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June 19, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
48:12
Episode 76 - SPYGATE, Iran and MS-13
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's a fun day.
You know some of your days are more fun than other days?
I declare today a fun day.
And if you're in here early, and if you're prepared, and if you can see the future, you know that the simultaneous sip is almost ready to happen.
Here it comes.
Get ready.
That's good stuff.
I'm going to go to the next one.
So, we have a name for our scandal.
You probably noticed by now.
President Trump has dubbed the latest alleged scandal of Brennan and Clapper and Comey and Strzok and all those folks allegedly trying to tank his campaign with allegedly a spy.
And we're calling it Spygate.
Now, I don't know that Spygate isn't.
As somebody else pointed out on Twitter, the president has a great sense for simplification.
So we've got this public that's trying to sort it all out.
We can't tell our Russia scandals from our deep state scandals.
Why is it all the same people?
And why are people having meetings?
And something about lawyers, lawyers, lawyers.
So the public...
It has this big complicated ball of accusations, allegations, and things that are all tied up.
It's not even one scandal.
It's like this weird hybrid cyborg scandal thing that we can't follow.
So what does the simplifier-in-chief do for us?
Boom! Spygate.
There it is.
All that complexity.
Taken down to one word.
Spygate. Now, independent of what is true and what is not true, we may never know.
But the branding of it as Spygate is actually quite effective and will make a difference.
It's the sort of branding that moves the needle.
Anyway, so...
As you know, I talk about cognitive dissonance all the time and one of the things that happens when people are in cognitive dissonance is they start spouting word salad and ridiculous explanations for things that don't even make sense.
They don't even make sense as words.
They're sentences, but you look at it and you go, I can't even agree or disagree with that.
I don't even know what's happening.
It looks like just Babel coming out now.
So that's usually your sign that you've reached, that someone you're talking to is in cognitive dissonance.
Let me share with you my tweets from this morning.
One of them is... It has almost 700 retweets in about 5 minutes, 21 minutes.
And I said the following, and I think this sums up everything we know about Spygate.
So my tweet this morning was Spygate.
All right, four things to understand about Spygate.
Number one, there was no spy in the Trump campaign.
Number two, the spying that did not happen was totally justified.
Number three, it would be bad for national security to identify the spy who doesn't exist.
And number four, his name is Stephan.
I don't think I'm wrong on any of those things.
I'll read it again. Four things we know about Spygate.
There was no spy in the Trump campaign.
The spying that did not happen was totally justified because of Russia.
Three, it would be very bad for national security to identify the spy who doesn't exist.
And four, his name is Stefan.
Now, if that's not cognitive dissonance, I don't know what is.
Because I don't think I got any of that wrong.
Except, I knew people would say, no, it's not a spy.
You can't say that an informant is a spy.
That's crazy stuff.
So I thought I would help you understand...
The difference between a spy and whatever this was.
So I tweeted also this morning, people, there's a big difference between spy and a person who is contracted by an intelligence agency to secretly infiltrate an organization, provide information, and manipulate outcomes.
Why is that so hard to understand?
Yeah, so it's not a spy.
It's just someone that a government intelligence agency contracted to infiltrate an organization secretly, provide information, and manipulate outcomes.
But that's not a spy, for God's sakes.
So I think we've got, the other side has that to lean on.
Now my other tweet that got a lot of attention, got a lot of retweets, Well, as you probably saw, the writers as putting the generic tracking poll of GOP versus Dems is showing for the first time that the GOP is plus six on the generic ballot, meaning when they do a poll of would you vote for a generic Republican or a generic Republican.
It used to be that the public would say, ah, we want the Democrat, which was bad news for the 2018 midterms if you were a Republican.
But that just reversed, according to Reuters.
We'll have to see if that holds.
But at the moment it reversed.
So I tweeted that Poll out, and I said, on the plus side, Democrats still have 100% support from MS-13 and Iran.
Now, 4,400 people thought that was funny enough to retweet, but it's more than funny.
Oh, it's more than funny.
It's the answer to the question, hey, Trump supporter, If President Trump is not a racist, can you explain to me why he has so much support from the KKK? And you probably didn't know how to answer that question.
You'd be like, um, well, it's complicated and, you know, people will support people for different reasons and, you know, why can't the KKK have their own reasons and be wrong about it while other people have these different...
It's hard to explain, isn't it?
It's one of those, do you still beat your spouse kind of questions.
Where there's nothing you can do after the question's been asked, you know, the answer is built into the question.
So, why did the KKK support President Trump?
So, here's the real reason that I tweeted this.
It wasn't because it was funny, although it was.
It was because it's the answer to the question.
Let me do this for you so that you can see the entire thing.
Normal person says, you know, everybody's calling President Trump a racist, but I'm not really seeing it.
And then the Trump hater says, oh, you don't see it?
You don't see it? It's pretty obvious.
For example, explain to me, explain to me why the KKK supports President Trump.
Go. Yeah, let's see what you can do with that.
Mic drop. What do you got?
What do you got? The KKK supports your president.
Explain that away.
MS-13 supports the Democrats.
There's a spy somewhere.
There's a spy somewhere.
I don't know what to do now.
All right, so that's how it works.
So your quick answer to why do the racists support President Trump is the same reason MS-13 supports Democrats.
For their own reasons.
Now, MS-13 doesn't vote, or at least most of them don't.
I can't say they all don't vote, but most of them don't vote.
However, it is fair to say that the MS-13 would prefer Democrats in power because they might go softer on them than the Republicans.
So they have their own reason.
It has nothing to do with health care.
The racists, they have their own reasons.
And it turns out that when somebody votes for you, you do not acquire their opinions because they voted for you.
It doesn't work that way.
Now, so anyway, Spygate is getting fun.
Let me give you a little context on this thing we call Spygate.
Now, we're still in the allegation stage, which is to say there are suspicions and allegations that there was this loose confederation of like-minded people, or possibly organized, who did not want President Trump to Get elected and did not want him to stay in office if they could do anything about it.
That's the allegation.
Now, we may never know the full truth of whatever is going on in the world here.
But let me give you two ways to look at that allegation.
One is that these weasels in the deep state were concerned only for their own jobs and their own well-being, and they colluded to do something that was very selfish for them, to keep power, to keep their jobs.
And, you know, that's what they were doing.
It was just a selfish internal coup kind of thing just for their own benefit.
Possible. Can't rule that out.
Here's another interpretation for the same set of facts.
And this would be compatible with everything I've been saying.
And it goes like this.
The manipulators on the Democratic side...
We're primarily in the Clinton campaign, at least in 2016 and before.
And their best influencers, especially whoever came up with the idea of calling everything Trump did dark and racist and homophobic and xenophobic and every other phobic that they had.
Whoever came up with the campaign idea of Of branding Trump as the monster of all monsters.
They didn't just convince themselves.
They convinced half the country.
Half of the country was convinced that a President Trump was a risk to the survival of the species.
Robert Cialdini, I believe he has now admitted he was an advisor for the Clinton campaign.
So I think we have that as fact now.
In my book, Win Bigley, I speculated that he was, based on what I thought was a fingerprint for his work, and it has now been revealed that he did consult, although we don't know at what level.
Not as much as prior campaigns, apparently.
And what happened was, you've got all these people in the government who not only are afraid of losing their jobs, But they're afraid for the whole country.
They're worried that this monster will destroy the world.
And what do you do?
What do you do if you're a patriot, you love your country, and you see a gigantic danger?
And let's say you're in the spy business.
You know, you're in the intelligence business.
What do you do when you see a what you believe is a mortal danger to your country?
Yeah, you might act.
So, I'm not going to defend anybody who allegedly did anything to subvert the will of the people in their legal election for Donald Trump.
But, We should not think so simply as to say, ah, they're just trying to keep their jobs and keep power.
They might have been trying to save the country.
They just were fooled by the media and by the influencers on Clinton's team to think that they were doing God's work.
It's entirely possible.
And by the way, let me put odds on this.
What are the chances that half of the country was convinced of this reality, the reality that Trump would destroy the economy, lose every war, start a nuclear war?
What are the chances that half of the country was convinced this was a true version of reality, and yet the people in the intelligence agencies somehow were immune?
They weren't immune.
Nobody's immune from persuasion.
Sometimes people say, well, if you learn about persuasion, then you're, you know, once you know how it works, then you're immune from it, right?
It doesn't affect you? Nope.
It doesn't work that way.
All the awareness in the world doesn't protect you from good persuasion.
These were very smart, qualified people who know what persuasion is.
They know how to do it.
They know it when it's happening.
And they are still not immune, not even a little bit immune.
So if you lived your life over in the echo chamber of the left for the last several years, you would not even know that there was a reasonable argument on the pro-Trump side.
You would not even be aware That there was anybody like me saying, oh no, you're reading this wrong.
This is just his style.
You know, good things are going to happen.
That story didn't even exist on the left.
So, here's an interesting question.
Suppose, someday, the people who have been alleged to be in on this spiky thing, if it turned out to be true, And I'm not concluding it is, by the way.
So where I'm at is that the Russia collusion story and the spy gaze story are very similar, meaning that they seem very convincing to the people who were inclined to believe it.
Now, I am inclined to believe it, meaning that even though I don't join a team per se, I am so associated with the pro-Trump side of things that I would not be able to tell an illusion from a reality I am so associated with the pro-Trump side of things that I would not be able to tell So you have to know this about yourself.
So I'm saying it about myself right now.
You should learn to say this about yourself.
It's helpful.
I would not know if Russiagate was real or false, and I would not know if Spygate was real or false.
And it doesn't matter how much information I get, which is the freaky part.
I am so primed to believe my side that I would not be able to recognize information that disproved it.
And somebody says, and yet, Scott will continue with this spy gay thing.
Yes, I'm continuing with it with that frame, which is that whether it's true or not, you can't tell.
But it is in the news, and that makes it legitimate to talk about.
So don't get caught with your pants down.
If it turns out that this whole spy gay thing is nothing, don't act like you've never heard that possibility.
Likewise, for the people who are probably not watching this, people on the left, if it turns out that there's no such thing as Russia collusion, which looks like the way it's going, don't be surprised.
Because the things that look like they're true just often are not.
Alright, so keep an open mind about all this stuff.
That said, if we imagine that Spygate was real, and let's say people got brought up on charges someday, would it be a legitimate defense to say that you had been brainwashed by top cognitive scientists who know how to brainwash?
Now, in my...
In my very limited understanding of the law and legal history, I don't know that there's ever been a successful defense that says I was brainwashed.
What happened with Patty Hearst?
I can't remember if she got convicted or...
Did anybody ever get off on a brainwashing charge?
I don't know if this ever happened, right?
But today, We have, yeah, even Patty Hearst went to jail.
See, the problem is that you probably can't use that defense because everybody would use it.
Once it worked, you would just say, well, I'm going to use that one.
I'm going to say I was brainwashed by my cousin.
My brother brainwashed me.
The gang brainwashed me.
I didn't mean to kill that person.
I was just brainwashed. So you can't really use that.
But what's interesting is this case, you will have in evidence professional cognitive experts.
People who know how to brainwash.
It's their science.
It's their specialty.
And you can see that they're the experts in brainwashing.
You can see the result of the work.
You can see the actual brainwashing advertisements, the way the campaign was organized in terms of their message, etc.
And then you can see the result.
You can see that the people were, in fact, brainwashed.
It probably will never be a legal defense because you can't allow that because then everybody would say it.
But it's probably true.
It might be true. Alright, let's talk about Iran quickly.
So I saw a little article that Iran is considering an internal law that would prevent them from funding terrorism.
Meaning, it's not that simple.
It would prevent them from doing things that would result in terrorism and getting money, I guess.
And they don't want to do that because some of the groups that they support that they don't call terrorists might be pulled into that definition.
But the fact that they're even considering that is interesting because that's what the President caused them to do.
Remember I told you, here's a better explanation of the President's negotiating style.
He goes into a situation, whether it's North Korea or the Middle East, and the first thing he does is he shakes the box.
And then things land in new places and that's either good for him or he shakes the box again.
And then he looks where everything lands and he looks at it again and if that's not good for him, he shakes the box again.
Once the box lands with everything that's good for him, then he stops shaking the box and there's nobody else who's a box shaker.
He's the only box shaker in the argument.
He can shake the box.
Other people can't quite do it the same way.
So he has this superpower where simply shaking the box and moving the variables around until they favor him kind of works every time.
You just have to shake until you get the right outcome.
Now, what he did was cancel the Iran deal.
That shook the box. And now everybody's thinking in a little more expansive way.
There are more variables in play.
Then he increased it to, let's talk about a treaty, not just a deal.
And then let's talk about the whole area.
Let's talk about the people you're funding.
Let's add lots of variables in this thing.
Shake the box again. Now when he shakes the box, there's all kinds of stuff in there.
The odds of one of those shakes giving him a good situation is pretty good.
If you shake long enough, you're not going to get it on the first shake or the second shake.
But if you keep shaking, things are going to line up your way.
In my prior periscope, I took you down the reasoning trail that said, when you ask yourself, what's the problem in the Middle East?
Like, what's the problem?
You get all kinds of different answers.
It's like, well, this group was humiliated.
These people think God gave them the land.
There's a fairness question.
There's a poverty question.
There's maybe too many males.
There's a cultural problem.
And I've taught you that when you have that many different explanations for a thing, probably none of them are true.
It's more likely that there's cognitive dissonance and that everybody is inventing their own explanation for it.
Everybody's confused about something, and they're building a movie to try to explain it, and that's why you get all these different movies, because everybody's trying to solve for the same confusion.
And here's the confusion.
And by the way, this is not how things started in the Middle East, so there were legitimate complaints at some point.
For example, if you got kicked off of your land when Israel was formed, well that's a pretty legitimate complaint.
But we're talking mostly about second generation people who have had to build their own movie about what the problem is, because they were born not in Israel, they've heard things, they're trying to explain the world.
And here's what I think is the trigger, and this is all preliminary, subject to better thinking in the future.
It seems to me that the trigger for cognitive dissonance over there Is that people believe that their God will do the right thing, help them win, help them prevail, and yet for 70 years since the founding of Israel, their God has apparently let them down hard.
So how do you explain your primary belief of the world is that you've got the right God, God's on your side, if you pray and do the right things you get a good result, and then for 70 years in a row, Just the Jews are getting a good result.
And, you know, according to you, they have the wrong God.
How do you explain that?
Well, that's cognitive dissonance, and that causes all these different movies to appear.
Now, if everybody has a different idea of what the problem is, some people are saying IQ. I don't think that's the problem, but, you know, there are lots of variables going on over there.
You need a solution This solves for the cognitive dissonance.
You don't need a solution that solves each of these individual movies because that would be impossible.
It's just too big a task.
Everybody has a different movie in their head.
But if you can solve the cognitive dissonance, in theory, everybody's movie would disappear.
How do you do that? I have suggested, and this is more food for thought.
I don't know that this is a good idea or a bad idea.
I'm going to put it out as an example of this way of thinking.
So don't take this too seriously.
This is all preliminary thinking.
My suggestion is that we redefine the battlefield.
It does appear...
That the physical war for Israel doesn't seem like you could win that.
It doesn't seem that there's, you know, in 2018 and on, it doesn't seem like there's a way that you could defeat Israel without your own people being destroyed.
So instead he changed the battlefield to the realm of ideas.
And I think we could invite all of the people in the Middle East to join the internet and join the war of ideas and get off of the physical plane.
Because the complaint tends to be in sort of this god-religious level.
And let's take that to where those things should be fought, which is the internet.
So I think we should, just as a mental experiment, let's say there was a Middle East peace plan and it looked like this.
We're going to give everybody in the Middle East the internet.
We're going to make sure everybody has access to the internet, and we want to take the war to the war of ideas.
If your idea of God is the good one, let's give you all the tools that you need to spread your idea of your God.
We'll be doing the same.
Everybody has their own ideas of how things should be.
And just fight it out on the internet.
And solve the little minor border squamishes.
Let's not fight it in the battlefield of people and bodies and money and roads and water.
Let's just solve that stuff and take the battle up a level.
Take it up to where it belongs.
Take it up to where God would prefer it.
If you were God, would you want the people to kill each other in your name?
Or would you want them to talk about it in your name?
Which would you prefer?
So... Here's how you reframe these things.
And I'm not saying that anything like this will ever happen.
But imagine if we just said, look, we need some big comprehensive solution for all this Middle East stuff.
Let's stop doing onesie-twosie things, fight a war here, fight a war there, threaten this person.
Let's see if we can get a comprehensive agreement.
And let's agree to take the battle from the field up to the battle of ideas to be more in keeping with God's preference.
Because there's no one who believes that God wants bodies to be destroyed.
If God created our bodies, He probably doesn't want some of those bodies to destroy the other bodies, if you don't need to.
There may be reasons that you need to, but why would God want that?
Somebody says that, yes, Allah does want that.
I don't believe so.
And I believe that there is, for at least some number of Muslims, an idea that they want to spread their beliefs to as many places as possible.
The internet is how you do that.
The battlefield is no longer a way that it works because it's too easy to arm rebels.
It's too easy to arm the resistance.
So you can't really conquer places physically anymore the way you used to be able to.
All right. Don't they have the internet?
Yeah, of course, but probably not as extensively as they could have.
So making sure that everybody has the internet has more to do with how you frame the problem than it does to get more people on the internet.
You need an Islamic scholar on your periscope.
No. Let me tell you something that will make everybody angry.
It's generally considered a fact that the more you know about these situations, the more likely you'll have something smart to say about how to fix it.
Wouldn't you say that that's a general truth?
That the more you know about the Middle East, the more you know about Islam, the more you know about Israel, the more you know, the better off you're going to be coming up with something smart.
Not true. It's not true unless the problem is knowledge.
Knowledge is not the problem here.
The problem is there's a whole bunch of people who have a different opinion of the problem.
And when that happens, you don't need to know the details of what their individual opinions are, because the real problem is cognitive dissonance.
And if that's the real problem, then you look next for the trigger, and the trigger is obvious.
Seventy years of the God that you know is all-powerful and on your side has been screwing you for 70 years.
How can this possibly be right?
So you have to invent a reason.
You know, the Israelis are bad, the Americans are bad, whatever that reason is, and then you've got to fight against it because you can't change your mind.
So, if you could remove the cause of cognitive dissonance, and the way to do that is to say, look, God is telling you as clearly as possible to move the battlefield.
God has proven to you That the battlefield of physical bodies standing on sand shooting at each other doesn't win.
And God does not have any prohibition against you improving your tools.
The way that you get to your godly end state, he doesn't care which tool you use, whether it's a sword, a gun, or the internet.
If you believe in God, and you believe God wants you to spread his word, you should believe he wants you to do it in the best way it's possible.
And that's the internet. We know that violence at this point has a limited use, and it's certainly not going to get rid of Israel.
So that's what I would do.
I would redefine the problem as a problem of religion, take it up to a higher level, try to address people's physical needs in more of a generous way, and just accept that the battle is infinite, but we'll take it up to the internet where the war of ideas belongs.
Knowledge isn't the problem said person without knowledge Well, keep in mind, for those of you who believe that superior knowledge will get you to a solution, if that were true, are there not plenty of people with superior knowledge?
And have they gotten us to anything that looks like even close to a solution?
So if you believe that superior knowledge can get you to a solution on the Middle East, you have to ask yourself why it hasn't worked yet.
If superior knowledge could tell you who is likely to be the President of the United States, can you explain why I was right and all the people with superior knowledge were not?
If superior knowledge tells you what's happening with North Korea and what to do about it, Why was I the only one who was describing a year ago exactly where we would be right now?
Is it because of my vast experience with North Korea?
No. Is it because of my vast experience in political matters?
No. When I became a famous cartoonist, is it because I had great knowledge of how to become a cartoonist?
No. I didn't even know how cartoons make cartoons when I started being a cartoonist.
When President Trump wanted to be a reality TV star with no experience, did it matter that he did not know as much as reality TV stars?
No. When President Trump became president, did it matter that he didn't know as much about the economy as economists?
No. Economy's doing great.
When he started fighting ISIS, did it matter that he did not know as much as the experts on ISIS? No.
Didn't matter at all. When we started dealing with North Korea, did it matter that President Trump was an expert on all things North Korea?
No. Didn't matter at all.
So check your assumptions.
It is true that you have to have some mental nimbleness.
It is true that you have to know something.
But if you believe that the higher you go in the knowledge rankings, the more likely you'll come up with a solution, then you don't really understand anything about how the world is really wired.
The person who comes up with a solution is probably going to be the one who just moves the right variable, whether it was intentional or not.
Remember I explained President Trump's method of shaking the box until one of those shakes gives you something that lines up favorably?
How much expertise do you need to shake a box?
The methods that President Trump uses don't require deep understanding of a topic.
I know you hate that because your entire life you've been taught that the more you know, the better off you're going to be.
And in general, that's true.
In general, the more you know, the better off you are.
That's certainly true in general, but I just gave you six or so easy examples of really big important topics where the person who solves them doesn't have much knowledge.
When Steve Jobs decided to build a computer, what did he know about building computers?
Nothing. When Steve Jobs said, hey, you know, I think maybe we'll move into smartphones, or whatever they called them before they were invented, do you think it was because Steve Jobs knew all about telecommunications?
Nope. Nope.
He knew about persuasion.
So, Steve Wozniak, yeah, he knew about chips, but he didn't know about marketing, he didn't know about a lot of things.
Yeah, what did Elon Musk know about rockets?
Well, at least Elon Musk is an engineer.
So, in that specific case, Elon Musk's superior knowledge probably does help him, but it's not enough.
His understanding of persuasion and how the world works is far more important than his engineering knowledge, in my opinion.
Way more experts get results.
So there's somebody still resisting my idea that in some cases you don't have to have the superior knowledge to have the better solution.
And I will agree with you that there are many cases in the small world where if you have a legal problem, it's better to listen to the lawyer.
There are cases where if you have a medical problem, it's probably better to listen to the doctors.
I can tell you in my case that if I'd listened to the doctors, I would not have recovered my ability to speak.
Because the doctors said it was incurable.
But I thought it probably wasn't.
Who knew more about this problem?
Some of you know I couldn't speak.
I had a voice problem for about three and a half years.
And it was considered incurable.
And when I talked to doctor after doctor who had heard of it, after finding people who actually had heard of it, they said there's nothing you can do about it.
This is just how it's going to be.
But I, knowing far less than the doctors, decided I didn't want that answer.
And so I went and got cured.
There are probably 50,000 people in this country who have that same problem, and they don't get it cured.
Do you know why? Because they believe the expert.
There's some expert that told them there's nothing they can do.
Because even now, people don't necessarily know there's an operation that can fix it.
It's not well publicized.
So, there are many, many situations in which the people who know the most are not the most useful for solving it.
I think the Middle East would be the classic example of that.
In fact, I would not expect the person who knew the most to be the best choice for fixing it.
Might be. I'm not going to say the expertise is bad, but it tends to take you down a fact-based trail, whereas the solution in the Middle East is not going to be a fact-based solution.
If there's a solution in the Middle East, it will be a psychology solution That recognizes what is the cause of the cognitive dissonance and addresses the cause.
And that person won't need to know a Shiite from a Sunni.
It just won't make a frickin' bit of difference, in theory.
In theory. I'm not saying it will be solved.
I'm not saying that expertise is bad.
I'm just saying it tends to not solve a lot of problems, because if expertise could solve the Middle East, there's plenty of it around.
We would have solved that pretty well by now.
I think the experts end up getting too fact-focused when the problem is not facts.
How about the Zionist oppressors, somebody asked me.
Well, that sounds like a slightly loaded question.
If you can ask that question in a different way, I might be able to answer it.
My voice problem was solved by the best voice expert.
It was. Let me tell you how the best voice expert developed the surgery for solving my problem.
Because I got to talk to him about it when I could talk.
And I said, how did you know?
That you could fix a brain problem, which is what people thought everybody has, and that's still the theory, is that my inability to talk was a misfire in my brain.
He solved me by rewiring some nerves in my neck that were not the problem.
How did this expert know That he could solve a brain problem, and everybody agrees it's a brain problem, everybody who studies this.
How did he know he could fix that by working on something completely unrelated?
I asked him, what is the logical connection between those two things?
Do you know what the answer was?
Doesn't know. Doesn't know.
He actually described it as an inspired guess.
Those are my words.
But it was basically, he said, you know, it's just the sum of everything I knew, and it was just sort of an intuition.
Again, I'm paraphrasing.
But he got there not because of facts.
He didn't get to the answer by a logical path.
So, nobody saw that coming.
All right. I believe I had one other topic I was going to talk about.
No, I think I covered them all.
That's how I write code, somebody says.
You write code by instinct, I guess you're saying.
Intuition. Starbucks.
Yeah, let's talk about Starbucks.
So there's a big story where Starbucks got in trouble for one Starbucks store, asked some African-American folks who were not purchasing anything.
I don't know, there was something about them using the bathroom or something.
And so Starbucks being a progressive kind of company, they huddled and they decided that they would allow anybody to use their bathrooms, whether they were customers or not.
Now, it's a really interesting play.
From the perspective of Starbucks, here's what I would expect to happen.
I would expect that in terms of reputation and brand, it's pretty good.
It's very much on brand.
They're the be nice to everybody kind of brand.
And I think that it may be a really smart corporate move because it really puts them in a different class from everybody else who just talks about being nice to the world, whereas they're actually taking a big hit to be nice to the world.
So on a branding level, I would say A+. So what the corporate executives did, and remember, I'm the guy who makes fun of corporate decisions.
I literally do that for a living.
I make fun of dumb corporate decisions.
This one looks very smart.
Now, what do we imagine will happen?
What I imagine will happen is that in some number of Starbucks, those stores will become unusable because the word will get around and the homeless, mostly the homeless, will just camp out and use the bathrooms as much as they want and they'll take advantage of that kindness.
So what we should see is that the Starbucks that are in those areas that might attract people who are homeless, they should probably be close to worthless in a short amount of time.
In other words, the customers who are most likely to have the money and want to buy Starbucks are the people who least want to be hanging out with the homeless.
There's probably not a lot of crossover there.
So I would expect Starbucks will lose Profitability at least in perhaps 3% of their stores, maybe less.
But the benefit to their brand is pretty substantial.
Now, where that might lead, let me just give you some speculation.
There might be some store locations where they know there are a lot of homeless people, where in the long run, they may build the store.
So it's got an internal...
I'm just speculating here.
Imagine in the long run, Starbucks builds a store in a place where they know homeless can get to it.
And they say, okay, we know that this place will be filled with homeless.
Unless, right next to Starbucks, we build a public bathroom.
Problem solved, right?
You don't have to come into Starbucks to use the bathroom.
It's actually, it's the second door.
Starbucks is here, and then they just put another door right next to it, public bathroom.
And they, you know, just use their corporate resources to keep it clean and whatever they need to do.
So you have a bathroom in the store for customers.
You have a bathroom Starbucks builds.
Now, if you already like Starbucks, how much more would you like them for building a separate bathroom for the homeless that wasn't there before?
I mean, you would go from appreciating Starbucks, maybe as a corporate level, maybe for their profitability.
You know, there are lots of reasons to admire Starbucks, a very successful company, made a lot of good decisions over the years.
But if they go from, we will even risk losing a store in a bad area, to, look, if we can build a new store and just put a public bathroom right next to it, it's expensive, but we can do it.
Now, I don't know if that'll happen.
But there's a direction it could go.
So I'd expect some Starbucks to be impacted in almost a mortal way.
And some Starbucks will be fine because there weren't many homeless people around there anyway.
All right. Some are saying they'll build stores without bathrooms.
Maybe, but I don't see them going that way.
I see more bathrooms, not fewer.
All right, that's enough for today.
I'm going to go back and do some work.
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