To Scott Adams with Love
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I was sad to hear Scott Adams announce he was in a mortal struggle yesterday. Scott has had a significant impact on me in many ways. First and foremost was his introduction of hypnosis to me and the world. I was a regular listener until I wasn’t.
I stopped regularly listening to Scott a while ago, because he taught me how. I'm not trying to be ironic or clever, and I’m thankful.
Thank you, Scott.
When Scott Adams told me, and millions of other people, that he was a hypnotist, I wanted to learn how to become one too.
Caveat: I never did quite learn how to be a practicing hypnotist, though, because it requires an extensive amount of practice. It also requires a bit of sociopathy. In the words of a friend, who's an ex-hypnotist, "it feels kind of rapey."
What I have discovered in the meantime is that one does not need to be a hypnotist to recognize hypnotism, the same way that someone does not need to be a player to understand sportsball.
For example, you don't need to perform a slam-dunk to recognize a slam-dunk.
That said, being able to recognize hypnosis is a bit of a superpower.
On the occasion when I was photographing him, I asked Scott where a good place to start learning hypnosis would be, and he seemed a bit taken aback. His answer was something like "Milton Erickson, I guess," but he wasn’t very forthcoming.
Eventually, I found a real sociopath's handbook to hypnosis in "The Game" by Neil Strauss, which I can highly recommend as a good place to start, if you can get beyond the lurid depravity of its premise. If nothing else, The Game functions as an excellent bibliography, which led me to Bandler, Grinder (USAR), Dilts, Robins, NLP, et al.
Later, I asked Adams about NLP, and he said he thought it was "pseudoscience, " as Wikipedia states. I found this curious, as people like Tony Robbins have built successful careers using NLP.
For the record, I do not believe that NLP is “pseudoscience.” It is a psychological warfare weapons system, as defined by the US Army Intelligence and Special Forces in the late 1970s, but in the most practical terms, it is at least 3,000 years old.
As I dug into NLP further, my best guess is that it was born as a US Army Intelligence Special Forces program. John Grinder, the originating author, was a “retiree” of that institution. One of the original deployments of NLP, with Tony Robbins, was the US Army marksmanship program, training soldiers in more effective ways to kill people with pistols.
NLP begins with the assumption that to express our beliefs in words, we delete, distort, or generalize the words we use to convey our beliefs and understandings, allowing them to fit into concise sentences. Those deletions, distortions, and generalizations have patterns, and the first step to understanding how our words reveal things about us is to learn how to recognize those patterns.
Learning two particular patterns, the cause-effect pattern, and the complex equivalence pattern, had a profound impact on me, as I discovered that almost all bullshit matches the use of these patterns, and some of the most powerfull bullshit is a combination of the two. (I’ve written about this elsewhere.)
Not all sentences that use this structure are BS, but enough of them are that – if you can teach yourself to recognize them – you can figure out when people are using hypnotic language in real time. It turns out that a majority of mainstream media voices consistently employ this form of rhetorical mind control. Once I started exploring these patterns, many of the people I had listened to and become friends with along the way simply became unlistenable.
Scott wasn’t the only person I couldn’t listen to anymore. Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, and many, many more “influencers” also became unlistenable. I also started to notice that the droning talking heads like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Glenn Beck, and Stu Peters all start their monologues with the exact same “mere-agreement” (AKA “yes ladder”) form of speech.
It turns out that you don’t need to be that smart to recognize linguistic patterns. It’s something you can teach kids, but they don’t.
But I would have never learned any of it if it weren’t for Scott.
MOTO
When I met Scott in person in 2016, I mentioned that his concept of the MOTO had a big influence on me. He said, “What’s that?” I said, “You know, Master of the Obvious?” Again, he said, “What’s that?” I answered, “It’s something you wrote back in the day, it was in your strip for years.” He said, “Do you know how many strips I’ve done? I can’t remember it all.”
A MOTO, for those who don’t know, is a “Master Of The Obvious.” In corporate America, these are senior people in meetings who feel the need to assert their authority by injecting something so obviously true that no one can disagree with them. (In retrospect, this is a neurolinguistic form of mere-agreement, but corporate pinheads from Sunderland aren’t smart enough to understand that, but I digress.)
I groked the MOTO idea and inverted it. I discovered a superpower during my time in corporate America: being the one in the room who asks the question that no one else can answer. It turns out that managers who think you’re smart enough to ask the question usually also assume you’re smart enough to find the answer. (And with enough budget and resources, you probably can.) Inverting Scott’s MOTO meme, I built an entire career asking the same seven questions.
Thanks for that, Scott.
Later, I mentioned to him that I believed coincidence was a process used by the program that runs the universe to manage memory. I explained that in object-oriented programming, reusing chunks of code and processes as “objects” is a form of memory management and system optimization. He held his finger up in my face and said, “That is an original idea!” He went on to explain that he hears many ideas that are seldom original, but he thought this one was unique.
Thank you, Scott.
WhenHub
In 2017, Scott launched with some fanfare a product that he claimed would change the world, called WhenHub. For what it’s worth, I was the biggest fan of WhenHub in the world. Imagine a geo-spatial-temporal version of Wikipedia that would allow you to turn timelines into animated movies, with the click of a button. It was that good. Unfortunately, it was the best software, with the worst marketing plan in Internet history.
Geo-spatial temporal refers to mapping entities over time and space. I showed it to George Webb, and he threw in a bunch of data off the top of his head, and we built an animation of the spread of the coronavirus from the labs at the University of North Carolina to Wuhan, China, which resembled the opening of an Indiana Jones movie. (We’re still looking for the animation).
WhenHub was brilliant.
Unfortunately, WhenHub was the best software with the worst marketing plan, ever. Later, Scott released another completely unrelated product, WhenHub Interface, and tried to market it on the same website. Things got really confusing,
Later, after Scott abandoned the project, I attempted to buy the IP, but he didn’t seem interested and moved on. If WhenHub were available today, it would kill most other narrative education software.
When I saw it, I thought researchers and students worldwide could assemble timelines of historical events seldom reported in the media and education. Maybe that’s why, WhenHub died, it was simply too dangerous.
Books like “Two World Wars and Hitler: Who was Responsible?: Anglo-American Money, Foreign Agents and Geopolitics” tell an entirely different version of history, and would be the type of information that a tool like WhenHub could make into a completely understandable narrative.
Someday, someone will pick up this idea and make it a reality. Thank you, Scott.
Reframing Mortality
As most subscribers know, I’ve been working on a book for four years called “Reframing Reality.” As a sop, I’ve published bits and pieces of it here on Substack. Scott Adams’ last book is titled “Reframe Your Brain” (which I have not read yet), but the title alone tells me what I need to know.
I believe your mind is not your brain.
Materialists — whether Darwin, the Huxleys, Bertrand Russell, or today’s transhumanist crowd — tend to point to the hardware that runs our experience of life and assume some accidental collision of “atomic” particles accounts for everything that matters. They invest billions, even trillions, to chase after the mechanisms of consciousness, hoping to find meaning in a thing they call a “quantum computer” — never mind that few can say how such a thing really works. They forget that even the best technology is useless without the network it plugs into.
To call the mind nothing more than a brain is like pointing at an Ethernet port and declaring it is the Internet. The port is just a local interface — a gateway, not the thing itself. Existence is not reducible to its material “ports.” Consciousness, meaning, purpose — these do not arise from circuitry alone.
Scott wrote a book called “God’s Debris,” drawing inspiration from a 16th-century Rosicrucian idea found in Jakob Böhme: for God to be revealed, he must first “contract” or “withdraw” so that a manifest world — and independent beings — can exist. In Scott’s thought experiment, God, possessing infinite power and knowledge, faces only one challenge worth pursuing: annihilation. God chooses to “blow himself to bits,” and the universe as we know it is what remains—matter, energy, and probability are all “God’s debris.”
But in the final chapters of Scott’s narrative, the “debris” begins to reassemble; the scattered fragments of consciousness and being evolve, connect, and move toward a new unity. The story takes a cyclical turn, pointing toward reunion, transcendence, and the possibility that what appears to be an ending is often the seed of a new beginning.
Even if one accepts the materialist conceit that the body is nothing but a complex machine, that does not make our mind an accident of molecules. Consciousness does not arise from matter; it is the faculty that recognizes its own frame — the awareness that stands outside thought and sees its own perspective.
We are not just our material being or our thoughts. Both come and go, but the self that notices, questions, and reframes them — the “ghost within” — is something else entirely. Our awareness reflects the source that transcends a physical process. I don’t care what anyone else has said or written; existence is not a random spark in the void. Every act of awareness, every memory, every moment of love, insight, or intention is our connection to the Almighty. Our hardware changes and the terminal wears out, but what animates us is not merely a chemical byproduct; it is a signal that comes from beyond the sum of its parts.
Even as our machinery wears down, our soul endures — not as an accident, but as a participant in a reality shaped by purpose, intelligence, and meaning. To recognize that the interface is not the network is to see that the self — whatever its fate — is a witness to something real and enduring, something that matter alone could never explain. In this, there is hope: that existence is intentional, that consciousness is a reflection of something greater, and that no one’s life, not even yours, is ever just debris.
To Scott Adams, I wish you Godspeed.
With love and friendship,
Peter Duke
This is pure gold. Thank you, Peter. I will re-read and metabolize. So much of your work seems to me to be at 30K feet but this is "down where the iguanas live". I've no knowledge or experience of Scott Adams or Dilbert etc but you laid out what I see in today's "reality", of which I want no part. The programming is ubiquitous, flooding consumers who eagerly devour it. Maybe you're making a small dent in the apparently prevailing tide of willful ignorance. I applaud you.
Beautiful and beautifully astute. The photo you took of him in black and white sans eyeglasses was brilliant. I don’t know if it was at your suggestion or no, but it was both vulnerable and powerful if that makes sense. Stripping the NLP and Hypnosis away to reveal the person without the process.