Ep 84 | You Don't Become Hitler at 70 | Scott Adams | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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If you have ever worked in an office setting, no matter what your role is, you can relate to my guest today.

In fact, he probably has made you laugh more than once in the absurdity of the personalities and situations you encounter at work.

Until late 2015, he was best known for the wildly successful cartoon that he pens every day, and also a best-selling author.

But a certain larger-than-life presidential candidate changed all of that, and it has changed his life.

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.

He said Trump was a master of persuasion.

But his explanation seemed too complimentary of Trump.

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.

His explanation of Trump's political rise translated into his public support for the president.

Still, he doesn't call himself a conservative, nor a Democrat.

He's one of the leading voices of what is becoming an endangered American species.

People who dare call themselves

a person who thinks for themselves.

He's still a cartoonist, still a best-selling author, but now is added blogger, podcaster, and political commentator on his day job.

He is the creator of the worldwide comic strip phenomenon, Dilbert.

Today's podcast, Scott Adams.

Scott, this is frustrating for me because I have so many things.

You are so fascinating on what you're doing and saying right now,

but I want to go back to the beginning to get to know you more because your whole life has been like this.

You win your first award for cartooning at 11.

Did you know then that's what you wanted to do?

Well, at age 11, I won a contest on the back of a cereal box.

And I also had applied at about the same age to the famous Artist School for Young People, a male correspondence course.

And I was rejected.

They rejected me.

Really?

Because, yeah, as they explained it, you have to be at least 12 years old to be a famous artist.

That's funny.

And I was 11.

So

that was my first failure.

When did you, did you always draw and doodle?

And was that always in you?

Yeah, you know, you always hear stories about, let's say, musicians whose parents were both musical.

It seems there's some kind of a second generation effect.

So my mother was an artist, and she would do portrait type of art.

And my father always wrote funny letters.

So you'd write funny letters to us in college and stuff.

And so you put those two talents together, and you got a cartoonist.

It's not an accident.

But you go to school

and you become,

what was it?

You have a degree in economics.

Right.

And then

later, I got an MBA at Berkeley.

Right.

And I worked at a big bank at first, a number of different jobs.

And then I went to the local phone company for another six and a half years.

Yeah, you said that you were literally a fake engineer and in technology lab.

Yeah.

Yeah, the actual story is it was a period where the department was not allowed to hire from the outside, but they needed some engineers.

So they said, well, can you connect these cables together?

Yeah, I guess.

Would you know how to load software on a computer, maybe?

And I was like, I could do that.

And if maybe somebody can show me the other stuff, I can bluff my way through.

So they actually gave me a business card that said engineers, so they'd have an engineer.

So

did you spend most of your time?

Because that was all in San Francisco, right?

The Bay Area, yes.

Yeah.

So you're in the Bay Area.

You were in the Bay Area in the 70s.

And

are you still in that area?

Yeah, I got here in 79 and have been in the Bay Area ever since.

Although I have to say, if ever there was a time to think about moving, it would be now.

It is one of the most beautiful place.

I grew up in Seattle, and

I absolutely love that climate.

I love the ocean.

I just love all of it.

It's beautiful, beautiful.

But it is, it's a little insane.

When you were working at Pacific Bell,

you said you set your alarm clock at 4 o'clock in the morning

every morning.

And

this is

so fantastic.

Explain what you did at 4 a.m.

So at 4 a.m., I would get my coffee and I would sit down and I would try to create

a new job, a new career.

And I tried a few different things, but the thing that worked out, of course, was cartooning.

So at 4 a.m., I would sit there with my piece of paper and my pencil and pen and make at first sample cartoons.

And then when I had enough of them, I submitted them to a cartoon syndication company, a number of them.

Most of them rejected me, but one of them said, how would you like a contract?

And that's how it all started.

So how many cartoons did you, how many different characters before you hit Dilbert?

Oddly enough, it was the first try.

Really?

That's the weird part about it, yeah.

Dilbert had been created as a character I used in my day job, and I would do little comics on my whiteboard in my cubicle.

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, and pretty soon they started to get spread around the company.

So I'd give phone calls from people who were in another part of the state saying, oh, I just saw your comic.

And I'd say, how?

Oh, they've been faxing around.

around they're they're going all over the company

so people encouraged me to do something with it professionally and and so that's what i did

so how much did your life change at that point

well it it i never had what i'd call the champagne moment yeah you know the moment where you say yes i've made it it was all these little things that were that were important,

but they didn't quite change my life until you look back years later and you say, Wow, it's really changed a lot.

Right.

But any given, any given day, it would be like this: We'd like to give you a contract to become a syndicated cartoonist.

I'm like, Whoa, whoa, I've made it.

They say, Hold on, hold on.

That doesn't mean we'll put you in newspapers.

That means that we'll work with you.

It's more of a development thing.

You still have to decide.

So then you work with them and they say, All right, we're going to put these in newspapers now.

And I'm like, Yes, I've made it.

And they said, It'll probably be in maybe 10 or 12.

I'm like, Oh, oh,

but you,

but this, I understand that early on, but in 2007,

in a blog post, you said, I still haven't popped the champagne.

I raised the bar for what would be the right moment, tell myself how tasty it would be if I ever accomplished something special in my work.

But in the late 1990s, I believe, weren't you

honored

in the cartoonist Hall of Fame?

Or

what was it?

It's called the Rubin Award.

The Rubin Award.

It's essentially the Oscars for cartoonists.

Once a year, they have a big event.

Not a champagne moment for you?

Here's what happened.

Dilber became immensely successful financially.

And once it became big financially, I won an award.

And as soon as I realized, wait a minute, it's because I'm popular that they want the event itself to

gather people.

And

I was now a name.

And it had nothing to do with the quality of my work because it was identical to last year and the year before.

And the moment I won it, it meant nothing to me.

It meant nothing.

I craved it.

I wanted it.

I thought, oh, it's the greatest honor a cartoonist can ever have.

And the minute I won it, didn't mean a thing.

Yeah.

I can relate.

It's strange how you get a perspective

once you get to a place to where you can earn something like that.

It somehow or another cheapens it.

You're kind of like, okay, I got it.

I got it.

I remember talking to a guy who was involved with the Pulitzer Prize.

I think his wife was one of the judges.

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?

Oh, I like this one.

How about this one?

It's not like they looked at all the books.

It's only the books that got submitted.

They had the right social message or whatever.

Some people liked it.

That's it.

That's the pool of surprise.

Just some people liked your book.

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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.

I mean, it's important you put the work in, but you did something else at four o'clock in the morning.

Oh, you're going to have to prompt me.

Tell me what you're looking for.

You

wrote down in the and said in the mirror, or you wrote down every day,

I am Scott Adams and I will become a famous cartoonist.

Yes.

So I wasn't doing that just at four in the morning.

That was more of a thing I'd do whenever I could.

So that's called affirmations and it's just having a specific objective in mind and repeating it and making it real in your head.

You know, in general, you can't do anything until you can imagine it.

Yeah.

You know, you can't even walk out of the house until you at least can imagine that that's a possibility.

So part of affirmations is talking yourself into it.

Part of it is focus.

I don't believe there's a magical part of it, but there's something called reticular activation, which is the effect where you can hear your name in a crowded room, but you can't hear any other words.

You hear

a background noise, and then Scott.

And you're like,

Why is that the one word I can hear clearly?

It's because you're tuned to it.

And part of what affirmations does is if you really are are putting that much focus into an objective, you'll start noticing things that you might not have noticed before.

And in fact, my big break came when I was flipping through the channels on TV and I noticed a TV show on how to become a cartoonist.

And I'd never seen it before, but I saw it just when I needed it, when I was focusing on that.

And that became my big break, actually.

You have launched a line of

burritos.

You

launched a couple of restaurants.

You said

that was beyond you, the restaurants.

And then you started making about a million dollars a year just from public speaking.

This is

where I think you become really fascinating at this point.

You develop something called voice dystonia.

Explain that.

Yeah, it was called

spasmodic dysphonia or a voice dystonia more generically.

So some people just get this for reasons that nobody quite knows exactly.

Sometimes it comes on from some regular respiratory problem.

But I lost my ability to speak intelligibly.

In other words, I could make noise, but my vocal cords would clench when I tried to form words.

So if I tried to order, let's say, a Diet Coke, it would come out like this.

And then people couldn't figure out what I was saying.

So I

couldn't talk on the phone pretty much at all.

And so for about three and a half years, I didn't have the ability to speak.

And that was, as you can imagine, it's just a devastating loss because you don't feel the ability that you're communicating with people, even if you can communicate, if you can't speak.

You know, the fact that you could write it down or you could text it to somebody or you could do sign language or something doesn't really get you there.

You're still completely alone.

It's like being a ghost ghost in the room and uh i couldn't find what it was first of all i you know my doctors couldn't even i couldn't even identify what problem it was did it come on suddenly like one day it came on

it came on um

as it often does with other people after what you think is a normal respiratory

laryngitis.

So I thought I just had a normal allergy or something, and then it just never got better and just got worse.

So I ended up finding out what it was on my own by Googling

the right term.

I'd had a separate problem a while ago of muscle dystonia in my drawing hand.

And I thought, well, what if it's one of those?

What if it's a dystonia like on my muscle in my hand, but it's for my voice?

So I Googled the term voice dystonia.

Boom, changed my life because a video came up and with an audio of somebody with the exact problem and that gave me the name of it.

And then I put that into Google, and whenever anything with that name came up, like a new treatment or something like that, I would check that out.

And one of them was a surgeon in Southern California who would come up with an experimental surgery.

And I tracked him down, went to Southern California.

He said, well, can't guarantee this will work.

It's probably a 15% chance that it will make it worse.

And not only make it worse, but make it permanently worse.

Meaning that if ever there's a cure, it might not work for you because this might ruin it forever.

This is kind of like

almost like a cochlear implant where you were actually cutting the nerves to the vocal cord, right?

And then taking nerves from another part of your body?

Yeah.

Is that right?

So

they open up the front of the neck.

There's a little scar here, but they don't go into the interior of the neck.

It's just the surfacey nerves because apparently these are the nerves that connect your brain to your vocal cords.

It goes to the front of the neck.

So they slice them.

So for a while you can't talk at all.

And then they splice in a different pathway.

And then eight weeks later, when the nerves regrow, you either can talk or you can't.

And I said to the doctor, you know, when is my follow-up visit?

He said, don't need one.

I'm like, what?

Why don't you need a follow-up?

He says, it's either going to work

or it won't work.

That's it.

And eight weeks later i talked and it took took a few more years to be able to gain my fluency back because once you can talk you still can't talk fluently because your brain hasn't talked in years so i i hadn't i hadn't formed sentences like i'm doing now for years so it took took quite a while to get back

I lost my, I had vocal cord paralysis.

I've had it a couple of times, and that scared the hell out of me because of what I do.

And at one point it lasted a month and a lot of things go through your mind when you can't speak just for a month.

Three years of not being able to speak.

What did you learn?

Well,

the first thing that happened was I started a blog and I found that the blog became my way to talk because

the main thing you learn is that listening to other people doesn't connect you to the world.

Speaking and knowing that they hear you connects you to the world and nothing else does.

And so the inability to do that, of course, had impact on my marriage, you know, my first marriage.

And

I just became like a ghost.

It was just a horrible, horrible experience.

But the thing I did learn is that

things that look incurable are not necessarily.

So that changed me.

So I didn't plan on going here, but you bring up an interesting point.

You say, if you can't can't be heard, you're not really connected.

You're a ghost.

I think there is

a large number of people in America today, and I think even in the world, look at Brexit, where they just feel like a ghost.

They feel like no one is actually listening to them.

Right.

Yeah, I imagine that that's massively true.

And it's probably maybe it feels worse because we have so much in terms of communication tools.

So you have every tool in the world to communicate, but nobody will listen to you.

Yeah, and nobody will listen to you, and

they call you all kinds of names, and you're not.

And

you're like,

wait a minute,

I'm not a racist because I'm white, I'm not a racist.

And nobody will listen.

Well, we're in this weird world now that I first called out in 2016 when Trump was running.

And I said he's going to change more than politics.

He's going to change how we view the world itself and reality itself.

More about reality than the physical planet.

And sure enough, at this point, it's common to hear people talk about two movies on one screen, something I came up with then, or the idea that we're existing in a subjective world or a bubble, and two people sitting in the same room can't see or hear each other anymore.

And you see it all the time.

So the example I'll give is the arguments used to be: well, maybe somebody doesn't understand or they don't have the knowledge or maybe they have different priorities.

But now you can say, the sky is blue, and somebody will say to you, tell me

what color the sky is.

And you'll say, I just said the sky is blue.

And they won't even be able to hear it.

It's almost like you're not even in the same room with the same conversation.

And that's new.

That wasn't like five years ago.

And that's what I saw coming.

The fact that we would just completely ignore objective reality because it wasn't working for us.

So is that a product of Trump?

Or is that revealed by Trump?

What is it?

I'm going to say that he was probably an accelerant because the thing that

really

different about Trump is that he doesn't have any adherence to objective fact unless it helps him.

So he would use hyperbole 100% of the time, stretch a fact,

do a little BS, a little salesmanship, a little bit of selling.

And it's so relentless and so completely, you know, it's just completely what he does.

It's not something he slips into.

It's his world.

Every now and then he says something that's not exactly true.

It's nothing like that.

Because as long as you're looking at people who sometimes told an untruth, you'd say to yourself, well, you're going to pay for that.

You know, that probably you wish you could take it back.

But when you see somebody become president of the United States using a technique that your conscious mind says, that can't work.

What you're doing.

of always exaggerating, always bending, just always shaping the truth, there's no way the public is going to buy, okay, you're the president now.

What the heck just happened?

What did we see happening here?

And that's what I saw coming.

I knew that he was going to be president.

I called him early based on his persuasion tools.

For your audience who may not know,

I'm a trained hypnotist.

So I saw the tools of persuasion in his toolkit and I thought, oh, God, he's not just going to change politics.

He's just going to rip the fabric of reality right in half.

Because the thing he knows, and he will always be called stupid for this, but the thing he knows is that following the exact facts

just doesn't make that much difference.

Is that a new thing for us, or has it always been that way?

I think it's only the degree, the fact that you can just completely dispense with any pretense of trying to be technically accurate, and it won't matter.

You'll still get excellent results.

I would argue that

they have to be certain, for instance, when you explain it that way, that's terrifying.

It's just terrifying.

And thoughts of that's what Adolf Hitler had.

He had this ability just to say, no, the Jews are going to a nice little happy town we built for them.

And people just agreed and just went, uh-huh, uh-huh.

So that's frightening.

So is that condition always there and people just

a few people can do it and take advantage?

Or does there have to be a condition in society that allows that person to get away with it?

I'm pretty sure it would work anywhere, meaning that it probably is not something new about people or about society.

What's new is the personality that would be willing to do it.

Because there's a brazenness to what Trump does that is hard to imitate.

You know, even if you said, all right, I see what he's doing there.

I'm going to try to do that myself.

I don't know that you could pull it off because he's fully committed to his version of reality, and that's what makes it work so well.

So this is kind of like who was the woman

in Silicon Valley that was saying she could test blood with a little machine and CVS and she could have tested it.

Yeah.

Is that the same thing?

I saw the documentary about her, and she may have had some of those talents.

It's hard to say, because I think she was a sort of a tall, you know, forceful kind of personality, a lot of charisma.

So there might have been some of that, yeah.

So you said he was a master wizard in hypnosis and persuasion.

You just said

that

he had unusual persuasion skills.

What are those?

Besides just being able just to

see reality the way he sees it

Well, he uses a number of very classic persuasion techniques.

Number one, he's very visual when he speaks.

So, if you were going to try to sell the public on, let's say, better border security, a bad way to do it is the way it's always been done before.

Well, we've got these numbers of people, this amount of crime.

Here's my statistics.

We'll use a variety of mechanisms to secure the border in different places.

It's a different method.

And Trump just says, I'm building a wall.

And then you see it.

Because, you know, as I said, things don't become real until you can imagine them.

So he forced us all to imagine the wall, which makes it easier to get it done.

He sort of wore the public down with various pushing on every door to get a little bit of a wall built.

And at least some of it's being built now.

Take, for example, when

he was running for president the first time, and Saturday Night Live invited him on, as they also invited Hillary Clinton.

And here's the difference between a good and a bad persuader.

Of course, the candidate gets to approve the skit they're in.

That just makes sense.

They're not going to be in a skit they don't approve.

So Trump approved a skit in which he was shown as the President of the United States in the Oval Office.

Now, I don't remember a single thing about the skit itself or the jokes.

You know, they were obviously at his expense.

That's why you do it.

But I remember seeing him in the Oval Office, and I remember saying, that is so smart.

Because the problem people had at that point was they literally couldn't imagine him as president.

And so he fixed it.

He gave them their imagination.

He put it right, he put it in a picture, and he acted it out.

And then you're like, yeah, I can see that.

There he is.

He's right there in the Oval Office.

Then Hillary Clinton does a skit on Saturday Night Live.

Same opportunity.

I'm sure she could approve or not approve.

And she approved one in which she was at a

drinking.

And, you know, and I forget if she was the bartender or the drunk, but

she was in a bar, basically.

The least presidential thing you could do, not really a great look.

So you see that Trump will always wear his suit.

Every opportunity except maybe golfing, that's about it, because that's part of the look.

You see him use his airplane even before it was Air Force One.

He would use his own airplane as a stand-in for Air Force One because then you could see him as the president.

So visual is part of it.

Then, of course, simplification.

He just keeps everything dead simple, which is super important.

And he repeats like crazy.

He has great discipline.

And, you know, you just, he scares people, too.

So fear is, of course,

fear is,

there's no better motivator than fear.

Because if you don't take care of your fear, you know, you can't take care of anything else.

You're going to run for your life.

So, you know,

it's not an accident that every election you see the fear ramp up.

So, what he did was he ramped up the fear of illegal immigration and whatever else was dangerous, you know, China, et cetera.

And that's just good technique.

Do you think he knows all of those things, or it just comes instinctively to him?

Do you think he studied and trained?

I don't know in terms of training, but it's definitely something he knows he's doing.

And a little-known fact,

his pastor or minister, I forget which word is correct, when he was a kid was Norman Vincent Peale.

So Norman Vincent Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, which was a mega hit when I was young.

And that was all about using the power of optimism to essentially shape reality.

In other words, just

causing reality to be what you wanted it to be through

sheer force of positivity.

And that is the president's feature, but also sometimes his bug.

So it's his feature when he's talking up the economy, which he does better than maybe any president ever, or maybe ever will.

But when you have a pandemic, you don't really want the positivity guy all the time, right?

I often say there's no such thing as a good or a bad president.

There's only a president that is either matched to the challenges of the time or not.

He was perfectly matched for accelerating the economy, perfectly matched for negotiating with China, not matched for the pandemic.

That required a little bit of a different personality, a little less optimism, maybe.

But I think we'll get through.

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How, because this is an interesting thing for me, because I hear Biden say, you know, how bad it would be,

you know, if he was to continue because of COVID, et cetera, et cetera.

But he was the first to say no travel.

I mean, I remember when he said no travel from Europe, I was shocked.

I thought, what?

I've never seen a president do that before.

And everybody

just bashed him for that.

He was way ahead.

Well, about a week before he did that, I was screaming on literally yelling and cursing on my Periscope that he needs to

close travel from China.

So there were people pushing for it.

But when he did it, I was amazed.

Yeah, well,

Scott, I want you to know.

I I was too.

I said, COVID's going to be bad.

We don't know how bad, but it's going to be worse for the economy.

We've got to stop this.

We can't overwhelm the hospitals.

But I think, like you, when he did it,

nobody does that.

That was the typical

out of the norm kind of, yep, we're just going to close it all down.

Now, I'm trying to remember.

Fact check me on this.

Was he the first leader to close a whole country?

I think he was.

I think he was.

And I don't even,

in my mind, I didn't imagine it was really a thing.

I mean, I was calling for it.

I wanted it, but I didn't quite think it was a thing until he did it.

And I was like, what?

I guess you can do that.

So where did he drop the ball?

Because

I happen to agree that the president can't be doom and gloom.

But he did take the steps that

everyone was telling him to take, except taking control of companies and taking control of states.

He was much more aggressive than New York was.

Yeah,

when I asked my Democrat friends to tell me, well, what exactly did he do wrong?

Because you're all saying words like he botched it and it's obvious he made mistakes.

And I keep saying, okay, 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.

And you end up with examples such as, well, he could have worn his own mask more.

And I say,

Are there really people who don't understand that the president is a special case and we want him to be?

That everybody's tested before they go in the White House and that he's the leader, et cetera.

And then they'll say, well, but he did his rallies.

And people went there without masks.

Now, that I would say, that's a good point.

But I don't think the rallies are what killed 200,000 people.

No.

Right?

No.

I mean, I would certainly agree that there may have been more damage from those than if you had not done them.

But that's not anything to do with the 200,000 people dying, if any.

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 blogged about Donald Trump, and you said pretty much what you just said to me, 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.

You didn't endorse him right off the bat.

I mean, you didn't,

you didn't come out and say, I'm a Trumpster.

You just said some things that you observed.

Yeah, I was just talking about his tools because I thought people needed to know he was bringing a whole different tool set.

You know, the popular thing at the time was he's just a reality TV guy and he was a business person.

He doesn't have experience in government.

And I was sitting there thinking,

I think those are exactly the right tools.

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 of his political experience because that's probably just baggage and people he owes favors to.

You'd make him an international business person and you'd give him all the skills of a TV star and a salesperson.

That's a pretty good package.

So, but you

got death threats.

You actually had to come out.

You say, where I live in California, it's not safe to be seen as supportive of anything Trump says or does.

So I fixed that.

I endorsed Hillary Clinton.

People don't care why I'm on their side.

They only care that I am.

Yeah, I said out loud that I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my safety.

And I would always add for my safety

so that it was clear I was doing it for effect.

And it actually calmed people down.

They didn't care why I was on their side.

As long as you're on our side, that's all.

So that actually made me feel safer.

Where does that hypnosis come from?

Well, I think people are just team players and they don't see much else.

I mean, you can't see the flaws in

your candidate.

You can't see anything but the good parts.

So I think,

well, I feel like I can, but

probably 80% of the world is having problems with that.

Maybe 20% of the world can even voice a flaw with their own candidate.

I think it's rare.

So we now have

the press.

I mean, I was amazed

that,

you know, I've been in those rooms and it's groupthink.

I've worked at CNN.

I've worked at Fox.

It's groupthink.

But and I never thought that they were curious.

There's no intellectual curiosity in those rooms at all.

They just, you know, that's the way the world is.

But now

objective truth, something that you can say

document

doesn't doesn't matter at all.

What happened to them?

And more importantly, what's happening to us?

Are we going to

slide into a world where

we accept that?

Or else?

Well, it looks like

artificial intelligence may be a lot of the background explanation for what we're seeing.

And what I mean is the algorithms that determine who sees what on social media, those are driven by computer programs.

And those programs are, of course, biased toward what gets the most clicks.

So they're obviously going to surface the things that make our emotions the wildest.

Now, as long as that business model exists, and I don't see it changing, we will become more siloed in what we hear and see.

So when I talk to my Democrat friends about politics, almost universally, they do not know the same things I know.

And usually I know everything that they've heard, but they haven't heard what I have also heard, you know, because they're CNN silo.

And so they often think that they're disagreeing on facts and reason or priorities or something.

And it's nothing like that.

I simply have a whole different set of data that's real.

You know, it's not even that they disagree with my facts.

They haven't heard them.

Haven't heard them.

And that's new.

I think before disagreements were still, were mostly based on the same set of facts, but not anymore.

So I learned that from a friend of mine, Riaz Patal.

He was a guy, very liberal, Hollywood producer.

Everybody was hating Donald Trump.

He decided to find out who these Trump people are.

He's a Muslim.

He's gay, adopted child.

I mean, he's on every

unpopular list, I guess, if you had had a GOP list of people we're supposed to hate.

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.

And he said,

they're nothing.

They're nothing like what I was told.

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.

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.

He had, a very intelligent, very well-read man, hadn't even heard of those stories and at first said, can't be true.

And I said, Google it right now.

You'll find it in the New York Times, but on page 24 and a story about that big.

And he couldn't believe it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I've had that experience over and over and over in the past year.

Are you serious?

You've never even seen this story.

You've never even heard that this happened.

It's widespread.

Let me take you to something else that you have written that I'd like for you to

explain to me.

You said,

where was it?

You were talking about how if Joe Biden is elected, and I hate to paraphrase this because it it was so specific, that

you might be dead.

Do you remember?

Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah.

Well, you know,

there are lots of ways that could go.

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.

And they use very threatening language like,

we're going to hunt you down.

we're going to find you,

don't believe that you can get away with being a Trump supporter.

Don't think that you can just

be somehow free from the ramifications of that.

And

you look at what's happening in the cities, especially, with the protests, and it starts to look like open season on Trump supporters.

Now, the problem I have is that, again, because of the silos of the news, there's just a whole bunch of people who think it's okay to talk like that.

And it's the talking like that that makes it real.

You know, if enough people talk like that, it guarantees somebody's going to

make it real.

So the language

is the part that foreshadows that.

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 Democrat, we will effectively have created a Chinese form of government.

It will be a one-party situation.

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.

And once they own the court, they can game the system and guarantee that the court will support them.

And they can just make sure that they have structural reasons that nobody else could ever get elected.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: 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.

We've heard that from both Republicans and Democrats for a long time, that that's really kind of the model of the future.

I hope to God not.

But there was a FBI

chief of Intel that just came out today, former,

he came out today and said, We failed, the system failed that allowed somebody like Donald Trump to get into office.

There has to be some sort of bipartisan committee that vets these people.

And I thought,

that's the central committee.

That's what they do in Cuba.

That's what they do in Russia.

The man,

you can run, but not you.

That's not America.

Yep,

that's closer to the worst case scenario than it is closer to America.

But that's what we're headed for, isn't it?

Well, depends who wins the election, doesn't it?

I still think Trump is more likely to win the election than Biden.

And I think the Senate has a good chance of staying Republican.

So we'll see.

Could go the other way.

Are you, I mean, you're so, I wish I had your kind of,

could go either way.

I,

you know, I used to, I used to be funny.

I used to do comedy.

And it's just the world is on fire.

It's just, I mean, look at me.

I'm actually 25.

When you look at this every day, it can really grind on you.

Yeah, I've started taking social media vacations during the day, you know, like after 8 o'clock, try not to look at Twitter.

And first hour that I get up, you know, don't look at anything.

And when I talk to people who are not watching the news, they're happier.

Yeah, they are.

They're happy.

They are.

You have talked a lot, especially recently, about the fine people hoax.

What is the fine people hoax?

Well, as the news reported, President Trump said that there were fine people on both sides at the Charlottesville Unite the Right

protest.

Now, that, of course, was reported to mean that he was referring to

the neo-Nazis as fine people.

But, of course, they only create that hoax by lopping off the last part of his statement, in which without any prompting,

nobody asked a follow-up question.

He was just continuing to talk, and he wanted to clarify.

And he said, I'm not talking about the white nationalists and the neo-Nazis.

They should be condemned totally.

So this entire

hoax that he called the neo-Nazis fine people is entirely created by editing out the second part of his statement.

Amazingly, when I show people the statement and say, oh,

here's the whole thing, 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.

And they will look at it and they'll say, well,

what were they doing marching with the neo-Nazis?

And I'll say, that's not in evidence.

In fact, I interviewed people who attended because I wondered the same thing.

So I asked for people who had attended to contact me.

And a number of locals who had, you know, just been, they lived in town, they heard about it.

And I said, well, why'd you go if you knew it was this neo-Nazi thing?

And some of them said, We didn't know.

We just heard there was a thing about a statue.

You know, it was like somebody told them.

Other people said, Yeah, we knew they were going to be there, but that doesn't affect us.

I can still go protest myself.

I'm not marching with them.

I'm not with them.

I'm not physically with them.

I don't support them.

I don't like them.

I disavow them.

But I like the statues.

So indeed, there were just regular people who disavowed the racists who also supported the statues.

But

the media just insists that didn't happen.

And it's so clearly in evidence.

I mean, it'd be easy to check.

Well, they're still doing it.

Chris Wallace at the debate did not ask Joe Biden to disavow Antifa and the violence.

But he did ask Donald Trump to disavow the Klan.

And

just a few days after he had signed an executive order saying that the Klan and Antifa are terrorist organizations.

Whoa, whoa.

Is that a sign that Chris Wallace just hasn't checked the news or

is part of the problem?

Well,

I think two things can be true at the same time here.

One is that it's obvious that the president has disavowed all the racism by all the different names lots of times.

You can see the compilation clip on the internet all the time, except Democrats never see it.

Every Republican has seen multiple compilation clips of President Trump saying, I disavow the KKK, I disavow white supremacists, and they act like it didn't happen.

But it is also true that the way he answers the question

It just begs the extra question.

So much so that

I said after the debate, he lost my vote.

I'm personally not going to vote for the president if he can't answer that question.

It bothered me because I had invested so much defending that find people hoax.

And then when that came up, I said, I actually got off the couch during the debate and I walked toward the TV and I was like, here it is.

He's finally going to clarify that thing.

He'll just tell them that he disavowed them.

They'll check the transcript.

Finally, we'll clear the record.

And then he handled it the way he did handle it, which was far less than optimal.

why I could not

believe

how he handled that.

The answer is, of course I disavow the Klan and white supremacy.

I just signed an executive order saying they're a terrorist group along with Antifa.

Joe Biden,

will you denounce both of those?

You hung out with Klan wizards early in your career and you're with Antifa now.

Will you denounce them?

Why didn't he answer that?

And why didn't Kaylee McEniny do the same?

Because she basically ran into the same situation and she did the same.

Well, he's said it in the past.

Or he said, sure.

And I'm thinking, no, those are not the right answer.

The public is looking for a very specific answer.

They're telling you what they're looking for.

You know why they're looking for it.

There's no ambiguity here.

This is what will make us feel better.

Please say this.

Won't do it.

Now, you can only speculate what's going through his head or what this is all about.

Here are some of my thoughts.

Number one, the president hates being told what to do.

In other words, if you say to me, hey, Scott, will you say this thing?

I might say yes.

But the president doesn't like to be told what to do.

So he will resist

being pushed, basically, or being bullied into doing something.

And so, some of it, I think, is just a resistance to being bullied.

If you've said it and you've said it the way you want to say it, can't that be enough?

If the way I said it is also clear, why do I have to say it your way?

Why can't I say it my way?

The other problem is, and you would probably be keen to this as well, people who have media training are trying to think a step ahead.

If he had said the easy one, do you condemn white supremacists?

Yes, absolutely, I condemn them.

What's the next question?

Do you condemn Breitbart?

Do you condemn Kyle Rittenhouse, who isn't even any of those things, but he's been accused of being it?

At what point

does he get off of the apologizing, clarifying, condemning train?

Now, I would see that coming.

Like,

I would smell that trap, and I feel like he smelled it twice, and it burned in both times.

Once

back in the Jake,

when,

you know, on CNN, when he was asked about Jake Tapper, about KKK, and he hesitated and said, you know, who are we talking about?

And everybody said, well, it was horrified.

It's like, why are you hesitating?

I think, again, it's just speculation.

I think he was anticipating what comes after that and wanting not to get himself in a trap.

I will tell you, I met with President Bush in the Oval Office, and I was not a fan of President Bush at the end because he was just so wishy-washy, and the war was going upside down.

I'm like, What are you doing?

And

I said to him, I was in his office for an hour, and he spent a lot of that time yelling at me, telling me, and this is a quote, you don't effing know what it's like to be president of the United States.

And I was like, Nope, I don't.

And

he said to me at one point, I said, at the end, because he was so clear, he had all the facts.

He had it.

And I said, no offense, Mr.

President, but where is this guy?

Because this is the guy that I'm looking for.

And I think a lot of people are looking for.

And he said,

very calmly, you don't understand how every word is parsed, is analyzed, not just by the media, but by our allies and our enemies all over the world.

I shift my eyes and I'm told don't do that, don't on not on that word.

That stuck with me because I at one point said, quote,

I think President Obama is a racist.

No,

that's not quite right.

He just seems to have this hatred for the white culture.

I couldn't, I didn't know it was called critical theory,

but that's what I sensed.

He didn't like the white European culture.

And it's all Marxism and critical theory.

And I had been asked about that for eight years.

Same thing.

And I was always very careful on how to answer it.

And I knew what was coming.

And so they would try to trap you.

And you just couldn't answer because anything you say,

they'd exploit.

So I think you're right about why he did that.

Yeah, because you can see him stopping and thinking, and

there's no standard politician answer for it, because obviously he knew what the right answer was.

He knew what to say to become elected, right?

There was nobody who thought to themselves, you know, maybe I'll go pro-KKK and I think that'll go well for my...

Nobody had that thought.

No.

He didn't have it.

And,

you know,

if you're willing to accept that he's willing to say what he he needs to say to get elected,

he was thinking something.

And he had to be thinking ahead.

That's my best guess.

So you said something interesting because people see that and they're like, he's a secret racist and he's going to kill all black people in his second term.

And he's Hitler, you know.

And you said

you don't become Hitler at 70.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's one thing you can pretty much depend on.

It's one of the advantages of Trump is you know exactly what you're getting, especially in the second term.

You know, I've argued that Biden, you don't really know what you're getting because you're getting some combination of the progressives and

whoever's backing him and who knows what.

But with Trump, at least you know exactly what it's going to look like.

The details may vary, but you can depend on him being the same guy.

So, what do you think of, I mean, Joe Biden would be the oldest president.

And I don't have any problem.

I just had Alan Dershowitz.

I did an hour with him last week.

He's 84.

Sharp.

He is on his game.

I don't have a problem with people who are elderly at all, as long as you're there.

Just the difference between Joe Biden in the primary debates and this debate, I honestly sat there.

And I feel bad for him.

I really do.

I think he's being used and

it's horrible what's happening.

But

I honestly tried to think, what is he going to be like a year from now or four years from now?

And no one seems to be concerned about that on the left.

I cannot figure out if they're not concerned or they're just putting it out of their mind.

I guess that would be the same as not concerned.

Or are they pretending they're not concerned because they figure there's a power behind the throne.

Which would be even more frightening, wouldn't it?

Well, that's the unknown.

It's not even that Kamala Harris would be the end of the world.

It's that you don't know.

Is it her?

Is somebody pulling her strings?

Right.

Who's in charge?

Let's talk about

stay with the debate here for a second.

Trump's taxes.

I was telling you about the Intel guy, and the one case that he made was that because he didn't, we're now just finding out about these taxes, we have to have some central committee vet all of these people.

And I thought, what exactly did you find in those taxes?

I mean,

he loses money?

What a surprise.

I mean, you know,

there was nothing surprising in there, was there?

I was actually surprised at the lack of surprise,

but it did confirm the wisdom of not releasing them, at least if he could have prevented it in any way.

Because what happened was it's complicated and the country doesn't understand taxes.

So what we learned is that 99 out of 100 Americans don't know anything about taxes.

They don't know how

any deductions work.

They don't know.

They certainly don't know how real estate works.

Depreciation is just a word they've heard.

I mean, this is, you know, when you have that much of a rich target environment, I just thought, oh my God, his critics will just pick pieces out of there, take it out of context, which is the entirety of political discourse is taking something out of context and pretending it's something else.

And I thought they'll just pick him to death with all that stuff.

So, but

I think the best answer,

I can't believe he said it, but he said it in the last debate and he said it in 2016.

Yeah, who who wants to pay taxes?

That's what I hire attorneys for.

If you don't like the laws, then he should have changed them.

I'm just using the law and if I don't have to pay taxes, I'm not.

That is, I think there's a lot of people that may not understand the tax code, but they're like, yeah, I'd like that too.

Yeah, I think that's the best answer for the public.

The best answer that I heard from me, you know, just for my mind, was he paid exactly the amount he owed.

Yes.

That's it.

Yes.

And there's no law that says you should,

they don't even want you to pay more than you owe.

The tax code doesn't have a part in it that says, you know, it'd be nice.

Maybe you could just pay extra.

Right.

Like, no, that's not anybody's expectation.

Nobody has that.

He paid what everybody pays, what they owe.

What do you foresee?

What

you look into your crystal ball as

a guy who, I mean, I think we're all under hypnosis.

I think we're all sleepwalking right now, everybody some form or another.

What do you see?

Do you see us waking up in time to save the Republic?

I think the Republic is stronger than we give it credit for.

I think that we might have a distorted feeling of how many Marxists and protesters and

BLM people there are.

Well, there are plenty of people who support the BLM idea, but they're not necessarily marching.

Wait,

You mean there's a difference between, there is a difference to you between BLM and BLM Inc.?

Yes.

Yes.

There's clearly a difference between what the organizers want and what the people with the signs want.

There's a difference there.

I just don't think there are that many of them.

And weirdly, we don't get a lot of reporting on that.

Even the protests, they don't report the numbers.

Have you noticed that?

Maybe in the early days they did, but we have a protest every night in some city.

But I never hear, is it 100 people or is it 1,000?

Because that makes a big difference.

Yeah.

I was interested to see yesterday

they covered Biden's speeches,

his whistle-stop speeches.

They never showed the crowds.

They showed him tight shot.

They never showed the crowds.

And I wondered, are there six people there or 6,000 people there?

Where are the crowd shots?

Yeah, well,

I don't mind that under the COVID situation because you'd expect it to be a sparse crowd.

Sure.

And you'd expect maybe they don't want to highlight that.

There's no real reason for that.

At the moment, the crowd size is, at least for him, it's not related to his popularity, I don't think.

So do you think that

is a myth of the invisible Trump voter, or do you think that's true?

Because the polls show Trump is losing.

So I ran a very unscientific Twitter poll yesterday in which I said, How many of you have actually lied to pollsters about Trump's support?

So not people who might, not people who think they would, not people who have, you know, in prior elections, how many have lied about Trump's support already?

Hundreds of people answered within 60 seconds.

I don't know what the final result was, but that's just people who follow me on Twitter.

Hundreds in a minute,

probably thousands by the time I check it again.

So yeah, they exist.

And I don't think that they existed in the same quantity in 2016.

I think

the perceived risk of supporting the president is now just far greater.

And I think also people have it in their heads that lying to pollsters is kind of fun and funny.

You know, when you talk to conservatives, when they talk about lying to pollsters, it feels like they're all part of a prank.

Yes.

And

I feel to some extent like I might have been part of the,

at least part of the prank of Genesis without trying to be, just by putting in people's heads.

You know, once it's in your head, it's there.

And I can tell you, I got a call from a pollster not too long ago.

And as soon as I realized what it was about, I planned to tell them I was going to vote for Biden for the same reason.

I just thought it'd be funny.

And it turns out

I wasn't yet registered.

I've since registered, so I couldn't answer the poll, but

I would have lied because I think it would be funny.

I have.

I've gotten those poll calls, and I have told him I voted for the other side.

Scott, so are you going to vote?

Was that a hothead kind of remark

after the debate, or are you still there?

The president has to answer this question or you're not going to vote for him.

Well, for the same reason that I said I would endorse Hillary Clinton for my safety, I'm not going to vote for Trump under the current conditions for my safety.

Because sooner or later, somebody's going to say, you know, it was a proven fact that he loves white supremacists.

And then I'm just going to look at him and say, I didn't vote for him.

Scott.

Thank you for being on the podcast.

I think you should open a bottle of champagne.

I think you should uncork it.

Is there anything that you're striving for that you think,

what's the next thing that you're like, I'll open it when that happens?

I'll tell you what.

If President Trump actually wins a Nobel Peace Prize,

he's been nominated four times now.

For this prize, four different people or groups have nominated him for a peace prize because of the Middle East, which is legitimate.

There's not a chance you will never taste champagne, ever.

Well,

I could always hope.

Thanks a lot, Scott.

Thank you.

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