Part Two: How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind

Robert is joined again by cartoonist Randy Milholland to continue to discuss Scott Adams. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Oh, what is dilling my dogs?

Speaker 2 (00:06):
I'm Robert Evans, and this is Behind the Bastards, a
podcast about Scott Adams, a man whose self awareness is
so minimal that he often his hands clipped through his
writing desk like he's a character in a video game
from the N sixty four era. I don't know, how

(00:27):
was that, Randy?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
That's perfect, That is exactly what I would say.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Okay, excellent, all right, So we have Randy Mulholland, artist
behind Something Positive, a wonderful webcomic, and now the legally
the Brain at least the limbic system of Popeye the
Sailor Man. Randy, how are we feeling as we come

(00:52):
into part two of this?

Speaker 1 (00:53):
I am just thankful that you invited me an episode
that probably does not involve childhood a section no child vivisection.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
We are he is? He is going to buy his
claim kill a kid in this so oh good, But
it's I don't think he really did. I think he's
just taking credit for it in a way that's kind
of more upsetting than if he just killed a child.
I don't know, maybe that's not right.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
At least now there's not a kid who's dead but
that's a weird.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh there's a kid who's dead. Don't don't worry. Don't worry.
The kid dies in this episode. We're fine, it's all good.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
I mean, that isn't the responsibility of every episode behind
the at least once? Yeah, must die.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
No, as soon as I announced that a child is
going to die in this episode, you know, like the
last scene in Return of the Jedi where it like
goes around the galaxy as all of the people are
celebrating in their different planets. It was it was that
was that was the behind the bastards fans. They're terrible
people a flame. Yeah, yeah, it's like it's choriscant. It's

(01:57):
the choriscant of our I don't know why I'm doing
Star Wars. Everyone's tired of Star Wars. Think of another.
Imagine I did another one, a different.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Story track thing.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
No, No, I feel like that one's pretty saturated too.
What's one nobody knows about? Farscape? That's right, Yeah, I
imagine I did a far Escape God. Okay, So back
to Scott. Early in his career, Scott Adams started receiving
requests for public speaking engagements, and he realized that this

(02:27):
could be a good side business for him. You know,
colleges wanted him to talk, and also a lot of
like corporations wanted him to come and like give speeches
for their employees because they would.

Speaker 1 (02:36):
You know, you're some manager.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
You see people have like Dilbert cartoons up over their cubicles,
and you're like, oh, well, let's pay this rich man
money that could be going to races for our workers
so they can hear this weirdo talk about how he
draws Dilbert. That'll make him happy. So Scott, realizing that
this was a thing that he might make some bank on,
enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course and this is while

(02:57):
he was still working at Pacific Bell. But drawing Gilbert.
His employer was kind of willing to foot the bill
because they saw it as beneficial to them. And Scott
didn't know how to do any public speaking, and so
he felt like this would help him. Now, do you
know anything about Dale Carnegie.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
That name sounds familiar and it doesn't make me h,
But that's familiar.

Speaker 2 (03:15):
You've all, like most people, you may not recognize his name,
but everyone's heard of this guy's book. He's the guy
who wrote How to Win Friends and Influence people.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Okay, yeah, my dad had yeah book, my dad, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
I'm going to guess something approaching one hundred percent of
our listeners had one or more family members with this
book in their house. It's an incredit. It's one of
the best selling books in the history of like writing.
You know, say what you will about it. That's undeniable.
Dale Carnegie was born in eighteen eighty eight. He's an
American writer and a lecturer. And yeah, he got rich

(03:46):
writing this book How to Win Friends and Influence People.
It is still a best selling book to this day.
It is sold probably like just an unbelievable number of copies.
Whether or not this is a good thing kind of
depends on yourve But as far as I can tell,
I don't think Dale. You know, there's a lot you
can say about him. He was kind of like I
would say, like a lame man. But he was not

(04:07):
like evil, right, He's not like this is not one
of those like I'm subtly writing this book about like
how to influence people so you can like sexually assault them,
like you know, you're talking about like modern you know,
like Andrew Tait types. Like he's not that kind of guy.
He's just sort of like a little griftie, I guess
in kind of his his Like I don't think he

(04:27):
is a grifter, but like the way he talks is
very appealing to them, and the things he's telling you
how to do is kind of appealing to more. Yeah, yeah,
it's definitely like that's who the ought. We'll talk about
that in a little bit. Yeah, So Dale he had
been kind of a like he'd been like a salesman
who kind of quits his career midstream to become an

(04:48):
actor and just sort of like in order to make
ends meet. He starts out teaching public speaking classes like
while he's being a stage actor, and he finds out
that he's like a lot better that than the actual
acting and that there's a lot more money in it.
During one session with a bunch of people trying to
learn how to do public speaking better, Dale started asking

(05:09):
his students while he was again he's trying to like
coach them how to get up in front of a
room of people and talk. He starts asking his students
to talk about something that made them really angry, and
he noted that like people who were really reticent who
had trouble getting up in front of people and talking.
When they started talking about something that pissed them off,
they were able to get over their fear of public
speaking more easily, right, Which makes a lot of sense. Yeah,

(05:31):
that's not an like's not that I mean, it's kind
of worth noting, it's worth being the guy who writes
that down. I'm not taking anything away from him. But
that's not like for us today. And that's most of
like Dale's actual good advice is stuff that today we're
just like, well, yeah, if you're pissed off, it's easier
to like not think about the fact that you're nervous
in front of a group of people or whatever.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, So Dale kind of used this and some other
revelations he had teaching these classes as the basis for
a book that promised to improve self confidence for the
average reader and teach them how to change the behavior
of others by altering their own behavior towards those people.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this other than that some
of David's some of Dale's advice works pretty well, and

(06:15):
kind of more to the point, I think the actual
problematic thing is that, like it's number one, it teaches
this kind of overly ritualized, rule based approach to how
to like influence and talk and convince people of things,
which can kind of there's you know how D and
D and stuff works, right where.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
You got yeah, yeah, where you've got like, Okay, you know,
here's a character and this character game to level, and
so I pick a feet and this feat works with
these other feats and it lets them do these other things.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
It's very there's kind of a hierarchy in terms of
how a lot of the skills work, right where you
get one skill and that allows you to get these
other skills and then you can do these kind of
like more complicated acts. That's not really how like charisma works.
But books like Dale's, I think, can convince people that
that's how it works. That if they just read these

(07:04):
books and stack these tactics, then they'll gain these like
eventually they'll get to do sort of the speaking equivalent
of like a whirlwind attack as a barbarian. Right, we're here, fine,
we have mobility, Yeah exactly, yeah exactly, And that's that's
really not how this stuff works. But I kind of

(07:25):
the fact that people start to believe that's how it works. Again,
Dale's not like a pick up artist, but this is
where we get pick up artistry, right, Like it all
kind of descends from the way that Dale talks about
how to win friends and influence people, and kind of
getting Americans advice on how to be more confident and
convincing is kind of like handing a loaded and chambered
pistol to a drunken chimpanzee. It's just not a great idea.

(07:48):
And yeah, we are. Of all of the peoples of Earth,
Americans are the ones who needed less self confidence. A
couple more hangaruts would be nice. Yeah, some humility courses
maybe make us. I don't know, we don't do so
great when we're scared either. I don't know how to
fix Themerica. Let's move on. Yeah, yeah, we should probably

(08:09):
just move on. I want to read a quote from
his book about his book from an article I found
in The Cut, which interviews science writer Maria Konikova, and
Maria is the author of a book on CON's and
conman called The Confidence Game. And here's Maria talking about Dale.
Dale Carnegie's had to win friends and influence people is

(08:30):
kind of the unofficial con artist's bible. Because a lot
of those tactics he talks about in terms of building
relationships and being successful in business are ideal for getting
people to trust you. One of the really easy things
is creating a feeling of familiarity. You're more likely to
trust someone who feels more familiar to you. It's even
enough to exploit something called the mere exposure effect, where
say you just go to the same coffee shop as

(08:50):
someone every single day, and they may not consciously note you,
but all of a sudden you feel more familiar. And
a lot of Dale's advice is kind of again, it's
not like necessarily all that problematic, and in fact, it's
kind of like the Art of War and that if
you like read it today, because some of the things
he wrote about have been so like spread so widely,

(09:11):
you'll be really bored. It'll seem it's like very basic
stuff to a lot of people today. It's all not
necessarily like bad advice, but it's just kind of like
basic as hell these days. Like people who obsess over
this book today, like people who obsess over the Art
of War are kind of like, I don't know, man,
there's like better stuff like it's been it's been a
one hundred years, Like there's better books on convince.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, it's nice to know what if you want to
try to go back to the basics and see what's started.
But yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
No, Scott's going to kind of religiously love this guy, right,
like he takes this on. This is kind of taking
the place of religion for him, and this is going
to build what sort of what does really in a
lot of ways replace religion in any kind of like
political sensibility as the thing at the core of Scott's
understanding of reality and how it works, Like what I

(10:01):
was just talking about, that sort of people take this
book and they interpret it like it's a D and
D manual, right, full of like feats and skills, and
as they level up, they can like stack these feats
and skills starting with this Dale Carnegie chorus. That's increasingly
how Scott is going to view the world.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
I mean I get it from a certain viewpoint of
being with an awkward dirt kid, just like why can't
I have a cheap code? Why can't just be a
direct manual? But someone like him who's like, but I
want to make sure I'm always a special boy. Yeah, Well,
in manipulations.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
The other danger of this, like there is some value
if you want to be a public speaker. Public speaking
is like a technical skill, and like any other technical skill,
if you want to do that for a living, it's
not a bad idea to study it, to study what
other people have written about it, to try to learn
more about it. But when you have this kind of
very engineer focused view of how something like public speaking works,

(10:58):
of how persuasion, of how charisma works, then one thing
you're not going to do is ever listen to other people, right, Yeah,
because they they're just they're the they're the again, they're
like the cr you know, five monster or whatever that
you're trying to figure out how to like drop before
it can you know, do any damage to you or
something like.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
They're not to.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
See everyone is a cobalt. Yeah, yeah, last, yeah exactly.
That's That's that's how you're going to look at the world.
And that's not a great way to look at the
world if you want to be if you want to
like have humility or or be capable of like change
and personal evolution. Anyway, I do think it's interesting that
these Dale Carnegie teachings how they may have influenced what

(11:40):
I always considered to be one of Scott's more reasonable
philosophical claims. And this is going to take us back
into the weeds a little bit.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
So.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Lawrence Peter was a Canadian professor who eventually came to
teach at the University of Southern California. His specialty on paper,
he's a professor of education. But over the years, Peter
felt drawn to studying organizations and why they succeeded or
failed in different circumstances, and he came to believe that
the best way to do that was to study hierarchies

(12:10):
within organizations and how they functioned and how they became dysfunctional.
He started to call himself a hierarchyologist, which is both
a fun term. It doesn't spell well, but if you
like say it out to yourself, it kind of works
pretty well. And yeah, he saw himself as like someone
who studies how different hierarchical systems function and don't function.

(12:31):
Lawrence was also a funny guy. He was kind of
renowned for peppering his different writings and essays and papers
with witticisms, like noblest of all dogs is the hot dog.
It feeds the hand that bites it. That's a Lawrence
Peter original.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Nice. I mean, that's a fun little quote. I can
see that.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yes, not a bad little not a bad little little jape.
In nineteen sixty nine, Lawrence co wrote a book called
the Peter Principle. The nut of the argument he made
in the book was this quote. In a hierarchy, every
employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence in time.
Every post tends to be occupied by an employee who

(13:07):
was incompetent to carry out its duties. Work is accomplished
by those employees who have not yet reached their level
of incompetence. Now, that is something number one. If you've
ever worked in any kind of large corporation, you will
be like, yeah, that shit works a lot of the time.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Right, it's pessimistic, but unfortunately it's yeah accurate. It is not.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
It's going to be familiar to basically one hundred percent
of people who have worked in corporate America. Right, even
if you don't believe that's how it always works, because
obviously that's not how everything always works. But like everyone
encounters people who are in this position right where they
were good at something, and that's the whole premise of
the office, right of the American Office. Michael Scott was
a really good salesman who got promoted well past his

(13:48):
level of competence, you know, and.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
You're receiving the American Office. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
Oh well, that's the premise of the show. It's all
based on the Peter principles. Right, they're doing great, Robert,
thank you, Thank you. People watch that.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
I think you should be noted that this is one
of the few times he like a pop culture reference
to a man's podcast and the guests didn't get it.
But Robert and you are very, very very correct. Yeah,
you know what I'm I'm I'm sick of all of you.
I'm going to go listen to my Ariana Grande records.
Wow you did.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
Oh my gosh, that's growth.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
Oh wait, I was trying to pronounce it wrong. Did
I accidentally get it right?

Speaker 1 (14:28):
You got it right?

Speaker 2 (14:29):
A son of a bitch? What a what a shameful
moment for me. I'm going to go read the name
of some British towns to get my mojo back there
you go.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
All I'm saying is I've infiltrated your mind.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Now today you know what, the only way for me
to get back on top, I'm gonna I'm gonna read
Welsh street signs.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
See how it goes for me. Small backwoods Massachusetts town
name so so yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Peter Laurence, Peter, you know, writes this book about how
people get you know, people who are competent get promoted
past their level of incompetence. And that's how like hierarchies work. Now,
this is not Peter is not pretending to write like
a super serious book of psychology. He's not trying to
write a business book. Either it's a satire, right like that,

(15:24):
or at least at various points he will say that
it's a satire and there's a lot of like joking
bits in it. For example, all of the evidence that
he cites to support his argument comes from what he
calls his hypothetical case file. So he's not like citing
from like real things that happened. He's citing from like
hypothetical stories, some of which are probably based on things
he heard or things that happened to him. But it's

(15:44):
like it's very tongue in cheek this book, right, And
he would later claim that the principle is the quote
key to understanding of the whole structure of civilization. That's
kind of and again he's like sort of joshing around
a little bit, but he's also like there's there's something
deep there, like that is this is like, I think,
a valuable a valuable warning and a valuable observation about

(16:09):
how hierarchy very often tends to work, right, because this
happens throughout government, throughout company, you know, the business world
in militaries, like.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
This is just a thing, and it's education nonprofits.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, and you can you can go back ten thousand years,
you know, looking at the best documentation we have of
different rulers of different and you'll find evidence of the
Peter principle. It's all throughout human history. So yeah, it's
it's a bit of like he's taken the piss a
little bit, but yeah, there's there's there's quite a bit there. Now,
the business community almost instantly adopted Lawrence's idea, even though

(16:43):
he was kind of like joking with it. This is
a hugely influential text for business people, for MBAs and shit,
and today the Peter principle is taken very seriously by
people who are like professionals at organizing corporate structures. In
a few seconds googling, I found a Harvard Business Review
article on quote overcoming the Peter principle and a Forbes

(17:05):
article titled new evidence that Peter principle is real and
I'm going to read a relevant quote from that real quick.
Three professors Alan Benson of the University of Minnesota, Danielle
Lee of MIT, and Kelly Schue of Yale analyzed the
performance of fifty three thousand and thirty five sales employees
at two hundred and fourteen American companies from two thousand
and five to twenty eleven. During that time, fifteen hundred

(17:26):
and thirty one of those sales reps were promoted to
become sales managers. The data show that the best salespeople
were more likely to A be promoted and B perform
poorly as managers.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
So like, there's.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
Actual data, you know behind this obviously not a universal rule,
but quite robust. So Scott Adams presumably learns about the
Peter principle while he's getting his MBA right, Like he's
kind of doing his MBA right at the time when
the Peter principle is kind of going viral in corporate America.
There's almost no way he wouldn't have read about this
and so probably listened to was at like conference and

(18:00):
stuff where people talk about it. And in nineteen ninety six,
just as Dilbert was blowing up, he decided to put
his own spin on the Peter principle in his first
text based book. So this is not like a book
of cartoons. This is like a nonfiction book. The Dilbert principle.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
The delivery that was the book. Yeah, it sure is,
it sure is, which I read when I was like
ten several ten year old were you? I was a
ten year old who, like I would go through sometimes
three or four books in a week, like I always
wanted to read like that. I was like, well, you know,
I got a lot. So my my uncle, who had
all the comics, was the guy. Also he worked at

(18:37):
a bookstore, and he would bring back what were called
strip cop books, which is like books that have sold
I know exactly we're talking about the ones out there,
Well we can't. Yeah, those are great.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
So everything I read either came from those books or
from his library. And yeah, he had a lot of
Dilbert books. So I read a lot of Dilbert books.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Yeah, surprisingly, I guess because also Dilbert came out when
I was much older. Yeah, And when I think about
what I was reading at ten was like D and
D novels.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, I read a lot of those, a lot of
dragon Lance.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeahs Scott Adams at that point, like yeah, oh, I've
read Hitching's Gut at each ten. Yeah, Like I remember
trying to pick Actually I'm trying to pick up once
my dad had a copy of How to Win Friends
and Influence People because my father was a union president,
and he and I remember pinging up and he's like,
you're too young for that. Go read something fun and

(19:28):
get out my hands.

Speaker 2 (19:29):
Don't be That's that's honestly great parenting. Like don' go donco,
don't read this. This will turn you into one of
these weirdos, Like go read something that'll make you laugh. Now,
I'm pretty sure at the time I read this, I
was like veering between the Wheel of Time series and
Delbert books.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
So you know, I was kid whipping.

Speaker 3 (19:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
I was a weird kid for sure.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
Anyway, at least Gore books that's all I care about. Yeah, yeah,
good god, we that's another episode. We'll get to that
one of these days, Victorians. Yeah, this was basically the
Dilbert principle. As Scott describes, it is basically an inversion
of the Peter principle. Instead of observing that hierarchies tended
to elevate competent people past the level where they are

(20:16):
good at what they do, Adams envisioned hierarchy in business
as a defense mechanism to elevate incompetent people to positions
of upper management where they don't actually have anything to
do and thus are less likely to interfere with the
people who actually produce work. Right now, if you've also
like you've probably I think this is less common for

(20:37):
people in the Peter principle because I think most of
us have stories of upper management who have like fucked
around in our shit. But like, if you've worked in
a company, you've seen this too. Both the Peter principle
and Scott's Delbert principle, these are things that you can
observe in the world, right, These are not like Yeah,
and I think both principles can be useful observations about
the way organizations work, get about pitfalls to avoid when

(20:59):
when created organizations. The Peter principle, I believe is a
lot more durable. It describes a much more widespread, I
would say, nearly universal phenomenon. I can think back to
like my own career at Cracked. All of my friends
and I started out writing funny articles and got promoted
to managing teams and like doing a lot of work

(21:19):
that we had absolutely no aptitude for because like we
just wanted to make our funny little japes and suddenly
we're like handling all of this like employment shit. And
you know that was that was There was a tough
learning curve there. I think that I lie, there were
you know, it was good and it was bad. It
worked better than it should have for a long time.

(21:40):
But like I can definitely say, and it's not like comprehensive, right,
because we all still wrote articles and made videos and
did the stuff we were good at. I think the
thing that I would say if I was going to
like make a maybe a more generalizable, you know, version
of the Peter principle is that competent people get promoted
to the point where they spend less and less of
time on the thing they're best at.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
Right, Yeah, Yeah, if you're not you have to or
at least you have to be very careful to avoid
that happening, right, because it's just kind of like.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
Naturally what what hierarchical structures do to people who are
good at shit? So yeah, I do think that Scott's
Gilbert principle, while I have seen versions of this in
my own life, is a lot less widely applicable. For
one thing, upper management constantly makes decisions that impact the
lives of people who actually produce shit and interfere with

(22:29):
them getting stuff done, and like Scott knows this. He
parodies this in a lot of his early strips, right,
like management making dumbs, decisions that fuck shit up, layoffs,
you know, in order to drink, stock prices that force
out productive workers in business units, that kind of shit.
And it's it's one of those things where like I
will give Scott some credit because it's there's in this

(22:51):
book kind of some valuable observations, and I don't think
most of it's like, I don't think they're valuable observations
to like a adults. I think this book is going
to be is pretty basic for anybody who's been out
and lived in the world, but as like an eleven
or twelve year old kid. There were a couple of
things that I found pretty influential, and in fact, one
I'm going to read one passage that I encountered at

(23:14):
a young age that I think is a pretty healthy
thing for a young man to encounter at a young age.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Here's Scott.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in
the modern age isn't an all encompassing twenty four hour
situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips
into many times a day. Life is just too complicated
to be smart all the time. The other day, I
brought my pager to the repair center because it wouldn't work.
After I changed the battery, the repairman took the pager
out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned

(23:43):
the battery around, and handed the now functional pager back
to me in one well practiced motion. This took much
of the joy out of my righteous indignation over the
quality of their product, but the repairman seemed quite amused,
and so did every other customer in the lobby on
that day. In that situation, I was a complete idiot,
Yet somehow I managed to operate a motor vehicle to
the repair shop and back. It is a wondrous human

(24:03):
characteristic to be able to slip into and out of
idiocy many times a day without noting noticing the change,
or accidentally killing innocent bystanders in the process. And I
think that's actually a pretty good observation. I think it's
also this this obsession that we have through media with
like hypercompetent protagonists, like isn't real, Like, there's nobody who's

(24:27):
like that that I've ever met in my life. And
if you kind of accept that, you will be if
you're able to accept your incompetence, and given situations, you're
a lot less likely to, for example, try to wire
your own house and wind up electrocuting yourself to death.

Speaker 1 (24:42):
You know, And I don't know, it was a useful
thing to come across, as it's you're the idiot, yeah,
and everyone is. The world is too complicated for you
to know how to like you can be. You can
know how to like from like from the ground up.
How like the Android or iPhone is coded right. You

(25:05):
could be an engineer at Apple or Google and know
everything about like how the actual software on your phone works,
But like you probably don't know how to solder the
entire thing together, and you certainly don't know how to
like mine the rare earth minerals and like put together
that we're all out of our depth if you really
think about it all the time. It's other people around
us who know what they're doing and who have figured

(25:26):
things out, and that that keep shit going right, Like
I don't know how to operate a power plant, but
thankfully there are people who do. You know, that's that's
the it's it's like humbling and valuable to think that way.

Speaker 3 (25:42):
I thought you want to say, I don't know how
to run a podcast, and I was going to be like, yep.

Speaker 1 (25:47):
I am Sophie Mellow.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Wow, wow, wow, hurtful, hurtful, but yes, I have no
idea what I'm doing. I don't even know what a
podcast is. Like, I've been trained to shout at this
blinking light when the box in my cage turns on,
and that's that's what all of this is.

Speaker 1 (26:07):
Let's how you get the food pillots.

Speaker 3 (26:09):
Yeah, did you see that it's now blinking blue, which
means ad break.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
Ah, speaking of shouting from your cage and a blinking light,
here's ads.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
We're back.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
So I've just said, I think that Scott's got a
good observation here, a useful thing for certainly a young
person to encounter. The caveat to this is I don't
believe Scott believes a word that he's written there, or
at least if he did at one point believe it,
he no longer does. But I don't think he ever
really did. For one thing, this book, the debrit Principle,

(26:47):
sells a million copies, which causes his ego to mistastasize
like a cancer cancer and devour his mind. I kind
of think the more I've learned about him, and the
more I've learned about the stuff that he read and
that's in fla, I think he's like, we're all idiots,
especially me. You know, I'm dumb a lot of the time.
Kind of stuff. This kind of self deprecating thing he does,

(27:09):
I think it's a calculated shtick rather than evidence of humility.
And I think part of why I believe this is
this line I came across in that interview with Maria Konakhova,
and here she is again describing a strategy from Dale
Carnegie's book that is really popular with con artists. There's
also the Mark Antony Gambit, which comes from Shakespeare where
Mark Antony begins a speech by saying, I come to

(27:31):
Barry Caesar not to praise him. He says the opposite
of what he then goes on to do, but he
primes people to think that he's on their side. And
I kind of think that's there's a version of like
Scott's doing a version of that with this, right, Like
he's saying, like, we're all idiots, you know, especially me,
I'm domb most of the time. But he's also that's
being packaged, is like and look at how smart I
am for realizing this and delivering this to you. You know,

(27:55):
like there's there's a little bit of we can call
it like kfe of there. Right, So Scott's books get
increasingly popular from here on out. The next year he
publishes The Delberate Future, which, of course I also read
as a small child. The subtitle of the book was
Thriving on Stupidity in the twenty first Century. It's a
pretty forgettable book. You would call it like a pop

(28:15):
futurist text about how technological development will impact people in
the future. Again pretty forgettable. It does include the prediction
technology and homeliness will combine to form a powerful type
of birth control, which is a joke in the book.
But I think Scott's going to kind of wind up
pseudo in cell in a lot of like his ideology

(28:35):
and a lot of the things he says. I think
you could see this as like a precursor to that
he is currently like this week as we talk chatting
with Andrew Tait about how nobody likes sex really like
it's not that good.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
Oh wow, yeah, on yourself there, buddy, Yeah, I tell
you might be telling on yourself a little bit there, Scott.
It's weird, as you'll see a screen camp for a
someone late saying women don't actually orgasm. Women they never like,
oh bloody no.

Speaker 2 (29:02):
And you know, you know what I'll say, for like,
the women don't enjoy sex, guys, you like, that's fucked up,
But they generally do enjoy sex.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
They just don't think women do.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Scott's like, boy, we all actually hate sex, right, And
it's like, for one thing, Scott, you know, there's like,
if you want to like explore this, you might learn
some stuff about yourself and come to accept some things.
But it would it would take having kind of a
more nuanced and plastic view of human intimacy that I
think you're capable of having.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
But I don't know if you were more of a
self reflective guy, well learning he was Ace. Yeah, I
don't know that he is.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
But some of the stuff he says is like, well, Scott,
if if you think that you've never maybe yeah, I
don't know, A more thoughtful person might like come to
some conclusions about himself through that. Scott just decides that
everybody feels the same way, and we're all lying about
enjoying sex for some reason, which I don't know. I
feel about that however you want so. The weird part

(30:03):
of the Book of the Delberate Future comes near the end,
when Scott starts writing about his habit of making affirmations
for the first time. He gives a couple of examples
of times that affirmations worked for him, and both repeatedly
gives a caveat that he's not saying there's anything supernatural
happening here, and also kind of leaving the impression that
he thinks he's discovered some kind of magical reality hack.

(30:26):
Over time and far too many books, Scott's feelings on
the Delbert principle and affirmation. Do you know what affirmations are?

Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, as a whole like speaker truth in the universal world. Yeah,
and the secret is basically it's the secret.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Right you have to ask if you tell the universe
what you're going to get or what you want, like,
it'll provide it for you. There's some rules to it, generally,
like the way Scott sees it, he has to like
write it down a certain number of times a day.
You have to be really specific about the thing that.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
You're going to do.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
So it's not just like I want to do well
in this class, but I'm going to improve my score
on this, you know, exam from this to this or
something like that. You have to be very and like,
you know, I don't think there's actually anything wrong with
this idea, Like if affirmations help you focus your mind,
focus on building skill in something, it's a it's you know,
I can I see. I think for reasonable people this

(31:14):
thing can be kind of a version of like meditation,
right where you.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
Think for most people that work can be this is
a harmless thing you did. Yeah, it's a personal ritual
and even that that can be still calming. Yeah, it
could be calming.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
It can help you kind of you get up in
the morning and you kind of you write your affirmations.
That helps you focus on like the things that you're.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
Going to work on.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
That's that's perfectly healthy if that works for you, Like,
that's a great thing to do. Scott is I think
kind of inherently hardwired to go really dogmatic about this stuff.
Like he presents himself as as very much like an
atheist and irrationalist, but he builds these kind of like
labyrinthine rule systems about this stuff. Rather than being like, oh,

(31:52):
you know, affirmations really helped me focus my mind and
I did well on that test, he has to like
set up these kind of increasingly arcane rule systems. He's
the kind of guy again, if he was a little
more open minded, a little cooler, he would have been,
like in the eighteen hundreds, like one of these guys
writing books about magic. You know, he would have convinced

(32:13):
himself he was a wizard and probably would have been
a healthier, happier person. Become a wizard, Scott Adams, You'll
you'll like it more than being I don't know, a
weird racist on YouTube.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
What his new book Dilbert Mancy. Yeah, Delbert Mancy, come on, Scott,
at least give us that you know where owed it?
Added Gandle Yeah exactly, Yeah, brit come on. So over
time kind of this, Scott's feelings on the Dilbert principle
and affirmations will evolve into this kind of labyrinthine scientifico

(32:48):
religious ideology with one goal, and that goal is explaining
why Scott Adams deserved his fame and incredible wealth, right.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
And that's the really problematic thing about Scott here is
that he's focusing all of this stuff. He's not just
using it to as like, here's you know, how you
can improve your life. He's using it to kind of
a priori justify, like why he's earned everything, Like why
luck didn't play into his, you know, life as much

(33:16):
as it really did.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
Why does he care? Like because no one else is
like asking I think God deserved money? No one never
comes up.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
I think it's simple, which is that if you are
really successful in a field where the odds are long
and against you, as God often notes, and you suddenly
make a shitload of money and become famous, it's pretty
natural to be terrified that it might end because you
never fully understand why it happened. Right, There's always people

(33:47):
around you who are just as talented, who work just
as hard, and shit doesn't work out for and the
fact that some people make it and some people don't
is kind of scary, right, And I think again the
mental the healthy thing to do is kind of embrace
the humility that that should engender in you and have
that influence how you treat other people and how you

(34:09):
try to give other people opportunities and try to level
the playing field and try to provide options for people
who benefit from luck less than you. The unhealthy way
to do it is to find justifications. Some people use religion,
Scott's weirder about it for why you deserve like and
it's because in Scott's case, I discovered the secret rules
of the universe, and you know, hacked my way into

(34:30):
being an influencer. I'm a master persuading. Really, in that
egg he found was a child, not just ten dollars.
The secrets the secret and that's kind of the primary
immorality at the center of Scott Adams in a lot
of ways, I think. So before Scott sort of degenerates
to a Trump reply guy, which is where this is
building towards. He got the chance to make his own

(34:53):
television show. On January twenty fifth, nineteen ninety nine, Gilbert
launched as an adult animated sitcom on You Up the
Network where I watched Star Trek Voyager as a little kid.
It was the highest rated comedy series premiere in network history,
but very few people watched UPN, so that's not much praise.
The show had quite a lot going for it though.

(35:14):
Larry Charles, who was a Seinfeld writer, was on the
development team. Danny Elfman, as we've talked about, was like
the theme music, and it's got some great voices in it.
Daniel Stern, who's Marv from Home Alone, did a lot
of the voices. Kathy Griffin does a voice. Jason Alexander
is up in there, you know from again, a lot
of like Seinfeld.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
After who did the Boss, because he's a really good time.
I think it's Larry's yeah, yeah, yeah, I forget you
like to play the really good smug asshole in the eighties
and nineties.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
The voices are pretty good. It's not like an incompetent show.
Like it's not bad whenever it comes online. Now, people
who like watch it as kids are like, well, the
show was actually really good. I did rewatch a lot
of it recently. I wouldn't say it's really good, but
for an adult animated series in nineteen ninety nine, it's
perfectly fine, right.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
It was. It was different. It was something that wasn't
trying to be the Simpsons, which was rare at that point. Yeah,
was trying to go the opposite direction of like family guy,
let's be as edgy and weird as we can. No,
it's just it gave what it promised. It was dilvert show.
It sure was, and that's there's nothing wrong with that.

(36:25):
Chris Elliott was Dogbert. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Kent was a boss. Yeah it all it all like,
the voices are are all pretty competent. So here's all
Scott says about it in his two thousand and two book,
published a year or so after the show's second season
in cancelation in nineteen ninety eight, I started working on
what would become the Delver TV show that ran on

(36:46):
UPN during nineteen ninety nine and two thousand. We had
a tiny operating budget, so I found myself doing more
of the writing than I had expected. Now, I don't
actually know what went on in that writer's room and
how much of the good parts of the show were
the Seinfeld guy and the other writers, how much of
it was Scott.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
But he does. You get a taste of Scott Adams
in this series. His voice shines through, and when it does,
it's often in uncomfortable ways. And I'm gonna play you
a clip now from an episode, and this is one
where Gilbert's antagonist in this episode is a bad guy
whose name is literally Bob Bastard, and Bob is trying
to unfairly sabotage and invention that Dilbert made. And as

(37:25):
a result of Bob being an asshole, all of everyone,
and especially like the female engineer Alice, loves him right
and Alice falls madly in love with him, even though
he's nothing but a dick to her. This is a
very uncomfortable scene, but like, it's not hard to see
what Scott's trying to say. Here you get another little
glimpse of that sort of attitude.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
What are you doing, I'm not doing anything. Why are
you dressed like that? I'm not dressed like that. You're
trying to look like him don't be ridiculous. It's just
that all my non Bob Bastard imitation closer in the laundry.
This is all I have left. What has happened to you?
Are you with Bob Bastard's camp? Now he has a camp? Cool?

(38:06):
Why do I try?

Speaker 4 (38:08):
I think we make a terrific couple, Alice, you really
think so? No, I'm just toying with your emotions since
I caught you in such a good mood. Can I
borrow another fifty bucks?

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Another fifty Oh, forget it.

Speaker 4 (38:22):
If you're gonna lay some kind of trip on me,
I'll see you around.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
No. Wait, okay, here, make that a hundred bucks.

Speaker 4 (38:30):
I'm saving up for a new mask.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
What do you mean you're changing your name? Seriously, don't
you think it sounds good? Wally Bastard? Have you lost
your all? Right?

Speaker 2 (38:40):
That's so that's enough, you get it, right?

Speaker 1 (38:43):
Yep?

Speaker 4 (38:43):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Women fall for abusive jerky.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah, women fall for abusive jerks. The unsaid part is
not like me, Scott Adams. Why don't they love me?
I'm so much better than all of the guys who
get the It's very you see this all of the internet. Now,
Scott was a was a trailblazer ahead of his time
with this sort of.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
Shit be a shit.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah, you also kind of get signs of this of
kind of what is now for Scott, an abiting hatred
of all journalists, who he seems to think are unethical
by nature of doing their job. He thinks it's like
unethical to report on stuff that's happening in the world.
This is now a pretty standard belief on the far right,
but it was less common in two thousand and two,
and it's it's pretty clear in this clip.

Speaker 1 (39:26):
What makes you qualified to be a reporter?

Speaker 4 (39:28):
I'm willing to violate anyone's privacy for my personal gain
and then claim with a straight face that the public
has a right to know, all right, So.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
Not subtle, right, And it's one of those things that
people who are remembering this is a good show, like
it's not bad for the time, but like there's not
a not a great density of comedy in these bits here, right,
Like there's it's got its moments, but yeah, a lot
of it's like weird and off putting, and I think

(39:58):
most of the off putting part arts are Scott's voice
just kind of shining through clear as a bell. Anyway,
the show gets canceled in two thousand.

Speaker 1 (40:06):
And two by Adult Swim for a little bit, though
didn't like it. Does like rerun and reruns and stuff. Yeah,
they also got Home Movies which was also a you
Pancho Home Movies, which was a much better show. Home
Movies had something to that. Yeah, never watch it every well,
so every other year.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
It's it still holds the fuck up. I I periodically
find myself singing the Franz Kafka song. But Scott's show
gets canceled. And now if I if I were to
ask you, why do you think Scott's show got canceled?
You know what would your answer.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Based It was a very targeted product on a rarely
watched network.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah pretty reasonable. Yeah, yeah, of course yes. And Scott,
to his credit, when he's interviewed about why the show
failed in two thousand and six, gives basically that answer.
He says, it was on upn and network that few
people watch, and because some because of some management screw
ups between the first and second seasons, the time slot
kept changing and we lost our viewers. We were also

(41:13):
scheduled to follow the worst TV show ever made, Shasta
McNasty on TV. Your viewership is seventy five percent determined
by how many people watch the show before yours.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
That killed us, that would probably do it. Yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
Don't know that Scott's I think he might be exaggerating
a little bit some of that, but like, yeah, that's
pretty reasonable, right. Not a lot of people watched it,
you know, they moved around the time slot, so people
didn't like that was more important back then. If you've
only ever watched in the streaming era, you may not
understand that. But this is not an unreasonable thing for
him to believe, however, right, Yeah, he's not going to

(41:45):
stick with that opinion as to why the show gets
canceled for forever. But what we're building to that, So,
right in the middle of the period of the time
when the Dilbert TV Show is on the air, when
it's in fact the comic is at kind of the
height of its popularity, Scott decided to try to branch
out into another business, the world of health food, and
he's going to I've been waiting for this one.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah. He creates a product called the dil Burrito, which
he says is like, so Scott is like a vegetarian
and he's he's angry that there's not any kind of
like good fast, like microwaveable food for vegetarians to eat
that can fulfill all of their nutritional requirements. He wants
something again. He has this kind of very mechanical ad

(42:30):
which is fine. A lot of people feel this way
about food. I know people who they don't particularly enjoy it.
They're like, I just this is why, Like soilet's a
popular thing with some people. So you guys have heard
of soilet, which is like this, they're these meal replacements
sort of like shake is a little bit of an
odd term, but like it's it's a drink basically, a
drinkable meal fulfills all of the necessary caloric requirements and

(42:51):
you can do it quick. And I know some people
who do it because it makes weight loss easier for him.
Some people they just don't have a lot of time
in the day, so it's good for I know people
who take soilt because like when you're doing drugs for
thirty six hours with your friends, you might forget to eat,
and it's easier to like pound a soilent than actually
like eat a meal when you're on so much ketamine.
That like the world is like melting all around you.

(43:13):
Scott wants this because he just wants like a simple
thing people can microwave and get all of their nutrients.
He describes it as only bad thing to want. It's
a fine idea, like sure, sure, I don't eat a
lot of meat, and I would love to have like
just simple make it in five minutes. Of course, it's
the most reasonable thing he's ever wanted to do. He

(43:35):
does describe it as the blue jeans of food, which
I find kind of funny, but like there's a peal
to that. So the problem is that Scott doesn't know
how to do this. Like Scott has no idea how
to make food. You don't get the feeling he's a
great cook, and he certainly does not have any experience
in like the business of mass producing food. So he

(43:58):
launches this product, which he calls the dil Burrito. I
would say not great branding either. It initially comes in
Mexican Indian barbecue, garlic and herb flavors. It's described as
being a tortilla wrapped comestible consisting of vegetables, rice, beans,
and seasonings that contain all of the twenty three vitamins
and minerals that nutritionists say are essential. Now, when you

(44:21):
jam as much nutrients as he's like, he describes as
like a vitamin pill wrapped in a tortilla, and when
you shove all of those vitamins and stuff into a
single burrito, it can have some negative consequences on your
gastrointestinal tract. As Scott would later say, because of the
veggie and legume content, three bites of the dil burrito

(44:43):
made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.
It is a disaster as a product, millions of dollars.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
It gets just lit on fire by this thing. I've
talked to people who apparently ate them and said that
they were prett be fucking nasty, And to be fair,
Scott describes him as pretty bad too. So there you go.
The del burrito. Kind of a funny little moment, but
not evil, right, He probably caused, yeah, disaster.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
I have friends, I have a roommate. We weren't a
time who you know. He was a tech guy. He
was a vegetarian, bordering vegan, and he hesitated because well,
I like the idea of fast food. I just don't
know that I would trust a fellow nerd making my
food and then someone else we knew ate it and
basic that to never try it because they they basically

(45:39):
thought they were going to ship their actual brain out.
Like they described it as so bad they could feel
their capitillarities of moving out of their body. It's just like, Nope,
don't mean that incredible. I mean indible food around too.
It was like dad Wood restaurant chain in the adults,

(46:01):
that makes sense. Dagwood eats a lot.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah, if you're if you're selling like the biggest sandwich
anyone's ever seen.

Speaker 1 (46:07):
Absolutely, Yeah, and that's it. And this isn't quite as
bad as a Garfield restaurant they attempted in Toronto, was well,
did he as also trying to do a restaurant at
one point or.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Was I just he did do a restaurant. We have
so much to cover. I don't think we're gonna get
into it. He ran an unsuccessful kind of restaurant in
the Bay Area at one point in time.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
Jesus. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
And it's it's it's very interesting, like it is kind
of like going to Dilbert, Like using him as the
mascot for for fast food is a little bit like
I don't know trying to sell mace that's Calvin and
Hobbes branded, Like, I just don't see much of a connection.
And also I'm like, I don't know if I don't
know if I trust the Calvin and Hobbs guy to

(46:50):
sell me mace.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
He doesn't seem like that's in his wheelhouse. Charlie Brown brand.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah, prophylactics, Yeah, yeah, the Charlie Brown condom.

Speaker 1 (46:58):
It works as long as life. Charlie Brown. You never
have sex. Weird diagonal line around the shirts? Yeah, absolutely?
Oh god, oh god.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Cliff Heathcliffe brand off roading tires, Like, why are we
doing this?

Speaker 1 (47:19):
What's going on? Cliff? That might happen? That comic is
so fucking weird these.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Days it does go off the rails. So this is
all fun. But by two thousand and four, Scott there's
some signs of some problematic stuff, but he's he hasn't
done anything fucked up yet really in a clear way.
He's expressed some odd beliefs, but he's not blaming diversity
or black people for his failures publicly yet again. The

(47:43):
book Where that stuff that we talked about comes in
from is published in two thousand and eight, but two
thousand and four is the point at which things start
to go really wrong in his life. Because of a
legitimate personal tragedy, he develops the symptoms of a rare
neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia. I'm going to quote from
an article in Braininlife dot org.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
Here.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
Adams's experience began in two thousand and four with what
seemed like an extreme allergy related at laryngitis. I used
to get laryngitis every May when my allergies were bad,
adams are called. It would usually last a few days
or a few weeks and go away, so I didn't
think anything of this particular bout. That was the first
of dozens of doctors' visits and an equal number of
treatments over several years. I was diagnosed with respiratory problems

(48:24):
that I was tested to roll out strep, throat and
acid reflux. From there, I went to an ear nos
and throat specialist to check for polyps in my vocal cords.
Nothing made a distance. I hit a wall. He tried
a bunch of herbal remedies, and it's one of those
things where like this starts out as laryngitis, but it
doesn't go away, and it gets worse and worse, and
he continued, he starts having very basic trouble talking right,

(48:45):
Like he's finding it harder and harder to speak. He's
trying every scientific and also like herbal fringe remedy that
he can come across, because he's just increasingly desperate. You know,
he's not able to go out and speak anymore. And
first his ability to kind of do public speaking goes away,
but soon his ability to just like talk to his wife,
to talk to his friends goes away. He's unable to
kind of communicate very well. He starts getting angry and

(49:08):
lashing out at people because he'll try to talk and
they won't understand him, and he just gets like enraged
at this. Eventually, this is what he says, kind of
causes the collapse of his marriage. And this seems like
a responsibility for something. Yeah, he kind of does with this,
Like it does seem like like this has to be
like a terrifying sense I have, Like that's horrible.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
Like I can't wish that on him, Like that would
probably be a legitimate tragedy, Like that is a nightmare
world to be in. Yeah, and yeah, you probably are
going to last. It doesn't make it right. You shouldn't
be lasting out of your spouse or anyone because something
happened to you. But I can get it.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Yeah, people don't perform perfectly in situations where they're both
frightened and like something fundamental about their nature has been
physically compromised. As Scott later kind of described, I felt
like I was a ghoat in the room. It's hard
to feel connected to others if you can't talk and
they can't listen to you. And yeah, again, sounds terrible. Obviously,

(50:07):
this is the kind of thing that's going to give
you some fucking PTSD.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
An today is an altered reality where he's like, so
I decided to start investing into nonprofits that help Yeah,
if we worked out or whatever, I know if that's
going to happen, I know why, because that's not about him.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
Yeah, he doesn't dedicate his life to helping others. As
a result of this, it ends with him unable to
talk entirely for like a couple of years, and he
pushes everyone away. He basically lives alone in his home,
not communicating with anybody for an extended period of time.
He considers suicide, but eventually he finds via googling his

(50:44):
symptoms enough that there is a rare condition that meets
his experiences. He finds a doctor who specializes in it.
He gets diagnosed finally, and the doctor offers him a
risky pioneering surgery. And basically the way the surgery works
is they cut the nerve that goes to the main
muscle that's spasming, and then they graft a new nerve
in its place to prevent the muscle from atrophying and

(51:07):
to stop the old nerve, which was like defective from
growing back.

Speaker 1 (51:11):
That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah, it's a it's a really interesting thing that they did.
The treatment is about eighty five percent effective. That the
doctor who does it says that about eighty five percent
of the time it provides, you know, an improvement or
complete cessation of symptoms, which is like not that's not
bad odds, but also like a fifteen percent chance that
you never talk again is like that's scary.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
You know, that's not low enough to not be terrifying, Right,
that is a love Then I would want to gamble
on most things much less.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
Yeah my voice, Yeah, I I Yeah, it's it's scary,
but like again, by this point, he can't talk already,
so he doesn't have any other options. So he has
the surgery in two thousand and eight, the same year
that he publishes the book where he blames all of
his life problems on black people, and after three years
of enforced isolation, in near endless silence, he starts being.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Able to talk again.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
And the way Scott describes it, the surgery works perfectly
and he's been fine ever since. Now there is a theory,
and you might call it a conspiracy.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Conspiracy is the wrong term because there's a conspiracy. But
there's a theory that you get among people who like
follow Scott and have followed him really going insane on
Twitter and stuff, that something goes wrong in this surgery
and it damages his brain and that causes some of
the behavioral changes that we see in him after this point.
I don't have any evidence of this. I've never heard

(52:32):
the doctor obviously, like say anything about this. I don't know,
Like it is true that after the he has this
surgery two thousand and eight, this is the year where
he becomes like very rapidly, he becomes increasingly racist and
aggressive online. But also number one, I think I can
see signs of the stuff that he would do later.

(52:54):
And number two, I'm not saying there's no chance to
something like that happened. That's a possibility, but like rather
than something fucking shady happening during the surgery, I find
it kind of likelier that three years of not being
able to speak of, losing every close relationship in his life,
of being completely isolated is what causes the behavioral changes

(53:16):
for the work. Now, that sounds a lot more like that.
And honestly, if nothing else, just like you came out
of this situation, like where you are facing a permanent
life altering situation, Yeah you maybe like fuck it, I'm
just going to throw caution to the end. Oh this
I feel weird about that, because how can we know,

(53:37):
Like that's I don't think about anybody who has surgery. Really, yeah,
I think that it's more. I mean, think about America,
Think about the COVID lockdown. Think about for how many
people that period of isolation was the straw that broke
the camel's back, that sent them spiraling into like Ashley Babbitt,
you know, like it doesn't take like We're all a

(53:58):
lot of us, most of us maybe are kind of
fragile at any given moment, and like, this is an
intense thing to deal with. I don't think I need
much more than like, Yeah, he lost the ability to
talk for several years and it blew up his marriage
and he lost everyone who was close to him for
a while and lived alone as a hermit. Not yeah, man,

(54:19):
I can see that fucking you up.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
Yeah. I mean, like even if like just like the
everyone I care about left, yeah, or I pushed him away. Yeah, No,
that's what I'm like. Yeah, oh my god, Like I
just can't even have fathom like how that would be
as anyone.

Speaker 2 (54:35):
I can see you not becoming the best version of
yourself after that, Right.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
You're either going to tell on a mia culpa tour
and trying to fix or you're just gonna say, well shit,
yeah why not? Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
So And in two thousand and eight, Scott publishes the
book Twenty Years of Dilbert, which is what I've been
quoting from several times. It's where he repeatedly blames diversity
programs for the great failure of his life. And it's
interesting because after this point he also like in this book,
like he blames you know, losing his job, not getting
promoted on diversity programs, and he blames now. In two

(55:11):
thousand and eight, he blames black people for the failure
of his television show, saying, quote, the show started out well,
but in the second season the network made a strategic
decision to focus on shows with African American actors. Gilbert
lost its time slot and cancelation followed. And that's very
different from the reasonable answer that he gives in two
thousand and six. It's also definitely not true. For the

(55:33):
next fifteen years or so, Scott is going to bring
these incidents up with increasing regularity. In twenty seventeen, he tweeted,
I lost my TV show for being white when UPN
decided it would focus on an African American audience. That
was the third job I lost for being white. The
other two are in corporate America. They told me directly,
which is again different on the story he.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
Gives Vampire Slayer around this time. Yeah, man, it's not
because you're white. Like it was number one UPN, not
a ground network. Number two. Your show didn't find an audience.
Most shows don't kind of getting two seasons isn't super common, bro, Like,
you got actually more of a chance than most people.
And it's like any reasonable person who gets to be

(56:14):
worth hundreds of millions of dollars for drawing doodles would
be like, I have no complaints about this system, right yeah? Yeah,
like just worked out perfect for me. Like, are you crazy, Scott,
Like you have been the luckiest anyone's ever been. I've
never been rich. I have supported myself. I've been able
to support my spouse when they were going through grad

(56:36):
school off doing comics. I'm proud of that. I feel
I'm very fortunate because I have not gone into an
office to work since two thousand and four. I feel
I'm so lucky. This motherfucker's worth millions. Yeah, he's like
like black people took my TV show. No, they fucking didn't.
They just didn't like it. No one else liked it either.

(56:57):
We all disliked it. We all took it from you.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
You have like three hundred million dollars in a mansion
in California shaped like Dilbert's head because of your glowing
like the system has Oh yeah, his his house is
shaped like Dilbert's head.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
Look, that is absurd. That is the dumbest fucking thing.

Speaker 2 (57:16):
Yeah, it's it's it's funny because again he's like, they
canceled it because they wanted to focus on shows with
black actors. Other people have pointed out Gilbert had the
second lowest ratings of any show on television at the
time it was canceled. And this is like when Scott
made his big post, they can't it was because I
was white. Like people brought this up and Scott goes

(57:37):
ape shit, just like he did with Norman Solomon, he
is unable to disengage, replying days later to his Twitter
trolls quote, I successfully stirred up a hornet's nest of
unsuccessful artists. They don't know they're part of the show.
Don't tell them.

Speaker 1 (57:56):
I'm a master. Yeah, I was really manipulu. No.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
Yeah, we're saying that, like you have seen tremendous success
and the fact that not everything you did worked isn't
something that black people did to you, Like it's most
cartoons don't succeed. Everyone I know who's I know, I've
known I know more than most people of like people
who have been very successful in Hollywood, all of them
have failures. All of them have more than one failure

(58:22):
in their background. Scott, like Scott Scott McFarlane right, like
who's made god knows how much money doing cartoon shows.
His first show gets canceled after like two or three seasons.
Oh right, he's out of the base, Yeah, Scott, Why
I was saying, Yeah, family guy, he's out of like
the he's out of like doing that for years when
the show gets canceled. You know, like his got brought

(58:44):
back because it developed a fan base, which the dilbrit
show didn't.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
But that's one interesting thing you compare that because they
both got brought back, like re ran on that swim.
But Sam may Farlane's, well, shit, if you're gonna be
rerun it, I'm gonna do these bumpers. Yeah, lean into it.
He actually built worked on if Yeah, I wonder if
Scott at well, I mean I'm glad he didn't. But
Scott has it put like effort like behind it, like
that could have helped him too. He just he wanted

(59:09):
to work the way it was gonna work, and it
didn't happen that way.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
And so now also my suspicion, I don't I'm not
an expert on Seth MacFarlane lore. But my suspicion is that,
like for Seth, being doing that TV shows has been
his whole motivating factor in life, and Scott.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Was animator though, that's where he began. He worked, Yeah,
he worked for Cartoon Network, he did shorts in the nineties.
I think he worked on a season of Johnny Bravo even.

Speaker 2 (59:36):
Yeah, that makes sense, And I suspect the reason he
put in all that extra work on those bumpers and
stuff is that, like, this is what he loved and
wanted to do, Whereas for Scott, the Delbert TV show
was like a side gig in between drawing cartoons and
trying to make burritos.

Speaker 1 (59:50):
You know, like brito Yah. Cannon's good, sir.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
It's such a weird thing to be Like, my like
third job didn't pan out. So black people are engaged
to conspiracy against me.

Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
It's it's it's like, it's not evidence of great mental health. Yeah.
If the entire black community was going to rally around,
like we need to take one white man down, why
the fuck would it be Scott Adens.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I think he's saying
that like it was these venal Hollywood types who wanted
to get the black you know viewer or whatever. But
I also see no evidence of that Like Hollywood, especially
in the early two thousands, wouldn't have killed a successful
show by a white guy to please the black community.
It wasn't a successful show, Scott.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
I can think of like a CEO of a channel
killing successful shows was in the early seventies when CBS
did like the rural purge, where any show that took
place or appealed to people in rural areas like Beverly
Hillbillies and he Hall got canceled despite having amazing ratings
because they didn't want to appeal to uh, they would

(01:00:58):
appeal to more urban viewers. Yeah again. It was white
people hurting white people.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
Yeah yeah again. Scott very silly man, So who knows
like why he suddenly starts to go down this road.
But as he gets increasingly like obsessed with the ways
in which he's been wronged by diversity, he also starts
to get increasingly elaborate with like his lore as to
why he thinks he's how he thinks he's uncovered the

(01:01:26):
secrets to success in the universe. And the best example
of this is his concept of talent stacking. In twenty thirteen,
he writes a book called How to Fail at Almost
Everything and Still Win Big And it's another it's him
kind of pretending to be humble, where he's like, I
was bad at all of this stuff, and I still
got super successful. And I got successful because you know,

(01:01:48):
even though I wasn't great at any one thing, I
had a bunch of little skills and they all synergize
together to allow me to be a big success. You know,
I wasn't the best artist, but I understood kind of
how to use the Internet, and so I was able
to take advantage of that to like promote my cartoon strip,
and you know that's why it was a big hit.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Here's how he describes this concept more succinctly in his
book Win Bigley, which he publishes a few years later,
you know, in the early Trump years.

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
A talent stack is a collection of skills that work
well together and make the person with those skills unique
and valuable. For example, a computer programmer who also knows
how to do good user interface designed would be more
valuable than one who does not. The power of the
talent stack idea is that you can intelligently combine ordinary
talents together to create extraordinary value. The key concept here
is that the talents and the stack work well with
one another. Now that's not wrong, but Scott, that's not

(01:02:40):
a discovery, right, Like if you were if you were
to go up to a person on the street and
be like, hey, do you think having more skills makes
you more valuable? I'm going to guess one hundred percent
of people.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
Say like yeah, of course goes like yeah that when
you turn in a resume, They're not like, oh shit,
he's got eight skills supposed to two.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
Yeah, yeah, oh he's got a great talent stack. No,
it's yeah, learning things is good. You are a more
valuable coder if you know how to code more things
you know. And just like when it comes to like
the artistic field, this is something that writers have talked
about for a long time. Oftentimes if you if you,
I mean this goes back decades. You see, like writers
answering letters from fans. Advice they'll give is go out

(01:03:22):
into the world, like experience things, meet people you know
that will make you a better writer. The more things
you know about, the more things you can write about
with versimilitude. Robert Heinlen, you know, had a great has
a great bit about like the creative value of having
a broad base of skills of knowing how to you know,
harvest crops and skin an animal and you know, go

(01:03:44):
phishing and you know all these kind of like different
things that are sort of like unrelated skills because as
has hurt Heinland said, specialization is for insects. Right, Like, again,
what Scott is done here is he's taken a basic
observation that is most people are aware of and that
people have been talking about one way or another forever,

(01:04:05):
and has reframed it in kind of the gamified language
of hustle culture. And I'm not sure if this is
just Scott trying to work a grift and knowing that
he's just repackaging very obvious shit, or if he just
hasn't read other people's writing, right, Like, does he legitimately
fail revelation?

Speaker 1 (01:04:24):
Yeah? Do it?

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
It doesn't matter, yeah, yeah, but it is interesting like this,
And I think that kind of the way he does this,
by sort of like treating it as such a dogmatic
like a skill tree and an RPG, I think kind
of makes it. It's it sets you into this very
like crystallized mode of thought that I think is more

(01:04:47):
brittle and might make you less likely to pick up
useful skills if you can't sort of like figure out
how that skill is gonna work in a talent stack,
because like the skill Scott talks about that synergized together,
he didn't like go into learning those things because he
knew they would hybridize as well. It was more just
like living a life where you have a wide base
of experiences makes you more versatile and more able to

(01:05:09):
like adapt to the world. And that's the only real
meaning of intelligence. But you know what else is intelligent?

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
Is it the products and services that weis to span
our minds and skills stack.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
That's right, every single advertiser on this show is a
member of MENSA. Oh that's the promise hear that. I've
never heard of another podcast talking about MENSA. But here
we go, Ah, we are back. So good stuff, good stuff.

(01:05:47):
So focusing obviously on acquiring talents that you can combine
is a good thing. But I think Scott's talent stacking
is kind of I think the way he's framing this
is more likely more likely than making you talented. It's
a very brittle way to interpret a phenomenon that, like,
viewed properly, can be liberatory. But I think looked at
the way that Scott looks at it might lock you

(01:06:08):
into a world where all you do is draw Dilbert
and repackage old self help books. But it works for Scott.
He does get rich, which means he's never had to
question the person that he's become or the ultimate value
of his conclusions about the world. As the years go on,
his work loses any edge of humility, and he veers
increasingly towards megalamoniacal shit. His two novellas are the best

(01:06:30):
example of this. He writes two fiction books and kind
of the early aughts. One is called The Religion War
and one is called God's Debris.

Speaker 1 (01:06:37):
Have you read these books? Randy's definitely never heard of them.
Oh oh boy, so oslo hesitant when I hear a
cartoonist has written a novel. Yep.

Speaker 2 (01:06:49):
Well, Scott considers this his only his real legacy, that
like he will be remembered for these books. He said
this that like what I will be remembered for is
my novels. He believed these are very deep and contain
important truths about the human condition that no one else
has elucidated before. Now I have not read God's Debris.

(01:07:10):
I have read The Religion War. These are both pretty
short books. You can find them for free online if
you want to steal them like I don't think Scott
put them up. But they're available, which is where I
found them, So just google them and google the title
and text if you want to read this shit. I
have read The Religious War. I would the Religion War.
I would charitably describe it as an atheistic rant that

(01:07:33):
managed to manages to be racist on an almost unique level.
The basic plot I will give Scott credit for this
is summarized efficiently in the first paragraph of the prologue.
And here's Scott's book. Here's how it opens. In the
year two thousand and seven, a brilliant and charismatic leader
named al z began his rise to power in the
Palestinian territories. He was the architect of the twenty year

(01:07:56):
Plan for eliminating Israel, the success of which started a
domino effect in the Middle East, as one Arab dictatorship
after another fell and their territories rolled into the Great Caliphate.
Alsi's subjects heady from an unbroken string of victories, demanded
the spread of Islam to the rest of the world.
AlSi understood that this was neither practical nor desirable, but
to satisfy the appetite of his people, he began an

(01:08:16):
unending war of minor terror against the Christian dominated world.
The attacks were calculated to be large enough to look
like progress let's yet small enough to avoid provoking all
out war. Publicly, he blamed renegade groups for the attacks.
The Christian dominated countries k new Alzi was behind the bombings,
but they depended on him for their oil and wanted
to avoid a larger war that would cripple their economies
and an all likelihood increase the number of bombings. Now

(01:08:40):
there's a lot that's insane about that. For one thing,
Scott doesn't seem to know that there are Sunni and
Shia Muslims, and that they, like the all disagree.

Speaker 1 (01:08:50):
About a lot. Neither of those words are in the book.
Sunni doesn't show up, Shia doesn't show up. He doesn't
mention Iran like we don't know what the Shia world
supposed to be? Are you doing here? Like? He just
is like all of the Muslims are in a caliphate
now because this guy and what so Alzi his plan
to destroy Israel is like he organizes the Palestinians to

(01:09:11):
demand democratic rights and like they become kind of quasi
equal partners in society and then one day they murder
all the Jews. Like, it's pretty fucked up. This is
a Christian novel that, like My Youth kind.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
Of does now He's he doesn't portray the Christians particularly
sympathetically either, right, the big Christian general was also portrayed
as a bad guy. It's more like an early Internet
atheist novel. But like, you know how a lot of
those guys, those like internet atheists from the nineties after
nine to eleven went like super hard anti Muslim. Yes,

(01:09:49):
Scott's doing the same thing here, right, it's pretty fucked up.
It's very racist. It's really funny. Like Scott has convinced
himself that his novel was prescient because it predicted the
rise of Isis. That's bullshit. That is not what Scott did.
All he did was use the word caliphate, which isis
also used, but also a bunch of governments have called

(01:10:11):
themselves caliph. Very it's a thing it goes back like
a thousand years. It's it's been a thing for a while.

Speaker 1 (01:10:19):
Agree, there isn't one of my D and D books
like for al Kadan. Does that mean like Ed Green
nineties predict It's.

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):
Also like fuck Scott Is, like once they start winning
the victories, just number one, like the west Is just
kind of ignores their campaign of low level terror, which
we didn't. We like bomb the crap out of them.
And number two he has this idea that like, well,
once a caliphate is declared, all of the Muslims just
start clamoring to join it and take over the Now
you know who actually defeated ISIS because I was there

(01:10:49):
for quite a bit of it. It was Muslims, by
the way, like uh whenever, like I don't know, people
shot at me. The folks who like threw their bodies
in front of me Muslims. The people who are like
at their day and night throwing like fucking with like
hand grenades and fucking combat knives, clearing buildings of ISIS
fighters were also Muslims. I watched him pray in the
mornings before they would go get fucking shot. Like very offensive,

(01:11:14):
this guy. Yes, I am very frustrated by Scott Adams
and his racist book, and that he thinks he predicted
isis like, go fuck yourself, Scott.

Speaker 1 (01:11:25):
I mean, are you surprised though, considering like nothing else
he's taking credit for it at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:11:30):
No, no, not at all. It just is like particularly galling.
So the way Scott writes about the Caliphate shows his
fundamental incuriosity about the world. He never expresses any understanding
of the actual religious doctrine behind the strains of fundamentalist
Islam most associated with terrorism. Even if this book was
anti Muslim hate speech, it might have come from a

(01:11:52):
position of understanding, you know, stuff like Selophism, right, it'd
be one thing, it would still be bad. But if
this was like anti Muslim and really gott into the
nitty gritty of like different really problematic beliefs among extremist Muslims,
like you know, Slofi Islam and stuff, that would at
least show that like he was curious to an extent,
you know, but he's he simply is not. And the

(01:12:15):
book itself does treat Christianity with a similarly broad brush.
The American Leader is this like general like, by the way,
the whole West is part of the Christian Alliance, that's
what they call themselves with like, I don't know, man,
I feel like it's a secular I feel like all
of the religious terrorism is part of why people have
become more secular in the twenty first century, as opposed

(01:12:35):
to making everyone pick sides in a religion war, like
it's just not what happened, Scott.

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
Not fucking fuck.

Speaker 2 (01:12:44):
Yeah, it's offensive to it should be offensive to anyone
who reads it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:12:48):
The conflict between these two big blocks is resolved when
Scott's self insert character who is a guru called the Avatar.
Who is the Avatar is like a wizard, but he's
a wizard. He's a wizard of smart right, He's so logical,
it's so rational that his ability to like talk to
people and make rational arguments is effectively a superpower. And

(01:13:11):
he solves the religion war becind because he finds an
old lady who's like he describes her as basically a
super influencer. Right, there's just this kind of mystical network
of people who are really convincing, and if you find
the right person, they'll talk to you know, fifty people,
and they'll convince all those people and those people will
talk to another fifty people and then kind of stocata
or kind of like over in a very short order,

(01:13:33):
everyone will be convinced of something. Right, if you find
the right person, you're able to like seed a thing.
And this old lady comes up with a joke where
she's like, if God is so smart, why do people fart?
And that revelation makes the entire world atheist more or less.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
That's the plot. That's the plot of Scott's book. I
hate this. I hate this. Yeah. By the way, if
you're listening to this and you want to read an
actual novels written by cartoonists Mel Lazarus who did The
Mama and Miss Peach's Class, I'm told I've read them.
Watch of Horley Racist not but like and I was like,

(01:14:09):
who was one called The Boss is Crazy Too, which
was based off his time working in a CD magazine
like fine stuff like that that's meant to be fun
and pulpy. What the fuck? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:14:20):
Or on the other end of the great cartoonist Alan
Moore wrote a book called Jerusalem, and I'm gonna be honest,
I haven't read it. No one I know who loves
Alan Moore has finished it, but you could put it
on your bookshelf and occasionally read pages and people will
think you're very smart. So sure, it's a great book.
One of these days, I'll read it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:39):
If it's Alan Moore, you probably just like at absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
And yeah, I keep it on my belt next to
my handgun in case you know there's a jam or something.
It's it's it's it's much more effective than a than
a combat knife. Wailing on some Nazi with a copy
of Jerusalem.

Speaker 1 (01:14:57):
Yeah, that's my new master material. Thank you, I will
I will remember that time. Sorry, Alan, I love you. Okay,
I'm going to keep freaking out about this book, going,
keep going, please, it's terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
So God's Debris, which is the sequel, is even more
out of again, Yeah, it's a sequel. The whole thing
is like a pseudo Socratic dialogue between a delivery boy
and the avatar from the first book. It is charity
to call this freshman intro to psychology gobbledygook, Like most
freshman psych students would write a better and more insightful

(01:15:35):
book than this. I'm not going to punish you all
with too much detail, but you can get an idea
of what we're looking at here with this passage, and
this is so this delivery boy comes to give an
old man a passage. The old man is the avatar,
and he's I guess, going to like pass wisdom on
to this kid. So like, here's the delivery boy talking
to the avatar. It's for you, he said. That's that's
the delivery boy. What's for me? The avatar applies the package.

(01:15:59):
I just delivered the packages, I said. My job is
to bring them to you. It's your package. No, it's yours, okay,
I said. Planning my exit strategy, I figured I could
leave the package in the hallway on the way out.
The old man's caretaker would find it. What's in the package,
I asked. I hoped to get an awkward to get
past an awkward moment. It's the answer to your question.
I wasn't expecting any answers, I understand, said the old man.

(01:16:22):
I didn't know how to respond to that, so I didn't.
He continued, let me ask you a simple question. Did
you deliver the package or did the package deliver you?
By then I was delivered a little annoyed with his cleverness,
but admittedly engaged. I didn't know the old man's situation.
But he wasn't as feeble minded as I'd first thought.
I glanced at my watch, almost lunchtime. I decided to
see where this was heading. I delivered the package, I answered,

(01:16:45):
that seemed obvious enough. If the package had no address,
would you have delivered it here? I said, no, Then
you would agree that delivering the package required the participation
of the package. The package told you where to go.
I suppose that's true in a way, but it's the
least important part of the delivery. I did the driving
and lifting and moving. That's the important part. How can
one part be more important if each part is completely necessary?

(01:17:06):
He asked, Now this is pointless, like there's no wisdom
to be revealed in this, but also like it's like
no delivery boy would be like, well, I'm the person
I'm responsible for why the package. Now the deliverer would
be like, look, man, this is my job. I got
to make rent, Like that's why I gave you this package.
Someone told me to deliver package here.

Speaker 1 (01:17:26):
Yeah, Like, I have to do this to afford food
and stuff, Like that's why I'm here. That's what drove
me here is my need for food.

Speaker 2 (01:17:34):
Don't you Tube minutes like, no, the package didn't make
me come here, and like that, we're not equally integral.
The integral part of this is I need a job
and this is the job that I have. Will you
please sign for the fucking package, asshole?

Speaker 1 (01:17:47):
Oh oh god.

Speaker 2 (01:17:48):
It's frustrating. In general, I think Scott Adams is maybe
the single person who handled the social media era the worst.
There were signs that this was going to be the case,
with him from early on having to filter his ideas
through editors at comics, syndicates and publishers kept the most
problematic stuff out of his work. When he was allowed
to just vomit his thoughts to people, things got really dark,

(01:18:09):
really fast, and an early sign that this was going
to be the case came in. An early sign that
this was going to be the case came in two
thousand and six when he made a blog post about
how he didn't vote because he was too ignorant. Right now,
I don't disagree with Scott there. I don't want him
voting either, But he immediately seguees off of this into
very wild territory, starting with the fact that like he's like,

(01:18:31):
you know, I think that the news doesn't provide us
with enough context to make a decision. So, for example,
I just learned recently that Iran is twenty five thousand
Jewish citizens, and everybody's talking about how anti Semitic the
president of Iran is. But there's all these Jewish people
living in Iran. So does that mean that the president
is anti Semitic and that I'm going to kill people way?
Or is he just kind of a bigot? You know,
the media hasn't provided me with the context that I

(01:18:51):
need here, And for one thing, like you could look
up life for Jewish people in Iran, Like there's Jewish
people who have like left Iran or who still live
there probably who you can like you can find like
their feelings on the matter. You could look this up,
like there are media, there's newspapers that have written articles
about this, Scott. The fact that every newspaper that talked
about this is during like when everyone was flipping out

(01:19:11):
over Mahmoud ahmadina Jod, the former president of Iran because
he made some statements about Israel. The fact that like
every news article on Amadina Jod didn't like go into
detail about life for Jewish Iranians doesn't mean that like
that context is not provided elsewhere by the media, you
chose not to look into it, and for some reason,

(01:19:31):
from that very strange statement, we veer into Holocaust denial.

Speaker 1 (01:19:36):
So here's Scott I gamm it. I'd also like to
know how the Holocaust death toll of six million was determined.
Isn't this sort of number that's so well documented, with
actual names and perhaps a Nazi paper trail, that no
historian could document it doubt its accuracy, give or take
ten thousand, Or is it like.

Speaker 2 (01:19:54):
Every other LRN large round number that someone pulled out
of his ass and it became true by repetition. Does
the figure include resistance fighters and civilians who died in
the normal course of war, or just the Jews rounded
up and killed systematically. No reasonable person doubts that the
Holocaust happened, But wouldn't you like to know how the
exact number was calculated? Just for context? Without that context,
I don't know if I should lump the people who

(01:20:15):
think the Holocaust might have been exaggerated for political purposes
and with the Holocaust deniers if they are equally nuts,
then I'd like to know that I want context. You
know what, Scott you can get context because there's libraries
full of books people have written calculating the death toll
of the Holocaust. All of these questions have been answered
numerous times by both journalists and historians. You chose not

(01:20:37):
to seek that out. It's not a problem that every
article that talks about mentions the Holocaust and its death
toll doesn't go into detail about how that death toll
was calculated, because that's not good article writing. You don't
like it would be like every time I talk about
fucking climate change, I discuss like how fucking internal combustion

(01:20:59):
in work. Like it's simply not necessary context every single time.
But it's super easy to learn about how the Holocaust
death toll was calculated. And if you were to just
have typed into Google in this period of time, how
was the Holocaust death toll calculated? You would find answers
to this question. And if people at home are curious,

(01:21:21):
The Holocaust Encyclopedia, operated by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
has a page titled documenting numbers of victims in the
Holocaust and Nazi Persecution, which you and Scott Adams can
peruse at your leisure if you want. This is not
hard stuff. It's easy to find. You do not have
to be a historian to learn the basic answers to
the questions that Scott is asking here.

Speaker 1 (01:21:40):
It's so it brings Yeah, it's so blatant. The holy
is like no one's covered this means I didn't have
the curiosity to go find out. Yeah no, man, you
didn't look like, why isn't the media telling me about this?
Well they did. You didn't read those articles. There's a
lot of articles, so you didn't want to know about it, Like, yeah,
I can hand I can hand mine toddler evidence that

(01:22:05):
if she cleans her room up, she will not trip
over her toys. She's not gonna read that. She doesn't
give a shit, she's gonna keep her toys out.

Speaker 2 (01:22:14):
It's like if I bought a car that didn't have
a manual in it and then I drove it and
never changed the oil until like the engine broke, and
then I was like they didn't give me the contact,
Like yeah, man, you like you can look up how
do I maintain a car? What does this light on
my dashboard mean? What are these noises from my car mean?
It's not hard to get that answer, Like it is

(01:22:36):
not the fault of the fucking car manufacture that you
chose to act like a helpless babe. This is all
a really perfect example of the kind of dumb that
Scott gives us. He thinks that like saying this, that
being like, well, I just want context, what about this?

Speaker 1 (01:22:51):
What about what I'm saying it didn't happen? Yeah, dot dot.

Speaker 2 (01:22:56):
Yeah, Like he thinks that this makes him look nice,
just deep and wise, but like kind of the cynical
prankster wise man, like the Avatar and his books, Like
you just accepted that number without thinking. Maybe now you'll
think more about the things you accept without thinking. No,
you should actually like try to learn the answers to
the questions that you're asking, because they're very readily available.

(01:23:17):
Scott Adams, it's like very frustrating.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
It's like.

Speaker 2 (01:23:25):
I think his attitude is that like when we talk about,
for example, Holocaust and I as shooting up synagogues and
murdering Jewish people, every article about that should include a
digression about like the estimated kill rate during acton Reinhard
and how it compares to the rate of killing in Rwanda.
Like that's literally what I think he's saying, which is
nuts and stupid, and he should feel bad, and also

(01:23:47):
somebody should throw p at him anyway for the sake
of fairness. I should note that at this point Scott's
ill considered political rants are not always entirely on the
wrong side, although there's always an element of wrong to them.
And May of two thousand and eight, he wrote a
blog post making fun of people who complained about illegal
immigrants and that's a noble cause. There are some cringe

(01:24:09):
worthy lines in the post, like Mexicans have great looking
skin that resists sunburn. I have skin that looks like
tappyokas spilled on canvassing skin. Mexic people, what the fuck, Scott, Well,
you don't need to get into that. Scott continued posting, though,
and he eventually started to draw criticism when other people

(01:24:29):
realized that the unfiltered Dilbert guy was a dick. This
happened first in a big way when he made this
twenty eleven post complaining about the unfair treatment of women.
The reality is that women are treated differently by society
for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally
handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone.

(01:24:49):
You don't argue with a four year old about why
you shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a
mentally handicapped guy, even if he punches you first. And
you don't argue when a woman tells you she's only
making eighty cents to your dollar. It's the path of
least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
So Scott posts this stupid thing because he's a dumb asshole,

(01:25:09):
and he gets made fun of on a blog called feminist,
and so he jumps he again. He can't handle people
not agreeing with him or not thinking he's smart, so
he leaps into the comments section to defend himself and
argue against everybody, and immediately, because he's not good at arguing,
he just kind of gives that up and starts insulting
people for their poor reading comprehension. He also suggests that

(01:25:33):
they all secretly agree with him and know he's right,
and are just arguing with him for the sake of
their own egos. Then he makes a blog post a
few days later reiterating all the points that had made
everyone mad, but insisting that everyone had just gotten him
wrong and that like Dilbert readers are smart enough, you know,
but other people didn't get it. I'm actually going to
read a quote from EW dot com here, like summarizing

(01:25:55):
the fallout. Adams insisted that his post was some sort
of forensic ex size that his loyal readers he presents
them as sort of uber rational Dilbert Nation, understand, but
he did eventually offer an apology. The best of my knowledge,
no one who understood the original post or its context
was offended by it. But to the women who were
offended by their own or someone else's interpretation of what

(01:26:16):
I wrote, I apologize.

Speaker 1 (01:26:19):
You week by your own interpretation. What. Yeah, it was
all just a game for me, the puppet master. But
I'm sorry if it hurt you. Like Scott, just if
you want to be if you want to believe shitty things,
just like say them on your massive platform and ignore
the people who argue with you. Yeah, don't be a

(01:26:42):
little baby about this, like he's such a whimp public
counts to defend himself or that.

Speaker 2 (01:26:49):
Oh boy, that's where we're heading to. So the attention
or because this kind of goes viral, more and more
people start to watch his blog posts because and then
they start to realize, like, wow, he says dumb all
the time, Like he's constantly saying bullshit without knowing anything
about the shit he's talking about. So in the mid
adds it kind of comes sport in a couple places

(01:27:09):
online to make fun of bad Scott Adams posts, and
Scott can't handle it, so he starts to make fake
accounts on MetaFilter and Reddit under the pseudonym Planned Chaos,
where he again he's doing this puppet master thing and
he pretends to be someone else defending himself because apparently
his rational superfans aren't like good enough to actually do

(01:27:31):
the job for him. Here's an example of a Planned
Chaos post. If an idiot and a genius disagree, the
idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has
lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That's
how the idiot mind is wired. It's fair to say
you disagree with Adams, but you can't rule out the
hypothesis that you're too dumb to understand what he's saying.

(01:27:53):
And he's a certified genius, just saying, first of all,
argument to authority. If you want to be like a
big fucking rules, D and D for real life guy,
Like that's the argument to authority. You're not actually defending yourself,
Like that's evidence that you've kind of like that whatever
argument you're you're you're making is completely hollow because you

(01:28:13):
have to rely on like, well, he's a genius, so
you just don't understand him. But also that's just like
such a sniffly little wiss thing to do, like say
it under your own name, you fucking coward.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):
Yeah, that's that's what Bobby Like, well, let's not to
the biggest thing that Bob Scott adams. But it's like,
I have never understood making a sock of an account
to defend yourself. It's sad, it's sad, it's weak anyway. Whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
Once Trump began his campaign for president, Scott's behavior accelerated.
He predicted a Trump primary win fair enough, gets that
one right, and then he takes back his endorsement of
Trump though after the Access Hollywood take tape, and he
endorses Gary Johnson, which he'll later come to like regret
and try to explain away, but it is it is
very funny. Once Trump wins, he publishes a book called

(01:29:02):
Win Bigley in which he argues that he and Trump
are both master persuaders, and Trump was ushering humanity into
a bold new world with his master persuader techniques. He
becomes increasingly partisan during the Trump years, but also increasingly
silly and deeply irresponsible, would be fair to say. In
twenty nineteen, you guys remember the Gilroy Garlick Festival mass

(01:29:25):
shooting that was carried out by that kind of fascist guy. Yeah,
real fucked up. Scott uses the tragedy as an excuse
to publish a video app he's made called win Hub,
which he's created as like a news gathering tool, and
he's like, while like the shooting is going on, he's
telling people to use this to report on what's happening.
If they're like, it's pretty fucked up. Like there's a

(01:29:48):
lot of debate in our culture about like what it
is and isn't appropriate to do in the wake of
a mass shooting, but I think we can all agree
trying to plug your app is not appropriate.

Speaker 1 (01:29:57):
Yeah, that's a bit off sides. Yeah, Yeah, that's just bad.
That's just real fucked up. Scott.

Speaker 2 (01:30:04):
A write up in MSN notes Adams didn't make major
waves with a February twenty twenty one comic that poked
fun at those who received a coronavirus vaccine, but he
did rouffle feathers when he espoused debunked claims that people
who weren't vaccinated fared better than those who were in
a video shared by the Just Think podcast. In the
twenty twenties, his political statements also started to focus more
on race. At the beginning of twenty twenty two, he

(01:30:25):
tweeted that he was going to self identify as a
black woman until Biden picks his Supreme Court nominee, which
the President had vowed would be a black woman, and
then in June of twenty twenty, Adams tweeted that when
the Dilbert TV show ended in two thousand after just
two seasons, it was the third job I lost for
being white. So Scott's madness crescendos after the twenty twenty

(01:30:46):
two Highland Park mass shooting. This, like so many mass shootings,
was carried out by a very young man twenty one
years old. Rather than seeing this as perhaps a reason
to explore more restrictive laws as to win firearms could
be purchased, or perhaps apps as a sign of deeply
toxic aspects of our culture and the things that young
men in it are raised to believe. Scott posted one

(01:31:07):
of the craziest things I've ever seen on Twitter, which
is an app fueled entirely my mental breakdowns. Here's Scott again,
in the wake of a mass shooting. The Highland shooting
and every fit in the overdose death among the young
are teaching us the same lesson, and we refuse to
learn it. It's difficult, but I'm qualified to give you
this lesson. Unfortunately, dam this won't be easy to read.

(01:31:28):
When a young male, let's say fourteen to nineteen, is
a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting
family to options. Number one, watch people die and number
two kill your own son. Those are your only options.
I chose one and watched my step son die. I
was relieved he took no one else with him. If
you think there is a third choice in which your

(01:31:48):
wisdom and tough love, along with government services, fixes that
broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There
are no other options. You have to either murder your
own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.
There is a sad reaction behind this, so like, I
that's like fucked up. That's real bad. First off, not true.
I mean, among other things, I did an interview when

(01:32:09):
I was still working with Cracked at a young man
who attempted to carry out a mass shooting at his school.
This was back in the late nineties, and got caught
and stopped, thankfully before he was able to shoot anybody,
but he had the guns, he was about to start.
He was penalized obviously, like he was sent to I
think a mental institution for a while. But like he's

(01:32:30):
like it's been decades, he's like a normal person. He's
got a life now, he's like hasn't killed anyone. Like
you can, in fact intervene in people who are like
going in dark directions and they can be saved. It
happens all the time. Part of why it doesn't get
more attention is that a guy shooting up a school

(01:32:51):
obviously is a thing that people are going to pay
attention to all the times every single day in which
a mentor comes across a kid who's starting to have
under a dark path and like reaches that convinces that person.
You know, every time that a parent like sees that
their child is starting to like embrace toxic aspects of

(01:33:11):
like belief and behavior, and it starts to talk to
them and you know, starts to work with them and
tries to understand and counsel them. Every time, like people
get pulled back from that brink. It doesn't like you
don't get a news story about that, right, like obviously, like,
but that doesn't mean it's not happening. It's it's kind
of fucked up to say that. Like, once people start

(01:33:32):
to show that they have that they're fetishizing violence, they
that you know, they're embracing like racist or problematic beliefs,
or that they're you know, starting to get addicted to drugs,
that there's no way to save them. Like if you've
lived a life, you know people who have been pulled
away from all sorts of fucked up things or who
have like gone too far down a dark road and
pulled themselves back. It happens all the time. Not that

(01:33:56):
it's like easy or simple. These are terrible things to
deal with as a kid, having a child who like
you think, might shoot up a school. That's a terrifying
position to be in as a as a But like
people get pulled away from that kind of stuff. Now
there is a sad his stepson that is a well,
that's what we're about to talk about. Oh no, it's

(01:34:18):
a pretty sad story. Scott's step son was involved in
a serious bicycle accident at age fourteen. He suffered severe
brain damage, which caused him to lose all impulse control,
and he became terribly addicted to drugs and eventually died
of a fentanyl overdose in twenty eighteen. This is a
horrible story. There's a video in twenty eighteen when Scott

(01:34:39):
gets the news where he's just like weeping to his audience,
and I have no doubt that it's genuine.

Speaker 1 (01:34:44):
Oh yeah, I mean it's yeah, yeah. I don't want
to brag on him for losing yeah, a child.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
No I don't either, But like number one, I think
at twenty eighteen, video doesn't look to me like a
man who like gave up on a child. That looks
to me like a man who's sad because what he
was doing didn't work. And I think it's very depressing that,
like the lesson he took out of this is that, like,
you can't save people when they start to have problems.
Obviously everyone can't be saved. Clearly, Scott's steps On, whatever

(01:35:14):
was going on, like was not something he was able
to pull out of. And that's a tragedy. I know
multiple people who had serious addictions to like things like
things that were going to kill them and stopped. You know,
I have friends who like I have a friend who
survived shooting himself. Like, people come through terrible things and

(01:35:36):
build lives afterwards. And the attitude that like, when a
young man is troubled, all you can do is let
them die or murder them is so that's the such
a bad thing to take out of this experience.

Speaker 1 (01:35:50):
That sounds sociopathic.

Speaker 2 (01:35:52):
It is, and it's also it's probably one of the
things that's really problematic to me about this is that,
like he is, he is bringing his step son's death
in the context of a man who went on a
mass shooting and murdered people. His steps on just had
a drug addiction. Having a drug addiction and dying as
a result of it is not in the same moral
universe as shooting strangers to death with a fucking rifle. No, Like,

(01:36:17):
comparing those two things is insane.

Speaker 1 (01:36:19):
Well, it's I think it's the whole mentality of Oh,
addiction is a moral failing, not a disease.

Speaker 2 (01:36:26):
Yeah, no, it's like number one, especially in this case,
like this is a kid who's got like brain damage
and he has no impulse control, which is sad and
hard to deal with, But like it's not the same
as deciding to murder people. You shouldn't be talking about
these things together. They're not even in the same realm. No, Like, ah,

(01:36:47):
it's it's one of those things, Scott. So obviously the
culmination of this where we are now is that earlier
this year, Scott made a number of super racist comments
about black people and about how like white people just
need to stop talking to and stop being you know,
associated with black people, stop living with black people. We
just have to separate. Like it's pretty fucked up shit,

(01:37:10):
and like everyone gets saying this is like the straw
that finally breaks the camel's back. He says something that
like the normies take note of, and it leads to
the collapse of his cartooning career. In like the space
of a week. He gets dropped by shitloads of newspapers.
His syndicate, his publisher drop him, everybody drops him, and
Scott again tries to do kind of the I was

(01:37:30):
really trying to make this very intelligent point, and all
the really smart people got what I was trying to
say in context, but the dumb people got angry. My argument,
Scott is that a writer who repeatedly fails to get
his point across to his audience is bad at writing.

Speaker 1 (01:37:47):
Anyway. Yeah, It's one thing I remember from all that,
because I do have people contact me and like ask
if I wanted you quotes. I was like, not really,
like contact cartoons, the color that's what you should be
talking to you, not me. But like one thing I
will always remember about it was feeling like I saw

(01:38:08):
people like, you know, applauding the syndicate Andrew's universe. Yeah,
and uh Andrew real universal and I'm like, yeah, they
did it, but like they it took this. Yeah, this
was like there were you dog whistles before this, Like
there was there are countless points where they could have
stoop and said, nah, that's too far dude. Yeah, but

(01:38:29):
like it literally got to a point where newspapers had
to say, oh, you're gonna lose this this spot and
it finally hurts and now they're like, oh, well we're
not gonna stand But no, you're not gonna stand out
of the fact that you're losing money if you had
the morality. And again I should point out I'm saying
this is myself, not on behalf of King Features or

(01:38:50):
Herst Media, my my syndicate does my first opinion. If
you really had any morality, he would have been dropped
a long time ago. Yeah, like this, like the bigotry
has been there in display for a while and now
you're like, oh, now you have the morality because you're

(01:39:12):
losing newspapers.

Speaker 2 (01:39:14):
No, now, I will say, I am now. Yeah, Yeah,
he's got his comic online. You can still read Dilbert
if you want to. For some reason, it is now
entirely focused on like weird, cancel culture, grievance shit. But yeah,
if you want that in your life, it's still available somewhere,

(01:39:35):
and it's it's one of those things. You know, you
you are not speaking on behalf of anyone else. I
am speaking on behalf of a of my corporation. I
am speaking on behalf of both Cools and Media, and iHeartRadio.
When I assure everyone Scott Adams lives inside of a
mansion shaped like Dilbert's head with a swimming pool out back,

(01:39:55):
also shaped like Dilbert's head, where he spends all of
his recreational time. Right now, Scott is sitting in a
swimming pool shaped like Gilbert's head, angry that people on
the internet are making fun of him. And if you
want to let Scott know that, let him know that
you know that he lives in a house shaped like
the hell head of Dilbert. I think he'd appreciate that.
Maybe it'll save him.

Speaker 1 (01:40:17):
I also remember, didn he he finally introduced a black
character in his comic in the last year or so. Yeah,
the first trip was literally using the black character to
shit on trans people.

Speaker 2 (01:40:28):
Yeah, it's very very Scott Adams. Everything he does is
very Scott as.

Speaker 1 (01:40:33):
It's just it's like that one shitty kid you went
to school with, who this is the only attention he
can get and he's so proud of it. And when
people hate I won No, you're just pathetic. Yeah, you
just kind of kind of sad, bro. And he could
literally say, you know what, I'm not talking to anybody.
I'm gonna sit joy my money for the rest of

(01:40:54):
my life. Vallid go for it, and we'd all we
have here again. There's not a single human being on
the face of the earth who has a bad opinion
of Bill Watterson. No, I mean the probably sending him
used to deal with him.

Speaker 2 (01:41:08):
Probably the syndicate because he cost him a lot of money.
But like fucking a you know, he was like, I
made this for ten years. I feel like if I
keep making it, the quality will drop. I'm going to
go paint landscapes somewhere in the rural Midwest for the
rest of my life.

Speaker 1 (01:41:23):
And Jim Davis again, like you may out like Garfield, Yeah,
you may think it's a shallow tompic whatever, but every
cartoonist or every person, yeah they were do. He's a sweetheart.
He is very supportive. He is a nice man. He
has never leapt into a fucking culture controversy. He knows
that's not what we need from the Garfield man.

Speaker 2 (01:41:44):
I don't need to know the Garfield guy's opinion on
any of this stuff, Like was.

Speaker 1 (01:41:48):
It that comic Garfield minus Garfield when it came up,
he could easily squash that. Instead he's like, no, that's
a great idea.

Speaker 2 (01:41:54):
Keeps funny, Yeah, keep doing it, like it's one of
those Like Jim Davis has never gonna like come in
and be like, here's what everyone needs to know about
like race mixing from Jim Davis, like we're fuck, he's
never gonna give you that and think like that's again
earned his money.

Speaker 1 (01:42:11):
Good for you, Jim Davis. And you know what, Scott,
just for some evidence of what you could be. Like
Jim Davis lives in a house shaped like Garfield's head
and we don't make fun of him for it because
we respect Jim Davis. You do you, Jim Davis, just
keep on hating Mondays and tell us how and we're
abuse of Odie and John creeping on the vet. That's

(01:42:34):
sure you've made it. You've made it. Yeah, although give
us a better explanation for having a fucking lineman, Davis.

Speaker 2 (01:42:41):
Don't, Yeah, have an alignement Davis. Yeah, that's some real
deep Garfield lore for those of you who are real
Garfield heads anyway, there's actually like a shocking amount of
very deep and unsettling online Garfield lore. People should seek
it out.

Speaker 1 (01:42:57):
There is really terrible to seek it out on a.

Speaker 2 (01:42:59):
Dark night when you're alone in your house and and
really delve into the Garfield hole. But you know what
other hole people should delve into.

Speaker 1 (01:43:08):
These ads and services. No, no, no, you're you're you're
oh yes, my holes, my deep holes. Yeah yeah, yeah,
uh well, if you want to find me online, my
my commic online comics something positive has been going around
for twenty one years. It is at something positive dot net.
Or if you want to read a new Popeye strip

(01:43:31):
every Sunday that makes apparently certain uncles on Facebook mad
go to comics Kingdom dot com slash Popeye every Sunday,
and thank you guys for having me. This has been
I mean, has it been say fun? It could have
been working. It could have been a John K episode,

(01:43:53):
It could have been dunk. Yeah, we'll get to well
califernakus or ever it's pronounced one of John awful human
being who Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:44:07):
Also a lot of a lot of great animator bastards
out there.

Speaker 1 (01:44:10):
But again, I work in a field where like, yeah,
we're left alone in dark rooms for hours on end.
It's gonna go one of two days.

Speaker 2 (01:44:21):
Yeah, yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but
Gahan Wilson helped build the Hiroshima bomb. Look it up, people,
look it up. It's it's out there. Find the evidence
I wanted.

Speaker 1 (01:44:30):
I almost made a joke about one of my predecessors
on pop Eye, but I'm pretty sure would get have
some of you're talking to. So they're all helpless, lovely,
lovely men, just just like everyone who's ever worked for
Clear Channel Communications. Anyway, that's the podcast. Everybody a great.
What about where they can find you? Uh? Well, the internet?
Oh yeah, I have a book called After the Revolution.

(01:44:52):
You can find it anywhere you find books, like, type
it whatever, wherever you get your books. Type it in,
go to a.

Speaker 2 (01:44:58):
Bookstore, you know, with with some sort of crude weapon,
ideally a copy of Jerusalem by Alan Moore, and threatened
the teller until they buy a copy of my book
After the Revolution.

Speaker 1 (01:45:08):
That's how you do it.

Speaker 3 (01:45:10):
And if you the listeners who do not enjoy ads
about Reagan's gold coins would like to listen to this
very podcast and all other cool Zone Media podcasts ad
free either coming soon or already out, depending on when
you're listening to this. We have Cooler Zone Media, our
ad free subscription channel exclusively on Apple podcasts. Is that right, Robert?

(01:45:32):
Did I do it?

Speaker 1 (01:45:34):
That is correct? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:45:35):
Sorry, everybody. It's just for people with iPhones. But that
is most of our listeners.

Speaker 1 (01:45:39):
One day I will matter.

Speaker 2 (01:45:40):
We apologize to everyone else. We'll figure out. I'm an
Android user too. You know, we're all in this together,
but sadly it's harder than you'd think to work stuff
like this out. Anyway, we've requested the Zone Media Apple.

Speaker 3 (01:45:52):
Podcasts behind the Bastards production of Cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts