#70 Scott Adams: Avoiding Loserthink

Dilbert creator and author Scott Adams shares cognitive tools and tricks we can use to think better, expand our perspective, and avoid slumping into “loserthink.” Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A typical artist says, "I've made this great art. If you don't like it, well, there's something wrong with you." There's sort of an ego that comes with art. But I lacked that type of artistic ego because I came from a different path. I was a businessperson. Art was a thing I was trying to do.

• 0:26Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a long-form conversation hosted by Shane Parrish. Our goal is simple: to learn something new in every conversation that makes us a little bit smarter than yesterday. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog/podcast. The Knowledge Project is a part of Farnham Street, a website dedicated to mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. Farnham Street puts together a weekly newsletter called Brain Food that comes out every Sunday. Much like this podcast, it's high-signal, timeless, and mind-expanding. Read what you're missing at fs.blog/newsletter. Today, I'm speaking with Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert Comic

• 1:07Shane Parrish?

  Strip and the author of Loser Think. We explore how Dilbert came to be and why a simple change, such as adding an email address, turned it into one of the most popular comics in the world. We dive into persuasion and spend a lot of time on cognitive tools and tricks that can help us think better, including how to deal with critics. It's time to listen and learn.

• 1:40Shane Parrish?

  Scott, I'm so glad to have you on the show.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Well, thanks for having me.

• 1:44Shane Parrish?

  As I was prepping for this, I noticed in one of your interviews with Naval, you asked him if he was going to give his own introduction, what would it be? And I'm going to flip that around on you. If you were going to give your own introduction, what would it be?

• 1:56Speaker 00

  I would say I'm the creator of the Dilbert Comic Strip, an author. And recently, I've been writing a lot about influence and persuasion and politics.

• 2:08Shane Parrish?

  I really want to deep dive into influence and persuasion. Maybe we can avoid a little bit of the politics, but you're most famously known for Dilbert, obviously. How did that come to be?

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Well, I was working my cubicle job. I worked for a big bank and then later for the local phone company. And my careers were stalling because my bosses, in both cases, they called me in and said, you know, we can't really promote white males anymore because we don't have enough diversity and we just got in trouble. So I left the bank when they told me that. And they told me that directly, by the way. When I tell this story, people say, well, you're reading between the lines. No, they said that directly. We can't promote you because you're white and male. And we got caught with our pants down, having basically 100% white male management. So they were trying to correct it, which I applaud, but it wasn't good for my career.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  So I left the bank, went to the phone company, got on the management track, was doing great. And one day, my boss called me in and gave me the identical speech. And so I asked, well, how long do I have to wait before that situation changes? And someone who has my DNA could be promoted at this company. And they couldn't tell me because, you know, it took 200 years to get where they were. How long would it take to undo it? So I started looking for something to do outside of the corporate world. I thought, you know, I always wanted to be a cartoonist. It was an early childhood ambition that I never really pursued. And I thought, well, let's see if I can figure out how to be a cartoonist. So I, I said about that, and I could give you as much details as, as you're willing

• 3:45Speaker 00

  to listen to, but.

• 3:46Shane Parrish?

  More detail is better.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  The breakthrough was I was thinking about becoming a cartoonist, but didn't know how, didn't know where to start, didn't know who to talk to, didn't know anything. And this was pre-internet. But pre-internet, you couldn't always find out information. It was sort of hard. And one day, when I was thinking about, how do I become a cartoonist? I turned on the television and I was just flipping through the channels. And there happened to be a TV show about how to become a cartoonist. And I missed almost the entire show, but I could tell what it must have been about by the the closing minutes. And as the credits were rolling by, the closing credits, I quickly grabbed a notepad and wrote down the name of the host and where they were broadcasting from.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  And I wrote a letter, and this is before email. That's how long ago it was. And wrote a letter to the host of the show and said, I missed your show, but I'd like to become a cartoonist. Can you give me some tips? And a few weeks later, I get a handwritten two-page letter from the host of the show. His name is Jack Cassidy, still alive. And he told me what book to buy, what materials to get. And then he gave me this advice. He said, it's a very competitive industry. You'll get a lot of rejections, but don't give up. So I thought, oh, good, I know exactly what to do. I bought the book he recommended, which tells you where to send your samples and what they should look like in terms of the materials.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Bought the paper and the pens he recommended, put together some of my finest comics and sent them off to the major magazines, Playboy, New Yorker, people who who buy comics. And all of my comics were rejected. And once I had all the rejections in, I thought, well, you know, I did what I could. I tried hard. I put my, you know, full heart into it. Didn't work out. And I was okay with that because I put a full effort into it. So I collected up all my materials and I put them in a closet and I just forgot about it. A year goes by and I go onto my mailbox and there's a letter there from Jack Cassidy, the cartoonist who gave me the original advice.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  And I hadn't even thanked him for his advice. So it had been a year that had gone by since his first letter. So it was kind of weird that there would be a second letter a year later. I opened it up and it said he was cleaning his office and he came upon my samples I'd sent him a year earlier in a big pile. And he said he was just writing to make sure that I hadn't given up. And that was the only reason he wrote. It was the only reason he wrote. And I had given up. And I thought, well, maybe he sees something that these other editors of these magazines that rejected me, maybe they didn't see it. He's a professional cartoonist. And I thought, maybe I don't see it either. Maybe he sees something there, some X factor that's a bit invisible.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  And so I got my materials out and I thought, well, I'll raise my sights rather than being rejected by mere magazines. I'll, I'll try to become a syndicated cartoonist, meaning that you, you make a deal with a cartoon syndicate. So I put together some comics that were the prototype for Dilbert. They were based on people I worked with and sent them off to the major cartoon syndication companies. And one by one, I started getting the rejections. And when I thought I had them all, I said, well, now I've tried twice and I still felt good about it because I put good effort into it both times. So I collected up all my art supplies once again and put them in my closet and forgot about it.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  A few months go by and I get a call from a woman who said she worked for some company I'd never heard of, some company called United Media. And she said she'd seen my samples and I didn't really know how, because I hadn't sent my samples to anybody with that name. And she said she wanted to offer me a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist. Now, I'm a little wary when I get this offer because it's just a stranger cold calling me, it seemed like, on my home phone and she's going to offer me like the most valuable thing anybody would ever want in the world. It's, it's like winning the lottery if you could actually get a real syndication contract. But I'd never heard of her, this company. So I was a little cautious and I said, you know, I'm flattered by your offer, but I'd

• 8:09Speaker 00

  really need to see some kind of references. Is there any cartoonist or cartoon you've worked with before? Anything that got published through you at all, a pamphlet, a, you know, an ad, anything? And there's this long pause and then she says, yeah, we handle Penis and Garfield and Marmaduke. She had about 12 more on the list. And that was when I realized that something big was happening and also that my negotiating position had been somewhat compromised at that point because I didn't know what I was talking about. It turns out that they were the parent company, the corporate parent of the entity that I had sent my samples to. So I just didn't recognize the corporate name. And they

• 8:53Speaker 00

  were the biggest in the world. And so they offered me a contract and it's, that's where it all started.

• 8:59Shane Parrish?

  That's an incredible story. What do you think made Dilbert so successful?

• 9:03Speaker 00

  Well, it was a combination of things. Probably the biggest change, you know, the thing that made it take off is that after the first few years, it really wasn't getting any traction at all. It just laid there in a few newspapers, not many. It wasn't growing. And your syndication company, their business model requires them to spend a lot of attention on whatever the new comic is that they're launching. But then after they've spent, you know, a year or two of that, they need to move to the next one if the last one's not taking off on its own. So that's what happened. And I was just sort of stranded, you know, another comic that wasn't going to make it. So I was on my own. But that's when luck intervened. I still had my day job. I was working at the phone company. I was working

• 9:47Speaker 00

  in the technology lab or one of them. And we had email before other people had email. So before the, the average person even knew what email was, we, we had it. And I thought, well, what happens if I start running my email address in the strip? And then I directly connect to my customers. Cause I had an MBA. And if you go to business school, rule number one is that you have to listen to the customer and you have to give them what they want. But that's the basic, you know, thing that a business person will do. That's kind of the opposite of what an artist normally does. A typical artist says, I've made this great art. If you don't like it, well, there's something wrong with you. There's sort of

• 10:28Speaker 00

  an ego that comes with art. But I lacked that type of artistic ego because I came from a different path. I was a business person. Art was a thing I was trying to do. And so I put my email address in the strip and I got thousands of emails a day. And people consistently said the same thing. They said, we like your cartoon a little bit, but when Dilbert is in the office, which was actually rare in the early days, he had a job, but it wasn't really focused on that. They would say, when he's in the office and he's with his boss and his coworkers, we love that. And so many people said exactly the same thing, that I actually changed the entire

• 11:07Speaker 00

  nature of the strip from a generic strip about a guy with a talking dog to a workplace strip. And when I made that change, just everything happened after that. It became easy to identify. It's that workplace strip. He's a cubicle. He's a technology guy. And then, of course, the dot com era came, and the downsizing era of the 90s. I was taking the advice of the readers in a way that artists typically don't. So I was trying to, as we say in Persuasion, pace the audience. You know, basically, give them back what they were giving me or telling me they wanted. And that worked sensationally well, because there wasn't really a workplace comic strip.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  When the big downsizing wave of the 90s came, and all the big companies were doing massive layoffs, all the news business wanted to do stories about it. But you can't really do a proper story about something unless you have a face. You need a person, you need a personality, to give a story a face. But this downsizing thing was sort of a concept. And here was Dilber, who became, you know, through my work, sort of the face of the downtrodden, about-to-be-downsized employee. And so, next thing you know, it's on the cover of the major magazines, and it's just being forwarded and clipped and cut out and copied everywhere. That was the big change, is that I combined my business skills, my MBA, my degree in

• 12:32Speaker 00

  economics, with the art, and it was those, that combination. I call it a skill stack, when you put together skills that are complementary. And that's really what made the difference.

• 12:43Shane Parrish?

  I mean, originally, the inspiration, as I understand it, was sort of like your experience in the office. But as time went on, is that still the case? Or where does the inspiration come from now?

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Well, it's very hard to make a comic or write humor. About something you don't have some personal experience with. So it's that personal experience that allows you to express it in the way that other people have had the same experience can say, oh, yeah, I've been there. Even though at this point, obviously, a lot of the suggestions come from people who are still in the office, I tend not to use them unless I can recognize them. So if I can't relate to it myself, I don't trust that other people will. But on top of that, my life is pretty complicated and it's a business life. You know, Dilbert is a major enterprise. It requires meetings and contracts and lots of interaction with people of different skill sets and stuff.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  I'm also involved with a startup called Wenhub. We have meetings, just like any company. We have strategies and budgets and all that stuff. So I'm always surrounded by it.

• 13:46Shane Parrish?

  What else did you learn in business school that combined maybe into a skill stack that you didn't recognize at the time or you find incredibly valuable now?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Well, one of the weird things about being a cartoonist at my level, and when I say my level, I just mean, you know, some amount of notoriety and scale, you know, it's just a big enterprise, is I spent a ton of time with lawyers and contracts and insurance and just business-y stuff. And I was a professional contract negotiator when I worked at the phone company and also a little bit at the bank. So just the, the business of being a cartoonist, if you only had art as training, you would have to hand off that stuff or you'd skip it. Maybe in some cases you say, I just, I don't know how to get into that. So the fact that I have broad business experience that goes everything from figuring out the

• 14:38Speaker 00

  cash flow advantage in the future to insurance, to contracts, you know, leasing versus buying. I mean, it's just coincidentally, I had a very deep experience in all the stuff that that matters. Now, on top of that, I also did a lot of training in public speaking and interviews and media training. You know, there's, there's something called media training. Where it trains you to do basically what I'm doing right now, which is how to speak in public in a way that you don't get sued or embarrassed or fired from your job. Those are all skills. It looks like it's just somebody talking in public and how hard it can be, but there's a lot of skill that goes into doing it well. Those skills are really complementary to cartoonists

• 15:19Speaker 00

  because, as this is an example, people like to talk to cartoonists. So the media is always interested in cartoonists once they reach a certain level of notoriety.

• 15:30Shane Parrish?

  I love talking to interesting people. And I'm curious about something you said there about the media training. If you were to give a quick two-minute class on media training, what would you advise us?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  The main thing that you learn in media training is almost laughable, which is you don't have to answer the questions. Now, when I say that, you're thinking, oh, I'll say, I refuse to answer that question. But that's the wrong way to play it. The right way to play it is you probably have something you want to say. So say what you want to say. And as long as it's interesting, you're probably OK. Because let's say you're on some four-minute hit on a national TV show, which was sort of typical. I've done hundreds or thousands of them at this point. And they'll ask some question that maybe shows they didn't read your book or they don't know who you are. And in the old days, I would say, I don't understand the question. Or could you restate that?

• 16:23Speaker 00

  You know, and that is boring television. But the smarter technique is that you just say, OK, they want me to say something interesting. I want to talk about the book. So I'll say something the audience likes. The person who asked the question will be fine with it. It'll also mention the book. It's a lot of variables you got to put together on the fly and think on your feet. But as long as you remember the golden rule, you don't have to answer the exact question. You do have to be interesting, or you won't be invited back. You know, I'm not talking about a political answer where you're just saying some partisan thing. I'm saying just being interesting, entertaining the audience, and doing it in a way that's functional for both the interviewer and for whatever your interests are. That's the main rule. There's one other rule. I can't remember if they told me this

• 17:08Speaker 00

  or it's just something I learned on my own. You never want to say something in an interview that could be easily misinterpreted. And almost anything can be misinterpreted. So I'll give you an example. People would ask me about my early childhood, when both my parents were alive. They both passed. And I would make the mistake of answering the questions. And man, if you want to find an awkward situation, wait till you see how some writer who heard your answer about your parents characterizes your parents. You don't want to see that in writing because they're going to characterize it the way they want to, not the way you said it. So the only way you can avoid that is by being boring. So I learned eventually if somebody say, "Tell us about your childhood, Scott."

• 17:52Speaker 00

  I would say, "You know, pretty normal. Two parents, totally ordinary." And you just make sure that doesn't make it in the story because anything that someone else says about what you said about your parents, nothing good is going to come from that.

• 18:08Shane Parrish?

  It'll just be to fit their narrative of what they sort of want to say.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:13Shane Parrish?

  What would you say are other people's biggest misconceptions of you?

• 18:17Speaker 00

  Well, at the moment, biggest misconception of me is that somebody has seen or heard something I said and understood it correctly. My normal texture of my life is just lots of people criticizing me every day. You know, before it was mostly about comics. Then I started blogging and it was about blog posts and that. And now most of it's on Twitter. And I'm just massively criticized every day about probably hundreds of different things over the years. And one thing that they almost all have in common is that they're based on a misrepresentation or a misunderstanding of my opinion. It's actually very rare for somebody to criticize

• 19:02Speaker 00

  my opinion as accurately understood. But mostly people get wound up and bent out of shape because they misinterpreted something I've said. Often it's just a joke. Sometimes I'll tell the joke and somebody will take that in context. It doesn't look like a joke anymore. And then suddenly I'm Satan because I said something that I didn't actually say. The things that I've seen online about me that people still repeat, and I'm talking about up to this week. I've seen people say that I'm a Holocaust denier. Uh, no.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  That I'm a white nationalist. No, whatever's not that is what I am. That I've got some problem with women? No. So, most of the things that people criticize me for are literally things that aren't actually in evidence.

• 19:51Shane Parrish?

  Did you always have a thick skin? Like, how do you deal with this? What do you know about handling criticism now that you didn't know when you first started getting this feedback? Or criticism, I guess, if you will?

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, one does not go into this public life without knowing that's part of the job. I made a promise to myself early on when Dilber started to be successful. And I said to myself, "I'm not going to be the guy who complains because the package has all the parts." Alright, so part of the package is I get to be rich and famous and I have the greatest job ever. But I don't get that part without the other part. Nobody gets that. You know, it's like, "I'd like an expensive car, but I don't want to pay any money for it." In the real world, criticism from the audience is just part of the job. So, part of it is knowing it's coming. Part of it is choosing it, you know, as part of the package of goodness and badness.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  And so, I can blame myself for what happens because it's part of a choice. Some of it is practice. The more you get criticized, the more used to it you get. It's like every other skill, you can get better at it. Some of it is perspective, because as I said, listening to somebody criticize their own misunderstanding feels different than being criticized for something you did say. They don't register the same. And so, I try to keep those separate. It's like, "Okay, somebody misunderstood something. They think they're mad at me. They're only mad at their own misunderstanding." So, sometimes I have to deal with that, you know, respond to it on social media or whatever.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  I fight back vigorously, but primarily for either entertainment of the people who are watching. If I do it on Twitter, for example, I try to do it in a witty way. Part of the content that entertains. Part of it is just to correct the record. So if anybody sees the comment, they might see my comment to the comment and say, oh, okay, looks like a misunderstanding here.

• 21:47Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I was curious about that when I was doing research for you. There's definitely a lot of information out there on you and some of it is very polarizing with the way that people respond to some of your comments, which at times I felt for you and I was like, why are you replying to this? Why are you even sort of acknowledging some of this?

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Well, I enjoy it. That's also part of it. There's when I'm engaging with people online, even when they're unpleasant people and even when they've said horrible things about me, I kind of like, I don't know, the game of it, the competition of it, the one-up smanship. Some of it is practice. I literally use them for practice because if somebody makes a certain kind of criticism, I can often count on other people in the future making a similar one. So I see if I can shut it down with a comment. I see if there's some fact that would change their mind. So there's always an element of experimenting and I experiment in public because my followers on Twitter especially, they like the show.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  So I don't know if you noticed this, but when I respond to critics, I'll often get a lot of applause from the people who are just following along, the people who are just watching the show.

• 22:56Shane Parrish?

  You've done a lot of work on persuasion and we're going to get to loser think in a second here, but when it comes to persuasion, when did you start studying it? What got you into it? And like, what did you study first? Like, how did you go about learning about persuasion? Like the active art of persuasion?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  When I was a kid, my mother used to tell us the story about how she delivered my younger sister. So she gave birth to my sister without any anesthesia, but she was hypnotized by her family doctor who was also a hypnotist. She reports being awake and feeling no pain during childbirth. Now, as time went by, I'm not entirely sure that that story was true. You know, there are things your mother tells you that you believe when you're young, but when you get older, you say, you know, could she have forgotten that they gave her a shot? So I don't know how much was true, but I can tell you that's where my interest started. I can tell you that there's enough science to show that some people, and it wouldn't

• 23:56Speaker 00

  be most, but some people actually can not feel pain under hypnosis. Something like 20% of the public can have extraordinary phenomena, as we call it. Hypnotists use that word phenomena, and it means that you can see or feel things that aren't actually there. The rest of the people, the 80%, can also be influenced or hypnotized, but it's generally a longer term, more subtle kind of a shift, not actually seeing something that's not there. So that got me interested. And when I was in my twenties, somebody just said, hey, about this hypnosis class? I don't remember what I was thinking, but I thought, well, I'll add that to my talent stack.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  I didn't use those words back then, but it was essentially, I was just adding talents that seemed complementary, no matter what I was going to do. And I thought to myself, well, if there's anything to this, if hypnosis is real, meaning it has any function whatsoever, how would you not want to add that to all of your other talents? It could be like the king of all talents, the one that makes all the other ones a lot less even necessary.

• 25:03Shane Parrish?

  It amplifies, at least, yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I remember hearing early on in the process, at the time, who knows if this is true, but it sounds like it's true, that the most successful insurance salesperson was also a professional hypnotist. And I thought to myself, well, that could be a coincidence, but it could also not be a coincidence. So I signed up for a class, took a proper class with an instructor, we'd be a few times a week at night, and got certified as a hypnotist. And one of the things you learn as a hypnotist, probably the most important thing I've learned maybe in life, you know, if you could, if you could pick one thing that's like the most important thing you know.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  I learned that hypnotists see the world, I would say, backwards, but that it works better backwards. Specifically, if you ask the average person, "Hey, what do you think of human beings? Are they rational or irrational?" The average person would say, "Well, I think people are rational most of the time, but sure, 10% of the time, we get a little crazy or emotional. You know, there's some topics that we're all a little crazy about. But 90% of the time, we're these rational creatures." Hypnotists turn it around and they say, "No, we are rationalizers. We are people who make decisions for reasons we don't understand, and then we explain them to ourselves after the fact, so that we are rationalizing irrational species,

• 26:32Speaker 00

  who can be rational 10% of the time." So that's the backwards part. The 10% being something that has no emotional content. You know, if you're balancing your checkbook or you're just, you know, doing some math or something. Yeah, that's rational. But for a lot of our big decisions about where do you work? How do you relate to people? Your relationships, you know, politics, all that stuff. That's pretty much all irrational, and then we explain it after the fact. As evidence of that, just look at the political parties. If anybody's paying attention for the last several years, I won't get political, I'll just make this persuasion point, which is, it's pretty clear, if you're watching politics, that it doesn't matter what happens. People just take sides.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  You see it so clearly that it's laughable at this point. That's the world that I live in, where people are not rational, but I accept that as the proper canvas, which I'm working with to paint something. If you try to paint anything useful, assuming that people are rational, you're going to build a system, you're going to try to manage to that. It just doesn't work, because people aren't. But if you go the other way and say, "What if I assume that everybody's just irrational? What would you do differently?" And often, what you would do differently is far more effective. Assuming people are irrational most of the time is a very clear way to see the world.

• 27:56Shane Parrish?

  Can you give me some examples of how that plays out? Like, what you do differently?

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Let me give you an example of a cigarette smoker. So you've probably had this experience. You talk to somebody who's been a smoker for thirty years. They of course know that all the science says that it's bad for them, but they can't quit. Some smokers will say, yeah, I want to quit, but I'm weak. You know, I just don't have the willpower or something like that. And they're probably closer to some kind of truth. But then you run into the people who say, my grandmother lived to ninety-five and she had steak and drank whiskey and smoked a pack of Marlboros every day. Now, that's not really thinking. That's that's not rational. Now, you see that kind of thinking, that faulty thinking all the time.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  And it's usually in the service of explaining why somebody is doing something irrational. And certainly in the realm of politics, again, without getting into any details, we see time and time again, that it doesn't matter what your team does, no matter how bad it is, you're still going to be okay with it because it's your team. And that's the part that people don't admit to themselves. You know, they'll they'll fight like wounded weasels to to defend whatever their side did. And probably they're thinking internally that they're actually making some kind of a coherent argument. But they're typically not. That's what my book, Losers Think, is mostly about. It's it's those rationalizations and bad thinking that you can learn to avoid.

• 29:26Shane Parrish?

  One of the things in that book that I thought was quite profound was that you said, and I'm going to get the quote wrong here because I'm paraphrasing, but a consistently bestselling nonfiction author is really a fiction author. Can you elaborate on that?

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Well, I think the context was, if I recall, that people who are writing nonfiction believe they're telling you what is objectively true in the world. But we don't have that capability. We all have this illusion that the version of the world we're seeing is the one. And then if anybody's got a different version, they must be wrong. It's sort of the most common illusion that we all have. So if you sit down and say, oh, I'm going to write, I'm going to write about

• 30:09Speaker 00

  You don't have that capability. It's not something you could do, no matter how hard you try, because all you have is a filter on reality. Now, we still label that as nonfiction, because somebody's not trying to write fiction. But most of what we regard as fact is some kind of filtered truth. I would go so far as to say that even our views of history, as is widely known, you know, the winners get to write history. But beyond that, it's not just that the winners write it, but the history is written for a strategic, functional purpose. In the case of the United States, we would like to brainwash our youth, and I'm using brainwash in a positive sense here, because what I'm going to talk about is good,

• 30:54Speaker 00

  which is you socialize the children to support their country and, you know, fight for it and feel some sense of, you know, belonging to the country. That's all good. But probably in service of that, we depart from the truth a little bit. So our versions of history that I learned when I was a kid, as an adult, I look back at them and I think, well, maybe we weren't so terrific. Maybe we weren't so awesome in how we handled Native Americans. Maybe the colonists were not such nice people. Maybe the founders of this country should not be celebrated, given that most of them were slave owners. There's a sanitized version that we feed to children

• 31:36Speaker 00

  in the service of brainwashing them into good citizens, which I think we should probably continue doing. You know, I don't have a problem with that. I think every, every country gets to brainwash their children, and we probably do a pretty good job of it.

• 31:50Shane Parrish?

  And then, so what are the skills that we, we can take away from that in terms of avoiding what you call loser think? I mean, in the book, you have chapters like, think like a psychologist, think like an artist, think like a historian. Can you expand on like what loser think is, how we can go about learning things to overcome it?

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I define loser think not as a quality of the individual. So when I say somebody is using loser think, I don't mean that they're a loser. It's not about the person. It is about the experience which the person has been subjected to. So since I have a degree in economics, as I mentioned, when I look at a situation in the news, I can apply that filter in a way that others perhaps could not. But it wouldn't take you, you know, four years to get a degree in economics to learn the basics. Likewise for psychology, history, art, you know, other things. So people tend to come at topics with just the filter that they just happen to have because of the life that they led.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  What I recommend is that you expose yourself at least to the general ideas of how other people think. For example, if somebody were to say, "How good is a certain president doing?" It doesn't have to be this president, I'd make a general point. If you say, "How good a president was President X?" The average person will say, "Well, I think that person did a good job, or that person did a terrible job." Those are both ridiculous opinions. And an economist would be in a position to tell you why. Because you haven't compared that president to another president who was doing the same job at the same time, under the same circumstances. Without that comparison, which by the way, any scientist would know to compare. So it's not just economists.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  There are certain disciplines that are good at comparing things. But most people have never learned the art of comparing things. The only way you could know if a president did a good or bad job, I mean, short of, you know, being treasonous or something ridiculous that's obvious on its face. But you really couldn't tell if a Democrat had been elected, if the economy would be doing even better. You don't know if a different Republican had been elected, we'd be at war.

• 34:04Shane Parrish?

  Because those are hypotheticals.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's no way to compare any president to anything that's actually meaningful. So anybody who has a strong opinion on it, again, unless there's some, you know, major event, starting a war that wasn't necessary, et cetera, you can't tell. That would be obvious to a scientist, obvious to an economist, obvious to a lot of people who have MBAs, et cetera. It would not be obvious to an artist. And on social media, it's very interesting when I'll see people who make what I would call "common mistakes of comparisons." I often check their profile, and sure enough, it's musician, it's artist, and it's completely expected. These are not people who are dumb. These are not people who are losers. These are people who are applying loser think accidentally because they haven't been

• 34:50Speaker 00

  exposed to the proper ways of comparing things. Now comparing things is just one topic of loser think, but it's the the general idea that, oh, let me give you one from today. This this just happened recently. Somebody was asked to me about all those UFO sightings that we're hearing about from the military. And his thinking was, well, these military guys seem reliable. It's multiple people who saw this thing. They can't explain it. These UFO things seem to have defied physics. They locked on to them with their instruments. There's just plenty of proof that there's something going on there that is either some dark ops human thing or an alien thing.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  One of the things that say a psychologist, somebody who is trained in psychology, might inform those people is that the most common explanation for something you don't understand is stuff you've never heard of, things you haven't imagined. So sometimes we think that the evidence is proving something's true. In this case, it's proof there are UFOs or at least something we don't understand. Whereas I say, no, the far more common explanation is mass hysteria because mass hysteria happens all the time. I would say half of the news is representing some kind of mass hysteria for one side or the other. Now, here's an interesting part of that.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  I was listening, I saw a clip where one of the pilots, who was one of the main witnesses to this phenomenon, these UFO type things, he describes his experience and his experience seemed really credible. He had videos, he had other witnesses, very detailed. He's a credible guy and all looks very credible. And then he adds this at the end, he tells the audience that his mother-in-law is so interested in UFOs that every time he sees her, she asks if he's seen one yet.

• 36:46Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  That's your tell because he's primed. I call him hypnotized, but people complain when I use that word. He's set up to have a confirmation bias because he wants to see them and it's being reminded of them all the time. So if you didn't know that, so let's say you were not a psychologist. Let's say you were not someone who worked in law enforcement. Because people who work in law enforcement can see this a mile away. They can see that he'd been primed to see something. Now, if he'd never been primed to see it, that would be more evidence that it might be a real phenomenon. But when he says, "Without prompting, somebody's asking me if I'm seeing UFOs all the time," and it's somebody that matters, his mother-in-law, probably matters a lot.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  He was primed. So his testimony actually would be worth exactly zero because of that. Now, I'm not saying that's the explanation. I'm saying that if you had my filter on life, if you knew how common mass hysteria was, if you studied any of the fields in which confirmation bias is normally a key topic, again, you know, law enforcement, if you're a lawyer, you're a judge, you're any kind of a scientist, I would say, and certainly if you studied psychology, you'd see that right away. Have you ever heard of the McMartin Schoolchildren case?

• 38:07Shane Parrish?

  No, what is that?

• 38:09Speaker 00

  So I forget when this was, it might have been the 80s, but I could be wrong about that. There was a preschool that got accused of having a satanic, some kind of a satanic situation in the basement under the school. And it was alleged that they were taking many of their students down there, and there were all kinds of satanic rituals and stuff like that. Now, the police got a lot of witnesses, eyewitnesses. Most, I think there were all the kids. I don't think any adults were involved in that. But they interviewed lots of kids. They interviewed them individually so that they weren't being polluted by the other kids' opinions. And those kids were all confirming that people were being brought down to the basement below the school

• 38:52Speaker 00

  and being part of these satanic rituals. In the end, it was discovered that there was not even a basement under the school. So none of this was true, and nobody could figure out why there could be so many eyewitnesses, in this case, all the kids, that would say the same thing. And then some experts who actually had a broader knowledge base, different filters, looked at the videos of the police questioning the kids, and they saw the tell. And the tell is the police were putting the ideas into the kids' minds. And kids are very easily persuaded that something that's not real is real. That's why they believe in Santa Claus and lots of other things. But probably some of those kids came to believe that that really happened,

• 39:36Speaker 00

  and it was nothing but the suggestion from the adult, who was credible. And they probably thought their friends were seeing it, too. They didn't want to be the one who didn't see it. That's the most famous case where people who are primed will see just fantastical things, and it can happen almost instantly.

• 39:53Shane Parrish?

  So why is it we're not taught to think in a multidisciplinary way, and we're more taught in a very specific, narrow field?

• 40:01Speaker 00

  As far as I can tell, nobody really thought about it. And that's why I wrote the book. And when I say nobody thought about it, I mean, they didn't think about it in the simple way that I lay it out. Because if you said to somebody, "Well, why aren't you a doctor and an engineer?" Somebody would say, "Well, I don't have that much time. What I'm offering is that you don't need to be an expert in those other fields. You just have to be exposed and really just hear it once." You know, now that I've explained this McMartin School, preschool thing, now that I've explained confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, they're pretty easy concepts. You hear them once and you get them. Now that I've explained the economic concept, which is really a scientific concept,

• 40:43Speaker 00

  of you don't really know how good something is unless it's compared to something that's, you know, a like thing in the same situation. Until you hear that the first time, it's just not obvious. But what I'm trying to add to the conversation is you don't need to be any expert in any of those things. You just have to be exposed to it once. You hear it once and you'll know it forever. These are really simple concepts, but people, for the most part, have not heard it even once.

• 41:08Shane Parrish?

  We have a big project in the works along those lines called the Fernham Street Mental Model, a lot of work of mental models. The idea behind the project is basically to give everybody the university 101 education in all the major disciplines. So, and like Numerus City will talk about permutations and combinations and sort of like compounding. And the idea is to expose people to a lot of these ideas in an effort to help people think in a more multidisciplinary way. I'm curious as to why you think we're not exposed in a multidisciplinary way in the education system?

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Well, I assume that we just sort of evolved that way. And also, there's probably something to the way universities and colleges are organized, that there may be some economic reason that they focus on certain things. It may have something to do with the fact that you need a degree that says you are something, or you are a trained economist, or you are a psychologist. It may be that having a good, general, how to be an effective human being kind of degree might not be the kind of degree anybody wants.

• 42:12Shane Parrish?

  How would you go about changing education? And what level would you change it at? Would it be elementary school, middle school, high school, university?

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Well, I think technology is going to change it on its own. I was trying to answer one very simple question about drumming. I'm learning to be a drummer. And I go to a YouTube channel, and sure enough, there's this great content. But it took about five minutes for the person to get past the introduction to tell me the one fact, that was the only fact that was going to be in this entire thing. And I thought, imagine if online training actually was done well. Because even if you look at the Khan Academy, for example, people would say, well, that's a good example of doing it right. But it's still really just somebody filming an instructor talking plus some graphics. Imagine if you will, and I think it's inevitable, we're gonna end up there,

• 43:03Speaker 00

  more of a Hollywood model where anybody can monetize their training class. There's some kind of platform that'll let you put your class up there the way you might put a book on Amazon. And you can put together a team of the best director, the best graphics artist, the best presenter, and the person who's an expert who can put it all together. At some point, watching either a 2D or even a virtual reality lesson will be so superior to anything you could do in a classroom that the classroom just won't make sense anymore. But we're not there, right? At the moment, the technology for online training is worse. So it's not quite competitive, except in special cases.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  So I think that the just the natural march of technology and incremental improvements are gonna end up, you know, that plus lots of experimentation and A/B testing and all that. It's gonna get us to a place where a lot of these things are solved just because we have the right tools and we've experimented with them long enough.

• 44:07Shane Parrish?

  And so do you think with multidisciplinary education, it'll be left to the individual to go pursue that? Or do you think it'll be arranged in some way by an education system or parents or?

• 44:18Speaker 00

  I'm kind of expecting that influential individuals and entities will start blessing certain sets of topics. So for example, you can imagine hypothetically that there might be a Warren Buffett degree. And all it would be is Warren Buffett in this sort of mental experiment here. You just imagine that he says, you know, if somebody took this set of classes, and I'll be specific, it's this set, then you could say you have the Warren Buffett four-year degree or something like that. As soon as somebody brands a set of classes as something that they're recommending or endorsing. And it's somebody with credibility and other people will look at it and say, well, that worked, then there'll just be more of it.

• 45:03Shane Parrish?

  In the book, you sort of go into Occam's razor a little bit in a way that a lot of people don't go into the nuances of it. You suggest that it works in science, but not on people. I'm curious to hear you expand on that more.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Well, Occam's razor is the belief that the simplest explanation, assuming you have more than one way to explain a set of facts, that the simplest one is usually correct. Now, in science, there may be an application for that, but you still have to test to make sure that you got the right solution. But in the real world, the problem is that we think backwards. What we think we're doing is picking the simplest explanation. What we're actually doing is defining our own preferred explanation as the simple one. And the example I like to give is, how did the world get here? How did it all get created? Well, the creationist says, God did it. Basically, three words. Can't get any simpler than that.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  God did it. And the scientist might say, evolution, natural selection. We just evolved this way. Simple. Can't get any simpler than that. Evolution did it. Both people would have wildly different opinions of what was the simple explanation.

• 46:14Shane Parrish?

  Well, when I hear something, which I hear the simplest explanation from somebody else's point of view, or hear any explanation from somebody else in terms of rebuttal or different argument, I'm often thinking, oh, like, what would have to be true for that to be true? So like, trying to get to my implicit sort of beliefs to make that true and understand how the other person sees the world.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Well, I think what you'll find out is that the person who has the simplest explanation is almost always the least informed, which is a problem. Because the part of what makes you think your explanation is right and simple is that you don't know the nuance of the situation. So anytime I see somebody say, well, let's fix the economy. All we have to do is X. That's almost always wrong.

• 46:58Shane Parrish?

  And so is there a way to guard against our sort of, not only our simplistic thinking when it comes to People, but also be aware of it in other people's thinking or see it. And then how should we respond if we do sort of recognize it in other people?

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Well, I like to just remind people that they can't tell what's the simplest explanation. If you have that little recording playing in your head, it should prevent you from saying, "Hey, my explanation is the simple one." Because you should know that other people think their explanation is a simple one.

• 47:32Shane Parrish?

  And so after writing Loser Think, I'm curious as to how you think differently through problems or make decisions differently. Is there a conscious sort of tools or tactics that you approach decision making with that you didn't before? Is there a different method of thinking that you're employing?

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not like there's one method, but rather there are a whole bunch of techniques that are common to different fields. And if you're familiar with them, then you have more tools. So basically, avoiding loser think is making sure you have a full toolbox that you could, for example, know how to compare things. You could, for example, know when to think coincidences mean something and when they don't, that you know the difference between the short term and the long term. The main thing that I got out of writing the book is reminding myself of this, you know, these tools, so they're a little more accessible, they're more front of mind, which is the goal.

• 48:27Shane Parrish?

  And do they come to you through intuition? Or are you going through them like checklist style, like, "Oh, I need to think like a psychologist here, I need to think like an engineer here." Like, how are you employing them? Or is it just pure, like, you understand them, so now you have an intuition about which ones to use and when?

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Well, it doesn't really take intuition if you know what the tool is. What you find when people are undisciplined in their thinking, and you see this wildly on social media, is that people will judge a thing without comparing it to anything, except their imagined perfect state. But usually, the other alternative is nothing like a perfect situation. It's another imperfect situation.

• 49:06Shane Parrish?

  Why do you think it is that most of us don't want to be exposed to? Like, is it mentally uncomfortable? What are the reasons that go through your mind when you think of why we don't want to expose ourselves to other people who have different opinions and are possibly smarter than we are?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Well, I don't know that we don't want to be exposed to that, but we definitely don't like to be shown that our current worldview is ridiculous. And you always have that risk if you're debating with somebody and they disagree, it's you could be wrong, and maybe you'll find that out, and that's uncomfortable, and it triggers cognitive dissonance and some strange things. But I think mostly people are not aware of what they don't know. I like to use the example of sunk costs, an idea in economics. If you'd never heard of that, you wouldn't know you were thinking about it wrong. But once you'd heard the concept that if you've already spent money on something, you should take that out of your decision about what to do next, because that money's gone, you

• 50:04Speaker 00

  can't get it back, it's already spent. That's the idea of a sunk cost. But you'll see lots of people who will say, "Well, I've got to make this decision, because otherwise the money I spent in the past is wasted." But that's actually nonsense, because that money's gone, it just doesn't exist. You need to make your decision based on the variables that are present at the moment. So, right there, there are probably some people who are listening to this right now and just said to themselves, "Oh, I never thought about that." But once they hear it, it's a permanent part of their thinking forever. It's so simple, they just have to be exposed to it.

• 50:39Shane Parrish?

  I mean, it's easier to see faulty thinking, I think, in other people than ourselves, because we're not running our brains in debug mode, or it's a conscious effort to do that. A lot of us don't want to do it. When we do do it, we start to see our own thinking. How do we help others sort of break out of their thinking? Just pointing out that they're wrong, or they're falling victim to this fallacy, or...

• 50:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, telling somebody they're wrong directly just makes them defensive, and usually that's, no matter what happens after that, it's not going to be productive. There are a number of tricks. One of them is pacing. Now, pacing's sort of a hypnosis term, and it means matching the person you want to persuade by agreeing with them as much as you can without lying, you know, actual things that you do agree with. So you start with that and sort of get them on your team, if you will. And then, once you start introducing some disagreements, they're at least primed to think, okay, this this person agrees with me on a bunch of stuff, so maybe I should take it seriously. So that's technique number one, is agree with as much as you can.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Technique number two is to put your disagreement in the form of questions as opposed to statements whenever you can. So you might say to somebody, what would it look like if your idea played out for the next 10 years? And get them to actually explain what the world looks like in 10 years under their idea. And it could be that they can't explain it, and you'll find them say, oh, well, I hadn't really thought about what it would look like in 10 years. I was really thinking about this year. That is an easy way to let them expose their own problems and their and their opinion without having to be challenged. You're just giving them a chance to sort of discover the holes in their own their own thinking. So those would be the main thing.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Now, it might be that in asking the questions, you get good answers, and it ends up talking you out of your position, but that's good, too. One of you may have improved.

• 52:30Shane Parrish?

  I always like trying to keep an open mind, which is something I learned from Andy Duke, which is I'm never 100% certain about anything. And just that little little infliction of like, I'm only 90% certain about this, makes it so much easier to change your mind on things. And then also keeping in mind that you're worried about outcome versus protecting your ego. I call it outcome over ego. And that helps me also. It's like, what is going to get us to the best outcome? Especially if we're making a business decision. It doesn't have to be my idea. It can be somebody else's idea.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I recommend in loser thing that you work on somebody's confidence about their opinion, because often you can't directly talk them out of it. Let's say somebody says, I believe this because all of the scientists agree. Well, you can't really talk to somebody out of that position. But you could say, you know, all the scientists agreed about what was good nutrition science, and they were pretty much all wrong for years. And the scientists agreed that the ozone hole was gonna get worse and we're in big trouble, but it closed, or it started to close. So if you point out how many times experts all agreed and then were all wrong, you can start working on somebody's confidence and at least introduce the idea that the majority

• 53:44Speaker 00

  doesn't mean they're right and that there are plenty of times in history that they've observed themselves in which they were sure about something and then later found out they were wrong. So I always encourage people to actually keep track of when they're grossly wrong about something they thought they were certainly right about. Because the more of those that you can tally in your own experience, the more you can look at a situation and say, "Well, I could be wrong. I'm 90% sure, but I'm completely open to that other 10%. I just have to hear a good case for it."

• 54:17Shane Parrish?

  I think that's a great approach. I want to end with the magic question, which was something that stuck out in your book to me. Can you explain the magic question and then how you've been testing it over the last year and what you've learned from it?

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Can you restate the magic question from the book?

• 54:31Shane Parrish?

  Oh, you said the most effective approach to addressing critics who misinterpret you and then criticize their own misinterpretation as if it came from you is this challenge. State one thing you believe on this topic that you think I do not believe.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  So that's the question I've been testing online and it's really effective because what I've noticed is that virtually everybody who seems to be disagreeing with me online is actually disagreeing with a misinterpretation of my opinion. And so when I ask people to tell me one thing that they believe that they think I do not believe, they will usually stumble. And in the process of answering those questions, they will convince themselves that they did not understand my opinion to begin with. And I find that a faster, more effective way to get to that place than just say, "Oh, you're misinterpreting me. You forgot this fact." You let them find it on their own.

• 55:25Shane Parrish?

  I thought that was a really good approach to sort of not only challenging your thinking, but effectively like putting the ball back in somebody else's court in a low-cost sort of way. Like, it's really easy to criticize somebody else's opinion and sometimes it's hard to defend that opinion. It's almost asymmetric, right? It takes two seconds to sort of criticize and then it might take a long time for you to explain. And I like the idea of this because it put sort of some of that thinking back on to other people.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, usually the kinds of responses I get from that are just almost crazy when you hear them. Somebody will say, "Well, for example, you don't believe that morality should be considered in any big decision." And I'll say, "Uh, no, that's not my opinion. I do believe morality is a factor that should be considered in any big action." And then they go to the next one. "Well, you believe that we should spend unlimited money to... No, I don't believe we should spend unlimited money." So you can quickly get rid of the two or three bad assumptions that somebody had, and usually that's enough.

• 56:26Shane Parrish?

  Well, thank you so much, Scott. I really appreciate you taking the time, and this has been a great conversation.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. This was great for me, too. I appreciate the questions, and thanks so much for having me.

• 56:43Shane Parrish?

  The Knowledge Project is produced in collaboration with Jason Oberholzer and the team at Charts and Leisure. You can find show notes on this episode, as well as every other episode, at fs.blog/podcast. If you find this episode valuable, share it on social media and leave a review. To support the podcast, go to fs.blog/membership and join our learning community. You'll get hand-edited transcripts of all the podcasts and so much more. Thank you for listening.