The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 561. Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson

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00:00:30.000 Some of your viewers know that I have terminal cancer, prostate cancer that's metastasized.

00:00:35.920 And once it's metastasized, you don't have the options of curing it like you would if it was localized.

00:00:41.700 So part of my system is to be open to all the possibilities.

00:00:45.220 But the other is the belief that nothing's impossible.

00:00:48.120 The spirit of your aim answers your prayers.

00:00:51.940 This is literally the case because once you set up an aim, your imagination and your cognitive systems orient themselves to serve that aim.

00:01:02.260 It wouldn't be the first time I had an incurable disease that I cured. 0.99

00:01:07.280 I'm a really cocky bastard. 0.97

00:01:09.160 I kind of enter a lot of situations thinking, I can do this. 0.99

00:01:12.740 You know, as an adult, I started thinking that, you know, I must be living in some kind of a simulation.

00:01:19.300 And that somehow the way I steer the simulation is by imagining what it is that I want to go toward.

00:01:25.520 And then things fall in line.

00:01:27.800 We're navigators and we navigate towards a destination like we set our sights by the stars.

00:01:33.740 All of this is true.

00:01:34.960 Most of us know Scott Adams as the creator of the world-famous Dilbert cartoon.

00:01:56.520 Wherein for decades he offered a satirical critique of corporate culture and office life.

00:02:02.140 But Adams is also a sage and a suffering sage.

00:02:07.460 In mid-May he announced that he had received a prostate cancer diagnosis, which is most likely terminal.

00:02:13.860 We spoke at length about his career, about his strange life, about the role of faith and affirmation in his movement forward.

00:02:22.920 About technology, about optimism and service and much more.

00:02:30.040 Join us.

00:02:30.940 It's a great conversation.

00:02:33.060 First, I'd like to thank you for two things.

00:02:36.580 For Dilbert and also on behalf of my son for Dilbert because he was an immense Dilbert fan when he was younger than he is now.

00:02:46.660 And I spent a lot of enjoyable time reading Dilbert.

00:02:51.620 And so, it's great to, to, what?

00:02:57.860 It's a little bit of satirical lightness in a world that's often, often lacks humor.

00:03:05.000 So, thank you for that.

00:03:06.440 And also, thank you more personally.

00:03:08.940 You wrote a cartoon about me when I was in the midst of my, I'm still in the midst of my interminable war with the College of Psychologists in Ontario.

00:03:19.380 And I don't think they were very happy about that.

00:03:23.660 I certainly hope not.

00:03:26.360 Apparently, I'm to be re-educated this month.

00:03:30.280 So, I'm dead serious.

00:03:33.380 They've reduced my penalty to one two-hour session by Zoom, which I'm supposed to keep private, but certainly will not.

00:03:45.640 Oh, my goodness.

00:03:48.160 Yeah, well, I think part of their problem is that everything I said turned out to be correct.

00:03:53.520 And so, that's kind of annoying three or four years later.

00:03:56.100 So, thank you.

00:03:56.800 Anyways, much appreciated for Dilbert and for the personal touch as well.

00:04:02.840 Glad to help.

00:04:04.220 You know, I should add that I owe you an apology for something you might not be aware of.

00:04:11.060 Okay.

00:04:11.540 When you first burst onto the scene and became sort of the biggest thing everywhere, I had not yet been exposed to your content.

00:04:23.240 But when I was doing my podcast, the chat would turn into just a nonstop, what do you think of Jordan Peterson?

00:04:30.140 And I had to start blocking people because it just completely took over my podcast.

00:04:38.720 And then finally, after, oh, it must have been months and months of that, I thought, all right, I'm going to go look at your content.

00:04:46.180 And I thought, oh, I get it now.

00:04:47.860 I completely understand why everybody was pestering me because when I watched your content, I had this weird sensation that I was like the less educated form of you, meaning that I largely agreed with everything you were saying, but I didn't have the science behind it.

00:05:08.000 So, that was like a big awakening for me.

00:05:13.420 And then I got hooked on your content and absorbed a lot of it.

00:05:18.760 Well, so apparently we're approximately equally reprehensible.

00:05:22.840 Is that the moral of the story?

00:05:26.500 Well, whatever you were saying was certainly hitting with a lot of people, including me.

00:05:31.660 So, I guess we're all reprehensible.

00:05:33.740 Yes, well, we've certainly moved to the point where many of us are reprehensible.

00:05:39.900 So, although maybe things are shifting back to something approximating whatever kind of sanity we might be able to accomplish,

00:05:49.100 I see that you, Penn, stripped Will Thomas of his medals two days ago.

00:05:55.980 And so, I'm always thrilled when a six-foot-five man no longer gets to have medals in a female swimming competition.

00:06:05.440 And to me, that's a sign of sanity.

00:06:07.140 But that's, I suppose, part of being reprehensible.

00:06:10.520 And I don't know, how are you feeling about the current, what, zeitgeist, let's say?

00:06:16.940 Well, it's incredible.

00:06:18.760 The fact that Trump is doing so many things he said he would do, and he's doing it as fast as possible, maybe because the midterms could disrupt things.

00:06:29.780 But now I'm mostly worried about how long it will last, because all it takes is one election and everything goes back to where it was.

00:06:38.220 And, you know, that would be pretty intolerable to me.

00:06:42.140 But at the moment, it just feels like nonstop, you know, goodness.

00:06:47.640 I saw people were trending.

00:06:50.080 The golden age has begun this morning.

00:06:53.180 So, at least half of the country thinks things are great.

00:06:58.220 And then I see the other half, you know, I like to call it two movies on one screen.

00:07:02.680 The other half of the country thinks they're living in some kind of, you know, nightmare hellscape.

00:07:07.440 And I wake up every day and I think, oh, where's the hellscape part?

00:07:12.420 It looks pretty good to me.

00:07:14.300 So, I'm enjoying it.

00:07:16.600 Yeah, well, as far as I can tell, the hellscape is the remnants of what had happened over the last 10 years.

00:07:21.660 I mean, things really seem to go sideways in a serious manner in about 2015.

00:07:27.280 And maybe that was a consequence of us all becoming hyper-connected, eh? 0.98

00:07:31.600 Because it's certainly possible that stupid, impulsive ideas spread faster than wise and sagacious ideas, right? 1.00

00:07:44.020 I mean, we've never... 0.99

00:07:45.280 Well, yeah, one of the things I write about in Dilbert all the time is that things start as good ideas when they're small.

00:07:53.940 Yeah.

00:07:54.300 Do you remember when there was a big fad of re-engineering?

00:08:00.080 And, you know, there's a book on it and everything.

00:08:03.120 And so, re-engineering was a great idea.

00:08:05.940 It was the idea that instead of just tweaking something that wasn't working, you should think about how to rebuild it from scratch and, you know, really make it exactly what you wanted.

00:08:14.840 Now, who can argue with that?

00:08:17.560 Except by the time it hit the corporate world, it turned into every manager has to re-engineer everything or else they're not with the new thing.

00:08:25.740 And, you know, and then it just became absurd.

00:08:29.360 You know, everybody was just looking for money to engineer, re-engineer something.

00:08:33.840 And that seems like what happened with all the wokeness stuff.

00:08:36.900 It probably started as, well, let's, you know, let's treat people respectfully and sort of acknowledge that people are different.

00:08:45.320 And then it just turned into a whole different thing.

00:08:48.300 Yeah, I wonder, you know, I read a couple of, there's three now, I think, psychological studies about, for example, about motivation for income redistribution.

00:09:01.860 So, imagine that you can generate a set of questions that reliably assess someone's attitude towards the more socialist idea of income redistribution, so that you can place them on a continuum in relationship to their support for that idea.

00:09:20.940 And you can do that relatively carefully, so it's a stable measurement.

00:09:24.240 And then you could look at what predicts that belief.

00:09:30.600 And these particular psychologists looked at three factors.

00:09:35.520 They looked at compassion, which would be the factor that you just described, genuine compassion, let's say.

00:09:42.160 And that seems to reflect trait agreeableness, which is one of the big five personality traits.

00:09:49.060 And so, and they looked at fairness, like actual moral concern with fairness, and they looked at malicious envy.

00:09:59.420 And the biggest predictor was malicious envy.

00:10:02.940 And the second biggest predictor was compassion.

00:10:05.880 And fairness didn't enter the prediction at all.

00:10:10.700 And so, one of the things. 0.99

00:10:11.640 Well, I, yeah, I was saying that fairness was invented so children and idiots would have something to talk about. 0.99

00:10:18.320 Because, you know, there's no standard for fairness. 0.98

00:10:22.720 Yeah, well, I suppose the entire political discussion in some ways is about what constitutes fair.

00:10:30.340 But it's interesting that the, you know, the claim is that it's compassion and concern with fairness, let's say, that drives concern with, well, equitable wealth distribution.

00:10:48.140 But if you do a careful analysis, it's malicious envy that's doing a lot of the work.

00:10:53.400 And so, I've become more and more skeptical of those, of, you know, you said things start out good and then deteriorate.

00:11:00.180 And I wonder to what degree that's the case, because that malicious envy, two things, and I'd like your comments on them, that malicious envy certainly plays a role.

00:11:12.320 I mean, that's a story as old as time, because that's the story of Cain and Abel.

00:11:15.860 And then there's also this proclivity for people to use God's name in vain, so to speak, which I did a very careful analysis of that commandment, trying to understand what it meant.

00:11:29.160 And what it means is don't claim moral virtue when you're feathering your own bed, right?

00:11:35.800 And so, you could imagine that the most egregious error you can make is to do something corrupt and then to sanctify it, right?

00:11:46.060 And there's a tremendous amount of that that characterizes our culture now.

00:11:50.280 I think much more than that was the case, let's say, when I was half my age.

00:11:55.740 Because I just don't remember that being that prevalent, you know, that people would thump their chest and proclaim that they were on the side of the angels with quite the amount of force that seems to be the common tactic.

00:12:12.340 Now, maybe that also has something to do with being hyper-connected, you know?

00:12:16.660 Because you can trumpet your moral virtue so easily into so many people that it's easy for it to be gamed.

00:12:22.240 Yeah, when I was young, I grew up in a family where we were very much not rich.

00:12:30.440 But we had a house that was directly across from the ski slope in town.

00:12:35.800 So, that's where the rich people went to ski.

00:12:38.740 And I'm pretty sure that I was full of malicious envy at the time.

00:12:42.820 Because the way we talked about the rich people was as if they were enemies who had, you know, somehow gotten there, you know, in some criminal way or some unethical way.

00:12:56.360 And those were just sort of assumptions that they didn't deserve their money.

00:12:59.720 And, you know, if you could imagine that if things hadn't gone well for me, you know, if I didn't do well in school so I had a path out, that, you know, I could have become a criminal and just said, well, you know, you didn't deserve your money.

00:13:16.280 I'll steal it from you.

00:13:17.980 Right, right.

00:13:18.320 So, I feel I've gone from the malicious envy mode just because of my circumstance and, you know, hearing other people talk to all the way to, you know, now that I have things I want to protect, I find myself suspiciously in favor of things that protect my assets.

00:13:38.760 And I, you know, talk is, oh, those are the godly things and those are the systems that protect us all.

00:13:45.880 And I mean it because the arguments for it are all good.

00:13:49.920 But I always ask myself, is it a total coincidence that all these things that I think are morally smart and good and systems that work better than other systems, is it my imagination that these are all good for me?

00:14:03.820 You know, I'm watching the big, beautiful bill get passed and, you know, I could have spent time looking at all the ways it would affect everybody, but I found myself just looking at how it would affect my taxes and I thought, hmm, there I go again.

00:14:19.280 Well, you know, okay, some thoughts on that.

00:14:26.320 I've been to a lot of different places in the world now, mostly and broadly in the West, let's say, but some other places as well.

00:14:34.340 There is one thing I've noticed that characterizes the United States more particularly and thoroughly than any other place I've been by a lot, which is that that sentiment of malicious envy is radically attenuated here.

00:14:53.640 And there is a major streak of American culture that's predicated on the opposite assumption, which is that it's possible to make good by doing well and that people who earn their living deserve to keep it.

00:15:12.240 And that much of what constitutes true wealth is honestly gotten.

00:15:20.340 And I do believe that that's a wellspring of wealth for the U.S.

00:15:27.140 And I've had a lot of dealings.

00:15:29.000 Well, you have too, and we can talk about this.

00:15:31.140 You've had a lot of dealings with the corporate world.

00:15:33.020 I tend to go speak at corporate events.

00:15:35.640 It's so funny, eh, because the evil corporate event.

00:15:39.460 So if I go speak at a corporate event, this is my experience.

00:15:42.820 So they pay me a lot.

00:15:44.920 They're thrilled to see me.

00:15:46.620 I can talk about anything I want.

00:15:49.260 The audience is extremely receptive.

00:15:52.060 Everyone's very hospitable.

00:15:53.800 It's hyper-efficient.

00:15:55.500 And all things considered, it's a great pleasure.

00:15:59.420 Okay, so that's the evil corporate world.

00:16:02.520 Then if I go to a university, so they don't pay me anything.

00:16:07.480 The administration and the students do everything they can to interfere with the experience and make it as miserable as possible, both directly in terms of challenge and also behind the scenes.

00:16:20.380 It's very inhospitable.

00:16:22.220 It's very badly produced.

00:16:23.820 And mostly it's a royal pain in the neck.

00:16:26.840 And so, and that's, that's, I don't think that's merely a matter of my self-interest making itself manifest, you know, like, and I do think that the U.S. continues to lead the world economically because that sentiment of malicious envy is more attenuated here by a lot than it is anywhere else in the world.

00:16:48.560 So, for what that's worth.

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00:18:06.960 Wait, but what would be driving it in America over the other countries?

00:18:11.900 You mean the lack of it?

00:18:14.700 No, the malicious envy.

00:18:17.220 Well, I think it's probably—

00:18:17.820 You're saying the malicious envy is worse here?

00:18:19.560 No, no.

00:18:20.140 It's not worse.

00:18:20.900 It's much less here.

00:18:23.120 It's much less in the U.S.

00:18:24.360 Oh, okay.

00:18:24.900 Oh, no.

00:18:25.440 It's much less.

00:18:26.220 Well, there's a genuine sentiment of—and maybe that's part of the depth of the American dream.

00:18:32.440 There's a genuine sentiment here that you can make good by doing well, and that if you do manage that, then you deserve the fruits of your labor, and you could be admired for your hard work and your success.

00:18:49.600 I mean, in your situation, I mean, we could analyze your situation.

00:18:53.320 You know, you were worried about your self-interest overwhelming your ethics.

00:18:58.340 Although I'll tell you, I'd rather deal with someone honestly self-interested than hypocritically altruistic any day.

00:19:06.480 You know, you can deal with a greedy man because you know what motivates him, and if you can make a deal with him that also benefits him, man, you're both playing the same game.

00:19:17.980 And that's pretty simple compared to someone who—in whose mouth butter wouldn't melt and who's always working for the betterment of the human race.

00:19:27.340 You have no bloody idea what they're up to or what motivates them.

00:19:30.540 And so, now you, I mean, you've come by your success by bringing joy, ironic joy, to hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people and for a long time.

00:19:44.820 And so, that seems like a good deal for everyone.

00:19:47.060 And if it provided you with a certain degree of material security and comfort and opportunity, then how in the world is that not a good thing for everyone?

00:19:56.700 I mean, I think the world's a better place because it had Dilbert cartoons in it by quite a substantial margin.

00:20:04.480 Yeah, my first ambition as a child was to become a lawyer.

00:20:10.200 Well, my first ambition was to become a famous cartoonist when I was about six years old.

00:20:15.260 But I soon found out that it's very hard to become a famous cartoonist, and the odds were very much against me.

00:20:23.300 So, I went through this age of reason from about age 11 where I was like, eh, I better do something that will work.

00:20:32.280 But the more I thought about being a lawyer, you know, I was sort of pre-law in my mind in college, the more I thought, wait a minute.

00:20:40.920 The only way I can win as a lawyer is by making somebody else lose.

00:20:45.000 I mean, there might be some exceptions to that.

00:20:47.100 But generally, it's an adversarial system.

00:20:49.380 And I thought, if I lose, I'm going to feel bad.

00:20:53.640 And if I only win because I made somebody else lose, I'm going to feel a little bit bad about that too, you know, depending on how badly I won.

00:21:03.100 And so, I thought, what about entertainment?

00:21:07.080 You know, who loses when you get entertained?

00:21:10.020 Nobody.

00:21:11.060 You know, they win, I win.

00:21:12.360 So, I thought, well, I'll go into some place where everybody wins.

00:21:15.580 So, that was both for my mental health, but also there was a moral dimension to that, which is I just couldn't build a life around winning.

00:21:25.880 I also thought, what if I'm really good at it?

00:21:28.540 If you're really good at being a lawyer, in some ways, that's the worst case because you're getting off guilty people.

00:21:35.640 You're prevailing where maybe the facts were not really completely on your side.

00:21:41.160 So, being a great lawyer would feel a little bit sketchy to me, but being a great cartoonist, if you could ever get there, would just be all plus.

00:21:51.720 So, I chose wisely in the end.

00:21:55.520 So, when you were six, you already had an inkling of your ambition.

00:22:02.260 And what were you, who were your idols?

00:22:07.500 Who were your cartooning idols?

00:22:08.780 I saw an article about Charles Schultz in a big magazine display.

00:22:15.820 And I saw him standing there in his sweater and looking a lot like I look now with, you know, the glasses and everything.

00:22:22.740 And I thought to myself, wouldn't that be the best job in the world?

00:22:27.840 You know, he draws one comic a day and he's world famous and he's got airplanes and stuff.

00:22:33.840 And I thought, yeah, I'll just do that.

00:22:36.420 But, you know, that's when you're a kid and you think you can be an astronaut or an NBA player if you just try really hard.

00:22:43.180 But eventually, I became smart enough to know it was impossible.

00:22:50.480 And then I gave up that dream for years, as I mentioned.

00:22:53.560 It wasn't until I was well into the corporate world and I learned that doing a good job in the corporate world doesn't exactly perfectly correlate with success.

00:23:04.520 That there are just so many other factors that can take you down.

00:23:10.140 That's when I started doing things that didn't make sense.

00:23:13.060 They were sort of irrational.

00:23:15.000 So I thought, well, I'll just try to become a cartoonist, even though I don't know how to do it.

00:23:19.600 And there was a weird sequence of events that allowed me to get into it.

00:23:24.520 It was so weird it made me, you know, doubt the nature of the universe, to be honest.

00:23:29.300 You said you weren't very sensible and you were dreaming of impossible fame like Charles Schultz had.

00:23:35.560 I mean, he had rockets named after his characters.

00:23:38.140 I mean, that man was at the top of the world for a good while.

00:23:41.260 And then you got sensible and you studied pre-law and then you took a nosedive, let's say, into the corporate world.

00:23:49.440 And then you stopped being sensible and then something impossible happened.

00:23:53.080 And then you made an allusion to that.

00:23:55.080 You said you had experiences that were so off-kilter, let's say, that it made you doubt the structure of the world.

00:24:02.520 So, hey, man, elaborate on that.

00:24:06.180 So I took a class in hypnosis when I was in my 20s because my mother had given birth to my little sister while being hypnotized because my family doctor was a hypnotist.

00:24:18.440 And she reported having no pain and being alert and essentially awake but still under hypnosis while she delivered a baby without, she said, without painkillers.

00:24:31.500 Now, once I got older, I started to doubt the story, whether it was true.

00:24:36.260 But in the meantime, in my 20s, I signed up for a hypnosis course.

00:24:41.180 And one of the students was into something called affirmations.

00:24:46.500 Now, most people have heard of it, but the way it was described to me was, oh, there's this book where if you just write down 15 times a day what you want, this magical coincidence stuff will happen.

00:24:57.980 And I thought, eh, you know, I'm not really a believer in anything magical.

00:25:02.560 But she kept saying, well, you know, it doesn't cost anything.

00:25:06.600 It's easy to try.

00:25:08.240 You know, it worked for me.

00:25:09.560 You know, some lover from my past just appeared magically when I affirmed it.

00:25:14.940 And I thought, all right, well, I'll give it a shot.

00:25:17.460 And long story short, I picked some things which, according to her instructions, I picked some things which I thought were highly unlikely to happen on their own,

00:25:27.820 such as a relationship that was, you know, with somebody who was way out of my league at that time.

00:25:34.560 And it happened.

00:25:37.040 And then some financial stuff that just seemed wildly unlikely happened.

00:25:42.280 And they were both subjects of my affirmations.

00:25:45.840 But I had been warned that if I didn't pick something that was wild enough, I wouldn't keep going with affirmations.

00:25:54.040 I would just tell myself, well, I guess I'm a lot more attractive than I gave myself credit for.

00:26:00.660 Or maybe my financial instincts are just wildly good.

00:26:05.100 And sure enough, I did those things.

00:26:06.980 So I said, hmm, I really got to give this the real test.

00:26:10.080 And so I decided the other part of the story is the reason that my corporate career failed is that my boss called me into her office one day when I was working at a bank and said,

00:26:26.000 I don't know how to tell you this, but we've been told by management we can't promote white men anymore.

00:26:31.940 And I said, what?

00:26:34.400 You can't – like, how long is this going to last?

00:26:36.700 And my boss was a woman, said, well, we don't know, but, you know. 0.90

00:26:41.780 So I thought to myself, all right, well, I quit.

00:26:45.440 So I resigned soon after, went to work for the phone company, got on the fast path to management.

00:26:52.780 And then one day my boss called me in and said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the word has come down from management.

00:26:59.400 And you know where this is going, that we can't promote white men. 0.76

00:27:04.100 And so that's when I decided, all right, I'm going to use an affirmation to become a famous cartoonist.

00:27:11.120 So I started writing down, you know, I, Scott Adams will become a famous cartoonist.

00:27:16.300 Not just a cartoonist, but a famous cartoonist.

00:27:20.000 And how do you do that before the internet?

00:27:23.120 Like, how in the world, if you had no connection to anything, it's not like there was a cartoonist college I could get into.

00:27:30.980 I didn't know a cartoonist.

00:27:33.020 So one day I come home.

00:27:34.900 One day I come home, and here's the magic part.

00:27:38.900 I turn on the TV, and I'm just flipping through the channels.

00:27:42.440 And it's before TiVo, you know, before any good technology.

00:27:47.160 And I see the end of a TV show on one of the PBS stations about how to become a cartoonist.

00:27:54.040 But I tuned in too late.

00:27:55.560 But I only caught the end of it, so just enough to know what it must have been about.

00:28:00.880 So I quickly, you know, ran and grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper.

00:28:04.520 And as the closing credits were going by, I wrote down, you know, where they were broadcasting it from and the name of the host.

00:28:11.280 And I wrote them a snail mail letter.

00:28:13.960 And I said, I missed your show, but I would like to become a cartoonist.

00:28:18.340 Can you give me some tips?

00:28:19.880 You know, where do I start?

00:28:20.740 And sure enough, Jack Cassidy was his name.

00:28:25.220 He was a working cartoonist.

00:28:26.920 He wrote back a two-page handwritten letter in which he said, answered all my questions.

00:28:32.820 He said, you know, buy this book.

00:28:34.700 It'll tell you where to submit things that people would buy.

00:28:38.740 Use this kind of paper because you can erase it a lot of times.

00:28:42.480 Use these kind of pens.

00:28:44.460 So I thought, oh, my goodness.

00:28:45.800 Now I know what to do.

00:28:47.440 So I bought the book.

00:28:48.840 I got the paper.

00:28:49.720 I made a bunch of comics that I thought were pretty good.

00:28:53.940 Sent them off to Playboy and the New Yorker and just some magazines because that was my ambition at the time.

00:29:01.120 And they came back with rejections.

00:29:03.960 But they weren't even personal rejections.

00:29:07.800 They were literally photocopies of generic declines.

00:29:12.920 We were not interested in your cartoons.

00:29:15.620 So I thought it was the time.

00:29:17.480 Well, I tried.

00:29:18.840 You know, I did my best because I really did try hard.

00:29:21.920 You know, I put lots of time into it.

00:29:24.400 Put my stuff away.

00:29:25.880 Forgot about it.

00:29:26.720 A year later, I walk out to my mailbox and I get a second letter from Jack Cassidy, the original advice I'd gotten.

00:29:37.060 And I thought, uh-oh. 0.97

00:29:38.900 I didn't even thank him for its advice, you know, because I suck. 0.87

00:29:44.700 I just sort of used it.

00:29:48.060 And a year later, he was writing me a second letter.

00:29:51.240 And I thought, what is this about?

00:29:53.440 And I opened his letter and it said he was cleaning his office.

00:29:57.740 And it came upon my samples I'd sent him a year before.

00:30:01.420 And he said, and this was the same advice he gave me on the first set of advice.

00:30:07.920 He said, I just wanted to make sure that you hadn't given up.

00:30:13.780 And that was the only reason he wrote.

00:30:15.700 There was no other agenda.

00:30:17.200 Didn't ask for anything.

00:30:18.940 He just said, I want to make sure you didn't give up.

00:30:21.280 And I thought to myself, well, what is he seeing that these other editors are not seeing?

00:30:26.620 So I thought to myself, I'll raise my standard instead of trying to get published in a magazine, which might give you a few hundred dollars a month.

00:30:34.340 And I thought, I'll try to become a syndicated worldwide cartoonist, like Peanuts, and, you know, do the hardest thing you can do as a cartoonist, which is to break into that market.

00:30:48.640 So I put together some samples that were now Dilbert because I'd been doodling him at work and a coworker gave him a name, Dilbert.

00:30:56.380 And I sent him off to the half a dozen cartoon syndicates.

00:31:01.280 Now, they're the ones that give you the big break.

00:31:03.200 There were only half a dozen of them at the time.

00:31:05.800 There are fewer of them now.

00:31:07.420 And if they said yes, they would work with you to sell your comics to all the newspapers in the world.

00:31:16.680 So if you got that break, that's like the break.

00:31:20.200 So I sent off my samples because I had that book that had been recommended to me, so I knew where to send them.

00:31:26.380 And the rejections started trickling in.

00:31:29.960 And one of them suggested that maybe I should find an actual artist to do the drawing for me.

00:31:36.900 Yeah.

00:31:38.180 Yeah.

00:31:38.700 So that's the kind of feedback I was getting.

00:31:41.920 So once I was pretty sure I had all the responses that I was going to get, I said, well, now I've tried as hard as I can twice.

00:31:51.940 But, you know, I'm no fool.

00:31:53.320 I'm not going to just keep chipping away for nothing.

00:31:56.060 So I put all of my art materials away in the closet, and I worked on my tennis game.

00:32:01.280 And a few months went by, and one day the phone rang.

00:32:04.140 And it was a woman who said that she was an editor for some company I'd never heard of, some company called United Media.

00:32:10.820 And I checked my notes quickly, and I hadn't sent my samples to anybody by that name.

00:32:16.140 But she said, we saw your samples.

00:32:18.160 I didn't know how.

00:32:19.640 And she wanted to offer me a syndicated cartoonist contract.

00:32:25.680 And I thought, okay.

00:32:27.840 I mean, that would be the big break.

00:32:30.220 But since I hadn't heard of this outfit, I said, well, I'm very flattered.

00:32:35.120 But I've never heard of your outfit, this United Media company.

00:32:39.720 Is there any cartoonist that you work with that's been published?

00:32:44.600 Have you worked on anything like, I don't know, cartoons and magazines or a pamphlet or anything?

00:32:50.780 And there's this long pause.

00:32:53.140 And she says, yeah, we handle Peanuts and Garfield and Marmaduke.

00:33:03.140 And when she got to about the 12th name on the list, I realized that my negotiating position had been compromised.

00:33:09.720 And I said, hell yes.

00:33:12.960 Got a lawyer, got a contract, and I went from there.

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00:34:27.240 So, let's take apart the affirmation issue, okay, and delve into that a little bit.

00:34:39.400 So, I have a program online called Future Authoring, and it's at a site called selfauthoring.com.

00:34:48.780 And what it asks you to do is to write for 15 minutes about what your life could be like in five years if you were treating yourself well and you got what you wanted and needed.

00:35:08.200 So, you want to put yourself in a state of mind where you're treating yourself like you're worth taking care of and then to imagine, play, pretend that things worked out for you.

00:35:24.680 And we kind of define that.

00:35:26.220 It worked out would mean, well, you know, it's worth getting out of bed in the morning.

00:35:31.720 You know, you feel like you're, you don't feel like.

00:35:35.120 Your life has a purpose that justifies its difficulty.

00:35:39.320 You have enough opportunity and enough security, enough challenge, enough adventure, all of that.

00:35:44.600 But just hypothetically, what would it take to satisfy a creature like you and then just pretend, right, for 15 minutes?

00:35:55.480 So, that's the first part.

00:35:56.580 And then the second part is, okay, now do the reverse. 1.00

00:35:59.700 Imagine that you let your stupidity get completely out of hand and augur you into the ground and your life is about maximally miserable. 1.00

00:36:08.520 And you've contributed to it. 1.00

00:36:11.760 What would that look like?

00:36:13.140 Okay, now you've got poles, you've got a little hell and you've got a little heaven.

00:36:18.020 And so, your narrative world is arrayed and then it walks you through a sequence of questions and answers about how you would operationalize your vision, right?

00:36:31.240 Now, people are visionary, right?

00:36:33.360 We can manipulate our visual cortex with our prefrontal cortex.

00:36:37.280 So, we can imagine various futures.

00:36:40.480 But even more importantly than that, this is the affirmation issue.

00:36:44.500 And maybe there's something more to it than this, but this is something.

00:36:49.560 Everything we perceive in the world, we perceive around a goal.

00:36:55.120 Like, that's how perception works.

00:36:56.640 You know, if you're looking down the road, you look at where you're going and everything relevant to that destination is what shows up in your visual landscape.

00:37:06.140 We live inside a story.

00:37:08.860 Like, a story is literally a description of the structure of our perception.

00:37:13.860 And that frames our emotion and our attention.

00:37:17.680 And so, the affirmation story is actually true.

00:37:22.640 It's like, as soon as you set a goal, your perceptions orient themselves around that goal.

00:37:28.240 And part of the reason that religious systems require you to aim up as diligently and religiously, let's say, as you can is because if you structure your perceptions around the highest imaginable goal, then the world lays itself out as the pathway to that goal.

00:37:51.220 That's literally how perception works.

00:37:53.780 There's a great book by a man named J.J. Gibson called An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.

00:38:01.220 And he was one of the early investigators into the structure of perception psychologically.

00:38:08.300 And I've elaborated on his ideas to some degree.

00:38:11.980 We see pathways.

00:38:12.800 We see tools and obstacles.

00:38:17.580 We see friends and foes.

00:38:20.780 And we see agents of magical transformation.

00:38:23.960 And agents of magical transformation change your goal.

00:38:28.020 And that's literally how the world...

00:38:30.200 So, but I'm curious about something deeper here, too, because I don't know how the world cooperates with this, you know?

00:38:38.640 Like, the fact that you caught the end of that PBS special makes sense to me because you had set your ambition.

00:38:47.080 And so, that show became relevant and popped out for you.

00:38:51.460 And so, that pop-out, that's what happens to Moses, by the way, when he encounters the burning bush.

00:38:59.440 That's something pops out that changes him into a leader.

00:39:02.500 He goes off the beaten path to investigate something.

00:39:06.480 And so, anyways, it popped out for you.

00:39:10.140 And you pursued it, you know?

00:39:12.060 But then you had these interesting...

00:39:14.380 Well, are they coincidences?

00:39:15.780 Like, how do you make sense of this?

00:39:18.140 Because this character, Jack, what was his name?

00:39:21.940 Jack Cassidy.

00:39:23.160 Jack Cassidy.

00:39:24.140 You know, that name rings a bell.

00:39:25.500 Was he a relatively famous cartoonist?

00:39:28.280 Was he an illustrator?

00:39:29.360 No.

00:39:30.740 He did the kind of work that you probably haven't seen because it wouldn't be a syndicated cartoonist.

00:39:38.380 But he worked at that job for his whole life.

00:39:41.520 Now, the question is, like, what motivated him?

00:39:46.700 What elemental goodness of heart motivated him to not only reach out to you once but twice, right?

00:39:54.140 Because that's a weird concordance, the fact that it happened at all.

00:39:58.940 And thank God for that.

00:40:00.140 And bless his heart, you know, seriously.

00:40:02.600 There's a man who went out of his way for reasons.

00:40:06.600 Do you have any sense of what was motivating him?

00:40:09.200 And then he did it again, right?

00:40:10.960 So, that's...

00:40:11.960 Right.

00:40:13.460 But it's not even the end of the coincidences.

00:40:17.680 Because getting a big contract to be a syndicated cartoonist still gives you only a 1 in 20 chance of succeeding.

00:40:25.940 Something like that.

00:40:26.840 But here is what happened to me.

00:40:30.620 First of all, the editor who liked me, the only one who liked me, and said yes, she was married to somebody who had the same job as Dilbert.

00:40:39.920 He was literally an engineer who wore a short-sleeved shirt with pens in his pocket.

00:40:46.120 So, what she saw was her husband.

00:40:49.020 So, when she would say, yeah, this could work, she was basically not in her personal experience.

00:40:53.820 So, what were the odds with only, let's say, six editors in the world who could have offered me that opportunity?

00:41:01.600 One of them was married to Dilbert.

00:41:04.180 First of all, what were the odds?

00:41:06.740 Next, that was enough to get published, but it failed on launch.

00:41:11.280 So, it only got in, I don't know, maybe a dozen newspapers.

00:41:15.320 And sometimes they buy it just in case it becomes big to keep it away from the competition.

00:41:21.280 So, they didn't even run it.

00:41:22.720 So, we sold into only a few newspapers.

00:41:26.660 Maybe one of them ran it.

00:41:28.140 I'm not even sure.

00:41:29.600 So, nothing was happening.

00:41:30.980 But, you know, it got a little bit of purchase.

00:41:33.940 Then the next coincidence happens.

00:41:36.220 If you don't sell into one of the big newspapers, everybody ignores you.

00:41:40.420 But if you can get into one of the big ones, then you can usually, you know, capitalize on that.

00:41:46.040 So, one day, the woman whose job it was to recommend comics for the Boston Globe, which was, you know, the big anchor paper for the Northeast.

00:41:55.720 She looked at the Dilbert samples from our salesperson and wasn't impressed.

00:42:02.480 But one day, she and her husband were driving to some holiday destination.

00:42:08.360 She was driving, and he was bored.

00:42:10.760 This was before cell phones, and, you know, he didn't have anything to do in the car.

00:42:14.940 He looks in the back seat, and there are a bunch of samples from failed cartoonists, including me.

00:42:20.840 So, he reaches in the back seat, pulls out the Dilbert sample case, starts reading them, and starts laughing like crazy.

00:42:29.220 And the wife is like, what, really? 0.97

00:42:32.260 And he can't stop laughing and reading them to her.

00:42:36.020 Now, what do you think he did for a living?

00:42:38.900 Engineer.

00:42:40.640 She was married to an engineer.

00:42:42.860 She didn't get it when she saw it, but she trusted his reaction enough to recommend it.

00:42:48.300 The bosses said, we don't see it.

00:42:50.840 We don't see what you see in this comic, but it's your job to get this right, so we're going to trust you.

00:42:57.960 And then it got in the Boston Globe.

00:42:59.540 It was huge.

00:43:00.340 All the newspapers in the East Coast bought it.

00:43:03.480 But then it gets wilder.

00:43:06.980 The entire middle of the country in the West, no sales.

00:43:10.460 I mean, almost nothing.

00:43:12.340 And I found out years later that the salesperson for the entire West Coast simply thought my cartoon was bad.

00:43:19.540 And so when he went in to sell things, he just didn't show it to people.

00:43:22.980 He showed the other comics he had to sell.

00:43:24.960 So here's where the lucky part happened.

00:43:28.220 He died.

00:43:29.900 He dropped dead in a hotel room on a sales trip.

00:43:32.920 And, you know, of course, I have a good alibi.

00:43:37.740 But he was replaced by a guy who, as they tell the story, they brought him in and said, could you sell these comics?

00:43:46.920 Because he was already in the business.

00:43:48.760 And they laid down all the comics they had to sell, including Dilber. 1.00

00:43:52.640 And I was told later that he went down the line and said, shit, this is shit, this is shit, this is shit. 1.00

00:44:02.040 I can sell this one. 1.00

00:44:04.260 He was the best salesman in the world.

00:44:07.380 And I had a map with tax whenever it sold into a market.

00:44:11.320 And I could watch him travel like an ant, you know, like I knew exactly where he was, because the sales reports would come in and say he sold another one, sold another one, sold another one.

00:44:20.840 He took the whole West Coast because somebody died younger than they should have died, completely out of my control.

00:44:30.480 And without those things, it just wouldn't have happened.

00:44:34.020 And so during that time, I was, you know, doing my affirmations that I would, you know, become a famous cartoonist, and sure enough.

00:44:42.200 And then one day, the Wall Street Journal asked me to write an article to be in the Wall Street Journal because they liked my comic.

00:44:50.300 And I wrote an article for that.

00:44:51.800 And then a publisher said, well, we liked the article.

00:44:54.140 Could you turn that into a book?

00:44:56.320 And I'd never even taken a writing class except business writing, which is specialized.

00:45:01.360 And, of course, I had learned to just say yes to everything.

00:45:06.560 So I was like, oh, yeah, oh, I could totally write a book.

00:45:10.200 Yeah, how hard could that be?

00:45:12.100 So while I was doing my day job, I'm doing my day job full time.

00:45:16.940 I'm doing Dilbert full time.

00:45:18.680 And now I'm writing a book.

00:45:20.820 And it almost killed me.

00:45:23.040 But I was doing my affirmations that I'd be a number one bestselling author.

00:45:26.580 You know, one of the things I really noticed as a clinician and as a university professor was that people closed doors to their movement forward constantly without noticing it.

00:45:43.780 And it was partly because they didn't have their affirmations, let's say.

00:45:47.440 So they actually couldn't spot an opportunity, right, because they had no goal-directed vision.

00:45:52.080 But often something would pop up that was unlikely.

00:45:56.840 You know, it's hard to know how many unlikely things happen to you in your life.

00:46:00.680 Like, unlikely things are happening all the time.

00:46:03.460 Your heart is beating, which seems rather unlikely if you think about it.

00:46:07.820 I mean, unlikely things happen a lot.

00:46:10.180 And some of those are going to be oriented towards, in principle, the pathway forward that you want.

00:46:15.900 But if you say no, I mean, how many unlikely things that go in the right direction do you think you're going to get?

00:46:21.880 It's not that many, right?

00:46:23.340 But if you say yes, then they multiply.

00:46:25.500 So I'm curious about how you learned or decided to say yes and how that was related, if at all, to this affirmation issue. 0.98

00:46:34.080 Well, you have to start with the fact that I'm a really cocky bastard. 0.90

00:46:40.060 So I kind of enter a lot of situations thinking, I can do this. 0.99

00:46:45.460 Yeah, I can do that.

00:46:47.540 You know, I had a childhood experience that probably set me on that way.

00:46:53.220 When I was 11, we would have these Easter egg hunts in our little town where you'd try to find the golden egg that was hidden among all the other eggs that were worth less.

00:47:04.600 And for years, I had thought, I will be the winner and find the golden egg.

00:47:10.040 So this is maybe a one in 200 situation because there are lots of people there.

00:47:14.480 And year after year, somebody else found it.

00:47:17.040 And then my last year, I'm like, I'm going to get that freaking golden egg.

00:47:22.120 And, you know, I try and try and try, and then the bell rings, and the event is over.

00:47:27.340 So now I'm basically retired forever because I've aged out of the Easter egg hunt.

00:47:32.620 And I'm like, wow, I really thought I was going to find the golden egg one of these times.

00:47:37.120 And then somebody announces, nobody found the golden egg.

00:47:41.260 So we're going to narrow the field to where it is.

00:47:44.980 And you're going to hunt again for another, I don't know, 10 minutes or something.

00:47:49.280 And I walked directly to the golden egg.

00:47:52.940 And next thing I know, I'm in the newspaper holding up this little golden egg on the front page of my hometown newspaper.

00:47:58.860 And that was one of the times, there were others, in which I said to myself, did this happen by coincidence?

00:48:07.240 Like, do I have magic eyes that I can see golden eggs better than other people?

00:48:12.680 How do you explain this?

00:48:14.780 And so by the time I became a famous cartoonist and I was working on having a number one book,

00:48:20.840 I just thought anything was possible.

00:48:24.100 And you want to hear the weirdest one?

00:48:25.620 Say yes.

00:48:26.700 Yes, definitely.

00:48:27.600 Oh, okay.

00:48:28.880 Here's the weirdest one.

00:48:30.800 I also had a habit of when I was trying to go to sleep or just daydreaming,

00:48:35.960 I would think of little stories of largely, impossibly, unlikely things that somehow I had succeeded at.

00:48:44.900 Oh, yeah.

00:48:46.340 One of them, because it made me happy and that I would go off to sleep thinking of positivity.

00:48:51.360 One of them was that someday, and I didn't know the specifics of it, the president of the United States would summon me to the Oval Office and ask my opinion on something.

00:49:03.760 And the idea was that I had become credible enough in whatever domain that a president would want to hear what I had to say.

00:49:13.940 And then in 2018, I got a message that Trump wanted to talk to me, and I ended up in the Oval Office chatting with him, and he actually asked my opinion on something.

00:49:26.760 And I thought, really, what were the odds of this?

00:49:29.900 What are the odds of any of this being true?

00:49:34.040 But my life has been consistently strange.

00:49:38.020 By the way, you must be having the same experience.

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00:51:05.240 Because, you know, you experienced the going from I have a really good job to something that's almost impossible to explain, the phenomenon, which is you.

00:51:18.040 Didn't you have the same wild, like, is there anything I can't do?

00:51:22.500 Did you have that experience?

00:51:23.820 I think it's just a continual state of ongoing trauma.

00:51:29.960 You know what I mean?

00:51:30.760 It's so preposterous.

00:51:32.500 I mean, my life is so preposterous all the time that, you know, actually one of the clinical markers for post-traumatic stress disorder is derealization.

00:51:43.900 So derealization is when something's happening, but it doesn't seem real.

00:51:48.320 Like, I don't have episodes of derealization.

00:51:51.960 That's my life.

00:51:54.040 It's like, it's 100% preposterous things nonstop.

00:52:00.320 And I don't, I have no idea.

00:52:03.520 I mean, I kind of learned, learned, I guess.

00:52:07.220 You know, back in 2017 or so, because this all blew up around me in 2016.

00:52:12.040 2016, 2017, I had this sense that I was on a hundred foot wave, you know, and that it would roll over me or it would flatten out.

00:52:21.220 Those were the most likely outcomes.

00:52:22.760 But neither of those happened.

00:52:24.740 It just kept rolling on.

00:52:26.740 And I don't know.

00:52:28.940 I'm along for the ride, I suppose.

00:52:31.480 Luckily, I have a lot of help.

00:52:33.100 Thank God for that.

00:52:34.540 A lot of people looking out for me.

00:52:36.180 But, and the world is, you know, I really liked your story.

00:52:40.880 It's so cool because that golden egg story, it's a perfect imaginative or mythological summary of everything that you just described that happened in your life.

00:52:53.620 You know, and, and, and so, and I don't know, I don't know what to make of that.

00:52:59.860 I do understand, as I said, like, perception is not what people generally think.

00:53:06.040 Like, you don't see the objective world.

00:53:09.720 You literally see pathways, tools, obstacles, friends and foes, and agents of magical transformation.

00:53:19.380 That's the world.

00:53:20.460 Now, here's the weird thing, Scott, is like, you could think about that as a narrative overlay on the real objective world.

00:53:30.320 But then if you're a scientist, you think, well, wait a second.

00:53:33.780 We've been selected by an evolutionary process, let's say, to perceive the world in a manner that most contributes to our, to the continuation of our life and our reproductive success.

00:53:52.780 And so, we see the world in a manner we describe as a story.

00:53:58.440 Well, how are we to decide that that's not what the world is then?

00:54:06.480 I mean, this is literally how we see.

00:54:09.620 So, yeah.

00:54:11.760 I've got a couple of hypotheses I've worked on to try to explain this whole thing so I can understand what's happening to me.

00:54:19.840 You may have heard the term reticular activation.

00:54:23.400 Yes.

00:54:23.720 Where if you think about a certain outcome or a certain situation long enough, you essentially rewire your brain because, you know, your brain changes with every experience and everything you learn.

00:54:36.260 Until you notice things that you wouldn't have noticed.

00:54:40.000 And if you do it right and you're thinking about something positive for you, then you're going to notice that thing.

00:54:48.500 So, back to your example of why did I notice the end of a TV show about how to be a cartoonist?

00:54:56.520 And would I have noticed that if I had not been doing affirmations?

00:55:01.340 No.

00:55:01.760 And my answer, I don't know.

00:55:04.240 It seems difficult to account for all of the unlikely coincidences that moved you towards your goal merely as a consequence of a shift in perception.

00:55:18.500 Right.

00:55:19.120 I mean, I think that's the best way to account for it to begin with.

00:55:22.600 The story about the PBS special in particular exemplifies that because it popped out for you.

00:55:31.820 But then you also played your part because you paid very careful attention to the credits and you took the next step.

00:55:40.180 Right.

00:55:40.380 So, you had a magical doorway appear.

00:55:43.300 But you also walked through it and looked for other doors.

00:55:48.160 And then that set off this cascade of events.

00:55:52.040 And I don't know.

00:55:53.880 There are coincidental things happening all the time.

00:55:56.660 I guess the question is, what would your life be like if you set yourself up so that you were maximally inclined to capitalize on those unlikely occurrences?

00:56:09.280 Right.

00:56:09.520 You were alert and awake and attentive.

00:56:11.780 And, well, that's why I was so curious about your decision to say yes.

00:56:18.120 Now, you tied that to that Easter egg story.

00:56:23.360 Can you concretize that a bit?

00:56:27.100 I mean, was that the first time you had an inkling that your determination, your vision, and your determination could shape things around you in a desirable way?

00:56:38.500 Yeah.

00:56:39.580 Yeah.

00:56:40.200 That was exactly when I thought, I don't know, maybe life is wired in a way that's non-obvious.

00:56:47.740 And if you could figure out how that wiring works, you could control reality itself.

00:56:53.280 You know, so at least I was sort of open to the possibility.

00:56:56.280 But, you know, this was also the age where I was watching, you know, reading comic books and, you know, magic seemed more accessible.

00:57:04.080 But, you know, as an adult, I started thinking that, you know, I must be living in some kind of a simulation.

00:57:10.980 And that somehow the way I steer the simulation is by imagining what it is that I want to go toward, and then things fall in line.

00:57:19.880 Yeah.

00:57:20.080 And you used the word authoring before, and that's my favorite word for controlling the simulation, because you author a story, and then you find yourself in the story later.

00:57:34.560 Yes.

00:57:34.800 And it's just like you wrote the book, and then you became the character in the book.

00:57:39.400 Yes, exactly.

00:57:39.760 And how do I explain that?

00:57:41.980 That goes way beyond anything I can put together with cause and effect.

00:57:46.860 So, I'm not 100% sure that we live in a simulation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the day I die, I wake up in a gamer chair, and they say only five minutes has gone by, but you live this entire other life in the game.

00:58:04.780 So, I always wonder, you know, maybe there's more to find out.

00:58:08.600 You never know.

00:58:09.140 Well, the fact that we represent the world with stories primarily, and that we're instinctively oriented to find stories attractive, even stories of magic.

00:58:21.860 Like, it was only this year that I figured out what an agent of magical transformation was, because they pop up in stories all the time.

00:58:28.520 And I, because I think concretely, I think biologically, it's like, why are we predisposed to believe in agents of magical transformation?

00:58:37.760 And then I thought, oh, I see, an agent of magical transformation is someone who comes along and changes the game, changes the aim.

00:58:45.420 And that's what Gandalf does for the Hobbit, you know, he elevates him into a new game.

00:58:51.040 And so, that kind of magic happens all the time, and it's definitely the case that we perceive in relationship to a goal.

00:58:58.600 There's absolutely no doubt about that.

00:59:01.160 I don't think there's, there are few facts as well established in physiological psychology as the fact that we perceive in relationship to a goal.

00:59:09.660 We are visionary.

00:59:11.280 We do use our prefrontal cortex to manage the world using our visual system.

00:59:18.360 We navigate.

00:59:19.900 We're navigators, and we navigate towards a destination.

00:59:23.400 Like, we set our sights by the stars.

00:59:25.920 All of this is true.

00:59:27.980 What it means is, like, the thing that's so peculiar about it, as far as I can consider, is that I don't know what it means that the world is a story.

00:59:39.140 That's not the same idea that the world is a set of objective facts, which, you know, is also obviously true in some way.

00:59:47.860 The question is, which facts, right?

00:59:50.720 The question is relevance.

00:59:52.320 And so, now, did your parents, I often ask my guests about their parents, especially if they, well, most of the people I interview have been successful in one way or another.

01:00:03.580 You said you're a cocky. 0.98

01:00:04.960 I think you said you were a cocky bastard, although maybe you didn't use exactly that phrase, but that was the gist of it. 0.99

01:00:10.180 But what kind of relationship did you have or do you have, did you have with your parents? 0.99

01:00:18.400 Like, did they, were they responsible for your confidence in some part?

01:00:24.940 Or was that something you think that was more a mere, a manifestation of your essential character?

01:00:29.920 Like, what did your, what was your relationship with your parents like?

01:00:34.220 All right, so here's where it gets even weirder.

01:00:38.520 My parents are part of this story, but others as well.

01:00:41.960 When I was very young, people would, adults, would tell me that I was going to be rich and famous someday.

01:00:49.760 And they would even use the same term.

01:00:52.360 I once got stopped on the street by an older woman who, you know, it was a small town, so she wondered who my parents were and stuff.

01:00:59.080 And she's just chatting with me for a minute.

01:01:01.880 And before she leaves, she goes, you're going to be rich and famous someday.

01:01:06.460 My mother told me that she expected me to get rich someday so I could take care of her in the manner in which she would like to become accustomed to.

01:01:17.760 That was her standard joke.

01:01:19.640 But I literally became rich and then helped them, you know, live in a life that was closer to the standard they wanted to live.

01:01:26.520 And so she always had her own confidence.

01:01:34.020 She was also an artist, by the way.

01:01:36.240 So she was a portrait artist.

01:01:37.900 And I picked up, you know, the drawing fever from either her jeans or her example.

01:01:42.620 I don't know.

01:01:43.680 My father was a wannabe comedian, meaning that he'd say funny things or all of his letters were funny.

01:01:52.780 So I got kind of the dry humor from him.

01:01:56.320 I got the confidence from, I think, my mother and from other people as well.

01:02:03.560 People spotted me early.

01:02:06.120 Now, there's one thing I wanted to add to what you were saying about goals.

01:02:09.180 I don't know if you've heard me talk about this.

01:02:12.380 But I famously write about systems being better than goals, meaning that having a goal but having no system that would help you being prepared for it isn't enough.

01:02:24.680 You got to have the system.

01:02:25.260 Right, right, right.

01:02:26.220 So even if you take the simplest one, like when I saw the TV show about how to become a cartoonist and I quickly wrote it down, part of my system has always been to make sure that you've got a pencil and a piece of paper really close all the time.

01:02:42.720 That was my actual system.

01:02:44.740 And that's never changed.

01:02:46.580 Now, how many times have I, like, gotten an idea and I've got exactly 15 seconds to write it down?

01:02:52.620 Yeah, right, yeah.

01:02:53.660 Before something changes, you know, somebody walks in and, you know, I forget it.

01:02:59.260 So that's the smallest example.

01:03:01.400 Well, that's very astute, I think.

01:03:03.800 I mean, one of the things I've learned as I've spent decades writing is that, like, if I'm laying in bed and I have an idea, I go write it down.

01:03:14.200 Because I know I'll forget it.

01:03:16.080 I'll forget it.

01:03:17.060 It's like, who knows what use that idea is.

01:03:20.040 And, you know, so here's another thing that's extremely cool.

01:03:24.400 So you set your goal and then the world arranges itself as a pathway to that goal and then everything relevant to that.

01:03:33.740 But that's also, this is so uncanny.

01:03:37.160 That's also how your imagination works.

01:03:39.960 Your thoughts.

01:03:40.640 So your aim calls forth revelation.

01:03:48.200 That's literally, well, it makes sense if you think about it for a minute.

01:03:52.200 Just imagine that you decide you're going to go somewhere.

01:03:55.400 Well, then, obviously, what your thoughts should do is circulate around that trip.

01:04:01.480 Because what the hell good are they otherwise?

01:04:03.540 So that, but here's the crazy part.

01:04:08.420 The spirit of your aim answers your prayers.

01:04:15.340 This is literally the case.

01:04:17.220 Because once you set up an aim, your imagination and your cognitive systems orient themselves to serve that aim.

01:04:26.220 And so, again, part of the religious insistence is serve the highest aim.

01:04:33.320 Well, what is that?

01:04:34.680 Well, that's up to you to figure out to some degree.

01:04:37.420 It's like most of us can tell the difference between an aim that's somewhat better than the one we have and somewhat worse.

01:04:44.580 Like we've got a pretty good sense of comparative aim.

01:04:47.180 But if you understand that your perceptions and your imagination and revelation itself is structured by your aim, then, well, that makes the world an entirely different place.

01:05:00.780 And it's also rather terrifying, you know, because if you have a pathological aim, then that will structure your imagination, right?

01:05:09.980 That's very close to demonic.

01:05:12.160 That's very close analogy.

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01:06:16.420 Let me give you a little story that plays perfectly into that.

01:06:24.160 When I was younger, I got married for the first time, and I had stepkids.

01:06:29.880 The marriage didn't work out after several years.

01:06:32.380 And because they're stepkids, you don't get joint custody or anything like that, so the loss is huge.

01:06:41.060 Like, you lose everything, your family all at the same time.

01:06:45.220 And I realized that that was my sort of main goal in life, was making this little unit happy and healthy and safe.

01:06:54.100 And when that went away, I realized, man, I'm going to need some kind of motivation.

01:06:59.560 Right.

01:07:00.180 And I actually said out loud, I was alone, but I said out loud that I was going to donate myself to the world.

01:07:07.720 And that from that point on, I would only work on things that had some larger multiplying effect on the world.

01:07:16.200 And that's why I started writing my books, like How to Fill at Almost Everything Still Win Big, which has had a big impact on people's success.

01:07:25.940 It's why I talk about politics, because I think it's useful.

01:07:30.000 It's why I do everything.

01:07:31.400 So, everything I do now has to have some connection to a larger body of people who would benefit if I do it well.

01:07:39.760 And that revived my sense of meaning at a higher level so that I haven't had an unhappy day in, I don't know, 20 years.

01:07:51.240 Because even if it's a bad day, I know I'm working toward this larger benefit.

01:07:57.340 Right, right.

01:07:57.860 Okay, so a couple of things related to that.

01:08:03.060 In the story of Abraham, Abraham is a sequence of upward transforming goals.

01:08:11.480 So, the father of nations is a man who reorients his goals in an increasingly upward direction as he moves through life.

01:08:22.140 Right, right.

01:08:23.540 And, you know, he ends up charged with the responsibility to try to save the doomed city, that's Sodom and Gomorrah.

01:08:32.040 He fails at that, but he's still charged with that responsibility.

01:08:37.660 And there are prophets in the Old Testament who succeed at such things.

01:08:41.080 Jonah succeeds, for example.

01:08:42.620 And so, Abraham is, the story of Abraham is structured as a set of transformations, upward transformations of goal.

01:08:52.400 And that story that you just told is, you know, you can see there that you moved from the proximal.

01:08:58.600 Not that your family wasn't important and transcendent in a sense, because it clearly was, but you broadened that.

01:09:06.800 And then the meaning that you described, like we actually experience positive emotion in relationship to a goal.

01:09:14.520 And so, if you set a high goal, then any indication of movement towards that goal floods you with dopamine, essentially.

01:09:26.280 That's, it produces new neural circuits and it's the essence of positive emotion that's motivating.

01:09:35.920 And so, now one other thing, that's also the meaning of the vision of Jacob's ladder.

01:09:40.280 You know, Jacob decides he's going to stop being an utter reprobate and he turns his eyes towards the heavens, let's say, because he decides he's going to improve.

01:09:49.880 And then he has a vision of a structure that connects heaven to earth with the ultimate goal at the top, basically defined as God, right?

01:10:01.600 In the Jacob's ladder vision, you can't see God because he's at the pinnacle and the pinnacle recedes as you move towards it.

01:10:10.280 But that's the definition.

01:10:12.680 And then the voyage of life becomes that climbing up that ladder, making the goals deeper or higher, depending on how you look at it.

01:10:24.680 That also, all that seems to be correct psychologically, as far as I can tell.

01:10:28.960 Like, it's not in the realm of superstition and myth.

01:10:33.240 It's, that's just how things work.

01:10:36.220 So, how did you see that so interesting too, Scott?

01:10:39.780 Because, you see, you could have despaired when you lost your family.

01:10:46.720 You could have shook your fist at the sky and cursed God, you know.

01:10:54.280 That's what Job's wife tells him to do when he's suffering. 0.99

01:10:58.420 You know, she says, there's nothing left for you except to shake your fist at God and die.

01:11:03.260 And, but you decided to replace a goal that was already positive with one that was broader and more positive.

01:11:13.180 How, how do you think you overcame your resentment, your bitterness, your sense of loss?

01:11:20.240 And I'm also curious about how that's playing out now because we haven't talked about this, but I know that you're quite ill.

01:11:26.240 And so, that's also germane.

01:11:29.200 So, why did you decide to stay, go ahead.

01:11:33.320 Well, I think the answer is that I was born with some kind of innate optimism that never turns off.

01:11:41.020 So, I could have horrible situations and it barely affects my optimism.

01:11:46.660 I just think, well, today was bad, but look at tomorrow.

01:11:50.360 To your point, some of your viewers know that I have terminal cancer.

01:11:55.100 So, I've got prostate cancer that's metastasized and once I've metastasized, you don't have the options of curing it like you would if it was localized.

01:12:05.900 And five months ago or so, the pain started, you know, because the tumors are all over my body.

01:12:13.480 And I was unable to walk.

01:12:16.040 I was using a walker and a wheelchair and I was just wracked in pain every single day.

01:12:22.060 Every day was a nightmare.

01:12:23.800 And in California, you get to choose your end date if you want to, meaning you can take your own life with a very civilized process that's legal in California.

01:12:36.140 So, I had planned that I, you know, wouldn't want to live in excruciating pain forever because, you know, my productivity was not going to be that good anyway.

01:12:46.040 And I'd picked a time for that.

01:12:49.020 And the time was this week.

01:12:52.020 But what happened was I had also been looking at some other alternatives, another drug that was kind of new.

01:12:58.240 And one of the requirements for the new drug is that first I have to take these castration drugs, they call them, which I've been putting off because no guy wants to sign up for castration.

01:13:11.620 But they literally turn off your testosterone, which is why they call it that.

01:13:15.520 And the cancer needs the testosterone to grow.

01:13:20.260 What I didn't realize is that the moment I started taking the testosterone blockers, which was just about three weeks ago, I think, it removed all of my pain.

01:13:31.340 And now I can walk again, unaided.

01:13:35.820 My day is largely just completely normal.

01:13:39.380 Now, it probably bought me maybe something like months to a few years.

01:13:44.940 Nobody knows because eventually the testosterone blockers, your body acclimates to them and, you know, doesn't work around.

01:13:52.780 So, it won't last forever.

01:13:54.060 But we've hit the age of AI, and there's probably something in the lab somewhere that can fix me.

01:14:02.620 And I've got this little window where the pace of scientific discovery, especially in healthcare, will probably be wilder than it's ever been before.

01:14:13.540 And I might have, just by luck, I might have just enough time to use that little window to find a way out because there's no way out.

01:14:25.980 But it wouldn't be the first time I had an incurable disease that I cured.

01:14:31.640 You probably know the story, or some of the listeners do, that some years ago, I lost my ability to speak to a rare condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which RFK Jr. has a version of it, a little different version.

01:14:49.260 In my version, if I ordered a Diet Coke, some of the letters would get swallowed, and it would sound like, go, go, go.

01:14:56.800 And so, I couldn't have any kind of a normal life.

01:15:00.780 This may have also been one of the reasons that my first marriage ended, because, you know, you couldn't have normal conversations or, you know, have friends over.

01:15:09.780 And it was incurable.

01:15:11.360 So, you basically lived with it, or you took painful Botox shots through the neck into your vocal cords, and you had to keep doing it, and it would ebb and flow in effectiveness, and it would sound like you had just done helium.

01:15:27.380 You talk a little bit like this.

01:15:28.920 So, I made the difficult decision to give up on the thing that would let me talk at least a little bit, which was the Botox, just in case I could find something that worked better for what was considered by the experts in curable.

01:15:44.940 So, I sent my Google alerts to tell me if there was any new science about this condition, and every time something beeped, I'd look into it as much as I could.

01:15:55.300 One day, there's a little beep on my alerts that says, a Japanese doctor, I'd come up with a surgery to put in some kind of a shunt or something, and that it was having great effect.

01:16:07.800 So, I went to my, you know, my doctor, and I said, is this real?

01:16:11.620 Well, and he said, well, you know, that particular doctor, we know of him, and he's an over-claimer, so probably not real.

01:16:20.120 But I happen to know of a guy who seems to have some different kind of surgery, Dr. Gerald Burke, down at UCLA's head, neck, whatever it is, and you should talk to him.

01:16:33.940 So, I look into it, I talk to him, he says he's developed a newish surgery, in which he would sever the nerves between my brain and my vocal cords, which are in the front of the neck.

01:16:47.240 And that he would redirect them, essentially take some nerves out of the neck and create a new path just in this little area, and that it would work on most of the people he tried it on, but not everybody.

01:17:01.780 So, he said, if you try it, there's maybe an 85% chance that you'll be pretty happy with it, it'll be at least better, if not a complete cure, and a 15% chance that it will ruin any chance you'd ever have of getting better, because it would be a permanent change.

01:17:19.520 And I signed up, and now I get to talk to you, and as you can tell, my voice is completely surfaceable, and that was an incurable disease, incurable.

01:17:35.040 Likewise, when you have one of those problems, it's a muscle spasm thing, in that case it was vocal cords, they often come in pairs.

01:17:44.380 Nobody knows why, but the spasm is actually caused by your brain.

01:17:48.840 It's not actually the muscle.

01:17:50.920 You know, that's why cutting the connection somehow worked.

01:17:54.440 But I lost the ability to draw, because my pinky would spasm, and I couldn't control it.

01:18:01.340 But, getting back to systems versus goals, for years, I had practiced drawing left-handed, just in case something ever happened to my right hand.

01:18:14.280 It was part of my system.

01:18:15.520 And so, it got to the point, recently, where I've been drawing all of my comics left-handed for, I don't know, a few years now.

01:18:27.220 And no difference, because I practiced it so long that I can pull it off now.

01:18:34.560 Hmm.

01:18:36.760 Engineered redundancy.

01:18:38.240 Yeah.

01:18:39.440 Yeah.

01:18:40.400 So, part of my system is to be open to all the possibilities, you know, the reticular activation.

01:18:46.780 But the other is the belief that nothing's impossible.

01:18:49.400 So, if it were someone else with any of those problems, as an observer, I probably would have said, well, you know, you're done.

01:18:58.400 But when it's me, I never think I'm done.

01:19:02.320 I always think, well, not only am I going to fix this problem, I'll do what I did with a spasmodic dysphonia.

01:19:09.020 I'll make sure other people know it exists.

01:19:11.340 So, I did a lot of outreach, and People Magazine did a spread on it so that other people could know that they could get the cure.

01:19:18.620 Right, right, right.

01:19:19.260 So, I always think as big as I possibly can, you know, outside of myself, because, again, that's the more motivational frame.

01:19:27.720 Right.

01:19:28.660 Well, Scott, I'm going to bring this particular part of our discussion to a halt.

01:19:33.300 I think that was an excellent place to close.

01:19:36.500 That was quite the lateral and sideways conversation.

01:19:41.380 I didn't expect that.

01:19:42.880 It was quite magical.

01:19:45.240 I really liked the tie-in with the golden Easter egg hunt.

01:19:50.420 That was a real nice narrative touch.

01:19:55.160 For everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Scott more about Dilbert.

01:20:01.380 I want to know how his life changed when he became an extraordinarily well-established cartoonist, what effect his cartoons had on corporate and engineering culture.

01:20:12.600 And then I want to talk to him as well about cancellation and his new life.

01:20:19.060 And so, obviously, we could talk for several hours, but we have another half an hour on The Daily Wire, and so you guys could all join us for that.

01:20:26.460 Anyways, thank you very much, sir.

01:20:28.220 Thank you.

01:20:28.700 Thank you very much, and to everybody watching and listening as well for your time and attention.

01:20:33.900 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 10, 2025

561. Scott Adams and Jordan Peterson

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