YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Adams

lines on the record: 141
first: 2015-09-22
most recent: 2015-09-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So thousands of people wrote in, but what they said was interesting. So consistently they said when Dilber is doing his office type things, which he actually wasn't doing much in the beginning. Mostly he was staying at home and interacting with Dogbird and going on dates. But only once in a while he would go to the office. But it turns out people liked that the most by far, and so I pivoted. So I changed Dilbert into a workplace strip. And that was certainly the biggest change, you know, the biggest thing that made a difference. The other was putting it on the internet early when being early to anything made a big difference. And it was the right product to be on the internet. But it also solved our biggest marketing problem with newspapers because our salesperson would go into a newspaper and say, hey, here's a new thing. And they'd say, you know, we don't get it. We don't care in the old days. But once I had literally thousands of”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I ran my email address in the margins of the strip. Thousands of people started writing to me. I was getting thousands of emails a day. A lot of them said the following. I don't know anyone else who has emails, so I'm writing to you. It was literally the dawn of the internet. I mean, to give you an idea how early it was in the dawn of the internet, my address was my full name, Scott Adams at aol.com. Nobody had that. I mean, there are six people named Scott Adams in my town”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there were several key things that happened, and this will dovetail back to a conversation about luck. But when we first contemplating putting Dilber on the internet, that in itself looked like a huge, risky thing because, my God, you can't give away your content that we're selling to other people right in front of their noses as we're selling it to them. I mean, it sounded crazy then, right? Today it's just a normal business, right? But that has seemed like a big risky thing. Likewise, when I decided to see if I could get better user input using the things I'd learned in my Berkeley MBA classes, I did what no cartoonists had ever done before. And it sounds stupid and trivial when you say it from today.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the voice that's trying to keep me from not laughing or forcing me to tell a bad joke suddenly, so I have a reason to laugh at it myself, really covering up that I'm thinking something horrible. So, yeah, he's the worst part of me, my megalomania and my lack of regard for other humans, which obviously is an exaggeration. I have plenty of regard for other humans, but not always their intelligence Dogbird takes that role.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in the beginning their characters are not really formed. So, you know, you've got an idea who they are, and maybe you're thinking of somebody else when you write it. But over time, they become some part of me. They each represent a different voice of my head. Dilbert's kind of the voice of reason and the one that is, oh, he's challenged by, you know, he loves a challenge. He likes fixing things more than he likes talking to people and social interactions and stuff. Dogbird is the evil part of my brain, the little voice in my head that is saying just the worst things when I'm in an otherwise polite conversation.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I wisely decided that was not a good commercial decision, at least now for newspapers, because they're all aggressively rated G.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So before Dogbert was published, he was a doodle that I would draw on my whiteboard and my cubicle at Pacific Bell and before that at Crocker National Bank. And I had a contest to name the characters. And the name Dilbert was named by a friend of mine, Mike Goodwin. Who didn't know he had seen it in a World War II cartoon that had the same name, Dilbert. And I found out about that after it got published. I wouldn't have used the name, but it's lucky I did. And I guess the original creator didn't have a problem with it because he never contacted me. But because I had this character, Dilbert, and he was the type of guy who would be a loner, I wanted to give him a dog just so there was somebody to interact with. And I wanted the name of the dog to have some correspondence with Dilbert. And so Dogbert's original name was Dill Dog.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But think of just this simple example where in the real world real work world, I'll say, I'm going to try doing X, oh my God, if X doesn't work, my career, my promotions, my everything. But after I didn't need to be there, I could just say, what's better? X or Y? X. Your mind is free.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd hate to say skill acquisition, but that's really a big part of the answer. I was working in the technology lab in those years when the intranet was new. Literally the first person I knew who heard the word internet outside of my work friends. So we were learning things that I knew had huge impact on my future and I didn't want to kind of lose that foot in it. And that actually became critical for the success of Dilbert later because Dilbert became the first syndicated comic on the internet back when that seemed like a silly idea. So someone was at, but when I say skills acquisition, I'm counting the fact that I was getting most of my fodder for the cartoon from my actual experiences and what co-workers were suggesting. So I had that going. But yes, I mean, I waited until I knew I could do it financially, but I continued waited long after that because of the skill acquisition and also”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was at Pacbell and stayed there after Dilbert was in newspapers for about eight years. Well, I stayed there for several years after Dilbert, but eight years in total.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was after being syndicated and then waiting several months for the accounting to work through the system. And that was probably 1989.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would kind of summarize that by saying that the product is always yourself As soon as you lose sight of that, then you're working a 14-hour day, you're sacrificing your health.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His bike and to go for a swim. After that, Iron Man. And for him, the challenge and the pain and the willpower is actually part of the attraction. So that's part of what it brings it to him. So it's no surprise that his weight is perfect because keep in mind that whatever you hear from me doesn't apply to everybody. So the other part of the system is finding experimenting continually. And I know you're into this, experimenting and trying to isolate one thing and saying, okay, I do this for a week. Did that make any difference in anything?”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just one thing I can't do today. Just one thing. Still takes a little willpower, but I noticed that after about a month or so, two months really to be clean, the craving goes away. And today, a couple years later, I look at a Daya Coke, and it's actually hard to wrap my head around the thought that I would want to put that in my body. It just looks like a little bunch of chemicals. Cravings can be completely managed if you isolate them and pick them out of the herd, don't put too much of a willpower burden on yourself at the same time. Now, the downside, of course, is that this takes several years instead of everybody wants to lose 10 pounds in a month, and I don't have any solution for you if that's what you want to do. Now, having said all this, I'll also say that everybody's different. And my good friend and startup partner, Quinn Harker, he will run a marathon and go riding.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have been mostly. I tried to introduce fish to my diet, but I'm having a hard time with it because I can't get past the icky factor. That's just personal. I'd like to. I just can't get past it. So in my case, I use zero willpower, right? And one by one, I have picked off things of which were problem cravings, such as diet coke. I was drinking somewhere between 10 and 20 a day, I think, of diak for years, 30 years probably. Now, if I said to myself, today's the day I'm going to go on a healthy eating diet, and Diet Coke was just one of the 45 things I was depriving myself of, it would be pretty tough. But instead, I say to myself, I'm going to eat everything I want all day long. I'm going to drink whatever I want. As long as that's on the good list.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“plain russet potato and some plain pasta and we're both trying to watch our weight all right what do you get And sometimes you want to eat the thing you want to eat. So sometimes it's about the flavor and the taste and sometimes it's, you just need a lot of food. So I allow myself to have a lot of food anytime I want. I don't put any control in that. I just make sure that it's the kind of food you can eat forever and you not regret it. So it could be salads and yogurts and fruits and vegetables, mostly raw stuff. And if I think I'm overdoing it a little bit, I'll throw in some peanuts or some roasted creamed almonds or something.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now everybody who's been alive for more than 10 minutes knows that that can work in the short run, but it just doesn't work in the long run. You need something else you need a system. So here's a system that I've been using that has me in the best shape of my life at 58 and uses no willpower whatsoever. Whatever I want, whatever I want to, it's just that my system is education. I go out of my way. If I see an article that says new thing discovered about the link between this food and what, most of that I can ignore, but every once in a while you see something that says, do you know you just eat more protein and less of those simple carbs, good things will happen? And you say, okay, I already knew that one. How deep does this knowledge thing go and how much difference does it make? Well, let me give you an example. Say you and I go to the salad bar and it's a terrible salad bar. All there is is a white potato.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So a goal-oriented approach in, let's say, diet would be, I want to lose 10 pounds, and I'm going to do it with my willpower. I'm going to keep those cookies out of my mouth. I'm going to put the fork down. I'm going to push away from the table. I'm just going to try harder because that's why I'm...”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strangers, he knows what works, what doesn't. He's got a thicker skin. And he also had a lot of girlfriends, so he was learning a lot that way as well. So he was failing in a way that put him ahead no matter what happened. I was failing in a way that didn't put me ahead. It just made me feel like a loser and probably put me behind for the next time I wanted to feel confident in front of someone else. I could give you more examples from, say, fitness and diet because I know some people had asked about that.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So my best story of rejection in seventh grade was asking the prettiest girl to dance the first time I ever asked somebody to slow dance. And she said, you know, it's too hot. I'd rather not. And I said, perhaps if you took off your downwinter jacket. And she said, and I'm also too tired. All right, so that was my dating experience in high school. That was a goal-oriented approach, right? So my friend Manuel, he had a different approach. He had a systems approach. He would simply go wherever there were plenty of girls, and he would ask them in order of descending order of looks, will you be my girlfriend? Or some version of that, of course, almost everybody said no. Now you're probably thinking, oh, you're telling me the old story about keep trying, you know, get back on the horse. I'm not telling you that story at all. I'm telling you he was learning a skill while I was wasting my time. That guy knows how to approach.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take me months, and at the end of it, it usually ended this way, right? She'd say one of two things. Either she had a boyfriend, so I've wasted three months, or she'd say, I don't like you. Then I've wasted three months. But every once in a while, she'd say, you know, this didn't happen often. But once in a while, she'd say, I have a boyfriend and I don't like you. So that was my experience with Michael Glar. So my friend”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and it doesn't work, I would say, oh I had a goal and I started that little startup and it failed and now I'm a failure. But if I started a company, there was in a field that I already work and I'm, let's say, making all the contacts that I made through the startup, the networking, the things I learned made me more valuable in the things maybe my day job or the next job I do than I came out ahead. So that's the system. Let me give you a kind of a non-business example of that. I had a friend in high school who wanted to have a girlfriend and I wanted to have a girlfriend but he had kind of a systems approach and I had a goal approach. My goal approach is I'd pick out the prettiest looking girl in my class and I'd say this girl must be my girlfriend. I will do everything I can to make this happen. I'd do my research and I'd figure out who her friends were, where I could hang out. And you know it.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“way better than that. Your boss's boss's job, for example. What are you doing about that? How about some job in another company? How about a lateral move that gets you in a better place to go higher later? So as soon as you focus, you've given yourself something to fail at and you've closed yourself out from the other opportunities. All right, so what I write about instead is what I call a systems way of looking at the world in which you are continually looking at ways to improve your odds in some favorable area, some favorable focus without being too specific. So your area might be business or art or whatever it is. So the hallmark of a good system is that even as things are failing, you're still improving your odds and your personal worth. So if, for example, I start up a company,”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is written in my book had to fail in almost everything and still win big. And the idea is that if you have a goal. So, if you're not keeping your eye on the whole of it and if you're not playing the odds and you're picking a moonshot as your way to go through life, you're going to feel like you're failing not only if you miss the moon, but you're going to feel like a failure all the way to the moon because you haven't gotten the moon yet and you're not quite sure if you're going to get there. So what's better than that? And by the way, I still recommend goals heartily for simple situations. So if you enter a bowling tournament, your goal is to win the bowling tournament, right? It's a simple situation. And usually when it's like a human-made construct, they are simplified and therefore a goal makes sense. Here's what may not make sense. Let's say you said my goal is to get my boss's job. That's a pretty common goal, right? That's stupid because your boss's job is just one of the many things that could be better than what you're doing now. And the chances are there's something.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Up 10 minutes before the interview. So you say that to me and I just laugh and say, okay, I don't know what the truth is here, Donald, but probably you're right, right? It's just brilliant.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally different. Check your facts is what I call the high ground maneuver, which I also write about. It's the same thing Jobs did when he explained away antennae just by saying all smartphones have problems. We're trying to make our customers happy. He made a national story go away in less than 30 seconds with those two sentences. He took the high ground. And everybody said, oh, wait a minute, we've been talking about you. Well, yeah, I guess that's just kind of normal when you think about smartphones. And I'm sure glad I have a smartphone, so I guess that's just normal. So what Trump did, if you said your facts are wrong, then he set the world, Matt Lauer, against Donald Trump and anybody who liked Matt Lauer better than Donald Trump, the other going to side with him. But instead, he said, check your facts. He said, I'm a person with more information, which actually seems pretty consistent because like it's his world, right? Like we were talking about his facts. It's not Matt Lauer's facts. Matt Lauer is a guy who studied.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, let me weigh on that for a moment. Look how many ways that could have been done incorrectly. Suppose he simply said, Matt, your facts are wrong”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And by the way, and so I'll say this at the end because I went on for a while. I'm not suggesting that there's a grand conspiracy there. It's a fact that all those things are connected. That doesn't mean the influence is running through them in some one-way direction like I described. If you use that as a possible one of your filters to explain what's going on with the Trump campaign, I just read in the news a writer saying essentially nobody understands why he's rising in the polls. And I'm saying, exactly. And you won't understand either.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Practicing his craft and he's doing it with such brilliance that I've literally, I don't think I've ever seen anybody do it this well, except, oh, I can think of one other person. Let's see, it was Bill Clinton, who also is a good friend of Tony Robbins.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If he does that, people are going to wet their pants, right? And then he's going to say, I guarantee it. He's going to say, and now this imagines he gets nominated and becomes president. And so I guess I can't guarantee anything. But if it got to the situation, the likely outcome would be that he'd say, look, yeah, that 11 million people, yeah, I guess it would be hard to round them up. Why don't we say that if you stay in a jail for X number of years, you pay your taxes, you register, you do some useful things that will make an exception to your case just for practicality because that's what a business person does. And by the way, I got my fence built. Now my brand, Brand America, is exclusive for the first time. And that's why you hired me. You hired me to be a brand manager. You didn't hire me to tell the truth on my first offer. You offered me to negotiate. He's literally running for the office of negotiator in chief and practice.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, because that makes immigration explode for the 10 years it takes you to build a fence. So you have to get there the way he got there. And it's a way of businessman would do it. You come in with this ridiculous first offer. You'd make all the idiots in the media who think he's a politician, even though he screams that he's not. I mean, he wrote a book on this stuff. It was the number one bestseller, right? He could not be more clear or more honest about what he's doing as he does it. But it's still invisible because you're looking at him as a politician and saying if his goal is to do this thing, it's a stupid goal. He's not going to kick out 11 million people. Nobody's going to go for that. That's not the game. It will never be the game. I almost guarantee you that if he gets approval to build defense, he'll probably get some Mexican funding, not completely, but it'll be enough to say, look, nobody else was even going to ask for half, right? I got you half of this paid for.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Became the Straight Talker, took control of Fox News all in one day. And all of that is straight out of the hypnotist playbook, although it's... If you evaluate him as a politician, which is what the political writers are all doing incorrectly right now, that's the most ridiculous bag of shit anybody ever proposed to the country because it has no chance of happening in that form, right? It's just not going to happen. But he's not a politician. He's a businessman and he's a hypnotist. And he just gave you an anchor. And his anchor is look at what I'm going to do. Everybody get excited. Let's talk about changing the Constitution. Let's talk about the cost and the heartbreak and the misery that would cause these 11 million people. I'm planning we kick out of the country. Let's talk about how expensive that fence is. And then when it gets to negotiate with Congress, guess what he gives off? He gives away. Because the only thing he wanted was the fence. The only thing he wanted was the fence. But can you say in your plan, I'm going to give everybody a free pass after we build the fence.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I know you follow the headline, so you know what happened next. Roger Ales of Fox News weighed in, say, like, we're going to need to make peace, right, with Donald Trump, because this is getting out of hand. And Donald Trump made peace with him. How do you interpret that? I'll tell you how I interpret it. I interpret it as Donald Trump just bought Fox News without paying a freaking penny. Because if he want him to appear on his show, that's up to him. And he just proved he doesn't need him. So he's going to get all the press he wants without Fox News. If they want to get on the program and support the guy who's probably going to be the nominee, that's what I've predicted because of his hypnosis skills in particular, having nothing to do with his policies, by the way. I'll get to that. I'm not a fan of the policies, but I don't think he is either. They're opening negotiating gambits as he does. So he effectively changed the”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Important than whatever Meg and Kelly just said, which should have been a full house. She showed him four kings and he beat her hand and he did it without even trying. And he did it with a method which is well understood, right? It's a negotiating technique. You throw down an anchor, you divert everybody. And so instead of becoming this sexist, which he could have been on day one, he became the straight talker. And he admitted in the very deck sentence that he had also said bad things about other women.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the question is the content, the logic of the answer, maybe somebody said, oh, that was taken out of context or whatever, which is what people usually say. And it usually is. I mean, that's actually usually true. But the public isn't going to hear that. They're just going to hear the feeling that they felt when Megan Kelly said, that person's name, bad to women. That's really like the beginning and the end of the thinking for, let's say at least 20% of the public, right? About the same 20% that can easily be hypnotized, coincidentally. But what did Trump do? As soon as that question came up, he semi-interrupted her and he said, only Rosie O'Donnell. That, my friends, is hypnosis. He took an anchor that everybody could visualize, and his core audience already had a negative impression. Their negative impression of Rosie L. Donnell almost certainly was bigger, stronger, and visual and more.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over it. Let me give you an example. And I wrote about this, so if you want to see the details is that, you know, Dilbert.com and my blog. But take the debate where he came in as the underprepared buffoon who was going to blow himself up. And Megan Kelly of Fox News decided that, yes, that's exactly what was going to happen. And she started right out with the, did you say all these bad things about women? Every other politician would have been smeared off the stage by that because it wouldn't matter what he said back, right? It wouldn't matter what the response was because the question itself, like NLB,”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Current psychology would expect. So there's a part of it that's real strong and powerful, but it's probably the minority of it. I mean, most of it is people being stiff as boards between two chairs and that sort of stuff. Now, the best practicer, most famous practitioner of NLP, the person who got his inspiration from it, is Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins has been a business associate with Donald Trump. They work together on some kind of program about success. You can see their videos of them talking one after another. If you Google them, you see them standing together on Google Images, etc. Now, I have no reason to believe that they ever had a conversation on the methods of persuasion. I think Trump is, first of all, a natural because he's been doing it for a long time. But if you look at his recent work, that has Erickson's fingerprints all over the world.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bilton Erickson, a name known only to people who study hypnosis usually or psychology. So he was a linguist who put a lot of this, I'm not sure if he was a linguist, but he put a lot of this stuff together, mostly by instinct, I think, in the beginning. One of his and his school is the school of hypnosis that I ended up going to. It was a different school with a few differences, but basically I grew out of that. Also out of the Erickson school is a couple of people, John Grinder, I think. Hope I didn't get the name wrong, who developed NLP neurolinguistic programming, which is a way to use largely words as a programming language, although they don't market it that way. Now, NLP is marketed with a lot of stuff that I don't buy into, but there's a core of it that comes from hypnosis, which matches pretty exactly with what scientific studies and”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me draw a line for you that I'll say in advance this is conspiracy talk, conspiracy theory talk, so you don't have to say it, none of their listeners have to tell me that. So it's just for fun. There is a connection between Donald Trump and me. There is an individual between us, that individual happens to be the father of hypnosis, Milton Erickson.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you've got a different sense, and that's why one was funnier, but it also had a why in it and had a k in it. So two levels of funniness built into the word. So I will consciously make a choice to get rid of a more accurate word to instill, to put in a word that has more of a programming control. Because you want people to have an experience because that's what they're going to remember. They're not going to remember what word choice you This dovetails exactly into my loud defense of Donald Trump's methods, which I've been writing about all week on the internet.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like everybody knows, hey, that's a good word, but you need to go to the next level. If you're saying to yourself, I am putting together a logical argument, and this word is the perfect word for my argument because it means the best thing. Because remember in my example, yank and pull aren't really the same thing, are they?”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say that learning to be a writer, you're only going to maybe brush accidentally on the level that I'm even talking about.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And everybody at home just said the same thing, right? So language does have that much specific control over the way you think. And so science and hypnosis was kind of a precursor to a lot of the studies that have borne out a lot of why hypnotist.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just the most brilliant word choice in a piece of writing you'll see. And I try to do that too. So when I'm writing, and I don't know if you use the same method, I write in layers. So there's first draft, second draft, but somewhere toward the end, the final layer, I look at every word I use and I say, is there a word that will work on an emotional level or a different level or just a more perfect level, something that will make you remember it, something that will keep you awake? That means exactly the same thing. So here's an example. If I said to the audience, and I do this in front of crowds, so you a home can play along and shout out the answer, but I already know the answer. I'm going to give you two words that mean about the same. You tell me out loud, and Tim, you can play along. Just say the one of the two words, they both mean about the same. That's the funnier one. Which one is funnier? Pull or yank.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the simplest, and I think everybody ends up with their own definition of it if they have any experience with it, because I don't think there's any one definition everybody's going to agree with. For me, it is for me a connection with either one person or if you're doing it to a group, if you're trying to persuade a group, you're connecting to the group, you're getting this sort of pacing and leading thing going on, you're building trust, and then you're using usually words are sort of the programming language. If you will, linguistics are the user interface for this moist robot that we are. So if you want to program your head, you pick words. If any of you saw a recent, it went viral recently. There was an article in the onion, which was just this funny article about a couple who allegedly used their complete despair and hopelessness as the thing that bound them together. But it was the most masterfully written thing I wish I could tell you the writer's name. But the choice of words puts you in a completely different mental state.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So all of that is just classic, well understood hypnosis training. But again, I'm not hypnotizing the audience. I'm simply giving them a better product. So keep in mind that when I talk about hypnosis, I include things like negotiating, obviously selling, marketing, but also design and product design.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that all comes out of hypnosis training. And what I do is I allow the reader to imbue the characters with as much of what they love as they possibly can without giving them a hard stop. So in other words, if I said, this is Dilbert Goldberg, all of the anti-Semites would say, well, I don't really relate to that Goldberg guy, any name you give him, somebody's going to be a hater, right? So you're taking people out of the equation as soon as you name them. Maybe it's a name they've heard of. There's a reason why it's Dilbert and not Bob. It's a pre-existing.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I could get is immense. And it includes the ability to craft a book the way I did. It includes a lot of technique I use for making Dilbert popular. For example, the reason Dilbert has no last name, the reason you don't know what town he lives in, you don't know the name of his company. And here's a first for a comic strip, I think. The second main character is the boss in terms of time on screen, and he doesn't have any name at all.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, you went on the car. So anyway, I thought I need an edge career-wise, dating-wise. And if there's anything to this, at the very least, I'm terribly curious about what it is and what it isn't. And, you know, you figure, your mother's not going to lie to you about childbirth. I mean, not something that became like a central story of your youth. It was kind of a big deal. It doesn't seem like the things you would have made up. So credibility was high. And I thought, well, let me check this thing out. But again, 20% of the people can have that kind of experience. And the family doctor obviously you become trained and quickly identifying who those people are. So he knew. But all the rest of the people can get substantial benefits. So unfortunately, I'm in the 80% that can't get those extreme benefits. But the stuff.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coach working with an elite player. The coach is not doing it. The coach is saying, hey, crossover dribble, go under your leg left, jog right. So that had a huge impact on me. And so it got me interested in that and other things. And so when I was in my 20s and I realized that a guy who works at a bank teller and drives a car which one girlfriend affectionately She had a terrible name for it, but I can't say it on the air. Oh, sure.”
2015-09-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #106: Scott Adams: The Man Behind Dilbert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT