#106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert

Scott Adams (@scottadamssays https://twitter.com/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 http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. In fact, a bunch of my start-ups are already using Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business. WealthFront https://www.wealthfront.com/ uses it to explain how WealthFront works. TaskRabbit https://www.taskrabbit.com/ 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 https://vimeo.com/business 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.) https://vimeo.com/business. There are no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. Try it risk-free for 30 days. Just go to Vimeo.com/business https://vimeo.com/business to check it out. If you like it, you can use the promo code "Tim" to get 25% off https://vimeo.com/business. This is a special discount just for you guys. This episode is also sponsored by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results http://99designs.com/tim. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run…

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  Could you tell me what you had for breakfast, please?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Um, I had my usual coffee and protein bar while staring out the window and wishing I'd eaten more calories.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:20Speaker 03

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:35Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Vimeo Pro, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. And in fact, a bunch of my startups already use Vimeo Pro, including Wealthfront, who uses it to explain how Wealthfront works. TaskRabbit uses it to tell their company's story. And there are many other names you would recognize among their customers: Airbnb, Etsy, etc. Why do they use it? Well, 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 gigabytes of video storage every week, unlimited plays and views, and a fully customizable video player, which can include your logo, custom outro, etc. You also get VIP support. And you get all of this for just $1.99 per year. That's $17 a month,

• 1:19Tim Ferriss?

  with no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. And you can try it risk-free for 30 days. So check it out. Vimeo.com/business. That's V-I-M-E-O.com/business. And use promo code TIM to get 25% off. That's a special discount just for you guys. So check it out. Vimeo.com/business, promo code TIM.

• 1:42Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design-related. I have used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mock-ups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became Number One New York Times, Number One Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app... ... thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite and you have an original that you love or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it and created some amazing things that

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 2:45Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, my heterogeneous homo sapiens, homicidal tomcats. That doesn't make any sense. I was gonna say homicidal homo sapiens, but heterogeneous. Why don't we say heterogenous, like Roganis 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.

• 3:30Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 4:10Tim Ferriss?

  I said which, which or who is Donald Trump, and the negotiator-in-chief that he is campaigning to become.

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  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,

• 5:03Tim Ferriss?

  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 @ScottAdamsSays on Twitter, so give a hello, give a thank you, give him some feedback, and there you have it. The "without further ado" is a little premature, but here we go. Without further ado, Scott Adams, please enjoy.

• 5:27Tim Ferriss?

  Scott, my good man, welcome to the show.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 5:30Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Oh, there's so much I can teach you, Tim. We're just getting started.

• 6:10Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  By the way, I gotta 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 words said.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  It was the coolest thing.

• 6:29Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that is, that is actually really related because I, 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, you're very methodical in many

• 7:13Tim Ferriss?

  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, and he was mentioning that at some point, at least based on, in, 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?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  You have accidentally given me the greatest beginning anecdote to a long explanation anybody ever did. So.

• 8:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  True, true story. Just a few days ago, I was having dinner with Naval and I'm just making conversation, you know, 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, it was the most random thing any two people could have said to each other after not seeing for a while. But that, that weird story, um, is a story about coincidence, right? Yeah, 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, bunch your interviews in a certain way or think about them a certain way.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  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. All right? So I never would have made that claim, although often people have put that, uh, 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. All right? You can make of it what you will. I have several explanations for why there seems to be what I would call the, the appearance of an effect, which by the way, would be amazing in itself.

• 9:33Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  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, you know, interfere with your job, nobody thought you were crazy, it'd be a cool feeling. So, so even if it's not real in some sense of reality, still worth having, frankly. So, we'd have, um, I, I'm gonna take as long as I want for this and you can just cut me off. It's a fun story from beginning, Dan.

• 9:58Tim Ferriss?

  I like long ones.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And a lot of people ask this.

• 10:00Tim Ferriss?

  This is what, uh, this is what this format is for, long form. So please go, go for it, yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  All right, so I'm in my twenties. I was taking a course in hypnosis to learn how to become a professional hypnotist, uh, and get certified. In my class was a woman who was, uh, 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 gotta 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, cause she couldn't tell me. And she said, "It works like this. All you do is you, 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."

• 10:47Speaker 01

  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? 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 gonna do this thing.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  So I picked as my goal, um, that I would have an encounter with a woman who was well beyond my buying power, shall we say. Uh, this is pre-Dilbert, so, you know, post-Dilbert, you get to add a few points to your, to your attractiveness scale. It's not fair, but that's just the way it works. So, so let's say, if, you know, if I could modestly say I was a, a six, uh, hoping to be a six and a half, you know, let's say she was a nine, just so you get a sense of the monumental task I, 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.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  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, you know, at the same time, I mean, you wouldn't believe the, the number of them, and I, I won't tell them here, because they're, they're just too many. But in the end, it was almost like we were fated to meet, all right? Now, 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, or, or maybe, maybe I'm a seven and a half, and maybe she's a nine, but she's got, you know, poor self-image, so she didn't know it. So maybe that's all that happened, right?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  So I said, well, I'm gonna 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, you know, a poor banking person, 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 know, if you went through the historical records, it was when Chrysler was flirting with completely going out of business. It was, I don't know if they were officially bankrupt, but they were, they were, the government

• 13:46Speaker 01

  had pumped them up and most observers were saying, you know, this is sort of the, the company that's circling the drain. So it didn't seem like a good idea and, but I tried to open my Schwab account anyway and pursue it just to see, you know, 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 and I didn't get my account opened. And in the meantime, the stock starts rising. Yeah, 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, you know, I mean, I picked a pretty good stock, but you know, my timing's off. So I guess the affirmation thing wasn't really working. So I didn't buy that stock. If you, if you go back, you'll find out it continued to go up because it turns out Chrysler

• 14:31Speaker 01

  did a turnaround. It was one of the great business success stories of all time. I knew nothing about that, except, you know, the headline news, um, before I, 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's, or so it seemed. But I, I lost out because I didn't trust it, I guess, right? I didn't buy and it became kind of the story stock of the year.

• 14:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  So I tried it one more time. I said, uh, I think I'll try to, uh, you know, 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 there's a, uh, back in the day when a, a company was going public, they would sometimes put a, um, a big notice in the newspaper. It was a company called Ask Computer, A S K or Ask Software, I forget. But there were a new tech company back before tech was anything. And I said, hey, I'm gonna 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, whatever it was. I thought, woo, I'm a genius. I think I invested about a thousand dollars, might have made a hundred, which was big money for a week of doing nothing. You know, when you're, when you're not making enough money to save money,

• 15:40Speaker 01

  making a hundred dollars for nothing seemed like a big deal. So I'm thinking, man, I am so smart. Sold my stock and that frickin' stock went to the moon after I sold it. And now I've got these three, 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, so there was another thing I did first. Let me insert that before I went big. I, I also made a bet with somebody that I would take the, uh, the GMATs, the test you take to get into a good school for your MBA. Um, because I'd taken them right after I'd finished my four-year degree

• 16:24Speaker 01

  and I'd got, I think, the 77th percentile, which is nowhere near enough to get into a school like Berkeley, which, which would make a difference in my career. So I made a bet with somebody who was gonna take a prep course. They were gonna try to, uh, raise their score, uh, into, from the eighties and something, perhaps the, the nineties, uh, 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, you know, she was in the high eighties, I think. But I thought I would beat her new score and I wasn't gonna take a test preparation course.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  I was just gonna take some, you know, practice tests, uh, on my own at home. So I did that, but I, I paired it with the affirmation. And then, uh, 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, the cumulative score was, I would see the, the number 94. And so I just kept, you know, focusing on 94, because I figured that would be close enough that if I got anywhere in that range... Um, you know, then I'm probably gonna get into a good school if I want to. So we take the test. I, my, every one of my practice tests, I got about the same as the first time I took it, somewhere in the high seventies percentile.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  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 passed, 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, 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 ninety-four. And I looked at it, and the fucking thing said ninety-four.

• 18:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Alright?

• 18:21Tim Ferriss?

  This was after the stock market experience?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, yeah, I'm getting my timing mixed up.

• 18:26Tim Ferriss?

  Put in there.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Somewhere roughly in that period, right? So, I literally sat there in my little, uh, mold-covered, literally, apartment in San Francisco, in the Hayth district. I sat in a chair and I stared forward for hours. And all night long, I would, I would say to myself, "I don't think I just saw that." And then I would reach over to my table and pick up the, the little, uh, 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, you know, a serial number or something, right? And it was right, and 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 gonna set my sights higher."

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And it wasn't long after I decided to start the affirmation, uh, my Scott Adams would become a famous cartoonist. So I mean, there were some years that, that passed in between, and then some other affirmations, but that's, that's essentially the, the path I took. So, the odds of becoming a, uh, famous cartoonist, uh, I think about two thousand people submit packages to the, 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, you know, I think the biggest breakout or one of the biggest in 20 years.

• 19:48Tim Ferriss?

  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, but...

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Oh, if I could, because I think your listeners want to hear this. I know it's rude to interrupt you here, but...

• 20:04Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, interrupt all you want.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  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, you know, except a one, I think a two-day course in business writing, and that was it. 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, you know, right? 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.

• 20:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Couldn't speak for three and a half years.

• 20:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's spasmodic dysphonia, yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll talk about that later, I think, but that was the next time I used affirmations. And the affirmation was, I, 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.

• 21:01Tim Ferriss?

  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...

• 21:20Speaker 01

  How do I explain it?

• 21:22Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I will start by saying, I'll tell you exactly how I did it, but then I'll also tell you that, on 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, you know, continuously for years, you know, about three years.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  So the way I did it back in those times was I used a, you know, pencil or a pen and a piece of paper and I wrote the same sentence fifteen times. Uh, 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, I don't think there's a reason that you should do it twice a day. I don't know if fifteen is magic. I'm sure ten would get you there. Twenty might be better, but I doubt it. I don't think it matters. And by the way, these are the questions that everybody asks me all the time. You know, do you save the piece of paper? No. You don't save the paper. The paper is irrelevant. Um, 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

• 22:34Speaker 01

  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, uh, I learned long ago and I forget who coined it, but have you ever heard the phrase reticular activation?

• 22:53Tim Ferriss?

  I have, yeah, yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  So it's basically the idea that it's easy to hear your own name spoken in a crowd, all right? So you, you'll hear background noise, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Tim Ferriss, blah, blah, blah, blah. 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, 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, all 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, you know, the thing that matters most to you. But you can use these affirmations, presumably,

• 23:36Speaker 01

  this is just a hypothesis, to focus your mind and, 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, allow some extra stuff in. Now, uh, 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. You know, 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.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  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, let me look for it. Where's Waldo? Where's Waldo? Where's... There's Waldo! Alright? You're gonna find a little bit more and more often than the guy who says, there was nothing to look for. I already know everything's gonna go wrong. I'll tell you tomorrow. Tomorrow's gonna be me going wrong. Bad day in your... Waaah, waaah. Right? So, that guy's just not looking for anything. Right. So, now let me give you an anecdote to tie that together.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  During the time, I was telling myself I wanted to be, you know, a cartoonist. How do you do that? Like, you know, where... This was pre-internet. I didn't know where to search for it. I didn't know anybody. Um, I came home and I noticed, alright? I noticed something I'd never seen before. Maybe it had always been there, I don't know. But I noticed a card... 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, uh, even shorter. Um, that set me on the road to know how to, you know, 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... Uh, I think it was on public TV, so it actually probably aired lots of times.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  But, um, there might have been other things I would have noticed. You know? 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, this thing I'd been focusing on, right? Now, the other possibility, um, every rational person in the audience is screaming, you know, at their, uh, at their speaker right now, "You idiot, this is selective memory." Um, what, what's really happening is there are lots of times that you were focusing on things and doing affirmations, and you just, you just fricking 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.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  I do have plenty of memories of when it hadn't worked yet. Like I said, the, the voice problem took years. Um, and, yeah, I suppose if I were, uh, doing one in particular right now, uh, that I could say it hadn't happened yet. So, so there's that. Um, but there's also just the fact that, um, it may be a self-identification thing. And what I mean by that is, uh, I, I have a view that we're mostly moist robots in the sense that, uh, you know, the, the environment is programming us and, you know, we've got a little DNA that's like our operating system. But basically, you know, you start with that and it can't vary a lot, right?

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Your DNA is a little bit, a little bit of a, a window of how much your, you know, your nature can change. But that's like a computer, right? And then the environment, uh, programs it within its parameters. So you got that going on. So you got a, a person who's, 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 in their dis- at their disposal, without necessarily knowing it, a, 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 gonna do this thing. You haven't figured it out yet, alright?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  But I'm doing the affirmations, doing the affirmations." So what I'm, what I'm suggesting is, it's not the affirmations that are making something happen. This thing is gonna happen, 'cause my subconscious already decided that I have these objectives, I have these goals, and I'm gonna chew through a fricking wall to make these happen, right? And I have some capabilities, so I can, I can chew. You know, I'm a good chewer. So maybe all this 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 is willing to write it down 15 times.

• 28:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  So in other words, the causation is exactly backwards from how it looks.

• 28:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  I'm already that person who's gonna 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.

• 28:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right, well, it's like looking at parents and 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 are the same people who are likely to buy a bunch of books and study.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and maybe, and maybe, just maybe, I've got three siblings who were raised in identical situations, and we all turned out completely different. Like, you just say that to anybody and watch them get the doe in the headlights look like, okay, you just changed everything I know about life, I will now erase that.

• 29:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but I do think that, no, you bring up a couple of really important topics and I think helpful lenses through which to view behavior. So the first is this potential combination of optimism and being an 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

• 30:02Tim Ferriss?

  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're You'll 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.

• 30:43Tim Ferriss?

  How did you decide to write what write God's Debris? What was what is the story behind that? Because when I when I ping 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 the premise and everything about the book is really fascinating. Could you describe how that how that came about?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, for the readers not or the listeners not familiar with God's Debris. That's a non-humor, non-Dilbert book. I wrote 2001, I think. And it's a 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 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, you know, how do you figure out that out? So that my writer's solution was a version of Occam's razor, sort of a bastardized

• 31:50Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, you know, i.e. Ronald Reagan, i.e. Donald Trump, simplicity is always compelling. But the larger part, you know, that 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.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Uh, 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, uh, my lifetime up to that point. It was forty-ish years, I forget. Um, 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, 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, you know, then put it in the form of fiction, it will give the reader the same feeling that I had when the sense

• 33:18Speaker 01

  came to me in the shower, where I got a full body tingle. I felt like maybe everything I knew was wrong. Um, not really, but you know, I'm talking about a sensation, just, you know, a feeling. And I thought, is there any way to package that? You know, 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 a number 12 and explain to you why it's all really the same thing. Right? Could I make somebody have that experience? That's what I, what I tried to do with the book. And I used throughout it, a lot of techniques that I learned in hypnosis classes, uh, to strengthen the, you know, the impact. And in the foreword, I, I give the reader, uh, you know, plenty of clues that this is

• 34:02Speaker 01

  a, a thought experiment. It's not a, a typical novel. It's not a story like they're, they're used to.

• 34:09Tim Ferriss?

  And what, what were some of the techniques from hypnosis that, that you implemented?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Oh, would that, if I told you, would it be a spoiler?

• 34:18Tim Ferriss?

  That's, okay. Well, if it gives away the plotline, I'm just curious, or maybe the broader question is, how have you incorporated?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:25Tim Ferriss?

  Because I'm, I'm a, a, uh... And 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.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first of all, the way I use hypnosis is too broadly for the public. Most people are thinking of a 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, right? 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, just to illustrate it. My challenge when I have a book that's, most of it is two people talking, is that you will get bored, right?

• 35:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  You know, 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?

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Pictionary.

• 35:43Tim Ferriss?

  Pictionary.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  So you need a certain amount of clues before anybody's gonna get it, right? Nobody gets it on the first line. So that was the experience I was going for is that, you know, you get it. I completely lost my train of thought thinking about Pictionary because...

• 36:00Tim Ferriss?

  We were talking about persuasion and hypnosis.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  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", paraphrasing myself. But in other words, I make, I make my character say the thing you just thought.

• 36:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  So that's a little different than traditional fiction where I'm making the character lead you all the way. So, 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. You know, if somebody uses, you know, 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.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Your, your brains kind of become like psychologically linked, you know, if, if one person pulls the other, one feels a tug.

• 37:16Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Just the way any relationship is, right? Just the normal way that any two people act when they're together. So, 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, um, without the, the leading, you know, I could never take them to the new place.

• 37:37Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, it's a lot like judo actually, in, 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, 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 to yours, which sounds pretty similar.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  God, do you know, do you know how much that makes me want to go wrestle somebody?

• 38:11Tim Ferriss?

  It's amazing. Oh, the foot sweeps in judo are just beautiful. I mean, so elegant.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  You know, I've never heard that explanation of judo, which instantly makes me interested in it. And I had no interest in it whatsoever before. So nicely done.

• 38:25Tim Ferriss?

  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, where one person is using an opponent's energy against them. Uh, but it can certainly have, I think have a lot of parallels in conversation and just human interaction. Uh, the, the, how are you, how are you introduced to hypnosis? You took this class that you'd mentioned, but what, uh, what sparked your interest? And for those people who are not familiar with hypnosis and have only seen the stage performers and so on.

• 39:09Tim Ferriss?

  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 out kind of the charlatans that you shouldn't really pay much attention to?

• 39:20Speaker 01

  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're asking it.

• 39:27Tim Ferriss?

  No, I haven't. I'm not, I'm not leading in this case.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  So that was the most accidentally, um, perfect question anybody ever asked. So nicely done. Let me, so let me start at the beginning. The, uh, my mother delivered, gave birth to, um, my little sister while under hypnosis and did not use any painkillers. She did not feel pain and she was awake the whole time.

• 39:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Now, now, just like, I, 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. Uh, but the, uh, but that had a huge impact on me. Um, so it turns out our family doctor was a trained hypnotist and, you know, he handled the birth and he just offered her that option. Now, uh, let me be quick to point out that there's sort of a, a rule of one in five in hypnosis, and that is that one in five people are, are able to go into a, um, 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

• 40:34Speaker 01

  and they can stop the sensation any way they want, anytime they want. But, you know, 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, so it's not, nobody's controlling you. It's more like a coach working with a, you know, an elite player, you know? The coach is not doing it. The coach is saying, you know, hey, you know, crossover dribble, you know, go under your leg, left, jog right. So that had a huge impact on me and so it got me interested in, in that and other things. And so when I was in my twenties and I realized that a guy who works at a bank teller and has, drives a car which, uh, one girlfriend, uh, affectionately, uh, she had a terrible name for it, but I can't say it on the air.

• 41:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure. Of course you could say it.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  So I, I realized there's a reason, not because it's a profanity, I just can't say it.

• 41:18Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, no problem. Just to trade, my, 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.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Okay, you went on the car. Uh, so, anyway, I thought, I need an edge, you know, career-wise, you know, 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 know, you figure, your mother's not gonna lie to you about childbirth. I mean, not something that became like a central story of your youth, you know, it was kind of a big deal. It doesn't seem like the thing she would've made up. So, credibility was high, and I thought, well, let me check this thing out. But I, again, 20% of the people can have that kind of experience. Uh, the family doctor, obviously, um, you become trained in quickly identifying who those people are, so he knew.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Um, but all the rest of the people can get, uh, substantial benefits. So unfortunately, I'm, I'm in the, you know, the 80% that can't get those extreme benefits. But the, the stuff I can get is immense. Um, and it includes, you know, the ability to, uh, craft the book the way I did, it includes a lot of technique I use, uh, for making Dilbert popular, for example. Um, 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, the second main character is the boss, in terms of, you know, time on, on screen, uh, and he doesn't have any name at all.

• 42:53Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  And, and that all, that all, all comes out of a 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, alright? All of the, you know, the anti-Semites would say, "Well, you know, I don't really relate to that Goldberg guy." Uh, you know, if, if, any name you give 'em, somebody's, somebody's gonna be a hater, right? So you're, you're taking people out of the equation as soon as you name 'em. Maybe it's a name they've heard of, or there's a reason why it's Dilbert and not Bob, you know?

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  It's a pre-existing association.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:56Tim Ferriss?

  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, etc. 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?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  So, simplest, and I think everybody 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.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  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, there's, there's, I write in layers. So you know, 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, is there a word that will work on an emotional level, or a different

• 45:52Speaker 01

  level, or just a more perfect level, something that will make you remember it, something that'll keep you awake? That means exactly the same thing. So here's an example. If I said to the audience, and I, I do this in front of crowds, so you know, you at home can play along and shout out the answer, but I already know the answer. I'm gonna give you two words that mean about the same. You tell me out 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?

• 46:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yank.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  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, you can program the, the box.

• 46:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, language is, is mind control, right? I mean, you can, 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, that we've created, known as language. And I've, I've just been so fascinated by that for so long. Do you find then, is writing an indirect way of developing the skillsets that would make you a fast learner in hypnosis? Or, or do they not, does it not really pour over that cleanly?

• 47:31Speaker 01

  I would say that learning to be a writer, you're only gonna maybe brush accidentally on the level that I'm even talking about.

• 47:38Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Like, like, like, everybody knows, hey, that's a good word, but you, you need to go to the next level. You know, 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, it means the best thing. Because remember in my, my example, yank and pull aren't really the same thing, are they?

• 47:59Tim Ferriss?

  No, they're not.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Right? Because you got a different sense, and that's why one was funnier, you know? But it also had a Y in it, and it had a K in it, so there, you know, two levels of funniness built into the word. So, I will consciously make a choice to get rid of, of a more accurate word, to instill, to put in a word that has more of a programming control.

• 48:17Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Right? Because, uh, you want people to have an experience, because that's what they're gonna remember. They're not gonna remember what word choice you used.

• 48:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  This dovetails exactly into my loud defense of Donald Trump's methods, which I've been writing about all week on the internet.

• 48:35Tim Ferriss?

  I've seen, I've seen some of the, some of the fireworks, so, please, tell, say more.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Uh, let me draw a line for you that, um, I'll, I'll say in advance, this is conspiracy, uh, talk, you know, conspiracy theory talk, so you, so you don't have to say it, none of the listeners have to tell me that. So, it's just for fun. Um, 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.

• 49:06Tim Ferriss?

  Milton Erickson.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Milton Erickson, um, a name known only to people who study hypnosis usually, or psychology. So, he was a linguist who, who put a lot of this, uh, 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, um, 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, and of the Erickson School, is, um, a couple of, uh, people, John Grinder, I think, hope I didn't get the name wrong, who developed, uh, NLP. Neuro-linguistic programming, which is a way to use largely words as a programming language, although they don't market it that way.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Now, NLP is marketed with a lot of stuff 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, you know, current psychology would expect, right? 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, you know, people being stiff as boards between two chairs and, you know, that sort of stuff. Now, the best practiser, 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 worked together on some kind of program about success. You can see their videos of them talking one after another.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  If you Google them, you see them standing together on Google Images, et cetera. Now, I have no reason to believe that they ever had a conversation on the methods of persuasion, all right? 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, you know, Dilbert.com and my blog. But take the debate where he came in as the under-prepared buffoon who was going to blow himself up, and Megyn Kelly of Fox News decided that, yes, that's exactly what was going to

• 51:16Speaker 01

  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... It's so primitive, right? Yeah, the question is the content, all right? The logic of the answer, the, you know, 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,

• 52:00Speaker 01

  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-int erupted 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.

• 52:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  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 know, you throw down an anchor, you divert everybody. And so instead of becoming this, you know, sexist, which he could have been on day one, he became the straight talker.

• 52:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  He's the guy, and he admitted in the very next sentence that he'd also said bad things about other women.

• 52:59Tim Ferriss?

  He, he has some really interesting...

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Oh, but wait.

• 53:04Tim Ferriss?

  Go ahead, go ahead.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Wait, there's a better part. I think it's better.

• 53:08Tim Ferriss?

  I'm ready.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Now, I know you follow the headlines, so you know what happened next. Roger Ailes of Fox News, um, you know, weighed in to say like, "We're gonna 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 interpreted it as Donald Trump just bought Fox News without paying a frickin' penny. Because if he wants them, if they want him to appear on his show, that's up to him. And he just proved he doesn't need him. So he's gonna get all the press he wants without Fox News. If they wanna get on the program and support the guy who's probably gonna be the nominee, that's, that's what I've predicted, um, because of his hypnosis skills in particular, having nothing to do with his policies, by the way, I'll get to that.

• 53:51Speaker 01

  I, you know, I'm not a, not a fan of the policies, but I don't think he is either. He's, he's just, you know, they're opening negotiating gambits as, 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, you know, the hypnotist playbook, although it's, you know, 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 to you 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 the giant fence, make Mexico pay for it, as if they want to do that. Round up 11 million Mexicans who've been in the country for a while and

• 54:33Speaker 01

  send it back. Change the constitution to get rid of the birthright. Alright, I'm saying it with my mocking voice. Right. But, you know, then I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna do. Everybody get excited. Let's talk about change of the constitution. Let's talk about the cost and the heartbreak and the misery

• 55:15Speaker 01

  that would cost these 11 million people. I'm planning to, 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 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 gonna 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 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

• 55:57Speaker 01

  this stuff. You know, it was a number, I think it was a number one bestseller, right? He could not be more clear or more honest about what he's doing, as he doesn't. 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 gonna kick out 11 million people. Nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna go for that. It's not the game. It will never be the game. I almost guarantee you that if he gets approval to build a fence, he'll probably get some Mexican funding, not completely, but enough, it'll be enough to say, 'Look, nobody else was even gonna ask for half, right? Alright, I got you half of this paid for.' If he does that, people are gonna wet their pants, right? And then he's gonna say,

• 56:39Speaker 01

  'I guarantee it.' I guarantee, he's gonna say, and now this imagines he gets nominated and becomes president, and so I guess I can't guarantee anything, but, but if it got to the 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 out of jail for X number of years, you pay your taxes, you register, you do some useful things that, uh, you know, uh, will make an exception to your case just for practicality, 'cause 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, you know, to, to tell

• 57:21Speaker 01

  the truth on my first offer. You offered me to negotiate.' He's, 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, 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. Um, let's see, um, there was Bill Clinton, who also is good friends of Tony Robbins.

• 57:45Tim Ferriss?

  I love the web. It's like six, six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, and so I'll say this at the end, because I went on for a while. Uh, I'm not suggesting that there's a grand conspiracy there. Um, it, it's a fact that all those things are connected. That doesn't mean that, you know, the, the influence is running through them in some one-way direction like I described. If you use as a, as a possible one of your filters to explain what's going on with the Trump campaign, I, 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.

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  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 like, "Attention, interest, desire, action." Like, you have to have the attention first, and Donald Trump is very good at doing that. The other technique that I had 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."

• 59:10Tim Ferriss?

  And so, with any journalist, and it throws them off balance just enough, because they're like, "Oh shit, like, did my researchers miss, you know, the one citation that refuted everything that I'm actually laying on this particular person?" And so, whether it's, you know, 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, and it's in a way, and that's not to say that I would want, you know, Donald Trump running the country, but it's, I do admire the, so the ringmanship.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  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."

• 59:55Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Totally, totally doesn't work.

• 59:57Tim Ferriss?

  Totally different, yeah, totally different.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  "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 to a 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, 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, the other go side with him. But instead, he said, check your facts.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  He said, I'm a person with more information, which actually seems pretty consistent, because like it's his world, right? Like, we're talking about his facts, it's not Matt Lauer's facts. Matt Lauer's a guy who studied up 10 minutes before the interview. So you say, 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, right? It's just brilliant.

• 1:01:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, it's, 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, how you think about your life in those terms or not.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yes, um, you want me to just jump right in and define those two things?

• 1:01:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please, that'd be, that'd be very helpful.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  All right, so this, um, is written in my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win 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 are 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, uh, it's, uh, it's modern times. There's probably more technology, more complexity in your pocket right now, in your smartphone,

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  than the farmer had in his entire operation, all right? 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, all right? 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 picked a goal and you marched straight 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

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  one," because they emerged while you were focusing on your goal, right? So if you're not keeping your eye on the, on the whole of it, and if you're not playing the odds, and you're picking a, you know, a moonshot as your way to go through life, you know, you're gonna feel like you're failing, not only if you miss the moon, but you're gonna 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 gonna get there. So, what's better than that? And by the way, I still recommend goals hardly 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 a, like a human-made construct, they are simplified and therefore a goal makes sense.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  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. Your boss's boss's job, for example. You know, what are you doing about that? You know, how about some job at 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. Alright, 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

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  area, some favorable focus, you know, without being too specific. So your area might be, you know, business, or art, or whatever it is.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  So the hallmark of a good system is that even as things are failing, you're still improving your odds and your personal worth. All right. 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, let's say, making all the contacts that I made through the startup, the networking, the things I learned made me more valuable and the things, you know, maybe my day job or the next job I do, then I came out ahead. So that's a system. All right. Let me give you a kind of a non-business example of that.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  I had a friend in high school who wanted to have a girlfriend and I wanted to have a girlfriend, but he had a 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 I'd figure out who her friends were and where I could hang out. And, you know, 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."

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  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 goal line. So my friend...

• 1:06:20Tim Ferriss?

  Even if I didn't have a boyfriend, right?

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  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, "Ah, 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. Alright, so, so that was, 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, you know, descending order of looks, will you be my girlfriend? And, or some version of that, of course, almost everybody said no.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Now, you're probably thinking, oh, you're telling me the old story about keep trying, you know, 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. Um, and he also had a lot of girlfriends, so he was learning a lot that way as well. But, so, so he, 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, you know, wanted to feel confident in front of someone else. Um, so, and I could give you more examples from, say, fitness and diet, because I know some people have asked about that.

• 1:07:48Tim Ferriss?

  They, they would love to hear this, definitely.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  So a, a goal oriented approach in, let's say, uh, diet would be, I want to, uh, lose 10 pounds and I'm gonna do it with my willpower. I'm gonna keep those cookies out of my mouth. I'm gonna put the fork down. I'm gonna push away from the table. Arrgh, I'm just gonna try harder, because.

• 1:08:09Tim Ferriss?

  White duck, yeah.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Right. 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, uh, has me in the best shape of my life at 58 and uses no willpower whatsoever. I eat whatever I want, whatever I want to. It's just that, uh, my system is education. I go out of my way. If I see an article that says, new thing, uh, discovered about the link between this food and what, then most of that I can ignore. But every once in a while, you see something that says, um, you know, you just, uh, eat more protein and less of those simple carbs, uh, good things will happen. And you say, okay, I already knew that one.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  How deep does this knowledge thing go and how much difference does it make? Well, um, let me give you an example. Say you and I go to the salad bar and um, 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. Alright, what do you get? Do you get the potato or the pasta? Now, I ask this question in live uh, crowds and it's about evenly split 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 they put the white potato, uh, as opposed to the sweet potatoes that are not bad. The white potato has a terrible glycemic index.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  The pasta probably should, but there's something about the way it processes that isn't fully understood, that it just doesn't. So, you know, pasta isn't the best food in the world if you're wa- looking to watch your weight, but if you had a little 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. Cause I've only, I've learned which foods I can eat like crazy and uh, not stimulate cravings. So, if I eat the simple carbs for lunch, I know I'm just gonna be hungrier later. I've learned that um, 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." You know, I need to either take a nap or I could eat some peanuts because I've read

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  and I, I've experienced this, I know it's true, that if you eat 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 uh, your cravings, cause fat's good at doing that, that you'll make up for it in the long run. And by the way, it's full of protein and goodness and you know, 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 um, both the quantity that I wanna eat, you know, the food, cause sometimes you just gotta shovel a lot in your face, you just, you know, you just gotta eat a lot.

• 1:10:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  And sometimes you wanna eat the thing you wanna eat. So sometimes it's about the flavor and the taste and sometimes it's, you just need a lot of food. So I allow myself to have a lot of food anytime I want. Uh, that, I don't put any control on that. I just make sure that it's the kind of food you could eat forever and you know, you're not regret it. So, you know, it's, 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.

• 1:11:28Tim Ferriss?

  And you are vegetarian, is that right? Or you have been?

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Mostly, yeah. I try to introduce fish to my diet, but I'm having a hard time with it because I can't get past the icky factor. 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 as Diet Coke. I was drinking somewhere between 10 and 20 a day, I think. 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.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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 this takes several years. Instead of, you know, 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.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  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, Ironman, and for him, the challenge and the pain and the willpower is actually part of the attraction, right? So that's part of what it brings it to him. So it's no surprise that his weight is perfect.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  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 do this for a week. Did that make any difference in anything?

• 1:13:42Tim Ferriss?

  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 stretchy 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. Branch-chain amino acids can do the same thing sometimes.

• 1:14:27Tim Ferriss?

  But the, 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, 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, et cetera. And 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 Workweek

• 1:15:06Tim Ferriss?

  had come out. And decided that I would invest based on the assumption that I would lose it all, but that I would try to optimize for skill acquisition.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  There you go. There you go. Okay.

• 1:15:20Tim Ferriss?

  And so, and so when I make decisions these days, whether it's a TV show, or The Four 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, right? Let me optimize the people I'm interacting with so that I can acquire as many skills or abilities as possible. You know, 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.

• 1:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  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, very similar way. Not to say it's the only way, but I find having both to be very helpful for me.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would kind of summarize that by saying that the product is always yourself.

• 1:16:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:50Tim Ferriss?

  What was the first time you were paid for Dilbert, like received payment for Dilbert?

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  It was after being syndicated and then waiting several months for the accounting to work through the system. And that was probably 1989.

• 1:17:10Tim Ferriss?

  1989. Oh, God, I'm having trouble doing the math here. Roughly, how old were you at the time?

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Oh, are we gonna do math in public?

• 1:17:19Tim Ferriss?

  I'm trying not to.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  That is a social...

• 1:17:21Tim Ferriss?

  So you were like 30, late 30s, I think? Is that right?

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Early, early 30s.

• 1:17:27Tim Ferriss?

  Early 30s. And were you at Pack Bell at the time, or had you already left?

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  I was at Pack 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.

• 1:17:45Tim Ferriss?

  And was that purely to get the income from cartooning to a point where you could you could survive on that? Or were there other reasons that you stayed at that job for eight years?

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  I'd hate to say skill acquisition, but that's really a big part of the answer. I was working in the technology lab, you know, 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, some of it was that, but when I say skills acquisition, I'm counting the fact that I

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  was getting most of my fodder for the cartoon from my actual experiences and what coworkers were suggesting. So I had that going. But, um, yes, I mean, I waited until I knew I could do it financially, but I continued waiting, 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.

• 1:19:05Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It's like, uh, 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.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  But, but, but think of, you know, just this simple example, where in the real world, real work world, I'll say, "I'm gonna try doing X. Oh, my God, if X doesn't work, my career, my promotions, my everything." But now, but after I didn't need to be there, I could just say, "Well, what's better, X or Y?" X. Your mind is free.

• 1:19:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. No, it's, uh, it's, 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." Like, if you can keep your, keep your current gig, do this on the weekends, do this early in the morning, uh, 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.

• 1:20:15Tim Ferriss?

  What was Dilbert's original name?

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  So, before Dilbert 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, you know, 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 was, 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.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  And I wanted the name of the dog to have some correspondence with Dilbert. And so Dilbert's original name was Dildog.

• 1:21:11Tim Ferriss?

  Now, did he ever, did he, did he ever make it into a strip with the name Dildog or no?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  No, I wisely decided that was not a good commercial decision. At least now for newspapers because they're all, you know, aggressively rated G.

• 1:21:28Tim Ferriss?

  What, what aspects of Dilbert changed besides that in the gestational period or when you were testing out new characters on the whiteboard and so on?

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Well, in the beginning, their characters are not really formed. So, you know, you've got an idea who they are and maybe you're thinking of somebody else when you write it. But over time, they become some part of me. You know, they're, they each represent a different voice in my head. You know, Dilbert's kind of the voice of reason and, you know, the one that, you know, is, I would say he's challenged by, you know, he loves a challenge. He likes fixing things more than he likes, you know, talking to people and social interactions and stuff. Dilbert 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.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, 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, you know, my megalomania and my, you know, my lack of regard for other humans, which, you know, obviously is an exaggeration. I have plenty of regard for other humans, but not always their intelligence. So Dilbert takes that role.

• 1:22:55Tim Ferriss?

  And you've done, I mean, you've had a massively successful career. Obviously, Dilbert 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?

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  So, there were several key things that happened, and this will dovetail back to a conversation about luck. But when we first contemplating 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.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  And it sounds, you know, 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, and the newspaper who sends it to production, you know, newspaper delivery boy gives it to the user who reads it. I have no idea what happened after that, right? 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.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  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, Scott Adams at AOL dot com. Nobody had that.

• 1:25:09Tim Ferriss?

  Nice.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  I mean, there are six people named Scott Adams in my town.

• 1:25:14Tim Ferriss?

  Seems like the primordial soup of the internet days.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Right. So thousands of people wrote in, but what they said was interesting. So consistently, they said, "When Dilbert 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.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  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'd name 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."

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, for a newspaper, if five people ask for something that they've never heard of, you know, and it's something that they can easily, you know, for $20 a month, they can put it in the newspaper, or whatever it is, you know, they're gonna do that.

• 1:26:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's true with politicians also, just as a side note for people, like honestly, you get 10 people to call a lawmaker's office, especially if they're not somebody who's in the news every day, gets a lot of attention. That's really smart.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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, you know, Dilbert or other jobs based on, you know, one or two emails.

• 1:27:19Tim Ferriss?

  What, what other types of feedback?

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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.

• 1:27:48Tim Ferriss?

  So, so more, I mean, many people said Catbert, but you had not given him that name?

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Right. So, so Catbert now, now comes out of nothing. I mean, certainly had no plans to have a, you know, a Garfield competitor, and now I'm stuck. I'm like, "Oh, they all want it, but what am I gonna do with it?" So I have to, 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, 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. So...

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  And recently, I started working with a company called Think HR, 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, you know, put water on the stuff that worked.

• 1:29:08Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Well, I use my Wacom Sintiq for the drawing. So what that is, is a special monitor. In my case, it's a really big one. I think it's 27 inches across. And I can draw on it directly with a stylus, much like you would draw on paper, although you have to learn new techniques and use Photoshop and, you know, a lot of different stuff. So it's just Photoshop and a Sintiq Wacom. And after that, it's, 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.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Sometimes I'll check the suggestions coming in from various places. Usually, you know, my, 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, 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 mood, 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.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:30:50Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right. It's sort of decreasing the noise to signal ratio so that what was already there is easier to solicit or put down? Is that how you think?

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  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 bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. Now, that's the part, unfortunately, everybody wants to know, what's the secret to being, you know, 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 know, 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.

• 1:31:41Tim Ferriss?

  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've adopted this habit, and it's become sort of exponentially easier over time, to the extent that now they can't contain it to 10. So it's, 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.

• 1:32:26Tim Ferriss?

  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.?

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  So depending on when I went to sleep, either 5 or 6, but let's say 5, I get up and... I walk directly downstairs 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.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Well, you know me well.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  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. You know, did I, did I say anything yesterday that caused the world to melt down? Because, you know, I'll need to know about that.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  Failing that, I usually open Business Insider because I just like reading. Or usually while I'm waiting for my coffee, I've looked at my Facebook feed and, you know, just tweeted, you know, played around. Basically, I'm just trying to wake up, get my mind working. And there's a process where, um, once you clear your mind, you have to flood it. And you may use different words for this, but I know you do it. Um, 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 flooding in all the, all the, uh, the new stuff.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  But then you, then you gotta, um, find out where in that flood is the little, uh, piece that's worth working with. And that's where I, that's where I use the body model. I kind of cycle through all this, the stuff. Body model, you said? Yeah, so the model is, um, your brain can't find good content. Alright, not directly in an intellectual sense, obviously the brain's 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 gonna care about too.

• 1:34:58Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's cool, I like that. So, that means posture, or what type of indicators are there?

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Um, 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 wanna do a full laugh, you know, sort of thing. There are other times when, um, 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, you know, my entire body lit up. Um, when I had the idea for the, uh, blog that I wrote recently that just sort of lit up the internet, um, I felt it as a full-body experience, long before I wrote it, right?

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  And, 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 of second nature that, you're kind of moving art into the domain of craft.

• 1:36:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  So, for example, I know, um, cause I've, you know, learned over time, that there are six elements of dimension 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 gonna be a really good joke, but that's not enough, there's still that, um, there's something about it, that X-factor, that thing you can't put your foot, your finger on, that just makes your body move, you know, it just moves your body, and if you can't get that, um, no craft in the world can survive, you know, it can't resuscitate it.

• 1:36:35Tim Ferriss?

  And have you, have you, you written about the six elements of humor before?

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  Uh, I did, I've written about it a number of times, I think if anybody Googles my name, Scott Adams, and "six dimensions of humor",

• 1:36:48Tim Ferriss?

  Six dimensions.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'll see a few references to it.

• 1:36:51Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And, um, what would be two examples of the six, just for fun?

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I know you're good at this, cause you know what you just did that was just so smart? If you had, if you had asked me for the six, I would've changed the subject, cause I know I'm not gonna remember.

• 1:37:06Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  But you asked me for two, because you know I could come up with two.

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Uh, alright. So, I'm gonna go for six, because you've now made it, you've made it safe for me to do that.

• 1:37:18Tim Ferriss?

  Wonderful.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Um, so there's cute, there's bizarre, there's recognizable, there's naughty, uh, how many was that?

• 1:37:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you're already way ahead of the game. You've got four. You've got cute, bizarre, uh, recognizable, and naughty.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  Ah, you'll have to Google the rest. But let me, let me give you an example. Um, so cute is usually, uh, kids and dogs, right? So, and bizarre is just anything that's out of place. So if you know your cartoon history, you will know that, uh, 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, alright? 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. Uh, the world is my canvas." Alright, but he started, he started ahead of you already. So, he's got the bizarre, and then he'll have the animal say something often

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  in the framing or the type of mood that a human would say, right? So that's the recognizable part. So if you could put yourself in the picture and say, "Oh, God, I recognize that situation." Uh, but it's an animal talking. Um, clearly, there's more to it than that. Again, that's just the, you have to have at least that, two dimensions. Um, take a look at the best comic strip of all time that I think nearly everyone in the world would say, um, Calvin and Hobbes. There's a, there's a talking tiger that is both bizarre and cute, alright? So he took, um, the far side one dimension further as a starting point, alright?

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  The, the moment you start reading Calvin and Hobbes, you already have cute, because his drawing is amazing, both of the, the child and the, you know, 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, you know, naughty, or, um, um, also anything bad happening to anybody is, of course, uh, one of the dimensions. So cruelty, did I mention cruelty? Am I up to five yet?

• 1:39:27Tim Ferriss?

  You're up to five. That's number five.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Shoot, by the end of this interview, I will have come up with that six one, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna scream it in the middle of whatever other unrelated question you're at.

• 1:39:38Tim Ferriss?

  Or you could just leave people with 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?

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  I would say a comic called F minus, F being, you know, 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.

• 1:40:18Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:40:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:40:53Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Sure. And I know you want to ask me about the voice thing possibly.

• 1:41:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, well, we could do that first. I mean, could you describe what happened to you and what you learned from that experience? 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.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  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, spaz 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 you know, doctor to doctor and you know, my path went through, you know, Japan down to USC and finally Dr. Gerald Burke

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  who had invented a surgery that was not well-publicized that worked for me. So I've been, since then I've been active trying to tell people who have spasmodic dysphonia, which by the way, I'm gonna do an audio impression of it, cuz there are people listening to this guaranteed, who have it and don't know they have it cuz they've never heard anyone else who spoke that way and they're trying to figure out what it is. So I'm gonna do an impression and I'm gonna send like three dozen people to their doctor with a solution, alright? Here's my impression, if I were to order a Diet Coke, um, since my vocal cords would clench especially on some problem syllables, um, it would come out like a clipped cellphone.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  So instead of a Diet Coke, or can I have a Diet Coke, it would come out as, "Diet Coke", like that, so it'd sound like you're just dropping syllables. So everybody at home who said, "Holy shit, I know somebody like that," um, the name for it is spasmodic dysphonia, but I got something much cooler, you wanna hear it? I do. That's on this. We might be able to solve this problem today. Let's do it. This is literally, 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 gonna take it. Alright, 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.

• 1:43:45Speaker 01

  They spliced in a new network that takes three and a half months to regrow and once it regrows, um, then I could talk, but very weakly and it took, you know, 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 nut, because science was not quite supporting his method.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  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% of the people, but keep in mind, this is an incurable problem. Right. That 10 to 20% 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

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  the subject takes an extended period without re-injuring the muscles in the vocal cords. Hmm. So, there is a non-zero chance, and I actually saw my surgeon like a couple of 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.

• 1:45:50Tim Ferriss?

  They would never heal.

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  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, 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. Uh, my normal speaking voice is actually much lower and I do that to preserve my, my speaking mechanism. 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, to solve spasmodic dysphonia is people didn't talk, not even a little bit, using their normal voice for an extended period. Um, three and a half months in one case, um, maybe as, as few as a week or two

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  weeks in the other case. But if you have this, or you know somebody 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 as at, uh, you'll see my email address, or you can find me on Twitter or anything. Uh, you see my addresses in the strip every day. And tell me if it worked. Cause if I could get three people in the world that this works for, Tim, we just fixed the problem.

• 1:47:08Tim Ferriss?

  It could be a really big breakthrough. You know, I, I love this idea. And, uh, for those people who might be considering this, uh, who think they might be a candidate, uh, you could also look at, um, for instance, uh, silent meditation retreats. There are uh, 10 to 14 day silent meditation retreats through groups like Spirit Rock and others. So you could actually create a context, uh, wherein that is reinforced, right? Not only, it's, it's not just willpower, but you're in an environment where it's not permitted. So that, that could be also something to look into. But no, this is very exciting. I like this idea.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  Yes. Uh, I should say that whispering is still, uh, 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.

• 1:47:53Tim Ferriss?

  This is very interesting. Well, I am glad we touched on that.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and again, I have to emphasize, it's totally a long shot. But there's somebody who listened to this who's gonna try it, and we'll find out.

• 1:48:03Tim Ferriss?

  But the long shots are worth it, right? I mean, you mentioned 10 to 20% with the humming in 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 stand a good chance of getting commercialized. You know what I mean? I mean, that's a viable tool. If you have a 1 in 5 chance of being cured.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  But listen to this. 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.

• 1:49:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right, for sure, definitely. I mean, it's kind of, not entirely a perfect parallel, but a lot of people who consider themselves hard gainers, meaning they have difficulty gaining muscle mass, this is particularly true with men, are simply training too often. They are not physiologically capable of recovering from the stress that they're imposing on themselves. They never sort of supercompensate and experience this hypertrophy. So it's just a matter of removing stimuli as opposed to adding something. You know, the subtraction versus addition, which is very anti-Western medicine in a

• 1:49:50Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  I've never given a book as a gift.

• 1:50:08Tim Ferriss?

  You haven't? Wow, okay. No, this is interesting. So what, do you give gifts? Maybe that sounds like a weird question, but I mean, if you do, I'd be curious to know what you what you often give as gifts.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  Um, I retired from the gift giving business a while ago, um, which takes a long time to train everybody.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  No, I, I replaced that in favor of being, uh, you know, a nice person on a general basis.

• 1:50:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  You know, like, maybe I want to buy you something today, you know, 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.

• 1:50:45Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  It would be, uh, a book called Influence, um, by, uh, I don't know how to pronounce.

• 1:50:51Tim Ferriss?

  Robert Cialdini or Cialdini?

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, 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.

• 1:51:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  A hundred percent of effective people seem to have read, read that book.

• 1:51:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  In fact, that'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.

• 1:51:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's true. It's very consistent.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but if you talk to the general public, it's still not well known. And then I would add to that, uh, 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 them.

• 1:51:32Tim Ferriss?

  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, there's a bit of material on the physiology and so on that's, that's outdated, but the vast majority is, is fantastically well done.

• 1:51:52Speaker 01

  Well, that, that needs an update because I have a theory that there's a real, um, there's something like 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, um, 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.

• 1:52:34Tim Ferriss?

  I agree. I totally agree. And I think I think I saw you mentioned something along these lines on Twitter, but it's we're in a distraction economy, right? I mean, and it's not only limited to a black box in our living room, but we have, we have obviously the phones, the tablets, the laptops. Now we have wearables.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, let me let me emphasize that point because I realize I sounded like an old man get off of my lawn. 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, 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

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  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, you had, 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. Ha ha. Those guys with the billboards, they weren't using a ton of science.

• 1:53:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  But now, now it's me against all the scientists in Google.

• 1:54:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, it's total, it's a total stack deck, not in your favor.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Before you call, this true story. So as part of the, your process, 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, you know, it's only two minutes, right?

• 1:54:29Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  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, so for five minutes, I simply chanted, "Print the form, print the form, print the form." I would pick, I would pick up my phone, just by reflex, and start to hit Twitter while I'm chanting.

• 1:55:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  And I would say, "No." I actually have to yell at myself. I yell at my head, "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.

• 1:55:19Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:55:20Speaker 01

  So, so I'm now like, "Find the email, find the email." So, without that, I don't have a hope.

• 1:55:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I need, I need to do that more often, I think.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:31Tim Ferriss?

  It's like holding up a shield to deflect all of the incoming distraction. You mentioned billboards. If, if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and where would you put it?

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  It would say, "Be useful." It would be everywhere.

• 1:55:55Tim Ferriss?

  I like it.

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  So, so I, I realized one day that I could boil down my entire philosophy of how to live into those two words, just be useful.

• 1:56:05Tim Ferriss?

  Be useful.

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that comes from my farming upbringing. My, my mother grew up in 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?

• 1:56:19Tim Ferriss?

  Can't afford it, yeah.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Waste is death. So, you, you know, you didn't lean, you always pitched in, you didn't, you didn't wait for somebody to ask. You just be useful. And so I, you know, having now made the money that I need to make, I'm, you know, far more focused on the being useful to the rest of the world. Part of the equation for the, the second half of my life and far more enjoyable. So if, you know, if somebody says, how do I be happy? How do I be happy? You know, 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. Cause what, guess what? People like you, they wanna be with you. You're useful.

• 1:57:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. People wanna hire you. You're useful. Everything comes together if you just do that one thing. And that dovetails back to, you know, the product is you. You know, that the project is, 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?

• 1:57:19Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And you, you mentioned, 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?

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  Well, Donald Trump, but only cause he's in the news. It was, you know, so, so I think the, the test was completely polluted. What I think is successful? I would say, um, if I think of it for two seconds, Bill Gates and, uh, there's nobody in second place.

• 1:57:47Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that?

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  First of all, he amassed a huge amount of money, but he do it, did so in a way that made the world forever better. All right? And, 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. You know, I think the putting the computer on every, on every desk or whatever, uh, was a real thing. Um, 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 um the world has ever produced and find out, well, surprise, everything you thought about him wasn't exactly what you thought.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  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 you know, he can go in with his brains and money and his scientific ways and you know, the the energy that he can attract to himself and pick off these things. You know, his contribution to Africa, by the time he, you know, takes the dirt nap or transfers his uh life force into software, which I think is far more likely in his case, they may rename the nation after him, you know, it might, it might be the continent of Bill Gates when he's done.

• 1:59:15Speaker 01

  And I'm not sure if everybody sees this coming. I mean, he's working on stuff like fixing water, you know, like, how would, how would everybody like to have water? Wouldn't that be good? I mean, he, he's going after the, 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.

• 1:59:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he's, he's a very impressive guy. I heard a, a first person anecdote from a friend of mine who uh somehow ended up going on a bird watching tour with Bill Gates. It's a small group of people and, and Bill Gates spent maybe an hour the night before reading a bird watching 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. It just mind boggling. I mean, talk about CPU power.

• 2:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:15Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, what advice, and I'll just ask you one or two more questions, what advice would you give to your 30 year old self?

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, thirty year old self. Um, that was a, that was a time of great transition. I would say probably patience, because you know, I've been playing the, the system game and not the goal game since, um, since I got into college and literally have a diary in which I, I wrote my master plan. If you take, you know, ten years following a, a process and it's not giving you, uh, results, that's hard to remain patient. So, uh, in retrospect, that was the only thing I needed to, uh, to maybe, you know, alleviate some of my pain. But on the other hand, impatience probably drove me harder. So maybe I wouldn't tell myself that either.

• 2:01:06Tim Ferriss?

  And if, if your thirty year old self said, how, how exactly do you propose I be patient? What would you, how would you respond to that?

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  Um, well, my thirty year old self wouldn't have access to medical marijuana. So I would have to, I'm a, I'm a limited, limited canvas with which to paint. Um, I, I've always made it a, a top priority since I was a teenager and had, uh, 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, um, is really the process of diversification. So I, I'm not going to worry about losing one friend if I have a

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  hundred, but if I have two friends, I'm really going to be worried. You know, not, not going to worry about losing my job because my one boss is going to fire me. Um, 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 worry about stress is to eliminate it. I, I don't worry about my, my stock picks because I have a diversified portfolio. So diversification works in almost every area of your life to reduce your stress.

• 2:02:29Tim Ferriss?

  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, not that we need it, but, uh, always fun to, uh, to, to chat with you. And, uh, where can people learn more about you, find you online, say hello? Uh, where would you like people to, to check you out?

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  And what is your Twitter handle if people want to ping you on Twitter?

• 2:03:20Speaker 01

  Scott Adams says.

• 2:03:22Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 2:03:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:03:44Tim Ferriss?

  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 fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out. And Scott, keep creating, man. I love your stuff and hope to see you again soon.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tim. I love this. Let's do it again.

• 2:04:08Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design-related. I have used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mock-ups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mock-ups and designs. You choose your favorite and you have an original that you love or you get your money back.

• 2:04:53Tim Ferriss?

  It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 2:05:16Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:06:00Tim Ferriss?

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