One to ten, on a scale of one to ten, how much flak have you gotten since Trump got elected? Because before, when you were predicting the Trump thing, it was a dumpster fire, your Twitter feed. And then afterwards, I would imagine there's some sense of, okay, you were right, but most of that's probably more like FU, I don't care that you were right. Well, a tremendous amount of the Twitter traffic were apparently professional trolls, because the moment he got elected, they just all went away. And it seems like they would have stayed around a little bit if they were just normal people to say, well, see what you've done and that sort of thing. But I would say it went down 80% after election, at least on Twitter. But in terms of the impact on my life, I would say my number of friends is probably down 75%. That's a lot. Since I started writing about it. So that you're down to one friend now. Yeah, just one friend and he's on the watch list right now. Yeah, right. Wow. I've noticed that a lot of people have mentioned that they've lost friends because of the political situation. And I think that's kind of a shame. I've got plenty of friends on both sides of the camp. They're probably not people I would want to have over at the same time, all of them. Some of them would be totally fine. There's only a few in each camp that I think are completely insufferable when they start talking about politics. And this has been a particularly divisive election, particularly divisive administration in general. And one thing that your book when bigly focuses on is the persuasion aspect of the current administration or of Donald Trump specifically. But during the show, I would love if possible, it probably isn't. I'm going to try anyway to divorce the persuasion concepts from the man himself. Because I don't want people to go, this is about Trump click, right?  But in the meantime, I'm going to learn something about persuasion. I don't know how feasible that is. I think we've already triggered a lot of people just by mentioning this. But for the rest of the people who are actually still listening, I think we might be able to learn something. Because I learned something, I learned a lot from the book, devoured it in one plane ride and went away thinking, okay, I'm not really qualified to say whether this is all accurate or not, but it's certainly interesting. Yeah, we can do that. Let's proceed. I'll try to detrump it as much as possible. Yeah, it might be tricky. You did mention your career and your income took a huge gap. I don't know if it's a gap, but what's a proper term for this? Nose dive maybe? It's a tricky hit. Yeah, a severe hit. What now? I guess now you write a book and then you try to make up for the little stop-loss here. I don't think the book will make up for the annihilation of my speaking career. I lost a big corporate license deal and probably we'll never get another licensing deal for Dilbert going forward. Because of that? Because of writing about the election, yes. Poor Dilbert. I mean, he's an innocent cartoon and now he's going to be exposed left and right. Well, so far the comic itself is fine because newspapers are a little bit immune to the left-right battle. They try to serve both, so I'm fine in newspapers, but that's the only solid place. Really? It seems strange to me that someone would go, hey, we were going to put your cartoon on a mug, but now we just can't do it because it reminds us too much of the president. Yeah, there are some people who just can't shake that association. Wow. Well, I guess if you had to do it all over again, what would you do? Would you do it exactly as you had or would you maybe sell the Dilbert stuff to a trust or something like that or move some IP around or maybe you'd be Adam Scott on Twitter instead of Scott Adams? You know, I think I'm actually attracted to trouble. It's been sort of a lifetime problem with me. I think, well, what's the most dangerous thing I could do? And then I think, well, that sounds good. Usually I talk myself out of it. In this case, I probably would have talked myself into it again because I did enjoy, I guess, the fight of it, the intellectual fight of it. But there was something bigger I thought happening during the election. I thought that it would change how people thought about their place in the world. It seemed like a far bigger thing than just one person's persuasion. Sure, because when I think dangerous, I think cartoonist. Well, you know, cartoonists do get killed. That's true. Oh, actually, you know what, that's very true, especially in the last few years. Yeah, the Charlie Hebdo guys. Yeah, and what was the other one, the drama, Mohammed Contest? The film, I guess it was, was that a filmmaker? Showmaker, yeah. Yeah, adjacent artists in general. Now it's not as safe as it was before. You say that you're in no political camp and you're more of an observer. And that's fair. It's hard to say that when you read the book because it is about one side, it is about the president's persuasion of power. And so a lot of folks might really not believe that. But to those folks, I kind of want to say it doesn't really matter whether or not that's true, in my opinion. I think looking at persuasion as a skill set, it kind of doesn't matter who we're learning from if that person is effective. I think it would be, there's probably no persuasion class anywhere, rhetoric class especially, anywhere on the planet that doesn't say, all right, we don't condone this, but here's a bunch of Hitler speeches and these were undoubtedly effective for negative results. And I think to omit that kind of case study is to just kind of plug our ears and sing la la la and hope that it goes away. Yeah, unfortunately, there are effective people that we don't like. And if you're just looking at the tools and you can hold your nose and say, what can I learn? Then you can learn. You mentioned that when you're a member of a group, you'll find their views more sympathetic. So of course, I have to ask you, is the book then a reflection of, well, you know, secretly I am a Trump supporter. So of course all of these things look like persuasion because they worked on me. Well, I describe myself politically as left to Bernie except with a preference for the things that might actually work. In other words, philosophically, I want free education, free healthcare and all those things. I don't know how to get there, but I think maybe America could, at least have a plan to get there eventually. So politically, I'm not on the Republican side, but in terms of the first word you used was in their camp. But as soon as you said that, I thought to myself, well, I am sort of in their camp because I do represent a point of view which they like and I do appreciate that group because they are the ones who supported me for two years whereas the other group attacked me viciously for two years. So I have a strong preference for the people which is different than the policies or the politician. It seems strange to me and I know how I started with let's not talk about Trump but now I've only done that, but I promise at one point I won't abandon that. You're not the first person who couldn't avoid it. Yeah, I know, right? It's like there's this huge magnetic force. It really is and we'll talk about that in a little bit as well. I think that it is interesting that we find that when someone strongly disagrees with a certain side's perspectives, they then start to disagree. And this goes for any person. This is not just from this election or just pro or anti-Trump. People then go, I don't like that you're even saying that this is a possibility therefore I'm going to attack you. Because it seemed to me always a little bit nonsensical to come after somebody who says I'm predicting a Trump win for better or for worse or somebody who also maybe in Silicon Valley would say things like don't keep talking about Trump, you're going to get him elected. Nobody went to that guy and said, you shut up, we'll talk about whatever we want. They all went, oh, okay, that's a good idea. And I had the same problem on this show when I interviewed Roger Stone. People went, I'm unsubscribing because he shouldn't be allowed to talk. And I thought, who made these decisions about who I'm allowed to talk to or about? And I think that's a weird problem that you have faced more than anybody. Let me bail you out. Let's talk about Colin Kaepernick's persuasion because I'm a big Kaepernick fan. There we go. So when I say fan has nothing to do with football, it doesn't even have anything to do with the specific policies he's pushing. Although the topic is important, of course. But persuasion-wise, Colin Kaepernick nailed it.  He stayed within the law. He didn't break any laws. He offended our sensibilities in exactly the right way for a protest. And now my image of the America that I want to live in is that I don't want a flag that I'm not allowed to burn. That's not a flag that has the same value to me. I'm offended when somebody burns it because it's just an emotional reaction. But I don't want to live in a country that has a flag I can't burn. And so Colin Kaepernick, I think persuasion-wise, it's like the Nobel Prize of persuasion. The entire country is talking about his thing. He broke no law. He hurt no people. And he had skin in the game. That's as good as it gets. Yeah, that's true, right? He's not in jail. He doesn't have any... Well, I don't know if he got a fine from the owner as it's hard to say. But if he did, it's going to be a drop in the bucket compared to whatever next contract he's going to end up with or the one he already has. Well, he doesn't have a contract now, so that's a problem. Well, I guess I don't know. I would say that that shows you, one, how much I follow sports versus other items on the agenda. But I don't think he's going to be suffering through this any more than... Well, I don't know. Actually, what do you think is going to happen in this situation? You're pretty good at predicting things so far. I think he's suffered quite a bit. I mean, the huge portion of the country will never forgive him. Oh, that's true. And that just will never go away. I don't think there's anything he can do to fix that. Well, he's good, so I just gave him big props for persuasion. So maybe he has more game than we know. But at this moment, I'd say he put his skin in the game for something he cared about. And it's going to cost him forever, probably. Do you think that it's politically, and I mean that in the broadest sense of the word, beneficial to then alienate certain people like he has done while then, of course, using that same platform to draw many, many people that much closer to him? For example, I didn't care about this at all. He was a name on a jersey and nothing more. Now he's been elevated a few tiers up as somebody who's an influencer in a way that actually matters. There are plenty of people who say, I'm not watching football anymore and screw this guy. It's almost a worthwhile trade-off, in my opinion, but I'm wondering what you think about that sort of thing. Well, it's certainly worthwhile in the sense that he raised the issue that he wanted to raise and he took the bullet. I mean, he knew that this was going to cost him and he did it anyway. So that I have to respect. Is that where you kind of fell on the Trump prediction scale as well? Because it sounds easy to say and that's why I wrote about Trump on my blog and it's like people are going to go, this guy wrote about Trump on a blog. The other guy took a knee in front of the whole country. It's not the same thing. Well, no, I certainly would never compare myself to any of those individuals. I took some risk with what I was doing, but I did think and I still think that if you look at the way people talk about the election, the word persuasion is now common. You know, you didn't see that in other elections. You see people referring to a phrase that I'm credited online for being the first to say, which is this 3D, 4D chess analogy. So it's become common to think that the way the president operates is through a persuasion filter and he's got some technique there and it's not just all random. And that's what I wanted people to know. I wanted to sort of, it wasn't about Trump so much as, you know, opening a hole in the universe to look through to a deeper truth. And the main thing I always talk about is the two movies on one screen. The number of times we're looking at exactly the same information. There's no data difference. We're smart. We're looking at it and we just come to different conclusions. I was just reading Scientific America on the plane the other day and they had a fascinating study where they were trying to figure out, what's up with these science deniers? Oh, yeah. Tell me about that. I would love to hear about that. So number one, I don't believe there's any such thing as a science denier. I've never met anybody who thought science was a bad idea. There are people who looked at the same stuff and came to different conclusions. And if you don't like the conclusion that they came to, doesn't agree with the majority, you've got a problem. But here's the study in Scientific America that tells you the two movies on one screen vividly. They wanted to find out if denying science had something to do with simply not understanding science. So the first thing you would test is, well, is it just the dumb people? And sure enough, they would find that there were plenty of dumb people who disagreed with the scientists. But they also found that across the entire knowledge scale, to the most unknowledgeable about science, no facts changed their minds. In other words, the data was never part of the decision to begin with. So the fact that some people are saying no and some people are saying yes is almost certainly because they align with the political side. At least in most cases, there have to be some independent minds there somewhere. But in general, people just vote their side and then they figure out why they did it after the fact. I could not agree more. When we had Shaquille O'Neal on the show, he mentioned that he was just joking when he said that the earth was flat. And I got a lot of email, mostly tweets, because you know how they go on Twitter, saying, no, no, no, the earth really is flat. This is the Freemasons are forcing him to say that he was joking because this, that, and the other thing. And every single person that I engaged with, because I was genuinely curious, there are really flat earthers out there. I want to know what these people are about. Universally, they were religious and they were part of a certain church that said the earth is flat and there's the firmament and that's what the angels live above that. And then all of the other, and I throw this in air quotes, science, then somehow has to be squeezed into that, that sort of perspective and that sort of perspective says, no, above the sky is the firmament and above the firmament is heaven. Everything else has to fall into that and that means the earth has to be flat. Well, I think I found my new religion because I like to keep it simple. Yeah, there you go. Earth is flat, angels up there, done. Yeah, angels up there, bad stuff down there. Just don't dig too far and we're good to go. Yeah. Tell me about, and I'd love to hear about 3D and 4D chess as a result of this conversation as well, so don't let me forget about that, but let's talk about the types of persuader. You go through that early in the book, Win Bigly, what are the different types of persuaders? What are we dealing with on a daily basis? So I try to help people figure out the different powers that different persuaders have and so it seemed to me that I'm what I call a commercial persuader and by that I mean I use persuasion for my job. It's part of how I write, it's part of how I make cartoons, it's part of how I write books and so I'm a commercial grade persuader. Above me would be cognitive scientists, people who actually study this for a living. So as I say in Win Bigly, if a cognitive scientist says, hey, this chapter's wrong, believe the scientist, not me.  These are people who have all the tools of persuasion but they bring something else, either a high-risk appetite or there's something about their personality that's just gigantic. In this case, Trump has both. So there are people like Steve Jobs, for example, where there's something about his willpower, his, again, appetite for risk and other things that just normal people don't have but they're above and beyond the tools of persuasion but you put them together and they're insanely powerful. So the things that we see master persuaders do are maybe not yet explained by science then, is that what you're saying? Or are there things that scientists have not studied since they're are rung above on the ladder? Let me give you some examples. Sure. So no, I don't think it's so much a case that science hasn't discovered what master persuaders can do. An example would be a master persuader says something that they know is not true and they're going to take a lot of flack for it but in the meantime, they're going to get attention for something that they want attention for. Ordinary people can't do that because they say, I'm not going to go in public and say something that I know isn't true. But a master persuader, sometimes they say, well, you know, it's for a greater good, perhaps, we hope, right? So I'll shade this. I'll use a little hyperbole. It doesn't really matter in the long run. What matters is where we're heading and I think that's a good place to go. So there's something about the personality that's able to do what other people would say, I just can't do that. Right, so it's almost, like you said, a high appetite for risk and or something that makes them almost immune to the social consequences or ignorance in a way that makes them just not care at all. Yeah, immune to shame is a big deal. If you look at my arc, you know, transitioning from cartoonist to guy who was writing about persuasion and stuff, that was a risky transition. And we see the risk and all the friction it caused, all the, you know, the cost to my main business, the, you know, the attacks that I got online and everything. But I'm at a point in my life where I like the risk and I'm not, I'm almost immune to shame. You know, it's sort of a learned behavior. We'll see about that when this comes out. Yeah, it's still early. But the, it is a learned skill to be immune to other people's opinions and just sort of brush it off and move on. Well, let's talk about that. How do we learn that skill? Because there are plenty of people that have nothing to be ashamed of but do have unpopular views that would love to know how they make that happen. Number one way is to be embarrassed a whole bunch of times and then look back a month later and say, oh, my day today is exactly like it would have been if that had never happened. Right, the real life consequences were I was embarrassed temporarily and nothing more. Yeah, I took the Dale Carnegie course.  I don't remember that and I've taken a lot of Dale Carnegie. Maybe they rewrote the curriculum after at a certain point. Maybe nobody would take it after that. Yeah. But I found that really, really helpful. And it even helps with things like public speaking because you're thinking, oh, what's everybody thinking of me?  And that's the safest thing you can do. So it's the worrying that causes the problem. You think, well, I'd better worry about this because this is a potential problem. But the only problem was the worrying. Once you get rid of that, it solves itself. So essentially we can go back and maybe journal sometimes where we felt really embarrassed and then examine the lasting consequences thereof and find that there really aren't any. Well, yeah. It's an ongoing process. And one of the things I've got going for me is that I'm old. Right? So I'm 60. I didn't notice. So the number of times that you've been embarrassed presumably is far fewer than the number of times I have. You'd be surprised. But yeah, maybe that's true. Especially recently, you've been racking them up I see online, I think. Whether you've done so intentionally or not. And I think a lot of people have it out for you and this is probably not going to help. What do you think? Oh, yeah. I think my popularity will plunge to a new low. But with books, books are not really sold to people who want to learn something. Well, let me modify that a little bit. People buy books to hear their own opinion expressed better. All right? At least political books. Right. My book has information in it about persuasion. But still, people are going to say, well, you're talking about this topic and I'm on the other side, so I'm not even going to listen to the persuasion. So what I expect is it will be a polarizing book, but it may not be bad for sales because you're better off exciting a small group of people who actually act than to be pretty good to a bunch of people. That's the Hollywood model. The Hollywood model is if you're testing a pilot for a show and everybody who's in the test audience says, yeah, that's good. I'd watch that show. That's pretty good. That means nothing. You want 10% of those people to walk out and say, good lord, this is the best show I've ever seen. Tell me when this is on. Can I get a copy of the tape? So you need excitement from a small number that predicts success better than a lot of people saying, yeah, that's pretty good. So this book will, and I can back you up on this, this will certainly polarize a lot of people. People who support the current administration are going to go, yeah, this is amazing. I'd never noticed all this stuff. It's so enlightening. Now I've got to go rewatch all this video. I'm going to be looking at him differently. And I will say that even now, having read this and not necessarily by any stretch falling into one of the mainstream political camps, that it's become at least, and I'll give you this, it's become very much a lot more interesting to watch the president speak because now I can look for the persuasion things instead of just saying, oh, what sweet, what fresh hell is this now with the climate thing or whatever. And I wish that we had a book about this for pretty much anybody that we had to watch that we didn't necessarily like for the next several period, for the next period of several years. And I will say also that the examples in the book, they're going to ruffle some feathers and I can see a review in, I think some of your best media that's going to sell a lot of this book are going to be people that just skewer the crap out of it, whether they do a good job at that or not. I think you're going to have a lot of rebuttal pieces from some of those reviews online and you should just warm up that keyboard and have a replacement ready because you're going to be doing a lot of typing, I think. It's going to be really challenging for reviewers, I think. I think they're going to have a tough time for it for the same reason the public will. They're going to try to separate the politics and their view of things from the actual book. I'm going on The Morning Joe Show when I do my tour. Wow, they're starting at an expert level. I'm going into the lion's den.  Yeah, that should be interesting. I often wonder though how many journalists that interview you read the stuff that you put out before they do the interview or if they just get five bullet points from an intern and then try to wing it. Well, in the case of a book, it's actually rare for somebody to read the book. So you're actually in rare territory having consumed it before I got here. I would say no more than one in eight or ten, maybe. It seems like that would be a huge advantage if you want to debate somebody about a book that they've written that you might want to go ahead and read it first or at least part of it. Well, it certainly gives me some freedom. Yeah. It's like, as I said in the book, you wouldn't know that. Yeah, exactly. Well, all right, people don't use facts to make decisions. That was one of the major points in the book. Tell us why that's true because a lot of people go, nope, all my decisions are fact-based and I am empirical and that's what's good about my decisions. Is there all based on facts? Yeah, everybody thinks that. But I think there was a recent study, I wish I could quote it, but something like 98% of people just won't change no matter what facts you give them on politics. People will change on things they don't care about. So if you were to imagine this on the graph, the more they cared about it, the less likely they're going to change, which seems backwards, right? The more emotion that they have into it, I guess that's the better way to say it. The more emotion, the more likely their mental processes are short-circuited. Right, because of all the fallacies, confirmation bias, some cost fallacy, there's a lot of emotional investment in anything that you are, I'm trying not to say there's a lot of emotional investment in things that you're emotionally invested in because that's circular, but things that you feel strongly about by definition, you're investing more and more emotion in that, which would make you more and more wrong in the past if you change your mind moving forward, which is why we see as remarkable people who do things like leave the Amish and join the, what do we call it? I guess the real world, I would say, the rest of the world, we find that amazing or somebody that shakes off severe issues growing up in the middle of rural Africa or something like that and becomes some sort of tech entrepreneur, those stories are amazing because of the amount of investment that somebody has in a certain way of life or a certain set of thoughts, religion, or otherwise. Let me give you a little example that's a current one. So after the Vegas shooting, there's lots of talk about the security guard, Jesus Campos, and where was he, and a lot of people came up with conspiracy theories and they were so sure their conspiracy theory was right that this security guard must have been somehow connected with the shooter that when they produced the actual picture of him and then people compared it to, I guess, an older picture which they knew was actually him and they said, they put him side by side on Twitter and they said, clearly not the same guy. They've replaced him with a body double and I looked at the pictures and I'm not, I don't buy into the conspiracy theories and therefore I have no emotional investment. I simply didn't think that was the thing. I look at those pictures and I think that's exactly the same guy. It could not be more obvious. I'm looking at him like two pictures next to each other, clearly the same guy, but other people, honest, smart, completely normal people who can hold jobs, looked at those pictures and said, oh my God, this one on the left is a whole different person. And when you see that starkly, you're actually standing in the room with somebody who's looking at the same simple thing and they're seeing it differently. It's amazing.  With a photograph that could not have been clearer in my opinion. Do you think we're evolved to see that way? We actually had a brain scientist on the show earlier and I can't remember which brain scientist it was, but she was saying that one of the things they're studying right now are a lot of these police shootings and they're thinking that the police are actually seeing dangerous weapons because their brain is painting a completely different picture and she thinks that with more advanced brain imaging in the next 10, 20 years, we're going to be able to see that people who make grave mistakes like that based on negative stereotypes, maybe of the race or ethnicity of the person that they're involved with, they're actually seeing something completely different than we're seeing on a video, which is why it looks so bad on the video because we look and we say, how did you think that guy was armed and running towards you when he was unarmed and running away from you? And if we one day get to the day where we can replay what they saw in their brain, somehow, we'll see exactly what they said, which is he was running towards me and he had a gun in his hand. You've probably seen the famous video of the people passing a ball around and then the monkey joins the circle. Yeah, this guy in a gorilla suit or something walks by slowly? He actually joins the circle for a moment. Oh, really? And because you've been asked to count the number of passes that they pass back and forth, people don't see a man in a gorilla suit joining a small group of, I don't know, five people in a circle. And after they tell you and then you watch it, you think I was blind to a giant monkey on screen and I didn't even see it. I thought it was a fake video where it played twice and one had the bear or the monkey or the gorilla, whatever it was, and one didn't, so I actually rewound it and rewatched it and then I reloaded it from an incognito tab and Chrome thinking, oh, it knows that I'm back because there's no way that I miss this and we can link to that video in the show notes for people that haven't run this test on themselves. You will be shocked. Well, I guess we've ruined it now, right? But show a friend who's not looking for that because now, of course, you'll say, how did you miss this in Knuckleheads? If you show it to somebody who's not aware of what the test is testing, you will find that they miss it almost 100% of the time. So stop me if I've told this story before last time we talked, but I was once a bank teller here in San Francisco and I got robbed at gunpoint. During the middle of the day? During the middle of the day. So it was a bank robbery? Bank robbery, which actually is very common. Most of the local branches get robbed on a regular basis, but you don't even know it if you're in the lobby of the bank. It's usually just a quiet transaction. Give me your money. They do. The guy leaves. Anyway, so I got robbed twice at gunpoint when I was a bank teller. When I was in my 20s. Oh, my God. And, of course, the FBI and police or whoever it is comes by and they say, give us the description. So I described him and keep in mind that he was right in front of me. He was at my window, the bank teller window, and I had a good look at him. And I said, oh yeah, he's about my size. He's about 5'8". He's had salt and pepper hair and he was sort of bald and he hadn't shaved for a while and he had a long trench coat. And I had a really good image. In fact, I still have it in my head, a perfect image of that guy. So I get a call from my boss and he goes, they're wondering if you really pulled the secret alarm which activates the camera, it tells you where the camera is supposed to be looking, you know, at what point they're supposed to be looking. And they said, they can't find that guy on the video when they play it back. So I actually went to the top secret FBI headquarters.  But the place that they look at the tapes and they said, you know, is this guy on the tape the guy who robbed you? That's not even close. The guy on the tape was, he looked like 35, like a young Clint Eastwood with this big bushy brown mustache, full head of hair and a sport jacket. Could not have been further from the guy that I clearly saw.  All right. So there was no ambiguity when you saw it on tape. He actually was robbing me. But my memory was an entirely different person. And, you know, the FBI said, yeah, don't even worry about it. That's actually kind of normal. Who did you think that robbed you? I mean, did you pick that guy out of a movie? Was it just somewhere stored in the memory banks from a TV show you saw as a kid? Who knows?  Right. And then you convince yourself you saw something you didn't see. Right. When you're trying to theoretically fight or flight, fight for your life, it's not going, your brain's not saying, you're going to be important for you to remember exactly what this person looks like for later.  And then there was a second one. The second time I got robbed, he actually put the gun up to my nose. So I actually took out a gun and held it right up to my face and said he would, you know, shoot me if I didn't give him money, which is really scary because you're pulling the silent alarm while you're looking down the barrel of the gun. Right. And he knows it. Right. It's a really scary situation.  I should have just, you know, given him my own wallet and said, hey, take away again. But I gave him the money and eventually I got asked to be part of a lineup, picking a guy out of a lineup. And I recognized him immediately, but he was also the only one smiling. And so, and the other people in the room because he'd robbed several banks, several witnesses. We all picked the same guy. And I always wondered after that day, was it because he was the only one smiling? Huh. So he just stood out. You didn't necessarily pick him. He was going out of his way to look like he wasn't worried. And the others were actors. So they were looking, they were trying to act like a guilty guy and he was the only one who wasn't. So I always wondered, did I really recognize him? Or did that cue me that he must be the guy? How interesting. I'll never know. So if you're in a lineup, try to just look like everybody else in the lineup. Don't try to look like you're relaxed. I'm hoping to avoid that lineup situation. Yeah, right. So why is this concept important that humans use emotion instead of facts to make decisions? What impact does this have on us? This is a concept we teach at our boot camps and our live programs quite a bit. But I'm curious as to what you would say about this. So I call this the hypnotist point of view. So I'm a trained hypnotist. And one of the things that you sort of have to believe in order to even do hypnosis and understand it and work with it is that people are rational about 90% of the time. 10% of the time on the little stuff they don't care about what they can do fine. But the common view of the world is exactly the opposite of that. The common view is that we are rational, 90% of the time, and about 10% of the time we get emotional and things go crazy. If you use those two filters on life and say, okay, which one is explaining things better? The irrational filter just wins every time. That doesn't mean it's true because we may live in the universe where we're just fooled about everything. But certainly as a filter to predict things, it's very true. Just look at the fact that two people can look at the same data with the same IQs, same backgrounds, and just see different things. Actually, literally see different things like we were just talking. That's completely irrational behavior and it's the norm. It's not the exception. One of the concepts in Winn-Bigly is that things we think about all the time rise a couple of rungs up on the ladder of importance in our minds. You gave a lot of really interesting examples of this and the way that Trump uses these examples to persuade. Can we explain and give some examples of this because that explains a lot of why a lot of these facts and assertions and things like that come out of his mouth seemingly for no reason.  So I'll quote Dr. Carmen Simon, expert on memory. She's been on the show, yeah. And she teaches and writes about the fact that if you don't have a little bit of wrongness, people won't remember it. So if everything looks the same, your brain just falls asleep. It's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, more of that because your brain can't remember everything, right? It's very selective. And so there's something about President Trump's natural style, which I think he is intentionally elevated for these purposes, that everything seems to violate something that you didn't think should have been violated. He either acts in a way that you say, no president should act that way, or he states something that you think that couldn't possibly be true, or he uses a word that shouldn't be used in that context. There's just something about it that's not normal. And he does that so consistently, it would be hard to think that that's completely accidental. Although I do imagine there are plenty of times where there's a small error and he just doesn't care. So some of it is not caring to make it exactly as how people expect. But the net effect of it is you can't turn away. If you tweet something, you just say, oh, that's more interesting than whatever else I was doing. Let's talk about that. And then it becomes part of your brain's architecture. How can we use this concept in our own lives if we're not the president of the free world here? What do we do in our daily lives to maybe capitalize on the fact that, look, I want people to think this is important. How do I get it wrong but not so wrong I lose credibility? Well, there's probably, there must be infinite ways to do something slightly wrong. So I guess it would depend on the specific situation. But if you're using hyperbole and let's say, let's use the classic example, let's say, well, for example, in this interview, I'm happy to see that at least 50 or 60 people have showed up in the audience to watch us. And I'm really happy about that. Million, million and a half, yeah. Now, when if that ever gets fact checked and we find out that it's two. And they're both my parents. Yeah. That would never, that would be, it's a little too far-fetched. Who's going to believe that anyway? But by the time somebody finds out that that fact was an exaggeration, they still have it in their head and they've lived with it. Well, I guess there were a lot of people at that thing. And even the corrected information just doesn't have as much impact we don't like to change our mind that much. So we can always use hyperbole and then just realize, because people think, why would he say that? Of course, he's going to get caught on that. And what you're saying is, yeah, but it doesn't matter if it's caught on that because the effect happens in the moment. It doesn't matter that later on down the line, it doesn't look accurate. Well, he also uses the trick where he makes you think past the sale quite a bit. So there was a recent tweet where he said something like, I can't imagine the Democrats if they voted against us, how would they live with themselves in the future? And it makes you think about, well, could they live with themselves? Would that be hard in the future? What would that be like if he didn't vote for this? That seems like an exaggeration. I think those Democrats would be fine because it's the way they voted. I'm sure they like that. So you're talking to yourself about this future where they've got a problem and you've already thought past, did they make that vote? So he's making them think about their bad future, which is strong persuasion. What types of things can we learn from cognitive dissonance? This is one of the things that you start the book with. It's a concept we discuss a lot on the show. Can we define it and then talk about why it makes us irrational? So the Scott's definition of cognitive dissonance without all the science in it is that if there's something that violates your expectations or your self-image or just the way you think the world is supposed to be, especially if it involves you, that's the biggest trick. Or if there's something about you that you would have to change.   It's far more likely you'd say, well, I had a good reason in this particular case. I didn't get sleep or whatever it was. Well, in that case, I would actually be the reason. So a terrible example. But the point is that we spontaneously come up with a reason why everything was fine and our original opinion was just great. So essentially we rationalize past opinions or behaviors in order to make them line up with pre-existing beliefs. Yeah, but rationalizing is almost too weak because cognitive dissonance can give you a full-blown hallucination in which you're seeing stuff you don't know that. Well, the example I gave of the people who saw the two photographs of the security guard, the people who were deeply invested in how brilliant they were, because they had figured out this conspiracy that somehow the government had not told the people on their way ahead of it. If their self-image is, I could not be wrong about this. I get this sort of stuff right all the time. And then they're clearly wrong. There's a photograph right in front of them. That might cause them to hallucinate that they see the photo differently. So essentially the rationalization or the hallucination gets us kind of back to zero. If we get some evidence in our face that says you're so wrong about this, we have to kind of reset our expectations. We either have to change our entire identity the way that we see ourselves or we have to go, what, those photos?  That's not the same guy. And that's just an easier calculation for our brains to make. Is that what you're saying? Yes.  Let me tie this to something fun. Sure. I know I've talked about the idea that we're a simulated universe and that some creatures built us to believe we're real. The idea here, and by the way, they're credible people for your listeners who believe this. Yeah, I think Elon Musk is one of them. Am I wrong about that? I believe I heard that. Yeah. So it's not a they're scientific scientists and philosophers who think this is worth a look. And the idea is that as soon as one species is smart enough to create a simulation that also thinks it's real, they'll probably make more than one. And they might make thousands of them. Maybe it's a game that kids can do. They can all make their own civilizations. So the odds are that it's very unlikely that we're an original species when there will be so many copies. So if we're a copy, then we're programmed, meaning that there's trying to conserve resources as all programmers do. It is unlikely that they would build a universe that had everything in it just in case somebody sought. That would not be any way to program anything. You would only do it as needed. But here's the fun part. You would also want to make sure that every person's experience was as easy to program as possible. So if you believed that we had had lunch yesterday, and I believed we didn't, and we get together when we realize we have different beliefs about this, one of us has to change. And it's much easier instead of having us rewrite our history and all that and all the things that was connected to for one of us to say, oh, now suddenly I'm spontaneously hallucinating that it was somebody who looked like you and yeah, I got that confused. But none of that might be true. In a simulated universe, the programmer is just trying to reconcile the problems without creating a permanent history that's objective. So this is kind of like all eight levels or eight worlds of Mario Brothers do not exist inside the TV at one time. The only thing that exists is the frames you're looking at on the screen while you're playing. And if somebody else is playing Mario Brothers at the exact same time, they're playing their entire, they're playing their own game. It doesn't have to reconcile with whatever you're doing at home in your living room with whatever they're doing at home in their living room.  Those are completely different movies. And the fascinating thing is that until something violates one of them, until somebody sees something that you just can't explain away, the program doesn't need to reconcile them. We can just both live and procreate and there was never any reason that we needed to reconcile them. How do we spot cognitive dissonance and then maybe short-circuit it? Is it possible? I think the best you can do is to figure out who got triggered, at least more likely got triggered. So if I, if you'll allow me to use the election example, people who supported Trump were optimistic he would get elected. They knew lots of people who voted for him. So when he got elected, there was nothing necessarily that I can see that would have triggered any kind of cognitive dissonance. But if you were positive this monster could never be elected and then he was, you have to rewrite your whole idea of the world you're living in. So it is far more likely that if, if members of those two groups disagree, it's more likely that the one who has an obvious trigger for cognitive dissonance is the one in it. That doesn't guarantee it because I suppose you could also be invisible to your own trigger, right? You know, the whole point of cognitive dissonance is that when you're in it you can't see it. But maybe, and this is really speculation on my part, maybe you could find the trigger and say, well in this case I had a trigger or the other person had a trigger and that might give you a hint. Yeah, maybe. I mean, I thought for sure this is going to be a trouncing of the nth degree and then when that didn't happen I remember waking up and going I clearly live in a bubble where only I only see people who have similar opinions to me. I need to fix that because this is so wildly wrong. I really thought it was going to be like over before I even felt tight, you know, the whole long evening, right? I thought, I'm going to be in bed as soon as I'm done with dinner because it's not even going to be close and we're going to wake up with what we all thought was going to happen. Now, based on your earlier comment the fact that you are not strongly aligned with any particular group allowed you to reinterpret your situation fairly rationally. I mean, what you just said sounds totally rational to me. It's like, oh, I just realized I was in a bubble. Yeah, I just went, holy California, I got to travel more or something. But you realize that 40% of the country said Russia. Right. Yeah. It had to be Russia or there are way more racist than we ever imagined. You know, so everybody came up with their own story about why they were wrong. Yeah, the racism thing made me quite sad because it sort of, there were a lot of people that said anybody this person is racist and I just thought like, I don't know if we want to run headlong down that track just yet. That seems pretty, it's maybe I'm delusional again, but I really don't want to think those types of negative things about the country that we live in. I don't want to bury my head in the sand if those things are true.  Although some of my friends who voted for both either party, we're certainly in that camp too. I don't want to always assume the worst about somebody who disagrees with me because I think that is a toxic mindset to have. Yeah, and both sides do, in fact, assume the worst.  And I'm sure that's true of the extremes on both groups, but it certainly misses, you know, 85% of both groups. In Wynn Bigley, you have some tells that you talk about with rationalizations, things like looking at cognitive dissonance and saying, all right, if we have a certain rationalization that is just beyond absurd, that's a tell. And there was also different tells, the variety of tells that people have were also good indicators. Can you flash that out for us? Yeah, my favorite one is, on Twitter, you'll see somebody start the sentence with, so, and then they'll misinterpret what you said as a, what I call, you know, a crazy absolute, you know, it's an absurd absolute. So if you say, for example, I'm in favor of, you know, guns, then somebody will say, so, you're in favor of giving a toddler a loaded gun in a crib.  And you think to yourself, how could anybody have interpreted that as giving, you know, that extreme absurd absolute. But the person, I used to think that the person who would say such a thing is just a bad debater.  Yeah, they're just saying whatever they need to say because that's the other side. But I now see that as they hit cognitive distance because whatever I said must have erased all of their good reasons. They actually had to reinterpret what I said until it didn't make sense so they could still be right. And when you watch somebody reinterpret what you say as an extreme absolute, it's like every time.  As soon as you see that, you know that they've accepted your argument, but, you know, at least it makes sense to them, but they can't live in that world so they've got to rewrite their, their personal history. That sounds like me arguing with my wife. I know she's right, so I have to think of the most extreme situation in which she would be wrong and that's the one I'm going to bring up in the car in the way here. Yeah, she's very familiar with that. Jen, you know all about that? Yes. Yes, she knows all about that. One of the tells that someone is engaged or indulging in cognitive dissonance was that there are one person explains it this way and another person explains it that way and there's a hundred different explanations and they all kind of lead to the one conclusion. Right. So right after the election, CNN published some long list of all the different reasons that people got it wrong and Trump actually won and they're all different and, you know, if you see that many different reasons for something, it means that nobody knows the reason which means that maybe they don't want to accept the reason. So, yeah, that's a red flag when you see lots of different explanations and everybody's looking at the same data. That's the thing. If everybody were looking at different information then different explanations make sense but if they're looking at the same stuff and they've had the same brains and they've got 24 different reasons to explain it, probably none of them are right. But can't there be multiple explanations for the same phenomenon or for the same result? Well, there are multiple variables so you could have a situation where, you know, lots of things were 2% of the answer. Sure. But when you're trying to sell it as the reason, you know, it would be reasonable to say, okay, well, there were a whole bunch of things and maybe this was 2% and this was 1%. Had somebody said that, I would say, oh, that's a reasonable person who is not in cognitive dissonance at all. But when you look into it and there are so many different things and you say, well, the reason is sexism. Right, Hillary ran a bad campaign on sexism and racism. Those could all be right though, right? Well, they could all be 1%, 2% of the problem and they're all complicated because it could work both ways in some cases and, you know, yeah. So if anybody says the complicated version likes, well, there are many variables. We can't suss it out. What I said was that persuasion would be a better predictor and then it did in fact predict a number of things along the way as well as the final result. But I still present that all the humility that I can muster as what I call a filter. That is to say, it seems to be that we don't really have a good sense of reality. Nobody does. We all have movies in our heads that are our personal reality. So the experiment was if you pick this variable, does it help you predict better than other filters in the world? So it doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean there's even an objective reality necessarily. But we can observe because I predicted publicly and I said, I predict this and then you can see if it was true and they were good predictions. Right, because there's a lot of folks out there that go, all right, guy gets lucky predicting a Trump win now I got a friggin' book in front of me? Come on, man, you're giving yourself too much credit. And it sounds like what you're saying is maybe we'll never know. I always make fun of the fact that somebody becomes a millionaire or they start a company, everything goes right and then the first thing they do is write a book. It's like, hey, well, everything I did must be the right thing to do. And of course, there's just no logic to that. Some people were going to succeed. You know, it was a thousand variables. Every one of them had to line up to make this happen. So you should be cautious of someone who writes a book and said I succeeded and therefore you should do it this way. So I try to write books that say here's a process you can try it yourself. It doesn't cost you anything to make your own decision. Is that called survivorship bias? Is that the fallacy that is involved with that? I always mix these things up. I think that's what it is and what I mean by that is an example that I see all the time is when we go to these entrepreneur events. Right now we're at the Nasdaq Entrepreneur Center and there's a lot of events here and sometimes you'll hear someone say you know, I'd like to think the talks here are better but sometimes you'll hear entrepreneurs say things like you know, just follow your passion. But the problem is when Mark Cuban or somebody says something like that he can say that and we see it because he's on Shark Tank. There's a lot of other people who believe the same thing and they live in the basement on their mom's couch because that's not good advice but it sounds really good and it certainly sounds better than be in the right place at the right time, work really hard. Here's how you manage a team of talented employees. Here's how you recruit those employees. Here's how you outsource manufacturing to China in a cost-effective way.  So the way I dealt with luck in my own career is I tried lots and lots of stuff and I waited for something to catch on but you never know which one in advance you never really know which one's going to work. I think we had somebody on the show in the past and Jason you're going to have to look this up and maybe we'll have to record a make good but he talked about the role of luck and how when he was doing studies of entrepreneurs and things like that, we all minimize the role that luck plays in anything that actually gives us an advantage because as a culture we don't look at things that are considered lucky and say this is a good thing to have on my side because we don't believe in magic and things like that it's a very western concept whereas if we do look at luck and we go, wow, I am so lucky that I started this podcast and that I had learned good work ethic from my father and I stuck with it off from my law job, that was actually lucky and then I kept doing this and now I'm in this great place and interviewing all these great writers and things like that, that looks like luck if you've really examined all these right things that fell into place but it's much nicer for me, my ego to say actually you know I just had a really good vision and I stuck to it because I'm very tenacious and I'm a hard worker and all these other things happen to me but I persevered anyway and no, luck of course not I earned all of this there's also a weird connection between perceived luck and your attitude so there actually were studies Dr. Richard Wiseman studied whether people had luck and he found that you can fake luck meaning that if you say to yourself I'm lucky, something good's going to happen it turns out it changes your perceptual abilities it sets your filter differently so if you expect luck even if you're just talking yourself into it you're more likely to notice something or even maybe do something a little bit differently so it's sort of a way of programming yourself to notice luck that was going to happen no matter what you just wouldn't have noticed before Is that called the reticular activation system? Yes, that's one of the names for you it's your ability to for example, pick out your name in a crowd when everything else is just crowd noise once you set your focus on something you just start noticing those things which matter to that focus and that's fairly well documented Why do you hate analogies so much? I use analogies all the time on the show to teach and illustrate concepts and I'll often get an email Scott, Adam says that analogies if you use those, you've already lost probably nothing is more misunderstood than my view of analogies so let me see if I can for the first time ever clearly explain what I mean analogies for explaining a new concept are excellent so I'm not saying analogies are bad all the time I'm saying that nobody ever won an argument with an analogy so nobody ever said well you've got a mustache, Hitler had a mustache apparently you're going to invade Poland so that's the sort of way people try to win an argument with an analogy but if you're trying to say if you're trying to describe a zebra to someone who'd never seen it you'd say well it's like a horse and it would get you there faster so analogies are an excellent way to describe a new concept but you're never going to win an argument with an analogy because you're arguing about something that you've set up that isn't what you're actually arguing about every analogy gives the opponent infinite ammunition to attack because the analogy is imperfect by its design that's what an analogy is it's not the thing it's something that just has something in common with the thing so you know that your opponent who is not going to be swayed at all is going to say well look at all the problems with that analogy ABC it's completely different because of this you can never get to the end of that path so analogies are useless there's so much in Win Bigly that has to do with persuasion and things like the power of slogans the power of color association the power of contrast I'd like to wrap with the concept of strategic ambiguity because as soon as I heard that I went oh my god I think I see this all the time and I think I use this all the time and never knew what that was called can we talk about why this is so effective well first of all what is it and why is it so effective so strategic ambiguity the way I use it in this context is when you present let's say a politician says I want to do this or that it's stated in a way that everybody gets to hear what they wanted to hear so for example when well we don't want to use Trump examples but we can we can use it I just don't want people to go this is all BS because we're talking about somebody I don't like because then the whole thing is lost but I think Trump's examples are perfect for this because he's the one using it and it's what the book is about so there are people who think that he is super tough on immigration because he's a racist so in other words they are racist themselves and they probably think hey this is great we found one of our own but there are people who are not racist just regular Republicans who don't see anything like that they just say border control is just normal business for protecting the country so their frame is completely different but both of them can see in the way that the president talks their own message now some are going to call that the secret racist dog whistle but I would say that the secret whistle is present anytime there's ambiguity anytime there's any lack of clarity people are putting their own interpretation on it if it happens to be a topic of racism then people hear the magic whistle if it's some other topic then they just get a different opinion about what the person said but since we're kind of locked into our previous opinions of the world any ambiguity it lets you see whatever you want to see so basically our mind fills in the blanks and if we're strategic about our ambiguity we're doing we're saying or doing something deliberately so that other people's minds will fill in the blanks yeah take my example of writing about president Trump's persuasion but not backing him on policies so that that's ambiguous because people don't expect you to say anything positive about the side you're not on even if you're talking about a narrow part of that right it just doesn't fit with people's idea that you need to be on the left of the right so it gives people on the left a reason to like me because I say I'm left to Bernie you know but only with practical plans and people say oh I'm left to Bernie too so I can like him but other people can say oh you wrote about this guy I don't like so I hate him so I've created this strategic well I've created ambiguity it wasn't strategic in this case maybe a little too late but it does allow me a little wiggle room so if somebody says my god you've aligned with this monster I can say read everything I've said my policies are completely policy preferences are completely different so I have at least that ambiguity working for me Scott is there anything else that you want to communicate to the AOC audience I know we've gone an hour in change now and I want to make sure that we're respectful of your time well whenever I mess that question I immediately go blank that's like the go blank yeah that's the idea strategic blank ability but if I were to let me summarize some of what I call the strongest techniques alright we talked about making people think past the sale that's a strongest technique but it's not like the strongest among the strongest would be contrast right the ability to set up you know this thing is horrible and this thing is great and that's something you see the best politicians do they don't just say hey you know we can improve my idea is good that doesn't create contrast you want to say Obamacare is the worst thing in the world is falling apart everybody's going to die and I've got this plan that's the best thing in the world is going to give everybody healthy so if we can abstract from the politics and the facts persuasion wise the greater the contrast the better you can you can make the persuasion how is that different from just hyperbole because it sounds like just hyperbole this is the best and this is terrible how is the power of contrast different of course it seems like hyperbole fits into a larger circle that is in this case you're using hyperbole to create the contrast is there another way that we could do this that that might seem maybe a little bit less right on the nose I mean I think everybody knows that we can just exaggerate in two different directions yeah well let me give you kind of an easy one let's say you wanted to attract a mate and you weren't using just online dating which I suppose everybody would just do now but if you put yourself in a situation where there's something that you can do well compared to the other people then people are going to say oh in this narrow field of whatever we're doing here it's a sport or whatever it is this one person is good so that kind of contrast makes you look like you're genetically advantaged in some way at least you're good at this one thing and that just triggers people automatically to say oh I guess I need to mate with somebody who's got good genes to do this thing that's why I started podcasting right Jen worked really good at something super nerdy like podcasting and all the ladies will come well that was good until I showed up and then your contrast went to hell for the record that's not true but it totally makes sense right that somebody who's really good at dancing would maybe do better in a mating scenario where dancing is involved well but for the contrast you don't want that person who's a dancer to go where all the good dancers are so you have to go to the dance club where everyone else stands on the wall and you're the one that's down on the dance floor I have a friend who shall remain nameless he's fairly well known but he took up dancing a really high level of dancing where you go to the club and people form a circle because they go oh my goodness this is somebody who's semi professional so he actually bought he hired dancing coaches and everything so when he goes to the club the contrast between what he's doing and what everyone else is doing is so shocking that he becomes everybody's friend and it's this amazing social experience and he did it through entirely the power of contrast Scott, thank you so much the book Win Bigly out October 31st so by the time you listen to this you can go and buy it and you will never look at television the same way because you can look at these examples and look if you're anti-trump or you're super pro-trump this will be interesting to you for different reasons I would imagine but it will cause you to look at behavior differently and I think that's the win I think that's the big win I think that's the unity the universe itself thank you very much


So I'm Yaoqi, the founder of all layer. So at all layer, we are basically building the runtime execution and the elastic scaling layer for Ethereum. So before we dive into all layer, we want to know what kind of fundamental problems we want to solve, right? So right now, we know Ethereum pulls a merge. And later on, we will also have this proto-dank sharding, and lots of scaling solutions will be applied sort of on Ethereum.  But at the same time, as we can see, for the past two years, there are more and more popular applications, like x infinity, dy dx, and also upcoming more and more games, which already have millions of users and have to handle sort of tons of million requests every day. So in that case, as you can see, for the past two years, we encounter a lot of network congestion, gas war, even for some FTE, sort of mint. Like one example on Ethereum is this other deed, like FTE mint, right? So basically, people probably pay more gas fees than the mint fees. It's not just sort of the scenario on Ethereum, but also on some highly scalable blockchains. Like Polygon, we had these sort of sunflower game, right? By the same time, just like so many transactions and congestion in the network. Same issue to arbitrom. Basically, we had a very successful campaign to onboard more users. But at the same time, it's just so popular. And at the same time, the network was so congested, and then they have to pause until the arbitrom natural came out, so they can resume such campaign. So how we solve these kind of network congestion problems for general purpose at once? So one sort of thing we observe, and basically, on our side, we want to propose, is about these application tailored L2 execution layers. That's something like, when we feel like there will be some network congestion for the application, so the application probably can just bring off a dedicated layer for them to handle these transactions. And in that case, all the transactions and requests can be handled on dedicated layer, and later we can roll up all the states back to the L1s. And that's how either we call this elastic layer too, or we can call L3. So some metrics, as you can see, right earlier, we can really provide very high throughput, like sort of execution environment, with very low sort of transaction fees, with very fast finality. Like right now, some metrics with some updated, and basically, we can achieve sub-second blood time, and even with tons of $1,000 transaction per second. Meanwhile, also support both EVM and also Wazen. So there are two products we would like to provide. The first one is sort of short-lived application-dedicated roll-up, and we call flash layers. And later on, I will just share with you why we want to have this short-lived flash layers. And meanwhile, there's persistent roll-up solutions quite similar to the other existing optimistic roll-ups. And the idea to have the flash layers is quite straightforward for lots of demands and requirements from the applications. Because as we can see, right, for a lot of empty projects, one of the biggest sort of campaigns is the empty mint. Also, sometimes it's an airdrop. For this short-lived campaign, right, typically only lasts for a few seconds or a few minutes. In that case, they can just sort of click a bunch of buttons via our dashboard, and protocol will automatically spin off a dedicated layer to handle the meaningless requests for the empty mint. The user can just do the empty mint, and everything will be handled properly within a few seconds or minutes. After that, protocol will automatically roll-up all the states and FTs back to Ethereum without sort of any, like, third-party interaction. Like, at the same time, right, apart from the empty mint, we also want to provide very smooth user experience. In that case, there will be sort of first-come, first-serve, and also a bunch of add-ons to make sure it can relatively easy to onboard empty projects and also for some game projects. Beyond that, as you know, right, for a lot of games or even some directed exchanges, they want a dedicated layer, not just for a short period of time, right, also for a long time, for months or even years. In that case, we will have this typical optimistic roll-up for it. Agent like our platform, right, the performance is quite good at the same time. It's both EVM equivalent and also wasm compatible. Beyond that, we also have a bunch of implementation for the like clients. For example, in the future, users or developers can just run the like client or the verifiers in their browsers. In that case, they don't need to wait for the confirmation from the L2 network, so they can quickly verify the latest transaction or the latest block themselves. In that case, it can further shorten the sort of a challenge period, and plus with some hardware hardened sort of verifiers as the challengers, so we can further sort of really reduce the verification or even the challenge period. Beyond that, right, as we all know, there are a bunch of state of art and new ZK libraries and also a bunch of game and metaverse SDKs which are not solidly compatible. In that case, we still want to support these libraries, so we have this wasm compatibility, so we can allow the developers to deploy these libraries and later they can use the solid contract to call these libraries to really have a versatile execution environment for the applications. Beyond that, right, we also did a bunch of sort of campaigns and use cases ourselves to show up sort of the capabilities of all layer. One night, we did one of these OG Badge Mint like two months ago. We got over 12,000 people participating in this campaign, and all the FTs minted within 18 seconds on the dedicated sort of flash layer, as I mentioned, right? So after the FT Mint minted within minutes, so the protocol can automatically roll up the FTs back to Ethereum. So right now, everyone can just treat the sort of FT around for a price of 0.6, either or something. And another sort of example is about game, and we hosted this community round for that four weeks, like three weeks ago, and we attracted tons of hundred players to play the game, and basically we precise around $100 transaction per day. The feedback we got from the players that I basically didn't really notice is fully on-chain games, so the performance and also experience are quite good. And in that case, as you can see, apart from these good performance and also seamless experience, we can definitely support both NFT and also game projects. Yeah, and right now, like last week, we launched the EVM equivalent testnet, so everyone can just try out the sort of the product for both of the systems. And beyond that, soon we will just connect to more L ones, especially the EVM compatible ones, and just try to provide a much better solution for both NFT and the game, and also derivatives exchange applications. Yeah, that's sort of like all about the earlier, and if you want to find more information, just feel free to DM me on Twitter. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you so much, big round of applause.


Look at fighter aircraft before World War II. It doesn't work real well. And it doesn't work really well. Where is the clicker? Oh, I guess this is a clicker. Right. And you see a fighter that worked out rather well. An amazing fighter, actually, because it's an accident. You realize that until 1940, there was no expectation of even buying the Hellcat. And then suddenly someone from the Navy procurement officer said, I understand that the plane you're buying may not work out right. And there's this alternative. And Navy's always been very good at that. By the way, am I audible in the back? Am I OK? It turned out rather well. You could argue it was a very successful airplane in the Pacific. I always found it more attractive than the Hellcat, but that's just me, than the Corsair rather. That's just me. Very forgiving airplane. But I was interested in how you use them and where they go. The other thing is, while I was doing this book, I was doing a project at the War College on wargaming between the wars. And as you read the war games, and I did, and I don't think anyone else has, because I would not recommend that as a light entertainment, as you read the war games, you realize that they were extremely important for the Navy. The war college at that time was the Navy's lab for understanding what a future war would be like. You've got to realize no one had ever imagined actually fighting a Pacific war. It's a horrible problem. It's an enormous ocean. And the first question is, well, how do you cause the Japanese to surrender? How do you do it with not a lot of troops? Because when the warplanes are drawn, no one can imagine forming a 12 million man army that's not in the cards. And what happens way out there in the Western Pacific? Oh, and by the way, the Japanese own the islands past which you've got to go, the mandates. This is just some difficulty. So one of the things the war college does is every year it plays a big game. The big game lasts about a month. It's the only game in which the junior and senior classes both play. And the big game simulates the war plan. In fact, in 1927, the president of the college says, this is the most important thing you're going to do. This is the rest of your careers. You pay attention to this game. Well, they played a game in 33. And it turned out the war plan didn't work. That's really what being a lab is about when you find out things better change. What happened was that the plan until then was called the through ticket to Manila. The through ticket to Manila was that the fleet goes straight to the Philippines. Once it's in the Philippines, it has a base. It fights the Japanese fleet. Once the Japanese have been wiped out, we can blockade Japan and strangle them. And the theory in all these war plans is if you want to beat the Japanese, you strangle them, which makes a lot of sense to what we did in the end. What happens in this game is the Japanese get Manila, but they don't get the southern Philippines instantly. But all there is in the southern Philippines is anchorages without facilities. So the fleet fights a battle on the way out. In this battle, the Japanese lose, but they don't get wiped out. The trouble is that in the course of beating them, we take a lot of underwater damage. And at that time, the college had a commentator, a captain, Van Orken. And Van Orken was a man of very strong views, and he was willing to say things. And he says, oh, you think this was a real victory, right? Well, there's a little problem. Once you get to these anchorages in the southern Philippines, there were about three places that had them on. The Taui Taui, Malampaya Sound, and there was another one. I've forgotten. It doesn't matter now. Well, you get there, right?  And there's nothing to fix you. You're stuck. You think this is a real good result? Well, no, it isn't a real good result. Then they played another game the following January, I guess, in which it was assumed that magically they'd repaired the fleet. But the Japanese is still coming. And the fleet is the only reason the Japanese don't overrun these anchorages. But the fleet needs support. So there's a convoy coming. And the question is, well, what happens when you go out to meet the convoy to bring it in, and the Japanese army turns up in your rear? And the answer is very bad things, surprise, surprise. So Van Okken writes this up. And I think the only time in history, this thing is sent to CNO. Oh dear, this was not a good thing to discover. The war plan changes to what we actually do, which is we go step by step. Now you don't think that has anything to do with fighters. It has a lot to do with them. Because what happens when you go step by step is real different. If you're going to go straight through to Manila, as you pass through the mandates, the Japanese bomb the living daylight side of you unless you can wipe them en route. So a lot depends on whether you can bomb their airfields. A lot depends on whether you can take their airfields out permanently. In a lot of these war games, the way you take airfields out permanently is you drop gas on them. If you're going step by step, then you seize an island. That becomes a base. Now you can use that as a base to attack other Japanese bases further in as you move forward. Also, it's not necessary to do with a carrier. You can do it with big flying boats with bombs. And at that time, briefly, it looked like flying boats could be as high performance as landplanes. Good luck. It doesn't work, but things change. That's why we buy a lot of seaplane tenders, because we're going to move everything forward. And if you look at the designations of the big seaplanes, they get a bomber designator. They're PBs instead of just P's.  It means they get serious bombs. Now the role of the fighters is going to change also. Because when you look at the fleet going all the way through, the fighters have to beat off land-based aircraft. So the fighters have to have the highest possible performance. You can't tolerate garbage fighters. Now you may think that's obvious. But if you look at another big Navy, the Royal Navy, they believe that somehow airplanes that operated off ships were inherently worse than airplanes from land. But since all they were going to face was shipboard aviation, they didn't have to have high performance. There's a logic to it, but the words wishful thinking come up a lot when you read about British comments. I think we were more realistic. I think we're much more cold-blooded and it shows in our successes. Well, here's what fighters do in this case and later on. The season air superiority is very difficult. The only way you can really do it is wipe out the other guy's air. And I don't think we ever thought you could do that. If he doesn't have a lot of air, you can wipe it out. And that's really what the maritime strategy was later on. I was involved in that stuff. The fleet air defense is very hard to do unless you have radar because you don't get enough warning. There was a lot of talk about how you would get warning, not so much about how you would use the warning. Just before the war, we in the British both get very interested in standing air patrols. I'm not talking about a combat air patrol. I'm talking about what spots the other guy coming in. And there was a lot of talk of using cruiser spotting planes for that purpose. I don't think that we ever tested it. I don't think it was for real, but I don't know. You don't get much discussion of how to do it. You find it in handbooks of how you operate your aircraft off the carrier. But you don't find it very much in, say, operational discussion. And the one thing that war college couldn't simulate when it wanted to pretty badly was air to air combat. There's a lot of discussion in their records of the problem of trying to make sense out of it. And then there's the strike support. If you're going to get it mostly by attacking the other guy, well, he's going to try to beat you off. You need escorts. So you need a combination of very high performance and very long range. And that's hard to do. So if you look back just before the war, the Bureau of Aeronautics thinks it's almost there, but they can't really get there until they have a new generation of engines. And that's the World War II fighters. Oh, I'm sorry. This is the gaming thing I've talked about. And I don't think that people have realized how important gaming was. I think that one of the parts of gaming that mattered was that if you came to Newport and you weren't an aviation guy, you learned about what aviation would do. And you learned by doing. That was a big thing about gaming. When you look at the records of the War College, most people focus on the lectures that are easy to find. And what I'm thinking is, remembering school, the lectures don't do it. You've got to do it. OK? The effect of the treaties, the War College advised about the treaties, but his advice is generally disregarded. On the other hand, when it came to we've signed the treaty, now what do we do? They had real influence. And you see that in cruiser designs into war. This is what I told you about how we were supposed to fight Japan. And in each case, you need a lot of air. Oh, and the other thing about these war games is pilots get used up like water. And so although we didn't have the money for a big pilot training scheme, I think that everybody who went through Newport realized you had to have a lot of reserve pilots. And once we have some money, we start doing it for real. We do it much more for real than anybody else. The British don't. And you know that the Japanese didn't. And I think that we could not imagine that there would be that stupid. And that had real effects. All right. How do you get air superiority? You hit their bases. Until you have radar, it's got to be preemptive. If you're lucky, and it's a carrier on a carrier thing, you hit the carriers first. So if you look at an American carrier in, say, 1940, you'll find that there's a squadron of scouts and there's a squadron of dive bombers, the same airplanes, but different jobs. And there's a lot of talk about if you can find them first, you win. The most astounding thing about 1944 and the Turkish shoot is they found us first and they lost. That is the rules changed. Radar changed everything. Fighters needed maximum performance, but you couldn't get it before the new engines. If you look at World War II, there's a jump in engine power that makes a tremendous difference. The fact that we could build engines in very large quantities that hadn't really existed two or three years earlier made a tremendous difference to us. And that's the R2600 and 2800, the 2,000 horsepower engines. Basically, you build an airplane, you make compromises. And the compromises are very difficult because it has to be light and you're trying to get some range out of it and it has to weight. And if you want high speed and you have 1,000 horsepower engines, you basically wrap an airplane around the smallest airplane you could build. That's like a Spitfire or some message meters like that. Once you have very powerful engines, you can wrap a much bigger airplane around them. You're limited in maximum speed by air resistance and what propellers will do. You're not going to get a whole lot faster at the maximum end, but you'll go a lot longer. You'll be armored. It makes an unbelievable difference. I think a Hellcat would weigh about twice as much as a Spitfire. And it's probably not nearly as maneuverable, but boy, it's a lot faster. And it can take a lot worse beating. The Japanese had been fighting in China. They had discovered that bombers would not always get through. The Chinese had real air defense. They found they had to escort their bombers. So they also realized that you had to have long-range high-performance fighters.  And allows the industrial base meant that although they could design more powerful engines, they couldn't produce them in quantity. And that's basically why Zeroes made out of paper. OK, these are Wildcats. They don't look like much, but they're rather impressive. Before the war, the Bureau of Aeronautics split this as one of the highest-performance airplanes around. It wasn't really, but it was very effective and, by the way, it stayed in service throughout the whole war, which is not bad. This is what Buer wanted. It's a Corsair landing on a carrier in Korea. That big engine at the front is what mattered. And you'll know that Corsairs had some problems, but they worked. If I look abroad, I think that the only way you can see who does it right and who does it wrong is to look at other people. Once you look at other people, you can say, geez, we avoided that problem. Boy, did they get stuck. Well, the Royal Navy had the problem of a separate air force that basically ate their air. And the effect of eating their air was subtle. The Royal Navy paid for its airplanes. Nobody tried to stop them from buying the airplanes, although in the 30s, the RAF wanted to kill their air because they thought there was going to be some kind of air disarmament. The disarmament story in the 20s and 30s is very bizarre. They thought they were going to gain air superiority by hitting Japanese carriers first. They also were interested in fighting Japan. And they were good on scouting. They were very good on training. They were very good at navigation. I think probably better than we. I think they were probably better than we were before the war at training observers. Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of them, and the airplanes were lousy. So if there weren't a lot of you at the start of the war, they're going to be a lot fewer. In their internal history, which hasn't been published, they talk about how mistakes they were making in 41 were due to the loss of all their hardly. Now, whether that's an excuse or reality, I can't answer. They wanted to try to get long range. But one of the effects of the RAF owning their air was that if you were a pilot in the Royal Navy, you ended up with an RAF job. So that they didn't have a lot of senior people who had a good feeling for air. I'm not talking about a good feeling for how you use airplanes. They have some very smart people. I'm talking about a good feeling for what the technology meant. So for example, they swallowed the line about how the planes will be lousy because they operate from carriers. They were apparently not very good at seeing anybody else. So when they built their dive bomber fighter to gain air superiority, it could lift a 500 pound bomb. And therefore, when they went for armored hangers, which are their famous armored carriers, that's what they were supposed to keep out. Now you say, oh, that seems sensible. No, we were flying with 1,000 pound bombs at that time. And I think it was fairly public. On the other hand, they regarded us as a lot better. There's a wonderful line where the director of naval construction is being asked what they should reveal to us in exchange for information about aircraft. And he says, reveal everything. We're lousy. These guys are terrific. The crumbs from their table are worth the effort. The inter-service problems are difficult to lay out, but they're obviously very serious. They invent radar fighter control that helps them a lot. It comes in kind of late, but they're pretty good at it. And when you look at actual battles, like there's a big convoy battle called pedestal, they do rather well out of that. They end up being badly hurt anyway, but the Mediterranean is a very nasty place. This is their preemptive strike aircraft. Lousy engine. You want long range, you're gonna get low speed and light bomb load. Now, the Japanese, they recognized that they would get wiped out by air attack. They don't seem to have made any serious attempt at understanding how to defend themselves. I know there were zeros trying to defend it midway. Without any fighter control, they all go to whatever looks interesting and then you get in the back.  They believed that they would find us first and hit us first and it would be over. They did a pretty good job, but we did a better one. The China experience really affected them and I think it determined the way they thought and they wanted long range. If you want long range and you have lousy engines, you're gonna pay for it. You're gonna get killed. Surprise. I don't think we realized what they were doing in China. I don't think anyone had a very good idea of what they were doing. If you look at intelligence before the war, they were pretty good at closing things down. This is a zero, kind of beat up. Very good fighter in 1941, but only as long as it's shooting you down, not as long as it gets damaged.  The point that people miss is that the fighter is a visible part of an iceberg and if you don't recognize the other bits, you miss the point. So there has to be some way of seeing things coming. That isn't the same as knowing what's happening. That's situational awareness. That's what happens in a plot or right now a computer system. Without that awareness of what's happening, you can't give orders to go there, he's coming in. Then there has to be some way of controlling the aircraft and that's a radio issue. And radios become effective for this job as the war starts. And then there's the final part is you gotta shoot him down. We were apparently extremely good at air to air gunnery. And there's some evidence that the British never quite got it. By the way, the Army Air Force didn't get it either. It's a matter of deflection shots. If you don't have all of it, you get killed. Now the other thing is before the war, when the war colleges to run games, carriers got hit a lot. And the question is, well, can you survive hits? Now I had always imagined that if you got hit, carrier was sort of an explosion waiting to happen and that was it. No, nothing like that. The story was that if you got hit in your flight deck, if it was a metal flight deck, it was a shipyard job. And by about 1930, people of the war college are saying, is there anything you can do to do rapid repairs? And the reason we had those flimsy wooden flight decks that everyone laughed at in England, that's to be able to fix it fast. If you look at our experience until the Kamikazes, if you look at, say, Enterprise. Enterprise is famous because she's in almost all the battles in the Pacific. Well, surprise, that's because she didn't spend all that time being fixed. If you took a bad beating on your flight deck and it was a nice steel flight deck that looks terrific, well, as long as it didn't break, you're in great shape. If your flight deck could beat all 500 pound bombs and a Stuka was dropping a 1500 pound bomb on you, unfortunately you wouldn't do very well. So, for example, Illustrious, which is the first of their armored flight deck carriers, it gets hit, I think in January 41 in the Med by a Stuka and it takes something like 11 months to fix it in Norfolk. We're terribly impressed by it. We will admit it, but that if you're gonna face real bombs, you want a lot more structure deeper in a ship. If you look at an Essex, Essex has two armored decks, the hangar deck and one below that. It'll take a lot worse beating. And if most of this literature hadn't originated in the UK, my line would be much more familiar to you. This is jealousy and you gotta remember this book originated in the UK and was imported here, but it was an American writing it so, tough luck. Another fighter role is if you can wipe out the other guy's air, you win. And that's a Turkish shoot in 44 in Philippine Sea. Now the most interesting thing about the Turkish shoot to me is if you read Morrison's account, Morrison is not real good on technology, but he's very good on what people are thinking at that time. And he said the pilots were very depressed because although they shot down all the Japanese aircraft, they hadn't been able to get into Japanese carriers. And therefore they felt they'd not achieve much. I mean, shooting down a whole bunch of Japanese planes was a day's work. Well, what they'd actually done was wipe out the Japanese naval air arm, which is rather nice. The reason they didn't realize, for my money, what they had done was that no one believed that the Japanese could be so incredibly stupid as not to be churning out pilots at a high rate. Now I think there was intelligence to that effect, but what's known, say, in Washington doesn't always percolate. None of you's ever experienced that, right? So they didn't realize what they'd done. When we looked again at the Turkish shoot in the 80s, when it was the outer air battle and maritime strategy, it was boy, is that a good idea. Now at the time, what comes out of it is if you're gonna wipe out Japanese naval air, you gotta wipe out the carriers. When Nimitz gives Halsey his marching orders, Halsey is told to concentrate on the Japanese carriers. Guess what? That's what happens when they go. And people conveniently forget his orders, as far as I can tell.  And so when Halsey goes north, he takes his battleships with him because he doesn't want his valuable carriers to get caught by accident. Nobody gets it. If you look at an actual attack on ships in World War II, it's very hard to sink a large ship. If you look at the sinkings that we achieve, the number of aircraft are very, very large. I mean, I think it's four carriers get Yamato. That's a lot of airplanes. So your view of surfer ships and carriers may be just a little different when you're looking at it that way. If you want to see what happens when you don't understand air, there's a ship named HMS Glorious in 1940. She's caught by a couple of German battleships. She's caught largely because the captain of the ship is having a fight with his air commander. Nobody's up scouting, surprise. It's like he doesn't get it. What did the war college do for us? They got it. That's why guys like Spurwin's knew how to wield carriers really well. That's here. Did a very good job. Okay, the turkey shoot, I've said all of this. I think that the reason that we were surprised by kamikaze was we didn't understand what we had done. Once all of your good pilots are gone, you're stuck. You're very desperate. The Japanese like suicide stuff anyway. Everyone knew that. By 1945, you see analyses in Navy publications saying, actually, if you're gonna lose all your airplanes, you might as well lose them this way. And after the war, Japanese said that to us. I remember reading a book in which a Japanese officer is asked, well, how could you do something horrible like that? He says, wait a minute. All pilots got killed anyway. And might as well get something for it. Now, what happens later? This is later. And the problem with the Russians was standoff missiles. By the end of the Cold War, this could probably attack from 150, 200 miles away. And we realized sometime during the Cold War that although this was quite a nasty threat, there weren't all that many of them. And they had very highly trained crews. So if it's a finite threat and you could somehow wipe it out, that gets kind of interesting. And that's the essence of what we try to do later. So we invented an idea called the Outer Air Battle. The Inner Air Battle was missiles shooting at whatever was coming in, which would mostly be missiles. And the Outer Air Battle was kill the bombers. And the line was, you must have heard it, kill the archer and not the arrow. If you could wipe out these expensive bombers, that was like wiping out the Russian fleet. Once you realize the bombers were the core of the Russian, if you like, anti-ship fleet, that gets kind of interesting. And that would gain the Navy freedom of action. It would allow the Navy to intervene in the war on land. Once you wiped out the bombers, and if you could neutralize the subs, which we also thought we could do, then you could take chances. And the chances where you could go in inshore, you could seize a Jutland after the Russians tried to, you could go after the flanks of an advancing Russian army. Armies don't like their flanks threatened, they tend to pull back. And I don't think anybody outside the Navy understood quite how impressive this could get. And you know that the maritime strategy was very controversial in the Army and Air Force, they hated our guts. We wanted a battle. We wanted a decisive battle. The Norwegian Sea was our favorite place. We thought that the new technology would do it. And the new technology was the computers that finally work without breaking down every five minutes. We had enormous advantage that way that we didn't even realize was the advantage we had. We assumed the Russians also had computers, they didn't. I think it looked kind of good. Now, if the Russians had brought in another generation of missiles, it would have gotten nastier. We had to try to beat off their satellite reconnaissance and things like that. But this is really fighters doing what fighters are supposed to do. And if you look at the Chinese now, in a lot of ways the Chinese play the same game as the Russians. What they get out of the carrier is not clear. There's a sense that when you watch them that we want to have all the stuff that makes you look good like you have without the logic that fits it together. It couldn't happen to nicer people. And to me, this is the symbol of the Outer Air Battle. It's an F-14, which was the long endurance fighter with long range missiles. And the E-2, which would direct it. And the payoff on the E-2 was it could go way out. Would it have worked perfectly? Nothing works perfectly. The F-14s needed new engines. We were putting them in during the 80s. We would have been happier with a lighter weight missile. Phoenix was a good missile, but not as good as you might like. I can talk about that if you want. But if you look at the logic of the situation, I think we rather well understood. It's a rather good story. And in between, if you look at fighters and jet fighters, I talk a lot about the problems we had developing them. I think we were more realistic than others. For example, we wanted every fighter to have a radar. And the reason was, if you're coming at somebody else, and each of you is almost Mach 1, you're approaching at incredibly high speed. If you don't see the guy pretty far out, you're not gonna react. So I read about the British and they have these attractive looking airplanes. And they also had a well known British aircraft rider who said, well, if it looks nice, it's good. Yeah, good luck. They didn't work. We had problems. We had a lot of trouble with engines. Probably if you know airplanes, you know about that. But I think that we did what you're supposed to do. It took a while to make it work. Through the 50s, I don't think it would have worked real well because we didn't have computer combat direction. Once we had it, I think it worked pretty well. If you look at Vietnam, the Navy's combat direction systems were tested in effect. They provided support to aircraft attacking North Vietnam. I think they did rather well. The missiles worked after a while too. And you know we had some spectacular successes. Once the electronics worked, it really worked. Look, I'm ancient enough that the first computer I ever saw, it was an IBM computer, and it was constantly breaking.  Does anybody remember that? And you just knew that if you bought a computer somehow, your life would be repair people. And then it changed. You would buy something in a box, you could drop it and it would still work. It would work when it came out of the box. It was very rare for these things not to work, right? That's a different world. And once you're in that world, this kind of thing works really well. Now there are other problems that come with that world.