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Aug. 19, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
40:08
Episode 187 Scott Adams: Have We Reached Peak Trump Derangement Syndrome?
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Just because it's Sunday that doesn't mean you don't have time to come in here and enjoy coffee with Scott Adams.
And if you're an early bird and you get here by the time we reach the thousand follower mark, which will be any moment, we're going to have the simultaneous sip.
Here it comes, 1,000 followers, and...
Oh, some of you got here in time.
Good job for you.
So, we're gonna check in on the state of Trump derangement syndrome today, but first, there was a headline that caught my eye.
So Kevin Spacey, who you all remember, Was accused of some B2 behavior with some young man years ago.
So Kevin Spacey has a new movie out.
And here's the headline on CNN. Kevin Spacey movie earns only $126 on day one.
You heard that right. Not $126,000.
Kevin Spacey's movie earned $126 on its first day.
Ouch! So, there's a weird little trend that I've just noticed in just the last few days.
And the trend goes like this.
That even the people who are critics of the president are trying to call back other critics, like, oh, you're going too far.
And this might be a sign that we've reached peak TDS, peak Trump derangement syndrome.
And I'm going to give you three examples.
Some of them you might be familiar with, but if you see them in context, they're more powerful.
So one of them is on Bill Maher's show.
One of the biggest critics of the president is Preet Bharara.
I think I'm pronouncing correctly.
So he was fired by the Trump administration and he admits he's a critic of the president for a number of things.
But I want to watch him push back when Bill Maher accuses the president of being a traitor.
So we'll see if we can see this.
Come on. Oops.
I've got a sound problem here.
Oh, maybe I don't.
I think the first part didn't have sound.
So Morrow was fired.
He was asked about President Trump's lawyer, blah, blah, blah.
We'll get to the good part in a moment.
Damn it. No sound.
Anyway, what it was supposed to say When Bill Maher referred to the president as a traitor, Preet Bharara actually stopped him and said that it degrades the criticism when you take it too far.
I don't think the phone was on mute.
Let's see if that was the problem.
Oh, you're right.
They're both enablers for a traitor.
Watch this. So I saw you when I said traitor, you looked like you were uncomfortable with the word.
You can subject yourself to criticism if you are sort of overstating, and I'm not saying necessarily are, but if you're overstating what other people have done.
See that? So he's an attorney.
You know, one of the top ones in the country, you think.
Top prosecutors.
And he refers to calling the president a traitor, overstating.
And he did that with Bill Maher.
All right, so that's your first example of a Trump critic calling back another Trump critic and saying, whoop, you went too far.
Let me give you a couple more.
These are fresh ones and fresh examples.
Alright, we'll go to, so there's a, the next two I've tweeted.
Dammit, why is nothing working today?
All right, here's John Brennan.
The President of the United States to continue to be barricade on this issue, I think, does a great injustice and a disservice to the men and women of the intelligence law enforcement community and does a great disservice to the citizens of the United States.
And that's why I said it was nothing short of treasonous.
- This is Rachel Maddow. - I didn't mean that he committed treason, but it was a term that I used, nothing short of treason.
- Now watch.
- You didn't mean that he committed treason though. - I said it's nothing short of treason, that was the term that I used, yeah.
- That's that, if we diagram the sentence, nothing short of treason, this means it's treason. - So even Rachel Maddow was calling out John Brennan on his BS.
She wouldn't let him weasel word it.
Of course, she wanted him to say treason, but she was sort of exposing him for being erratic.
So the irony is that he lost his security clearance for allegedly being erratic, and then he goes on, Rachel Maddow, and Rachel Maddow can't even understand what he's saying.
It seems to me he's being a little erratic.
That's my opinion. But here's the best one.
I think it's Katie Turishow on MSNBC. And Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for the New York Times.
And Michelle Goldberg is going to suggest that the president wants to round up and kill people.
He just hasn't done it.
So watch what happens when Katie Turr hears her guest, a New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, say this.
Watch Katie Turr try to call her back.
Memory, right? He is the leader of the free world.
No, he's not. So the no he's not is Michelle Goldberg.
Sorry. Way from the good part.
Here it comes. It's like, right, he's part of a block that includes Vladimir Putin, Duterte, he's, you know, he's kind of part of a, he's part of kind of an axis power.
Well, hold on, that's...
It's worse in a certain way.
I mean, not that that's not the worst thing you could have said, because it's about the worst thing you could say about him.
Well, he's not almost rounding people up and murdering them without any, you know, due process.
He'd certainly like to. I don't think you can say that definitively.
So, Michelle Goldberg, New York Times colonist, goes on television and says with total confidence that she knows what the president is thinking and that he's thinking he wants to round people up and kill them.
Now, that is so far Beyond the realm of, you know, sane behavior.
I don't think she's medically insane, but certainly temporarily she's operating like she's got Trump derangement syndrome there.
So there are three examples where you're seeing the anti-Trumpers, one pulling back the other.
It's like, oh! And let me put a frame on this.
The people who are anti-Trumpers are starting to embarrass themselves.
In other words, it's starting to get embarrassing to be an anti-Trumper.
Do you remember...
This was a prediction I got wrong, but probably only because of the timing.
So that... The prediction I made prematurely was that the anti-Trumpers would start to be embarrassed, would start to be embarrassed by their criticism of the president.
I just showed you three examples that happened this week in which you saw for yourself three anti-Trumpers being a little bit embarrassed by their own team.
I'm not going to claim that I got that prediction right because I missed it by about a year.
But, yeah, premature prediculation.
Exactly. The 48-hour rule.
So yes, the 48-hour rule is in effect, but I didn't see anything that any of these folks said that would necessarily be something that would change in 48 hours.
But if they do, if they do, if anybody clarifies in the next 48 hours, I will abide by the 48-hour rule for clarification.
And I will say, I accept the clarification.
Do you know why? Because I don't want to be Michelle Goldberg.
She believes she can read minds and she is so certain that she said it in public.
Imagine going in public and saying with confidence you can read the mind of somebody else.
You are a shill.
Let's block that guy.
Yeah, how do you clarify?
It would be a hard one to clarify, but hey, if somebody does clarify, I'm all in.
There's another attack in Seattle, somebody saying?
Somebody wearing a mega hat?
I haven't seen that yet.
Will you be embarrassed if you're wrong?
I'm generally not embarrassed when I'm wrong about anything.
I was going to do a periscope about...
How to not be embarrassed and how to not feel shame.
It's the reaction to it.
Yeah, I'll probably give you a separate periscope on how to avoid shame and embarrassment.
um um Well, maybe I can make it quick.
I'll give it to you right now.
So this is how to avoid shame and embarrassment.
These are just a few tips.
Number one, try to be good at something.
Doesn't matter what it is.
You could just have a good character, You could be helpful.
It doesn't have to be a world-class skill.
But you could be a good parent.
You could be a good student. It's not a very high bar.
But try to be good at something.
Because then if you fall on your face doing something else...
You won't say to yourself, my God, I'm a gigantic loser and everything I do is bad.
So you need a few things in your arsenal that you can say, oh, okay, I'm bad at this or I messed up on this, but I'm clearly not a bad person because I can do other things well and I have a good character or whatever it is.
But be good at something. That gives you a little protection.
The next thing is a learned ability.
The ability to withstand shame and embarrassment is completely learned.
Not completely learned, but it's very learnable.
And the way you do it is you put yourself in situations where you will absolutely feel a little bit embarrassed, but it won't hurt you.
I took the Dale Carnegie course, somebody mentioned earlier here, and one of the exercises was you would do something embarrassing in front of the class.
Now, even though it's a small group and you get to know them pretty well, maybe 25 people, the advice you get is you do, here's what we did.
This was many years ago. I'm sure they don't do the same exercise.
But they make you talk like you're a, at least the men, they would make the men talk like a Weird hillbilly woman.
They didn't use the word hillbilly.
But you'd have to go in front of the class and you'd say something like, this is a bad example of it, but they'd say, I am Scott, my name is, you know, and you would just go way over the top.
In acting about somebody who's a different gender.
So something that would be weird and uncomfortable and there's no way you could do it well.
So the exercise by its nature was something nobody was going to do in an elegant, respectful way.
You just couldn't do it. You were going to look like an idiot and you were going to do it in front of the class.
And everybody would do it.
So all 25 people would have to get up and embarrass themselves.
And even though it's a controlled, safe environment, you still feel it.
You still feel embarrassed because we're just wired that way.
But you do it a few times and then the class simply doesn't care.
They just don't care about you.
They're thinking about themselves.
They're thinking about what they had for breakfast, you know, what they're going to eat for dinner, I suppose.
But people don't really care about you just embarrassing yourself.
And once you go through the cycle enough times, you realize, hey, I've embarrassed myself 15 times this week and nothing's different.
My coffee tastes the same.
I still have my job.
I still, you know, my loved ones are exactly the same.
Look at all the ways I've embarrassed myself.
Nothing changed. Nothing physical.
Nothing changed.
It was all in my mind.
And it's never enough simply to just tell somebody that, like I'm telling you.
So the fact that I'm just explaining it won't help you a bit.
You have to actually go and put yourself in positions where you are guaranteed to be embarrassed, but in safe ways.
Because you'll still feel embarrassed, and then you just get used to it after a while.
Can you imagine the number of times I've been criticized in my 30 years of public life?
Every single day, lots and lots of times.
How many times have I sent a tweet with a typo?
Or just a word spelled wrong.
I won't even call it a typo because that's letting me not be embarrassed.
But sometimes I just spell a word wrong in public.
I'm a professional writer.
I'll spell a word wrong and tweet it out and a quarter of a million people will say it.
Should I be embarrassed by that?
Maybe. Some people would.
But... I don't know why people...
Damn it, it's hard to block the right people here.
Somebody says never embarrassed equals narcissist.
So here's another tip for avoiding embarrassment.
If you're hung up on who is or is not a narcissist, then you don't understand ego.
If you think ego is who a person is, then you're also going to think that if they're not embarrassed, they might be a narcissist.
But none of this is about who you are if you do it right.
If you do it right, your ego is just a tool and you can ramp it up and you can ramp it down.
A good time to ramp up your ego is if you're going in for a job interview or you're in some kind of an athletic competition.
It's good to get your confidence as high as you can in those cases.
But if you're going into some other situation, let's say you're meeting the parents of your boyfriend, girlfriend, or fiancé or something, you probably don't want to go in looking like a narcissist, so you want to dial it down.
You see the president doing this all the time, by the way.
He dials it up and dials it down.
So the tip is, if you're asking the question, hey, is somebody who is not embarrassed, are they a narcissist?
If you're even asking that question, then you're seeing the world in an unproductive way.
The real question is, if all of you accuse me of being a narcissist, does that embarrass me?
Nope. Because first of all, I happen to have a better insight about myself.
And whether it's true or not, I wouldn't care.
Because I can use my ego as a tool.
If I crank it up and you say, hey, you're a narcissist, I don't care.
Because when I need to, I'll crank it down and then somebody will say, well, you're a very humble person.
And neither of those will be true.
I'm neither the humble person when I ramp it down, nor am I the narcissist when I ramp it up.
I'm not those people. I'm a person who understands ego as a tool, and I move it where it needs to be to get me the best result.
So once you start thinking of it that way, and it's not who you are, it's just how you manage your confidence, that's a more productive way to look at it.
Another way to avoid or reduce your shame slash embarrassment Is to use the imagination and to imagine yourself on your deathbed.
So this is the deathbed imagination technique.
So you get embarrassed and you're like, you know how sometimes you're just like, you're red and you're sweaty and you're like super embarrassed?
Say to yourself, okay, imagine yourself decades in the future and you're on your deathbed.
Are you going to be thinking about that?
Are you going to be thinking about that day that you were embarrassed?
You are not. In fact, ask yourself how many of your past embarrassments are you thinking about right now?
Personally? None.
Zero. That's how many past embarrassments I'm thinking about right now.
So one of the great things about the way humans are designed is that they forget.
A lot of stuff. So however embarrassed you are at any moment, you should know with certainty that you're going to get over it and you don't have to do anything special to do it.
There's nothing you have to do to get over it.
It just goes away.
So you just think yourself into the future and say, oh, if I do absolutely nothing special, This problem that I'm feeling just goes away.
And that will actually help diminish it in the near term because you know it's not a problem.
The way our brains work is that when we're worrying about something at the moment, let's say you're feeling shame at the moment, what you're really doing Is worrying that that feeling is going to continue.
And when you tell yourself it never does, it allows you to minimize it at the moment.
Because you're not really worried about the moment.
Because the moment is already past.
How long is a moment? So if you say, I feel embarrassed at the moment, the moment is gone.
What you were really worried about was the next moment and the next moment and the next moment.
And the one thing you could say about the next moments for sure is that you will be less embarrassed.
So the future looks good when you're embarrassed.
Actually, when you're embarrassed, the future looks great because it's going to be better than whatever you're feeling right now.
Guaranteed. Pretty much always does.
So those are a few tricks.
The other thing is, here are a couple more tricks.
You know, I've talked about the simulation theory way too much.
The idea that we're not necessarily an original species, but we might be a computer simulation created by some other species.
And the argument there, most of you have heard it by now, is that if there is ever a species that can create a simulation, they'll probably create more than one.
So the odds that you're the original and not the many copies of worlds is very low.
So sometimes I tell myself, what if I'm just a simulation?
What if I'm just software?
Is this feeling that I'm having, the feeling of embarrassment, is that me?
It's not gonna last.
It's not who I am.
It's not me.
It's just transient.
And you can actually just think your way past it by saying, I seem to be whole.
There's nothing wrong with me.
My hands, my legs, my body, I can still eat.
There's just no impact from any of these thoughts I'm having.
So you can sort of think yourself up to, instead of being your ego, and your ego just got beat up, You're not the thing that got beat up.
You're not that thing.
So stop thinking of yourself as the thing that just got beat up.
You are some kind of entity, whether you're a simulation or not.
You're something bigger than that event.
That event was not terribly important in your life.
So those are some techniques.
Someone says, I always get embarrassed.
Practice. So if you always get embarrassed, run toward it.
Don't run away from embarrassment if you feel embarrassed.
If you're feeling embarrassed on a regular basis, run toward it.
And here's a little tip for those of you who feel embarrassed about stuff.
Every time you feel embarrassed...
You become more protected because you go through the experience of being embarrassed and then however long it takes, you know, a few hours or a few days, you're over it.
You're just over it.
What if you make an important mistake?
Well, I'm big on apologies and fixing things.
In fact, one of the... One of the main ways that I define character is not by mistakes.
I do not define character by what mistake you made.
I define character, partly, by what you did about it.
So if I were to judge any of you by your mistakes, Well, you're all a terrible bunch of people because you've all done horrible things.
You haven't killed people necessarily, but you've all made mistakes.
Probably most of you have lied.
Some of you have omitted information.
You've done selfish things.
We've all done some bad stuff.
But if you make a mistake and then you atone for it, you know, you apologize, you restate your mistake so people know you understand your mistake, and then you do whatever you can do.
Every situation is different, but you do what you can do to, you know, fix the situation.
You pay somebody back, you promise to fix something, you talk to somebody, you apologize, whatever it is in the situation.
I definitely judge people by how they handle their mistakes.
And that's the way you should judge yourself.
So here's another tip.
You're probably going to judge yourself by a standard that you would judge other people by.
Why wouldn't you, right?
If your standard for judging character is the mistakes you made and the things you did that you should legitimately feel embarrassed by, if those are the things you judge who you are, you're probably judging other people that way too.
That's not a good way to go through your life.
Don't judge people by their mistakes.
Judge them by what they do about them once they have been pointed out that there's a mistake.
I can think of situations in which I've done something, usually accidentally, that was just bad and I should be embarrassed about it.
And I find that my level of embarrassment goes way down when I go toward it.
In other words, I go right to the person that I harmed accidentally, directly apologize, directly state what the problem was, and directly say what I'm going to do about it in the future.
That's the Steve Jobs apology stack, if you will.
So the apology stack is you restate it so people know what it is, know you're talking about the same thing, and you're not trying to weasel out of it.
So you state it in the starkest, clearest way, and then people go, okay, you get what went wrong here.
Step one. Step two, you apologize for it in a way that sounds sincere.
Don't apologize if you don't mean it.
And then you say what you're going to do about it to make it better in the future.
You can't fix the past.
Can't fix the past, but you can do something about it in the future.
I'll call that the Steve Jobs apology stack, how to deal with an embarrassing problem.
If you haven't heard this story, I tell it a lot, but when Apple had the antenna gate problem, When you held your phone, if your finger was in a certain place, it blocked the antenna and the phone would drop its signal.
What an embarrassing problem for a company that makes a phone you hold in your hand.
It's made to be held in your hand, and its specific flaw was that you couldn't hold it in your hand.
It's the most embarrassing thing you could ever imagine.
Well, I'm sure you could get something more embarrassing.
But imagine how embarrassing that is as the person whose identity, Steve Jobs, is identified with this object.
Hey, I made a handheld object.
I bet my company on it.
And the only time it doesn't work is when you hold it in your hand.
How embarrassing would that be?
Was Steve Jobs embarrassed?
I'm not a mind reader, but look at the way he handled it.
He went on a conference call and he said some version of this.
I'm paraphrasing. He said, all smartphones have problems, which was brilliant.
He changed the frame so you could put it in context.
And by the way, that's good for you too.
If you're feeling embarrassed, Put it in context.
You're not the one person on earth who was embarrassed today.
You're not the one person on earth who was ever embarrassed.
You're living in a world where there's just embarrassment all over the place, and most people don't care about yours.
They think about their own, but they don't really care about your embarrassment.
And then he said, you know, we want to make it better for our customers.
And then he said what he was going to do about it.
So if you handle your embarrassment in a proper way, that also helps you get past it.
Here's another fact that just helps you put things in perspective.
And some of you have heard this.
There's research that shows that the most loyal customer is not the one who had a good experience.
The most loyal customer, and this is counterintuitive, but you'll see how this fits in.
The most loyal customer is not the one who had a good experience.
The most loyal one is the one who had a bad experience, complained, and then you fixed it.
When you fix somebody's bad experience, it bonds them to you.
So you should think, you know, if you're on the other side of that equation and you know that you've done something embarrassing and bad and you need to apologize for it, your apologizing makes you a better person than if nothing had happened in the first place.
Who would you trust?
Somebody who messed up, sincerely apologized, understood the problem, and said what they were going to do about it.
Would you trust that person?
I would. That's a person I would trust a lot.
In fact, my opinion of that person's character would go way up.
And I wouldn't judge them by the original problem.
I would judge them by how they handled it.
So those are a few techniques.
Trump never apologizes.
Yeah, in his case, he's got a whole thing going on where he knows that if he starts apologizing, he's never going to be done.
Priests don't apologize.
Is that true? That may not be true.
Anything new with Blight Authority?
I still need to do... There are some interesting things brewing with the Blight Authority that I won't tell you about, but there's some very high-level activity, meaning that smart people are looking at it.
That's all I can tell you for now.
Can't log into the forum?
I'll look into that.
So you're saying that blightauthority.com won't let you log in?
I'll make sure that it's working.
If you tried it the other day, it was subject to a denial-of-service attack.
So if you tried to log into the platform a few days ago, it was down.
Some hackers had attacked it, but it was back up.
And if it was a few days ago, you had the problem.
Just try it again. What's my new book going to be?
The new book is going to be on how to escape your mental prisons.
Somebody asked about the URL. I believe that both URLs work.
Blight Authority and also The Blight Authority.
I think it'll send you to the other one.
Has the manuscript gone to copywriting yet?
No, I'm only 20% done writing it.
So it's brand new.
I just started it.
Am I happier now or before Trump?
Have you ever heard the theory about baseline happiness?
It's the idea that it feels like your happiness is being determined by things happening in your life, but science has debunked that.
It turns out that people are born with some kind of genetic biological disposition to how happy they can be.
And they can have a bad day and still be happy, and other people can have a good day and never be happy.
So you don't have a lot of movement from your baseline, and if you do, it's usually temporary, and then you're back to your baseline.
So when you say, am I happier before or after Trump?
Before Trump, if you went way back, maybe I had bigger problems, and those made me unhappy.
But I'd say the same.
I'm happy in a different way.
I'm happy when things are going well and less happy when they aren't.
How do you determine your baseline?
Oh, you probably know.
Just over the course of your life, where do you spend most of your time?
Are you mostly happy or are you mostly unhappy?
That's probably your baseline. Is being happy the same as being positive?
No, but you know, I have a very controversial theory, hypothesis, let's call it a hypothesis, that everybody gets angry when I state it.
So you know that when people are angry at your hypothesis, it either means you're way off or you're nailing it.
And here's the hypothesis.
You're going to hate this, by the way.
And remember, I'm calling it a hypothesis, so don't take this out of context.
Hypothesis means I am not certain this is true, nor am I thinking it's most likely to be true.
It's just something interesting enough that it's worth saying.
When people are unhappy, or even I think physical depression, I won't go that far, but let's just say they're unhappy, they're having a bad day.
How often Is it that they're also low energy?
And I think that people think that they're low energy because they're in a bad mood or they're low energy because they're mildly depressed.
And in this context, I'm not talking about clinically depressed where that's a whole different deal, but just your attitude is somewhat depressed.
They're almost always low energy, meaning that My hypothesis is, if you took somebody who is just normally, miserably unhappy, and you just gave them a shot of some drug that just pepped them up, that they would act happy.
And if you asked them, are you happy?
They'd say, well, at the moment I am.
And so the hypothesis is that we mistake happiness and energy.
Because when we are happy, we're also high energy lots of times.
Like, hey, you know, let's party.
I'm happy. And when we're unhappy, we're often, uh, I don't even want to get off the couch.
I don't know what I want to do. And the way we process that is that our attitude has affected our energy.
My hypothesis is that we have it backwards and that if you could directly affect somebody's energy, They would act and feel happy more often than not.
Now, like I say, I'm not counting people who have clinically medical depression and mental problems.
That's its own category.
But within the normal zone of happy or not, I think it's energy.
If you want to test this, if you have children in your life and those children are unhappy and fighting and grumpy and they're crying and whatever, try feeding them.
Just giving them some food.
Now, when you eat, it gets your energy up a little bit.
Sometimes you're hungry and it just saps your energy.
If you feed kids that are in a bad mood, watch how often they get in a good mood instantly.
It's almost phenomenal how well that works.
Likewise, if your kids are fighting and angry and miserable about everything, ask yourself how much they slept the night before.
And you'll find an almost perfect correlation with children between those two things.
Did they get enough sleep?
And have they eaten recently?
And watch that correlation because those are the energy correlations.
Now also hydration because if you're poorly hydrated you'll actually feel tired even though it's fake tired.
It's actually just dehydration.
So if they're hydrated, they've eaten, and they've gotten good sleep, watch how rarely Children are miserable.
So that's my hypothesis.
Anyway, that's enough for now.
I'm going to try to come back later this afternoon and do something on Blight Authority.
So if you can log into blightauthority.com and you have some ideas about how to design a community, That would be a great help to the world.
You can help the world.
That's not even an exaggeration.
If you've got a good idea, you can go to the Blight Authority, put it on there.
I guarantee you all see it, and probably lots of other people who are in the right space to make something happen.
And your idea could change the world.
That's not even a little bit of an exaggeration.
A couple of good ideas might be what we need to make a big difference in your urban areas.
Alright, so I'm all positivity today, and we'll keep it that way.
And I will talk to you all later.
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