All Episodes
Previous Next
June 16, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:32
Episode 106 - The Children in Cages
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody!
It's the weekend.
Unless you're watching this on replay.
And then it might be...
Well, anytime at all.
And those of you who are getting here early, you know the advantage of being early.
Yeah, it's a simultaneous sip.
A lot of people come late and they say to themselves, something's missing.
I like the periscope, but I feel an emptiness.
That's because they weren't here for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your beverage and get ready, because here it comes, the simultaneous sip.
Ah, that's good coffee.
Okay, so the whole darn world is blowing up about the children who are being kept in cages.
Now, when you hear something as bad as that, children being kept in cages, you say to yourself, this, this is a problem.
And when I talk about the children kept in cages, of course, I'm talking not about the illegal immigrants.
The children kept in cages are the anti-Trumpers.
Because have you noticed that the anti-Trumpers seem to be in sort of a weird mental cage that they can't get out of?
And in their little mental cage, there's all kinds of stuff happening that isn't really happening anywhere else except in the cage.
For example, if you're in the Democrats' little mental cage, you might see that the Trump administration is putting children coming across the border in cages.
Apparently their news is telling them something like that is happening.
Nobody is delighted that parents and children are separated at the border in some cases.
Apparently, if they come through the normal entry points, that doesn't happen.
But in many cases, it is happening.
And when I say children in cages and when I talk about the Democrats who are the anti-Trumpers, the reason I call them children is that there's a way children think.
And it goes like this.
Mom, I don't think I need to go to school.
And the parents, being complicated thinkers, say, no, school is unpleasant, but you have to do it because your life will be better if you go to school.
And the child says, but I don't like school.
And the parent says, no, wait a minute.
You're only looking at part of the equation.
You're looking at the child part where you don't like school.
That's just part of it.
I know you don't like school, but the bigger picture is, if you go to school, your life will be better.
And the child says, but I don't like school.
So that's child thinking and inability to see the whole picture.
They just see their little part.
So when you see people arguing about the children being ripped from their parents, nobody likes that.
Is there any Trump supporter who says, yeah, let's take children from parents?
I mean, there might be, but I hope I never meet that person.
But... The Trump supporters are saying, well, there's a bigger picture.
Taking children from parents is terrible.
We all agree on that part.
But, what exactly is the alternative?
Do you put both the parents and the adults in some kind of facility?
Well, no, that's worse, because then the kids get abused, etc.
Do you just let them go?
Well, that's worse too, because it would encourage all kinds of families to come up here and, hey, we just have to bring a kid.
We can all just go free. So that doesn't work.
There's the sending them back immediately, just pushing them over the border and closing the door again.
But that doesn't work.
They'll just come back or they'll be subject to other crimes once they're pushed across the border.
So that doesn't work.
So, yeah, you can't let them go.
You can't put them together in a confinement.
What exactly is the alternative?
So when you see the anti-Trumpers talking about the children in cages, just be aware that they are the children in the cages.
They're in a little mental cage, like children, because they can't suggest an alternative to the thing they're complaining about.
Now, the Trump administration being, in this situation, the parents, the Jeff Sessions and the Trumps, etc., acting like parents, are saying, you know what?
We also hate separating children from parents.
And the moment we come up with a better plan, we're going to do that.
We're going to be all over it.
We just need that better plan.
And we've got some comprehensive immigration reform stuff that you could sign tomorrow, and it would end this right away.
So even if you don't like what they're doing, That is the parental approach.
The anti-Trumpers, at least on this topic, are taking the child approach.
The child approach is that all you're looking at is the part you care about, and you just ignore any other considerations, as a child does.
But, that said, this attack on the Trump team is really, really good.
You know that I like to separate the technique of persuasion from the ethics of it.
Not because ethics don't count, Sam Harris.
They do count, but they can be looked at individually.
There's the tools, and then were the tools used for good or bad.
Both important, but you can separate them for analysis.
And in this case, the anti-Trumpers who are using this children in cages approach, although it is completely fraudulent and lacking in factual accuracy for the most part, especially if they're using the old photographs from 2014, Of children in cages.
So although it's untrue and misleading and out of context and they could solve it tomorrow, it's still really effective.
And what is the key takeaway in terms of why this completely fraudulent approach is effective?
Because facts don't matter to persuasion.
It just doesn't matter.
And the poor Trump supporters are left arguing facts.
It's the losing position.
The people arguing the facts are losing all over the place because the Trump supporters are saying, wait a minute, that photo you're showing is old.
Or they can get in at the approved border places, or it's only six weeks and we're putting them in good facilities.
You know, they're not in danger and we don't really have any alternatives.
Fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.
Total value in terms of persuasion, total value of all those facts.
Zero.
Zero.
No persuasive power.
It just persuades the people who are already persuaded.
The people on the other side are saying, they're writing to me and here's what I was getting yesterday.
So, Scott!
You remember you said in your tweet two years ago that if Trump ever did anything slightly Hitler-ish, you would switch sides and be against them.
So what do you call putting children in cages?
Hitler-ish, right?
Have you switched sides yet?
And there's absolutely nothing I can do.
To that attack, because it's not based on facts, and so if I present facts, I don't have any defense.
Facts are useless in this case.
It's not just this case.
It's really every case.
The facts are just not persuasive anywhere, anytime.
You could argue that the people who are doing this persuasion, which is deeply effective, fraudulent but deeply effective, are doing it for a higher good.
They're trying to create a situation that's better for the children, etc.
But... It doesn't feel that way.
You know, I do believe people want what's right for the children, but it feels like it's more about Trump than the children.
Doesn't it? Yeah, I don't want to be a mind reader and say that I can tell what's in their mind, but I'll just put that out there.
Does it look to you like the driving force is to save the children?
Because it's the same situation it's been for a while.
It doesn't feel like that.
Because if the driving thing was to save the children, wouldn't they have alternative suggestions?
Such as, hey, let me take some of those children.
I'll take them into my house.
Or let's start a GoFundMe to create some more nice facilities for the children that maybe have the parents nearby.
Or, can't we pass some legislation tomorrow to put more funding into these facilities so the parents and the children can be at least close to each other?
Those would look like caring about the children.
But when you take the child's view, which is, hey, there's only one variable, children in cages, you're not really trying to solve the problem.
You're not really caring about the children.
It's just an attack you're using on the president.
Now, again, I'm not a mind reader, so people could be only caring about the children.
But if they were, it feels like they would act differently.
Internment camps.
Internment camps.
Yeah, I suppose they are internment camps.
I mean, it's sort of word thinking, what you call them.
They're either detention centers or processing centers or jail or cages.
but those words don't change what it is.
Um, ba-boom, it's child abuse.
It probably is.
It is child abuse.
It is child abuse by the parents who brought them here and put them in that situation.
Which is sort of the point of what Jeff Sessions is saying.
I'm not a big Jeff Sessions fan, by the way, in case you're wondering.
But given that no one is presenting him with functional options...
I have to ask what people's motives are.
Well, we don't really have to ask, do we?
All right. It's against international law.
Would it be against international law to just push them back across the border?
That would be legal, right?
Would there be any law violated if somebody comes across, they're detained as a family, and you just open the fence back up and just push them back and say, nope, we're done.
That's legal, right?
So I think you're right that it might be some kind of violation of international law, but as far as I know, it's because they don't have a better option for the children.
That also protects the border, which is something that they're not going to sacrifice.
Alright. What else we have going on?
I felt exhausted last week from all the news.
You know, we're watching the OIG report break the world into their two movies again.
Some of them say there's nothing there.
Some of them say there's everything there.
And of course there's enough in there for everybody to draw their own conclusions.
Now, the one thing that I've told you consistently is that whenever a situation is complicated, those are the ones that are easy to break into two movies, because the simpler the situation, the more easy it is to see that it's just a different set of opinion.
But when you have complicated situations people can just craft that complicated situation into whatever they want to see.
So you see that with anything from trade agreements to immigration.
They're complicated enough that people can see whatever they want.
I've been tweeting for the last day or so examples of what I call the laundry list tell for cognitive dissonance.
Have some of you seen that?
So I think I'm up to four or five I've tweeted.
And what that is is the anti-Trumpers Who will list quite often five things.
For some reason they think five is about the right number.
And people have asked me for a little bit more explanation of why that's a tell for cognitive dissonance.
And the first thing I should say is, I'm not relying on science for this.
So as far as I know, there's no scientific study that would support what I'm going to tell you right now.
So this is experiential, it's observational, and the reason I'm showing you examples is so you can look for it yourself, reach your own opinion.
But I'll tell you my thinking.
And you can bounce that against whatever other thinking you think is relevant.
So my thinking is that the people who have decided they dislike the president started with big reasons.
In the beginning, the big reason was, my God, he's going to blow up the world in a nuclear fireball.
Or he's going to destroy the economy.
Or he's going to round up gay people and put them in camps.
The initial complaints about the president were just these enormous, gigantic complaints.
But it's now been 520 days or whatever it's been of the presidency, and he's made nuclear war far less likely in North Korea, certainly.
He's been great for the economy, or at least he hasn't broken it.
Even if you're a critic, he hasn't broken it.
You know, ISIS is being beaten back, etc.
So all of the big stuff that people had in their heads as these are the reasons we hate Trump, they were big things, but they just don't work anymore.
So the big things don't work.
They've been falsified by experience, by observation.
But They haven't changed in their opposition.
They've defined themselves as part of the resistance and they've defined themselves as the smart ones in the conversation.
So they can't change that.
That's their identity. So they need to change what it is they're saying about the president because it now looks ridiculous to say he's going to start a nuclear war with North Korea, he's bad for the economy, etc.
It just doesn't work anymore.
So, when trapped to say why they resist, they go with whatever they have left.
So they say, you're supporting a con man.
So that's the first thing in their list.
You're supporting a con man.
Now, if that was enough, they'd be done.
So, for example, if they said, you're supporting somebody who's going to kill us all in nuclear war.
Well, that's such a big point that if it were true and convincing and the facts seemed to support it, you'd be done.
One and done.
I'm good.
He's going to destroy the world.
I don't even need to tell you anything else.
But if all you have left is, he's a con man, as soon as you write it in your tweet, you have a bit of self-realization.
Well, that's not very big.
And And somebody could easily say that con man is similar to leadership.
You know, it's about convincing people to do something.
And we haven't seen him con us into doing anything terrible yet, like blowing up the world, ruining the economy.
And the conning he's doing seems to be good for the economy and good for world peace.
But he's a con man.
So as soon as they say it, They realize it's not enough.
So they say, and he's a con man, and he's a liar.
But as soon as they say the liar thing, they realize all politicians are liars.
Well, he might lie more than other politicians, but we're not seeing exactly where the lies are hurting anything, because again, North Korea, economy, ISIS... But I know he's lying, and I don't like that.
All right, so now I've got con man, and I've got lying.
Those two don't seem to be enough, but I can compensate by adding some more.
So I'm going to add, it's a cult of personality.
Yeah, yeah. Con man, liar, and a cult of personality.
And as soon as they say it, they think to themselves, Well, that's kind of true of Obama, too.
It certainly would have been true of Hillary.
But he's slightly more of that, I think.
A little bit more.
But that's not very persuasive.
It just says that people like him.
It's almost a compliment.
I want it to be worse.
So I've got con man that didn't mean much.
I've got liar that doesn't seem to make any difference.
I've got call to personality that's practically a compliment.
Three things isn't enough.
So I'd better add...
I'm a Russian collusion.
Russian collusion. He's a con man, a liar, cult personality, and Russian collusion.
But Mueller hasn't really given us much on the Russian collusion, and people are starting to not talk about it anymore.
It seems to me that the Russian collusion, if there was something big, it probably would have leaked because everything big leaks.
So, not enough.
Alright, what do I have so far?
I've got four things. Con man, liar, cult of personality, Russia thing.
Man, all four of them don't seem to mean much.
I mean, compared to a great economy, peace with North Korea, I don't have much.
I'm going to need a fifth thing.
Fifth thing for, let's see, what else can I throw in there?
Children in cages.
Children in cages.
Suck on that. What?
The children in cages were a photograph from the Obama era?
Doesn't matter. Sure, maybe the children in cages thing isn't as big as it should be because I don't really have a better way to handle it myself.
But when you look at all the other things, my god man, are you blind?
Look at all the things.
You got your lion, you got your con man, you got your cult of personality, you got your Russia, you got your children in cages.
Bam! Hitler! So, that's why the laundry list is a tell for cognitive dissonance.
Because you can almost see the thought process in the tweet.
It's like, eh, he's this.
Well, that wasn't much. And he's this.
Still not much.
And, you know, you get to the fifth one.
By the time you reach five, it becomes obvious to the person writing the tweet that there's nothing there.
And it's not going to get better with six or seven.
Because if you keep going, it just starts looking ridiculous.
And I saw somebody did the laundry list that I think had Maybe 15 items on it.
But if you look at it, I think there were several items that were just duplicates because they ran out of reason.
So they had to do something about taxes twice because the list still wasn't long enough.
Well, I already said taxes, but how can I reword the taxes thing again?
Yeah, something else about taxes.
And they end up criticizing low taxes as one of their worst attacks.
The Human Rights Council issue at the UN, I don't know what that means.
gas prices yeah maybe that'll be that'll be next all right I'm just looking at your comments now Are Trump's lists cognitive dissonance too?
Well, his lists are, so here's the difference.
When Trump does a list of his accomplishments, he says stuff like, you know, economy is good and North Korea and ISIS and cutting regulations and stuff.
And you look at that and you say, okay, those are actually big things.
And those are the things that his supporters wanted him to do.
So a list of accomplishments is fair game.
But look at the difference in the list.
Trump's list are enormous world-changing things that he's at least done the way his supporters wanted him to do.
The entire laundry list of the critics is stuff that even they don't think is convincing.
So if they thought their list was convincing, they could stop at one or two, I'm sure.
Terra fairness.
I'm not sure what that question or comment was about, but I think it's probably something good.
Does George Lakoff have cognitive dissonance?
Maybe some of you saw the article and a tweet from George Lakoff.
He was a UC Berkeley professor, linguistics expert.
So he's one of the few people who are actually qualified To have an opinion on Trump.
And he's qualified in the sense that he understands persuasion, he understands the cognitive element, he understands the third dimension.
And what's funny is that Lakoff is trying to warn his own side, you know, the anti-Trumpers.
He's yelling as loudly as he can, hey, it's not luck!
Stop saying it's luck.
It's not luck.
It's evil, you know, in Lakoff's opinion, but it's skill.
And here's what he's doing.
Here are the skills.
I'm describing the skills.
You can see him consistently using them.
You can see that these are real persuasive skills.
Now, of course, Lakoff would use words like propaganda.
He would use words to make it sound as bad as possible.
But the reason that...
And this is the funny part...
The reason that Lakoff is both an expert on persuasion, at least his version of it, the linguistic part.
So I think it's probably fair to say he's an expert in the cognitive elements of persuasion.
Maybe not the same exact overlap with Cialdini, but from his linguistics field and the expansion of it, I would say Lakoff is a genuine expert.
And, of course, he went to UC Berkeley because he was a professor there, so that makes him brilliant as well.
But here's his problem.
He still thinks facts matter.
He knows it doesn't matter to persuasion because he observes it.
He's watching it and he's calling it out.
But he can't leave the field of facts matter.
And if he doesn't, he can't convince anybody of anything.
So he's sort of trapped in his own little child cage that as long as he's wed to the fact that the facts matter, he's in trouble.
And let me complete that thought.
Because the facts matter and because he knows what he's talking about, he can see that Trump is not an idiot.
He can see that just clearly because he sees him using technique, which are the high-end, most effective techniques, and he uses them consistently enough that it's not chance.
So Lakoff knows something, a fact, that 100% of the people-ish, you know, not really 100%, let's say 99% of the people who are anti-Trump don't believe is true.
Because they believe that Trump is an idiot and that nothing he's doing has any intelligence to it.
So poor George Lakoff, who actually is at a far higher level of understanding of what's going on here, except that his fear, I think, is turning the obvious good things that are happening, you know, the economy, North Korea, etc., that's being distorted in his mind to the end of the world and society is falling apart.
Even though the opposite of that is happening right in front of him.
But at least he's way ahead of the people on his side because he understands the tools that Trump is using and he just can't sell that to his own side.
He's completely handicapped by the fact that his side has bought into the movie in which Trump is only lucky.
Do you know the Chauncey Gardner reference from the movie Being There, a very old movie, in which the main character, who is literally a moron, becomes President of the United States because people can't tell the difference between the moron and somebody who's a genius.
They just confuse the two.
It's like, oh... We don't understand what he's doing, but it turned out, it worked out, so he must be a genius.
And then once they decide he's a genius, everything he does looks genius-y to the people who have been fooled.
So you see a number of people, I saw Sam Harris and some other people making that specific reference to Chauncey Gardner, that he's the Chauncey Gardner president.
And the fun part about that is that that point of view has sort of a fuse on it.
Yeah, you can start with that point of view and you can say, well, he got this far on luck.
But the luck hypothesis, once you leave the movie script world where anything's possible, if you leave the movie script world into the real world where the odds matter, The longer Trump goes getting things done that at least his supporters want him to do, even if the other side doesn't, the harder it is to attribute it to luck.
Who is Lakoff?
Lekhoff's an expert on linguistics and has been a professor at UC Berkeley, author, prominent voice in the sort of cognitive field.
Democrats are picking an anti-Asian bent, somebody says.
I have not noticed that.
But I'd be open to examples of that.
Michael Pollan said the ego is a controlled substance.
There you go. Watch how many people start coming to that realization.
So there's a natural enlightenment that comes once you realize the two-movie reality.
Once you realize that people are just literally observing and interpreting their world in completely different ways...
Then you're free to start realizing that your ego is not who you are.
It's just sort of a tool that you can use.
And part of that is the humility of knowing that you could be in the wrong movie.
Once you understand that you could be in the wrong movie, or your movie might not be the one that predicts the best, then you can say, oh, my ego is not helping me out here, because my ego kept telling me I'm right.
But then I observe that I'm wrong.
So once you see that your ego is not helping you, and it's only hurting you, at least hurting you when it's telling you incorrect stuff, then you can use it as a tool.
You can ramp it up when you need some confidence.
You can ramp it down when you think it's just fooling you.
How much of this boils down to fashion?
Probably a lot. Fashion in the sense that people like to be on the fashionable side of history.
But the fashionable side It's actually a good analogy, even though I tell you analogies are dangerous.
Fashion is something you usually attribute to the young, don't you?
As soon as you hear the word fashion, your mind goes to young models and teens and people who care about fashion.
You're not thinking about the 45-year-old dad who's wearing his khakis and sandals.
You're thinking about young people.
So fashion is a good way to talk about it.
Because the left have become the children in the argument.
Their opinions of the world are best described as young.
Because what I was saying before is that if your opinion is that something is bad, but you don't have any concept of what the alternatives are, that's a child's frame of the world.
And you see that on pretty much everything.
They take sort of the child's frame.
The adult frame is, this is going to be hard for all of us.
It's not gonna be fun, it's gonna hurt, but it gets us to a better place.
So yes, we're gonna do something tough, but it's because of the long run.
That's an adult frame, and it's what the...
If you look at, you've seen some videos recently, Of President Trump from however many years ago.
He was doing an interview before he was president and before he was even a candidate and saying, if we don't do something about North Korea now, it's going to be harder and worse in the future, so we've got to go hard now.
That's an adult frame that you've got to take some pain now because it'll be better later.
The child frame is that you take the pleasure now, you let the children do what they want, you just give everybody money, you don't worry about what happens after that.
So it's sort of the long run versus short run thinking that is typified by children versus adults.
All right.
So 1999 is when Trump said that in an interview interview.
I think somebody's prompting me here.
What happened with the global warming lawsuit?
Good question. Don't we remember there was a lawsuit in which the judge had asked the climate change proponents and anti to make their cases.
And it feels like we just stopped hearing about that.
I'd love to know how that worked out.
They might be in some kind of a delay or break or something.
It's hard for most people to delay gratification.
It is. But wouldn't you agree that it's something that you get better at as you get older?
You know, the five-year-old can't delay any gratification.
Teenager can do it sometimes.
A 20-something can do it once in a while, you know.
But by the time you're my age, Well, by the time you're my age, there's no point in delaying it because you don't have much time left, right?
So I may be moving to the other side of the curve pretty quickly.
So there's some, let me just switch topics.
Let me tease you that there's some interesting things happening in the urban development world.
I'm going to update you on that maybe in the next few weeks relative to Bill Pulte's Urban blight project where he's tearing down homes and getting rid of the crime and other bad influences that those abandoned buildings had.
But now the next part is what do you do with it?
And that's where the fun is going to happen.
So I'll just give you a teaser for it.
This is not the bigger, better stuff that's coming, but just a teaser.
You probably saw that Elon Musk's Boring Company, B-O-R-I-N-G, Boring, which creates tunnels, has agreed, or got the contract, I guess, to make a tunnel from,
I guess, the suburbs to the airport or something in Chicago, and And Chicago has, I believe, Bill Pulte said something like 7,000 buildings that are candidates for being removed with the blight authority method, you know, just tearing them down quickly.
And it turns out that one of the big problems when you remove a bunch of buildings is that they have basements that are just holes in the ground, and you need to fill them in with dirt.
So Bill tweeted yesterday, Hey, what are you going to do with all that dirt, Elon Musk, when you build those tunnels?
Now, we've already talked about the fact that Elon has developed a technology, or his company has, to build, to turn that dirt into bricks.
And that might be one of the great uses for it from the Chicago dirt.
But the other use is just to pair up with the Blight Authority and start filling in the basements that need to be filled in.
Now, if you're going to rebuild, I don't know if you always want to fill in the basement, but I'm assuming that people know more than I do about this stuff.
So there's a really good example of where you've got two private citizens Who are doing something for Chicago that's really substantial and it's the basis for what can reduce crime, make it easier to get a job, make it easier to go to school, because once you get rid of the blight and the crime, everything gets easier.
So we may be in a world, and I've said this before, but I want to run this by you.
So fact check me on this.
Fact checking being not exactly the right term.
I want your opinion on this.
Here's my opinion, and you can weigh in with yours.
That having a president Who is a famous entrepreneur?
He didn't do just one kind of business.
He did golf courses and every project, every business is a new thing.
He did licensing.
He did TV. Now he's the president.
So he's a very entrepreneurial figure.
Even if you say, oh, his casinos didn't work, he had bankruptcy, etc.
That's very typical of the entrepreneurial arc.
It's not unusual for entrepreneurs to lose it all before they get it back.
Or at least lose a lot before they make it big.
So do you think that having an entrepreneurial president is causing the citizens to be more entrepreneurial?
And specifically entrepreneurial in a way that has a public good?
Because that's what you see in the Blight Authority.
It's what you're seeing with Elon Musk doing some of the things he's doing.
Some of the things you see out of the...
So Sam Altman's Y Combinator.
You see Y Combinator working on projects which are clearly for the public good.
They're also trying to make money, but the headspace is very much public good.
Yeah, and I'm seeing a number of you say yes.
I find myself drawn to helping in a way that I never have been before.
And it feels like there's something permissive about the Trump presidency, permissive in an entrepreneurial way, that if you've got a good idea and you've got the energy to do something, you might be able to do it.
And take for an example, just a small example, Kim Kardashian, who I would argue, that's not much of an argument, is probably one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our age.
If you look at what Kim Kardashian has done in a variety of fields, including making a new fortune in a video game or video games, etc., hugely entrepreneurial.
The whole family seems to be pretty entrepreneurial.
And so she takes this idea into the president and says, hey, I have this idea about letting Alice Johnson out of prison and pardoning her.
One of the most famous entrepreneurs in the world takes an idea to one of the other most famous entrepreneurs in the world, President Trump.
And what does he say?
Sounds good to me. What do you expect when two entrepreneurs at that level have a conversation?
Something good, something good might happen.
So that's the sort of thing where you see somebody just have an idea, they bring it to the president, and the president says, I could work with that.
And I feel like we've seen that a number of times, haven't we?
Haven't you seen a number of times the president had said, bring me an idea?
Do you remember in healthcare?
He said, I'll sign it, just bring me something that works.
That's sort of the entrepreneurial kind of approach.
It's like, bring me good ideas and I'll help you make them work.
Likewise, he said to the NFL kneelers, if you've got some ideas of people who need pardons, bring them to me.
It's a permissive, entrepreneurial world.
We're cutting regulations.
We're just setting an example.
Yes, perfect example.
Thank you. When the president talked to Kim Jong-un and showed him the video...
It was an entrepreneurial pitch.
It was, hey, you can have condos on the beach, your economy can be zippin'.
So, I feel like that's one of the most underrated elements of this presidency, is that his example, and you watching him sort of jazz, improvise a lot of things, very entrepreneurial approach, instead of the The lawyerly approach is like, well, we've got to get this taken care of before we can move to this.
And then we'll have to do this in order.
Never do things out of order.
Make sure you covered all the bases.
You know, the lawyer approach that we've had so many times.
He just wades into the situation, shakes the box, says, how about this?
Let me throw this out. A little A-B testing while we're working.
I'll tweet this, see what happens.
Fix it. Tweet it.
Fix it. Tweet it. Fix it.
So he's carving the turkey right in front of us based on what's happening and feedback and the variables that are immediately in the vicinity.
It's a sort of approach that someday historians are going to say, why can't we get more of that?
Um, okay.
So, shake the box.
All right.
Bye.
I'm just looking at your comments here.
Didn't have much to say today, so I think I'm going to sign off.
Is there any other topic that I haven't covered that you'd like me to before I go?
I'll just look at your comments for a moment and see if anything else comes up.
Reprime Summer of Love.
Yeah, so has anybody noticed the Summer of Love?
Bong weasels. So somebody asked me, where can you buy a bong weasel?
Right now, there's not a webpage for that, but if there is, I'll let you know.
Anything with Hawk Newsome?
Not since last time I updated you.
Best reply to people freaking out about the children in prisons.
Well, the best reply is that you agree with them.
So first you pace them.
Children being separated from their parents and put in prison is the worst.
It's the worst. So first you agree, because you do agree.
There's nobody here who says, oh, I'd like to put children in prison.
So first agree, and then say, so what should we do?
And if they say, don't put them in prison, you say, yeah, yeah, I'm with you.
But what should we do instead?
And then walk them through the options.
Send them both back immediately, put the families and adults and children in the same place, or catch and release, I guess that's what it's called, and they just melt into the landscape, which is the same as just not having a border, because anybody could come with a child and then just melt into the landscape.
Agree on the emotional part.
Here's the mistake. Here's what you can't do, and it would not be effective if somebody comes at you and says, the president you like is putting children in cages.
What doesn't work is challenging them on the facts.
You certainly could point out that the pictures they saw of the cages was from 2014.
That's fair. But generally speaking, The facts aren't going to win you the day on this conversation.
You want to first agree with them emotionally.
Yeah, children taken away from parents.
That's very bad.
Let's not do that.
And then guide them toward describing their solution.
And you're going to find that they run out of words and change the subject.
And then you have won.
Declare victory. Somebody said, I've been trying this, they don't respond at all.
Alright, before I read that comment, I just told you that's what would happen.
You're going to make them actually just silent.
They will just sit there, or they will find a reason to leave, or change the subject, or tell you something else bad about President Trump.
But that is your victory.
Once they change the subject, you've done what you can do.
Victory is sometimes silent.
Yes, it's the cognitive brain freeze.
Once you ask them to describe the alternative, and they realize they don't have one, but you can't tell them, don't tell them they don't have an alternative.
Help them walk through them.
As helpfully as you can.
And they will come to the conclusion of themselves.
You can help people talk themselves out of their opinion, but it's very rare that in a single conversation you're going to change somebody's mind.
Even with my considerable persuasive experience, that's rare.
I almost never see it.
Oh, by the way, speaking of Patreon...
So I started the Patreon account.
You can find it at my same name as Twitter and Periscope, Scott Adams says.
And a lot of people are donating their $1 usually.
And I'm using that to pay...
To pay for the translation of my Periscopes into podcasts, you can see them on the Dilbert.com site.
Just go to the blog page and there's a little menu for the podcast.
But I'm also having them translated into YouTube form, which is a bit of work because you've got to download them and translate them and it takes about an hour.
But I'm putting them on YouTube by request, not because it's another big platform, which is cool too, but because you can play YouTube in the background of your device.
Apparently the periscopes only play in the foreground, so you can't use your phone at the same time for other stuff.
But the podcasts and the YouTubes will play in the background, so that's what I'm using the Patreon donations for.
And the reason I'm taking donations when, in fact, I'm, as you know, quite rich is because I don't get paid for this.
So, if people want to expand this, knowing that I don't get paid for it, they can contribute to Patreon, and then Patreon will expand it in ways that people like to consume it.
And putting it on YouTube also gives me a platform that might protect the content in case Periscope ever goes away.
Somebody said you could get my entire library onto YouTube in two days.
Well, you'd have to do the same thing.
You'd have to download and convert each file, add a description.
It's not that easy, but it'll be done in a day or two.
You can background the Periscopes on the iOS now.
I don't think that's the case, but I'll test that.
That might be something you can do now.
Oh, some people are saying, yes, you can.
You can. Others say, nope.
Well, I'll test it.
It could be something that a new operating system allows.
Somebody said they just did.
Oh, just updated. Oh, that's great.
Okay. Well, having it on YouTube will just give people better options for finding it and interacting with it.
So, it's a new update on Periscope.
Oh, that's so good to know. Okay.
Thank you. Alright, that's it for me for today.
▲
Export Selection