Speaker 1: Oh, what is dilling my dogs?
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, a
Speaker 2: podcast about Scott Adams, a man whose self awareness is
Speaker 2: so minimal that he often his hands clipped through his
Speaker 2: writing desk like he's a character in a video game
Speaker 2: from the N sixty four era. I don't know, how
Speaker 2: was that, Randy?
Speaker 1: That's perfect, That is exactly what I would say.
Speaker 2: Okay, excellent, all right, So we have Randy Mulholland, artist
Speaker 2: behind Something Positive, a wonderful webcomic, and now the legally
Speaker 2: the Brain at least the limbic system of Popeye the
Speaker 2: Sailor Man. Randy, how are we feeling as we come
Speaker 2: into part two of this?
Speaker 1: I am just thankful that you invited me an episode
Speaker 1: that probably does not involve childhood a section no child vivisection.
Speaker 2: We are he is? He is going to buy his
Speaker 2: claim kill a kid in this so oh good, But
Speaker 2: it's I don't think he really did. I think he's
Speaker 2: just taking credit for it in a way that's kind
Speaker 2: of more upsetting than if he just killed a child.
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe that's not right.
Speaker 1: At least now there's not a kid who's dead but
Speaker 1: that's a weird.
Speaker 2: Oh there's a kid who's dead. Don't don't worry. Don't worry.
Speaker 2: The kid dies in this episode. We're fine, it's all good.
Speaker 1: I mean, that isn't the responsibility of every episode behind
Speaker 1: the at least once? Yeah, must die.
Speaker 2: No, as soon as I announced that a child is
Speaker 2: going to die in this episode, you know, like the
Speaker 2: last scene in Return of the Jedi where it like
Speaker 2: goes around the galaxy as all of the people are
Speaker 2: celebrating in their different planets. It was it was that
Speaker 2: was that was the behind the bastards fans. They're terrible
Speaker 2: people a flame. Yeah, yeah, it's like it's choriscant. It's
Speaker 2: the choriscant of our I don't know why I'm doing
Speaker 2: Star Wars. Everyone's tired of Star Wars. Think of another.
Speaker 2: Imagine I did another one, a different.
Speaker 1: Story track thing.
Speaker 2: No, No, I feel like that one's pretty saturated too.
Speaker 2: What's one nobody knows about? Farscape? That's right, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: imagine I did a far Escape God. Okay, So back
Speaker 2: to Scott. Early in his career, Scott Adams started receiving
Speaker 2: requests for public speaking engagements, and he realized that this
Speaker 2: could be a good side business for him. You know,
Speaker 2: colleges wanted him to talk, and also a lot of
Speaker 2: like corporations wanted him to come and like give speeches
Speaker 2: for their employees because they would.
Speaker 1: You know, you're some manager.
Speaker 2: You see people have like Dilbert cartoons up over their cubicles,
Speaker 2: and you're like, oh, well, let's pay this rich man
Speaker 2: money that could be going to races for our workers
Speaker 2: so they can hear this weirdo talk about how he
Speaker 2: draws Dilbert. That'll make him happy. So Scott, realizing that
Speaker 2: this was a thing that he might make some bank on,
Speaker 2: enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course and this is while
Speaker 2: he was still working at Pacific Bell. But drawing Gilbert.
Speaker 2: His employer was kind of willing to foot the bill
Speaker 2: because they saw it as beneficial to them. And Scott
Speaker 2: didn't know how to do any public speaking, and so
Speaker 2: he felt like this would help him. Now, do you
Speaker 2: know anything about Dale Carnegie.
Speaker 1: That name sounds familiar and it doesn't make me h,
Speaker 1: But that's familiar.
Speaker 2: You've all, like most people, you may not recognize his name,
Speaker 2: but everyone's heard of this guy's book. He's the guy
Speaker 2: who wrote How to Win Friends and Influence people.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, my dad had yeah book, my dad, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm going to guess something approaching one hundred percent of
Speaker 2: our listeners had one or more family members with this
Speaker 2: book in their house. It's an incredit. It's one of
Speaker 2: the best selling books in the history of like writing.
Speaker 2: You know, say what you will about it. That's undeniable.
Speaker 2: Dale Carnegie was born in eighteen eighty eight. He's an
Speaker 2: American writer and a lecturer. And yeah, he got rich
Speaker 2: writing this book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Speaker 2: It is still a best selling book to this day.
Speaker 2: It is sold probably like just an unbelievable number of copies.
Speaker 2: Whether or not this is a good thing kind of
Speaker 2: depends on yourve But as far as I can tell,
Speaker 2: I don't think Dale. You know, there's a lot you
Speaker 2: can say about him. He was kind of like I
Speaker 2: would say, like a lame man. But he was not
Speaker 2: like evil, right, He's not like this is not one
Speaker 2: of those like I'm subtly writing this book about like
Speaker 2: how to influence people so you can like sexually assault them,
Speaker 2: like you know, you're talking about like modern you know,
Speaker 2: like Andrew Tait types. Like he's not that kind of guy.
Speaker 2: He's just sort of like a little griftie, I guess
Speaker 2: in kind of his his Like I don't think he
Speaker 2: is a grifter, but like the way he talks is
Speaker 2: very appealing to them, and the things he's telling you
Speaker 2: how to do is kind of appealing to more. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's definitely like that's who the ought. We'll talk about
Speaker 2: that in a little bit. Yeah, So Dale he had
Speaker 2: been kind of a like he'd been like a salesman
Speaker 2: who kind of quits his career midstream to become an
Speaker 2: actor and just sort of like in order to make
Speaker 2: ends meet. He starts out teaching public speaking classes like
Speaker 2: while he's being a stage actor, and he finds out
Speaker 2: that he's like a lot better that than the actual
Speaker 2: acting and that there's a lot more money in it.
Speaker 2: During one session with a bunch of people trying to
Speaker 2: learn how to do public speaking better, Dale started asking
Speaker 2: his students while he was again he's trying to like
Speaker 2: coach them how to get up in front of a
Speaker 2: room of people and talk. He starts asking his students
Speaker 2: to talk about something that made them really angry, and
Speaker 2: he noted that like people who were really reticent who
Speaker 2: had trouble getting up in front of people and talking.
Speaker 2: When they started talking about something that pissed them off,
Speaker 2: they were able to get over their fear of public
Speaker 2: speaking more easily, right, Which makes a lot of sense. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's not an like's not that I mean, it's kind
Speaker 2: of worth noting, it's worth being the guy who writes
Speaker 2: that down. I'm not taking anything away from him. But
Speaker 2: that's not like for us today. And that's most of
Speaker 2: like Dale's actual good advice is stuff that today we're
Speaker 2: just like, well, yeah, if you're pissed off, it's easier
Speaker 2: to like not think about the fact that you're nervous
Speaker 2: in front of a group of people or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Dale kind of used this and some other
Speaker 2: revelations he had teaching these classes as the basis for
Speaker 2: a book that promised to improve self confidence for the
Speaker 2: average reader and teach them how to change the behavior
Speaker 2: of others by altering their own behavior towards those people.
Speaker 2: There's nothing inherently wrong with this other than that some
Speaker 2: of David's some of Dale's advice works pretty well, and
Speaker 2: kind of more to the point, I think the actual
Speaker 2: problematic thing is that, like it's number one, it teaches
Speaker 2: this kind of overly ritualized, rule based approach to how
Speaker 2: to like influence and talk and convince people of things,
Speaker 2: which can kind of there's you know how D and
Speaker 2: D and stuff works, right where.
Speaker 1: You got yeah, yeah, where you've got like, Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: here's a character and this character game to level, and
Speaker 1: so I pick a feet and this feat works with
Speaker 1: these other feats and it lets them do these other things.
Speaker 2: It's very there's kind of a hierarchy in terms of
Speaker 2: how a lot of the skills work, right where you
Speaker 2: get one skill and that allows you to get these
Speaker 2: other skills and then you can do these kind of
Speaker 2: like more complicated acts. That's not really how like charisma works.
Speaker 2: But books like Dale's, I think, can convince people that
Speaker 2: that's how it works. That if they just read these
Speaker 2: books and stack these tactics, then they'll gain these like
Speaker 2: eventually they'll get to do sort of the speaking equivalent
Speaker 2: of like a whirlwind attack as a barbarian. Right, we're here, fine,
Speaker 2: we have mobility, Yeah exactly, yeah exactly, And that's that's
Speaker 2: really not how this stuff works. But I kind of
Speaker 2: the fact that people start to believe that's how it works. Again,
Speaker 2: Dale's not like a pick up artist, but this is
Speaker 2: where we get pick up artistry, right, Like it all
Speaker 2: kind of descends from the way that Dale talks about
Speaker 2: how to win friends and influence people, and kind of
Speaker 2: getting Americans advice on how to be more confident and
Speaker 2: convincing is kind of like handing a loaded and chambered
Speaker 2: pistol to a drunken chimpanzee. It's just not a great idea.
Speaker 2: And yeah, we are. Of all of the peoples of Earth,
Speaker 2: Americans are the ones who needed less self confidence. A
Speaker 2: couple more hangaruts would be nice. Yeah, some humility courses
Speaker 2: maybe make us. I don't know, we don't do so
Speaker 2: great when we're scared either. I don't know how to
Speaker 2: fix Themerica. Let's move on. Yeah, yeah, we should probably
Speaker 2: just move on. I want to read a quote from
Speaker 2: his book about his book from an article I found
Speaker 2: in The Cut, which interviews science writer Maria Konikova, and
Speaker 2: Maria is the author of a book on CON's and
Speaker 2: conman called The Confidence Game. And here's Maria talking about Dale.
Speaker 2: Dale Carnegie's had to win friends and influence people is
Speaker 2: kind of the unofficial con artist's bible. Because a lot
Speaker 2: of those tactics he talks about in terms of building
Speaker 2: relationships and being successful in business are ideal for getting
Speaker 2: people to trust you. One of the really easy things
Speaker 2: is creating a feeling of familiarity. You're more likely to
Speaker 2: trust someone who feels more familiar to you. It's even
Speaker 2: enough to exploit something called the mere exposure effect, where
Speaker 2: say you just go to the same coffee shop as
Speaker 2: someone every single day, and they may not consciously note you,
Speaker 2: but all of a sudden you feel more familiar. And
Speaker 2: a lot of Dale's advice is kind of again, it's
Speaker 2: not like necessarily all that problematic, and in fact, it's
Speaker 2: kind of like the Art of War and that if
Speaker 2: you like read it today, because some of the things
Speaker 2: he wrote about have been so like spread so widely,
Speaker 2: you'll be really bored. It'll seem it's like very basic
Speaker 2: stuff to a lot of people today. It's all not
Speaker 2: necessarily like bad advice, but it's just kind of like
Speaker 2: basic as hell these days. Like people who obsess over
Speaker 2: this book today, like people who obsess over the Art
Speaker 2: of War are kind of like, I don't know, man,
Speaker 2: there's like better stuff like it's been it's been a
Speaker 2: one hundred years, Like there's better books on convince.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's nice to know what if you want to
Speaker 1: try to go back to the basics and see what's started.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2: No, Scott's going to kind of religiously love this guy, right,
Speaker 2: like he takes this on. This is kind of taking
Speaker 2: the place of religion for him, and this is going
Speaker 2: to build what sort of what does really in a
Speaker 2: lot of ways replace religion in any kind of like
Speaker 2: political sensibility as the thing at the core of Scott's
Speaker 2: understanding of reality and how it works, Like what I
Speaker 2: was just talking about, that sort of people take this
Speaker 2: book and they interpret it like it's a D and
Speaker 2: D manual, right, full of like feats and skills, and
Speaker 2: as they level up, they can like stack these feats
Speaker 2: and skills starting with this Dale Carnegie chorus. That's increasingly
Speaker 2: how Scott is going to view the world.
Speaker 1: I mean I get it from a certain viewpoint of
Speaker 1: being with an awkward dirt kid, just like why can't
Speaker 1: I have a cheap code? Why can't just be a
Speaker 1: direct manual? But someone like him who's like, but I
Speaker 1: want to make sure I'm always a special boy. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: in manipulations.
Speaker 2: The other danger of this, like there is some value
Speaker 2: if you want to be a public speaker. Public speaking
Speaker 2: is like a technical skill, and like any other technical skill,
Speaker 2: if you want to do that for a living, it's
Speaker 2: not a bad idea to study it, to study what
Speaker 2: other people have written about it, to try to learn
Speaker 2: more about it. But when you have this kind of
Speaker 2: very engineer focused view of how something like public speaking works,
Speaker 2: of how persuasion, of how charisma works, then one thing
Speaker 2: you're not going to do is ever listen to other people, right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: because they they're just they're the they're the again, they're
Speaker 2: like the cr you know, five monster or whatever that
Speaker 2: you're trying to figure out how to like drop before
Speaker 2: it can you know, do any damage to you or
Speaker 2: something like.
Speaker 1: They're not to.
Speaker 2: See everyone is a cobalt. Yeah, yeah, last, yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: That's That's that's how you're going to look at the world.
Speaker 2: And that's not a great way to look at the
Speaker 2: world if you want to be if you want to
Speaker 2: like have humility or or be capable of like change
Speaker 2: and personal evolution. Anyway, I do think it's interesting that
Speaker 2: these Dale Carnegie teachings how they may have influenced what
Speaker 2: I always considered to be one of Scott's more reasonable
Speaker 2: philosophical claims. And this is going to take us back
Speaker 2: into the weeds a little bit.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: Lawrence Peter was a Canadian professor who eventually came to
Speaker 2: teach at the University of Southern California. His specialty on paper,
Speaker 2: he's a professor of education. But over the years, Peter
Speaker 2: felt drawn to studying organizations and why they succeeded or
Speaker 2: failed in different circumstances, and he came to believe that
Speaker 2: the best way to do that was to study hierarchies
Speaker 2: within organizations and how they functioned and how they became dysfunctional.
Speaker 2: He started to call himself a hierarchyologist, which is both
Speaker 2: a fun term. It doesn't spell well, but if you
Speaker 2: like say it out to yourself, it kind of works
Speaker 2: pretty well. And yeah, he saw himself as like someone
Speaker 2: who studies how different hierarchical systems function and don't function.
Speaker 2: Lawrence was also a funny guy. He was kind of
Speaker 2: renowned for peppering his different writings and essays and papers
Speaker 2: with witticisms, like noblest of all dogs is the hot dog.
Speaker 2: It feeds the hand that bites it. That's a Lawrence
Speaker 2: Peter original.
Speaker 1: Nice. I mean, that's a fun little quote. I can
Speaker 1: see that.
Speaker 2: Yes, not a bad little not a bad little little jape.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty nine, Lawrence co wrote a book called
Speaker 2: the Peter Principle. The nut of the argument he made
Speaker 2: in the book was this quote. In a hierarchy, every
Speaker 2: employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence in time.
Speaker 2: Every post tends to be occupied by an employee who
Speaker 2: was incompetent to carry out its duties. Work is accomplished
Speaker 2: by those employees who have not yet reached their level
Speaker 2: of incompetence. Now, that is something number one. If you've
Speaker 2: ever worked in any kind of large corporation, you will
Speaker 2: be like, yeah, that shit works a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: Right, it's pessimistic, but unfortunately it's yeah accurate. It is not.
Speaker 2: It's going to be familiar to basically one hundred percent
Speaker 2: of people who have worked in corporate America. Right, even
Speaker 2: if you don't believe that's how it always works, because
Speaker 2: obviously that's not how everything always works. But like everyone
Speaker 2: encounters people who are in this position right where they
Speaker 2: were good at something, and that's the whole premise of
Speaker 2: the office, right of the American Office. Michael Scott was
Speaker 2: a really good salesman who got promoted well past his
Speaker 2: level of competence, you know, and.
Speaker 1: You're receiving the American Office. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: Oh well, that's the premise of the show. It's all
Speaker 2: based on the Peter principles. Right, they're doing great, Robert,
Speaker 2: thank you, Thank you. People watch that.
Speaker 1: I think you should be noted that this is one
Speaker 1: of the few times he like a pop culture reference
Speaker 1: to a man's podcast and the guests didn't get it.
Speaker 1: But Robert and you are very, very very correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm I'm I'm sick of all of you.
Speaker 1: I'm going to go listen to my Ariana Grande records.
Speaker 1: Wow you did.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, that's growth.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, I was trying to pronounce it wrong. Did
Speaker 2: I accidentally get it right?
Speaker 1: You got it right?
Speaker 2: A son of a bitch? What a what a shameful
Speaker 2: moment for me. I'm going to go read the name
Speaker 2: of some British towns to get my mojo back there
Speaker 2: you go.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: All I'm saying is I've infiltrated your mind.
Speaker 2: Now today you know what, the only way for me
Speaker 2: to get back on top, I'm gonna I'm gonna read
Speaker 2: Welsh street signs.
Speaker 1: See how it goes for me. Small backwoods Massachusetts town
Speaker 1: name so so yeah.
Speaker 2: Peter Laurence, Peter, you know, writes this book about how
Speaker 2: people get you know, people who are competent get promoted
Speaker 2: past their level of incompetence. And that's how like hierarchies work. Now,
Speaker 2: this is not Peter is not pretending to write like
Speaker 2: a super serious book of psychology. He's not trying to
Speaker 2: write a business book. Either it's a satire, right like that,
Speaker 2: or at least at various points he will say that
Speaker 2: it's a satire and there's a lot of like joking
Speaker 2: bits in it. For example, all of the evidence that
Speaker 2: he cites to support his argument comes from what he
Speaker 2: calls his hypothetical case file. So he's not like citing
Speaker 2: from like real things that happened. He's citing from like
Speaker 2: hypothetical stories, some of which are probably based on things
Speaker 2: he heard or things that happened to him. But it's
Speaker 2: like it's very tongue in cheek this book, right, And
Speaker 2: he would later claim that the principle is the quote
Speaker 2: key to understanding of the whole structure of civilization. That's
Speaker 2: kind of and again he's like sort of joshing around
Speaker 2: a little bit, but he's also like there's there's something
Speaker 2: deep there, like that is this is like, I think,
Speaker 2: a valuable a valuable warning and a valuable observation about
Speaker 2: how hierarchy very often tends to work, right, because this
Speaker 2: happens throughout government, throughout company, you know, the business world
Speaker 2: in militaries, like.
Speaker 1: This is just a thing, and it's education nonprofits.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can you can go back ten thousand years,
Speaker 2: you know, looking at the best documentation we have of
Speaker 2: different rulers of different and you'll find evidence of the
Speaker 2: Peter principle. It's all throughout human history. So yeah, it's
Speaker 2: it's a bit of like he's taken the piss a
Speaker 2: little bit, but yeah, there's there's there's quite a bit there. Now,
Speaker 2: the business community almost instantly adopted Lawrence's idea, even though
Speaker 2: he was kind of like joking with it. This is
Speaker 2: a hugely influential text for business people, for MBAs and shit,
Speaker 2: and today the Peter principle is taken very seriously by
Speaker 2: people who are like professionals at organizing corporate structures. In
Speaker 2: a few seconds googling, I found a Harvard Business Review
Speaker 2: article on quote overcoming the Peter principle and a Forbes
Speaker 2: article titled new evidence that Peter principle is real and
Speaker 2: I'm going to read a relevant quote from that real quick.
Speaker 2: Three professors Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota, Danielle
Speaker 2: Lee of MIT, and Kelly Schue of Yale analyzed the
Speaker 2: performance of fifty three thousand and thirty five sales employees
Speaker 2: at two hundred and fourteen American companies from two thousand
Speaker 2: and five to twenty eleven. During that time, fifteen hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty one of those sales reps were promoted to
Speaker 2: become sales managers. The data show that the best salespeople
Speaker 2: were more likely to A be promoted and B perform
Speaker 2: poorly as managers.
Speaker 1: So like, there's.
Speaker 2: Actual data, you know behind this obviously not a universal rule,
Speaker 2: but quite robust. So Scott Adams presumably learns about the
Speaker 2: Peter principle while he's getting his MBA right, Like he's
Speaker 2: kind of doing his MBA right at the time when
Speaker 2: the Peter principle is kind of going viral in corporate America.
Speaker 2: There's almost no way he wouldn't have read about this
Speaker 2: and so probably listened to was at like conference and
Speaker 2: stuff where people talk about it. And in nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 2: just as Dilbert was blowing up, he decided to put
Speaker 2: his own spin on the Peter principle in his first
Speaker 2: text based book. So this is not like a book
Speaker 2: of cartoons. This is like a nonfiction book. The Dilbert principle.
Speaker 1: The delivery that was the book. Yeah, it sure is,
Speaker 1: it sure is, which I read when I was like
Speaker 1: ten several ten year old were you? I was a
Speaker 1: ten year old who, like I would go through sometimes
Speaker 1: three or four books in a week, like I always
Speaker 1: wanted to read like that. I was like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I got a lot. So my my uncle, who had
Speaker 1: all the comics, was the guy. Also he worked at
Speaker 1: a bookstore, and he would bring back what were called
Speaker 1: strip cop books, which is like books that have sold
Speaker 1: I know exactly we're talking about the ones out there,
Speaker 1: Well we can't. Yeah, those are great.
Speaker 2: So everything I read either came from those books or
Speaker 2: from his library. And yeah, he had a lot of
Speaker 2: Dilbert books. So I read a lot of Dilbert books.
Speaker 1: Yeah, surprisingly, I guess because also Dilbert came out when
Speaker 1: I was much older. Yeah, And when I think about
Speaker 1: what I was reading at ten was like D and
Speaker 1: D novels.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I read a lot of those, a lot of
Speaker 2: dragon Lance.
Speaker 1: Yeahs Scott Adams at that point, like yeah, oh, I've
Speaker 1: read Hitching's Gut at each ten. Yeah, Like I remember
Speaker 1: trying to pick Actually I'm trying to pick up once
Speaker 1: my dad had a copy of How to Win Friends
Speaker 1: and Influence People because my father was a union president,
Speaker 1: and he and I remember pinging up and he's like,
Speaker 1: you're too young for that. Go read something fun and
Speaker 1: get out my hands.
Speaker 2: Don't be That's that's honestly great parenting. Like don' go donco,
Speaker 2: don't read this. This will turn you into one of
Speaker 2: these weirdos, Like go read something that'll make you laugh. Now,
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure at the time I read this, I
Speaker 2: was like veering between the Wheel of Time series and
Speaker 2: Delbert books.
Speaker 1: So you know, I was kid whipping.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was a weird kid for sure.
Speaker 2: Anyway, at least Gore books that's all I care about. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: good god, we that's another episode. We'll get to that
Speaker 2: one of these days, Victorians. Yeah, this was basically the
Speaker 2: Dilbert principle. As Scott describes, it is basically an inversion
Speaker 2: of the Peter principle. Instead of observing that hierarchies tended
Speaker 2: to elevate competent people past the level where they are
Speaker 2: good at what they do, Adams envisioned hierarchy in business
Speaker 2: as a defense mechanism to elevate incompetent people to positions
Speaker 2: of upper management where they don't actually have anything to
Speaker 2: do and thus are less likely to interfere with the
Speaker 2: people who actually produce work. Right now, if you've also
Speaker 2: like you've probably I think this is less common for
Speaker 2: people in the Peter principle because I think most of
Speaker 2: us have stories of upper management who have like fucked
Speaker 2: around in our shit. But like, if you've worked in
Speaker 2: a company, you've seen this too. Both the Peter principle
Speaker 2: and Scott's Delbert principle, these are things that you can
Speaker 2: observe in the world, right, These are not like Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I think both principles can be useful observations about
Speaker 2: the way organizations work, get about pitfalls to avoid when
Speaker 2: when created organizations. The Peter principle, I believe is a
Speaker 2: lot more durable. It describes a much more widespread, I
Speaker 2: would say, nearly universal phenomenon. I can think back to
Speaker 2: like my own career at Cracked. All of my friends
Speaker 2: and I started out writing funny articles and got promoted
Speaker 2: to managing teams and like doing a lot of work
Speaker 2: that we had absolutely no aptitude for because like we
Speaker 2: just wanted to make our funny little japes and suddenly
Speaker 2: we're like handling all of this like employment shit. And
Speaker 2: you know that was that was There was a tough
Speaker 2: learning curve there. I think that I lie, there were
Speaker 2: you know, it was good and it was bad. It
Speaker 2: worked better than it should have for a long time.
Speaker 2: But like I can definitely say, and it's not like comprehensive, right,
Speaker 2: because we all still wrote articles and made videos and
Speaker 2: did the stuff we were good at. I think the
Speaker 2: thing that I would say if I was going to
Speaker 2: like make a maybe a more generalizable, you know, version
Speaker 2: of the Peter principle is that competent people get promoted
Speaker 2: to the point where they spend less and less of
Speaker 2: time on the thing they're best at.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, Yeah, if you're not you have to or
Speaker 1: at least you have to be very careful to avoid
Speaker 1: that happening, right, because it's just kind of like.
Speaker 2: Naturally what what hierarchical structures do to people who are
Speaker 2: good at shit? So yeah, I do think that Scott's
Speaker 2: Gilbert principle, while I have seen versions of this in
Speaker 2: my own life, is a lot less widely applicable. For
Speaker 2: one thing, upper management constantly makes decisions that impact the
Speaker 2: lives of people who actually produce shit and interfere with
Speaker 2: them getting stuff done, and like Scott knows this. He
Speaker 2: parodies this in a lot of his early strips, right,
Speaker 2: like management making dumbs, decisions that fuck shit up, layoffs,
Speaker 2: you know, in order to drink, stock prices that force
Speaker 2: out productive workers in business units, that kind of shit.
Speaker 2: And it's it's one of those things where like I
Speaker 2: will give Scott some credit because it's there's in this
Speaker 2: book kind of some valuable observations, and I don't think
Speaker 2: most of it's like, I don't think they're valuable observations
Speaker 2: to like a adults. I think this book is going
Speaker 2: to be is pretty basic for anybody who's been out
Speaker 2: and lived in the world, but as like an eleven
Speaker 2: or twelve year old kid. There were a couple of
Speaker 2: things that I found pretty influential, and in fact, one
Speaker 2: I'm going to read one passage that I encountered at
Speaker 2: a young age that I think is a pretty healthy
Speaker 2: thing for a young man to encounter at a young age.
Speaker 1: Here's Scott.
Speaker 2: I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in
Speaker 2: the modern age isn't an all encompassing twenty four hour
Speaker 2: situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips
Speaker 2: into many times a day. Life is just too complicated
Speaker 2: to be smart all the time. The other day, I
Speaker 2: brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn't work.
Speaker 2: After I changed the battery, the repairman took the pager
Speaker 2: out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned
Speaker 2: the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back
Speaker 2: to me in one well practiced motion. This took much
Speaker 2: of the joy out of my righteous indignation over the
Speaker 2: quality of their product, but the repairman seemed quite amused,
Speaker 2: and so did every other customer in the lobby on
Speaker 2: that day. In that situation, I was a complete idiot,
Speaker 2: Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to
Speaker 2: the repair shop and back. It is a wondrous human
Speaker 2: characteristic to be able to slip into and out of
Speaker 2: idiocy many times a day without noting noticing the change,
Speaker 2: or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process. And I
Speaker 2: think that's actually a pretty good observation. I think it's
Speaker 2: also this this obsession that we have through media with
Speaker 2: like hypercompetent protagonists, like isn't real, Like, there's nobody who's
Speaker 2: like that that I've ever met in my life. And
Speaker 2: if you kind of accept that, you will be if
Speaker 2: you're able to accept your incompetence, and given situations, you're
Speaker 2: a lot less likely to, for example, try to wire
Speaker 2: your own house and wind up electrocuting yourself to death.
Speaker 1: You know, And I don't know, it was a useful
Speaker 1: thing to come across, as it's you're the idiot, yeah,
Speaker 1: and everyone is. The world is too complicated for you
Speaker 1: to know how to like you can be. You can
Speaker 1: know how to like from like from the ground up.
Speaker 1: How like the Android or iPhone is coded right. You
Speaker 1: could be an engineer at Apple or Google and know
Speaker 1: everything about like how the actual software on your phone works,
Speaker 1: But like you probably don't know how to solder the
Speaker 1: entire thing together, and you certainly don't know how to
Speaker 1: like mine the rare earth minerals and like put together
Speaker 1: that we're all out of our depth if you really
Speaker 1: think about it all the time. It's other people around
Speaker 1: us who know what they're doing and who have figured
Speaker 1: things out, and that that keep shit going right, Like
Speaker 1: I don't know how to operate a power plant, but
Speaker 1: thankfully there are people who do. You know, that's that's
Speaker 1: the it's it's like humbling and valuable to think that way.
Speaker 3: I thought you want to say, I don't know how
Speaker 3: to run a podcast, and I was going to be like, yep.
Speaker 1: I am Sophie Mellow.
Speaker 2: Wow, wow, wow, hurtful, hurtful, but yes, I have no
Speaker 2: idea what I'm doing. I don't even know what a
Speaker 2: podcast is. Like, I've been trained to shout at this
Speaker 2: blinking light when the box in my cage turns on,
Speaker 2: and that's that's what all of this is.
Speaker 1: Let's how you get the food pillots.
Speaker 3: Yeah, did you see that it's now blinking blue, which
Speaker 3: means ad break.
Speaker 2: Ah, speaking of shouting from your cage and a blinking light,
Speaker 2: here's ads.
Speaker 1: We're back.
Speaker 2: So I've just said, I think that Scott's got a
Speaker 2: good observation here, a useful thing for certainly a young
Speaker 2: person to encounter. The caveat to this is I don't
Speaker 2: believe Scott believes a word that he's written there, or
Speaker 2: at least if he did at one point believe it,
Speaker 2: he no longer does. But I don't think he ever
Speaker 2: really did. For one thing, this book, the debrit Principle,
Speaker 2: sells a million copies, which causes his ego to mistastasize
Speaker 2: like a cancer cancer and devour his mind. I kind
Speaker 2: of think the more I've learned about him, and the
Speaker 2: more I've learned about the stuff that he read and
Speaker 2: that's in fla, I think he's like, we're all idiots,
Speaker 2: especially me. You know, I'm dumb a lot of the time.
Speaker 2: Kind of stuff. This kind of self deprecating thing he does,
Speaker 2: I think it's a calculated shtick rather than evidence of humility.
Speaker 2: And I think part of why I believe this is
Speaker 2: this line I came across in that interview with Maria Konakhova,
Speaker 2: and here she is again describing a strategy from Dale
Speaker 2: Carnegie's book that is really popular with con artists. There's
Speaker 2: also the Mark Antony Gambit, which comes from Shakespeare where
Speaker 2: Mark Antony begins a speech by saying, I come to
Speaker 2: Barry Caesar not to praise him. He says the opposite
Speaker 2: of what he then goes on to do, but he
Speaker 2: primes people to think that he's on their side. And
Speaker 2: I kind of think that's there's a version of like
Speaker 2: Scott's doing a version of that with this, right, Like
Speaker 2: he's saying, like, we're all idiots, you know, especially me,
Speaker 2: I'm domb most of the time. But he's also that's
Speaker 2: being packaged, is like and look at how smart I
Speaker 2: am for realizing this and delivering this to you. You know,
Speaker 2: like there's there's a little bit of we can call
Speaker 2: it like kfe of there. Right, So Scott's books get
Speaker 2: increasingly popular from here on out. The next year he
Speaker 2: publishes The Delberate Future, which, of course I also read
Speaker 2: as a small child. The subtitle of the book was
Speaker 2: Thriving on Stupidity in the twenty first Century. It's a
Speaker 2: pretty forgettable book. You would call it like a pop
Speaker 2: futurist text about how technological development will impact people in
Speaker 2: the future. Again pretty forgettable. It does include the prediction
Speaker 2: technology and homeliness will combine to form a powerful type
Speaker 2: of birth control, which is a joke in the book.
Speaker 2: But I think Scott's going to kind of wind up
Speaker 2: pseudo in cell in a lot of like his ideology
Speaker 2: and a lot of the things he says. I think
Speaker 2: you could see this as like a precursor to that
Speaker 2: he is currently like this week as we talk chatting
Speaker 2: with Andrew Tait about how nobody likes sex really like
Speaker 2: it's not that good.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, yeah, on yourself there, buddy, Yeah, I tell
Speaker 1: you might be telling on yourself a little bit there, Scott.
Speaker 1: It's weird, as you'll see a screen camp for a
Speaker 1: someone late saying women don't actually orgasm. Women they never like,
Speaker 1: oh bloody no.
Speaker 2: And you know, you know what I'll say, for like,
Speaker 2: the women don't enjoy sex, guys, you like, that's fucked up,
Speaker 2: But they generally do enjoy sex.
Speaker 1: They just don't think women do.
Speaker 2: Scott's like, boy, we all actually hate sex, right, And
Speaker 2: it's like, for one thing, Scott, you know, there's like,
Speaker 2: if you want to like explore this, you might learn
Speaker 2: some stuff about yourself and come to accept some things.
Speaker 2: But it would it would take having kind of a
Speaker 2: more nuanced and plastic view of human intimacy that I
Speaker 2: think you're capable of having.
Speaker 1: But I don't know if you were more of a
Speaker 1: self reflective guy, well learning he was Ace. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know that he is.
Speaker 2: But some of the stuff he says is like, well, Scott,
Speaker 2: if if you think that you've never maybe yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't know, A more thoughtful person might like come to
Speaker 2: some conclusions about himself through that. Scott just decides that
Speaker 2: everybody feels the same way, and we're all lying about
Speaker 2: enjoying sex for some reason, which I don't know. I
Speaker 2: feel about that however you want so. The weird part
Speaker 2: of the Book of the Delberate Future comes near the end,
Speaker 2: when Scott starts writing about his habit of making affirmations
Speaker 2: for the first time. He gives a couple of examples
Speaker 2: of times that affirmations worked for him, and both repeatedly
Speaker 2: gives a caveat that he's not saying there's anything supernatural
Speaker 2: happening here, and also kind of leaving the impression that
Speaker 2: he thinks he's discovered some kind of magical reality hack.
Speaker 2: Over time and far too many books, Scott's feelings on
Speaker 2: the Delbert principle and affirmation. Do you know what affirmations are?
Speaker 1: Yeah, as a whole like speaker truth in the universal world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the secret is basically it's the secret.
Speaker 2: Right you have to ask if you tell the universe
Speaker 2: what you're going to get or what you want, like,
Speaker 2: it'll provide it for you. There's some rules to it, generally,
Speaker 2: like the way Scott sees it, he has to like
Speaker 2: write it down a certain number of times a day.
Speaker 2: You have to be really specific about the thing that.
Speaker 1: You're going to do.
Speaker 2: So it's not just like I want to do well
Speaker 2: in this class, but I'm going to improve my score
Speaker 2: on this, you know, exam from this to this or
Speaker 2: something like that. You have to be very and like,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't think there's actually anything wrong with
Speaker 2: this idea, Like if affirmations help you focus your mind,
Speaker 2: focus on building skill in something, it's a it's you know,
Speaker 2: I can I see. I think for reasonable people this
Speaker 2: thing can be kind of a version of like meditation,
Speaker 2: right where you.
Speaker 1: Think for most people that work can be this is
Speaker 1: a harmless thing you did. Yeah, it's a personal ritual
Speaker 1: and even that that can be still calming. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: could be calming.
Speaker 2: It can help you kind of you get up in
Speaker 2: the morning and you kind of you write your affirmations.
Speaker 2: That helps you focus on like the things that you're.
Speaker 1: Going to work on.
Speaker 2: That's that's perfectly healthy if that works for you, Like,
Speaker 2: that's a great thing to do. Scott is I think
Speaker 2: kind of inherently hardwired to go really dogmatic about this stuff.
Speaker 2: Like he presents himself as as very much like an
Speaker 2: atheist and irrationalist, but he builds these kind of like
Speaker 2: labyrinthine rule systems about this stuff. Rather than being like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, affirmations really helped me focus my mind and
Speaker 2: I did well on that test, he has to like
Speaker 2: set up these kind of increasingly arcane rule systems. He's
Speaker 2: the kind of guy again, if he was a little
Speaker 2: more open minded, a little cooler, he would have been,
Speaker 2: like in the eighteen hundreds, like one of these guys
Speaker 2: writing books about magic. You know, he would have convinced
Speaker 2: himself he was a wizard and probably would have been
Speaker 2: a healthier, happier person. Become a wizard, Scott Adams, You'll
Speaker 2: you'll like it more than being I don't know, a
Speaker 2: weird racist on YouTube.
Speaker 1: What his new book Dilbert Mancy. Yeah, Delbert Mancy, come on, Scott,
Speaker 1: at least give us that you know where owed it?
Speaker 1: Added Gandle Yeah exactly, Yeah, brit come on. So over
Speaker 1: time kind of this, Scott's feelings on the Dilbert principle
Speaker 1: and affirmations will evolve into this kind of labyrinthine scientifico
Speaker 1: religious ideology with one goal, and that goal is explaining
Speaker 1: why Scott Adams deserved his fame and incredible wealth, right.
Speaker 2: And that's the really problematic thing about Scott here is
Speaker 2: that he's focusing all of this stuff. He's not just
Speaker 2: using it to as like, here's you know, how you
Speaker 2: can improve your life. He's using it to kind of
Speaker 2: a priori justify, like why he's earned everything, Like why
Speaker 2: luck didn't play into his, you know, life as much
Speaker 2: as it really did.
Speaker 1: Why does he care? Like because no one else is
Speaker 1: like asking I think God deserved money? No one never
Speaker 1: comes up.
Speaker 2: I think it's simple, which is that if you are
Speaker 2: really successful in a field where the odds are long
Speaker 2: and against you, as God often notes, and you suddenly
Speaker 2: make a shitload of money and become famous, it's pretty
Speaker 2: natural to be terrified that it might end because you
Speaker 2: never fully understand why it happened. Right, There's always people
Speaker 2: around you who are just as talented, who work just
Speaker 2: as hard, and shit doesn't work out for and the
Speaker 2: fact that some people make it and some people don't
Speaker 2: is kind of scary, right, And I think again the
Speaker 2: mental the healthy thing to do is kind of embrace
Speaker 2: the humility that that should engender in you and have
Speaker 2: that influence how you treat other people and how you
Speaker 2: try to give other people opportunities and try to level
Speaker 2: the playing field and try to provide options for people
Speaker 2: who benefit from luck less than you. The unhealthy way
Speaker 2: to do it is to find justifications. Some people use religion,
Speaker 2: Scott's weirder about it for why you deserve like and
Speaker 2: it's because in Scott's case, I discovered the secret rules
Speaker 2: of the universe, and you know, hacked my way into
Speaker 2: being an influencer. I'm a master persuading. Really, in that
Speaker 2: egg he found was a child, not just ten dollars.
Speaker 2: The secrets the secret and that's kind of the primary
Speaker 2: immorality at the center of Scott Adams in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways, I think. So before Scott sort of degenerates
Speaker 2: to a Trump reply guy, which is where this is
Speaker 2: building towards. He got the chance to make his own
Speaker 2: television show. On January twenty fifth, nineteen ninety nine, Gilbert
Speaker 2: launched as an adult animated sitcom on You Up the
Speaker 2: Network where I watched Star Trek Voyager as a little kid.
Speaker 2: It was the highest rated comedy series premiere in network history,
Speaker 2: but very few people watched UPN, so that's not much praise.
Speaker 2: The show had quite a lot going for it though.
Speaker 2: Larry Charles, who was a Seinfeld writer, was on the
Speaker 2: development team. Danny Elfman, as we've talked about, was like
Speaker 2: the theme music, and it's got some great voices in it.
Speaker 2: Daniel Stern, who's Marv from Home Alone, did a lot
Speaker 2: of the voices. Kathy Griffin does a voice. Jason Alexander
Speaker 2: is up in there, you know from again, a lot
Speaker 2: of like Seinfeld.
Speaker 1: After who did the Boss, because he's a really good time.
Speaker 1: I think it's Larry's yeah, yeah, yeah, I forget you
Speaker 1: like to play the really good smug asshole in the eighties
Speaker 1: and nineties.
Speaker 2: The voices are pretty good. It's not like an incompetent show.
Speaker 2: Like it's not bad whenever it comes online. Now, people
Speaker 2: who like watch it as kids are like, well, the
Speaker 2: show was actually really good. I did rewatch a lot
Speaker 2: of it recently. I wouldn't say it's really good, but
Speaker 2: for an adult animated series in nineteen ninety nine, it's
Speaker 2: perfectly fine, right.
Speaker 1: It was. It was different. It was something that wasn't
Speaker 1: trying to be the Simpsons, which was rare at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: was trying to go the opposite direction of like family guy,
Speaker 1: let's be as edgy and weird as we can. No,
Speaker 1: it's just it gave what it promised. It was dilvert show.
Speaker 1: It sure was, and that's there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1: Chris Elliott was Dogbert. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Kent was a boss. Yeah it all it all like,
Speaker 1: the voices are are all pretty competent. So here's all
Speaker 1: Scott says about it in his two thousand and two book,
Speaker 1: published a year or so after the show's second season
Speaker 1: in cancelation in nineteen ninety eight, I started working on
Speaker 1: what would become the Delver TV show that ran on
Speaker 1: UPN during nineteen ninety nine and two thousand. We had
Speaker 1: a tiny operating budget, so I found myself doing more
Speaker 1: of the writing than I had expected. Now, I don't
Speaker 1: actually know what went on in that writer's room and
Speaker 1: how much of the good parts of the show were
Speaker 1: the Seinfeld guy and the other writers, how much of
Speaker 1: it was Scott.
Speaker 2: But he does. You get a taste of Scott Adams
Speaker 2: in this series. His voice shines through, and when it does,
Speaker 2: it's often in uncomfortable ways. And I'm gonna play you
Speaker 2: a clip now from an episode, and this is one
Speaker 2: where Gilbert's antagonist in this episode is a bad guy
Speaker 2: whose name is literally Bob Bastard, and Bob is trying
Speaker 2: to unfairly sabotage and invention that Dilbert made. And as
Speaker 2: a result of Bob being an asshole, all of everyone,
Speaker 2: and especially like the female engineer Alice, loves him right
Speaker 2: and Alice falls madly in love with him, even though
Speaker 2: he's nothing but a dick to her. This is a
Speaker 2: very uncomfortable scene, but like, it's not hard to see
Speaker 2: what Scott's trying to say. Here you get another little
Speaker 2: glimpse of that sort of attitude.
Speaker 1: What are you doing, I'm not doing anything. Why are
Speaker 1: you dressed like that? I'm not dressed like that. You're
Speaker 1: trying to look like him don't be ridiculous. It's just
Speaker 1: that all my non Bob Bastard imitation closer in the laundry.
Speaker 1: This is all I have left. What has happened to you?
Speaker 1: Are you with Bob Bastard's camp? Now he has a camp? Cool?
Speaker 1: Why do I try?
Speaker 4: I think we make a terrific couple, Alice, you really
Speaker 4: think so? No, I'm just toying with your emotions since
Speaker 4: I caught you in such a good mood. Can I
Speaker 4: borrow another fifty bucks?
Speaker 1: Another fifty Oh, forget it.
Speaker 4: If you're gonna lay some kind of trip on me,
Speaker 4: I'll see you around.
Speaker 1: No. Wait, okay, here, make that a hundred bucks.
Speaker 4: I'm saving up for a new mask.
Speaker 1: What do you mean you're changing your name? Seriously, don't
Speaker 1: you think it sounds good? Wally Bastard? Have you lost
Speaker 1: your all? Right?
Speaker 2: That's so that's enough, you get it, right?
Speaker 1: Yep?
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: Women fall for abusive jerky.
Speaker 2: Yeah, women fall for abusive jerks. The unsaid part is
Speaker 2: not like me, Scott Adams. Why don't they love me?
Speaker 2: I'm so much better than all of the guys who
Speaker 2: get the It's very you see this all of the internet. Now,
Speaker 2: Scott was a was a trailblazer ahead of his time
Speaker 2: with this sort of.
Speaker 1: Shit be a shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you also kind of get signs of this of
Speaker 2: kind of what is now for Scott, an abiting hatred
Speaker 2: of all journalists, who he seems to think are unethical
Speaker 2: by nature of doing their job. He thinks it's like
Speaker 2: unethical to report on stuff that's happening in the world.
Speaker 2: This is now a pretty standard belief on the far right,
Speaker 2: but it was less common in two thousand and two,
Speaker 2: and it's it's pretty clear in this clip.
Speaker 1: What makes you qualified to be a reporter?
Speaker 4: I'm willing to violate anyone's privacy for my personal gain
Speaker 4: and then claim with a straight face that the public
Speaker 4: has a right to know, all right, So.
Speaker 2: Not subtle, right, And it's one of those things that
Speaker 2: people who are remembering this is a good show, like
Speaker 2: it's not bad for the time, but like there's not
Speaker 2: a not a great density of comedy in these bits here, right,
Speaker 2: Like there's it's got its moments, but yeah, a lot
Speaker 2: of it's like weird and off putting, and I think
Speaker 2: most of the off putting part arts are Scott's voice
Speaker 2: just kind of shining through clear as a bell. Anyway,
Speaker 2: the show gets canceled in two thousand.
Speaker 1: And two by Adult Swim for a little bit, though
Speaker 1: didn't like it. Does like rerun and reruns and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they also got Home Movies which was also a you
Speaker 1: Pancho Home Movies, which was a much better show. Home
Speaker 1: Movies had something to that. Yeah, never watch it every well,
Speaker 1: so every other year.
Speaker 2: It's it still holds the fuck up. I I periodically
Speaker 2: find myself singing the Franz Kafka song. But Scott's show
Speaker 2: gets canceled. And now if I if I were to
Speaker 2: ask you, why do you think Scott's show got canceled?
Speaker 2: You know what would your answer.
Speaker 1: Based It was a very targeted product on a rarely
Speaker 1: watched network.
Speaker 2: Yeah pretty reasonable. Yeah, yeah, of course yes. And Scott,
Speaker 2: to his credit, when he's interviewed about why the show
Speaker 2: failed in two thousand and six, gives basically that answer.
Speaker 2: He says, it was on upn and network that few
Speaker 2: people watch, and because some because of some management screw
Speaker 2: ups between the first and second seasons, the time slot
Speaker 2: kept changing and we lost our viewers. We were also
Speaker 2: scheduled to follow the worst TV show ever made, Shasta
Speaker 2: McNasty on TV. Your viewership is seventy five percent determined
Speaker 2: by how many people watch the show before yours.
Speaker 1: That killed us, that would probably do it. Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know that Scott's I think he might be exaggerating
Speaker 2: a little bit some of that, but like, yeah, that's
Speaker 2: pretty reasonable, right. Not a lot of people watched it,
Speaker 2: you know, they moved around the time slot, so people
Speaker 2: didn't like that was more important back then. If you've
Speaker 2: only ever watched in the streaming era, you may not
Speaker 2: understand that. But this is not an unreasonable thing for
Speaker 2: him to believe, however, right, Yeah, he's not going to
Speaker 2: stick with that opinion as to why the show gets
Speaker 2: canceled for forever. But what we're building to that, So,
Speaker 2: right in the middle of the period of the time
Speaker 2: when the Dilbert TV Show is on the air, when
Speaker 2: it's in fact the comic is at kind of the
Speaker 2: height of its popularity, Scott decided to try to branch
Speaker 2: out into another business, the world of health food, and
Speaker 2: he's going to I've been waiting for this one.
Speaker 1: Yeah. He creates a product called the dil Burrito, which
Speaker 1: he says is like, so Scott is like a vegetarian
Speaker 1: and he's he's angry that there's not any kind of
Speaker 1: like good fast, like microwaveable food for vegetarians to eat
Speaker 1: that can fulfill all of their nutritional requirements. He wants
Speaker 1: something again. He has this kind of very mechanical ad
Speaker 1: which is fine. A lot of people feel this way
Speaker 1: about food. I know people who they don't particularly enjoy it.
Speaker 1: They're like, I just this is why, Like soilet's a
Speaker 1: popular thing with some people. So you guys have heard
Speaker 1: of soilet, which is like this, they're these meal replacements
Speaker 1: sort of like shake is a little bit of an
Speaker 1: odd term, but like it's it's a drink basically, a
Speaker 1: drinkable meal fulfills all of the necessary caloric requirements and
Speaker 1: you can do it quick. And I know some people
Speaker 1: who do it because it makes weight loss easier for him.
Speaker 1: Some people they just don't have a lot of time
Speaker 1: in the day, so it's good for I know people
Speaker 1: who take soilt because like when you're doing drugs for
Speaker 1: thirty six hours with your friends, you might forget to eat,
Speaker 1: and it's easier to like pound a soilent than actually
Speaker 1: like eat a meal when you're on so much ketamine.
Speaker 1: That like the world is like melting all around you.
Speaker 1: Scott wants this because he just wants like a simple
Speaker 1: thing people can microwave and get all of their nutrients.
Speaker 1: He describes it as only bad thing to want. It's
Speaker 1: a fine idea, like sure, sure, I don't eat a
Speaker 1: lot of meat, and I would love to have like
Speaker 1: just simple make it in five minutes. Of course, it's
Speaker 1: the most reasonable thing he's ever wanted to do. He
Speaker 1: does describe it as the blue jeans of food, which
Speaker 1: I find kind of funny, but like there's a peal
Speaker 1: to that. So the problem is that Scott doesn't know
Speaker 1: how to do this. Like Scott has no idea how
Speaker 1: to make food. You don't get the feeling he's a
Speaker 1: great cook, and he certainly does not have any experience
Speaker 1: in like the business of mass producing food. So he
Speaker 1: launches this product, which he calls the dil Burrito. I
Speaker 1: would say not great branding either. It initially comes in
Speaker 1: Mexican Indian barbecue, garlic and herb flavors. It's described as
Speaker 1: being a tortilla wrapped comestible consisting of vegetables, rice, beans,
Speaker 1: and seasonings that contain all of the twenty three vitamins
Speaker 1: and minerals that nutritionists say are essential. Now, when you
Speaker 1: jam as much nutrients as he's like, he describes as
Speaker 1: like a vitamin pill wrapped in a tortilla, and when
Speaker 1: you shove all of those vitamins and stuff into a
Speaker 1: single burrito, it can have some negative consequences on your
Speaker 1: gastrointestinal tract. As Scott would later say, because of the
Speaker 1: veggie and legume content, three bites of the dil burrito
Speaker 1: made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.
Speaker 1: It is a disaster as a product, millions of dollars.
Speaker 2: It gets just lit on fire by this thing. I've
Speaker 2: talked to people who apparently ate them and said that
Speaker 2: they were prett be fucking nasty, And to be fair,
Speaker 2: Scott describes him as pretty bad too. So there you go.
Speaker 2: The del burrito. Kind of a funny little moment, but
Speaker 2: not evil, right, He probably caused, yeah, disaster.
Speaker 1: I have friends, I have a roommate. We weren't a
Speaker 1: time who you know. He was a tech guy. He
Speaker 1: was a vegetarian, bordering vegan, and he hesitated because well,
Speaker 1: I like the idea of fast food. I just don't
Speaker 1: know that I would trust a fellow nerd making my
Speaker 1: food and then someone else we knew ate it and
Speaker 1: basic that to never try it because they they basically
Speaker 1: thought they were going to ship their actual brain out.
Speaker 1: Like they described it as so bad they could feel
Speaker 1: their capitillarities of moving out of their body. It's just like, Nope,
Speaker 1: don't mean that incredible. I mean indible food around too.
Speaker 1: It was like dad Wood restaurant chain in the adults,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Dagwood eats a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're if you're selling like the biggest sandwich
Speaker 2: anyone's ever seen.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Yeah, and that's it. And this isn't quite as
Speaker 1: bad as a Garfield restaurant they attempted in Toronto, was well,
Speaker 1: did he as also trying to do a restaurant at
Speaker 1: one point or.
Speaker 2: Was I just he did do a restaurant. We have
Speaker 2: so much to cover. I don't think we're gonna get
Speaker 2: into it. He ran an unsuccessful kind of restaurant in
Speaker 2: the Bay Area at one point in time.
Speaker 1: Jesus. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's it's it's very interesting, like it is kind
Speaker 2: of like going to Dilbert, Like using him as the
Speaker 2: mascot for for fast food is a little bit like
Speaker 2: I don't know trying to sell mace that's Calvin and
Speaker 2: Hobbes branded, Like, I just don't see much of a connection.
Speaker 2: And also I'm like, I don't know if I don't
Speaker 2: know if I trust the Calvin and Hobbs guy to
Speaker 2: sell me mace.
Speaker 1: He doesn't seem like that's in his wheelhouse. Charlie Brown brand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, prophylactics, Yeah, yeah, the Charlie Brown condom.
Speaker 1: It works as long as life. Charlie Brown. You never
Speaker 1: have sex. Weird diagonal line around the shirts? Yeah, absolutely?
Speaker 1: Oh god, oh god.
Speaker 2: Cliff Heathcliffe brand off roading tires, Like, why are we
Speaker 2: doing this?
Speaker 1: What's going on? Cliff? That might happen? That comic is
Speaker 1: so fucking weird these.
Speaker 2: Days it does go off the rails. So this is
Speaker 2: all fun. But by two thousand and four, Scott there's
Speaker 2: some signs of some problematic stuff, but he's he hasn't
Speaker 2: done anything fucked up yet really in a clear way.
Speaker 2: He's expressed some odd beliefs, but he's not blaming diversity
Speaker 2: or black people for his failures publicly yet again. The
Speaker 2: book Where that stuff that we talked about comes in
Speaker 2: from is published in two thousand and eight, but two
Speaker 2: thousand and four is the point at which things start
Speaker 2: to go really wrong in his life. Because of a
Speaker 2: legitimate personal tragedy, he develops the symptoms of a rare
Speaker 2: neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia. I'm going to quote from
Speaker 2: an article in Braininlife dot org.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 2: Adams's experience began in two thousand and four with what
Speaker 2: seemed like an extreme allergy related at laryngitis. I used
Speaker 2: to get laryngitis every May when my allergies were bad,
Speaker 2: adams are called. It would usually last a few days
Speaker 2: or a few weeks and go away, so I didn't
Speaker 2: think anything of this particular bout. That was the first
Speaker 2: of dozens of doctors' visits and an equal number of
Speaker 2: treatments over several years. I was diagnosed with respiratory problems
Speaker 2: that I was tested to roll out strep, throat and
Speaker 2: acid reflux. From there, I went to an ear nos
Speaker 2: and throat specialist to check for polyps in my vocal cords.
Speaker 2: Nothing made a distance. I hit a wall. He tried
Speaker 2: a bunch of herbal remedies, and it's one of those
Speaker 2: things where like this starts out as laryngitis, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't go away, and it gets worse and worse, and
Speaker 2: he continued, he starts having very basic trouble talking right,
Speaker 2: Like he's finding it harder and harder to speak. He's
Speaker 2: trying every scientific and also like herbal fringe remedy that
Speaker 2: he can come across, because he's just increasingly desperate. You know,
Speaker 2: he's not able to go out and speak anymore. And
Speaker 2: first his ability to kind of do public speaking goes away,
Speaker 2: but soon his ability to just like talk to his wife,
Speaker 2: to talk to his friends goes away. He's unable to
Speaker 2: kind of communicate very well. He starts getting angry and
Speaker 2: lashing out at people because he'll try to talk and
Speaker 2: they won't understand him, and he just gets like enraged
Speaker 2: at this. Eventually, this is what he says, kind of
Speaker 2: causes the collapse of his marriage. And this seems like
Speaker 2: a responsibility for something. Yeah, he kind of does with this,
Speaker 2: Like it does seem like like this has to be
Speaker 2: like a terrifying sense I have, Like that's horrible.
Speaker 1: Like I can't wish that on him, Like that would
Speaker 1: probably be a legitimate tragedy, Like that is a nightmare
Speaker 1: world to be in. Yeah, and yeah, you probably are
Speaker 1: going to last. It doesn't make it right. You shouldn't
Speaker 1: be lasting out of your spouse or anyone because something
Speaker 1: happened to you. But I can get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people don't perform perfectly in situations where they're both
Speaker 2: frightened and like something fundamental about their nature has been
Speaker 2: physically compromised. As Scott later kind of described, I felt
Speaker 2: like I was a ghoat in the room. It's hard
Speaker 2: to feel connected to others if you can't talk and
Speaker 2: they can't listen to you. And yeah, again, sounds terrible. Obviously,
Speaker 2: this is the kind of thing that's going to give
Speaker 2: you some fucking PTSD.
Speaker 1: An today is an altered reality where he's like, so
Speaker 1: I decided to start investing into nonprofits that help Yeah,
Speaker 1: if we worked out or whatever, I know if that's
Speaker 1: going to happen, I know why, because that's not about him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he doesn't dedicate his life to helping others. As
Speaker 2: a result of this, it ends with him unable to
Speaker 2: talk entirely for like a couple of years, and he
Speaker 2: pushes everyone away. He basically lives alone in his home,
Speaker 2: not communicating with anybody for an extended period of time.
Speaker 2: He considers suicide, but eventually he finds via googling his
Speaker 2: symptoms enough that there is a rare condition that meets
Speaker 2: his experiences. He finds a doctor who specializes in it.
Speaker 2: He gets diagnosed finally, and the doctor offers him a
Speaker 2: risky pioneering surgery. And basically the way the surgery works
Speaker 2: is they cut the nerve that goes to the main
Speaker 2: muscle that's spasming, and then they graft a new nerve
Speaker 2: in its place to prevent the muscle from atrophying and
Speaker 2: to stop the old nerve, which was like defective from
Speaker 2: growing back.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a it's a really interesting thing that they did.
Speaker 2: The treatment is about eighty five percent effective. That the
Speaker 2: doctor who does it says that about eighty five percent
Speaker 2: of the time it provides, you know, an improvement or
Speaker 2: complete cessation of symptoms, which is like not that's not
Speaker 2: bad odds, but also like a fifteen percent chance that
Speaker 2: you never talk again is like that's scary.
Speaker 1: You know, that's not low enough to not be terrifying, Right,
Speaker 1: that is a love Then I would want to gamble
Speaker 1: on most things much less.
Speaker 2: Yeah my voice, Yeah, I I Yeah, it's it's scary,
Speaker 2: but like again, by this point, he can't talk already,
Speaker 2: so he doesn't have any other options. So he has
Speaker 2: the surgery in two thousand and eight, the same year
Speaker 2: that he publishes the book where he blames all of
Speaker 2: his life problems on black people, and after three years
Speaker 2: of enforced isolation, in near endless silence, he starts being.
Speaker 1: Able to talk again.
Speaker 2: And the way Scott describes it, the surgery works perfectly
Speaker 2: and he's been fine ever since. Now there is a theory,
Speaker 2: and you might call it a conspiracy.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Conspiracy is the wrong term because there's a conspiracy. But
Speaker 2: there's a theory that you get among people who like
Speaker 2: follow Scott and have followed him really going insane on
Speaker 2: Twitter and stuff, that something goes wrong in this surgery
Speaker 2: and it damages his brain and that causes some of
Speaker 2: the behavioral changes that we see in him after this point.
Speaker 2: I don't have any evidence of this. I've never heard
Speaker 2: the doctor obviously, like say anything about this. I don't know,
Speaker 2: Like it is true that after the he has this
Speaker 2: surgery two thousand and eight, this is the year where
Speaker 2: he becomes like very rapidly, he becomes increasingly racist and
Speaker 2: aggressive online. But also number one, I think I can
Speaker 2: see signs of the stuff that he would do later.
Speaker 2: And number two, I'm not saying there's no chance to
Speaker 2: something like that happened. That's a possibility, but like rather
Speaker 2: than something fucking shady happening during the surgery, I find
Speaker 2: it kind of likelier that three years of not being
Speaker 2: able to speak of, losing every close relationship in his life,
Speaker 2: of being completely isolated is what causes the behavioral changes
Speaker 2: for the work. Now, that sounds a lot more like that.
Speaker 2: And honestly, if nothing else, just like you came out
Speaker 2: of this situation, like where you are facing a permanent
Speaker 2: life altering situation, Yeah you maybe like fuck it, I'm
Speaker 2: just going to throw caution to the end. Oh this
Speaker 2: I feel weird about that, because how can we know,
Speaker 2: Like that's I don't think about anybody who has surgery. Really, yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that it's more. I mean, think about America,
Speaker 2: Think about the COVID lockdown. Think about for how many
Speaker 2: people that period of isolation was the straw that broke
Speaker 2: the camel's back, that sent them spiraling into like Ashley Babbitt,
Speaker 2: you know, like it doesn't take like We're all a
Speaker 2: lot of us, most of us maybe are kind of
Speaker 2: fragile at any given moment, and like, this is an
Speaker 2: intense thing to deal with. I don't think I need
Speaker 2: much more than like, Yeah, he lost the ability to
Speaker 2: talk for several years and it blew up his marriage
Speaker 2: and he lost everyone who was close to him for
Speaker 2: a while and lived alone as a hermit. Not yeah, man,
Speaker 2: I can see that fucking you up.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, like even if like just like the
Speaker 1: everyone I care about left, yeah, or I pushed him away. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm like. Yeah, oh my god, Like I
Speaker 1: just can't even have fathom like how that would be
Speaker 1: as anyone.
Speaker 2: I can see you not becoming the best version of
Speaker 2: yourself after that, Right.
Speaker 1: You're either going to tell on a mia culpa tour
Speaker 1: and trying to fix or you're just gonna say, well shit,
Speaker 1: yeah why not? Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: So And in two thousand and eight, Scott publishes the
Speaker 2: book Twenty Years of Dilbert, which is what I've been
Speaker 2: quoting from several times. It's where he repeatedly blames diversity
Speaker 2: programs for the great failure of his life. And it's
Speaker 2: interesting because after this point he also like in this book,
Speaker 2: like he blames you know, losing his job, not getting
Speaker 2: promoted on diversity programs, and he blames now. In two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight, he blames black people for the failure
Speaker 2: of his television show, saying, quote, the show started out well,
Speaker 2: but in the second season the network made a strategic
Speaker 2: decision to focus on shows with African American actors. Gilbert
Speaker 2: lost its time slot and cancelation followed. And that's very
Speaker 2: different from the reasonable answer that he gives in two
Speaker 2: thousand and six. It's also definitely not true. For the
Speaker 2: next fifteen years or so, Scott is going to bring
Speaker 2: these incidents up with increasing regularity. In twenty seventeen, he tweeted,
Speaker 2: I lost my TV show for being white when UPN
Speaker 2: decided it would focus on an African American audience. That
Speaker 2: was the third job I lost for being white. The
Speaker 2: other two are in corporate America. They told me directly,
Speaker 2: which is again different on the story he.
Speaker 1: Gives Vampire Slayer around this time. Yeah, man, it's not
Speaker 1: because you're white. Like it was number one UPN, not
Speaker 1: a ground network. Number two. Your show didn't find an audience.
Speaker 1: Most shows don't kind of getting two seasons isn't super common, bro, Like,
Speaker 1: you got actually more of a chance than most people.
Speaker 1: And it's like any reasonable person who gets to be
Speaker 1: worth hundreds of millions of dollars for drawing doodles would
Speaker 1: be like, I have no complaints about this system, right yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like just worked out perfect for me. Like, are you crazy, Scott,
Speaker 1: Like you have been the luckiest anyone's ever been. I've
Speaker 1: never been rich. I have supported myself. I've been able
Speaker 1: to support my spouse when they were going through grad
Speaker 1: school off doing comics. I'm proud of that. I feel
Speaker 1: I'm very fortunate because I have not gone into an
Speaker 1: office to work since two thousand and four. I feel
Speaker 1: I'm so lucky. This motherfucker's worth millions. Yeah, he's like
Speaker 1: like black people took my TV show. No, they fucking didn't.
Speaker 1: They just didn't like it. No one else liked it either.
Speaker 1: We all disliked it. We all took it from you.
Speaker 2: You have like three hundred million dollars in a mansion
Speaker 2: in California shaped like Dilbert's head because of your glowing
Speaker 2: like the system has Oh yeah, his his house is
Speaker 2: shaped like Dilbert's head.
Speaker 1: Look, that is absurd. That is the dumbest fucking thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it's funny because again he's like, they
Speaker 2: canceled it because they wanted to focus on shows with
Speaker 2: black actors. Other people have pointed out Gilbert had the
Speaker 2: second lowest ratings of any show on television at the
Speaker 2: time it was canceled. And this is like when Scott
Speaker 2: made his big post, they can't it was because I
Speaker 2: was white. Like people brought this up and Scott goes
Speaker 2: ape shit, just like he did with Norman Solomon, he
Speaker 2: is unable to disengage, replying days later to his Twitter
Speaker 2: trolls quote, I successfully stirred up a hornet's nest of
Speaker 2: unsuccessful artists. They don't know they're part of the show.
Speaker 2: Don't tell them.
Speaker 1: I'm a master. Yeah, I was really manipulu. No.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're saying that, like you have seen tremendous success
Speaker 2: and the fact that not everything you did worked isn't
Speaker 2: something that black people did to you, Like it's most
Speaker 2: cartoons don't succeed. Everyone I know who's I know, I've
Speaker 2: known I know more than most people of like people
Speaker 2: who have been very successful in Hollywood, all of them
Speaker 2: have failures. All of them have more than one failure
Speaker 2: in their background. Scott, like Scott Scott McFarlane right, like
Speaker 2: who's made god knows how much money doing cartoon shows.
Speaker 2: His first show gets canceled after like two or three seasons.
Speaker 2: Oh right, he's out of the base, Yeah, Scott, Why
Speaker 2: I was saying, Yeah, family guy, he's out of like
Speaker 2: the he's out of like doing that for years when
Speaker 2: the show gets canceled. You know, like his got brought
Speaker 2: back because it developed a fan base, which the dilbrit
Speaker 2: show didn't.
Speaker 1: But that's one interesting thing you compare that because they
Speaker 1: both got brought back, like re ran on that swim.
Speaker 1: But Sam may Farlane's, well, shit, if you're gonna be
Speaker 1: rerun it, I'm gonna do these bumpers. Yeah, lean into it.
Speaker 1: He actually built worked on if Yeah, I wonder if
Speaker 1: Scott at well, I mean I'm glad he didn't. But
Speaker 1: Scott has it put like effort like behind it, like
Speaker 1: that could have helped him too. He just he wanted
Speaker 1: to work the way it was gonna work, and it
Speaker 1: didn't happen that way.
Speaker 2: And so now also my suspicion, I don't I'm not
Speaker 2: an expert on Seth MacFarlane lore. But my suspicion is that,
Speaker 2: like for Seth, being doing that TV shows has been
Speaker 2: his whole motivating factor in life, and Scott.
Speaker 1: Was animator though, that's where he began. He worked, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he worked for Cartoon Network, he did shorts in the nineties.
Speaker 1: I think he worked on a season of Johnny Bravo even.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense, And I suspect the reason he
Speaker 2: put in all that extra work on those bumpers and
Speaker 2: stuff is that, like, this is what he loved and
Speaker 2: wanted to do, Whereas for Scott, the Delbert TV show
Speaker 2: was like a side gig in between drawing cartoons and
Speaker 2: trying to make burritos.
Speaker 1: You know, like brito Yah. Cannon's good, sir.
Speaker 2: It's such a weird thing to be Like, my like
Speaker 2: third job didn't pan out. So black people are engaged
Speaker 2: to conspiracy against me.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's like, it's not evidence of great mental health. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If the entire black community was going to rally around,
Speaker 1: like we need to take one white man down, why
Speaker 1: the fuck would it be Scott Adens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I think he's saying
Speaker 2: that like it was these venal Hollywood types who wanted
Speaker 2: to get the black you know viewer or whatever. But
Speaker 2: I also see no evidence of that Like Hollywood, especially
Speaker 2: in the early two thousands, wouldn't have killed a successful
Speaker 2: show by a white guy to please the black community.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a successful show, Scott.
Speaker 1: I can think of like a CEO of a channel
Speaker 1: killing successful shows was in the early seventies when CBS
Speaker 1: did like the rural purge, where any show that took
Speaker 1: place or appealed to people in rural areas like Beverly
Speaker 1: Hillbillies and he Hall got canceled despite having amazing ratings
Speaker 1: because they didn't want to appeal to uh, they would
Speaker 1: appeal to more urban viewers. Yeah again. It was white
Speaker 1: people hurting white people.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah again. Scott very silly man, So who knows
Speaker 2: like why he suddenly starts to go down this road.
Speaker 2: But as he gets increasingly like obsessed with the ways
Speaker 2: in which he's been wronged by diversity, he also starts
Speaker 2: to get increasingly elaborate with like his lore as to
Speaker 2: why he thinks he's how he thinks he's uncovered the
Speaker 2: secrets to success in the universe. And the best example
Speaker 2: of this is his concept of talent stacking. In twenty thirteen,
Speaker 2: he writes a book called How to Fail at Almost
Speaker 2: Everything and Still Win Big And it's another it's him
Speaker 2: kind of pretending to be humble, where he's like, I
Speaker 2: was bad at all of this stuff, and I still
Speaker 2: got super successful. And I got successful because you know,
Speaker 2: even though I wasn't great at any one thing, I
Speaker 2: had a bunch of little skills and they all synergize
Speaker 2: together to allow me to be a big success. You know,
Speaker 2: I wasn't the best artist, but I understood kind of
Speaker 2: how to use the Internet, and so I was able
Speaker 2: to take advantage of that to like promote my cartoon strip,
Speaker 2: and you know that's why it was a big hit.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Here's how he describes this concept more succinctly in his
Speaker 2: book Win Bigley, which he publishes a few years later,
Speaker 2: you know, in the early Trump years.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: A talent stack is a collection of skills that work
Speaker 2: well together and make the person with those skills unique
Speaker 2: and valuable. For example, a computer programmer who also knows
Speaker 2: how to do good user interface designed would be more
Speaker 2: valuable than one who does not. The power of the
Speaker 2: talent stack idea is that you can intelligently combine ordinary
Speaker 2: talents together to create extraordinary value. The key concept here
Speaker 2: is that the talents and the stack work well with
Speaker 2: one another. Now that's not wrong, but Scott, that's not
Speaker 2: a discovery, right, Like if you were if you were
Speaker 2: to go up to a person on the street and
Speaker 2: be like, hey, do you think having more skills makes
Speaker 2: you more valuable? I'm going to guess one hundred percent
Speaker 2: of people.
Speaker 1: Say like yeah, of course goes like yeah that when
Speaker 1: you turn in a resume, They're not like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: he's got eight skills supposed to two.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, oh he's got a great talent stack. No,
Speaker 2: it's yeah, learning things is good. You are a more
Speaker 2: valuable coder if you know how to code more things
Speaker 2: you know. And just like when it comes to like
Speaker 2: the artistic field, this is something that writers have talked
Speaker 2: about for a long time. Oftentimes if you if you,
Speaker 2: I mean this goes back decades. You see, like writers
Speaker 2: answering letters from fans. Advice they'll give is go out
Speaker 2: into the world, like experience things, meet people you know
Speaker 2: that will make you a better writer. The more things
Speaker 2: you know about, the more things you can write about
Speaker 2: with versimilitude. Robert Heinlen, you know, had a great has
Speaker 2: a great bit about like the creative value of having
Speaker 2: a broad base of skills of knowing how to you know,
Speaker 2: harvest crops and skin an animal and you know, go
Speaker 2: phishing and you know all these kind of like different
Speaker 2: things that are sort of like unrelated skills because as
Speaker 2: has hurt Heinland said, specialization is for insects. Right, Like, again,
Speaker 2: what Scott is done here is he's taken a basic
Speaker 2: observation that is most people are aware of and that
Speaker 2: people have been talking about one way or another forever,
Speaker 2: and has reframed it in kind of the gamified language
Speaker 2: of hustle culture. And I'm not sure if this is
Speaker 2: just Scott trying to work a grift and knowing that
Speaker 2: he's just repackaging very obvious shit, or if he just
Speaker 2: hasn't read other people's writing, right, Like, does he legitimately
Speaker 2: fail revelation?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Do it?
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter, yeah, yeah, but it is interesting like this,
Speaker 2: And I think that kind of the way he does this,
Speaker 2: by sort of like treating it as such a dogmatic
Speaker 2: like a skill tree and an RPG, I think kind
Speaker 2: of makes it. It's it sets you into this very
Speaker 2: like crystallized mode of thought that I think is more
Speaker 2: brittle and might make you less likely to pick up
Speaker 2: useful skills if you can't sort of like figure out
Speaker 2: how that skill is gonna work in a talent stack,
Speaker 2: because like the skill Scott talks about that synergized together,
Speaker 2: he didn't like go into learning those things because he
Speaker 2: knew they would hybridize as well. It was more just
Speaker 2: like living a life where you have a wide base
Speaker 2: of experiences makes you more versatile and more able to
Speaker 2: like adapt to the world. And that's the only real
Speaker 2: meaning of intelligence. But you know what else is intelligent?
Speaker 1: Is it the products and services that weis to span
Speaker 1: our minds and skills stack.
Speaker 2: That's right, every single advertiser on this show is a
Speaker 2: member of MENSA. Oh that's the promise hear that. I've
Speaker 2: never heard of another podcast talking about MENSA. But here
Speaker 2: we go, Ah, we are back. So good stuff, good stuff.
Speaker 2: So focusing obviously on acquiring talents that you can combine
Speaker 2: is a good thing. But I think Scott's talent stacking
Speaker 2: is kind of I think the way he's framing this
Speaker 2: is more likely more likely than making you talented. It's
Speaker 2: a very brittle way to interpret a phenomenon that, like,
Speaker 2: viewed properly, can be liberatory. But I think looked at
Speaker 2: the way that Scott looks at it might lock you
Speaker 2: into a world where all you do is draw Dilbert
Speaker 2: and repackage old self help books. But it works for Scott.
Speaker 2: He does get rich, which means he's never had to
Speaker 2: question the person that he's become or the ultimate value
Speaker 2: of his conclusions about the world. As the years go on,
Speaker 2: his work loses any edge of humility, and he veers
Speaker 2: increasingly towards megalamoniacal shit. His two novellas are the best
Speaker 2: example of this. He writes two fiction books and kind
Speaker 2: of the early aughts. One is called The Religion War
Speaker 2: and one is called God's Debris.
Speaker 1: Have you read these books? Randy's definitely never heard of them.
Speaker 1: Oh oh boy, so oslo hesitant when I hear a
Speaker 1: cartoonist has written a novel. Yep.
Speaker 2: Well, Scott considers this his only his real legacy, that
Speaker 2: like he will be remembered for these books. He said
Speaker 2: this that like what I will be remembered for is
Speaker 2: my novels. He believed these are very deep and contain
Speaker 2: important truths about the human condition that no one else
Speaker 2: has elucidated before. Now I have not read God's Debris.
Speaker 2: I have read The Religion War. These are both pretty
Speaker 2: short books. You can find them for free online if
Speaker 2: you want to steal them like I don't think Scott
Speaker 2: put them up. But they're available, which is where I
Speaker 2: found them, So just google them and google the title
Speaker 2: and text if you want to read this shit. I
Speaker 2: have read The Religious War. I would the Religion War.
Speaker 2: I would charitably describe it as an atheistic rant that
Speaker 2: managed to manages to be racist on an almost unique level.
Speaker 2: The basic plot I will give Scott credit for this
Speaker 2: is summarized efficiently in the first paragraph of the prologue.
Speaker 2: And here's Scott's book. Here's how it opens. In the
Speaker 2: year two thousand and seven, a brilliant and charismatic leader
Speaker 2: named al z began his rise to power in the
Speaker 2: Palestinian territories. He was the architect of the twenty year
Speaker 2: Plan for eliminating Israel, the success of which started a
Speaker 2: domino effect in the Middle East, as one Arab dictatorship
Speaker 2: after another fell and their territories rolled into the Great Caliphate.
Speaker 2: Alsi's subjects heady from an unbroken string of victories, demanded
Speaker 2: the spread of Islam to the rest of the world.
Speaker 2: AlSi understood that this was neither practical nor desirable, but
Speaker 2: to satisfy the appetite of his people, he began an
Speaker 2: unending war of minor terror against the Christian dominated world.
Speaker 2: The attacks were calculated to be large enough to look
Speaker 2: like progress let's yet small enough to avoid provoking all
Speaker 2: out war. Publicly, he blamed renegade groups for the attacks.
Speaker 2: The Christian dominated countries k new Alzi was behind the bombings,
Speaker 2: but they depended on him for their oil and wanted
Speaker 2: to avoid a larger war that would cripple their economies
Speaker 2: and an all likelihood increase the number of bombings. Now
Speaker 2: there's a lot that's insane about that. For one thing,
Speaker 2: Scott doesn't seem to know that there are Sunni and
Speaker 2: Shia Muslims, and that they, like the all disagree.
Speaker 1: About a lot. Neither of those words are in the book.
Speaker 1: Sunni doesn't show up, Shia doesn't show up. He doesn't
Speaker 1: mention Iran like we don't know what the Shia world
Speaker 1: supposed to be? Are you doing here? Like? He just
Speaker 1: is like all of the Muslims are in a caliphate
Speaker 1: now because this guy and what so Alzi his plan
Speaker 1: to destroy Israel is like he organizes the Palestinians to
Speaker 1: demand democratic rights and like they become kind of quasi
Speaker 1: equal partners in society and then one day they murder
Speaker 1: all the Jews. Like, it's pretty fucked up. This is
Speaker 1: a Christian novel that, like My Youth kind.
Speaker 2: Of does now He's he doesn't portray the Christians particularly
Speaker 2: sympathetically either, right, the big Christian general was also portrayed
Speaker 2: as a bad guy. It's more like an early Internet
Speaker 2: atheist novel. But like, you know how a lot of
Speaker 2: those guys, those like internet atheists from the nineties after
Speaker 2: nine to eleven went like super hard anti Muslim. Yes,
Speaker 2: Scott's doing the same thing here, right, it's pretty fucked up.
Speaker 2: It's very racist. It's really funny. Like Scott has convinced
Speaker 2: himself that his novel was prescient because it predicted the
Speaker 2: rise of Isis. That's bullshit. That is not what Scott did.
Speaker 2: All he did was use the word caliphate, which isis
Speaker 2: also used, but also a bunch of governments have called
Speaker 2: themselves caliph. Very it's a thing it goes back like
Speaker 2: a thousand years. It's it's been a thing for a while.
Speaker 1: Agree, there isn't one of my D and D books
Speaker 1: like for al Kadan. Does that mean like Ed Green
Speaker 1: nineties predict It's.
Speaker 2: Also like fuck Scott Is, like once they start winning
Speaker 2: the victories, just number one, like the west Is just
Speaker 2: kind of ignores their campaign of low level terror, which
Speaker 2: we didn't. We like bomb the crap out of them.
Speaker 2: And number two he has this idea that like, well,
Speaker 2: once a caliphate is declared, all of the Muslims just
Speaker 2: start clamoring to join it and take over the Now
Speaker 2: you know who actually defeated ISIS because I was there
Speaker 2: for quite a bit of it. It was Muslims, by
Speaker 2: the way, like uh whenever, like I don't know, people
Speaker 2: shot at me. The folks who like threw their bodies
Speaker 2: in front of me Muslims. The people who are like
Speaker 2: at their day and night throwing like fucking with like
Speaker 2: hand grenades and fucking combat knives, clearing buildings of ISIS
Speaker 2: fighters were also Muslims. I watched him pray in the
Speaker 2: mornings before they would go get fucking shot. Like very offensive,
Speaker 2: this guy. Yes, I am very frustrated by Scott Adams
Speaker 2: and his racist book, and that he thinks he predicted
Speaker 2: isis like, go fuck yourself, Scott.
Speaker 1: I mean, are you surprised though, considering like nothing else
Speaker 1: he's taking credit for it at this point.
Speaker 2: No, no, not at all. It just is like particularly galling.
Speaker 2: So the way Scott writes about the Caliphate shows his
Speaker 2: fundamental incuriosity about the world. He never expresses any understanding
Speaker 2: of the actual religious doctrine behind the strains of fundamentalist
Speaker 2: Islam most associated with terrorism. Even if this book was
Speaker 2: anti Muslim hate speech, it might have come from a
Speaker 2: position of understanding, you know, stuff like Selophism, right, it'd
Speaker 2: be one thing, it would still be bad. But if
Speaker 2: this was like anti Muslim and really gott into the
Speaker 2: nitty gritty of like different really problematic beliefs among extremist Muslims,
Speaker 2: like you know, Slofi Islam and stuff, that would at
Speaker 2: least show that like he was curious to an extent,
Speaker 2: you know, but he's he simply is not. And the
Speaker 2: book itself does treat Christianity with a similarly broad brush.
Speaker 2: The American Leader is this like general like, by the way,
Speaker 2: the whole West is part of the Christian Alliance, that's
Speaker 2: what they call themselves with like, I don't know, man,
Speaker 2: I feel like it's a secular I feel like all
Speaker 2: of the religious terrorism is part of why people have
Speaker 2: become more secular in the twenty first century, as opposed
Speaker 2: to making everyone pick sides in a religion war, like
Speaker 2: it's just not what happened, Scott.
Speaker 1: Not fucking fuck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's offensive to it should be offensive to anyone
Speaker 2: who reads it.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: The conflict between these two big blocks is resolved when
Speaker 2: Scott's self insert character who is a guru called the Avatar.
Speaker 2: Who is the Avatar is like a wizard, but he's
Speaker 2: a wizard. He's a wizard of smart right, He's so logical,
Speaker 2: it's so rational that his ability to like talk to
Speaker 2: people and make rational arguments is effectively a superpower. And
Speaker 2: he solves the religion war becind because he finds an
Speaker 2: old lady who's like he describes her as basically a
Speaker 2: super influencer. Right, there's just this kind of mystical network
Speaker 2: of people who are really convincing, and if you find
Speaker 2: the right person, they'll talk to you know, fifty people,
Speaker 2: and they'll convince all those people and those people will
Speaker 2: talk to another fifty people and then kind of stocata
Speaker 2: or kind of like over in a very short order,
Speaker 2: everyone will be convinced of something. Right, if you find
Speaker 2: the right person, you're able to like seed a thing.
Speaker 2: And this old lady comes up with a joke where
Speaker 2: she's like, if God is so smart, why do people fart?
Speaker 2: And that revelation makes the entire world atheist more or less.
Speaker 1: That's the plot. That's the plot of Scott's book. I
Speaker 1: hate this. I hate this. Yeah. By the way, if
Speaker 1: you're listening to this and you want to read an
Speaker 1: actual novels written by cartoonists Mel Lazarus who did The
Speaker 1: Mama and Miss Peach's Class, I'm told I've read them.
Speaker 1: Watch of Horley Racist not but like and I was like,
Speaker 1: who was one called The Boss is Crazy Too, which
Speaker 1: was based off his time working in a CD magazine
Speaker 1: like fine stuff like that that's meant to be fun
Speaker 1: and pulpy. What the fuck? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Or on the other end of the great cartoonist Alan
Speaker 2: Moore wrote a book called Jerusalem, and I'm gonna be honest,
Speaker 2: I haven't read it. No one I know who loves
Speaker 2: Alan Moore has finished it, but you could put it
Speaker 2: on your bookshelf and occasionally read pages and people will
Speaker 2: think you're very smart. So sure, it's a great book.
Speaker 2: One of these days, I'll read it.
Speaker 1: If it's Alan Moore, you probably just like at absolutely.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I keep it on my belt next to
Speaker 2: my handgun in case you know there's a jam or something.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's it's much more effective than a than
Speaker 2: a combat knife. Wailing on some Nazi with a copy
Speaker 2: of Jerusalem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's my new master material. Thank you, I will
Speaker 1: I will remember that time. Sorry, Alan, I love you. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to keep freaking out about this book, going,
Speaker 1: keep going, please, it's terrible.
Speaker 2: So God's Debris, which is the sequel, is even more
Speaker 2: out of again, Yeah, it's a sequel. The whole thing
Speaker 2: is like a pseudo Socratic dialogue between a delivery boy
Speaker 2: and the avatar from the first book. It is charity
Speaker 2: to call this freshman intro to psychology gobbledygook, Like most
Speaker 2: freshman psych students would write a better and more insightful
Speaker 2: book than this. I'm not going to punish you all
Speaker 2: with too much detail, but you can get an idea
Speaker 2: of what we're looking at here with this passage, and
Speaker 2: this is so this delivery boy comes to give an
Speaker 2: old man a passage. The old man is the avatar,
Speaker 2: and he's I guess, going to like pass wisdom on
Speaker 2: to this kid. So like, here's the delivery boy talking
Speaker 2: to the avatar. It's for you, he said. That's that's
Speaker 2: the delivery boy. What's for me? The avatar applies the package.
Speaker 2: I just delivered the packages, I said. My job is
Speaker 2: to bring them to you. It's your package. No, it's yours, okay,
Speaker 2: I said. Planning my exit strategy, I figured I could
Speaker 2: leave the package in the hallway on the way out.
Speaker 2: The old man's caretaker would find it. What's in the package,
Speaker 2: I asked. I hoped to get an awkward to get
Speaker 2: past an awkward moment. It's the answer to your question.
Speaker 2: I wasn't expecting any answers, I understand, said the old man.
Speaker 2: I didn't know how to respond to that, so I didn't.
Speaker 2: He continued, let me ask you a simple question. Did
Speaker 2: you deliver the package or did the package deliver you?
Speaker 2: By then I was delivered a little annoyed with his cleverness,
Speaker 2: but admittedly engaged. I didn't know the old man's situation.
Speaker 2: But he wasn't as feeble minded as I'd first thought.
Speaker 2: I glanced at my watch, almost lunchtime. I decided to
Speaker 2: see where this was heading. I delivered the package, I answered,
Speaker 2: that seemed obvious enough. If the package had no address,
Speaker 2: would you have delivered it here? I said, no, Then
Speaker 2: you would agree that delivering the package required the participation
Speaker 2: of the package. The package told you where to go.
Speaker 2: I suppose that's true in a way, but it's the
Speaker 2: least important part of the delivery. I did the driving
Speaker 2: and lifting and moving. That's the important part. How can
Speaker 2: one part be more important if each part is completely necessary?
Speaker 2: He asked, Now this is pointless, like there's no wisdom
Speaker 2: to be revealed in this, but also like it's like
Speaker 2: no delivery boy would be like, well, I'm the person
Speaker 2: I'm responsible for why the package. Now the deliverer would
Speaker 2: be like, look, man, this is my job. I got
Speaker 2: to make rent, Like that's why I gave you this package.
Speaker 2: Someone told me to deliver package here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, I have to do this to afford food
Speaker 1: and stuff, Like that's why I'm here. That's what drove
Speaker 1: me here is my need for food.
Speaker 2: Don't you Tube minutes like, no, the package didn't make
Speaker 2: me come here, and like that, we're not equally integral.
Speaker 2: The integral part of this is I need a job
Speaker 2: and this is the job that I have. Will you
Speaker 2: please sign for the fucking package, asshole?
Speaker 1: Oh oh god.
Speaker 2: It's frustrating. In general, I think Scott Adams is maybe
Speaker 2: the single person who handled the social media era the worst.
Speaker 2: There were signs that this was going to be the case,
Speaker 2: with him from early on having to filter his ideas
Speaker 2: through editors at comics, syndicates and publishers kept the most
Speaker 2: problematic stuff out of his work. When he was allowed
Speaker 2: to just vomit his thoughts to people, things got really dark,
Speaker 2: really fast, and an early sign that this was going
Speaker 2: to be the case came in. An early sign that
Speaker 2: this was going to be the case came in two
Speaker 2: thousand and six when he made a blog post about
Speaker 2: how he didn't vote because he was too ignorant. Right now,
Speaker 2: I don't disagree with Scott there. I don't want him
Speaker 2: voting either, But he immediately seguees off of this into
Speaker 2: very wild territory, starting with the fact that like he's like,
Speaker 2: you know, I think that the news doesn't provide us
Speaker 2: with enough context to make a decision. So, for example,
Speaker 2: I just learned recently that Iran is twenty five thousand
Speaker 2: Jewish citizens, and everybody's talking about how anti Semitic the
Speaker 2: president of Iran is. But there's all these Jewish people
Speaker 2: living in Iran. So does that mean that the president
Speaker 2: is anti Semitic and that I'm going to kill people way?
Speaker 2: Or is he just kind of a bigot? You know,
Speaker 2: the media hasn't provided me with the context that I
Speaker 2: need here, And for one thing, like you could look
Speaker 2: up life for Jewish people in Iran, Like there's Jewish
Speaker 2: people who have like left Iran or who still live
Speaker 2: there probably who you can like you can find like
Speaker 2: their feelings on the matter. You could look this up,
Speaker 2: like there are media, there's newspapers that have written articles
Speaker 2: about this, Scott. The fact that every newspaper that talked
Speaker 2: about this is during like when everyone was flipping out
Speaker 2: over Mahmoud ahmadina Jod, the former president of Iran because
Speaker 2: he made some statements about Israel. The fact that like
Speaker 2: every news article on Amadina Jod didn't like go into
Speaker 2: detail about life for Jewish Iranians doesn't mean that like
Speaker 2: that context is not provided elsewhere by the media, you
Speaker 2: chose not to look into it, and for some reason,
Speaker 2: from that very strange statement, we veer into Holocaust denial.
Speaker 1: So here's Scott I gamm it. I'd also like to
Speaker 1: know how the Holocaust death toll of six million was determined.
Speaker 1: Isn't this sort of number that's so well documented, with
Speaker 1: actual names and perhaps a Nazi paper trail, that no
Speaker 1: historian could document it doubt its accuracy, give or take
Speaker 1: ten thousand, Or is it like.
Speaker 2: Every other LRN large round number that someone pulled out
Speaker 2: of his ass and it became true by repetition. Does
Speaker 2: the figure include resistance fighters and civilians who died in
Speaker 2: the normal course of war, or just the Jews rounded
Speaker 2: up and killed systematically. No reasonable person doubts that the
Speaker 2: Holocaust happened, But wouldn't you like to know how the
Speaker 2: exact number was calculated? Just for context? Without that context,
Speaker 2: I don't know if I should lump the people who
Speaker 2: think the Holocaust might have been exaggerated for political purposes
Speaker 2: and with the Holocaust deniers if they are equally nuts,
Speaker 2: then I'd like to know that I want context. You
Speaker 2: know what, Scott you can get context because there's libraries
Speaker 2: full of books people have written calculating the death toll
Speaker 2: of the Holocaust. All of these questions have been answered
Speaker 2: numerous times by both journalists and historians. You chose not
Speaker 2: to seek that out. It's not a problem that every
Speaker 2: article that talks about mentions the Holocaust and its death
Speaker 2: toll doesn't go into detail about how that death toll
Speaker 2: was calculated, because that's not good article writing. You don't
Speaker 2: like it would be like every time I talk about
Speaker 2: fucking climate change, I discuss like how fucking internal combustion
Speaker 2: in work. Like it's simply not necessary context every single time.
Speaker 2: But it's super easy to learn about how the Holocaust
Speaker 2: death toll was calculated. And if you were to just
Speaker 2: have typed into Google in this period of time, how
Speaker 2: was the Holocaust death toll calculated? You would find answers
Speaker 2: to this question. And if people at home are curious,
Speaker 2: The Holocaust Encyclopedia, operated by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Speaker 2: has a page titled documenting numbers of victims in the
Speaker 2: Holocaust and Nazi Persecution, which you and Scott Adams can
Speaker 2: peruse at your leisure if you want. This is not
Speaker 2: hard stuff. It's easy to find. You do not have
Speaker 2: to be a historian to learn the basic answers to
Speaker 2: the questions that Scott is asking here.
Speaker 1: It's so it brings Yeah, it's so blatant. The holy
Speaker 1: is like no one's covered this means I didn't have
Speaker 1: the curiosity to go find out. Yeah no, man, you
Speaker 1: didn't look like, why isn't the media telling me about this?
Speaker 1: Well they did. You didn't read those articles. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of articles, so you didn't want to know about it, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can hand I can hand mine toddler evidence that
Speaker 1: if she cleans her room up, she will not trip
Speaker 1: over her toys. She's not gonna read that. She doesn't
Speaker 1: give a shit, she's gonna keep her toys out.
Speaker 2: It's like if I bought a car that didn't have
Speaker 2: a manual in it and then I drove it and
Speaker 2: never changed the oil until like the engine broke, and
Speaker 2: then I was like they didn't give me the contact,
Speaker 2: Like yeah, man, you like you can look up how
Speaker 2: do I maintain a car? What does this light on
Speaker 2: my dashboard mean? What are these noises from my car mean?
Speaker 2: It's not hard to get that answer, Like it is
Speaker 2: not the fault of the fucking car manufacture that you
Speaker 2: chose to act like a helpless babe. This is all
Speaker 2: a really perfect example of the kind of dumb that
Speaker 2: Scott gives us. He thinks that like saying this, that
Speaker 2: being like, well, I just want context, what about this?
Speaker 1: What about what I'm saying it didn't happen? Yeah, dot dot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like he thinks that this makes him look nice,
Speaker 2: just deep and wise, but like kind of the cynical
Speaker 2: prankster wise man, like the Avatar and his books, Like
Speaker 2: you just accepted that number without thinking. Maybe now you'll
Speaker 2: think more about the things you accept without thinking. No,
Speaker 2: you should actually like try to learn the answers to
Speaker 2: the questions that you're asking, because they're very readily available.
Speaker 2: Scott Adams, it's like very frustrating.
Speaker 1: It's like.
Speaker 2: I think his attitude is that like when we talk about,
Speaker 2: for example, Holocaust and I as shooting up synagogues and
Speaker 2: murdering Jewish people, every article about that should include a
Speaker 2: digression about like the estimated kill rate during acton Reinhard
Speaker 2: and how it compares to the rate of killing in Rwanda.
Speaker 2: Like that's literally what I think he's saying, which is
Speaker 2: nuts and stupid, and he should feel bad, and also
Speaker 2: somebody should throw p at him anyway for the sake
Speaker 2: of fairness. I should note that at this point Scott's
Speaker 2: ill considered political rants are not always entirely on the
Speaker 2: wrong side, although there's always an element of wrong to them.
Speaker 2: And May of two thousand and eight, he wrote a
Speaker 2: blog post making fun of people who complained about illegal
Speaker 2: immigrants and that's a noble cause. There are some cringe
Speaker 2: worthy lines in the post, like Mexicans have great looking
Speaker 2: skin that resists sunburn. I have skin that looks like
Speaker 2: tappyokas spilled on canvassing skin. Mexic people, what the fuck, Scott, Well,
Speaker 2: you don't need to get into that. Scott continued posting, though,
Speaker 2: and he eventually started to draw criticism when other people
Speaker 2: realized that the unfiltered Dilbert guy was a dick. This
Speaker 2: happened first in a big way when he made this
Speaker 2: twenty eleven post complaining about the unfair treatment of women.
Speaker 2: The reality is that women are treated differently by society
Speaker 2: for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally
Speaker 2: handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone.
Speaker 2: You don't argue with a four year old about why
Speaker 2: you shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a
Speaker 2: mentally handicapped guy, even if he punches you first. And
Speaker 2: you don't argue when a woman tells you she's only
Speaker 2: making eighty cents to your dollar. It's the path of
Speaker 2: least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
Speaker 2: So Scott posts this stupid thing because he's a dumb asshole,
Speaker 2: and he gets made fun of on a blog called feminist,
Speaker 2: and so he jumps he again. He can't handle people
Speaker 2: not agreeing with him or not thinking he's smart, so
Speaker 2: he leaps into the comments section to defend himself and
Speaker 2: argue against everybody, and immediately, because he's not good at arguing,
Speaker 2: he just kind of gives that up and starts insulting
Speaker 2: people for their poor reading comprehension. He also suggests that
Speaker 2: they all secretly agree with him and know he's right,
Speaker 2: and are just arguing with him for the sake of
Speaker 2: their own egos. Then he makes a blog post a
Speaker 2: few days later reiterating all the points that had made
Speaker 2: everyone mad, but insisting that everyone had just gotten him
Speaker 2: wrong and that like Dilbert readers are smart enough, you know,
Speaker 2: but other people didn't get it. I'm actually going to
Speaker 2: read a quote from EW dot com here, like summarizing
Speaker 2: the fallout. Adams insisted that his post was some sort
Speaker 2: of forensic ex size that his loyal readers he presents
Speaker 2: them as sort of uber rational Dilbert Nation, understand, but
Speaker 2: he did eventually offer an apology. The best of my knowledge,
Speaker 2: no one who understood the original post or its context
Speaker 2: was offended by it. But to the women who were
Speaker 2: offended by their own or someone else's interpretation of what
Speaker 2: I wrote, I apologize.
Speaker 1: You week by your own interpretation. What. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: all just a game for me, the puppet master. But
Speaker 1: I'm sorry if it hurt you. Like Scott, just if
Speaker 1: you want to be if you want to believe shitty things,
Speaker 1: just like say them on your massive platform and ignore
Speaker 1: the people who argue with you. Yeah, don't be a
Speaker 1: little baby about this, like he's such a whimp public
Speaker 1: counts to defend himself or that.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, that's where we're heading to. So the attention
Speaker 2: or because this kind of goes viral, more and more
Speaker 2: people start to watch his blog posts because and then
Speaker 2: they start to realize, like, wow, he says dumb all
Speaker 2: the time, Like he's constantly saying bullshit without knowing anything
Speaker 2: about the shit he's talking about. So in the mid
Speaker 2: adds it kind of comes sport in a couple places
Speaker 2: online to make fun of bad Scott Adams posts, and
Speaker 2: Scott can't handle it, so he starts to make fake
Speaker 2: accounts on MetaFilter and Reddit under the pseudonym Planned Chaos,
Speaker 2: where he again he's doing this puppet master thing and
Speaker 2: he pretends to be someone else defending himself because apparently
Speaker 2: his rational superfans aren't like good enough to actually do
Speaker 2: the job for him. Here's an example of a Planned
Speaker 2: Chaos post. If an idiot and a genius disagree, the
Speaker 2: idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has
Speaker 2: lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That's
Speaker 2: how the idiot mind is wired. It's fair to say
Speaker 2: you disagree with Adams, but you can't rule out the
Speaker 2: hypothesis that you're too dumb to understand what he's saying.
Speaker 2: And he's a certified genius, just saying, first of all,
Speaker 2: argument to authority. If you want to be like a
Speaker 2: big fucking rules, D and D for real life guy,
Speaker 2: Like that's the argument to authority. You're not actually defending yourself,
Speaker 2: Like that's evidence that you've kind of like that whatever
Speaker 2: argument you're you're you're making is completely hollow because you
Speaker 2: have to rely on like, well, he's a genius, so
Speaker 2: you just don't understand him. But also that's just like
Speaker 2: such a sniffly little wiss thing to do, like say
Speaker 2: it under your own name, you fucking coward.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's what Bobby Like, well, let's not to
Speaker 1: the biggest thing that Bob Scott adams. But it's like,
Speaker 1: I have never understood making a sock of an account
Speaker 1: to defend yourself. It's sad, it's sad, it's weak anyway. Whatever.
Speaker 2: Once Trump began his campaign for president, Scott's behavior accelerated.
Speaker 2: He predicted a Trump primary win fair enough, gets that
Speaker 2: one right, and then he takes back his endorsement of
Speaker 2: Trump though after the Access Hollywood take tape, and he
Speaker 2: endorses Gary Johnson, which he'll later come to like regret
Speaker 2: and try to explain away, but it is it is
Speaker 2: very funny. Once Trump wins, he publishes a book called
Speaker 2: Win Bigley in which he argues that he and Trump
Speaker 2: are both master persuaders, and Trump was ushering humanity into
Speaker 2: a bold new world with his master persuader techniques. He
Speaker 2: becomes increasingly partisan during the Trump years, but also increasingly
Speaker 2: silly and deeply irresponsible, would be fair to say. In
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen, you guys remember the Gilroy Garlick Festival mass
Speaker 2: shooting that was carried out by that kind of fascist guy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: real fucked up. Scott uses the tragedy as an excuse
Speaker 2: to publish a video app he's made called win Hub,
Speaker 2: which he's created as like a news gathering tool, and
Speaker 2: he's like, while like the shooting is going on, he's
Speaker 2: telling people to use this to report on what's happening.
Speaker 2: If they're like, it's pretty fucked up. Like there's a
Speaker 2: lot of debate in our culture about like what it
Speaker 2: is and isn't appropriate to do in the wake of
Speaker 2: a mass shooting, but I think we can all agree
Speaker 2: trying to plug your app is not appropriate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a bit off sides. Yeah, Yeah, that's just bad.
Speaker 1: That's just real fucked up. Scott.
Speaker 2: A write up in MSN notes Adams didn't make major
Speaker 2: waves with a February twenty twenty one comic that poked
Speaker 2: fun at those who received a coronavirus vaccine, but he
Speaker 2: did rouffle feathers when he espoused debunked claims that people
Speaker 2: who weren't vaccinated fared better than those who were in
Speaker 2: a video shared by the Just Think podcast. In the
Speaker 2: twenty twenties, his political statements also started to focus more
Speaker 2: on race. At the beginning of twenty twenty two, he
Speaker 2: tweeted that he was going to self identify as a
Speaker 2: black woman until Biden picks his Supreme Court nominee, which
Speaker 2: the President had vowed would be a black woman, and
Speaker 2: then in June of twenty twenty, Adams tweeted that when
Speaker 2: the Dilbert TV show ended in two thousand after just
Speaker 2: two seasons, it was the third job I lost for
Speaker 2: being white. So Scott's madness crescendos after the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two Highland Park mass shooting. This, like so many mass shootings,
Speaker 2: was carried out by a very young man twenty one
Speaker 2: years old. Rather than seeing this as perhaps a reason
Speaker 2: to explore more restrictive laws as to win firearms could
Speaker 2: be purchased, or perhaps apps as a sign of deeply
Speaker 2: toxic aspects of our culture and the things that young
Speaker 2: men in it are raised to believe. Scott posted one
Speaker 2: of the craziest things I've ever seen on Twitter, which
Speaker 2: is an app fueled entirely my mental breakdowns. Here's Scott again,
Speaker 2: in the wake of a mass shooting. The Highland shooting
Speaker 2: and every fit in the overdose death among the young
Speaker 2: are teaching us the same lesson, and we refuse to
Speaker 2: learn it. It's difficult, but I'm qualified to give you
Speaker 2: this lesson. Unfortunately, dam this won't be easy to read.
Speaker 2: When a young male, let's say fourteen to nineteen, is
Speaker 2: a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting
Speaker 2: family to options. Number one, watch people die and number
Speaker 2: two kill your own son. Those are your only options.
Speaker 2: I chose one and watched my step son die. I
Speaker 2: was relieved he took no one else with him. If
Speaker 2: you think there is a third choice in which your
Speaker 2: wisdom and tough love, along with government services, fixes that
Speaker 2: broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There
Speaker 2: are no other options. You have to either murder your
Speaker 2: own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.
Speaker 2: There is a sad reaction behind this, so like, I
Speaker 2: that's like fucked up. That's real bad. First off, not true.
Speaker 2: I mean, among other things, I did an interview when
Speaker 2: I was still working with Cracked at a young man
Speaker 2: who attempted to carry out a mass shooting at his school.
Speaker 2: This was back in the late nineties, and got caught
Speaker 2: and stopped, thankfully before he was able to shoot anybody,
Speaker 2: but he had the guns, he was about to start.
Speaker 2: He was penalized obviously, like he was sent to I
Speaker 2: think a mental institution for a while. But like he's
Speaker 2: like it's been decades, he's like a normal person. He's
Speaker 2: got a life now, he's like hasn't killed anyone. Like
Speaker 2: you can, in fact intervene in people who are like
Speaker 2: going in dark directions and they can be saved. It
Speaker 2: happens all the time. Part of why it doesn't get
Speaker 2: more attention is that a guy shooting up a school
Speaker 2: obviously is a thing that people are going to pay
Speaker 2: attention to all the times every single day in which
Speaker 2: a mentor comes across a kid who's starting to have
Speaker 2: under a dark path and like reaches that convinces that person.
Speaker 2: You know, every time that a parent like sees that
Speaker 2: their child is starting to like embrace toxic aspects of
Speaker 2: like belief and behavior, and it starts to talk to
Speaker 2: them and you know, starts to work with them and
Speaker 2: tries to understand and counsel them. Every time, like people
Speaker 2: get pulled back from that brink. It doesn't like you
Speaker 2: don't get a news story about that, right, like obviously, like,
Speaker 2: but that doesn't mean it's not happening. It's it's kind
Speaker 2: of fucked up to say that. Like, once people start
Speaker 2: to show that they have that they're fetishizing violence, they
Speaker 2: that you know, they're embracing like racist or problematic beliefs,
Speaker 2: or that they're you know, starting to get addicted to drugs,
Speaker 2: that there's no way to save them. Like if you've
Speaker 2: lived a life, you know people who have been pulled
Speaker 2: away from all sorts of fucked up things or who
Speaker 2: have like gone too far down a dark road and
Speaker 2: pulled themselves back. It happens all the time. Not that
Speaker 2: it's like easy or simple. These are terrible things to
Speaker 2: deal with as a kid, having a child who like
Speaker 2: you think, might shoot up a school. That's a terrifying
Speaker 2: position to be in as a as a But like
Speaker 2: people get pulled away from that kind of stuff. Now
Speaker 2: there is a sad his stepson that is a well,
Speaker 2: that's what we're about to talk about. Oh no, it's
Speaker 2: a pretty sad story. Scott's step son was involved in
Speaker 2: a serious bicycle accident at age fourteen. He suffered severe
Speaker 2: brain damage, which caused him to lose all impulse control,
Speaker 2: and he became terribly addicted to drugs and eventually died
Speaker 2: of a fentanyl overdose in twenty eighteen. This is a
Speaker 2: horrible story. There's a video in twenty eighteen when Scott
Speaker 2: gets the news where he's just like weeping to his audience,
Speaker 2: and I have no doubt that it's genuine.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean it's yeah, yeah. I don't want
Speaker 1: to brag on him for losing yeah, a child.
Speaker 2: No I don't either, But like number one, I think
Speaker 2: at twenty eighteen, video doesn't look to me like a
Speaker 2: man who like gave up on a child. That looks
Speaker 2: to me like a man who's sad because what he
Speaker 2: was doing didn't work. And I think it's very depressing that,
Speaker 2: like the lesson he took out of this is that, like,
Speaker 2: you can't save people when they start to have problems.
Speaker 2: Obviously everyone can't be saved. Clearly, Scott's steps On, whatever
Speaker 2: was going on, like was not something he was able
Speaker 2: to pull out of. And that's a tragedy. I know
Speaker 2: multiple people who had serious addictions to like things like
Speaker 2: things that were going to kill them and stopped. You know,
Speaker 2: I have friends who like I have a friend who
Speaker 2: survived shooting himself. Like, people come through terrible things and
Speaker 2: build lives afterwards. And the attitude that like, when a
Speaker 2: young man is troubled, all you can do is let
Speaker 2: them die or murder them is so that's the such
Speaker 2: a bad thing to take out of this experience.
Speaker 1: That sounds sociopathic.
Speaker 2: It is, and it's also it's probably one of the
Speaker 2: things that's really problematic to me about this is that,
Speaker 2: like he is, he is bringing his step son's death
Speaker 2: in the context of a man who went on a
Speaker 2: mass shooting and murdered people. His steps on just had
Speaker 2: a drug addiction. Having a drug addiction and dying as
Speaker 2: a result of it is not in the same moral
Speaker 2: universe as shooting strangers to death with a fucking rifle. No, Like,
Speaker 2: comparing those two things is insane.
Speaker 1: Well, it's I think it's the whole mentality of Oh,
Speaker 1: addiction is a moral failing, not a disease.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's like number one, especially in this case,
Speaker 2: like this is a kid who's got like brain damage
Speaker 2: and he has no impulse control, which is sad and
Speaker 2: hard to deal with, But like it's not the same
Speaker 2: as deciding to murder people. You shouldn't be talking about
Speaker 2: these things together. They're not even in the same realm. No, Like, ah,
Speaker 2: it's it's one of those things, Scott. So obviously the
Speaker 2: culmination of this where we are now is that earlier
Speaker 2: this year, Scott made a number of super racist comments
Speaker 2: about black people and about how like white people just
Speaker 2: need to stop talking to and stop being you know,
Speaker 2: associated with black people, stop living with black people. We
Speaker 2: just have to separate. Like it's pretty fucked up shit,
Speaker 2: and like everyone gets saying this is like the straw
Speaker 2: that finally breaks the camel's back. He says something that
Speaker 2: like the normies take note of, and it leads to
Speaker 2: the collapse of his cartooning career. In like the space
Speaker 2: of a week. He gets dropped by shitloads of newspapers.
Speaker 2: His syndicate, his publisher drop him, everybody drops him, and
Speaker 2: Scott again tries to do kind of the I was
Speaker 2: really trying to make this very intelligent point, and all
Speaker 2: the really smart people got what I was trying to
Speaker 2: say in context, but the dumb people got angry. My argument,
Speaker 2: Scott is that a writer who repeatedly fails to get
Speaker 2: his point across to his audience is bad at writing.
Speaker 1: Anyway. Yeah, It's one thing I remember from all that,
Speaker 1: because I do have people contact me and like ask
Speaker 1: if I wanted you quotes. I was like, not really,
Speaker 1: like contact cartoons, the color that's what you should be
Speaker 1: talking to you, not me. But like one thing I
Speaker 1: will always remember about it was feeling like I saw
Speaker 1: people like, you know, applauding the syndicate Andrew's universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh Andrew real universal and I'm like, yeah, they
Speaker 1: did it, but like they it took this. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: was like there were you dog whistles before this, Like
Speaker 1: there was there are countless points where they could have
Speaker 1: stoop and said, nah, that's too far dude. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: like it literally got to a point where newspapers had
Speaker 1: to say, oh, you're gonna lose this this spot and
Speaker 1: it finally hurts and now they're like, oh, well we're
Speaker 1: not gonna stand But no, you're not gonna stand out
Speaker 1: of the fact that you're losing money if you had
Speaker 1: the morality. And again I should point out I'm saying
Speaker 1: this is myself, not on behalf of King Features or
Speaker 1: Herst Media, my my syndicate does my first opinion. If
Speaker 1: you really had any morality, he would have been dropped
Speaker 1: a long time ago. Yeah, like this, like the bigotry
Speaker 1: has been there in display for a while and now
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, now you have the morality because you're
Speaker 1: losing newspapers.
Speaker 2: No, now, I will say, I am now. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's got his comic online. You can still read Dilbert
Speaker 2: if you want to. For some reason, it is now
Speaker 2: entirely focused on like weird, cancel culture, grievance shit. But yeah,
Speaker 2: if you want that in your life, it's still available somewhere,
Speaker 2: and it's it's one of those things. You know, you
Speaker 2: you are not speaking on behalf of anyone else. I
Speaker 2: am speaking on behalf of a of my corporation. I
Speaker 2: am speaking on behalf of both Cools and Media, and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: When I assure everyone Scott Adams lives inside of a
Speaker 2: mansion shaped like Dilbert's head with a swimming pool out back,
Speaker 2: also shaped like Dilbert's head, where he spends all of
Speaker 2: his recreational time. Right now, Scott is sitting in a
Speaker 2: swimming pool shaped like Gilbert's head, angry that people on
Speaker 2: the internet are making fun of him. And if you
Speaker 2: want to let Scott know that, let him know that
Speaker 2: you know that he lives in a house shaped like
Speaker 2: the hell head of Dilbert. I think he'd appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Maybe it'll save him.
Speaker 1: I also remember, didn he he finally introduced a black
Speaker 1: character in his comic in the last year or so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the first trip was literally using the black character to
Speaker 1: shit on trans people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very very Scott Adams. Everything he does is
Speaker 2: very Scott as.
Speaker 1: It's just it's like that one shitty kid you went
Speaker 1: to school with, who this is the only attention he
Speaker 1: can get and he's so proud of it. And when
Speaker 1: people hate I won No, you're just pathetic. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: just kind of kind of sad, bro. And he could
Speaker 1: literally say, you know what, I'm not talking to anybody.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna sit joy my money for the rest of
Speaker 1: my life. Vallid go for it, and we'd all we
Speaker 1: have here again. There's not a single human being on
Speaker 1: the face of the earth who has a bad opinion
Speaker 1: of Bill Watterson. No, I mean the probably sending him
Speaker 1: used to deal with him.
Speaker 2: Probably the syndicate because he cost him a lot of money.
Speaker 2: But like fucking a you know, he was like, I
Speaker 2: made this for ten years. I feel like if I
Speaker 2: keep making it, the quality will drop. I'm going to
Speaker 2: go paint landscapes somewhere in the rural Midwest for the
Speaker 2: rest of my life.
Speaker 1: And Jim Davis again, like you may out like Garfield, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you may think it's a shallow tompic whatever, but every
Speaker 1: cartoonist or every person, yeah they were do. He's a sweetheart.
Speaker 1: He is very supportive. He is a nice man. He
Speaker 1: has never leapt into a fucking culture controversy. He knows
Speaker 1: that's not what we need from the Garfield man.
Speaker 2: I don't need to know the Garfield guy's opinion on
Speaker 2: any of this stuff, Like was.
Speaker 1: It that comic Garfield minus Garfield when it came up,
Speaker 1: he could easily squash that. Instead he's like, no, that's
Speaker 1: a great idea.
Speaker 2: Keeps funny, Yeah, keep doing it, like it's one of
Speaker 2: those Like Jim Davis has never gonna like come in
Speaker 2: and be like, here's what everyone needs to know about
Speaker 2: like race mixing from Jim Davis, like we're fuck, he's
Speaker 2: never gonna give you that and think like that's again
Speaker 2: earned his money.
Speaker 1: Good for you, Jim Davis. And you know what, Scott,
Speaker 1: just for some evidence of what you could be. Like
Speaker 1: Jim Davis lives in a house shaped like Garfield's head
Speaker 1: and we don't make fun of him for it because
Speaker 1: we respect Jim Davis. You do you, Jim Davis, just
Speaker 1: keep on hating Mondays and tell us how and we're
Speaker 1: abuse of Odie and John creeping on the vet. That's
Speaker 1: sure you've made it. You've made it. Yeah, although give
Speaker 1: us a better explanation for having a fucking lineman, Davis.
Speaker 2: Don't, Yeah, have an alignement Davis. Yeah, that's some real
Speaker 2: deep Garfield lore for those of you who are real
Speaker 2: Garfield heads anyway, there's actually like a shocking amount of
Speaker 2: very deep and unsettling online Garfield lore. People should seek
Speaker 2: it out.
Speaker 1: There is really terrible to seek it out on a.
Speaker 2: Dark night when you're alone in your house and and
Speaker 2: really delve into the Garfield hole. But you know what
Speaker 2: other hole people should delve into.
Speaker 1: These ads and services. No, no, no, you're you're you're
Speaker 1: oh yes, my holes, my deep holes. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: uh well, if you want to find me online, my
Speaker 1: my commic online comics something positive has been going around
Speaker 1: for twenty one years. It is at something positive dot net.
Speaker 1: Or if you want to read a new Popeye strip
Speaker 1: every Sunday that makes apparently certain uncles on Facebook mad
Speaker 1: go to comics Kingdom dot com slash Popeye every Sunday,
Speaker 1: and thank you guys for having me. This has been
Speaker 1: I mean, has it been say fun? It could have
Speaker 1: been working. It could have been a John K episode,
Speaker 1: It could have been dunk. Yeah, we'll get to well
Speaker 1: califernakus or ever it's pronounced one of John awful human
Speaker 1: being who Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Also a lot of a lot of great animator bastards
Speaker 2: out there.
Speaker 1: But again, I work in a field where like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're left alone in dark rooms for hours on end.
Speaker 1: It's gonna go one of two days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but
Speaker 2: Gahan Wilson helped build the Hiroshima bomb. Look it up, people,
Speaker 2: look it up. It's it's out there. Find the evidence
Speaker 2: I wanted.
Speaker 1: I almost made a joke about one of my predecessors
Speaker 1: on pop Eye, but I'm pretty sure would get have
Speaker 1: some of you're talking to. So they're all helpless, lovely,
Speaker 1: lovely men, just just like everyone who's ever worked for
Speaker 1: Clear Channel Communications. Anyway, that's the podcast. Everybody a great.
Speaker 1: What about where they can find you? Uh? Well, the internet?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I have a book called After the Revolution.
Speaker 1: You can find it anywhere you find books, like, type
Speaker 1: it whatever, wherever you get your books. Type it in,
Speaker 1: go to a.
Speaker 2: Bookstore, you know, with with some sort of crude weapon,
Speaker 2: ideally a copy of Jerusalem by Alan Moore, and threatened
Speaker 2: the teller until they buy a copy of my book
Speaker 2: After the Revolution.
Speaker 1: That's how you do it.
Speaker 3: And if you the listeners who do not enjoy ads
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Speaker 3: ad free subscription channel exclusively on Apple podcasts. Is that right, Robert?
Speaker 3: Did I do it?
Speaker 1: That is correct? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Sorry, everybody. It's just for people with iPhones. But that
Speaker 2: is most of our listeners.
Speaker 1: One day I will matter.
Speaker 2: We apologize to everyone else. We'll figure out. I'm an
Speaker 2: Android user too. You know, we're all in this together,
Speaker 2: but sadly it's harder than you'd think to work stuff
Speaker 2: like this out. Anyway, we've requested the Zone Media Apple.
Speaker 3: Podcasts behind the Bastards production of Cool Zone Media. For
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