In this episode of the Awakened Wondrous Podcast, we have a fantastic interview with Scott Adams, who you might know from Dilbert, or from his recent book, Reframe Your Brain. You might also know him as the author of the excellent book, "The Art of Persuasion: How To Persuade People To Think Past The Sales" and as the host of the show, "Real Coffee", on the show on Locals. In this episode, we talk about how Trump is a master at the art of persuasion, and how he uses it to get people to think past the sales pitch. We talk about the power of nicknames and how Trump uses them to get his supporters to vote for him. It's a fascinating interview, and one you won't want to miss. Click the link in the description below to see the full conversation with Scott on Real Coffee, and if it's within your means, press the red button to become a member of our AWAKEDWonders Locals community. If it's not, click the link below and become a supporter of our community. You can see this conversation in its entirety on our new show, On Locals, where you'll get an extra half hour of extra half an hour of Real Coffee! Click here to watch the entire interview on the Real Coffee show. You'll get a copy of "On Locals" by Scott Adams' book "Reframing Your Brain" right here. You can also see the entire conversation on his new show on his show "On Local Coffee" on his YouTube channel, where he'll be talking about all things you need to know about how to be a good human being a better human being. by becoming a part of a community of like-minded people. Thanks for listening and supporting the community! - Scott Adams - click here to learn more about his new book "reframed your brain" by Reframed Your Brain: The Art Of Persuaded To Think Beyond the Sales Machine. - see it on Local Coffee, Real Coffee and much more! We hope you enjoy this episode. . Thank you for listening, Scott Adams: I'm looking forward to hearing back from you! Tweet Me! , by: . . by and I'll see you in the next episode! by Tim Leary: - Tim's Tweets: )
00:00:10.000We've got a fantastic interview, an extended interview, in fact, with Scott Adams, who you might know from Dilbert, you might know from his recent You might know because of his excellent and interesting books.
00:00:22.000I'm going to be talking to him about all of that.
00:01:13.000Of course, I suppose leadership Leadership remains a fascinating subject, I suppose because leadership and persuasion are the ability to, through charisma perhaps, or through other means, and perhaps you'll explain them to me, create
00:01:32.000Realities that people will willingly or even unconsciously participate in.
00:01:38.000Tell me what you think specifically Trump exemplifies.
00:01:43.000In the book you talk about him being sort of some like indigenous or native or a natural genius when it comes to the art of persuasion.
00:01:53.000What do you mean by that and what are examples of that?
00:01:57.000Well, he seems to have the full toolbox of persuasion, which if you didn't study it as a field, as I do, I'm a trained hypnotist, you wouldn't recognize.
00:02:07.000So for example, the number one tool of persuasion is fear.
00:02:12.000So he started out in 2015, the illegal people who may be criminals are streaming across the border and, you know, Chinese could eat our lunch and basically scaring you.
00:02:58.000He also says it's going to have a door in it.
00:03:02.000Now, that's making you think past the sale, because you already have to accept there could be a wall for there also to be a door.
00:03:10.000And then he tops it off with, and Mexico's going to pay for it?
00:03:14.000Now, that's the funniest, make you think best, the sale I've ever seen.
00:03:19.000Because if he can make you argue about how ridiculous it is that Mexico would pay for the wall, you've already uncritically accepted that there might be a wall.
00:03:48.000And he comes up with nicknames that are not only visual, like Low Energy Jeb, It's a concept, but when you see him, it changes how you see him.
00:03:59.000And I always say that when I first saw Jeb Bush, you know, come on the scene, I thought to myself, wow, he's got exactly that executive, calm, cool, you know, probably would be great in an emergency because he wouldn't get too excited about it, you know.
00:04:15.000And then the moment that Trump says he's low energy, That's all I could see, because he made a comparison between his own energy and Jeb, and from that moment on you could only see it.
00:04:26.000But the other magic he does is he picks a nickname that will be almost certainly reinforced by future events.
00:04:36.000So when he says low-energy gem, you know there's going to be a video where somebody says, there he is, he's looking low-energy.
00:04:42.000You could probably find that for anybody.
00:04:44.000But then when he says Crooked Hillary, you think to yourself, ah, there's no way she won't be at least accused of something that would fit into that frame.
00:05:42.000And that's the secret behind a reframe and behind hypnosis and a lot of AI as well.
00:05:48.000It seems like what you're saying, and I would say it's alluring and it's an attractive proposition, is that there are kind of universal principles in communication.
00:06:02.000that don't alter, whether they're within the realm of hypnosis or neuro-linguistic programming.
00:06:08.000They are just certain indefatigable facts that if people use them, you know, I like to think,
00:06:14.000"No, no, I'm very sophisticated. I know how to discern information. I'll know if someone's
00:06:18.000trying to dupe me or lead me up the garden path." But this is sort of, in a sense, an inability to
00:06:25.000acknowledge my own hardware and my own unconscious biases and the way that the part of me that's
00:06:33.000Firstly do you think that Trump is doing this instinctively almost as a genius might in the way a genius athlete or like sort of the way that Marlon Brando might pick up a glove and on the waterfront and just sort of thumb it unconsciously creating an organic naturalness or The way that Willie Mays might strike a ball, and I know nothing of baseball, so I would use football if it was left to me, but I know who the audience are.
00:07:02.000Or do you think that this is something that he's learned through sales?
00:07:04.000Because in a sense, these are sales techniques.
00:07:07.000I often see how the culture has evolved, often around people that I admire, even mentors of mine, that at their point of origin would have been much more
00:07:15.000focused on the world of sales and pitching that now have migrated into a more overtly spiritual space,
00:07:22.000I would say. In a way, some of the principles hold true. I know that thing of two
00:07:28.000suggestions and then two verifiables and then a suggestion. I recognize what you're saying about
00:07:33.000that stuff. It seems like I'm making these notes and thinking, "Yeah, man, this is how I should
00:07:36.000be communicating. This is how we should all be communicating if our job, and God, has it not become
00:07:41.000our job now more than ever, to present a version of reality that's more appealing than our
00:07:46.000opponents'. If Trump is a genius of it, say, if that is indeed what you believe and somehow a native
00:07:52.000genius of it, is it stuff that everyone does badly and even his opponents do it badly? Can you talk
00:07:58.000us through a few examples of their crap versions of it as well?
00:08:03.000Well, the universals would include repetition.
00:08:07.000The more you repeat something, the more people think it's true.
00:08:09.000That's what he does with the perfect phone call.
00:08:12.000He just keeps saying it until you can't not think it when it's paired with the topic.
00:08:17.000So he's got that, but he has all the sales techniques of thinking past the sale, et cetera.
00:08:39.000I don't think you'd pick that up on your own.
00:08:42.000His minister of the church he went to every Sunday when he was a kid, his family, was the author of the book, The Power of Positive Thinking.
00:08:51.000Whose name is escaping me for some reason.
00:10:26.000And this idea of compounding concepts is significant even in the, I don't know if it's more sophisticated or simply different, but the idea of abstinence is predicated, of course, on the notion that it is the first drink that's the problem, not the ninth or the 10th or that you'll ever be able to drink safely.
00:10:46.000And in this instance, the compound is to equate even drinking at all with an annihilation of your life.
00:10:52.000And in fact, any kind of behavioral adjunct pivot progression
00:10:57.000would have to be predicated upon a vision of some description.
00:11:02.000And in the case of like a 12 step person like me, it's I now equate the use of a recreational drug,
00:11:09.000even or, you know, street drugs, or even a sort of a socially acceptable
00:11:13.000and legal drug like alcohol with personal destruction.
00:11:17.000And that like that is a, you know, it's a form of conditioning has taken place
00:11:21.000and ultimately sort of in this instance, a beneficial one.
00:11:25.000I wonder if, you know, obviously comment on anything you want to mate,
00:11:29.000but like, I wonder if you think that part of what Trump has been able to do in addition to his evident
00:11:35.000and obvious rhetorical skill, and I've always thought it was a failing of his opponents
00:11:38.000not to sort of acknowledge and register and enjoy that even when opposing him,
00:11:43.000because it sometimes looks like they don't inhabit the same sort of universe as everyone else
00:11:48.000when they just sort of say he's stupid or whatever.
00:11:51.000I I wonder if there's something, one, that he engages with people emotionally in a way that's sort of somehow anomalous or at least rare in an age of bureaucrats and managerial politicians that are somewhat visionless.
00:12:10.000And this idea of vision, this idea of being able to give an authentic vision.
00:12:17.000to an audience. And given that we're living in a time of obvious conflict where the culture is,
00:12:24.000in a sense, it feels to me, and again tell me what you feel, and I know I'm throwing a lot
00:12:28.000at you here but I feel like you're tracking it, like that the culture is trying to centralise
00:12:32.000and control perception. The culture is aggressively saying, "This is what reality is,
00:12:41.000This is the information that you have to believe.
00:12:43.000If you don't believe this information, you are the worst kind of nefarious individual.
00:12:48.000Do you think, how do you believe we can penetrate, challenge, attack, control, overcome that?
00:12:55.000Well, the tough part is you never know who your enemies are.
00:12:58.000Because I feel like whoever's behind the shadow banning and maybe some cancellations that are more political than content related, you don't really ever know who's behind it.
00:13:12.000So if you look at my situation, the Washington Post was sort of the flagship that got the other newspapers to cancel me.
00:13:19.000But the Washington Post is well known as, let's say, well connected with the intelligence outfit in the United States.
00:13:28.000So the question I ask is, is the fact that the Washington Post is so associated with Democrats and also the intelligence group, which are also associated with the Democrats, is it a coincidence that no Republicans cancelled me?
00:13:42.000So when we're talking about free speech and how do you penetrate the narrative, there's also some amount of dirty tricks and secret players that are really hard to know who your targets are.
00:13:55.000So it's hard to fight back when you don't know who you're fighting against.
00:14:01.000But to answer, the only way I can imagine there would be a difference is people like Trump who can break through because he's just too hard not to cover.
00:16:07.000He's another person on the Axe platform who talks about the intelligence agencies, you know, maneuverings behind the scenes, as if he's opening the hood so we can see.
00:16:17.000And I think it was today he was tweeting that he's expecting, you know, just a massive personal attack and probably some form of lawfare against him.
00:16:36.000It appears, too, that what was once regarded as the, I would say, liberal left and the assumption that built into that were ideals that grew out of the civil rights movement that are pretty righteous and laudable.
00:16:58.000set of interests has become curiously authoritarian in the name of liberty, safety, convenience.
00:17:07.000I'm seeing these odd pacts emerge between sort of big tech and sort of neoliberalism
00:17:14.000that are creating curiously in a way that I could never have imagined.
00:17:20.000Alliances on what might once have been termed the other side of the aisle, but you've mentioned
00:17:25.000Glenn Greenwald, and let's mention him once more.
00:17:30.000In a way, personally, and I wouldn't expect you to know this or even care, I used to be
00:17:36.000regarded as a kind of conventional lefty sort of Hollywood type person, but I was always
00:17:42.000actually anti-authoritarian and sort of pro-individual freedom and pro-community freedom.
00:17:50.000I was also interested in community and care about society and have values and principles.
00:17:55.000And then as my content became more vocally anti-establishment, as I started to speak out against electoral democracy, its corruption, legacy media, how they simply amplify state and corporate state message at that, rather than interrogating it, how they spend no resources
00:18:11.000on investigating issues that really seriously affect people and significant resources on
00:18:15.000bringing down dissent and controlling potential dissidents. I started to be called like right-wing and a
00:18:20.000right-wing conspiracy theorist and like I've spoken to a bunch of people that I guess
00:18:26.000And I find them absolutely delightful, I'd have to say.
00:18:30.000But I still feel that what's emerging, potentially now, is something new.
00:18:34.000And I cite often Martin Guri's book, The Revolt of the Public, which is a sort of, in a way, a companion piece to that famous book, Here Comes Everyone, that simply explores how The way that communication technology has altered has meant that the establishment can no longer keep up with the diversification and dissemination of information and has necessarily become authoritarian in order to countenance these new threats, these new information threats.
00:19:01.000And in order to legitimise what they're doing, which is basically state censorship, they've had to invent new categories, misinformation, disinformation, and create
00:19:11.000enemies that would warrant, this is why you see people being called Nazis and the most egregious
00:19:16.000and awful things that you can accuse anybody of, racist, and the list, we can all add
00:19:20.000to that list of course, because they need to legitimize the end goal, shut down dissent,
00:19:25.000control dissent invoices, because any dissent invoice, now anyone with a phone is a potential
00:19:32.000Martin Goury talked about that in The Revolt of the Public, that the old models are dying, so they have to find ways of controlling the emergent new model.
00:19:41.000And in a sense, Trump was, you know, one of the first people that effectively used these new forms of communication technology, famously through Twitter as it then was.
00:19:52.000And I wonder what you think about these likelihood of new alliances with people with a broad base of social philosophy and ideology.
00:20:00.000I wonder what you think about the possibility, and again I suppose to your point about who are these people that are controlling it.
00:20:07.000I guess I would say that it's the nexus of interests that exist between, like for example with this new online safety bill in the UK, demonstrates that the UK government and the EU and all of the Five Eyes countries are introducing legislation that enables their government in unprecedented ways to utilise big tech so that, and I guess it's like a deal they're doing really, of we're not going to shut you guys down and your ability to profit and advertise if you allow us to Yeah, you know, my take on this is that I see the world as a big old dopamine machine.
00:20:52.000I used to say, follow the money and it explains everything.
00:20:56.000But money is just a holding place for dopamine, right?
00:20:59.000You can keep it in your money until you're ready to buy the jazz ski, and then you get your dopamine.
00:21:04.000So, when you're looking at why is it this weird connection of people who don't even seem to be on the side they used to be on, I think it's because the philosophical layer, the why we do things, has always been fake for the people in power.
00:21:19.000The people in power want to keep their job, keep their influence, keep their dopamine high, you know, have more babies than the other people, so basically win.
00:21:27.000So, whatever it takes to win is what they're going to promote, and it doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't have to be consistent with what they've ever done, it doesn't have to be ethical, it doesn't have to be moral, because they're just chasing dopamine.
00:21:39.000So, once you see the world as a dopamine chase, everything makes sense.
00:21:44.000It's just very unpleasant to think of it that way.
00:21:47.000Yeah, it does seem pretty, obviously literally endocrinal and therefore animal and unconscious and beyond individual freedom and beyond any kind of freedom you might conceive of.
00:21:57.000Hey, you said that Trump would win in 2016, famously, when people were considering it to be a preposterous and implausible outcome.
00:22:13.000In 2024, almost anything could happen.
00:22:16.000We're in a weird situation where I do worry about his physical security.
00:22:21.000I do worry that 91, what looked like to me, political charges, is not the end of it.
00:22:29.000And it looks like there's no level of obviousness that they're trying, well, they're not trying to be less obvious anymore.
00:22:37.000The latest charges in New York, Look to me like they're not even trying to be legitimate.
00:22:45.000It looks to me like it's just purely political.
00:22:48.000And I don't know if most of the country will either understand banking and insurance issues to know how blatantly, obviously political it is or not.
00:22:58.000But they're not trying to hide anything.
00:23:00.000I think complexity is the friend of the The power mongers, because they can hide anything in complexity, say, well, you don't understand legal tax accounting things, bad, orange man, bad.
00:23:14.000And then, you know, trust us, orange man, bad accounting, you don't understand.
00:23:18.000And they could take anybody down with that.
00:23:21.000So, I would expect that if Trump survives these charges, all the ones we know about, I think they'll just be new ones.
00:23:29.000I think they'll just invent new ones until they can find some way to take him out.
00:23:34.000They'll obviously go after all of his lawyers, anybody who would talk to him, anybody who would support him.
00:23:41.000If you say anything nice about him, even though I'm endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy, I like somebody younger for the next era.
00:23:52.000Even then, because I say positive things about Trump's skill set, they'll try to take me on as well.
00:23:59.000Now, the thing about free speech is the people trying to suppress it are, of course, the people in power, because people in power are the ones who are most, let's say, threatened by free speech.
00:24:10.000So they don't have to take everybody out.
00:24:12.000They only have to take out the notables.
00:24:15.000Because if they take out the people who are really good at communicating and have some chance of breaking through into their base that doesn't hear the other arguments, those are the dangerous ones.
00:24:25.000They don't need to take out everybody who has a social media account and complains online.
00:25:05.000What is it that you sort of, like I saw you say that white people should stay away from black people because there was so much tension being generated and it wasn't safe.
00:25:21.000What did you mean and how do you think it was misused especially?
00:25:29.000Well, everything that public figures say gets taken out of context, because there's always a bigger context.
00:25:35.000So, the bigger context is that in the United States and other countries as well, we're suffering under these things called ESG and CRT and DEI.
00:25:45.000Now, they all have in common the idea that there's an oppressor group and an oppressed group.
00:25:52.000The oppressors are the rich old white guys, mostly, but white people in general.
00:25:58.000And the oppressed are black people and people of color, but black people in particular, because of the legacy of slavery and ongoing systemic racism.
00:26:09.000And so the idea is that if you're in the group that has been labeled the oppressor, and the other group has been told that you've oppressed them and you have their stuff, And they should get it back.
00:26:28.000It has nothing to do with anybody's DNA.
00:26:30.000It has nothing to do with anybody's culture.
00:26:33.000So it has nothing to do with even the color.
00:26:35.000It has to do with the fact that we've decided to organize our society in a way that we're trading people, not only in school, But all the way through their corporate life and through the media, that one group of people are the bad people and they have your stuff.
00:26:54.000Now, it's hyperbole to say, get away, because we live in a big world in which getting away isn't really a practical thing.
00:27:01.000So I was hoping people would see that as hyperbole.
00:27:05.000But if you take it seriously, it sounds like a sounds like a whole different thing.
00:27:09.000Yeah, I suppose in a sense it appears to me that elite interests have always been able to dominate.
00:27:18.000I mean, what is power other than the ability to dominate and control reality, whether that's the perception of reality or the economics of reality themselves?
00:27:28.000And yeah, there is a sort of a reductivism in many of the dominant narratives around
00:27:35.000how we should sort of almost re-segregate society that don't seem to have a very, what
00:27:41.000do I want to say, congenial vision for our future.
00:27:46.000I.e. there is not a very optimistic appraisal of our ability to live together beyond our
00:28:19.000I wonder if you feel that in using that type of framing and that type of analytic we can look at what's happening when the more vilified Trump becomes the more popular he becomes.
00:28:32.000Superficially it would seem that people are so mistrustful of the legacy media and detest the state so deeply and this is something I spoke to Glenn Greenwald and I spoke last week And he said that people hate the state and they actually hate the media now.
00:28:51.000It's like there is a hatred that's almost a tipping point.
00:28:55.000And that, in a way, an anti-establishment figure, for whatever you think of Trump, whether you're pro-Trump or anti-Trump person, it's pretty plain the establishment don't want him there.
00:29:05.000It's pretty plain they're going to considerable lengths to prevent him becoming an incumbent political force, at least.
00:29:15.000I wonder, What type of ways might this undercurrent, this emotional undercurrent, be harnessed, corralled, motivated, activated for anti-establishment movements elsewhere?
00:29:33.000And if you agree with the basic analysis that he's become an anti-establishment icon?
00:29:47.000You know, you'd have to find somebody who just, by luck, had similar characteristics and, you know, a billion dollars so they could, you know, weather the storms and didn't need to have a day job and all kinds of things.
00:30:02.000I mean, there's things I would say at my current age that I never would have said as a younger man, because right now I'm risking a few extra years of my remaining life.
00:30:13.000So that's a smaller risk than 40 years of life.
00:30:17.000So I'm in a lower risk situation, as is Trump, because he's a certain age.
00:30:24.000So, he can simply do and say things that other people are not free to do.
00:30:28.000So, that's the kind of freedom you could imagine other places would have, older people.
00:30:34.000But I don't recommend people over, I don't know, 75 being in office.
00:31:12.000We just didn't know it as well as we know it now.
00:31:15.000We didn't know that the news was as fake as Trump taught us.
00:31:19.000Once we started looking for it, you could see it everywhere.
00:31:22.000But until he alerted you to it, you thought, well, maybe a few stories are sketchy, but mostly they're playing it straight down the middle.
00:31:59.000The first step of building is destruction.
00:32:01.000So we may be entering a transparently beneficial destruction period.
00:32:08.000But we're also nimble enough in 2023, and there are enough smart people and hardworking people, that we can actually adjust to incredible shocks.
00:32:40.000So we're really good at seeing problems way ahead of time and then adjusting appropriately.
00:32:46.000So my most likely prediction for the United States is that there will be corrective forces because there always are.
00:32:53.000Things don't go in one direction forever.
00:32:55.000That's just not a feature of human experience.
00:32:59.000Things do reach a point that's too far.
00:33:02.000This week, for example, we're hearing there was a member of Congress who had a carjacking.
00:33:09.000There was a journalist who got murdered in his home in Philadelphia.
00:33:13.000So the stories of crime in the cities Are certainly going to cause a change to the massive, you know, let's say unmitigated immigration into the cities.
00:33:27.000So we're reaching a breaking point, but not for the wrong reason.
00:33:32.000We're probably reaching a breaking point because you have to use reality to fix people's brains if they're living in an illusion.
00:33:39.000If the illusion is we can be kind to everybody and it'll all work out, well the massive immigration into New York City is the physical disproof of that.
00:33:49.000So you probably need a physical disproof to change people's minds.
00:33:53.000And the minds are what needs to be changed right now.
00:33:56.000So we might be heading toward a lot of destruction, but creative destruction.
00:34:02.000I feel often that the amount of effort, bureaucracy, corruption, legislation, militarisation of the police forces, anti-protest laws, new censorship bills, increasing surveillance, cultural machinery that appears to be utilised to divide people from one another, collectively to be taken as a scale of endeavor that must
00:34:26.000be matched by a kind of latent and unexpressed belief that real change is possible and burgeoning
00:34:33.000and that there will come a point where people are willing to overlook cultural
00:34:38.000differences if the right messages can reach them/us and recognize that ultimately we have
00:34:44.000more in common than one another than the small sets of institutions and interests that benefit
00:34:51.000from this ongoing state of crisis and decay that you describe. Also I agree with your
00:34:58.000necessity of destruction being a precedent or a precursor to real change in a kind of almost
00:35:07.000Vedic Shiva the destroyer creator way because I also feel sometimes that whilst it
00:35:15.000appears to be an archetype that most cultures lean into, the idea of a golden age, the
00:35:22.000idea of Eden, the idea of a time where we were more awake. It feels to me that...
00:35:29.000There is a heaviness in our materialism.
00:35:32.000There is a heaviness in our individualism.
00:35:34.000The rationalism has voided the space between us, has robbed us of the potential charge that can exist between individuals and create the kind of charismatic healing that great individuals can bring about and perhaps great social movements can.
00:35:49.000So I sometimes take heart In how hard they work to prevent change from happening that in a sense like you know I'm sure this is something that you're familiar with it seems like your kind of wheelhouse those miraculous moments where suddenly tulips are no longer prized where sort of economic bubbles burst where new realities just penetrate immediately and people sort of simultaneously awake as if there's some new perfume has reached something dormant within them so
00:36:19.000That's how I keep myself cheerful, Scott.
00:36:23.000I wonder if you might tell us a little more.
00:36:25.000I know that your Alcohol Is Poison is part of your Reframe Your Brain, at least some of the ideas that you cover within your new book, Reframe Your Brain.
00:36:59.000Just imagine that you're in a video game That your reality is actually just a video game and you're in it, and you just respawned, and you just came alive, and you're in the life that you observe, but you have to figure it out from here.
00:37:13.000And you say to yourself, alright, I'm just born now, so the time started today, and if I do this exercise, I say, okay, what am I?
00:37:22.000I'm a male, I'm alive, I seem to be perfectly healthy.
00:37:26.000I look in the mirror, I go, I could be a lot uglier.