Part One: The Religion War, by Scott Adams (with Matt Lieb)

Robert reads selections from Scott Adams's terrible novels to help unravel the great mystery: who is God, and how can we kill him?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. Legally the only
podcast that you're allowed to listen to under the terms
of the New World Orders. Fucking International Monetary Fund, build
a Berg group, whatever you know it, that's the law.

(00:24):
So hate the Buildeberg Group. Oh see, I don't actually
have a bit ready for this, Mettley. How are we
doing today, Matt? I'm doing great.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
I am right now hidden in my bedroom because my
baby is a cheap on the other side of the
house and I don't want to wake her up with
all of the loud.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Noises that I intend to make. That is fair, now, Matt.
You are if folks are not aware, if our listeners
are to wear You are the host of a number
of podcasts, including a Sopranos podcast called pod Yourself a Gun,
That's right, and the Wire podcast called pod Yourself the Wire.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yes, which you can find on a feed called pod
Yourself a Gun.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
It's nice and confusing.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
If you see Tony Soprano's face and the logo, you
know it's a show about the Wire.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
That's been extremely clear, now, Matt. Both of those titles
are obviously a reference to the intro music for the sopranos.
That's right, which which the refrain is something like woke
up this morning, got yourself a gun. That's right.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Now, guys, what are we doing today? Do we have
a Do we have another Scott Adams book?

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Oh? Yeah, not all that long ago. We did our
deep dive into Scott Adams. We talked about the life
of this man. And he's got a couple of books
that he wrote that he considers to be He thinks
that his cartoons in time will be forgotten, but generations
from now, his novels are what people will remember of him.
He said this. He's gotten the record about this.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Are these graphic novels of Dilbert that were calling books?
Or are these just words? No cartoons?

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yeah, they're just words, and they're they're real short. He says,
they're real short because he wanted something that a person
could read in an afternoon, which is a fine goal
for a book. Normally I consider brevity to be an
example of skill and craft, but in this case it
just means he didn't tell a story right, right right.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
I love starting an offul book with the idea of
like no shorter, shorter, better, shorter, good, less words, more
read fast.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, I'm going to publish like a big three hundred
page book with a fancy title like the Origin of Mankind,
and it's just going to have two words in it.
Just fuck it on page one, empty space the rest
of the time.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Yeah, yeah, like a dick in the middle of it,
and you have to search for the dick and then
when you find it, you win.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yeah, and it's a whole book for like, yeah you can.
You can just like say you finished it in a
day and it out on your desk when people walk
by and be like, I finish this one. Oh boy,
I've been busy.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Yeah yeah, oh me, I've just been reading all these
books here. You have a whole fucking shell filled with them.
People are opening them up and there's nothing in them
except for that dick that they find, and then they
feel like they won.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah. You find the dick, you email it to us,
and you make a sacred pledge never to tell anyone
that there's not an actual book in there. Exactly. Yeah.
It's like Santa Claus. We all do it and we
all benefit. So Matt he wrote these books, the Religion
War being the one that we're going to talk about today,
and they're terrible. And I went back and forth, should

(03:37):
we do a book episode about this? Because another podcast
I really like quite a lot, House of Decline Haus
has done got over both these books with the lovely
Rory Blank as the guest. And there was one other
podcast that did at least one of these books. So
we're not breaking totally new ground here. And I got

(03:59):
kind of like self conscious about that. And then you
know what I said, Matt, what did you say? I said,
who gives a fuck? Dude? That's how I live. That's
that's not what I decided, as.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Someone who does TV would rewatch podcasts of twenty year
old show exactly. I'll let you know. Done doesn't matter.
People need the content they want more.

Speaker 1 (04:20):
This is, this is all. We all have a moral
right and a moral duty to access Scott Adams's terrible
books for free because they're available for free on the
Internet archive. Don't ever spend money on these. Oh, we
are doing no, no, and that's what we're gonna do.
I love it. It's great.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
You know this is nice for me because it's not
a Nazi. Well, okay, let me take that back. I'm
gonna rewind that a little bit it's not that it's
not a Nazi, it's that it's not a guy who
was in the Nazi Party in Germany in the thirties
and forties, and that's that's nice for me.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah. Now, Scott would have loved to be a Nazi,
don't get me wrong, but uh, tragically, I mean, he
probably would have been like Phipps, the cartoonist who did
the illustrations for dere Sturmer, if he'd gotten the chance,
because modern Dilbert is not all that far off.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
But it's mostly just dog birds looking around for some
Laban's realm.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yeah, yeah, he would. He would have used the ill
gotten Nazi gold to build a swimming pool shape like
Dilbert's head instead of just using the money that he
got from Dilbert to make a swimming pool shape like
Dilbert's head.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
He has wit he has a swimming pool shaped like
Dilvert's head.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
That's what he did. Matt. If you if you look
that up, you might find something you don't want to find.
So what I'm going to tell you is, you know,
sometimes it's good to just have faith in things. You know,
these are like this is like you know how the
Holy Spirit the Catholics don't want to tell you what
it is, but you gotta you gotta think it's really
just a big deal. Yeah, it's a big deal. Yeah,
it's like this is like the Holy Spirit. The Dilbert

(05:59):
head swimming pool in Scott Adams's backyard is the Holy
Spirit of making fun of Scott Adams, and you just
have to accept it. In the I believe it.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
I believe it's an article of faith that he has
this Dilbert shaped swimming pool.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
He does have a tower in the back of his
house shape like Dilbert's head. Anyway, Now, I should note
here that The Religion War is actually the second book
in the series, but chronologically it happens before the second book.
We're going to read them in order, which will be
my first step towards correcting Scott Adams's numerous mistakes.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
Oh my god, so you're telling me now, I was
assuming this was nonfiction.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
You know it is? Okay, Wait, is this is this
nonfiction or is this this is a novel? Well Scott
Scott actually has a lot to say about that. In
his first book. He's like, you know, I don't know
whether I should call this fiction or nonfiction. Because fiction,
uh you know, like this is this is based on

(06:59):
like characters and stories that didn't actually happen, but it's
kind of nonfiction because it has an impact on the reader.
And I was like, that's not the definition between fiction
and fiction. It's impact in a lot of people. And
we did not have a War of the Ring. I've
checked listen.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
If there had been, I would have been firmly on
the side of Sauraman.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
He seems like he takes care of his workers, you know. Yeah,
they have menus that that implies restaurants and yeah, and
sometimes meat is back on the menu. Yeah, yeah, which
also means that presumably there are vegan and vegetarian options.
I love that. Yeah, that's important. Yeah, all right, so

(07:42):
let's finally start the introduction to this terrible book. Let's
do that. We're reading because I needed a week to
not write a script about a Nazi. So The Religion
War this is. This is his little intro, the prologue.
The Religion War is a different kind of book. It's
written in traditional fiction form, with a plot, yes, a
plot in parentheses, involving the smartest man in the world

(08:03):
trying to stop a pending war between Christian and Muslim forces.
The story takes you forward to a few decades to
imagine where our current delusions about reality might lead us,
and in the end, it poses some questions that I
think you'll enjoy rolling around in your head and jabbering
about with friends while sipping a beverage.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
It's not a I'm sorry, are Is he trying to
sell the reader on the book they've already purchased.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yes, yes he is, and he's trying to tell you, oh.

Speaker 2 (08:28):
You're really gonna like this book. That was I think
the opening to Blood Meridian.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
Yeah, yeah, that's Cormack McCarthy was like, boy, I hope
you enjoy the story of the judge, a psychopathic demiurge
character fucking ranting about how he wants to murder birds.
Yeah that's great. Good. Yeah, you know, have a good time,
roll some questions about this around in your mouth with

(08:55):
your friends while sipping a tasty beverage.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yes, get your face retreat sits down and start reading
this piece of shit and then ask your friends, hey,
you read that fucking thing.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
That'll be fun. It is. It does tell you the
difference between you know. Cormack McCarthy is like the platonic
ideal of like a real author. And then Scott Adams
is Scott Adams and like Scott's like, I hope you've
enjoy my book. Please sip it well, like discuss it
with your friends sipping a tea. And Cormac McCarthy is
like if you were to walk up to him on

(09:29):
the street when he was alive and say, I'm interested
in reading your book, his response would have been to
pull a handgun, like, yeah, that's that's like a real
like a real artist. Yeah, here's the prologue. In the
year two thousand and seven, a brilliant and charismatic leader
named al Zie began his rise to power in the

(09:50):
Palestinian territories. He was the architect of the twenty year
Plan for eliminating Israel. Now let me tell you what
this plan is, Matt. This the twenty year Plan for
a limit Israel. Is that we all kind of like
calmly actually, you know what, I can scroll down to
the chapter where he talks this all out because this
is low key. So a couple of things you should note.

(10:11):
You know how the Islam includes both Sunni and Shia, right,
you know, like there's different kind of like you know
how there's Catholics and Protestants in Christianity. Scott doesn't know that.
So everyone's like Iran, you know, Palestine, it's all the Iraq,
they're all the same. They're all in there together with

(10:31):
like the Turks, and they're they're in the basics of
this is that like, yeah, he destroys Israel and kills
all of the Jews and then builds a caliphate and
they launched like a low key terrorist war with all
of the Christian states, and so this Christian alliance builds
up using NATO as a background, and they have this

(10:55):
like constant low ki war with the Muslims where the
Muslims do terrorist attack, but they're special terrorist attacks. They're
real careful not to get too big, like nine to
elevens that they have to respond. And then the Christians
sail around gigantic aircraft carriers kind of like occasionally killing people.
It's kind of unclear what their role in the war is.

(11:17):
And there's a number of things that get glossed over
in this, including the Christian forces are made up of NATO,
and the second largest army in NATO is a Muslim army.
In the real world. Scott didn't google that. He actually
learns just the other day that Turkey is a country.
I love this. I love the mini nine to elevens thing,

(11:38):
you know.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Yeah, it's like, you know, hey, we don't want to
get it too, but you know, it's it reminds me
of the famous you know question, would you rather be
killed by a horse size nine to eleven or a
thousand duckling size nine to elevens?

Speaker 1 (11:54):
And I think I think the duckling sized ones is
the way to go. Yeah, it's interesting. There's so much
that's going on there, including like Scott's talking about how
this is, you know, his his presumption of how things
will continue if like the madness of the present era
and he's writing this kind of in the not that
long after the invasion of Iraq, in the post nine

(12:15):
to eleven era.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, I assume this must have come out like, you know,
two thousand and four or something, because he's like, this
takes place in the year two thousand and seven.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, and I mean, well that's when that's when the
destruction of Israel starts, you know. Yeah, So I there's
a degree to which I understand why that's the focus.
But it's also very much like, you know, if you
pay attention to America, the idea that like there could
be this giant caliphate that's constantly doing low level terrorist

(12:45):
attacks against us, and we wouldn't lose our minds. Yeah,
Like they don't have to kill a lot of people,
they don't have to kill anyone. It has to be
all that. All we need is like a TikTok to
go viral, making people thrink, the Muslims of poison the water,
and like twenty percent of the country will be ready
to do a genocide.

Speaker 2 (13:03):
Yes, yes, I love in his America. We show restraint.

Speaker 1 (13:08):
Yeah, he really does. There's this mix of like zero
faith and way too much faith in the country. That's
that's utterly fascinating. So h Chapter one is old Man.
So okay, yeah you get this. You get this guy
Alsie and he he kills all of the Jews by
basically convincing Israel to give Palestinians civil rights and then

(13:31):
they vote themselves into power and then hold in the book. Yeah,
gaining legal equality.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Genocide, yeah, step one.

Speaker 1 (13:43):
White genocide is always wiping up the Jews. That's cool. Yeah,
it's good stuff. Historically, always been the case, this architect
of the twenty year genocide plan then makes a big
old caliphate and everybody's happy, and he starts this low
level and then on the other side on the NATO
Christian side, but let's pretend Turkey's not a country. We

(14:06):
have General Horatio Cruz, who's the guy running the Christian Alliance,
and now we're in twenty forty and the war is
kind of hitting a fever pitch. So the first proper
chapter is old Man, and I think this is going
to introduce the avatar, who will meet again in the
second book. We're going to read in this series, who's
the smartest man in the world? Right, Yeah, And he's

(14:28):
he's so good at thinking through things that he's basically
a wizard, but he doesn't have spells. He just is
smart enough that he can he can confound and flummox people.
I love.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
I love being a fiction writer. Is like, all right,
it's gonna be a story about it to a real
smart guy. Yeah, really real smart. Yeah, his superpower big
brain smart.

Speaker 1 (14:50):
There's a lot of versions of this, and like better
artists than Scott do it too. When every other a
TV show where the premise of the TV show is
the main characters like the best author around or the
best musician and anytime it's time. We just got this
with like at least the Weekend is a pop star
on this terrible the Idol show. But like still it
was a little I'm thinking, still.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
So surprised you watched the entire I heard it was bad. Ever,
it's the worst show I've ever seen in.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Like, worst show I've ever seen. The act it was
so he's not a good actor. I enjoyed every yeah
of it.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, oh yeah, I watched it, and you know, I
was just really impressed with how uh they've managed to
make being horny sound blame like it was. It was like,
you know what it felt like to me is that, uh,
Sam Levinson grew up only watching porn, porn, humb premium absolutely,

(15:56):
and so he doesn't know about X videos. So the
things that he thinks are hot are like very glossy,
very shiny. And I was like, no, this guy doesn't
he doesn't get you what hot is. He just thinks
this is hot.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
It's like it was written by a dude who like
was raised like homeschooled as a kid, like raising a
strict Christian household, but like from the beginning, was a
little bit of a bad boy and found out how
to get around the internet blockers, so we had access
to like to like one partially censored porn website. But
thinks he's really he's like really worldly about he's like, look, guys,

(16:30):
and then he's like sitting at a table with like
a bunch of hollywod people. All right, So picture this.
She walks in the room and her skirt up above
her knee. You can see you can see all the
knee folds on this bitch, dozens of knee folds. It's
folding like crazy around that knee. And she's sweaty always.

(16:51):
You know, she's so shiny, sweaty, hot lady.

Speaker 3 (16:55):
What's sad is they like they He was not always
supposed to be on the project, and the original project
sounded really great.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
It was supposed to be yeah, yeah, really really great.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
Instead we got fucking Li's depth smoking cigarettes in the Weekend,
being believe I Willie say horny and bad at being
horny so good.

Speaker 1 (17:15):
So so you get the thing that is relevant about
the Weekends Terrible TV Show and this Terrible book is
that they both feature someone who's supposed to be the
best at something right, and then they try to show
it and it's like so at the end of the idol,
like this character who's this like sleazy cult leader type,
we see him like put on a show to convince
these execs to like fund a tour, and it's supposed

(17:38):
to be like, Wow, this is the hottest, coolest music
thing ever, all these guys, and it just is like
a bunch of like drug addled weirdos gyrating around the
room that's like dark, and the music's kind of off,
and it's like, I don't want to see this. Like
I've been to a lot of awkward, drugged up parties
where people gyrate weirdly in a dark room, and this

(18:01):
is not a good example of this.

Speaker 2 (18:04):
Your music executive, The idea you would sit around and
watch the whole performance is the most insane thing I've
ever seen.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
It was.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
It was a hybrid of what Robert just said, which
is like a weird party with people on drugs gyritick
and also like like a middle schooler's performing arts camp recital.
It was.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
And then they were like the same, let's.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
Put this in a stadium that the show also the
woman is the villain all on.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
Show like Boo done. And I mean it's one of
those things. You can have all sorts of stupid shit
in your plot, but if you're telling us this person
is the best at something, and then you have them
do it on screen, and it sucks ass right. It's
the same thing with Scott, if you're telling us this
guy is a super genius and then we actually see
him try to be a genius and we're like, oh,
you're just a guy who's roughly as smart as Scott

(18:59):
Adams and that's not impressive. In no way is that impressive.
He's the smartest man on earth. He is a cartoonist.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
He writes cartoons about guy in office Holderilbert.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
I love stuff.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
This has not been a long advertisement for the idol,
but it is.

Speaker 1 (19:25):
Ah, you know what the weekend will No, I don't
want to say anything bad about the Weekend. I feel
bad for him. Watch listen to some ads. Forget that
he had a TV show, Forget that.

Speaker 3 (19:37):
Rat tail that for some reason.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
Have I love it.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
He's like, he's like somehow worse than Tommy wiz Oh,
and I wish that a I could replace him with Tommy.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
Was Oh yeah, and we're back. We're back, and we've
all actually all come around and decided that the weekend
having a rat tail is a mark of character, right
you know. Yeah, it's like when a hot actor agrees

(20:13):
to like wear all exactly seven pounds and wear a
fake nos so that they can pretend to be the
ugly version of themselves when they get hot.

Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, it's really brave. Yeah, courageous, Yeah, to be ugly
for you know a little bit. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Anyway,
let's start this book actually, so it begins Chapter one
is old man, and there's an old man in the
lobby and he wants to talk to General Cruz, the
Christian leader, who is described as a reddish rhino of

(20:43):
a man, which is a little more creative than Ben
Shapiro's bear of a man. I'll give him that.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
Yeah, rhino is pretty good. There's a I don't is
he It feels like an anti Irish slur, but all, yeah,
it is an.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Anti Irish slur. That's a low key Scott Adam's trait.
Cruz used his eyes the same way he used everything else,
like weapons. Lieutenant Ben water Good, no.

Speaker 4 (21:10):
Notes, no notes, I think Scott nailed it, crushing high
five yourself, Scott, Lieutenant Ben Waters suddenly found himself in
the crosshairs.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
It wasn't the first time Waters had seen that look,
that sort of look from a man who killed people
for a living. It would reduce most people to stuttering.
Waters viewed it as information, nothing more. CRUs had handpicked
Waters from a thousand candidates, not because of his test
scores or his combat record, both unremarkable. It certainly wasn't
Waters his personality charitable.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
It was his social media posts that had a lot
of questionable things to say about Palestinians.

Speaker 1 (21:44):
There was something else. At the age of eight, Ben
Waters used the family shotgun to kill both of his parents.
It was a small town, and the neighbors agreed. Ben
saved his younger brother from an unimaginable fate. No charges
were filed since then. The area of Ben Waters his
brain that makes a person feel alive was a catastrophe
of molecules. He never suffered from shame offense. Okay, so

(22:07):
what's going on here is he picked this guy. He's
this general Cruise is worried he might get too powerful,
So he has this guy standing next to him with
a gun at all times to kill Cruise if he
becomes like crazy with power, which is like potentially a
fun idea if you're introducing like your idea of this
world with like the leaders always followed by this guy,
he's supposed to kill him if he goes mad with power.

(22:27):
But the introduction of this character, he doesn't explain. Scott
doesn't explain why this guy's parents had to die, just
an unimaginable fate. There's no like you're left to assume
it was probably like moless stations. Actually, sure, there's a
good reason for it.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
Every time someone kills their parents, I'm gonna be honest,
I'm pretty much always on the side of the kid
because I'm like, there's a reason you don't just kill
your parents, so you know.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
You know, even that would have been better writing if
we had just learned that this guy's attitude was like,
I'm just always going to side with the kid who
kills their parents. I used to assume I don't know
what went on. I didn't listen, I didn't know any digging.
I just figured kid kill his parents probably cool.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
If my kid killed me, Like, listen, I don't know why,
but I get I get the need to do this.
We all want to kill our parents, so we're just
not brav enough.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Freud said a lot about that's just why I support
legalizing cocaine, because that'll let more kids kill their parents.
I don't know why we're going down this road. So
this old man is here and he wants to talk
to the general, So Waters tells him. The old man
started talking to the guards, and five minutes later they left.
They didn't say, why call the marines off the roof

(23:43):
if the old fool won't leave, shoot him? Yes, Sir,
said Waters, in a way that revealed he knew it
wasn't a workable plan because the Scott Adams insert is
able to talk the army down from shooting him for
invading what is effectively the Pentagon. The whole world are fools,
muttered Cruise using a ruler to drag a battle platform
from the Indian Ocean. Matt makers were a frustrated group.

(24:05):
The old notion of a country was meaningless. Al Z
dominated the entire Islamic world. Governments existed under his rule
in a fashion to keep the water running, to remove gardamage,
and to run in doctrination centers for children, but The real.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
War about Muslims, dude, is open borders. You know, just
they just want to they just want to go to
the Middle East and completely erase these borders that we
totally made up in nineteen seventeen.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
You know, fucking bullshit dog it is. It's yet another
example of this like thing you get with a specific
kind of like and this is like particular. You get
this with like weirdo Christian folks, right wingers who hate Muslims,
but you get it also with like atheists who hate Muslims,
especially in this period where they're like they have this
attitude that like, well, the entire Muslim world is just

(24:54):
always angry at America and secularism. They're just always pissed
at it, right, Whereas I don't know. Again, you spend
a lot of time in the Middle East, and one
of the things you learn is that the people who
live there are like the people everywhere else. They are
mostly angry at the folks who live right next to them. Right,
It's just like Texas and Oklahoma. That's everywhere in the world.
That's everywhere I've ever been. Yes, yes, anyway, not to

(25:19):
flatten politics too much, but people are generally pissed at
their neighbors, because that's who you rub up against. But
in this all of the Muslims, presumably Arabs and Persians
and Kurds, everybody all together. You know, anyone who's just
kind of in that region of the world is all
a Muslim, and they're all backing the guy who killed

(25:40):
all of the Jews. Yep, that's good. Yeah. So there's
no countries anymore, and in the Christian part of the
world there was still a pretense that civilian governments ruled
their respective countries. In reality, crews had the power to
redraw boundaries and remove so called leaders with a word.
He didn't need military power to get his way, although
it was available if it's suited him. Cruz was widely

(26:01):
believed to be the only person who could stop the
terror of al Zie. No one felt it was a
good idea to distract him. The atheists and the smaller
religions were lying low, supporting the Christian power base and
enjoying safety and numbers. The most enthusiastic supporters of the
Christians were the Jews who had escaped Israel after So
that's good, thank you, No, I'm glad, he wrote me

(26:22):
in there. Yeah. Yeah, no, you guys, you guys got
stuck in there. You got to you gotta mention.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you for you know,
I like that Scott Adams. He's like, by the way,
in this future, the Jews finally show some respect.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
They finally show some gratefulness for.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
Christian America for helping you with this thing I invented.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
I am now picturing the if Scott had gotten the
made for TV movie version of this. Well, the narration
goes on. It just like cuts to a guy in
like a bagel shop, like saluting with a bagel at
the camera.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
Just walks into a bagel shop standing ovation by all
Hasidic Jews in there. Yeah, turns to the camera and
he goes, you're welcome the Jews and then walks away
without paying for his bagel.

Speaker 1 (27:14):
Now, look when people when when authors whose thing is
not writing about military stuff right about fantasy future military stuff,
it's usually bad, which is fine, But you know, I
wouldn't normally criticize someone for this, but I am going
to criticize Scott Adams because he's I hate him. So
here's his description of the weapons system that the Christians

(27:37):
have developed in order to fight what appears to just
kind of be a constant, low level like suicide bombing
using drones campaign, which is what the Muslims. So that
your enemy is every couple of days they kill like
three people with a drone bomb, right, Like, that's the
that's the the opposing side, right, So here's what they've
built to counteract that. Battle platforms were a recent addition

(28:01):
to Cruise's arsenal. They were the size of cities floating
on the ocean, vastly more powerful than the aircraft carriers
they replaced. The platforms could be assembled in days, ringed
by destroyers, and monitored by an umbrella of satellites. Nothing
could penetrate their perimeters thanks to NATO's technical breakthrough of
forced particle beams that could slice through incoming metal like
a hot poker on a cobweb. The rest of the world,

(28:22):
which was mostly Alsi's territories and a sprinkling of non
aligned powers, used conventional missiles that were no match for
the particle beam defense grid. Now here's the thing, here's
the thing. A couple of things, A couple of for
one thing. Maybe it is realistic that this is fundamentally
a weapons system that would be no use in the
war that they're fighting. That's not what Scott, he wants
us to think. This is cool, but like it is

(28:42):
like useless for fighting like a low level terror campaign
that's just a bunch of mild terrorist attacks, right for
a lot of I mean for one thing, like he's
like they're even more powerful than aircraft carriers we have,
but the enemy just has like some drones with grenades,
like aircraft carriers are fine for that, you know, like
you don't need But also, well, why why are you

(29:04):
how is this supposed to help? Like? How is how
is controlling the oceans supposed to help? When your enemy
is not opposing you in a direct military manner? Why
is this useful? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (29:13):
I am I am generally confused also as to like
the amount listen.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
The amount of people. It sounds like that al Zie
is killing.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
Is he's doing an occasional terrorist attack every couple of days,
killing a couple of people. Yeah, And the entire world
is like, oh man, we gotta fucking wipe these fools
off the map because because literally a billion people have
a murder rate of three per day.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, that's pretty good. I'm just sadestly, man's that's better
than we're doing right now. That's not bad. Americans kill
a lot more Americans than these guys all the time.
It's a little I no, like, yeah, we shoot I
don't know, like thirty five thousand something like that of
us get shot to death each year in this country.
At least, like they are they breaking those numbers? Is

(30:05):
Alsi's campaign even doing that many Americans anyway, fascinating question.
So Cruz has accepted that he's going to have to
kill all two billion Muslims to win this war. I mean,
you know, you gotta do what you gotta do. I
will give it to That's fine, Like that's a bad
thing to do. But in terms of characterizing this dude,

(30:25):
it's a bad guy, which he is. This guy's not
the hero. Give Scott that, that's fine. The tall wooden
doors of Cruz's war room open to a stream of
military advisors, admirals, and generals. There were twenty five of them,
one from each of the dominant NATO countries. So what
about Turkey, the Muslim majority country? About Turkey? Turkey? What

(30:46):
the fuck? He just doesn't know? They had no decision
making power. Cruse had the monopoly on that, but they
were useful in maintaining the illusion that NATO enjoyed some
sort of democratic input. It was thin fiction, the sort
of war that a wartime population was happy to accept.
The Joint chiefs of Staff of the United States had
become over addressed, advisors, symbolic and useless. The NATO generals

(31:09):
were more loyal to cruise than their own civilian governments
in times of extreme danger. And again they're trying to
be like, everyone's this load of cruise because it's the
only guy who can beat this man. But like, we're not.
It's not ever established what he did to earn that, Like,
there's a vague mention of battlefield victories. All he talks
about the Muslims doing is carrying out terrorist attacks. Which

(31:29):
where are the battlefield victories? What are the what's the
fighting this for doing?

Speaker 2 (31:35):
He's the best of the best, you know, again, when
he was doing battles, doesn't matter where, you know, he
was best at it.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
It's okay. You could you could establish this early on
by being like when he was a captain in the field,
you know, he was an embassy. Dude, he stops a
terrorist attack, right and like yeah something, but like, no,
we don't. We don't get that Sky has this, like
it's okay whatever. Cruse gets angry that they're not murdering
this old man who has somehow gotten through his defenses

(32:06):
and demanding to talk. So he grabs an M sixteen.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
He flips off the safety so at least Scott knows
that guns have safety. He did a little research for this,
all right. Yeah, credit little bastard. He's up to something,
Cruse muttered, watching the floor indicators. He's just sitting in
a waiting room right now. Yeah, he's He's in his
big meeting room with all of his generals. It is
like his Sabbath moments. They're all gathered in their masses,

(32:33):
you know. Yeah, and this guy's.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Man in the waiting room just kind of being I'm
just waiting to see the general.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
He's breaking his way through all of the layers of
security that NATO has put up by just like being
a smart old man and talking his way through. We
don't need to hear her see any of.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
This obviously, is he's getting through every single defense of
the entire Christian world army.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Okay, this is just this guy being frustrated that nobody
is able to stop this old man by murdering him
or just like holding him, you know, like what cops
would actually do if like a crazy old man was
at a military base, probably just like taze him, you know,
put his hands behind his back. But he's really he's

(33:16):
really smart. I assume, Yeah, this doesn't make much sense either.
So he decides he's going to flee because someone in
the room that he's just been in is leaking war plans.
We're not told why. Yeah, the general is gonna leave. Yeah,
he's got he's gonna bounce someone of my staff. Someone

(33:38):
in that room is leaking war plans. We're gonna put
some distance between that old man and me because the
smell's wrong. Once commanded control is secured, I'll deal with
the leak and the old man get the car. And
then we're informed that he has a portable device that
lets him fire a missile at wherever he wants to,
launched from a site in South Dakota that fewer than
a dozen people on Earth knew about. So there we go.

(34:01):
I guess that's yeah, that he's going to murder all
these guys in order to secure absolute power. Even though
he already has absolute power.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
I've got an app that'll blow up any McDonald's in
a thousand mile radius.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
Cool, Yeah, why are we needed? Yeah, it's good stuff.
How do you explain plan to explain it to the world, waters,
His assistant, who murdered his parents, asks, I won't have
to explain anything. The world will assume it was an
attack from one of Alzi's fanatics. Hundreds of buildings had

(34:33):
blown up in the past two years alone. The military
had stopped analyzing the remains of each explosion long ago,
assuming correctly that they were all the work of al Z.
No one would request an inquiry about this blast because
AlSi would be the universally presumed perpetrator. Really tight ship
they're running over in NATO, we just say, whenever a

(34:53):
building blows up, we assume it's this guy. You don't
do anything about it, you know, Yeah, that's yeah. Let's
try the next chapter here, Horatio Cruz takes over NATO. Okay, interrogation.
So they've captured the avatar, and we finally get a
description of this old man who's been slowly talking his
way through the NATO defenses. The avatar was sixty two

(35:16):
years old, but could have been mistaken for ninety gaunt,
clad in a threadbare delivery man's outfit from an earlier time.
His silver gray hair was short and untamed. Looking a
picture of Scott Adams, and I think we'll see why
that's important. A red plaid blanket covered his shoulders, clutched
tight in front. Thirty years ago, as a package delivery man,
he met the prior avatar, from whom he learned the

(35:37):
secrets that brought him to the fifth level of awareness.
But it took a terrible to learn of the water,
he learned the way. Humans are not genetically equipped to
handle this kind of knowledge, and he was no exception.
The awareness aged him prematurely. He understood too much about reality,
and with that knowledge came an overwhelming responsibility and an
incalculable stress that spread to every cell of his body.

(35:59):
That's why Scott needs the Gilbert swimming pool, you know's
the only way to know too much. He reduced incalculable shelf.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
He's got to do, you know, he's got to do
the backstroke in order to like inuntenses shoulders from you know,
knowing who runs things, you.

Speaker 1 (36:15):
Know what I mean. He's rich we're supposed he looks poor,
but the Avatar's got a fuckload of money. He has
his own Victorian home in San Francisco, so that's pretty nice.
He got most of his money from the previous avatar,
but he also invests money because he's so good at
at knowing Patternskay, Scott is really giving us a lot
about himself here.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
Yes, No, he's describing himself. I think you're gonna have
to explain to me what you mean by avatar here.
I mean, like, this is what is uh, what are
we talking about here?

Speaker 1 (36:47):
Well, the avatar is this line of the smartest people
in the world who pass on their knowledge about reality,
which is mostly weird little brain tricks that Scott Adams
picked up that he that he like affirmations and ship. Right, Okay,
so it's all the ship from Scott Adams is.

Speaker 3 (37:04):
Terrible problem James Cameron thing.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
No, I figured notatic about big big jim Big Jimmy anyway.
I mean, so, uh god, what matters. What matters is
Scott Adams in describing the Avatar is describing himself, and
it's beautiful. He was painfully lonely. The last Avatar hadn't

(37:28):
advised him to avoid personal relationships. It was just obvious
that he had to. No one could understand the Frenches.
He could no longer talk to normal people without leaving
them changed in some way. It was unfair.

Speaker 3 (37:42):
He was.

Speaker 1 (37:44):
He was just divorced.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
He was the most divorced, smartest divorce man in the world.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
The only thing larger than the NATO battle platforms was
the amount of divorced in this one man's art. You
know who else is divorced man? The sponsors of this podcast.
Every single one of them was left by their wives
for good reason, and very much for good reason. We're

(38:12):
really proud of of there. I don't know why I'm
continuing to go on about this anyway. Yeah, why don't
you divorce us and listen to these ads? We're back
and we're you know, divorced as hell. Uh, super divorced.

(38:36):
That's that's what Scott was trying to avoid by by
by hiding. As the avatar is. Now his divorced energy
has been passed on to us. I have a race
car bed Matt. You're really into pickleball? Yeah, yeah, it's
just been a calamity over her.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
I like to take over various tennis courts and say hey,
fuck you undivorced, and then play pickleball.

Speaker 1 (39:00):
Sophie's dressing like one of those one of those guys
from a nineties movie who like moves in with with
the main character who super divorced X and is like,
you know, I don't know. I'm thinking actually of the
movie hot Rod here whatever, Yeah, great movie anyway, Well,
off topic, back to the Avatar. No ordinary person could

(39:21):
understand what it was like to be an avatar. Even
when he did talk to people when it was absolutely necessary,
he was still utterly alone. He felt as though he
was one short gasp from insanity. Most of the time,
he felt certain that he had a special role to play,
that he was chosen, that he alone could save the
world from upcoming destruction. Other times he felt he must
surely be mad, because only insane people think like that,

(39:43):
and they, as did, he have no capacity to know
which category they really belonged to. Ah, so smart, that's
so smart. How'd you think of that? You know? Too long?

Speaker 2 (39:56):
I was convinced he's the smartest person in the world.
Writing story about the smartest person in the world. This
is my favorite genre of.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
Novel, and you get a lot of I think when
people like make fun of Scott a lot of like, wow,
this guy really should have gone to therapy. I don't
think that's the answer for Scott. I think what Scott
needed was like a normal, a full time job that
didn't pay him seven hundred million dollars, where like he
had to he had to like strive for something with
a group of other people and like be confronted sometimes

(40:26):
the limits of his own capability and you know, his
his his shortcomings and work with other people to seal
those up. That really would have been good for Scott.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
In a just timeline, in a just society, he would
have been a middle manager who's only making a handful
of people's life.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
Hell as opposed to what he became. I think, like, honestly,
if you if you make Scott working like I don't know,
like a road work crew right where he's getting out
there every day. He's doing something hard, but it's also
something every day you can see like, oh, we finished
paving this chunk of road, and like that's some progress.
People are going to use this right and you're you're
out with other people, they're going to call you on

(41:04):
your bullshit when you say insane things like you know
he would have he would he wouldn't have a pool
shaped like Gilbert's head, but I think in his soul
he'd be a happier man.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
No, you have just a bunch of affirmations on his
wall that just says, you know, work will set.

Speaker 1 (41:20):
You free, but set you I think would have set
Scott free occasionally broken. Sometimes work sets yeah free. Look,
I don't know why. I don't know why. We're going
down the baby out with the bath water sometimes. Yeah right, yeah, Okay,
So the avatar has got to look among other things.

(41:41):
And by the way, he's supposed to be in an
interrogation room here that hasn't been introduced. We're just learning
about the avatar again here. Uh. So he's looking for
his replacement because he's gonna die. He's old. Uh, he
doesn't know whether or not it's fair for him to
pass it down to somebody. And then yeah, finally we
get actually back to the story. I'm sorry, really, I am, said,

(42:02):
the avatar, cuffed to the wall in eyewing for what
getting caught ground the thick necked interrogator with an oversized
forehead and stubby fingers as he moved his cart full
of pain tools nearer his subject. I'm sorry for what
I have to do. This will end quickly if you
tell me everything, said the interrogator. That's why you're here.
What do you think you got the pain tools? Yeah?

(42:25):
I do kind of want to know more about these
pain tools. I want to know what they are. You know, Yeah,
seems like fun. He's like, that's why I'm here to
tell you everything, which you know, is what the avatar
is about to do to get out of this interrogation thing. Yeah. Smart, Yeah,
he's going to use his smarts before I turn your
guts into jam. How about you tell me this is

(42:45):
the interrogator. How about you tell me everything I need
to know. It's a little courtesy I like to extend
to my guests. Nobody has ever taken me up on
the offer, but I feel it's only fair to put
it out there. Jesus, this interrogator's like, this is so
much worse than torturing a man. Let's say you figure
out what questions I need to ask and then you
just answer them. If you make me ask the obvious
questions over and over, I'm gonna get tired, and that
makes me cranky. You don't want that very well, replied

(43:08):
the avatar, and again I'm truly okay. So he's doing
this thing where like the torture is like, you're gonna
tell me everything or I'm going to kill you, and
the avatar clearly is going to like do some brain
jiu jitsu that destroys this man. Who's But it just
keeps going on for several pages of him being like,
all right, I'm about to do my brain jiu jitsu.
You want to do it, Yeah, do it. I'm gonna

(43:28):
do so much smart that you're gonna be like wow. Yeah.
So a page and a half goes by. Tell me
something brilliant, old man, mocked the interrogator. Convince me you're
the smartest man in the world, and I'll let you go.
I don't think the smartest man in the world would
believe that you're sincere. The interrogator flashed an executioner's grin
and turned up the voltage. He moved the electric paddles

(43:50):
towards the old man's chest. This is just to get
your attention. Do me a favor and don't die right away.
Who is patrick, asked the avatar. The interrogator froze for
a moment, then quickly boiled. How do you know, my brother?
What bullshit is this? What else do you know about me?
The old man looked into the eyes of his interrogator
and took a deep breath. I know that you were
raised Catholic, but as an adult you pick and choose

(44:11):
the parts you want to believe. You think it's okay
to hurt people as long as it's in the interest
of the greater good. You convinced yourself that you'd still
go to Heafen's so long as you accept Jesus before
you die. You were treated unkindly as a child, especially
by the older boys and by the better athletes. You
don't sleep much because every time you close your eyes,
you see your victims, and you hear their voices just
before you drift off to sleep, and it pulls you

(44:31):
back your restlessness. Sometimes you try to stop the voices
by drinking. The drinking works to an extent, but it
has ruined your relationships. The interrogator dropped the paddles and
stepped away from the old man. Just kills himself, so
he just and now. The avatar explains that he did
a cold read, which like it's not even a good read.

(44:52):
That's whatever. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
That's also not something that's smart, that's all. That's literally
just something con.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
I have to assume that the reason why he guessed Patrick,
which this dude reacted strongly to, is because he's Catholic
and every Catholic man has a Patrick in there. Of course. Yeah,
very simple, very simple. Also, like half of the Catholics
are I don't know, like living in Latin America, Like
I don't know how many Patrick Patricio.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Maybe I love the idea of it was like it was,
you know, Officer Weinstein, and he just looks at him
and he goes like, tell me about Rachel. It's like, Rach,
how do you know it my extended family?

Speaker 1 (45:33):
Did you know her name? Did you know Rachel? Of course? Oh,
it's great, you're a lot about it.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
He's like basically, you know, he's like he's kind of
modeling it after every smart guy character you've seen in
fucking anyhow.

Speaker 1 (45:51):
It's a fucking cold reading, right, yes, yeah, it's it's
it's remarkable as opposed to I think a fun version
of this character when he's every time he's in like
a situation and he's got to boil someone's brain. It's
just a Ponzi scheme. He just gets him to invest
in a Ponzi scheme.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
Yea exactly, just starts explaining crypto. Five minutes later he
gives them forty you're.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
Shaaned up in a fucking dungeon. What do you even
as a return on your four oh one k? Right now?
What if I were to tell you I could double
your money in under six months and all I'm got
in need is a check for twenty grand and a
picture of your feet For feetpigs dot com, here's Scott

(46:33):
explaining cold reading. For centuries. Phony psychics abused a version
of the cold read the dup global customers. It's nothing
but good observations combined with educated guesses and generalities like
that a Catholic man has at.

Speaker 2 (46:45):
Patrick in the You know, it seems like so many
and whatnot?

Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yeah, but it seems like so much more to the
person hearing it. Some fake psychics weren't usually skilled at
noticing clues from a person's appearance or mannerisms and making
guesses that sounded uncannily accurate. The avatar was the best
of the best, able to recognize patterns, so subtle that
even the most skilled phony psychic would have found an
amazing Today's situation was especially easy. The interrogator was clearly Irish.

(47:15):
Someone in his family was probably named Patrick. By the way,
he's Irish because earlier the avatar notices that he has
a drinker's nose. That's literally it's so good. I love this.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
I love this, and like listen, I knew that the
dilber guy was like racist, he's awkwardly racist, but I
like that he's like old timey racist.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
I do you know what? You know? What's progressive about
this is that we start with the idea that all
Muslims everywhere secretly just want to wipe out the Jews,
which is very racist. But then we move on to
the idea that like every drunk irishman loves a Patrick.
You can't get through that.

Speaker 2 (47:57):
Yeah, no, that's fucking iron clad fact right there.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
That destroys this man, right, we can. That's how the
avatar gets out right, we don't, we don't need to
continue on to hear he's he's ruined.

Speaker 2 (48:10):
Every day you see your don and you want to
get your real fight right every day, your master of
baking Jesus Christ is that, like, how did you know this?
How could you possibly have known that every time my
master made I cry?

Speaker 1 (48:26):
Good? That's good stuff. We're going to move along a
little bit because I want to get to kind of
the crux of this book, because the basic idea here
is that the Avatar is working to stop a cataclysmic,
apocalyptic you know, nuclear exchange type deal between the Christians
and the Muslims, and the best way to do that
is to get everyone to stop believing in religion at once.

(48:47):
Because obviously this is another like you know, Scott has
this interest, this fun mix of like Christian conservative stuff,
but he's not a Christian. He's like coming out of
the internet atheist community. So he has this fundamental belief
that like the cause of all of the problems is
that all of these people believe these irrational religions, right,
which is, by the way, mostly bullshit. Like the cause

(49:08):
of it is that even when you look at like
Christians here who are pushing these bullshit laws, they're not
largely doing it because like they're irrational Christians. They're doing
it because like certain types of people make them fundamentally uncomfortable,
exactly because they're racists and they would be racist about
something if Christianity wasn't the justification.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
In fact, like, that's what I noticed about the kind
of evolution of the internet atheist because I remember back
when I used to be like I'm a proud atheist
or whatever, and it was completely in reaction to like,
you know, conservative Christians and everything else. And then all
of a sudden, I was like, oh, this seems like

(49:48):
a very interesting front for people to just say some
anti Muslim shit.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
It became just a way to be Islamophobic without saying,
you're as, I hate all religion, but I only talk about.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Islam, Yeah, exactly. It's it's that same like that old
stand up thing where it's like I'm racist against everybody.
It's like, yeah, but there's only two slurs you use. Man.
Although to be fair for Scott as the trailblazer, he
is he really that's the first. That's the first. Like
that's like, that's like a degree of racism against the
Irish that, like the British in the nineteen seventies would

(50:25):
have been like, well this is a sorry, yes, I
prolist never to do an English accent again. And here
I perfect flicted it up on you. That's what it
sounds like. So Scott obviously the only thing that can
resolve this conflict between because it's a conflict between these
two irrational religions as opposed to like a conflict between

(50:48):
there's like bombings and like people's families have been killed
and they're fisted about that. Anyway, it's an irrational religious conflict,
right right, right.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
It has nothing to do with colonialism or imperialism. That's
words that people use to master fact. It's about religion.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
So if he can just get everyone to stop being
religious all at once, you know, he can sit and
Scott has all these weird ideas about like persuaders and
influencers and to be for one thing that I think
Scott is a little bit ahead of the curve on
He has been really obsessed with the idea of like
influencers and connectors and shit since the early two thousands.

(51:25):
He's got a few years on most folks on this.
So his his like obsession with Trump as a master
persuader because he believes Trump is like a messianic figure
who's so good at persuading. He's going to like usher
in a new age of human evolution by teaching us
all persuasion tricks. That's why Scott wrote his terrible book
Win Bigley. So his attitude here the avatar is kind

(51:47):
of like moving through the world and the major characters
of this conflict looking for like the influencer. There's one
person who, because of their network of social ties, right,
could get an idea out in a way that will
cascade sort of algorithmically, and then convince the whole world
overnight to stop being religious. That's that's the plot of
this book, right. Yeah, he's gonna find this person at

(52:11):
this cafe.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
So we're gonna start a YouTube channel and.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
I'll do it. That is kind of why he does
his YouTube is he secretly thinks he's he's the master
persuader and if he can just like tell the right
joke to people, it'll change the world. Yeah, they would
just stop throttling me in the algorithm. Everyone would be
smart like me. Yeah, that's that's why he's gotta he's
gonna really saddle up to Elon Musk. Finally, finally, so

(52:38):
the avatar rolls up in front of this cafe. Uh,
he had never felt a pattern like this. As the
hydro cap that's a hydro powered cab pulled away. The
avatar stood on the sidewalk trying to get a lock
on the pattern, but he had failed. His stomach growled,
and the avatar smiled, realizing his hunger must have been
clogging his intuition. But now the pattern was gone, softening
to a vibration. Patterns did that, sometimes rising and falling

(53:01):
for no apparent reason. The avatar walked towards a restaurant
next to the building, Stacy's Cafe. It was the oldest
business on the block, looking out of a place nestled
in the modern architecture of the San Francisco Metropolitan Area area.
The avatar entered and was greeted by a bartender from
behind a large oval bar. Hi, can I help you
one for lunch? We're closed behind three between three and five.

(53:22):
Can you come back at five? A pink haired woman
in her sixties on the other side of the room
interrupted the Avatar's response. She was waving a half eaten
plate of food at the chef and getting agitated. Look
at this presentation. This is crap. My name is on
this business, and you want to serve crap. If people
want crap, they can make it at home. The Chef's
eyes were locked in a death stair with the pink
haired woman as she dramatically slapped the dish on the table.

(53:42):
I want you to care about this place as much
as I do. If you don't, I can replace your
ass tomorrow. The pink haired woman her rumped and turned away,
then turned back with an afterthought. That reminds me, she said,
in a softer voice that seemed as though she was
channeling an entirely different person. Have you written down all
your recipes so I can fire you at any time?
I want? Almost, I have a few more to do,
said the chef. Very good, give me a hug. What

(54:05):
the fuck is this the bear? Yes? Kind of the bear? Yeah,
I don't know. I think it's just that, like she's
this woman who's in this. This is supposed to be charming,
that she moves between.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
This. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
Yeah, she's supposed to be fun and sassy. So she
decides to order for him because everyone should eat. She
believes the food that she likes, which is a vegetable crutee.
So Stacey made hand signals to the bartender, who was
still wiping water spots off the bar glasses. He nodded
and started to pour a chardonnay. Stacey pulled out a

(54:41):
chair and sat down across from the avatar. I think
I have a headache or a tumor or something. I
gained two pounds this week and my hair is falling
out in clumps and I have gas. Don't say I
didn't warn you. Thank you for the warning. I don't
know how I do this job every day. I'm gonna quit,
I swear I am, except it wouldn't work because I
own the place. I'd fire myself if I could, but
I don't want to pay the unemployment benefits to myself.
Hey god, this is just such a great character. Is fun? Yeah,

(55:05):
we get along and she and the avatar start talking
about modern politics.

Speaker 2 (55:09):
Right, to be clear, these guys they're they're both in
their mid sixties.

Speaker 1 (55:15):
Right, yes, yes, they're both. They're both old people, and
they're both kind of Scott Adams. Okay, that's important here.
So the avatar tells her that he's trying to figure
out how to stop a war, and she's like, how
can a guy like you stop a war? You couldn't
even feed yourself until I decided to have pity on
your s and you dress like a hobo on crack.
What's up with that? Would it be okay if I
answered the first question? Stacey laughed, Okay, if you do

(55:37):
a good job on that, I'll let the other one
slide go. Think of humanity as a giant software program.
Our bodies are the hardware, and our ideas are the software.
Sometimes the software gets a virus. What are you talking about? Interpretation.
I have never heard this concept before. Yeah, you must
the smartest man of the world. Religions are a virus

(55:59):
in computer programming, right, uh you know, yeah, it's I
guess this is sort of a very boomer attitude towards
the Internet, where it's just like, well, the computer's always
got a virus on it.

Speaker 2 (56:11):
Right, Yeah, yeah, you can't virus click.

Speaker 1 (56:13):
The links that infect your all Ta Vista, right.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
My mccaffee software every day tells me about new virus.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
I keep buying more of it, more virus keep coming.
Buy a new mccaffee every day. I buy three new mccaffees,
and now not one virus. I got a Muslim virus,
I got two virus. I got Irish virus. It is also, yeah,
he is low key being like yes all like Islam

(56:43):
is a virus, you know. Yeah, to beanity is a
virus too, But I'm not less concerned about the exce.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
This is all just a way of like, it's just
how you get to Therefore we must eradicate blank.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
Yeah. No, And the biggest virus of all is being Irish.
You know. That's really what Scott's getting at. Yeah, there
is so much more anti Irish racism in this that
I expected. Bill's Irish, so he must know a Patrick,
yet he must just know he must love a Patrin. No,

(57:21):
I love Patrick in the family. Yeah that is yeah,
from hearts, Yeah, from his from his drinkers knows that
he loves a Patricks. Must be that's really quite amazing.
So in this next part, he's talking with this lady
about I was going to and he explains his concept
of a prime influencer. I'm looking for the reboot button

(57:45):
metaphorically speaking, I'm looking for the one person who is
connected to everyone else in a chain of influence, the
prime influencer. That is why I am visiting today. So like,
that's that's the thing. Everyone's connected to this person. And
by the way, it have to be this lady, right, Yeah,
it's her. It's Stacy, I thought, you know, and she's like,

(58:07):
I don't believe in this because people never change their mind.
You don't believe people can change their opinions, ask the avatar.
Come on, who buys books written by conservatives? Conservatives? Who
writes books written by liberals? Liberals? People only listen to
what they want to hear. Nobody changes anyone's mind, even
if the argument is very good, hasn't happened, never will.
The avatar sat back in his sheet, adjusting his napkin

(58:27):
on his lap. I can see why you would have
that view, but in reality, everyone knows one person who
could change his opinion on a particular topic, usually a
different person for each topic. And it's not the argument
or the logic that matters to people, but the source.
Humans are driven by examples, by role models, not by logic.
So you're saying someone could make me a devil worship
er even if I didn't want to be. That's nutty.

(58:48):
A year ago you would have said that no one
could convince you to wear pink tinted hair, but you
seem to have embraced the trend enthusiastically. Okay, so Scott's
Scott's this lady, is like nobody changes their mind and
Scott like, no, no, no, that's nuts. Everyone can have
their mind changed by one person who's their specific influencer
and can hack their brain on it. That's right.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
Yeah, yeah, it's their favorite podcaster tells them.

Speaker 1 (59:12):
Then they will change their minds. That is act. I mean,
that is how the world works. That's true. That's why adds.
You know, Joe Rogan has convinced me to eat nothing
but raw liver.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
Uh yeah, I look that this is all just him
going on a quest to find the Joe Rogan.

Speaker 1 (59:27):
He's looking for the Joe Rogan. That is what he
believes though, right like when Trump comes out, he's convinced
that Trump is this prime influencer, which is like that.
By the way, this is another thing that like these
weird online atheist types all did, which is they all
found a way to reinvent religion for themselves. Right, they
gave up they don't believe the Jesus that the Christians

(59:48):
believe in, but they did like have to invent another
Jesus for themselves, like God's yeah, exactly one way or
the other. They all do it, right, Yes, not all atheists,
but all of these weird internet atheists that Scott is right. Yes,
I'm not saying this is a general trade of atheists.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
It's a specific yes, like I'm an atheist, but I
just don't say it because then all being subscribed to
a bunch of newsletters I don't want well.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
And it's it's also like you know, we were talking
about how like you've got people who will like use
religion as the justification for the way I want to
kill certain people. But the real thing is that, like
they just hate certain people, right right. The religion rarely
is the thing that inspires it purely. It's like something
else that comes out that may but and it's the
same thing. You've got all these the soda folks who

(01:00:37):
started out as being like lefties in the early two thousands,
like Jimmy Dore and whatnot, and they're all preaching like
hard right shit right now, and they're all super racist,
and they're all really anti trans and whatnot. And it's
because like, yeah, what matters isn't Actually it's like whether
or not you're a giant piece of shit, you know,
I think it's primarily the thing and people will people

(01:00:59):
will if you're a big piece of shit, and you
hate people. You know, if you're inclined to pretend you're
to be like left wing or whatever, then you'll find
some reason why communism wants to kill all the trans people,
or like first in the d transition or whatever. And
if you're a Christian, you use Christianity for that. But
I think it's just like, you know, some people are
fucking assholes, and Scott Adam's an asshole, right, so he's

(01:01:21):
going to get rid of religion and the Irish one presumes.
The avatar decided to test her light of thinking with
an argument that was common i'llbe it flawed. If God exists,
he must be smart to design the world so perfectly.
Everything is in perfect balance. If any of our natural
laws were altered in the least life would be unsustainable.
Only an omnipotent genius could create such a perfect balance

(01:01:41):
in the laws of physics, physics schmisics. If God is
so smart, why do you fart? The avatar waited for
the rest of the argument, but there was none. The
two strangers stared at each other for a moment before
being overcome with a wave of laughter that brought them
all to tears. So, yeah, that's a.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Love writing, writing, and getting a real good laugh. Got
a real big laugh on the joke.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Yeah, very funny. So I'm going to spoil the rest
of this book for you. That winds up being the
key to destroying religion, right, is that this woman is
the prime influencer, and by getting her to tell this
joke to people, it spreads to everyone else in the world.
And then they give up Christianity and Islam, and they

(01:02:26):
give up their wars. And I'm gonna switch ahead to
him explaining all this. The major religions changed after the war.
Modernized was the word used most often for the disintegration
of primitive beliefs. The free flow of ideas caused dangerous
religious thoughts to perish unto the weight of common sense,
most notably the idea that God was limited by a
human personality with human wants and human intelligence evaporated. Now

(01:02:50):
the mental health profession handled people who believe that God
was talking to them directly. The voting public never got
a chance to elect such people, whether they were charismatic
or not. Religions came to be seen as true that
lent flavor to holidays and encouraged good behavior, nothing more.
The public didn't know who had said it first, but
it was the most powerful question in human history, and
nine words. It overturned centuries of tortured logic and magical thinking.

(01:03:12):
It pushed superstition into a cage and gave common sense
room to maneuver. The cause of the religion war sprung
from one colossal religious misunderstanding that God thinks like humans,
except smarter, and that we people can comprehend his intent.
That crippling misunderstanding was swept away in a single wave
of clarity. The question was translated into thousands of languages,
published billions of times. In English, it was if God

(01:03:33):
is so smart, why do you fart right again? It's
this like we just have to puncture religion with a funny,
fucking logical puzzle and then it'll go away. It's just
this trap around people's brains. It's not that like people
want land or resources and have been fighting over them

(01:03:54):
and so are angry about the history of conflicts between
peoples and are able to use sort of religion or
politics to kind of justify continuing them. It's not that
people are like greedy. It's not that people get like
scared about folks who live far away from them. It's
not any of that shit. It's that their minds have
been enraptured by religion and you can get common sense
to maneuver if you tell a smart joke.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
It's like, honestly, the most fucking like buttoned up, fucking
elitist it's it's it's got like smatterings of liberalism in there,
especially circa around this time, and just uh, and just
a sort of ignorance that was so prevalent at the
time was basically that everyone uh in the Middle East,

(01:04:41):
they're all just fucking stupid and angry, and so they
all believe in this like magic spaghetti monster and so
you know they're at war because the spaghetti monster says so.
And it's like a way to completely ignore literally any
history that has happened within that region. And you know,
it's it's great. It's you know, I love when the

(01:05:02):
stupidest man in the world writes himself as the smartest
man in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
It is it is very fun because again it doesn't
take all that much like to learn that the reality
is more complicated, right. I remember one of the big
moments for me of like, you know, just going into
fucking Iraq and talking to people in camps and stuff,
a bunch of whom had been Isis supporters kind of
early in Isis's reign was them explaining like, well, you know,

(01:05:29):
we supported them because the cops under the old government,
for like religious sectarian reasons, had punished and abused our family.
And they like, yeah, they killed my brother, they killed
my uncle, they tortured, you know, my dad. So when
Isis came and they said that they were, you know,
getting rid of these shitty ass police, we were like,
maybe this will be better. It's not like the Iraqi
government was anything to write home about, like we think,

(01:05:51):
and then it turned out they sucked. So now we're fighting,
and it's like, yeah, look, there's always you know, there
are brainwashed fucking extremists out there, variety of ways, but
the vast majority of people's motivations make sense, even if
they're bad, even if they're doing bad things, it makes sense, right.
It's like the Nazis. The Nazis didn't get like enthralled
by Hitler magically. They wanted other people shit, yes, yeah,

(01:06:16):
that's why they did it, very.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Very human reasons, and you know, like the I think
we have a tendency to take every kind of like
villain or anyone who's in opposition to whatever. You know,
the fucking American cultural hegemon has to say and go like, oh,
it's because they are all fanatical. They must be crazy

(01:06:43):
to believe that we in any way could be an enemy.
And I think just in general, it's like, oh, you
have to understand how absolutely fucking regular people are, and
you know how villainy is not necessarily this thing that
comes from like, oh, everyone's a psychopath. It's like, no,
it's actually much more simple and uh and that makes

(01:07:06):
it ten times as like complicated and scary sometimes, you know.
But yeah, I'm like, I'm just like getting flashbacks to
me like in college and just being like an atheist
and just being like fucking like, yeah, man, fucking.

Speaker 1 (01:07:24):
I'm so smart. I don't even I don't even believe
in God, you know, yeaheah, it's almost yeah. The idea
that like you're both saying that like, look at these
look at these silly religious people who are like denying
sort of the you know, they've gotten their minds washed
and they can't understand like the true complexity of reality.

(01:07:48):
But also everyone does things for one reason, right, like everyone,
All of the Muslims have one motivation and it's killed
all the Jews. And if you kill all the Jews,
then all of the Muslims support you. Right. All of
the Irish have one motivation and it's their friend Patrick.
It's their friend Patrick.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
And you know, just checking down a nice fucking Guinness
after a hard day's look.

Speaker 1 (01:08:12):
So you know, look, take the wisdom of Scott Adams
with you into the world. Is I think what we're
trying to say here. Absolutely, And the next time you
see a man with a drinker's nose, tell him about
his beloved Patrick, ask him about Patrick. Mind.

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
Yeah, I'm like, I am low key impressed at the
way he went after the White Ethnics in this. You know,
there was a time finally when Scott Adams was cool.

Speaker 1 (01:08:44):
He could just go after the Irish. Oh my god,
I am looking forward to Uh. I assume in the
sequel to this he finds a way to destroy Saint
Patrick's day.

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
Yeah, yeah, turned out all the snakes we needed to
get where these goddamn Irish.

Speaker 1 (01:09:02):
You get, you get a lot about like his thought process,
because Scott is I think a fundamentally pretty and curious person,
and so he just doesn't do really like he didn't
know that like Sunni and Shia like exist as divisions
of Islam. Didn't even do the basic research to the
second largest army in NATO is like a majority Muslim

(01:09:22):
nation and his his, He's just like decided, Okay, well,
what's something a guy could notice? Well, if you can
notice if somebody's got like a red nose because they're
drinking a bunch Okay, who drinks a lot Irish people?
What's an Irish name? Saint Patrick's day, Patrick Boom Boom.

Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
Got it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
I just got a whole fucking point to a story.
So funny.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
He's just like taking his calendar and he's marking on
I need three hours to write this?

Speaker 3 (01:09:52):
Is this?

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
For sure was stream of consciousness. Yeah, this guy is
not putting a lot of thought.

Speaker 3 (01:09:57):
I think he just used the like talk text app
and just was.

Speaker 1 (01:10:02):
Like, well, man, God bless him. You got anything to
plug here?

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
Oh? Man, Well, I'm writing a book about the scourge
of the Irish.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
No, actually I do.

Speaker 2 (01:10:18):
Uh you know this wire podcast the wire you watch
podcast pod yourself on gun is the name of the feed,
and uh it is essentially a show where we denigrate
Irish Americans in the form of McNaulty.

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
So you know, here's all of the wire is a
behind the bastards on McNaughty. It really is.

Speaker 2 (01:10:42):
It's behind one specific bastard, Jimmy McNulty uh and his
grubby little Irish wiener and uh yeah, if so, check
that out, check out the frodcast.

Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:10:56):
It's a show where we talk about, you know, everything
except for the wire. Yeah, a lot of fun, I
do it Vince Vancini and oh right, I almost forgot.
If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area or
any of the surrounding areas, on Tuesday, October seventeenth at
eight pm, specifically, my wife, Francesca Iforantini and I are

(01:11:17):
going to be headlining the San Francisco Punchline Comedy Club.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
So yeah, please come out to that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
It is a Tuesday at eight pm, October seventeenth, Bortt Voice,
My wife and I are gonna be co headlining. There's
gonna be some other great comedians coming out. It's gonna
be a lot of fun. You can get your tickets
at Punchlinecomedyclub dot com and yeah, October seventeenth. Please come out.

(01:11:46):
It's going to be so good, I swear to God.
I mean, at the very least you're gonna get to
see my wife and I kiss, like live on stage.
It's a sex show. Anyways, come out to that, man.
I'm so glad I remember to say this. Otherwise I'd
have to record this audio later and then send it
to you and have you figure out a place to

(01:12:08):
put it in the edit, and that would just sound weird. Anyways,
got thank you for having me on for, you know,
to talk about something light like, you know, the Irish
and how religion bad. You know, smart people are influenced

(01:12:29):
by some douchebag they see online.

Speaker 1 (01:12:32):
Yeah, and and check out more Scott Adams and our
upcoming podcast with Scott. I don't want to make any
more like anti Irish kind of jokes, So we're done.
We're just done with the episode. There you just so
everyone knows. I love Irish people everything that you Irish create.
Scott for being racist, which is why I'm stopping. The bit.

Speaker 5 (01:12:54):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website fo
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
H