The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Scott Adams Reframes Racism and Other Matters

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

Scott Adams discusses it all. Was the election stolen, why he was canceled and how to "reframe" racism, his new book Reframe Your Brain, media bias, conspiracy theories, Tucker Carlson, and more.

The Comedy Cellar Podcast, this week co-hosted by Coleman Hughes, our guest, author of the new book, Reframe Your Brain, Scott Adams. Okay, let's do this. What follows is the interview with Scott Adams that I did jointly with my friend and bandmate, Coleman Hughes. Coleman, who I'm sure many of you know from his podcast, will likely add his own intro that will surely be worth your time as everything Coleman does is. Scott Adams is someone I always wanted to interview. He first came on my radar in the 1990s when my college roommate, Don Fabricant, outside Steve's older brother, became obsessed with Dilbert. Don worked in the corporate world and for him, this was a work of great insight. I enjoyed it too, but having not spent time in

that world, I don't think I fully ever understood what a tour de force it was. Later, I rediscovered Scott Adams when he kind of made Sam Harris's head explode in a 2017 interview where he defended Trump and what Scott Adams saw as the method behind Trump's madness. Everything Trump did, no matter how odious, no matter how dishonest it was, no matter how awful it seemed, Scott Adams was able to defend it in some way. I recently re-listened to this podcast and I do strongly recommend it. You can be the judge of what Adams got right, what he got wrong, where in retrospect he might have been reaching, but I don't think anyone can say he got everything wrong, that's

for sure. It's a good example of how different types of thinking can all lead to different and valid conclusions. After the interview with Adams, I read two of his books, the Harris interview with Adams, Win Bigly and How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Both these books are both like self-helpy and kind of the kind of thing that usually turns me off. But I found these books to be extremely useful. Useful in their insights, and I highly recommend them. Although, in my opinion, the irony of self-help books is that the healthier you already are, the more likely they are to help you. But having read these books and listened to his interview, I realized this was a formidable

guy, a singular guy, so who wouldn't want to interview him? His daily stream show, Real Coffee with Scott Adams, also attracts a huge audience and an influential audience. I think Donald Trump listened to his podcast. Anyway, interviewing Scott Adams became quite a more complex matter after he got in trouble for some charged comments he made on that show. Comments which I do ask him about on this interview I'm about to play. So two issues. One, many people these days think it's unacceptable to interview a guy who might hold views they find offensive or over the line. I have a lot to say on that matter, and I don't really want to go

too deeply into it today because no matter how I try to avoid it, the analogies I'd be tempted to use in my argument might falsely imply an equivalency with Scott Adams, and that would be unfair to Adams. Hopefully we can find a guest in the future to discuss that issue because that's a big issue. Anyway, maybe one thought experiment will suffice. Think of any influential or consequential person who you think one should not be willing to interview. They're over the line. And imagine you have your way and no one but sycophants ever interview them. Now consider whether 50 years from now or 100 years from now, if the understanding of history will have been better served by the fact that no one ever engaged these people in a skeptical interview, that no historical record exists where that person was ever engaged in any back and forth conversation that gave us a

deeper and maybe more fair insight into what motivated them and what they actually believed. I think the issue is dumb. I think you should be able to talk to anyone you want. Bad ideas cannot be suppressed. They only can be and should be combated out in the open. And I'm not talking about Scott Adams here. If you want to understand whether in the remarks that got Scott Adams canceled, Adams was making a deep philosophical point about race or racial hypocrisies, or if he actually leaked some noxious views or had some grand strategy that never got to unfold, or a bit of all these things. You're going to need to listen to him and listen to him with an open mind.

Then make up your mind. Informed opinions are always better. Second, and to make matters even much more difficult, before he ever met me, Adams went on record with some outlandishly generous praise of my interview with Philip Bump. I will, I will immodestly now play you some of what Adams said. How many of you saw the greatest show that has ever been on the Internet, in my opinion? And it featured Phil Bump, allegedly a writer of the Washington Post, being grilled. Oh, my God. It was amazing.

By a podcast by the owner of the comedy seller, Noam Dorman. Well, whether or not he's an attorney or he went to law school, he had the best game I've seen of any podcaster. That's a pretty big claim, but I'll say it again. He had the best game I've ever seen of a podcaster in the political domain. He probably thought that because the guy owned a comedy shop, he was probably more of an artist who got lucky in business or something,

and that this would be like an easy one, and he would just say everything he wants to say, and the other guy wouldn't know what the good questions were or what was wrong with his answer. Oh, no, that's not what happened. Again, I can't say enough about Noam Dorman. I've never seen a more capable or competent political interview. I mean, he's a star.

So now that he paid me such compliments, I was quite aware that people would be eager to attack me if they thought I rolled over and asked him softball questions. As my friend Jack wisely warned me against opinion capture. And it is tempting. It's hard to come at somebody who's been nice to you. It feels impolite. But I hope you'll agree after listening that I didn't do that. And to be honest, it really wasn't easy, but I had to. This is corny, but I didn't want to become one of those people that I look down on, that I diss on this podcast. I've learned over the past few weeks that among journalists, I guess like among everybody, personal relationships can be every bit as corrupting as money, if not more so. For instance, the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post has refused to correct Phil Bump's account of our interview, even when I presented incontrovertible evidence of Bump's misstatements. The Washington Post stands by the lies. Finally, Scott Adams has a new book out called Reframe Your Brain, which in my view can be life-changing, especially for those people,

again, healthy enough to be able to take some control of themselves and to make actual alterations to their mental outlook. We don't get enough email. Please email us at podcast at comedyseller.com and let us know what you think. Let me cut in one more finally right before this goes to press, as it were, a couple of days ago after the interview, Adams posted a very provocative kind of cryptic tweet implying that the government is out to kill him. And this is typical Scott Adams. You don't really believe he thinks that. You don't really believe that. You're not quite sure. You imagine that if he was on the show,

he would explain to us what he's hoping to accomplish by that. Very, very interesting. Anyway, I'm very, very sorry that I didn't get to ask him about it, but I don't know. What kind of master plan might he have at work about that?

Anyway, you decide. Okay, Coleman, hit it. Scott Adams and Noam Dorman. Thanks so much for coming on my show. My pleasure. Pleasure. So to kind of catch the audience up on how this happened, I've been friends with Noam for a long time.

Haven't yet. I've been on Noam's podcast several times. He's never been on this one. On Noam's podcast, you had Washington Post columnist Philip Bump on the show, I guess over a week ago now, maybe almost two weeks now. Two weeks ago, yeah. Yeah, to discuss the Hunter Biden slash Joe Biden corruption scandal. And you did what you often do on your show, which is you exposed the absolute bankruptcy of a so-called expert.

Now, you know, since I know you and I follow your show, I've been seeing you do this literally for years to some of the top experts on, on all kinds of issues. And I've always, that's, you know, one of my favorite things about your podcast. And it's a, it's a thing of beauty, as I told you. But not so many people in the wider media space had seen this happen before. And I think the Philip Bump, the Philip Bump moment really was a moment where lots of other people saw it happen, including Scott Adams, who you and I have both been following for a long time, and he commented about it. So that was basically the occasion to get you two in a room together, the three of us, and discuss areas of mutual interest.

Check. Agreed. All right. so that's how this that's how this happened i think that uh for my part you know i've i've paid attention to you scott for a while i've paid attention to your media commentary i would really describe what you do as media analysis more than political analysis because you are you're more often analyzing the the way that the media speaks about things um i guess as much as you are the things themselves and that's where i found the most value in your in your commentary. And to give one example, I went back and listened to your somewhat infamous podcast with Sam Harris from 2017 about Trump. And I hadn't listened to it since it came out, I guess, six years ago now. And I can't really remember how I reacted at the time, but certainly with the

benefit of hindsight, you seem to understand the way that Trump communicates in a way that I definitely didn't. And I think a lot of his critics didn't in terms of, for example, his tendency to go with a big first offer and then give himself lots of room to negotiate back from. Just understanding that gets you almost halfway to understanding what Trump means when he says things. I don't think that's all of it, those those are the kinds of insights that I think you tend to have automatically and quickly that most media analysis just doesn't even consider. when you started really talking about Trump and analyzing Trump's communication style for people. Can you sort of call balls and strikes with yourself?

Six years later, do you feel that you got everything spot on about Trump, or do you feel that you made some mistakes that you can now see with hindsight? Well, let me put some context on it, and then I'll answer directly. Context for your viewers is I'm also a trained hypnotist. So I often use the filter of hypnosis, which is, I like to see as an umbrella for persuasion in general. And if somebody is extra persuasive and they have all the tools of persuasion, it's something that another trained persuader can see right away. But if you're not trained in it, you just think they're talking. You don't notice. Or you might just think, hey, that's a big old liar. Or why does that person talk like that? But if you know the techniques,

you can see him using them very consistently and very effectively. So that's where I came in. So in 2015, I was one of the first to say, you don't see this coming. I used to say he was bringing a flamethrower to a stick fight. And if you were just looking at him as an outsider trying to be president, nothing would make sense. But if you knew he had a secret flamethrower, which is his persuasive abilities, then everything made sense. So that part I got right, for sure.

And I remember in 2016 people were telling me, Scott, you're crazy to think that he's persuasive. He's not persuading anybody of anything. He's just getting a bunch of racists on board or whatever they were saying. And at this point, even his biggest critics will admit he might be the most persuasive person we've ever seen in the political realm, since, you know, maybe a Reagan, and then Obama had his own superpowers as well. Bill Clinton was good.

But Trump is still unique in that he uses the tools just really aggressively and effectively. So I would say I was right about his tools, and that everybody would be on the right page at that. But what happened was several years of what are apparently organized ops running against him. So we saw the fine people hoax where the media actually convinced half of the public that somebody who was the President of the United States in public, after thinking about it, half of the public that somebody who was the president of the United States, in public, after thinking about it, called neo-Nazis fine people.

Now, it takes about two minutes of research to find out that they just clipped a part of the speech so it looked like that. So then there was the drinking bleach hoax. There were a lot of hoaxes in between, but these were the tentpole hoaxes. I called them the tentpole hoaxes because if you believe these, everything else sounded believable. You know, all the smaller hoaxes, well, if he did this one,

he could have also done this other one. So then the drinking bleach hoax or the injecting disinfectant hoax, here's a little scoop that a lot of people don't know. I might have been the cause of that. I don't know for sure. But at the time, I was tweeting about a company right in the weeks before he talked about it. I was tweeting about a company that was using light as a disinfectant, and they were going to shove it down your throat in a ventilator device and directly spray the COVID with light, a UV light, a special kind of light.

So when, and I also knew, this is maybe a scoop for some people listening, that the president used to listen to my, listen to my live streams from the Oval Office. Now I know this from people who were in the office with him when he did it. So I know that he was following me on Twitter because he retweeted me and interacted a few times. But he also followed, I'd say, the top 50 political people on Twitter. So anything the top 50 influencers said, he usually saw it. So I know for sure, well, I can't know anything 100%,

but I'd say 99% likely that he or his staff saw me tweeting about this new technology, which looked promising, actually. So when he talked about it on stage, he said, blah, blah, blah. They were talking about light as a disinfectant outside the body on surfaces. And then he said, well, what about light? Could you bring it inside the body? And they cut that part out. And then they start with a disinfectant put in the body, and you're already lost. Because you don't know there's a real technology

that's actually in the lab at that time. It wasn't even speculative. And the people who did that trial wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal and said, yeah, that was our technology it in the Wall Street Journal and said yeah that was our technology but the bad guys just cut out the beginning where he said he was talking about light they never tell you it's a real technology

and then they cut out the last part which is doubly clever where he goes back to saying he was talking about light just in case you were confused so both of those hoaxes were done the same way now we get to January 6 now I would imagine just in case you were confused. So both of those hoaxes were done the same way. Now, we get to January 6th. Now, I would imagine that if somebody was going to say to me,

Scott, you got this all wrong. You know, you staged an insurrection, and, you know, how do you explain that? And the way I explain it is this way. There was no insurrection. How in the world were trespassers going to conquer a superpower? Were they going to just keep trespassing until the codes were given to them? How was that going to work? And then some people say, no, it's not about that. It was about getting those fake electors in there. Because if he gets the fake electors in there, then he can take over the

country with his fake electors. But of course, they weren't fake. That's the way it was reported. They were alternates. And they were just there as a placeholder to make sure that if the legal things went the way that they wanted, they'd have some alternate electors. So the entire thing was a big op by the Democrats, just like the fine people hoax, just like the drinking bleach hoax. This was just the insurrection hoax. Republicans do not go to a coup without guns, right? If you see them show up unarmed, they're there to talk. You know, some of the, obviously some of them did some dangerous things. Some of them did some violent things, but that would be true of every big group. You know, it's hard to get that many angry people in one place without some of them doing things

that are just illegal. So nobody's in favor of the illegal stuff, but somehow half of the country got convinced that there was something like an actual insurrection that wouldn't have been either sorted out by the Supreme Court if it had been a paperwork legal thing, or they would have just got tired of going home if the trespassing was the insurrection. So somehow the fact that we got to this point, that people would believe something that insanely obviously not true, half of the country. So that's where we are. So I would say that if you did not fall for any of the hoaxes, I was pretty much on target. The part that I couldn't have anticipated, and it was a real problem, is that he did get people worked up to the point where it's hard to have a country,

because half of the country is just too worked up. But I can also argue that that's because the Democrat opts, and not necessarily because of the things he said. So I think that's the big picture. If there's something specific you think that he didn't get done, I probably would agree with you. If you said, hey, how about that border? He should have put that wall

up. I'd say, well, maybe he should have done better on that. And there'd be a number of things like that. But generally speaking, I would say he's one of the most, well, certainly the most consequential president in decades. And probably history will remember him quite fondly, I expect. Can I just ask to clarify, an insurrection is not the same as a coup, though. An insurrection could just be a rebellion of some kind, right? It doesn't have to have the goal of changing power, or does it? Well, without getting into the word-specific definitions, I know people use them the same. So I'll just talk to the popular way the words are

used, but I won't argue the definitions. Yeah, because I hear them differently. I don't know if it was an insurrection or not, but I know it definitely was not a coup. Definitely was not a coup. Explain the difference. What would be the goal of an insurrection that was not a coup? Well, I think of an insurrection as being a more free-form rebellion, not necessarily aimed at the goal of ending it by changing power, by having a new leader in command. No, but that was specifically the aims of the protesters. They specifically wanted a different president. Now, they thought that they won, so that they didn't think they were breaking the law in that sense, but they certainly wanted a different outcome.

Yeah, I think they wanted to disrupt the process that was going on in a free-form kind of way, which may or may not be properly defined as an insurrection, but a coup is as if they thought they were going to go home with a different president installed, and that was ridiculous to call it a coup. It's just a, I may be wrong about this, I never looked up the two words, but whenever I heard insurrection, I always said, well, you know, that's probably kind of a fuzzy term. But a coup to me has a very clear term, meaning that you install a new leader. So, you know, it's a fine point. I would guess most of the country sees them as similar to be overthrowing a leader. And, you know, to me, I think it's sort of a moot point only in the sense that the key is whether Trump planned and directed it, which I never I never believed.

And that is what people wanted to hang their hat on. Right. Even if it were a riot, I don't think Trump anticipated, planned or directed it. I think he was as surprised as as we all were when when they they got into the Capitol. Yeah, there were certainly parts of it he probably enjoyed. Yeah, sure. The fact that there was a lot of energy on his side, I'm sure he enjoyed that. Yeah, but I can't help but disagree

that history will look back on him as a good president because despite the fact that most of his policies were not bad not bad in any way and some of them were really quite good and you even wonder if other presidents could have made them happen to the same degree I think all of that probably will be sullied by his attempt to overturn the election now this is putting the alleged insurrection to the side, talking about what happened before January 6th. Could I quibble with his attempt to overthrow the election?

Overturn, I said, yeah. Overturn. Because that would be a frame. That would be a narrative. What I saw was somebody who genuinely thought, as far as we can tell, because he's been consistent, there's no private conversation that he ever said anything different. And there's so many other people who believe that the election

was rigged. I've not seen evidence of it, but a lot of people believe it. So it's reasonable to assume he did. If you put me in that position, I'd probably believe it too because that's a pretty emotion packed situation and that makes you a little bit irrational so I can imagine that I would have believed it as well

but if he believed it was a bad outcome and that there would be a way to check fairly quickly which I believe was the hope then it wasn't stopping a process, it was trying to improve it. And that literally was the stated and obvious observable action, was to try to take an outcome that looked corrupt and make it not corrupt. Now, if it was not corrupt, then of course it would end up being the opposite of fixing it. It would make it worse.

But under his assumption, and the people were there, they were fixing something that was broken, not breaking something that was working. Yeah, I would agree with that analysis. The reason I view it differently is because even if it was a good faith belief on his part, which is consistent with the evidence we have, and he really believed the election was stolen, his level of delusion alone, to persist in that delusion for that long, is to me, says something very damning about someone. And I'll do the shoe on the other foot test for this. Stacey Abrams believed that she is the rightful governor of Georgia because the process

was corrupted by voter rolls and all this totally debunked stupidity. I believe that's a good faith belief on her part. And her not conceding that election, in her mind, she's just trying to improve the system. As you say, I still lose faith for someone that has a low enough bar and poor enough judgment to not reality test in the right way and so tries to overturn the results of an election, given how important it is to our democracy. Well, let me ask you this. It sounds like you're coming from a belief that you or anybody could know that the election was fair. Is that knowable? Not with 100% certainty. What level of certainty would he put on it? That I know the election was fair? I don't know if I would bet thousands of dollars that it was

if there were an answer in the back of the book to fact-check us all. Would you want to do a little experiment right now? Can I just say, I think fair is the wrong standard. The question is, do you think there were enough false votes or enough votes that were cast that are somehow corruptly hidden that it would overturn the result. I'm sure. Go ahead. Sorry. It was the accurate. Because you can certainly make an unfair argument about the rules things that were completely legal.

To me, the contest is partly a cheating contest. Meaning that if you could game the system before the election happens, well, you get an advantage. So both sides are trying to game it, and if one side gamed it better, I don't love it, but if it wasn't a crime and they played the game better and everybody had access to the same game, that's not where I'm going to make a big stink. But can I do an experiment? Can I change your mind in real time? Yeah, sure. Hopefully if I can do that.

Would you agree with the following statements that are not about the election? That most of our institutions we've seen for sure are corrupt, at least at the leadership level. Would you say that we've seen our finance system at various times, you know, banking system, you know, discriminates, et cetera. Banks are paying gigantic fines for bad activities. We're seeing Congress apparently corrupt, you know, running people who are 100 years old,

and there couldn't be any reason other than to protect their game somehow. We're seeing that the FDA wasn't quite what we thought it was, the CDC, the WHO, the ADL, you know, the Washington Post, the press was never anything we thought it was. And every single institution that I can think of from the IRS, you know, you name it, Department of Justice, you could go right down the line. They all appear to be corrupt. But in order to believe that the election was not, you would have to believe that 50 separate elections and then each of the precincts, which were independently run, well, they had a boss, but they were managed independently.

You'd have to imagine that those were the weird exception that all 50 states were run properly in the context of 100% of everything else that's a big organization where somebody could do mischief, they did. So what would be the reasoning behind everything being corrupt and obviously observably, provably so,

except for elections? What would be the logic that that's the only... And by the way, you also know it's not fully auditable. There's some specific things you can check, but nobody would check, for example, the source code, right? There's nobody checking the source code. Nobody would know, for example, if there were some ballots that were dropped off that were just taken away in a truck and nobody counted them. Nobody would know. Nobody would know if there were fake ballots

if they got away with it, if nobody noticed. Now, I'm not making any of these claims. I'm just saying it would be extraordinary if everything in the world was broken, but all 50 elections run by different entities that are political by nature, and their sub, you know, their precincts, were all done correctly.

What are the odds of that in America in 2023? I'd agree, but it strikes me as maybe a true but trivial point only in the sense that the general corruption of everything could lead to an election being rigged anyway, right? You need specific, if you're going to have a specific allegation of a specific conspiracy, you always need sufficient evidence of that specific conspiracy rather than the general point that there's corruption everywhere, which I agree with. Can I get in? Sure, go ahead, Nolan.

Yeah, so I don't actually accept the premise. There is corruption in all these things you've mentioned, but all the while in every one of those cases, like for instance the financial crisis, there were smart people making evidence-based cases that things were going bad, that the story we were being told is not what's really going on. And they had real evidence. And in every one of these cases, the truth began to build up and build up. And then the lid came off on some element of corruption, which really doesn't mean the entire – everything is corrupt, but there is – there were examples of corruption in all these cases.

In the election, the first question in my mind would be, well, what about the polls? I mean the polls have a certain margin of error. Did we see something that would give us some reason to think, to even consider that there would be corruption given that the elections came out pretty much along the lines that the polls came out? of an enterprise which would require quite a few people to be involved in one way or another has come forward and this is you know the classic case against conspiracy theories is that you just can't get that many people to keep these kinds of secrets for this amount of time so those would be my differences yeah that used to be a good rule of thumb that you couldn't make this many people keep a sickly that bad but we just watched 97 percent or whatever of professionals agree with absolute complete bullshit about masks and vaccinations and boosters and immunity and everything else so we saw that if if anybody can get a choke point which is we pay you guys they can control the entire narrative. Look at the hoaxes that I mentioned.

Look at all the people who pushed the, and still do, the fine people hoax. Entire networks, hundreds and hundreds of people, and none of them broke ranks, and we know that's a lie. The drinking bleach thing, nobody broke ranks. The entire left world stayed unified, while the right largely debunked it, but it didn't make any difference. Look at climate change. Climate change used to be a strong argument. 97% of the

scientists agree. But once you find out that they're just agreeing because the other scientists told them to, and they know they can't get funding, they can't get jobs, suddenly getting 97% of people to agree goes from almost impossible to trivially easy. You just say you can't make money if you disagree. That's it. I get it, but I need a single solid fact. One solid fact would be a lot. Hold on. If you have a transparent system where you can basically see how everything works and there doesn't seem to be anything that looks illegal, you could assume there probably isn't. If you have an opaque system

where by its design it can't be checked, did you see there was any point during the process where anybody said, can we look at the code? Can we track one person's vote from the beginning to find out they got completed? Can we count the number of people who thought they voted and compare it to the number of votes we actually got? Now, those would be closer to something like a complete audit.

Whenever you have a situation, and you'll never find an exception, where there's a big complicated thing, could be the financial markets, could be anything complicated, a lot of people involved, and that allows that some of them are bad, because it's a lot of people. And you have a huge incentive to

cheat if you could get away with it. Under those conditions, you will get fraud 100% of the time. That is, I just described our election system. So the thing that I don't know, which is fair, is I don't know if it's happened yet. I don't know if it happened sporadically.

I don't know if it happened maybe in some precinct that didn't make any difference to the outcome. But I do know that when you said you would notice it by the outcome, it would be sort of obvious. Not in the situation where it's really razor thin. Because our polling is not accurate enough to tell a razor thin difference. That's not a thing. So the polling argument I would discard, but I would replace with it the bellwether precincts. So there's some precincts that you

can just guarantee are going to go one way or another, and they didn't. And this was the first time. Now, there is a reason for that. An alternate explanation is that the Democrats were really good in a totally legal way of getting, let's say, more ballot boxes and stuff like that. And it might have been just a Trump is an outlier, pandemic has never happened before, they did a good job, so you got a result that could not have been predicted the way you normally predict the bellwether areas. And the down ballot votes as well. So what would you put the odds at? Well, the odds that the election system will be rigged at some point in our modern history is 100 percent.

I agree with that. If you can't audit it, then somebody's going to game it sooner or later. For sure. And the incentive to do it this time was not like any other time because half the country had been told that they were dealing with Hitler, not a normal candidate. If you put me in a position to manage an election, let's say every other time I've played it straight.

No cheating. I'm not even rounding off any edges. I'm just playing it straight. And then you say, the guy who's running this time, and he has a really good chance of winning, is literally Hitler. What do I do? I cheat.

So you can turn everybody into a cheater if your brainwashing is powerful enough to say, if you don't cheat, you're electing Hitler. That's sort of on you. If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, wouldn't you do it? Yeah, I would strangle that baby in its crib. If I could stop the Holocaust, I could literally pick up a baby, an actual baby, and strangle it. If I knew for sure I was stopping the Holocaust. I don't even think I'd have a bad dream over it. I'd be happy with myself

that I strangled that baby. The ADL is not going to believe you when you say that. By the way, I do a better job than the ADL does of debunking anti-Semitism, but we could talk about that later. Go ahead, Coleman. I don't want to get too hung up on this, but I think at the risk of making the whole podcast about this, we should just move on. But I think you made a point a few minutes ago, which I thought

was a good one. And it's one you've made on your podcast, one I've made on my podcast as well, which is, which experts are the real experts and which experts are the fake experts? Because I think at this point, anyone who listens to my podcast and has heard me talk about the so-called race experts and just as a parenthetical, you keep referring to the very fine people hoax. If anyone doesn't remember that, the specifics of that, if you go after Trump said there were very fine people on both sides, literally like 15 seconds after that in the speech, he says, but the white supremacists or the neo-Nazis, I condemn them completely. That's close to an exact quote. So the very fine people, he was talking about the other factions that may have been there to defend the statue. So this is like, you know, like seventh grade English reading comprehension. It was clear what he didn't mean. So yes, so there are a million things like that. And yet the journalists and the race experts just consistently get things like that wrong. On the other hand, there is such a thing as realized, you really should trust the experts because they know more than you, very likely, about how the planets move around the sun and so forth.

And they tend not to have any dog in the fight politically, and they tend not to be paid off by factions. But when you get onto any political topic, the quality of utterances by experts goes down by orders of magnitude. But to be fair, even the experts who are not talking about politics or these types of topics, there was a study done of scientific papers, and fewer than half of them,

even after they pass peer review, which is supposed to give us some comfort, doesn't. Fewer than half of them turn out to be true later. We're living in a time when the Big Bang was just questioned. Somebody said, we found a universe or a galaxy or something that just can't exist if the Big Bang is what we said it was. And so now we're like, hmm. And then we hear simulation theory, which would debunk evolution. Now, when I was a kid, if you told me

that evolution and the Big Bang would have some serious questions about them when I was an adult, I wouldn't have imagined. So I would add that when money is involved, if somebody's being paid for a study, they're just the marketing department of the pharma company or whoever paid them to do the study. That's what studies are. They're just marketing for some product half the time. But when there is no politics, they're far more likely to be right. But let's keep that in perspective. Far more likely means there's a 30% chance if it's something new. If it's something that's been around for a long time and it's been tested really well. But then you still have the Big Bang.

It may not be what we thought it was after all this time. So I'm way more skeptical than the average public on science. Yeah, I know you are. I think I am as well. I don't know if I'm quite as skeptical as you, but I'll just tell one story of the moment I became far more skeptical is when I was an undergrad at Columbia and I was doing a kind of assistant work for a philosophy professor, which was my major. And we were doing a study where we asked people a series of questions of what they would

do in a certain scenario and the whole point of this was to we got this very interesting answer that people had one moral intuition about what was the right thing in one case but in a similar case they kind of had a different intuition it was sort of like a trolley problem-esque scenario and if you change one variable people have a different intuition. It was sort of like a trolley problem-esque scenario. And if you change one variable, people have a different intuition. And then that becomes interesting because it doesn't look like they should change their answer. So we got the interesting result once. And so we, you know, this professor wanted to do the study again and tweak it to do a follow-up study. The problem is the initial result didn't replicate,

right? We didn't get the interesting result. We got the boring result. And this professor turns to the, you know, the psych grad student who was really running point and says, well, why can't we just do it again? We've gotten this results other times, right? And to his credit, this psych grad student said, no, that's not how it works. And the professor was becoming visibly frustrated. And of course, it was the highest status person in the room, visibly frustrated with the fact that we couldn't repeat the study and throw out this result. And the psych, the grad student held ground and and it didn't go through but the fact that this professor didn't understand that simple norm of research was it was eye-opening for me and i think status alone status alone is is a reason why people can fudge results and and throw away

the null results and so forth and we know about this from the replication crisis. But also, don't we have to allow, I mean, I'm sure the greatest heart doctor, greatest cardiologist in history has misdiagnosed a few. And if you focus on that, you might want to call his expertise into question. But certainly his batting average is way better than everyone else's. He's still an expert. I think the experts will never be infallible, and you have to find a way to put that in perspective.

I don't know what the batting average we expect them to have is, but it can't be 1,000. Yeah, you have to look to how old is the knowledge. The older it is, the more likely it's true. And you have to look at the money and the motivation, et cetera. So I think where I red-pilled myself was when I worked for a big corporation, worked for a big bank, and then I worked for the phone company. And my job was to do financial analyses

that would predict where we'd be in five years based on some project. So it was just the project, not the company. And I was well aware what my boss wanted the outcome to be. If he wanted to upgrade his computers, I needed to show that that would work. And if I ran my numbers and it didn't work, I had to rerun them again. It changed my, tweaked my assumptions, you know, changed my discount rate a little bit, changed the amount of time, make an assumption about, you know, what would it be worth to resell the old equipment at the end, which, you know, nobody could possibly know. So I would just tweak the assumptions until my boss got what he wanted. In my banking career, I actually went to a senior

vice president one time and said, hey, you asked me to do this report. I did the report, but I have to tell you that the data is so unreliable that it's just random. It's useless. But I did it. And he said, that's great. I'll use that. And I said, but did you hear the part about where it's random? It's useless. He said, no, I'm just going to use it when it agrees with what I wanted to do. So if there was a manager he needed to fire, he would look at my report, and if it said the manager was doing great on the report, he wouldn't mention it.

But if it said he was doing poorly, he'd say, well, that's why I'm firing you. Look at this report. So that's the way data works in the real world, in a real corporation. I was talking to somebody who was just below the president of the corporation. Yeah, I mean, so I think I've noticed... Sorry, go ahead. No, you want to go ahead? No, no, I think that's right.

I see it in my own business too. Go ahead. Yeah, and I see it in mine too in terms of whenever a business gives you a projection chart, you can basically close your eyes and call bullshit on it. I don't think you can ever go wrong in that scenario. And I think – It's such bullshit. I'm sorry to say it's such bullshit that when various – when I've been involved in certain deals and they've asked me for like a business plan or they've asked me for projections, I tell them I don't have the nerve to give it to you because it's going to be bullshit.

You know, I don't even want be bullshit I can't bear to do it I almost lose respect for someone who asks if you ask me for my past numbers that is a legitimate ask but if you ask me for but I think that's the through line Scott if I'm to ask what is the through line

between the Dilbert comics and your media analysis it is kind of I don't want to say extreme but it's like more cynicism than people are used to but presented with a smile and a laugh is that right?

It's funny when you make that observation you just connected something in my mind that I can't let go go I always wondered what philosophy majors would imagine they would do for a living it's like the perfect major for being a podcaster well you're perfect yeah like you just connected two parts of my work like philosophically and I'm not sure that was obvious to other people so you're in exactly the right place.

But yes, to your observation, primarily Dilbert and also my other work is about the illusions of truth. And there's somebody always pushing an illusion of truth and what's really behind it. Yeah, that's behind all of my work. That's correct. So there was one other question I wanted to ask you about, and this is something you spoke about last week, I think, on your live stream, which is how left-wing hoaxes work as opposed to how right-wing hoaxes work. And one of the reasons I think you're an interesting commentator is because in contrast to most people which are purely partisan, you acknowledge that there are hoaxes on both sides

and see you're interested in how they tend to work differently and they do tend to work differently. So if you recall that, can you give a little summary of the difference between right-wing and left-wing media hoaxes? Yeah. The left-wing hoaxes appear to be coordinated across multiple entities. So you might have an intelligence group, let's say with the Hunter laptop thing,

or with Russia collusion. So you'll have some entity that might be intelligence. You'll have some entity that might be intelligence. You might have an entity that's the DNC. You might have them working with their media contacts to fill bumps of the world to get the world out.

Then they'll do the thing where they'll say, it's not me saying it. Look at the Washington Post. They're the ones who say it. I'm just repeating it. So they do this thing where they validate each other. And then they've got the ADL and the SPLC or whatever it is, the fact checkers as well, that look like, to the public, they look like independent watchdogs and trying to keep us from being racist and trying to make sure the facts are true. But it turns out they're just Democrat operative industries. So they've created essentially a machine that can push any level of non-truth to their own audience

and make sure that all the connected parts will agree with it. So they look entirely scripted. It looks like somebody in some kind of control position is telling everybody, all right, here's the lie of the day. Everybody support this. That's what it looks like. That's just observational. I'm not behind the curtain.

But if you look at what is the Republican BS, it almost always seems to trickle up from a QAnon person or there was this one meme somebody saw that wasn't real. It starts with individuals, and then other individuals say, oh, yes, that looks real. And then it kind of bubbles up until somebody in Congress says it. And then everybody on the left mocks them for

saying it because it was ridiculous. That's the real difference. And I think the difference is that the Republicans would play it the same way if they could control all these other entities. So apparently they're not controlling intelligence groups. They're not controlling most of the media landscape. They've got a nice chunk, but they don't control the big part. And I think if they did, and the ADL was a Republican group, and all these other fact-checkers were Republican groups, then maybe the Republicans would run ops. But they just don't have that mechanism.

Yeah, I think I think so one thing I've noticed just from commentating at CNN which is very much part of the mainstream media blob that you're right to criticize and I don't think careful careful careful go ahead careful

I hope I can say this Careful, careful, careful. Go ahead. Careful. I hope I can say this. So one thing I noticed is a lot of media bias is not the obvious kind of bias. The obvious kind of bias is a neutral observer would, for instance, say there is a hell of a lot of smoke and probably fire to the Hunter Biden, Joe Biden corruption influence peddling scandal. I think a nonpolitical neutral observer would say that. The obvious bias is to say, oh, there's nothing there, and what about Trump? And it's right. The less obvious kind of bias, which I've noticed, is that it's not about what you talk about and how you talk about it. It's about what you don't talk about.

So, for example, I think when – and I can speak to this – when cable news is deciding we've got ten minutes to cover three stories. They will start out with five possible stories. The three stories that they end up actually telling on CNN or MSNBC are invariably, they invariably exclude the ones where the left is being super crazy, right? So I'll give two recent examples of things that just like, you know, end up on the on the on the on the chopping block, I guess. One is, you know, preventing Trump from becoming president using the 14th Amendment. Right. This is something that, you know, if you were to cover it, there's just no fair way to cover it without making it seem like left-wing overreach. And so that story just doesn't end up on CNN or MSNBC. So if you're watching one of those channels, you will just, you'll often see Republicans acting crazy. And

you may get a bit of a biased lens on that craziness. But fundamentally, people are doing what they're doing, what they're doing, and they're saying what they're saying. And you just won't be presented with the examples of people on the left acting crazy. So over the months and over the years, you will form this perception, well, oh, my God, right wingers are just constantly, and did you see this, and did you see that, and you just won't even be seeing the things that people on the far left are doing, and of course the reverse is to some extent true. I don't actually watch Fox News, so I know less about really the mechanics of bias there, but I assume the reverse is true there too. Yeah, I would say in both cases, leaving out stuff becomes the news, so much so,

you know, it becomes the true news. The truth is what got left out. Like, if you can figure out what's missing, you can sometimes piece together what's happening. I'll give you my best example recently. So we all heard that when Hunter Biden asked for the firing of the prosecutor Shokin in Ukraine, that his cover for that, and why that's definitely not corruption, is that there were so many other international European entities who wanted it too. And do you remember your news sources telling you who those people were by name, and then checking with them, did you really want this to happen? If you search for those people, you're going to find, well,

there was a diplomat who said it. Well, what's his name? Well, there was an entity that said it. Who? Well, the other ambassador said it. What's their name? You'll find no names of anybody who agreed with Biden because, I assume, because it's missing, that's the important part, which tells me it's not true. And they have no reason to be anonymous because they'd just be backing up what the vice president said. So why would they keep it a secret?

They should have immediately come public and said, my God, yes, this story is being misquoted everywhere. I've been saying it publicly. This Shokin guy has to go. Just like Biden said, we're on the same page. How easy is it to support the United States when it's unambiguously right? That's the easiest call in the world,

especially if you're getting paid by the United States. If you're an ambassador or something, or of our country, I suppose, but if you're even working with us at NATO or anything else, yes. You want to agree with us when we're unambiguously right. That's the easy one. Nobody did. Okay, so speaking of Biden, I think listeners should go back

and actually listen to the Philip Bump episode with Noam. If they haven't yet, that will give you the context. But I'm pulling this quote, Scott, from your- You'll be watching it at my funeral. Go ahead. This is a quote from your recent book, which when I read it, it was almost eerie the degree to which it described the Philip Bump interview. You write, quote, for example, if you imagined you were a subject matter expert and some non-expert annihilated your opinion in an undeniable way, that would trigger a hallucination. You might hallucinate that your critic is a foreign spy and dismiss them as a troublemaker.

You might hallucinate that you keep answering the question while never doing anything of the sort. A hallucination can take any form, from a false memory to a false belief that the words you're saying make sense, unquote. So that is almost, that is just an uncanny description of what happened with Noam and Philip Bump, and I just thought that would be funny to interject. Yeah, speaking of books, I'm sure you wanted to mention my new book, Reframe Your Brain, available in stores, Changing Lives. But reframing, what I talk about in the new book, helps to understand the cognitive dissonance thing. And it's all related to AI, which is sort of perfect timing for us to understand all this stuff. AI taught us that you can create something like intelligence

just looking at the combination of words that people have spoken in the past about anything. If they use this combination of words more, that's like intelligence. And what hypnotists have known forever is that people think that they're thinking rationally, but they're just using words. And that's something hypnotists have always known. So when AI did it, I was like, oh, what took so long? So once you realize that people are word thinkers and that rationalization is not even...

Or they rationalize after the fact. They're not making decisions based on their rational thinking. They rationalize after they're done. Once you realize that, then everything makes sense. So a Phil Bump may or may not have believed things he was saying. It's hard to say. But his reaction would look the same whether he had ever believed them or not. In both cases there would be consternation and irrational behavior and that's what you saw. Okay, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about the controversy you got into a few months ago

over some comments about race. I think probably because of that, I would assume there are some people in my audience that assume right now that I'm having a friendly conversation with a white supremacist or a white nationalist. And that would be because of comments you made about a Rasmussen poll, which found that 26% of black people disagreed with the statement, quote, it's okay to be white. And 21% weren't sure. Yeah. Sorry. And so you reacted and 53% agreed. Can I read the statement, Coleman?

Yeah, sure, sure. So you said, you know, nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll. Not according to me. According to this poll. Not according to me. According to this poll. That's a hate group. That's a hate group. And I don't want to have anything to do with them.

And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people. Just get the fuck away. So when I first heard this, I knew for a while that you've been saying that kind of thing about how you identified as being black kind of tongue in cheek. So it was hard for me to tell whether you were making like a deep, deeply tongue in cheek point about hypocrisy, the dangers of identity politics, or if you were more deeply serious. just to get it out there you pair it a little bit later with this kind of you know brutal statement and you say i'm also really sick

of seeing video after video of black americans beating up non-black citizens um you know i realize it's anecdotal and you know it doesn't give me a full picture of what's happening. But every damn day I look on social media and there's some black person beating the shit out of some white person. I'm kind of over it. I'm over it. So when I heard that, I had this trace memory of something I read in Wynne Bigley. And the persuasion tip 21 is, quote, when you associate any two ideas or images, people's emotional reaction to them will start to merge over time. So my question became, this feels like tip 21 in action, or is it?

Did you intentionally link the poll results indicating widespread black resentment of white people with black violence against whites is that is that part of what you're trying to do and why would you do that if it is can i answer generally and give you a better answer without yeah of course i'm not trying to avoid that question i think there's just a cleaner way to get to the center of it fast answer however you want of course so um you're aware, you both watch the media enough, that you've seen that news about public figures is never true in its completeness. So maybe somebody said the thing that they said, but the context is missing.

And we're talking about the part of the story that's missing. Did you notice that I got fully canceled and nobody bothered to ask me what was going on? Yes. Like what was behind it? Did that seem unusual to you? Because the first thing you have to understand is that I'm a political figure at the moment.

And now if you follow politics, you knew that. And if you followed enough, you know that I would be one of the most actually influential political people, maybe in the top 20, some would say higher. Now, if you thought I was a cartoonist, you would miss the entire context, because the cancellations were almost entirely from Democrats, who would be well aware that they were taking a player off the field. So, and we're in the period working up to an election where you're just seeing one person after another being identified for destruction, especially if they're in the political realm.

So if you knew that the context was, as far as I know, no Republicans canceled me. There were a lot of them who said you shouldn't have said that. That was very offensive. But it was meant to be offensive. So the first thing you should know is intended to be maximum offensive. Then the next thing you should ask is, why the hell would you do that? Why would you try to be that offensive? Now, obviously, I was aware of it. It wasn't an accident. Here's the context. And the larger context is things that I talked about a lot prior to that day, but also since then. And now you can tie them all together. The context was, and is, that in a world in which DEI, CRT, and ESG

are dominant, let's say, themes, the population is being taught that there are oppressors and there are victims. If you're on the group that has been branded the oppressor, you should get out of that environment. And that would apply to anybody of any color. So in the current situation, it wouldn't make sense ever, in my opinion,

to discriminate against any individual for race or religion or gender or any of that. So I wouldn't discriminate or advocate it in friendship. I wouldn't advocate it in romance. I wouldn't advocate any discrimination in employment, getting loans, all the basic stuff. But there is one category where discrimination is not only allowed, it's the only smart thing to do, and that's self-defense. In the realm of self-defense, you can discriminate as much as you want. For example, if you were going to hire a babysitter

and you had a choice of a 16-year-old girl or a 35-year-old single man, would you discriminate? Of course you would. Most people would. And it's pure discrimination. But most people would say, oh, you're trying to keep your kid alive. I get that.

So in the context of protecting yourself, you can make larger protective decisions, and they're completely ethical and moral, and doesn't mean that you would discriminate against any individual. So having nothing to do with anybody's DNA, that's not part of the conversation. Having nothing to do with what somebody looks like, their color, nothing to do with the conversation. What does have to do with the conversation. What does have to do with the

conversation is that a segment of the population has been, let's say, programmed, because we're all programmed in different ways, but one segment, the black segment of the population, has been programmed to see themselves as victims, rightly so, and to see the white people as aggressors or oppressors, historically, rightly so. But if you're in that environment and you're white, you're going to get fucked, and you should know that. And if you're a black man in America and you want things just to be better, as we all do, you should know that. You should know that white people see black Americans as being weaponized by this programming, which has nothing to do with being black,

has nothing to do with anybody's DNA or their chromosomes, has to do with how society is organizing itself. It's pinning people against each other. So if you can't stop that, and most individuals can't, you should get away from it. Let me give you a perfect example. By the way, nobody believes the examples I'm going to give you, so I know in advance the viewers will be like,

I don't think that's true. My first career at a bank was ended because I'm white, and I was told that directly. My boss called me in, who was white, and said, the order has come down that we don't have diversity in senior management, so we can't promote you because you're white. And I said, well, how long is that going to last? And they said, well, don't know. I mean, it took 200 years to get to this point where we don't have diversity. It's not going to be overnight that we fix it. So I quit. And I said, well, okay, if you're telling me directly I don't have a career here, I'll quit. So I quit. Went to work at the phone company and

got put on a management fast track because I was working on my MBA. I checked all the boxes. And after a couple of years there, my boss called me in his office and he said, we just got in a lot of trouble from the press because we don't have diversity in this company at senior levels. So until further notice, white men are just not going to be promoted. Again, it was a white man who told me. And he wasn't guessing. He was telling me that that was the order. Same with the bank. It was an order. He was just following the order.

And so that's when I quit working hard at the phone company and decided to become a cartoonist because I thought, well, I wouldn't be subject to this stuff. So I become a cartoonist, and things went so well that I started a TV show. UPN had a Dilbert animated TV show. It was running on Mondays, and it did well the first two half seasons, well enough to be renewed for the second half season.

And about halfway through, UPN decided that they were going to turn Monday into a block of African-American content that was also funny. So it was going to be the humorous black programming block. So that required my Dilbert show that was not in that vein to be removed from its good time slot. And if you know much about TV, you know that moving a time slot usually will kill the show. It's almost death to a show you move a time slot. So that's what happened. So that's now three careers I've lost for being white.

Because if I'd been black and the content had been black, it would have stayed where it was. Then, as you know, I recently got cancelled worldwide for cartooning and also for publishing. All of my books were removed. And ask yourself, if I had said exactly what I said, for cartooning and also for publishing. All of my books were removed. And ask yourself, if I had said exactly what I said, but I'd been black, would I have been cancelled?

And the answer is, not a chance. Not a chance. So that's how dangerous it is to be a white professional in a situation in which people see you as the problem and something must be done to you to fix the problem. Okay, so you have been treated badly at the hands of white people. Right. So, again, if we look to who's to blame, is it the white people or the black people,

by far it was white people who discriminated against me on behalf of what they thought they were doing for other people. But by far. In fact, in my entire life, I don't believe I've ever even had a whiff of discrimination from anybody black. I can't think of any time that's ever happened. But I've been discriminated against viciously

by white people. Right. But you got angry it seemed to me. And then you brought up the case of violence by blacks on whites. And in your response, to be fair, you said, if you know a high, if you know a population, an identifiable population

has a high level of disregard for you, you should stay away. And who would go on the side of disregard for you, you should stay away. And who would go on the side of saying, yes, you should hang around with people who have a bad opinion of you. But, you know, I have to say that I don't know if I even agree with that because my whole life, I established good relationships with people who I knew came from cultures who had a bad opinion of me. I had a lot of very meaningful relationships with Arabic people who for sure... Hold on, hold on, hold on. I have to stop you. Sure. We agree that on an individual level, friend, hiring, loans, loving, no discrimination, right? We're only talking about it at a population level. Go. So what does it mean to stay away from black people? Well, see, this is where hyperbole comes in.

Did anybody think that was a serious recommendation? No, so I actually did. I did at first. But how would you do it? This is the point. That's why I brought in the other thing. I wouldn't have thought it was serious if it wasn't punctuated by this anger about these real cases of violence and these videos where you say I'm overseeing white people being beaten up by black people. And that point I said, well, actually this is ringing true because those are real incidents. And now you're saying stay away from black people and they're both in the same package. And I said this – I thought this guy's losing his temper you know right so the the the videos of

people being beaten up the question that i provocatively asked is that this is clearly out of context it's not like a scientific study of who's who's being bad to whom you know we're being fed this basically a racist view of stuff from racists. Most of those videos were just being brought up by racists. A lot of them were old. They weren't even things from the last 10 years. So after a while you say, oh, wait a minute, we're being fed a narrative. So at the same time, and I think I said it in the quote that you read,

I was aware that I was being fed a narrative, but unfortunately the narrative was working even though I knew I was being said it in the quote that you read. I was aware that I was being fed a narrative, but unfortunately the narrative was working even though I knew I was being fed it. And the question that I asked is, where are the videos of the Asians beating up black people? Where are the videos of the white people just attacking black people randomly? Well, hold on.

I have to finish this point. I will take no interrupting on this point. Go ahead, go ahead. Sorry. The larger theme was that a segment of the population is being taught that there's a victim and an oppressor class. Under that situation, whether or not any of those videos were telling you something true you should be able to predict that there would be an uptick in random violence against a group that

is identified as the problem now the fact that you don't see it the other way would further suggest that for example asian americans have not been weaponized to see black people as the problem and they have to act on it in some way. So how people are programmed is the key here. It's not about their color, and it's not about their DNA, and certainly not about any one person individually interacting with another, because that's just got to be on an individual basis. But how many people would want to live

in a dense, urban, black area with high crime? And I think what I said, and you didn't say this in the quote, is I said that there's a correlation between being poor and black and crime that has more to do with the poor part. So if there were a dangerous white neighborhood, I'd tell you to stay out of it. If there's a dangerous white neighborhood, I'd tell you to stay out of it. If there's a dangerous black neighborhood, I'll tell you to stay out of it.

So that part's the least interesting part of what I said, because nobody disagrees with the point that you should stay away from dangerous places. If I left something out, then I'm going to have to apologize and make sure I include it afterwards. I didn't mean to leave anything out, and maybe in my haste I did.

I don't think I did. But let me ask you this. In another incident, I don't know what the incident was, but I saw, just by coincidence, a bit of your podcast. We went nuclear about something on Twitter, I think. That was your word, nuclear. And you said something really interesting, and the only reason I'm going to ask you about it is because you said it on your show,

so I feel I can ask you about it you said that you have manic episodes and then from time to time you go nuclear fueled by some sort of mania is that is that part of this story in any way i think the mania story was related to creativity it wasn't related to creativity? It wasn't related to anger? No, it was, you said one of the side effects is that on Twitter, by now you know my pattern. If somebody starts a damaging false rumor about me, I usually go nuclear on it until I can draw more attention to the correction than the original claim. So what I'm trying to do is light all the kindling I can, get everybody as mad as possible, provoke everybody,

draw as much energy toward me. And so yesterday I was just responding to every troll and I was swearing at them, but I was just having fun. But this was all in the context of how these manic episodes manifest

and i and i actually thought i said this to call him and i said well maybe he just losing his shit when he said that no i actually uh when when i when i go off online i know exactly what i'm doing and i know what the ramifications of it are no i, I've never done anything that later I said, ooh, I shouldn't have said that because I was in a bad mood. But it is true that I have manic what I think. I mean, I'm not a doctor, so it feels like I have manic periods that will last about a week in which my creativity and energy just go through the roof. I can just create all kinds of stuff.

But it's usually not the manic thing is not associated with anger. Separately, things could make me angry. But I don't think the manic part's part of that. Look, I think Coleman and I agree on the following that, and I'm sorry, Coleman, if you want to say that, that identity politics is, it's maybe the only thing we have to worry about in this country. I mean, I know the left says there's so many terrible things,

but actually we have so much reason to be optimistic and more optimistic than any other nation on earth. The only thing that can ruin this country is identity politics. It's what makes other countries come apart. Klauswitz could well have said that war is identity politics by other means. This is what's going to – so you feel like – Can I solve it for you? an obligation of citizenship or patriotism, you know, to really be extremely careful how they communicate how we should all be reacting to these things. Because you don't want to put fuel on the fire like I would accuse Tucker Carlson of doing.

You defended him, too. But go ahead. Go ahead. Answer what you wanted to answer. So this gets back to why did I make such a big provocative statement. The point was to draw attention to me, so that on this topic I would have a bigger voice, because who's going to invite me to talk on this topic, right? So I thought, well, if I offend enough people, I can get enough eyeballs for what I call a reframe. So this is something I've been working on for several years,

and I was getting ready to announce it about the same time as my reframe book. I thought this would all come together, and the book would come out, and I would give you a reframe for racism to fix it. Will you accept my challenge that I'm going to fix racism right now in front of you? Drum roll, please. Come on.

Let's do it. Everybody who tells you that you should compare the average of one group to an average of another, similar to what I did in my provocative statement, they're not on your side. Because there's nobody who's average. We're all individuals. If you reframe from comparing averages,

which made a lot of sense when things were much worse, because that was pure discrimination, right? But when you get to the point where things are within spitting distance of equity, let's say, you have to change the rules, because you're in a whole new ballgame. And the reframe that works is to change from comparing groups, which does not give you a solution other than taking some money from one and giving it to the other, then that's not really a good solution. Instead, reframe it as individuals who have individual needs for success.

So, for example, if you gave me a 10-year-old black kid in a bad situation, and I could spend two days with that kid, and I could teach them reframes, how to think of success, what are the tools of success, how does anybody become successful, especially starting from a bad situation. Everybody who is successful does it the same way. Black Americans have a special problem

that makes something unavailable to them that's available to everyone else, and it's imitation. The way that I got successful is I, at a very young age, I said, how do people become successful? And I would study all the successful people. I'd read their books, I'd read the newspaper articles, I'd ask my parents, you know, what makes this work? Until I had assembled enough, you assembled enough rules of personal success that I could go from a very low, modest income home to a good life.

Now, I put those in a book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and then Reframe Your Brain is even a tighter summarization of some of that. So I'm also working with Joshua Lysak on a student guide that would be rules of basically the simple laws of success, how to favor systems over goals, why you should build a talent stack, why following your passion isn't necessarily the best idea. So a very practical guide to be successful. And if we can shift people's thinking from the average of one group to the average of another, and nobody's average, it doesn't help you. You can shift that to what

does each person need and how do we get it to them individually, then you're in a much better shape. Because you can't get rid of systemic racism by talking about it. You can't even get people to agree what it is and like that would help. It wouldn't. It's kind of nothing you can do to make it quickly better. But you can take any individual and make them slice through it like it didn't exist. Take me. I'm short and bald and nearsighted,

which in the business world is a gigantic disadvantage. If I could look like you, Coleman, I would be like a god walking into a – because you're a good-looking guy. How tall are you? Thank you. Thank you, Scott. Not tall. I'm like 5'6", 5'7". Well, so you've heard that the tall people have advantage in the corporate world, right? I've heard that, but I've also seen an article that says that sometimes attractive men get penalized in the corporate world because of envy. I saw one article that said that. I have no idea if it's true.

I could see that happen at some level. I didn't have to worry about that. That wasn't one of my big concerns. But here's my point. If I take a, let's say, a 21-year-old college graduate, a white person or a black person, I would give them separate advice that would make both of them succeed. I'd tell the white person, you know, you might want to be an entrepreneur because if you go into corporate America, you might have the experience I had, which is the corporation doesn't have enough diversity, and they're really going to try to get it because it means a lot to them.

So if you're there, you're not going to be their first choice. So maybe look at starting your own thing. If I had a black college student who was looking to start out, I'd say, go to any big corporation. You're going to be at the top of their list because they're just thirsty for real diversity of people who are qualified. You can walk right into that job. Then you would use your corporate experience to pick up as many skills as you can so that someday you'd have the option of leaving and starting your own business. So I would give that kind of advice to both of them.

My guess is that if you're a 10-year-old black kid in America, somebody's telling you that you won't succeed as easily because there will be discrimination. What you should be taught is there's discrimination everywhere. It's not going to go away, but you should go where it works for your favor. Why would you go where it doesn't work in your favor? Which is essentially

the same advice I would give to anybody. So if you're in a situation where the general situation is not favorable to you, but there's another situation right next to it where it is in your favor, maybe unfairly, go there. For your individual success, you should look for all the unfairness you can find and surf it. You should be using it, not running away from it, because everybody's got their own little pocket where their advantage works. So that's the reframe. The reframe is, as long as you're comparing averages,

you're falling for somebody else's game, grifters, politicians, people trying to manipulate your opinion. But if you're making it possible, and that's what the student guide would hope to do, making it possible for individuals to put together skills, how much is systemic racism going to bother you if you come with a package of skills? It'll be there, but it'll be like it didn't exist.

You just slice right through it. Coleman, you got something? Yeah. So, I mean, I definitely couldn't agree more in terms of not looking at averages. I think we focus far too much on average statistics. Every other article I read is comparing black outcomes on some measure to white outcomes on some measure and implying or directly stating that the gap is due to racism when, you know, I think, you know, you need only read one of Thomas Sowell's 20 books on the subject, but I think most people who are paying attention rationally know that you cannot actually infer anything from an outcome gap of that kind. And it creates, it does prime you as a black person to envy and distrust and dislike and feel that you are owed from white people. And I think one of my arguments, and this is really one of Thomas Sowell's

arguments, has been, you know, show me a single example from anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world of a multi-ethnic society where you have a poor minority group that goes from poverty to affluence via the method that is being advertised for black Americans. In other words, asking the government for racial preferences, asking for special treatment, and then, you know, lying about the fact that it's in fact special treatment. Find me one example of this working. I don't think you can, and if you can, I could counter with 50 examples of groups that rose from poverty to affluence via the sort of conservative route of, you know, doggedly pursuing either entrepreneurship or education,

no excuses, personal responsibility, etc. And you can feel however you want to feel about those strategies. But you you can't really tell me that one has a better scorecard than the other or that one doesn't have a better scorecard than the other historically or or worldwide but so so here here's the trap that we fall into so easily when when you said that that was sort of a conservative worldview, you know, the work on yourself and make yourself successful, as soon as we label it that, it's unavailable to black Americans because they're going to be like, well, no, we're not doing this conservative thing,

we don't like Trump or whatever they're going to say. But if you were to say, it doesn't matter if you're left or right, forget the politics, personal success is the same set of tools. I wouldn't call them conservative in the least because the richest liberals use exactly the same tools. Look, can I say something, Coleman? I bought a lot of your books and I've recommended them to people. I bought them for people. I even, your new book, Reframe, I put it on my 10-year-old's bed a few days ago because he's very precocious, but he has a lot of anxiety. Coleman knows him. And I think this notion of reframing can really, really help him with some of the things that bother him. All of which is to say that the reason I'm focused on this is because I want to resolve it

for myself that somebody I have not only intellectually admiring of you, but unique, you know, unique between the eyes insights that I've never gotten from anyone else. And so I do want to understand the whole picture. And it could just come down to me just fundamentally disagreeing with you, which I'm very able to do. And I think it's my superpower is that I can have really good relationships with people that I really, really don't agree with on things. But I do want to say that I'm having trouble with all that. The Tucker Carlson thing where he talked about fighting like white people, and he said more than that,

and if you look at the whole text message or email, whatever it was, he also is being introspective about his own kind of bad outlook on things. But what that seemed to me to be a blaring communication of is that he sees himself as part of the white identity. And, you know, in my lifetime, only Nazis saw themselves as part of a white identity. The rest of us saw ourselves as Italians or Poles or Jews or whatever. And this is a man who's always gone on TV and kind of denied that and said that was a terrible thing. And if you're not careful, this is what will happen. And that would be the worst thing that ever could happen to America is to create a white identity. And then in a private moment, it just jumps out that actually the first thing he thinks about when he sees a white guy kicking the shit out of somebody

in an underhanded way is, or three white guys is that that's not the way white people fight now if I heard a Jew saying that I would say to myself well, Jew to Jew we know what the world has done to us

so he would be commenting on, listen knowing what people have done to us we shouldn't't be behaving that way. No Jew should fight that way because we should know better. That's not the way I read Tucker Carlson's thing. The way it read to me was other people fight that way, but we're better than they are. And the animals fight that way. And you didn't see it that way. And this is the last difficult question I want to ask you, but I would never forget myself if I didn't put that to you.

And maybe you'll convince me that I'm wrong. You'll reframe me in some way. So go ahead. But why are you asking me about Tucker Carlson? What's I got to do with it? Because you had defended him, and you had a tweet on your show too. You said – and also, of course, obviously people – your detractors will bring this up as another knock against you and refer to the first thing we talked about.

So in your tweet, you said, shoo on the other foot test, which I guess is a Dershowitz reference. If a black man said in a private message, that's not how black men fight, it would not be news. Same with Asians, Hispanics, etc. Obviously, the attack on Tucker is based on his race. What is it when you attack someone based on race, meaning like the attack on Tucker was racist? And I just don't think it is. I think the attack on Tucker is pointing out that he sees himself as part of the white identity. And for a guy like me, this is the kind of guy I want to run directly away from,

because as I said, whether it's white people or black people, this is the most dangerous intellectual movement we have in this country. This will be the end of us, especially if white people see it that way. So I hope it didn't sound like I was embracing his comment. I was simply saying I wouldn't have minded it from anybody else. So if I wouldn't have minded it from somebody else...

Go ahead, Colin. I think, Scott, that you're right to point out there's a double standard here. There's a double standard, namely if I said in a text privately, that's not how black men fight, I don't think that my career would be over, I wouldn't get canceled.

Whereas if a white person, and even to your point, Noam, to a point, Noam, even if we meant the analogous thing by it, even if my comment was actually a comment about black superiority. Yeah, but you are black. But you are black. You see yourself as black.

Correct. But I'm saying, yeah, there's a mirror image. I want to acknowledge that there's a double standard, even in the mirror image scenario. What bothers me is that whenever you have a double standard, there's the further question, which direction should we collapse it in, right? Should we collapse it in the direction of what Tucker said should be okay because it would be okay if a black person said it? Or should we collapse it in the direction of really stigmatizing all such expressions of racial tribalism and racial disdain for other races. My general viewpoint has been outside of a comedy club where I think anything that's funny goes. In terms of public statements, and it's worth saying this was not a public statement, certainly we should collapse all the double standards in the direction of stigmatizing race-based hatred across the board. Can I answer, and then the last thing I say,

I think that you've identified what is a very common logical fallacy where somebody points out the same thing that someone else does, and rather than understanding, well, then it shouldn't be right no matter who, that that's the problem, that the other people would get away with it, rather than you should let this person get away with it. You're right, except I don't, in this particular case, I don't see the double standard as the main issue here. What I see as the main issue here is that Tucker Carlson identifies himself as a white ethnic,

as his ethnicity is white and his culture is whiteness. That's not the way white people fight. And that to me is unacceptable and especially unacceptable because he denies it. If he owned it and said, that's the way I see it, then I'd listen with an open mind for whatever it is. But the fact that it's a big lie

and in a private moment, he felt like a white person. And then you have to plug that into everything else he said, which can be taken one way or another depending on what benefit of the doubt you want to give him about where he's coming from, right? Very often I hear Tucker Carlson say things that I do agree with, but now I'm hearing them differently when I know he sees himself as a white person first.

So that's all I have to say. All right. So let me push back on that a little bit. First of all, there's a little bit of mind reading with your interpretation. And I always reject the mind reading if the mind reading gets to a point where the subject looks bad. Okay. I reject that totally. Number two, to your question about which way to collapse it

I love that question and the way you put it I would collapse toward free speech and being lighter with each other in terms of what we take seriously let me give you an example a few years ago there was a black woman who was a big fan of my show, and she said something about white stereotypes. And so I laughingly said, well, what are some white

stereotypes? And she said, you like to eat cheese. I laughed for 20 minutes, because I never thought of that, that white people like to eat cheese. I don't even know if it's true. I don't know. Do white people eat more cheese than other people? But I knew I liked cheese. It might be true. Western Europeans are the least lactose intolerant population on earth. Although I'm not sure what kind of cheese is that might matter. So when I heard that, it was sort of a race-based thing, but it was also silly. When I hear Tucker Carlson say white people don't fight like that, to me that's just silly, because obviously some white people fight like that. To say that, I don't know how you take that seriously

like you would take a real racial insult. I would like you, Coleman, to be able to insult me at that level and for me to laugh at it, because it would be funny. And if you can get to the point where you're not on each other about the funny stuff, I mean, a better model is men and women, right? So, you know, if somebody says women like to shop or they like their shoes, that's obviously not true for all women, and there are plenty of men who like their shoes. So it would be just this weird little funny thing that nobody should take seriously.

And when somebody says something like, white guys don't fight like that, yeah, to my ears that sounds a little sketch. Like, you know, my eyebrow goes up and I go, what exactly did you mean by that? But number one, if you can't read his mind, you don, you know, my eyebrow goes up and I go, what exactly did you mean by that? But number one, if you can't read his mind, you don't really know. And I don't think he's talked about it. Well, let me read you the sentence right before because I don't think he says jumping a guy like that is dishonorable. Obviously, it's not how white men fight. I don't think it's mind reading. Can I say one thing as well here? I think I share your desire to be able to

lightly hold many kinds of stereotypes. If you were to tell me like black people are good at basketball, that is a stereotype that I could totally laugh at and analogous to the cheese thing, right? It's like no one is, if anything, it's a positive stereotype. And people get too sensitive about even those things. People claim those things are racist, even if it's a positive stereotype. On the other hand, the stereotype of black people as criminals, the stereotype of white people as, say, colonizers, right? Like there's this video, I don't know if you covered this on your show, Scott, from The Cut, which I think is an arm of New York Magazine

or owned by New York Magazine, since taken down, I think it was in 2020 or 21, where they just had a string of, like, 30 people, 30 black people, and the question the interviewer asked all of them was, what are white people superior at? And down the line, they just said things like colonizing, violence, insecurity, so forth. Just all of these, all of the negative perceptions that people of color, you know, have about

white, quote unquote, white oppressors. So those are all negative stereotypes. Those ones are much more difficult to stomach in both directions, and they're often meant seriously. So how is one supposed to take lightly something that is meant seriously? Well, you know, you have to look at every situation individually. Liking cheese, everybody agrees is silly. But talking about one group as a colonizer,

that gets a little more serious. And that gets closer to, do you want to hang around with people who think you're a colonizer? Like, is that comfortable? I mean, it's not very comfortable. So, you know, that's where you have to choose people individually to make sure that individually you're with people you're comfortable about. But I would, personally,

this is just my own where I'm comfortable, I would have no problems joking with a black American citizen who said I was a colonizer. Like in person, I would think that would be a fun conversation. So I wouldn't take

that too seriously. And I think we have to get to the point where the, you know, let's say the bottom 80% of all the stuff we're pretending to get mad about is really just an excuse to give our opinions that we already had about why we're mad about something else. So maybe 80% of all the things we talk about, there are these racial differences. Maybe they're just not important. And maybe 20% we should pay attention to. After my Phil Bump interview, I got an email from a guy who's a producer in MSNBC, who's a friend of mine. And he told me to be wary of opinion capture, I think is the phrase he used, and I was worried about this too. For instance, I had a lot of anxiety, Coleman knows, about doing this interview.

Because you paid me maybe the greatest compliment anyone ever had in my life. And now I want to ask him the tough questions I fantasized about asking you before I was on your radar. How do you avoid that? Do you feel like when it's Tucker Carlson, for instance, do you feel any additional pressure to go easy on him in some way because a lot of the people who follow you might also be fans of his? This is difficult stuff to me anyway. Well, yeah, it's a big problem.

The way I deal with it is uh let's say incompletely by trying to make sure that i do go against things that i know my audience won't like for example my audience thinks that soros is the devil i think there's something else going on like i don't know what it is but to me it doesn't look like some, you know, giant theme for him to take over the world and make money. I don't know what he's up to, but I reject the Soros is the devil. It's all that simple, nothing else to it, part of the Jewish conspiracy. So I don't buy any of that. They do not like that, and it really costs me.

I had different opinions on the pandemic from many of them. I had different opinions on the pandemic from many of them. I had different opinions on a lot of stuff. So there's plenty of stuff that I've challenged them enough and lost followers just immediately that I have a little bit of credibility. So that's all you can do. The only thing you can do is set up a history that has shown you can look at some things objectively and then they'll give you a little bit benefit of a doubt on the new thing. Coleman, you probably struggle with that too. Yeah, I do struggle with it. You know,

especially once you get to know people, there is, um, there's just no easy answer to how to deal with friendship in public with people that you disagree with. I think, frankly, I'm helped in that I'm, I guess I do know a lot of people publicly, but I think I have made a conscious effort not to join any clubs too tightly and to have my own island via this podcast that it makes it easier to disagree with people but that even that doesn't get you totally out of it because you form relationships with people and you you you even feel close to people that you've only spoken to a few times and then all of the psychology of friendship and bias comes online when they say something you disagree with and you pull your punches or you say nothing.

This is, I think, this is just completely, it's like a hazard of the job and there's no simple way of dealing with it. Yeah, I'd love to tell you the answer. I'll give you the best example in my case. I like RFK Jr. because I just like him. So when he says something that, you know, politically I might disagree with the policy, I'm actually conscious of the fact that I've gone easy on him. Right. Me too. So, like, it's in my head and I know it's something I need to fix. So it's sort of an ongoing struggle. It's not something that, you know, you can take a pill and it goes away. Do you have time to go over? I know we're out of time.

I wrote down a few of your reframes. I thought maybe you want to maybe just give a quick takes on them. If we can do it quickly, I do have to run. Which one did you want to? Success requires setting goals. Reframe. Systems are better than goals. Yeah. This is probably the biggest thing I've added to the world

is the idea that you need a system and that your goal, maybe if you had a really narrow thing like winning a bowling tournament, winning is the goal. So that makes sense. But in the big world where everything is changing so quickly, you're changing, the world is changing, if you had one singular goal, by the time you got there, you might not even want it anymore.

It might not be the thing you need to do. AI may have made that job go away. So if you have a system instead, you don't feel bad because you're not at your goal. So first of all, the psychology is better because every day you're working on your system successfully. But you can prepare yourself for a variety of things with a good system. So for example, a good system would go to college and learn business and, let's say, communication. If it turns out you didn't run a business, all that stuff is still useful in

whatever you do, right? So make sure that you're building a system to build toward a goal. That's okay. But make sure if you don't hit the goal, you end up with a whole bunch of skills or a whole bunch of contacts. Maybe you networked with people. Maybe you got a thicker skin.

So you want to make sure that wherever you end up, you personally are worth more, even if the thing you were going for ended up not being worth going for. So that will change your life if you start working on systems. It's amazing stuff. I hope someday that maybe me, you and Coleman will actually get to shoot the shit in person at some point if you ever get to New York because I have so many things about business

and experiences I've had I'd love to tell you about and I'd love to hear your stories. Coleman, did you know he took a job as a computer programmer but he didn't know how to program and experiences I've had, I'd love to tell you about, and I'd love to hear your stories. Coleman, did you know he took a job as a computer programmer, but he didn't know how to program at the time he took the job? Can you imagine the balls? Sorry, I don't know how you sign off, Coleman. Okay, I have one last quick question. One last quick question.

As a hypnotist, I've tried to be hypnotized twice in my life and failed both times. Are there just some kind of people that literally can't be hypnotized, or is it something I'm doing wrong? And keep in mind, these were both group settings. Oh, group hypnosis doesn't work. It doesn't work. Is it a hoax? Is everyone pretending?

Now, let's say you were in an audience for a hypnotist on stage, the hypnotist would do some things to identify the few people, about 20% of the public, who can actually see and feel things that aren't there. The rest of them can get a benefit from hypnosis. So let's say you wanted to reduce your fear of flying. The hypnotist would take you through visualizations, etc., until you were used to it, and then you'd feel better. So that kind of stuff, the normal stuff, just being better at something, less afraid of something, more confident at something,

everybody could get that benefit one-on-one. It doesn't work in a group setting. Because the hypnotist's skill is not just what they say, but observing the individual and how they change, their breathing, their posture and everything. And then you can tell what's working. If you're getting a resistance, you can see it in their face. And if you're not, you do more of it.

So one-on-one is what works. If you're in the 20%, you can see an elephant that isn't there. But if you're in the 80%, you could see an elephant that isn't there. But if you're in the 80%, you could get rid of phobias and perform better. Buy this book for your kids, parents. I think there's not a better book a kid could read. Reframe your

brain. It's written, Scott does not show off his vocabulary, although I'm sure it's extensive. He writes it in order to be understood. And my kids, my son Manny, he read the first two chapters of it and he totally got it. And he was really provoked by it. He was really thinking about it. Prodigy. I do have to run. So if we could sign off Coleman, this has been great. I really appreciate the depth of the conversation. Yeah, me too. Thanks so much, Scott. Thanks, Noam.

Thank you, Scott.