Speaker | Time | Text |
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I asked on Twitter, a little Twitter poll, have any of you actually lied to the pollsters about your support for Trump? | ||
Hundreds of people said yes and they weren't saying we might lie or we think we'll do it in the future. | ||
They said we have this year. | ||
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
It's Locals Week here on the Rubin Report and I'm doing a series of mini interviews | ||
with creators on why they decided to become less reliant on big tech | ||
and instead own their content community and livelihood with locals.com. | ||
Joining me today is the creator of the legendary Dilbert comic strip, as well as a best-selling author and guy who really, really loves coffee, Scott Adams. | ||
Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
Thanks, Dave, thanks for having me. | ||
How much coffee do you drink a day? | ||
I always think you're just drinking coffee constantly, basically. | ||
You know, Christine and my wife gave me a new trick where I only do half coffee and half hot water. | ||
And instead of coffee, it's like a coffee-flavored beverage that you can drink more of it. | ||
So that's my current trick for doubling my output. | ||
I think that's a little bit like an Americano, right? | ||
Isn't that when you go to Europe and you drink an Americano, it's just coffee and they just add water to it, I think, maybe? | ||
You know, I don't know my coffees, but I'm going to say yes. | ||
I'm just going to say yes to that. | ||
You got very Long Island there when you said coffee. | ||
Your coffee. | ||
You don't know your coffee. | ||
Well, I'm upstate New York, so we drink coffee and we go up on the roof and down by the creek. | ||
We go swimming in the creek. | ||
Well, I'm gonna send you one of these Locals coffee mugs. | ||
We've got one. | ||
But before we get into Locals, and you've absolutely just crushed it on there, I wanted to talk about something separate altogether, which is that because we live in this strange time where it seems no one can make sense of anything, you're one of the people on a very short list, I can probably do it on one hand, people who I think are actually making some sense. | ||
Did you ever think you were gonna be a sense maker? | ||
I mean, that's partly what being a comic guy is, you're making little quips and you're trying to make sense of the world, but did you ever think it was gonna be this level of it? | ||
You know, you're asking me the most embarrassing question you possibly could, because the answer is yes. | ||
You're supposed to be humble here. | ||
Yeah, I know. | ||
The answer is yes. | ||
In my whole life, actually. | ||
So, I always had an image that someday, I didn't know what path I would take, but that I would be doing something in public in which I would be explaining things to people who needed a little help having things explained. | ||
So, It's amazing that it ended up the way it ended up, because the way I got here could not have been predicted in any way. | ||
But yes, the answer is I did see my future exactly like this. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Are you shocked, though, to see that the general systems of sense-making, our institutions, the media, the rest of the stuff that guys like us spend most of our day talking about, are you shocked to see how rapidly they've crumbled? | ||
Or is this just the last gasp of air? | ||
Like, what's happening right now? | ||
Well, I think Trump took the last bit of credibility out of the system. | ||
But all he did was reveal what the system was. | ||
I don't think that he changed it as much as he revealed it, and we can see it. | ||
So who knows how corrupt the news used to be? | ||
I mean, I used to hear stories back in Kennedy's day of the, you know, Kennedy would go out on the yacht and take the New York Times or the other top reporters with him. | ||
And did he get good coverage? | ||
Of course he did. | ||
Of course he did. | ||
So, you know, things are different, but I don't know if they're more corrupt. | ||
I think we just might be a little more aware of it. | ||
And the thing that Trump did is he just completely just said, I think I'll just say whatever I want to say, as long as it leads me in, you know, a productive way that's good for the country. | ||
Didn't worry about the facts, and it didn't hurt him at all. | ||
He became president doing that. | ||
When everybody was saying, well, you can't be president if you keep saying things that the fact-checkers don't agree with. | ||
And then he did, and he proved that it didn't matter that much. | ||
So didn't worry about the facts. | ||
When people criticize you, or they criticize me, or some of the other people that are just walking around, not even that are necessarily rah-rah Trump people, but just don't suffer from Trump derangement syndrome, that's the thing, the facts, the facts, the facts, the facts. | ||
How do you, I've heard you explain it a little bit, but how do you explain his sort of loose relationship with the facts? | ||
Well, I call it directionally accurate. | ||
So if Trump says something like, well, there were 40,000 people at my rally, but the real number was 25,000, it's kind of the same, right? | ||
It doesn't change how you think about it. | ||
A lot of people came to the rally. | ||
How much should it have been? | ||
I don't know. | ||
If he says the economy is the best economy we've ever had, but it's only the best one in the last 40 years, does that help us or does it hurt us? | ||
Well, it helps us because the economy is a psychology engine, as I like to say, and if you think it's doing well, you invest, you buy, you have confidence, and then it does well. | ||
So he has the ability to use hyperbole and a little bit of exaggeration to make things work better than they would have worked without it, which is completely different than a flat-out lie like, let's say, the fine people hoax. | ||
That's nothing but a divisive lie. | ||
That's a bad, you know, missing the fact-checking. | ||
That's as bad as you can get. | ||
But if you're just talking something up that needs to be talked up, that's fine. | ||
Yeah, I actually wasn't gonna bring this up, but let's just do it real quick before we get to your community. | ||
The Very Fine People hoax, you were one of the first people, at least sort of mainstream-ish people, or someone with some cred, let's say, that was calling out the Very Fine People hoax and pointing out that before he said very fine people on both sides, which he meant about the monument argument in and of itself, that really he had condemned the white nationalists and the KKK the sentence before. | ||
Biden has said that this is the reason he's running for president, yet the media doesn't call him out on it. | ||
Does anything shock you at this point? | ||
I really don't understand if the media doesn't know it's a lie, because they've been reporting it as true for so long, and they all believe that they saw it. | ||
They saw it with their own eyes, heard it with their own ears. | ||
Now what they saw and heard was the edited part, where they take out the sentence where he clarified that he totally wasn't talking about those people, in the clearest possible words. | ||
They just leave that out. | ||
And that it's misleading. | ||
So the fact that the media does that is still puzzling to me because I can't tell how intentional it is or if they're really just fooled by their own propaganda. | ||
It's hard to tell. | ||
It's kind of, I always think it's like they've gone so deep with it and repeated it so many times that it would be just too, it would like shatter their world basically if they had to admit that it wasn't true. | ||
It's something like that. | ||
Yeah, that's why Trump basically could win the election just by bringing that up at a debate. | ||
And just, you know, just stop the show, bring that up and say, look, here's the deal, people. | ||
Go look up the transcript. | ||
See for yourself if they've been lying about the central theme of the campaign. | ||
I won't even tell you what I think. | ||
Just go look at the transcript. | ||
Get back to me. | ||
Got it. | ||
Can you imagine that during a debate? | ||
If he just literally said, I'm actually not even gonna, I have two minutes, I'm not gonna talk for the next minute and a half. | ||
Google it right now. | ||
That would actually, it would crack the internet. | ||
Google find people hoax. | ||
Those three words and you'll get all you want. | ||
And there you go. | ||
All right, Scott, let's talk about your local community, because you were one of the first people that we brought on board. | ||
You were on Patreon before, and I kinda was like, you know, I think we got a better option for you. | ||
We took a couple meetings, you jumped on board. | ||
Can you just tell me a little bit about what your experience has been like and why you think what you're doing over there is working? | ||
Because it really is working. | ||
You've got a very vibrant community. | ||
Yeah, it's far exceeded my expectations. | ||
It's way better than I thought. | ||
And the problem I was having with the other social media from, you know, YouTube and Twitter, is that I couldn't control what anybody saw. | ||
Because Twitter could shadow ban me, YouTube could demonetize me, and it looked like one wrong move and I would just be out of business. | ||
So here I am putting tons of work into something that I have no control over. | ||
They can just snap a finger and I'm out of business. | ||
So I thought it wouldn't be good to have one place where there's only subscribers. | ||
They want to be there. | ||
There are basically no trolls because trolls don't want to subscribe to something to just complain. | ||
So it ends up being this happy place where you don't get all the nastiness of the other platforms and I can't be canceled. | ||
It's sort of perfect. | ||
And monetarily, it's been, you know, well, like I said, it exceeded my expectations almost embarrassingly. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Do you think that the future of the Internet is subscription-based as opposed to ad-based or in effect that we, the free people, are the product? | ||
Well, if I speak for myself, I can't handle ads anymore. | ||
Not any kind of ads. | ||
I can't watch regular TV. | ||
I just can't watch anything with an ad. | ||
You know, so even on YouTube I'll pay the subscription so I don't have to watch the ads. | ||
So I can't see other people being that different. | ||
I think social media has shortened our collective attention spans. | ||
So sitting there for like five minutes of ads, or even one minute, It just seems impossible now, where in the old days you thought, well, it's just a minute. | ||
Right. | ||
But now a minute seems like a long time. | ||
I mean, a minute, man, when I'm watching YouTube and there's a seven-second unskippable ad, it's like I'm pressing that button over and over and over, trying to buy back a second of my life. | ||
Yeah, I'm trying to start a hobby. | ||
unidentified
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I'm like, seven seconds, what can I... What can I do in seven seconds? | |
So one of the things that I think is interesting about what you've done with your community is you're putting edgier content there, stuff that either you kind of want to test out with your own people or that you think maybe is going to bring you more flack from the normies. | ||
What was the idea behind that? | ||
Yeah, there's some types of content that if you put it out in the general public, it just attracts trolls. | ||
But if I'm in my subscription community, it's only people who want to be there. | ||
So people, you know, they may comment that they disagree with it, but it'll be a polite disagreement. | ||
So there's lots of stuff that I just wouldn't bother putting on the regular internet, because I just don't want to deal with the blowback. | ||
But on locals, as I often say to them, I go, don't spread this outside of locals. | ||
Not like they could if they wanted to, but I ask them to. | ||
And they don't, weirdly. | ||
I mean, that's amazing, too. | ||
Imagine thousands of people, and I say, this would really get me in trouble. | ||
Don't put this on the internet. | ||
And they don't. | ||
They don't. | ||
Now, none of it would kill me, so I'm not gonna put anything there that's gonna take me down completely, but I really appreciate the fact that they actually keep it on low. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Can you talk a little bit just about the community side of it and what kind of interactions you're having with people there? | ||
Because, you know, like everybody else that I'm talking to this week, and myself included, you know, it's like we can get into it with the trolls and all the haters and all of that stuff, but you said they're not even there, so you're getting some actual human communication. | ||
Yeah, part of what I didn't expect is that the other community people who just are paying money to follow me, I didn't understand how much content they would be posting themselves. | ||
And at first when I saw other people posting, to be honest, my first impression was, hey, I'm the one who should be posting. | ||
unidentified
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"Hey, how about a little bit more about me, huh?" | |
And then I started looking at their posts and I was like, "Oh, that's pretty good." | ||
And then I'd see another one, it's like, "Huh, I didn't see that on Twitter. | ||
"That's very interesting." | ||
So they end up curating all these things that since they know I'm the sort of leader of the | ||
community They assume other people in the community would like what I would like, and then they end up guessing really well what I would be interested in. | ||
So it's fascinating that way. | ||
Then there are a lot of direct messages. | ||
People pay a little bit more to direct message me, and I try to answer all of those if I can. | ||
Yeah, how different do you think the internet's gonna look in five or 10 years? | ||
Do you think we're really, like, I'm starting to feel like we're really at the end of this version of the internet, that in a certain way, this election almost feels like the end of everything. | ||
The debates feel like the end of the debates. | ||
I feel like we've taken Facebook and Twitter, we've taken all of these things to their end conclusion, and that the internet of 2024, 2025, is gonna be way, way different than what we're looking at right now. | ||
Well, I've argued that artificial intelligence has already taken over the world. | ||
It's just not exactly the way we thought it would be. | ||
It's not in a robot body. | ||
It doesn't talk to us. | ||
But the algorithms of the social media platforms, they decide what you see. | ||
And they decide based on a simple rule of what's going to make the most money and nobody goes to jail. | ||
You know, just a few other considerations. | ||
And as long as that algorithm is going toward that one outcome, it's going to cause people to be at each other's necks. | ||
So a lot of the fighting and the conflict and the divisiveness comes from math. | ||
It comes from the algorithms. | ||
It's not people deciding that we should fight. | ||
It's the machine. | ||
The machine decided that we're going to fight. | ||
The machine decided that I'm going to see something that's going to make my hair catch on fire. | ||
And then I go over to locals. | ||
There's no algorithm. | ||
There's just people doing what they want to do with the people they want to do it with. | ||
And suddenly I feel like it's human contact again. | ||
It's like real people. | ||
But I think AI is literally, I don't mean this in a figurative analogy kind of way, I think It's behind us, the takeover. | ||
I don't think it's in front of us. | ||
The game is fixed and we keep playing anyway. | ||
All right, Scott, give me a prediction for the election. | ||
Have you made an official prediction yet? | ||
Well, I've been saying that Trump would win from the start. | ||
He's sucking air in the polls, but I'm gonna stick with my prediction that the polls are inaccurate and people are lying to those pollsters because it's funny. | ||
It's funny. | ||
I asked on Twitter, a little Twitter poll, have any of you actually lied to the pollsters about your support for Trump? | ||
Hundreds of people said yes. | ||
And they weren't saying we might lie or we think we'll do it in the future. | ||
They said we have. | ||
This year. | ||
Yeah, well, what I saw today as we're taping this, we're holding it for a few days, but I saw an article that was from four years ago today, and it said it had the average of the polls were Hillary up by 14 points, and Hillary obviously lost. | ||
So right now when they show you, okay, Biden's up by maybe four points, it's like, guys, deja vu all over again? | ||
I mean, come on. | ||
It could be, but the one thing that you can count on with 2020 is we're not done. | ||
We're not done. | ||
It's not like we're gonna wait, nothing's gonna happen between now and election day. | ||
There's a lot that's gonna happen between then, and so anything could happen. | ||
Ain't it the truth. | ||
All right, like a professional, pimp out your locals so we can send people over there and they can see all that tolerance and decency. | ||
Yes, it's scottadams.locals.com. | ||
Did I get that right? | ||
You did! | ||
That's what I have right here. | ||
Very impressive, Scott Adams. | ||
You are a man of persuasion. | ||
Thanks for having me. | ||
All right, thanks, my friend. | ||
If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |