Scott Adams, whose popular comic strip “Dilbert” captured the frustration of beleaguered, white-collar cubicle workers and satirized the ridiculousness of modern office culture until he was abruptly dropped from syndication in 2023 for racist remarks, has died. He was 68.
Here is that interview.
MARK BRODIE: We start with Scott Adams. He’s the creator of the "Dilbert" comic and author of the new book "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter." Adams looks at president, and candidate Trump before that, through the lens of persuasion.
And Scott, you wrote about how you weren't necessarily looking to get involved in the presidential election, but when you saw then-candidate Trump, things changed for you. What was that realization like for you?
SCOTT ADAMS: Yeah, it certainly snuck up on me. I've got a background as a trained hypnotist, and I've been studying the various forms of persuasion for decades as part of what I do as a writer.
And when I started noticing that candidate Trump had the same set of tools, I realized that he was coming into a stick fight and bringing a flamethrower, but nobody could see the flamethrower, and it was actually the first debate that was the flag for me.
When he took that first question from Megyn Kelly about his comments about women in the past, and that should have ended his campaign right there, but he came up with the Rosie O'Donnell reply, which not only was not a direct reply to the question, but it was so interesting and provocative that we forgot the question for a while and just thought about the answer.
And it was very popular with his base. It was visual and it just hit every point of a trained persuader like nothing I've ever seen. And by the time he got to his “low energy Jeb” linguistic kill shot, I could see that the technique was not accidental.
BRODIE: Now, in theory anyway, you would think that all politicians should be working to persuade people, right? They're trying to get people to understand that their ideas are the right ones.
Do you see that there are other politicians trying to do this and just not as successful, or are they not even trying?
ADAMS: Well, I think most ordinary people who don't have this kind of specific background or at least filter on reality think that the facts are going to, going to win the day. And we're just not a species who makes decisions based on facts.
So one of the things you learn when you become a hypnotist is that the normal way of looking at the world is that, oh, we're a logical species, you know, 90% of the time anyway. But the hypnotist reverses that, and says we're irrational 90% of the time, and we make our decisions first and then we rationalize them after the fact.
BRODIE: How do you reconcile that now that Donald Trump is the president and he has to deal in facts?
I mean, there are certain things that come up, be they unemployment numbers or, you know, documents coming from foreign governments or things that other people are saying. I mean, at some point you do, do you, I guess as a president have to deal in facts.
ADAMS: Yeah, I mean, to some extent just to get through the day, facts matter to outcomes. So if you walk in front of a truck, that fact is going to matter a lot.
But once you understand that people don't make decisions based on facts, then you can, you can change your approach to accommodate that reality.
So for example, if the president says, "Hey, 100,000 people came to my rally," And then they fact check him and say,
"No, it wasn't 100,000, it was more like, you know, 50,000," he still has everybody thinking that a lot of people went to his rally. So in many cases the wrongness will attract your energy.
And if you, if you want to persuade, the first thing you need to do is capture somebody's focus and energy. And once he has your energy, you're thinking about the things he wants you to think about.
And the way we're designed is that reality is not based on facts, at least the way we process reality in our minds. It's based on how much time you spend thinking about things. Those things become the important things in your mind, even if they aren't.
BRODIE: In your mind, is there a difference between the kind of persuasion that a candidate might use on the trail with voters and the kind of persuasion an elected official might need to use with his or her colleagues?
ADAMS: Not a lot, no, I would say there's probably a 95% overlap without knowing what the 5% would be. Persuasion is a, is a general tool. You use it in everything from your, your work to your personal life.
BRODIE: The reason I ask is because clearly he was able to persuade enough people to vote for him that he became president. But once he's become president, it seems like he's had a slightly more difficult time persuading members, for example, of the Senate to pass a health care bill.
I'm wondering if it's maybe a more difficult sell for other politicians than it is for, you know, voters on the trail.
ADAMS: Well, there's a structural problem because in those cases he has to convince a lot of people who are dug in pretty hard when he's doing things like telling the world that the economy is going to be great under his administration. That actually makes the economy better.
Now, in the case of health care, I've argued since early on in the process that because the sides were so dug in and their positions were close to mutually exclusive, there was no deal to be had at the beginning.
BRODIE: Scott Adams created the "Dilbert" comic. His new book is called “Win Bigly Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.”
