Part Two: How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind

Imagine I did another one, a different.

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.

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 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 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 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 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, 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.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this other than that some of David's some of Dale's advice works pretty well, and 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.

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

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. 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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.

more about it. But when you have this kind of very engineer focused view of how something like public speaking works, 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.

philosophical claims. And this is going to take us back into the weeds a little bit.

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. 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.

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.

the office, right of the American Office. Michael Scott was a really good salesman who got promoted well past his level of competence, you know, and.

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

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 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 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.

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.

all the comics, was the guy. Also he worked at 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.

of the Peter principle. Instead of observing that hierarchies tended to elevate competent people past the level where they are 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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 a young age that I think is a pretty healthy thing for a young man to encounter at a young age.

After I changed the battery, the repairman took the pager out of my hand, flipped open the battery door, turned 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 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

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.

How like the Android or iPhone is coded right. You 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 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.

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, 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 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, 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 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 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.

feel about that however you want so. The weird part 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.

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

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 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.

never fully understand why it happened. Right, There's always people 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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.

to unfairly sabotage and invention that Dilbert made. And as 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.

McNasty on TV. Your viewership is seventy five percent determined by how many people watch the show before yours.

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.

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 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. 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 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 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 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 made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.

It is a disaster as a product, millions of dollars.

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, that makes sense. Dagwood eats a lot.

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.

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, 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 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.

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 to stop the old nerve, which was like defective from growing back.

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. 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 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, 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 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, I can see that fucking you up.

promoted on diversity programs, and he blames now. In two 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 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.

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 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. We all disliked it. We all took it from you.

was white. Like people brought this up and Scott goes 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.

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 back because it developed a fan base, which the dilbrit show didn't.

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, 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.

one another. Now that's not wrong, but Scott, that's not 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.

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 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, 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?

of makes it. It's it sets you into this very like crystallized mode of thought that I think is more 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 like adapt to the world. And that's the only real meaning of intelligence. But you know what else is intelligent?

viewed properly, can be liberatory. But I think looked at the way that Scott looks at it might lock you 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

all the Jews. Like, it's pretty fucked up. This is a Christian novel that, like My Youth kind.

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 themselves caliph. Very it's a thing it goes back like a thousand years. It's it's been a thing for a while.

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,

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.

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 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 to making everyone pick sides in a religion war, like it's just not what happened, Scott.

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, 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.

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.

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. 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, 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?

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.

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, 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 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 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, from that very strange statement, we veer into Holocaust denial.

exact number was calculated? Just for context? Without that context, I don't know if I should lump the people who 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 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 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, 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.

over her toys. She's not gonna read that. She doesn't give a shit, she's gonna keep her toys out.

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?

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 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 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. 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, 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 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

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 I wrote, I apologize.

about the shit he's talking about. So in the mid adds it kind of comes sport in a couple places 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 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. 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 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.

very funny. Once Trump wins, he publishes a book called 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 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 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.

on race. At the beginning of twenty twenty two, he 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 gets the news where he's just like weeping to his audience, and I have no doubt that it's genuine.

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 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.

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, 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 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.

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 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 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 losing newspapers.

When I assure everyone Scott Adams lives inside of a mansion shaped like Dilbert's head with a swimming pool out back, 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.

of Bill Watterson. No, I mean the probably sending him used to deal with him.

I mean, has it been say fun? It could have been working. It could have been a John K episode, 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.

it whatever, wherever you get your books. Type it in, go to a.