Andrew Clavin dissects Barack Obama’s legacy through sexual misconduct scandals like Charlie Rose’s alleged groping and Roy Moore’s 14-year-old victim claims, critiquing media hypocrisy in targeting figures based on political utility. He ties this to the IRS’s 2013 suppression of conservative groups under Lois Lerner, who invoked the Fifth Amendment amid threats. Scott Adams then joins, arguing Trump’s 2016 win stemmed from masterful persuasion—90% irrationality-driven—citing Kahneman and Cialdini, while dismissing China/Russia as overblown threats. Adams predicts a tech-fueled "golden age," where $2K medical devices and algorithmic influence reshape reality, framing progress as inevitable despite moral inconsistencies. [Automatically generated summary]
The scandal that started in the movie business has now spread to journalism.
The latest man accused is Charlie Rose, the 75-year-old co-host of CBS This Morning and of the Charlie Rose show on PBS, has been accused by numerous viewers of being a pseudo-intellectual, no-talent blowhard who could turn an exclusive interview with God himself into an excruciating snooze fest.
The accusers say he hasn't done 10 minutes of prep work since 1973.
Also, he grabs women's breasts and exposes himself.
Which is bad, but not as bad as those interviews.
Also, we have a genuinely gripping interview with Dilbert creator Scott Adams.
He predicted Trump's election, and his latest prediction is pretty amazing.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is to get it.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky.
The world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Alright, the mailbag is smart.
It's the end of the week already tomorrow, because it's Thanksgiving.
So get your questions into the mailbag.
I went on to our site to do it myself, just so I tested it finally.
And it's really easy.
You just press the podcast button, go on the Daily Wire, press the podcast button, press my podcast, and then there's a little mailbag sign there.
It says, I think it even says mailbag.
And you press it.
You send me any question you want, personal questions, religious questions, political questions.
I will answer them all.
All my answers will be 100% guaranteed correct and will change your life, possibly for the better.
Who knows?
But you have to subscribe.
You got to subscribe.
It's 10 bucks a month, 10 lousy bucks a month.
I will solve all your problems.
The people, the reactions I've gotten from these mailbags, people saying that all their problems are solved, you know, it's just, it's amazing.
And that's 10 lousy bucks.
For 100 lousy bucks, you get a full year subscription and the leftist tears mug.
So after your tears are dried because of all the wonderful answers you get on the mailbag, you can just drink leftist tears and enjoy yourself without any problems whatsoever.
You know, while I'm asking for stuff, you know, yesterday Knowles and I were talking about Another Kingdom, this podcast we have that's on iTunes, and you can subscribe.
It's a fictional, it's a story, a fantasy suspense story about a guy who's an ordinary Hollywood schlub, and one day he walks through a door and he finds himself a murder suspect in this bizarre fantasy world, and it gets more and more complex from that.
Knowles is the performer.
He performs it, does all the voices and all this stuff, and it's really doing well.
Yesterday, I got a call from one of the biggest TV producers in town here in LA who's interested in having me come in and talk to them about it.
And this is, I can't tell you who it is, but very, very successful producer whose chief assistant is a woman who is actually the single best story person I've ever met in Hollywood, one of the very few people who can actually improve your story when you discuss it with her.
Because one of the problems with Hollywood, if you wonder why so many movies are bad, is because the one person who knows how to tell the story, who's the writer, has no real power.
And any idiot who, the nephew of the studio head who wanders in and makes a suggestion wants to put his imprint on it.
Insane Mrs. Fields Cookies00:03:31
But this is a woman who is just somebody I really trust.
And like I've worked with her before, and everything she does, every conversation you have with her story gets better.
My point is this.
If you can and you want to, I would really appreciate it if you would go on Another Kingdom on iTunes and subscribe.
And if you like it, leave a five-star review.
Everything I get is ammunition.
My chances of selling this thing are very tiny.
Tiny just because chances of selling anything in Hollywood are tiny.
But me, you know, I'm now a toxic guy because of my politics.
But if there's a presence, if you show up, I mean, already the thing has got something like, it's got well over 100,000 downloads.
And all like 700 plus five-star reviews.
But if you add to that, it is very helpful to me going into this meeting, which will probably be right after Thanksgiving.
So just saying, if you got a chance, please, please do it.
Now, I have to tell you, I am somebody who is not allowed in most kitchens because I just set things on fire and I hurt myself.
I am really.
But once, a long time ago, I actually did, this is very, very many years ago.
I actually tried to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie because I love, love chocolate chip cookies.
But back in those days, those far-off days, chocolate chip cookies were like this little brown piece.
If you got them packaged, if your mother didn't make them, you got this like little kind of brown piece of cardboard with little brown dots in it.
It was just awful.
I'm sure you can still buy those in the store.
And then, and then, I think it was, I don't know, maybe late 1970s, Mrs. Fields cookies came along and they changed everything because I was trying to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie.
Now you didn't have to because Mrs. Fields was making it for you and you could go into a store and find now they said, Can you, is this on camera?
Can we get this on camera?
This basket here?
They sent us this enormous basket of chocolate chip cookies, which are just like so good.
I mean, if you've never had a Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookie, this is the best thing ever.
I mean, they're just so good.
And now they have a holiday deal for you.
They've been around for 40 years, but now, for the very first time, you can, wait, just a minute.
Please give me a cookie.
Oh, my God.
Look at this thing.
It's so, it's so soft.
This is terrible.
Just entertain yourselves for a moment, would you?
Oh, my God, this is so good.
They have an exclusive deal because you can give these as gifts.
You can give something like this as a gift.
You will be the best, they will think you are the best person in the universe, whoever you give this to.
If you go to mrsfields.com, God, these are good.
They're insane.
Insane cookie.
Go to mrsfields.com, click on the microphone on the upper right-hand corner and enter Clavin, which is, as you now know, K-L-A-V-A-N, K-L-L-K-L-A-V-A-N, and mrs.Fields.com, and you will get 25% off Mrs. Fields' best-selling Peace, Love, and Cookies tin.
You get nibblers, there are bite-sized cookies, brownie bites, and more.
So click on the microphone and enter promo code Clavin at mrsfields.com to get the perfect holiday gift.
25% off mrsfields.com and enter Clavin.
These things, I'm telling you, they are insane.
You know, I'm not going to take these home.
I will leave these here so that people can eat these things.
And you'll see that the whole place is going to fall apart because all they will do is eat these cookies for the rest of the, until Thanksgiving is over.
Oh, my Lord.
Why We Should Forgive00:12:51
You know, it was like a religious experience.
All right.
So we can just do the whole show.
I'm just going to eat this basket while it's here.
I say I'm going to leave it for people, but there's not going to be anything left.
You know, I've been watching these scandals.
This scandal now, this sex scandal, unlike anything I've ever seen.
And just before the camera was going to come on, I thought, I don't want to talk about this the same way everybody else is talking about it.
I actually see almost everything from, let's call it a spiritual perspective.
I try to look at things a little differently.
I'm not really a political person.
I mean, I'm fascinated by politics because politics is human nature writ large.
And that's what makes me so fascinated with it.
And it's history and it's all these things unfolding.
But I always see it in a kind of different way.
Let me just put this, let me just talk for a minute about religion.
Let me talk about Jesus.
I'm going to talk about Jesus.
Hey, we're going to talk about Jesus.
You know, When I read the Gospels, I see something in them.
I don't think I'm the first person to ever see this in them, but it's not the usual thing.
It's not the usual religion, be nice instead of not being nice, do good instead of not being good, don't sleep with this person.
I don't actually think that God had to come to earth and die to let us know that we should treat each other nicely.
We know that we should treat each other nicely.
When I read the Gospels, what I see is a man who is the incarnation of God and who therefore has the consciousness of eternity speaking to us who only have the consciousness of time.
And there's all these conversations in the Gospels where Jesus is trying to explain to us that eternity, if you live in eternity in your mind, the world looks a lot different.
You don't have to worry about things.
You can forgive sins because in eternity, every sin becomes tiny, right?
In time, the sin is enormous.
But in eternity, it can be forgiven.
And you can, you know, if you, he's basically giving you instructions on how to get your mind into eternity.
Love your neighbor, love God, forgive.
All these things that he's telling you are ways to get a mindset, an eternal mindset.
And what you can hear Jesus kind of talking to these people, it's almost like he doesn't quite understand us at first.
He says things like, you know, Peter tries to walk on the water like Jesus does, and Peter takes a couple of steps and then he sinks.
And Jesus says, oh, ye of little faith.
You think like, really?
How much faith do you have to have to get even two steps on the water?
You know, I mean, I couldn't take two steps on the water.
But what Jesus is learning, I think, is he's seeing that we don't have that eternal perspective.
In the eternal perspective, the mind is the thing, the consciousness is the thing that dominates in physical reality, like illness, just vanishes.
It's just, that's how Jesus is constantly healing why he's healing.
He's showing you that in the eternal perspective, you know, it really, these physical things that we worry so much about don't have as much weight.
And that's the whole thing about forgiveness, is you can forgive, you know, the great mystic poet William Blake wrote a line where I'm quoting from memory, but it's something like, all throughout eternity, I forgive you and you forgive me.
Great, great line, great couplet of poetry.
But in time, no sin goes away.
And this is the frustration we have, for instance, that white people sometimes have with black people, right?
In time, in history, every sin, every evil bends the ark of history so that it goes in a certain way.
And in order to forgive those sins and rise above them, you have to have an eternal mindset.
And so each person is an eternal thing.
But a society is not.
A society lives in time.
But each person is an eternal thing.
So when blacks say, oh, you know, you white folks held slaves.
And we say, like, I never had a slave.
You know, what are you talking about?
My Jews were slaves.
How do you like them apples?
So, because we're saying that because in eternity, we're innocent.
Each person is innocent.
In time, the ark of society was bent by that evil.
It just was.
And it was bent by Jim Crow, and it was bent by those things.
And in order to lift above it, somebody has to forgive.
Somebody has to lift into eternity.
What we are seeing now is we are seeing this play out in real time.
The things that are coming out right now are the result of 25 years of lies and a society that was trying to, a portion of society that was trying to socially engineer this country into something that it wasn't before.
And yes, I am blaming the left and I'm blaming the media.
I'm not blaming people for being left-wing because I think sometimes left-wingers say important things, but I'm blaming a media that tried to black out one side of the equation because if we talk truthfully to one another, we can compromise, we can forgive each other, we can find a way forward.
But when the media just takes over and they have only one perspective, we become wrapped in these lies.
25 years ago, we had a president who was a serial sexual abuser.
He was accused, let me put it another way.
He was plausibly accused of this.
Not just the media, not just the president himself, the president's wife, everyone around him conspired to make that seem like it didn't matter.
Bill Bennett wrote a wonderful, we had a wonderful comment last night, the commentator Bill Bennett, he said he wrote a book at the time called The Death of Outrage.
Where was the outrage at Bill Clinton's crime?
And he says, but it turns out outrage wasn't dead.
It was just asleep for 25 years.
What we're seeing now, and the reason that we're all having such a hard time dealing with these charges that are coming out, is not just because sex is so complex, and it is complex, but also because we were told it didn't matter.
And now we're being told it matters because the Clintons are out of the picture, because they were pushed aside.
And this very aggressive male figure, Donald Trump, has risen to the presidency, which has been traumatic for some women.
Some women look at that guy and they think, ah, that's like that guy who backed me up in a corner and did things to me I didn't like.
That's like guys I've dealt with all my life.
They look at Donald Trump, and yes, it's women on the left, but still, they look at Donald Trump and they hate the guy and they find his traumatic.
And suddenly they're saying, well, you know, I want to speak about that.
And I want to speak about what Harvey Weinstein did to me.
And I want to speak about what Charlie Rose did.
And all the people who covered up for Bill Clinton are saying, well, okay, then we have to have a reckoning with Bill Clinton.
And the people on the right, because nothing disappears in history, no lie, no wrong, goes away.
People on the right are saying, well, wait, you know, it's too late.
It's too late.
You can't, you know, I'm not going to ditch my Roy Moore when you didn't ditch your Bill Clinton.
And so there's this kind of back and forth.
And in order for us to get past this, we're really going to have to take a moral look at ourselves, at all of us.
The women, there are women who are out there saying, you know, men are going to have to participate in this.
And of course that's true.
This is not a sexual thing.
The sexual thing is an adjunct of power abuse.
I mean, the very same reason that our founders made power disparate, the reason we believe in capitalism is because it makes power disparate.
It separates power and means people play power off one another.
It's because when power collects, it is abusive because we're who we are.
We're what we are.
If we want something and we have the power to take it, we will take it.
So, you know, I've just been watching this whole thing unfold and trying to come to my own terms with it because, you know, let's take Roy Moore for a minute.
I don't know.
People keep writing me and saying this woman who accused Roy Moore of physically assaulting her when she was young, that now they think that she was lying and Gloria Allred was involved, which always makes everybody look like you're lying.
You just have to walk by Gloria Allred.
It's like a lie aura is cast over you.
Why do I feel like a lie?
Oh, they're standing next to Gloria Allred.
But the woman who originally made the charge that he had, you know, what's the word I can use?
He put his hands on her when she was 14.
It was not a non-consensual thing technically, but she was 14, so she had no ability to give informed consent, and he was 32.
Her name is Lee Korfman, and she sounds, you know, she sounds very, you know, reliable.
Let's listen to Lee Korfman just as she went on TV and she talked about what happened.
I wouldn't exactly call it a date.
I'd say it was a meet.
At 14, I was not dating.
At 14, I was not able to make those kind of choices.
I met him around the corner from my house.
My mother did not know.
And he took me to his home.
After arriving at his home, on the second occasion that I went with him, he basically laid out some blankets on the floor of his living room and proceeded to Seduced me, I guess you would say.
And during the course of that, he removed my clothing.
He left the room and came back in wearing his white underwear.
And he touched me over my clothing, what was left of it.
And he tried to get me to touch him as well.
And at that point, I pulled back and said that I was not comfortable.
And I got dressed and he took me home.
So that's her story.
So, you know, the one thing I will say about Roy Moore is I don't know why people, nobody has come out recently.
All this stuff is 30, 40 years ago.
And I wonder why Moore didn't just come out if these things are true, if they're true, why he didn't just come out and say, you know, yeah, I was a bad guy, but now I'm not.
And I think the voters of Alabama probably would have forgiven that.
I don't know what they're going to do now.
But people, remember, when Bill Clinton came out, all these feminists suddenly abandoned their principles and said, you know, we have to protect abortion rights.
And now you have guys like Stephen Moore.
Stephen Moore, excellent economist, writer, but he has become a full-fledged Trumper.
And Stephen Moore went on and said, well, what about, you know, yes, Roy Moore seems to be kind of a creep, but what about his opponent, Doug Jones?
Democratic candidate is for partial birth abortion in a state that's highly Christian and Catholic.
I mean, so, you know, there's no moral high ground here between the two candidates.
I'll simply say, except one is an alleged child molester.
Yeah, and the other one is for partial birth abortion, which a lot of people in Alabama think is which is most people will consider a political position as opposed to, you know, well, look, I was just in Alabama last week, as a matter of fact.
I mean, people are really, they're disgusted by Roy Moore's behavior, no question about it.
A lot of Republicans have said they're not going to vote for him.
But who should make this decision?
I mean, I'd ask you all that question.
Who should make the decision?
And my argument is people in Alabama should make the decision.
If I were living in Alabama, I wouldn't vote for either of these two.
I'd vote for somebody like Jeff Sessions or something like that.
But that is actually an argument.
The thing that the other, I don't know who the other commentator is, is untrue.
Being for partial birth abortion is a political position if you're a politician.
But how many babies would have to be saved before we would say, well, I don't care what Roy Moore did?
You know, it's a complicated, it's a complicated moral issue.
And because of feminism and because of the death of sexual morality since the 60s, it's very hard to make the case.
It's very hard to make the case that we all have this kind of consensus of what sexual morality should look like, where we might have more of a consensus that you shouldn't kill babies.
I mean, it's like kind of, I think that's a, you know, Moore is not making, he's not making a completely immoral point.
People who are making completely immoral points, guys like this pastor Earl Wise, I mean, this is one of the things that, you know, evangelical Christians have been traditionally very sexually rigid.
They think this is right and this is wrong and this kind of sex.
Well, you know, now here's a guy who says, who this pastor Earl Wise gave an interview.
He says, I don't know how much these women are getting paid.
These accusers are getting paid, but I can only believe they're getting a healthy sum.
Wise said he would support Moore, even if the allegations were true and the candidate was proved to have sexually molested teenage girls and women.
There ought to be a statute of limitations on this stuff.
How these gals came up with this, I don't know.
They must have had some sweet dreams somewhere down the line.
Plus, there are some 14-year-olds who the way they look could pass for 20.
So, you know, what I love about this, you're talking about a basket of deplorables.
This is like, it's like it never happened and it was a long time ago.
You know, it's like it never happened.
It was a long time ago.
Plus, some of these girls, there are no angels, you know, they're asking for it.
Statute of Limitations Controversy00:02:37
I mean, it's nuts.
It's nuts.
You know, and if that's your position, what you're essentially saying is I will vote for anybody for any reason whatsoever.
What Stephen Moore was saying, it's an argument.
It's an argument.
If he says, look, you know, these are two bad guys.
I don't agree with his argument, just like I didn't agree with the Never Trumpers that you don't vote for anyone.
Unfortunately, in a binary choice, I just think that's a weak moral argument.
I think it is a weak moral argument not to vote for anyone when one of them is going to win.
I think you have to make a choice.
Obviously, if you think they're equally bad, if you think what they would do is equally bad, if you think their effect on the country is equally bad, that's different.
But even so, I think you have to, you know, if it's a binary choice, you should pay your money and take your choice.
Hey, I have to stop, but I want to get on to the fact that this goes beyond sex.
I mean, I know that sex is the thing we all love to talk about, but it goes beyond that, and I will talk about that in just a second.
But first, I have to talk about underwear.
And this is like the most sexual show.
I mean, everything I say goes right back to your crotch.
But at least this is a good, honest crotch talk, because you want your crotch to be comfortable, and that's why you want to wear meundies.
This is the underwear of pirates.
Ah, meundies.
The underwear, the best, the most comfortable pirates wear meundies.
I'm sorry.
I actually, you know, they sent me some of these.
They are insanely comfortable.
And I wear them to hike in because that's when I need all this flexibility and everything.
And they're really soft.
They're made of, I don't know what they're made of, but it's not like cotton.
It is actually softer than cotton.
And they also have all these different styles and patterns to choose from for both men and women.
And you can go on and the styles change all the time.
And you can actually tell them what you like and what you don't like.
If you go to meundies.com, Clavin, I guess it's probably dot com slash Claven.
It doesn't say slash, but it's dot com Clavin.
Yeah.
Slash Claven, yeah.
You will get 20% off the best and softest underwear and socks you will ever own.
And you get free shipping and 100% satisfaction guarantee.
And, you know, I'm kind of obviously conservative, so I go for the black and the gray and all this, but they have all these crazy designs and smiley faces and the whole thing that you can have on your underwear.
And it actually is a lot of fun.
If you like your underwear to be fun, I just want comfort, and that's it.
Meundis.com slash Claven, meundies.com slash Claven give you 20% off the best and softest underwear and socks you'll ever own, free shipping and 100% satisfaction guarantee.
And you will get to make that pirate joke to your wife until she's just absolutely sick and tired about it.
Lois Lerner's Fifth Amendment Silence00:04:48
You know, the thing about this is, though, all these sins of the past coming back, they skew the moral order of our society.
And this is not just true of Clinton.
It is also true of Obama.
And one of the things that is happening now, and over the weekend, Chris Wallace wrote a piece in the Washington Post saying Donald Trump is a threat to the free press by his constant attacks on the free press.
And I thought, no, You know, the press earned Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is to the press what Godzilla is to nuclear tests.
You know, remember in those old Japanese movies, they do a nuclear test and it would create this gigantic lizard who'd come and destroy Tokyo?
The nuclear test that these guys did was the lies about Obama.
Now, some of this stuff is now coming up.
One of the biggest scandals of the scandal-free Obama administration, because all the press, universally, they said, oh, wonderful, scandal-free.
It was scandal-free.
One of the biggest scandals was this IRS scandal.
What happened was there was this Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, which basically said that corporations cannot be stopped from spending money like individuals on a campaign, on a campaign.
And that was right.
I mean, it was David Bossy made an anti-Hillary film.
They wouldn't show the anti-Hillary film on television because they said, oh, well, that essentially is a campaign donation.
And the Supreme Court said, no, that's a violation of free speech rights.
And the left went nuts because Hillary, they wanted to silence Obama, started giving speeches about these dark, these dark organizations with their unknown funding that were a threat to our democracy.
And Lois Lerner, who was the director of the exempt organizations unit of the Eternal Revenue Service, started to slow walk tax-exempt registration for Tea Party groups, any group that had Tea Party or Patriot in its title, so that they couldn't speak during Obama's reelection campaign.
So Obama effectively used the IRS.
I mean, this is a tremendous violation of anything that could be considered constitutional governance.
Used the IRS, the most powerful agency in the country, to silence his opponents to help him get re-elected.
And it came out, and when Lois Lerner went before Congress and was questioned, first she said, no, I'm not guilty.
This is the way it worked.
This is the way.
And then she pled the fifth, which you're not supposed to do.
Just so you remember, here's Lois Lerner, the director of the exempt organizations unit of the Internal Revenue Service, going before Congress and pleading the Fifth Amendment.
Listen.
In February of 2014, President Obama stated that there was not a smidgen of corruption in the IRS targeting.
Ms. Lerner, do you believe that there is not a smidgen of corruption in the IRS targeting of conservatives?
On the advice of my counsel, I respectfully exercise my Fifth Amendment right and decline to answer that question.
Okay, now because she had already said something, she had waived her Fifth Amendment rights by speaking, that was the argument.
She was held in contempt.
But instead of prosecuting that, John Boehner sent it over to Obama's Justice Department, the most corrupt justice department in American history, and they just dumped it.
They let her go.
Later, she was sued and they settled two lawsuits and admitted that they had done this thing.
Okay, so now a Tea Party guy is trying to get the testimony from Lois Lerner's testimony and her deputy, Holly Paz.
They're trying to get that testimony released so the American public can see what they said and get through this Fifth Amendment silence, this wall of Fifth Amendment silence, which the IRS should not be allowed to do in the first place.
So she has filed a motion.
I swear this is true.
Lois Lerner has filed a motion saying in her bid, I'm reading this from Bill McGurn in the Wall Street Journal, in her bid to keep her testimony in a recently settled Tea Party lawsuit against the IRS secret, Lois Lerner has Lois Lerner and her former IRS deputy, Holly Paz, filed, put a filing to a judge.
They want to persuade a judge to keep their testimony from becoming public.
And this is what they said.
Public dissemination of their deposition testimony would expose them and their families to harassment and an incredible risk of violence and physical harm.
In other words, you'd be so ticked off at what the IRS did that you would actually attack them.
And that's their argument.
Their argument is we're so awful.
We did such a terrible, terrible thing that if the American public were to find out about it, we'd be screwed.
That's their argument for keeping it silent.
You know, there's more I want to go on, but I really have to go on to this Scott Adams interview.
Please stay tuned and listen to this.
It is just a really fascinating thing.
Top Techniques in Persuasion00:15:14
The guy is a fascinating guy.
He's the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, which, as I say during the course of the interview, is one of the really hilarious comic strips.
But he is also a man who studied persuasion and hypnotism.
And when Donald Trump was running and all of us were saying Donald Trump can never win, he can never win, Scott Adams said, no, he is going to win.
And now he's written a book called Win Bigly, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, which talks about why he knew that Trump would win.
Take a listen.
It's really interesting.
Scott Adams, first of all, let me tell you, it is just a delight to have you here.
I think Dilbert is up there with Calvin and Hobbes as one of the great comic strips of all time.
Really terrific, terrific stuff.
Thank you.
But we're here to talk about Win Bigley, your new book, Win Bigley Persuasion, in a world where facts don't matter, which is certainly the world we seem to be living in.
Let's start with Donald Trump, because obviously from the title, this is who you're talking about.
You predicted Trump's win basically when everybody was giving him zero chance at all.
What did you see that everybody else missed?
Well, I'm a trained hypnotist, and I've been studying persuasion and all of its various forms for communication for decades as part of what I do as a writer.
And I recognized fairly early on that he possessed an arsenal of technique for persuasion, the likes of which I've never seen.
One of the most complete talent stacks that you'll ever see.
And by a talent stack, I mean a combination of skills that work especially well together.
So he's got the technique, but on top of that, he's good in front of the public.
He's tall, size matters.
He's got that big personality.
He's got an appetite for risk, for controversy.
So those are things you don't often, or maybe never, find in the same person.
That's what makes you president if you have all of that working at the same time.
So you weren't thinking about policy at all?
You weren't thinking about demographics or anything like that, just his ability to persuade.
Right.
Now, of course, everybody, after the election's over, everybody looks back.
I think CNN had 24 different reasons that he won.
They were all completely obvious after he won, but not before.
So I made a big deal of the fact that I was so sure, I said, I'm going to predict he's going to win so that I'm not doing hindcasting like everybody else will do when he wins.
And I did a number of in-between predictions just to make the point that the persuasion filter, as I called it, would give you a better prediction ability.
So for example, the first day that I heard low-energy Jeb, most of the world was just saying, that's inappropriate for a candidate.
That's silly.
And I publicly and loudly said that's the end of the Jeb Bush campaign because there was so much technique in that that wasn't obvious.
We could talk about that later.
And then I also called the top for Carly Fiorina, and I called the top in the polls for Ben Carson.
And each of those calls was based on persuasion as a means of seeing the future.
Wow, that really is amazing.
I mean, so I have to ask this, because when I listen to you talk, first of all, you have an incredibly dry sense of humor, and you also, just looking at Dilbert, you have a wonderful sense of the absurd, which I greatly appreciate.
I'm not always sure whether or not you're supporting Trump as he is now.
I mean, do you like what he's doing as an actual politician, persuasion aside?
So politically, I label myself as left of Bernie, except I prefer plans that have some chance of working.
In other words, makes you a right-winger, doesn't it?
Well, I'd love to have universal health care and free college.
I just don't know how to get there.
But if we could, I'd love those things.
And on the big stuff, I'm not smart enough to know the best way to fight ISIS or the best tax plan or any of that stuff.
So I tend to take a sideline and just observe the show.
I do enjoy the president's sense of humor.
I love what I call the show.
He brings the theater all the time.
He's the first who effectively merged theater and politics and totally made it work.
It was jarring to people at first, but we saw most recently in his latest North Korea tweet where he went, he finally, it felt like he was breaking the fourth wall.
For the first time, he looked at the audience and said, wink.
All the other times, up until this point, you wondered, or at least half of the country wondered, the other half didn't.
But half of the country said, is he just crazy?
Does he have no impulse control?
What's going on?
And half of the country was like, oh, that's funny.
You know, good one.
And so finally, he brought in the other half.
Now they understand it's intentional.
And that might change the conversation a little bit.
I have to say, I laughed for straight five minutes at that tweet.
And when somebody was saying, oh, wow, we've fallen so far since Churchill.
Actually, I wasn't sure that in this culture, Churchill wouldn't have said exactly the same thing.
That might have been exactly where he would have gone.
Yeah, I got to think Churchill would have been on Twitter.
You're absolutely right on that.
So you talk about a world where facts don't matter.
Is this a change?
Is this something new that's happened?
No, it's something new that we're realizing.
When Trump first came on the scene, I realized that he would change more than politics, and I predicted that in the beginning, too, back in 2015.
I said, he's going to change more than politics.
He's going to change how humans see their place in the world, how we see reality itself.
And here's the shift.
As a hypnotist, when you're in hypnosis school, the first thing you have to learn in order for any of it to work is you have to understand that people are irrational 90% of the time.
And we rationalize our decisions as if we did use logic and facts.
Now, the hypnotist knows this, but it's only been in recent years that you're seeing a number of popular books, let's say the last 10 to 20 years.
You've seen some books trickle out that put the lie to that.
You know, from Kahneman, Think You Fast and Small, Influence, books by Childini, now Presuasion by Childini, the book Nudge.
These are all books that speak of the science that shows that people only imagine that they're making rational choices.
And now we're also seeing insiders from Google and the big tech companies saying, you think you know why you do things, but we know why you're doing it.
We're making you do these things.
We're influencing you to such a degree that you're actually addicted to our platforms.
It's all intentional.
You don't really have free will in the way you imagined you had it before.
So I saw that developing, and I thought, this is way bigger than politics.
So that's what caused me to want to write about it so much.
Yeah, yeah.
We're talking to Scott Adams, not only the Dilbert creator, but also the author of Win Bigly, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.
I mean, this is another thing.
Social media has sort of upped the game.
And I myself frequently find myself addicted to Twitter, have to keep breaking the addiction, and they do it on purpose.
But you made the comment that basically social media is now our brain.
What does that mean exactly?
Well, when I do a Periscope, which is the streaming service that Twitter owns, and I may have 1,500 people watching at the same time, I can have a thought, an unforeigned thought, I put it out there, and immediately corrections come in.
They fact correct me, they augment it, they extend it.
And so it's almost like there's one brain operating in real time.
Now, you see it more distinctly in a live setting where the comments are coming in at the same time you're talking.
But I would say it's true of all the social media.
It's one person's brain.
It gets critiqued and augmented.
The good ideas become viral.
The bad ideas die, which is very much like your own thoughts.
You know, your good thoughts rise to the surface.
You think about them a lot, and they maybe inform what you do.
Social media is the same thing.
The good ones rise to the top, they become viral, and it starts informing what we all do, including each individual.
So we do have something like a collective brain at this point.
That's a hive mind.
So the book is called Winn Bigley.
And by the way, I haven't received it.
I didn't receive it in time to read it, and I'm going to read it.
But I did last week have dinner with one of the smartest conservative editors I know, a guy named Brian Anderson.
He was almost finished with it, and he just thought it was absolutely terrific.
I mean, he was absolutely immersed in it and felt it was a very serious book, had a lot of really important things to say, even though they were said in an entertaining way.
It's called Winn Bigley, which kind of suggests there's something we can learn from this.
Something we can learn from Donald Trump in our own lives.
Is that true?
Yeah, so it's organized as a bunch of persuasion tips that anybody could use in any context, you know, work or politics or their social life.
And a lot of people don't know that Trump had as his pastor at his church when he was a kid, the whole family had their pastor.
Their pastor was Norman Vincent Peel.
Now, some people of at least my age recognize him as maybe the most, well, at the time, he was probably the most influential author.
And he wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, which essentially I'll summarize the whole book, which is he was the first who said you can reframe the way you're thinking about things, and that will cause you to be successful.
Until then, that wasn't really a thing.
He was really the one who pioneered that.
And he was so influential in his day that people accused him of being a hypnotist.
Now, you see his influence in the president already.
The other day, for example, he was talking about the GDP.
And most presidents would say, hey, we got 3%.
That's great, isn't it?
Hey, everybody, that's great.
And they'd stop there.
He doesn't do that.
He went and folded Norman Vincent Peel, and you'll see this all kinds of ways.
He said, we got 3%.
That's great.
Except for the hurricane, we probably would have had 4%.
I think we're going to have 4%.
Yeah, 4% is coming.
Now, what he's done is he's put our brains into that, yeah, I think we're going to 4%.
That will cause people to actually be more optimistic because they're hearing it from the top source, the president, and they might invest more.
And if they invest more, that becomes the reality.
So he is literally thinking the economy into a higher state.
None of this is an accident.
He's got the background, he has the influence, and we see the tools and technique.
So while I credit Obama with the strong base of the economy, I'd give him 75% of the credit for at least the first year of the Trump administration.
There's clearly a 25% impact that his optimism, his approach, is reducing regulations, his clawing back jobs and businesses, even talk about taxes.
These are psychologically having a big impact.
That's why the stock market's up.
It's why consumer confidence is up.
It's why the jobs numbers remain good.
And I would expect that to continue because he has exactly the right kind of background to keep that up.
Now, what about the moral hazard?
I mean, this is the thing you keep hearing from the never-Trumpers that basically, if we are going to surrender to this world of thinking positively but not thinking truthfully, of not thinking that facts matter.
I mean, surely facts matter in the sense that if you don't take into account the fact that the road ends over here, you're going to drive off the road and off the cliff, right?
I mean, facts.
I mean, I've been very committed to the idea of truth my whole life, and it really does seem to me that we're living in a time where irrational arguments are made with absolute sanctimony, that you know, that people make irrational arguments with absolute conviction and sanctimony.
Isn't there a moral hazard to ascribing to a world, a non-factual world?
Well, so here's the thing: persuasion is a set of tools, and like any tool, you could use it for good or bad.
You can hit somebody in the head with a hammer if you want to, but it's better if you build a house with it.
So, we all have essentially the same set of ethical preferences.
So, we're starting with that.
But I want to be clear that we aren't suddenly choosing a preference for ignoring facts.
Literally, nobody has that preference.
If we could have the facts and they would help us, we would all prefer that.
What we're witnessing instead is a higher level of awareness that the facts don't affect us the way they should, and we don't really know the facts.
I just saw, I think it was today, an article somebody forwarded around from Slate, and somebody in Slate was, no, a salon, one of those, and was saying that, gosh, why is it that the conservatives are always fooled by science and get all the facts wrong?
That was a perfect example of someone who is in their bubble and believes that there are correct facts and they have access to them in a secret way that some half of the country can't see.
Now, the truth is that both sides are irrational, and both are quite certain that the set of facts that they're looking at are the real ones, and what the hell is wrong with the people in that other bubble, right?
So, the only thing I'm adding, and I guess I could steal a little bit from Richard Dawkins, who used to say, he's a famous atheist, and he used to say, I'm practically like everybody else.
I only believe in one fewer God, which is very clever.
So, with these bubbles, I'm suggesting that we're all in a bubble.
So, I'm not suggesting that only half of us is, which was the old way of looking at things.
Okay, fair enough.
And where do you think when you look at the country?
I mean, I've had some very funny conversations with Trump supporters, like Victor Davis Hansen, when I've said to him, doesn't it remind you of the fall of the Roman Republic?
And he said, oh, absolutely.
It looks exactly like that.
Do you think we're headed for bad times because of this?
Or do you think this is actually just another level of understanding?
I think, and this might be the most controversial prediction.
Okay, let's see.
It's starting to look like we're on the verge of a golden age.
I think you're right.
And I mean, a serious golden age.
I'll just give you some, just a little bit of why I think that.
On the Verge of a Golden Age00:02:34
First of all, there's no such thing as shortages anymore, at least for the industrial country.
There's nothing we need that we don't have access to.
So that means your economy is good.
You can educate people if they want to, et cetera.
And the internet helps that as well.
But I saw today somebody passed around a $2,000 body imaging device that would at least do some of what maybe an MRI would have done for $2,000, handheld.
So these are the kinds of things that are coming online.
So right now, what's our biggest problem?
Healthcare.
Costs too much.
There's a whole bunch of stuff happening, and I've seen some of it because I invest in startups.
So I've seen what's coming down the pike.
And there are a bunch of devices that will sit on the table, hold in your hand, look on the internet that are going to make those costs drop 90% if we allow it, assuming that the laws and everything are friendly.
So I think healthcare is going to be inexpensive.
I see Bill Gates just decided to build a fresh city from bare ground to try to figure out what is the optimal living arrangement, which is a great start.
You see Elon Musk tunneling under the cities to improve everything from transportation to who knows what.
So if we can get North Korea under control, that's the big wildcard.
And if we can avoid whatever climate change things are ahead of us, those are big wildcards.
We're looking really good because I don't think China is going to attack.
I don't think Russia is going to attack.
We're on the verge of having no serious enemies except for terrorism that will be ongoing.
And an economy that is insanely good.
We could be almost there.
You know, it's funny.
I think many of the same things about this, and it's very hard to convince people to be that optimistic.
You obviously are a hypnotist, so you've convinced me.
If after this interview, I go out and cluck like a chicken every time a white Volkswagen goes by, I'll know that the interview was much different than I remember.
Scott Adams, the author of Win Bigly, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.
I'm a big fan.
I appreciate you coming on.
I hope you come back.
Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Really interesting interview, but we are out of time.
I got to say goodbye.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
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