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Sept. 11, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
33:40
Episode 216 Scott Adams: The Tucker Carlson Diversity Question and Presidential Popularity
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Yes, I'm back again.
Had a few rough starts this morning.
I overslept.
Didn't get enough coffee.
Everything's a little bit harder.
But I'm back now.
I'm using the correct technology.
I can see your comments.
And I know, sorry about all those periscope teases.
This is the real one.
And as my way of making amends, if I can, for the late start, the bad start, I've got great content for you today.
Oh, it's so good.
So good. But first, the simultaneous sip.
Please join me. Ah...
So a couple of fun topics.
You may be aware that Tucker Carlson is getting himself in some hot water, with his critics anyway.
He's not in hot water with his fans, but his critics are having trouble with the fact that he has challenged people to explain to him why diversity is strength.
What is the argument for diversity being an advantage?
Now, I actually have an argument for that.
And I'm gonna answer Tucker's question.
But I watched Don Lemon's show, a clip from it, I didn't see the entire show, in which he was talking about this topic.
And the folks on Don Lemon Show said the answer to Tucker's question of why is diversity a strength, here's their answer.
Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist.
Did that sound like an answer to the question of, can you explain to me why diversity is an advantage?
I'm not saying it's not, I just haven't heard the argument.
And the argument was, from Don Lemon's crew, his pundits, well you're obviously a white supremacist.
That's very racist of you.
Now, did anything in that situation sound like an advantage?
Did you feel like you were better off because Tucker Carlson was a white guy with one opinion, And Don Lemon had several people.
They weren't all white. I think three African Americans and one white pundit.
And they disagreed.
Were we better off?
Well, probably not in that specific case, but here's what's illegitimate about both sides of the argument.
I think both sides of the argument have implicitly in them That there's something about diversity that would either always be good or never be good, or at least never be a plus.
And I don't think that's anywhere near the truth.
It seems far more likely that there would be situations in which it makes things worse.
And there would be situations in which it would make things better.
But nobody has actually expressed The positive argument.
The argument that there is an advantage and I'm going to do that for Tucker's benefit and for yours as well.
Now, let us first admit that there's not one answer that's just right all the time, right?
It's going to be a little of both, and let me talk about the little of both part.
I think Tucker used the example, if you were, let's say you were, you know, and these are crazy examples because they don't really conform to the actual world, but they're sort of conceptual.
Let's say you and three other people were trying to build a bridge across a river.
And you didn't speak the same language.
Would it be easier or would it be harder for the small group of you to work together, given that your diversity has caused you to be so different that you don't even speak the same language?
Well, in that artificial example, clearly it's worse.
But does that little example You know, describe our whole world.
It does not. It doesn't even come close.
Let me give you an example where diversity would be a strength.
Let's say, take the Blight Authority project.
Most of you know I'm working on that with Bill Pulte.
You should go to blightauthority.com and add your ideas, if you have any, for what to do about These inner city areas where there's a lot of blight, and some of them have been cleared by the Blight Authority so that it's now empty ground, and you're trying to figure out, well, what do you do with this now?
Now, is it an advantage to have opinions from, let's say, billionaires who have money And let's say African-American residents who grew up there or still live there who are completely different than some billionaire who maybe wasn't even born in this country.
But the billionaire's got the money.
The people in the inner cities have the knowledge, the insight.
They've got the experience.
Don't you need both of them?
You need the money and you need the people to know that's a good idea or that's a bad idea or why I want work.
That's a clear example where having everybody involved gets you to a better place.
So there's an example for you.
Now, I think embedded in Tucker's question, and maybe I'm going a little further than he would go here, I don't like to mischaracterize someone's opinion, so I hope I'm not doing that.
But if you were to start from scratch, let's say there was no planet, there was no world, and you were going to say, let's build a perfect little planet.
I'm God. I'll make a planet.
Would it be better if the people were more alike or just completely different to the point where some of them want to kill the other ones?
You know, you're God, and there's no planet yet.
You just get to create one.
Which is better? Well, I suppose it depends what you're trying to accomplish, and nobody can figure out what God would have in mind.
But it does seem to me that if you could start from scratch, having people who don't have a reason to fight that's just baked into some stupid reason like, hey, your DNA is different than mine, I have to kill you, you probably want less of that.
Right? Right? But that is not our current situation.
The current situation is diversity is a given, meaning that we're different.
We live in a world full of different people.
So you don't get a choice of non-diversity.
There's no choice.
It just exists.
It's like air. You know, what would be the point of saying, would it be better to have three kinds of air or one kind of air?
It's not really a question.
We just have the air we have.
It's a given. So given that it's a given, are there situations in which it is an advantage?
And the answer is absolutely yes.
Because one of the ways that diversity is an advantage is you can get more feel for more things than you could if you had one sensor.
I tend to think of civilization As sort of like a living creature.
The sum of all people is like a living creature that's evolving even as we speak.
And what I mean by that is that the centralized elements such as the government, social media, the internet, those are like the brains.
The internet plus the government are sort of like the brain of civilization.
But all the people...
are like the five senses.
All the people are in different places doing different things.
They're different ages, different situations all over.
And if we didn't have all of those different sensors feeding into the central government, the central internet, the central brain, we wouldn't be effective.
We would be flying blind.
We wouldn't know when to do this or when to do that because the sensors wouldn't be telling us what's happening when we do things.
So from that perspective, let's look at the United States.
The United States has diversity.
There's not any realistic, you know, real-world situation where that's going to change.
So how do you make it a plus?
Instead of making it what it could be, if you didn't pay attention, it could be a negative.
Well, one of the ways you make it a plus is you try to standardize on language so that at least you're talking the same language.
You try to standardize on culture as much as possible, but that causes its own problem because there are some cultures that don't, let's say, assimilate as easily.
For example, I would say that the Mexican immigrants, legal or illegal, they do assimilate fairly well Maybe not as easily as an Australian who already speaks the language or somebody from Great Britain who already speaks the language.
They'd have a little advantage, right?
But in my experience, Mexican immigrants assimilate really well.
It might take them one generation to really dial it in, but that's pretty quick.
Compare that to, let's say, somebody who's coming from a devout, 100% Muslim nation, don't speak English, and if they had their choice, they would like to see the American government change to Sharia.
Are they going to assimilate at the same rate?
Probably not. It's going to be an extra challenge.
You've got the language challenge, plus you've got a religion that you can't leave without pretty big penalties.
And that religion has its own set of beliefs that comes with it.
So in that case, well, it's a little harder.
A little harder. So what do you do when you've got...
All of this diversity in all these situations.
I would argue that the United States has done an excellent job of selling the melting pot as a positive thing.
What are some of the advantages of selling this melting pot situation as a plus?
Well, I'll give you a real-world example.
So if you saw one of my earlier periscopes this morning, I was talking about my startup, Wenub.
Now, the genius in my startup, the smartest person by far, is Nick.
Now Nick is our CTO, co-founder, and he was born in India, came here, got educated here, and is an American.
So am I better off?
Because I live in a country that was able to import a genius who just happened to have a completely different background.
Well, yeah. We built a company.
He was the main mastermind behind it, the main idea guy.
We all did our part.
So in the startup, I have a certain set of skills that I can bring to it.
Quinn, our CEO, has a certain set.
All the other folks who are working with us, they have different skills.
We're all very different people.
But we couldn't have built this product without a bunch of really different kind of people coming together to work on it.
And why is it that Nick is even available to be in this country and to meet me?
It's because the United States did a good job of making this country a place that you could come, no matter who you were.
You can come here.
It's not easy. Immigration is not easy.
I think Nick would tell you it was, you know, there were some tough years.
But certainly I'm better off because, you know, I could meet Nick and we could build something that I think could actually make a big difference in the world.
Now that's not to say that diversity works well all the time.
What caused the 9-11 problem?
What caused somebody to attack the United States on 9-11?
Well, you can't say diversity exactly, but the fact that we're completely different, and that difference was the basis of what the disagreement is.
One pursuing a radical Islamic version of the world, and one who seemed to be opposed to that, and then you've got war.
So there is no overall answer that says that diversity is always good or always bad.
But it is very clear to me that there are situations where diversity gives you more insight and more ways of looking at things so that you can have, let's say, a diversified portfolio of not only thought, but here's the important part, but of experience.
If you don't bring that different way of thinking, different experience, you're missing something pretty powerful.
Somebody's saying that's anecdotal, and you are correct.
I'm using anecdotes to make the bigger point, but I think the bigger point stands on its own.
Which is, if I were trying to start this same startup, and I didn't have somebody who had, say, Nick's point of view, I'd be behind.
Way behind. So, that's what I wanted to say about that.
So, to Tucker, your question was an excellent question.
Why does diversity give us strength?
Why does it give us power? And I think it does, through the diversity of thought.
And in the real world, you could tell yourself, well, what if people were all the same ethnicity or same gender?
Couldn't they also have different thoughts?
And the answer is yes.
But in the real world, not so much as if you actually came from a different gender, came from a different ethnicity, came from a different country.
That's a whole greater level of diversity of thought.
And there are plenty of situations such as brainstorming, starting a new company, innovating, plenty of times when you want the superior thought.
Alright, let's talk about another topic, which is watching CNN having just absolute orgasms over the fact that President Trump's disapproval level, according to them, has reached 57%.
And as the midterms are approaching, they are interpolating, or they're sort of extending that thought, This way.
And they're making a gigantic analytical error that it's hilarious to watch it happen.
And here's the error.
In the past, The popularity of the president was very correlated to how the midterm election goes.
So if the president had lots of disapproval, you would expect his party would do poorly in the midterms.
And there's plenty of history of that.
And so CNN and others are saying, well, the president's doing really poorly.
He's in the mid-30s, I think, in approval.
And that would, if history is our guide, that would tell us that the midterms are going to be a disaster, a catastrophe.
They're actually using that word, a catastrophe, for the Republicans.
And they note that in particular the independents are leaning in the wrong direction.
But here's what's wrong with that analysis.
Have I ever told you that history doesn't repeat itself?
You know, we think it does, but it doesn't.
History definitely does not repeat.
And here's what's different.
This president has a screaming economy.
This president has a whole bunch of stuff going right.
North Korea, you could make an argument that it's moving slowly but in the right direction.
You could see that the trade deals, a lot of people like the fact that trade deals are being pushed on.
We'll probably see a few more countries come online with deals.
Mexico said yes, Canada can't be far away.
Maybe we get some more between now and the midterms.
So here's what's different from history.
There's never been a president who performed more strongly while being personally disliked so much.
And most of it is because of the accusations of racism, the accusations of being a bully, more of the personal stuff.
We've never seen that before.
So if there were going to be a year in which the old statistic didn't work anymore, where the President's popularity no longer predicted what the midterms would be, this would be that year.
Don't you think?
If ever there could be a year where the popularity of the president is disconnected from what people think is his performance, this is the year.
All right.
So we might see a bit of a surprise.
If you were to ask an Independent who does not identify with the Republican Party, what do you think?
Do you approve of President Trump?
What would an Independent say?
I think they might say, I don't approve of him.
But I sure like this economy.
I sure like what's happening overseas.
Many of them are going to say, I like the court picks.
It's sort of exciting.
The news is more interesting lately.
I wish race relations would be better.
I wish we could do something with health care.
But things are going pretty well.
Now, so I've got a feeling that independents are not answering surveys the way people expect that they will.
Can you guys hear a loud background noise right now?
Or is that just me? So, here's what I would...
Yeah, we'll stop in a minute.
So here's what I would look for.
I think the Republicans are going to do better than what all the indicators are.
I don't know that the Republicans will pull it out.
I'm not predicting a red wave.
But I think they'll perform better than the experts are going to say.
And it's for similar reasons to why the President won when the polls said he wouldn't.
Because people will tell you they don't like him, but it's not related to his job performance.
And now we've actually seen his job performance.
But here's the other thing that strikes me.
I've told you that people don't form independent opinions about politics.
They think they do. You think they do.
Everybody else thinks they do.
But they don't. People's opinions are assigned to them By the media that they choose to watch.
So if you're a conservative and you choose to watch Fox News and Drudge Report, you're going to end up with one hardened opinion that's sort of similar to that side.
If you watch CNN and MSNBC and New York Times, you're going to end up with a hardened opinion that is what they have assigned to you.
So when CNN reports that the disapproval of the president has reached 57%, what is the other way they could report that that would be the same information and also completely accurate?
Another way they could say that is CNN has succeeded in convincing people, 57% of the public, that the president should not be approved.
Right? Because it's the media that causes these opinions.
People don't just have opinions and then the media measures them.
The media creates the opinion and then they measure how well they did.
CNN is doing really well right now.
And you know what's interesting is that this change seemed to correspond to them talking less about Russia.
Did you notice that?
I don't know if it's related or not, but the news has sort of abandoned Russia as a story.
And move to just other things.
You know, there's the Woodward book and the New York Times anonymous thing.
And it looks to me like the anti-Trump press has found some winning messages and it wasn't Russia.
Russia just wasn't moving the dial.
So now they're back to, oh, there's chaos in the White House, and he might be crazy, and maybe we have to have him removed from office, and he's unhinged.
So maybe that's just a more effective attack, and the polls are just reflecting that.
But you also have the effect that the independents are going to say, now we don't approve of him, but when I walk into the voting booth, Tell me again why I wouldn't vote for a Republican if I would have voted for a Republican under a different administration.
When they walk in the booth, I think independence...
Well, let me put it this way.
What is it that makes you register as an independent instead of a Democrat or Republican?
It's the feeling that you've got some independent thought and that you could go either way.
I mean, these are people who are self-identified.
Will a self-identified independent walk into the voting booth and say, I'm not going to vote for this Republican because a totally unrelated person, I don't like his personality, but I do like his performance, and his performance will be even better and give me more of what I want if I vote for this person who happens to be a Republican?
Is an independent going to say, no, I'm not going to vote for the person I want, this congressperson, because I have a bad feeling about the tweets coming from a completely different person?
Do independents think that way?
I think in the past, people would have said the approval rate of the president is basically an approval rate of the party.
They would have said those are sort of the same thing.
But now those have just disconnected.
The approval rate of the president is really just about him.
It's just about a personality.
And the approval rate of the party is, wait for it, what's the most recent thing you heard about the party?
Oh, it was an anonymous article in the New York Times in which someone who is presumably a Republican was operating as a control on the personality that was the part you didn't like.
Are you going to get more or less control on this president if everybody's a Republican or if you get a split Congress?
I don't know. It seems to me that the people who control this president, to the degree that he can be controlled, are Republicans, wouldn't you say?
Who is it that's the better control on this president?
Is it, let's say, is it Maxine Waters?
Is Maxine Waters having a productive effect on President Trump by forming his opinions and helping him move toward more reasonable policies?
Probably not Maxine Waters.
Is it Nancy Pelosi who's having a good impact on this president to take some of the rough edges off that you don't like?
Probably not. Is it Rand Paul?
It is.
Who does the president listen to?
Rand Paul or Maxine Waters?
One of those people can help you get what you want from this president, which is taking the advice, you know, Lindsay Graham.
Who has more influence with this president?
Lindsay Graham. Or Chuck Schumer.
There's no competition.
So if you like what this president has done mostly, but you want to make sure that there's some gating factors, there's some second opinions that he'll listen to, and that's really what it is, because the president's still in charge, but second opinions are useful.
Well, Rand Paul's got a good second opinion.
Lindsey Graham's got a good second opinion.
And you know, you could go down the line.
There are lots of Republicans who operate as, I would say, quite credible Yeah, Lindsey Graham's very credible.
Take, let's say, New Gingrich.
He's not in office at the moment, but prominent Republican.
Is New Gingrich a good voice in terms of the president's second opinions?
Yes, he is. So, if you're an independent I think you might find yourself voting for your best interest.
Ted Cruz, another good example, right?
And voting for your best interest, given that this president will probably be president for six more years, your best interest is somebody who's a credible second opinion for the president.
And those are Republicans.
So, we'll see how it goes.
I'm not going to predict a red wave, but I think the blue wave won't be this high.
It might be more of a blue splash.
So, actually let me commit.
I'm going to commit to a prediction.
My prediction will be that the blue wave will be a blue ripple.
A small ripple.
Okay? That's my prediction.
Not quite sure if it will change who's got control.
But I'm going to say it's not a wave, it's a ripple.
And it's because the polls are not capturing the fact that people are evaluating their approval of the president based on personality and not results.
And if they want more of the results, they're going to go more Republican, I think.
Alright. Will the media call it a wave anyway?
Probably. Do you even vote?
I do not vote.
I've explained in the past why I don't vote.
And it's a combination of two things.
One is I don't think I add much to the outcome.
Rarely do I have confidence that I have the better idea.
So I don't know what to do about trade agreements, what to do about North Korea necessarily.
But on top of that, It would make me less unbiased.
So as soon as you join a team and you say, I'm one of these people, or even if you say, I voted for this person, you're kind of committed and you're going to defend that person no matter what.
I have been saying positive things about President Trump for a few years now.
People would say, well, you're already biased.
You're so biased in his camp.
Everything you do seems to be pro-Trump.
But that's not true.
I criticize them on race relations.
I criticize them on health care.
I criticize them on immigration.
That should have been wrapped up by now.
I think Puerto Rico, it's hard to judge whether the recovery there could have been better because it was the last disaster of several.
So the resources were strained and it is an island.
So you can't really know if things should have been better.
But you can say it wasn't great.
You can say that however it came out wasn't great.
So if you're asking me, you know, if I vote, I would be more inclined to say everything that the person I voted for is great, even if it isn't.
If I don't vote, I maintain a little bit of independence, mental independence, in which I can say, yeah, I like these things he does.
These things need work.
So there you go.
Food was found rotting in containers in Puerto Rico.
In a big disaster relief situation, you have to assume that there will be lots of flaws, lots of imperfections, a lot of inefficiencies, because they're just shoving massive resources in the general direction.
And hoping that people can sort it out when it gets there.
I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit.
Of course they do have a plan, but I imagine that they're sending more resources than they have people who can keep up with it.
So that's why it's hard to know.
If that was a failure of management, there's just no way to know because you would need a control group that was managed by somebody else under the same situation at the same time to know if they should have gone differently or a better leader could have got a better result.
There's just no way to know. Oh, somebody is asking me to tell you my I Am Spartacus story.
Well, I was driving this morning, and I changed the lane.
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