Will jump right in. No interest in giving a speech before so we are just going to start asking questions. Here we go, and just in time for thanksgiving. A book to help you deal with people with whom you disagree. [laughter] so, intro and questions. Please send yours up. They dont have to be related to adjusjust about. Here we go. My name is melissa, welcome to the Commonwealth Club hosting of scott adams. In his new book and he dives into the epidemic of mental shortcuts that he believes is making us proud to be leaving and bad ideas. Available for people stereotyping and avoiding self reflection when relationships end. We are excited to have him with us tonight to discuss his new book and whatever else you would like to ask him he said nothing is offlimits. Please welcome scott adams. [applause] it is a word that i invented because i noticed when i was on twitter the debate and every once in a while somebody would make a good comment and i would think i dont agree with that, but its well put. And i checked on the profile. There would be lawyers or economists, scientists and then i see a comment that is just crazy. Im not supposed to say that probably. But looking at it, wh who said s and i would click on the profile and there would be a poet, musician, journalist and i would think to myself is that a coincidence or something that you experience in different fields that teaches you that its fake and i reflected on my own experience i have a degree in economics and mba and it really teaches you how to think. Its not so much learning the specifics about economics, but how to compare things, they teach about the time value of money coming into these are just some of the techniques, but they think they could teach you how to think productively about the world. Its not just economists. Scientists have their own way of looking at things, historians and psychologists. Ive had experience in all of those field i am a trained hypnotist. [laughter] and i worked in Corporate America for 16 years and a whole variety of strategies for marketing to technology so just by chance a lot of domain and pick up what they think of the domains and a lot of people havent been exposed to them so i thought i would write a book and fill in the gaps if you have any. Begin to case for people that are sort of multidisciplinary, if you are, just been on humanity. Its not even learning the depth of the field. I can teach you how an economist thinks. I will give you an example. If youve never heard of the concept of the sunken costs, raise your hand. Maybe less than half. So, first the idea if youve already spend your money on something, you shouldnt look too bad to make your next decision. You should say i cant get it back. Theres nothing i can do in the future that will change the fact that its gone. If you make your decision based on the money that youve already spend which people do and say ive already put the dollars into this i dont want to waste iwasteit so i better double dowd keep investing, that feels like common sense but the first time you hear that you cant change the past and you say thats gone i will just make my decision as if i were starting today. So that is how easy you can learn it. You dont need to be an economist you just have to hear some of these things once and it becomes a part of your thinking. You write that you want to stay away from calling people names. Calling people stupid will not make them smart. [laughter] you said loserthink because you want to address the behavior and not demonize the person. We can talk about the use of labels and how thats one method. Some of the things i learned is that democracy is an incredibly powerful and people would say to me i cant tell you how many people have said this, lots of people over the years they would write to me and say we were going to do this certain policy. Its like you dont even have to wait. I mock you in advanc mocked youu dont even have to wait. The power of that is that you didnt have to explain what it meant because everybody was familiar. You know one when you see one. That is a dilbert situation. I used this technique for coming up with a word people can use and say thats loserthink and specifically here is a photograph i took with my phone of the page of the book that explains it better than i can so i give permission to people that have a gap in their thinking and maybe can be filled in. Having a word like loser think makes it easier to mock people because nobody wants to hear as i was checking my feet before i came in here and a lot of people read the book and thought its already working. [laughter] so im using it in the most productive way. Do you think the people that really need this book are going to buy it or is it just like holiday sales for people to buy. [laughter] when you name a book loserthink you pretty much guarantee somebody will give it to their relative for the holiday. It feels like a gift that you are not really sure. [laughter] like i got you this book, loserthink. One of the chapters that you talk about, pun intended you read my mind with it because it is one of the most frustrating things icy on the internet, people who are sort of trying to assert they know what is in your soul and your mind in somebody elses heart. Applying it in this way gives it a little extra power. If you look in the news you will see the ponderings jabbering on one side or the other, and quite often they are chattering about an assumption about what is stranger in their thinking. What is the real reason youre doing this. Sometimes they are right, sometimes it is obvious political stuff. There are other times couldnt possibly know what the stranger is thinking. I give you every relationship youve ever been in because theres probably somebody sitting right next to you in thn the last 24 hours assumed you were mad when you were not, assumed you were hungry when you were not an assumed you were happy when you are not. My husband is in the front row, be careful. [laughter] i dont know a Single Person ever call it out. You are imagining that you can read from somebodys mind at the moment it is called out of becomes a part of the conversation and then you will start to spotting it. Wait until you see what happens in the coming weeks. Weeks. Youll start seeing iyou will sl over the place and i guess i saw it before but it gets crystallized because somebody talked about it as a word and now it is a thing. There are a lot of Great Concepts in the book there are some things here in this one part you talk about the difference between coincidences and anything you should take seriously. So hes writing about his day and things that appear to be magical. A few days ago i arranged my collection of flashlights. And i was like you have a collection of flashlights . How many do you have, is there a community, i need to know. [laughter] i really like them. I built a shrine to my flashlights in my man gave in the garage. Usually i put them on a board and make sure they have fresh batteries and everything. I had never done that before. I always buy a flashlight when i see one like thats a new one. So i have my collection there. I was so happy with it and the First Time Ever that ive been living in my house, somebody ran into a power pole within s. E. And one july neighborhoods into darkness at the same time. So i thought to myself. How many do you have blacks i throw some out so i have a good solid 25. Are there and he that are hard to find, is there a community . Thats a good idea. Mostly plastic and i just like how they look. There is no explaining it. Terrific. Now we know. Thank you. So you are not a fan of the press. As a member of the press i was reading it and i think it is fair. I didnt feel like it was unfair attacking some of the structure on the price is something a little journalists wouldnt even disagree with you about. Can you talk about that and how it feeds into the way people think. I like to put it into the context of a change nobody notices when it happened which is the ability to measure the position of people are clicking on. Once that was the case once everybody could measure, it would have become obvious. Its the stuff that makes your hair catch on fire. I dont want to hear about the budget or the impeachment with a plot to overthrow the government. We are all located in our opinions because the news model is forcing us to work more provocative stuff so before when they would say here is the news. Now its replaced entertainment to a large extent. How many of you watch the news like entertainments like its not even for the news anymore . So many liars and here. Everybodys hand should be up. [laughter] that is the big problem. Once you can measure stuff there was no way that they would be holding to stockholders to do things that get the most attention. There is no way you could ignore that so we have to get to this point once the technological change happened and that caused to complete civilizations at this point and we dont see whats happening in the other because it looks crazy or insane or maybe they are lying and we cant quite tell. We know there is something wrong but it doesnt send. We cant make sense of it and its largely because people have become totally bifurcated in their news consumption. So, conservatives are a little more likely i think statistically to at least sample cnn once in a while. But people on the left typically are not even aware of the argument on the right or you might know one of them is not a the good one for example. [laughter] so, thats part of the problem. But you do have some tips for how to get out of the bubble to recognize if you are in one and then how to communicate. Yes. I recommend them to the pharmaceuticals. There are pharmaceutical commercials that come on and if you make the mistake of actually listening to one, you are going to hear more problems than you knew a human could have healthwise. You can take this pill and it will solve one problem that people have diarrhea and your heart will explode into your lungs will be congested. And forget about sex because it takes that off the table, thats the first thing. What i do when theres a pharmaceutical commercial on, i say to myself first of all get this off of there because i dont want to hear about all these problems because i dont have those problems but if i hear about them im going to get them like i do think i have a rash as a matter of fact. So come and gone to change the channel as quickly as possible. If i on cnn i will go to fox news. I recommend that. You dont have to do with the way i do but if you are not singling both sides, you really dont know whats going on but you might think you do and that is the most dangerous situation. You tell a story about your dog and its a great anecdote. You write i think that my dog believes im an idiot because i dont take her outside when she is communicating to me that its time to do so. She knows shes sending me to let go outside signal, and she knows im physically able to go outside so if i can stop what dt im doing and take her out, does she think i am stupid. You go on to say sometimes you are snickers and sometimes you are you and in the way that requires empathy and imagination to really think about where the other person is coming from. Heres an example where being an artist or a creative person gives you better vision in the world than the engineer or scientist. When i said different professions have different styles of thinking it was meant to insult one because theres genius that goes acros across ae domain but in this example, an artist or somebody that creates for a living might have a little more propensity to imagine the other explanations for the fact. He has the time and its never washed he is probably saving water or he cares about something or he is blind. Whats the reason. The real reason is the one that you would never imagine. In fact you try to think of it right now but what is the real reason, is he going to tell us . Yes. The reason is i have an irrational fear of public instructions. I dont know if any of you have this but i dont want to be in public where anybody can see me and i have to figure out the instructions. It will be very clear but poor example there will be a store sign that says, appear but you say to come up and i dont know if you have the authority. I am waiting here. [laughter] i dont want to get in halfway, turned sideways and have to dismantle it to free me and then theres a head cartoonist. So the point is we have to make assumptions to live. And those about what people are thinking no matter how poorly we do it. You have to to survive, but just be aware just because you cant think of the reason these other things could happen especially if you were watching the news, that doesnt mean the one reason given is the only reason. I talk about the 48 hour rule when you should just wait 48 hou48hour rules when you see son the news that makes your blood boil you think how could that happen, and then two days later it says it didnt actually happen, it seems we got that wrong so just wait a couple of days until the fog dissipates until you get too worked up about anything. Excellent. We have questions from the audience and we will kind of go back and forth between the audience and question. This is a great one. Why does his [inaudible] the characters are mostly versions of me. Different personalities, well, hes a part of my personality that says and does things i couldnt do because i would be beaten up or jailed. [laughter] but they are thoughts. I think of those things i just dont do them because it isnt polite or legal. So he can do that and i would like to show the delight because he doesnt have a high goals or a mouth. [laughter] okay. Okay. So, this question is when do you find yourself using loserthink . The one i fall into all the time is using analogies for no more than they should be used for and its just so easy because it is a natural thing to talk to make analogies. Now and analogies are great for explaining a concept for the first time. If you try to tell somebody what is the braves and they dont know what it is that they know the horse is, it is like a horse with stripes, its a good shortcut. What you dont want to do is use the analogy to predict. If you turn on the news you will see all kinds of people doing exactly that and it makes no sense. If you see that your cat has a marking under his nose that looks at a hitler mustache, doesnt mean your cat is going to invade poland. [laughter] it doesnt work that way. Likewise if you see the president criticizing the press, dictators did that but it doesnt mean hes going to invade poland either. It could mean the press has crossed the line in this provocative to criticize him, but dont take the analogy as predictive. An analogy is a bad way to predict. Host you talk about a number of things people do it and how bad things are going to be based on the history repeating itself. Thats one of the familiar examples. History doesnt repeat. It cant because you are in a different situation with different variables and often you are familiar with the other history so that tells you not to do at this time, but the reason it feels like history repeats. You talk about your political cues and how in some ways they are very liberal. Although now youve done a lot of engaging people about allegations. Can you talk about how this came to be and how youve been in this position of somebody that may be liberal on some issues that you finbut you find yoursef being defending the republican president part of it was a joke on myself because there was nothing left of bernie so there was a way of not characterizing myself. But then they found a bunch of people that were left. I have this space all to myself. What it meant was at least on social issues so i will give you some examples certainly do a test on opioids. Drugs on commercials during the news. Another example just to make the point. On abortion, liberals and bernie would say under the right conditions, yes. Left of the end i would say whatever you wouldnt want to do i will be supportive, so whatever the consensus, im going to be quiet and supported because they dont have that kind of scam in the game and add anything like i dont have the extra smarts to add on top of your decision. Its going to be the same whether i have an opinion or not. I think the most credible, and when you have walls people will tell over, when its not potentially destructive you need a result no matter which way it goes that is credible that people say i didnt get my way and its important, but the way that we arrived it looked credible to me. The less credible it is and women will have largely the same opinion. Our men and women about th of t, roughly wa . So donald trump comes along. It was 2015 and i was writing posts about whatever caught my attention and i have a background as a trained hypnotist and when i saw trump i said i recognize that tick me technique. You dont see it if you havent experienced in that domain but i could see it clearly and i could see the other people but also have the same background could see it just as clearly. We saw a guy bringing a flame thrower to the stick side. I was writing about his persuasions go it wasnt about democrats or anything but you get pulled into it and people want to interview me about it and suddenly i got dragged in. I did get to mee meet the presit that year ago he invited me to the oval office. Sitting in the oval office with the president of the United States on the other side of the resolute desk there is no experience that will come close to that. I woke up to the fact you cant hang out with him and still be as critical as maybe you could have been because i like him personally. If you hang out with him for ten minutes, no matter what you started with, ten minutes later you could say that he is a nice guy. He has more responsibility than anybody in the world and for half an hour he made me feel like i was the only thing that mattered, like i was the only person in the room and he could do that to you. So here is the thing he does have that charisma and ability to make people like him and for different reasons. Im not biased in terms of him personally. Personally, i like them. What i thought the country would get out of him and the reason i didnt feel any conflict about promoting his abilities which i will promote them, if i felt that he was bringing a toolkit that have tools in it that we bd never seen before. Sometimes your civilization will get a little ostracized. Youll get stuck and its something an ordinary politician cannot own stick. Examples with the trade with china. When he first started talking about it and everybody said the trade war is bad. How about that record the stock market. The trade war is not so bad. And in fact if we never make an agreement which by the way i dont predict that we will except maybe on some small stuff i think that we will be fine and gradually decoupled from china as we should anyway. So i think that he brought to the neck a set of tools that could help and then see what we can do after you shake the box. I knew that it would be messy. I knew that there would be breakage but everybody knew that and they knew what they were getting. They cut the benefits that i would say are enormous at this point. You like beating the caliphate and the economy, but if you dont like those things maybe you have a different opinion. And on the personal stuff of course, hes driving people crazy which is definitely at a cost. The way people feel about each other and the political heat. I thought that was a worthy expense to get stuff done and running the temperature down we will think the others. Who do you think will be the next president mr. Super predictor . I dont think that he will win every election. But the one after is where you will get interesting. Sooner or later, they will be running for president against each other. Probably not 2024. Are they old enough . Shes not, he might be but sooner or later they will run against each other. I had identified him as another master persuader. I had a written blog post that said theres something hes doing that isnt like normal people, its not like music and my domain at all tha but i was t seeing something where theres an extra persuasive level and you see the impact any time you inject cant be kanye into anything hes such a force. Now hes doing this religious revival stuff and hes setting his sights higher than the president , literally. I think that he wants to be a spiritual leader in the United States and may be saying hes ms going to run for president is good for the affect, but i think that he has bigger sites and the president. Than the president. Bigger than the president. Well, we dont really have a spiritual leader that is not nondenominational. We dont have that, do we . It got quiet. Youve got your megachurch and everyone has a leader and someone you could name, but we dont have somebody that is nondenominational and would be regarded by everybody as openminded to all the other religions. It could be bigger than everything weve seen politically. You dont think that you will run for president . Seem nights, but he might have a bigger role. Those including bloomberg had a shot . Years ago i wrote that bloomberg would be an excellent choice for president because he was sort of middleoftheroad pragmatic and he seems to be able to break with his party if he felt it. He had all the qualities. But hes also 77. If you havent seen his speech or even worse, his mobile phone video youve got to tell these guys over 70 cant turn the phone sideways. [laughter] if you can d cant do that, yout be president. Turn it sideways. If you havent seen bloomberg yet with the video that i mentioned with somebody holding up the phone and you have to see it because he isnt the Mike Bloomberg that he used to be. I hate to say that but its a little bit of a joe biden problem which is great patriots and contributions of the country, total respect for both of those people, but there is an age where we all need to know its time for somebody in the family to cut you off. Unfortunately, bloomberg is there but i dont know if hes trying to be president or if he has a better play. It allows him to go in strong and trash trump so effectively he may be doing it just for the democrat to emerge. It might be a way to take biden out because bloomberg goes in and of the people that said i might donate, they will say hold off a little bit. This is a guy that is the same age similar politics. So he might be giving up just to get by him out because he cant win against trump. So that helps like Elizabeth Warren, for example. Is that in the longterm . Im pretty sure he doesnt want Elizabeth Warren to be president. I think it only helps me be to imagine it is a four dimensional thing you have to work hard to make it make sense. Probably its just running for president. He is so smart and strategic but its hard to understand why he would do something that he couldnt possibly win unless he surprises us all at this point it looks like he couldnt possibly. You write about financial and filtering people out in the media. So, that you write about Financial Advisors and just sort of felt to be skeptical of them. And then you write there is a little sort of twitter area that says be skeptical of any efforts that have the ability to mislead you and almost no risk at their end and i wrote political consult. I wonder if a couple guys with a powerpoint didnt get in here and say here is the plan. This is what happens all the time. In california especially we see this. Wealthy people just burning their money. So thats me b that may be parts well. That is one of the best. When you think it through how hard would it be for the persuasive consultants to convince a 77yearold this is your time. If they only get a billion out of them its okay. [laughter] some audience questions. Somebody wrote please share opinions you have. That is a big question. Jordan peterson for a long time i would than people from mentioning him and they would say you must dislike jordan peterson. No its because he was so popular it was sick of hearing about it. But then i listened to him. Ive heard his name and billion times. I am so sick of it. So i listened to a youtube video. It doesnt matter which one because they are all amazing to rearead i thought this is like powerful and different and important. Usually you dont go to youtube to find something important, but i thought this is way beyond just helpful. This is important. And so i got hooked as many people do i started watching his content. It was so useful that i didnt know how to explain that it was so different and fresh and changing people. You could see people were changing. Now you may know the story. Hes checked himself into rehab. So he apparently had some issues and got on some whatever it doesnt matter but he checked himself in and i think that hes still there working through it. And i realized that on the ones like you say to your self i hate to see these heroes go to rehab. I have a different opinion about that because he is a role model. Him going into rehab is one of the most important things that ever happened in this country. When he comes back it is going to be awesome. Is videos about religion are interesting if you think about who is the spiritual leader that can traverse the various state. The fact that he hasnt so together they still had to go to rehab, that is an Important Message that the addiction isnt about being smarter, clever, trying harder. It is its own thing and its very important. You once had a fear of public speaking. How did you get over it . I wouldnt say i have a fear that i took the carnegie course and if you havent heard of that, its one of the best things ive ever done. Its life altering. It teaches you to do what i am doing now which is talk to a group of people as easily as if you were just talking to somebody and it teaches you to do that and what i watched was person after person who had been sent by a boss usually because they couldnt stand in front of people and talk. I remember watching a woman who was in the class and you had to volunteer to talk and decide when you were ready to come up and everybody would talk to the class. She stood up there and couldnt make words and started sweating in an airconditioned room. I watched these beads of sweat and fell in front of a room like this. She was afraid of public speaking and that was her experience. The thing you need to know about the class is that there was only one rule that everybody gets complemented and you never criticize anything. So, nobody that speaks of ever hear a bad word about them. She goes back to her chair completely defeated. The instructor gets up and says that was brave and it was true. Next time she came up a little bit better. She lives throug lived through d got a complement. So, watching data transformation from nothing but positive words is lifechanging because you realized the power of a complement to the point of my current philosophy is if you hold that you are thinking something good about somebody i dont need to say that, it is almost a and. With a great point. Thank you. [laughter] actually you do write about this in your book and i want to give you an opening ticket. One person in the audience, what are some go to questions you can use to challenge and broaden your colleagues thinking. I use a technique called the magic question when people are disagreeing with you. They think they are disagreeing with my opinion, but really they form a misleading opinion of my opinion and they are giving the misleading thing. If i try to correct it and say thats not my opinion. Its actually this, do they then argue the actual opinion . Never. They turned that into a wrong opinion to argue that one. So, trying to get people to actually argue my opinion hasnt worked in my entire life, but this technique you say tell me something you think is true that you think i dont think is true, just one thing that you think i dont think is true. I agree we both think that is true. When you get to the third one they usually disappear. [laughter] because they realized they didnt even know what they were arguing about. Why do you argue with folks because it seems so futile sometimes, you get there and you are spending your energy to try to change peoples mind and it just seems like, assuming it is a person and it isnt blocked, there you are spending your time trying to change the opinions. I can only speak for myself which is i get benefits that the ordinary person doesnt get. People follow my twitter and the comments as well. And because i am a cartoonist i have some comments. Sometimes its part of the show so if i can argue in a way it is entertainment. But i also am drawn to it. I love it but its educational. So the more response i get coming you are learning what other peoples arguments are and it strengthens your argument. To me it is just all good. But i have a very high tolerance for trolls and insulting personal insults. You get insulted a lot of it i have a lot of tolerance, so i can get most of the benefits because the bad parts, and it just doesnt bother me. Someone that is a conservative good works in an industry like entertainment, news or movies is impossible to be conservative without ruining a persons career bac . [laughter] i will give you some suggestions to make it go down better. You want to keep the most provocative stuff to your self. But if you arif you are surroune who disagreed with you, try pasting which is a hypnosis trick and it means agreeing with people on everything you can agree with and matching them in style. You might match their body language and the way they speak. Anything you can match. As many as you can and will make them feel more connected to you. They wont maybe think it in their head that they will feel it. This is a person that is like me anin all these ways. Then if you need to disagree, youve at least set the table. This is somebody that realizes they have agreed with you on ten things or they are compatible so now you can introduce the 11th thing but you dont want to work right into the middle of the. Dilbert is the only mailing list ive been a subscriber for for ten years. Havent the characterhaving them their mistake over the years . [laughter] if they did, i would need a new job. The beauty of the comic strip world is that the characters exist so i dont have to think too hard its not like writing a new movie every day because youve already got the characters. I take the topic and throw it into the world and say thats something a lazy guy would respond to so its easier to write once youve got your character set. Which character are you, i think you said you are all of them but is there one that you feel especially close to . Originally dilbert was based on me. He had my lack of social graces and interest. He was a single guy and i was a single guy at the time. He was basically an inversion of me that he was smarte but he wae was an engineer. His body shape is actually based on a coworker. Do they know . [laughter] heres the fun part. He doesnt know. [laughter] ive never told him. What is his name, lets tell him . [laughter] i didnt even know him that well. He would walk by and he looked like a walking dilbert i guess. [laughter] i always wondered years later. You remind me of, i cant place it. This person wants to know why you dont like the godfather film. I feel like i need security to get out. [laughter] i will make a general statement that i cant watch movies at all anymore. I have completely given up on movies because my Attention Span has shrunk in. Watching a two and a half hour movie on anything is just painful now. Its like going to the dentist for me. They are moving so slowly. So that is the first thing. But the producer of the godfather recently was making fun of the avenger films. He was making fun of these phones and im thinking to myself as a reason they make a billion dollars, because they are really entertaining. The movies that dont, theres a reason they dont make a billion dollars. They are not that entertaining. If they were they would take a billion dollars. So i have a weird background part artist and part economist which is a weird combination. If they buy it twice, its really good if they dont, i dont care how much they are willing to admit, nobody wants it. So, dilbert was created because they said we like your cartoon in the beginning it wasnt in the workplace so much but we like it a lot when hes in the workplace. So, unlike scorsese, i said what is it that my buyers want, they want the workplace, done so i moved into th it into the workpd that is when he took off. I am not on the side of the artist that has a thing called artistic integrity ive heard of. I try to avoid it at all cost. If you are an artist you should be making things for the artist, not for yourself so if they are not willing to shell out some hard cash, you didnt make anything. Left the hate mail begin. This is probably related to the earlier question and it might be the same answer. What is the most dangerous idea that you have and you believe in . Is there Something Else . I guess it would be dangerous to whom, me or other people . I am a believer in that we live in a simulation. I heard a groan out there becausbecause youve heard it ty times for me probably. It requires a little explanati explanation. First let me say that there are brilliant people that have the same opinion. Elon musk is one, physicist in fact it was invented by physicist all the smartest people. The idea is if it would be possible in our lifetim lifetims certainly well, for us to build a Little Software world where there are characters in the world and they live as if they are real so they have a program belief that they are real characters come if we tried to build it today it would be a basic version within 30 years we would be able to make people that act like they are alive and as far as they know, they are. It would be a Software Game and up to that adjacent property it doesnt get formed does our world look like that cracks at the quantum level it does. But it doesnt become solid also a world to get to the edge of the universe. You cant. So all the things that you need to be true that were all they are. And there will be lots of them. So how do you disprove this theory cracks. I dont have a solution to prove it but like most religious beliefs they are falsified and allpowerful could hide pretty easily. But if it is like simulation that is one explanation because my life is crazy. I just chatted with the president. And i have a bestselling book and a cartoon strip i get to talk to you. I dont have a normal life in any way that i have lived it like i can program it. So taking the assumption from the early age that would be programmable for me and i programmed and i fantasized literally exactly the life that i imagined when i was six years old. What was the book . s. But this fades into the speaking of poets there is one poet who characterizes to be a wash of the money. What do you make of that and that i want to be in a Cryogenic Chamber so the Technology World because if i was not doing what i was doing thats what i would be doing but i do hear terrible things from people who are in it. I dont know if thats true but but it doesnt sound good but as long as there is problems i will have material. And so to talk about persuasion and trumps mentors. Norman vincent po how many of you have heard the name . s when i was a kid as one of the most influential authors without the power of positive thinking you could program your simulation and program your life how you change how you thought. I was interested in and so was donald trump in fact not only was he bestselling author but he is actually the trump family pastor or minister. That is who he would see in church. On church or someone on sunday the most influential person may be whoever lived in the United States tony robbins would be the other. That is the influence he was given every sunday. I actually asked him about that and he went on how amazing Norman Vincent peel was in his lifetime he was accused to be a hypnotist because he was so influential we know the president picked it up from the best source of her i would like to see a study of everyone who attended that church and compare them to the average. That would be interesting because i can almost guarantee their life is completely different than ordinary people i dont know too much about roy ecohen other than what you know and you see those qualities in trump but you also see the persuasion part so he has a lot going on. So with those kinds of arguments and Climate Change so in Northern California with the wildfires and mudslides talk about your perspective how people should think about Climate Change thats not loser think. Im not trying to change any minds so you are safe but all i talk about is a way to analyze it if that causes you to change your mind thats your business but here are some insights. Its useful to break up the Climate Change conversation into its parts and get into Different Levels of credibility so the chemistry and physics adding co2 to the air it will get warmer. And emergency matter and that scientists make models and are they accurate . s nobody knows. But what happened to the models that dont work next they keep them or throw them away . s but throw away all the ones it will not work exactly like your models work. Does the temperature go up at a rate we should be alarmed that . Probably. And then there is the third part. The third part is the economics. If you have to move your beast childs that cost money so that moving it to the economics part now you are in my domain. And they are all bogus. What the reliability should he put on that that over 80 years if it goes the way its predicted that says the gdp could be as much is 10 percent lower. So i think to myself, that is trillions and trillions of trillions of dollars and 10 percent reduction of the Economy Today would be massively expensive and people would starve to death and it would be a big deal. Because in 80 years the gdp will be five or ten times bigger than it is now if it if it was less would you notice . You wouldnt know the difference you would think things were great that people would be in poverty the robots are scratching your back. Because thats the un bad case prediction so until i told you that but we have no idea of the economics. [laughter] and tucker bank was swallowed up by wells fargo and pacific bell not by verizon. So what do you do about this . If there are several startups building giant scrubbing machines that will literally pull the co2 out of the air and then to do some of the things maybe there are none of them but just like the pc industry in the beginning it was hard to know which company would last but pcs and computers would last so likewise the co2 scrubbing i dont know if these specific startups will last but it is an industry and its a big deal but also we have Nuclear Energy if you are not up on Nuclear Power money give you 60 seconds of what you need to know your grandfathers Nuclear Power was more dangerous than it needed to be in all of the meltdowns of you ever heard of from fukushima or early versions of nuclear we would never build any of those models today. Today you go with generation three. The generation three reactor to have a Nuclear Incident is zero. None. Literally the Safest Technology for energy on the planet because the other form is killing people people are literally falling off roofs installing solar power literally more people are dying from solar power more people are dying from putting up a window that all the generation three Nuclear Power plants in the world. Now heres generation for that is backed by people like bill gates who is put a ton of money into it there is a Company Called tara power this is just one of them what generation for can do it actually reduces if you put it right next to an old plant of Nuclear Waste and its built so that if anything goes wrong it just turns off. So the other ones you have to feed energy to keep it from melting down the new version as soon as the energy goes away the reaction goes away. Those are already designed and already looking for a place to build it we could do that economically and reduce Nuclear Waste. So the point is if youre working on an 80 year projection for Climate Change i am glad some people are panicked but we as a population and a species are really good at solving problems so im not going to worry about it i hope we have is handled but there is something to worry about but personally i will not worry about it. [laughter] thank you to scott adams thank you for joining us today copies are available and he will take photos here on stage in a few minutes please form an orderly line on behalf of myself and scott adams thank you for joining us here at the Commonwealth Club. [applause] in this room tonight my mother who is a poet in her own right as a child i watched her every move and see her eyes fall upon every word in the Grocery Store are on the bus in my high School Textbook always wolfing downwards insatiable thats where i learned that words were a sustenance and how i learned that words would make me know that my mother always said in between raising 12 humans. I am in this room ;semicolon and so was my mother. [applause] and this room leaving when she was only 19 which then felt like a lurching mission to a planet unknown and in this room tonight that you have a fellow artist the most inspired accompaniment of my life in the chorus my siblings not here whose voices exist in mine, thank you for telling me the stories in the first place and for trusting me to make something of them and allowing me to call your names because it is no small thing to recover the names they are names of my family who told the history of myself some died before the book was finished these absent presences my auntie my mothers only sister my uncle joe and then my oldest brother who died the day after this book appeared in the world. Thank you so much for coming i am honored to introduce as a senior fellow