In episode twenty-three of The Babylon Bee podcast, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle interview Scott Adams, the world famous creator of the Dilbert comic strip, a modern-day Nostradamus, and the New York Times best-selling author of Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. He famously predicted Trump's election through a psychological analysis of persuasion. He discusses with Kyle and Ethan his most recent book LOSERTHINK: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America. Follow Scott Adams on Twitter. This episode is sponsored by the Christian Standard Bible, specifically their CSB Study Bible. This English translation strives to be faithful to the original languages without sacrificing clarity. To inspire you to grow in your understanding and love for God's Word, the CSB Study Bible contains an award-winning array of study resources, including over 16,000 study notes, tools, and word studies. Now available in eight different cover options, including two new covers. Whether you are preparing for future Bible studies or daily readings, this study Bible is the ideal resource for lifelong discipleship. Learn more at CSBible.com or visit LifeWay.com to order your copy of the CSB Study Bible today. Intro- Kyle and Ethan discuss seeing Kellen Erskine's show. Kyle went to a Switchfoot concert. Kyle got sick. Story 1 - Millennial Wishes There Were Some Historical Examples Of Socialism We Could Study To Have Some Idea How It Might Turn Out Story 2 - ABC News Claims Story On Epstein Was Accidentally Thrown Out Then Shredded Into Tiny Pieces And Incinerated Story 3- CNN Criticizes Pregnant Woman For Shooting Poor, Defenseless Man Who Was Simply Seeking Asylum In Her Home Interview: Scott Adams Hate Mail- Podcast Reviews Paid-subscriber portion - Story 1- The Babylon Bee has been coming up with handy infographics for use as media guides. Like The Babylon Bee Explains Assault Rifles and A Style Guide For News Organizations Story 2- Authorities Horrified At Woman Who Killed Baby With Meth Instead Of Traditional Brain-Sucking Device Ethan and Kyle Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world of fake news, this is news you can trust.
Maybe they're born with it.
Maybe it's Jesus.
You're listening to the Babylon Bee.
Here are your infallible hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
Yes, welcome to the Babylon Bee Podcast, the show where we keep you informed.
Correct.
Extremely informed.
With news.
With news and commentary and scathing opinions.
And tidbits.
And lots of juicy.
Juicy morsels of information.
How you doing, Kyle?
I'm doing good, Ethan.
Well, here we are.
We are getting ready for this episode.
We got to talk to Scott Adams.
So we talked to Scott Derrickson last week.
We're talking with Scott Adams.
And then I think next week or a future week, we're going to be speaking with Mike Adams.
Yeah, so it's getting really confusing.
So we got to keep it straight.
We have to talk to Mike Derrickson.
Yeah.
If anybody's out there that knows a famous, semi-famous Mike Derrickson.
Yeah.
Or Adam Scottson.
Anyway, yeah, so yeah, the Dilbert guy who makes predictions.
He's like the Nostradamus of our day and age.
He sits on a mountain somewhere and just says Trump.
A mountain that he had fashioned out of Dilbert comics.
Yeah, because he's really rich, right?
Out of cash.
Yeah.
Anyway, so yeah, that's later in the episode.
Yeah.
What'd you do this week?
Well, I got sick yesterday, which was horrible.
And it was just like 12 hours.
Like vomiting?
Like I didn't, but my family was.
I still not sure I was sick.
I think it was just.
Yeah, that happened to us.
And then that's how it went for me, too.
I was the only one who didn't.
Yeah, and I'm just losing control.
But I got really sick, but it just didn't come out.
It's like you know it's coming, so you just feel it and you just lie down.
You're like, it was terrible.
But the day before that was fun because you and I went and saw Kellen Erskine.
Yeah.
The comic who happens to be a Latter-day Saint.
Member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
That is a mouthful.
Yeah, he played it nearby us.
And yeah, it's always funny how comedians are funnier live.
Yeah.
Like he's already funny when you watch him on Amazon.
I already laughed pretty hard at that.
He was really funny live, I thought.
Yeah, it was really good.
Well, I don't think live makes you funny if you're not funny.
Yeah, it's just the energy in the room and you react more to other people laughing.
But you're right.
Good comics.
If you enjoy them on the special, on TV or whatever, you'll enjoy them more live.
He was very good at like, I don't know, reading the crowd, the crowd's energy and playing off it.
He doesn't just do a script.
He does things where he asks the crowd to ask.
He asks the crowd to give him input, throw things at him.
He plays off the crowd really well.
Yeah, he's clearly a professional.
Yeah, but even like, let's say a joke wasn't getting a ton of laughter.
He knew how to just make it into something funny or blow right through it and go to the next thing.
I was pretty impressed by that skill, you know, that comics have to have.
And he did a great job.
The openers, not so much.
I wasn't there.
I'm not going to call him out by name here on this podcast and shame them.
But it was like a Sunday night show.
And I don't know how many Christians or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will go to a Sunday night comedy show.
So the crowd was a little small, but I mean, it felt fuller than that.
If you guys notice that Kellen's coming to your town, you guys got to go see him.
Funny, funny man.
Yeah.
Support Clean Comedy.
He's the clean comic who does birthday parties.
These guys that opened for him weren't clean comics.
They were trying to use every joke, you know, they could make any joke they wanted.
Yeah.
And they struggled, man.
And then he came up there, pure clean jokes, and had the place dying.
But you know, exactly what he said on our podcast was: I don't, I want people to think afterwards, hey, that was clean.
Yeah.
You know, and that's exactly what it felt like.
It didn't feel like, oh, he's telling these safe jokes because the other guys were doing like Trump jokes that weren't landing and then some joke about how ugly his friend was or something.
My friend's so ugly and you know, paying getting trying to get people to pay money to date her.
And what are you talking about, dude?
So it was good.
We had a good time.
So me and Ethan want to keep up his appearance as though we like each other.
We want you guys to feel like we have this relationship outside of the podcast because that's important.
Yeah, so you try to go make public appearances as friends.
But then we go somewhere and there's only like 20 people there.
Nobody saw us.
We need to go to we should have gone to Switchfoot together and walked around arm in arm.
I did.
Did I record this podcast after I did Switchfoot?
I don't think so.
I don't know.
I think when we recorded, I mentioned I'm going to Switchfoot.
The timeline's all messed up for me.
How was Switchfoot?
It was great.
Cool.
Yeah.
It was a lot of fun.
My wife went and she saw you there.
Yeah.
And your wife said, Switchfoot, it was really cute.
Yeah, she said it was really cute.
They had this shipwreck theme.
They do like a shipwreck theme, right?
Where the guy comes out and reads their diary of like, we've been shipwrecked this many days.
So it was a pirate.
Yeah, something like that.
It was good.
So all right, some stories of the week.
Stories of the week.
But first, we have a sponsor this week.
This episode is sponsored by the Christian Standard Bible, specifically their CSB study Bible.
This English translation strives to be faithful to the original languages without sacrificing clarity.
To inspire you to grow in your understanding and love for God's word, the CSB study Bible contains an award-winning array of study resources, including over 16,000 study notes, tools, and word studies.
Now available in eight different cover options, including two new covers.
Whether you are preparing for future Bible studies or daily readings, this study Bible is the ideal resource for lifelong discipleship.
Learn more at csbible.com or visit lifeway.com to order your copy of the CSB study Bible today.
Frank Fleming's a fan.
I don't know.
I don't know if our will our sponsors appreciate Frank laughing at them.
I don't know.
We could cut throughout.
How dare you?
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Stories of the week.
Let's do this.
Every week, there are stories.
These are some of them.
Millennial wishes there were some historical examples of socialism we could study to have some idea how it might turn out.
If only.
If only.
Yeah, if only there were some examples.
Let's say, uh, yeah, like Sweden, isn't Sweden ideal?
Well, I think the thing with Sweden is it's like it's driven by a capitalist economy and they just have like a big social safety net.
So I think a lot of times when people say they support socialism, that's what they mean.
It's like, yeah, they want that kind of like capitalist with some socialism mixed in there.
Yeah.
They don't actually want the state to own the means of production, the memes of production.
The memes of production.
We need to seize the memes of production.
The May Maze of production.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
I got nothing to say on this one.
It's so self-explanatory.
This is quality.
Quality content.
This is a Frank Fleming article, right?
No, that's his mind.
This is mine, dude.
Oops, sorry.
I'm often mistaken for Frank Fleming, actually.
I was like, oh, this has got to be a Frank.
I think that is probably the greatest honor I can get, though.
That's a good honor.
As a comedy writer, it's like, hey, is this written by Frank?
Yeah.
I just kind of smile and nod and I go, sure, whatever you want.
After I made Axe Cop and I was known as the guy who made the comics of the five-year-old, people would check on my other stuff.
Be like, is this by your brother too?
Did your five-year-old brother write this too?
I'd be like, no, no, I just wrote that one.
They'd be like, oh.
And they'd walk off all disappointed and not read it.
That's kind of an opposite problem.
That's a little opposite.
So they did.
They wanted.
Well, I was trying to think if it was like an insult, like, this looks like a five-year-old wrote it.
Yeah.
Is that true?
And you're like, no.
Like, oh, I wrote it.
Oh, you came up with this concept by yourself?
By yourself without a five-year-old?
And you're a grown adult and you wrote this.
What was the one you did?
Was it Chumbull Spuzz or something?
Was that written by a five-year-old, Ethan?
No, it was written by me.
Oh, Jerk.
Oh.
Never mind.
Never mind then.
Yeah, so they should really start writing something like history books, some sort of books containing like historical information where you could go back and look and see.
Accounts.
Yeah, account books.
Has it been tried?
Has real socialism been tried?
Have real history books been tried?
Yeah.
Where we could write down like, oh, all these countries in South America are exploding.
Oh, by the way, have you seen, did you see the new Jack Ryan season?
No, I'm like three episodes in.
I hardly watch anything now.
I'm like forced myself just to watch that.
Season two?
Yeah.
Yeah, it was amazing to me because it's set in Venezuela.
Oh, yeah.
And there's like a.
Which is collapsing because of socialism in real life.
Yeah, yeah.
And they make it the opposite in the show.
It's not a secret.
Yeah.
In the show, it's like, well, even like, I don't know, episode three or four, they talk about all the specific problems.
You know, they're talking about, oh, inflation, starvation, corruption.
You know, I'm like, yeah, those are all the problems in Venezuela.
And they're like, it's because of this right-wing nationalist.
And the lady that's coming up to challenge them is like a social justice warrior type.
I'm like, well, why, why not just make it like a fictional country at that point?
Because I can buy into, okay, there's this crazy fascist guy and he's ruining everything.
I could buy that concept, right?
But why set it in something where it's the opposite?
I don't know.
It's bizarre to me.
Isn't that, I always feel like that's what people in Hollywood expect you to do.
Like, they want you to set your world up as it's supposed to be in their mind.
Like, like all of Congress is women.
The president is a wheelchair bound Pacific Island lesbian.
Everything has to be the world they want it to be.
Right.
And if you don't set it up like that, if you set up as the world is, you're just, you're just perpetrating the horrible world we live in and not solving all our problems for us.
Yeah, like you can't.
You can't tell stories about how the world is.
You have to tell it how it is.
It should be.
Yeah.
Yeah, I liked that.
They did that show.
I think it was called Commander in Chief or something right before Hillary ran.
And it was like a woman becomes the first president.
I'm like, okay, I get what you're trying to do.
24 did that.
Yeah.
24 always had, first they had the black president, before black president, before Obama.
Then they had the female president.
She was a horrible president, though.
I don't like her.
You know, I watched like two or three seasons of 24.
I don't, when did she?
I was done 24.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dun done.
What was his name?
Is that the right noise that?
The first president in 24, you really liked him.
You're like, man, he's great.
And you're like, man, I'd vote for a Democrat if that was him.
He was a great guy.
That was the black guy, right?
Yeah.
I forgot his name.
The real name is Hazebert, Dennis Hazebert.
I know that because he played a tree frog on Axe Cop.
Wow.
Yeah.
Six degrees of separation from Axe Cop.
It's great because this little tree frog is like, back cop.
Like, has that deep voice?
Anyway.
Did you ever watch West Wing?
No.
It's a good show.
I think Rush Limbaugh used to call it like.
It was the escapism during the Bush years.
Oh, that's the new 24th.
Keep your sidelines and becomes president.
Oh, what's that called?
Designated Survivor.
That's pure fantasy.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, that's a bummer.
It's pure pre it starts off so good.
It's like this really great premise where this like every man just becomes president.
And then it just like you can see like the whole idea of the whole show was to become super preachy.
And so they like, they have all these things come up where it's clearly they're trying to make a show that middle America will get hooked on and then they can like be like, see how racist you all are?
And see how you're polluting everything?
Like everything is just like, he just, it just becomes about issues and not about this terrorist plot.
Like the terrorist plot becomes way behind that.
It really is so good for the first like six episodes or so.
Like, oh, finally, a new good show.
And then just, no.
That's terrible.
Yeah, I don't know if we mentioned it here before, but it's like the how cringy the old preachy Christian movies were.
And that's what the new, you know, everyone's preaching.
We're all getting preached at.
Speaking of preaching, we're going on a long time on this first story.
Let's go to the next one.
ABC News claims story on Epstein was accidentally thrown out, then shredded into tiny pieces and incinerated.
Boom.
Mic drop.
I can't drop this mic because it's attached to the boom.
It's on an arm to the stuff.
Screw it.
It's really annoying.
Yeah, so there was leaked audio or not audio video footage of that anchor that was on ABC News who was saying how, well, I had all this information on Epstein three years ago and they wouldn't let me release it.
They told me to cover it up.
And then later she's like, oh, I was just expressing feelings that normal people have about covering up pedophile stories.
Speaking, it's really weird.
That's a normal emotion people have all the time.
I have it every day.
I'm like, you know, I'm going to the bathroom.
Every time I cover up information for covering up pedophile stories, it's just a feeling I have sometimes.
Who among us hasn't covered up normal human emotion?
This massive pedophile room for the frustration and pedophile cover-ups.
Anger.
Anger.
Anxiety.
Yes.
Yeah.
So I guess supposedly she had information on Prince Andrew and that was part of the deal was like there was all these connections.
We're like, well, the royal family doesn't want you to bring this out.
It's like, I thought that, you know, isn't that their whole rallying cry?
It's like speaking truth to power.
That's what they're always saying.
You know, as journalists, we speak truth to power.
It's like, yeah, not this time.
I never know if when people are talking about princes and princesses, I can't remember if it's from a Disney movie or from real, a real life thing.
What?
So you said Prince having this search.
Like, was that Frozen?
Your head was like flipping through all the princes.
All the Disney movies.
Disney movies where they are sexist.
Like, name the name of one prince in a Disney movie.
Remember, Prince Charming doesn't count.
Charming.
I couldn't even say thanks for that.
That's like Princess Hot.
Eric.
Prince Charming, Princess.
Princess Hot.
Princess Sexy.
Yeah, Prince Eric on Little Mermaid.
Boom.
His name's Eric.
Oh, with facts and logic.
It's embarrassing that you know that.
Well, what?
And I was at Catch 22, and he challenged me, and I yeah, I guess I don't know what Mulan's dude was named.
Just some dude.
Just a generic dude there.
I can't even think of any movies right now.
Yeah.
Okay, Prince Hans in Frozen, but he was a bad guy.
Even Beauty and the Beast.
What's that guy's name?
He's the beast.
Prince.
Probably got some name.
I remember Gaston, the bad guy.
Yeah, I remember the bad guy.
You can always remember the bad guys.
I guess I can't ever remember the princes.
The prince and stuff.
Aladdin.
Prince Aladdin.
He's just a piece of meat that can snow wipe.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
So, see, I keep going off the topic because I don't pay attention to this news stuff.
Yeah.
It's just kind of sick to me.
Well, the thing that always gets me is like that I, when I keep thinking about this, is that this guy was still doing stuff, right?
Like, supposedly.
I mean, I don't know exactly the timeline, but if he was still doing stuff, aren't you like literally allowing people to get abused?
Right.
By not covering.
And then as a reporter, wouldn't she go, I don't know what her contract's like and any of that stuff.
I don't know any of the details, but don't you go, I'm going to take this somewhere else or I'm going to leak this.
I have, you know, don't you have some kind of moral duty to probably never, I mean, that's the thing of this kind of stuff.
It's not the way it is in the movies.
I assume there's nobody going like, no, we're squashing this because he pays us well or something.
It's more like it's not that.
It's not the right time right now, but we need to gather more evidence.
Or well, they cover it with this feeling that we're going to get to it eventually or something.
Or other people are going to be put in danger and we need to do it.
You know, I think that, you know, there's always, it's just never as black and white as movies make it.
That's probably true.
At least all the times I've covered up for pedophiles.
Yeah, I mean, just a normal human thing.
Like the last week when you told me to cover up all the pedophile stories, and I was like, all right, sir, because you're my boss.
It's a super relatable thing.
Happens all the time.
Happens all the time.
Next story.
I'll let you read it.
CNN criticizes pregnant woman for shooting poor, defenseless man who was simply seeking asylum in her home.
Is this based on a real story?
It is.
There was a Florida woman that I think she shot and killed an intruder with her AR-15.
Pregnant woman charging around with an AR-15.
And I guess I think she had, I think the intruders were beating on her husband or something.
And then she saw it and she went and got the gun and shot him.
And then the cops found him dead later on in a ditch or something like that.
I just made up all those details off my head.
So hopefully that's accurate.
But yeah.
Yeah, you know, they were just seeking asylum.
I should have read these notes before we started.
You probably should have, or at least read the Babylon Bee once in a while.
I read the story.
I've been spending the whole week working on since Cinematic Universe.
Oh, man.
I went up today.
I'm very excited about that article.
And you've been working on our few people will read it.
You've been working on our best of book.
Yeah.
Which we haven't officially announced.
That's what I spend a lot of time on.
We're working on a big, pretty Babylon Bee book with lots of pictures.
And it is going to be absolutely amazing.
Stunning.
Ethan keeps showing me pages from it, and I'm just like, like, I wrote a lot of these articles, and I'm just reading them just amazed at how good this thing could be.
Ethan is redoing all the Photoshops.
Yeah, almost all of them.
Just because they're not the right size for print.
A lot of our early Photoshops weren't great.
And then also, yeah, they weren't high resolution.
So we're going to get all new Photoshops for these, and it's just going to be amazing.
Yeah, we make a big, pretty coffee table book full of Babylon Beef fun and joy.
Yeah.
And also a pregnant woman shot a man.
Yeah.
A poor definition.
With an AR-15.
I always wonder if someone, if I had a gun, which I don't yet, because I still try.
You still don't have any guns.
I'm trying.
I'm trying to get one.
It's just so freaking hard in California.
I've heard it's easier in this.
The county we're in is not as because there's still the state laws.
Well, I don't think the county necessarily matters for concealed county.
That's what's different.
But I always wonder if I had a gun, if I would actually be able to shoot someone that charged in the front door.
Yeah, like with all that adrenaline and like one with, I mean, I don't know.
I always think like, hey, I'd have to run because I don't have any guns in our bedroom.
I'd have to run out to the garage.
Hang on a second.
Pull it out of the sleeve, find the bullets, which I don't even know where the bullets are.
So yeah, I don't know.
I'd probably, at the very least, try to aim the gun while it's still in its sleeve at the person and hope they believe it's loaded.
This is a real gun.
Inside this giant sock is a shotgun.
Yeah, that's the other side, too.
I'm always, you know, I've got a young child in the home.
It's like, I don't know.
My young child is kind of dumb, you know, and he would definitely be someone to grab a gun.
Well, by law, you're supposed to have a lock in the shotgun.
And if it's a shotgun, you have to have a lock in the trigger, like a key lock, a padlock.
And all these guns you're supposed to.
Handguns, you have to have them in a case that's locked with a padlock, I believe.
The laws.
Yeah, so I don't even know how much.
How do you get that?
You fumble the key.
How much time do you have between realizing, oh, someone's coming into my house too?
Okay, now I'm going to go unlock all these.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I assume it's at night.
You realize they're in there when they're standing in front of your bed.
Hang on a second, sir.
Be right back.
All my gold is in the garage.
Let me go get it for you.
Let me get you a bunch of gold.
Hold on.
That's a good plan.
Now we know how to do it.
I would actually have to run to my neighbor and say, hey, can I borrow your gun real quick?
Oh, I think we were talking about this on my other podcast.
The weird feeling of like, you should sleep clothed because if somebody does invade your house, like who wants to get in a gunfight in your underwear?
Because most guys sleep in their own underwear, I assume.
Especially down here where it's hot.
Yeah.
But one thing you could do is you could grab the comforter off your bed and throw it over the guy so he never sees you and just start hitting him under the comforter.
That's one idea.
I don't know.
I just came up with that.
Just throw it over him.
He can't see anything.
And then he'll feel really silly.
It's like beating up a ghost.
Well, we thoroughly covered that story.
Yeah, yeah.
You want to move on and talk with Scotty Adams?
Scott Adams?
Let's do it.
Since it's Scott Month here at the Babylon B podcast.
Scott Month.
All right.
Let's get another Scott in here.
All Scott November.
Presenting an exclusive Babylon B interview.
All right, everybody.
We are here.
We are interviewing Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, the comic series, the cartoon.
What do you call it?
Comic or cartoon?
It's not really a comic.
It's more like a Sunday comic.
It's just a documentary.
It's a documentary of the office life.
And also author of books.
Scott, welcome to the Babylon B podcast.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
So my dad works at an aerospace engineering company.
And he said for years they always wondered how you, you know, if you just had their office like tapped with a microphone or you had some secret camera watching them.
That's actually one of the most frequent comments I get.
And part of that was fueled by the fact that I have a common name.
And it turns out that almost every Fortune 500 company in this country, if you looked at their employees, you know, if they have like a million employees or something, you look and sure enough, there's a Scott Adams there.
So there were actually a number of Scott Adamses at different big companies who took a lot of heat because people said, well, we know this is you.
This is obviously our company.
This is your name.
It's obvious.
Yeah, you're getting people fired because human resources is thinking that they're drawing comics about what's going on in the office.
You know, jokey aside, I've actually gotten several people fired accidentally because they posted my comic or they gave it to the wrong person.
And it was, I guess people thought it was unbusinesslike or something.
So yeah, people actually have been fired for that.
Oh, wow.
Well, pour one out for them.
So I make comics and I tried for a while to get into making funnies, like Sunday comics, what do you call them, newspaper comics?
Back when I don't even know when the last time a new one was made, like a new one actually got picked up.
I figure you were one of the were you one of the last?
Do they still get last?
The major cartoon syndicates still launch the same number of comics they ever did, but it just gets harder and harder for somebody new to break through.
So you don't notice because a new launch might be in 35 out of 2,000 newspapers and none of them are in the big market.
So you just don't even notice that they existed.
Yeah, and I guess I don't even read the newspaper anymore, so I wouldn't even know if there is new cartoons.
But that said, there are some big famous ones since me.
Pearls Before Swine came after me.
I'm bad to remember the names of cartoons, but there are several that are pretty big, quite successful.
They came after Dilbert.
So is this, like, was cartooning a thing that you saw yourself making your living doing?
Or I know that you didn't start out doing it, but was it a like I am curious about that journey real quick?
Well, when I was very young, say six years old, I thought I wanted to be a famous cartoonist, and specifically I wanted to be Charles Schultz, who did peanuts.
And that was my goal.
And I would draw pictures.
I'm seven, eight, nine years old.
When I reached about the age of 11, I realized, wait a minute, there are about six billion people in the world, and there's only one Charles Schultz.
What are my odds?
And I decided to go the rational route and just study in school and go to college.
I was economics major.
I thought it might be a lawyer or a businessman or something.
I worked for corporate America for 16 years, but I hit a sort of a glass ceiling there.
It was a weird period during the, I guess this was late 80s and 90s, where both my major employers told me that they couldn't promote me because I'm white and male.
And they told me that directly, by the way.
When I tell this story, people always say, well, you're reading between the lines.
And I say, no.
I was called into the office and I was told that the order had come down that no white males will be promoted until further notice.
Now, the reason was actually a fairly good one, which was, you know, if there could be, because there was no diversity in either of those companies in senior management and they got caught.
So the local press put pressure on them.
And at the first company, it's the reason I left the bank.
I was at Crocker Bank.
So I left soon after.
They told me I couldn't get promoted, went to the phone company, thought, well, I'm safe now.
It's all going to be good.
And one day my boss called me in the office and gave me the same speech for the same reason.
The press had noticed they had no diversity in senior management, so they just said, well, until further notice, if you're white in your mail, you're not getting promoted.
Wow.
So that was about the time I said, maybe I should try to do something that doesn't have a boss.
And maybe do a little work on the side and see if I can get something going.
So cartooning wasn't the only thing I tried on the side.
It was just the only thing that worked.
Is that when you started to learn how to do hypnotism?
Because then you could be like, you will hire me.
I will become CEO.
That was even before cartooning.
So I did it first.
That was just building what I call my talent stack.
I tried to develop skills that work well together.
And you can add persuasion and hypnosis to just about anything, and it makes you a more valuable person, employee, I guess.
And so I tried cartooning, and the short version of the story is that worked out.
I'll say.
Cool.
So how do we know that you're not hypnotizing us right now to ask all the right questions that make you look good?
Because you asked that question.
See what I did there?
Oh, man.
But that's exactly what you would say to make people think.
Kyle's eyes have little spirals in them right now.
What are you doing to him?
Why are you so amazing, Scott Adams?
Everybody buy Scott's book.
We have stacks in the office.
So, no, you're not being hypnotized.
It just feels that way as far as you.
It's just your personality.
So we have your new book here, Loser Think.
I will completely admit that I have not had a chance to read it.
We're looking through the bullet points here and stuff like that, but I like the title.
I like the guys in the bubbles.
Yeah, you write good titles, Scott.
Yeah, you're good at titles and covers.
I've been told that by my publisher.
So to dive in, what do you think?
Sure, yeah.
So you, I mean, through Dilbert, you kind of use mockery, humor, satire to, I mean, do you feel like people actually change their ways based on humor?
Because that's what we do.
You know, we write humor, and sometimes you feel like you're just writing jokes.
Sometimes you wonder if you're actually impacting culture, impacting people at all.
So I think you talk a little bit about in Loser Think, about how people have, people as big as Elon Musk have mentioned Dilbert as an influence to how they tell their people to manage.
So is that something that you, is that a purpose that you see for humor, satire, cartoons?
Yeah, mockery is one of the most powerful forces in the world.
It's right up there with fear and greed, I think.
And people don't want to be mocked.
It's one of the things we like the least.
And so if you can create a situation where if you do X, you will definitely get mocked.
A lot fewer people are going to do X because nobody wants to walk into the kill zone.
So as you mentioned, Elon Musk at one point sent out a little email or some kind of communication to his staff saying the little rules that he wanted them to follow to have a proper culture at the company.
And one of the rules was don't do anything that would end up in a Dilbert comic.
And the power of that is in the context of why I put it in the book.
The power of that is that by creating the name and the property Dilbert, everybody had a common reference.
So he didn't have to go into detail.
Well, in these situations, and here's what I mean, and here's a thousand examples, because everybody kind of holds in their mind what a Dilbert situation looks like and what isn't one.
And we all recognize them when we see him.
So it became a shorthand.
And the context was that LoserThink creates its own set of shorthand labels for things to help you mock people away from bad thinking patterns.
Do you think he smoked weed on Joe Rogan's show inspired by Dilbert?
I don't care.
Probably not.
Although I did smoke weed on Joe Rogan's show before he did, so maybe I inspired him.
Yeah, see?
Maybe.
Man, how come we haven't been on Joe Rogan's show to smoke weed yet, Kyle?
We are a Christian website, Ethan.
So Loser Think.
Because you wrote Think Bigly.
I started reading that, and I didn't realize that that was, we're talking to you about Loser Think and that it wasn't the other one.
Or is it not Think Bigly?
Are you telling me you read the wrong book?
I was reading the wrong book in preparation.
Show up to school having done the wrong homework.
Yeah.
Win Bigley, Win Bigly.
That's it.
Yeah.
So I'm really unprepared.
But Kyle's over there looking at your book right now.
Yeah, I like how you quote, you quote rep Eric Swalwell.
Remember that guy?
He's always good for an example because he does a lot of things that make you say, ah, okay, I got to talk about this now because there's something deeply wrong with this.
I need to talk about this.
Is he the guy who ran for president?
Yeah, he's the guy who wanted to nuke everybody.
Nuke everybody.
Okay.
Yeah.
He's my local representative.
Really?
I've met him a few times.
We have common friends.
So you quote him as saying, destruction of evidence is consciousness of guilt.
At this point, please show me evidence that Donald Trump is not working for Russia.
And you're using this as an example of how it's rarely possible to prove that something isn't true.
And the funny thing is that he's a lawyer.
So he obviously was completely aware of, wow, I don't want to read his mind.
But one assumes that a lawyer knows the most basic thing about the law, which is you prove somebody did something.
You don't prove somebody didn't do something.
Oh, I didn't even see this.
You actually included his tweet about nuking everybody in your book.
Yeah.
And I defended him about that tweet because it was such so obviously just a hyperbole, and people took it seriously.
And then later people said, when I called people out for taking it seriously, they said, well, we know it wasn't real, but we like making a target out of them.
So people don't even respond based on what they actually really believe.
They respond based on how it's going to hurt somebody.
That happens all the time, especially with Trump.
He's clearly joking around or being hyperbolic or just being Trump, and everybody has to, they put their monocle on and start freaking out and taking everything completely seriously.
He's saying I'm not sure where the monocle reference comes in.
Oh, dude.
Yeah, they like sipping tea, touching at pearls.
Okay, that's a complete picture.
They have to put the monocle on so that it can pop.
It pops.
They're so freaked out, it pops.
Okay, got it.
Trump pops a lot of Onacles.
So what's some of your favorite examples in recent history of loserthink that we got this Swalwell one?
What are some more to kind of piggyback on your book here?
Well, one of them I tell I tell people not to act like pundits and use the techniques they do because they're advocates.
One of the things that pundits like to say is don't normalize that.
Don't normalize that.
Now, the word is meant to sort of close down the thinking.
It's like, okay, we're done.
Don't normalize that.
But it makes you uncritically think past the main question, which is, is the behavior good or bad?
Because if it's bad, well, you don't want to normalize that.
But if it's good, of course you want to normalize it.
So it makes you think best whether it's good or bad.
And now, in the case of Trump criticizing the press, if this were the old days when the press was just trying to get the news right, criticizing the press under that condition would be probably bad.
You wouldn't want to make the free press any less capable because of criticism.
But in our current model, where the press is really driven by emotion and clicks, in other words, they present material that drives your emotions up, and that's how they make their money.
In that kind of world, where the facts are less important than how excited you got about reading the article, the president's criticism seems entirely appropriate.
Wouldn't you want your president to criticize things that are broken when those broken things are really, really important to the American public's health?
So of course you would.
So that's exactly what I would want to normalize.
I would like to normalize presidents criticizing important things that are broken that need to get fixed.
So there's an example of loserthink.
So, I mean, you were one of the first people to predict that Trump would win.
And I think at the time, his odds were like 2%, according to Nate Silver and some of the other people.
So, I mean, how did you predict that?
Well, I have that background in hypnosis that I mentioned, and I've been studying the ways of persuasion for decades as part of my job as a writer.
And I noticed early on that he had these high-grade persuasion talents, and I imagined that other people couldn't see it because if you haven't studied that field, you would think he's just talking and bullying and whatever else people think.
And you would lose the technique.
But about the time that he labeled Jeb Bush as low energy, that's the day that I predicted he would be president.
Because long before, and here's, you know, if you want to see how powerful it is to have that talent of understanding persuasion, the day I saw the tweet, I said, Bush is done, you know, publicly.
I tweeted that.
And that was it.
That was the end of him.
His poll numbers stopped there and went down until he was out of the race.
And I could see that clearly because what Trump did was they took somebody who was this calm, cool, collected, executive type, very experienced.
People thought, okay, that's exactly who you want.
You want somebody who's calm, collected.
They're not some kind of crazy person jumping around.
But the moment that Trump labeled him low energy, and you could see the contrast between Trump's high energy and his, you could no longer see him as anything except sort of sleepy and tired and boring.
And so Trump used his skill at branding to literally brand the top dynasty in the United States out of office.
And then he branded everybody else out of office, including Hillary.
So when you see that happening, the first few times you might say, well, you know, lion squirrel finds a nut.
He got lucky.
He was just a bully and it worked out.
But after three years of it, well, four if you count the campaign, it's so consistent and it works so well that it's getting harder and harder to deny that it's technique.
Yeah, it's so crazy looking back that, I mean, the amount of candidates he's up against, it just seems so like, of course he's not going to win.
It's just, yeah, I don't know.
I'm reliving it as you talk about the strangeness of it all.
And you qualify yourself.
From my perspective, it was like he brought a machine gun to a cage match.
So I'm looking at a guy with a machine gun against an unarmed guy with his fist, and I'm saying, I'm going to go out on a limb here.
I'm going to say the machine gun beats the guy with the fist.
And that's what happened.
Yeah.
Well, I think part of what we've seen, too, is that people protest against that kind of humor and branding too much.
Like you see, people start fighting back against those.
It's like, no, I'm not low energy or no, I'm not that.
And it makes it worse.
Oh, yeah, Rubio.
If you don't play along with it, you just look, you know, it looks like Trump's having a great time and you're just the serious guy in the room.
Yeah, and it's obvious that Trump has branded Biden out of the race, too.
Now, Biden might have taken himself out of the race just by being Biden.
But when he started calling him Sleepy Joe, it was just brilliant sort of trash talk that you might see in a sporting event.
Because if you tell somebody that they're sleepy, they're going to have to show that they're not.
And you would have exhausted Biden, who was a certain age and a certain energy.
And they were trying to keep Biden in.
It's like, well, you know, Joe, maybe you could just have one event today and then, you know, it's nap time.
And it was obvious that they were sort of keeping him on the short schedule.
So as soon as Trump says he's sleepy, you start saying, well, that's not many events you're going to there, Joe.
Otherwise, nobody would have even noticed.
But then Trump upgraded it to slow, slow, sleepy Joe.
And slow is such a slow is a total hypnosis term because you can interpret it any way you want.
So it's open-endedness and its ability for the people who hear it to say, oh, I know what that means.
And they just inhabit the word with their own experience.
And that's what makes it powerful.
Everybody's got their own interpretation.
It all fits in there.
What does slow mean?
Does it mean he's slow to get around to stuff, slow on the campaign, or is he mentally declining, which I think most people would take it to mean that?
But if he had said something like, he's too old, people would say, well, you're pretty old.
If he had said something like, well, I think he's got Alzheimer's, people would say, well, maybe you have Alzheimer's.
But when you say slow, you can't really use that against Trump.
So that's, you know, when you think to yourself, okay, he's just throwing out names.
But he does it so well engineered that there are things that can't be thrown back at him, and they're open-ended so people can kind of interpret them the way they want, and it's always bad.
That's just really good engineering.
So his branding skills are better than anything you've ever seen, probably.
So you're saying he's playing 4D chess and the rest of us are playing tiddlywinks.
I'm not sure if you know I'm the person who came up with that as a description of Trump's technique.
I think he kind of caught on.
It's come full circle now.
Yeah, I think I said 3D chess, and then the people who were mocking him started turning it into, you'll see this in CNN even still.
I saw it just the other day.
Somebody will say, and his supporters say he's playing 27D chess, but obviously he's just a clown who's blundering around and keeps getting lucky 700 times in a row.
So that's sort of the CNN take.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure.
I'm never sure if it's intentional or not, but it does seem like Trump does something, some blunder, and you see it as a total blunder.
It would sink any other politician.
And then the left or whoever opposes him does something even worse.
And it's like he always somehow manages to come out on top.
And it's unbelievable.
You're reminding me of my favorite quote recently from Mike Cernovich, because he would talk to Democrats who would say, you know, oh, yeah, the Democrats will win this time.
Trump will be kicked out of office.
And he has to remind them that Trump is actually running against a specific person.
We don't know what it is yet, but he's going to run against an actual person.
And once you have the direct matchup, it's just going to be lights out.
Trump is just going to annihilate whoever it is.
The only reason that any of the Democrats are still standing is that he's holding fire, waiting for the designated target.
Now, you qualify yourself in your Winn Bigley, Winning Big Lee.
Sorry if I can't remember.
The word Bigley is in the title of your book.
Win Bigley.
Win Bigley.
And you say you start off by listing off how far left you are and a lot of stuff.
I think you call yourself ultra-liberal or something like that.
Left of Bernie.
Left of Bernie.
So you are like a commie.
But I'm curious, because when you talk about Trump, and this is why I think a lot of people, especially on the left, get all upset about you.
You sound a little giddy.
You sound like you admire the guy.
Are you a fan of Trump?
Or is it just in certain aspects?
I'm a total fan of his skill.
I'm a very much I enjoyed.
I got to meet him a year ago.
He invited me to the Oval Office and had this incredible experience of literally sitting in the Oval Office while the President of the United States, the most interesting one we've ever had, is sitting on the other side of the resolute desk and we're just shooting the breeze for half an hour.
And it was the coolest thing that's ever happened to me.
I'll never be able to top that.
But having said that, it's very difficult to spend a half an hour chatting with him and not coming away really, really liking him because he's the leader of the free world, the most important person on the planet.
And when he talked to me, and I'm sure everybody has the same experience because I can't, you know, I couldn't imagine it would be specific to me.
You have the experience that nothing else in the world matters except you at that moment.
And it's really, I got to tell you, it's a powerful thing.
He's not the only president who could do that.
You know, Bill Clinton was famous for that.
Obama, I'm sure, had the same thing.
So when you reach that level, half an hour chatting with somebody like that, you walk away thinking, I like this person.
So yes, yes, I undeniably like him personally, and I'm a huge fan of his technique.
But I do criticize specific things that I would have done differently or I wish weren't happening.
So how many swastikas are hanging up in his office?
Well, all I saw was a short bit.
When I got the tour of the Oval Office, Ivanka was nice enough to introduce me to the president and show me around before we chatted.
And she was telling me about the furniture choice in the Oval Office.
Apparently, each president gets to choose from various stored historical items like the couch and the carpets and the drapes or whatever.
And he had the Bill Clinton carpet in the sitting area of the Oval Room.
And I was thinking, somebody needs to blue light that thing because I don't know what kind of cleaning they do for the White House carpet, but I want the deep clean.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, we've got to send that puppy out to the dry cleaners.
So is Trump going to win again?
Is that what you're telling us right here, right now, Scott?
I would say that unless there's some big surprise, and of course, we live in a world where big surprises happen once a week.
But if something big happened, anything's possible.
But if we just straightline it and say, well, Trump's going to run against one of those candidates who's already in the race, Trump wins big.
I can't imagine him losing in that case.
There it is, everybody.
Place your bets in Vegas.
What other predictions do you have for this?
To be fair, I did predict a year ago that Kamala Harris would get the nomination.
This was before I learned that she's the worst campaigner in the history of all campaigns.
I've never seen anybody worse.
Now, in all fairness, I'd seen her doing her interrogations in the Senate of various people who are testifying and stuff.
And she looked strong and leaderly and effective and smart.
And I thought, okay, if you've got all that going for you, and you're a woman, and you're a person of color, and you're a senator, and you're a Democrat, well, that's the full package.
And then she gets on the campaign trail, and it looks like she's campaigning for the principal of your school.
All her campaign ads are like in a classroom talking to some kids.
And it's not as if education and children aren't really, really important.
But if you're so incompetent that the visuals and the image that you're transmitting is that you're running for school principal instead of president of the United States, you don't have even the basic talent to be president.
Yeah, it's weird how simple.
Yeah, by the way, she's the only person in the race I would say that about.
Others have policies I don't agree with, but they certainly have the talent and the smarts and the ability.
But she really stands alone as being completely incompetent.
Yeah, it's crazy.
Some people, when they get on the campaign trail, it doesn't work for them.
Like I remember Ben Carson thinking he's going to do great.
And then when he got at the campaign trail and debates and stuff, it was rough.
It was rough to watch.
Yeah, you know, that's a perfect example.
I thought the same thing.
I thought, wow, you know, surgeon, smart, African-American guy on the Republican Side.
I don't think people believe this, but the Republicans are really ready for a black candidate.
Totally.
I don't think anybody on the left believes that to be true.
But if you had some kind of a let's say Colin Powell, if he had been full Republican, certainly the Republicans would have backed him all the way.
Yeah, totally.
So your book, Loser Think, I feel like we're dodging around it a lot.
I really want to get into because I'm fascinated by the idea of just thinking about thinking, like, you know, stepping back from the way you approach things, the way that you're, even culturally, you're taught to think about things or to react to things and to go, oh, wait, that was really dumb.
And that seems to be kind of the goal of your book.
Would you like to hear some examples?
Please.
So here are just a few of the things in the book.
One of the things I warn against is the mind reader problem, where you imagine that you can read the mind of somebody you don't even know, some political figure, for example, and that even though the things they're doing are perfectly acceptable, you're sure that their thoughts are selfish and impure, and there's something bad that's going to happen because you can tell what they're thinking.
Now, it sounds ridiculous when I say this, but it's one of the most common things you see.
You scan the headlines, and it's not uncommon that a quarter of the headlines are somebody assuming what somebody else is thinking and acting like that that's a reasonable thing to do.
Now, if you've ever been in any kind of a relationship ever, you know that even the person closest to you, your spouse, your girlfriend, boyfriend, they can't tell what you're thinking.
They're wrong all the time.
You can't tell what they're thinking.
You're wrong all the time.
Why does that get better when you're judging a stranger on the other side of the world, somebody you've never met?
Obviously, it doesn't.
We're terrible mind readers.
So that's one of the things I caution against.
And you see that I put words on it.
I call it the mind-reading problem.
So there's something to mock.
Another one I talk about all the time is analogies.
Analogies are perfectly good for explaining a new concept.
So if you're going to say, explain to me a zebra, I might say, well, you start with a horse, but imagine has black and white stripes.
But people use analogies to predict, and they're not meant for that.
For example, people say that just because your cat has markings under its nose that look like a little Hitler mustache, that doesn't mean your cat is going to invade Poland.
Now, when I use that example, people usually say, come on, that's ridiculous.
Nobody does that.
And then I point out that when President Trump criticized the press, the most common response was, well, there he goes, just like a dictator.
The next thing you know, concentration camps.
We can predict from this behavior, this analogy, that he's analogous to a dictator, and therefore we predict full-on concentration camps and dictatorship.
And of course, that's absurd.
It feels like it's everything, everything he says or does.
They're like, oh, I think Hitler did that somewhere.
Let's go check.
Yeah.
Then there's the laundry list persuasion that I like to mock.
We saw recently, it's very common.
We saw recently with Alyssa Milano.
She did a tweet in which she listed nine reasons that President Trump should be impeached.
Now, one of the tells for not having one good reason is if you list nine of them.
Because people who have one strong killer reason will be clever enough to know, well, it's just a tweet.
Let me pound this one good reason and I'm done.
I don't need another reason because this one just makes the case.
If you need nine reasons, you're sort of signaling that you understand none of them are really strong.
So I recommend that when you're faced with that and you're trying to argue against it, don't go all whack-a-mole and try to debunk each of the nine.
Because when you get to the ninth thing, they always repeat, and they start at the first one as if you hadn't just talked about it.
And that's been my experience.
So instead, just say, well, don't have time for nine items, but tell me what is your strongest point on the list.
And would you agree that if I can debunk your strongest point, you'll rethink the rest.
And that's the best you can do is to give them, you know, assuming that you actually can debunk their strongest point.
And if it's a laundry list persuasion, you probably can.
It probably isn't going to be hard because they're all weak points.
Then you've affected their confidence.
And maybe later they can go back and change their mind.
It's hard to change people's mind in the moment.
So those are some of the many examples of loser think.
What about using the clap emoji in between every word that you tweet?
How's that work?
Is that good?
I'm sort of anti-emoji, except for the basics.
Yeah, I don't like too many hieroglyphics in my tweets.
I don't want to go full Egyptology.
It's like, okay, all right, there's a hat.
There's the turd.
We've got the turd hat, the eye.
Speeching it all together.
I'm praying for a turd eye.
No, I don't know what it is.
I give up.
What's this zucchini doing here?
I was at one of those little girly shops yesterday because I was with my kids and they wanted to go into unicorns and cotton candy toys.
There are so many poop toys now.
But they're all rainbow-colored, like rainbow poops and blue poops and pink poops.
It's really weird that feces has become such a popular icon for little girls.
Well, you know, once farts became the primary comedic tool for every kid, like every Disney movie would have farting or something.
You know, you've got to figure somebody's going to try to take it up a level.
They're like, all right, farts are very, very entertaining for a certain subset of the population.
Farts are hot right now.
What can we do to refresh this a little bit?
Let's take it up a level, a creative level.
We'll go full turd.
Full turd.
Never go full turd.
Yeah, we can't wait till something else comes, you know, like the vomit or something.
A bunch of vomit pillows going around.
I just saw a packaging for a product that I guess is part turkey, part duck.
And instead of calling it a duck key, I guess that was one option, they went with turduck.
Turduck.
Except the first four words are turd.
Yeah.
And the last letters are uck.
Turd uck.
I wonder how many people are buying turduck.
They definitely didn't run that by like a 13-year-old kid.
Because they would have caught that.
Or me, which is basically the same thing.
Basically the same idea.
So what are Alyssa Milano's chances of taking the White House?
You know what's the funny thing? Is if she entered the Democratic race tomorrow, she'd be polling the top four.
Strangely enough, I have a lot of respect for Alyssa Milano's political work.
She gets the same diminishment that I get.
No matter what I do, I've written three best-selling books on different topics of proving your life and persuasion and now loserthink.
And online, people still say, and so the cartoonist says something.
Let's all ignore the cartoonists.
What do cartoonists know?
And Alyssa Malavica is the same thing.
It's like, actress Alyssa Milano.
It's like, she's done so much in the political realm that she's more like a political activist.
Why not call her that?
She's been very effective for her side.
So even if I don't agree with anything she says, I've got to give her props.
She's putting in the work.
She sacrificed her career because you don't get the same good jobs once you get into the political sphere.
So I actually have a lot of respect for her, but just disagree with some of the opinions.
Yeah, I mean, and you, you know, when you kind of moved into the political sphere, how did your audience react?
Did you all of a sudden make like 10 times as much money for speaking out, or did you lose some audience?
Well, my income went down by about a third, and I lost 75% of my friends and a whole lot of money.
And it's dangerous to go in public now.
I wouldn't accept a speaking engagement on a university, for example.
I would consider that physically dangerous for me.
So, yeah, it had a lot of costs.
But, you know, I didn't intend to be political.
I started out just by writing about Trump's persuasion skills because I thought, oh, I can see something that maybe other people don't have a window on because they don't have that same background.
And it was so popular, it became hugely viral because what I did was, accidentally, I explained why Donald Trump makes sense, meaning that people were looking at him and saying, hey, crazy clown, random guy.
And then I did a persuasive explanation about why this is all technique.
And not only is it technique, it's the best I've ever seen.
And not only that, he's going to be your next president.
And people read that and thought, oh, that's not the way I was seeing this.
And a lot of people started buying into that frame.
And indeed, that's the frame that was the most predictive.
I think a lot of people think that just by saying that you're persuading people to vote somehow, I think that they take when they're in that kind of tribal state of mind.
You can't acknowledge that.
You can't say that.
Well, they're correct.
I asked in a tweet one time how many people I had personally influenced to vote for Trump.
And I think I forget the exact number, but it was a whole bunch of people.
I think 1,500 people answered the tweet and said that they voted for Trump because of the way I explained him.
Now, imagine you extrapolate that.
That's just the people who saw the tweet, answered the tweet, are on my Twitter feed, and there were 1,500 of them.
My best guess, I may have moved a quarter of a million people.
Shame on you.
So, you know what?
The funny thing is that when Hillary complains about all the reasons she lost the election, she never mentions me.
That's the number, yeah.
Sad.
That's like it.
That's the line.
So what's some loser think that you see happen on the right?
Just, you know, I'm curious if common mistakes we make in our thinking, people that are more conservative.
Well, people will be surprised that loserthink tries to balance that out.
So it's not anti-left or anti-right.
I try to show a little on both.
One of the examples is the idea of friction.
And people like to act as though friction doesn't change behavior.
But in the real world, if you make anything harder, fewer people are going to do it.
There's almost no variance to that.
That's what friction does.
It makes you less likely to do it.
So when we talk about gun control, you'll hear people on the right say, gun control doesn't work because then only criminals will get guns.
But that's ignoring the fact that friction works really every time.
You could argue that it doesn't work well enough, but to argue that it has no effect is ignoring everything we know about humanity and the entire history of people.
Friction matters.
Now, a bad law, of course, isn't going to help anybody, and it's still true that criminals will get guns.
But certainly there are situations in the middle where there's somebody who wasn't a hardened criminal, but they got an idea to shoot up their school.
And maybe if it had been a little harder to get a gun, maybe time had gone by and they changed their mind.
Maybe they'd say, ah, it's too hard to get a gun.
It would put me, might flag me as one of those people.
So friction just always works.
And people on the left and the right like to pretend it doesn't.
It's the same argument for the wall, by the way, the wall on the border with Mexico.
The people on the left say, well, the wall's no good because drugs will still go through.
That's not the right argument.
Nobody's trying to stop all the drugs.
You could put a lock on your house, but it doesn't stop all the burglaries.
You could carry your own gun for self-defense, but it doesn't stop all those people with guns from getting shot by somebody else who has a gun.
So friction is what you're trying to create.
In the case of the wall, you're really just trying to reduce the amount of human manpower and people power.
I guess manpower is sexist, right?
Human power.
Woman power.
Yeah, you're trying to reduce the amount of people you need, and they can be allocated toward those places where you really need people, and the wall can do some of the work that people would have done.
So friction, that's a good example.
Okay.
Well, I mean, I see that in my own experience because I can't buy a gun in California.
They put up so many hurdles, it's just almost impossible.
But you can.
You know, that's true.
I live in California, and I was recently going to get a handgun, and I started looking into it.
It's like, oh, that's a lot of work.
So I cannot add to my arsenal easily.
Yeah, it's like you've got to take the written exam.
By the way, I like to tell everybody I'm very pro-Second Amendment because I think it reduces the number of home invasions in my house.
Oh, you just tell people that.
I put up the Gadsden flag.
I put up the, you know, don't tread on me.
And then people just assume I have a ton of guns.
Yeah, anybody who comes to my house has to assume that I'm armed and ready.
That would be your smart assumption.
So let's say that Hollywood producers came to you and said they're going to do the gritty live-action reboot of Dilbert.
What's the cast going to look like?
Oh, the cast.
I'm really bad to remember the names of actors.
Who was the actor who played the young son on Arrested Development?
Do you remember him?
Yeah, Michael Cena.
Cena, it is Cena.
Oh, no.
Is it?
Shoot.
Something like that.
Sarah, Sarah.
Sarah.
That's right.
Sarah, Michael Sarah.
Yeah.
I absolutely love him as a comedic actor.
I like to see Jack Black play the boss.
Oh, yeah.
Kathy Griffin was the voice of Alice when it was an animated show.
But I suppose she would still be a great choice for the TV show.
So those are the ones that jump to mind.
Would that be gritty, though?
I'm thinking gritty.
Yeah, it's got to be like Liam Neeson as Dilbert.
Yeah, Dilbert's down on his luck.
It's got to be like the Joker.
His family has been wiped out.
He's seeking revenge.
I'm thinking Joker, where all the media would freak out and say this movie's going to cause everybody to shoot everybody office shootings.
Yeah.
Good joke, speechless.
Good joke, Jerk.
Yeah, there probably won't be a Joker version of Dilbert.
Ah, man, he's shooting down my hopes and dreams here.
Dilbert.
Yeah, we used to gather around and watch the TV show when I was growing up.
Joker?
No, the cartoon of Dilbert.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Really?
See?
Well, you have to.
Got a real fan of here.
Excellent taste.
That's it.
So I think one of the main things you talk about, at least early on in this book, is you talk about how we have these bubbles.
And one of the reasons we keep going back to LoserThink is because everybody in our, you know, we never break out of our way of thinking because we're in this bubble or this echo chamber.
So what are some ways that we can break out of that?
Do you think that's like a do you think that's a root of these kind of problems?
And then how can we break out of that if we're in a bubble like that?
I was expecting more turd questions.
I can't believe that.
And also.
Well, so I talk in loserthink.
I advise people to make sure they don't get locked in one news silo.
So don't watch just the news on the right or just the news on the left.
If you're not sampling the other side, you really don't know what the other side is even saying.
So you can't evaluate whether you're hearing the best argument because you haven't heard the other argument and you're probably lacking context.
But specifically, I say that if a fact is reported as a fact by either the left or the right, but the other side says it isn't, it probably isn't.
Now, that's not a 100% rule, but that's a good one to keep you skeptical.
If they both report the fact that's the same, if they say a hurricane's coming, you know, pack up your flower bed.
It's going to be trouble.
But if one says, you know, President Trump ate a puppy, and the other side says, we can't find any evidence of this puppy eating situation, then probably it didn't happen.
And the other advice I give is to make predictions based on your worldview.
Now, you could put those predictions into the world, tell a friend, tell a spouse, write it down, tweet about it.
And then there's a permanent record, so you can't have selective memory, which is a normal human condition where we remember the things we like and forget the things that were unpleasant, or at least forget things that didn't fit with our view of ourselves, would be a better way to say it.
So once you put it down in the universe, people can go back to you and say, you know how you said Kamala Harris was going to be the next nominee?
Here's your tweet.
And here's what happened.
How's your predicting now?
Now, of course, I fall into every loser think error myself.
And it helps that my Twitter followers remind me often.
And that's what I recommend.
We sort of police each other when you fall into loserthink because it's so easy.
It's just a reflex.
People use analogies when they shouldn't.
People read minds, but they say, well, in this case, I'm good at it.
So we all make the same mistakes, and I don't mind when people call me out for it.
And when I make bad predictions, it's useful for people to call me out because then I can say, okay, why did I get that wrong?
And with the case of the Kamala Harris thing, there was some information I didn't have, which was the only thing that mattered, which is she's the worst campaigner in the history of campaigns.
I wonder if she would win a school president.
Yeah, we should see if she could run for school president.
Maybe she would win.
Small school.
Yeah.
I'm not talking about a big city school, but yeah.
Suburban, maybe, maybe country school, Appalachia.
We're running low on time here.
We really appreciate you coming on.
Do you have a final, you know, since you are the modern-day Nostradamus?
Yeah, if you'd like to hypnotize our audience or something, here's and give us a final prediction time for you to do that.
When will the world end?
Give me a topic in the news, and I'll give you my prediction.
Topic in the news.
The apocalypse.
See how I turned that around.
Okay, when will climate change destroy the Earth?
12 years.
I plan to be dead by then, so we'll be fine.
Here's what's going to happen with climate change.
And in a way, it's already happening.
Are you familiar with Generation 4 nuclear power?
You mentioned it in your book.
Do you have heard that term?
Yeah, you mentioned it in your book, I think.
Yeah, so for the people listening who haven't heard of it, so the regular power plants that exist in the United States and in most places are the old technology.
And people don't realize that existing nuclear plants in this country were designed before computers, literally slide rulers.
Now, the new stuff, and let's say Bill Gates has a big investment in a company called TerraPower, just as one example, there are a number of startups in this field.
And what they've designed using supercomputers, which can simulate different fuel and design strategies, they've come up with designs which they're ready to test.
They just need a location that eats nuclear waste as their fuel.
So these would actually reduce nuclear waste because they eat the existing waste as fuel.
And secondly, they're designed so if there's a big problem, they not only don't melt down, they just turn off and they just sit there with no nuclear event.
So that's what the new designs can do.
The remaining problem, of course, is the economics.
And we know how to solve that by making them smaller and modular.
And then you just kind of bang them out in parts.
Once it's all the same parts and you say, okay, the United States is going to do a whole bunch of this kind, then the economies, the scales kick in, and it becomes very rapidly the cheapest technology.
Now, the reason I brought it up is you asked me about the future of climate change.
And the answer is that whether you think climate change is cataclysmic or you think it's a Chinese hoax, you still want to pursue Generation 4 nuclear and really maybe even before that, some of the safe designs for Generation 3 because I think none of them have ever.
I don't think there's any Generation 3 nuclear reactor that ever had a meltdown.
It's all the older ones that we know about.
So no matter what you think of climate change, you want as much nuclear as you can get as fast as you can, as cheap as you can, as safe as you can.
And everybody wants that.
It happens to be the solution to climate change that's the most productive, along with solar, along with other green energies.
So you don't want to skimp on the other things because they're actually going in a good direction right now.
But the smart people will tell you you need to do everything, and you need to do everything fast.
The people who don't believe climate change is even a problem still like anything that's economical and good and gives you energy and helps underdeveloped countries power up, keeps the lights on.
I mean, I live in California and there was sort of state.
Well, both of you do, I guess.
My house just barely missed the last set of blackouts.
And I swear to God, I think if the lights had gone out once because of bad management of the state, which is really the reason the lights go out, I think I would have just sold my house and moved because I don't want to live in a third world state.
So that's the long answer to what's the future of climate change.
Yeah, mine is better safer nuclear power.
Yeah, my power was out for four days last week.
Yeah.
Brutal.
Kyle barely made it through.
Yeah, it seems silly that the first generation of nuclear plants, they decided that a good thing to happen when there's a problem is just for the whole thing to melt down.
That seems like a silly design decision.
Well, the non-engineering explanation is that the older and current designs, the electricity and the power is necessary to prevent a meltdown.
Whereas the new generations, when the electricity goes out, it can't function.
It can't do anything.
So it just sort of sits there and doesn't melt down.
So that's a pretty big difference.
We all need to learn to just sit there and not melt down.
I think.
I think we got something good for our lives out of this.
That's wise.
That's so wise.
Wow.
Any book that I publish, can I put on the back, Ethan Nicole is so wise?
And then your name, Scott.
Yes, you can use that blurb.
Okay, thank you.
So wise.
You could just shorten it to so wise.
So wise.
All right.
Perfect.
All right.
Well, your book is out now, Loser Think.
And where do you want people to look for that at?
Is Amazon all right?
Everywhere books are sold.
We got audio books and Kindles, and Amazon's always a good place, but Barnes ⁇ Noble, any place they sell books.
All right.
Beautiful.
Well, Scott Adams has solved climate change for us, and he's bringing the nation together by helping us to stop our loserthink.
That's right.
So thanks for coming on, Scott.
You're welcome.
Yeah, you're welcome.
Thank you so much.
Everybody say thank you.
Thank you, guys.
Thanks.
Bye.
Bye.
All right, Scott Adams.
That was a great conversation with old Scotty Adams.
I really liked him.
He's a really interesting guy.
He is.
He's not a normal thinker.
So I like that.
So my dad actually told me to ask that first question.
I said, I'm talking to Scott Adams.
Do you want to have any ideas?
Oh, yeah.
He said, my dad works for an aeronautic space corporation or something like that.
I was like, NASA?
It's like that.
Wait, what did I say?
Did I say aeronautics?
Whatever you said it was.
Aerospace would be.
Aerospace nautical something space.
No, you said whatever you would.
It'd be like if you were talking about McDonald's and you were like a burger manufacturing restaurant.
It's like, it's McDonald's.
He talked to says that.
Well, everybody knows what it is.
I guess I was thinking, I didn't know if I should say, but I've probably said it on the show before.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, sorry.
It's Boeing.
It's not NASA, actually.
Oh, but you said your dad sent you man to the moon.
Right.
Because NASA doesn't do anything.
No.
Okay.
They contract all the manufacturers.
Yeah, but everybody knows what Boeing is.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, whatever.
We're going to read some not hate mail.
We're going to read it.
Some from iTunes reviews.
No, not iTunes, a popular podcast.
Oh, yeah.
Popular MP3 distribution platform with a picture of an apple on it.
Okay.
I really miss Adam 4.
You want that?
Well, it's kind of the hate mail section, but there's not, I mean, it's not technical hate.
I really miss Adam Ford.
I can only get like five of these to come up.
You have to like scroll and then hit more, and it's like, yeah, it's not very good.
So we're looking at iTunes reviews because we're so flattered by them, and we want you guys to know we read them.
But I also have this issue here where I can't get them to come up.
I don't know what I'm doing wrong.
Oh, see all.
There we go.
We should have had some prepared.
Yeah.
Okay.
This is the best podcast I have ever listened to.
Despite the Babylon B going sharply downhill since Adam Ford left, this podcast is one of the best things to come out of the site in decades.
Oh, holy cow.
I just hit more and this is like a five-paragraph massive review.
He says, as a homeschooler, he appreciates the explanation of all the references.
So I'm not going to read the whole thing, but thank you, Dad's Bud 11.
Nice.
That's Bud.
I don't know if it's Dad's marijuana or dad's.
Dad's Bud.
So needed.
Great pod.
Much cast.
That's from El Blown Apart.
That's a good one.
Nice and simple.
All right, here's one.
I want you to read this one, Ethan.
The Carmen.
Do you have that up there?
I can't find it.
How does it start?
I feel like this guy referenced my not all banjos hashtag.
I was glad to find out I wasn't racist just because I like banjos and my musical choices.
All right.
Oh, here it is.
Okay.
Yeah, I want you to jimbo69.
A2J.
Can I not say that number?
Flowermen.
This is from Yojimbo.
Number, number, number.
A2J 2019 style.
Yo, what up, fellas?
Dispute Carmen.
I just love what you're putting down in the streets, fellas.
I remember K-Max was on a while back, and he brought back fond memories of when we gangsters made A2J.
I think that's addicted to Jesus is what A2J is.
I'm now addicted to your pod.
Addictions, you know, everybody got them.
Keep up the good work.
It's so hip and fresh.
This pod is the champion.
Carmen out like a witch.
Seeing to wait.
Carmen out like a witch, seeing the Holy Ghost.
Peace, my brothers.
There we go.
Review from Carmen.
I feel like we need a real sound clip of Carmen rapping.
Carmen approved.
I love how he raps in that weird old Brooklyn guy.
He really sounds like your uncle trying to rap.
Yeah.
M. N. Scorpio says, pretty, comma, funny.
And then he says, I strenuously recommend this podcast.
That's good.
He's like pulling a muscle.
He's referencing the Candace Owens episode.
Oh, did we do a straight?
I strenuously object.
I strenuously object.
Someone's very happy here about us having Doug Tanapel on and that Earthworm Jim is a Christian.
This one says, you know who else likes this podcast?
Your mom.
But they gave us five stars, so I guess that's good.
Some don't make sense.
This generic podcast distribution platform is terrible because I can't.
If you like click away from it, you end up the Babylon Bee is often fairly funny.
Five stars.
I think he was referencing a different hate mail.
Oh, we did that once, I think.
There's a one-star one here.
Shall we read a one-star one?
While the Babylon B usually recognizes the potential for satire and the hubris of others, this episode declines with the tire critique of older generations.
Oh, yeah, we read this one.
We did this one.
We did that one.
Yeah, it's kind of funny because we have a lot more reviews now, but it only shows you.
Yeah, it's picking and choosing.
Well, I guess maybe if they just click the star, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're writing it and it doesn't show it.
I don't know.
I don't know.
This guy says, I love the B five stars.
When is John Christ coming on for an interview?
Not anytime soon.
That was that was this was written a month ago.
And I don't think we're going to be having John Christ on.
So, too soon?
Maybe too soon.
Too soon.
Anyway, I just like to say thank you guys for writing these interviews.
I mean, these reviews, inter-reviews.
And we appreciate it.
Yeah.
Because it gives us warm fuzzies.
This, oh, this guy says, be careful.
The humor is a little bit forced, like it was supposed to be the main thing, right?
Thinking Christians know that the main thing is Christ Jesus, not trying to be clever.
Just over 50% of the humor is fine.
Did we read that one?
I feel like we're getting into ones we read.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's funny.
Because we thought it was fun.
It's bizarre.
It's two stars.
Just over 50% of the humor.
Because we were trying to figure out what the star rating should be if you think 50% is fine.
Did we do this one?
Okay.
I think we should abandon this right now.
I feel this guy's happy that we built a paywall.
He says, You built the paywall.
Oh, yeah.
Must be Trump.
Five stars for building the wall.
All right, let's do like one more.
We can find one here.
One more.
Didn't know what I was missing, says Noah's mom.
I do like that this person identifies herself as Noah's mom.
Like she had a kid.
I have a brother named Noah.
It's possible.
No wonder it's the five-star.
And she says, Just when I thought I reached the bottom of the podcast barrel, I decided to give the bee a try.
Wow.
Fantastic podcast and possibly the most honest Christian podcast.
Dot dot dot dot ever.
Funny, entertaining, and great content.
Don't miss this.
Everybody listen to Noah's Mom.
Yeah, Noah's Mom knows what she's doing.
Noah's what she's doing.
I do like the idea that she listened to every podcast on the planet and there was like what's the bottom of the barrel in podcasts?
What's that?
That would be pretty bad.
Isn't like 200 and something new podcasts a day or something they get launched.
Yeah.
It's like, wow.
I think some fan fiction, like reviewing fan fiction of some like Minecraft adult.
I don't know.
Going down a bad path here.
Did you see that little biography that they wrote in the New York Times of that girl who launched the podcast?
And she like, oh, yeah.
Do you remember this?
It was like, I don't know, it was probably six months ago.
And she like would record them on her phone in the library.
And it was like, she's like, my podcast is going to be called like the Great Advice Podcast.
And it was like the most generic idea for a podcast you could possibly think of.
Was she real?
What was it?
It was a real girl.
And she like, and she only recorded like seven episodes and then abandoned it in six or seven episodes and abandoned the whole thing.
And she got this whole write-up in the New York Times about how hard it is to launch in the podcast space and all this.
That was really weird.
And she was all proud of it.
Like she's look, they shared my journey in the podcast world.
And people are like, you recorded it, you know, the worst podcast idea on a phone.
Cool ideas.
And it was like the ultimate millennial stereotype of like, well, I tried.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know what else I could do to get success.
I remember when Conan O'Brien decided to do a podcast, this is like well after.
I mean, this is recently.
He just recently decided to podcast.
And like all the newspaper stories about were like Conan O'Brien is bringing podcasts, making podcasts cool, or as if he invented the whole idea of having a podcast.
Yeah, it's really weird.
It's just anyway.
We thought of it.
Yeah, we did.
No, we were way.
And I remember when we made this podcast, I was like, man, are people even going to want to listen to another podcast?
There's so many.
Yeah.
Well, if you have a certain level of fame, like I think some of the people from the office launched the podcast and it's like, boom, number one.
You know, because it's just, you can just launch a podcast and you're going to be successful at that level.
With us, it was enough of a gamble because our podcast is so different from our site.
Yeah.
And nobody really knows who we are.
We have no idea how this was going to go.
But it's going well.
We appreciate it.
We really enjoy it.
It's a whole other outlet than the stories.
It's completely different.
Yeah.
It was reassuring to find that people actually enjoyed it because we had no idea what people would think when we did this.
Yeah.
I saw The Onions launching another podcast.
They used to do one and they're doing a new one.
And I think it's going to be like satire or comedy, which is what we tried and it's just not good.
So we'll see.
Onion, Onion copying us.
Yeah, once again.
Sad.
Well.
All right.
Let's see.
Was that an episode?
That was an episode, so let's cut it off.
And we're going to head off into our yacht.
We're going to kick all the homeless people out.
And the banquet table is only for those who are just in the robes of a Babylon Bee subscription.
So if you want to do that, go to BabylonB.com slash plans and you get free.
Wait, no, you don't get free.
You do get a free something.
I love when somebody says subscribe, pay money, and you get free.
There's actually a legal, there's like legal implications when you say the word free for advertising.
And a lot of times it's used wrong.
Because if you're paying money, it's not free.
Wow, thank you.
Anyway.
Law.
That's my legal expertise.
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm just saying.
Anyway, so go to BabylonB.com slash plans.
You get a little gift sent to you.
You get full-length, ad-free podcasts.
Correct.
And you get some other cool benefits.
So do that.
Yeah.
Join us on our audio yacht.
Indeed.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.