Scott Adams and his book Wynne Bigley are scrutinized for framing Donald Trump as a "master persuader" whose victory resulted from mystical hypnosis rather than political realities. Hosts critique Adams' regressive views on gender, his conspiracy theories regarding an Islamic caliphate, and his dismissal of cognitive bias as universal truths. By comparing Trump's rise to Hitler while ignoring standard tactics, Adams promotes a subjective reality where facts don't matter, effectively attempting to turn Trump into a religion through unverified persuasion techniques and cult-like affirmations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:01:44
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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All right, I just want to say I don't know what we're getting into.
The Hands On This Cover00:09:10
I don't know what book you've picked, and I want to apologize to Garrison Davis in advance.
That's right, motherfuckers.
It's a book episode of Behind the Bastards, the only podcast.
That's right.
That's what we are.
What have you done to us?
What's happening?
I'm having a great day, Sophie.
I'm feeling good.
I'm sitting down.
I'm having my first cafe Ole made with milk from my girl.
Oh, you're making a cafe Olay.
Good for you.
I think that just means coffee with milk.
If not, don't tell me.
I don't care.
Anyway, Garrison, how are you doing today?
Hi, Gare.
I'm doing fine.
I'm having a chai tea brave.
I also just said to make everyone mad about saying chai tea.
Anyway, I'm drinking some of this Cuban coffee that I smuggled into the country to support the Castro regime, specifically to make people in Florida angry.
And yeah, it's delightful.
It's wonderful.
I'll get you some when you come over next to watch that Nazi movie we're going to watch.
Jesus Christ.
But speaking of Nazis, do you know what we have to read today?
No, not quite.
It's a book by Dilbert creator Scott Adams.
No.
Why?
I just saw the fucking Dil Burrito on Twitter today.
I'm like, oh, God.
Oh, man.
Yeah, the Dil Burrito is a fun story.
I am currently writing.
I just finished part one last night and I'm starting on part two today, the Scott Adams episodes, which will be soon with someone else, a cartoonist, as the guest.
But I wanted to sit down with you and go over a Scott Adams book, Garrison, because when I was a wee lad, like literally like 10 or 11, I read some of Scott Adams' books.
And I felt like this would be a bonding experience for all of us and for Sophie too.
Why?
The book we're reading today is Wynn Bigley, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter.
In some versions of the book, I think he credits Donald Trump as a co-author, even though he's not.
It's his book about...
So for a little bit of context, Gare, Scott starts this comic called Dilbert in the late right at the tail end of the 1980s, kind of the end of the Reagan era.
And it gets really big around 1995.
So early in the Clinton era, right at the start of the dot-com boom, right after kind of a bunch of companies of, you know, these big companies like GE did huge rounds of layoffs.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
I looked at the cover.
Oh, no.
Oh, oh, yeah.
Sophie, why don't you show Garrison that?
For a while, people thought Scott Adams liberal or maybe even kind of stealth left-wing guy because Dilbert was, some people saw it as kind of like an anti-capitalist.
Establishment or something.
Yeah.
And a lot of it's about how stupid these like mainstream management tactics are and these things that like all of these corporate leaders are doing, how like fucked up and often cruel they were.
The reality is that like Scott was just bitching about things that annoyed him personally and is absolutely in no way anti-capitalist or anti-really anti-any of the bad things that he used to write about.
Jesus Christ, the hardcover is $32.
Yeah, it's not.
I didn't pay for it.
Don't worry.
So I'm looking at the cover.
I have to be cagey about how I don't pay for books now.
Because the last time I told people, Amazon closed the loophole.
Oh, really?
Really?
Yeah, they won't let you return a book when it's past 10% read or something like that now.
Ah, damn.
They caught me.
So I've had to get creative, but don't worry, everyone.
I'm still in compliance with the law as far as you know.
Yeah, I bet.
Sure.
I've never seen you illegally in pirate media before.
No, of course you haven't, Garrison.
I would never do anything like that.
Can I just say before we get into more of your alleged crimes, really nailed the hands on this cover?
Have you seen it yet, Garrison?
Yeah, looking at it.
Yeah, he's good at hands.
Yeah, he's all three fingers on.
So they're very puffy.
Was King Charles the goal for the hand model for this?
It was probably just Scott Adams himself.
Does he also have really, really, really, really swollen hands?
Maybe he just sees the world the way he draws Dilbert.
Like, what if that's just how he interprets reality?
It's just through these Dilbert drawings.
It would have to have an impact on your brain after a while and not a positive one.
Clearly, it hasn't.
Yeah, no, his brain's not working correct from what I can tell.
Scott, one of the things that we all learned from the great Bill Watterson is that the best thing you can do as a creator of popular art is never let anyone know anything about you.
Quit at the height of your fame and then spend the rest of your days as a hermit in the woods painting landscapes.
Yeah.
Scott did not do that.
He started a blog, which was a terrible mistake.
And then he took the Twitter approach.
And then he got on Twitter, which was an even worse mistake.
And over time, people became aware that Scott had some pretty regressive opinions, specifically around women.
He starts posting some like incel adjacent shit.
And then when Trump comes around, everyone is kind of surprised who hasn't been following him closely that he gets like super into Trump.
And at first, he takes this like weasely approach where he's like, well, I don't agree with him about a lot of stuff, but I'm really impressed by what a master persuader he is.
He's like a super genius communicator.
And he's playing, he's one of those 3D chess people.
He's like one of the first Trumps playing a game of 3D chess on all of you.
And I think one of the funniest things, so Scott, when you really dig into all of his claims, is wrong about nearly everything.
Like Trump didn't, wasn't a master persuader.
Like he took it, his first election was largely a product of taking advantage of the way the Electoral College works.
He, he never got most of the country on board with his ideas.
He's not good at persuading people.
He was good at speaking to the bigotry and the anger of a chunk of people who are already bigoted and angry.
But Scott gets convinced that Donald Trump is basically like a magician, like a psychic magician taking over people's minds.
Yeah.
And thinks that this is a good thing because Scott is into hypnosis and he's also into affirmations.
Interesting.
I've actually read a, there is a, there's a whole book about Trump's ties to like a, to a, to a NEW Thought church back in, back in like the 60s and 70s.
That focuses a lot on how, like hypnosis became popular in like this weird like New York business scene that Trump was in as a kid and how it kind of informs the way that he goes about in in like um interactions and the way he does affirmations.
Yeah yeah, there's a.
The kind of guys that he's super, that Trump is kind of inspired by, are sort of like a mix of kind of quasi-prosperity gospel dudes and, like Napoleon Hill, think and grow rich kind of people.
Yeah, where it's it's talking about like yeah, the power of positive thinking and all this sort of stuff in creating wealth and opportunities for yourself.
Scott's really into that stuff too and I noticed this as a kid.
It was really interesting.
Like his first book or not his first book, but the first one I read had some like pretty reasonable stuff in it.
Like he's very, he was early on very motivated by what's called the Peter principle, which is this idea and like business theory that people tend to get promoted past their level of competence and that this is like a problem right that like, people who are good at job, who are good at their job, get promoted to a point where they're no longer good at what they're doing, and that this is what causes a lot, which is, as far as i've seen, quite quite an accurate uh thing.
And Scott takes from this this idea that, like um, you should always be aware that that, at any given time in the world, like most people are, are idiots right, most people don't know what they're doing, don't understand the world around them um, are kind of like in over their heads um, and then he uses that to kind of pivot, to like, so I developed this system of affirmations and uh, you know I can't explain why it works, but it clearly does.
And if you develop like, adopt this system for yourself, you know, maybe you'll be able to achieve things that would otherwise be impossible.
Um, which struck me as odd as a little kid um, and as Scott gets kind of older, he gets more and more into this stuff um, and it's it's interesting.
He talks a lot about how like, when he was young, he took mushrooms um, and it was this wonderful experience for him um, and it changed his life uh, but people shouldn't do it.
Trump Was No Ordinary Politician00:11:40
It changed his life specifically because it showed him that like, reality was largely a product of of thought and of like the, the perception.
But then he came to the conclusion that like, no one else should do drugs.
You should just read my books, because i'm going to recreate the psychedelic experience.
Only I'm smart enough to be able to do this.
Everyone else will buy my books and I'll explain it to you.
So I'm going to start by reading the preamble, which he's called The Day My Reality Split Into Two.
Which is horrible.
Oh boy, Garrison.
I have the Amazon preview, so I can look at all the different names of all the different chapters and parts.
Oh yeah.
And there's some wild titles throughout this book.
Once we get through this preamble, you can let me know which ones you most want to hear about and we'll go into them.
But I feel like we should start where he does.
Yes, yeah.
In February of 2016, I began to experience two separate realities at the same time.
In one reality, candidate for President Donald Trump had just ended his chances of becoming president of the United States by refusing to disavow the KKK and David Duke on a CNN interview with Jake Tapper.
Trump said he didn't hear the question.
This was a big problem for candidate Trump, and it was also a big problem for me.
I was one of the earliest public figures to have predicted Trump's win, and I was in the middle of an unplanned career pivot from guy who created the Dilbert comic to something like a political pundit.
Sure.
Sure.
Yeah.
Scott, buddy.
That is how people see you.
I'll check it.
Look, let's check in on that in 2023.
Let's see.
Let's see how good that's going.
Oh, boy.
I have an unfortunate fact dump for you, Scott, and it's that till the day you die, the only way people will refer to you is the Dilbert guy.
Like they call you, someone will say, have you heard what Scott Adams said?
And inevitably the response is, who's Scott Adams?
And then you say, the Dilbert guy.
That is how everyone talks about you.
As I've been writing the Scott Adams episodes, I've had that conversation like 11 times.
Yeah, I'm writing a piece about Scott Adams, who, you know, the Dilbert guy.
Oh, boy.
My blog traffic went through the roof whenever I wrote about Trump's skill as a persuader.
I don't know much about politics, but I know skillful persuasion when I see it.
As it turned out, there was a big demand for what I called my persuasion filter on the race.
Producers for news outlets, both large and small, were scrambling to get me on their shows.
I wrote and spoke so much about Trump's persuasion skills that people labeled me a Trump supporter, although not in the sense of supporting his policies.
By then, my writing about Trump had already cost me half of my friends.
My lucrative speaking career had dropped to zero, and I didn't expect any new Dilbert licensing deals.
I had become toxic for any kind of mixed crowd.
But I was okay with my situation because I expected to be right in my prediction that Trump would win it all.
Winning fixes most problems.
So true.
So true, buddy.
Yeah, you've only, your popularity only increased after Trump won.
Although the polls disagreed with me, I thought my prediction of a Trump win was looking good until the Jake Tapper interview on CNN.
In this version of reality, I had foolishly alienated my friends, annihilated my professional reputation, and cut my income in half.
And all I would get in return was a Wikipedia entry under my name saying I had supported an alleged racist for president.
The situation was less than ideal.
I publicly disavowed Trump because of his CNN interview, just to get out of the blast zone.
But by then, it was too late to salvage everything I had already lost.
Like an idiot, I had managed to turn a respected career as one of the top cartoonists in the country into a grimy embarrassment that wouldn't wash off.
That was one version of reality.
I experienced a second version of reality at the same time.
This version involved Trump brushing off the CNN-KKK controversy and going on to win the presidency.
In that version of reality, I would be redeemed in the end, at least in terms of being a credible political forecaster.
Winning always feels good.
So it's interesting because I went through a period of thinking, oh my God, Trump's going to win.
And then, oh, my God, maybe Trump won't win.
And then, oh, my God, Trump's going to win during the 2016 election.
And I never interpreted it as I was living in two different realities.
I interpreted it as American politics is very unpredictable.
Almost anything can and does happen.
And I didn't know what was going to occur, which is how most people would put that, like describe that.
I think it's interesting his like obsession with like clearly he views predicting the presidential race as a win, which I think probably is part of why he went so crazy when Trump lost, because he takes it deeply personally that Trump lost.
Anyway, interesting, interesting stuff.
Yeah, especially because his predictions seem to go hand in hand with his own like affirmations.
Yeah.
So you kind of need them both to come true in order for your system to make any kind of internal logic.
Yeah.
Part of this is because, again, he's like, he's really, he's convinced not just that like he's not saying what Trump is doing is a credible political election strategy, which I think any honest person has to admit it was.
Obviously, he won.
What he's saying is that Trump is a master persuader.
And so for that to happen, he needs to be actually convincing people he's the best choice for president, as opposed to, again, kind of feeding into this grievance politics that the right had been stoking for forever and becoming the avatar of it, which is a different thing.
But Scott had to believe that he had to kind of buy into the idea that like the mass of Americans had come around to Trump's political ideology, which was never the case.
And so he's got to like leap into contortions in order to justify kind of what happens.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
Scott ends this little chapter by saying, for the next several months, I lived both realities, but I trusted only one of them.
I doubled down on my prediction of a Trump win.
If that sounds crazy to you, well, that's nothing.
We're just getting started.
There's plenty more crazy in this book.
Oh boy.
Sure is, buddy.
Introduction, where I prime you for the rest.
I'm a trained hypnotist and I'm going to tell you.
Close book.
Close book.
Yeah.
Richard.
Slap that shut.
No.
The only person I want to hear talk about their hypnotism training is Werner Herzog because he's going to hypnotize a chicken.
And that is, that was a great time for everybody.
I do not think that the Dilbert guy can be a successful hypnotist.
I'm sorry.
I don't.
No, no.
For one thing, his eyes are as lively as a Dilbert comic.
It's just unsettling.
I'm not going to look into them.
So here's Scott again.
I'm going to tell you about the spookiest year of my life.
It happened between June 2015 and November 2016.
Okay, that's a little more than a year.
Everything you are about to read in this book is true, as far as I know.
I don't expect you to believe all of it, but I promise it's true to the best of my knowledge.
I've waited decades to deliver the message in this book.
I waited because the world wasn't ready, but also because the messenger, yours truly, didn't have the skill to deliver it right.
The story was too hard to tell.
Yeah.
This is just one step removed from a religion.
No, well, that's the thing.
So when Scott talks about, and this is in a book that he wrote a fucking 20 years before this one almost, like 15, 16 years, he talks about how like, as a kid, he realized that like prayer didn't work.
And so he became an atheist, but he didn't like atheism.
And interestingly, like the thing he didn't like about atheism is it didn't let him predict the future.
Like that, that was his issue with it.
So like he developed this personal belief system that aliens had like were like managing life on earth and that he was like the child of an alien sent to earth for some like special purpose and lived under that belief system for some period of time.
I met a few people like that at the at the Oregon Ghost Conference a few months ago.
Yeah.
He's kind of always been a kook.
So So he talks about how he waited and waited and waited and he wasn't ready and he was learning and preparing to deliver this important message.
And then in 2015, Trump rides his golden elevator down to announce his candidacy for president.
Like most observers at the time, I didn't fully understand what I was seeing.
It wasn't until the first Republican primary debate that I realized what was happening right before our eyes.
Trump was no ordinary politician.
He was no ordinary business person either.
In fact, he wasn't ordinary in any sense of the world.
Trump is what I call, in bold letters, master persuader.
That means he has weapons grade persuasion skills.
Based on my background in that field, I recognized his talents early.
After watching him in action during the election, I have to say that Trump is the most persuasive human I have ever observed.
I have to check my persuasion skills when I'm at the airport.
They will not let me go in the carry-on with you.
You know, because they're weapons grade.
You're not allowed to take those on.
TSA will catch you.
It's an easy way to get...
They've got those dogs to sniff for weapons grade persuasion skills.
Scott's going to drive everywhere.
So many problems.
This is the same thing with all the esoteric fascists and stuff.
So many problems to be solved if we just force people to play D and D. You just got to get that out.
You got to give these people an outlet for this shit.
And if you're talking about weapons-grade persuasion, you're just talking about D ⁇ D. Just roll, roll some dice, get some friends together, have a dinner party.
Cast charm.
Like, for the love of God, they're going to take a will save.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
It is remarkable.
President Trump carried those persuasion skills into the White House where his supporters say he has gotten a lot done and his critics say he hasn't.
Oh boy.
Who's to say who's right?
No one says any.
Like, yeah, his supporters love the stuff he does.
His detractors don't say he didn't get a lot done.
They say he did a lot of bad things.
No, he didn't get in the White House.
He was just sitting around.
He was just playing golf every day.
It's such a weird, because he describes his like his supporters say he did all of, you know, he fought ISIS and he did this.
And his detractors say he was, it was a chaotic administration that didn't get any, no, his detractors say he did a lot of stuff that hurt people.
And like, yeah, his, the fact that his administration had a lot of leaks and like internal chaos was kind of evidence of the fundamentally bad people that were involved in it.
But like the, his, no one was like nothing got done by Trump.
Like a lot of bad things were done by Trump.
Anyway, President Trump's critics and mine in brackets asked me how I could call the president a master persuade.
He capitalizes the M and the P every time he says master persuader.
He's trying to make it a proper noun.
Yeah.
He's trying.
Yeah.
He wants people to take this very seriously.
And like it's, for one thing, a silly thing to call somebody.
We already have the term like charismatic.
We have the term demagogue.
Like those work.
Like charming.
That works.
You don't need master persuader just is so inherently silly that I'm not going to take anything else that you're saying very seriously.
But you know what I do take seriously, Garrison?
Oh, is it is it the very brave and stunning products that allow us to continue this show?
Yes.
Yes, the heroic products.
Heroic Products And Truth00:03:26
Some people are too scared to advertise on this show.
They don't.
That's right.
They do not want you to hear the truth.
No, they don't want you to hear the wisdom of a master persuader like me, who's who's going to convince you to, you know.
They don't want you to put some money into Blue Apron.
You know, your eye surgery.
Do it all.
They don't want you to hear what's on page 127, how to design a linguistic kill shot.
They don't want you to know.
Scott Adams?
It is so easy to write a stupid book.
Like, writing a good book is really hard, but writing this book, this is like 45 minutes.
Like, this is a solid light afternoon of work.
You knock this out while finishing a fridge press of coffee.
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Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
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He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
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It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
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Sunlight Is The Greatest Disinfectant00:16:08
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As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
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This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
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We're back and I just persuaded Garrison to support eliminating the capital gains tax using my weapons-grade persuasion skills.
I rolled a Nat 20.
You know, I think we should just have a federal sales tax, and that's evenly distributed across all the money spent.
Yeah.
And that is the way to solve all of our economic problems.
That's right.
That's right.
A lot of people who get paid by the Heritage Foundation are saying that.
So, President Trump's critics and mine asked me how I could call the president a master persuader when his public approval levels were in the cellar.
The quick answer is that low approval didn't stop him from winning the presidency.
No, but you're not saying he's a master winner of the presidency.
You're saying he persuaded people.
And the evidence is most people never liked him.
Anyway, whatever.
He's so obsessed with the idea that Trump is persuading people and that that's what the debate is about when really like nobody's nobody's arguing that.
Like the people who like him are saying that like the folks who are against him are engaged in an evil conspiracy against America and the folks who hate him are like he's shitty and he took advantage of a fucked up and archaic election system in order to win.
Like nobody's, nobody's, nobody reasonable thinks that Trump is good at convincing the masses of things.
Like that's just not what he did.
Anyway, that's what Scott's convinced that he did.
But here's the fun part.
I also believe that Trump, the master persuader, keeps using that term, was going to do far more than win the presidency.
I expected Trump to rip a hole in the fabric of reality so we could screw it to a deeper truth about the human experience.
Well, that may have happened.
That did actually happen.
That is true.
Oops.
Yeah.
Either that or a series of decisions that were made that included the development of a parallel digital culture driven by algorithms faded the divisions between realities and a fucking homunculi was able to creep through.
A political shoggoth, if you will, broke into our reality.
And most of that is probably Zuckerberg's fault, but someone was going to do it.
Somebody was going to do it, and it was Donald Trump.
But anyway, we'll give Scott that one, okay?
We'll give Scott that one.
You know, he does title his next section, Why Facts Are Overrated.
So.
Yeah, that is true.
We'll skip right to that one after we finish this little bit.
The common worldview shared by most humans is that there is one objective reality.
I don't know that most humans actually agree about that.
And we humans can understand that reality through a rigorous application of facts and reason.
I definitely don't think all human beings agree on that.
For one thing, like religions exist.
This view of the world imagines that some people have already achieved a fact-based type of enlightenment that is compatible with science and logic, and they are trying to help the rest of us see the world the right way.
As far as I can tell, most people share that interpretation of the world.
The only wrinkle with that worldview is that we all think we are the enlightened ones, and we assume the people who disagree with us just need better facts or perhaps better brains in order to agree with us.
That filter on life makes most of us happy because we see ourselves as the smart ones.
And it does a good job of predicting the future, but only because confirmation bias will make the future look any way we want it to look within reason.
What I saw with Trump's candidacy for president is that the within reason part of our understanding about reality was about to change bigly.
I knew that candidate Trump's persuasion skills were about to annihilate the public's ability to understand what they were seeing because their observations wouldn't fit their mental model of living in a rational world.
Is interesting because, for one thing, I think the first accurate like warning about Trump which came out before or right around the time when Scott started making his posts was by my former colleague, cracked Adam Todd Brown, who wrote a whole article about how Trump was like very influenced specifically by old fascist political leaders and was using a lot of those tactics in order to build a base of support within the Republican Party, and that he would indeed win the Republican primary.
Um, Adam called that months before any of this happened, and there were a lot of other people, and particularly a lot of actual, like scholars of fascism, who were warning about him well, prior to him winning the uh uh the, the primaries, and these were not people who were like uh say, like the attitude that like people were saying he can't possibly win.
I just doesn't gel to me with what a lot of people who were paying attention were saying.
I think a lot of the and that's different from saying like well, I don't know if he's likely to win in like say, january or like december of 2015, but um yeah I, I don't know it.
It's like I think he's silly here.
The difference between what Scott's doing is right.
Scott's saying that the reason why this worked is because there's like this magical thinking aspect where Trump is just like naturally better at being this like mystical persuader versus actual, like scholars identifying and like identifying the use of a playbook um, and those are.
Those are two very, very different things yeah, and it's it's again, he's kind of he's obsessed with this framing that he's put together of Trump as a persuader and it's, I think, kind of leading him to lose what, what could be kind of some of the the actual useful conclusions that you could draw based on some of this stuff.
A lot of people's belief in normalcy and like the value in like political normalcy is what caused them to not see Trump coming and not see the danger.
This was particularly a problem for a lot of uh, republic establishment Republicans who did not think that something like this could happen, who didn't think like an outsider like this could won, and I think most, most people observing kind of looked at the past of Trump's previous runs for president and generally of the long history of like weirdo candidates and thought that it was likely to go that way.
That's not like a belief about like I wouldn't call that confirmation bias.
That's kind of um, because again like reality didn't wind up bearing that way and most people rightly saw this as a problem right away.
They didn't think like reality has broken.
They were like oh uh, American politics is more broken than I had thought.
The American electorate is more up than I had thought.
The electoral college is a worse system than I had realized, which is kind of like a reasonable way to translate this.
But Scott's got to make it all about like how Trump, like cunningly manipulated reality um, as opposed to Trump kind of taking advantage to flaws within the system that people didn't realize a lot of people didn't realize were as flawed as it was, but a lot of people in fact did realize and warn about it and and recognize what was happening here.
He's again kind of got to make himself the only person who thought that Trump could win, which he clearly wasn't.
But anyway, whatever.
It's fun.
So yeah.
I think we were in.
Did we get to Washington?
Yeah, no, I've got his next here.
So he's talking about where he lands politically.
I label myself an ultra-liberal.
And by that, I mean liberals seem too conservative to me.
I'll give you some examples.
Generally speaking, conservatives want to ban abortion while liberals want it to remain legal.
I go one step further and say that men should sideline themselves from the question and follow the lead of women on the topic of reproductive health.
Men should still be in the conversation about their own money, of course.
What does that mean, Scott?
Like, what does that line mean?
What are you talking about?
They're not going to pay for an abortion.
Are you saying that men should not have a be compelled to pay child support ever?
Is that the statement?
Because I'm kind of trying to interpret that.
And I don't know where men's money comes up in the conversation of reproductive rights, other than if you're bringing up the fact that you don't think men should have to be compelled to pay child support if they get someone pregnant because it's the woman's choice.
I think that's kind of where Scott's coming in on this.
I guess so.
Yeah, it's interesting.
My personal sense of ethics says that the people who take the most responsibility for important societal outcomes should also have the strongest say.
My male opinion on women's reproductive health adds nothing to the quality of the decision.
That part's fine.
Women have it covered.
The most credible laws on abortion are the ones that most women support.
And while life or death issues are on the table, credibility is essential to the smooth operation of society.
That's great.
Good for you, Scott.
He says that he is legal for, or he is for legalizing marijuana.
And he also thinks doctors should prescribe recreational drugs for old people.
Holy shit, yeah, I'm all right with that.
That's fine.
That's fine, Scott.
When it comes to complicated affairs about economics and foreign affairs, my opinion is that I never have enough data to form competent opinions.
Neither does anyone else.
Well, that, Scott, now, actually, a lot of people have to have an opinion.
Do have, especially on like foreign affairs.
It's like, well, actually, Scott, there's people whose like entire lives are understanding the interaction of, for example, the United States and other foreign countries or understanding what countries that are having problems with like food insecurity or like not lack of access to clean water or difficulties like dealing with the AIDS virus.
There are people who dedicate their whole lives to understanding those issues in the context of other countries.
There are a lot of people who have understandings about what are good policies there.
That's a very silly statement, Scott.
Anyway, that's that's the it's fine.
Whatever, Scott.
Generally speaking.
What chapter is this on?
This is a introduction still.
Okay, we're still an introduction.
Yeah, yeah.
We're still in introduction.
Generally speaking, conservatives think we live in a country where everyone always already has equal opportunity.
I don't know.
That's what they say, though.
I'll give him that.
That is a statement that gets made.
Liberals generally think the government should do more to guarantee equal opportunity.
I go one step further and suggest considering slavery reparations for African Americans in the form of free college and job training funded by a 25-year tax on the top 1%.
Hey, that's fine.
Although, I wonder if he still has this opinion.
I don't know that he does.
It's also interesting that he's like, I'm not going to state an opinion on abortion because as a man, I shouldn't have one.
But he is like, here is exactly how I think reparations for black Americans should work.
Yeah, yeah.
That is interesting, Scott.
Maybe you could just say I support reparations and let someone else figure out how it's supposed to go.
The diligent guy's got to figure out.
That's a reparations plan.
But hey, look, at least he's closer to the right on that side than I think you would have expected given his most recent racist statements that got the Dilbert comic canceled.
Yes.
Okay, so I guess that's the end of the things that make him an uber liberal.
Fine.
Fine enough.
So I think we're going to move on to why facts are overrated.
Part one of his book.
The most important perceptual shift in history.
My spooky year was fun for me, but it was also a dangerous time for the world's collective mental health.
Enlightenment can be a risky business.
When your old worldview falls apart, it can trigger all kinds of irrational behavior before your brain rewrites the movie in your head to make it consistent with your new worldview.
We all have movies in our heads that we believe are accurate views of reality, and those movies are very different.
Normally, we don't notice the differences in our personal movies, or we don't care.
But when politics are involved, the stakes are higher than we notice.
Emotions are already raw in election years, and millions of people are focused on the same topics at the same time.
That's a barrel of gasoline and a lot of matches in one place.
The last thing the country needed was millions of people simultaneously going nuts.
I hoped I could reduce that risk by writing about Trump's persuasion talents and preparing the public for what I saw coming.
It's interesting.
He is, there's a degree, this and some other parts of the book.
He's like kind of trying to repackage Robert Anton Wilson's ideas about like reality tunnels and doing it, number one, in a way that's kind of like overly simplistic and also doing it in a way where the goal is to like bring people to a specific understanding of reality rather than understand the different kind of realities that people live in.
And being able to kind of move through different reality tunnels as that's kind of advantageous for the things that.
you're trying to do.
Like his attitude on this is so much more brittle than I think the kind of elegant concepts that Robert Anton Wilson brings up when he talks about like how kind of inhabiting, letting yourself and figuring out how to kind of like metaprogram your mind to inhabit different realities can allow you to deal with stuff like addiction,
can allow you to like become more artistically productive in certain ways, can allow you to like achieve things that you would otherwise have difficulty achieving because perception dictates to a substantial extent how we how we like interface and experience reality.
What Scott's talking about is like so much more brittle than that.
And you also get the feeling that he believes that he and the master persuaders are the only ones who can actually like see the tunnels people are moving through.
And it's about kind of manipulation of large groups of people as opposed to understanding yourself and taking more control over your own interactions in the world.
Yeah.
And I, because he's, he's also, he's like promoting himself as like this figure that's like seen, like, I've like seen the divine prophecy when Trump comes down the golden elevator.
And now I will distill the secrets onto you.
And it's all this like, it is, it is, it is a very, it is, it's for completely different ends than what someone like Robert Anton Wilson's doing.
It's also like, I'm not sure how, I'm not sure if, if the Dilbert guy can recognize how far into a reality tunnel he is in.
Yeah.
And how much like, how much of that like self-awareness can like extend out to other people.
Scott talks a lot about his own ignorance of certain things, like I think history.
And it's kind of evident here because he talks about how like, you know, if you watched the entire election and concluded that Trump was nothing but a lucky clown, you missed one of the most important perceptual shifts in the history of humankind.
And I agree, it's wrong to view Trump as just a lucky clown.
Trump is an authoritarian utilizing very time-worn tactics to take advantage of the worst aspects of American culture, which have been evident as long as this country has existed.
Scott, like, I don't think has a, I either is pretending not to have any kind of understanding of like American political history and some of the different figures that Trump learned from.
He doesn't know about kind of the history of, I don't know, how Nixon got elected of the kind of the Southern strategy, all this kind of shit that you see echoes of in the way Trump did his campaigning and is going to do his campaigning for the next election.
Trump Hacked The Human Brain00:07:06
Scott, he's certainly like, I don't know if it's that he doesn't know this or he doesn't think that it's profitable to bring it up, but like the complete the framing of this is like Trump hacked the human brain somehow, and that's how he won rather than like, it's always been profitable to trade on bigotry and fear in American politics.
And Trump figured out how to take advantage of social media to do that extremely efficiently.
But, you know, that's not the way Scott describes this as happening.
No, here we go.
Instead, Trump can then be seen as this, like a mystical persuader as opposed to someone using like a very, a very tried and true playbook for gaining political power.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Like when you, when you talk about like this kind of stuff, it reminds me a little bit about how people talked about and still to some extent do talked about like Hitler's rise a lot where they, you know, they described it as like he kind of like brainwashed the German people and he was somehow able to like gain this deep degree of control over their minds using these almost like his mythical charisma and persuasion techniques.
It was a, it was a mass hypnosis.
Yeah.
No, he engaged in a number of time worn like campaign traditions and he also understood new technologies like radio and the airplane and their application in a democratic election in a way that other people didn't yet.
And so as a result, there was kind of less immunity from his political opponents to those strategies and less understanding of how to counter them.
And he was able to combine that with kind of the venal cowardice of a number of folks who were, you know, his political opponents, but not diametrically politically opposed to his attitudes and able to sneak into power that way.
Like the like Hitler's, there's nothing like hard to explain about how Hitler took power.
It was a mixture of like savvy political techniques and then social engineering and basically bribery.
And it's, it's, you know, with Trump, it's less on the bribery side of thing, but it's like, yeah, he, he won election.
Like there's not much of a difference between how he came to power and how George W. Bush came to power.
Yeah, exactly.
Like it's, it's, yeah, but anyway, he's a master persuader.
So if you seek enlightenment, these are two of the most important concepts you will ever learn.
Cognitive dissonance.
This is a mental condition in which people rationalize why their actions are inconsistent with their thoughts and beliefs.
For example, if you think you are smart, but you notice yourself doing something that is clearly dumb, you might spontaneously hallucinate that that was a good reason for it.
Now, Scott, you might want to read that part again.
You might want to go over that sentence a couple of times, buddy.
Yeah, this is a common phenomenon in all normal humans, but we generally believe it applies only to other people.
I think you're revealing a lot about yourself there, Scott.
I actually think most people are humble enough to be like, yeah, I often fall short of like how I believe I should be acting or behaving.
I am not always consistent with the things that I know are right.
Sometimes I'm dishonest.
Like most people I know are capable of admitting that they're flawed people.
I think Scott is, it's interesting that he has this attitude that like, I'm the only one who understands that cognitive dissonance is a factor in my life.
Like, no, I think most of us are aware it's hard to be consistent with the versions of ourselves that theoretically are the best.
Anyway, whatever.
He talks about confirmation bias, which he also describes as a common phenomenon that we believe only happens to other people.
I saw in the election of 2016 a dangerous situation forming.
If the public misunderstood Trump's methods and intentions, and that seemed likely, things could turn ugly.
Worse yet, the public might not appreciate the extraordinary richness of their choice in the election.
No matter what you thought of Trump or his policies, he certainly was different and he certainly knew how to make things happen.
I thought the public deserved to see the Trump candidacy as clearly as possible without the biased framing that his adversaries were applying.
You might be wondering how confident I was about my prediction that Trump would win.
Well, no one is psychic.
I can't say with, know, with total certainty what the future holds.
For example, I couldn't predict what types of scandals would pop up along the way, but I do know persuasion.
I know its power in a way that few people do.
And I recognize that with Trump's level of persuasion skill, he was bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight.
Speaking of, in part four, there's a section called how a trained persuader of?
Was it how a trained persuader evaluates scandals?
Yeah, Scott starts talking about how good he is at predicting here and he brings up his 2004 book, The Religion War, now garrison.
This is one of the worst books ever written.
Um, if you're interested in in reading some reviews of this and one of his other terrible fiction books uh, the Podcast House OF Decline H-a-us has been doing a read-through.
Uh, that includes my friend and cartoonist, Rory Blank.
That's quite good, but it Scott.
Here's how Scott describes it.
I predicted the rise of an Islamic caliphate in the Middle East and their use of hobby-sized drones for terror attacks.
That happens to be a good description of Isis in 2017.
Now, that's not what Scott writes in this book.
In this book, he's writing about like a fictional war between like all of the Western countries like out like unite under this like Christian, you know, democratic military alliance to fight the Muslim world, which in this book, a Palestinian man engineers the destruction of Israel and then unites all of the Arab countries.
And also, I think like Iran and stuff.
So like not just Arab countries, but like is like Sunni and Shia all get together in this Islamic caliphate and launch a long term terrorist.
attack against the West.
That includes, like constant suicide drone bombings of like, like western cities.
That's actually not a good description of ISIS.
Uh ISIS, for one thing, didn't destroy Israel.
Uh they, they didn't actually overthrow any state.
Uh, and while ISIS did use hobby drones, they didn't use them for terrorist attacks.
They used them as part of a military like strategy.
Like they use them as spotters for their mortars.
Uh, they use them to drop bombs on soldiers.
In other words, Scott kind of imagined the use of like this, this kind of like perpetual terror war against the West by this evil Muslim empire created by a Palestinian man who had used democracy to destroy Israel.
Um, and he's saying that's exactly like what happened with Isis in 2017.
It is not Scott.
You were predict.
This is not.
You did not predict Isis um.
Are you saying Gilbert is not an Isis understander?
I, I don't think that he is um.
Anyway uh he, yeah.
What do you?
What do you want to go through next here?
Master master, persuader?
Bifurcated Check One00:03:48
There's there's a funny section called about facts, but I mean, a lot of these are pretty good.
I mean, there's the myth of the rational mind pretty funny.
Yeah, we'll probably check that out.
Mass delusions, when reality bifurcated, which is it on a sentence when no, that reality bifurcated?
I guess it no yeah, because when reality oh yes like yeah, that works I I, I see what he means now yeah anyway, Trump's Rosie O'donnell moment, you know what bifurcated?
Well, we're gonna have to check that one out.
Wait, you know what bifurcated is the moment that he's also a Casey Anthony Truther.
Uh, I hope so um, because because I, you know who else is a Casey Anthony Truther?
Sophie.
Uh, this ad for the podcast that might come up, that might.
There's a non-zero chance that we get an ad for the podcast.
Here we go.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes and rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield and in this new season of the girlfriends oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh hell no, I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me babe, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
The Myth Of The Rational Mind00:15:05
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ah, we're back.
I hope the subreddit's having a good time figuring out what was bleeped.
That's a real bleep.
That's not one of the ones where I like put in a fake.
No, I'm like, really?
That was a real bleep.
And I'm mad about it.
I don't, yeah, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure how much do we have to bleep out there.
It is really unclear.
It's going to be quite a bit because we could get in trouble for that one.
But I'm super pissed off about it because I'm so fucking right.
Are we going to have to bleep Trump's Rosie O'Donnell moment to just to just be Trump's bleep?
No, no, we can say that.
We can say Rosie O'Donnell in that context.
It's fine.
Anyway, someone on the subreddit will figure out what we probably said.
But as long as we don't say that.
Just know I was really fucking proud of it.
It was very funny, Sophie.
So about facts.
On August 13th, 2015, I predicted in my blog that Donald Trump had a 98% chance of winning the presidency based on his persuasion skills.
Wait, why did he pick 98%?
Why is that?
First off, that's a nonsense number.
And it's funny.
He says a week earlier, he talks about like Nate Silver had put the most respected political forecaster in the United States had put Trump's odds of winning the Republican nomination at 2% in his 538 blog.
Yeah, which is like, yeah, I guess it's fair that people didn't note that he was going to, enough people didn't note that he was likely to win the primaries early on.
Although it also is worth noting that Nate Silver is one of the people who actually accurately called the way in which Trump was going to win, like when he gave him like a 30-something percent chance, which was higher than any of the other pollsters.
And he laid out basically the collapse of the Democrat firewall in kind of the Midwest and how that could lead to an electoral victory and was pretty much correct, which is more impressive than Scott saying 98%.
Oh boy, some of the rare and notable predictors of Trump's win included Mike Cernovich, Ann Coulter, Stefan Molyneux, Milo Yiannopoulos, Bill Mitchell.
Night Airport rotation.
Yeah, absolutely horrible.
There's some more names on the street.
There's true people.
Yeah, just all terrible people.
Good stuff.
Good stuff.
In California, where I lived, it seemed as if most Trump supporters were in hiding because of the social and career risks of publicly supporting him.
Luckily, he was wrong.
Trump's Twitter followers adopted him immediately and had my back every step of the way.
The critics came after me on Twitter and elsewhere.
Trump supporters flooded in to back me.
I didn't ask them to do it.
They just did.
Wow.
So that's why he wrote this book.
He did it to an act of solidarity with Trump's Twitter followers.
Oh, that's great.
That's good.
It's good stuff.
Okay, well, we get some persuasion tips.
Some great persuasion tips.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
One is reciprocity.
If you're nice to people, they want to be nice to you in return.
That's a really tip for you, Garrison.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know about that.
Tip number three.
All of these, his brilliant techniques, like being nice to people, work even if people know what you're doing.
That's good.
This is all like very basic shit.
Like there's been scientific studies about how stuff like reciprocity works.
Like none of this is like new.
All of this is stuff you can find in a million different books about like how to negotiate and shit.
It is pretty boring.
Yeah, let's move on to another chapter that's less boring than this.
That's less third grade fucking persuasion tactic shit.
The next section is how to see reality in a more useful way, which starts off with the myth of the rational mind.
Okay.
Wait, Garrison, I got to give you this.
He keeps talking about Nate Silver later in this chapter.
I got to go into this here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
This is telling.
I picked 98% as my Trump prediction because Nate Silver of 538 was saying 2%.
I did that for branding and persuasion purposes.
It is easy to remember my prediction, both because of the way it fits with Silver's prediction and for its audacity, which people perceived as wrongness.
The prediction was designed to attract attention, and it did.
It was also designed to pair my name with Nate Silver's name to raise my profile by association.
That worked too.
Social media folks mentioned me in the same sentence with Silver countless times during the election, exactly as I had hoped.
And every mention raised my importance as a political observer because I was being compared with someone already important in that field.
Keep in mind that at this point in our story, I was playing the wrong sport.
I was a cartoonist writing about politics and persuasion.
I needed whatever credibility I could get to build an audience for my Trump blog.
It's interesting because he's talking about how I subtly hacked people's brains to make myself seem more credible.
No, I mean, the people who were, it wasn't like serious political pollsters who were taking Scott Adams seriously.
It was like random Trump supporters on Twitter who liked you because you were saying what they already believed.
Again, Scott consistently talks about what he's doing as persuasion.
You didn't persuade anybody.
You joined a crowd of people all cheering for a guy, and they liked that you were cheering for the same guy.
In the same sentence where he talks about confirmation bias.
You said before Trump won the primary that he was going to win the primary.
You know, I'll give you credit for being right there, but you're talking about persuasion.
You didn't persuade people.
You went to a group of people who all thought Trump was going to win because they were Trump's supporters on Twitter and they liked you because you were also a Trump supporter on Twitter.
That's not persuasion, Scott.
Okay, now we can move on.
What is it you wanted me to get into next?
The myth of the rational, the myth of the rational mind on page 33 looks pretty good.
And then there's then there is, then there's mass delusions on 62.
God, there are so many fucking chapters here.
It's a lot.
This is horrible.
Wait, where the fuck is the myth of the rational mind?
33.
33.
How many chapters are there?
Well, I don't know.
There's like five parts, but each part has its own little like sub subgrouping.
He has a bunch of like short, shitty chapters, and they all have like dog shit little weird, stupid titles.
Go Bigley or Go Home.
Great.
Yeah.
Great title.
Wait, but what was Donald Trump's Rosie O'Donnell moment?
We'll find out.
There are so many little chapters I want to read here.
The making of a hypnotist.
Who could be hypnotized?
Hypnosis superpowers.
Finding a hypnosis school.
Oh, fuck off.
Oh, boy.
All right.
The myth of the rational mind.
Students of philosophy remember that Plato.
Jesus Christ.
Remember that Plato talked about the subjective nature of our personal realities in the allegory of the cave.
Plato asked us, oh God, I don't want to go.
I don't need Scott Adams to explore.
We don't need Scott Adams to explain the allegory of the cave to us.
I'm sorry.
No, you all learned about this in high school, right?
Which is the last time Scott learned anything.
Or the Matrix.
Who cares?
Or the Matrix, yeah?
Who cares?
The point of Plato's allegory is that, figuratively speaking, we humans might be chained to a cave created by our own faulty brains and senses, experiencing a shadow world that is entirely different from objective reality.
Other famous philosophers, notably David Hume, have questioned the nature of the existence of free will.
If, as some philosophers claim, humans have no free will and we are nothing but victims of cause and effect, that means our common view of reality is absurd.
In this model of the world, we are little more than meat robots who wrongly believe we control our own decisions and actions.
And now he's talking.
He's like summarizing Wikipedia pages for four guys.
He's about Kant next.
He just like Google.
God, there's nothing I want less than him talking about a manual fucking concept.
No, we have to read at least one sentence of Scott Adams.
He uses a lot of words to say reality isn't necessarily anything like the way we perceive it.
I will agree with Scott on one thing.
Kant uses a lot of words.
You have to give him that.
I just like that.
That's his abbreviated version for Kant's philosophy.
Well, he does say he explained that our brains don't have direct access to base reality.
We have to settle for interpreting the input from our faulty senses.
Okay.
Good job.
There you go.
There you go.
I only mentioned mass delusions on page 62.
I only mentioned them to show that smart people throughout history have made arguments about the subjective nature of reality that are compatible with what you will read in these pages.
No, no, that's not the case, Scott.
That is not what you're saying.
Plato, David Hume, and Kant agree with me.
Because for one thing, what Scott's been building to this whole time is not like reality is entirely subjective and like the result of flawed senses.
It's I, Scott Adams, understand reality in a way that's not the same.
I'm the only one who did.
I was the right one, and you need to understand how I'm right about reality in this weird, specific way.
Great.
Immanuel Kant Appreciator, Scott Adams.
Jesus, fuck.
It's good stuff.
What are we looking at next?
Mass delusions on page 62.
Yeah.
Okay.
And that one is back to back with when reality bifurcated.
So, you know, just being good stuff, but then within those like nine pages.
I am excited to get into that.
I do like that.
Mass delusions is only like five pages long.
No, no, you don't need that much space to talk about mass illusions, you know?
It's after confirmation bias.
Ah, there we go.
And right before Salem Witch Trials and Orson Welles's War of the Worlds.
I feel like, though, Robert, like the word searches you could do to find things in this book would be incredible.
I might do our good old, our old standby word search and just see what he has to say about the Jewish people.
Control F Jew.
Yeah, Control F Jew.
If you don't know how frequently mass delusions occur in your daily experience, many of your opinions about the world are likely to be nonsense.
In your daily experience?
Yeah.
That's because mass delusions are the norm for humanity, not the exception.
Don't believe me?
It's easy to check.
Just ask your neighbors about their religious and political views.
You'll find plenty of disagreement with your worldview.
And so, according to you, your neighbors and all the people who agree with them must be living in some sort of hallucination.
No, they're not.
What are you talking about?
Okay, that's not you.
Like, you can tell that my dad is a conservative and believes different things about the way rich people should be taxed.
I don't think he's hallucinating.
I think he has a series of opinions based on a mix of like things, propaganda that he's consumed and what's financially best for him.
But that's not a hallucination.
You can tell that this man's never read a single page of Plato, David Hume, or Connie.
And only read the Wikipedia summary because, like, when I encounter somebody in my community who expresses a racist view or drops a slur, I don't think they're hallucinating.
I think they're a shitty person.
Like, that's that, like, there's a, there's a difference between those two things.
Like, it's, it's like saying that, like, you have to believe if somebody disagrees with your worldview that they're engaged in a hallucination.
Like, for one thing, just a lot of times you encounter people who feel different.
Like, when I encounter someone who is not a bad person or not expressing anything mean, but is like, I don't know, a Muslim or a Christian or something else that I'm not.
I don't think that they are a Muslim or a Christian or whatever because they're engaged in a mass hallucination.
Like, I didn't go to India and meet a bunch of Hindu people and go, wow, look at all these hallucinating people.
Like, no, it's just a religion that's not my own.
That's the way the world is.
Lots of people believe things I don't.
It's like the weird way to go about the world.
It's so weird, like, that he believes everyone else thinks this way.
Like, there's certainly like bigots who think that way, but like, I don't know.
I've had a lot of conversations with people of different religions and philosophical stances and political stances and disagreed with them or not, just felt the same way.
And neither of us walked away being like, well, that guy's fucking tripping balls.
Like, that's such a strange way to describe this.
Anyway, whatever.
Do you remember when millions of Americans believed President Obama was a secret Muslim?
That was a mass delusion.
Now, who was pushing that mass delusion, Scott?
Was it Donald Trump the master persuader?
I guess he didn't persuade enough people.
No, he didn't persuade Scott.
Do you remember when President Trump got arrested and there were protests in the street because they thought he was the next Hitler?
That was a mass delusion.
He did try to coup the government and put himself in as a dictator, Scott.
To be fair, this was what, in 2017 when this book came out?
Yeah, something like that.
Yeah.
But also, that is just evidence that people who protested may have caught something that Scott didn't.
Although I don't think he thinks J6 was bad, so it's fine.
Do you remember the dot-com bubble?
That was based on mass delusions about the value of money losing startups.
Every other financial bubble was also a mass delusion.
Well, partly, but they were also largely cons.
Like a lot of the people who made money on the dot-com bubble knew it was going to collapse and very intelligently figured out how to make as much money as they could by taking advantage of dumb people, much like people did with crypto or every other financial bubble.
Like it's it, he's only focusing on like the side that's delusion and not the side that's bad people trying to take advantage of other people.
Also interesting to me.
Mass Delusions About Startups00:16:28
Oh, here we go.
Below is a starter list of more than 30 notable mass delusions.
Wikipedia lists over 30 examples of mass hysteria through the years.
Did he say that?
Did he just quote Wikipedia in his book?
And now he's just like, yeah, he's going through the same, he's just dropping the list he found.
Honestly, this is the Oxford English Dictionary describes mass delusions.
do have some respect for scott here because this is a really like the next like mini pages of the book are just him like summarizing the wikipedia entry for mass delusion and that's an easy way to write a book it's hard to write a book when you do real research this would get like this would be like like if you if you tried to submit this in school it would be like sent back be like no you have to find a real you can't cite wikipedia You can't,
you can't explicitly say, I got this list from Wikipedia.
Yeah, it's funny.
Anyway, this chunk of the book ends on him saying Trump was wrong to call climate change a hoax, but he was also right because he called out the Paris Climate Accord and it was expensive for the U.S. and wouldn't lower temperatures.
So the fact that Trump said climate change was wrong is fine because the Paris Accord was a lie that would have benefited China.
That's Scott Adams' opinion on the Paris Climate Accord.
I'm glad he's changed from being a cartoonist into a political analyst.
Again, I'm glad I love like switching from Scott being like, nobody understands politics, which is why I don't give my opinions on politics to the Paris Climate Accord couldn't lower it.
Like, Scott, I don't know, man.
Like his stance, his argument is that like no one disagrees with any of this.
I don't know.
I bet they do, Scott.
You haven't cited anything here.
You just say experts agree on this.
There's no citation.
He has no like...
He has cited Wikipedia.
He didn't previously cite Wikipedia on a separate topic.
Okay.
So what do we want to close out on here?
Rosie.
Rosie.
The Rosie O'Donnell.
There's so many good ones.
Like, when I'm going to be able to do that.
I do want to know what ISIS in the Vatican means.
Oh, God.
Which is what immediately precedes Rosie O'Donnell.
I also want to briefly look at how to design a linguistic kill shot.
Oh, you know what?
I think that this is.
So this is Trump's Rosie O'Donnell moment.
Okay.
So yeah, this is like him explaining how Trump's genius strategy of like insulting people works.
As the election started getting traction in all of our minds in the summer of 2015, I was experimenting with a new comic that featured a talking robot that never moves.
He just reads the news.
You can see in this comic that I had already noticed Trump's successful use of persuasion that was confusing the public.
And this is Robots Read News by Scott Adams.
And it is in fact a poorly drawn robot reading the news.
Donald Trump keeps saying dumb things because he is so darn dumb, unlike you.
He is also surging in the polls while putting almost no effort into it.
So how is SMART working out for you?
I don't know, man.
It does seem like he was constantly touring the country and doing events.
I don't think anyone thought he wasn't putting effort into it.
I guess this is a real own on the people who said that Trump was dumb, which, you know, to be fair, I have always thought was a mistake on behalf of some Democrats.
But I don't know.
Whatever, Scott.
It's not really a joke, but we'll give you that one.
But I didn't know how big a deal this was until what I now call the Rosie O'Donnell moment.
In the first Republican debate on August 6th, 2015, Megan Kelly was moderating, and her first question to Trump should have ended his campaign on the spot.
Only a few people in the world could have escaped her trap.
Kelly started.
Okay, okay.
Yeah.
So this is what Megan Kelly was like, you call women you don't like fat pigs, slogs, or disgusting animals.
And Trump said only Rosie O'Donnell, right?
Or O'Donnell, sorry.
Yeah.
Scott calls this a masterstroke of persuasion executed perfectly in front of the world.
He got goosebumps.
What the?
He insulted somebody.
He like made a mean joke.
People do that all the time, Scott.
I got it in your.
I'll get you.
They don't usually do it while running for president, but they do it all the time.
I like that Scott describes this as like a transcendent experience for him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's like full body orgasming over Donald Trump making a mean comment about Rosie O'Donnell.
Making a misogynist joke.
Yeah.
It's fun.
So yeah, that's Trump's weapons grade persuasion is insulting Rosie O'Donnell during an interview with Megan Kelly, an interview largely made for people who were already voting for him that I don't know if I think actually convinced anybody of anything.
But, you know, again, there's always like pieces of accuracy here.
Yeah.
One of the things about Trump's political strategy was effective was that he didn't do the normal thing of like apologizing and backtracking when criticized, which is, you know, effective.
It allows you to spend less time dealing with like the critiques of your political opponents.
It's again, also a pretty well-worn political strategy, particularly for authoritarians.
It's not wildly new, but there you go.
That's Scott Adams explaining how Trump persuaded America by calling Rosie O'Donnell fat, a thing no other comedian had ever done before.
A thing that multiple South Park episodes never did.
Well, there is an index at the very end of the book that I have access to.
He cites Donald Duck and trade the swab back to back.
That's good.
The KKK has a few shout outs.
The last thing I do want to see is the how to design a linguistic kill shot, because I think we should at least give listeners one piece of actionable advice.
Yeah, so they can do that.
So you can keep a linguistic kill shot loaded up in case somebody mugs you on the street.
You can conceal carry it actually fairly easily in all 50s.
In all 50s.
That's on page 129.
Okay.
Over the course of the election, we saw Trump assign one sticky nickname after another to his opponents.
It seemed as if each new nickname was a winner.
Clinton's team tried a few nicknames for Trump, but they failed badly.
None of this is a coincidence.
Trump's nicknames are deeply engineered and they were tested in front of live audiences.
And then he goes, and like, I do think, actually, if you're looking at like, what are things that Trump did that made him a successful campaigner?
His ability to like, that's part of why I don't think that Ron DeSantis has any chance of beating him.
Putting Ron.
Yeah, putting Ron.
And then it's over.
Then it's done.
Yeah.
So let's give him here.
Yeah, it's also like the most obvious tactic that he engages in.
But here we go.
Wow, he has two Elizabeth Warren nicknames on here.
Oh, no.
That's good.
I bet they're somehow racist.
It is interesting.
He doesn't have any of his nicknames for Biden on here.
Maybe because Biden was up against Biden.
Yeah, Biden was not a big player in 2017.
Yeah, no, I think you're right.
Yeah.
If you thought the names were nothing more than common insults, you missed a lot of his persuasion engineering.
I'll walk you through it in this chapter.
How powerful were Trump's nicknames?
So powerful that the day I heard Trump say low energy jeb, I predicted Bush was done and blogged that opinion in August 27th.
Keep in mind that literally no other pundit saw this nickname as important to the elect.
That may be true.
But also everyone who saw, from the moment I saw Jeb Bush on the fucking debate stage, I said, well, this is a guy who can't be president.
He was like, everyone knew he was pitiful.
I like that.
I like that he rames.
I like that he frames like listening to Trump as like reading tarot cards.
Yeah.
It is interesting because again, there's a reasonable case to be made for talking about the way in which Trump uses insults and mockery as a political strategy.
But like being like, and that's why Jeb Bush isn't the president.
No, Jeb Bush is the president because he was never going to be the president.
That was never in the cards because he is Jeb Bush.
That's so funny.
He just talks about why the nicknames are accurate nicknames.
Yeah, that's good.
Yeah.
Do you want him to read him analyzing Lion Ted for three pages?
He does a three-page analysis of Lion Ted.
What a hard thing.
That does include the sentence.
Lion Ted simply looked like a liar.
Look, he's not always wrong.
I saw Ted Cruz.
I was like, that guy is a liar.
I like that we can always turn to Scott Adams for this cutting-edge political analysis.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's also funny.
Part of what's fun about these nicknames isn't that they're super complex and it isn't that they engineer opinion.
It's that it's so easy to like cut people who are kind of obsessed with the like playing at being at the polites of like a political etiquette and just being a dick is powerful, right?
If you're playing a different game than everyone else, that's powerful.
But also like it only worked the one time.
He tried all of this again in 2020 and he lost by the most that any president has ever lost in terms of like actual votes.
Okay.
I'm at the end of the book now.
I just found I just found three amazing things back to back.
So at the very end, after the acknowledgements, there is three, there is like four appendixes, but the first three are the ones that I think are really interesting.
The first one is the persuasion reading list, which might have some really funny finds at the end.
There's also Appendix B is how to be a better writer.
It's two pages long.
And then Appendix C is how to find out if you are in a simulation.
Yeah, yeah, I was looking at that just a second ago.
So you can first of all get a, get, get a list of books to read, become a, become a better writer, and then find out if you're living in a computer all within the span of seven phases.
Shotgun approach to writing a fucking nonfiction book.
And I think he literally, Appendix C is just one of his old blog posts that he's quoting.
He talks about simulation theory.
Oh, God.
Man.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
I'm not interested in anything less than I am fucking brained idiots talking about the theory that we live in a simulation.
You know what's simulated?
Your fucking dick, Scott.
This podcast.
Your fucking weird penis is a simulation.
So true.
Yeah, that's what I got to say.
I think you should find one book on the reading list that we should recommend and then give one writing tip via Scott Adams and then we can call it a day.
Okay.
His writing tip is to write whatever you're writing the way Trump writes things because he's a great writer.
Are you serious?
Yes.
Trump's not a good writer.
I think there is like a difference between like Trump was effective at a good shit poster on Twitter and Trump was objectively a great shit poster.
Yeah, but not on purpose.
I don't know.
We can debate that, but also like, I don't think, like, it's kind of like saying like, how to be a better right now, how to be a better poster on Twitter.
Like, I would take you, you can take Donald Trump's advice on that.
Writing is a little bit wider of a discipline.
And you might wind up having some difficulty if you try to take the Donald Trump approach to, I don't know, becoming an editor on Wikipedia so that Scott Adams will appreciate your work.
Nothing against Wikipedia.
It's just funny that that's the only source he cited other than Plato.
Okay, here's some other advice that he has.
Your first sentence needs to grab the reader.
Go back and read my first sentence in this post.
I rewrote it a dozen times.
It makes you curious.
That's the key.
His first sentence is: good writing is also persuasive writing.
Jesus Christ, Scott.
That's the driest shit I've ever heard.
Oh my God.
So for his on his persuasion reading list, I accidentally wound up on this, but it includes how to hypnotize anyone: confessions of a rogue hypnotist.
And then in brackets, I have not read this book for this story.
What?
It probably gives you a good taste of the topic.
Are you serious?
Yes.
That's so funny.
He's recommending a book he hasn't read and he admits it.
Yeah.
He didn't even read it.
He put it on his reading list.
It's probably a good idea.
I don't know.
He admitted.
There's a Tony Robbins book on here.
Yeah, that makes it.
Trump the Art of the Deal, of course.
Yeah.
Tells you to take a fucking Dale Carnegie class.
Great.
Yeah, that tracks.
Yeah.
Good stuff.
So, yeah.
What a guy.
I think that's a good look at Scott Adams' book.
Yeah, I think that is a decent dive into the mind of Scott Adams.
Are you ready to go into the world now, Garrison, and become a master persuader?
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to be working on my.
I think if I get, I mean, Oregon does not have the, does not have the round capacity limit yet because I'm trying to figure out how many linguistic kill shots I'm allowed to carry with me at any point in time.
But once you get to the point.
Yeah, I think you can still have 13 linguistic kill shots loaded and not be in violation of state law.
So I'll spend a few hours coming up with those so I can just have them at the ready.
Yeah, I'm just going to call people low energy Jeb, even if they're not named Jeb.
That was the that was pretty funny.
Okay.
So yeah, that's our man.
Garrison, do you have anything you would like to plug?
I guess the one thing I could plug is I recently on It Could Happen Here, I finished a shocking five episodes worth of content about the last week of action in Atlanta to stop Cop City.
Stopping Cop City In Atlanta00:02:40
I believe we should have that put into a compilation as well by now.
But yeah, that is on the It Could Happen Here feed for the last week of action.
And I mean, as of recording, the city council process to approve the funding for that is ongoing.
There's been, there was like 500 people showing up, I think like just like two days ago as of time of recording to give public comment.
And that process is going to last a few more weeks.
So we will see how that goes.
You can keep up to date with that with the Atlanta Community Press Collective.
So yeah, that is it.
Excellent.
Well, you can find me.
Yeah, we can.
Bye.
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