Scott Adams Discusses Syndication and the Media (Podcast)

communication skills to cartooning and writing books. Uh. He and I have been on the opposite side of the Trump phenomena, and I have to say we actually had a very fascinating and civil conversation about what makes Trump so unique and different than everybody else, how he's disrupting politics, how he has one big lee coincidentally, the name of of

the most recent book Scott wrote. Uh. And Scott admits to being to the left of Bernie Sanders, which I think would surprise a lot of the people who criticize is him on Twitter and elsewhere. We had a fascinating conversation be shorn state till the very ends. To listen to that, because really it's quite intriguing, and if I had another hour, I probably could have um continued the conversation for that much longer. So with no further ado,

my conversation with Scott Adams. My extra special guest this week is Scott Adams. He is best known as the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, which appears in over two thousand newspapers worldwide in sixty five countries and twenty five languages. He is the author of numerous books, including Dilbert, Future and The Joy of Work. His most recent books are How to Fail At Everything and Still Succeed and

When Bigley. He received the National Cartoonist Society Ruben Award and the Newspaper Comic Strip Award in Scott Adams, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thanks for having me. You seem to come out of a fairly typical corporate background. You worked in banking and technology. How did that road lead to the creation of Dilberg. Well, the corporate thing didn't work out for me. So I worked for eight and a half years at a big bank in San Francisco and eight and a half years at We're about eight years at

the local phone company. But both of those careers ended for the same reason. Uh. In both cases, my boss called me into my office and said, Uh, it turns out the media just discovered that we have no diversity in management and and in each case, my boss said, I'm going to tell you plainly, you can't be promoted here really, yeah, until things balance ound a little bit. Now, when I tell this story, people always say, stop being a victim and stop complaining. I'm not doing that. I'm

telling you what happened. So how did each of those events lead you to exploring cartooning? You you have been drawing since what you're levin something like that. Yeah. When I was a little kid, like lots of little kids, I thought, hey, I think I'll grow up to be a cartoonist. That's one of the most commonly little kid you know dreams. You know, basketball player and cartoonists, the race, race car driver, yes, astronaut. And I thought I wanted

to be Charles Schultz when I grew up. But by the time I reached probably age eleven twelve, I started to be able to reason, you know that, and suddenly the fantastical world of children started to fall away. You know, Santa Claus wasn't real, etcetera. But I started to think, wait a minute, I want to be Charles Schiltz, the most famous cartoonist in the world. But they're around six billion people in the world, maybe back then and it was only one of him, and I thought, I'm not

liking my odds. Maybe I should try to be a lawyer or a businessman or something. So I gave up an old cartooning thing and went to you know, traditional economics degree, business world. Kind of a lie. But when it didn't work out, I started to say, what can I do? There? Would not have a boss because because I noticed that the common element was having a boss, because my my success or lack of it in the corporate world didn't have anything to do with my ability

or how hard I worked. It was entirely up to what a boss decided for the bosses and the company's own reasons. And I thought, well, I'd like to be free of that. So I I've tried a number of things over the years. Cartooning was the one that worked. And what I did was I tried to do things which would have a low risk. You know, I wouldn't die if it didn't work out, and I wouldn't be bankrupt if it didn't work out. I would just be tired or embarrassed. You know, those were the worst case scenarios.

I saw the world as sort of a slot machine that you didn't have to put money into, meaning that I could just sit there and pull until I got a jackpot, and I could win every time if I was willing to sit there long enough and pull. So cartooning was one of those polls. It wasn't the only one. There were lots of them. I wrote about it and had it failed almost everything and still wouldn't big and uh, it just happened to be the one that worked. So

let's talk about cartooning a little bit. Becaus in the beginning, you got a lot of rejection. You pulled the lever. You actually were debating, Hey, maybe I'm I've pulled long enough on cartooning and it's not working. But an inspirational letter from a fan kept you going. Tell my misstating that, am I overstating You're you're you're close, You're in the same zip code. Okay, let me tell you this story. One day I came home and I was flipping through the channels on TV, and there was a show on

how to become a cartoonist of all things. I've never seen it before, but I missed most of the show, and so I wrote down from the closing credits the name of the host and figured out how to send him a snail mail letter, and I said, hey, I missed your show, but can you give me some tips

how to become a cartoonist. And a few weeks later I got a two page handwritten letter from the host of the show, Jack Cassidy is his name, and he gave me some advice about what books to buy, what materials to use, and then he gave me this advice. He said, it's a really competitive industry and you're gonna

get rejected a lot, but don't give up. A year goes by and one day I walk out into my mailbox and there's a letter from the same cartoonist, Jack Cassidy, who had given me the original advice, and he said he was cleaning his office and he came across my samples and the letter I'd sent him in the bottom of some pile, and he said he was just writing to make sure that I hadn't given up. And I thought, maybe you see something I don't see. So I decided

to get out my materials and try again. And by then I had this idea for a character called Dilbert, who was roughly based on my work experience, and uh, sent it out to the major syndicates. Most of them rejected me. Once I thought I had all the rejections, Um, I put my materials back in the closet again. And then the phone rings a few weeks later, and it was Man who said she, uh, she worked for a company I never heard of, some company called United Media,

and they said they saw my samples. I didn't know how, and it wanted to offer me a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist, the biggest break you could possibly have in cartooning. But I've never heard of this company. And so I said, um, I haven't heard of your company, this United Media company. I didn't send my samples to

anybody with that name. So I'd feel more comfortable if you had some references, you know, is there somebody you've worked with before, a cartoonist who has been published in any way, you know, on a on a pamphlet or a greeting card, anything like that. And there was this long pause and then she said, yeah, we handled Peanuts

and Garfield and a robot Man and Nancy. And when she got to about the twelfth name on the list, I realized my negotiating position have been compromised, and I got myself a lawyer and got a contract and and that's the rest. That's hilarious. UM. So let's talk a little bit about about that process of syndication. How does that work? What is the economics of syndication? What rights

do you give up? What rights do you retain? Well, first of all, uh, the old syndicate was bought by the new syndicate, So it's the universal you click, Uh, is the syndicate now. And the way that works syndication uh, and it works for cartoonists and columnists is that once you do your contract with the syndication company, they do the marketing and the selling and the distribution, so that

you can just concentrate on the creating. And depending on your your leverage, you might you might make a deal where you split the revenue fifty fifty, but they're picking up a lot of expenses. Um. And then as you get more successful, you might be able to negotiate a better mix than that that That seems pretty reasonable. Um. So you're working in corporate America for a big bank and a telco company. I've always thought Dilbert character was the man in the middle. He's got an incompetent boy

boss above him. He's got lazy co workers adjacent to him. He's got aggressive salespeople who always promised the world and expect him to deliver um and then annoying um mentors and interns beneath him. What was the motivation for the experience, because some people have said, well, Scott Adams is obviously Dilbert,

but you've kind of pushed back on that. Well, all of the characters are either some part of my own personality, usually not the full personality, because the cartoon characters work better if they have some distinguishing characteristic that's usually a flaw right, not fully fleshed out, but they are this key characteristic. So if you're looking to develop your own cartoon, what you want to look for is can you describe

the character in a word or two? Garfield's a cat, you know, Dilbert is a nerd, you know, he's depending on what word you want to use, he's a he's an office worker. You know, Alice is angry while he is lazy. Dog Bird is scheming. So if you can't the Albonians, the Albonians are just the every other country, you know. I learned that trick that if you use any other country that's a real country, there's just nothing

you can do humor wise, it's gonna come back. So I had to develop an imaginary country just to have somebody who's in another country doing foolish things. And and the fact that it's underwater. What what's the significance of that it's under mud? Sudden? The Albonians are always in waste deep mud. But that's never explained. Um. All right, so let's talk a little bit about how the strip

has evolved over the years. You've gotten some pushback from other cartoonists, uh, including some people who I have to admit to being perplexed by this claim that you're basically excusing bad corporate behavior. I don't it that way. How do you how do you see? Do you? First of all, do you respond to other cartoonists slagging your work? And what do you think of the sort of um, I don't know, push back to the charming simplicity of the message of somebody stuck in the middle of a corporate

drone type of workplace. Well, first of all, the the hierarchy in cartooning especially is that the people were very successful tend not to criticize other cartoonists. There's always punched up that's legit, and the people who are lower in the rank are pretty sure that everybody above them got there by luck or or the public doesn't understand how bad it is and they can't understand why it's successful. So the people who are not yet successful are just

brutal right. The people who are peers or or above me and success cartooning are almost never that way. It's the rarest thing in the world. You also want to interrupt right here and say you have frequently just discussed the role of luck in everybody's life. Luck is so important. If this person didn't follow up, Cassidy didn't follow up with that email, that letter, pre email, who knows what might have might have happened. Yeah, luck is. Luck is

always the big variable. But I think the mistake is thinking that you can't control luck. Now, you can't control actual, you know, random events, but you can certainly put yourself in places where more luck can happen. For the phrase luck is what preparation meets opportunities, there's that, Plus there's amount of energy. If you put more energy into the universe, if you if you try to start ten companies, you know, one after another. The odds of one of them working

out by luck is pretty good. If you try one thing once and then you give up, your odds of finding luck are very low. So you can do a lot to go where the luck is. It's the reason I moved from upstate New York to San Francisco because there was just more happening, more opportunity, more chances for luck, and much better weather, much better weather, to say the least. Have have you ever considered dramatically shifting the way Dilbert's

life has progressed. You've introduced new characters, you've introduced new plot lines, but he seems to be pretty consistently Dilbert all the way through. Well, actually, um, I did make one big change early in the strip. The first several years, it wasn't really about the workplace. He was a guy who had a job, but it was about things he did with his dog and things he did at home. And it was just about the time that email was

just becoming a thing. And I had email early because I it was something we did at work, so I got it before most of the public and the few people who got on email didn't have anybody to email, so they didn't have anybody to send a message to. But I started publishing my email and the comic strip, and then people all over the country would say, hey, I got somebody to write to. I'm going to tell you what I like about your strip and what I don't like, and insistently they said, we love it when

he's at work doing workplace stuff. Oh, I don't like it as much when he's at home. So because my background is an m b A And an economics degree and not art, I did not have any artistic integrity to lose because I didn't start with any And I said, what's the point of making art that the audience doesn't want to see? So I gave the audience what they wanted more workplace and that that's when it all took off.

Do you do you ever get specific ideas from people who shoot you an email and saying hey, this happened at my job. Yeah. Most of what I write is based on other people's suggestions, So I used to get get those suggestions by email. Before that it was from my own experience. And today, every every week or two I'll just send down a tweet and say, hey, what's bothering you about your job, and I'll get hundreds of responses, and usually that writes my my week of Dilbert right there,

that that that's absolutely astonishing. So I have to ring up. Very early in the cycle, before the Republican nomination in was wrapped up, you had identified Trump as having a different approach to messaging, that he was basically steamrolling not only the rest of the nominees of Republicans, and you said he would win the Republican nomination, but you also said he's likely to win the whole shebang at a at a point in history where that was just a

wild forecast, and it turned out you were correct. So tell us what did you see in that so many other people completely missed just by chance. I have a weird combination of skills and experience that gave me a different filter on the situation. One as I grew up in New York, upstate, but it's close enough to get sort of the New York sensibility. So that helped me understand when Trump was serious and when he was kidding,

which seems to be a huge problem with people. Literally can't tell when he's just sort of kidding or he's using hyperbole to get a point. The famous line is take him seriously, but not literally. Right. Uh. The other thing I have going for me is a business background, and so I could understand, for example, when he uses hyperbole to tell you the economy is doing better than it's ever been, it's going to be the greatest thing.

He understands that the economy is a psychology engine. We don't have a shortage of materials, we don't have a resource problem, we have a psychology problem. And he was looking to fix it directly. Now, I also have a background as a trained hypnotist, so I could recognize. And I've also been studying the ways of persuasion in general

for decades. So when I was watching the President work on the campaign trail, I was saying, the techniques of persuasion used at the highest level I've ever seen in public, and and to me, it looked like he was bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight. And and I thought it was actually an easy prediction. You know, It's funny. New Yorkers kind of know him as a goofball businessman, want to be. He's not a huge Developer's not this,

He's not that. But He's been an incredibly successful person at managing and manipulating the media, and I think a lot of people completely missed that skill set. There are few better than Donald Trump at dominating the news cycle, even when he says something that's not true and everybody rushes to correct him. The next day, all we're talking

about is is still Donald Trump? Yeah? And you saw that right from the start at the first Republican debate when he was asked the very first question, Megan Kelly s m is incredibly toxic, damaging, career ending, campaign ending question for anyone or anyone else about his bad statements about women. And instead of apologizing like somebody might do, or or avoiding the question in the normal way that people do it, he's he He interrupts her with only

Rosie O'Donnell. Now, first of all, completely not true, but didn't matter. It didn't because he took all of the energy out of the question, which was lethal, and he moved it to his answer, which was so much fun and so provocative and so enjoyed by his bass especially because they have the feeling about Rosie o'donald that I said, oh my goodness, he just sucked all of the energy out of the problem and put it into something that

people can't stop talking about while forgetting the question. And I literally stood up and walked towards the television like my I had a tingle on my arms, and I thought, I think I just saw the future. How to win Bigley by dominating the news cycle and sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Now that the the actual subtitle of the book is UH Persuasion in a World where Facts Don't Matter. When I first wrote that and when I first started saying facts don't matter back into fifteen,

people just rejected that. Just ridiculous. Now you see those words, those exact words, the facts don't matter, and they're talking about in terms of our opinions, not the real world. And the real world if you walk in front of a bossity hit you, that matters, physics matters, facts don't. But your decision about what to do that day might it might not be driven by facts. It's about your emotion,

how you feel everything else. So now I would say that that's common way of thinking that and I predicted in as well, and this isn't win big Ley, that Trump would do more than win the presidency. I said he would tear the fabric of reality apart and that we would see see ourselves and how we fit into the universe completely differently because of the experience. And you're watching the fact checkers say, um, he got seven thousand things wrong in the past twenty four hours. Why is

nobody acting differently because of this? Well, because the facts don't matter, you know, as long as he's persuading us in a direction that people feel comfortable going better. Economy beat ices, you know, have good news in North Korea, people are okay with it. I want to talk about the book How to fail Out At Almost Everything and Still When Big, because there are some really fascinating ideas in that book, one of which is, don't have goals, have a system. I I was intrigued by that. Explain

the thought process there. Yeah, So the distinction there is a goal is you've you've got a very specific idea what you want, but a system is something you do every day that gets you to a better place, but you don't know exactly how it's going to turn out. So an example would be if you go to college and get a degree, you might not know exactly where that's going to lead, but there's a virtually a guarantee that you'll have more options to do whatever you want.

And in the book you use the example, don't set a goal of losing twenty pounds, set a goal of eating more healthy well or even more specifically well. Uh, using the top pick of diet, I say, make it a lifelong practice to increase what you know about nutrition, to understand that this is better than that you know. To to understand, for example, that if you have a choice between a plain white potato and pasta, that the

pasta has a better glyciamic index. So if you if you like them the same, if the pasta, you're going to be better off. That's just one example, but you could learn almost forever about nutrition so that you always have an option of the healthier versus the less healthy choice. I tell people to make it a habit to practice trying to figure out how to get the best flavor and the things that are good for them. Let's talk about the combination of mediocre skills, which I'm also amused by.

How do a series of mediocre skills add up to something that's very successful. Yeah, this is the idea of the talent stack. So a talent stack is where instead of becoming uh, the one best person in the world, that is of a skill which only works for a few people. So if your Tiger Woods learned to golf and you know, just ride that horse as hard as you can. But for most of us, we don't have

a Tiger Woods level skill at anything. But what we do have is the ability to put together a stack of talents in which we're pretty good, maybe top of compared to the rest of the world, just because the rest of the world isn't practicing those skills in the first place, and if you combine them right, you get a very powerful package. For example, UM, as a cartoonist, it's no secret that I'm not very good at drawing, and you would think that's pretty important to being a cartoonist.

You should be a pretty good artist, but I'm not. I can, however, draw better than most people. Likewise, I'm not the best writer in the world, but I can write better than most people. I'm not the funniest guy in the room, but I'm funnier than most people. I don't know the most about business, but I know a lot, so it gives me a topic to write about. So I probably have a dozen or so modest skills which happened to sum up to something that's commercially extraordinary. So

let's talk about your process. I love to write in the morning. I feel like it's a fresh reboot. You shake the a sketch screen empty and you begin clean. You also like to write in the mornings, but for a different reason. Explain why you enjoy the mornings. Yeah, that's that's part of my system as well. There are some things you can do in certain energy states that you can't do in others. So in the morning, my

brain is at its very best. So between four and ten in the morning, I'm absolutely the most creative, most productive, best concentration. By noon, I'm a little burned out and it's a perfect time to go to the gym because I don't want to think too hard, but my body is in perfect shape. And then by evening I'm ready to do, you know, more fun stuff. So I try to match my energy state to the task, which is something you can only do if you don't have a boss.

Most of the time, if your boss is saying, yeah, you know, I want you to be here in the meeting from eight to ten, you don't get to say you know, boss, that was the only time I was going to do something useful and you just took it from me. So that's a big, big incentive to find a way that to control your own schedule because, and I often say this, happiness is not caused by whether you can get the stuff you want. Happiness is caused as even more by getting the stuff when you want it.

It's not what you have because we live in a world where you can often get you know, what you need, but you can't often get it when you need it. You can't often sleep when you're tired, eat when you're hungry, exercise when you have the energy, and right when your brain is is the best. So to the extent that you can develop a system so that your energy is always right for the task, your way ahead. So let's

talk a little about the happiness ratio. I love that concept of having a certain so you and I will disagree about certain things. The ability to self focus your thoughts on happy ideas and create a sort of self awareness of positivity. Am I overstating that is an important aspect. Yeah, you can. You can manage your own brain like you can manage shelf space. So if you don't manage your brain.

It's going to think about whatever it thinks about, and for most of us, that will drift off to negative thoughts. There's something that happened in the past, there's something bad that might happen tomorrow. But if you tell yourself, well, let me think about what could you go right? Let me think about what I appreciate, Let me think about who I'm in love with, let me think about that. You can you can just use up the shelf space and the more happy thoughts to negative thoughts gives you

a better racial and that affects your whole outlook. Right, So, so assuming that the things you think are just the things you think is sort of a losing strategy. A better system is to manage what you're thinking because you can make yourself think about other topics for sure. You have that control. And if you do that, your body will respond, your health will respond, your you know, every part of your your immune system will be stronger because

we know that negativity works against all that stuff. So let me push. I'm with you on this. You and I are completely sympatico on the happy thought ratio. There are other ways to phrase that, but we're in the same camp there. I have to push back a little bit on the daily affirmations, which look to me like survivorship bias, meaning well, the ones that don't work out we don't really focus on. But hey, I used to

say affirmations about Dilbert, and Dilbert worked out. Therefore, so how do you separate the daily affirmations that work from the ones that don't? Or am I just being, you know, a stick in the mud. It might not matter which is which is the interesting I'm not sure if I'll be able to expand on it completely. But what we're talking about is the practice of writing down what you want uh every day, so you might say I Scott

Adams will be a famous cartoonist. Now that works against the system's way of of working, because it's better to have a system that could get you lots of different outcomes. So if you're doing an affirmation, it's probably better to say I'll be wealthy than to say I'll be rich in a specific way, because you want to leave open

the options. Now, the idea here is that there's there's something about focusing that gives you a better result, and the repeating it or the writing it down every day for consistency, according to Bob and so, yeah, it's just just the process of doing that sort of reprograms you into a better collector of information, meaning that you can

tune your brain to notice things you wouldn't notice. You know, how, you're in a crowd sometimes you'll hear people say background noise, Scott Well and like you can pick your name out of a crowd without trying. So whatever you tune your brain to, you notice things that are useful. So part of what might be good about affirmations is that by concentrating on it is sort of allows you to see the world. It expands your your perception. And by the way,

there's a science behind that, the availability bias. You go out and get a jeep and suddenly you see jeeps everywhere because you're familiar with it. Yeah, but beyond that, there's also been studies to show that if you approach the world as an optimist and you you just sort of keep optimistic thoughts in your head, that you actually increase your perception. And this can be shown that um, you'll you'll notice things that other people wouldn't notice. Let

me give an example. So part of the test was this was Wiseman was the guy who did this test. Dr Wiseman, and he showed people uh the same copy of a newspaper, but they were divided into two groups. One group consider themselves lucky and another group considered themselves unlucky. Self evaluated, self evaluate. Of course, there's no such thing as actual luck. Not in either those groups could perform better on randomized test. But he said, count up the

number of photographs in these newspapers. And the people who were unlucky or considered themselves unlucky, counted the number, and on average they got the right number. Let's say it was forty two. The people who considered themselves lucky also got the right number on average, but they were done in seconds, whereas the other people took minutes. What was the difference in each of the newspapers that both groups saw on page two in big words and said, stop

counting the photographs. There are forty two of them. Now, if you expect to be lucky, you're looking for luck because you expect it. So the people were looking for luck. It just had a broader perceptual plane, and they noticed that sentence the rather the other said, well, my task is to look at photographs. Where are the photographs? One? Two, three? Hi, shure him board what a boring day looks like? Another bad day for me? So your your outcome can actually

change what you recognize as opportunities. That's fascinating. Can you stick around a little bit. I have a ton more questions. We have been speaking with Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. If you enjoy this conversation, well, be sure to come back and listen to the podcast Astras, where we keep the tape rolling and continue to discuss all sorts of things, ranging from cartooning to how to win bigly in political battles. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us

at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can find that at iTunes, Overcast, SoundCloud, Bloomberg dot com, wherever your finer podcasts are sold. Check out my daily column at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. You can follow me on Twitter at Ridolts. I'm Barry Retults. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, Scott. Thank you so much for doing this. I've been looking forward to having this conversation for a while. I have

so many questions. I have to start by saying, how annoyed I am. I have most of your books, and including various Dilbert collections, but um, the early Dilbert Scott Adams corporate books as opposed to Dilbert collections, and we moved about three years ago and we're mostly impact. And I went through a bunch of boxes of books in the basement and over the weekend and I could not find anything that's making me well, that's why I write more. There you go. So I just count on you to

lose the old ones. And you, speaking of writing more, you have win bigley out this month in paperback. Is that is that right? That's right for those people who wanted to wait for the cheaper version. So let's talk a little bit about uh politics. And by the way, your email is still public, so for angry people, don't

email me. You cannot email Scott um about whatever. But you got a ton of pushback on a lot of things that you wrote about Trump, even though many of those things have come to pass and that your forecasts and expectations have proven out. How do you how do you deal with that sort of um pushback? Is it just that people can't see what they don't want to see, or yeah I would. I should say first of all that I'm not a Republican. I'm not a conservative. I

consider myself left of Bernie. So when I was talking about Trump. When I was talking about Trump, I was talking about his technique, and I think there are some unique things he brings, such as the way he can he can talk an economy up uh, and the way he could talk to North Korea, for example. So I was really trying to find the positive, and I trusted the rest of the media to find the negative. You know, that's their job. They do a really good job of it. Some would say too good a job at it um.

And having been in the public for a long time with Dilbert, I'm used to withering criticism on a daily basis, and you do kind of get used to it. Thick skin develops after you're coming up on is it twenty five years? Is that right? Thirty years of Dilbert Um? But what what is different when I talk about politics is that recently, just in the last year or so, I've discontinued appearing in public for actually security reasons. Come

on that. Yeah, that's true, it's literally, in my opinion, dangerous for me to be in a big crowd these days, because you don't know. It only takes one not in the crowd to ruin your day, as we've seen recently what's taking place in Pittsburgh and what's taken place with mail bombs and god knows what else. Um, but let me let me, let me kind of put a frame on that. Here's here's my observation of why the world

looks crazier. And it all came. It all started when the technology allowed us to measure for the first time exactly how the news was being received by the audience. So as soon as you could tell that this headline got you more clicks than that line, this approach got you more than the others, the fiduciary responsibility of management of people in the media and the press was to follow the clicks. You've got to go where the profit is because you're a public company in most cases, and

the shareholders require that the BuzzFeed model. So yeah there, and you can't really avoid that and still stay in business. So once you got that, you you had a press which, through no fault of their own, no bad intentions, just following the clicks had to go where the the emotional centers of the brain were most stimulated, because that's what

makes people click, makes them act. And so the news went from even attempting to give an unbiased view of the world to not really trying to do that at all, um but rather trying to give a view that they know, their their their base, whoever's watching them already will interact with will like. So once you get in that situation, it has to get worse because the business model won't change. You know that there's nothing that's going to replace the model where you make a lot of money by getting

people to click. So any calls for people to be more civil are missing a basic understanding of how the world works. People are not going to be nicer because they know they ought to. They they are, Their opinions are coming from what they read, what other people say, how they feel about stuff, and the business model is now designed to keep them permanently in fight or flight mode. You know, I literally have a column. We're recording this the day. The column should be out in about fifteen minutes.

How to have a financial debate without mailing pipe bombs to each other? Because if you believe the founding fathers and if you believe um the marketplace of ideas, we should be able to debate these things, not with our Danny Konaman system one emotional fight or flight response, more coolly and and actually have a debate about the merits of these issues. But it sounds like, at least in the public political sphere, we don't get past that immediate

response very often, do we. Yeah, we've developed two separate worlds. I call it two movies on one screen. So the people on opposite sides believe they're looking at the facts and making a perfectly objective opinion based on what they see as the facts. Trouble is, the other side thinks exact actually the same thing, and they're looking at for the most part, the same facts. There are some differences about the different silos. You know, we'll have a little

bit of different information. For example, one silo does not like George Soros, the other silo doesn't talk about it, So those things are different. But for the most part we're looking at the same information and having completely different conclusions. So let's talk about that, because there's a couple issues here and I want to unpack them. But you raise like a really interesting question to me. So, first of all, I'm in New York, pretty middle of the road guy

working in finance, Jewish background. I have never felt oppressed or discriminated against, but clearly within the little bubble that's my world, Um, I'm not discriminated against. And even go back fifth ye or a hundred years, the reason firms like Goldman Sachs came about, or some of the bigger freed Frank or Kholer or some of the big your law farms came about was because Jews couldn't get hired at the waspy farms and so they created their own.

So I was fortunate to be born into part of the world where I don't really experience discrimination, although I certainly see it online and to me when I when I see the way George Soros name is used, it always seems to be a totem for a dog whistle for the anti Semites, for people you can name a million different financiers it used to be the Trilateral Commission, or go down the list of all the crazy different people who were pulling the levers of power behind the scenes.

How do you respond when people say, hey, George Soros's dog whistle uh to anti Semites. He's a billionaire, he's Jewish. Therefore, wink wink, nudge, nudge, we're gonna let people know exactly what we're saying. Well, let me tell you the experiment I've been running on Twitter recently. Um, I couldn't understand what all the complaints about sorrows were about. And I thought, well, that's just because I've not exposed myself to it. If I if I read the right link, if I read

the right stuff, I would maybe have an opinion. So I asked people, can you tell me in summary what the problem is? And people couldn't do it, not even close. But they would say, oh, but if you look at this link, look at this interview, watched this video. Most of the video links were too an edited video he did for sixty minutes in which it's taken out of context to make it look like he really enjoyed the Holocaust. Yeah, I'm exaggerating a little bit that that's essentially how it's

being portrayed, or that he was a Nazi collaborator. If you see the whole clip without the editing, it doesn't look like that. So part of it is that people are looking at the wrong video, and they threw no fault of their own. They believe it's it's the full story. So it starts with that, just uh, some editing hub. But then you go, okay, but what's he doing now? I get why you don't like what he did when he was fourteen, even if you have the wrong information,

but what you complain now? And people will send me these long, rambling articles in which there's mind reading written into the article. In other words, the author will say, and then George Soros wants to destroy the fill in the blank, you know, destroy our republic, destroy Israel. He wants to destroy something. And I'm thinking to myself, I'll bet he never said that. I'll bet there's no quote of him saying I want to destroy you know, whatever

they love. But everybody is sure they've seen it, They've seen enough information, uh that they have that opinion. So then I asked a simple question, Okay, you don't like well organizations he's funding, because those organizations are doing things which you you think are destructive to the United States,

to Israel or whatever you're complaining about. And I say, can you tell me the percentage of the budget of those people he's fun day and then give me an idea what bad things they're doing, so I know if he's like the big reason that some bad stuff is happening. Nobody has that list, or at least nobody I can find it can forward it to me in a consumable form.

I'll get endless a word salad descriptions about the bad things he's funding to destroy the world, But nobody seems to be able to actually describe it in any coherent way. So I can't even form an opinion about whether he's something I should be opposed to or in favor of. I literally can't even form an opinion. So what I'm observing is a mass hysteria kind of reaction. And and part of the way that you can tell it's um it's not based on the fact is that it's limited

to one silo right the people on the left. It's invisible to him, it's just not even a question. But it's so far along to the people like Ken McCarthy is the guy teed up to replace Paul Ryan. He tweeted something about Soros funding the caravan coming from Guatemality, United States. When it reaches that level, it makes you stop and say, what's going on here? And to me, the common thread through all of at least on the right, I find the left and the right are it's not identical,

and the crazy is different in different ways. And I'm very anti anti PC culture. The left tends to embrace that the right has something unique which the left doesn't. Fox News is a very different animal than CNN or MSNBC. I'm happy to say every media outlet has a bias, there's no I don't think anybody could disagree with that. But Fox News behaves like it's a wholly owned subsidiary and that's a quantitative difference from everything else. Agree or disagree, Well,

let me put it in this frame. It's my observation that the side this out of power is craziest while they're out of power. So, while Obama was in power, Fox News was talking about birtherism, Donald Trump was talking about uranium one, etcetera. UM and GA email server go down the whole list. So so you know, nobody's innocent of pushing stories that you know don't pass all the

fact checking. But at the moment, because Trump is in office, it seems obvious to be that Fox has the advantage that they can talk about real things like, oh, the economy is doing well and North Korea and it's going well, etcetera. So why why don't they They did a lot of time on other I'm always back and forth the two of them. So I'm giving nobody a pass here. I'm just saying that, in a relative craziness scale, the one whose ount of power will act crazier while they're out

of power until they get back in power. Because Fox News can talk about real things that are good things, and they've got a factual basis for that. If you're anti Trump, say cy An n MSNBC, you talk about things like, well, I think if we saw his tax returns, there'd be a problem. Or I think when Muller is done, we'll find something we don't know that we don't like about Russia and Trump. Or I think he's going to say something in the future that will blow up the world.

Or I think this violence that happened is because something he said, although we should probably talked about, you know, those sorts of things separately, um because I think it deserves its own topic. So I think that you see a lot of mind reading imaginary Trump derangement syndrome on the left because he's in power and he's changing their

world in the way they don't like. If if Trump, uh, you know, left office and you know, just saying Nancy Pelosi took over the presidency in a few years, it would just reverse and Fox News making up stuff and seeing then it would be reporting more facts. We clearly saw Obama derangement syndrome, and before that, we clearly saw

a Bush arrangement syndrome. There's there's no doubt. I'm fond of pointing out that the death so called deficit hawks, the people who concerned about deficit spending, is directly a function of who's in power. Of course, so when George Bush is in in the office, the Democrats are saying, what do you mean you want a big tax cut that's not funded and a war of choice that's going

to cause brillions of dollars. Then the Democrats come into the office and we have to rescue the banks, and we need a stimulus and we need this, and now the Republicans are talking about it, and then that reverses. Now Trump is in office and we have a big tax cut, and the deficit has gone up it's always

a function of who's out of power. But the question that I raise is is there a qualitative difference to that derangement syndrome UM between each side or are you suggesting it's just strictly who's ever out of power is angry and they say and do things that are are crazy. The two biggest variables are who's in an antipower and then the personality of the person in the office. Is there is there something about them that's special. Trump is special in you know, lots of ways. So he tweaks

people's feelings harder than anybody's ever tweaked feeling UM. So you should expect that every everything that's a normal bias becomes a super bias in this situation. And that's what we see. So we're recording this about a week before the mid terms. What do you think happens any thoughts? You're not a political analyst, but you have some insight into how both sides communicate. Sometimes they're more effective, sometimes they're less effective. What what do you think is the

outcome here? So I think it's tough for people in my position to call individual races because it probably has more to do with the matchups, and no, I mean generally who takes the House, who takes the Senate, what happens in the governorships. So in general, you need to know a lot of the details to make a good overall prediction. So I'll stick with what I feel comfortable with. Uh, it looks like Republicans are heading for an historic turnout, like a jaw dropping amount of turnout, and I think

they're holding their keeping their powder dry. I think Republicans have, as a characteristic, if I can generalize, they like to act more than they like to talk. And so I think you're gonna be surprised the way people were surprised about the election in twent sixteen the Republicans turn out. And then the other prediction is that it's going to be closer than people imagined a year ago. I think

it could. Uh, this will be the most extreme. I'm not sure I want to call this a prediction, but if things go the way that the world has been going for the last couple of years, it almost seems like whatever is the best movie plot is what happens that would that would result in almost a deadlock in the house, meaning would be so close that there's something about it, one of the one of the somebody who got elected. Maybe there's some doubt about the vote. I

think we're not going to get a clean outcome. It's possible that Will will have something that's so close to even that there will be enough things in doubt that we wonder who we even won. I will I will concur by saying if under normal circumstances in a mid term election, the party out of power usually gain seats both in the House and at the state assembly level. But if anybody can steal defeat from the Joseph victory,

the Democrats know how to do that. That said, by the time this broadcast, the results are probably in, and I'm guessing the Democrats take the House. I have no idea what happens in the Senate, but like like you said, this is very tough to do. Neither of us are political analysts, and we don't really know, um what the out come is. But I'm I'm intrigued by your perspective

of the communication that takes place and how people are influenced. UM. I would imagine the Democrats should be more motivated to come out and vote only because the Republicans got what they want they got their task cut, they got Kavanaugh, they shouldn't be as motivated. But who can tell your your your position is he is a great motivator, and therefore they're going to come out and vote. Well. There's

also there a number of other influences. One is that people are more motivated by a fear of loss than they are motivated by, hey, I might guess something. The Democrats are trying to guess something, and the Republicans are trying to prevent losing what they've already gotten. Those are different motivations, and usually the person who's trying to prevent a loss is going to get off the couch before the person who was like, well, if I vote something

good might happen. That's a lesser motivation, classic risk aversion, right, And so there's that UM, but I also think the Democrats might be more transparent about how much UM. Let's see how much energy they have on their side. You can see them dancing in the streets, you can see them talking, you can see them registering people that apparently

record rates. But the Republicans are sleepers and and this is weird, but I think you might see a repeat of six just because Republicans enjoyed it so much the first time. In other words, they saw the model where while we didn't talk about it, but we showed up and voted, you saw what happens. Well, the argument is they, but they if you look at total votes cast, Trump got less votes than Hillary did in the presidential election and the GOP got less votes than the Democrats did

in Congress. However, they got the right votes in the right states for the electoral college and for the individual congress people. Yeah, that that obviously makes a huge difference, and you can't discount that. But there's there's a big energy issue too, and uh that might be the energy might be the difference between that one or two percent in either direction. And that's really all that's in play.

People that people have largely made up their minds, but they there there may be one who were going to vote, but it's raining, or you know, they don't have a babysitter, and how hard are you going to try? So you think you think the Republicans are more motivated than the Democrats realize. I think it's a big sleeper and and they're going to break some records that that is quite fascinating.

You mentioned something earlier. By the way, I love that you and I disagree about a lot of things and can actually engage in a civil debate, where online it seems so few people can do that. Well, if people were polite online like they are in person, online would

be fine too. Well. That that's the the um the automobile pedestrian disagreement, when people yell stuff from the safety of their stealing glass enclosure that you would never say walking down the street, and online seems to be that indulgence of id seems to be encouraged when you're online people people forget that you're not dealing with the robot, You're dealing with a human being on the other side. It's very easy to lose sight of that when you're

just punching something into a little Twitter square and hitting tweet. Yeah. Probably, you know, twenty times a day at minimum, somebody will come onto my Twitter feed and say some version of your cartoons are terrible. You're an idiot, And that's all they'll say. There's nothing else, And I think to myself, what exactly was your motivation there? It had to just feel good, So I think they just get a little charge and being able to hurt somebody they don't know

that they've got a problem with that. That's doesn't seem like it's a positive or healthy way to deal with a disagreement. I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I made a resolution this year to try and be nicer on Twitter. And you would be shocked at how often somebody says something that is you know, there's a legitimate point there, but it's lost in the obnoxiousness and the anger.

And when you just respond with a factual statement about well, here's the data source I used and this was the basis of that, the person will then turn around and say, oh, thanks for that. By the way, I love Masson's in business. Keep doing what you're doing. I'm like, wait a second, you were just a total jerk. And I learned that a long time ago, and it's easy to get caught up in the emotion and forget these are real people

you're dealing with. Yeah, I might have different people following me because I've never it's pretty rare that I can send them better information and have them say, oh, yeah, you changed my mind. Usually it's uh, you know, your link is crazy and you're crazy, and they don't say they've changed their mind. They said, oh I like the radio show, like they still haven't walked back whatever whatever

data point. You know. I love when people tell me, well, you didn't inflation, and just that I can't inflation, and just height, it's just the guy's height, what are you talking about? So so that's sort of you know, you get sort of stuff. I do get the Uh it's not that uncommon to get somebody who will insult me while complimenting me, you know, and you'll say, yeah, I

love your show, you're crazy about this. Uh yeah, So I don't know if I should block them because they've got these weird, uh insulting ways to be my friend. And are you familiar with the soft block? We were just discussing this in the office the other day. The mute soft block is if somebody's following you, I shouldn't Well, normally I would say I wouldn't reveal this because this is a secret trick. But the old joke is if you want to hide something, bury it in the back

of a podcast, nobody'll hear it. Um. So someone's following you and you don't want to block them, but you're tired of their crap, So you block and then immediately unblocked them, and what that does is it makes them unfollow you, and then you mute them, and so now you don't see their stuff. They're no longer getting your stuff, but they don't know they've been unfollowed, and everybody's life just goes on their separate paths with let's just agree

to divorce and move forward. It's the Twitter case of an amicable divorce. You've changed my life. So I have to give credit to um my partner Josh Brown, who claims to have invented this in two thousand and ten. I discovered it independently five years later. I'm like, this is a very effective technique too, because once you block somebody, then it's like, ah, that idiot's got atoms blocked riddles,

she's a jerky blocked me. So instead block, but you have to do it immediately so they can't see it. It's blocked, unblocked, and then mute and we all just move along with our lives. That's brilliant. I've been calling people Nazis and them locking him. That's funny. So so let's talk about Nazis for a second. Or actually, more specifically, you said the situation with Pittsburgh and some of the more incendiary rhet rhetoric is different than some of the

other stuff, Um, what were you thinking along? Yeah, just in the sense it requires a little more expansive context. The first thing I'd say is that if you're looking at the president's rhetoric and saying how is that affecting people? There are different filters to view that. If you're looking at it a legal filter or a social filter. Even his enemies agree that you can't blame the talker for the person who did the bad act. Hey, you're the

guy with the gun. You know, crazy is crazy. But if you've viewed it through a science lens and you've got millions of people listening to a message, are some of them going to be influenced in ways that are unproductive and dangerous? In the answer is yes, just about every time. Now, President Trump is surely the type of personality that could trigger people on the fringes, but I would say most presidents probably are. Probably most presidents have

triggered people for their own reasons, uh to do things. Now, if you're looking at somebody who has triggered too, in the case of the synagogue shooting to attack people who the president clearly favors. I mean, he's been good to Israel, his family is Jewish, his daughter married someone who is Jewish and converted to Judy, his advisors. You know, you can go round down and the shooter actively disliked Trump, but he's still being Trump is still being blamed for

raising the temperature. And what about what about the mail bomber? How do you define that guy? Just um? Mental illness. You know, it's always the problem to to say that we should change all of our behavior because there are some mentally deranged people who are going to take it wrong. So well, all presidents say things that might affect some of the people the extreme fringe. Trump seems to be

much more incendiary than Obama or Bush or Clinton. I think that's right, and I don't think that we should ignore that, and then the president should do whatever he needs to do with that. Um, but let's also size it. I did a Twitter poll, which of course is deeply unscientific, but I asked, what do you think causes people to act more violently the president's rhetoric or fake news, video

games or music. And what you find is that the president is in is in the same range, at least in people's opinions with music and video games, which I also believe do trigger people. If you're looking at a huge population and you know, if a hundred million people are playing a video game where somebody gets shot, somebody's gonna shoose somebody. It's just the question is is the video game or you take a hundred million people and statistically there's going to be one crazy it's in that

it's the price of free speech. But you want to size it. Fake news can kill millions. I mean, fake news is a serious So how do you define fake news? And two ways? And now the reason I'm going to tee up this question very specifically, there's an inherent bias in all media operations, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, um and people entities on the far extreme. What what is your definition of fake news?

So for me, fake news would be inaccurate news that especially the kind of that they should have known or should have corrected. But that's kind of rare. There isn't that much of the like. Seriously, fake news the other kind is worse because it's changing how we're thinking about things. So if if you talk uh consistently about let's say Russia, it will rise in people's minds in importance. That may be good, but it may be bad. So the media is change raaging the importance and the priority and how

we how we rank things, the focus of perception. By the way, I meant to tell you, I know you're a big fan of Bob Geldini, who wrote Influence and Persuasion. It was fun reading his stuff and then reading your stuff because clearly he has influenced you. Yes, he's influenced me a great deal, which makes sense. He wrote a book called Influence. Um, uh yeah, he's probably one of my biggest influences. And uh, you know we've we've we've

have brief connection on Twitter exchange some professional compliments. So the concept of re prioritizing and focusing comes from um influence comes from his book. You're saying what the media does fake news not so much false statements of fact, but changing or re prioritizing the subjects were discussing, right, And then there's a hybrid, which is the worst case in my opinion, this is the worst fake news maybe we'll ever see short of actually starting a war. And

that was what I called the Charlottesville hoax. Now the way, this is what and it goes like this. When the President said they were fine people on both sides, the frame that should have been reported was both sides of the statue question. People want statues, people want them to come down. There are fine people on both sides of that,

even if you disagree with their position. But because the news had framed it as Antifa against the white supremacist, they reported it as both sides being white supremacist and Antifa. And then they said, well, the president is calling the white supremacist find people, so now I have to go back. Yeah, now, let me finish. Finish now. In order to believe that, you would have to believe that he called the Antifa demonstrators find people. Also because he said on both sides,

that didn't happen. Second of all, there is no world in which the President of the United States got in front of the public and decided to side with the white supremacists by calling them find people. In no world was that possible or did it happen. Indeed, when they asked him for clarification, he condemned the white supremacist. He clearly was not supporting them, and anybody who could have

seen this subjectively should have known that. But you can turn on CNN almost any day of the week and there will be a pundit who will say, well, he called the white supremacists find people, and nobody calls him on it. Nobody says, wait, wait, that was ambiguous. Obviously he wasn't saying white supremacists or find people, because those white supremacists, for God's sakes, they were marching against it

was an anti Semitic demonstration. You know, his daughter's Jewish, his you know his his family is Jewish, He's pro Israel. Israel loves him very very much so, by the way, right more than any president amongst the Orthodox Jews. I think his approval rating is like in the United States, very very so. To think that he got in front of the public and made a choice to say, yeah, I think this will work out well for me. I'll

throw in with the white supremacist. That absolutely did not happen, but is reported as fact by c AN, n MSNBC, And I would say that that one event crystallized all the things that people worried about the president and put it into fact. So he and so and so that event, more than anything else, is ripping the fabric of the country apart. And it's despicable and it's bordering on intentional. So I have to now go back and rewatch that video because I didn't see it live. I just saw

the clips. However, now if you if you see the video, that won't clear it up. You have to wait for him to him to explain what he meant that he was disavowing them, and then you have to understand that the context was always two sides of the statue debate. That's what the whole event was about. I'll watch the whole thing. Part of the problem is that we bring past statements to what we do. So the whole birth or contra vercy very much looks like it's a racist

trope and he was key in that. Wait a minute, why do I agree that people are perceiving it that way? But are you saying that the facts support that as being a racist attack. The first African American president clearly born in Hawaii, Clearly tons of evidence that that's where he's from. Somehow he's a Muslim where somehow he's a non US citizen. Well, the I don't think the president was bringing up the Muslim part. I believe the president was using a common attack that he uses for everybody.

He said, Ted cruising in the United States. He said, Ted Cruz was a Canadian. Well, he was born in Canada, but to American parents and your duels. So you see that the president uses every available attack against every opponent without exception. If he can say it, if he can throw it against the wall, and he thinks that will influence three voters, He's gonna throw wrote that against the wall, he said. He said that Ted Cruz's father might have

been involved in killing Kennedy. Now you don't believe he believed that, right, nobody believes. So let me throw another one at you, which I think is fascinating. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show there was an episode where he attacks Trump. I think it was for how he cut pizza, something idiotic, and Trump tweets John Leebowitz, also known as Jon Stewart. Now I interpreted that as, Hey, everybody in

Hollywood and everybody on TV changes their name. You're bringing up a very Jewish name that sounds like a dog whistle to the anti Semites. Tell me why that's wrong. It sounds to me like he was calling him a phony. In other words, he wasn't he wasn't true to his own heritage like everybody else in show business. Right. But the fact that don't get caught up in the logic of the fact of it. It was something he could say to make him dealing. And he just throws everything.

He opens the cannon fodder and that's it. Whatever you can throw, he throws. Yeah, if you if you see him going easy on opponents who happened to be white males, let me know, because I haven't noticed that. He well, low energy Jeb and lion ted and what do you call Rubio tiny Marco or something like that. He but it seems like it's not religious or racial. It seems

that cry and chuck. I mean, you know, if if you are someone who insults everybody with every tool that you have at your disposal all the time, if you're picking out that one example and say, well, he's this one's black, so it must be racist. That is not based in fact just machine guns everybody in that Your bias is showing through in that. So I have my favorite questions. I asked all my guests, but I have one more question. I have to get to you because people are I see why you are um annoyed by

the tweet streams that come at you. You said earlier you're to the left of Bernie. Correct, How do you define left right? That you're to the left of Bernie sand Bernie Sanders right, Bernie? All right, So let me give you some examples on abortion. Conservatives would like the limited, Liberals like, you know, more of it with certain conditions. I'm left to that, which is I say that men and me in particular should abstain from the decision and

just support women. And the reason is that women bear the greatest responsibility for childbirth and child rearing, and as a general standard, the people who take on the biggest responsibility, especially for something so important, should have the greatest say,

that's a pretty progressive perspective. And and my and to think that men should have somehow an equal say in what women do with their bodies as a law is ridiculous because first of all, it assumes that men are adding something to the to the quality of the decision. Nothing like that's happening. We're not adding to the quality of the decision. But what society needs is a decision, because it's life and death because it's one of our

biggest issues. You need it. You need an outcome that's credible so that even the people who don't like it say, yeah, but the way you got there, that's a good. At least at least it's credible, even though I don't like it. Give us another example, because I'm fascinated by this, let's take um reparations. Conservatives don't like it. Even most liberals would not be in favor because they feel like, I

don't want to pay for something it wasn't my fault. UM. I say, we should at least consider solve one of our biggest social problems to have a one percent tax on just i'm sorry, attacks on just the top one percent, so that would include people like me, and it would be a twenty five year let's say, one generation tax only to make college and trade training free for African Americans for one generation, so that we could say, look, we recognize there was something bad, we can do something

about it. Now. Well, here's what's ushle. The top one percent also have nothing. Most of them have nothing to do with slavery. Their their ancestors weren't involved at all. But what's different is the top one percent, if they can make a big difference in what's in the let's say, the most disadvantaged part of society. If you can flip somebody from being unemployed to employed, that is a huge boost to the economy. And who benefits from that the

top one percent. We we live in in a society where the top one percent gets most of the game. Give us one more example, and then I'll go jump to my favorite questions. Oh Scott Scott socialist. Yeah, let's take healthcare. Healthcare. The conservatives say, let the market work it out more or less. Liberals say, let the government,

you know handle. I say the government should be more involved, which is that we should be creating a portfolio, meaning just a conceptual portfolio of startups that could lower the cost of healthcare in the future. So if the president said, look, I'm going to give you a running list of companies that, if they did well, your healthcare costs would go down. So the government, I think, could be more involved than

just being single pair. They could be directly involved in boosting that part of the uh the startup um world that will directly help things. Scott Adam Jewelry fascinating and complex individual and and I've enjoyed our conversation. Let's jump to our speed round. I'll try and get through as many of these questions as quickly as possible. Tell us the most important thing we don't know about you? Wow, I live such a public life that has a very

small category things you don't know about me. I'm learning to play the drums because I think it will be good for my brain as I reached my older years. Um with you, it's just adding to that that talent stack. Um. Who are some of your early mentors. Obviously this Cassidy gentleman Jack Casty, as I mentioned before, my college roommate Mike Chorley. Weirdly, I got into college without knowing much about the world, and he sort of taught me what

it was like to be a functioning person. Uh. And then my first editor, Sarah Gillespie, who's the one who called me and offered me the first contract. Any specific cartoonists that influenced the way you approached Dilbert, Yeah, um, you mentioned Charles Sergio Arigonis, who does who did the little characters in the margins of Mad Magazine? They were fantastic. Yeah, Gary Larson, of course I stole his technique of drawing characters that don't have next uh, and probably those are

the big ones. Yeah, I would say Schultz and Gary Larson. Uh. Favorite books we mentioned Bob Sheldini. What are some of your favorite books, be they fiction on fiction, cartoonists, related, or other. Oh Man Impossible to Ignore is good, teaches you how to uh do memorable presentations and slide shows and stuff by Dr Carmen Simon. Um. I'm reading Sapiens now. I like it so far, so I'm pretty sure I'm gonna like the rest of you will find the second book,

Homo dais to be very very dark. Um, where this one isn't very dark. Well, okay, I'm just maybe I'll stay away from that one. Um. And then, as we mentioned Childini's book Influence and then his follow up book, his newer one, pre Suasion, those I would consider absolute fundamental reading for anybody in the business world. If you haven't read those books, you're you're disadvantaged this period. And

I wouldn't say that about many books. And then then my books Win Bigley and how to Win It almost Everything and still win big would be I consider fundamental reading on persuasion. But what are you excited about right now? Right now working with Bill Palty on something called the UM the blight authority blight meaning b L I g h T, the rundown inner cities areas. Why he's he's doing with his nonprofit is helping cities clear out big

contiguous areas. Uh. And then I'm helping him try to figure out, you know, can we attract some ideas because ideas are the bigger problem than money. Nobody knows what to do, so we're trying to come up with some ideas to help the inner cities and productively use that space. Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned from the experience. Wow. Um, you mentioned the restaurant in How to Fail at Everything and Still Win. Yeah,

I thought that was interesting. So almost everything I've failed at UM was something I chose that would teach me something along the way. So, Uh, the first time I gave a corporate speech when I was paid way too much to give a speech, when Dilbert was just taking off, and you know, the speaking requests come in and I didn't know how to be a public speaker, but I

took the deal. I did really really poorly. And then they paid me, and I thought, wait a minute, I did really, really poorly, in my opinion, and then they paid me. So I thought, well, maybe I should do more of this, and maybe I could get good at it, and eventually I was one of the top corporate speakers in America. What do you do for fun? Well, my girlfriend Christina and I spend a lot of time together, and um, mostly it's whatever couples do you know, go

out to dinner? Travel sounds like fun. Uh. Someone comes to you a millennial, recent college grad and they're interested in becoming a cartoonist. What sort of advice would you give them? Well, I would tell them, first of all, develop their talent stack, so I would tell them to concentrate on writing even more than the art. I would tell them to create online and see if they can build an audience. I would tell them to change their art based on what the audience is telling them is

working or not. I would tell them to know exactly who they're targeting their art at, too, and not try to be a generic Oh everybody will love this, because that's kind of rare these days. But rather to say, as I did, this is a comic for the workplace. This is a comic for pet owners, This is a comic for single people. Whatever it is, it makes perfect sense. Final question, what do you know about the world of

cartoonists today? You wish you knew thirty years ago when you were first starting Tilbert, I did not know that. The main thing you have to get right is that the reader looks at your comic and says, oh, that happened to me too. If you don't get that part right, you don't have anything. Now. There was a day when that wasn't true. The old style of humor was or more absurdist and more generic. But in today's world people just have to say, oh, that's me, or they don't care. Fascinating.

We have been speaking with Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and look Up an Inch or Down an Inch on Apple iTunes and you could see any of the approximately two hundred and fifty such conversations we've had previously. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can check out my daily column at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. You could follow

me on Twitter at Rioults. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that helps put this together each week. Medina Parwanna is my producer. Adica Valbron is our project manager. Taylor Riggs is our booker. Michael Batnick is our head of research. I'm Barry Riholts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.