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