Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has since written self-help books like 'Win Bigly' & 'Loserthink' and now hosts his own podcast "Coffee with Scott Adams".In mild-mannered, folksy, and avuncular style, he has a 'simultaneous sip' of coffee, a little chuckle with his listeners, and then they chat about the events of the day and how democracy is a farce and maybe a benevolent dictatorship would be preferable.Scott's fatherly advice is geared towards one thing: undermining your belief that there is any truth or justice in world - or that these things are even possible. You can trust literally nobody. All systems are corrupt, and the world works through the exercise of naked power and the manipulation of gullible rubes like you.It doesn't even matter if the libs stole the election. Trump should just go ahead and take it, if he can.Scott Adams considers himself a Master Persuader and he uses every rhetorical trick in the book to persuade you that America is so corrupt to try and get you to agree that a benevolent dictator would probably be preferable at this point.Think of the kind of 'helpful advice' that Wormtongue used to demoralise Théoden in Lord of the Rings.It's really horrible...So, if this sounds like fun to you, join Chris and Matt as they go to hell and become increasingly depressed throughout the episode!LinksCoffee with Scott Adams Episode 1197: Odds of rigging an election and getting away with it (Part 1 & Part 2)Coffee with Scott Adams Episode 1206: Watch Me Monetize My Dumbest Critics While Discussing the Election Allegations. Thank You, Critics! (Part 1 & Part 2)
It's the podcast where us, two academics, listen to content from the online world and we try to decode them, figure out what they're talking about.
So I'm Matt Brown.
I'm a professor in an Australian university and with me is Chris.
Hi, Chris.
Hello, Matt.
Hello.
I just thought I'd break up the intro by, you know, getting you involved.
And you are, he is also an academic in Japan.
So we are going to do our usual thing and decode Andrew.
So we've been given some shit about our accents, Chris.
Some people say nice things about it, but also in a kind of backhanded kind of way.
Apparently, you just ramble on an unintelligible brogue.
And I go, yeah, mate.
Yeah, mate.
Vegemite.
Good on you.
That's not what I heard.
I heard that it was you who were unintelligible and I have a lilting Irish accent that makes anyone who hears it swoon for miles around.
Yes.
This is the ideological blinkering we hear so much about.
This is what you've got going on.
I also heard a conspiracy theory that we are, in fact, the same...
That would be impressive if somebody could actually manage that, you know, to sort of have your kind of dark energy and my laid-back Aussie charm in the same person.
That would be weird.
And it would be super meta if it was true and we were actually doing it and having this conversation about it.
Okay, so let's get into it today.
So we're going to be looking at Scott Adams, who I didn't know much about before, but he absolutely is a guru.
He definitely does have deep, deep takes on a lot of...
He's a bit conspiratorial and he writes self-help books.
So yeah, he definitely hits all of the guru buttons.
Yeah, I think I'll issue a spoiler up front.
We've looked at people, some of whom are extremely irritating.
JPCers springs to mind.
And in other cases, the rhetorical techniques are a little bit frustrating at times to delve into.
So I think it is some achievement that Scott Adams is by far the person that I have disliked the most that we've covered.
And I'm really going to struggle to say anything nice about him because he's such an asshole.
I'm sorry.
I know this is the ad hominem sin up front, but I'm just going to say.
He's an asshole.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, Matt.
That's okay.
That's okay.
Look, I'm with you on this one.
Like, I think one of the things I'm proud of is that people do say that we are kind of even-handed and talk about the positives and the negatives.
But, yeah, we don't have much good to say about it.
So it's good to just get that out of the way up front.
Like, we'll detail why, and I'll do our best to deal, man, his...
It's hard.
It's hard.
You'll see.
You'll see, everyone.
But anyway, before we get into Scott, we've got a little bit of housekeeping to go through.
So let's start off with our State of the Gurus roundup, Chris.
You've got a few points here, I think.
Yeah.
Rutger Bregman, as far as I have seen, is not up to much, or at least he's not tweeting much.
Same difference on our account.
But Jordan Peterson was announced that he's releasing another book.
I think it's another 12 Rules for Life or like a follow-up to that with Penguin.
And it was met with some consternation amongst some Penguin employees who were reported as breaking down and crying and being upset at a meeting because of disagreeing with his views and thinking that Penguin shouldn't be profiting from his kind of ideology.
You have any thoughts, Matt?
I have some, but...
Yeah, look, I didn't look at it closely, and I don't know what the sequel to Twelve Rules is about.
I presume it's more of the same, and I don't think it's anything that anyone needs to cry about.
I'm almost certain it's not a terribly harmful book that needs to be stopped to save civilization.
But, you know, it's the usual storm in a teacup, isn't it?
You have the news stories about a lot of...
People getting upset about that and then a lot of people getting upset that other people are upset and probably there's other people getting upset about those people being upset about those people being upset.
That's probably me.
I think that's my general response as well.
I don't think it's worth getting that upset about Jordan Peterson having another book even though I'm not a big fan of his book.
But I don't think it's that much of an issue.
But I also don't mind if you want to get upset about it.
Go ahead.
I find it more frustrating that we have to have this big debate about some people being upset and what does that mean?
And is this censorship?
If this book was not being published...
If the employees had got it pooled, then fine.
But, like, they haven't as far as I've seen.
So what we're talking about is just, okay, some people weren't happy that their employees are publishing a book and they express that.
And that's it.
Like, why do I care?
I literally don't care about this event.
You know what I mean?
But yeah, it seems to have done the news cycle.
So yeah, like you say, people getting annoyed about people getting annoyed about people getting annoyed.
It's a irritating cycle.
It's exhausting, isn't it?
It's exhausting.
How does that trope go?
I forget.
I don't know.
That's a good one.
That's a very insightful you've added there.
Actually, while you were speaking, I was just thinking of that meme, which I really like, which is the scene from the movie The Fugitive where somebody's got Harrison Ford, I think, cornered in a sewer and he gives them this great big spiel about him being innocent and all that stuff and he says,
I don't care.
Tommy Lee Jones.
I don't care!
I think that's a great meme and I want to use that for so many things now.
There is a gif of that, so you can have your dream.
It's within your grasp.
I'm going to find something on Twitter.
Reply to it with that.
Okay.
Back to the state of the gurus, eh?
Yeah.
So one other thing that happened that was quite funny was that James Lindsay's Twitter rampage continues.
And he went off on just a short rant, took a screenshot or shared someone's article and basically accused them of wanting to burn books.
But it turned out he misread.
The article, which was actually arguing the opposite and was written by somebody who had won the Orwell Prize, which is given to people, you know, fighting for freedom of speech and that kind of thing.
And when the author pointed this out to James and said, you know, maybe don't be so quick to jump the gun.
They said it harsher than that, but his response was something like, Yeah, okay.
You don't need to be such a fucking bitch about it.
Classic James.
So, you know, just never retreat.
Never admit you, you know, if you made a mistake, you should be annoyed at the other person.
Yeah, just be as insulting and derogatory as possible.
This is how to have an impossible conversation, I guess.
Like, literally, if you want to make conversation impossible, act like that.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, I think this will be a consistent occurrence.
So maybe we won't update on this every month, but just to say, James is still being a dick on Twitter.
That's a summary.
That's right.
Don't amplify this stuff.
Chris, don't platform it anymore than it already is.
It's too late, Matt.
We've done it.
We've done it.
That's really what our podcast is about.
We are doing it now.
We are giving more space to all of these terrible things that don't deserve space.
C 'est la vie.
C 'est la vie.
That's what it is.
One other one to mention was that our friend and special guru in our hearts, Eric Weinstein, released a Another audio essay.
We did a detailed breakdown of one of them, but this one is an hour long.
So if we do a detailed breakdown of it, it will probably take us like a week to go through it.
But it's pretty remarkable.
It is another, you know, masterpiece of both ciderism, obscurantism, and the way I would frame it, which is not how Eric or his fans would frame it, but is...
Basically presenting fairly standard right-leaning positions and takes and framing them as if they are these never-before-heard, unheralded opinions that cannot be found in mainstream discourse and which completely break the fabric of our duopolistic media narrative.
And yeah, it's just...
It's a sight to behold, but he does talk about, you know, he responds to Sam Harris trying to disown the intellectual dark web and basically says that he can't because it's like the Hotel California and you can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.
Oh dear.
Yeah.
Oh good.
Well, yeah, I think it's hard to resist.
I know you're very tempted.
We're both tempted to go back and return to Eric.
On one hand...
There's so many gurus to get to, and I don't want this to be focused on any one particular person.
On the other hand, yeah, Eric Weinstein is an airbender of this stuff.
He's just amazing.
Yeah, he's the gift that keeps on giving.
I genuinely think he's a person in the conspiracy guru space who is offering a newly...
Like, it's still all the old same conspiracy and same old rhetoric, but it's packaged in this novel new book.
Well, for me, the interesting thing about him is unlike people like Scott Adams, who we're going to talk about today, who to a large degree is just a straightforward political partisan and as such is not super interesting.
Eric is interesting because he is just purely guru.
You know, he's not primarily about...
In my opinion, about partisanship or about pushing a particular ideological line.
But he seems to me to be purely about acting and the image of a guru and convincing people that he's a guru seems to be his primary impetus, which makes him really interesting because he's pure and refined in a way that a lot of these other people aren't.
Pushback against that, I would give is that I can't agree that like the overriding motivation is how intelligent Eric is and his takes.
But I will say that his contrarian streak has a fairly predictable quality to it, right?
Like when it comes to voter election conspiracies.
He basically wants to say, you dismissing people for that?
That's actually you being close-minded and narrow.
But he can't be so straightforward to just say that the mainstream allegations of fraud are true.
So he needs to find, like, you know, a kind of hipster way to make contrarian arguments.
And it means that he has his novel takes, but they're all...
Fairly much in line ideologically where you would expect him to go.
Eric was tweeting about how he gets a much warmer reception from like Tucker Carlson and those kind of people than he does from, you know, CNN or so on.
And I wonder why.
I really wonder why.
Because him and his friends spend most of their time complaining about the left and arguing that Trump...
Isn't as bad as people claim?
It's very hard to tell why they would be more receptive to that kind of message.
Yep, that's true too.
No disagreement there.
So let's move on and do a few shout-outs, hey, Chris?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I might start with Two Psychologists, Four Beers, a long-standing psychology podcast.
And these guys have been very supportive of us and have tweeted nice things about us and also shouted us out on a recent episode.
Wanted to say thank you for that.
Yes, that's right.
Although I'm going to give the credit to Mickey.
I haven't heard super prayers coming from UL.
So let's not give credit.
Yeah, what's up with UL?
But no, I really like two psychologists for beers and I follow Mickey and UL and they're both good follows and the podcast is a good one to listen to.
So yeah, I endorse your shout out.
And I have my own to offer.
So one thing I forgot in the previous weeks is I meant to mention that Evolving Moloch on Twitter was kind enough to share an essay that he had written about Rutger Bregman reviewing his book critically.
And it agreed with most of the points that we...
He independently had kind of reached.
But it was very helpful to read because he, you know, had read the book.
And I meant to give a shout-out during the Rick Bregman episode and forgot.
Excellent.
Good.
Yeah.
EvolvingMoloch on Twitter is a good person to follow if you like anthropology stuff as well.
Yeah, I follow him.
He's great.
We have some other shout-outs on the list I'm looking at in front of me that we wanted to make, but we won't.
Do them all at once.
We'll save them for future episodes, won't we?
Yeah, so if you didn't hear your name, maybe it's you next week.
Look at that.
You won't know unless you tune in.
Good.
Okay, so that's done.
What are we doing next?
Reviews.
Reviews, because we solicited them and only fair that we should cover some of them.
I also have more breaking news for you, Matt, about the ongoing success of the podcast.
And that is...
We broke another top 100, so we're still in the top 100 in Iceland.
That's good.
And I had some Icelandic...
Listeners, reach out and basically claim responsibility because you only need about three or four people.
But still, we're actually currently 24th in the Icelandic society and culture chart.
So there you go.
It's number one.
Icelandic listeners, we can do this.
Let's get to number one.
We just need four more people.
But Matt, this is the news that I don't know how you're going to react to this because of your deep national rivalry.
But we're in the top 100 in New Zealand in society and culture.
Oh, that makes me very happy.
I'm a fan of New Zealand.
I think maybe they should be incorporated into Australia.
I like them so much.
They love hearing that.
Yeah, that's great.
I'm happy.
Yeah.
Oh, wait.
No, sorry.
It's fake news.
It's fake news.
Because I've just realized I've read the little chart thing wrong.
And it actually says it's not our rank.
We're out of the top 100 or 200.
And it says the change is that we are down 70. So we might have broke the top 200 for like a day and then we dropped 70. So sorry.
Big news for you.
I don't get too excited.
What a letdown.
Fill me up and then you knock me down again.
The rollercoaster ride.
I'm sorry, Matt.
We have to tone down the anti-New Zealand rhetoric.
Ireland is the one with the sheep gig, okay, New Zealanders?
That's our thing.
You stick to your quasi-Australian-ness.
Now, so two reviews.
That's the usual thing that we do.
And sticking with the New Zealand theme, we have a review from New Zealand.
It's a five-star review.
Very good.
And it says, nice intro music, but otherwise, this podcast is the condensed dribble that seeps out of a trash bag after fermenting for a few days in the rotting material of a left-wing echo chamber.
Oh, that's excellent.
Great.
Is that it?
Is there any more?
No, that's it.
That's it.
So there's two possibilities here.
Elo, this is a genuine criticism, and somebody just clicked the wrong reading button.
Or EP350 is the person.
I don't think that's their name, though.
But they have followed our instructions, or your instructions from previous weeks, and given a positive review with negative text.
Great.
Yeah, good.
So yeah, Elo, it was entertaining.
So thank you very much, EP350.
Thank you.
That's right.
The most awful, most critical reviews get the airtime.
They get the shout-out.
That's right.
We're doing this wrong.
No, Matt, what has happened that I give one good review and one negative review?
So that's the negative one for this week.
All right.
So now I will give you...
The positive review.
So this is the other way to get a shout out.
Just fawning praise.
Fawning praise.
That's it.
Okay.
So the title of this one, and this one is from Australia, Matt.
It might be a family member.
It may not.
We shall find out.
It's from Quad Zeus, which is a good name.
I quite like that.
Favorite new podcast of 2020.
Good start.
Five stars.
This is easily my favorite podcast in a long time.
Good job.
It is generally an excellent dissection of the claims made by many public intellectuals, with some humour thrown in to stop you from falling asleep.
I am definitely looking forward to the eventual episode where Chris and Matt decode themselves.
That would be meta.
That would be very meta.
Yeah, this has been requested several times.
It's probably going to have to happen at some point where we decode our own episode, which will be very upsetting.
The thing I wanted to highlight in this review is, again, I think we've got a neg, another neg, that there's some humour in to stop you from falling asleep.
What does that suggest?
It's a bit backhanded, isn't it?
Yeah, this is like saying, you know, we barely keep people away with our monotonous, relentless...
Repetitious criticism.
But then we occasionally throw a bad joke in and, like, that keeps people awake.
This negging has got to stop, right?
Like, pure positive.
Pure positive.
That's it.
I'm worried that it might be some way accurate.
And I'm also concerned that sooner or later somebody is going to decode us and we'll be hoist by our own petard and everything will get thrown back at us.
So we'll have to...
We'll have to be on our best behavior.
Well, when you upset me enough, I will flounce out of this and start my own podcast and start just taking you apart.
That will meet the listener's request and be an enjoyable adventure for both of us as well.
So there you go, Matt.
Something to look forward to.
Well, if you do that, then I'll start my own podcast as soon as I can find someone else to do most of the work.
Then you'll be in trouble.
Well, things to look forward to.
More podcasts to come.
This does remind me, just very offhand, that there was someone in one of Eric's Discords that claimed they were going to launch several podcasts, including one dedicated to taking us down.
So I didn't really trust them to see through because, you know, having launched just one...
I really don't think you're going to do that.
But, you know, maybe.
Yeah, it's actually quite a lot of work, isn't it?
Relatively speaking.
Which actually brings us to our next topic, which is to...
Good segue, Matt.
Good segue.
That's actually our first segue that we've ever done.
So it's the dreaded P word.
P-hacking!
Sorry, not P-hacking.
There's no money in that.
Not P-hacking.
Okay, well, it's not, Matt, isn't it?
Okay, so look, long story short, Chris has looked at what he's been charged to host Help On Park and has realised that it's not free.
We've spent a few hundred bucks, I guess, Australian bucks, probably.
Well, yeah, don't pull the curtain back too much, Matt.
Yeah, we have decided that, you know, now that we've...
Build up our massive Icelandic audience that we now want to monetize them and become the millionaire culture warriors that we were always destined to become.
Yes.
We're going to start a Patreon.
Patreon.
So the plan is to quit our...
Our cushy academic jobs and to rely entirely on Patreon support.
So yeah, we've got high hopes.
Yeah, so it's definitely a winning formula.
This is not a niche podcast that would be impossible to live off at all.
So what are we doing at Patreon for?
So like Matt has hinted at, the main reason is to try and make sure that we just break even.
I think that's a reasonable goal.
The podcast doesn't actually cost us money.
And that wouldn't require that much.
So I think that's a decent goal.
But do we have anything to offer in return, Matt, or any plans?
Or is this purely a cynical money grab?
Okay, well, we do.
We did talk about this, didn't we?
We thought we would...
This was another segue for us.
This was a segue for the pitch.
I hadn't prepared a pitch.
Don't say that.
You can tell we're definitely going to be very good at monetizing or raking in people with this level of professionalism.
Yeah, sorry, continue on, continue on.
Okay, what can we offer?
Well, we did have some ideas about that.
Like, apart from having that sort of Patreon-type group where we might have a bit of, you know, in-house discussion amongst fellow travellers who are interested in this kind of thing, we thought that would be good.
And the other thing is we thought we would release some patrons-only podcasts, which is actually kind of helpful because we want to stick with our theme, stick with our format for the Gurus, and we don't want to change that for the public broadcast.
But there's a lot of other interesting tangentially related topics that we could
Yeah, so I think the two things are that Patreon gives you the ability to release Patreon-only feeds where we can put extra material, shorter episodes, which wouldn't be so long or would be about,
like kind of more niche topics that don't require massive amounts of post-production.
Like, for example, I have considered looking at the back catalogue of Eric's audio essays and going through them.
But obviously, we don't want to do every week an Eric Weinstein audio essay.
But there's a lot of nonsense in them.
Like we've seen with the special episode, they're kind of condensed conspiratorial thinking and guruism.
So I think it would be neat to
But that might be something to release on the Patreon feed.
And other things would be that the audio clips that we use for the episodes to put them up.
For everyone to download and do whatever you want, listen to it at night, to put yourself to sleep.
If you ever wanted these audio clips, now is your chance.
And the last thing is, like Matt says, I use Patreon and the thing that I tend to like about the content that I support is that there's like a little community that forms because you're contributing to a thing and have similar interests.
And like, obviously it depends how big the podcast is, but we're...
Fairly niche.
So yeah, we're just hoping a couple of people are interested in doing that.
Then we'll release content.
And we have tiers and all that ready to go.
So yeah, you can check it out and contribute or don't.
Yeah, it starts at $2.
So really good value.
Good value.
Nice and cheap.
Yeah, so that's it.
Rank commercialism segment.
And now, Matt, we also are able to be accused of being grifters.
So I hope you prepared for this because it was nice while it lasted to be able to say, well, we're not, we're actually costing money.
And possibly that will continue.
For a while.
It might continue indefinitely.
But yeah, I'm sorry.
We've now entered the grifter accusation space.
So, c 'est la vie.
C 'est la vie.
All right, moving right along.
Let's introduce the man of the hour, Scott Adams, shall we?
Yes, why not?
I'll let you do the honors, since I think I've already flagged up my ability to be...
Yeah, me too, unfortunately.
But I don't have a great deal to say because I knew virtually nothing about him before, apart from the fact that he created the Dilbert cartoon, which is a bit of a blast from the past, but I remember quite liking it, thinking it was kind of funny.
But, you know, since Dilbert, he's had a substantial career as writing various books, initially leveraging off the...
The cartoon and then moving more into sort of other areas.
And they're interesting books.
I haven't read them, but I've read about them.
You know, they've got a political aspect to them.
And I'm thinking of titles like Win Bigly and Loser Think.
And they seem to be interesting and very much aligned with his current podcast, which we are reviewing today, where it's kind of part sort of self-help.
Rules for life, but supposedly training in persuasion and critical thinking and to how to figure out when you are being played, but also teaching you these skills.
And he's very interested in Donald Trump and the four-dimensional chess and so on that Trump undertakes to be convincing.
So it's got a part political commentary, part self-help, and supposedly an explication of logical fallacies and so on.
But as we'll see, it doesn't...
Yeah.
He talks about the logical fallacies in what we're reviewing today as well, so we'll see how well he goes with that.
So yeah, he's very much a conservative, partisan figure, very much in the Make America Great Again camp.
You know, a deep climate change sceptic, for instance.
Oh, I didn't even know that.
So that makes me like him even less.
Yeah, it's pretty much if you could check off all of the partisan, you know, hyper-conservative opinions, and he would pretty much have them all.
So getting into his podcast, which is called, what's that called?
Coffee with Scott Adams podcast.
And the two episodes that we focused on were 1197, odds of rigging an election and getting away with it, question mark, whiteboard time, and 1201.
Watch me monetize my dumbest critics while discussing the election allegations.
Thank you, critics.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can get a sense of the tone of that.
So he releases these at an extraordinary rate.
One a day.
One a day.
And the format is basically quite, quite folksy.
And yeah, he sits down, has a cup of coffee with his listeners and just has a bit of a chat about the topics of the day.
As we'll see, they tend to be very much a political diatribe, but organized in a very distinctive style, which I think is very guru-like.
So he's turned out to be quite interesting, but as we said at the beginning, a little bit unappealing.
A little bit.
Yeah.
So I think the theme of the podcast about sitting down, starting your day with a cup of coffee and...
Hearing, you know, Scott Adams break down the political and cultural news for you.
That's the way it's presented.
But it's with a heavy dose of this audience interaction thing that we've seen with other gurus.
Now, he isn't presenting his followers so much as friends like Eric does, but rather as people who are able to see beyond the usual Smokescreen that the mainstream throws up,
right?
You're one of the people that is able to look at things critically and they understand the techniques of persuasion.
So there's a lot of audience back patting, but because he's such an obnoxious character, a lot of it is framed at presenting as how much smarter he is than anyone else and kind of speaking down or lecturing to his audience that obviously you would agree with him.
If you have any brains.
And this thing that he does at the start about getting a coffee, like you say, a kind of folksy nature to it.
I think playing an example of it would be a good start.
Just to get the general gist of how it starts off.
And in order to enjoy the double-sided whiteboard to its full extent, what do you need?
Not much.
A cup or mug or glass, a tank or chelder, a stein, a canteen jug or a flask.
A vessel of any kind.
And you can fill it with your favorite liquid, I...
I'm partial to coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
Way better.
75% better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
It happens now.
Go.
Ah.
I feel science becoming more accurate.
I feel data starting to be credible.
And that's just one sip.
Imagine if I finish that entire mug.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
That's so upsetting.
Yeah, so it's very dissonant.
That sort of folksy approach is kind of dissonant when you look at the topics that he covers.
So just to give people a sense of this, and I've just pulled up the latest episode, which from December the 3rd or just yesterday, and he's got the bullet points, hopefully, of it, which is everything we know about COVID origins was BS.
Limited martial law and redo the election?
Obvious, massive election fraud is okay now.
We've lost democracy freedom.
Can we get it back?
So it's hyper-partisan stuff, so it's really quite dissonant.
With the framing of that, oh, let's just sit down and relax and have a cup of tea.
Yeah, I think part of the issue for me is I know what comes next.
So it actually is triggering to hear his vocal tics and stuff because I know what they're going to be used to say.
So I blame you, Matt, because I barely got through the one episode that we broke down and then you suggested we do another one.
And I've since ended up listening to more of them.
Because this is something I would do to myself.
And so, yeah, like, if you're just a listener and you know nothing about Scott Adams, maybe that just sounds nice.
You know, it just sounds like somebody saying, you know, okay, let's get a coffee together to start.
But for me, that's the intro to an hour and a half of mental pain.
Yeah, I have to.
That's very true.
I've, yeah, having listened to several hours of him now, they were not pleasant.
Hours.
My skin was crawling pretty much the whole time.
So yeah, look, we're setting this up in a very negative way, aren't we?
But I mean, it's just better to be right.
It's justified.
It's going to be justified.
So okay, I agree that now we need to get into the reasons that this response has been provoked.
So let's start off our proper analysis.
If you were waiting for the ad hominems and whatnot to stop, they will stop now.
We'll go into this content.
Okay, so maybe a good place to start is Scott's view on science and how to best approach science, especially important in this era where there's been now new vaccines developed and the coronavirus.
So let's hear the man speak for himself.
We all know we should trust science and we should trust the experts, but they interpret things differently.
The experts and the scientists look at the same data and they interpret it differently.
So how can you trust them?
Trusting science is a good idea.
Trusting scientists is the dumbest fucking idea in the world.
Because they're people.
And people can't be trusted.
People can be right.
And people can be wrong.
But you can't trust them.
You can't trust them.
Yeah, so that little chuckle there at the end, we're going to be hearing that quite a few times, aren't we?
Endlessly, Mark.
We're going to hear it endlessly.
Yeah, it's like a little bookmark that signifies a point that's just been made.
So, yeah, so that's pretty representative of some of the themes he likes to hit.
You can see the logic there.
Any problems with the logic that you can see?
Yeah.
Of course, you cannot have science without scientists.
You cannot have expertise without experts.
And therefore, they are people.
People can't be trusted.
Yeah, you can't.
So you can't.
So he's definitely eliminated those sources of knowledge with a stroke of logic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, we've come into this pattern where people say, I'm not going to do something, and then they go on to do it.
And in this case, obviously he doesn't want to come across as someone who completely dismisses science.
But in essence, he does completely dismiss science because you need scientists to do science.
So there's no science without scientists.
So saying that I respect science, but I don't respect what scientists tell me, then how the hell do you know what...
Science is, if you don't respect the scientific literature, what people say.
And now, it is certainly true that scientists are imperfect and there can be mistakes and that you shouldn't treat them as infallible experts.
But that's the straw man, right?
That's not the point.
Like, climate scientists are fallible.
Yes, that doesn't mean the science behind climate change is...
It's untrustworthy and, you know, it's 50-50 on whether it's convincing or not, which is what he's pushing.
Yeah, I mean, the general theme that I'm sure he'll hit again and again in these clips is to maximize distrust, maximize cynicism.
Yeah, and there's a nice illustration of this dichotomy he creates between the platonic ideal of science, which he respects, and the...
Shitty reality of the humans who do it.
And here it is.
But trust science.
But I don't have access to science, do you?
Reach into your pocket and grab me a handful of science.
Do you have any?
Because I don't have any.
Look at my shelves.
I got some books on my shelves, but I don't have any science.
I don't have science.
I can't get my hands around it.
Don't have access to it.
I'll tell you what I do have.
People telling me their opinions.
That's what I have.
I don't have any fucking science.
I got people telling me their opinions about science.
I don't trust people.
Are you kidding me?
I don't trust people at all.
Yeah, so again, the villainous giggle or chuckle at the end.
I mean, he spells it out there for himself, but the immediate question that should raise is then, okay, so you don't trust scientists.
So what do you trust since scientists are people and he believes that he can read people?
So how do you check yourself against simply selecting what you want to believe based on your own internal motivations?
And the answer, as we'll see as things go on, is that...
He doesn't.
He completely leans into whichever experts or data or views that supports his argument, he will endorse.
And anything else, he'll just try to cynically undermine or he'll suggest that it's unknowable.
There is no data that is meaningful.
And if you trust data, you're an idiot.
But then in the next sentence, he'll happily cite data that supports his views.
I'm throwing my hands up, Matt.
Yeah, no, understandable.
Look, that's actually pretty well said.
I don't have too much to add to that because I think you're right.
It's a process of undermining things.
I mean, in a platitudinous kind of way, of course it's true.
People are fallible.
There's a sociological context in which...
Knowledge is generated by science and data and so on.
But really what it is is a smokescreen to just believe whatever narrative it is that you want.
And it's a kind of postmodernism that we see in conservatism more and more these days, which, yeah, I find kind of chilling.
But yeah, let's maybe go and look at some more examples of this.
Yeah, so this leads on to him discussing data.
So he's already explained how people should view science.
So let's see how he regards data, any kind of data.
I don't believe anything that's data in 2020.
It doesn't matter what the topic is.
It's voting, it's coronavirus, it doesn't matter.
If you believe any public, regardless of the source, if you believe any data you see in public in 2020...
You haven't been paying attention.
It's pretty much all unreliable.
Some of it is true, but it's all unreliable.
Okay?
Okay.
At least we didn't get a chuckle that time.
Yeah, thank goodness for small mercies.
Yeah, so it's more of the same, isn't it?
Very strong.
It's just amazing how postmodern it is because it really is this argument for complete detachment from any kind of knowable material reality and a real leaning into this post-truth era.
So Scott is a big fan of Donald Trump and his methods of persuasion.
And yeah, you can really see that here.
He fully endorses jumping in.
Feet first into a post-truth mindset.
Yeah.
And let me just play a clip, though, that shows just how cynical this claim is about data and the level of skepticism we should attach to them.
Because this is him talking about evidence of election fraud.
So, of course, as a Trump apologist, he's completely all in on this voters fraud conspiracies.
So here's him talking about whether there's evidence for that.
How could you possibly convince 79% of the people that fraud happened with zero evidence?
How does that happen?
Well, it could be because there is evidence, and Democrats just say there isn't.
I would say the sworn statements from over 200 people, that they personally observed irregularities, is evidence.
Yeah, so the skepticism that you should attach to data, It seems to, you know, feed away or dissolve whenever there's like, and this is witness testimony or, you know, one thing that strikes me about this is Scott Adams is maximally cynical when it comes to primarily anybody on the left or Democrats.
But in many respects, even though he's claiming to be very cynical and cockeyed when it comes to everyone's claims.
He's either extremely gullible or he's simply being a propagandist and he doesn't care what's true.
Because the fact that you could get 200 people in a country of over 300 million to take a partisan stance when a president and highly vocal partisan figure is strongly encouraging people to To make those kind of claims.
That should be a case where, yes, you should be sceptical of the data then.
You should be sceptical of those accounts because there is motivated ideological factors at play.
But he has none of that scepticism when it comes to things which serve his narrative.
Yeah, exactly.
So, at least to me, I'm not sure if it's clear to our listeners, but it just feels transparently obvious to me that he is a propagandist.
And is using these rhetorical, pseudological tricks to make his case for persuasion.
So it's kind of ironic, actually, that touches on the theme in his podcast generally, which is that he does consider himself to be an expert on methods of persuasion, and his books are partially about that.
So it's kind of ironic that his...
His podcast really is an exercise in just almost every slippery rhetorical trick.
So I'm sure we'll see a lot more examples of it.
I think on some level, he probably would acknowledge that and say that it's just about...
I feel there's a bit of a Schrodinger's cat situation where he wants to argue that he's making logical, well-thought-out, persuasive arguments.
But he's also at the same time winking that what he cares about is convincing and persuading people and not necessarily whether arguments are true.
Well, exactly.
And in his talk about the election, I mean, it was kind of indicated by that clip there, but there are clips later on that illustrate it.
He really does emphasize that it's perception that matters.
The actual reality of the truth doesn't actually matter.
All that matters is people's perceptions.
So, yeah, I think you're right about that.
Yeah.
And so you raised the point, Matt, you know, is he an expert?
And he, as we saw, you know, he disparages expert opinion almost constantly about every topic.
But when it comes to the position of himself, let's hear what he says.
And, hey, wait a minute.
Am I an expert?
Am I an expert on, let's say, human motivation within a large organization?
I kind of am, in my own way.
If you're the author of the Dilbert comic, you are kind of an expert on human motivation in large organizations.
But I don't have a degree in anything like that, so I won't make that claim.
So, Matt, can I just blow out my own brains there at someone saying, after making that claim explicitly that they are an expert in some topic, finishing the sentence by saying,
but I'm not going to make that claim.
It's like, you just did.
You actually had rhetorical questions to yourself where you said, you know, am I an expert?
Well, yes, I am.
But the ending is this denial that that's what was claimed.
And it's upsetting to me that the logic is so contradictory and so superficially contradictory that I really hope people would notice that kind of thing.
But I don't think...
I think there are many people that don't.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
But luckily we're here to point it out.
Hey, Chris.
I'm sorry.
In case the listeners haven't noticed, this was an upsetting one because the level of bad argumentation and constant rhetoric, self-aggrandizing partisan rhetoric, it's really hard to overstate.
That's all his podcast is for like an hour and a half.
Anyway, anyway, okay.
So let's have one last clip about what's the problem with experts exactly, Matt.
It might be this.
The listen to the experts thing is purely stupidity because you can't tell which expert to listen to.
If you could, you know, that's a different conversation.
But you can't.
You can't tell.
Is it Rudy or is it this election professional?
They have different opinions.
Yeah.
I mean, I actually struggle to comment on this because to me it just seems I'm pointing out the blindingly obvious.
Do it, Matt.
Do it.
What is the blindingly obvious?
Okay.
Just because you can find someone who declares an opinion that is different from...
Other experts' opinion doesn't mean that it is completely impossible to access expert opinion.
You can actually take into account people's motivations and backgrounds and roles.
Really?
Yes, you can.
And there is a difference between, say, Rudy Giuliani, who is not, you know, is who he is.
He's completely impartial.
He's so far in the Trump camp that he's like...
I can't even think of an analogy, but he's in there.
He's at the centre.
He is the tent that they are inside.
Yes, he's at the epicentre of partisan ideological blindness.
But when you have heaps of other people, many of them Republicans, who actually do have a role in supervising elections and judges, any number of other people saying the opposite, then yes, you can.
Weight what different people are saying.
Consider who they are and what their motivations are.
And you can get a pretty good estimate of expert opinion.
Like the same goes for climate change, for instance.
Or whether or not smoking causes cancer.
Yes, you can find a doctor who has been paid a lot of money by Philip Morris, right?
Who will say something different.
But that does not obviate.
The fact that there is an expert consensus on that matter.
So I find this rhetoric just so, well, seems so bad to me, but clearly it's not that bad because he's got 300,000 followers on Twitter and many people listen to this and think he's a genius.
So I'm just so sad just knowing that this podcast exists and that people like it.
Well, let me make you sadder.
So here's Scott making the case for why we are wrong about casting.
Who would be a good expert to tell you whether a city election was rigged?
Would you want to hear from an election law professional?
Or would you want to hear from Rudy Giuliani?
Now, say what you will about Rudy Giuliani, but don't you think he's kind of an expert on municipal fraud?
I always think he would know more about that than just about anybody in the world.
I was very tempted, Dermatt, to scream when he presented those two options.
The first one, the expert on election legal law.
That's who I want.
Not Trump's lawyer.
Like, yeah.
But you can see the case he makes, right?
Which is, it's just highlighting very selective facts and ignoring massively.
The thing that spun this off is some legal expert on elections telling him, you know, he shouldn't be so cynical and that the system, we've got lots of good reason and a large consensus amongst experts that the American voting system is,
you know, robust and transparent, relatively speaking.
Not to say it's not a system without its flaws, right?
But then his response was, well, should we trust that guy or Rudy Giuliani?
And, yeah.
It's depressing.
And, you know, I guess it's particularly depressing given just the context here, which is that there's a lot of people like Scott Adams who are, including the president, just doing everything they can to undermine Americans' confidence in their own democracy and their own system.
I find it...
I find it really depressing, but we should soldier on and deal with more shitty opinions.
Well, okay.
So before we get back to all the political nonsense, which is a lot of this content, I did want to highlight one of the guru techniques that we see a lot.
And I already talked about, you know, the engagement with the audience and this folksy sipping coffee.
But we also see the presentation that only the select who can hang with the big boys can follow his arguments and will be able to handle him.
So this is him framing, just the framing of one of his arguments.
I can say this a million times and most people won't be able to hear it.
There are some ideas.
That we just can't hear.
It's an unusual phenomenon.
I'll give you one.
Some of you will be able to hear what I say next.
Some of you just can't hear it.
It'll be like noise like Charlie Brown's teacher.
And so this will be an experiment.
And it goes like this.
So, you know, it's screaming things that if you...
Find his argument unpersuasive.
It just shows your mental limitations.
Yeah, it's a wonderful illustration of the Emperor's new clothes thing, isn't it?
Where if you can't see his argument and agree with it, that's like not seeing the Emperor's clothes, and you don't want to be one of those people.
Yeah, it's such a blatant trick, but yeah, it's interesting that it works.
Yeah, and there's...
Well, there's another segment where he, I can only describe it as deploying full naivety.
And as he's casting these things, he does get feedback, I think, from his YouTube or Periscope commentators.
Yeah, he does.
And he sometimes responds to things that they say.
And actually, before the full...
Naivety one.
There was an amusing interaction where one of his followers pointed out that with his election fraud conspiracy stuff, he had started to slip towards QAnon.
And here was his reaction to that.
Somebody says, Scott's going full QAnon.
You have fallen.
I'm going to block you for saying that.
You have fallen for the narrative.
So I just like, I'm going to block you for saying that.
Justice is swift and harsh.
Yeah, so I think that's a good illustration of the kind of way that he regards his followers.
Like, yes, he needs them and they pay money and that and stuff, but out of line and you're gone.
You're there, question the master, and there we go.
Okay, so this is the application of fake naivety.
To make a point, and it's excruciating, but here we go.
Since Democrats don't listen to Trump, or they want to do whatever is the opposite he says, you expect the Democrats are already wearing their masks, right?
I mean, sure, maybe sometimes they get caught without one, but let's say generally they're wearing their masks.
Oh, in the comments, you think I'm wrong.
You think Democrats are not wearing masks?
Well, that doesn't make any sense.
How could it be that Democrats are not wearing masks completely?
Because they're not listening to Trump because they're Democrats.
Oh, huh.
So did you get his point there, Matt, what he was waffling about?
No, I don't think I did really.
In that segment, he's talking about how when Biden comes into power, that they won't be able to increase the amount of masks wearing because...
Democrats are already wearing masks at ceiling levels and Republicans won't listen to him, right?
Like Trump fans.
So, like, it doesn't matter.
But he can't resist when the opportunity arises to insinuate that Democrats are, one, just reactionarily responding to Trump.
That's why they're not wearing masks, right?
Just despite...
Trump, not because of the positive reasons to do that.
And then secondly, to respond to the audience suggestion by kind of invoking, oh, you think they would be hypocritical?
Democrats would be hypocritical?
Hmm.
Oh, I guess so.
And it's just like, it's all so slimy.
He still landslides on to the point, but it's just everything feels like pantomimed to me.
The way he presents things and the way he engages with arguments.
Yeah, we'll be seeing a lot more of that.
Yeah, so as you said, most of his stuff is about Trump and the election and politics.
So should we get into that big pile of stuff?
Yes, yes, let's.
Well, one section that I found somewhat amazing was this section where he...
So first of all, he...
He kind of goes back and forth on whether or not Biden will be elected or, you know, will become the president.
And then he does a thing which lots of guru types do, where he's constantly making contradictory predictions and then throwing some words about doubt, basically saying, you know, well...
There's a path to Trump to win the presidency.
And if you are willing to count that out, wow, you're quite the rube.
But then in another segment, he'll say, no, yes, it's very likely that Biden will be the president.
But that doesn't mean there was no fraud, right?
And so no matter what happens, he has these things that he can point to where his claim was validated.
There's a section where he starts speaking about Biden specifically, but maybe the better illustration of this is he made a prediction about if Biden wins, Trump voters being hunted.
And this is him assessing whether that prediction hit or not.
Remember I predicted that if Joe Biden won, Republicans would be hunted.
And I was roundly mocked through society for such a ridiculous thing.
Well, of course, we've seen people get assaulted just for being Trump supporters, so indeed they are hunted on the street, and certainly they will be ferreted out in employment, etc.
Okay, so that's the first claim of success.
Before you respond to that, Matt, I will play just a slightly...
Longer one where that's his first evidence that he supplied.
And here's the second which proves that he was correct.
Just questioning the outcome.
If they should be jailed.
You fucking bitch.
You fucking piece of shit.
Rachel Maddow.
She's asking if Trump supporters should be jailed for not breaking a crime.
Just doubting the outcome of an election.
Think about that.
Now, when you were mocking me for saying that Republicans would be hunted, what the fuck is this?
What the fuck is this?
If this is not a pretty clean signal that Democrats are willing to jail, I mean, that's her word.
She used the word jail.
I'm not interpreting.
Just for the context, though, that's a news reporter on CNN or MSNBC or one of them who asked a legal expert, well, are people cynically contesting election results could face jail time?
That was the context.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, one of the reasons listening to him is so creepy is that there's just so much venom sort of underneath that sort of folksy style.
Yeah, but I think the reason you chose that clip was just to illustrate how these predictions can always be shown to be true.
What you need is one case of someone wearing a MAGA hat getting roughed up on the street or one journalist speculating whether or not cynically pushing conspiracy theories that undermine the election process might be a criminal offence.
And he can sort of prove his claim.
Which is really hyperbolic.
To go back to the original claim, it's not like it was expressed in a cautious or conservative way.
It was saying that Trump supporters would be hunted down.
Yeah, it's not the exact same, right?
Like a pundit on a political...
Even if she was making what he claims, and it seems not, you know, maybe it was like a badly chosen question or something, but...
She's not jailing anyone.
She has no power.
It's just a pundit asking a legal person a question.
That's it.
Yeah, that's it.
Yeah, yeah.
But that's all you need, isn't it?
There's so much.
There's so much chatter, there's so much discourse in the infosphere that everything happens at least once.
So there is stuff that will support any narrative that you like, including, yeah, Trump supporters getting hunted down after the election.
Anyway.
Yeah, and you know, one of the motivations originally behind doing this podcast was that the people in the sphere...
Especially in the political sphere, don't really get covered by skeptics or that kind of thing, right?
You won't hear the Skeptics Guide to the Universe talking about Scott Adams, for example.
But in large part, I think they actually should because the technique that he's employing here is the exact same technique as a psychic who throws out vague predictions, a whole bunch of them, and then when it comes later, points back to the things that are hits.
And completely ignores the misses.
And also reframes things such that things that are classified as hits are very, very questionable.
And like Scott Adams is doing here.
So this is basically just the exact same logic as bad psychics.
But people don't approach it like that.
They kind of treat political commentary as a separate category.
And that's one of the things, to me, I don't think it is.
Yeah, I agree with you there.
I think...
You're right.
I think people don't usually touch it.
And it is difficult to deal with because most political discourse is pretty bad, like across the spectrum.
A lot of it is partisan and one-eyed and all that stuff.
But some is really worse than others.
And this is one of those situations, I think.
Yeah, I'll give another illustration, which hasn't happened yet, but you can see the framing coming in advance for how...
Scott will justify when Biden is sworn in and none of the court cases work.
So he has a whole ton of explanations ready for this.
But this was one that struck me as particularly notable.
But let's say he goes through the process that he is absolutely the president of the United States.
Our Constitution is acted.
The Supreme Court is spoken if they get involved.
It's just done.
And then, hypothetically, just asking the question, and then after that, proof comes out that the election was rigged and rigged sufficiently that it changed the outcome.
What would happen?
Because haven't all the experts been telling us it's too late?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Hasn't every expert said, you know, once it gets to this point, well, then it's just too late.
It's over.
Is it?
Is it?
I'm not so sure.
Yeah.
He's like the fucking Joker.
Yeah, yeah.
That's just...
So there's just so many things wrong with that.
I mean, at first, the most obvious thing is that it's just based purely on speculation, on just a hypothetical scenario, which, you know, there's no evidence for, but it will be...
Yeah, anyway.
Well, it allows him to say that when it doesn't happen, it could happen in years to come, right?
Which is like, it's always something that could happen.
Like, if in the future...
Evidence emerges that completely vindicates my view.
I'll be vindicated.
Yes, that's true.
But there's no reason to suspect that will happen.
But it will allow him to basically say to his audience that he hasn't been proven wrong because there isn't 50 years from now.
So it's a little bit like the people who are waiting for the alien spaceship that's attached to a comet or something that will lift them up.
From this world and carry them off to Nirvana, right?
They've got a date.
They're expecting it to happen.
By this date, it's definitely going to happen.
And that date passes and they revise the dates and just got to wait a little bit longer.
But yeah, people are astoundingly patient no matter how many dates get missed.
And the alien spaceship hasn't lifted them off from this mortal coil into a higher spiritual realm.
They seem quite okay with that constant deferment of the promise.
Yeah, it doesn't matter, right?
And to some extent, Scott's audience must be just enjoying the reinforcement because I don't think that Scott has a lot of people listening to him who want to be challenged by his takes.
No.
It's just someone telling you what you want to hear in various inventive ways.
Like, he presents arguments that are internally inconsistent.
All the time in this.
But I don't think people mind.
And if I can give one example.
So this is still on the Trump apologetics, which is like so much of what he does.
He starts talking about Trump and crimes and whether if he is removed, whether he should be prosecuted for crimes or whether he's committed any crimes.
So here's the start of that segment.
Trump does some kind of a clever pardon before he leaves office.
You know, something like stepping down on the last day of his term and having Pence pardon him for everything he's ever done.
I hope that happens.
Now, normally, I would say, I sure hope that anybody who committed a crime gets caught.
I mean, typically, I would like people to get caught for doing crimes.
But what exactly is Trump's crime?
Can you think of one?
I have not heard a crime even alleged, have you?
Apparently there are all these lawsuits in the Southern District of New York and they're looking through his financials and stuff.
But do me a fact check on this.
Has anybody alleged a crime?
And why haven't we heard it?
What is the specific crime?
Because otherwise it looks like they're just looking for a crime.
Are you okay with that?
Are you okay that a politician...
Can be examined just to see if there's a crime without any evidence that there was a crime.
Are you okay with that?
I'm not okay with that.
There's a lot there.
I'll get your reaction in a second, but I have to mention the part where he's like, has Trump been accused of a crime?
There's no crime.
Of course, there's all these legal cases.
Where he's been accused of various things.
But I've never heard of the specific details.
Is that a crime?
And then also that he should pardon himself in advance because there's no evidence of there being a crime.
But then why would he need to pardon himself?
It's all...
Internally inconsistent.
Well, I guess his argument would be that the Democrats are, well, that his enemies are manufacturing crimes and therefore it's legitimate to use a trick to protect yourself against a dirty trick, which I think he gets into.
Yes, he does.
So let me play him explaining that to us in his own unique way.
So if Trump and Pence used a political...
You know, to sort of pardon him for everything that happened up to that point in life, I think that would be appropriate because there's a trick being used against him.
So if you use a trick to counter another trick, I'm okay with that 100%.
And I very much hope that it happens.
And again, I don't care if there's a real crime or not.
Because whether or not there's a real crime is a much lower priority.
Then we shouldn't be doing this.
Yeah.
Interesting reasoning there, isn't it?
If people are being prosecuted for, and they are actually indeed guilty of a crime, then if the motivation for that prosecution is in any way, or, you know, investigation is in any way politically motivated, then that's much worse than the crimes actually occurring.
You could use any trick in the book to subvert that process.
Yeah, it's just amazing logic to, as you say, Chris, the people listening to this are people who, there's no one here that are Trump skeptics or Democrats.
He's essentially delivering the kind of logical or mental framework that is deeply satisfying to people who are just full-blown.
Yeah, he's a human embodiment of confirmation bias, not only of himself, I think for the vast majority of people who want the consumer's content, because I can't imagine anybody who is sufficiently critical not being tortured by listening to him.
Like, it's torture.
And I listen to a lot of people who make bad arguments and bad logic, but this is...
Shocking.
And I'll just play just moments before he went into that thing saying he doesn't care if there's a real crime.
He did say this.
Now, if it turns out there's all this evidence of a crime that I don't know about, then I will revise my opinion.
But based on what we know now, it looks like they're after him for political reasons.
And I think that should be shut down.
Yeah.
So that's not true, Scott, because a minute later you said you don't care if there's actual evidence for crimes.
So, yeah, I know he can't hear me, but I just need to express the level of inconsistency.
That's just over the space of four or five sentences.
He manages to completely change his standards, change the argument, reverse claims about what he's saying.
And yet...
Still manage to add in his smug little chuckles and giggles.
Yeah.
I think the thing that really...
I know.
I think the thing that really irritates you and me too, obviously, is that pretense at...
It's a real pretense at logical argument when it's just...
It's so much just pure ideological fixation and it's just so transparently a rationalization of...
What you initially want to believe.
But going through the motions of reasonableness is just so annoying.
When I'm teaching about debate to students in my classes, I make them aware of this distinction between substantive arguments and rhetoric.
And basically, if you're doing a debate, rhetoric is often more effective than substantive arguments.
It shouldn't be, but it is.
And the thing is that Scott is 100% rhetoric.
He's pure rhetoric.
He's like a man.
Rhetoric took human form and came to earth and was a Dilbert cartoon writer.
But just to continue on that point, and then I'll tap out and let you highlight some things maybe you would like.
There's this segment where he starts talking about...
Why do people care if Biden's going in anyway?
Because he can't change anything.
He's not going to improve anything.
And here's the logic there.
Isn't that in the past?
Because how do you fix the past?
Is Joe Biden going to use his time machine to go back and fix the past?
I don't think that's an option.
So what is it he's going to do that would be that different than what Trump would have done if he had a second term?
I feel like the mask wearing is going to be pretty similar.
I feel like the shutdowns are going to be pretty similar.
And I feel like the vaccines are going to come out and be delivered pretty similarly.
So even if you accepted, oh, we hate what Trump already did in the past, and even if you accept that it was a mistake and caused X number of lives, even if you believe that, how does that translate into the future?
Because now we actually understand the situation in a way we didn't before.
So now that we understand it better, I would imagine that a Republican and a Democrat would end up acting the same way.
When you didn't know what worked and what didn't, which is the early months, then you would expect some people would get it wrong, some people would get it right.
But now that we're far more informed, still not quite informed, but more informed...
I would expect a Democrat and a Republican to look pretty much the same.
So I'll jump in first.
Please, please.
So he's conflating two terrible arguments.
And it's partly in response to the pretty widespread belief that Trump did a terrible job in handling COVID, right?
Yes.
So he's got two arguments there.
One, which is just so terrible, is that there's no point changing a president.
Who's done a really bad job for one who might do a better job because that has happened all in the past and you can't change the past so you may as well just stick with the present you've got.
I don't know how to explain how that's terrible.
Is that self-evidently terrible or do I need to explain it?
It's so bad.
It's almost so bad in the notion that it's hard to pinpoint where the worst part of it is.
Perhaps in...
The failure to acknowledge that past events connect to present events and are predictive of future events.
That might be like simple causality.
Oh, Chris, by the way, this foreshadows his talk about the lawsuits, which we'll talk about later on, where none of the lost lawsuits can generate.
That doesn't tell us anything about the likelihood of the next lawsuit to succeed.
But anyway, sorry.
No, that's it.
I was just pinpointing one part that is particularly terrible, but please go on.
Well, just to finish, the second part of his argument is that we just didn't know that, yes, Trump's handling of it was not great, but he's making out that was because we were working with incomplete information and we didn't know enough about the time and so on.
And, you know, we don't want to relitigate that, but I just want to point out that that's a very poor argument because so many other places did so much better than Trump, and they did have the information, and the Republican Party and Trump have been constantly undermining any kind of reasonable...
But I think it was the one about, well, you may as well just keep electing the same people.
It doesn't matter how badly they do, because it's all in the past, man.
Tomorrow's a fresh new day.
That's the most enlightened both-siderism that you can have to basically say, like, none of it matters.
The person can completely contradict scientific experts and they can...
They can do whatever.
And like, ultimately, some people will be right and some people will be wrong.
But in the end, how are things going to be different now with a Republican and a Democrat?
And one of the first things that the Biden transition team has done is set up this panel of experts to advise.
Not a panel of family members and partisan morons, right?
And I'm not saying that there aren't scientific advisors in Trump's cabinet.
There are, you know, Fauci and all that kind of thing, but not his cabinet, but you know what I mean, the advisors around him.
But the look on their faces is one of constant pain and one that they're constantly having to correct what he's claimed publicly or walk it back or walk this tightrope to avoid him going on a rage against.
So just the notion that that doesn't matter, it's so transparently wrong.
The other thing that struck me is that if he really believes that it doesn't really matter who's elected...
Yeah, why does he care?
Why does he care?
And why is he such a hopeless Trump partisan?
If it doesn't matter, if it makes no difference exactly, what's the matter?
Then who's there?
It's all the same, right?
And there's...
So he starts from that part.
He begins looking at these claims that Trump was uniquely bad and then trying to litigate the Trump administration and show that basically he has done nothing wrong.
It's all been successful.
There's loads of examples he gives, but I'll just touch on two of them.
The second one is the Middle East.
What about the Middle East?
Will Biden go in there and fix everything that Trump broke in the Middle East?
Well, no, actually, it looks like Trump fixed the Middle East, or at least is heading in the right direction.
Israel's making friends with a number of neighboring countries like never before.
Iran seems to be, you know, marginalized, and things seem to be relatively less warlike than normal.
So I don't know what he's fixing there.
Yeah, so Trump solved, fixed the Middle East, Matt.
And, you know, backing out of the Iranian nuclear deal and all that, what does that matter?
Yeah.
You can have a positive assessment of Trump's foreign policy.
That's possible, right?
But casting it in the extreme way that he does, that it's been an unmitigated success and Trump has created unprecedented levels of peace.
It's really not.
It shouldn't be convincing to people.
He may not.
I often hear people making this point about, you know, Trump didn't start some international foreign war.
And I really think, does anybody believe if 9-11 happened under Trump's watch, if an event like that happened, do you really think he would be constrained and wouldn't react like in belligerent and aggressive?
form based on whatever his hunches or advisors said.
He's never shown that kind of restraint.
Yeah. I think maybe there are conservatives who could possibly agree
Yeah.
How about the economy?
Trump had the economy just humming along until coronavirus, of course.
Now, will Biden fix the coronavirus?
There's not much he can do for the economy.
The economy is going to do what it does.
So when the economy was going well, that was Trump that made that happen.
But when Biden enters office, then, well, he can't affect the economy.
It just does what it does.
Yeah, yeah.
That's convenient, isn't it?
Like, he's actually probably right.
But that's not his point.
His point is just partisanship.
That's all it is.
The economy is good.
That's a positive for Trump.
If the economy is good with Biden, well, that's just nothing to do with him.
And it's in the same sentence almost, Matt.
It's in the same sentence.
That's right.
I mean, that's not a surprising thing to see with partisan people.
But to put it in the same sentence virtually, I think that's impressive.
Yeah.
So I'm still animated about this.
So maybe...
I'll let you lead us where we go to next from here.
So much to choose from.
I'm looking at our folders here and wondering what to pick.
I think we'll return to the logic around the election, the stolen election, which he does spend an awful lot of time going into.
So let's start by looking at this logic about how the election in the United States definitely didn't reflect the will of the people.
But let's look at them together.
Social media, maybe move things 5%.
Fake news, 5%.
Rule changes, 5%.
COVID, I don't know, maybe another 5%.
Fraud, maybe 5%.
Now, if you add all these together, how many did you get here?
5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%?
And most of that movement would be toward Biden.
How much did the will of the people factor into this election?
Zero.
Yeah, so he actually spends a fair bit of time going through all of these 5% and talking about how all of these factors would have influenced the election.
And it's speaking to this broader theme that he's got, which is that the election was just sort of fundamentally...
Illegitimate.
And the outcome of the election was illegitimate.
So what do you think of his logic there, Chris?
Yeah, I mean, he goes through those exercises of illustrating all those individual points and then basically explaining his take, which assigns all of these percentages to Biden.
And it's basically just him listing out his motivated reasoning exercises where he discounts any...
I mean, I do get why, but I'm exasperated that that should be convincing to anyone because it's so clearly designed to reach a predetermined outcome that it's no surprise what he reaches because that's all he's saying it for.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it doesn't make mathematical sense, obviously, to sort of have these guesstimates of how much some arbitrary thing, like in quotation marks, fake news affected the election, and then to just nominate some percentage that it...
Shifted the sort of needle of the popular vote and then add all those up.
The whole exercise is just logically flawed.
But, yeah, as you say, the motivation for it is just so transparently partisan.
Part of this broader argument to undermine the election, not just in the specifics, not to say, oh, you know, these particular votes here shouldn't have been counted or something like that, but really to show just in principle that the American election couldn't.
I wanted to mention, Matt, that I think we'll get onto it in more detail after, but it seems a good time as any to start flagging up the level of cynicism he has about American democracy and how there was no democracy in this election.
So I also have a clip of him talking about the lack of democracy, which follows on from the clip you played.
Probably the thing that affected the election was whatever social media brainwashed you for, whatever the fake news created as your reality, the mail-in ballots, which is a process change,
which probably changed the outcome.
Just the fact that there was a coronavirus and they had to do mail-in ballots probably could change the outcome.
And then what about the fraud?
We'll talk about that in a minute.
So, how much of what I just mentioned is the people's will?
None of it.
It's the opposite of the people's will.
Nothing like democracy happened.
There was nothing like democracy that just happened in the United States.
But, we probably will get over it.
Yeah, that's a good example, Chris.
Essentially, it's the main point of these two episodes, and I presume many of his podcast episodes, which is that you don't live in a democracy, and really to delegitimize the election result in every fundamental way that you can.
So the thing about it that's, I guess, so irksome to both of us is that it's just so transparently...
Motivated reasoning.
It's designed for people who just don't like the outcome and want to just emotionally reject it as not real.
For people who are essentially MAGA to the hilt and cannot possibly contemplate the very concept that Trump might not be the most popular presidential candidate.
And all of these pseudo-logical exercises are designed to Provider, just this sort of facsimile of a logical framework to support that predetermined belief.
Yeah.
I hate it.
Yeah, yeah.
To be very clear, I don't hate people who are conservative or vote Republican.
You know, I'm not one of these people who think, oh, they're all terrible racists and et cetera.
But I hate the...
Yeah, the cultish behavior of it and the violence that has been done to rational thinking, that is to pretend to do it when really you're just pandering to just the most base partisan emotions.
Yeah, I agree.
So is there another clip that we should hear?
Oh, God.
So many.
There are so many.
We'll try to focus more on the logical problems here.
So let's look at an issue here where he's talking about this shift in the goalposts being done by Democrats about widespread fraud and different definitions of fraud.
So maybe let's listen to that one.
That's raw manning.
You're just pretending somebody said something else so you can defend the other thing because you can't defend the actual thing.
So that's what the widespread thing is.
So the claim is that there's specific fraud in just the right places, and what they say when they defend is like, well, there's no widespread.
There's no widespread claim.
So that's just strawmanning by changing the argument.
All right.
Yeah, it's pretty hard to capture because he spends a lot of time talking about it.
This idea that the Democrats have consistently changed their stance.
Apparently, first of all, they were saying it's not possible.
We've got a rigorous system.
There's no possibility of fraud.
And then they changed their tune.
They said there's no evidence for fraud.
We haven't seen any fraud actually occur.
And then apparently they changed their tune again to say that there's no...
Widespread fraud, or then it's baseless versus it hasn't been proven yet.
And there's a lot of wordplay going on here to supposedly demonstrate that the other side, the Democrats in this case, are consistently changing their position.
Yes, there was another part in one of the episodes where he's complaining about the voting expert that we heard him talk about earlier.
Basically...
Responding to an argument he made.
And it completely echoes this point.
So I'll play that clip and then, yeah, hold on.
And he says, I really hope you listen to experts on this.
Because experts are really fucking believable.
So he says, I really hope you listen to experts on this.
More paper ballots, more identity validation, more audits, more bipartisan observation and transparency.
Widespread fraud is not possible and didn't happen.
See what he did there?
You see how he inserted the word widespread?
Did I say widespread?
Nope.
If he had not put the word widespread in there, would he be so confident?
Nope.
Was the Kennedy-Nixon election that was allegedly rigged?
Was it widespread?
No.
No, it was very targeted.
So that distinction, right, the widespread versus targeted, that's the crucial thing.
So people can refute that there's widespread fraud, but that's not his point.
His point is that there's targeted fraud, right?
Yeah, yes.
So, I guess, how should we deal with this?
Because we don't want to re-litigate.
Well, one thing I will say, Matt, is that he's very clear that he isn't saying that there was widespread voter fraud, right?
Let me just play a short clip from later in the same episode.
Did they believe the fine people hoax?
Did they believe the drinking bleach hoax?
If you believe this stuff because you believe the fake news...
Does that create a situation in which the motivation for massive fraud involving potentially lots of people, is the motivation there?
Yes, right?
Is there anybody watching this who would disagree with the statement that the motivation to cheat was higher than it has ever been?
By far.
Not even close.
So, just a note there, he said massive.
Massive voter fraud.
And the highest motivation ever.
So it's like, I'm sorry to veer off, but it was just, that struck me when I was listening to the episode that, you know, it'll get redundant to point out how internally inconsistent he is.
But he really is.
And he can allege massive fraud across.
Loads of people because of the exceptional circumstances in this election.
And then in the next segment, he'll be saying, you stupid idiot, suggesting that I said there would be massive fraud.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know.
There's that.
And then there's also just the, what seems to me, this really just duplicitous wordplay.
I've, you know, I've somewhat casually but followed this controversy and the response by all the people on the other side has been entirely consistent to any reasonable person who's not doing dodgy rhetoric.
In terms of the replies saying, yes, we have a very rigorous and safe electoral system where large-scale fraud isn't possible.
And then that's not inconsistent to say that there's no evidence of widespread fraud, is it?
And this idea of, like, it's not a very complicated concept to grasp that in every election, when there's, you know, untold millions of votes cast, that there's always a bit of noise.
You know, the counting process, all of these things, no one expects any election count to be literally perfect to the final vote.
It just has to be reliable within a certain margin of error.
And so every election is subject to just random people doing random dodgy stuff.
That's why there's some qualifier because you can't say absolutely there was no fraud whatsoever because obviously even just one case of one person manufacturing one vote.
So there is no contradiction.
There is no sort of smoking gun here or shifting Gold Coast, as he says.
It's been extremely consistent, as far as I can tell, which is to say that you have a safe system.
The degree of fraud that is being alleged isn't practicable, given a system like this.
And it's exactly the same in Australia.
Nobody seriously thinks that's actually possible.
And none of those positions are inconsistent.
Yet this rhetorical ploy that he's Yeah, and that point that he made about the Kennedy-Nixon election and the role that Freud played in that,
this is him discussing that case a little bit earlier.
Number one, do you believe that the Kennedy-Nixon election was rigged?
Now, if it was rigged, and I believe historians now agree on this, right?
Give me a fact check.
But I think the historians agree that the Kennedy-Nixon election was rigged.
Now, did it have to be widespread?
Apparently not.
Yeah, so this is just to say, I don't trust Scott Adams, so I checked.
And no, historians do not agree that there was definitely voter fraud and that's what swung the election.
There's disagreement and there's significant debate that while there was suspicion of some fraud in Illinois with the mayor, there's also plenty of historians that say it wouldn't have made a difference anyway.
The people, rather predictably, who think it did determine things tend to be Republicans.
So, like, the way he just casts it as if, well, that proves that things can be targeted and historians agree that that election was won via this very specific targeted fraud.
No, they don't.
And the wider premise that Biden's team was so prepared that they knew exactly the swing states the target and the...
Amount of ballots, the way they needed to do it and so on.
It is really grandiose and it's like, it's easy to look back, you know, it's the sharpshooter's fallacy.
And actually it's not true because Biden has won by quite a bit.
He has the popular vote, but the way the US election system means that in some swing states, the margins were not massive, but they're not close.
It's not like the Bush and Gore election, which came down to 500 votes in Florida or whatever it was.
It's not like that.
So all this injection of doubt, it's almost pointless to refute the individual points because they're not in good faith.
No, they're not in good faith.
And there's just so many of them.
So it's probably just better for us to just point to the broader theme here, which is that he is just using every rhetorical trick and also misrepresenting things in order to make it seem inevitable and incontrovertible that the election was stolen and is illegitimate.
So if you don't mind, we could play a clip where he essentially argues that it would be extraordinary.
To even imagine that the Democrats didn't steal the election, even without any evidence.
And then I go on and I say, Democrats make the extraordinary claim.
Now, see if you think this is an extraordinary claim that Democrats are making.
That despite sky-high motivation and plenty of opportunity to cheat in the election, that they didn't do it.
How extraordinary would it be?
If you, let's say, took a pile of money, cash, and left it on the street of a crime-ridden inner city, how extraordinary would it be if you came back in a week and it was all there,
that nobody took any?
That'd be pretty extraordinary, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
So, again, more awful reasoning.
The logic goes that...
Because there is a lot of motivation to cheat purportedly on the behalf of Democrats and because, again, purportedly they had a lot of opportunity.
I don't know if that's true, given I do think the American electoral system is reasonably robust.
He makes out that it would be extraordinary if they didn't steal the election and likens it to leaving a wallet full of money on the street and for it not to be stolen.
So he's shifting the burden of proof on the other side to prove that it wasn't stolen, essentially.
Yeah, and it actually doesn't matter if the system is robust or not, Matt, because here's him talking about the voting system.
Let's just hear him highlighting some issues.
But I don't think there's anybody who believes that these alone, the cameras and the direct observation, given how limited that is for the entire chain of custody, is there anybody who...
Drives around behind the vans carrying the ballots?
Does anybody drive behind those vans to make sure that they don't stop and unload anything?
There must be massive parts of the process that are not witnessed by two witnesses.
Wouldn't you say?
So it doesn't matter whether or not you can show that because the system automatically must have these things.
Three people at all times looking at every ballot.
So you can insert uncertainty and doubt.
Even if there are robust systems, there's always some part where you're going to have a weak link in the chain.
And that's all he needs to insert his gnawing doubt, right?
And to convince people they don't need to heed the result because you'd be stupid.
You'd be a rube to trust this system.
Yeah, and the bigger picture, the context in which this is happening, of course, is the persistent inability of Trump's team to actually bring forth any solid evidence of fraud.
So what he's doing is building this kind of logical, tautological case where it just must have been stolen and you actually don't need to have any evidence of that because logically it had to happen.
And in any case, you can't prove it didn't happen.
And yeah, you need to go with your feelings about this.
So I think it's probably good now to move into this other clip, which illustrates his opinion that it doesn't really matter what the facts of the matter are, but what's really important is how people feel about them.
These sworn testimonies of hundreds of people who said they saw frauds, Republicans are likely to believe, even if they're not true.
So, fact aside, And court aside and science aside, our democratic process-ish, the republic, if you will, is built on how we feel.
It's not built on the court.
It's not built on the truth.
It's not built on science.
Yeah, yeah.
So, look, I'm trying to keep these clips short because he takes an awfully long time to build these arguments, but really what he's...
Doing there is stepping further and further away, away from the notion that any kind of...
Fraud has to be demonstrated, but rather laying the groundwork for saying, well, what's important is just the level of confidence that people have in the election.
And if the Republicans don't have confidence in the election, that's all that matters.
So this completely ignores the fact that people like Trump and him have been doing their level best to destroy confidence in elections.
But then if people then subsequently don't have confidence in their elections, then that is sufficient justification to actually put aside.
The results of the election and instead go to one of these alternate processes whereby the states actually just disregard the electoral college or disregard the popular vote in their state and they just nominate whoever they want as their electors in the college.
So I find it, yeah, I just find it chilling.
It has this kind of, again, this sort of folksy, fatherly approach to it.
But really, and we're going to hear more of this.
His theme throughout these podcasts is to encourage people to forget about elections, forget about their democracy, and instead take all means necessary to ensure that the outcome that they want comes to pass.
Well, look, that sounded a lot like JP Sears saying...
What matters is what you feel is true.
Just go with what you're feeling.
And as we talked about in that episode, that's a terrible way to ascertain things that are actually true because you're loaded with biases and lack of knowledge about how things actually operate rather than they superficially seem.
And you're right that...
His role in this is to inject doubt to make the system seem illegitimate for his purposes or to prop up Trump, which indirectly helps him as well.
But there's endless examples of this that we could give.
But I want to play one.
I'm not sure if it caught your eye, but it caught mine, where he's talking about something that we haven't seen on the mainstream media, that we should have seen.
Have you seen, did you see the special on CNN?
I hope you all saw this special on CNN where they went through the entire voting process from beginning to end.
And they showed you all the controls and the way that they monitor it so that you could see with your own eyes from beginning to end.
There's a trail of custody that's watched the whole time.
You have multiple observers.
You've got cameras.
You all saw that special, right, that showed that election cheating is so difficult it basically couldn't happen.
Did you all see the special?
Oh, no, you didn't.
Because it doesn't exist.
Yeah, there's no special like that.
But why not?
Isn't that the most obvious news content you can imagine?
So, I mean, the point I want to make there, Matt, is just he's poisoning the minds of the people listening because, like, you didn't see that.
And, like, I actually can see from in that clip how someone reasonable could listen and go, yeah, you know, why haven't I seen that documentary?
And first of all, I think Scott Adams has done absolutely nothing to examine coverage of voting systems in the run-up to this election.
But secondly, of course you can't have a single friggin' documentary that covers the entire voting system in the US, except on like a really superficial level, to get into all the specific details across so many different states.
With different regulations and because it's a federal system, you can't have that.
But he uses the fact there isn't something there.
And there has been tons of documentaries like 538 explaining voting procedures and rules that people probably didn't pay attention to before about mail-in voting.
And I would imagine like on lots of all our media as well.
But he uses that to just create the seed of doubt in the person listening.
That's suspicious, isn't it?
Why haven't I seen that?
Man, you know, whispering little worm that he is trying to sow doubt in any way he can.
Yeah, that's right, any way he can.
And you're right, you hear the same arguments in even Flat Earther conspiracies where, isn't it weird that we haven't seen a video of this particular thing?
And it's not weird, you know what I mean?
Yeah, oh dear, it's painful.
It's painful.
But look, I've got so many clips here of him doing very similar stuff.
For instance, before we talked about how the past is no predictor of the future, therefore...
You know, this kind of reasoning there.
And he talks more about that kind of thing with this logic on the lawsuits, just completely disregarding the outcomes of all of those suits that were filed by the Trump team, which they were very confident about and they talked up an awful lot and were then subsequently rejected.
He, of course, disregards those outcomes and says that doesn't give us any indication at all about whether or not the next lawsuit that comes up could possibly win.
I'm not sure whether we need to play all these clips because there's just so much of it.
Well, let's hear this one at least.
The fact that completely different lawsuits with different evidence and different claims, the fact that those were rejected certainly makes me feel safe that the next one, that they've had time to prepare good evidence and make completely different kinds of claims,
well, I'm pretty safe that those different lawsuits are going to be failures too.
So that would be your confirmation bias and your pattern recognition kicking in and trying to protect yourself.
I feel like saying, how dare you invoke those concepts when that's all you exist on?
Yeah, to make out that the fact that however many dozens of lawsuits have been rejected, to present it to be a fallacy that one might have any expectation about the likelihood of Lawsuit number 37 or whatever they're up to,
to make that out to be a fallacy.
Yeah.
Well, he has a habit of doing this, presenting arguments as if things are fallacious, right?
The people who are criticizing him for a given thing are fallacious.
We've seen it throughout all the clips.
It almost doesn't matter which cover you play because you kind of get it wherever you're looking.
But there was another part where he was talking about how persuasive Trump is.
And like, even with these field cases, you mentioned the level of support he gets.
And he makes this point.
So, apparently there's a...
Some data out there.
79% of Trump supporters believe the election was fraudulent.
79%.
Now, do you remember back in 2016, one of the biggest criticisms that I personally received was Scott.
Are you telling me you think that President Trump, or candidate Trump at the time, are you telling me you think Trump is persuasive?
Where's the evidence of that?
I don't see any evidence he's persuasive.
Well, how about convincing 79% of his supporters that an election had been thrown?
You can't get much more persuasive than that.
Yes, you can!
I just...
Yeah, look, what are we going to say there, Chris?
All I want to say is it's just another illustration of him using evidence which doesn't support the conclusion he makes, right?
There's no surprise that in a hyper-partisan political environment that the vast majority of Republicans will go along.
with whatever Trump says.
Like that pattern has already been established well.
It doesn't mean that he's uniquely protected
Yeah, of course.
I don't even know if people actually legitimately believe what Trump claims, you know, or they just echo whatever his line is.
I'm not sure that even Scott Adams believes it.
Like, I think he really does believe that persuasion and public opinion trumps truth and science, in his words.
Like, he really is all about that.
He's so postmodern.
So even if you grant his premise, right, that Trump convincing 79% of Americans that the election was stopped.
No, 79% of Republicans.
Oh, Republicans.
Yeah, of course.
Now, I mean, if it was so obvious, if there was so much evidence that the election was stolen, he wouldn't need to be persuasive, right?
He's using Trump's spin and disinformation.
He's implying that there is a lot of spin and persuasiveness required to back up claims.
Well, the problem there, Matt, is you're trying to connect two points where Scott Adams is incapable of doing that.
So you are trying to say, well, yes, but doesn't that undercut his argument?
You know, the stuff that we've just been talking about, you know, making the cases and all that kind of thing.
Yes.
Their feeling.
What's the issue about persuading?
But it doesn't matter to him that those two points are contradicted, right?
Trump being persuasive, no matter what, means that even if he's talking shit, that people will accept it.
So it doesn't matter if the evidence is real or not.
But yet...
It is real.
And then he'll spend time undermining it.
So it all feels empty and just extremely cynical.
Yeah, empty, cynical rhetoric.
And it's so depressing to listen to.
I think this is probably one of our least entertaining episodes because...
It just has been so depressing and such an unhappy experience to have to listen to Scott.
But, you know, I think it had to be done because he really does exemplify some of the worst aspects of this kind of conspiratorial guru behaviour.
So I think we have to, you know, just persevere through to the bitter end.
Yes, so take us where you will, MacDonald.
Okay, we're getting there.
We're getting there.
So look, I guess it's following on this theme of really quite Machiavellian thinking in terms of winning at all costs and with complete disregard to reality.
So let's play a clip where he's talking about all Trump needs to do in order to win.
And there are enough states, and the swing states controlled by enough Republican legislatures, that if they inject enough doubt into the electoral process, fortunately, the founders and the framers of the Constitution, they allowed for that.
So that was a known risk.
And so the process has very clear steps.
Oh, if you can't make a decision with the electoral college process...
It moves to the House.
The House gets one vote for each state, and there are more Republican states.
That's it.
That's it.
Yeah, so there's some stuff to say about that, but why don't we, before we comment, just play the next clip there, talking about the role that the lawsuits play in this road to victory.
The strategy was to inject a doubt, maybe get a delay.
Keep the argument alive in the mind of the public.
Make it look like there's lots of smoke, so there must be fire.
Did it accomplish those things?
Well, it certainly accomplished the latter, which is make you think there's a lot going on.
I know.
So for me, this is just so horrible.
It feels like after all of that talk about how it's just obvious that the Democrats had to have stolen the election, and that's just truth and facts and logic.
Now he's switched mode and he's talking in terms...
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't actually matter.
It's just pure Machiavellianism.
All you need to do is to...
It feels like he's saying the quiet bit out loud, which is the real strategy here.
This is where he's actually speaking the truth, right?
He's saying it's all about injecting doubt and uncertainty and undermining confidence in the elections.
And the lawsuits were sort of a partial success in that.
In that respect, because it's, you know, he's virtually admitting exactly what we are criticizing for.
And this is so horrible.
Yeah.
And we know, I think, Matt, maybe we're both sick of this guy.
So, like, let's get to the dark place where this goes to in the end.
And I mean, it's dark every day.
I've heard more podcasts since then.
And there's one where he's just reeling against bullying.
And how he'd be willing to have a civil war to end bullying, even if a million people died.
And you might think from that, oh, what, like he doesn't like bullies?
He means the people poking fun at the witnesses called by Giuliani and Trump.
He doesn't mean Trump.
He doesn't factor in the thing that Trump is famous for being a bully.
And he just reels against bullies, but never highlights a hypocrisy.
Democracy is gone.
We are living in a bullyocracy.
The result of the election wasn't based on democracy.
It wasn't based on the republic.
It wasn't based on the constitution.
So the guy who's worried that we will lose democracy in the United States, you need to catch up with the news.
We lost democracy.
So I ask this question by tweet.
Do you want to live in a system in which bullies...
Literally physical bullies decide who will be president.
You are living in that system.
Right now, according to hundreds of witnesses.
Anyway, it's a different horror show every day, is the point I want to make.
But in the episodes we listened to, he went to a genuinely dark place at one point with all these arguments.
So maybe we should go there.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So when you're talking about all these, there's no fair elections, there's no real democracy, and there hasn't been a fair election in 60 years.
This is something Rudy Giuliani says at some point.
And Rudy Giuliani says if Philadelphia had a fair election this time, it's the first time in 60 years.
Why don't you listen to him?
Because listen to the experts.
So what's the point anyway?
Is there any alternative?
Let's see what Scott thinks.
Our process is now maybe 20 rich people fighting it out for control.
It's 20 rich people fighting it out for control.
That is our system.
Is it worse than, like, an actual democracy?
Probably not.
Probably not.
Yep, yep.
So there's a lot more where this comes from, of this.
So why don't we work our way through these, Chris, and, yeah, hear where it leads.
Yeah, so let's see the dark places that he goes with these arguments.
You get used to it already, aren't you?
Think about how you felt the first time you heard that Trump could win the election without winning the popular vote and without winning the Electoral College.
And that it would be perfectly legal and constitutional.
And it wouldn't even be an aberration.
It would be the way the Constitution was designed.
Yeah, so we've come a long way from that friendly sip of coffee at the beginning.
Hey, Chris.
Yeah, yeah, we're starting to talk about, like, I mean, you know, to try and inject some degree of charity towards them, like, there are legitimate points he makes about that there's a limited amount of families and influence who tend to get elected in America and in most countries,
right?
And that democratic systems often do have these components of them which are quite archaic and sometimes seem anti-democratic, like the House of Lords in the UK or potentially the...
The Electoral College.
Yeah, the Electoral College.
So yes, he's highlighting to some extent things that people can take issue with.
But the way that he's doing it is more like, ha ha ha, how silly to think we live in a democracy.
It's all a sham anyway.
And you thought the system was fair?
No, you see now that it's all just a ridiculous show for your benefit.
So who cares?
Yeah.
So what's next?
I know what's next, but shall we hear him leading us to the inevitable step-by-step?
Yes, let's listen to it.
It's not a democracy.
It's not any kind of a dictatorship, clearly.
But it's definitely a war between oligarchs and persuaders.
There's this hidden underground war of, you know, now you've got the data analysts who are coming in like an infantry.
You know, the Republicans send in the data analysts.
It's just like a war.
You know, they said, all right, you know, we got the tanks over here.
We better call in the air support over here.
Got the data analyst, moved the data analyst in.
That's right.
So it's a very dark view that he's putting forward, and it's really one that really justifies just the naked use of power and rhetoric.
You know, he contrasts people like him, persuaders, against oligarchs.
Yeah.
We call them elites.
And his point is that...
He's trying to convince his listeners that they do not live in a democracy.
You'd have to be a fool to think that America was any kind of democracy.
Really, all that matters is the exercise of power, whether it's through oligarchic systems of influence or the kind of rhetoric that he's doing.
And really, his point is, in the end, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if the election was about any kind of evidence.
Fraud and so on.
He's doing his best to undermine the confidence of his listeners in American democracy.
And he's, to my mind, doing his best to support the idea that really anything goes to maintain power for your side.
Yeah.
And like, in some respect, it's almost, it sounds farcical.
About oligarchs and their armies of persuaders and the data analysis infantry.
But it does reflect such a bleak and cynical worldview and one that I don't think is actually reality.
It might be the reality for people like Steve Bannon and Scott Adams and various other political factors who see the world through.
Who can be manipulated and what levers the pull?
And McConnell kind of figure, right?
It's all about power and the exercise of power and the ways to keep power.
And of course, real politics is an actual thing that you have to be concerned about.
But the absolute vacuum of genuine values or belief.
In institutions and systems of democracy and so on.
It's just, yeah, it's horrible.
It's so bleak.
Yeah, yeah.
So let's hear that almost final clip about whether democracy is really the best system for the United States.
Yeah, since this system is so crap, what is maybe a better system that we'd be happier with?
If our system is, as I say, not a democracy, but rather is a competition between oligarchs, is that worse?
If you had a choice of a benevolent dictator or a very flawed democracy where the wrong person could get elected, which one's a better system?
If you knew, and of course this is the hard part because you can't guarantee that a dictator is benevolent.
Which is better, a benevolent dictator or democracy?
It's very hard.
It's, you know, 50-50.
Let me think about that.
Yeah, so, alright, so stepping back a little bit and just thinking about what he's doing here.
I mean, because we've talked a lot about all the individual ways in which he does this kind of rhetoric, but the...
The methods that he uses, which we're not fans of, I think it's fair to say.
But it's also useful, I think, to think about what he's arguing for, what he's exerting his talents, to what aim.
And it's clearly to, one, just completely demoralise any confidence his listeners might have that they live in any kind of free and fair democracy.
It's not only this election was unfair and rigged, but all elections are.
And I said this to you before, but the thing that kept going through my mind was this character from Lord of the Rings, this advisor to, now I've forgotten the name of the king.
Theon.
Theon.
Oh, Theon.
Theon, thank you.
Yeah, Wormtongue, this horrible, slimy advisor that just whispers in this guy's ear and just gradually, bit by bit, day after day, erodes his confidence.
And also his belief that there is any such thing as something that's true or good.
And there's nothing but the raw exercise of power, which is, of course, the evil.
He's just like that.
He is.
In episodes and at the start of this one, we kind of highlighted that it's difficult with Scott Adams, more so than it's been with anyone else, to stand a significant amount of charity.
And the reason is because he's just such a repellent.
Snake.
That's it.
Yeah, I know that that's an ad hominem and an attack, but if you've made it this far and you don't see why that's a fair assessment of the man, I can't help you.
I even think by his own logic that it's kind of fine to paint him as like that because under his system, all that matters is if I can convince people that that's true.
So it doesn't matter what techniques I need to use to do that and undermine his character or that kind of thing.
So by his rules, ad hominems, unfair attacks, anything like that, it all goes because it's just about persuasion.
Who can persuade people better?
Yeah, I completely agree with that assessment.
A writer whose name eludes me right now has talked about postmodern conservatism.
Do you remember the name of the chap?
No.
That's okay.
But it's a thing.
Trump obviously personifies that.
But a lot of other people have really gotten on board with this.
And they sort of pay lip service to this idea of...
Logical reasoning and evidence and so on, but they so quickly undermine it and undercut it.
And Scott Adams, you're completely right, which is that he just personifies this complete relativistic idea of just whatever you can convince people of, whatever power you can exert is right.
It's just a power-based, might-is-right way of looking at the world.
And, yeah, he's a snake.
So, you know, we try to be fair and even-handed with the people that we look at, but I think Scott Adams is going to be the one that, the exception that proves the rule, because I've got nothing good to say about him.
Yeah, and I've got a nice illustration of this point, maybe to lead us to, like, the final conclusions, although maybe we're offering those now.
Where he talks about the upcoming Georgia election, right?
And his view of what Republican strategy might be in that election.
So let me just play this clip to cap things off.
Because if the Republicans used their same techniques and the Democrats knew it, what would they do?
Because they couldn't really call them out for the technique.
Because their entire argument is that these techniques can't work.
Not that they didn't work, that they can't.
It just isn't possible.
So, again, I'm not recommending it because it's breaking the law.
I never recommend breaking the law.
But it would be funny.
I'm just saying it would be funny.
I don't recommend it.
Yeah, that's a nice disclaimer.
You love disclaimers like that, don't you?
Yeah, I do.
They just, they warm my soul.
Like, you know what, in case it wasn't clear there, he's saying that they should engage in voter fraud and steal the election.
And then, just one other thing, Matt, is that he also makes another point that if the Republicans lose those elections, that because they're expected to win, The only explanation can be voter fraud and that the Democrats would have engaged in that because they've just got away with it.
But then here we have them like suggesting the Republicans should do it to win, but then saying, you know, but he's not suggesting that.
So any outcome where the Republicans lose is illegitimate.
Yeah.
And any way that they use to win is legitimate.
Yes.
That's it.
It's like the catch 22. Well, that's what I meant before by the naked exercise of power, where really nothing matters apart from winning and convincing people.
Yeah.
And so I will say, Matt, we've got like about, you know, we have another hundred clips that we could play of him being a smug asshole and undermining confidence in making contradictory.
Claims and arguments, but I want to stop talking about him as soon as possible.
Oh God.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
So I'll offer very brief final thoughts and then you can say whatever you like about him.
I think my position on him is already evidently clear, but I'll just emphasize that a lot of what he does is based around this kind of...
Cynical, just asking questions.
That's all he does.
And at some point, he actually says out loud, I'm just asking questions.
I'm just asking questions.
But it's all about sowing doubt.
And this is an episode that should show people that just asking questions is a rhetorical strategy that people use.
It isn't this innocent, you know, open-minded thing.
He has an ideology and he's pushing it.
The fact that it's worded as a question doesn't matter.
And then the second thing is that the sheer amount of contradictory and the sheer amount of arguments that he can issue and that contradict each other, which undermine the points, and that still there will be a large audience who treat him as if he's an intellectual,
as if he's, you know, a wise guru.
That should tell you again that within these realms of gurus, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if you're not consistent, if your arguments aren't logical, if you're openly partisan and ideological, you're still able to keep followers and still be treated by various other people as if you're somebody with a reasonable position.
And I hope it's clear he isn't.
That's me.
That's all I've got to say.
Yeah.
Yeah, look, I co-sign every single one of those statements.
So let me think about what I could add to that.
I think I'm just going to stick to my gut feelings a little bit because we can delineate all of the problems in his arguments and they are many.
But in the end, you can just sum it up by as being completely cynical rhetoric.
He will literally say anything, no matter how contradictory or absurd that.
Sounds persuasive in order to further his partisan goal, which is Trump and conservatives winning at all costs.
I'm not quite sure why he cares so much about Trump and the Republican Party winning at all costs because he's so cynical.
He seems to have so little faith in literally everything, including Republicans.
I can't imagine actually exactly what his motivations are.
But one thing is for sure.
All of his argumentation is directed to one goal, which is to do everything he can to create more cynicism and sow more doubt in the minds of his listeners, to bring them around to a worldview that their entire political system is hopelessly corrupt and that nothing matters except for the raw exercise of power and that...
Anything.
Anything goes.
Anything is permissible and nothing matters in terms of respect for institutions or processes or evidence or any of those things.
All that matters is winning.
And I find him...
Exactly like Wormtongue in Lord of the Rings, I find him the most despicable, horrible person I've ever listened to.
He's repellent.
I feel sorry in some respect.
I genuinely feel sorry for inflicting this upon people, but I think it's useful to look at people.
Like him, because even, you know, with the coronavirus denialism and stuff we looked at, like it didn't feel good, but you're able to, you know, joke about it and stuff.
But it's been hard on this episode because it's just so bleak, because he's such an ass.
So, yeah, I apologize.
And the next episode, I think we need a...
A palate cleanser of some type.
Every time we do this, we end up getting somebody who's doing...
We'll probably end up with a neo-Nazi holocaust in there by accident.
But yeah, I think we deserve it, Matt, after this.
Yeah, I definitely agree.
I didn't...
Yeah, we didn't...
You can tell listeners that we didn't enjoy listening to Scott and we're sorry that the episode was such a downer.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, one point.
So one person who...
Who recommended Scott.
What's his name, Chris?
What's his name?
Willard from Twitter.
Thank you very much.
You bastard Willard.
I'm going to find out.
I will find you.
I'm going to do my Northern Irish accent.
There's your credit for this.
Look what you did.
But also, many people requested that we cover him.
And who knows, maybe we will again in the future.
But yeah, it'll be hard to top him.
That's all I would say.
Yeah, I'll say that too.
Hard to top.
Okay, well, good.
Let's draw a line under this.
This is like...
Like, Bill and Ted go to hell or something like that.
This has been a dark, dark tunnel, but I'm happy we've got to the other end of it.
I've written that.
I better think he's going to just, you know, be stuck in my head for the rest of the week, but yeah.
Yeah, he's living rent-free in our minds now.
He is.
Okay.
So we don't have the next Guru to announce yet because...
All of the options that we were considering are kind of also terrible.
We may need to recharge with someone like a little out of left field.
So watch Twitter and we'll make the announcement.
But yeah, thanks for enduring this with us.
And sorry if it wasn't as light-hearted as may have been in previous weeks.
