Name: Scott Adams on The Persuasive Ways of Donald Trump (from Joe Rogan Experience #874)
Uploaded: 2016-11-21T18:23:41.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Scott Adams on The Persuasive Ways of Donald Trump (from Joe Rogan Experience #874)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-11-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Scott Adams on The Persuasive Ways of Donald Trump (from Joe Rogan Experience #874)' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-11-21. Transcript available.

Scott Adams on The Persuasive Ways of Donald Trump (from Joe Rogan Experience #874)

- Hello, freak bitches.
I might have to spark up a joint for this episode.
You just went real deep real quick.
I was hoping, I was hoping it'd go that way.
- Do you want some?
Do you smoke the weed?
- I could do it for the first time.
I'd be willing to try it once. - Ever?
Well, I don't know if I want to give it to you
for the first time.
I don't want you to freak out.
You don't smoke pot at all?
- The truth is I've smoked pot once.
- Ever?
- It was in first day of college,
but I never stopped.
So that's really just once.
- Oh, I understand.
So you smoke pot all the time.
So you did it once and you just kept going.
- I'd be willing to try the second time is what I'm saying.
- I understand what you're saying.
Okay.
So, what has life been like for Scott Adams
during this election?
You came into the, well, you're obviously always well known
for being the creator of Dilbert,
but along this election cycle, all of a sudden there was,
I had, you know, people that I was in contact with
that were saying, you know, Scott Adams is a Trump supporter.
And I was like, what?
Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, is a Trump supporter?
Because, you know, everyone assumes you meet someone
and they're in the creative business.
You know, you're in a creative business.
You write a comic strip.
You would assume that you would be a left wing guy.
Like almost, almost immediately.
- Well, I'm neither left nor right.
I'm sort of all over the place.
My, my views didn't match, you know,
either of the major candidates on anything.
- So you're a free thinker.
- I like to think I'm right and everybody else is wrong.
- Hmm, I would like that too.
- No, I'm actually, my larger philosophical grounding is that,
is informed by my experience as a hypnotist.
I'm not sure if you knew that.
- No, I didn't know you were a hypnotist.
- So in my twenties, I went to hypnosis school
and became an actual trained, certified hypnotist.
- Wow.
- And one of the things you learn as a hypnotist
is that the world is backwards
to the way people normally perceive it.
So normally you see the world as,
hey, you know, 90% of the time people are rational
and doing rational things.
- Right.
- But 10% of the time we just go nuts
and we do stupid things
and it's because something happened that sparked it, right?
That's the normal view of the world.
The hypnotist view of the world is opposite.
The hypnotist says that 90% of the time
we're completely irrational
and we're just making rationalizations
for why we did things after the fact.
10% of the time we're rational,
but that's only when there's no emotional content
to the decision.
You know, you're balancing a checkbook or something,
you know, trying to pick up, you know,
the best route to someplace.
And so that's how I see the world.
And so when I look at either the Trump supporters
or the Clinton supporters,
to me, from the hypnotist perspective,
and someone who's studied persuasion for decades,
I use it in my writing,
I see both sides as completely ridiculous.
And I see both of them are grounded in complete absurdities.
They're just different.
Yeah.
But nobody knows why they're deciding.
The real reasons that people make decisions are fear,
identity, you know, they have some aspiration.
They've got something they're trying to solve.
There's something they're trying to work out.
But the reasons we give are usually completely false.
And the grounding for this is that if you think about evolution,
I assume you believe we evolved?
Yes.
There was no requirement in evolution
that we ever understand our environment
the way we imagine we do.
And here's an example of that.
You could believe that you were a monk,
you know, you're reincarnated from a 10th century monk.
Like Steven Seagal.
Does he believe that?
Yeah, he's like a Buddha or something.
From an actual?
Yeah, like he actually got it bestowed upon him
by some Tibetan character.
All right, so let's use Steven Seagal.
So Steven Seagal can be standing in a grocery store next to,
let's say, a Muslim who believes that his prophet
literally flew to heaven on a winged horse.
Those two people don't live the same reality.
But they both buy groceries.
They both go, they cook it.
They live.
They survive.
So it turns out that understanding your reality at an actual,
you know, I really know what is objectively happening
and I get it and I've got a mental model that's quite accurate.
We don't need any of that.
So it would be deeply unlikely that we evolved such a specific skill
that's completely unnecessary as far as we can tell.
You know, we do need to know that if you run into this wall,
you know, your head is going to hurt.
So there's some basic stuff.
But we're probably all even interpreting that experience differently.
So there's no reason to think that the way I think of it
is the way you think of it.
So I see the world as this big irrational ball.
And I use the hypnotist persuader skills to back up and try to deduce,
you know, what's really driving things.
And when people said I was a Trump supporter,
what they meant was they may have only seen part of what I was talking about.
I was writing about his skill as a persuader.
And what I mean is that I noticed in him the skills that I've developed over
decades for persuasion.
But at a higher level than I've ever seen.
Meaning that he is the most persuasive living human I've ever experienced.
And I mean that in terms of actual technique.
You know, he's full of technique and it's all the time.
I'll give you some examples of that.
First time I noticed it was the very first debate
when Megyn Kelly was asking him the question about the insults he had allegedly
said to women.
Not allegedly, he said them.
And this is a setup that any other politician with this setup is totally
trapped.
Because they can either try to like deny they said it.
And then somebody has a videotape and that doesn't work.
Or they can say, oh, I didn't mean it.
There's almost nothing you can say.
You're just trapped.
And that would have been the end of his campaign.
First debate should have been over.
And if you remember, do you remember what he said?
No, I don't.
She said, you said this, this, and this about women.
And he smiled.
He sort of looked at the audience it looked like or the camera.
And he said, only Rosie O'Donnell.
And the audience erupted in laughter.
Completely unexpected and a place.
Inappropriate.
Provocative.
And what I noticed was that Rosie O'Donnell is a visual image that everybody
shares.
Right?
You've got a picture of her since I say the name.
And for his base that he was catering to, it was an unpopular image.
And one that would just suck all the energy away from the question, which was
toxic.
And really, you know, you can't touch the question.
You just have to suck all the energy into another part of the room and wait for
the time to run out.
And that's what he did.
And it became the headline, blah, blah, blah.
And he, you know, certainly highlighted the things he said about women maybe
more than it would have.
But the way he escaped that got my attention.
And I thought, that doesn't look normal.
All right, that's operating at another level.
And so I looked for more examples of it.
And you could see it everywhere.
And it was especially clear by the time he started saying, well, the other
visual things he does is,
he says, build a wall.
And you can just imagine a wall.
When he says, we're paying too much ransom to Iran for those soldiers.
He says, we paid, you know, 400 million or whatever the number is.
He goes, imagine that money piled up.
It'd be so much money, you know, it'd fill this room.
You can't even imagine that big pile of money.
He always goes for the visual.
Because we know that the visual part of our brain is the dominant part.
And if you can get its attention and get it on your message,
it talks the rest of your brain into anything you want it to.
When he talks about ISIS, he goes visual also.
He doesn't say, they are bad people whose religions, you know, has been
distorted,
you know, to the type of thing you might hear from Hillary Clinton.
He says, they put you in cages and they drown you in the cage.
They chop your head off.
I mean, you can see that.
You're playing moving your head.
Right.
So everything he does gets more attention than everything everybody else does
because he puts it into a provocative picture.
So that was the first thing I noticed.
Then when he got to Jeb Bush and he needed to defeat Jeb because he was the
strongest competitor.
So if he couldn't get past him, there was no point.
And he went after him strong and he went after him fast.
And he went after him with a low energy kill shot.
That's why I call these linguistic kill shots.
It's not just an insult.
It's not just a clever nickname.
And we saw Clinton try to come up with clever nicknames that had no purchase
whatsoever.
Like dangerous Donald.
You know, it just didn't work.
But look at low energy Jeb.
Here's how it's engineered.
It's engineered for confirmation bias.
Meaning that you want the future to make this look like a better nickname every
day.
And you want it to match his physicality.
So before I ever heard low energy Jeb, I had a good impression of Jeb Bush.
I thought, when you looked at Jeb Bush, didn't you say to yourself, this guy
looks like a cool character?
No.
No, but he looked like he was an in control, calm, reasonable, exactly the
person you'd want.
If the nuclear question came up, if there was some big decision, Jeb Bush isn't
going to get excited.
He seemed like a competent CEO.
Competent CEO, exactly.
And as soon as Trump said low energy, could you see him any other way?
He was low energy and he will always be low energy.
And lie in Ted.
No, lie in Ted.
Lie in Ted was beautiful.
Lie in Ted, because you knew that because he's a politician.
Sometime in the next several months, he's going to say stuff that you can say
is a lie, whether
it is or not.
Right, doesn't have to.
But more importantly, Ted has a physicality about him that unfortunately, he's
got beady eyes.
And I've said this before that if you're going to cast a movie, you know, we
need a guy who looks
dishonest.
Right.
It would be his face.
Right.
And unfortunately, I mean, I don't know if he's actually dishonest.
I'm not going to make a judgment.
So who came up with the Zodiac Killer thing?
Was that a Trump fan or was it Trump himself that started saying that Ted was
the Zodiac
Killer?
I think that probably started with a fan.
But so the other thing that was fucking harsh, man, he'd be given speeches.
Are you the Zodiac Killer?
People would scream it out.
Like, imagine having to deal with that.
And did your father kill, you know, somebody?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
His father was, maybe his dad was the Zodiac Killer.
Is that what the...
Because the Zodiac Killer was like the '70s, right?
Might not be old enough.
So...
Crooked Hillary.
Crooked Hillary, same thing.
So...
Crooked Hillary is a brilliant one.
So she wasn't physically, you know, as limber as a young person.
So you could imagine her sort of a little bit crooked physically.
And you knew that there would be stories coming out in which people could say,
"Well, there's another example of that crookedness."
Did you see...
But you thought of that in a physical sense?
Like, the way she looked?
All I thought about is corruption.
I heard Crooked Hillary.
I saw her like with like a burglar's mask on, trying to sneak away with bags
that had dollar
signs on them.
Yeah.
That's what I saw.
You know, if you look at any one of these individually, his nicknames, you
could say,
"Well, it's sort of random.
He just got lucky."
But if you look at them all, they all have that physicality.
They all have the priming so that, you know, confirmation bias will kick in.
Whatever you see after that will just fit the label because it's the first
thing you think
about.
Well, he's a performer.
You know, you can say Donald Trump is a businessman.
He most certainly is.
He most certainly is a real estate investor.
But he'