm counting the fact that I was getting most of my fodder for the cartoon from my actual experiences and what coworkers were suggesting. So I had that going. But yes, I mean, I waited until I knew I could do it financially, but I continued waiting long after that because of the skill acquisition and also because the pain of working completely goes away when you don't need to do it. Right. It's like dealing with small children, right? As long as you're not forcing them to do something, the likelihood of it happening goes way up. But think of just this simple example where in the real work world, I'll say, I'm going to try doing X. Oh my God, if X doesn't work, my career, my promotions, my everything. But after I didn't need to be there, I could just say, what's better, X or Y? X.

Your mind is free. Yeah. No, it's I think something that is commonly misinterpreted with, say, some of the writing that I've done is people are like, oh, I should just quit everything and throw Hail Mary and sort of jump off the cliff and learn to fly on the way down. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like if you can keep your current gig, do this on the weekends, do this early in the morning, moonlight, and then you can decide where on the spectrum you want to be, whether you want to have both jobs, whether you want to do one 20% of the time, but there's no need to sort of put all of your eggs in one basket right at the outset. What was Dogbert's original name?

So before Dogbert was published, he was a doodle that I would draw on my whiteboard in my cubicle at Pacific Bell and before that at Crocker National Bank. And I had a contest to name the characters, and the name Dilbert was named by a friend of mine, Mike Goodwin, who didn't know he had seen it in a World War II cartoon that had the same name, Dilbert. And I found out about that after it got published. I wouldn't have used the name, but it's lucky I did. And I guess the original creator didn't have a problem with it because he never contacted me. But because I had this character, Dilbert, and he was the type of guy who would be a loner, I wanted to give him a dog just so there was somebody to interact with. And I wanted the name of the dog to have some correspondence with Dilbert.

And so Dogbert's original name was Dildog. Now, did he ever make it into a strip with the name dildog or no no i i wisely decided that was not a good commercial decision at least not for newspapers because they're all you know aggressively rated g what uh what aspects of dilbert changed uh besides that in the gestational period or when you were testing out new characters on the whiteboard and so on? Well, in the beginning, their characters are not really formed. So you've got an idea of who they are, and maybe you're thinking of somebody else when you write it. But over time, they become some part of me. They each represent a different voice in my head.

Dilbert's kind of the voice of reason and the one that is – I would say he's challenged by – he loves a challenge. He likes fixing things more than he likes talking to people and social interactions and stuff. Dogmert is the evil part of my brain, the little voice in my head that is saying just the worst things when I'm in an otherwise polite conversation. It's the voice that's trying to keep me from not laughing or forcing me to tell a bad joke suddenly so I have a reason to laugh at it myself, really covering up that I'm thinking something horrible. So yeah, he's the worst part of me, my megalomania and my lack of regard for other humans, which obviously is an exaggeration.

I have plenty of regard for other humans, but not always their intelligence. So Dogbird takes that role. And you've done – I mean you've had a massively successful career. Obviously, Dogbert has done spectacularly well. I've heard that one of the innovative things you did of many was including your email address in your panels. Is that – do you think that had a huge impact? And what other types of decisions do you think helped Dilbert to become the success that it became? So there were several key things that happened, and this will dovetail back to a conversation about luck. But when we first contemplated putting Dilbert on the Internet, that in itself looked like a huge risky thing because, my God, you can't give away your content that we're selling to other people right in front of their noses as we're selling it to them.

I mean it sounded crazy then, right? Today it's just this normal business, right? But then it seemed like a big risky thing. Likewise, when I decided to see if I could get better user input using the things I'd learned in my Berkeley MBA classes, I did what no cartoonist had ever done before. And it sounds stupid and trivial when you say it from today's perspective, but I opened a channel directly to my customers. So normally what happens is the cartoonist writes something. It goes to an editor who sends it to an editor in a newspaper who sends it to production. Newspaper delivery boy gives it to the user who reads it.

I have no idea what happened after that. I don't know if they laughed, cursed, hated me. So I thought, well, I'll do business 101. I mean, this is what I should be doing. It's a business. It's not art per se. And so I ran my email address in the margins of the strip. Thousands of people started writing to me. I was getting thousands of emails a day. A lot of them said the following, I don't know anyone else who has emails, so I'm writing to you. It was literally the dawn of the internet. To give you an idea how early it was in the dawn of the internet, my address was my full name, scottadams.aol.com. Nobody had that.

I mean, there are six people named Scott Adams in my town. It's like the primordial soup of the Internet days. Right. So thousands of people wrote in, but what they said was interesting. So consistently they said when Dilber is doing his office type things, which he actually wasn't doing much in the beginning. Mostly he was staying at home and interacting with Dogbird and going on dates. But only once in a while he would go to the office. But it turns out people liked that the most by far. And so I pivoted. So I changed Dilbert into a workplace strip. And that was certainly the biggest change, the biggest thing that made a difference. The other was

putting it on the internet early when being early to anything made a big difference. And it was the right product to be on the internet. But it also solved our biggest marketing problem with newspapers because our salesperson would go into a newspaper and say, hey, here's a new thing. And they'd say, ah, you know, we don't get it. We don't care in the old days. But once I had literally thousands of email messages saying, this is the greatest thing. Why don't you put it in my newspaper? And then they named the actual newspaper. I printed them all out. I collected them by what newspaper they mentioned, sent them off physically like printouts to the salespeople.

And then they walked into the office of the editor and put the printout on their desk, and the editor said, okay. I mean for a newspaper, if five people ask for something that they've never heard of and it's something that they can easily – for $20 a month, they can put it in the newspaper or whatever it is. They're going to do that. It's true with politicians also. Just as a side note for people. Honestly, you get 10 people to call a lawmaker's office, especially if they're not somebody who's in the news every day. It gets a lot of attention. That's really smart. Yeah, and let me say that about me as well.

I mean I'm a voracious reader of all my feedback on social media as well as email and everything else. And I've changed substantial things in the way I approach Dilbert or other jobs based on one or two emails. What other types of feedback? Oh, don't ask me. Well, I'll tell you the biggest change that there were actually more emails than a few, but it's one that jumps to mind. When Catbert was originally introduced, he was just a cat.

He wasn't meant to be a regular character. But thousands of people, I'm not going to say thousands, I'll say probably hundreds of people emailed and said, we love Catbert. And what's interesting is he didn't have that name. So more, I mean, many people said Catbert, but you had not given him that name. Right. So, Catbert now comes out of nothing. I mean, I certainly had no plans to have a Garfield competitor, and now I'm stuck.

I'm like, oh, they all want it, but what am I going to do with it? So, now I'd moved Dilbert into the office by that time, and I'm like, ah, how do I get a cat in the office? It's already too much that I've got a dog there. And then I realized that a cat's personality fits perfectly with human resources, so I made him the director of human resources. Because, you know, like a human resources person, a cat doesn't really care if you live or die. He just likes playing with you before it happens. And recently I started working with a company called ThinkHR who does subscriptions of HR advice, I guess, my simple description. And I'm working with them with Catbird as a potential way to get their message out there.

So this is a good example of the systems versus the goal. I mean, I certainly didn't start out to have a cat cartoon. I started out to do a bunch of things. I introduced a lot of characters. I watched to figure out which ones worked. And I just put water on the stuff that worked. What are some of the tools that most help you, tools or routines that most help you cartoon these days or write for that matter either? Well, I use my Wacom Cintiq for the drawing. So what that is, is a special monitor.

In my case, it's a really big one. I think it's a 27 inches across. And I can draw on it directly with the stylus, much like you would draw on paper, although you have to learn new techniques and use Photoshop and a lot of different stuff. So it's just Photoshop and a Cintiq. Welcome. And after that, I just usually peruse the news, drink coffee, eat my protein bar in the morning, and something jumps in my head. And if it doesn't, maybe I'll read a few email messages that I think will have messages or suggestions.

Sometimes I'll check the suggestions coming in from various places. Usually I've got an email address just for that that runs in the strip every day. So some combination of that gives me some kind of an idea or I jump off of what was the last thing I wrote the day before because sometimes they lend themselves to a serial treatment. But I don't have much of a process beyond being in the right frame of mind physically and mentally, like getting rid of all the other distractions, which is in part why I do it in the morning, not just because my energy and my mind are better, but because distractions are far less. So, you know, for me, creativity is a process of removing barriers.

It's not so much a process of pulling something in that was outside me. Right, right. It's sort of decreasing the noise to signal ratio so that what was already there is easier to elicit or put down? Is that how you do it? Well, actually, the analogy I use is it has more to do with flow rate. That is to say, if I'm busy, I'm thinking about lots of things, I might have one good idea in an hour. But if I clear my mind, I can't stop them coming. They're like bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Now, that's the part, unfortunately, everybody wants to know.

What's the secret to being a creative person and having a new idea every day? And unfortunately, there's just some of this that either is a bad childhood experience or DNA. You can do a lot to make yourself better at whatever you have, but the flow rate of ideas that I have, I think probably is unnatural. I think that's true, but I also think it's a skill that can be cultivated. James Altucher, who's a friend of mine, has recommended to his readers for some time to develop the habit of just writing down 10 ideas, I think usually in the morning each day. And I've spoken to a number of people who have adopted this habit and it's become exponentially easier over time to the extent that now they can't contain it to 10. So it is a curious question. I mean, the question of creativity comes up a lot.

But like you, I have to prevent too many extraneous inputs if I want to have any type of unique output. And so I'd love to ask you about your question or your morning, rather. If you have full control of your day, what is your ideal first 60 to 90 minutes look like in your day like what time do you wake up what type of protein bar do you eat etc so depending on when i went to sleep either five or six but let's say five i get up and i walk directly downstairs um and get my coffee so push one button and wait for it. Have my one protein bar, which is always the same, because the coffee is always the same, the protein is always the same,

and the time is always the same, give or take that hour, because I'm removing decisions. What type of protein bar do you eat? I eat a Builder's 20-gram protein bar chocolate peanut butter, and I'm so smart that I actually picked it up and had the label in front of me because I expected that question. Well, you know me well. At that point, I usually get on and start looking. I guess I check Twitter first and check my webpage to see if anything blew up that I don't know about.

Did I say anything yesterday that caused the world to melt down? Because I'll need to know about that. Failing that, I usually open Business Insider because I just like reading it. Usually while I'm waiting for my coffee, I've looked at my Facebook feed and just tweeted, played around. Basically, I'm just trying to wake up, get my mind working. And there's a process where once you clear your mind, you have to flood it. And you may use different words for this, but I know you do it. So you empty it, and then you flood it with new input that's not the old input.

So I'm looking at the news. I'm looking at stuff I haven't seen. I'm not looking at yesterday's problem for the fifth time. I'm looking at a new problem. I'm thinking of a new idea. So I'm flooding in all the new stuff. But then you've got to find out where in that flood is the little piece that's worth working with. And that's where I use the body model.

I kind of cycle through all this stuff. The body model, you said? Yeah. So the model is your brain can't find good content, right? Not directly in an intellectual sense. Obviously, the brain is involved. But what I mean is that as I'm thinking of these ideas and they're flowing through my head, I'm monitoring my body. I'm not monitoring my mind.

And when my body changes, I have something that other people are going to care about too. Oh, that's cool. I like that. So that means posture or what type of indicators are there? I'll tell you. If I'm thinking of, let's say, a particular setup for a joke, I'll think of the joke and then quite often I'll audibly go. And it wasn't planned, right? It just went, and it was sort of a half laugh that you do when you're by yourself and you think of something funny, but you don't want to do a full laugh.

There are other times when, so for example, I told you the story about being in the shower and thinking of the entire plot for God's Debris in one moment. My entire body lit up. When I had the idea for the blog that I wrote recently that just sort of lit up the internet, I felt it as a full body experience long before I wrote it. So that's largely true. Now with Dilbert, if you do this long enough, a lot of the things that used to be technique just get baked into your personality after a while. And so there's stuff you do second nature that you're kind of moving art into the domain of craft. So for example, I know because I've learned over time that there are six elements of humor, six dimensions of humor. And if I use at least two of them, I've got a

joke. If I use three of them, it's probably going to be a really good joke, but that's not enough. There's still that, there's something about it, that X factor, that thing you can't put your finger on that just makes your body move. It just moves your body. And if you can't get that, no craft in the world can survive. know we can't resuscitate it and have you have you you written about the the six elements of humor before i did i i've written about it a number of times i think if anybody googles my name scott adams and six dimensions of humor you'll see it yeah you'll see a few references to it got Got it. And what would be two examples of the six, just for fun? Oh, I know you're good at this, because you know what you just did that was just so smart?

If you had asked me for the six, I would have changed the subject, because I know I'm not going to remember. But you asked me for two, because you know I could come up with two. All right. So I'm going to go for six six because you've now made it safe for me to do that. Wonderful. So there's cute, there's bizarre, there's recognizable, there's naughty. How many was that? Yeah, you're already way ahead of the game. You got four. You got cute, bizarre, recognizable, and naughty. You'll have to Google the rest. Let me give you an example. So cute is usually kids and dogs, right?

And bizarre is just anything that's out of place. So if you know your cartoon history, you will know that the far side used primarily the dimension of putting something out of place. So you'd have an animal talking. So as soon as the animal's talking, he's got one dimension. the far side used primarily the dimension of putting something out of place. So you'd have an animal talking. So as soon as the animal's talking, he's got one dimension. So he's basically starting a race, and he's already ahead of you if you're the cartoonist who's sitting there saying, I think I'll do a comic about anything. The world is my canvas. But he started ahead of you already.

So he's got the bizarre, and then he'll have the animal say something often in the framing or the type of mood that a human would say. So that's the recognizable part. So if you could put yourself in the picture and say, oh, God, I recognize that situation, but it's an animal talking. Clearly, there's more to it than that. Again, you have to have at least that, two dimensions. Take a look at the best comic strip of all time that I think nearly everyone in the world would say,

Calvin and Hobbes. There's a talking tiger that is both bizarre and cute. All right? So he took the far side one dimension further as a starting point. All right? So he took the far side one dimension further as a starting point. All right? The moment you start reading Calvin and Hobbes, you already have cute because his drawing is amazing, both of the child and the – he's got a double cute.

He's got a child and an animal, and it's a cool animal, right? So he starts that before he even writes a joke. So then if he has the kid doing something naughty or also anything bad happening to anybody is, of course, one of the dimensions. So cruelty, did I mention cruelty? Am I up to five yet? You're up to five. That's number five. Shoot. By the end of this interview, I will have come up with that sixth one, and I'm going to scream it in the middle of whatever other unrelated question. Or you could just leave people with a bated breath to tap

Google into their keyboards. That's another way to get them to go to your site, I'm sure. But we've got cruelty. What are some of the most, or could you be just one, underrated or underappreciated cartoonists in your mind? People that perhaps listeners haven't checked out that they should check out. I would say a comic called F-, F being like you're a failure, F. You can Google that. It's syndicated, and that's the one that makes me laugh the most of the ones you haven't heard of. Of the ones you may have heard of, that also makes me laugh the most, Pearls Before Swine. And that would be no accident because he literally studied the two of six rule, and I had conversations with him when he was coming up,

and you can see that he's one of the few cartoonists who's approached it the way I have, which is as a business, not just an art. And so he's the most methodical operator out there now in terms of doing what is the smartest thing to do for your art. Cool. F-minus and pearls before swine. I will check out both of those. I actually have not checked out either. I want to be respectful of your time, but I would love to ask a couple of rapid fire questions. The answers don't have to be rapid, but I'd love to just ask a couple of short questions before we come up on time, if that's okay with you. Sure.

And I know you want to ask me about the voice thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, we could do that first. I mean, could you describe what happened to you and what you learned from that experience?

I mean, and there's a fair amount out there for people who want to dig into the specifics of the condition and so on, but maybe you could just give people an overview of what happened because it sounds terrifying.

Right. So I'm not going to give like a big scary medical thing on your show. It'd be terrible and people can Google it. If you Googled spasmodic dysphonia, you would learn that I and tens of thousands of other people had this problem where you lose your voice, meaning that it clips your vocal cords spas at times when you don't want them to, so you can't get out words that make sense. It was so unknown that it took me a long time to figure out what it was,

and I had to figure out using Google and hunting down a doctor and doctor to doctor. My path went through Japan down to USC, and finally Dr. Gerald Burke, who had invented a surgery that was not well publicized, that worked for me. So since then, I've been active trying to tell people who have spasmodic dysphonia, which, by the way, I'm going to do an audio impression of it because there are people listening to this, guaranteed, who have it and don't know they have it because they've never heard anyone else who spoke that way. And they're trying to figure out what it is.

So I'm going to do an impression, and I'm going to send like three dozen people to their doctor with a solution. All right? Here's my impression. If I were to order a Diet Coke, since my vocal cords would clench, especially on some problem syllables, it would come out like a clipped cell phone. So instead of a Diet Coke or can I have a Diet Coke, it would come out as Diet Coke like that. So it sounds like you're just dropping syllables. So everybody at home who said, holy shit, I know somebody like that, the name for it is spasmodic dysphonia. But I got something much cooler. You want to hear it? I do. That's on this. We might be able to solve this problem today. Let's do it. This is literally true. I might

actually be able to, with your help, solve the entire problem for 50,000 people in this country. Maybe. It's a long shot, right? Let's give it a go. But I'm going to take it. All right. The surgery fixed me, and what that involved was cutting some nerves in my neck that disconnected my brain from my vocal cords for three and a half months. They spliced in a new network that takes three and a half months to regrow, and once it regrows,

then I could talk, but very weakly, and it took years to get my voice back to where it is. What's interesting about that is nobody knows why that works, because the problem has been well-identified to be a little brain hiccup. So you don't fix your brain by rewiring the nerves in your neck. Now, hold that thought. Nobody knows why the surgery works. Now, the only other thing that works for this that I've personally verified, because I've talked to the individuals who've done this, and I actually went through this training myself, was a doctor who some thought was a not because science was not quite supporting his method. But he would go in and he would say, everybody hum at the key of F

for weeks and try to never talk at your natural, deeper tone. Instead, just hum. Now, I think it might have worked for 10 or 20 percent of the people. But keep in mind, this is an incurable problem. Right. The 10 to 20 percent of the people walked out with perfect voices. I spoke to one of them, actually several of them. I spoke to live, so I verified.

And one of them crossed over my week so i know it's a real person not a shill or something now what do these two things the surgery which nobody knows why it works and the humming in the key of f which nobody knows why it works what do they have in common in both of those cases it's the only time the subject takes an extended period without re-injuring the muscles in the vocal cords. So, there is a non-zero chance, and I actually saw my surgeon a couple months ago just at an event, and I said, is it possible that the only reason your surgery works is that you prevented me from re-injuring the muscles of my vocal cords for long enough for them to heal for the first time ever. Because when you have this problem, you end up straining it every single day because you're trying really hard to talk.

It's just not working. So imagine if you had a sprained ankle and you ran a marathon every day. It would never heal. Right. it would never heal right so the humming in the key of f uses different equipment like it uses just a you know or or maybe it just has less of a pressure on the the same equipment i don't know and by the way i'm talking at what i can best approximate as the key of f i have i'm tone deaf so i'm not sure i'm getting there my normal speaking voice is actually much lower and i do that to preserve my my speaking. That's one of the things you learn. So put those two things together.

The only two things, these two things that are the only things that work to solve spasmodic dysphonia is people didn't talk, not even a little bit, using their normal voice for an extended period. Three and a half months in one case, maybe as few as a week or two weeks in the other case. But if you have this or you know somebody who does and you're listening to this, somebody out there, I want you to see if you're in a special situation where this makes sense for you. Just don't talk for two weeks. If you've got maybe a spouse who can answer the phone or type of job where you can do an email, just as an experiment. And then email me.

You'll see my email address or you can find me on Twitter or anything. You'll see my addresses in the strip every day. And tell me if it worked because if I can get three people in the world that this works for, Tim, we just fixed the problem. It could be a really big breakthrough. I love this idea. And for those people who might be considering this, who think they might be a candidate, you could also look at, for instance, silent meditation retreats. There are 10 to 14-day silent meditation retreats through groups like Spirit Rock and others. So you could actually create a context wherein that is reinforced. It's not just willpower, but you're in an environment where it's not permitted.

So that could be also something to look into. But no, this is very exciting. I like this. Yes, and I should say that whispering is still perfectly allowed because that doesn't use your vocal cords. So you can communicate with anybody you want to in a quiet room during this quiet period. This is very interesting. Well, I'm glad we touched on that.

Yeah. And again, I have to emphasize, it's totally a long shot, but there's somebody who listened to this who's going to try it and we'll find out. But the long shots are worth it, right? I mean, you mentioned 10 to 20% with the humming and the key of F. If that were a drug for a major condition and the people for whom it didn't work had no side effects that would that would stand a good chance of getting commercialized you know i mean that's that's

a viable so it's a viable tool if you have a one in five chance of being ah but listen to this the um it gets more interesting because this is more validation for why this might work this doctor could get no credibility because when he would report his cures, which he was shouting at the top of his voice, he was making videos showing the people, showing the actual people talking before and after. It was as convincing as it possibly could be. And when he would take it to the medical community, they would say, oh, it looks like all that happened here is that these people were misdiagnosed in the first place. So you didn't cure spasmodic dysphonia. These are people who just had strained voice boxes or strained whatever,

vocal cords, and you let them rest them for a while and now they're better. I say maybe that's everybody. Right, right. For sure. Definitely. I mean, that's, uh, it's kind of not entirely a perfect parallel, but a lot of people who consider themselves hard gainers, meaning they, they have difficulty gaining muscle mass is particularly true with men are simply training too often. They, they, they are not physiologically capable of recovering from the, the stress that they're imposing on themselves. They never, uh, they never, uh, sort of super compensate and experience this, this hypertrophy. So it's just a matter of removing stimuli as opposed to adding something, you know, the subtraction versus, versus addition, which is

very anti Western medicine in a lot of respects, but in the conventional sense. Let me ask you this. Besides your own books, what book or books have you given most as a gift? I've never given a book as a gift. You haven't? Wow. Okay. No, this is interesting.

So do you give gifts? Maybe that sounds like a weird question, but if you do, I'd be curious to know what you, what you often give as gifts. Um, I retired from the gift giving business a while ago, um, which takes a long time to train everybody. No, I, I replaced that in favor of being, uh, you know, a nice person on a general basis. Right. You know, like maybe I want to buy you something today, you know a nice person on a general basis right you know like maybe i want to buy you something today you know it doesn't need to be a reason so no i don't i don't do gifts in particular but i'd say uh if you're looking for a book that i think everybody should read perfect it would be a book called influence um by uh i don't know how to pronounce robert chialdini or chialdini yeah that's that's the part i was choking on i didn't know how to pronounce it. Robert Cialdini or Cialdini. Yeah, that's the part I was choking on.

I didn't know how to pronounce the first part, but it's C-I-A-L-D-I-N-I. Yeah. 100% of effective people seem to have read that book. Yeah. In fact, it's one of those things that when I meet somebody and they're operating at a pretty high level, if you mention that book, they've all read it. Yeah, that's true. It's very consistent. But if you talk to the general public, it's still not well known.

And then I would add to that, I haven't read these books, but I took the Dale Carnegie course. And if the books say anything that is as useful as the course, that's probably a good thing. I hear good things about him. I'm a big fan of a lot of his work in particular, not the how to win friends and influence people, but how to stop worrying and start living, which I think is a fantastically well-written book on anxiety. And there's a bit of material on the physiology and so on that's outdated, but the vast majority is fantastically well done. Well, that needs an update because I have a theory that there's a real, there's something called a digital disease,

meaning that if you take the average person and put them in the average simple environment of the past, they were not overwhelmed by its complexity. But I believe that today the average person is overwhelmed by the complexity of life because it got more complicated. And that I barely know an adult who isn't on some kind of drug, either prescribed or otherwise, to deal with anxiety. And I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case when I was a kid. Maybe we have more options now, I guess.

I think there's like a real legitimate mental illness plague. I agree. I totally agree. And I think I saw you mention something along these lines on Twitter, but we're in a distraction economy, right? And it's not only limited to a black box in our living room, but we have obviously the phones, the tablets, the laptops. Now we have wearables. Well, yeah, let me emphasize that point because i realize i sounded like uh old man get off of my lawn um stop this stop this new technology stuff

but i think most people who have heard of me know that i'm very pro future and technology so yeah i'm not saying we should we should back up but keep in mind the names of these biggest companies in your your world like Google, Apple, their business model is distraction. You know, your smartphone, all of that depends on them taking you off your task and making you look at an advertisement or buy their new song or buy their new thing or look at a new app or something. So they're literally in the business of making you distracted and doing the job that

the smartest people in the world using the best science and A-B testing can provide. While in the normal world, it was a fair fight, right? Like, hey, I'm going to ignore your billboard on the highway because I can. It wasn't that hard. that hard ha ha those guys with the billboards they weren't using a ton of science yeah but now now it's me against all the scientists in google yeah all right it's it's total on it's a total stack deck not in your favor yeah uh before you call this true story so as part of the your process um your assistant sent me a form that needed to be filled out. In order to do the process of finding it in my email, printing it out, or in this case, realizing that I had to print out something to look at to realize I didn't need to print something out, it's only two minutes, right? Right.

Totally worth the time, not complaining about the process, completely necessary. But in that two minutes, I only had one hope to be able to complete that two-minute task within the hour so that I'd have it in on time for this. And the only hope was chanting it continually to keep the other thoughts out of my head. So for five minutes, I simply chanted, print the form, print the form, print the form. I would pick up my phone, just by reflex, and start to hit Twitter while I'm chanting. And I would say, no. I actually have to yell at myself. I yell at my hand, no, no, no. And I yell it out all the way back to the table.

And then I go, print the form, print the form. After I printed it, I still had to – then I learned I really needed to do something online instead. And so I had to find that again. So I'm now like, find the email, find the email. So without that, I don't have a hope. Yeah, I need to do that more often, I think. Yeah. It's like holding up a shield to deflect all of the incoming distraction.

You mentioned billboards. If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and where would you put it? It would say, be useful. It would be everywhere. I like it. useful, it would be everywhere. So I realized one day that I could boil down my entire philosophy of how to live into those two words. Just be useful. That comes from my farming upbringing. My mother

grew up on a farm and I grew up next to the farm she grew up on so I worked on it with my grandparents and stuff. And there, you know, there's no wasted energy, right? You can't afford it, yeah. Waste is death. So, you know, you didn't lean. You always pitched in. You didn't wait for somebody to ask.

You just be useful. And so having now made the money that I need to make, I'm far more focused on being useful to the rest of the world, part of the equation for the second half of my life, and far more enjoyable. So if somebody says, how do I be happy? The biggest question in the world, I'd say, be useful. It works every time. It doesn't sometimes work. It works every time. Be useful. Because guess what? People like you. They want to be with you. You're useful. People want to hire you. You're useful. Everything comes together if you just do that one thing. And that dovetails back to the product is you. The project is semi-relevant whether it succeeds. What really matters is did you become a more valuable and therefore more useful person at the end of it? Definitely. And you mentioned happy.

I think a lot of people strive to be happy. A lot of people also strive to be successful, and that means different things to different people. When you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind for you? Well, Donald Trump, but only because he's in the news. So I think the test was completely polluted. What I think is successful, I would say, if I think of it for two seconds, Bill Gates and there's nobody in second place.

Why is that? First of all, he amassed a huge amount of money, but he did so in a way that made the world forever better. And I'm sure that now that you see how the second half of his life is going, I think that he always needed something that didn't just make money. I think that putting the computer on every desk or whatever was a real thing. I believe he amassed that money largely so he could do the second part of his life. And now you take the smartest, most rational human the world has ever produced and find out, well, surprise, everything you thought about him wasn't exactly what you thought. And years ago, when he said his plan was to give it away, and nobody really took that seriously, guess what? He's doing that too. And the way he's doing it is he's picking the

thing that governments can't do and poor people can't do. He's taking not only the place that has the greatest leverage, because he can go in with his brains and money and his scientific ways and the energy that he can attract to himself and pick off these things. His contribution to Africa, by the time he takes the dirt nap or transfers his life force into software, which I think is far more likely in this case, they may rename the nation after him. It might be the continent of Bill Gates when he's done. And I'm

not sure if everybody sees this coming. I mean, he's working on stuff like fixing water. How would everybody like to have water? Would that be good? I mean, he's going after the biggest targets with some guns that have all the ammunition that you would need to go after those targets, and nobody else can do it. He's a very impressive guy. I heard a first-person anecdote from a friend of mine who somehow ended up going on a bird-watching tour with Bill Gates. It's a small group of people, and Bill Gates spent maybe an hour the night before reading a birdwatching guide. And according to my friend,

I mean, literally had perfect factual recall of that book on the tour the next day to the point where he could talk to this professional bird guide in a tropical environment on a peer level, just mind boggling. I mean, talk about CPUpu power yeah what advice and i'll just ask you one or two more questions what advice would you give to your 30 year old self yeah 30 year old self um that was a that was a time of great transition i would say probably patience because I've been playing the system game and not the goal game since I got out of college and literally have a diary in which I wrote my master plan. If you take 10 years following a process and it's not giving you results, that's hard to remain patient. So in retrospect, that was the only thing I needed to maybe alleviate some of my pain. But on the other hand, impatience probably drove me harder. So maybe I wouldn't tell myself that either. And if your 30-year-old

self said, how exactly do you propose I be patient? How would you respond to that? Well, my 30-year-old self wouldn't have access to medical marijuana, so I would have to have a limited canvas with which to paint. I've always made it a top priority since I was a teenager and had tons of stress-related medical problems to make that job one, to learn how to not have stress. I would consider myself a world champion at avoiding stress at this point in dozens of different ways. And a lot of it is just how you look at the world. But most of it is really the process of diversification.

So I'm not going to worry about losing one friend if I have 100, but if I have two friends, I'm really going to be worried. I'm not going to worry about losing my job because my one boss is going to fire me because I have thousands of bosses at newspapers everywhere, and lots of them can like me one day, and it doesn't make any difference to my life. So one of the ways to not't make any difference to my life. So one of the ways to not worry about stress is to eliminate it. I don't worry about my stock picks because I have a diversified portfolio.

So diversification works in almost every area of your life to reduce your stress. I love this. Well, Scott, we need to hang out more. We need to play more tennis. We should get Naval in the room to just up the intensity quotient also. Not that we need it, but always fun to chat with you. And where can people learn more about you, find you online, say hello? Where would you like people to check you out? I would like people to go to Dilbert.com and check out my blog if they

like my non-humor thoughts. Pretty soon, my startup, which is now called Calendertree.com, will have a little pivot and have a new name. And we'll make lots of noise about that. But you'll want to watch for that. And what is your Twitter handle if people want to ping you on Twitter? Scott Adams says. And if you could make, just in closing, one ask or recommendation to the people listening to this, what would that be besides checking your stuff out? Think of your life as a system. Think of yourself as the most important part of the system.

Be useful and make yourself more valuable as you go. I love it. So everybody listening, for links, I'll also include specific links to a couple of popular posts on Scott's blog. Just visit the show notes. Everything we mentioned will be in there at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out. And Scott, keep creating, man. I love your stuff and hope to see you again soon. Thank you, Tim. I love this. Let's do it again.