I followed a lot of Scott's content from 2015 to around 2019-2020. I haven't seen these details elsewhere in the thread, so I'll share them. If you are wondering why a cartoonist involved himself in politics, here is the background:
Pre-2016 Election
(These posts were originally made on blog.dilbert.com, but they now redirect to scottadamssays.com. The content of the posts is the same, but the formatting is weird and the public comments have been lost, unless they can be connected to Disqus, which hosted them. Here is a page with the posts that has better formatting: (
archive).)
A week after the first 2016 Republican Party primary debate, on August 13, 2015, Scott made a post titled
Clown Genius (
archive). In it, Scott talks about some behaviors he observed in then-joke candidate Trump's debate style that, after some other research, led him to to believe Trump had a set of persuasion skills that would win him the presidency. At the end of that post, he publicly made the then-outlandish prediction that Trump would indeed become the next President.
He followed that post up with two more.
Can We Call a Trump Puppet a Trumpet? (
archive) on August 14, 2015 talked about some psychological compliance techniques Trump might have been using.
Wizard Wars (
archive) on August 17, 2015 talked about psychologist Milton H. Erickson and some of the people he went on to influence, chaining down to Trump; this was later expanded upon in livestreams as a direct chain of influence through Trump's pastor Norman Vincent Peale, which, by Trump family accounts, supported some level of this theory.
If you viewed the daily comic on dilbert.com, you would see recent blog posts under it. Shortly after these posts, Scott began livestreaming on Twitter's Periscope app, doing rather well in comparison to other streams on the platform because hardly anyone streamed on the platform. In addition to "hey it's the guy who makes Dilbert" from the video titles, these posts are where I suspect Scott's early livestream audience came from. These early streams had around 100-200 live viewers.
Pre-election, these livestreams were almost entirely about Scott reading into how Trump's actions were the work of a "Master Persuader", and explaining what he recognized as the psychological techniques behind them. The focus was not on why Trump would be a good choice for President (no policies were discussed on their merits or lack thereof), but rather on why his support was growing, and how you could use similar methods in your life. Regardless of the opinion behind them, the techniques described were detailed by real psychologists like Robert Cialdini (lovingly dubbed "Godzilla"). Some of this was genuinely good career advice.
I believe he stated that these streams were a deliberate attempt to leverage social media to branch out in influence in a new field for which he not already known, for whatever purpose (he really did not like being told to stick to cartooning or to "stay in his lane", maybe partly due to ego and partly due to what I understand to be his belief system). These streams attracted a few hundred live viewers (~500-1000) at the start of the workday, and quickly grew his Twitter presence. The very early streams were done on his phone, and were deleted after the session ended; you had to catch them live, and they have since faded into the ether. Later streams were left up after a certain point in time, but are likely mostly gone with the shutdown of Periscope. Some of the later-later ones from this time may be on his YouTube channel.
I believe he also once mentioned how he took a gamble in making his initial prediction, and was prepared to fade into the shadows and lose most viewers if the election did not turn out as he expected.
Post-2016 Election
Trump was elected the 45th President. Scott's livestreams now averaged a few thousand viewers.
Streams from this era largely talked about Trump's how actions as President were meant to influence the other world leaders and people around him, again going into examples of the techniques as described by psychologists. He also began talking a little bit about his personal life.
At some point, he began talking about a project he was working on and about how people kept asking how they could invest in any of his attached projects (I believe this claim to be true, based on a lot of live chat comments I remember seeing from the time). This is the start of WhenHub as described in the OP.
I believe the project was described a collection of tools for revolutionizing viewing and organizing time (hence the name "WhenHub"), similar to how spreadsheets revolutionized organizing data (yes, really). I was not particularly impressed by early demos of functionality, one of which showed what could be described as PowerPoint slides connected on a linear horizontal timeline (I think "Cards" or something else from here: (
archive)), and the other of which was a tracking service that could show where your friends/family/colleagues were and how long it would take them to arrive (with granular permissions you could set to limit sharing of some information, which to my understanding was the main selling point over other services; you can see it at the bottom of these pages: (
archive) and (
archive)). Other early planned functionality can be found here: (
archive). Hopes and dreams for the service can be found here: (
archive).
There was later a blog post announcing the service's launch.(
archive)(
archive2 with Disqus comments!) It was a crypto buy-in. At this point, the service pivoted to what is described in the OP; a service meant to connect you in a live chat with "experts" in any particular field, and pay them with the token through the app. It had a lukewarm reception on the post itself, the top comment of which hilariously was/is:
Well, two problems:
1. I am too stupid to know what most of those words mean. An excellent writer called Scott Adams warned me to be sceptical of people selling via confusion.
2. I own this orange book, warning me about this guy called Scott Adams, who fails at 90% of things he does. Apparently the other 10% win big. He seems like a nice guy, and the book is well worth $10. But I don't like those odds for giving him my money.
(referencing his
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big book (
img))
I started losing interest around this time. Scott continued his show, now in an actual studio he set up in his house, and again predicted Trump would win the 2020 election ("Slaughtermeter," the cat is on the roof/fire, etc.)
Post-2020 Election
Trump was not elected President (for whatever reason you'd like to believe).
The biggest hit here is that, without Trump's actions to analyze as a "Master Persuader", there's not much to talk about. As far as I could tell, there weren't preparations made to pivot in content in the event of a loss. I had lost interest by then, but I believe he started talking about the vaccine a lot. I don't know what his opinion is on it, but he seems to take issue with what other people think he thinks. I don't care what his opinion is on this topic, because I don't find the topic interesting either way.
I don't know what the state of his livestreams are now.
Hi Scott - Please don't sue me, I still kind of like you.
