Scott Adams, creator of the world-famous Dilbert cartoon, joins Jemele to discuss his life and career, including his recent diagnosis of terminal cancer, the role of faith and affirmation in his movement forward, and much more.
00:00:30.000Some of your viewers know that I have terminal cancer, prostate cancer that's metastasized.
00:00:35.920And once it's metastasized, you don't have the options of curing it like you would if it was localized.
00:00:41.700So part of my system is to be open to all the possibilities.
00:00:45.220But the other is the belief that nothing's impossible.
00:00:48.120The spirit of your aim answers your prayers.
00:00:51.940This is literally the case because once you set up an aim, your imagination and your cognitive systems orient themselves to serve that aim.
00:01:02.260It wouldn't be the first time I had an incurable disease that I cured.
00:03:08.940You 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.
00:03:19.380And I don't think they were very happy about that.
00:04:47.860I 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.
00:05:08.000So, that was like a big awakening for me.
00:05:13.420And then I got hooked on your content and absorbed a lot of it.
00:05:18.760Well, so apparently we're approximately equally reprehensible.
00:06:18.760The 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.
00:06:29.780But 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.
00:06:38.220And, you know, that would be pretty intolerable to me.
00:06:42.140But at the moment, it just feels like nonstop, you know, goodness.
00:07:54.300Do you remember when there was a big fad of re-engineering?
00:08:00.080And, you know, there's a book on it and everything.
00:08:03.120And so, re-engineering was a great idea.
00:08:05.940It 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.
00:08:17.560Except 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.
00:08:25.740And, you know, and then it just became absurd.
00:08:29.360You know, everybody was just looking for money to engineer, re-engineer something.
00:08:33.840And that seems like what happened with all the wokeness stuff.
00:08:36.900It probably started as, well, let's, you know, let's treat people respectfully and sort of acknowledge that people are different.
00:08:45.320And then it just turned into a whole different thing.
00:08:48.300Yeah, 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.
00:09:01.860So, 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.
00:09:20.940And you can do that relatively carefully, so it's a stable measurement.
00:09:24.240And then you could look at what predicts that belief.
00:09:30.600And these particular psychologists looked at three factors.
00:09:35.520They looked at compassion, which would be the factor that you just described, genuine compassion, let's say.
00:09:42.160And that seems to reflect trait agreeableness, which is one of the big five personality traits.
00:09:49.060And so, and they looked at fairness, like actual moral concern with fairness, and they looked at malicious envy.
00:09:59.420And the biggest predictor was malicious envy.
00:10:02.940And the second biggest predictor was compassion.
00:10:05.880And fairness didn't enter the prediction at all.
00:10:11.640Well, I, yeah, I was saying that fairness was invented so children and idiots would have something to talk about.
00:10:18.320Because, you know, there's no standard for fairness.
00:10:22.720Yeah, well, I suppose the entire political discussion in some ways is about what constitutes fair.
00:10:30.340But 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.
00:10:48.140But if you do a careful analysis, it's malicious envy that's doing a lot of the work.
00:10:53.400And so, I've become more and more skeptical of those, of, you know, you said things start out good and then deteriorate.
00:11:00.180And 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.
00:11:12.320I mean, that's a story as old as time, because that's the story of Cain and Abel.
00:11:15.860And 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.
00:11:29.160And what it means is don't claim moral virtue when you're feathering your own bed, right?
00:11:35.800And so, you could imagine that the most egregious error you can make is to do something corrupt and then to sanctify it, right?
00:11:46.060And there's a tremendous amount of that that characterizes our culture now.
00:11:50.280I think much more than that was the case, let's say, when I was half my age.
00:11:55.740Because 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.
00:12:12.340Now, maybe that also has something to do with being hyper-connected, you know?
00:12:16.660Because you can trumpet your moral virtue so easily into so many people that it's easy for it to be gamed.
00:12:22.240Yeah, when I was young, I grew up in a family where we were very much not rich.
00:12:30.440But we had a house that was directly across from the ski slope in town.
00:12:35.800So, that's where the rich people went to ski.
00:12:38.740And I'm pretty sure that I was full of malicious envy at the time.
00:12:42.820Because 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.
00:12:56.360And those were just sort of assumptions that they didn't deserve their money.
00:12:59.720And, 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.
00:13:18.320So, 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.
00:13:38.760And I, you know, talk is, oh, those are the godly things and those are the systems that protect us all.
00:13:45.880And I mean it because the arguments for it are all good.
00:13:49.920But 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?
00:14:03.820You 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.
00:14:19.280Well, you know, okay, some thoughts on that.
00:14:26.320I'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.
00:14:34.340There 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.
00:14:53.640And 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.
00:15:12.240And that much of what constitutes true wealth is honestly gotten.
00:15:20.340And I do believe that that's a wellspring of wealth for the U.S.
00:15:55.500And all things considered, it's a great pleasure.
00:15:59.420Okay, so that's the evil corporate world.
00:16:02.520Then if I go to a university, so they don't pay me anything.
00:16:07.480The 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.
00:16:23.820And mostly it's a royal pain in the neck.
00:16:26.840And 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.
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00:18:26.220Well, there's a genuine sentiment of—and maybe that's part of the depth of the American dream.
00:18:32.440There'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.
00:18:49.600I mean, in your situation, I mean, we could analyze your situation.
00:18:53.320You know, you were worried about your self-interest overwhelming your ethics.
00:18:58.340Although I'll tell you, I'd rather deal with someone honestly self-interested than hypocritically altruistic any day.
00:19:06.480You 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.
00:19:17.980And 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.
00:19:27.340You have no bloody idea what they're up to or what motivates them.
00:19:30.540And 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.
00:19:44.820And so, that seems like a good deal for everyone.
00:19:47.060And 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?
00:19:56.700I mean, I think the world's a better place because it had Dilbert cartoons in it by quite a substantial margin.
00:20:04.480Yeah, my first ambition as a child was to become a lawyer.
00:20:10.200Well, my first ambition was to become a famous cartoonist when I was about six years old.
00:20:15.260But I soon found out that it's very hard to become a famous cartoonist, and the odds were very much against me.
00:20:23.300So, I went through this age of reason from about age 11 where I was like, eh, I better do something that will work.
00:20:32.280But 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.
00:20:40.920The only way I can win as a lawyer is by making somebody else lose.
00:20:45.000I mean, there might be some exceptions to that.
00:20:47.100But generally, it's an adversarial system.
00:20:49.380And I thought, if I lose, I'm going to feel bad.
00:20:53.640And 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.
00:21:03.100And so, I thought, what about entertainment?
00:21:07.080You know, who loses when you get entertained?
00:21:12.360So, I thought, well, I'll go into some place where everybody wins.
00:21:15.580So, 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.
00:21:25.880I also thought, what if I'm really good at it?
00:21:28.540If you're really good at being a lawyer, in some ways, that's the worst case because you're getting off guilty people.
00:21:35.640You're prevailing where maybe the facts were not really completely on your side.
00:21:41.160So, 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.
00:22:08.780I saw an article about Charles Schultz in a big magazine display.
00:22:15.820And I saw him standing there in his sweater and looking a lot like I look now with, you know, the glasses and everything.
00:22:22.740And I thought to myself, wouldn't that be the best job in the world?
00:22:27.840You know, he draws one comic a day and he's world famous and he's got airplanes and stuff.
00:22:33.840And I thought, yeah, I'll just do that.
00:22:36.420But, 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.
00:22:43.180But eventually, I became smart enough to know it was impossible.
00:22:50.480And then I gave up that dream for years, as I mentioned.
00:22:53.560It 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.
00:23:04.520That there are just so many other factors that can take you down.
00:23:10.140That's when I started doing things that didn't make sense.
00:24:06.180So 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.
00:24:18.440And 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.
00:24:31.500Now, once I got older, I started to doubt the story, whether it was true.
00:24:36.260But in the meantime, in my 20s, I signed up for a hypnosis course.
00:24:41.180And one of the students was into something called affirmations.
00:24:46.500Now, 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.
00:24:57.980And I thought, eh, you know, I'm not really a believer in anything magical.
00:25:02.560But she kept saying, well, you know, it doesn't cost anything.
00:25:09.560You know, some lover from my past just appeared magically when I affirmed it.
00:25:14.940And I thought, all right, well, I'll give it a shot.
00:25:17.460And 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,
00:25:27.820such as a relationship that was, you know, with somebody who was way out of my league at that time.
00:26:06.980So I said, hmm, I really got to give this the real test.
00:26:10.080And 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,
00:26:26.000I don't know how to tell you this, but we've been told by management we can't promote white men anymore.
00:30:18.940He just said, I want to make sure you didn't give up.
00:30:21.280And I thought to myself, well, what is he seeing that these other editors are not seeing?
00:30:26.620So 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.
00:30:34.340And 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.
00:30:48.640So 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.
00:30:56.380And I sent him off to the half a dozen cartoon syndicates.
00:31:01.280Now, they're the ones that give you the big break.
00:31:03.200There were only half a dozen of them at the time.
00:33:12.960Got a lawyer, got a contract, and I went from there.
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00:34:27.240So, let's take apart the affirmation issue, okay, and delve into that a little bit.
00:34:39.400So, I have a program online called Future Authoring, and it's at a site called selfauthoring.com.
00:34:48.780And 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.
00:35:08.200So, 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.
00:36:13.140Okay, now you've got poles, you've got a little hell and you've got a little heaven.
00:36:18.020And 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?
00:36:56.640You 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.
00:37:08.860Like, a story is literally a description of the structure of our perception.
00:37:13.860And that frames our emotion and our attention.
00:37:17.680And so, the affirmation story is actually true.
00:37:22.640It's like, as soon as you set a goal, your perceptions orient themselves around that goal.
00:37:28.240And 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.
00:37:51.220That's literally how perception works.
00:37:53.780There's a great book by a man named J.J. Gibson called An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
00:38:01.220And he was one of the early investigators into the structure of perception psychologically.
00:38:08.300And I've elaborated on his ideas to some degree.
00:40:30.620First 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.
00:40:39.920He was literally an engineer who wore a short-sleeved shirt with pens in his pocket.
00:41:36.220If you don't sell into one of the big newspapers, everybody ignores you.
00:41:40.420But if you can get into one of the big ones, then you can usually, you know, capitalize on that.
00:41:46.040So, 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.
00:41:55.720She looked at the Dilbert samples from our salesperson and wasn't impressed.
00:42:02.480But one day, she and her husband were driving to some holiday destination.
00:44:04.260He was the best salesman in the world.
00:44:07.380And I had a map with tax whenever it sold into a market.
00:44:11.320And 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.
00:44:20.840He took the whole West Coast because somebody died younger than they should have died, completely out of my control.
00:44:30.480And without those things, it just wouldn't have happened.
00:44:34.020And so during that time, I was, you know, doing my affirmations that I would, you know, become a famous cartoonist, and sure enough.
00:44:42.200And 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.
00:45:23.040But I was doing my affirmations that I'd be a number one bestselling author.
00:45:26.580You 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.
00:45:43.780And it was partly because they didn't have their affirmations, let's say.
00:45:47.440So they actually couldn't spot an opportunity, right, because they had no goal-directed vision.
00:45:52.080But often something would pop up that was unlikely.
00:45:56.840You know, it's hard to know how many unlikely things happen to you in your life.
00:46:00.680Like, unlikely things are happening all the time.
00:46:03.460Your heart is beating, which seems rather unlikely if you think about it.
00:46:47.540You know, I had a childhood experience that probably set me on that way.
00:46:53.220When 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.
00:47:04.600And for years, I had thought, I will be the winner and find the golden egg.
00:47:10.040So this is maybe a one in 200 situation because there are lots of people there.
00:47:14.480And year after year, somebody else found it.
00:47:17.040And then my last year, I'm like, I'm going to get that freaking golden egg.
00:47:22.120And, you know, I try and try and try, and then the bell rings, and the event is over.
00:47:27.340So now I'm basically retired forever because I've aged out of the Easter egg hunt.
00:47:32.620And I'm like, wow, I really thought I was going to find the golden egg one of these times.
00:47:37.120And then somebody announces, nobody found the golden egg.
00:47:41.260So we're going to narrow the field to where it is.
00:47:44.980And you're going to hunt again for another, I don't know, 10 minutes or something.
00:47:49.280And I walked directly to the golden egg.
00:47:52.940And next thing I know, I'm in the newspaper holding up this little golden egg on the front page of my hometown newspaper.
00:47:58.860And that was one of the times, there were others, in which I said to myself, did this happen by coincidence?
00:48:07.240Like, do I have magic eyes that I can see golden eggs better than other people?
00:48:46.340One of them, because it made me happy and that I would go off to sleep thinking of positivity.
00:48:51.360One 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.
00:49:03.760And the idea was that I had become credible enough in whatever domain that a president would want to hear what I had to say.
00:49:13.940And 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.
00:49:26.760And I thought, really, what were the odds of this?
00:49:29.900What are the odds of any of this being true?
00:49:34.040But my life has been consistently strange.
00:49:38.020By the way, you must be having the same experience.
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00:51:05.240Because, 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.
00:51:18.040Didn't you have the same wild, like, is there anything I can't do?
00:51:32.500I 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.
00:51:43.900So derealization is when something's happening, but it doesn't seem real.
00:51:48.320Like, I don't have episodes of derealization.
00:52:36.180But, and the world is, you know, I really liked your story.
00:52:40.880It'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.
00:52:53.620You know, and, and, and so, and I don't know, I don't know what to make of that.
00:52:59.860I do understand, as I said, like, perception is not what people generally think.
00:53:06.040Like, you don't see the objective world.
00:53:09.720You literally see pathways, tools, obstacles, friends and foes, and agents of magical transformation.
00:53:20.460Now, here's the weird thing, Scott, is like, you could think about that as a narrative overlay on the real objective world.
00:53:30.320But then if you're a scientist, you think, well, wait a second.
00:53:33.780We'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.
00:53:52.780And so, we see the world in a manner we describe as a story.
00:53:58.440Well, how are we to decide that that's not what the world is then?
00:54:23.720Where 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.
00:54:36.260Until you notice things that you wouldn't have noticed.
00:54:40.000And if you do it right and you're thinking about something positive for you, then you're going to notice that thing.
00:54:48.500So, back to your example of why did I notice the end of a TV show about how to be a cartoonist?
00:54:56.520And would I have noticed that if I had not been doing affirmations?
00:55:04.240It 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.
00:55:53.880There are coincidental things happening all the time.
00:55:56.660I 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?
00:56:27.100I 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?
00:57:20.080And 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.
00:57:41.980That goes way beyond anything I can put together with cause and effect.
00:57:46.860So, 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.
00:58:04.780So, I always wonder, you know, maybe there's more to find out.
00:58:09.140Well, the fact that we represent the world with stories primarily, and that we're instinctively oriented to find stories attractive, even stories of magic.
00:58:21.860Like, 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.
00:58:28.520And I, because I think concretely, I think biologically, it's like, why are we predisposed to believe in agents of magical transformation?
00:58:37.760And then I thought, oh, I see, an agent of magical transformation is someone who comes along and changes the game, changes the aim.
00:58:45.420And that's what Gandalf does for the Hobbit, you know, he elevates him into a new game.
00:58:51.040And so, that kind of magic happens all the time, and it's definitely the case that we perceive in relationship to a goal.
00:58:58.600There's absolutely no doubt about that.
00:59:01.160I 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.
00:59:27.980What 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.
00:59:39.140That's not the same idea that the world is a set of objective facts, which, you know, is also obviously true in some way.
00:59:52.320And 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.
01:00:04.960I think you said you were a cocky bastard, although maybe you didn't use exactly that phrase, but that was the gist of it.
01:00:10.180But what kind of relationship did you have or do you have, did you have with your parents?
01:00:18.400Like, did they, were they responsible for your confidence in some part?
01:00:24.940Or was that something you think that was more a mere, a manifestation of your essential character?
01:00:29.920Like, what did your, what was your relationship with your parents like?
01:00:34.220All right, so here's where it gets even weirder.
01:00:38.520My parents are part of this story, but others as well.
01:00:41.960When I was very young, people would, adults, would tell me that I was going to be rich and famous someday.
01:00:49.760And they would even use the same term.
01:00:52.360I 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.
01:00:59.080And she's just chatting with me for a minute.
01:01:01.880And before she leaves, she goes, you're going to be rich and famous someday.
01:01:06.460My 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.
01:02:06.120Now, there's one thing I wanted to add to what you were saying about goals.
01:02:09.180I don't know if you've heard me talk about this.
01:02:12.380But 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.
01:02:26.220So 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.
01:03:03.800I 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.
01:04:34.680Well, that's up to you to figure out to some degree.
01:04:37.420It's like most of us can tell the difference between an aim that's somewhat better than the one we have and somewhat worse.
01:04:44.580Like we've got a pretty good sense of comparative aim.
01:04:47.180But 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.
01:05:00.780And it's also rather terrifying, you know, because if you have a pathological aim, then that will structure your imagination, right?
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01:06:16.420Let me give you a little story that plays perfectly into that.
01:06:24.160When I was younger, I got married for the first time, and I had stepkids.
01:06:29.880The marriage didn't work out after several years.
01:06:32.380And because they're stepkids, you don't get joint custody or anything like that, so the loss is huge.
01:06:41.060Like, you lose everything, your family all at the same time.
01:06:45.220And I realized that that was my sort of main goal in life, was making this little unit happy and healthy and safe.
01:06:54.100And when that went away, I realized, man, I'm going to need some kind of motivation.
01:07:00.180And I actually said out loud, I was alone, but I said out loud that I was going to donate myself to the world.
01:07:07.720And that from that point on, I would only work on things that had some larger multiplying effect on the world.
01:07:16.200And 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.
01:07:25.940It's why I talk about politics, because I think it's useful.
01:08:42.620And so, Abraham is, the story of Abraham is structured as a set of transformations, upward transformations of goal.
01:08:52.400And that story that you just told is, you know, you can see there that you moved from the proximal.
01:08:58.600Not that your family wasn't important and transcendent in a sense, because it clearly was, but you broadened that.
01:09:06.800And then the meaning that you described, like we actually experience positive emotion in relationship to a goal.
01:09:14.520And so, if you set a high goal, then any indication of movement towards that goal floods you with dopamine, essentially.
01:09:26.280That's, it produces new neural circuits and it's the essence of positive emotion that's motivating.
01:09:35.920And so, now one other thing, that's also the meaning of the vision of Jacob's ladder.
01:09:40.280You 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.
01:09:49.880And 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?
01:10:01.600In 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.
01:11:29.200So, why did you decide to stay, go ahead.
01:11:33.320Well, I think the answer is that I was born with some kind of innate optimism that never turns off.
01:11:41.020So, I could have horrible situations and it barely affects my optimism.
01:11:46.660I just think, well, today was bad, but look at tomorrow.
01:11:50.360To your point, some of your viewers know that I have terminal cancer.
01:11:55.100So, 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.
01:12:05.900And five months ago or so, the pain started, you know, because the tumors are all over my body.
01:12:23.800And 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.
01:12:36.140So, 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.
01:12:52.020But what happened was I had also been looking at some other alternatives, another drug that was kind of new.
01:12:58.240And 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.
01:13:11.620But they literally turn off your testosterone, which is why they call it that.
01:13:15.520And the cancer needs the testosterone to grow.
01:13:20.260What 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.
01:13:54.060But we've hit the age of AI, and there's probably something in the lab somewhere that can fix me.
01:14:02.620And 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.
01:14:13.540And 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.
01:14:25.980But it wouldn't be the first time I had an incurable disease that I cured.
01:14:31.640You 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.
01:14:49.260In my version, if I ordered a Diet Coke, some of the letters would get swallowed, and it would sound like, go, go, go.
01:14:56.800And so, I couldn't have any kind of a normal life.
01:15:00.780This 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.
01:15:11.360So, 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.
01:15:28.920So, 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.
01:15:44.940So, 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.
01:15:55.300One 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.
01:16:07.800So, I went to my, you know, my doctor, and I said, is this real?
01:16:11.620Well, and he said, well, you know, that particular doctor, we know of him, and he's an over-claimer, so probably not real.
01:16:20.120But 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.
01:16:33.940So, 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.
01:16:47.240And 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.
01:17:01.780So, 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.
01:17:19.520And 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.
01:17:35.040Likewise, 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.
01:17:44.380Nobody knows why, but the spasm is actually caused by your brain.
01:17:50.920You know, that's why cutting the connection somehow worked.
01:17:54.440But I lost the ability to draw, because my pinky would spasm, and I couldn't control it.
01:18:01.340But, getting back to systems versus goals, for years, I had practiced drawing left-handed, just in case something ever happened to my right hand.
01:19:55.160For everybody watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Scott more about Dilbert.
01:20:01.380I 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.
01:20:12.600And then I want to talk to him as well about cancellation and his new life.
01:20:19.060And 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.