From: intraphase@gmail.com

THE ART OF PERSUASION AS A VITAL SKILL



Scott Adams Talks Trump, Persuasion, and our Post-Fact World

By Mike Cernovich

Enjoy this interview with Scott Adams, which is one of ten interviews in from the new book Hoaxed: The Truth About Fake News. Scott Adams discusses his newest book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.

Who are you and what are you about?

I am Scott Adams. I’m the creator of the Dilbert comic strip and, for the last two years, I’ve been writing a lot about President Trump’s powers of persuasion. I’m a trained hypnotist and have studied persuasion for decades for my work, and in
him I noticed a special set of tools that I’ve been writing about.

It’s interesting you call yourself, “the creator of Dilbert,” because I read your book — it’s a long title, How To Fail At Nearly Everything In Life And Still Win Big — and I’ve been familiar with Dilbert, so when I think of you, I think of
you as more of a mindset guy or something else outside of Dilbert.

My brand has changed a little bit, because as I write more about persuasion —
and, in particular, as it applies to President Trump — people are starting to
know me from that part of my writing and less about the cartoon.

Yes, because I actually recommended — when I read your book on life, essentially — how you really systematized a lot of things that I’ve intuitively sort of recognized and noticed in people. That book kind of took off in the last couple of years.

Yeah. So my book, How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big, is about persuasion, in a sense. It’s about how to persuade yourself. It’s about how
to reprogram yourself to be more effective. So that was my introduction to the world of
persuasion, in terms of the audience’s perception of me.

Yeah, that’s an interesting point…which is that, for example, you talk about mantras in your book. And a mantra is ultimately convincing yourself to believe in yourself.

Affirmations, yeah.

Affirmations are persuasion. So I guess we would say that fake-, of course, humorous persuasion, too, so making somebody laugh-, I read your article from years ago on what the six elements of humor…

Yeah. So persuasion is in everything. So if you’re communicating, you’re persuading — even if the only thing you’re trying to persuade is that you’re smart, or you want somebody to like you, or think you’re competent. So persuasion is just-,
it’s around everything, it’s in everything. And if you don’t recognize it
for what it is, you’re missing a big dimension of your-, of your experience.

Now, when you break up persuasion, it seems like a lot of people have weird superstitions about it. Maybe talk about that.

Well, persuasion is scary to people — especially if they think it’s the same as manipulation. Now, I try to-, I try to have a distinction between manipulation and just persuasion based on intent. If your intention is to do something that’s good for
you, and bad for someone else, that’s probably manipulation. If it’s in a business context, then both sides are doing it, and you both have commercial grade negotiating skills — well, that’s a little bit fair, because you both
know what the game
is and you’re both playing. But you certainly wouldn’t want to use persuasion to just do something evil. It’s a tool — and you could do good things with it or evil — just like any other tool.

Is the media trying to persuade us when they share the news?

The media’s persuasion comes in a lot of different forms. One of them is visual. The most persuasive thing is visual. Our visual sense overpowers everything else. So what they choose to show as an image is the message, no matter what the “yak-yak-yak�
�� is that comes over it…no matter what the other words on the screen say. What you remember is what you saw. So if you see the president — let’s say,
working with minorities and, you know, them liking him and touching him and and
all, being happy �
�� that’s the image that sticks with you. And if you see an image of Melania Trump wearing high heels on the way to a hurricane disaster — of course, it was only the first few steps to the helicopter she wore those heels — but it doesn’t matter
what the explanation is. What’s-, what sticks in your head is the picture of the heels. That’s why it was such a big story is there was a picture involved. You take the picture away and there’s no story.

So, with the media, by choosing what image to use, are trying to persuade people about something.

The media is persuading both by visual images, but also by what topics they cover and what they don’t: Who is talking about it, how credible they are, how many times you ask the same question over and over. So you could watch, let’s say, CNN, and
then switch back-and-forth between FOX and CNN and you would see the same news.
Meaning that the facts would be reported, essentially, the same, but the amount
of time they spend talking about one fact, versus the other fact, is completely
different. And
that’s where all the persuasion is.

Yeah I read a book — I think it’s called, How To [Watch] TV News, or something — by Neil Postman, and a journalist had confessed — this is, I think, a hundred years ago — that if you want to manufacture a crime wave, all you do is start
reporting on the crimes that occur every day in any big city.

Yeah, you can-, you can cause some amount of the public to be influenced by just about anything, if you give them enough messages. So, most people are not that influenced by just watching the news, right? They’re already set in their ways and it’s
not going to change. But if you’re working on a big population of people over
time, and you’re very consistent in your message, you can get five percent of
the people to believe anything.

Maybe more than five percent of the people.

Yeah, depending-, depending how good you are — how long you take them and where they started from — you could get more than five percent.

So, the things that people consider important are not the things that are important. They’re the things they’re thinking about. So, whatever you’re
thinking about just seems like that’s the big thing because your brain can’t handle everything.
You’ve got to-, you’ve got to, you know, filter out the small stuff and decide what you’re focusing on. So, if the media makes you focus on one thing, you’re going to think that’s important, eventually. Even if it isn’t.

Is the media trying to get people to focus on one given subject?

Well, the media right now is sort of split down the middle. People who were sort of left-focused media were anti-Trumpers at this moment than the people who are more pro-Trump. And my observation is that the team that’s out-of-power gets the craziest
and has to try the hardest to persuade, because they’re starting from a hole and they’ve got to punch hard. The-, the group that has their person in the White House feels like “business as usual”, and just reports the facts, and
that is going to
get them further. You know, they’re all, of course, biased on both sides. But
the out-of-power side is always going to be the crazy one until the power changes.

One thing I’ve noticed, in media coverage, is that if you have a hundred people — say, at a Trump event — and ninety-nine of them are nice, all the cameras go to one person who maybe isn’t so nice.

The news only cares about the stuff that is visual, that’s violent, is provocative. It’s-it’s the thing that you don’t see. So, there’s no such thing as news about somebody who did the thing that they always do — that they did a little bit
better. That’s not news. Somebody’s gotta, you know, break the mold, and the people doing that are the minority. Meaning, if there are a hundred people,
one of them might be breaking the law, but they’re going to get all the-, all
the camera time.

Do you think that the media created a certain narrative about Trump supporters that maybe wasn’t fair?

I think both sides in the political realm create a cartoon version of the other
and try to brand all the people on the other side by that, by the worst few people. So, on the right, the right got branded as a bunch of “KKK racists,” when, in fact,
the average Republican is nothing like that. The left is branded as: “You Antifa crazy people with masks,” and, you know, they want to open borders and, you know, get rid of the government. There are very few people on the left
who actually would
embrace all of that stuff. So it’s really cartoon characters on both sides.

Yeah, I sometimes feel like we’re-, we don’t talk to each other. We talk to
the caricature of you that I’m [believing] you really are.

Communication depends primarily — and this is probably the first rule of communication — that it doesn’t matter what someone says. It only matters what you think they were thinking. And if you think somebody is evil, whatever comes out of their
mouth is going to sound pretty evil. And if you-, if you think that person is on your side, even if they say something that sounds a little bit evil, you’re going to say, “Uhh, that’s Bob — he doesn’t mean that.”

So [through] our expectations — based, really, on magical thinking in many cases — we imagine we can see what’s in the soul of other people. That’s the most classic mistake you could make, because we’re really terrible at that. I mean, if you’
ve ever been in a relationship of any kind, you know that a lot of it is: “Well, I thought you were thinking this, and I figured you were mad, but I couldn’t tell.” You can’t even tell with your loved ones.

We certainly can’t tell with strangers that we’ve never met, [that] we’ve
seen on television: “Well, that person has evil in his or her soul and, therefore, I look at their message that way.” So, probably the biggest flaw in our perceptions
about other people is that we imagine that we have this clear insight into their soul. You know, they’re, uh, good or bad. And, weirdly, we imagine that
these normal people — who would be our friends in any other context — are actually like
monsters on the inside. And it’s pretty rare that anybody is actually a monster on the inside.

Yeah, one of the things I actually tell people with my mindset thing is what I call the “STS” method, which is: Stop Telling Stories. Which is, you go to meet somebody, like, “Oh, look at that guy. Oh, but he’s dressed a certain way. Therefore I
know what he believes,” and your whole entire interaction is based on this story that you’ve told yourself about this person that you’ve never even met.

There are a couple of things happening with the “branding,” if you will, of
Trump supporters. One is that it’s just a normal political process that both sides, you know, brand each other negatively. But, on top of that, we had that surprise
election outcome, which was this enormous trigger for cognitive dissonance. It was one-half of the country found out that they weren’t smart. They didn’t understand the world they were living in. They weren’t as clever as they imagined they were.
They were just wrong about so much and they found it out, sort of, at the same time, you know, on election night. And that triggers people.

If people have normal brains — so this is not a-, not an insult to any of these people — the normal way the brain works is that when your worldview gets shook like that, you have to rewrite the script in your head to make it make sense. And a lot of
people rewrote the script so that they would still be right. And the way they would still be right is, “Ah-ha! Maybe we were wrong about who got elected. We were certainly right that he is a monster and he must be a racist and he will ruin the world.”
And then they watch for the evidence of that. And amazingly, they see it, but only they can see it. The other half, they got what they expected, which was President Trump — they voted for him, they wanted him. That’s just what we expected to happen.
We were glad they did. They-, they’re more likely to see an unbiased view. Of
course, everybody’s biased. There’s no such thing as unbiased in our world.

But, the Trump supporters didn’t get triggered in such a violent way as the people who said, “This man could never be president.” So they really had to
rewrite their movie in their heads to make it make sense. And the best way they
can do it is to
say, “Yeah, we were right — he’s a monster — you’ll see any minute now.” And we wait, and we don’t see it.

Since you were one of the first — if not the first — people who predicted Trump to win, your phone must have been blowing off the hook with the media trying to get you to come explain this, right?

I became suddenly very popular when my prediction of a Trump win happened, because I was one of the-, one of the first people who predicted it. Now, I’m
pretty sure a guy named Mike Cernovich predicted that about the same time, or earlier than I did.
But, yeah, I became quite popular for getting it right. Now, of course, at the same time, I have to say somebody was going to get it right if it-, if we’re being completely objective. A lot of people had their pet ideas about what would happen and what
wouldn’t happen and somebody was going to be right. And this-, and this time I was on the side that was right.

I’d like to think there was a reason for my being right, but I can’t know.

One thing I noticed, though, is that when people go, “Oh, I bet you the media’s calling Scott Adams,” saying, “Come on and explain why Trump really won!” and I didn’t see that latter part happening.

After Trump won, I saw an article on CNN’s website in which they listed — I
believe it was twenty-four different reasons, from different publications — that said, “Well here’s the reason this result was a surprise.” And I don’t think any of
those results included my best explanation which is: He’s just really persuasive. And he knows the tools and he works the tools well. He understood the public and connected with them.


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