Ep 84 ｜ You Don't Become Hitler at 70 ｜ Scott Adams ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per Minute
166.14659
Summary
Until late 2015, a cartoonist who had never been overtly political suddenly was acquainted with the consequences of having an opinion when it was deemed the wrong one. His explanation of a certain larger than life presidential candidate changed all of that, and it has changed his life.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
If you have ever worked in an office setting, no matter what your role is, you can relate to my guest today.
00:00:05.700
In fact, he probably has made you laugh more than once in the absurdity of the personalities and situations you encounter at work.
00:00:13.740
Until late 2015, he was best known for the wildly successful cartoon that he pens every day and also a bestselling author.
00:00:24.100
But a certain larger than life presidential candidate changed all of that, and it has changed his life.
00:00:30.840
While the media drove itself and the rest of America insane trying to figure out the how and why of Donald Trump, my guest today had an articulate explanation that to him seemed very obvious.
00:00:42.200
He said Trump was a master of persuasion, but his explanation seemed too complimentary of Trump.
00:00:48.820
So this cartoonist, who had never been overtly political, suddenly was acquainted with the consequences of having an opinion when it was deemed the wrong one.
00:00:59.080
His explanation of Trump's political rise translated into his public support for the president.
00:01:05.540
Still, he doesn't call himself a conservative nor a Democrat.
00:01:08.700
He's one of the leading voices of what is becoming an endangered American species.
00:01:14.120
People who dare call themselves a person who thinks for themselves.
00:01:20.180
He's still a cartoonist, still a bestselling author, but now is added blogger, podcaster and political commentator on his day job.
00:01:27.980
He is the creator of the worldwide comic strip phenomenon, Dilbert.
00:01:38.700
Scott, this is frustrating for me because I have so many things.
00:01:52.660
You are so fascinating on what you're doing and saying right now.
00:01:57.000
But I want to go back to the beginning to get to know you more because your whole life has been like this.
00:02:11.440
Did you know then that's what you wanted to do?
00:02:15.320
Well, at age 11, I won a contest on the back of a cereal box.
00:02:20.240
And I also had applied at about the same age to the famous artist school for young people, a male correspondence course.
00:02:34.440
Because, yeah, as they explained it, you have to be at least 12 years old to be a famous artist.
00:02:49.400
Yeah. You know, you always hear stories about, let's say, musicians whose parents were both musical.
00:02:57.260
You know, it seems there's some kind of a second generation effect.
00:03:01.100
So my mother was an artist and she would do portrait type of art.
00:03:08.300
So you write funny letters to us in college and stuff.
00:03:11.180
And so you put those two talents together and you got a cartoonist.
00:03:15.860
But you go to school and you become, what was it?
00:03:25.620
Right. Yeah. And then later and later I got an MBA at Berkeley.
00:03:30.240
And I worked at a big, big bank at first, a number of different jobs.
00:03:34.780
And then I went to the local phone company for another six and a half years.
00:03:39.720
Yeah. You said that you were literally a fake engineer and in technology lab.
00:03:44.240
Yeah. The actual story is that it was a period where the department was not allowed to hire from the outside, but they needed some engineers.
00:03:56.660
So they said, well, can you connect these cables together?
00:04:03.120
Would you know how to load software on a computer maybe?
00:04:08.700
And if maybe somebody can show me the other stuff, I can bluff my way through.
00:04:12.720
So they actually gave me a business card that said engineer.
00:04:33.840
Yeah, I got here in 79 and have been in the Bay Area ever since.
00:04:39.380
Although I have to say, if ever there was a time to think about moving, it would be now.
00:04:46.880
I grew up in Seattle and I absolutely love that climate.
00:04:55.020
It's beautiful, beautiful, but it is it's a little insane.
00:05:01.580
When you were working at Pacific Bell, you said you set your alarm clock at four o'clock in the morning every morning.
00:05:18.380
So at 4 a.m., I would get my coffee and I would sit down and I would try to create a new a new job, a new career.
00:05:29.020
But the thing that worked out, of course, was cartooning.
00:05:31.440
So at 4 a.m., I would sit there with my piece of paper and my pencil and pen and and make a first sample cartoons.
00:05:39.460
And then when I had enough of them, I submitted them to a cartoon syndication company, a number of them.
00:05:44.840
Most of them rejected me, but one of them said, how would you like a contract?
00:05:51.120
So how many cartoons did you how many different characters before you hit Dilbert?
00:06:02.360
Dilbert had been created as a character I used in my day job.
00:06:06.100
And I would do little comics on my whiteboard in my cubicle.
00:06:09.060
And sometimes I'd do presentations as part of my job and I'd put in some comics that I drew and they were kind of popular around the office.
00:06:17.960
And pretty soon they started to get spread around the company.
00:06:21.340
So I'd give phone calls from people who were in another part of the state saying, oh, I just saw your comic.
00:06:33.500
So people encouraged me to do something with it professionally.
00:06:39.060
So how much did your life change at that point?
00:06:44.540
Well, I never had what I'd call the champagne moment.
00:06:49.340
You know, the moment where you say, yes, I've made it.
00:06:51.840
It was all these little things that were that were important, but they didn't quite change my life until you look back and years later and you say, wow, it's really changed a lot.
00:07:06.620
We'd like to give you a contract to become a syndicated cartoonist.
00:07:20.800
So then you work with them and they say, all right, we're going to put these in newspapers now.
00:07:26.880
And they said, it'll probably be in maybe 10 or 12.
00:07:37.100
But in 2007, in a blog post, you said, I still haven't popped the champagne.
00:07:42.820
I raised the bar for what would be the right moment.
00:07:44.700
Tell myself how tasty it would be if I ever accomplished something special in my work.
00:07:49.680
But in the late 1990s, I believe, weren't you honored in the cartoonist like Hall of Fame or what was it?
00:08:18.920
You know, Dilber became immensely successful financially.
00:08:24.200
And once it became big financially, I won an award.
00:08:28.420
And as soon as I realized, wait a minute, it's because I'm popular that they want the event itself to, you know, gather people.
00:08:38.260
And it had nothing to do with the quality of my work because it was identical to last year and the year before.
00:08:43.980
And the moment I won it, it meant nothing to me.
00:08:51.200
I thought, oh, it's the greatest honor a cartoonist can ever have.
00:09:00.140
It's strange how you get a perspective once you get to a place to where you can earn something like that.
00:09:15.540
I remember talking to a guy who was involved with the Pulitzer Prize.
00:09:21.880
And when I heard how you get a Pulitzer Prize, it's basically a group of people sitting around and saying, well, what book do you like?
00:09:38.120
You know, they had the right, you know, social message or whatever.
00:09:46.600
There is no denying that 2020 has been a very crazy year and we're seeing chaos happening in cities all across America that we never imagined that we would see.
00:09:53.960
And because of all of this madness and chaos happening in our own communities, we've had to ensure that our own reporters at the blaze that are brave enough to be on the scene of this chaos are protected for any situation that they might face.
00:10:11.540
Our own Elijah Schaefer has been confronted multiple times with extreme danger and it has made us look for the best way to protect him and our crew should they be caught in the middle of these types of dangerous situations.
00:10:22.720
I have actually done this for a couple of reporters who are out.
00:10:27.920
I've done this for somebody at the Daily Wire as well and and and the Daily Caller.
00:10:33.340
I I think these people are really brave, but they have to have protection.
00:10:38.420
And so we shipped out some ballistic body armor and it may seem like something that you never thought you'd have to do.
00:10:45.880
Something we never thought or hoped that we wouldn't have to do for our friends here.
00:10:50.520
But when we did, we used our friends at AR500 armor.
00:10:55.480
They're the ones we turned to and trusted with supplying us with the right ballistic body armor for the different kinds of scenarios our reporters find themselves in personal note.
00:11:20.100
That was my choice for my grandchildren the other day.
00:11:28.200
Um, it makes buying ballistic body armor easy, approachable and affordable.
00:11:33.660
And they built out a special package that's 30% off now for you.
00:11:38.140
Um, anybody, anybody that feels like you just need to have the right amount of protection for dangerous situations.
00:11:47.620
Go to AR500 armor.com slash Beck AR500 armor.com slash Beck.
00:11:55.840
Use the promo code Beck for 20% off anything in the entire store.
00:12:00.700
Plan now how to protect yourself and your family.
00:12:08.400
I want to go back to when you are getting up at four o'clock in the morning because that I don't think is the important part.
00:12:16.040
You put the work in, but you did something else at four o'clock in the morning.
00:12:23.680
You, uh, wrote down in the, and said in the mirror, or you wrote down every day.
00:12:31.660
I am Scott Adams and I will become a famous cartoonist.
00:12:36.140
Yeah. So, so, uh, I wasn't doing that just at four in the morning.
00:12:40.580
That was more of a thing I'd do whenever I could.
00:12:43.380
So that's called affirmations and it's just, uh, having a specific objective in mind and repeating it and making it real in your head.
00:12:52.040
You know, in general, you can't do anything until you can imagine it.
00:12:55.740
You know, you, you can't even walk out of the house until you at least can imagine that that's a possibility.
00:13:00.720
So part of affirmations is talking yourself into it.
00:13:06.140
Um, I don't believe there's a magical part of it, but there's something called reticular activation, which is that it's the effect where you can hear your name in a crowded room, but you can't hear any other words.
00:13:19.860
And then Scott, and you're like, why, why is that the one word I can hear clearly?
00:13:27.340
And part of what affirmations does is if you really are putting that much focus into, you know, an objective, you'll start noticing things that you might not have noticed before.
00:13:37.800
And in fact, my, my big break came when I was flipping through the channels on TV and I, and I noticed a TV show on how to become a cartoonist.
00:13:46.260
And I'd never seen it before, but I saw it just when I needed it, when I was focusing on that.
00:14:03.380
You said that was, that was beyond you, uh, the restaurants.
00:14:07.700
Um, and then you started making about a million dollars a year just from public speaking.
00:14:13.740
This is where I think you become really fascinating at this point.
00:14:27.400
Yeah, it was called, uh, um, spasmodic dysphonia or a voice dystonia more generically.
00:14:33.320
So some people just get this for reasons that nobody quite knows exactly.
00:14:38.380
Sometimes it's comes on from some regular respiratory problem, but I lost my ability to speak intelligibly.
00:14:44.920
In other words, I could make noise, but my vocal cords would clench when I tried to form words.
00:14:50.360
So if I tried to order, let's say a diet Coke, it would come out like this.
00:14:54.820
I go, and then people couldn't figure out what I was saying.
00:14:58.920
So I couldn't talk, couldn't talk on the phone pretty much at all.
00:15:02.940
And so for about three and a half years, I didn't have the ability to speak.
00:15:07.580
And that, uh, was, as you, you can imagine, it's just a devastating loss because you don't
00:15:14.200
feel the ability that you're communicating with people, even if you can communicate, if
00:15:19.640
you can't speak, you know, the fact that you could write it down or you could text it
00:15:23.820
to somebody or, you know, you could do sign language or something doesn't really get you
00:15:29.340
It's like, it's like being a ghost in the room.
00:15:34.880
First of all, I, you know, my doctors couldn't even, I couldn't even identify what problem
00:15:42.660
Yeah, it came on, it came on, um, as it often does with other people after what you think
00:15:52.480
So I thought I just had a normal allergy or something, and then it just never, never got
00:15:59.480
So I ended up finding out what it was on my own by, uh, Googling the right, the right term.
00:16:06.180
I'd, I'd had a separate problem a while ago of a muscle dystonia in my drawing hand.
00:16:12.020
And I thought, well, what if it's one of those?
00:16:14.280
What if it's a dystonia, like on my muscle in my hand, but it's for my voice?
00:16:19.800
So I Googled the term voice dystonia, boom, changed my life because, uh, a video came up
00:16:27.060
and with a audio of somebody with the exact problem and that gave me the name of it.
00:16:31.880
And then I put that into Google and whenever anything with that name came up, like a new
00:16:36.840
treatment or, or something like that, I would, I would check that out.
00:16:40.120
And one of them was a, a surgeon in Southern California who would come up with a experimental
00:16:47.480
And I tracked him down, went to Southern California.
00:16:53.200
It's probably a 15% chance that it will be, make it worse and not only make it worse, but
00:17:00.200
Meaning that if ever there's a cure, it might not work for you because this might ruin it
00:17:05.260
This is kind of like, uh, it was, it's almost like a cochlear implant where you were actually
00:17:14.240
And then taking nerves from another part of your body.
00:17:18.700
So they open, they open up the front of the neck, uh, this little, uh, scar here, but they
00:17:25.460
It's just a surfacy, uh, nerves because apparently these are the nerves that connect your brain to
00:17:30.660
your vocal cords that goes to the front of the neck.
00:17:40.180
And then eight weeks later, when the nerves regrow, you either can talk or you can't.
00:17:45.860
And I said to the doctor, you know, what, when is my follow-up visit?
00:17:55.000
He says, it's either going to work or it won't work.
00:17:59.720
And, uh, eight weeks later I talked and it took, it took a few more years to be able
00:18:06.280
to gain my fluency back because once you can talk, you still can't talk fluently because
00:18:14.340
So I hadn't, I hadn't formed sentences like I'm doing now for years.
00:18:25.180
I've had it a couple of times and that scared the hell out of me because of what I do.
00:18:30.720
And at one point it lasted a month and a lot of things go through your mind when you can't
00:18:36.260
speak just for a month, three years of not being able to speak.
00:18:44.360
Well, uh, the first thing that happened was I started a blog and I found that the blog
00:18:50.800
became my way to talk because the main thing you learn is that listening to other people
00:18:59.900
Speaking and knowing that they hear you connects you to the world and nothing else does.
00:19:04.380
And so the inability to do that, of course, had impact on my marriage, you know, my first
00:19:09.360
marriage, uh, and, um, I just became like a ghost.
00:19:17.240
But the thing I did learn is that things that look incurable are not necessarily.
00:19:26.100
So I didn't plan on going here, but you bring up an interesting point.
00:19:29.240
You say, if you can't be heard, you're not really connected.
00:19:35.360
I think there is a, a large number of people in America today.
00:19:40.440
And I think even in the world, look at Brexit where they just feel like a ghost.
00:19:45.540
They feel like no one is actually listening to them.
00:19:53.200
And it's probably maybe a feels worse because we have so much, uh, in terms of communication
00:19:58.280
tools, you have every tool in the world to communicate, but nobody will listen to you.
00:20:02.980
And nobody will listen to you and they, they call you all kinds of names and you're not.
00:20:09.080
And you, you're like, wait a minute, I, I'm not a racist because I'm white.
00:20:16.040
Well, we're, we're, we're in this weird world now that, uh, I, I first called out in 2016
00:20:25.520
when, when Trump was, uh, running and I said, he's going to change more than politics.
00:20:31.200
He's going to change how we review the world itself in reality itself, uh, more about reality
00:20:39.340
And, uh, and sure enough at this point, it's a common to hear people talk about, uh, two
00:20:45.720
movies on one screen, something I came up with then, or the idea that we're, we're existing
00:20:52.200
in a subjective world or a bubble and two people sitting in the same room can't see or hear
00:20:58.060
each other anymore and you see it all the time.
00:21:00.660
So the example I'll give is the, the arguments used to be, well, maybe somebody doesn't understand
00:21:07.460
or they don't have the knowledge or maybe they have different priorities, but now you
00:21:12.240
can say the sky is blue and somebody will say to you, tell me, you know, what color the
00:21:18.640
And you'll say, I just said the sky is blue and they won't even be able to hear it.
00:21:23.220
It's almost like you're not even in the same room with the same conversation and that's
00:21:27.280
new that, that, that wasn't like five years ago.
00:21:33.240
The, the fact that we would just completely ignore objective reality because it wasn't
00:21:39.360
So is that a product of Trump or is that revealed by Trump?
00:21:49.120
I'm going to say that he was probably an accelerant because the thing that, um, really, that's really
00:21:56.640
different about Trump is that he doesn't have any adherence to objective fact unless it helps
00:22:04.280
So he would, so he would use a hyperbole a hundred percent of the time, stretch a fact,
00:22:10.620
you know, do a little BS, a little salesmanship, a little bit of selling.
00:22:14.780
And it's so relentless and, and so completely, you know, it's just completely what he does.
00:22:21.380
It's not something he slips into, you know, it's not something.
00:22:26.800
It's not every now and then he says something that's not exactly true.
00:22:29.920
It's nothing like that because as, as long as you're looking at people who sometimes told
00:22:36.300
an untruth, you'd say to yourself, well, he's going to, you're going to pay for that.
00:22:39.500
You know, that, that probably you wish you could take it back, but when you see somebody
00:22:43.520
become president of the United States using a technique that your conscious mind says
00:22:49.080
that can't work, what, what you're doing of always exaggerating, always bending, just
00:23:10.640
I called him early based on his persuasion tools for your audience who may not know.
00:23:19.060
So I saw the tools of persuasion in his toolkit and I thought, oh God, he's, he's not just
00:23:26.140
He's, he's just going to rip the fabric of reality right in half because the thing he knows
00:23:34.600
But the thing he knows is that following the exact facts just doesn't make that much difference.
00:23:43.140
Is that a new thing for us or has it always been that way?
00:23:47.400
I think it's only the degree that the fact that you can just completely dispense with any pretense
00:23:54.940
of trying to be technically accurate and it won't matter.
00:24:01.940
Are there, they have to be certain, for instance, when you explain it that way, that's terrifying.
00:24:09.680
And, and thoughts of that's what Adolf Hitler had.
00:24:13.900
He had this ability just to say, no, the Jews are going to a nice little happy town we built
00:24:19.820
And people just agreed and just went, uh-huh, uh-huh.
00:24:25.820
So is that condition always there and people just, it's just a few people can do it and
00:24:32.100
take advantage or does there have to be a condition in society that allows that person to get away
00:24:39.860
I'm pretty sure it would work anywhere, meaning that it probably is not something new about
00:24:47.140
What's new is the personality that would be willing to do it because there's a brazenness
00:24:57.280
You know, even if you said, all right, I see what he's doing there.
00:25:02.340
I don't know that you could pull it off because he's fully committed to his version of reality.
00:25:09.820
So this is kind of like, uh, who is the, the woman, um, in Silicon Valley that was saying
00:25:16.100
she could test blood with a little machine and CVS and she convinced, yeah, is that the
00:25:23.360
Um, I, I saw the, the documentary about her and, um, she may have had some of those talents.
00:25:31.420
It's hard to say because I think she was a sort of a tall, you know, forceful kind of
00:25:40.740
So you said he was a master wizard in hypnosis and persuasion.
00:25:46.880
You just said that, um, he had unusual persuasion skills.
00:25:53.520
What are those besides just being able just to see reality the way he sees it?
00:26:00.900
Well, he uses a number of very classic persuasion techniques.
00:26:08.980
So if you were going to try to sell the public on, let's say better border security, a bad
00:26:14.460
way to do it is the way it's always been done before.
00:26:17.060
Well, we've got these numbers of people, this amount of crime.
00:26:22.100
We'll use a variety of mechanisms to secure the border in different places.
00:26:31.380
And then you see it because, you know, as I said, things don't work.
00:26:37.580
So he forced us all to imagine the wall, which makes it easier to get it done.
00:26:42.660
You know, you, you sort of wore the public down with various pushing on every door to
00:26:51.500
Take, for example, when he was, uh, he was, uh, running for president the first time and,
00:26:56.780
uh, Saturday night live invited him on as, as I also invited Hillary Clinton.
00:27:01.720
And here's the difference between a good and a bad persuader.
00:27:05.340
Uh, the, of course, the candidate gets to approve the skit they're in.
00:27:12.300
They're not going to be in a skit they don't approve.
00:27:14.540
So Trump approved a skit in which he was shown as the president of the United States in the
00:27:21.500
Now, I don't remember a single thing about the skit itself or the jokes.
00:27:28.080
But I remember seeing him in the Oval Office and I remember saying, that is so smart because
00:27:33.880
the problem people had at that point was they literally couldn't imagine him as president.
00:27:50.860
Then Hillary Clinton does a skit on Saturday Night Live.
00:27:58.300
And she approved one in which she was at a bar drinking.
00:28:02.500
And, you know, and I forget if she was the bartender or the drunk, but she was in a bar,
00:28:09.520
The least presidential thing you could do, not really a great look.
00:28:14.040
So you see that Trump will always wear his suit.
00:28:17.780
Every opportunity except maybe golfing, that's about it.
00:28:22.520
You see him use his airplane even before it was Air Force One.
00:28:26.240
He would use his own airplane as a stand in for Air Force One because then you could see
00:28:36.300
He just keeps everything dead simple, which is super important.
00:28:47.640
So fear is, of course, fear is that there's no better motivator than fear, because if you
00:28:55.500
don't take care of your fear, you know, you can't take care of anything else.
00:28:58.480
You know, you're you're going to run for your life.
00:29:00.760
So, you know, it's not a it's not an accident that every election you see the fear ramp up.
00:29:06.600
So what he did was he ramped up the fear of, you know, illegal immigration and whatever else was
00:29:18.700
Do you think he knows all of those things or just comes instinctively to him?
00:29:24.140
I don't know in terms of training, but it's definitely something he knows he's doing.
00:29:31.980
And a little known fact, his his pastor or minister, I forget which word is correct, when
00:29:41.180
So Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, which was a mega hit when I was young.
00:29:48.360
And that was all about using the power of optimism to essentially shape reality.
00:29:54.240
In other words, just just causing reality to be what you wanted it to be through sheer
00:30:02.580
And that is the president's feature, but also sometimes his bug.
00:30:07.940
So it's his feature when he's talking up the economy, which he does better than maybe any
00:30:14.980
But when you have a pandemic, you don't really want the positivity guy all the time.
00:30:22.380
You know, I often say there's no such thing as a good or a bad president.
00:30:27.440
There's only a president that is either matched to the challenges of the time or not.
00:30:32.700
He was perfectly matched for accelerating the economy, perfectly matched for negotiating with
00:30:37.980
China, not matched for the pandemic that that required a little bit of a different
00:30:47.060
But I think we'll get through when you think of your future.
00:30:52.760
Where you want to be substitute dreams for goals.
00:30:56.960
And suddenly planning your future is bigger because no one ever has small dreams.
00:31:01.560
They might have small goals, but take those dreams and turn them into goals.
00:31:05.920
And all of a sudden, your future is bigger and it will be even bigger with a degree from
00:31:12.560
Ashford University's online bachelor's and master's degree program allow you to learn on
00:31:19.160
At Ashford, expert faculty teachers will teach you real world skills from real world experience
00:31:26.800
in online classes built for your life's twists and turns.
00:31:30.980
You can learn from home or wherever you feel the most comfortable.
00:31:33.400
You can pursue a degree in one of Ashford's 60 plus programs like business education, health
00:31:38.960
care administration and psychology with 24 seven access to your classroom, daily support,
00:31:46.280
Ashford will give you all the tools you need to go from dreaming to doing.
00:31:51.040
Go from dreaming to doing your bigger future starts today at Ashford University.
00:31:55.580
No fee to apply, standardized testing, none of that required to enroll.
00:32:12.400
How because it's an interesting thing for me, because I hear Biden say, you know, how bad
00:32:17.040
it would be, you know, if he was to continue because of covid, et cetera, et cetera.
00:32:27.720
I mean, I remember when he said no travel from Europe.
00:32:42.100
So about about a week before he did that, I was screaming on literally yelling and cursing
00:32:48.920
on my periscope that he needs to close the close travel from China.
00:32:58.700
So I want Scott, I want you to know I was, too.
00:33:04.640
We don't know how bad, but it's going to be worse for the economy.
00:33:11.940
But I think like you, when he did it, no, no, he does that.
00:33:18.600
That was the typical out of out of the norm kind of.
00:33:28.040
Was he the first leader to close a whole country?
00:33:33.820
And I don't even in my mind, I didn't imagine it was really a thing.
00:33:40.200
I wanted it, but I didn't quite think it was a thing until he did it.
00:33:50.140
Because I happen to agree that the president can't be doom and gloom.
00:33:57.060
But but he he did take the steps that everyone was telling him to take, except taking control of companies and taking control of states.
00:34:13.820
When I when I asked my Democrat friends to tell me, well, what exactly did he do wrong?
00:34:19.160
Because you're all saying words like he botched it and it's obvious he made mistakes.
00:34:23.380
And I keep saying, OK, but can you explain what was it that the experts were saying that he didn't do at the same time the experts said to do it?
00:34:33.540
And you end up with examples such as, well, he could have worn his own mask more.
00:34:38.780
And I say, are are there really people who don't understand that the president is a special case and we want him to be that, you know, everybody's tested before they go in the White House and that, you know, he's the leader, etc.
00:34:52.280
And then they'll say, well, but he did, you know, he did his rallies and, you know, people went there without masks.
00:34:58.140
Now, that I would say that's a good point, but I don't think the rallies are what killed 200,000 people.
00:35:04.560
I mean, I would certainly agree that there may have been more damage from those than if you had not done them.
00:35:11.040
But that hasn't that's not anything to do with the 200,000 people dying.
00:35:15.280
So you have you've written some and said some amazing things, but you when you when you first in 2015, I think the first time you you blogged about Donald Trump and you said pretty much what you just said to me.
00:35:36.940
And that doesn't necessarily sound like a compliment that he's a master wizard, but you got so much blowback from even just talking nicely.
00:35:54.300
I mean, you didn't you weren't you didn't come out and say, I'm a Trumpster.
00:36:01.840
Yeah, I was just talking about his tools because I thought people needed to know he was bringing a whole different tool set.
00:36:08.860
You know, the popular thing at the time was he's just a reality TV guy and, you know, he was a business person.
00:36:17.920
And I was sitting there thinking, I think those are exactly the right tools.
00:36:23.720
If you were going to if you were going to design a president from scratch and you could make him any way you'd want, you'd get rid of his political experience because that's probably just baggage and people he owes favors to.
00:36:35.980
You'd make him an international business person and you'd give him all the skills of a TV star and a salesperson.
00:36:50.360
You you say where I live in California, it's not safe to be seen as supportive of anything Trump says or does.
00:37:06.520
Yeah, I said out loud that I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my safety and I would always add for my safety.
00:37:13.980
So that it was it was clear I was doing it for effect and it actually calmed people down.
00:37:23.500
You know, as long as you're on our side, that's all.
00:37:32.040
Well, I think people are just team players and they don't see much else.
00:37:35.660
I mean, you can't see the flaws in your your your candidate.
00:37:45.140
But yeah, probably probably 80 percent of the world is having problems with that.
00:37:50.040
You know, maybe 20 percent of the world can even voice a flaw with their own candidate.
00:38:02.060
I mean, I was amazed that, you know, I've been in those rooms and it's groupthink.
00:38:13.940
But and I never thought that they were curious.
00:38:16.840
There's no intellectual curiosity in those rooms at all.
00:38:23.140
But now objective truth, something that you can say document doesn't matter at all.
00:38:32.560
What happened to them and more importantly, what's happening to us?
00:38:38.680
Are we going to slide into a world where we accept that or else?
00:38:46.620
Well, it looks like, you know, artificial intelligence may be a lot of the background explanation for what we're seeing.
00:38:56.560
And what I mean is the the algorithms that determine who sees what on social media, those are driven by computer programs.
00:39:04.260
And those programs are, of course, biased toward what gets the most clicks.
00:39:08.320
So they're obviously going to surface the things that, you know, make our emotions the wildest.
00:39:14.720
Now, as long as that business model exists and I don't see it changing, we will become more siloed in what we we hear and see.
00:39:22.960
So when I talk to my Democrat friends about politics, almost universally, they do not know the same things I know.
00:39:31.540
And usually I know everything that they've heard, but they haven't heard what I have also heard, you know, because they I found that myself.
00:39:42.520
And so they they often think that they're disagreeing on facts and reason or priorities or something.
00:39:49.940
I simply have a whole different set of data that's real.
00:39:53.540
You know, it's not even that they disagree with my facts.
00:40:01.160
I think I think before disagreements were still were mostly based on the same set of facts, but not anymore.
00:40:07.480
So I learned that from a friend of mine, Riaz Patel.
00:40:18.360
He decided to find out who these Trump people are.
00:40:25.360
I mean, he's on on every, you know, unpopular list, I guess, if you had a GOP list of people we're supposed to hate.
00:40:33.840
And he went and he said, I went to Alaska because I figured they're the people with the guns that are kill me, you know, and bury me in the snow.
00:40:50.120
He came down here and we talked and I brought a chalkboard out and I said, I want to ask you if you just know these stories.
00:40:58.720
And I went through some of the biggest stories that the Tea Party had brought up, you know, the IRS being used and all of these things.
00:41:25.320
Yeah, yeah, I've had that experience over and over and over in the past year of, you know, are you serious?
00:41:34.800
You've never you've never even heard that this happened.
00:41:40.020
We take you to something else that you have written that I'd like for you to explain to me.
00:41:55.320
You were talking about how if Joe Biden is elected and I hate to paraphrase this because it was so specific that you might be dead.
00:42:10.460
Well, you know, there are lots of ways I could go.
00:42:13.260
But the the the the the dangerous part is that if you're a Trump supporter, there are a lot of Democrats who are saying out loud, meaning on social media, that there's going to be a reckoning.
00:42:25.480
And they use they use very threatening language like we're going to hunt you down, we're going to we're going to find you, you know, don't don't believe that you can get away with being a Trump supporter.
00:42:37.620
Well, I don't don't don't think that you can just, you know, be be somehow free from the ramifications of that.
00:42:44.820
And, you know, you look at what's happening in the cities, especially with the protests.
00:42:52.420
And it it starts to look like open season on Trump supporters now that the problem I have is that, again, because the silos of the news, there's just a whole bunch of people who think it's OK to talk like that.
00:43:06.620
And it's the talking like that that makes it real.
00:43:09.060
You know, if enough people talk like that, it guarantees somebody is going to make it real.
00:43:14.880
So the language is the is the part that foreshadows that.
00:43:19.540
Now, I also tweeted today that if Biden gets elected and let's say he packs the court and let's say the Senate turns a Democrat, we will effectively have created a Chinese form of government.
00:43:34.020
It will be a one party situation who who ends up in charge of that one party will be more about the inner workings of the party and not much about the election at all.
00:43:45.620
And once they own the court, they can game the system and guarantee that the court will support them.
00:43:51.660
And they can just make sure that they have structural reasons that nobody else could ever get elected.
00:43:56.240
Well, if you see the World Economic Forum and what they call the Great Reset, that's what they're trying to form the whole world into the Chinese model.
00:44:05.080
We've heard that from both Republicans and Democrats for a long time, that that's really kind of the model of the future.
00:44:13.560
But there was a FBI chief of intel that just came out today's former.
00:44:23.560
The system failed that allowed somebody like Donald Trump to get into office.
00:44:28.660
There has to be some sort of bipartisan committee that vets these people.
00:44:47.200
That's closer to the worst case scenario than it is closer to America.
00:44:54.660
Well, depends who wins the election, doesn't it?
00:44:57.380
I still think Trump is more likely to win the election than Biden.
00:45:02.500
And I think the Senate has a good chance of staying Republican.
00:45:30.860
When you when you look at this every day, it can really grind on you.
00:45:38.380
I've started taking social media vacations during the day.
00:45:42.480
You know, like after after eight o'clock, try not to look at Twitter and first hour that I get up, you know, don't look at anything.
00:45:49.880
And when I talk to people who are not watching the news, they're happier.
00:45:56.860
You have talked a lot, especially recently, about the fine people hoax.
00:46:06.040
Well, as the news reported, President Trump said that there were fine people on both sides at the Charlottesville Unite the Right protest.
00:46:17.240
Now, that, of course, was reported to mean that he was referring to the the the neo-Nazis as fine people.
00:46:25.740
But, of course, they only create that hoax by lopping off the last part of his statement in which, without any prompting, nobody nobody asked a follow up question.
00:46:35.720
He was just continuing to talk and he wanted to clarify.
00:46:39.360
And he said, I'm not talking about the white nationalists and the neo-Nazis.
00:46:44.920
So this entire hoax that he called the neo-Nazis fine people is entirely created by editing out the second part of his statement.
00:46:55.980
Amazingly, when I show people the statement and say, oh, you know, here's here's the whole thing.
00:47:01.260
You can see very clearly that he was clear as possible without prompting that he did not mean those people to be the fine people.
00:47:09.100
And they will look at it and they'll say, well, what were they do?
00:47:12.420
What were they doing marching with the neo-Nazis?
00:47:17.000
In fact, I interviewed people who attended because I wondered the same thing.
00:47:20.760
So I asked for people who had attended to contact me and a number of locals who had just been they lived in town.
00:47:29.300
And I said, well, why'd you go if you knew it was this neo-Nazi thing?
00:47:35.700
We just heard there was a thing about a statue.
00:47:40.980
Other people said, yeah, we knew they were going to be there, but that doesn't affect us.
00:47:57.080
So so indeed, there were just regular people who disavowed the racists who also supported the statues.
00:48:14.460
Chris Wallace at the debate did not ask Joe Biden to disavow Antifa and the violence.
00:48:21.660
But he did ask Donald Trump to disavow the Klan.
00:48:25.680
And and just a few days after he had signed an executive order saying that the Klan and Antifa are terrorist organizations.
00:48:37.440
Well, is that is that a sign that Chris Wallace just hasn't checked the news or is part of the problem?
00:48:48.820
Well, I think two things can be true at the same time here.
00:48:52.920
One is that it's obvious that the president has disavowed all the racism by all the different names.
00:48:59.320
Lots of times you can see the compilation clip on the Internet all the time, except Democrats never see it.
00:49:05.420
You know, every Republican has seen multiple compilation clips of President Trump saying, I disavow the KKK.
00:49:16.060
But it is also true that the way he answers the question is just just beg.
00:49:22.260
It just begs the extra question so much so that, you know, I said after the debate, he lost my vote.
00:49:28.980
I'm personally not going to vote for the president if he can't answer that question.
00:49:33.460
It bothered me because I had invested so much defending that fine people hoax.
00:49:39.780
And then when that came up, I said I actually got off the couch during the debate and I said I walked toward the TV and I'm like, here it is.
00:49:55.020
And he then he handled it the way he did handle it, which was so far less than why I could not believe that how he handled that.
00:50:06.340
The answer is, of course, I disavow the Klan and white supremacy.
00:50:11.780
I just signed an executive order saying they're a terrorist group along with Antifa.
00:50:22.380
You hung out with Klan wizards early in your career and you're with Antifa now.
00:50:38.620
Because she she basically ran into the same situation and she did the same.
00:50:43.120
Well, he's he's said it in the past or he said, sure.
00:50:47.720
And I'm thinking, no, those are not the right answer.
00:50:50.320
The public is looking for a very specific answer.
00:51:04.700
Now, you can only speculate what's going through his head or what this is all about.
00:51:11.320
Number one, the president hates being told what to do.
00:51:16.180
In other words, if you say to me, hey, Scott, will you say this thing?
00:51:21.000
I might say yes, but the president doesn't like to be told what to do.
00:51:25.200
So he will resist being pushed, basically, or being bullied into doing something.
00:51:31.280
And so some of it, I think, is just a resistance to being bullied.
00:51:34.520
If you've said it and you said it the way you want to say it, can't that be enough?
00:51:39.020
If the way I said it is also clear, why do I have to say it your way?
00:51:46.000
The other problem is, and you would probably be keen to this as well, the people who have
00:51:51.720
media training are trying to think a step ahead.
00:51:55.200
If he had said the easy one, do you condemn white supremacists?
00:52:06.860
Do you condemn Kyle Rittenhouse, who isn't even any of those things, but he's been accused
00:52:16.660
At what point does he get off of the apologizing, clarifying, condemning train?
00:52:32.000
Once when, back in the Jake, when, you know, on CNN, when he was asked about, Jake Tapper,
00:52:41.620
about the KKK, and he hesitated and said, you know, who are we talking about?
00:52:53.820
I think he was anticipating what comes after that and wanting not to get himself in a trap.
00:52:59.460
I will tell you, I met with President Bush in the Oval Office, and I was not a fan of
00:53:03.960
President Bush at the end, because he was just so wishy-washy, and the war was going
00:53:11.880
And I said to him, I was in his office for an hour, and he spent a lot of that time yelling
00:53:17.840
at me, telling me, and this is a quote, you don't effing know what it's like to be
00:53:27.240
And he said to me at one point, I said, at the end, because he was so clear, he had all
00:53:37.900
And I said, no offense, Mr. President, but where is this guy?
00:53:48.640
And he said, very calmly, you don't understand how every word is parsed, is analyzed, not
00:53:57.380
just by the media, but by our allies and our enemies all over the world.
00:54:02.220
I shift my eyes, and I'm told, don't do that, don't on, not on that word.
00:54:07.640
That stuck with me, because I at one point said, quote, I think President Obama is a racist.
00:54:20.200
He just seems to have this hatred for the white culture.
00:54:25.060
I couldn't, I didn't know it was called critical theory.
00:54:39.980
And I had been asked about that for eight years.
00:54:45.060
And I was always very careful on how to answer it.
00:54:54.440
And you just couldn't answer, because anything you say, they'd exploit.
00:55:03.820
Yeah, because you can see him stopping and thinking.
00:55:06.560
And there's no standard politician answer for it, because obviously he knew what the right
00:55:17.060
There was nobody who thought to themselves, you know, maybe I'll go pro-KKK, and I think
00:55:26.240
And, you know, if you're willing to accept that he's willing to say what he needs to
00:55:38.220
So you said something interesting, because people see that and they're like, he's a secret
00:55:41.740
racist, and he's going to kill all black people in his second term.
00:55:55.140
That's one thing you can pretty much depend on.
00:55:58.360
It's one of the advantages of Trump, is you know exactly what you're getting, especially
00:56:03.760
You know, I've argued that Biden, you don't really know what you're getting, because you're
00:56:07.720
getting some combination of, you know, the progressives and whoever's backing him and
00:56:15.080
But with Trump, at least you know exactly what it's going to look like.
00:56:17.880
The details may vary, but you can depend on him being the same guy.
00:56:22.300
So, what do you think of, I mean, Joe Biden would be the oldest president, and I don't
00:56:38.880
I don't have a problem with people who are elderly at all, as long as you're there.
00:56:43.960
Just the difference between Joe Biden in the primary debates and this debate, I honestly
00:56:55.320
I think he's being used, and it's horrible what's happening.
00:56:59.260
But I honestly tried to think, what is he going to be like a year from now or four years
00:57:08.400
And no one seems to be concerned about that, on the left.
00:57:14.280
I cannot figure out if they're not concerned or they're just putting it out of their mind.
00:57:20.520
You know, I guess that would be the same as not concerned.
00:57:22.740
Or are they pretending they're not concerned because they figure there's a power behind
00:57:27.680
Which would be even more frightening, wouldn't it?
00:57:32.900
It's not even that, you know, Kamala Harris would be the end of the world.
00:57:45.740
Let's talk about, stay with the debate here for a second.
00:57:58.660
And the one case that he made was that because he didn't, we're now just finding out about
00:58:06.340
We have to have some central committee vet all of these people.
00:58:09.220
And I thought, what exactly did you find in those taxes?
00:58:18.580
I mean, you know, there, there was nothing surprising in there.
00:58:25.780
I, I was actually surprised at the lack of surprise, but it did, but it, but it did confirm
00:58:33.560
the wisdom of not releasing them, at least if he could have prevented it in any way, because
00:58:39.020
what happened was it's complicated and the country doesn't understand taxes.
00:58:43.220
So what we learned is that, um, 99 out of a hundred Americans don't know anything about
00:58:49.500
They don't know how, you know, any, any deductions work.
00:58:54.200
They certainly don't know how real estate works.
00:58:58.820
I mean, this is, you know, when you have that much of a rich target environment, I just
00:59:04.560
thought, oh my God, his, his critics will just pick pieces out of there, take it out of
00:59:09.100
context, which is the, the entirety of political discourse is taking something out of context
00:59:16.740
And I thought they'll just pick him to death with all that stuff.
00:59:20.480
So, but I don't, I think the best answer, I can't believe he said it, but he said it
00:59:34.300
You don't like the laws, then he should have changed them.
00:59:37.160
I'm just using the law and if I don't have to pay taxes, I'm not.
00:59:41.600
That is, I think there's a lot of people that may not understand the tax code, but they're
00:59:51.240
The best answer that I heard for me, you know, just for my mind was he paid exactly the
01:00:00.680
And there's no law that says you should, they don't even want you to pay more than you
01:00:05.920
The tax, the tax code doesn't have a part in it and says, you know, it'd be nice.
01:00:22.520
What you look into your crystal ball as a, as a guy who, I mean, I think we're all under
01:00:30.780
I think we're all sleepwalking right now, everybody, some form or another.
01:00:36.660
Do you see us waking up in time to save the Republic?
01:00:39.780
I think the Republic is stronger than we give it credit for.
01:00:46.480
I think that we might have a distorted feeling of how many Marxist and protesters and BLM people
01:00:53.940
Well, there are plenty of people who support the BLM idea, but they're not necessarily
01:00:58.960
Wait, wait, wait, you mean there's a difference between, there is a difference to you between
01:01:08.800
There's clearly a difference between what the organizers want and what the people with
01:01:14.660
So, um, I just don't think there are that many of them.
01:01:18.600
And weirdly, we don't get a lot of reporting on that.
01:01:21.340
Even, even the protests, they don't report the numbers.
01:01:25.660
Maybe in the early days they did, but we have a protest, you know, every night in some city,
01:01:30.060
but I never hear, is it a hundred people or is it a thousand?
01:01:35.740
I was, I was interested to see yesterday, uh, they covered Biden's speeches, uh, you know,
01:01:55.760
Well, I, I, I don't mind that under the COVID situation because, you know, you'd expect it
01:02:04.120
And you'd expect, expect maybe they don't want to highlight that.
01:02:09.400
You know, at the moment, the crowd size is for, at least for him, it's not related to
01:02:15.300
So do you think that there is a myth of the invisible Trump voter, or do you think that's
01:02:26.880
Uh, so I ran a very unscientific Twitter poll, uh, yesterday, which I said, uh, how many of
01:02:33.820
you have actually lied to pollsters about Trump support?
01:02:37.200
So not people who might, not people who think they would, not people who have, you know,
01:02:42.520
in prior elections, how many have lied about Trump support already?
01:02:47.720
Hundreds of people, uh, answered within, within 60 seconds.
01:02:51.120
I don't know what the final result was, but that's just people who follow me on Twitter
01:02:56.280
hundreds in a minute, probably, probably thousands by the time I, I check it again.
01:03:04.720
And I don't think that they existed, um, in the same quantity in 2016.
01:03:10.180
I think what the, the perceived risk of supporting the president is now just far greater.
01:03:16.460
And I think also people have it in their heads that lying to pollsters is kind of fun and
01:03:22.280
You know, when, when you talk to conservatives, when they talk about lying to pollsters, it
01:03:29.840
And, and I feel to some extent, like I might've been part of the, the, at least, at least part
01:03:36.020
of the prank, uh, Genesis without trying to be, uh, just by putting in people's heads,
01:03:43.340
And I can tell you, I got, I got a call from a pollster not too long ago.
01:03:47.740
And as soon as I realized what it was about, I planned to tell them I was, I was going to
01:03:56.340
And, uh, it turns out I, I wasn't yet registered.
01:04:01.120
I've, I've since registered, so I couldn't answer the poll, but, um, I would have, I would
01:04:08.220
I have, I've gotten those poll calls and I have told him I voted for the other side.
01:04:17.760
Was that a hothead kind of remark on, uh, after the debate or are you still there?
01:04:22.880
The president has to answer this question or you're not going to vote for him?
01:04:28.340
Well, the same reason that I said I would endorse Hillary Clinton for my safety, I'm not
01:04:34.380
going to vote for Trump under the current conditions for my safety because sooner or later, somebody's
01:04:39.760
going to say, you know, it was a proven fact that he loves white supremacists.
01:04:44.480
And then I'm just going to look at him and say, I didn't vote for him.
01:04:52.100
Uh, Scott, thank you for being on, uh, the podcast.
01:05:02.100
Is there, is there anything that you're striving for that you think?
01:05:06.660
What's the next thing that you're like, I'll open it when that happens.
01:05:10.600
I'll tell you what, if president Trump actually wins a Nobel peace prize.
01:05:18.120
He's been nominated four times now this for this prize, four different people or groups
01:05:25.060
have nominated him for a peace prize because of the Middle East, which is legitimate.
01:05:30.100
There's not a chance you will never taste champagne ever.
01:05:49.560
Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend