Scott Adams (speaker) delivers a loose, conversational monologue reacting to current social-media events. He critiques a Howard Dean retweet of a photo (originally shared by Amy Siskind) showing neo-Nazis in Georgia and frames such broad smears of Trump supporters as misguided. Adams discusses Kanye West retweeting clips of Adams’ own remarks about Kanye and Candace Owens, warns that media outlets (example: BuzzFeed) will likely manufacture or misrepresent controversies about him, and advises audiences to "not be captive of the past"—a recurring theme meaning people and nations should focus on present actions rather than historical baggage. He also comments on Elon Musk’s internal memo about better meetings (invoking the Dilbert test) and praises the persuasion skills of the early PayPal founders (Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk).
Chapters
Hey, everybody. I hope you're. Hey, Jack. I hope everybody's day is as weird as mine. What a weird day. I'm not even sure I have much to talk about, but I'll tell you what I do have to talk about. Did you see the Howard Dean tweet? So Amy Siskind first tweeted it. She's an advocate for women's rights. Politico 50. Okay, so she tweets this photo of neo Nazis gathering in Georgia. Now, my understanding is that the entire bunch of Nazis are all in the photo. There's nobody left out. Like, that's it. They're all in just one photo. I have a rule that goes like this. If all of my enemies can fit into one photo without any photoshopping, not too worried about him. But then Howard Dean retweets that, and he says, trump base voters literally talking about the kkk. Now, of course, it may be true that they're Trump voters. That might actually be true. But of course, the point of it is to smear the rest of Trump supporters with these idiots in Georgia. And so Howard Dean tweets this exactly the same week that Kanye is tweeting Candace Owens and me. And it seems like there's a zeitgeist. There's a thing happening. There's something important happening in just the consciousness of the world. And Howard Dean is not quite on the ship. Here's the ship. Here's Howard. I don't know how you could be so far away from sort of the average person's thinking that smearing Trump supporters with the KKK still makes sense to you. And how does he not know that that's the problem and not the solution? He tweets it like he's helping. Maybe if I tweet this, there will be fewer Nazis and Trump will go out of office. Let me tweet this. And that was a bad imitation of Howard Dean tweeting. Let me do a better impression of Howard Dean tweeting or something like that. I forget how he screams, but wow. Anyway, so here's the interesting thing. Oh, wow. 2.3 thousand people watching. So here's the interesting thing about the. So Kanye, if you don't know, Kanye west tweeted, I guess, nine different subsets of outtakes from a clip I did in which I was talking about him and his tweet about Candace Owens and how that tore a hole in the fabric of reality. And I'll tell you what's happening already. You're already seeing it. BuzzFeed has already tried to brand me as a. A men's rights activist. They're calling me a men's rights activist because once I wrote a blog post mocking men's rights activists. That's it. I once wrote a blog post in which I made fun of men's rights activists. And so buzzfeed does their research and says, ah, I guess he's a men's rights activist. By that logic. By that logic, the buzzfeed logic. Howard Dean is in the kkk. Am I wrong? Howard Dean is criticizing the kkk. I criticize men's rights groups. So if criticizing them means you are one of them, well then Howard Dean is in the kkk. Okay, I realize that's cheap and dumb, but I had to say it anyway. So here's what to watch for. Watch. See if you see the left attacking me in a way that you haven't seen lately. You've seen it before, but you haven't seen it lately. There's been sort of a lull on the attacks on me because I've been so damn right so often. But now Kanye just made me dangerous. And once you're dangerous, wait till you see the stories that people concoct about me. So I wanted to tell you in advance because if I tell you after it happens, then it's going to look like a response to it. So I want to tell you in advance. There's going to be a lot of shit just totally made up about me. My advice is that half of what you read about me tends to be correct and about half tends to be out of context or just flat out incorrect like the men's rights stuff. The worst criticism I saw about me is that somebody found a 10 year old blog post in which I predicted. I don't even remember the details, but I think I predicted that Romney would win. So it was a bad prediction, but it was sort of a protest prediction. I forget the reason, but it had to do with something specific. It was about one issue. I forget what it was, but I wasn't really involved with politics. It was a one off BL blog post 10 years ago. So my video and the one that Kanye retweeted was about this point. Don't be a captive of the past. Don't let history be your prison. So how did they attack me? Watch the attacks on me. All of the attacks are going to be based on something that happened a while ago. If you ask me today what's my opinion of Romney? I would say I'm glad he's not president. So watch how Often the people who don't like it when either Kanye or Candace or I say the same thing. Don't be trapped in your prison of the past. Watch how often they go to the past to make their argument. It's going to be weird and fun. Somebody on Twitter just pointed out that I had set up. I'd frame this to be a perfect trap because in order to mock the idea that you don't want to be in a mental prison, the only way you can mock it is to put yourself in a mental prison. So you're going to watch all of my critics and Candace's and Kanye's, at least critics on this topic, putting themselves in the mental prison that we just created for them. So let's just say some of us got out of prison, but there are a lot of other people who are driving as fast as they can toward that prison. And the funny thing is that the reason I did this periscope is that it occurred to me that there are probably people all over the country, if not the world, you know, writers and journalists and publications who are all searching through my old blog posts and looking for the controversies that they'll always get wrong. Because if you do a quick search on anything that I've been criticized about in the past, you're almost certainly going to see somebody's misinterpretation as an article, and then people will quote the misinterpretation like they'd really done some research. So. So I had this image that because of Kanye's nine tweets about my video, that all over the world people are like, ah, we're going to get this guy. We must stop him. He's saying something that people like, we can't abide by that. And so they're doing opposition research. You're going to see some good stuff. I don't know if you're going to see stuff that even I don't know about or hasn't ever come out before, but you might see, like, totally new things about me that probably not true, some of them might be. By the way, here's my advice to you. If you're trying to sort out what ridiculous stories you hear about me are true and which ones are false, I would ask you to do it this way. Just believe they're all true. Just believe they're all true. Sorry, I got kicked off there for a moment. So rather than try to figure out, is this terrible story about Scott true or false, just assume it's true. It's more fun. It's way Better. So especially if they're really bad, just assume it's true. All right. I'm on the right side of history. I sure hope so. I'd hate to be on the wrong side of history. That would be terrible. Had I heard of Candace before this? I had, but I hadn't really. I hadn't taken note. I just seen her name come up a number of times, but I hadn't really looked into it. Am I going to advise Kanye's 2024? Well, who knows if Kanye is really going to run for office? Who knows if he would do it in 2024? But my advice is always free. I do it publicly. So I doubt there's anything that there's. I doubt there's much I would tell him privately that I wouldn't say publicly. I hear a request to hear another video of my brother laughing. Maybe that would be fun. All right. Well, I didn't really have much to say today. I just wanted to share this moment because, you know, it was credit where it's due. Mike Cernovich was the first one to say few weeks ago that it felt like there's something happening in just the universe. There was something that's clearly about to change and probably in a good way. I don't know if he said it in a good way, but I think that was implied. I've been calling it the golden age, And I think this is the sort of thinking that can get us there. Because if you think about it, most of our problems now are prisons of the past. North Korea, it's not a current problem, it's a prison of the past problem. Russia, same problem. Iran, same problem. We're all victims of the past. Israel, Palestinians, same problem. Victims of the best. And when you have enough people saying, hey, the past doesn't exist, and if it did, you could still ignore it because what matters is what you're doing today. So, any other young conservatives to follow? Maybe I'll come up with a list. I don't have a list right now, but I'll do that. All right. What about the Elon Musk memo? Yeah, it just feels like the universe is tapping me on the shoulder. No, that was me. I guess I had an itch. I thought it was the universe, but that was me. Yeah. So if you didn't see that, Elon Musk sent out an all employee memo with five points about how to have better meetings. And one of them was don't make a policy that you could imagine appearing in a Dilbert comic strip. So one of the ways that Dilbert has been persuasive is exactly that. When Dilbert first hit its stride and people had heard of it and seen it, I got a lot of mail from people who said I was going to introduce this policy in the company. But I realized that if I saw this in a Dilber comic, I would laugh at it. So I canceled the policy. A lot of that happened. So you're seeing Elon Musk using that phenomenon as if your policy looks mockable. Maybe put a little more thought into it. It's a good idea. By the way, I often am asked, are there any other master persuaders in the world? And I always get back to the so called PayPal mafia. Do you remember that PayPal the original founders were Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk and a few other guys. And I always thought to myself the hardest thing that PayPal had to do was to persuade people to trust an unknown startup with their money. Imagine how hard that was. Imagine persuading people to put their actual money into an app for the first time before that was common. You know, if you were to do this today, everybody does this. It's no big deal. But imagine being, you know, among. I think they were among the first or the first to actually get people to believe and trust them with their money that you're just sending into the Ethernet or sending into the ether, I should say. So the PayPal mafia are some seriously persuasive people. They gave you Elon Musk, they gave you Peter Thiel, and they gave you Reid Hoffman. And if you don't know enough about Reid Hoffman, you should do some reading about him because those three guys are the real deal. You know, I'm pretty sure that those three would have been successful, whatever they were doing, because they have extra skills, persuasion wise, that are hard to ignore. All right, that's enough for now. I got some work to do. I'll talk to you all later. It's great to spend some extra time with you. Bye.
