Episode 610 Scott Adams: Risk Management Mistakes, Death Penalty, Some GOOD News Stories

Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Hey, everybody, come on in here. You know, you probably ask yourself, what is the best thing about my day? And this would be you talking to yourself, not me talking to myself. And you probably say to yourself, the best part of the day, it's probably that time when I have the simultaneous sip in the morning with that cartoonist guy who doesn't know the words to the song. Well, you're in luck, because that moment is upon us. It's the moment when all the dopamine in your body comes out to party. It starts the day right. It's that little bit of togetherness, a little bit of feeling connected to your fellow human being and your lady human being. Is it sexist to say fellow human being? It might be, but we don't need to solve that right now. What we need right now is, well, I think, you know. I think, you know what you need right now. It goes like this. You need a copper, a mug or a glass, a steinochalis, a tankard, maybe a thermos of flask, a canteen, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip. Unparalleled pleasure. Dopamine. Good stuff. So, in no particular order, let's talk about some stuff that's happening. So, apparently the Supreme Court gave a victory to the Trump administration and is going to allow them to use defense funds for defending the country. Now, I know it seemed to you like it might be a close call, but, yes, our Supreme Court is on it. They're on it, and they've decided that you can make a budget and then you can. You can decide where that budget goes. Exactly. So if you've got a defense budget, apparently you can divert some of that to any kind of defense that makes sense, in this case, a wall. And I'll tell you the thing that fascinates me about this is, do any of you know how much wall has been built or approved or how much needs to be built? Because I keep thinking I'm getting a handle on that. You know, I'll hear a number and I'll say, okay, that's. I'll hold that number in my mind. That's the number of miles that we want to, you know, have a wall or some kind of a barrier. And then I'll say, okay, how much are we actually getting done? How much is funded? And it always seems like some small amount. And then somebody will say, and that's not even new area. It's just rebuilding a wall that had some problems. But I say to you this, if this wall situation is like every other situation in the entire world, there are some parts of it that are very important to protect, and there are other parts that are less important. So if the, if the areas that they're doing right away, even if it's only, you know, 100 miles here or there, that might be the most important hundred miles. So we could be getting a bigger bang for the buck than the numbers indicate, but I don't really know. And what I love about this is that the President has, I would say he's created a reality where none existed. And then the actual reality is probably going to follow the artificial reality that the President has created. The artificial reality is that he's going to get funding for a wall, he's going to start building the wall, and he'll just keep going until there's enough wall. So he's created that impression in many people's minds that that process has already begun. And indeed it has already begun. But it does make a difference if it's tiny versus it's significant. But psychologically, it doesn't make much difference because if you're anti Trump or pro Trump, anti wall or pro wall, you're still hearing stories about wall getting built. You're hearing people argue, well, it's 50 miles or it's 100 miles, or he's got approval for 300 or he's got approval for 100. But every time you. What you're hearing is some wall is getting built. So the President starts with making you feel it, think it, visualize it, until you can't imagine that no wall will get built. It becomes impossible to imagine a world where no wall ever gets built. And then he reports that walls getting built. Now, were his first reports of walls being built exactly accurate? Does he do that? Is this the President who always gets all the details exactly accurate? No, he's the President who knows how to create reality out of nothing. And in this case, he created a reality in which some wall was getting built. Critics would say, there's no wall being built, there's just funding that we already had to fix up some walls that already existed. And so some people say there's nothing happening that wasn't going to happen anyway. And others say, well, he promised us a wall. And sure enough, we're hearing reports that there's a wall getting built. So I think the President has. And he'll never get credit for this sort of thing because it's sort of invisible. But he's created reality, he sold the reality. Maybe shading the details of what's a rehab versus what's new, all maybe shading the details of what budget's already been approved long ago and what's new money. So maybe those details got shaded a little bit. But at the end of it, the entire country is under the impression that the government's building a wall. And they're not really going to see any bad from that, are they? There's nobody who's going to hear a story that says they built a wall and therefore somebody died or something because of the wall. I mean, there might be a construction accident, but that's not what I'm talking about. So you're not going to hear anything negative that the wall broke. It's one of those things where it could take years before you even know if it's making a difference. So you're going to hear all the success stories every time a block gets picked up or a pipe gets stuck in the ground or whatever they're doing to build walls. So I think the President's created this perfect situation where we have the impression that the wall is inevitable. The wall is already being built and there are some little questions about where the money comes from, but the government's working it out. That's exactly where the President wants everybody to be thinking. Now you might say to yourself, scott, Scott, Scott, the details matter, he's not building enough wall. Well, let me ask you this. How much wall does he need to build for the people who are thinking about coming across the border to imagine it's getting harder to come across the border. The border is largely psychological. And when I say the border is likely is largely psychological. With or without a wall. If people were incentivized enough, it was a matter of life or death, they could get across, they could figure out a way. It would just be really, really hard. So there's a psychological element which is you thinking, okay, this is harder than I'm willing to take on. So the psychology of it he consistently gets right. That's the real story there. I'm seeing this debate, new topic, on whether white supremacist mass murderers are worse than jihadis and that we must all be racists if we're worried about radical Islamic terrorists. But we're not worried about white supremacist murders because the history recently is mostly white supremacist related murdering. And so people say, hey, if you're gonna go by the numbers, if you're gonna be rational, these white Supremacists are racking up the body count, so they're the ones you need to worry about. And the radical jihada jihadists haven't really killed anybody lately in the mainland, at least not in the homeland. And so they say that the white supremacists are the big risk. To which I say, what's wrong with your brain? Is there something. Did something happen? Did you have a terrible accident which injured your ability to think? Because you don't judge future risk by past experience. If you're smart, you don't say, what has happened before that's going to tell me what's going to happen in the future. How many times has there been a nuclear war that killed us all? Zero times. How worried are we that we'll have a nuclear war? Plenty worried. All right. How many times has North Korea nuked the United States? Zero. Never happened. Should we therefore say, well, there's no risk. North Korea's never nuked us before. Does that make sense? It does not. So when you're looking at risk, you can't look at the body count for the past month or year or even 10 years. You have to look at the situation. What are the variables that are in play? If the only thing that was mattering, that sentence made no sense. Let me try that again. Backing up. Let's say hypothetically that there had never been an Elbonian who came to the United States and killed anybody. Never happened. Not a single person from the country of Elbonia ever came to the United States and hurt anybody. But we also have credible information that they're trying to get a dirty bomb and they've made threats that they want to use the dirty bomb in the United States. Under those conditions, should we be concerned about Elbonians or should we say, you know, they haven't killed anybody yet. Let them in. Of course you should be concerned. So anybody who's just counting bodies and saying, okay, well, our risk of the future is based on these numbers from the past you are experiencing. Loser think. That is not good thinking. It's not a question of good or bad opinions. That's just bad thinking, which is different. You can have different opinions based on different priorities and experience and everything else. But if you think that future risk is based on what we've experienced recently, that's not an opinion. That's just something wrong with the thinking. You should know the difference. So there's a story about apparently a gigantic bust of somebody who used to be a police officer, some kind of police officer in Mexico, but he's in the United States now. And he got busted with enough. I think it was fentanyl or car fentanyl or something to kill millions of people. Of course, people are saying, how long before that's on a drone? And the answer is not long, because there are people who have drones and there are people who have vials of the worst stuff in the world. It's just not going to be that long before somebody puts them together. Now, don't worry about me giving people that idea because trust me, that idea is plenty obvious. But I do worry that there'll be a time when just nobody wants to go to public events. It's possible that in our lifetime you won't see public events anymore where people all go to a place and stand in the same place in a stadium or something. It might just come to an end, but maybe not right away. Here's an interesting story. I tweeted this around because what made it remarkable is the way CNN reported it. So CNN had an article in which they talked about the federal change to make capital punishment a thing again. So apparently the states could have their own laws about capital punishment, but on top of that, the federal government could have a death penalty for federal offenses. There are fewer of them compared to the number of people that the states are prosecuting, but they exist. And the Trump administration has reversed a policy that's been in place for a number of years in which they weren't pursuing any deaths. But apparently Trump administration will. Now, I talked about this before. One of the funny and smart things that they're doing is apparently they're going to execute a white supremacist first. Okay. It doesn't get any better than that. Politically, that's just the smartest thing you could possibly do. I don't know if that's a coincidence or just somebody was smart enough to make it work that way, but man, oh man, does that. That's just so perfect. There's nothing else to say about it. But that's not what I wanted to talk about as part of the context for the story. CNN's article, I couldn't tell if it was really a news or opinion piece because, you know, CNN is not clear about what's in news and what's an opinion. But it was sort of in between as much of their stuff as. And it talked about the story of Trump and the Central Park Five. And he talked about the. The full page ad that Trump ran calling for the death penalty to be reinstated for serious crimes. Now, what was remarkable about the article is that it was unbiased and it's the first time I've seen that. So let me say this again. It was an article on CNN's website. It was not written by a Trump supporter. It's obviously written by somebody who was not trying to support the president. You can tell that much. But, but they reported the story accurately. And here's what, what I mean by that. So the way you, you've heard it on the Internet and you've heard it from all the President's critics, you probably heard that he wrote a full page ad calling for the execution of the five African American young men who were accused and actually confessed to a horrible crime in Central Park. They raped and almost killed somebody and later they were exonerated. I guess the confessions were forced or something. But during that time, that time zone, Trump ran the full page ad. But here's what CNN accurately reported. They accurately reported in clear language that Trump wasn't talking about the Central Park Five specifically, that he was talking about crime general. And it also reported that the Central Park Five had confessed. And in other words, there was, even if, even if Trump had been wrong about their guilt, it's obvious that if the five had confessed that a reasonable person could think they were guilty. You could be wrong, but it's perfectly reasonable to think that five people who confessed might be guilty. That's not an unreasonable thing to think. Then they ran a clip of a Younger Donald Trump, 1989, I think, on Larry King. And Larry King asked him if he thought that these five people should get the death penalty. And he said that the woman had not died their victim. And if she didn't die, then no, because the death penalty was for, you know, for murder. And so I thought it was the cleanest, I would say judgment free story about Trump maybe I've ever seen on cnn, because, you know, anybody on social media, they hear the Central Park Five, they say, and that's proof that he's a darn racist because he wanted to execute innocent black men. Okay, that's like taking the story that's true and then adjusting it just enough so it's a completely different story. And it's sort of like it reminds you of the actual story. But CNN reported the actual story that the Central Park Five had confessed. Like most people, Trump thought they were guilty. And he ran an article about crime in general. Didn't even mention the Central Park Five. But of course, it was on his mind, which he had, you know, he essentially admitted with Larry King. So they did nothing in the article to accuse him of being racist in one of the biggest, let's say, accusation areas there is. They just reported it accurately for the first time. Maybe not the first time, but it was striking. It really was, because I don't. Oh, but here's the other interesting thing. You ready for this? Here's the bow I'm going to put on it all. So I read this story, the first unbiased story about Trump maybe I've ever seen on cnn. And I think to myself, I'm going to tweet this story. So I go looking for the Twitter button so you can retweet it. Like, where is that button? Guess where the button was. Didn't have one. Now, I don't know. I don't know if I'm actually noticing something real or it's a coincidence. So I don't know. But the one unbiased story didn't have a sharing button on it for any of the sites, Twitter or Facebook or anything else. And I looked everywhere, and I'm pretty sure their stories have share buttons. Right? Am I wrong about that? I'm almost positive that they have. They all have. Yeah. So I ended up copying the link and doing it manually. But think about how few people will share something if you don't have a share button. You know, I mean, I did it because I was going to talk about it, but I probably wouldn't have shared it. If I had just been somebody who thought the article was interesting and it didn't have a button. I probably wouldn't have copied the link and done it that way. All right, that's worth mentioning. The other thing that's interesting about this death penalty situation is that now it introduces the topic and apparently all of the Democratic candidates for president except Biden have weighed in. Oh, no. There's one of the lesser guys who's running, whose name I can't remember, who is still okay with the death penalty under certain situations. But I guess Joe Biden hasn't weighed in yet and you can see what a setup it is, right? So Kamala Harris is against the death penalty. Joe Biden in the past has been for it. Donald Trump is for it. What does Joe Biden do if Joe Biden changes his mind? He looks like another flip flopper and he just fits in with the crowd. And by the way, it might not be what he honestly thinks. So he might look a little disingenuous if he suddenly just takes the AOC position on it or Kamala's position or whatever. But what if he comes out for the death penalty, then he's agreeing with Trump, and it opens up an attack from Kamala. Who can say, well, you would be in favor of the death penalty. Do you know what color people are who are usually. Who are usually executed? I don't know if this is true, but it seems like it opens up an attack that Biden is a little more interested in killing black people than the other Democrat candidates. Now, none of this is fair or accurate. It doesn't really. It's not a way. It's not a. It's not an honest way to characterize the situation. You know, even if Biden is in favor of the death penalty, it doesn't mean he's in favor of killing black people. But if you're running for president, somebody's going to spin it that way, and that can't be good for him. So that is an interesting story. So, you know, we talk at great length about how dangerous the Internet is in terms of everything from phishing scandals to bullying to addiction, you know, being addicted to the Internet. So the Internet has its negatives, but I want to talk about some positives. There have been some real positives lately. The most notable one is if you're not following Bill Pulte, you should. He's kicked off what we could call, or what he calls hashtag, Twitter, philanthropy. And he's at Pulte, at P U L T E. And he's literally giving away money, most of it his, some of it other, other people's, to people who have a good explanation of why they need it. Now, he can't give money to everybody, of course, so he's. He's opening it up so that other people can see the people asking for money and other people can jump in and say, well, you didn't get Bill Pulte's money this time, but maybe I can help you out. So you're seeing people sort of jumping in. I have been amazed at how Bill has tapped into, I guess, some kind of need that people have naturally to be generous. So people who've got a little extra or even just a little bit extra, and even people who don't have extra are still willing to give because they have an impulse. It either matches their religion, it matches their internal moral mechanisms or something. But he's tapped into something important and a lot of people are jumping on board. And then I saw something today that was just one of the best things that I've seen in a long time. So I wanted to share that. And the setup is that there was a gentleman on Twitter who tweeted yesterday that he had been influenced by a little somewhat by me and somewhat by Ed Latimer, who is. If you're not following Ed Latimer, he's one of the best followers on all of Twitter. And what Ed and I both do in our different ways is we give life advice. I do it through my book, how to Fail at Almost Everything and still went big. And my new book that's coming out in a few months Looser think will be, you know, more useful stuff. And apparently there's some number of things I said that this man found useful and things that Ed Latimer said useful. And he stopped drinking. So he decided to stop drinking after years of drinking and was having some success and was crediting the influence of Ed Latimer. I think Ed more than me because Ed has a little more closer experience with that world. And. But here's the good part or even the better part. So that tweet caused another gentleman to some. So Timothy Gumm, G U M M on Twitter weighed in and said, this is Timothy Gum saying, I've drank at least 10 beers a day for the last 20 years. Today is brand new. I'm not going to drink today. I'm going to will it. So with all courage I can muster. So someone who observed someone else who was being influenced by Ed Latimer, I think mostly in a little bit by me, that guy stopped drinking. His example caused an observer to say, hey, you can do it. I can do it. I'm going to jump in now. If you all know that quitting drinking or quitting any kind of drug is hard, not just a little hard, but like crazy hard, hard, hard, hard. So it's going to be a tough challenge. But this gentleman is jumping in and I wonder how many other people would potentially jump in if they felt they were part of something. How many times have we seen the. We've seen the Tide Pod challenge, we've seen the kicking the top off of the bottle challenge, the ice water bucket challenge, whatever it is. And I wonder if these things. I wonder if positive news, you know, things that are actually good for people, I wonder if they could spread at the same rate if it were the right thing. And so I'm really intrigued by this. So I tweeted this gentleman and I noted that he was the bravest person on the Internet today. And I mean that the. The guy who just said in public, I've been drinking heavily for 20 years, or whatever, it was 10 at least. Yeah, 20 years. The guy who admitted that in public and then publicly told us it was he was going to quit. Knowing how hard that is and knowing that, you know, a lot of people don't make was the bravest thing I saw today. Now you might say, ah, that's not as brave as X, Y, Z. No, no, it is, it is. It's as brave as, you know, stopping an armed robbery. He's putting his whole life on the line. You cannot underestimate how hard this will be. This is very, very brave. And I hope he inspires other people because you can see sort of a ripple effect. You know the stuff that Bill Pulte is doing, it causes people to think differently and they start thinking, hey, there's somebody doing something on Twitter and here are people who are clearly being helped by it because the success stories are always reported and usually there's a video somebody who's received this generosity and they're happy about it. But watching these people get off of alcohol and influencing other people to get off alcohol is just one of the best things that you'll ever see. So this made me feel very, very good. I would note that. And before I say this, let me criticize myself before you do, so you don't have to. Right. What I'm going to say next is totally self serving, but it's genuine. So you're going to hear a commercial, but it's for a good purpose. My startups app called Interface allows you to connect with an expert of any type at any price that the expert sets and you have an immediate video call or you could schedule is ideal for someone who wants to help somebody with sobriety and they could do it for no charge, which makes no money for anybody, or they could do it for a charge, but I think most people probably wouldn't. So I probably would not make money on this because people would mostly do this at low or no charge. But imagine being able to talk to somebody right away. Video a stranger who is in the same situation. Sometimes you can't call a friend, sometimes you can't call a family member and maybe you're not that close with them to begin with, but imagine being able to just pick up your phone and be able to talk to somebody who can really coach you on sobriety. Now we won't always have an expert who's available for that, but there are a number who have signed up who are sobriety coaches and addiction specialists. So that's another resource. But you know, and I hope you understand that there's there's not much in the way of money involved for me if people use this because like I said, most of the sponsors are probably going to be so inexpensive or zero that it's not really a money maker. But if it's helpful, that would be great. I hope it would be all right. I have a topic that I've been saving because it's hard to talk about, but it's so helpful. And this is completely off of anything we've talked about, but it's something directly helpful to every one of you. This will be could be one of the most useful things you'll ever hear. It's not about politics, it's just a real world thing. Okay, so there's your setup. So I've raised your expectations and I'll give you a little background. One of the things I like to do with my Dilbert money, you know, once I started making more money than I needed, I'm not huge on luxury. I don't like a lot of cars or houses or anything. So I would spend my money on getting massages. Not the happy ending kind, just regular massages. And one of the things I've learned over the years, having done this now for years with different massage therapists, you know, usually if I'm on vacation, etcetera, do it or maybe once a week here at home. And so I've experienced, I guess over the years, hundreds, hundreds of different massage therapists. And here's what I've discovered. Some of them know how to touch and some don't. In fact, most of them don't know how to touch. They actually don't know how to touch somebody in the right way. And I'm going to teach you how. I'm going to teach you something that apparently the majority of massage therapists actually don't know, which surprises me. And here's the trick. And you can see even people petting a dog. You can tell if they know how to touch. So here are the two tricks to know how to touch. Number one, you must be in the moment. If you're scratching the back of your partner while reading a book, scratch reading a book. What does it feel like to the person who's getting their back scratched? It feels no different than if they scratched their back on a pole. They do not feel your intention because your mind is somewhere else. You're reading a book and you're haphazardly scratching. They can feel it physically, but they cannot feel it emotionally. The good massage therapists are empaths and they can feel what you can Feel or imagine that they can. They're very sensitive to what you feel. And what they do is. Here's the trick, they imagine they're you while they touch you. So while they're touching you, they're putting themselves mentally into your body and they're saying, okay, if I were being touched there, how would I want to be touched? And so they imagine you, they stay in the moment and they're thinking only about you and how it feels while they're touching you. Those people can send you to the moon. The difference between an empath who's been professionally trained giving you a massage is a 10 out of 10. The best massage therapist who's gone to all the school, has years of experience, but is not an empath is a six. Six out of ten. That's the best you can be unless you're putting yourself in the position of the other person and really imagining it. That's the only technique. One technique number two, A B testing and looking for feedback. As a trained hypnotist, one of the things you learn is you look for micro changes in a person to see if you're making them more relaxed, if they're getting into the hypnotic state. So you can do that just by paying attention. Over time, you can pay attention to people's breathing, their body language, their tension, etc. If you're touching somebody, let's say you're a massage therapist and you touch them in a certain way and their breathing changes. That's probably telling you it's either good or bad. Their body changes, they stiffen, they soften, they do something differently, they might even moan. You do more of that. So you a B test until you figure out what works and what doesn't. Let me give you an example on my cat, who isn't here right now. So I've been experimenting on my cat Boo for years. So when I pet my cat, I will pet my cat in whatever normal ways she usually likes. But I'll often test a new thing. This week I discovered that my cat goes completely limp when I, when I massage her chest, sort of her upper cat chest. Now, she likes her stomach massage sometimes, like a dog does. She'll lay at her back and you can rub her stomach. But I noticed that when I pick her up, she usually doesn't want to stay picked up too long. She gets a little, you know, a little anxious after, say, a minute. But if I pick her up and just rub her chest, she goes completely soft, like she's almost been euthanized. And I can hold her as long as I want, as long as I'm doing that. Now, my point is not that your cat would like that. And in fact, I've never met a cat who liked that that I could determine. But this cat, through AB testing, I discovered something that makes her absolutely limp with pleasure. Had I not tested for literally years, I never would have discovered it. Likewise, my dog Snickers has a place that she likes to be petted that you never would have guessed. It's between the eyes. I tried it with other dogs, and they don't seem to have the same experience. So if I pet my dog Snickers between the eyes, she just goes completely limp and will let you do it as long as you want. Now, people are just like that. If you have a partner, or even if you're a massage therapist and you're trying to touch them in a way that you want them to enjoy, the first thing you do is put yourself into their body mentally and you and you keep yourself in the moment. Never touch them haphazardly. Don't touch your partner while you're thinking of other stuff. They'll tell. They can tell the difference. And then secondly, test. Try a little scratch of the neck. Try a little massage of the shoulders. Do they like something on their feet? Who knows? But when you find that thing, it's going to be crazy. I'll tell you one little personal secret. You may notice that I'm due for a haircut. Christina, my girlfriend, volunteered, I don't know, months ago. She said, hey, I could cut your hair, because, you know, easy, obviously, it's just. And so I said, well, I would love that. It turns out that for me, the experience of having Christina cut my hair when she knows I actually like how it feels is better than a professional massage. Because I know she's in the moment. She's not thinking about anything else because she's concentrating on the process and concentrating on me. And it just sends me into, like, a whole other universe. Like, you can't even imagine. Somebody says, too much information. It's a haircut. That's not too much information, is it? So my point being, if you do these two things, put yourself in the other person's mind, do a little AB testing, and stay in the moment, you will send your partner to the moon. But you might have to do a little AB testing to find out just what works best. Listen for breathing. Here's your tell. I don't know if I could do a demonstration of this on video. The tell that a hypnotist looks for is a sudden breathing change. So if you were trying to, let's say, give a massage or something, and somebody went, that's sort of an obvious one. But you look for even more subtle ones. It might be without the noise, it might be just the breath. If you get that, see if you can produce it again. If you can produce it twice, you probably have something there. And that is my advice for the day. Somebody here is saying, I kick my wife. So anything else? She loves it. You've lowered her expectations. Good job. Might take years to do that, but you want to lower expectations. All right, so that's a little. You're not. Let me tell you this. You're not going to understand how good this advice was on touching until you try it. Because if you don't already know these things or you haven't tried these things, you know, the A B testing, the empathy, putting yourself in the other person. If you haven't tried that, you have no idea what you're about to experience. You're about to change somebody's experience with you in a crazy way. You're going to like it. And that is all I have for today. Go have a great day.