Oh, what is dilling my dogs?

I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about Scott Adams, a man whose self awareness is so minimal that he often his hands clipped through his writing desk like he's a character in a video game from the N sixty four era.

I don't know, how was that, Randy?

That's perfect, That is exactly what I would say.

Okay, excellent, all right, So we have Randy Mulholland, artist behind Something Positive, a wonderful webcomic, and now the legally the Brain at least the limbic system of Popeye the Sailor Man.

Randy, how are we feeling as we come into part two of this?

I am just thankful that you invited me an episode that probably does not involve childhood a section no child vivisection.

We are he is?

He is going to buy his claim kill a kid in this so oh good, But it's I don't think he really did.

I think he's just taking credit for it in a way that's kind of more upsetting than if he just killed a child.

I don't know, maybe that's not right.

At least now there's not a kid who's dead but that's a weird.

Oh there's a kid who's dead.

Don't don't worry.

Don't worry.

The kid dies in this episode.

We're fine, it's all good.

I mean, that isn't the responsibility of every episode behind the at least once?

Yeah, must die.

No, as soon as I announced that a child is going to die in this episode, you know, like the last scene in Return of the Jedi where it like goes around the galaxy as all of the people are celebrating in their different planets.

It was it was that was that was the behind the bastards fans.

They're terrible people a flame.

Yeah, yeah, it's like it's choriscant.

It's the choriscant of our I don't know why I'm doing Star Wars.

Everyone's tired of Star Wars.

Think of another.

Imagine I did another one, a different.

Story track thing.

No, No, I feel like that one's pretty saturated too.

What's one nobody knows about?

Farscape?

That's right, Yeah, I imagine I did a far Escape God.

Okay, So back to Scott.

Early in his career, Scott Adams started receiving requests for public speaking engagements, and he realized that this could be a good side business for him.

You know, colleges wanted him to talk, and also a lot of like corporations wanted him to come and like give speeches for their employees because they would.

You know, you're some manager.

You see people have like Dilbert cartoons up over their cubicles, and you're like, oh, well, let's pay this rich man money that could be going to races for our workers so they can hear this weirdo talk about how he draws Dilbert.

That'll make him happy.

So Scott, realizing that this was a thing that he might make some bank on, enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course and this is while he was still working at Pacific Bell.

But drawing Gilbert.

His employer was kind of willing to foot the bill because they saw it as beneficial to them.

And Scott didn't know how to do any public speaking, and so he felt like this would help him.

Now, do you know anything about Dale Carnegie.

That name sounds familiar and it doesn't make me h, But that's familiar.

You've all, like most people, you may not recognize his name, but everyone's heard of this guy's book.

He's the guy who wrote How to Win Friends and Influence people.

Okay, yeah, my dad had yeah book, my dad, yeah yeah.

I'm going to guess something approaching one hundred percent of our listeners had one or more family members with this book in their house.

It's an incredit.

It's one of the best selling books in the history of like writing.

You know, say what you will about it.

That's undeniable.

Dale Carnegie was born in eighteen eighty eight.

He's an American writer and a lecturer.

And yeah, he got rich writing this book How to Win Friends and Influence People.

It is still a best selling book to this day.

It is sold probably like just an unbelievable number of copies.

Whether or not this is a good thing kind of depends on yourve But as far as I can tell, I don't think Dale.

You know, there's a lot you can say about him.

He was kind of like I would say, like a lame man.

But he was not like evil, right, He's not like this is not one of those like I'm subtly writing this book about like how to influence people so you can like sexually assault them, like you know, you're talking about like modern you know, like Andrew Tait types.

Like he's not that kind of guy.

He's just sort of like a little griftie, I guess in kind of his his Like I don't think he is a grifter, but like the way he talks is very appealing to them, and the things he's telling you how to do is kind of appealing to more.

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely like that's who the ought.

We'll talk about that in a little bit.

Yeah, So Dale he had been kind of a like he'd been like a salesman who kind of quits his career midstream to become an actor and just sort of like in order to make ends meet.

He starts out teaching public speaking classes like while he's being a stage actor, and he finds out that he's like a lot better that than the actual acting and that there's a lot more money in it.

During one session with a bunch of people trying to learn how to do public speaking better, Dale started asking his students while he was again he's trying to like coach them how to get up in front of a room of people and talk.

He starts asking his students to talk about something that made them really angry, and he noted that like people who were really reticent who had trouble getting up in front of people and talking.

When they started talking about something that pissed them off, they were able to get over their fear of public speaking more easily, right, Which makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, that's not an like's not that I mean, it's kind of worth noting, it's worth being the guy who writes that down.

I'm not taking anything away from him.

But that's not like for us today.

And that's most of like Dale's actual good advice is stuff that today we're just like, well, yeah, if you're pissed off, it's easier to like not think about the fact that you're nervous in front of a group of people or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, So Dale kind of used this and some other revelations he had teaching these classes as the basis for a book that promised to improve self confidence for the average reader and teach them how to change the behavior of others by altering their own behavior towards those people.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this other than that some of David's some of Dale's advice works pretty well, and kind of more to the point, I think the actual problematic thing is that, like it's number one, it teaches this kind of overly ritualized, rule based approach to how to like influence and talk and convince people of things, which can kind of there's you know how D and D and stuff works, right where.

You got yeah, yeah, where you've got like, Okay, you know, here's a character and this character game to level, and so I pick a feet and this feat works with these other feats and it lets them do these other things.

It's very there's kind of a hierarchy in terms of how a lot of the skills work, right where you get one skill and that allows you to get these other skills and then you can do these kind of like more complicated acts.

That's not really how like charisma works.

But books like Dale's, I think, can convince people that that's how it works.

That if they just read these books and stack these tactics, then they'll gain these like eventually they'll get to do sort of the speaking equivalent of like a whirlwind attack as a barbarian.

Right, we're here, fine, we have mobility, Yeah exactly, yeah exactly, And that's that's really not how this stuff works.

But I kind of the fact that people start to believe that's how it works.

Again, Dale's not like a pick up artist, but this is where we get pick up artistry, right, Like it all kind of descends from the way that Dale talks about how to win friends and influence people, and kind of getting Americans advice on how to be more confident and convincing is kind of like handing a loaded and chambered pistol to a drunken chimpanzee.

It's just not a great idea.

And yeah, we are.

Of all of the peoples of Earth, Americans are the ones who needed less self confidence.

A couple more hangaruts would be nice.

Yeah, some humility courses maybe make us.

I don't know, we don't do so great when we're scared either.

I don't know how to fix Themerica.

Let's move on.

Yeah, yeah, we should probably just move on.

I want to read a quote from his book about his book from an article I found in The Cut, which interviews science writer Maria Konikova, and Maria is the author of a book on CON's and conman called The Confidence Game.

And here's Maria talking about Dale.

Dale Carnegie's had to win friends and influence people is kind of the unofficial con artist's bible.

Because a lot of those tactics he talks about in terms of building relationships and being successful in business are ideal for getting people to trust you.

One of the really easy things is creating a feeling of familiarity.

You're more likely to trust someone who feels more familiar to you.

It's even enough to exploit something called the mere exposure effect, where say you just go to the same coffee shop as someone every single day, and they may not consciously note you, but all of a sudden you feel more familiar.

And a lot of Dale's advice is kind of again, it's not like necessarily all that problematic, and in fact, it's kind of like the Art of War and that if you like read it today, because some of the things he wrote about have been so like spread so widely, you'll be really bored.

It'll seem it's like very basic stuff to a lot of people today.

It's all not necessarily like bad advice, but it's just kind of like basic as hell these days.

Like people who obsess over this book today, like people who obsess over the Art of War are kind of like, I don't know, man, there's like better stuff like it's been it's been a one hundred years, Like there's better books on convince.

Yeah, it's nice to know what if you want to try to go back to the basics and see what's started.

But yeah, I mean.

No, Scott's going to kind of religiously love this guy, right, like he takes this on.

This is kind of taking the place of religion for him, and this is going to build what sort of what does really in a lot of ways replace religion in any kind of like political sensibility as the thing at the core of Scott's understanding of reality and how it works, Like what I was just talking about, that sort of people take this book and they interpret it like it's a D and D manual, right, full of like feats and skills, and as they level up, they can like stack these feats and skills starting with this Dale Carnegie chorus.

That's increasingly how Scott is going to view the world.

I mean I get it from a certain viewpoint of being with an awkward dirt kid, just like why can't I have a cheap code?

Why can't just be a direct manual?

But someone like him who's like, but I want to make sure I'm always a special boy.

Yeah, Well, in manipulations.

The other danger of this, like there is some value if you want to be a public speaker.

Public speaking is like a technical skill, and like any other technical skill, if you want to do that for a living, it's not a bad idea to study it, to study what other people have written about it, to try to learn more about it.

But when you have this kind of very engineer focused view of how something like public speaking works, of how persuasion, of how charisma works, then one thing you're not going to do is ever listen to other people, right, Yeah, because they they're just they're the they're the again, they're like the cr you know, five monster or whatever that you're trying to figure out how to like drop before it can you know, do any damage to you or something like.

They're not to.

See everyone is a cobalt.

Yeah, yeah, last, yeah exactly.

That's That's that's how you're going to look at the world.

And that's not a great way to look at the world if you want to be if you want to like have humility or or be capable of like change and personal evolution.

Anyway, I do think it's interesting that these Dale Carnegie teachings how they may have influenced what I always considered to be one of Scott's more reasonable philosophical claims.

And this is going to take us back into the weeds a little bit.

So.

Lawrence Peter was a Canadian professor who eventually came to teach at the University of Southern California.

His specialty on paper, he's a professor of education.

But over the years, Peter felt drawn to studying organizations and why they succeeded or failed in different circumstances, and he came to believe that the best way to do that was to study hierarchies within organizations and how they functioned and how they became dysfunctional.

He started to call himself a hierarchyologist, which is both a fun term.

It doesn't spell well, but if you like say it out to yourself, it kind of works pretty well.

And yeah, he saw himself as like someone who studies how different hierarchical systems function and don't function.

Lawrence was also a funny guy.

He was kind of renowned for peppering his different writings and essays and papers with witticisms, like noblest of all dogs is the hot dog.

It feeds the hand that bites it.

That's a Lawrence Peter original.

Nice.

I mean, that's a fun little quote.

I can see that.

Yes, not a bad little not a bad little little jape.

In nineteen sixty nine, Lawrence co wrote a book called the Peter Principle.

The nut of the argument he made in the book was this quote.

In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence in time.

Every post tends to be occupied by an employee who was incompetent to carry out its duties.

Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.

Now, that is something number one.

If you've ever worked in any kind of large corporation, you will be like, yeah, that shit works a lot of the time.

Right, it's pessimistic, but unfortunately it's yeah accurate.

It is not.

It's going to be familiar to basically one hundred percent of people who have worked in corporate America.

Right, even if you don't believe that's how it always works, because obviously that's not how everything always works.

But like everyone encounters people who are in this position right where they were good at something, and that's the whole premise of the office, right of the American Office.

Michael Scott was a really good salesman who got promoted well past his level of competence, you know, and.

You're receiving the American Office.

I'm sorry.

Oh well, that's the premise of the show.

It's all based on the Peter principles.

Right, they're doing great, Robert, thank you, Thank you.

People watch that.

I think you should be noted that this is one of the few times he like a pop culture reference to a man's podcast and the guests didn't get it.

But Robert and you are very, very very correct.

Yeah, you know what I'm I'm I'm sick of all of you.

I'm going to go listen to my Ariana Grande records.

Wow you did.

Oh my gosh, that's growth.

Oh wait, I was trying to pronounce it wrong.

Did I accidentally get it right?

You got it right?

A son of a bitch?

What a what a shameful moment for me.

I'm going to go read the name of some British towns to get my mojo back there you go.

Oh my god.

All I'm saying is I've infiltrated your mind.

Now today you know what, the only way for me to get back on top, I'm gonna I'm gonna read Welsh street signs.

See how it goes for me.

Small backwoods Massachusetts town name so so yeah.

Peter Laurence, Peter, you know, writes this book about how people get you know, people who are competent get promoted past their level of incompetence.

And that's how like hierarchies work.

Now, this is not Peter is not pretending to write like a super serious book of psychology.

He's not trying to write a business book.

Either it's a satire, right like that, or at least at various points he will say that it's a satire and there's a lot of like joking bits in it.

For example, all of the evidence that he cites to support his argument comes from what he calls his hypothetical case file.

So he's not like citing from like real things that happened.

He's citing from like hypothetical stories, some of which are probably based on things he heard or things that happened to him.

But it's like it's very tongue in cheek this book, right, And he would later claim that the principle is the quote key to understanding of the whole structure of civilization.

That's kind of and again he's like sort of joshing around a little bit, but he's also like there's there's something deep there, like that is this is like, I think, a valuable a valuable warning and a valuable observation about how hierarchy very often tends to work, right, because this happens throughout government, throughout company, you know, the business world in militaries, like.

This is just a thing, and it's education nonprofits.

Yeah, and you can you can go back ten thousand years, you know, looking at the best documentation we have of different rulers of different and you'll find evidence of the Peter principle.

It's all throughout human history.

So yeah, it's it's a bit of like he's taken the piss a little bit, but yeah, there's there's there's quite a bit there.

Now, the business community almost instantly adopted Lawrence's idea, even though he was kind of like joking with it.

This is a hugely influential text for business people, for MBAs and shit, and today the Peter principle is taken very seriously by people who are like professionals at organizing corporate structures.

In a few seconds googling, I found a Harvard Business Review article on quote overcoming the Peter principle and a Forbes article titled new evidence that Peter principle is real and I'm going to read a relevant quote from that real quick.

Three professors Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota, Danielle Lee of MIT, and Kelly Schue of Yale analyzed the performance of fifty three thousand and thirty five sales employees at two hundred and fourteen American companies from two thousand and five to twenty eleven.

During that time, fifteen hundred and thirty one of those sales reps were promoted to become sales managers.

The data show that the best salespeople were more likely to A be promoted and B perform poorly as managers.

So like, there's.

Actual data, you know behind this obviously not a universal rule, but quite robust.

So Scott Adams presumably learns about the Peter principle while he's getting his MBA right, Like he's kind of doing his MBA right at the time when the Peter principle is kind of going viral in corporate America.

There's almost no way he wouldn't have read about this and so probably listened to was at like conference and stuff where people talk about it.

And in nineteen ninety six, just as Dilbert was blowing up, he decided to put his own spin on the Peter principle in his first text based book.

So this is not like a book of cartoons.

This is like a nonfiction book.

The Dilbert principle.

The delivery that was the book.

Yeah, it sure is, it sure is, which I read when I was like ten several ten year old were you?

I was a ten year old who, like I would go through sometimes three or four books in a week, like I always wanted to read like that.

I was like, well, you know, I got a lot.

So my my uncle, who had all the comics, was the guy.

Also he worked at a bookstore, and he would bring back what were called strip cop books, which is like books that have sold I know exactly we're talking about the ones out there, Well we can't.

Yeah, those are great.

So everything I read either came from those books or from his library.

And yeah, he had a lot of Dilbert books.

So I read a lot of Dilbert books.

Yeah, surprisingly, I guess because also Dilbert came out when I was much older.

Yeah, And when I think about what I was reading at ten was like D and D novels.

Yeah, I read a lot of those, a lot of dragon Lance.

Yeahs Scott Adams at that point, like yeah, oh, I've read Hitching's Gut at each ten.

Yeah, Like I remember trying to pick Actually I'm trying to pick up once my dad had a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People because my father was a union president, and he and I remember pinging up and he's like, you're too young for that.

Go read something fun and get out my hands.

Don't be That's that's honestly great parenting.

Like don' go donco, don't read this.

This will turn you into one of these weirdos, Like go read something that'll make you laugh.

Now, I'm pretty sure at the time I read this, I was like veering between the Wheel of Time series and Delbert books.

So you know, I was kid whipping.

Yeah.

I was a weird kid for sure.

Anyway, at least Gore books that's all I care about.

Yeah, yeah, good god, we that's another episode.

We'll get to that one of these days, Victorians.

Yeah, this was basically the Dilbert principle.

As Scott describes, it is basically an inversion of the Peter principle.

Instead of observing that hierarchies tended to elevate competent people past the level where they are good at what they do, Adams envisioned hierarchy in business as a defense mechanism to elevate incompetent people to positions of upper management where they don't actually have anything to do and thus are less likely to interfere with the people who actually produce work.

Right now, if you've also like you've probably I think this is less common for people in the Peter principle because I think most of us have stories of upper management who have like fucked around in our shit.

But like, if you've worked in a company, you've seen this too.

Both the Peter principle and Scott's Delbert principle, these are things that you can observe in the world, right, These are not like Yeah, and I think both principles can be useful observations about the way organizations work, get about pitfalls to avoid when when created organizations.

The Peter principle, I believe is a lot more durable.

It describes a much more widespread, I would say, nearly universal phenomenon.

I can think back to like my own career at Cracked.

All of my friends and I started out writing funny articles and got promoted to managing teams and like doing a lot of work that we had absolutely no aptitude for because like we just wanted to make our funny little japes and suddenly we're like handling all of this like employment shit.

And you know that was that was There was a tough learning curve there.

I think that I lie, there were you know, it was good and it was bad.

It worked better than it should have for a long time.

But like I can definitely say, and it's not like comprehensive, right, because we all still wrote articles and made videos and did the stuff we were good at.

I think the thing that I would say if I was going to like make a maybe a more generalizable, you know, version of the Peter principle is that competent people get promoted to the point where they spend less and less of time on the thing they're best at.

Right, Yeah, Yeah, if you're not you have to or at least you have to be very careful to avoid that happening, right, because it's just kind of like.

Naturally what what hierarchical structures do to people who are good at shit?

So yeah, I do think that Scott's Gilbert principle, while I have seen versions of this in my own life, is a lot less widely applicable.

For one thing, upper management constantly makes decisions that impact the lives of people who actually produce shit and interfere with them getting stuff done, and like Scott knows this.

He parodies this in a lot of his early strips, right, like management making dumbs, decisions that fuck shit up, layoffs, you know, in order to drink, stock prices that force out productive workers in business units, that kind of shit.

And it's it's one of those things where like I will give Scott some credit because it's there's in this book kind of some valuable observations, and I don't think most of it's like, I don't think they're valuable observations to like a adults.

I think this book is going to be is pretty basic for anybody who's been out and lived in the world, but as like an eleven or twelve year old kid.

There were a couple of things that I found pretty influential, and in fact, one I'm going to read one passage that I encountered at a young age that I think is a pretty healthy thing for a young man to encounter at a young age.

Here's Scott.

I proudly include myself in the idiot category.

Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all encompassing twenty four hour situation for most people.

It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day.

Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.

The other day, I brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn't work.

After I changed the battery, the repairman took the pager out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back to me in one well practiced motion.

This took much of the joy out of my righteous indignation over the quality of their product, but the repairman seemed quite amused, and so did every other customer in the lobby on that day.

In that situation, I was a complete idiot, Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to the repair shop and back.

It is a wondrous human characteristic to be able to slip into and out of idiocy many times a day without noting noticing the change, or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process.

And I think that's actually a pretty good observation.

I think it's also this this obsession that we have through media with like hypercompetent protagonists, like isn't real, Like, there's nobody who's like that that I've ever met in my life.

And if you kind of accept that, you will be if you're able to accept your incompetence, and given situations, you're a lot less likely to, for example, try to wire your own house and wind up electrocuting yourself to death.

You know, And I don't know, it was a useful thing to come across, as it's you're the idiot, yeah, and everyone is.

The world is too complicated for you to know how to like you can be.

You can know how to like from like from the ground up.

How like the Android or iPhone is coded right.

You could be an engineer at Apple or Google and know everything about like how the actual software on your phone works, But like you probably don't know how to solder the entire thing together, and you certainly don't know how to like mine the rare earth minerals and like put together that we're all out of our depth if you really think about it all the time.

It's other people around us who know what they're doing and who have figured things out, and that that keep shit going right, Like I don't know how to operate a power plant, but thankfully there are people who do.

You know, that's that's the it's it's like humbling and valuable to think that way.

I thought you want to say, I don't know how to run a podcast, and I was going to be like, yep.

I am Sophie Mellow.

Wow, wow, wow, hurtful, hurtful, but yes, I have no idea what I'm doing.

I don't even know what a podcast is.

Like, I've been trained to shout at this blinking light when the box in my cage turns on, and that's that's what all of this is.

Let's how you get the food pillots.

Yeah, did you see that it's now blinking blue, which means ad break.

Ah, speaking of shouting from your cage and a blinking light, here's ads.

We're back.

So I've just said, I think that Scott's got a good observation here, a useful thing for certainly a young person to encounter.

The caveat to this is I don't believe Scott believes a word that he's written there, or at least if he did at one point believe it, he no longer does.

But I don't think he ever really did.

For one thing, this book, the debrit Principle, sells a million copies, which causes his ego to mistastasize like a cancer cancer and devour his mind.

I kind of think the more I've learned about him, and the more I've learned about the stuff that he read and that's in fla, I think he's like, we're all idiots, especially me.

You know, I'm dumb a lot of the time.

Kind of stuff.

This kind of self deprecating thing he does, I think it's a calculated shtick rather than evidence of humility.

And I think part of why I believe this is this line I came across in that interview with Maria Konakhova, and here she is again describing a strategy from Dale Carnegie's book that is really popular with con artists.

There's also the Mark Antony Gambit, which comes from Shakespeare where Mark Antony begins a speech by saying, I come to Barry Caesar not to praise him.

He says the opposite of what he then goes on to do, but he primes people to think that he's on their side.

And I kind of think that's there's a version of like Scott's doing a version of that with this, right, Like he's saying, like, we're all idiots, you know, especially me, I'm domb most of the time.

But he's also that's being packaged, is like and look at how smart I am for realizing this and delivering this to you.

You know, like there's there's a little bit of we can call it like kfe of there.

Right, So Scott's books get increasingly popular from here on out.

The next year he publishes The Delberate Future, which, of course I also read as a small child.

The subtitle of the book was Thriving on Stupidity in the twenty first Century.

It's a pretty forgettable book.

You would call it like a pop futurist text about how technological development will impact people in the future.

Again pretty forgettable.

It does include the prediction technology and homeliness will combine to form a powerful type of birth control, which is a joke in the book.

But I think Scott's going to kind of wind up pseudo in cell in a lot of like his ideology and a lot of the things he says.

I think you could see this as like a precursor to that he is currently like this week as we talk chatting with Andrew Tait about how nobody likes sex really like it's not that good.

Oh wow, yeah, on yourself there, buddy, Yeah, I tell you might be telling on yourself a little bit there, Scott.

It's weird, as you'll see a screen camp for a someone late saying women don't actually orgasm.

Women they never like, oh bloody no.

And you know, you know what I'll say, for like, the women don't enjoy sex, guys, you like, that's fucked up, But they generally do enjoy sex.

They just don't think women do.

Scott's like, boy, we all actually hate sex, right, And it's like, for one thing, Scott, you know, there's like, if you want to like explore this, you might learn some stuff about yourself and come to accept some things.

But it would it would take having kind of a more nuanced and plastic view of human intimacy that I think you're capable of having.

But I don't know if you were more of a self reflective guy, well learning he was Ace.

Yeah, I don't know that he is.

But some of the stuff he says is like, well, Scott, if if you think that you've never maybe yeah, I don't know, A more thoughtful person might like come to some conclusions about himself through that.

Scott just decides that everybody feels the same way, and we're all lying about enjoying sex for some reason, which I don't know.

I feel about that however you want so.

The weird part of the Book of the Delberate Future comes near the end, when Scott starts writing about his habit of making affirmations for the first time.

He gives a couple of examples of times that affirmations worked for him, and both repeatedly gives a caveat that he's not saying there's anything supernatural happening here, and also kind of leaving the impression that he thinks he's discovered some kind of magical reality hack.

Over time and far too many books, Scott's feelings on the Delbert principle and affirmation.

Do you know what affirmations are?

Yeah, as a whole like speaker truth in the universal world.

Yeah, and the secret is basically it's the secret.

Right you have to ask if you tell the universe what you're going to get or what you want, like, it'll provide it for you.

There's some rules to it, generally, like the way Scott sees it, he has to like write it down a certain number of times a day.

You have to be really specific about the thing that.

You're going to do.

So it's not just like I want to do well in this class, but I'm going to improve my score on this, you know, exam from this to this or something like that.

You have to be very and like, you know, I don't think there's actually anything wrong with this idea, Like if affirmations help you focus your mind, focus on building skill in something, it's a it's you know, I can I see.

I think for reasonable people this thing can be kind of a version of like meditation, right where you.

Think for most people that work can be this is a harmless thing you did.

Yeah, it's a personal ritual and even that that can be still calming.

Yeah, it could be calming.

It can help you kind of you get up in the morning and you kind of you write your affirmations.

That helps you focus on like the things that you're.

Going to work on.

That's that's perfectly healthy if that works for you, Like, that's a great thing to do.

Scott is I think kind of inherently hardwired to go really dogmatic about this stuff.

Like he presents himself as as very much like an atheist and irrationalist, but he builds these kind of like labyrinthine rule systems about this stuff.

Rather than being like, oh, you know, affirmations really helped me focus my mind and I did well on that test, he has to like set up these kind of increasingly arcane rule systems.

He's the kind of guy again, if he was a little more open minded, a little cooler, he would have been, like in the eighteen hundreds, like one of these guys writing books about magic.

You know, he would have convinced himself he was a wizard and probably would have been a healthier, happier person.

Become a wizard, Scott Adams, You'll you'll like it more than being I don't know, a weird racist on YouTube.

What his new book Dilbert Mancy.

Yeah, Delbert Mancy, come on, Scott, at least give us that you know where owed it?

Added Gandle Yeah exactly, Yeah, brit come on.

So over time kind of this, Scott's feelings on the Dilbert principle and affirmations will evolve into this kind of labyrinthine scientifico religious ideology with one goal, and that goal is explaining why Scott Adams deserved his fame and incredible wealth, right.

And that's the really problematic thing about Scott here is that he's focusing all of this stuff.

He's not just using it to as like, here's you know, how you can improve your life.

He's using it to kind of a priori justify, like why he's earned everything, Like why luck didn't play into his, you know, life as much as it really did.

Why does he care?

Like because no one else is like asking I think God deserved money?

No one never comes up.

I think it's simple, which is that if you are really successful in a field where the odds are long and against you, as God often notes, and you suddenly make a shitload of money and become famous, it's pretty natural to be terrified that it might end because you never fully understand why it happened.

Right, There's always people around you who are just as talented, who work just as hard, and shit doesn't work out for and the fact that some people make it and some people don't is kind of scary, right, And I think again the mental the healthy thing to do is kind of embrace the humility that that should engender in you and have that influence how you treat other people and how you try to give other people opportunities and try to level the playing field and try to provide options for people who benefit from luck less than you.

The unhealthy way to do it is to find justifications.

Some people use religion, Scott's weirder about it for why you deserve like and it's because in Scott's case, I discovered the secret rules of the universe, and you know, hacked my way into being an influencer.

I'm a master persuading.

Really, in that egg he found was a child, not just ten dollars.

The secrets the secret and that's kind of the primary immorality at the center of Scott Adams in a lot of ways, I think.

So before Scott sort of degenerates to a Trump reply guy, which is where this is building towards.

He got the chance to make his own television show.

On January twenty fifth, nineteen ninety nine, Gilbert launched as an adult animated sitcom on You Up the Network where I watched Star Trek Voyager as a little kid.

It was the highest rated comedy series premiere in network history, but very few people watched UPN, so that's not much praise.

The show had quite a lot going for it though.

Larry Charles, who was a Seinfeld writer, was on the development team.

Danny Elfman, as we've talked about, was like the theme music, and it's got some great voices in it.

Daniel Stern, who's Marv from Home Alone, did a lot of the voices.

Kathy Griffin does a voice.

Jason Alexander is up in there, you know from again, a lot of like Seinfeld.

After who did the Boss, because he's a really good time.

I think it's Larry's yeah, yeah, yeah, I forget you like to play the really good smug asshole in the eighties and nineties.

The voices are pretty good.

It's not like an incompetent show.

Like it's not bad whenever it comes online.

Now, people who like watch it as kids are like, well, the show was actually really good.

I did rewatch a lot of it recently.

I wouldn't say it's really good, but for an adult animated series in nineteen ninety nine, it's perfectly fine, right.

It was.

It was different.

It was something that wasn't trying to be the Simpsons, which was rare at that point.

Yeah, was trying to go the opposite direction of like family guy, let's be as edgy and weird as we can.

No, it's just it gave what it promised.

It was dilvert show.

It sure was, and that's there's nothing wrong with that.

Chris Elliott was Dogbert.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kent was a boss.

Yeah it all it all like, the voices are are all pretty competent.

So here's all Scott says about it in his two thousand and two book, published a year or so after the show's second season in cancelation in nineteen ninety eight, I started working on what would become the Delver TV show that ran on UPN during nineteen ninety nine and two thousand.

We had a tiny operating budget, so I found myself doing more of the writing than I had expected.

Now, I don't actually know what went on in that writer's room and how much of the good parts of the show were the Seinfeld guy and the other writers, how much of it was Scott.

But he does.

You get a taste of Scott Adams in this series.

His voice shines through, and when it does, it's often in uncomfortable ways.

And I'm gonna play you a clip now from an episode, and this is one where Gilbert's antagonist in this episode is a bad guy whose name is literally Bob Bastard, and Bob is trying to unfairly sabotage and invention that Dilbert made.

And as a result of Bob being an asshole, all of everyone, and especially like the female engineer Alice, loves him right and Alice falls madly in love with him, even though he's nothing but a dick to her.

This is a very uncomfortable scene, but like, it's not hard to see what Scott's trying to say.

Here you get another little glimpse of that sort of attitude.

What are you doing, I'm not doing anything.

Why are you dressed like that?

I'm not dressed like that.

You're trying to look like him don't be ridiculous.

It's just that all my non Bob Bastard imitation closer in the laundry.

This is all I have left.

What has happened to you?

Are you with Bob Bastard's camp?

Now he has a camp?

Cool?

Why do I try?

I think we make a terrific couple, Alice, you really think so?

No, I'm just toying with your emotions since I caught you in such a good mood.

Can I borrow another fifty bucks?

Another fifty Oh, forget it.

If you're gonna lay some kind of trip on me, I'll see you around.

No.

Wait, okay, here, make that a hundred bucks.

I'm saving up for a new mask.

What do you mean you're changing your name?

Seriously, don't you think it sounds good?

Wally Bastard?

Have you lost your all?

Right?

That's so that's enough, you get it, right?

Yep?

Uh.

Women fall for abusive jerky.

Yeah, women fall for abusive jerks.

The unsaid part is not like me, Scott Adams.

Why don't they love me?

I'm so much better than all of the guys who get the It's very you see this all of the internet.

Now, Scott was a was a trailblazer ahead of his time with this sort of.

Shit be a shit.

Yeah, you also kind of get signs of this of kind of what is now for Scott, an abiting hatred of all journalists, who he seems to think are unethical by nature of doing their job.

He thinks it's like unethical to report on stuff that's happening in the world.

This is now a pretty standard belief on the far right, but it was less common in two thousand and two, and it's it's pretty clear in this clip.

What makes you qualified to be a reporter?

I'm willing to violate anyone's privacy for my personal gain and then claim with a straight face that the public has a right to know, all right, So.

Not subtle, right, And it's one of those things that people who are remembering this is a good show, like it's not bad for the time, but like there's not a not a great density of comedy in these bits here, right, Like there's it's got its moments, but yeah, a lot of it's like weird and off putting, and I think most of the off putting part arts are Scott's voice just kind of shining through clear as a bell.

Anyway, the show gets canceled in two thousand.

And two by Adult Swim for a little bit, though didn't like it.

Does like rerun and reruns and stuff.

Yeah, they also got Home Movies which was also a you Pancho Home Movies, which was a much better show.

Home Movies had something to that.

Yeah, never watch it every well, so every other year.

It's it still holds the fuck up.

I I periodically find myself singing the Franz Kafka song.

But Scott's show gets canceled.

And now if I if I were to ask you, why do you think Scott's show got canceled?

You know what would your answer.

Based It was a very targeted product on a rarely watched network.

Yeah pretty reasonable.

Yeah, yeah, of course yes.

And Scott, to his credit, when he's interviewed about why the show failed in two thousand and six, gives basically that answer.

He says, it was on upn and network that few people watch, and because some because of some management screw ups between the first and second seasons, the time slot kept changing and we lost our viewers.

We were also scheduled to follow the worst TV show ever made, Shasta McNasty on TV.

Your viewership is seventy five percent determined by how many people watch the show before yours.

That killed us, that would probably do it.

Yeah, yeah, I.

Don't know that Scott's I think he might be exaggerating a little bit some of that, but like, yeah, that's pretty reasonable, right.

Not a lot of people watched it, you know, they moved around the time slot, so people didn't like that was more important back then.

If you've only ever watched in the streaming era, you may not understand that.

But this is not an unreasonable thing for him to believe, however, right, Yeah, he's not going to stick with that opinion as to why the show gets canceled for forever.

But what we're building to that, So, right in the middle of the period of the time when the Dilbert TV Show is on the air, when it's in fact the comic is at kind of the height of its popularity, Scott decided to try to branch out into another business, the world of health food, and he's going to I've been waiting for this one.

Yeah.

He creates a product called the dil Burrito, which he says is like, so Scott is like a vegetarian and he's he's angry that there's not any kind of like good fast, like microwaveable food for vegetarians to eat that can fulfill all of their nutritional requirements.

He wants something again.

He has this kind of very mechanical ad which is fine.

A lot of people feel this way about food.

I know people who they don't particularly enjoy it.

They're like, I just this is why, Like soilet's a popular thing with some people.

So you guys have heard of soilet, which is like this, they're these meal replacements sort of like shake is a little bit of an odd term, but like it's it's a drink basically, a drinkable meal fulfills all of the necessary caloric requirements and you can do it quick.

And I know some people who do it because it makes weight loss easier for him.

Some people they just don't have a lot of time in the day, so it's good for I know people who take soilt because like when you're doing drugs for thirty six hours with your friends, you might forget to eat, and it's easier to like pound a soilent than actually like eat a meal when you're on so much ketamine.

That like the world is like melting all around you.

Scott wants this because he just wants like a simple thing people can microwave and get all of their nutrients.

He describes it as only bad thing to want.

It's a fine idea, like sure, sure, I don't eat a lot of meat, and I would love to have like just simple make it in five minutes.

Of course, it's the most reasonable thing he's ever wanted to do.

He does describe it as the blue jeans of food, which I find kind of funny, but like there's a peal to that.

So the problem is that Scott doesn't know how to do this.

Like Scott has no idea how to make food.

You don't get the feeling he's a great cook, and he certainly does not have any experience in like the business of mass producing food.

So he launches this product, which he calls the dil Burrito.

I would say not great branding either.

It initially comes in Mexican Indian barbecue, garlic and herb flavors.

It's described as being a tortilla wrapped comestible consisting of vegetables, rice, beans, and seasonings that contain all of the twenty three vitamins and minerals that nutritionists say are essential.

Now, when you jam as much nutrients as he's like, he describes as like a vitamin pill wrapped in a tortilla, and when you shove all of those vitamins and stuff into a single burrito, it can have some negative consequences on your gastrointestinal tract.

As Scott would later say, because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the dil burrito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.

It is a disaster as a product, millions of dollars.

It gets just lit on fire by this thing.

I've talked to people who apparently ate them and said that they were prett be fucking nasty, And to be fair, Scott describes him as pretty bad too.

So there you go.

The del burrito.

Kind of a funny little moment, but not evil, right, He probably caused, yeah, disaster.

I have friends, I have a roommate.

We weren't a time who you know.

He was a tech guy.

He was a vegetarian, bordering vegan, and he hesitated because well, I like the idea of fast food.

I just don't know that I would trust a fellow nerd making my food and then someone else we knew ate it and basic that to never try it because they they basically thought they were going to ship their actual brain out.

Like they described it as so bad they could feel their capitillarities of moving out of their body.

It's just like, Nope, don't mean that incredible.

I mean indible food around too.

It was like dad Wood restaurant chain in the adults, that makes sense.

Dagwood eats a lot.

Yeah, if you're if you're selling like the biggest sandwich anyone's ever seen.

Absolutely, Yeah, and that's it.

And this isn't quite as bad as a Garfield restaurant they attempted in Toronto, was well, did he as also trying to do a restaurant at one point or.

Was I just he did do a restaurant.

We have so much to cover.

I don't think we're gonna get into it.

He ran an unsuccessful kind of restaurant in the Bay Area at one point in time.

Jesus.

Yeah.

And it's it's it's very interesting, like it is kind of like going to Dilbert, Like using him as the mascot for for fast food is a little bit like I don't know trying to sell mace that's Calvin and Hobbes branded, Like, I just don't see much of a connection.

And also I'm like, I don't know if I don't know if I trust the Calvin and Hobbs guy to sell me mace.

He doesn't seem like that's in his wheelhouse.

Charlie Brown brand.

Yeah, prophylactics, Yeah, yeah, the Charlie Brown condom.

It works as long as life.

Charlie Brown.

You never have sex.

Weird diagonal line around the shirts?

Yeah, absolutely?

Oh god, oh god.

Cliff Heathcliffe brand off roading tires, Like, why are we doing this?

What's going on?

Cliff?

That might happen?

That comic is so fucking weird these.

Days it does go off the rails.

So this is all fun.

But by two thousand and four, Scott there's some signs of some problematic stuff, but he's he hasn't done anything fucked up yet really in a clear way.

He's expressed some odd beliefs, but he's not blaming diversity or black people for his failures publicly yet again.

The book Where that stuff that we talked about comes in from is published in two thousand and eight, but two thousand and four is the point at which things start to go really wrong in his life.

Because of a legitimate personal tragedy, he develops the symptoms of a rare neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia.

I'm going to quote from an article in Braininlife dot org.

Here.

Adams's experience began in two thousand and four with what seemed like an extreme allergy related at laryngitis.

I used to get laryngitis every May when my allergies were bad, adams are called.

It would usually last a few days or a few weeks and go away, so I didn't think anything of this particular bout.

That was the first of dozens of doctors' visits and an equal number of treatments over several years.

I was diagnosed with respiratory problems that I was tested to roll out strep, throat and acid reflux.

From there, I went to an ear nos and throat specialist to check for polyps in my vocal cords.

Nothing made a distance.

I hit a wall.

He tried a bunch of herbal remedies, and it's one of those things where like this starts out as laryngitis, but it doesn't go away, and it gets worse and worse, and he continued, he starts having very basic trouble talking right, Like he's finding it harder and harder to speak.

He's trying every scientific and also like herbal fringe remedy that he can come across, because he's just increasingly desperate.

You know, he's not able to go out and speak anymore.

And first his ability to kind of do public speaking goes away, but soon his ability to just like talk to his wife, to talk to his friends goes away.

He's unable to kind of communicate very well.

He starts getting angry and lashing out at people because he'll try to talk and they won't understand him, and he just gets like enraged at this.

Eventually, this is what he says, kind of causes the collapse of his marriage.

And this seems like a responsibility for something.

Yeah, he kind of does with this, Like it does seem like like this has to be like a terrifying sense I have, Like that's horrible.

Like I can't wish that on him, Like that would probably be a legitimate tragedy, Like that is a nightmare world to be in.

Yeah, and yeah, you probably are going to last.

It doesn't make it right.

You shouldn't be lasting out of your spouse or anyone because something happened to you.

But I can get it.

Yeah, people don't perform perfectly in situations where they're both frightened and like something fundamental about their nature has been physically compromised.

As Scott later kind of described, I felt like I was a ghoat in the room.

It's hard to feel connected to others if you can't talk and they can't listen to you.

And yeah, again, sounds terrible.

Obviously, this is the kind of thing that's going to give you some fucking PTSD.

An today is an altered reality where he's like, so I decided to start investing into nonprofits that help Yeah, if we worked out or whatever, I know if that's going to happen, I know why, because that's not about him.

Yeah, he doesn't dedicate his life to helping others.

As a result of this, it ends with him unable to talk entirely for like a couple of years, and he pushes everyone away.

He basically lives alone in his home, not communicating with anybody for an extended period of time.

He considers suicide, but eventually he finds via googling his symptoms enough that there is a rare condition that meets his experiences.

He finds a doctor who specializes in it.

He gets diagnosed finally, and the doctor offers him a risky pioneering surgery.

And basically the way the surgery works is they cut the nerve that goes to the main muscle that's spasming, and then they graft a new nerve in its place to prevent the muscle from atrophying and to stop the old nerve, which was like defective from growing back.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it's a it's a really interesting thing that they did.

The treatment is about eighty five percent effective.

That the doctor who does it says that about eighty five percent of the time it provides, you know, an improvement or complete cessation of symptoms, which is like not that's not bad odds, but also like a fifteen percent chance that you never talk again is like that's scary.

You know, that's not low enough to not be terrifying, Right, that is a love Then I would want to gamble on most things much less.

Yeah my voice, Yeah, I I Yeah, it's it's scary, but like again, by this point, he can't talk already, so he doesn't have any other options.

So he has the surgery in two thousand and eight, the same year that he publishes the book where he blames all of his life problems on black people, and after three years of enforced isolation, in near endless silence, he starts being.

Able to talk again.

And the way Scott describes it, the surgery works perfectly and he's been fine ever since.

Now there is a theory, and you might call it a conspiracy.

I don't know.

Conspiracy is the wrong term because there's a conspiracy.

But there's a theory that you get among people who like follow Scott and have followed him really going insane on Twitter and stuff, that something goes wrong in this surgery and it damages his brain and that causes some of the behavioral changes that we see in him after this point.

I don't have any evidence of this.

I've never heard the doctor obviously, like say anything about this.

I don't know, Like it is true that after the he has this surgery two thousand and eight, this is the year where he becomes like very rapidly, he becomes increasingly racist and aggressive online.

But also number one, I think I can see signs of the stuff that he would do later.

And number two, I'm not saying there's no chance to something like that happened.

That's a possibility, but like rather than something fucking shady happening during the surgery, I find it kind of likelier that three years of not being able to speak of, losing every close relationship in his life, of being completely isolated is what causes the behavioral changes for the work.

Now, that sounds a lot more like that.

And honestly, if nothing else, just like you came out of this situation, like where you are facing a permanent life altering situation, Yeah you maybe like fuck it, I'm just going to throw caution to the end.

Oh this I feel weird about that, because how can we know, Like that's I don't think about anybody who has surgery.

Really, yeah, I think that it's more.

I mean, think about America, Think about the COVID lockdown.

Think about for how many people that period of isolation was the straw that broke the camel's back, that sent them spiraling into like Ashley Babbitt, you know, like it doesn't take like We're all a lot of us, most of us maybe are kind of fragile at any given moment, and like, this is an intense thing to deal with.

I don't think I need much more than like, Yeah, he lost the ability to talk for several years and it blew up his marriage and he lost everyone who was close to him for a while and lived alone as a hermit.

Not yeah, man, I can see that fucking you up.

Yeah.

I mean, like even if like just like the everyone I care about left, yeah, or I pushed him away.

Yeah, No, that's what I'm like.

Yeah, oh my god, Like I just can't even have fathom like how that would be as anyone.

I can see you not becoming the best version of yourself after that, Right.

You're either going to tell on a mia culpa tour and trying to fix or you're just gonna say, well shit, yeah why not?

Yeah yeah.

So And in two thousand and eight, Scott publishes the book Twenty Years of Dilbert, which is what I've been quoting from several times.

It's where he repeatedly blames diversity programs for the great failure of his life.

And it's interesting because after this point he also like in this book, like he blames you know, losing his job, not getting promoted on diversity programs, and he blames now.

In two thousand and eight, he blames black people for the failure of his television show, saying, quote, the show started out well, but in the second season the network made a strategic decision to focus on shows with African American actors.

Gilbert lost its time slot and cancelation followed.

And that's very different from the reasonable answer that he gives in two thousand and six.

It's also definitely not true.

For the next fifteen years or so, Scott is going to bring these incidents up with increasing regularity.

In twenty seventeen, he tweeted, I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African American audience.

That was the third job I lost for being white.

The other two are in corporate America.

They told me directly, which is again different on the story he.

Gives Vampire Slayer around this time.

Yeah, man, it's not because you're white.

Like it was number one UPN, not a ground network.

Number two.

Your show didn't find an audience.

Most shows don't kind of getting two seasons isn't super common, bro, Like, you got actually more of a chance than most people.

And it's like any reasonable person who gets to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars for drawing doodles would be like, I have no complaints about this system, right yeah?

Yeah, like just worked out perfect for me.

Like, are you crazy, Scott, Like you have been the luckiest anyone's ever been.

I've never been rich.

I have supported myself.

I've been able to support my spouse when they were going through grad school off doing comics.

I'm proud of that.

I feel I'm very fortunate because I have not gone into an office to work since two thousand and four.

I feel I'm so lucky.

This motherfucker's worth millions.

Yeah, he's like like black people took my TV show.

No, they fucking didn't.

They just didn't like it.

No one else liked it either.

We all disliked it.

We all took it from you.

You have like three hundred million dollars in a mansion in California shaped like Dilbert's head because of your glowing like the system has Oh yeah, his his house is shaped like Dilbert's head.

Look, that is absurd.

That is the dumbest fucking thing.

Yeah, it's it's it's funny because again he's like, they canceled it because they wanted to focus on shows with black actors.

Other people have pointed out Gilbert had the second lowest ratings of any show on television at the time it was canceled.

And this is like when Scott made his big post, they can't it was because I was white.

Like people brought this up and Scott goes ape shit, just like he did with Norman Solomon, he is unable to disengage, replying days later to his Twitter trolls quote, I successfully stirred up a hornet's nest of unsuccessful artists.

They don't know they're part of the show.

Don't tell them.

I'm a master.

Yeah, I was really manipulu.

No.

Yeah, we're saying that, like you have seen tremendous success and the fact that not everything you did worked isn't something that black people did to you, Like it's most cartoons don't succeed.

Everyone I know who's I know, I've known I know more than most people of like people who have been very successful in Hollywood, all of them have failures.

All of them have more than one failure in their background.

Scott, like Scott Scott McFarlane right, like who's made god knows how much money doing cartoon shows.

His first show gets canceled after like two or three seasons.

Oh right, he's out of the base, Yeah, Scott, Why I was saying, Yeah, family guy, he's out of like the he's out of like doing that for years when the show gets canceled.

You know, like his got brought back because it developed a fan base, which the dilbrit show didn't.

But that's one interesting thing you compare that because they both got brought back, like re ran on that swim.

But Sam may Farlane's, well, shit, if you're gonna be rerun it, I'm gonna do these bumpers.

Yeah, lean into it.

He actually built worked on if Yeah, I wonder if Scott at well, I mean I'm glad he didn't.

But Scott has it put like effort like behind it, like that could have helped him too.

He just he wanted to work the way it was gonna work, and it didn't happen that way.

And so now also my suspicion, I don't I'm not an expert on Seth MacFarlane lore.

But my suspicion is that, like for Seth, being doing that TV shows has been his whole motivating factor in life, and Scott.

Was animator though, that's where he began.

He worked, Yeah, he worked for Cartoon Network, he did shorts in the nineties.

I think he worked on a season of Johnny Bravo even.

Yeah, that makes sense, And I suspect the reason he put in all that extra work on those bumpers and stuff is that, like, this is what he loved and wanted to do, Whereas for Scott, the Delbert TV show was like a side gig in between drawing cartoons and trying to make burritos.

You know, like brito Yah.

Cannon's good, sir.

It's such a weird thing to be Like, my like third job didn't pan out.

So black people are engaged to conspiracy against me.

It's it's it's like, it's not evidence of great mental health.

Yeah.

If the entire black community was going to rally around, like we need to take one white man down, why the fuck would it be Scott Adens.

Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I think he's saying that like it was these venal Hollywood types who wanted to get the black you know viewer or whatever.

But I also see no evidence of that Like Hollywood, especially in the early two thousands, wouldn't have killed a successful show by a white guy to please the black community.

It wasn't a successful show, Scott.

I can think of like a CEO of a channel killing successful shows was in the early seventies when CBS did like the rural purge, where any show that took place or appealed to people in rural areas like Beverly Hillbillies and he Hall got canceled despite having amazing ratings because they didn't want to appeal to uh, they would appeal to more urban viewers.

Yeah again.

It was white people hurting white people.

Yeah yeah again.

Scott very silly man, So who knows like why he suddenly starts to go down this road.

But as he gets increasingly like obsessed with the ways in which he's been wronged by diversity, he also starts to get increasingly elaborate with like his lore as to why he thinks he's how he thinks he's uncovered the secrets to success in the universe.

And the best example of this is his concept of talent stacking.

In twenty thirteen, he writes a book called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big And it's another it's him kind of pretending to be humble, where he's like, I was bad at all of this stuff, and I still got super successful.

And I got successful because you know, even though I wasn't great at any one thing, I had a bunch of little skills and they all synergize together to allow me to be a big success.

You know, I wasn't the best artist, but I understood kind of how to use the Internet, and so I was able to take advantage of that to like promote my cartoon strip, and you know that's why it was a big hit.

Right.

Here's how he describes this concept more succinctly in his book Win Bigley, which he publishes a few years later, you know, in the early Trump years.

Quote.

A talent stack is a collection of skills that work well together and make the person with those skills unique and valuable.

For example, a computer programmer who also knows how to do good user interface designed would be more valuable than one who does not.

The power of the talent stack idea is that you can intelligently combine ordinary talents together to create extraordinary value.

The key concept here is that the talents and the stack work well with one another.

Now that's not wrong, but Scott, that's not a discovery, right, Like if you were if you were to go up to a person on the street and be like, hey, do you think having more skills makes you more valuable?

I'm going to guess one hundred percent of people.

Say like yeah, of course goes like yeah that when you turn in a resume, They're not like, oh shit, he's got eight skills supposed to two.

Yeah, yeah, oh he's got a great talent stack.

No, it's yeah, learning things is good.

You are a more valuable coder if you know how to code more things you know.

And just like when it comes to like the artistic field, this is something that writers have talked about for a long time.

Oftentimes if you if you, I mean this goes back decades.

You see, like writers answering letters from fans.

Advice they'll give is go out into the world, like experience things, meet people you know that will make you a better writer.

The more things you know about, the more things you can write about with versimilitude.

Robert Heinlen, you know, had a great has a great bit about like the creative value of having a broad base of skills of knowing how to you know, harvest crops and skin an animal and you know, go phishing and you know all these kind of like different things that are sort of like unrelated skills because as has hurt Heinland said, specialization is for insects.

Right, Like, again, what Scott is done here is he's taken a basic observation that is most people are aware of and that people have been talking about one way or another forever, and has reframed it in kind of the gamified language of hustle culture.

And I'm not sure if this is just Scott trying to work a grift and knowing that he's just repackaging very obvious shit, or if he just hasn't read other people's writing, right, Like, does he legitimately fail revelation?

Yeah?

Do it?

It doesn't matter, yeah, yeah, but it is interesting like this, And I think that kind of the way he does this, by sort of like treating it as such a dogmatic like a skill tree and an RPG, I think kind of makes it.

It's it sets you into this very like crystallized mode of thought that I think is more brittle and might make you less likely to pick up useful skills if you can't sort of like figure out how that skill is gonna work in a talent stack, because like the skill Scott talks about that synergized together, he didn't like go into learning those things because he knew they would hybridize as well.

It was more just like living a life where you have a wide base of experiences makes you more versatile and more able to like adapt to the world.

And that's the only real meaning of intelligence.

But you know what else is intelligent?

Is it the products and services that weis to span our minds and skills stack.

That's right, every single advertiser on this show is a member of MENSA.

Oh that's the promise hear that.

I've never heard of another podcast talking about MENSA.

But here we go, Ah, we are back.

So good stuff, good stuff.

So focusing obviously on acquiring talents that you can combine is a good thing.

But I think Scott's talent stacking is kind of I think the way he's framing this is more likely more likely than making you talented.

It's a very brittle way to interpret a phenomenon that, like, viewed properly, can be liberatory.

But I think looked at the way that Scott looks at it might lock you into a world where all you do is draw Dilbert and repackage old self help books.

But it works for Scott.

He does get rich, which means he's never had to question the person that he's become or the ultimate value of his conclusions about the world.

As the years go on, his work loses any edge of humility, and he veers increasingly towards megalamoniacal shit.

His two novellas are the best example of this.

He writes two fiction books and kind of the early aughts.

One is called The Religion War and one is called God's Debris.

Have you read these books?

Randy's definitely never heard of them.

Oh oh boy, so oslo hesitant when I hear a cartoonist has written a novel.

Yep.

Well, Scott considers this his only his real legacy, that like he will be remembered for these books.

He said this that like what I will be remembered for is my novels.

He believed these are very deep and contain important truths about the human condition that no one else has elucidated before.

Now I have not read God's Debris.

I have read The Religion War.

These are both pretty short books.

You can find them for free online if you want to steal them like I don't think Scott put them up.

But they're available, which is where I found them, So just google them and google the title and text if you want to read this shit.

I have read The Religious War.

I would the Religion War.

I would charitably describe it as an atheistic rant that managed to manages to be racist on an almost unique level.

The basic plot I will give Scott credit for this is summarized efficiently in the first paragraph of the prologue.

And here's Scott's book.

Here's how it opens.

In the year two thousand and seven, a brilliant and charismatic leader named al z began his rise to power in the Palestinian territories.

He was the architect of the twenty year Plan for eliminating Israel, the success of which started a domino effect in the Middle East, as one Arab dictatorship after another fell and their territories rolled into the Great Caliphate.

Alsi's subjects heady from an unbroken string of victories, demanded the spread of Islam to the rest of the world.

AlSi understood that this was neither practical nor desirable, but to satisfy the appetite of his people, he began an unending war of minor terror against the Christian dominated world.

The attacks were calculated to be large enough to look like progress let's yet small enough to avoid provoking all out war.

Publicly, he blamed renegade groups for the attacks.

The Christian dominated countries k new Alzi was behind the bombings, but they depended on him for their oil and wanted to avoid a larger war that would cripple their economies and an all likelihood increase the number of bombings.

Now there's a lot that's insane about that.

For one thing, Scott doesn't seem to know that there are Sunni and Shia Muslims, and that they, like the all disagree.

About a lot.

Neither of those words are in the book.

Sunni doesn't show up, Shia doesn't show up.

He doesn't mention Iran like we don't know what the Shia world supposed to be?

Are you doing here?

Like?

He just is like all of the Muslims are in a caliphate now because this guy and what so Alzi his plan to destroy Israel is like he organizes the Palestinians to demand democratic rights and like they become kind of quasi equal partners in society and then one day they murder all the Jews.

Like, it's pretty fucked up.

This is a Christian novel that, like My Youth kind.

Of does now He's he doesn't portray the Christians particularly sympathetically either, right, the big Christian general was also portrayed as a bad guy.

It's more like an early Internet atheist novel.

But like, you know how a lot of those guys, those like internet atheists from the nineties after nine to eleven went like super hard anti Muslim.

Yes, Scott's doing the same thing here, right, it's pretty fucked up.

It's very racist.

It's really funny.

Like Scott has convinced himself that his novel was prescient because it predicted the rise of Isis.

That's bullshit.

That is not what Scott did.

All he did was use the word caliphate, which isis also used, but also a bunch of governments have called themselves caliph.

Very it's a thing it goes back like a thousand years.

It's it's been a thing for a while.

Agree, there isn't one of my D and D books like for al Kadan.

Does that mean like Ed Green nineties predict It's.

Also like fuck Scott Is, like once they start winning the victories, just number one, like the west Is just kind of ignores their campaign of low level terror, which we didn't.

We like bomb the crap out of them.

And number two he has this idea that like, well, once a caliphate is declared, all of the Muslims just start clamoring to join it and take over the Now you know who actually defeated ISIS because I was there for quite a bit of it.

It was Muslims, by the way, like uh whenever, like I don't know, people shot at me.

The folks who like threw their bodies in front of me Muslims.

The people who are like at their day and night throwing like fucking with like hand grenades and fucking combat knives, clearing buildings of ISIS fighters were also Muslims.

I watched him pray in the mornings before they would go get fucking shot.

Like very offensive, this guy.

Yes, I am very frustrated by Scott Adams and his racist book, and that he thinks he predicted isis like, go fuck yourself, Scott.

I mean, are you surprised though, considering like nothing else he's taking credit for it at this point.

No, no, not at all.

It just is like particularly galling.

So the way Scott writes about the Caliphate shows his fundamental incuriosity about the world.

He never expresses any understanding of the actual religious doctrine behind the strains of fundamentalist Islam most associated with terrorism.

Even if this book was anti Muslim hate speech, it might have come from a position of understanding, you know, stuff like Selophism, right, it'd be one thing, it would still be bad.

But if this was like anti Muslim and really gott into the nitty gritty of like different really problematic beliefs among extremist Muslims, like you know, Slofi Islam and stuff, that would at least show that like he was curious to an extent, you know, but he's he simply is not.

And the book itself does treat Christianity with a similarly broad brush.

The American Leader is this like general like, by the way, the whole West is part of the Christian Alliance, that's what they call themselves with like, I don't know, man, I feel like it's a secular I feel like all of the religious terrorism is part of why people have become more secular in the twenty first century, as opposed to making everyone pick sides in a religion war, like it's just not what happened, Scott.

Not fucking fuck.

Yeah, it's offensive to it should be offensive to anyone who reads it.

Now.

The conflict between these two big blocks is resolved when Scott's self insert character who is a guru called the Avatar.

Who is the Avatar is like a wizard, but he's a wizard.

He's a wizard of smart right, He's so logical, it's so rational that his ability to like talk to people and make rational arguments is effectively a superpower.

And he solves the religion war becind because he finds an old lady who's like he describes her as basically a super influencer.

Right, there's just this kind of mystical network of people who are really convincing, and if you find the right person, they'll talk to you know, fifty people, and they'll convince all those people and those people will talk to another fifty people and then kind of stocata or kind of like over in a very short order, everyone will be convinced of something.

Right, if you find the right person, you're able to like seed a thing.

And this old lady comes up with a joke where she's like, if God is so smart, why do people fart?

And that revelation makes the entire world atheist more or less.

That's the plot.

That's the plot of Scott's book.

I hate this.

I hate this.

Yeah.

By the way, if you're listening to this and you want to read an actual novels written by cartoonists Mel Lazarus who did The Mama and Miss Peach's Class, I'm told I've read them.

Watch of Horley Racist not but like and I was like, who was one called The Boss is Crazy Too, which was based off his time working in a CD magazine like fine stuff like that that's meant to be fun and pulpy.

What the fuck?

Yeah?

Or on the other end of the great cartoonist Alan Moore wrote a book called Jerusalem, and I'm gonna be honest, I haven't read it.

No one I know who loves Alan Moore has finished it, but you could put it on your bookshelf and occasionally read pages and people will think you're very smart.

So sure, it's a great book.

One of these days, I'll read it.

If it's Alan Moore, you probably just like at absolutely.

And yeah, I keep it on my belt next to my handgun in case you know there's a jam or something.

It's it's it's it's much more effective than a than a combat knife.

Wailing on some Nazi with a copy of Jerusalem.

Yeah, that's my new master material.

Thank you, I will I will remember that time.

Sorry, Alan, I love you.

Okay, I'm going to keep freaking out about this book, going, keep going, please, it's terrible.

So God's Debris, which is the sequel, is even more out of again, Yeah, it's a sequel.

The whole thing is like a pseudo Socratic dialogue between a delivery boy and the avatar from the first book.

It is charity to call this freshman intro to psychology gobbledygook, Like most freshman psych students would write a better and more insightful book than this.

I'm not going to punish you all with too much detail, but you can get an idea of what we're looking at here with this passage, and this is so this delivery boy comes to give an old man a passage.

The old man is the avatar, and he's I guess, going to like pass wisdom on to this kid.

So like, here's the delivery boy talking to the avatar.

It's for you, he said.

That's that's the delivery boy.

What's for me?

The avatar applies the package.

I just delivered the packages, I said.

My job is to bring them to you.

It's your package.

No, it's yours, okay, I said.

Planning my exit strategy, I figured I could leave the package in the hallway on the way out.

The old man's caretaker would find it.

What's in the package, I asked.

I hoped to get an awkward to get past an awkward moment.

It's the answer to your question.

I wasn't expecting any answers, I understand, said the old man.

I didn't know how to respond to that, so I didn't.

He continued, let me ask you a simple question.

Did you deliver the package or did the package deliver you?

By then I was delivered a little annoyed with his cleverness, but admittedly engaged.

I didn't know the old man's situation.

But he wasn't as feeble minded as I'd first thought.

I glanced at my watch, almost lunchtime.

I decided to see where this was heading.

I delivered the package, I answered, that seemed obvious enough.

If the package had no address, would you have delivered it here?

I said, no, Then you would agree that delivering the package required the participation of the package.

The package told you where to go.

I suppose that's true in a way, but it's the least important part of the delivery.

I did the driving and lifting and moving.

That's the important part.

How can one part be more important if each part is completely necessary?

He asked, Now this is pointless, like there's no wisdom to be revealed in this, but also like it's like no delivery boy would be like, well, I'm the person I'm responsible for why the package.

Now the deliverer would be like, look, man, this is my job.

I got to make rent, Like that's why I gave you this package.

Someone told me to deliver package here.

Yeah, Like, I have to do this to afford food and stuff, Like that's why I'm here.

That's what drove me here is my need for food.

Don't you Tube minutes like, no, the package didn't make me come here, and like that, we're not equally integral.

The integral part of this is I need a job and this is the job that I have.

Will you please sign for the fucking package, asshole?

Oh oh god.

It's frustrating.

In general, I think Scott Adams is maybe the single person who handled the social media era the worst.

There were signs that this was going to be the case, with him from early on having to filter his ideas through editors at comics, syndicates and publishers kept the most problematic stuff out of his work.

When he was allowed to just vomit his thoughts to people, things got really dark, really fast, and an early sign that this was going to be the case came in.

An early sign that this was going to be the case came in two thousand and six when he made a blog post about how he didn't vote because he was too ignorant.

Right now, I don't disagree with Scott there.

I don't want him voting either, But he immediately seguees off of this into very wild territory, starting with the fact that like he's like, you know, I think that the news doesn't provide us with enough context to make a decision.

So, for example, I just learned recently that Iran is twenty five thousand Jewish citizens, and everybody's talking about how anti Semitic the president of Iran is.

But there's all these Jewish people living in Iran.

So does that mean that the president is anti Semitic and that I'm going to kill people way?

Or is he just kind of a bigot?

You know, the media hasn't provided me with the context that I need here, And for one thing, like you could look up life for Jewish people in Iran, Like there's Jewish people who have like left Iran or who still live there probably who you can like you can find like their feelings on the matter.

You could look this up, like there are media, there's newspapers that have written articles about this, Scott.

The fact that every newspaper that talked about this is during like when everyone was flipping out over Mahmoud ahmadina Jod, the former president of Iran because he made some statements about Israel.

The fact that like every news article on Amadina Jod didn't like go into detail about life for Jewish Iranians doesn't mean that like that context is not provided elsewhere by the media, you chose not to look into it, and for some reason, from that very strange statement, we veer into Holocaust denial.

So here's Scott I gamm it.

I'd also like to know how the Holocaust death toll of six million was determined.

Isn't this sort of number that's so well documented, with actual names and perhaps a Nazi paper trail, that no historian could document it doubt its accuracy, give or take ten thousand, Or is it like.

Every other LRN large round number that someone pulled out of his ass and it became true by repetition.

Does the figure include resistance fighters and civilians who died in the normal course of war, or just the Jews rounded up and killed systematically.

No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened, But wouldn't you like to know how the exact number was calculated?

Just for context?

Without that context, I don't know if I should lump the people who think the Holocaust might have been exaggerated for political purposes and with the Holocaust deniers if they are equally nuts, then I'd like to know that I want context.

You know what, Scott you can get context because there's libraries full of books people have written calculating the death toll of the Holocaust.

All of these questions have been answered numerous times by both journalists and historians.

You chose not to seek that out.

It's not a problem that every article that talks about mentions the Holocaust and its death toll doesn't go into detail about how that death toll was calculated, because that's not good article writing.

You don't like it would be like every time I talk about fucking climate change, I discuss like how fucking internal combustion in work.

Like it's simply not necessary context every single time.

But it's super easy to learn about how the Holocaust death toll was calculated.

And if you were to just have typed into Google in this period of time, how was the Holocaust death toll calculated?

You would find answers to this question.

And if people at home are curious, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, operated by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a page titled documenting numbers of victims in the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution, which you and Scott Adams can peruse at your leisure if you want.

This is not hard stuff.

It's easy to find.

You do not have to be a historian to learn the basic answers to the questions that Scott is asking here.

It's so it brings Yeah, it's so blatant.

The holy is like no one's covered this means I didn't have the curiosity to go find out.

Yeah no, man, you didn't look like, why isn't the media telling me about this?

Well they did.

You didn't read those articles.

There's a lot of articles, so you didn't want to know about it, Like, yeah, I can hand I can hand mine toddler evidence that if she cleans her room up, she will not trip over her toys.

She's not gonna read that.

She doesn't give a shit, she's gonna keep her toys out.

It's like if I bought a car that didn't have a manual in it and then I drove it and never changed the oil until like the engine broke, and then I was like they didn't give me the contact, Like yeah, man, you like you can look up how do I maintain a car?

What does this light on my dashboard mean?

What are these noises from my car mean?

It's not hard to get that answer, Like it is not the fault of the fucking car manufacture that you chose to act like a helpless babe.

This is all a really perfect example of the kind of dumb that Scott gives us.

He thinks that like saying this, that being like, well, I just want context, what about this?

What about what I'm saying it didn't happen?

Yeah, dot dot.

Yeah, Like he thinks that this makes him look nice, just deep and wise, but like kind of the cynical prankster wise man, like the Avatar and his books, Like you just accepted that number without thinking.

Maybe now you'll think more about the things you accept without thinking.

No, you should actually like try to learn the answers to the questions that you're asking, because they're very readily available.

Scott Adams, it's like very frustrating.

It's like.

I think his attitude is that like when we talk about, for example, Holocaust and I as shooting up synagogues and murdering Jewish people, every article about that should include a digression about like the estimated kill rate during acton Reinhard and how it compares to the rate of killing in Rwanda.

Like that's literally what I think he's saying, which is nuts and stupid, and he should feel bad, and also somebody should throw p at him anyway for the sake of fairness.

I should note that at this point Scott's ill considered political rants are not always entirely on the wrong side, although there's always an element of wrong to them.

And May of two thousand and eight, he wrote a blog post making fun of people who complained about illegal immigrants and that's a noble cause.

There are some cringe worthy lines in the post, like Mexicans have great looking skin that resists sunburn.

I have skin that looks like tappyokas spilled on canvassing skin.

Mexic people, what the fuck, Scott, Well, you don't need to get into that.

Scott continued posting, though, and he eventually started to draw criticism when other people realized that the unfiltered Dilbert guy was a dick.

This happened first in a big way when he made this twenty eleven post complaining about the unfair treatment of women.

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.

It's just easier this way for everyone.

You don't argue with a four year old about why you shouldn't eat candy for dinner.

You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy, even if he punches you first.

And you don't argue when a woman tells you she's only making eighty cents to your dollar.

It's the path of least resistance.

You save your energy for more important battles.

So Scott posts this stupid thing because he's a dumb asshole, and he gets made fun of on a blog called feminist, and so he jumps he again.

He can't handle people not agreeing with him or not thinking he's smart, so he leaps into the comments section to defend himself and argue against everybody, and immediately, because he's not good at arguing, he just kind of gives that up and starts insulting people for their poor reading comprehension.

He also suggests that they all secretly agree with him and know he's right, and are just arguing with him for the sake of their own egos.

Then he makes a blog post a few days later reiterating all the points that had made everyone mad, but insisting that everyone had just gotten him wrong and that like Dilbert readers are smart enough, you know, but other people didn't get it.

I'm actually going to read a quote from EW dot com here, like summarizing the fallout.

Adams insisted that his post was some sort of forensic ex size that his loyal readers he presents them as sort of uber rational Dilbert Nation, understand, but he did eventually offer an apology.

The best of my knowledge, no one who understood the original post or its context was offended by it.

But to the women who were offended by their own or someone else's interpretation of what I wrote, I apologize.

You week by your own interpretation.

What.

Yeah, it was all just a game for me, the puppet master.

But I'm sorry if it hurt you.

Like Scott, just if you want to be if you want to believe shitty things, just like say them on your massive platform and ignore the people who argue with you.

Yeah, don't be a little baby about this, like he's such a whimp public counts to defend himself or that.

Oh boy, that's where we're heading to.

So the attention or because this kind of goes viral, more and more people start to watch his blog posts because and then they start to realize, like, wow, he says dumb all the time, Like he's constantly saying bullshit without knowing anything about the shit he's talking about.

So in the mid adds it kind of comes sport in a couple places online to make fun of bad Scott Adams posts, and Scott can't handle it, so he starts to make fake accounts on MetaFilter and Reddit under the pseudonym Planned Chaos, where he again he's doing this puppet master thing and he pretends to be someone else defending himself because apparently his rational superfans aren't like good enough to actually do the job for him.

Here's an example of a Planned Chaos post.

If an idiot and a genius disagree, the idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong.

He also has lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief.

That's how the idiot mind is wired.

It's fair to say you disagree with Adams, but you can't rule out the hypothesis that you're too dumb to understand what he's saying.

And he's a certified genius, just saying, first of all, argument to authority.

If you want to be like a big fucking rules, D and D for real life guy, Like that's the argument to authority.

You're not actually defending yourself, Like that's evidence that you've kind of like that whatever argument you're you're you're making is completely hollow because you have to rely on like, well, he's a genius, so you just don't understand him.

But also that's just like such a sniffly little wiss thing to do, like say it under your own name, you fucking coward.

Yeah, that's that's what Bobby Like, well, let's not to the biggest thing that Bob Scott adams.

But it's like, I have never understood making a sock of an account to defend yourself.

It's sad, it's sad, it's weak anyway.

Whatever.

Once Trump began his campaign for president, Scott's behavior accelerated.

He predicted a Trump primary win fair enough, gets that one right, and then he takes back his endorsement of Trump though after the Access Hollywood take tape, and he endorses Gary Johnson, which he'll later come to like regret and try to explain away, but it is it is very funny.

Once Trump wins, he publishes a book called Win Bigley in which he argues that he and Trump are both master persuaders, and Trump was ushering humanity into a bold new world with his master persuader techniques.

He becomes increasingly partisan during the Trump years, but also increasingly silly and deeply irresponsible, would be fair to say.

In twenty nineteen, you guys remember the Gilroy Garlick Festival mass shooting that was carried out by that kind of fascist guy.

Yeah, real fucked up.

Scott uses the tragedy as an excuse to publish a video app he's made called win Hub, which he's created as like a news gathering tool, and he's like, while like the shooting is going on, he's telling people to use this to report on what's happening.

If they're like, it's pretty fucked up.

Like there's a lot of debate in our culture about like what it is and isn't appropriate to do in the wake of a mass shooting, but I think we can all agree trying to plug your app is not appropriate.

Yeah, that's a bit off sides.

Yeah, Yeah, that's just bad.

That's just real fucked up.

Scott.

A write up in MSN notes Adams didn't make major waves with a February twenty twenty one comic that poked fun at those who received a coronavirus vaccine, but he did rouffle feathers when he espoused debunked claims that people who weren't vaccinated fared better than those who were in a video shared by the Just Think podcast.

In the twenty twenties, his political statements also started to focus more on race.

At the beginning of twenty twenty two, he tweeted that he was going to self identify as a black woman until Biden picks his Supreme Court nominee, which the President had vowed would be a black woman, and then in June of twenty twenty, Adams tweeted that when the Dilbert TV show ended in two thousand after just two seasons, it was the third job I lost for being white.

So Scott's madness crescendos after the twenty twenty two Highland Park mass shooting.

This, like so many mass shootings, was carried out by a very young man twenty one years old.

Rather than seeing this as perhaps a reason to explore more restrictive laws as to win firearms could be purchased, or perhaps apps as a sign of deeply toxic aspects of our culture and the things that young men in it are raised to believe.

Scott posted one of the craziest things I've ever seen on Twitter, which is an app fueled entirely my mental breakdowns.

Here's Scott again, in the wake of a mass shooting.

The Highland shooting and every fit in the overdose death among the young are teaching us the same lesson, and we refuse to learn it.

It's difficult, but I'm qualified to give you this lesson.

Unfortunately, dam this won't be easy to read.

When a young male, let's say fourteen to nineteen, is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family to options.

Number one, watch people die and number two kill your own son.

Those are your only options.

I chose one and watched my step son die.

I was relieved he took no one else with him.

If you think there is a third choice in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, fixes that broken young man, you are living in a delusion.

There are no other options.

You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.

There is a sad reaction behind this, so like, I that's like fucked up.

That's real bad.

First off, not true.

I mean, among other things, I did an interview when I was still working with Cracked at a young man who attempted to carry out a mass shooting at his school.

This was back in the late nineties, and got caught and stopped, thankfully before he was able to shoot anybody, but he had the guns, he was about to start.

He was penalized obviously, like he was sent to I think a mental institution for a while.

But like he's like it's been decades, he's like a normal person.

He's got a life now, he's like hasn't killed anyone.

Like you can, in fact intervene in people who are like going in dark directions and they can be saved.

It happens all the time.

Part of why it doesn't get more attention is that a guy shooting up a school obviously is a thing that people are going to pay attention to all the times every single day in which a mentor comes across a kid who's starting to have under a dark path and like reaches that convinces that person.

You know, every time that a parent like sees that their child is starting to like embrace toxic aspects of like belief and behavior, and it starts to talk to them and you know, starts to work with them and tries to understand and counsel them.

Every time, like people get pulled back from that brink.

It doesn't like you don't get a news story about that, right, like obviously, like, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.

It's it's kind of fucked up to say that.

Like, once people start to show that they have that they're fetishizing violence, they that you know, they're embracing like racist or problematic beliefs, or that they're you know, starting to get addicted to drugs, that there's no way to save them.

Like if you've lived a life, you know people who have been pulled away from all sorts of fucked up things or who have like gone too far down a dark road and pulled themselves back.

It happens all the time.

Not that it's like easy or simple.

These are terrible things to deal with as a kid, having a child who like you think, might shoot up a school.

That's a terrifying position to be in as a as a But like people get pulled away from that kind of stuff.

Now there is a sad his stepson that is a well, that's what we're about to talk about.

Oh no, it's a pretty sad story.

Scott's step son was involved in a serious bicycle accident at age fourteen.

He suffered severe brain damage, which caused him to lose all impulse control, and he became terribly addicted to drugs and eventually died of a fentanyl overdose in twenty eighteen.

This is a horrible story.

There's a video in twenty eighteen when Scott gets the news where he's just like weeping to his audience, and I have no doubt that it's genuine.

Oh yeah, I mean it's yeah, yeah.

I don't want to brag on him for losing yeah, a child.

No I don't either, But like number one, I think at twenty eighteen, video doesn't look to me like a man who like gave up on a child.

That looks to me like a man who's sad because what he was doing didn't work.

And I think it's very depressing that, like the lesson he took out of this is that, like, you can't save people when they start to have problems.

Obviously everyone can't be saved.

Clearly, Scott's steps On, whatever was going on, like was not something he was able to pull out of.

And that's a tragedy.

I know multiple people who had serious addictions to like things like things that were going to kill them and stopped.

You know, I have friends who like I have a friend who survived shooting himself.

Like, people come through terrible things and build lives afterwards.

And the attitude that like, when a young man is troubled, all you can do is let them die or murder them is so that's the such a bad thing to take out of this experience.

That sounds sociopathic.

It is, and it's also it's probably one of the things that's really problematic to me about this is that, like he is, he is bringing his step son's death in the context of a man who went on a mass shooting and murdered people.

His steps on just had a drug addiction.

Having a drug addiction and dying as a result of it is not in the same moral universe as shooting strangers to death with a fucking rifle.

No, Like, comparing those two things is insane.

Well, it's I think it's the whole mentality of Oh, addiction is a moral failing, not a disease.

Yeah, no, it's like number one, especially in this case, like this is a kid who's got like brain damage and he has no impulse control, which is sad and hard to deal with, But like it's not the same as deciding to murder people.

You shouldn't be talking about these things together.

They're not even in the same realm.

No, Like, ah, it's it's one of those things, Scott.

So obviously the culmination of this where we are now is that earlier this year, Scott made a number of super racist comments about black people and about how like white people just need to stop talking to and stop being you know, associated with black people, stop living with black people.

We just have to separate.

Like it's pretty fucked up shit, and like everyone gets saying this is like the straw that finally breaks the camel's back.

He says something that like the normies take note of, and it leads to the collapse of his cartooning career.

In like the space of a week.

He gets dropped by shitloads of newspapers.

His syndicate, his publisher drop him, everybody drops him, and Scott again tries to do kind of the I was really trying to make this very intelligent point, and all the really smart people got what I was trying to say in context, but the dumb people got angry.

My argument, Scott is that a writer who repeatedly fails to get his point across to his audience is bad at writing.

Anyway.

Yeah, It's one thing I remember from all that, because I do have people contact me and like ask if I wanted you quotes.

I was like, not really, like contact cartoons, the color that's what you should be talking to you, not me.

But like one thing I will always remember about it was feeling like I saw people like, you know, applauding the syndicate Andrew's universe.

Yeah, and uh Andrew real universal and I'm like, yeah, they did it, but like they it took this.

Yeah, this was like there were you dog whistles before this, Like there was there are countless points where they could have stoop and said, nah, that's too far dude.

Yeah, but like it literally got to a point where newspapers had to say, oh, you're gonna lose this this spot and it finally hurts and now they're like, oh, well we're not gonna stand But no, you're not gonna stand out of the fact that you're losing money if you had the morality.

And again I should point out I'm saying this is myself, not on behalf of King Features or Herst Media, my my syndicate does my first opinion.

If you really had any morality, he would have been dropped a long time ago.

Yeah, like this, like the bigotry has been there in display for a while and now you're like, oh, now you have the morality because you're losing newspapers.

No, now, I will say, I am now.

Yeah, Yeah, he's got his comic online.

You can still read Dilbert if you want to.

For some reason, it is now entirely focused on like weird, cancel culture, grievance shit.

But yeah, if you want that in your life, it's still available somewhere, and it's it's one of those things.

You know, you you are not speaking on behalf of anyone else.

I am speaking on behalf of a of my corporation.

I am speaking on behalf of both Cools and Media, and iHeartRadio.

When I assure everyone Scott Adams lives inside of a mansion shaped like Dilbert's head with a swimming pool out back, also shaped like Dilbert's head, where he spends all of his recreational time.

Right now, Scott is sitting in a swimming pool shaped like Gilbert's head, angry that people on the internet are making fun of him.

And if you want to let Scott know that, let him know that you know that he lives in a house shaped like the hell head of Dilbert.

I think he'd appreciate that.

Maybe it'll save him.

I also remember, didn he he finally introduced a black character in his comic in the last year or so.

Yeah, the first trip was literally using the black character to shit on trans people.

Yeah, it's very very Scott Adams.

Everything he does is very Scott as.

It's just it's like that one shitty kid you went to school with, who this is the only attention he can get and he's so proud of it.

And when people hate I won No, you're just pathetic.

Yeah, you just kind of kind of sad, bro.

And he could literally say, you know what, I'm not talking to anybody.

I'm gonna sit joy my money for the rest of my life.

Vallid go for it, and we'd all we have here again.

There's not a single human being on the face of the earth who has a bad opinion of Bill Watterson.

No, I mean the probably sending him used to deal with him.

Probably the syndicate because he cost him a lot of money.

But like fucking a you know, he was like, I made this for ten years.

I feel like if I keep making it, the quality will drop.

I'm going to go paint landscapes somewhere in the rural Midwest for the rest of my life.

And Jim Davis again, like you may out like Garfield, Yeah, you may think it's a shallow tompic whatever, but every cartoonist or every person, yeah they were do.

He's a sweetheart.

He is very supportive.

He is a nice man.

He has never leapt into a fucking culture controversy.

He knows that's not what we need from the Garfield man.

I don't need to know the Garfield guy's opinion on any of this stuff, Like was.

It that comic Garfield minus Garfield when it came up, he could easily squash that.

Instead he's like, no, that's a great idea.

Keeps funny, Yeah, keep doing it, like it's one of those Like Jim Davis has never gonna like come in and be like, here's what everyone needs to know about like race mixing from Jim Davis, like we're fuck, he's never gonna give you that and think like that's again earned his money.

Good for you, Jim Davis.

And you know what, Scott, just for some evidence of what you could be.

Like Jim Davis lives in a house shaped like Garfield's head and we don't make fun of him for it because we respect Jim Davis.

You do you, Jim Davis, just keep on hating Mondays and tell us how and we're abuse of Odie and John creeping on the vet.

That's sure you've made it.

You've made it.

Yeah, although give us a better explanation for having a fucking lineman, Davis.

Don't, Yeah, have an alignement Davis.

Yeah, that's some real deep Garfield lore for those of you who are real Garfield heads anyway, there's actually like a shocking amount of very deep and unsettling online Garfield lore.

People should seek it out.

There is really terrible to seek it out on a.

Dark night when you're alone in your house and and really delve into the Garfield hole.

But you know what other hole people should delve into.

These ads and services.

No, no, no, you're you're you're oh yes, my holes, my deep holes.

Yeah yeah, yeah, uh well, if you want to find me online, my my commic online comics something positive has been going around for twenty one years.

It is at something positive dot net.

Or if you want to read a new Popeye strip every Sunday that makes apparently certain uncles on Facebook mad go to comics Kingdom dot com slash Popeye every Sunday, and thank you guys for having me.

This has been I mean, has it been say fun?

It could have been working.

It could have been a John K episode, It could have been dunk.

Yeah, we'll get to well califernakus or ever it's pronounced one of John awful human being who Yeah, I don't know.

Also a lot of a lot of great animator bastards out there.

But again, I work in a field where like, yeah, we're left alone in dark rooms for hours on end.

It's gonna go one of two days.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but Gahan Wilson helped build the Hiroshima bomb.

Look it up, people, look it up.

It's it's out there.

Find the evidence I wanted.

I almost made a joke about one of my predecessors on pop Eye, but I'm pretty sure would get have some of you're talking to.

So they're all helpless, lovely, lovely men, just just like everyone who's ever worked for Clear Channel Communications.

Anyway, that's the podcast.

Everybody a great.

What about where they can find you?

Uh?

Well, the internet?

Oh yeah, I have a book called After the Revolution.

You can find it anywhere you find books, like, type it whatever, wherever you get your books.

Type it in, go to a.

Bookstore, you know, with with some sort of crude weapon, ideally a copy of Jerusalem by Alan Moore, and threatened the teller until they buy a copy of my book After the Revolution.

That's how you do it.

And if you the listeners who do not enjoy ads about Reagan's gold coins would like to listen to this very podcast and all other cool Zone Media podcasts ad free either coming soon or already out, depending on when you're listening to this.

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Is that right, Robert?

Did I do it?

That is correct?

Yeah?

Sorry, everybody.

It's just for people with iPhones.

But that is most of our listeners.

One day I will matter.

We apologize to everyone else.

We'll figure out.

I'm an Android user too.

You know, we're all in this together, but sadly it's harder than you'd think to work stuff like this out.

Anyway, we've requested the Zone Media Apple.

Podcasts behind the Bastards production of Cool Zone Media.

For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts