Episode 536 Scott Adams: Nuclear Persuasion

Date: 2019-05-21 | Duration: 18:30

Topics

Whiteboard discussion: SAFE nuclear power persuasion

Rough Transcript

This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

Transcript

[0:03]

yes all right I want to give you a little persuasion on nuclear energy I give you give you a quick lesson on it I save this the end so I might I might edit this part out and make it a special little part on nuclear energy so I’m going to act as though I’m starting a new periscope even though I’m in the middle of a periscope because I might edit this part out and making its own thing okay I’d like to talk about persuasion in the service of nuclear energy trying to get the country to understand that nuclear energy is a practical and safe and probably the only solution for climate change if you’re worried about it and if you’re not worried about climate change it’s still something you should do because it’s good for the world it’s good for poor people that lowers the cost of energy etc so I think we should drink to that pick up your mug have a sip now I’m

[1:08]

pick up your mug have a sip now I’m gonna give you some tips because I sent out a tweet in which I tweeted a little spreadsheet and if you go to my Twitter feeds got Adam says and you look at the pin tweet you can follow along if you have another device to watch this on otherwise I’ll give you the high points here so the idea was that I was trying to figure out the easiest way to convince the population of the United States maybe the world but focusing in the United States getting them to understand the question of nuclear energy what’s the risk what’s the payoff what’s good what’s bad because it’s a real complicated thing and people who try to tiptoe into it will get overwhelmed with details and I thought to myself what I’m good at is simplifying I used to do this for a living make presentations about complicated things and try to simplify them so decision-makers know the key variables I’m going to do that for you

[2:11]

variables I’m going to do that for you but basically I showed a chart that showed the generations generation one two three and four of nuclear I showed how many plants have been built I showed how many people have died from accidents and you can see the generation of one was terrible you see the generation two killed a bunch of people but only with one accident and it was the Chernobyl plant which as it turns down you would never build a plant like that and none of the other generation tears had any deaths so even generation two had exactly one one death creating event and nobody would ever build a plant like that even even if they were building a generation to plant today they wouldn’t build it like Chernobyl they wouldn’t run it by true Nobel that’s that was an outlier remember that’s just generation to generation three is what people would build if they started today so far there

[3:11]

build if they started today so far there are zero deaths from generation three plants but there aren’t as many of them and that’s part of the current part of the context and then generation four is under development in Russia and China in particular and that design would get you down to not even possible to have a big meltdown event so that technology would make it impossible even safer but I want to show you so so the spreadsheet is pinned to my Twitter feed at the top so if you go to Socata adam says it’s the top tweet and you can see the details there but i want to tell you what persuasion methods i used because i know a lot of you watch for that right the first persuasion method I used was on myself to do this this is one of the most important persuasion techniques you’ll ever hear in your life when I

[4:13]

you’ll ever hear in your life when I thought about putting this together I said oh my god that’s gonna be a lot of work I have so many other things to do that I want to do how am I ever gonna create this simplified chart to help people understand nuclear energy and so I did what I recommend that you do when you find yourself in this that’s too hard how do I get started I just got started I did the bad version if you can’t convince yourself to do something that’s big and hard and you want it to do to do it right you’re right your alternative is to don’t start you know don’t do anything or put in more energy than you want to don’t do either those things instead find the smallest thing you’re willing to do and then do it even if the smallest thing you’re willing to do is to send somebody an email and say hey do you have some information once you start with the smallest thing the next day you can say well I’ll do one

[5:13]

next day you can say well I’ll do one more small thing you you eventually find that you get yourself a little bit pregnant and you create some momentum simply by starting small so I write more about this in my upcoming book lose you think but the best persuasion you’ll ever give yourself is start small and do the first little thing that you can do don’t imagine the whole thing that you have to do alright so when you look at my chart that I just told you I put on Twitter you will notice it doesn’t look very good then it’s not pretty that’s okay because people in the comments are saying hey this number should have an asterisk on it you should include this fact add this little context that’s great they’re telling me how to improve it if you want advice on how to do something right first do it wrong works every time if you want free advice on how to do

[6:16]

if you want free advice on how to do something right do it wrong in public I do this all the time you have to learn to have no shame that’s part of the process but look at all the free advice isn’t getting look at the comments on that now this is an iterative process all persuasion is if you do it right if you don’t understand this next point everything else I tell you is useless almost right the next point is the important point remember this one even if you forget all the other points it’s about iteration nobody is smart enough to know on the first try how to be the most persuasive you try something as I did you see how people react you fix it you try again you see how people react you fix it you try again persuasion is an iterative process if you’re not thinking of it that way you’re not doing it right doesn’t matter what else you do if you’re not thinking

[7:16]

what else you do if you’re not thinking of it as a in evolution where you get smarter and smarter based on the feedback you’re just not doing it right here are the things that are included in my tweet persuasion that you can seep into my Twitter feed on nuclear persuasion you can see that iteration that I just mentioned is important people will look at that and they’ll say for example hey maybe you should have given it a blue background maybe you shouldn’t be formatted this way maybe you should simplified maybe you should add a little bit so it will probably improve over time and as it does I’ll retweet it it it’s it’s visual as it exists because I pasted a spreadsheet into my tweet a tweet without a visual gets far less traffic so if you’re trying to persuade people with a tweet put a picture there the current picture is a terrible picture it’s not attractive it’s just a

[8:17]

it’s not attractive it’s just a spreadsheet and it still works because it takes up more real estate it tells you there’s something more important because there’s a picture it draws people in but it could be much better and it would iterate to a better picture you want to keep people’s attention so it’s not good enough that I get them to look at the spreadsheet I’ve got to keep them there and spending time there the more time they spend grab you know grappling with the data even if the reason that I keep them there is that they’re trying to understand it whatever the reason if I can keep them on there more time they spend thinking about it the more important they will imagine it and the more they will remember it so getting people to pay attention to it as important so I could have made my spreadsheets simpler and then people would have spent less time on it I could have made it more complicated and then people would be discouraged from spending time on it the sweet spot is that people say hey that looks simple

[9:19]

that people say hey that looks simple enough that I could get the idea and then they they look at it and go oh I get the idea but I still kind of want to look at some other stuff here there’s enough there to keep them interested for half a minute which is way better than keeping them interested for 10 seconds so the level of complexity is part of your persuasion you want a little bit to keep them there but not too simple you want repetition and you’ll see that if people retweet it people will start seeing this same presentation more and more the more they see it the better simplicity as I mentioned it’s got to be simple enough for people to read it and get the basic idea and then those people go forth as advocates because they’re now armed with some good context so they can now talk about this topic in a way that they couldn’t before so I keep it simple so that the message can travel it can spread into more brains come out of more

[10:20]

spread into more brains come out of more mouths it’s automatically more viral if it’s simple but not too simple contrast is the primary persuasion tool that I use I first contrast generation 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 so the first message is if you don’t understand that the current nuclear technology is completely different from the early generations you’re not up to you’re not up to speed all right so so I contrast not only generations of nuclear so you can see the new stuff is good I also contrast it to other ways that people die so if you see that you dozen people dying or one person dying from nuclear you compare that to how many people died on bicycles how many died and drowning in pools how many died from automobile accidents most of the accidental deaths are big numbers

[11:22]

the accidental deaths are big numbers you know bicycles I think are 2,500 a year 2500 people a year die on bicycles the most the most that nuclear the biggest nuclear disaster was 39 people and that was Chernobyl and we would never build one like that again all right and even Fukushima the people who died were escaping it and they didn’t die from the explosion itself all right the other persuasion is I started in my tweet I said that there’s bipartisan support now when you tell people that there’s wide bipartisan support you’re saying other smart people think this is a good idea and that and that’s a that’s a good thing so if people think everyone else agrees it biases them toward thinking well maybe I should agree everybody’s on this team I also called it bipartisan support so the people who were team players and would never cross

[12:24]

were team players and would never cross to agree with the other team can still like this because their team likes it so it was very important to say your team likes this because people may not go beyond that for at least 80 percent of the country if you say hey Democrats like this the Democrats will say well then I like it it’s same with Republicans you just tell them that their team likes it and suddenly they like it there’s been plenty of studies to suggest that’s true so tell people their team likes it because it’s true not not the entire team but even a overseas said she’s open to to nuclear if you have small errors and I put errors in quotes because maybe an imperfection is not exactly an error maybe something you could have clarified it’s not exactly an error just something you could have done better but if some imperfections in your presentation people will spend more time engaging if

[13:25]

people will spend more time engaging if those imperfections are not core to your message you actually improve your persuasion by having errors this is something that the president does to perfection he will say something that’s not quite exactly true maybe there’s a fact check that you you question and by spending time questioning the small fact you spend more time with the main message and that’s the win you want people to spend more time with a main message even if they’re debating some trivial part of it so that’s good intentional small errors now there are no intentional small errors in my graph that I put together but I am smart enough to know because I’ve done this sort of thing enough for long enough that there must be small imperfections things that people will disagree with so I didn’t engineer it in but I knew it was there and it’s part of the persuasion I tell people indirectly I

[14:25]

persuasion I tell people indirectly I suggest that people who have seen this tweet read the chart and now have learned to understand with the nuclear opportunity I make sure that they believe that they’re the smart ones because if you tell people hey look at this in 30 seconds you’re gonna be smarter about a major topic people like that people like to feel smart that’s that’s a real draw so I give them an opportunity to feel smart that’s good persuasion the hero opportunity this is very important to making something viral the reason I put it all in a tweet is this is the hope that other people would would tweet it so in order to be tweetable it’s helpful to create the hero opportunity the hero opportunity is for those of you who read my tweets you say to yourself hey if I retweet this or send it to somebody I think could use it I’m making the world a better place I’m actually improving the world and the person who receives

[15:26]

the world and the person who receives this will probably thank me because I have cleared up this whole nuclear energy opportunity in the way that they’ve never seen before so I could be a hero in a small way but everybody likes that who doesn’t like being being a hero and that I also said it was a no-brainer to consider nuclear now when you say it’s a no-brainer you remove people from the critical thinking process so it’s a little bit unfair but it’s also true in other words I’m not lying it is sort of a no-brainer once you see the you don’t see the facts laid out I would say that that’s why a OSI can agree with you know the most Republican Republican the reason that they can come to the same conclusion is because this is a no-brainer the only people were disagreeing are the people who haven’t quite come up to speed with the fact that the newer technologies are as good as they are now

[16:29]

technologies are as good as they are now thank you to mark Schneider who is at at sub schreiter SCH and Eydie ER for his for his information to help me build this and you should follow him on Twitter if you’re not already now also I would say to mark Schneider you should use interface by when table my startup to add a link on your web page that people can contact you directly from that link and it will open up the interface by when hub app that my company makes and you could have a direct video call with Mark were scheduled one because that same link would let you schedule one and he can he can help you out with some persuasion he’s already on the app but I noticed that his web page did not take the link that we provide and put it on the page

[17:30]

that we provide and put it on the page so that somebody can contact him to schedule a phone call and if you have any kind of webpage that you would like to do the same go to when hub com if you’ve already signed up to be to be an expert on the interface by one hub app so there are two things you need the app the mobile app that works on any mobile device so if you have that it’s free but you also want to go to the web hub comm page search for yourself and that will give you the the link that you can put on your web page just just add the link and people can automatically be directed to a schedule or to catch you live if you happen to be live on the interface app and they can talk to you in person without exchanging any personal information so that’s all for now and I will talk to you all later