12/15/15 – Scott Adams – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Up next, it's Scott Adams, the author of the Dilbert cartoon, and also it turns out a very interesting political analyst other than in cartoon form.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
So I saw you on CNN saying some very interesting things and talked about it here on the show a little bit, and then so I've been reading your blog a little bit more and learning a little bit more about what you have to say about this Donald Trump phenomenon and thought I'd like to give people a chance to hear it.
So if you could, first of all, as you explain on your blog, could you explain the moist robot hypothesis, which I think I agree with just from hearing the title, and then from there, what exactly is a master wizard, if you could say?
Well, the moist robot hypothesis, I wrote about my latest book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, but the idea is that we're essentially programmed computers.
The free will is an illusion, and that if we take care of our bodies, our minds generally go to a good place.
So the idea is that we can be easily influenced by a master persuader, someone who has the talent to know how to program that user interface that is human beings.
And that set of skills is very well known.
Science has tested it.
There's lots of studies about what influences people.
I'm a trained hypnotist by background.
So I recognize in Donald Trump, a number of these skills of persuasion that he himself says he has.
He wrote a book called The Art of the Deal, where he talks about negotiating, and that field of negotiating, hypnosis, persuasion, influence, it's all kind of the same thing.
It's the same set of skills.
Well, that's interesting.
So I've told the story before.
I took psychology and social psychology in junior college just to try to protect myself from this kind of thing.
So I could try to be reasonable and make my decisions based on information and not in an emotional way or some looking glass self way or some victim of advertising or political spin kind of way.
I want the truth, damn it.
And yet I recognize that everybody else in class were going into advertising or government for a living.
And that's why they were there, was to learn how to manipulate people.
I don't know if any of them were ever attained the rank of master wizard.
But, you know, basically, I guess you're right.
At the end of the day, what's reason got to do it?
It's all about how you make people feel.
And if you feed them jelly beans while you tell them your argument, they'll be 75% more likely to agree with you at the end kind of thing.
It's just, yeah, it's like that.
With Donald Trump, it goes way beyond just saying things that people want to hear him say.
Although that actually is a method of persuasion.
If you say something that people, someone is thinking before they've said it, then that's a hugely persuasive thing to do.
They'll end up agreeing with everything else you say after that.
So when Trump did that about blocking Muslim immigration temporarily, he accurately guessed that a large percentage of the general population was thinking that but wouldn't say it out loud.
And polls have backed them up.
So that was not just a good guess and not just a politically expedient thing, which is the way it's being reported.
But it's a it's a deep, persuasive technique.
I'll give you another one.
When Trump talks about whether Hillary Clinton was the worst Secretary of State of all time, or not, that's a trick called selling past the close.
All right.
If he makes you think about the question of who else is as bad as she was, you've already accepted the premise that she was bad.
And all you're talking about is whether she was the worst.
So when you see somebody says some set up a question in that form, it's a car salesman trick.
So when the car salesman says, do you do you think you would like the blue one in your driveway better or the red one?
He's making you think past the decision of buying it.
But that's a pretty cheap trick, isn't it?
That doesn't sound like a wizard technique as much of as much as kind of a hack technique there.
No.
Well, first of all, if you saw only one of the techniques in isolation, of course, it wouldn't mean much.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
But you have to understand that you're getting a blizzard of associations and an influence every time Trump opens his mouth.
But the other thing that's interesting about influence is that you can tell somebody what you're doing while you're doing it to them.
And it won't affect the fact that it works.
So the fact that I told you just how that works, you know, the selling past the close, that doesn't change its effectiveness.
It still works.
So and the other the other big trick that Trump does is he directs energy to where he wants it.
So my best example was during the first debate when he got the gotcha question about his comments about women in general.
And he quickly brought up Rosie O'Donnell, because that just absorbed all the headlines and turned it into sort of a focus on a character that he knew would not be popular with his Republican base.
So he basically just owned the conversation simply by moving it to someplace irresistible that would that would keep the energy there.
And you'll see the same trick over and over.
For example, when Chris Cuomo was interviewing on CNN, this was a while ago, a few months ago, and said, you know, the Pope had some bad things to say about capitalism.
You know, the question was set up to get Trump to disagree with the Pope.
All right, that's what the question was designed to do.
But what Trump did was he didn't fall for it.
He said instead, he said some version of the Pope should be worried that ISIS is coming to take over the Vatican.
Right?
Now, as soon as you get that in your head, you forget what the question was.
Right?
Because as you imagine, ISIS coming into the Vatican and taking over, which by the way, always has a at least one pinky in truth, because ISIS would love to do that.
They would love to do that if they could.
So nothing he says is 100% crazy.
But it's just provocative enough that it takes all the energy to a place where he's strong, which is his opinions about immigration, defense, economics, and away from anything that would be a weakness for him.
And I say Scott on CNN that this what this amounts to is the others have no chance whatsoever.
And Jeb Bush can basically do nothing but cry because as you put on CNN, they're bringing sticks to a flamethrower fight.
And he is just he's a giant stomping and crushing them.
And I can see your point there that there's really nothing that they can do about this.
At this point.
He's he's a couple of clarifications.
First of all, I don't support Trump.
I'm not endorsing him.
I'm rather just analyzing his method.
Sure.
And in my blog for entertainment, I predict that he's definitely going to win.
And I use the the what I call the master persuader filter to make those predictions.
Now, that doesn't mean it's true.
I'm just saying that if you predict things based on this filter, see how it see how it does.
So I use that filter to predict that Carly Fiorita would hit a top in the polls after she mentioned the the dead squirming aborted baby image, because what she did was pair that image with her in people's minds.
And that really is the master persuader, you know, suicide.
So that's something that Trump would never do.
Right.
And it killed her.
I mean, that was the that was the end of the read after that association.
If you look at the closing statements of the last debate, each of the other candidates said something terrible was happening.
The world was coming to an end.
Trump made maybe a quick statement about things are bad.
I'm going to make this place great, great, great.
It's going to be terrific.
Look at all the things I can do.
I'll find trillions of dollars of free money that's overseas and bring it back.
So what he does is he says things that make you simply feel good.
He's not, you know, at least in that example, none of it is a lie.
It's you just focused on things that make you feel good.
Now, you don't have a choice about feeling good when people say things that are images you like.
That's just an automatic association.
But if, let's say, Rand Paul has a good intellectual idea of how we should approach taxes or anything else, that's an intellectual reason.
All right.
Your brain can look at that.
It can reject it.
It can accept it.
Usually it rejects it because we don't like to change our minds.
But Trump doesn't work on that level.
He's not working on the rational level.
He's going for automatic connections.
And he's winning.
It's terrific.
No, I'm just kidding.
All right.
Hold it right there, everybody.
We'll be right back after this break with Scott Adams, the author of the Dilbert cartoon and the master wizard hypothesis about Donald Trump and his control of the masses minds.
It's a lot of fun.
Go read his blog.
It's a lot of great stuff on there.
We'll be right back.
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Well, that was kind of a fitting intro for this interview with Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert cartoon.
Hell, is that even the right way to say that?
Author of a cartoon?
Sure.
I say creator, but author works too.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
Boy, I've been reading your stuff for years and years and years.
I like to think I'm not at all, but okay.
Yeah.
Sorry about that.
Me too.
If it makes you feel any better.
All right.
Hey, listen.
So everybody, Scott has this theory about the master persuader, and he says that Donald Trump is one.
And boy, oh boy, does he know all the tricks for getting people to give him his way.
And he uses them unapologetically.
And boy, is it working in the head to head polls with Hillary.
And of course, he's just way ahead of everybody else.
He's by far the front runner of this campaign.
And he doesn't seem, you know, in the last couple election cycles, the Republicans all had their little Herman Cain, Rick Perry moment, but it never lasted.
But this is nothing like that.
This is just, man, is he way out ahead and staying there.
But so here's the thing, though.
To a lot of us, this guy is a freaking maniac.
He doesn't seem to have any principles whatsoever.
He believes only in himself.
Some of his solutions are things like I will find the most ruthless murderer in the entire Pentagon to kill every last Sunni until their Islamic state is gone.
Or, you know, some madness.
You know, the the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
Yeah, well, a lot of the privileges that we've had are going to have to go and things like this.
And we think, you know, maybe he can master persuade some people.
But some of the rest of us are thinking, you know, boy, I sure don't support any other candidates, I'll say.
But I can I say I support him the least when he's talking outright about violating people's right to pick what church they go to in this kind of thing.
This is madness.
That's the real question, I guess.
Where did he say anything about limiting the rights of legal Americans?
I don't I don't think he said anything at all.
Yeah, no, he did.
Well, the I don't know exactly the frame of the question, but it was a legit newspaper reporter, Yahoo News or AP or Reuters or one of them were they were asking him about closing down mosques.
And then he referred to the Bill of Rights as a privilege and said, well, you know, we're going to have to get used to the idea and we're going to have to get rid of some of these privileges that we have had up until now.
Was he talking about specific mosques?
I don't think he was talking about banning mosques in general.
No.
Yeah, no, I don't I don't mean to imply in general, but it didn't seem like it was going he was going to be discriminating that carefully.
You know what I mean?
It was it was a pretty threatening statement the way I heard it.
But but let me check it.
So this is fun for me because I've actually never talked to anybody with the opinion that you just expressed.
And I've been waiting because I just want to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind.
Yeah, no, of course.
What makes you think, you know, what's in his mind, given that he says loudly and often that he negotiates and asks for outrageous things so he can negotiate back, given that he's that he states that and lives it and demonstrates it in 100 percent of all he has done for decades.
Why do you think it's different this time?
Well, I don't necessarily, but I have a problem.
To me, it's criminal enough almost that he would normalize that kind of thing when it used to be even under George W. Bush that, hey, man, don't be intolerant toward Muslims just for being Muslims.
And Trump is saying, screw that.
You know, anybody who has a minority share of the power, feel free to pick on them one way or the other.
That's the side I'm on, he seems to be proclaiming.
And like the Politico thing said, all the white supremacist groups are getting a big bump because, as the Storm Fronter put it, their biggest problem was demoralization.
And now they're going, yeah, the great white hope, everybody come on.
And all the Klan groups all across the country are growing because of this guy saying basically talking in ways that no other Republican would legitimize that level of bigotry, you know, and so like rounding up all the Mexicans and getting rid of them, that kind of deal, you know, or all the illegals, 12 million people.
But keep in mind, the things you're angry at are the things you believe he thinks, not the things he's proposed.
No, no, I'm talking about the things that he's talked about.
We'll round up all the illegal immigrants and get rid of them.
I'm not saying I think he will actually do that.
I'm saying he's creating an atmosphere where the right is worse than they always are.
And he's helping give a stamp of approval on that from on high.
Yeah, well, that's true.
But let me just drill down on any one of those claims, because what happens is if you drill down on any one of them, individually, you end up saying, okay, well, he's just trying to, you know, do the job of the president, which is get rid of the illegals and keep the legal people in and protect them.
So really, that's just his job description is what he what he described.
I mean, there's no one who thinks the country should have 11 million illegals.
There are just different ways that you deal with it.
Either you're trying to work with them.
And by the way, I would agree with working with people and trying to figure out a way to keep the people have been good, good citizens, if not legal Americans.
I certainly don't care if there are 12 million illegals in the country.
What's illegal?
The government said they can't come in.
I don't care about that.
And a lot of people don't be happy to welcome them all.
But let me what my what's interesting is that Trump provides a plan, which you can hate, but it's not being compared to another plan.
So if you have an opinion on his plan without an alternative, which I haven't heard yet, then you haven't you haven't quite created an informed opinion.
So what would be the alternative?
Oh, you're asking me for one repeal every immigration law.
That's my solution.
That's easy.
And just open the borders.
Yeah, of course.
This is a free society or not.
I accept that as a consistent opinion.
Yeah, I'm a libertarian.
I'm very consistent.
But no libertarian means just get rid of the government's in general, right?
Of course.
Yes, absolutely.
Wars, wars, war and torture and mass rounding up and deportations are the first things to go mass imprisonment and mass.
But if you follow that, don't you become Islamic eventually?
Huh?
Wouldn't the Islamic forces take over wherever there wasn't a government to stop?
Oh, come on, man.
Are you really saying that?
One seventh of the population of the world is all hell bent on one Islamic empire to rule them all.
Is that what you think?
That's what they say.
I'm just I'm just reporting what they say.
Well, whatever.
But if a five year old in kindergarten said the same thing, are you going to go, oh, OK, I guess you represent all the five year olds and you're all coming to get me.
That's completely stupid.
What are you talking about?
It is it is a group of people who have taken over most of several countries already and are planning attacks on other shores.
No, they've taken over where America, by invading, has created ungoverned spaces.
They have filled the vacuum in the smallest part of Iraq and OK, the majority, at least half of Syria.
But that's because America made it that way for them.
That's not because their religion mandated all of this stuff.
Of course, of course.
I'm agreeing.
They're going into a vacuum.
I'm saying you might as well be frightening me with Khrushchev from the 50s is going to come forward from the past to come in and get me or some other ridiculous boogeyman.
No, the American people have there's no enemy state on this planet.
The closest thing we have to an enemy are these jihadist groups.
And our government supports them right now in Syria, where they accidentally supported them before in Iraq and in Libya.
Well, Libya was pretty deliberate.
And anyway, no, all our government needs to do is stop intervening to protect us from terrorists.
They're not protecting us from terrorists.
They created these guys in the first place.
Scott, you know, I'm going to talk to you because you're afraid of what I'm going to say next.
No, no, no, I'm not.
I'm just answering your question.
Please go ahead.
The floor is yours.
Well, you just said that ISIS filled the vacuum that we created.
And you said, why don't we create a vacuum over here by getting rid of the government?
And I'm saying the vacuums get filled.
That's all.
I'm just agreeing with you.
Yeah, but you said it's bad.
People fill vacuums.
Yeah, but I'm saying you're really saying that the likelihood would be the vacuum would be filled in America, not in Iraqi Sunnistan, but in America, it would be filled by the Islamic State and the U.S. government is the one holding them at bay?
I mean, come on.
It would be filled by bad actors.
Tell me more about Donald Trump's magic tricks.
OK, what would you like to hear?
Well, how is it that he gets these right populists to not mind all the completely ridiculous, inconsistent and horrible things that he says and and only see him as their champion?
He even says the problem is wages are too high in America.
And that's why the companies are leaving.
At the same time, he says he's going to make all their wages go higher and they just don't care.
Is it because he has a coin and it weighs in front of their eyes or what is it?
Well, I think the game of getting elected is saying lots of bullshit that people will believe.
And I think all the candidates do that.
I mean, there's nobody on the trail who's saying things that can actually happen.
You know, it's all a lot of magic tricks of cutting expenses and cutting taxes at the same time and a lot of magic.
So his particular brand of baloney tastes different than other people's, but it's not it's not less ridiculous.
See now, here's the point where you and me are completely eye to eye is when when Jeb and the rest of them cry that, oh, Donald Trump is illegitimate.
Karl Rove, this guy is so far out of bounds, whatever.
He's actually on some of these issues.
He's just one click to the right or maybe to the left of them on this thing or another.
And if he's completely illegitimate, they sort of have four fingers pointing back at themselves.
It sure seems like a good way.
Right.
He's he's got some interesting traps.
Take take, for example, his call for banning Muslim immigration.
Well, you don't see until it develops is what a trap that is, because as soon as I asked you for an alternate plan, obviously, that's not your job to come up with alternate plans.
And you had one, I guess.
But if he does that to a standard politician, they have two choices.
They either say, I don't have a plan and then they can't get elected or it's worse.
They say, I do have a plan.
We're going to let people in.
We'll do it in some rigorous way.
And then the odds of something blowing up after that is so high that nobody is going to put their name on that plan.
Hillary Clinton doesn't want to say, I support Plan A and Plan A is what causes a building to get blown up in three years.
She's never going to put her name on that.
So Trump has created a situation where there can only be one plan under discussion and it's his.
Now, you could hate that plan or you can love that plan, but there's only one plan.
All right.
Now, Scott, I'm sorry.
I just want to apologize to you.
I'm actually keeping you over time a little bit, but I'd like to ask you one more thing, if that's OK.
Sure.
About Iraq War Two.
And this is a miracle to me.
This is something that Ron Paul tried so hard and he made great progress, but was never really able to succeed, you know, in any serious way.
But Donald Trump, I think, has has done so much to normalize regret over Iraq War Two on the right.
And he outright just says about Hillary Clinton, for example, you know, oh, I'm anti-Muslim.
She killed a million of them or one hundred thousand of them or something, he said.
And because of her stupidity and her mistakes and her ignorance and this kind of thing.
Well, that's that's the exact same base that supports him with the hardest core supporters of Iraq War Two who hated anyone who told them otherwise.
And here Donald Trump says, oh, no, you're an idiot for supporting the war.
At least she and Dick Cheney were idiots for supporting that war.
And it doesn't seem to hurt him at all with the right.
And I wonder how is he pulling that off where they're able to get over that cognitive dissonance of having to take back their previous position that, you know, me and everybody at anti-war dot com are all a bunch of traitors who should have been run out of town on a rail for no one better back when.
Well, that's part of his magic.
Certainly he can make anybody believe in anything, but there's more to that trick.
Again, when he said Hillary Clinton killed hundreds of thousands of people, the media went scrambling to figure out if the number was really that big or if she only killed 50 or 100.
Right.
So once you have it in your mind that some big number.
Oh, sure.
He always exaggerates.
But God, Trump didn't kill anybody.
All he did is hire a lot of female executives for his company over the last decades when nobody was doing that.
Hillary Clinton actually killed hundreds of thousands of women, innocent women.
She killed them with their policies, he would say.
But again, I'm not taking sides.
I'm just giving you the the Trump persuasion method.
Yeah.
And that really is the thing is he's willing to say things that no one else would ever, you know, would you know, like, for example, the right wing mean that George W.
Bush kept us safe and never mind the anthrax attack and never mind, you know, this, that or the other thing.
And certainly never mind 9-11.
That stuck for years.
And Donald Trump is just like, yeah, really?
And and got rid of it with the wave of his hand, pulled the rug right out from under Jeb and hit his head and everything on that one.
And that was a really powerful argument for a long time.
I don't know how, but they had gotten away with it until Trump said, well, hey, who was in charge on the big day, man?
You know, and that's I think that actually is helping because I consider him actually to be quite a few clicks more dangerous than the average Republican who I think are all pretty dangerous as far as that goes.
But I think he is so funny and I just love him for destroying Jeb Bush and the way that it's happened, reducing Jeb to a crying little baby and everything is so beautiful.
And but I think he really disarms people with that humor that because he knows just what to say to make you laugh while he cuts somebody, you know, and it's but it sort of makes him seem less dangerous than I think he really is.
I don't know if Mussolini ever, you know, really had a great sense of timing for a punch line.
You know what I mean?
You know, the whole fascist Mussolini thing, I get the analogy and I get that he's got the mouth that looks like Mussolini.
But when you when you start analyzing who he's after, they tend to be people who are not Americans to protect Americans.
So his frame is completely different than those guys.
But I do get that there's enough similarity that people are making sort of an automatic connection, very similar to the master persuader theory.
If you were to actually dig into the details of, you know, is he a fascist or is he Hitler?
It falls apart pretty quickly.
But it feels like it totally feels like it.
Even I get that, too.
But rationally, it's not even close.
Yeah, well, I mean, there are some parallels.
It's never it's never the complete hyperbole.
But when you're talking about picking on people because of who they are, then that is something that typically, you know, at least recently in America, we've tried to live down that pass and do better.
And he's bringing that back in a way that is further to the right than what was even the populist right in, say, the 1990s, I think so.
So far, he's only been after criminals.
He's not said anything about a group that we're not actually trying to kill us.
And he's not anti-Muslim.
He's just saying, hey, if nobody has a better idea how to keep us safe, let's do this temporarily until we figure it out.
That's not crazy.
You could hate it, but it's not insane.
All right.
Fair enough.
Hey, listen, I kept you way over time here.
I really appreciate your time on the show, Scott.
All right.
Thanks for having me.
It's very interesting stuff there.
All right.
So that is Scott Adams.
He is the creator and the author of the Dilbert cartoon.
It's blog dot Dilbert dot com for the cartoons and the political writing and all the rest of it.
And yeah, well, see you tomorrow.
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