How to Fail at Almost Everything with Scott Adams

the Dilbert principle leadership is Nature's Way of removing morons from the productive flow with us today the man behind the Dilbert principle for that matter the man behind Dilbert itself cartoonist author and it turns out political philosopher Scott Adams uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson raised in a small town in upstate New York Scott Adams graduated from Hartwick College in 1979 he worked for a number of years for the Crocker National Bank in San Francisco earned an MBA at the University of California at Berkeley and then went to work for another number of years at Pacific Bell a period during which he began getting up early each morning to draw cartoon strips by the middle of the 1990s mr. Adams had at last become a full-time cartoonist and the name of that cartoon strip is Dilbert today Dilbert appears in thousands of newspapers in more than 50 countries and in more than a dozen languages mr. Adams is the author of the best-selling book the Dilbert principle of many collections of his cartoons and most recently of how to fail at almost everything and still win big subtitle kind of the story of my life recently mr. Adams has also attracted attention for his blog where he has been offering advice to his fellow Americans on how to think about President Trump and a advice to President Trump on how to think about America Scott Adams welcome thank you thanks for having me let's get this out of the way right away all right you and Donald Trump president Trump's approval ratings are the lowest on record and among academics and journalists and for sure professional people here in Northern California he is almost universally derided but here's you on your blog quote Trump doesn't have one talent that is best in the world but he does have one of the best talent stacks I have ever seen close quote okay so what's a talent stack and then tell us about Donald Trump well first of all let me let me clarify that when I talk about Trump I'm talking about it through a persuasion filter in other words I have a background as a hypnotist I'm a trained tip noticed and I've been studying eyelids are growing heavy even now and I have studied persuasion in all of its forms as part of what I do as a as a writer a cartoonist and I noticed in candidate Trump first a a type of persuasive skill that you just don't see yeah he brought the full package of persuasion and if you're not if you're not a student of it you would miss it entirely in other words if you didn't know anything about the techniques he was using you would say what's this crazy random chaotic clown who keeps doing things hey he won again he won the primary well that was luck but he'll never win the Oh what just happened so I predicted all of this I think a year and a half before Election Day and I predicted that he would win by a lot now you could argue whether the electoral college victory was a lot and you could argue about the you know the popular vote but the fact is he played a game they have a set of rules and he won by a lot on the game he was playing which was the Electoral College yes he didn't win the game he wasn't playing but I kind of assumed that didn't matter and it didn't so what I talked about his talent stack that's a little bit of some some thinking from my book that you just mentioned and the idea is let's look at your copies it's a wonderful book thank you there are two basic ways to really make a difference in this world and succeed and here success is not just financial but just success in life one way is to be insanely good at one thing let's say Tiger Woods you know right is good at one thing but you really have to be about one of the best in the world depending on the thing you're doing to really make a dent alright but the other way you can do it is the way that I've done it which is I've compiled a a set of complementary skills and I'm not really the best in the world at anything right so if you were to go into you know any crowded room you could find a better artist than me it would be easy because I just don't have much artistic but the think of argument I'll let you be self denigrating but go ahead well I think anybody who studies cartoons would look at the page and say well there's the worst artist on the page so there's no no false humility alright maybe then I've never taken a writing course but I know how to make short pithy sentences so I'm good at that I have a lot of business experience because I for 16 years I worked in the corporate world so I had something to draw up on which is you know the fodder for this trip and you could go down the line of you know what it takes to be a cartoonist business skills for example you know I have my MBA from from Cal and those things all just work together really well but I'm not great at any of them I'm not I'm not Warren Buffett my business skills but I have enough to do this thing and they just work together well know this lovely image of us you stack this talent on this talent on this talent on this talent and you end up with something that's pretty impressive right and then the trick is that they have to be complementary skills right so being able to be as a speaker being comfortable in this kind of format works really well with being a writer you know if yeah if you have only the writing skills well where are you gonna promote your book right so they just work well together now back to Donald Trump if you look at the things he can do better than most people he can definitely give a speech better than most people but the experts will say wow look at that he's no John Kennedy yeah he's no Reagan wears his where's this soaring rhetoric right and all that well it doesn't have that but the crowd loves him he's funny alright and it's hard to be funny and funny really helps your popularity helps your persuasion and again he's not a stand-up comedian funny but if you put him in a room it would be one of the top 20 percent funny people in a room right he's smart not the smartest person in the world you know he's not he's not the physicist who's gonna solve a you know the next great problem in physics well he's clearly smarter than most people right unambiguously he's smarter than most people he knows enough about government in how it works from the other side because he dealt with it a lot right that he was no expert in government what he knew more than somebody who wasn't involved in any way right right he knew about being a boss he knew about leadership he knew about he knew about entering the field that he'd never entered before because he'd done it a number which by the way is usually a tell for what I call a master persuader so who knows persuasion and also has built a talent stack that can take them in a lot of different directions that's so he goes from Queens to Manhattan he goes from building to casinos he goes from casinos to branding personal branding various items and entity and then he goes to becoming a television personality those are really quite distinct career patterns and then President of the United States and before that candidate a whole different job right like the job of candidate is pretty different this guy's done a lot and not only did he do those things but he almost entered at the top you know he was so strong going in that they had just on the whole package now the other thing he has which is a big deal is that he brought the whole Donald Trump persona all right so that allowed him for example to be largely immune from scandals that would pop up because you knew that at some point during the the election somebody would say what about that thing you did with this or that woman you knew that was going to happen right and sure enough the you me the tapes that we the wheel heard showed that but he was somewhat immune from that because he he started from the beginning he said I'm no angel and he's divorced with I from Ivana was on the front page of the New York Post day after day for weeks back in the minute whatever was early 90s nobody knew he nobody thought of him as a choirboy you smart enough never to make a big deal about you know I'm your family role model right never sold himself that way so he was never vulnerable to those attacks and the way that regular people would be the other thing he has and and I think this comes with learning persuasion is that he has the thickest skin you know he's accused of being exactly the opposite because he always attacks back you know I can talk about that specifically but imagine the amount of abuse that he clearly knew was going to come his way just by robbing and then by winning you know gets that much worse so he you signed up for that you know you don't do that unless you you've got a thick skin and leave the stuff he's brushed off you know so far it's it's really impressive okay now there you are during the presidential campaign and you start blogging and I have to say this gets my attention why with a guy who's a cartoonist have such fresh insight okay so I'm looking at it but you're putting a distance between yourself often are quite a ride distance between yourself and Donald Trump you said his policies weren't necessarily your policies you've quite cagey about all the time well let me let me give you there because I'm trying to figure out where I want to know where you stand and you may not let me ask that but go ahead no I'm gonna volunteer that socially I call myself an ultra liberal meaning that I'm more liberal than liberals all right so you couldn't give further from you know the Republican standard I am I'll give you an example a normal liberal would say you know drugs should be maybe more legalized I say that if you're over 50 your doctor should be giving them to you thank you because really the growing old sucks and if you if you're 80 you should get LSD you know you should get you should get mushrooms whatever it takes you know to make you happy so wherever the liberal position is I'm quite often even further to the left than that I'll give you another example conservatives might want to ban abortion liberals might want to say we would like that option I go further than left and say men stay out of it right whatever the women figure out for how this reproductive rights should be how about we listen to them who clearly know everything we know about you know meaning men about you know the science and the details and the politics but they have the extra appreciation and more importantly the extra responsibility they take the responsibility of reproduction the men can take and in general when people take on more responsibility Society often says we'll give you a little extra rights a little consideration because you're doing something that's so important so I say an abortion men should listen and whatever women collectively agree with I'm okay with that we're that goes so you can't get more right less than that right so back to your point and on stuff like international relations what do we do with trade deals and stuff like that my view is always the same I don't know but this stuff is way too complicated for an average voter to figure out you know what to do with the TPP and you know we don't know so you did find this quotation because I thought to myself I've got him let's see if I have got you Trump's value proposition is this is you on your blog quote Trump's value proposition is that he will make America great that concept sounds appealing to me the nation needs good brand management okay so whatever else is going on issue by issue by issue you'll look at this and guy and say you know he's my guy well I'm gonna say I'd say my guy I say that he has a set of skills which are extraordinary and the thing I was most interested in was that the country could see it clearly without the filter put on it by the opposition right right because they're both painting at each other terribly in Hillary Clinton's situation people know what a standard politician is right so the you know they could see through the attacks on the other side we knew what we were gettin right but with Trump people didn't know what their again at least half the country thought he was crazy Hillier and I had actually predicted I guess before he was inaugurated that you would see the following story arc develop because it just was obvious if you if you trained in persuasion it was going to go this way it would start with oh my god we've accidentally elected Hitler like how did this happen how did half the country or so not know that we've elected a monster and I figured okay after a few months of not doing Hitler stuff it's just gonna sorta dissipate and it has right right so by summer I said that the Hitler thing will dissipate and it did but it would be replaced with but he's incompetent he's incompetent he's competent and sure enough that was the big word of the summer up to yeah up till now I didn't see the Russia thing coming because that you know that's physic right but I've predicted that after the he's incompetent phase will come the well he did get a lot done but we don't all like that you know he did things we don't like but he was awfully effective and he did do the things he said he was gonna do we just don't like those things so you're gonna see that by your end and in fact you're already seeing that he has a turn it's it's pretty it's visible now you can see the turnout right I want to return to Donald Trump and current politics in a moment but how to fail at almost everything and still win big kind of the story of my life is a book that combines a fascinating life story with insights from a fascinating mind and also lovely light touch with the prose it is so readable a couple of moments from the book and I'm just I just want to give a flavor of Scott Adams and the way his mind works we have a very young Scott Adams dressed in a cheap three-piece suit seated on an airplane to California next to a businessman and learning I'm quoting from the book quote goals are for losers close quote how do we get to that scene and how did you learn that lesson in that moment well let me let me finish that story of the airplane and then I'll extend that to systems versus goals so that the person I chanced upon meeting struck up a conversation with me and part of the reason was because I was wearing a suit on an airplane and I was 21 I guess and you thought people dressed to go on airplane I'd never better than an airplane I've never been on one and didn't know many people who had been that's how small my town was and how small my experience was and I also didn't know how to pack yet so I thought well I'll just wear it and this this gentleman I'm sitting next to started a conversation and he told me about his system for life at the moment he would get a job you know ideally a promotion he would immediately start looking for his next job so his concept of what his career looked like was not a goal as in I will get this job it was a system where he never had the job he was gonna keep you know his system was that you're always you're always looking for the next job and it's a better job and I extended that in the book and it's sort of my my philosophy of life is is I look for a system instead of a goal now I could give would you like to hear the event I would I would well first of all I want to make sure that I think I got it because I read the book but I want to tease it out a little bit so a goal is some the goal is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow a system is something you do every day it is a method it is a means of approach if I got that that's the basic distinction okay so far so go ahead so for example getting a specific job or promotion would be a goal but going to college would be a system because you're doing it you know the whole time you're there you're working on it but you don't know exactly where it's gonna go right but you know your odds just got a lot better right in a whole bunch of different ways right so any good system has that quality you're doing it regularly and it increases your odds so I extend that to fitness and and diet and in jobs as well so the talent stack is a system so if you say to yourself well I've got these skills and maybe you've got some natural ability there's something about you that it would be hard for people to equal you're just born that way you got the gift of gab you're you're handsome you're whatever you are and you say well what goes well with that and then you build a system of learning those things and adding to the stack so that would be one system and they're different systems for exercise and diet etc okay I just thought this entered my head coach Belichick coach of the Patriots execute the plays and the score will take care of itself that's exactly the same point you're making isn't it well to the extent the trouble is that football is such a constrained man-made thing right nothing really translates from right right it's all okay here's another moment you're working for years at a bank and then you're working for years at a telephone company and then all of a sudden you're the one of the most famous cartoonists in America so how did that happen and the lesson here again I'm quoting from the book is luck can be managed sort of how did you manage those years this what was it 14 years I think in corporate America yeah 16 15 well when I say luck can be managed I mean this if you wanted to be hit by lightning let's let's just say that was something you wanted you know most people would say well it's very unusual to be hit by lightning right so it's just luck there's nothing you can do about it but I would say they're very much is something you can do about it you can go outdoors that would increase your odds you could go outdoors when it's raining in a place that has thunderstorms that would increase your odds and if that's not enough sell all your possessions move to the top of a mountain that has frequent thunderstorms build a network of connected lightening rods and campout with your hand on one you're gonna get hit by some frickin lightning all right so so when you say you know I don't know what to do I'm not lucky you know lucky I find you you can go find luck the first thing I did when I got at a college in my you know small upstate New York life as I said where is all the luck you know and I was thinking opportunity but I'll either there's so correlated and I said I got to get outta here and I I said California wreath of three-piece suit in the airplane and ended up in I actually traded my car to my sister for a one-way ticket to California really okay again and this is going to this is going to leave me from the book to current politics but I'll let you I don't want to reveal just how at the moment I'm quoting from how to feel that almost everything and still one big quote I ignored my father's advice to work for the Postal Service I got into college without much help from my guidance counselor and I stayed in school against my doctor's advice you had mono and the doctor said you should drop out you stayed in school this was about the time that my opinion of experts and authority figures in general began a steady descent that continues to this day I think I see another reason you like Donald Trump you're subversive you don't like being told what to do or looking up to anybody you know and part of it is life experience the older you get the more examples you see of hey you remember that food pyramid that we're all taught as a kid turns out there was no science to that hey what about those vitamins you take your one-a-day vitamin that's been tested right not really there's no reason you take it one once a day all those vitamins and minerals should be delivered in different doses in different ways and by the way we haven't studied both of them you know how about those eight eight glasses of water you were supposed to drink or something turns out no science to that what about the don't go swimming you know if any we have to eat turns out no science of that so you can go you know the older you are the more of these you have seen the less your respect for the experts you know can be maintained okay so now this takes us right to the issues of the day and on your blog you have what are to me at least completely novel ways of looking at a number of issues about which I because of the nature of my work at a think-tank thought I had read and heard everything and here's one of them climate change quote it seems to me that a majority of experts could be wrong whenever you have a pattern that looks like this there's a severe social or economic penalty for having the wrong a wrong in quotation marks opinion in the field I agree with the consensus of climate scientists because saying otherwise in public would be social and career suicide for me even as a cartoonist imagine how much worse the pressure would be if science was my career close quote yes no it's nothing about the science you're just looking at the human psychology of the thing right well that's that's at least half of it okay mid psychology of it so a lot of people who have not studied persuasion for example have never seen mass delusions you know explain to them in ways that just make your head explode for example a lot of people watching this I've never heard of the McMartin school case right where a whole bunch of kids allegedly said that they'd all been you know molested I can't 80s as I recall late 80s Early 90s all these people who had similar stories of molestation and satanic rituals and stuff apparently and it turns out that all of it false because it's easy to manipulate kids into telling stories because you act like you want them to and then they just do so there there are lots of stories of mass delusion so in my world it is common and the examples I gave you the food pyramid etc it's common for all the experts to be on one side and still be wrong to the average person that seems unusual right but it's not unusual if you've expanded your your scope and if you just look for these things you see it everywhere I just just somebody just send me an article of 43 peer-reviewed articles that were just removed from some publication because it turns out somebody was gaming the peer-review system but here's the other part of that kind of science whenever you see a big complicated projection model with lots of variables and by the way there's not just one of them there are dozens of them and the ones that didn't work they throw away and there's lots of judgment about mmm we're gonna adjust these numbers we have good reasons we're telling you everybody you know you can peer review it right well we're making some human decisions and in that in that situation there's a level of complexity of these models that makes the likelihood that they're right you start to approach zero as the complexity you know increases now part of my perspective on that is that I used to do that well not what if you're the banker well yeah so for the bank I would do financial projections based on all these variables and assumptions and everything and I knew that I could give you any answer you wanted I would ask my my boss how do you want this to come out and then I would just sit there with my spreadsheet and put in numbers until it came out and so that's my perspective but if you haven't been through that world if you haven't lived in my corporate world and seeing how many experts were wrong let me give you that anecdote that just popped into my head years ago I worked in a lab in the phone company where we were testing cell phones and somebody was trying to test if they would be dangerous you know with the EMF or whatever it is I was holding up to you so the top engineer studies it he looks at everything and he concludes no there's no reason to be worried holding these things up to your head I talked to him privately and I said do you believe that like would you would you hold the phone up to your head for hours at a time he said no no way and this was the expert whose report the entire company made their decision on he said no I wouldn't do it one more quotation from your blog or still on climate science because I think it illuminates a certain amount about your approach quote if you believe that experts are good at predicting future domme you're probably scared to death about climate change but any danger we humans see coming far in the future we always find a way to fix and then you know predictions of food scarcity we haven't run out of food predictions we run out of oil we have more energy than we know what to do with quote I refer to this phenomenon as the atoms law of slow moving disasters when we see a disaster coming as we do with climate science we have an unbroken track record of avoiding doom if you ask me how scared I am of climate changes ruining the planet I have to say it is near the bottom of my worries close quote now because I'm humane I'm going to give you a chance to take that back right now you live in Northern California Scott now as most of you have been following videos and you saw that the Paris climate agreement the United States back down Trump takes us out of it right right and before that happened I have to say I thought that thing was probably pretty useful like I thought well it's probably a bunch of really useful guidelines that would get us to you know at least reduce whatever this danger is and by the way I completely buy the idea that humans are heating up the earth but you so so I'm buying that and then the experts weigh in on how much difference it would have made if we'd stayed in it turns out not really much of anything it just wouldn't make much difference I didn't know that I actually thought independent of the science I thought that that agreement would make us do things that would change things there's that not so much what did all the experts tell us before we actually looked at that agreement you know in some detail they all said it's important it's vital to the earth right vital to the survival of the earth all the experts were lined up on that I mean as much as they were lined up for climate science today good luck finding somebody who can still defend that agreement and I'm not talking to this decided three weeks or a month or something like that it's like been a month and we've completely redefined what we thought was reasonably okay so now we have established that you're a you have a fascinating story go ahead can I can I just didn't do anything you want to so my contribution I think to the conversation of climate science yes is to break it into three categories and to and to treat them with three separate probabilities all right because we're we're all sort of guessing what are the odds that this is right right the basic science part the chemistry the physics if you had the co2 in a closed system will heat up under these conditions probably is solid right I'm not a scientist but I would definitely believe the experts then there's the making the models part scientists are doing it other scientists are reviewing it they're using science II things and logic and reason I'm sure they're doing their best but the odds of that being accurate are much lower than indeed there have been lots of climate models in the past that that we wrong but the third part that doesn't get talked about is what I'd like to contribute to the conversation which is the economic model right because the science doesn't tell you what to do how hard to do it or when to start the science doesn't do that the economic model says ok if you're gonna do something it's gonna cost a lot of money so you either start now or you you hope you can wait till later so for example I added solar panels to my house when I built it you know tie this to climate change in a second when I bought them they said if you get these solar panels it'll pay itself off in lower lower expenses in next year's that was true you know it looks like that that actually is happening was it a good idea economically for me to get those solar panels seems like it right it paid off just like they said no it was a terrible economic idea i my background as economics as well because the cost of the installation dropped by probably 50% in a couple years so if I had simply done nothing and waited for the technology to improve I would had a far better economic outcome likewise with climate science there's a lot happening that could be improvements in you know green this or that I talked to an expert on nuclear stuff and he says fusions actually almost solved you know really yeah apparently we're closer to just the engineering part than the science part got it in and these are enormous civilization changing you know developments but there also could be developments in the next say five years of the scrubbers ways to take things out of the atmosphere maybe a better understanding of how it's all happening which gives us a new clue so waiting is often the smartest thing you can do take the year 2000 bug everybody said hey year 2000 the world's going to fall apart and it looked like you know a year before that we didn't really have much you know of a plan or a mechanism to fix it but by the last few months humans stepped up geniuses got involved I mean I wasn't I wasn't watching it closely but you know geniuses got involved right and they that they probably built tools that allowed them to do the thing that they couldn't do quickly quickly right right so so probably the same thing could happen in climate change my point is the even if all the science stuff is exactly what the scientists say and how would I know I'm not a scientist the economic part is just completely unfathomable it's unpredictable by its nature there has never been a good long-term economic model with lots of variables that worked out it's something that just hasn't been done right back to the contemporary political / cultural scene let me ask you to give some advice to people who could use it here's a category republicans and conservatives who are having trouble with President Trump here's Bill Kristol quote the problem isn't Trump's Twitter the problem is Trump's character close quote here's George will president Trump suffers from quote intellectual sloth and an untrained mind bereft of infor and married to stratospheric self-confidence close quote people who are on his side to the extent that he lines up ideologically who just can't just are beside themselves what's your advice advice for them or yes/no for them well keep in mind that this is a an arena in which people take sides you know and once I joined their team there isn't much that you can get them off the team you you can get them to talk less I suppose and success would do that so there's no substitute for winning all right if if President Trump does well if things go well the economy does well Isis stays you know beaten back as they are if North Korea we find some some reasonable solution there which would be hard people are going to forget all that and they're just going to reinterpret their their impression of what what they saw in the past okay Democrats who are not only uniformed and denouncing President Trump but seem completely fixated on getting him out of office removing him from office and even it seems to me I could be wrong about this but it seems to me that there's not much policy work being done there's not there's just nothing happening on the Democratic Party except denunciations of President Trump your advice for the Nancy Pelosi's and the Maxine Waters is of the world so it seems to be true that whichever party is out of power is the ridiculous one and but there's a reason for that there's a perfectly logical reason when Obama was in power it seemed like the right was ridiculous it's like hey you what about your birth certificate and you know are you a secret Muslim it just it look crazy right it just look crazy and the people and of power the last thing they want to do is put forward a positive proposal because first of all it's not going to happen guys that are not in power the other side isn't good thing that was a good idea we're just glad so it would be a waste of the time but also it gives targets to the other side right you know if they want to just criticize what's happening with the administration they don't want to their own target sitting there that they can fire back so I think that's just the state of politics is that the the party out of power is going to look crazy and you know confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance and all that stuff is gonna be swirling around whichever side is out of power and it's just going to look crazy okay and the press hears journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate Fame quote we are in the midst of a malignant presidency it calls on our journalists to do a different kind of reporting the close quote and that's you get a lot of that in the mainstream media this guy is so bad this is such uncharted territory for Americans that we have to be advocate advocate journalism we've got to let Americans know how what a catastrophe is your advice to the press keep in mind that the advocates are just advocates and therefore there's nothing that they say that can be taken with any form of credibility in other words they don't even necessarily believe what they're saying some of them probably do but I think there as soon as you say I'm on this team and you know I'm gonna fight to the death the there's no sense of credibility with any of those folks okay and now your advice for Donald J Trump himself he's got an impressive talent stack you've convinced me of that but he's also stuck at 40% in the polls that's where they've peaked who knows where he is today maybe thirty six percent something like that would you keep him from tweeting if you could no way tweeting has won him the presidency it connects him to the people it makes the people who love him love him more he is entertaining he has he has made all of us learn more about politics the law really just how the world works we have learned so much and a lot of it that is his direct you know contact with the people unfiltered the warts and all I would take you back a couple years during the campaign when people said the one thing we know for sure about Trump is that with this low popularity you can never win the presidency I said no you're missing the other way you win the presidency you don't have to outrun the bear you have to only outrun your camping buddy so if he can make Hillary Clinton look worse than he looks doesn't matter how low his number is he could be a 10 if she's a 5 what happened he made her look worse because he is the best brand or best influencer best persuader I've ever seen all right you know lyin Ted low-energy Jeb crooked Hillary these are not random insults you saw the other seller and low-energy Jeb and did jeb Bush's campaign which I predicted the day the day I heard it I said that publicly it's the end of him when nobody was saying that and the reason is the his linguistic kill shots as I call them are not random he first of all picked something that fix fits their physicality in other words there's a visual element to right and the visual is the most persuasive of all right it's the senses it's the one sense that just overrides all your other stuff and this is I heard that I said to myself before I heard that my impression of Jeb Bush was this is a cool calm executive you know this guy is gonna be the perfect guy in there's war he's not gonna get to it you know kind of control the moment I heard low energy I couldn't see him any other way because and then every time I saw him he the contrast with Trump's high energy just made it all the more damning and by the way contrast is an enormous thing in persuasion so it's not enough to say I'm high energy on high energy you got to say and I'm competing against low energy Jeb right that's just deadly he was done in that day it's got a couple of less questions and one question is why do you do what you do you live in Northern California where your views are intensely unpopular and so why do you blog the way you blog and I think I figured it out you write Dilbert for ordinary Americans you came from a small town in upstate New York and yes you got out as fast as you could you flew to California right away after graduating from college but it's still in your mind I think you're a kid from upstate New York and you don't like getting pushed around you don't like deferring to experts or Authority and so I think that in some basic way you are as much of a champion of ordinary overlooked Americans as is Donald Trump I love your version of it wait let me put let me put it in my works I like to describe a perfect life this way we're born as selfish baby can't do anything right you have to do something for it kids still selfish but they're learning to do a few things maybe some errands some chores by the time you've got your own kids you've changed a little bit you're you're giving more than you're taking but you're somewhere in the middle and by the time you're my age if you've done everything right you have enough for yourself you're done what you need to do and finally you can be mostly a giver right so that was always the life arc that I've pursued start perfectly selfish and on your last day give it all the way literally you die your state's gone and by then you should have given all of your wisdom any any kindness you had any anything you could contribute so I'm at that stage in my life where that means more to me than money because I have money and I have unusually good health you know for my age and everything and this is how I can give back when when Trump came on the scene what I wrote long before he made a dent in the election when people still thought he was a joke I said not only is he gonna win at all but he's going to put a hole in the universe he's going to change everything about the way you think of your human condition and the way you understand your reality and I thought if I'm not explaining this as it happens because there weren't too many people who could sort of see it from this perspective it could be chaos it could be there could be a riots in the streets which there almost were but when you start seeing this in the through the filter of persuasion it makes you feel comfortable that he knows what he's doing even when he departs from the fact checkers you know he says fact-checking works for you but I can make it work without that it is completely intentional here's a last question President Trump in Warsaw earlier this month quote the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive do we have the confidence in our values to defend them do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it close quote you and I grew up a couple of counties apart in upstate New York we're within a couple of months of the same age and what I know about that is it means you can remember the 80s and you can remember the Reagan years the economy revived the recovery recovered its morale people of our age can actually remember what that felt like and the West won the Cold War well the Trump years represent something like that some kind of national renewal as I predicted that he would win when nobody thought he would I also predict that he has at least a very high potential to do things in his term the likes of which we haven't seen for example I don't think anybody else could solve North Korea I think he can't now I'm gonna stop short of saying he can do it because it's so monstrously difficult but I think he has the skill set well you know you saw the way the way he was dealing with China because China has to be part of this he said hey China is great you know you guys this is your problem in your boat one backyard see if you can take care of it well you tried look at the level of persuasion that is you know people thought well it's just a cute tweet he's just being folksy and so but the way that paints this picture it makes China kind of need to step up to the set up to the plate because what he said is is that you're sort of not the superpower you want to be right he basically has challenged them to be the country that they want to be that's the key that's how persuasion works don't tell somebody to be the way you want them to be saying look if you want to be the way you want to be here's how to get there that's very persuasive Scott Adams creator of Dilbert author of many books including how to fail at almost everything and still win big thank you thank you and while the camera is still rolling you have a new book coming out in October and deduct over entitled how to win huge how to win big Lee does just win big Lee wen Begley when big Lee all right you've been a simple we'll do a show on win big Lee love to excellent for uncommon knowledge and the Hoover Institution I'm Peter Robinson [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 597,546

Rating: 4.7454643 out of 5

Keywords: Donald Trump, Dilbert, Scott Adams, climate change, talent stack, political philosophy, Uncommon Knowledge, Hoover Institution, comic strip, comic artist

Id: Ac8OOeaIgFo

Length: 43min 33sec (2613 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 14 2017