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Oct. 28, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:54
Scott Adams | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 25
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Time Text
And so Trump comes in, and he goes, huh, I see everybody around me is lying about 30% of the time, and it seems to be effective.
I'll ramp that up to 70.
See what happens.
Hey, and welcome to...
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special, and we have as our special guest this Sunday, Scott Adams.
He is the creator of Dilbert and also the author of Win Bigly.
So you can go check that out.
We'll get into his book and his theory that President Trump is, in fact, a master communicator in one second.
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Well, Scott, thanks so much for stopping by.
Well, thanks for having me.
Really appreciate it.
So let's start off with this.
How did the creator of Dilbert become the Trump guy?
Totally accidentally.
I wrote one blog post in which I thought I saw some skill in him back in 2015 that people weren't noticing.
I thought he had persuasion talents that were unusual.
And I wrote a blog post called Clown Genius, and it was hugely viral, and I thought, well, I'll write one more.
And that was viral as well, and everything I wrote about Trump got more traffic than anything else I was doing.
Which is the same experience of every other person writing about Trump, right?
The universal experience?
I thought it was just me.
But it's so interesting, I can't stop doing it.
I feel I'm actually addicted in some way.
How politically did you end up at the point where the left now considers you a Trumpkin, even though you consider yourself, and you talk about in the book, the fact that you're pretty liberal on a lot of major issues?
Yeah, on the social stuff.
And then the big stuff I don't understand.
If you ask me, what's the best trade deal with China?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Does anybody really know?
But on the little stuff like gay marriage, yes.
Should we have universal health care?
I'd like to see it.
I just don't know how to pay for it.
So, I'm sort of a liberal with an economics degree, so it makes me a hybrid.
And yet, the fact that you sort of consider Trump to be an actual good communicator led everybody to believe that you are deeply embedded in the right now, and that you are, in fact, President Trump's number one proponent.
I call myself a supporter, but I also call myself a supporter of every sitting president.
So, I was an Obama supporter, primarily.
I had one issue with him.
But I support the president, in general.
What was your one issue with Obama?
So, Obama originally said he was going to let the weed business in California alone and in the States alone, and then he got in office and he changed his mind.
Now, that would have been okay with a reason.
You know, here's my reason, I thought about it, here's the new facts.
But without a reason, one must assume there's something going on.
And without a reason, you have to assume he's bought.
Right.
Now, if he had explained it, I would certainly accept the explanation if it was anything reasonable.
But without the explanation, I consider that a remove from office kind of situation.
Okay, so let's talk about your Trump theory.
So, you sort of became famous in Trump circles, obviously.
You were always famous before that for Dilbert and everything else that you do.
But you became famous in sort of political circles for taking this peculiar view in 2015 that President Trump was in fact a communication genius, that he was actually terrific at this, and that everybody who's out there mocking him and thinking he's a fool, that we all had it wrong.
What made you think that President Trump was a genius at communication?
So, I've got a background as a hypnotist.
I was a trained hypnotist in my 20s, and I've been studying all the ways of persuasion for decades as part of my work.
So, to be a good writer, I learned how to word things, how to do marketing, how to do sales, how to negotiate.
These are all related topics.
And when you look at Trump, he's got, first of all, he wrote a book on negotiating.
Sort of.
Sort of.
He read it.
He read it.
But even if you just brand yourself as the negotiating person, it attracts that knowledge to you over time.
So, in all likelihood, he knows more about negotiating than most people on the planet because it's an interest and he does it a lot.
But he also had this weird experience as a kid.
So, when he was in church, his family pastor, I believe, was Norman Vincent Peale.
The author who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, which in a sense is a persuasion Bible for people of those times.
And it was about how to use optimism, essentially, I'll paraphrase it too much, but it was how to think your way into a better situation.
And we see him modeling that all the time.
I don't think it's a coincidence, you know, if you sit in that church with someone who is considered so influential, so persuasive, this is Norman Vincent Peale, He was actually accused of being a hypnotist in his day.
He was so persuasive.
So I think Trump comes by it honestly, in the sense that he's been around it and then he's also developed it over his career.
But beyond that, I noticed a lot of specific technique that you wouldn't notice if you don't study this stuff.
So what were some of the techniques that first jumped out at you that you think President Trump was using?
So, the wall.
Let's take the easiest example.
Visual persuasion is the most powerful.
If you had a concept, let's say you said, well, there are too many people coming across the border, our crime rate is up 5%, or whatever you're going to say.
Concepts don't persuade.
You show a picture of a wall.
And people want it or don't want it.
You show a picture of a caravan of people coming, and people say, that's immigration.
Now I have a visual image.
You'll watch that the president does visual imagery so consistently compared to anybody else in the game.
He's just the most visual thinker.
He simplifies.
Simplifying is hugely important.
Politicians want to act like they're the academic, the smart one, the lawyer in the room.
Yeah.
So their impulse is to get a little bit more complicated than the people they're talking to.
Remember, Trump was mocked for what they say in a fourth or sixth grade vocabulary or something like that.
Yeah.
But if you talk to anybody who's an expert in this field, they'll say, well, what's the audience?
Okay.
He's talking to the audience in the way that you talk to people who, you know, are operating on that level.
Do you think that when he's in private he talks like a British professor?
Or suddenly he sounds like, you know, he suddenly sounds like Ayaan Hirsi Ali behind closed doors?
Well, several weeks ago I got to meet him.
So I was in the Oval Office.
Were you shocked by his mellifluous British accent?
Yeah.
Yeah, the British accent totally threw me.
No, he seemed exactly the same person, just, you know, the relaxed version, you know, in the room.
Although, I'm not sure I've... I'm not sure he ever... He's not the relaxed version?
Yeah.
So, I guess that is one of the questions is, how much of this do you think... I mean, look, he's obviously a guy who gets his message across in unique ways and with a unique sort of appeal.
How much of this is conscious and how much of this is just natural to him?
How much of this is instinct and how much of this is planned?
I think he would say it's something natural that he sort of just picked up.
But he either has an amazing instinct or he's learned more than he remembers learning because his technique is so consistent and it's just nobody in the game is matching him.
Now, the other thing he has is his willingness to do things that would be embarrassing to other people.
You know, his willingness to go outside the box and take the risk.
So if you add his gigantic personality with his willingness to break the edges on everything, you know, almost every tweet he does has a little something wrong with it.
And when I say wrong, I mean perfect.
You know, wrong in exactly the right way.
You know, even his famous, you know, Stormy Daniels horse face tweet.
So, he will consciously pick something that will make you obsess on it because it's the error that makes you focus.
You know, your brain is designed to flush out all the stuff that's normal and doesn't matter.
You know, when I leave this room, I'm not going to remember the scenery or anything.
I'll remember just the key things.
And he's just great at making you focus on the key things and making you think about what he wants you to think about better than anybody ever.
And one of the questions that I have is whether this is a bit of an unfalsifiable thesis.
The reason I ask that is because at the end of the book, you have an appendix where you say, here are the things that I think that President Trump has said that are just wrong.
When you talk about Charlottesville, you talk about some of the other things that you think that the, obviously the Access Hollywood tape, which was before he was running, but it's not a great thing to say.
And how do you decide prospectively?
When you see something the President says, is this an act of communicative genius or is this an act of complete and pure idiocy?
Because there's a very thin line sometimes with what the President says.
So it's the perfect question.
And it's the reason back in 2015 I said clearly and often, I said this as often and publicly as I could, you won't be able to tell if I'm guessing luckily.
Unless I tell you this is a prediction.
I'm going to tell you the tools he's using as he uses them so you can follow along.
And I predict he'll win the presidency back in 2015 because of the tool set, not even because of policies or anything else.
And so exactly to your point, if you can't predict it, What is it, right?
You know, it's just, you're describing the past, and you can fit almost any theory to the past.
Indeed, when Hillary Clinton lost, I think, how many reasons did CNN print the next day?
You know, just dozens of reasons.
Well, here's the reason, here's the reason she did this wrong.
So you can fit any theory to the past, and that's why I was so obsessed about saying, I'm predicting this.
OK, so what do you predict then for 2020, since you already have one data point that is in your favor.
It hasn't been one election.
There's been one data point in your favor.
What do you think happens in 2020?
Well, let me point out that I also predicted the North Korea situation a year before it happened.
So I was predicting for the same reason that Trump's skill set would be uniquely, perfectly suited For the North Korea situation, and so far it's looking like it's moving in the right direction.
We don't know, but everything looks positive.
Back to 2020.
Yeah, 2020.
I mean, that one is, I think we're going to need a little more data before I hand you that one.
Okay.
Just to be fair, just because, I mean, we don't know, like, there's not enough information yet, whether this is just a pushing off play by the North Koreans, or whether they're secretly developing anything, or whether anything has really happened.
But, I mean, they blew up their own nuclear mountains.
But you can see some things that are really positive.
For example, apparently they've reduced their internal propaganda.
And that would be the first thing you'd look for to see if it's real.
Because they don't want to reverse course on their internal propaganda and then have to reverse it again.
Why would they do that?
They would just keep it the way it was.
Right.
So those are all positive signs.
And there does seem to be that the president has a personal relationship, and that might be the key.
It seems to me that the way he played it was the opposite of how it had been played before.
He started with the boss, Kim Jong-un, and said, let's talk.
Let's show you some respect.
Let's make you a player who belongs on the stage.
and then we can negotiate.
As sort of peers, you know, not really, you can't be a peer with the United States, but at least in terms of respect.
And that was probably a key thing.
It probably also allowed Kim Jong-un to say, I can work with this guy, and if I give up some things, I won't necessarily be vaporized.
So there was something about Trump's willingness to talk to anybody, which he's often criticized for, that it's like a superpower.
He can talk to anybody.
He can make a deal with anybody if it's in the best interest of the country.
That is a wildly powerful thing.
Do you think there have been cases where you've over-applied your thesis?
Do you have a perfect record, in other words, since 2015?
I've never been wrong.
Yes, so there are times.
For example, trying to guess the vice president pick.
That was an overreach because really to make that pick you'd have to know about personal chemistry, you'd have to know the biographies, you'd have to know the secret vetting information.
You can't really pick a vice president from this distance.
But had I known that Mike Pence was even on the short list?
He's the perfect choice for vice president because he's sort of the bad version of the president, the boring version.
You know, if you started with Trump and you removed everything interesting about him, it would be Mike Pence.
And I like Mike Pence, right?
There's nothing against Mike Pence.
But all of the fun, the interest, the thing that makes you, you know, look at the president and you can't look away even if you hate him or love him, all that stuff is You know, sort of missing in Mike Pence, who is a top-rate politician.
He just doesn't have the stuff that Trump has.
So back to my question about 2020.
You're looking forward a couple of years here, and obviously the pollsters are, I would say, 50-50 on where President Trump is at this point, because he's riding kind of where he was expected to be, below 50 percent, maybe a little bit above where he was expected to be.
He's 46, 47 in some of the polls.
Do you look at any of the Democrats who are out there and say, this one is a particular threat to President Trump?
Nope.
At this point, I don't see anybody who would be a serious threat.
Kamala Harris, close.
You know, we'd have to see, I'd have to see her in action a little bit more on a sort of a running for presidential, you're running for president kind of basis.
But I think she's got the tools, and that doesn't mean she'll come close.
If things keep going the way they're going, well, take for the fact, Just consider the fact that there was a recent poll that said health care is the number one issue.
It's the number one issue because he's doing so well on other big issues, right?
ISIS is off, you know, off the headlines.
North Korea is looking good.
Economy looking good.
You know, so health care just rose up.
He needs to do something about that.
And, you know, this is my left-leaning part of me here.
Now, I think there's probably a... I think there's a way to address health care.
The Bill Gates way.
Bill Gates recently came out with a set of ideas for dealing with climate change.
You don't have to believe that climate change is man-made or anything else about it, but his idea was to create a portfolio of startups and innovative companies and shine attention on them and say, if these companies do what they're supposed to do, it's really going to make a difference to the climate.
You could do the same thing, let's call it a Republican system for lowering health care costs.
You could have what I call the president's portfolio, just a spotlight, not any government money, but just saying these companies are working on all the parts of health care.
If they succeed, it would dramatically lower costs.
And that's the whole game, right?
You're not going to get to universal healthcare in this country without dramatically finding a way to lower the cost.
Could be regulations, could be technology.
In just one second, I want to talk about kind of the 40 MAGA MAGA, underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry hippos of it all.
One of the things I've spotted on particularly your Twitter following is you'll tweet something out saying that the president has Really thought something through and done something brilliant.
And everybody jumps on it with both feet, who's in sort of the President Trump fan club.
Right.
And this is why he becomes sort of the poster boy for the pro-Trump movement, even though you call yourself a supporter of the president in the same way you've supported every other president.
Do you think that people are sort of strawmanning your argument a little bit online, on Twitter?
Because that's virtually everyone I see.
It's sort of like the Bill Mitchells of the world, tweeting you out and going, well, this is what I've always been saying.
Everything the man does is just pure genius.
So some of it is certainly over-interpreting things.
So a common thing that happens now, maybe every day, is I'll get at least one tweet from somebody saying, here it is again, the thing you predicted came true.
And I'll look at it and I'll think, no, I talked about it.
I didn't really predict that quite that way, but people are starting to, you know, I guess confirmation bias is just kicking in.
If they think I've been accurate before, they just think it's continuing to happen.
But yes, there's absolutely a certainty that some number of things I've said, oh, this is good technique and it's going to work, that some of them I've misdiagnosed.
But I wouldn't know which ones.
So I guess the question about, you know, President Trump's sort of skill set in doing all of this is if he's really, the obvious question is if he's such a great communicator, he lost the popular vote by 2.5 million.
He won in three states by a combined total of 80,000 votes.
The number of, basically, a lot of the same folks who say that President Trump swept the country, did unbelievably well in consolidating a movement, and all this, they're the same people who make fun of Hillary Clinton saying, well, if you'd visited Michigan or Wisconsin once, you would have won.
But assumes that if she'd done that, she would have won, which is to suggest that she, you know, actually blew it more than he won it.
But in this book, you really make the contention that he won it, she didn't blow it.
If he's such a great communicator, why is he stuck at 42%, 43%?
Why did he win 47% in the popular vote as opposed to being sort of over... We've seen great communicators in the past who've been a lot more popular.
It's like the economy.
It depends how you measure things.
If you were to measure Trump on dollars spent per vote, Best ever.
I don't know if that's true, but it's probably true.
I'm sure that's close.
It's probably best ever.
Certainly in modern history.
If you were to look at where he started his popularity within, let's say, the Republican Party on day one, 5%, 10%.
It's now 90%.
So it's nine times bigger than it was when he started two years ago?
Well, part of that's being president, but yes.
Well, yes.
And winning the nomination.
I mean, you get past certain posts and then there's a big spike, right?
Well, success makes you popular, sure.
So if you were to look at that, I would say he's probably influenced more people to turn from not liking him to liking him than maybe anybody in that frame of time, you know?
You know, maybe Obama, because he was sort of a phenomenon.
Maybe Bill Clinton.
But it's rare air that you can turn that many people in that length of time.
And now he's going for the hardcore.
All right.
We don't know if he'll ever make a dent in the Democrats, you know, the real haters.
But you're starting to see people say, you know, I didn't like him, but I sure liked the economy.
I didn't like him, but we sure seem safer from North Korea.
You know, I don't like those judges necessarily, but they're qualified, you know, so you're seeing that kind of talk.
So some of the theories that, you know, you've heard, and I'll admit I'm a proponent of the theory that what, you know, the gal you brought to the dance is not necessarily the one that you leave the party with if you're the president, meaning that what got you to be president is not necessarily what keeps you being president.
The people expect a different thing in the office than they expected getting to the office, and that the skill set may not be directly applicable in terms of communication strategies.
So I've suggested that some of his tweets outweigh the benefits when it comes to, or when he goes in front of a rally and he makes a reference to a congressman body slamming someone in the middle of arguing jobs, not mobs, that this sort of stuff hurts him, that And his fans, I've also argued, his most ardent fans, they don't care nearly as much about policy as about those tweets.
The stuff that they like the most is the affect.
The affect is what is attractive to them, not the policy.
He can dump the policy on the side of the road three quarters of the time.
You actually make this argument a little bit in terms of him moderating his policy, but they stick with the affect.
Do you think there's a point here where he actually does have to change how he communicates in order to reach that middle core?
Because his base is there.
But every time he says horseface, is he winning anyone over in the middle by going horseface about somebody he schtupped ten years ago?
Well, the fun part about this is if you would just go back in time and remember how we felt about these tweets just two years ago.
Whether you loved them or hated them, how did you feel about these tweets?
Your hair caught on fire.
Like, it was like, if you loved him, you'd be like, don't do that, don't do that.
And if he hated him, it was like, well, look what you've done.
And now he tweets horse face about a porn star that he was allegedly got with.
And the entire world went, horse face?
I can see it.
You know, you'd have to agree.
You'd have to agree that the level of hair on fire went to maybe a slight, you know, tingling on the scalp.
And he has the ability to just make us get used to it.
He's definitely inured us.
I mean, there's no question.
After this many levels of acid on the skin, we've developed a certain thickness of skin.
But I do wonder, do you think that... But let me give you a more complete answer to that.
I think there's a portfolio effect here.
There's a diversification effect.
He throws out a lot of stuff.
If you were to go back and say, all right, during the campaign, these 10 tweets, would you have done these 10 tweets, Mr. expert political person, whoever you're talking to?
And the expert would say, no, I would not have done nine of these.
These are all mistakes.
But probably, now that we have the benefit of watching him win, probably two or three were a problem.
And then seven just fired up the base, made it more interesting, collected energy, took attention away from his rivals.
But which of the three could you have picked them in advance?
It's hard.
So I think that we have to be A little bit humble about whether we can look at his tweets that got us here, and we didn't recognize which were good or bad then, that suddenly we've developed this ability that, oh, now we can tell.
Now he's president.
Now I can tell that's a bad tweet.
That one will hurt him.
Now, there's some that even I say the same thing.
I go, in the example you gave, you know, talking about physical confrontation in any way is probably just a bad idea.
I didn't become president, and I'm not sure I would have had the talent to do it.
So I always keep that little bit of doubt that maybe just talking tough, maybe being the toughest guy in the room, has some benefits that are not immediately obvious.
And I think it might translate to a lot of different fields, that he's just the toughest one.
And we feel that.
We always feel his toughness.
It just comes out in every way.
How solid do you feel in the theory?
Meaning, is this theory good until it isn't?
So if he loses in 2020, if the bottom falls out on him, and it turns out that he has, it seems to me that the American public could have two reactions to this.
One is exactly what you say, which is, we're inured, the sound has been turned to 11, and so our ears have adjusted now to the sound, and now we can't even hear it.
It's just white noise in the background at this point.
The other possibility is that it's like I am with my two kids under five, that I love them, they run around, they're extraordinarily loud, and at 7.30 at night I say, you need to go to bed now.
Because if you don't, I'm gonna go start drinking.
And is it possible that the American people just, there's a sort of feeling of return to normalcy that kicks in in the same way that there was wrongly with Jimmy Carter after the Nixon Ford years, or with Warren G. Harding after the Wilson years, that there's sort of a backlash to all of this, or is this just the new world we live in?
I think there's an addiction thing going on on the people who love Trump.
And I would say that I'm one of them in the sense that, you know, if a good tweet comes out that I know is going to make people angry, that's a good day for me.
I actually, I can feel it, like physically, I can feel the joy.
And I know that, you know, 60 million people are giggling at it almost precisely the same time all over the country.
They're looking at their phones and they're like, And you get that little jolt, right, of whatever chemical thing that is.
So I think the haters will hate, the lovers will love, and I think it's going to be just like that in 2020.
How much of his success do you think is a result of his communication skill, and how much do you think is a result of The Democrats really sucking at what they do.
Meaning that he's the beneficiary of every time he says something that seems off the wall, they then proceed to interpret it as the worst thing since Hitler.
And it doesn't matter what it is.
Every single thing.
Horseface.
It's the worst thing since Hitler.
Right.
Gianforte.
The worst thing since Hitler.
Every single thing is the worst thing since Hitler, and so we begin to tune that out, too.
And so we actually end up not only tuning out his myriad sillinesses, but we end up tuning out their response, which is actually in some ways more important, because he's trolled them into undermining their own credibility and their critiques of him.
Yeah.
They've gone as far as you can go and still be reasonable, but it didn't get it done.
So now they're deciding, well, we should be maybe bad people like he was.
In their opinion.
So we'll just copy the part that we understand, which is the mean part, the bully part, and they're missing the technique.
So they're picking up all the stuff that you wouldn't want to imitate because they don't get the technique that they should imitate.
So what do you think is, I asked you this before, but what do you think if you had to pick, you talk about, what, 12 techniques here?
11 techniques?
If you had to pick like the two or three that are the most effective that he uses on a routine basis, what would those be?
You mentioned visual, but what were some of the others?
Well, fear.
So, fear is always your good one, and the Democrats used that well during the campaign.
So, Hillary made this fear proposal that Trump was dark.
Everything he did was dark.
His proposals were dark.
His policies were dark.
It made you think that there really was, you know, concentration camp in the future somewhere.
So, fear is always the best.
You want identity.
Identity is a powerful one.
You can say, we're Americans.
We're on this team.
You know, it's us against them.
That's always good.
Pacing and leading is good.
You want to match your public, and you want to match them even harder than they are themselves.
Like, you want to be more of them than they are themselves, and you saw that with immigration.
Remember he started out with, deport 14 million people?
Sure.
What do you think, people?
People who might vote for me?
That's what you want?
That's what I want too.
Deport 14 million people.
When I saw that, people were saying, my God, how can you support this man?
He's like a monster.
He's going to deport 14 million people.
I said, no.
Based on what I've seen so far, he's pacing the public.
He's getting their trust.
He's saying, I'm more like you than you are like yourself.
I'm going to get rid of those 14 million people.
But I also predicted long ahead of time that once he got elected, he would moderate.
And that part was the first one that went away.
You know, the killing the families of terrorists.
Like, I want to fight terrorism harder than you want to fight terrorism.
I know you hate terrorists.
Watch how hard I hate terrorists.
Now I'm president.
Well, let's be reasonable.
Right?
So that's the leading part.
So you pace them until they say, you and I are the same person.
Like, we think the same.
The thoughts coming out of your mouth are like just the ones out of my mouth.
And then he changes a little bit.
And they go, oh, that's me talking now.
And then they can follow.
So that's probably one of his strongest techniques.
This is a very negative view of the American populace and how we vote, right?
These techniques that can be used in persuasion are Very useful, and there's no question that you're right.
I mean, and you talk about all the social science research with regard to how we actually think and how much of our decision-making is instinctive, and then we backtrack and create a rational process based on the work of Daniel Kahneman and such.
What does this say about the future of democracy?
That's something we can educate our own way out of, or are we basically destined to fall into line behind master communicators, no matter which area of the spectrum they come from?
I've actually worried that Trump might be the last human president.
And I mean that literally, in the sense that the algorithms and the social media companies will be able to control the thoughts and the feelings and the attitudes and even the policy preferences of the public to such a degree that the politicians will just have to do whatever the public is saying.
Because it's pretty hard to be a president and do something that 70% of the public doesn't want you to do.
That's very unusual.
So, the presidents will be captive to the public, as they are.
Except the public will not be independently thinking and they won't be led by the president and vice versa.
I think the algorithms will decide what the public thinks and then the public will tell the president what to do and the president's going to either have to do it or get a new job.
So it's possible that even the Because of the complexity of the algorithms.
You know, it's not something that one person sits down and says, okay, here's my little equation.
I'll tweak this one.
I understand how to change this.
It's nothing like that.
It's complicated.
It's a lot of different inputs.
In all likelihood, there is no human being at any of these companies, no single human, who understands how the algorithm works.
And that means Humans aren't in charge anymore.
It means the algorithm is going to do what it's going to do.
And we can maybe say, if you change this variable, I'm pretty sure that something will happen in this end.
But it's not a one variable situation.
There are so many variables.
It's sort of like climate change, you know, modeling it.
You know, insanely hard.
So I think that complexity will mask the fact that the algorithms will start running the show with a little bit of correction from humans.
So you're suggesting that we may be a lot less skeptical of social media than we even ought to be, even those of us on the right who have been very skeptical of sort of the left-leaning bias in places like Facebook and YouTube.
You can be skeptical all you like.
It's too late.
Yeah, there's nothing that can happen that would stop what I just described.
Well, I mean, the only question I have about that is, what is the agenda of an algorithm?
I mean, somebody has to actually create the parameters for the algorithms in the first place.
But they don't know how it's going to turn out.
They can know that tweaking this is likely to change this, but since there are so many other things being tweaked, they can't really know what the end result is going to be.
It's just going to be too complicated.
So maybe we just reached the end of democracy, basically?
I'm not sure we ever had a real democracy, did we?
I mean, didn't we just come from a, or maybe we're in it, a period where money was the thing?
You know, the billionaires are backing certain candidates and, you know, the public doesn't know where the big money's coming from.
Trump sort of broke that model because money wasn't the thing that got him elected.
It was personality and technique.
But he's such a unique character that he's stronger than the algorithm, he's stronger than the money.
You're not going to get another one of those.
You know, good luck.
You could try, but that is a powerful package.
I mean, so this is a pretty dangerous message to a certain extent for the American people, because what do you expect the American people to do with this?
They're now controlled by master communicators, by algorithms beyond their control.
What's their daily life look like?
How do they shape the system?
I mean, do you see any cause for optimism here at all, or basically surrender to your machine masters?
For the voters, it may not look any different, because before it was sort of the media companies who were maybe shaping the message, and then the voters would think they made their minds up, but really they're just adopting the message of their favorite communication channel.
So if you're watching Fox, you think your opinion matches Fox.
Hey, how about that?
I'm watching Fox and my opinions are the same as those of the most case, and the people watching CNN say, my opinions match that.
But they're not really making opinions, they're receiving opinions.
The difference is that going from, we're probably moving from a place where there are people at the top, you know, not many of them, deciding what the messages will be for their side.
That's sort of what it is now.
But Trump is strong enough that he can, he can kind of, you know, be above that process.
But when there's no Trump and when the algorithm is stronger than the people running the messages, it's going to be the algorithm.
So if the president has the sort of strength you're suggesting, and let's say you're advising the president on how to create a system in the United States that could help prevent the sort of stuff that you're talking about.
Do you want to prevent it?
What is the assumption that it must be prevented?
I mean, the assumption is that attempts to manipulate people's free will by technological companies run by an oligarchic few are probably a bad thing.
Well, we're moving from the oligarchic few to this brief time when Trump is stronger than the oligarch, to the point where it won't be the oligarch and it won't be Trump, because someday there won't be a Trump.
At that point, the algorithm will be stronger than the oligarchs and money won't matter anymore.
Okay.
And at that point, do you think that the United States is, since we're all presumably thinking more alike under this algorithm that's controlling us, does it sort of restore some sort of American unity?
Or do things just continue to decay in terms of the polarization of the culture?
That's a good question.
And a lot of that probably gets to Fox News and maybe a couple other outlets.
Because if Fox News suddenly just went out of business, What would the country look like?
It would very quickly start to form around whatever communication channels were left.
So I think as long as Fox is there and CNN and MSNBC and the like, we're going to be two sides for a while.
But I think the algorithm will drive us to one.
Okay, so let's talk a little bit about kind of the Dilbert side of you.
So you told me before the show that your time now is split 60-40 between politics and Dilbert.
So where did the Dilbert side come from?
What was the origin of that side of what you do?
Well, I had a day job.
I worked in a big company.
It was a big bank.
And one day my boss called me in, and I was a sort of identify it as a management potential type of person early on.
And a boss called me in and said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the media has discovered that we don't have any diversity in senior management.
And they said, we won't ever be able to promote you because you're a white male.
And I was told this directly, by the way.
I want to make clear, I'm not interpreting.
This is what my boss, a white woman, told me.
And she was saying it apologetically, like, it's not my decision, it's coming from the top, but don't expect to get a promotion.
So I left, you know, left as soon as I could.
Got a job at the phone company, got on the management track.
And a few years in, my boss called me in his office and he said, I don't know how to tell you this, but the media realized we have no diversity in senior management.
And until further notice, and we don't know how long that's going to last, you cannot be promoted because you're a white male.
And that was the point where I thought, maybe I need to work somewhere that doesn't have a boss.
Maybe the boss is the problem, right?
Now, I had, you know, very specific problems that were coincidentally the same, but having a boss is never a good idea.
So I thought, well, let's try some things.
And one of the things I tried, it wasn't the only thing I tried, but was cartooning.
And I submitted some comics, that's the short version, and one syndication company said yes, and the rest was Dilbert history.
How has the comic community treated you since you came out of the closet as a Trump supporter?
Every once in a while I get the tweet that says, I will never read another Dilbert comic.
I'm burning my Dilbert book.
But I think for every one person who does that, there are still nine who didn't pay attention to politics before.
They're not paying attention to it now.
They just like their Dilbert comic.
So you talked a little bit about the fact that coming out politically in the area where you live was actually a dangerous thing.
So what's been the response in the area you live?
Because you obviously live in a very left-leaning area of California.
Yeah, so in Northern California is where the San Jose situation happened during the primaries, when some Trump supporters got attacked just walking to their cars, literally doing nothing but walking to their cars.
And that was about the time I realized that it's actually physically dangerous.
And I was also getting tons of troll traffic, and who knows how much are paid trolls and how much are not.
But a lot of them were branding me, you know, Joseph Goebbels, if I'm pronouncing it correctly.
So Hitler's, you know, PR person.
Now, here's the thing.
When they're labeling the president killer, and they're labeling me as just a supporter explaining his technique as Joseph Goebbels, you're creating a situation where it's approval to punch me.
It's approval to hit me.
Because you wouldn't say, go hit a candidate running for Congress, but you would say, go kill Hitler.
And if the situation were reversed, and I thought it was a real Hitler, like a real, real Hitler, and I could stop him, I'd kill him.
I hope you would too, right?
So that situation was becoming real in people's minds.
It left politics and had entered the realm of, yeah, I think there's a real Hitler coming, and that might be his little buddy.
We'd better get him first.
So I stopped appearing in public.
Wow.
So I don't do any public stuff, if I can avoid it.
I've done a few, but only if I had to.
So, you've met the President.
I mean, there are pictures that came out of it.
What was that like?
Did it confirm your views of the President?
Did it undermine your views of the President, now that you saw him behind those closed doors?
You know what this great relief was?
Because it was during the time when everybody was saying that maybe we need the 25th Amendment, maybe he's crazy, you know, he's flipping out behind doors.
And I thought to myself, what if I'm wrong about all this?
What if I meet a private lady and he's just like, just whack job.
But it turns out that he's the most reasonable, sane person in person, completely personable.
For the entire time I was there, he acted like I was the only person in the room.
His social skills are off the chart.
His charisma is crazy.
I mean, it's just, you know, in the good way.
And, you know, nothing that would even be slightly worrisome about, you know, his mental state.
He's definitely in control.
It seems to me that overall your philosophy is a pretty deterministic view of human nature, that people can be controlled from above by great communications or by algorithms— You in your own life, though, have made a bunch of choices that are, you know, pretty individually motivated and look like you're kind of surging off the beaten track.
I mean, first of all, to leave business and go into comics is one, and then to go from comics to, I'm going to analyze this kooky candidate who's in the middle of the wilderness in 2015 and point out what he's, and now I'm spending 60% of my time analyzing his machinations and politics.
So you're yourself a pretty individualistic guy.
Are you deterministic about human nature, about yourself?
Well, I don't believe in free will, but I believe that I have to act as though I have it.
You know, apparently I'm programmed to act as if I have it.
So that's as far as I go in terms of the deterministic part.
So, yeah, it might be that we're just a simulation.
I happen to buy into the simulation theory that humans are perhaps a software simulation created by a prior civilization.
Whoa!
Okay, explain that one.
Well, Elon Musk says the same thing.
When he's smoking pot with Joe Rogan or the rest of the time also?
I don't know.
I think the rest of the time, too.
And there are physicists who say this, too, so it's actually a legitimate thought.
For those who haven't heard it before, the idea is that in our lifetime, we will certainly be able to create software simulations that look and act and In whatever way that's true, think that they're real, so that they'll just be a simulation.
If we can do it...
It's more likely that we're the result of it.
In other words, for every real civilization that can get to the point it can create a simulation that thinks it's real, it won't make one.
It's going to make more than one.
It might be a kit for teenagers.
They can, hey, make a civilization.
So the odds are that there are far more simulated realities than there are original species.
And there might be more than one original species, but there will always be far more simulations, and you can't tell if you're one.
So did we just get the weirdest one?
Is that what's happening right now?
Apparently.
We're just in the weirdest one.
I mean, honestly, on that sort of philosophical note, is that just a way... I know we've gone far afield here, but it's interesting to me.
Is that just a way of escaping God, basically?
I mean, that's as unfalsifiable as God.
The idea of a God that created human beings in a certain way sounds a lot like what you're talking about.
It's just that you've called the God a 400-pound guy who invented a program in his basement.
It would have a lot of overlap, right, and maybe it would validate our, you know, our feelings that we have that there's something that created us and, you know, so maybe there's something to that.
But I think that my basic feeling about the world is that the human brain did not evolve to understand reality.
Because it didn't need to.
It needed to survive and procreate.
That's it.
That was the whole thing.
So you go to the grocery store and you're buying some vegetables and you're standing next to someone who thinks they reincarnated.
And on the other side is someone who thinks that their prophet flew to heaven on a winged horse.
And behind you is somebody who thinks their Savior walked on water.
Now, some of those things might have all happened at the same time, but we're generally walking around with people who are in completely different realities.
If you look at the reality of the Trump hater versus the Trump supporter, this is what I call two movies on one screen.
We think we're looking at the same thing, but we are really not interpreting it as the same reality on a base level.
So, when you say, you know, is it God?
Is it a simulation?
Is it anything?
I guess the way I reduce that is if it makes you happy and it helps you predict what's going to happen next, which also makes you happy, then you've got a good filter on life.
So the persuasion approach that I take to things makes me happy and has done a pretty good job so far of predicting.
If it stops, if it stops predicting, I'll try to adopt a new filter.
So I listened to the interview that you did with Sam Harris, and Sam was quite exercised about the kind of morality of what President Trump does.
And he was saying, you know, trying to peg you down to the idea that what President Trump has done politically is immoral.
Do you actually think that the stuff that he does politically, the use of these techniques, the kind of Inherent fibbing in what he's doing sometimes.
Is there a moral component to that?
No, if it's directionally appropriate.
So if what he's doing is—the best example is the economy.
So if he tells 10 lies about the economy and the fact-checkers say, well, that's not exactly true.
This isn't the best job since then.
It's not the best GDP since then.
He may be technically incorrect, but what is his intention?
His intention is that he understands the economy is a psychology machine.
If you get the psychology right, the machine works.
So he takes us to a higher level of hyperbole, higher level of optimism.
He says, everything's better than it's ever before.
What does that cause people to do?
It causes people to invest.
Because they say, really?
It's great?
It's even greater than I thought it was.
It's that great?
Thanks, Mr. President.
I'm going to invest a little extra.
And what does that do?
It makes it great.
So the investing makes the economy work.
So he's actually sort of using hyperbole, and that's his word, he says he uses it, to try to draw us to positive places.
If he says that ISIS is the worst thing in the world and it's going to destroy the planet, that's why we have to do so much to defeat them, well that might be a little bit of an exaggeration.
But you still want to beat ISIS, and if that's what it took to get everybody on the same page, that's a virtuous direction, even if the fact-checking was not accomplished.
Well, to be fair to some of President Trump's critics on this score, some of the hyperbole that he's used in attacking his opponents, for example, is, I think, pretty obviously not morally or directionally appropriate.
I mean, when you suggest that— Well, give me an example.
Okay.
Suggesting that Ted Cruz's dad killed JFK is probably a pretty good example.
Okay, well, but you had acknowledged that that was just a throwaway, right?
I mean, in the big scheme, that wasn't anything.
No, but it was, yes, but it was part of an overall kind of line of attack on Cruz that Cruz was lying to Ted and that his wife was ugly.
There's a fair bit of this, right?
So let me ask you, if Ted Cruz had been elected, would we have such a good situation with North Korea?
Maybe not.
Now you're asking me counterfactuals.
And everybody who's doing this obviously believes that they are going to be the best presidents, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
So what's wrong with that?
That doesn't make it immoral.
It sort of does.
The morality that you are positing is a goal only morality.
It is not a means including morality.
I'm saying that the ends justify the means.
Yeah, you are.
Let me say that right to the camera.
The ends always justify the means, and people who argue otherwise are doing what I call loser think.
Because in every decision—I'll talk to you again—in every decision, you weigh the costs and the benefits.
It's only if you're trying to influence somebody, you say, oh, the ends didn't justify the means.
In some cases, that's true.
But generally speaking, in every decision, you're looking at the costs, all of them, and you're looking at the benefits, all of them.
And some of that cost might be the moral fiber that comes apart a little bit if you're fibbing.
So that's just part of the cost.
But you still have to compare it to the benefits.
It's not immoral to I mean, the problem is that, and I'm going to ask about this in a second, sometimes your perception of the goals and the means are misaligned.
Every bad person in history has said the same thing, right?
Which is that I have certain ends, and those justify the means that I'm using.
And since I can argue that the ends are good, the means are therefore justified.
And one of the things that we have tried to argue against is the idea that people can be used as tools in pursuit of particular means.
So, the idea of grand equality between men, a surging economy, and a peaceful coexistence leads to the extermination of entire populations or the creation of gulags.
There's not a bad person in history who thought the ends didn't justify the means.
I'm not calling you Hitler, by the way, but that morality is... Finally, somebody doesn't call me Hitler.
But you have to, you know, there's an analogy problem here.
You can't compare some hyperbole that gets you better policies to, you know, the Holocaust.
No, of course I agree with that.
Of course I agree with that.
But the question was one of, is the president using immoral tactics when he does that?
And your original statement was that he was not.
I'm looking at the whole.
I'm saying that if you were to look at, in isolation, is fibbing good or bad, I would agree with you.
Oh, fibbing's bad.
You know, we don't want to live in a world where everybody's lying.
But then we go to realism, all right?
If you're in the business context, is anybody lying at your job?
Everybody, right?
Everybody.
Everybody's lying from why they were late, to why they didn't get the report in on time, to the marketing is mostly lies, you know, dressed up to be barely legal.
Sales is mostly lies.
The government is mostly lies.
And so Trump comes in, and he goes, huh, I see everybody around me is lying about 30% of the time, and it seems to be effective.
I'll ramp that up to 70.
See what happens.
It's sort of the same thing.
It is, but is there a limiting principle?
Meaning, at what point would you adjudicate that the ends did not justify the means?
So what could President Trump have done in 2016?
Let's say, this was the argument that was actually made very often in 2016.
It's a binary race.
It's Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.
Hillary, from a conservative perspective, is an existential threat to a lot of the things that conservatives believe.
So President Trump is justified in doing pretty much anything in the leftist view, up to an including collusion with Russia, which I obviously don't believe.
I think it's a bunch of crap.
But the leftists say, well, that's what he was willing to do.
Donald Trump Jr. was willing to do that, get together with the Russians and all the rest of it.
What would you say would be the limiting principle to the idea that some threat requires the use of 70% lying or 100% lying?
I'm not sure you could ever make one rule that you would be happy applies to all situations because every situation is a whole bunch of variables.
You know, and no two situations are exactly alike.
But, for example, if he had said, I think I'm going to have Ted Cruz executed, like I'll have a hit squad, just kill him, I would say, OK, that seems bad.
Okay, good, we've gotten there.
That would be a precedent that would not only, if he got into office, he may be convicted, so it doesn't even work on a practical level, plus you don't want to start this standard, so the whole thing falls apart, right?
So some of them are just easy.
But if you say, was it okay for him to insult somebody or to suggest something in a political campaign that wasn't true, I'm going to say, that's sort of standard material.
Okay, so where do you see the country going from here?
It seems like you're a happy guy with a very pessimistic view of the future.
Not at all.
It's a different view of the future, but it's actually more optimistic than I think I let on.
Okay, so what is that vision of the future?
What's the happy part about being controlled by algorithms and everybody lying to you?
Well, the algorithms won't necessarily do a bad job, right?
Compared to human performance, humans are pretty sketchy, so I don't automatically assume that humans will be worse at governing or that computers will be worse at governing or worse at driving cars, right?
I'm looking forward to the self-driving cars.
So, but I've said that we're entering a golden age, and the way I define the golden age is a weird time that only really will happen once in a civilization, when you don't have resource shortages, you have idea shortages.
If you take the urban areas, for example, I've been working with Bill Pulte on the Blight Authority, and what he does is he It's a non-profit where he clears out blighted areas in the inner cities, and then we're trying to figure out what to put there.
One of the things you learn is that fixing the inner cities is not a money problem.
You would think it would be, right?
It's like, oh, nobody has the money to do this.
But there are plenty of people who would put money into it if you had a good enough idea.
So we have an idea shortage, not a resource shortage, and I don't know if the world's ever been there before.
And that means that if we use our thinking, our persuasion, our communication skills right, we can solve just about everything now.
Just about everything.
A simple example is cancer.
There are a whole bunch of cancer trials, and then there are a whole bunch of cancer doctors.
But the cancer doctors, even the ones who keep up with it, don't know about all the trials.
And the trials are specific to specific types of cancer.
So now there's a company, I think it's called Drive, that makes a database to pair patients with a specific test, because even the doctor wouldn't know how to find them.
There's nothing been added but information.
And it has the potential to revolutionize that area by getting people to the right kind of treatment.
So you see something like that just in all other realms of civilization right now.
So I do have one final question for you.
I want to ask you whether the lessons of President Trump can be applied to any other politician.
Can we look forward to applying those lessons in our own life, and if so, how?
But if you actually want to hear Scott's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, just go over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, give us your money, and you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Well, go check out the book, Win Bigly by Scott Adams.
Scott, thanks so much for stopping by.
Fascinating stuff, and it's great to see you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera.
And title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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