Distilled Philosophy

[Martin Hash]

Scott Adams is the most insightful person I’ve ever followed but the guy is a bundle of neurosis. It got me thinking: I only read top-of-his-game Scott Adams but IRL, Scott’s life happens between paragraphs; his laser-focus thoughts become muddled & dim, then he ramps up to write about a new focus. I know this feeling well: if someone just listened to my podcasts, they’d think I was a goddamn Socrates. More than once I’ve had people tell me something I’ve said on a topic and it sounds terrifically informed, but I can’t remember. I look it up and there are my words; obviously I was on a different plane when I wrote them. People can know more about my philosophy than I do by reading batches of my distilled thoughts. My writing is a different person than me. That's what's going on in spades with Scott Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, who are geniuses as icons but deeply flawed as human beings, as are we all.