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Sept. 13, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
32:27
Episode 219 Scott Adams: Google, Woodward, Jamie Dimon, Norm McDonald
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Time Text
- Ba-da-bum-bum. Ba-bum-bum-bum-bum. Ba-bum-bum, ba-bum-bum-bum.
Hey, Joanne.
Hello, Milton.
Hello, whatever that name is.
Come on in here. Gather around.
It's time. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams.
It's your favorite time of the day.
It's the time you look forward to.
You probably already have your beverage ready.
Your mug, your cup, your vessel, your chalice, your glass, with your beverage.
Could it be coffee? It might be.
It's time for the simultaneous sip.
Join me. Well, it looks like the hurricane is disappointing the news organizations by being only a mid-sized, major, life-threatening disaster.
So, that probably took some of the steam out of the storm chasers, but we're glad it's smaller than it needs to be.
I'm gonna make a note about something you just said there.
So, I got a few topics.
You may know that comedian Norm MacDonald has said a few things that got people buzzing.
And then when he tried to clarify it, he said something else that got people buzzing again.
Now, I'm not going to repeat any of the things that Norm said, because then people will get on me for saying the same things.
But I will say this.
His new talk show on Netflix debuts on Friday.
I'm definitely watching that.
So, Friday, Netflix, Norm MacDonald, you should really check that out.
I've got a feeling that's going to be really good.
I'll definitely be watching.
Now, you saw that Jamie Dimon, banker Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan, said in some kind of a speech that he could beat Trump if he ran for president.
And Trump, of course, batted him back and said that he's a nervous-looking speaker, which is one of Trump's best getting-in-your-head plays.
He tells his opponents that they're nervous.
Which makes them look nervous, and everybody's looking for their nervousness.
It's a hilariously effective thing to say that people don't really say in public, but when he started saying that about Rubio, you remember when he was basically saying those things about Rubio, I thought, oh my god, I would hate it.
If somebody said that about me, imagine you're running for president or something, and of course you're concerned or nervous about how you look because you're running for president.
And the very first frame that somebody puts on you is nervous.
Yeah, he's just sort of nervous and unconfident.
It's hilariously effective.
But then Jamie Dimon apparently took it back.
I think he said he shouldn't have said he should run for president.
And he clarified by saying that he could never get nominated.
Because the progressives would never nominate him.
And I thought to myself, well that's absolutely true.
Because I don't see Democrats nominating for president a white male.
Do you? This seems, I mean, anything's possible.
But in, you know, 2018 and beyond, I think that boat has sailed.
The Democratic Party has largely become the female party.
You know, obviously there are plenty of men in it, but in terms of their priorities, in terms of who they're likely to have as a candidate, in terms of who they're likely to support for a leader, top two people on the list of Power candidates are Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
So those are the top two.
Cory Booker probably had a chance until he gave himself his own perma name.
So Spartacus probably is not going to make it to the final two.
But between...
Between Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, assuming that their skill levels are kind of similar, I don't see how Warren can be the nominee.
And here's why.
In order for the Democrats to win, they have to have something like, you know, 90 plus percentage of the African American vote.
Now, Running a white candidate probably keeps some people home.
Kamala's got enough, you know, ethnic interest going on there that she might get people to vote.
So it seems to me that the left almost has to end up with Kamala Harris.
It's too early to say lots could happen between now and then, there could be surprises, etc.
But if you were just to straight line it and there were no new surprises, I'd say Kamala Harris would be the candidate.
They don't have a chance with anybody else, I don't think, and they probably don't have a chance with her either, but she might be the strongest.
I'd have to see more of her in public to be sure about that.
Alright, so that's fun. Did everybody see the Google video from 2016 in which the management team was having a Full staff or, you know, I guess an open staff meeting with a big group of people right after the election.
If you haven't seen it, it lasts around an hour, it's worth watching the whole thing.
So it's an exclusive that Breitbart got.
Somehow they got a hold of the video.
And to me, the whole thing was jaw-dropping.
If you've lived in one version of the movie, as I call it, you know, I've said that on Election Day, the world split into two movies, but they were playing on the same screen at the same time.
And if you've only seen the Happy That Trump Got Elected movie, and you haven't actually spent, you know, time looking at the other movie, you really have to see this.
It will change your entire impression of what's going on.
It did for me. Now, you might say to yourself, okay, I already know that the tech people wanted Hillary Clinton.
I already know that they're not going to be happy that she lost.
And you think to yourself, I kind of already know what that video is going to be about, right?
And that's what I thought.
Because we've all seen the videos of the people crying when Hillary lost.
We see the people... Screaming at the sky.
We've seen the protesters. So we think we know what that mindset was like.
But you don't know until you watch this video.
So here's what was just jaw-dropping about it for me.
To watch the leaders of one of the biggest companies in the world, one of the biggest public companies in the world, the entire leadership team In front of an auditorium full of employees, speaking as though there could not possibly be any Trump supporters in that room.
That's it. This whole giant room of all these leaders and all these employees, and I don't know how many there were, hundreds maybe?
But they spoke as though it's obvious that there would be no Trump supporters in that room, and if there were, They would not be appreciated.
See, nobody said those words, but it was very clear that if you were a Trump supporter in that room, you kept your frickin' head down because they made it very clear you were not welcome.
I've never seen anything like that in a corporate environment.
So the big companies that I worked for were a big bank, public bank, and a big phone company.
And if you had said anything like anything that those executives said in those companies, I'm pretty sure you would have been removed from your job.
You know, could IBM, could somebody at IBM stand up and say, man, it's a tragedy that this president got elected and make it seem that anybody who supported that candidate was an inferior human being in some way?
Because that's pretty much what that meeting was about.
That's how it came across to me.
And then the next jaw-dropping part is there was sort of a casualness to the fact that they needed to change things.
And I don't know how to say this to get all the importance across because it was so casual.
Google was talking about changing the result next time because they didn't like this result.
Now the way they talked about it and the reason it was casual is because they were talking about it in terms of improving the tools.
So you say to yourself, well of course you want to improve the search tools.
You want to get rid of the fake news.
You know, on some level those things are all things we all agree with, right?
But the way they talked about it was that they were going to make changes to get a different political outcome that felt like what they assumed was the right thing to do.
Oh my God!
Oh my God!
The casual evil that I don't think anybody in that room would have regarded as evil.
In fact, they would have regarded it as the opposite of evil because they would have said, We want the process to be more fair, to match our values, to get a good outcome for the world.
I don't think that they had any evil self-intentions.
In other words, they would not have labeled their own actions anything like evil.
It would have been exactly the opposite of that.
But the result of how casually they talked about their ability to change the outcome of the election and how they were unhappy, deeply unhappy, like crying unhappy in one case, you know, so one of them was actually weepy, that that should scare the pants off of you.
And if you don't have pants, put some pants on so that they can be scared off of you.
It seems to me that this video moves the needle Most news doesn't really change stuff, but this one really feels like it changed something.
Now, assuming enough people see it.
If you don't see it, you can't really understand the depth of the feeling.
And it's the depth of the feeling that allows them to talk casually about changing the outcome of future elections with their tools.
That's scary. All right.
Somebody asked me to talk about the quote, hoax of the 3000 deaths.
I think you're talking about Puerto Rico.
So is there now, I think there's some kind of controversy about whether it's true that 3000 people died or whether that number is not accurate or not.
I don't have any information on that.
I just wanted to note that I saw it.
But I don't think it's productive To argue about whether that number is accurate.
I don't think that moves the ball forward in any way.
Whether it's 1,000 or 3,000, it's kind of the same situation.
And here's the problem with evaluating Puerto Rico.
Let me give you a little economics lesson, the most basic economic lesson anybody ever had.
If you say to yourself, Puerto Rico If you say Puerto Rico was handled poorly, you are not good at analyzing things.
If you say that Puerto Rico was handled well, you are not good at analyzing things.
There are two things that you can rule out As reasonable opinions.
The first thing you can rule out is that Puerto Rico, the disaster recovery was handled well.
You can rule that out.
That's not a reasonable opinion.
You can also rule out the opposite.
So you can rule out as reasonable opinions, it was handled well, and you can rule out that it was handled poorly.
You can also rule out that it was handled in between.
Does anybody know why?
And now, I'm not saying that those things are not true or false.
I'm saying that they're not reasonable opinions.
Not because it's both.
Not because there's too many variables.
Oh, my goodness. Nobody knows the answer to this question.
See, this is shocking.
It's one of the reasons I'll have a chapter in my book about this.
No one... Yes, thank you.
We have a winner. Somebody had the correct answer.
If you have studied economics, or really any field in which you learn to compare things or analyze things, the only way you could judge whether the Puerto Rico Disaster program was effective or ineffective, well managed or poorly managed.
The only way you could know that is if you had two Puerto Ricos and one was managed one way and the other was managed the other way.
Oh wait, is two enough?
No it's not. You would need lots of Puerto Ricos and you would need each of them to be managed in a different way at exactly the same time as if the other ones didn't exist.
Then you'd be able to say, oh, given all the variables stayed the same, you can see that this management approach worked and this one didn't.
Now you have an opinion. Had that happened and you had an opinion that it was either good or bad, that would be an actual valid opinion.
It would be based on facts.
It would be based on a comparison that made sense.
Was there a second Puerto Rico?
No. If you're saying, sure there was.
What about the hurricane that just happened in Texas?
There were a lot more white people there, right?
So they got better service and it was better.
Texas wasn't Puerto Rico.
Texas happened first.
What if the order had been reversed?
Would Puerto Rico have gotten a better response because it was first?
You know, before FEMA got overwhelmed?
Did it make a difference? How about the fact that it was on an island?
How about the fact that the management, the government, and the infrastructure of Puerto Rico were different than taxes?
Do all of those things matter?
Of course! Of course!
They matter a lot! They matter a lot!
So, if you have an opinion that Puerto Rico was handled poorly, you're dumb.
If you have an opinion that Puerto Rico was handled well, you're dumb.
You're dumb. Now, it might be more the case that you're uninformed or you're uneducated on how to compare things.
But if you learn how to compare things, you would understand that it is Not an adult, well-informed opinion for us.
You know, we weren't there, especially, to say that Puerto Rico was handled well or that it was handled poorly.
That opinion can't reasonably be formed with what we, the public, know.
And even the government probably couldn't give you an opinion.
And I would even go further.
Even FEMA, you know, the people who were actually there, they probably can't tell you either.
Because they also were not involved in any other Puerto Rico that happened at the same time.
Nobody can compare it.
You know, you can say there were or were not problems, but every disaster is going to have problems, so you just can't compare.
Alright. I'm working on a hypothesis I want to run by you.
And I don't know if I've ever talked about this before, but I don't think so.
It's a little provocative, so I'm going to Try to be careful about how I word it.
And I'm more interested in your opinion than mine.
Because I'm going to make...
It's a hypothesis about how you feel.
So my opinion about how you feel isn't worth a lot.
I want to see how you feel.
It seemed to me that if you looked at the history of the United States, there was sort of an agreed contract.
Sort of an unwritten contract in civilization.
Or let's say just society within the United States.
And that contract went like this.
At least in the recent decades.
The contract went that our government was elected to represent all of us.
Didn't matter what your ethnicity was.
Didn't matter your gender.
And so it didn't matter who ran.
Didn't matter what the ethnicity or the gender of the person who ran.
Because that was the deal.
They were going to They're gonna take care of all of us.
And sure enough, when you saw who voted for each candidate, you could find that some ethnic groups would be weighted more for one candidate than the other.
But that alone is not a reason for concern, because you could imagine that one candidate had programs that were more logical for one group or the other.
But still, the votes would be largely distributed.
Each ethnic group, each gender, their votes would be largely distributed.
Maybe 60-40, but there were votes on both sides.
When President Obama, and here's the hypothesis, tell me what you think about that.
When President Obama ran the first time, and he got, whatever the number is, north of 90% of the African American vote, It made perfect sense for African-American voters to prefer him because you just wanted to make sure that somebody who looked like you could get elected, first of all. You wanted to break that glass ceiling, if you will.
You wanted to get maybe some racial understanding.
There was some pride.
So there were lots of good reasons To vote for Obama if you were black.
He was qualified. He was a Democrat.
There was lots of good reasons.
And of course, plenty of white people voted for him.
I supported him as well at the time.
And I also was influenced by the fact that I thought it was just time.
It was just time to get a black president, get past that, check that box off.
Maybe the country would be better off from it.
My thought was that it would be a real positive step for race relations.
To me, it seemed like, man, the country just needs to get past this.
And then we can really understand that we can all get elected president.
And once you think that everybody can get elected president, that should make us all feel a little better about each other, right?
But what happened? And I would say this is an unintended consequence.
So here's the key of my point.
I believe there was an unintended consequence.
And the unintended consequence was because the 95% or so African-American voters voted for him because he was black.
Now, if you ask them, they would probably say they like his policies too.
But the way it looked to the observers, who might be right, they might be wrong, but I'm just saying how it looked.
It looked like the special American contract that I talked about was broken.
You see where I'm going with this?
It looked like the unspoken contract That makes America work.
You know, the fact that we're not voting for people because of their race or their gender.
The contract got broken.
When the contract was broken, it was broken.
And I believe that that allowed a lot of white supporters of Trump later to say, I think we can just vote for him because he's white.
I believe, and I think that it also allowed some Trump supporters to say, I think we can just vote for him because he's a man.
I don't think that was a big factor, actually.
I don't think I ever heard even one person, a Trump supporter, talk about Hillary's gender.
Well, honest to God, I don't think even one person, even on social media, accepted a joke.
So I think gender really wasn't part of it.
But here's the hypothesis.
The hypothesis is that all the good intentions that were behind voting for President Obama had an unintended consequence of breaking the social contract.
Because when one ethnicity broke pretty much just for race, it kind of made people of other races say, wait a minute, did you just line up With a different framework?
Because the framework we had was America.
America was the team.
Are you saying you're on another team?
There's a black team and now there's a white team?
I feel like it broke a contract somehow.
Now, I don't know that there's any point to that except to say that it certainly determines what 2020 looks like.
Because in 2020, there will be people voting for President Trump, who are voting for the American team, and there will be people who are voting for, whether it's Kamala Harris, I'm guessing, and it may be along racial lines.
Now, the reason that I think it has to be Kamala Harris is because, follow me on this, If the Democrats can't hold the black vote, they don't really have a party.
They don't have to lose many of the black vote in order to lose.
So if they run another white woman after the last white woman lost, There are going to be a lot of black folks saying, are we just throwing our vote away here?
But if you give them a racially interesting character, maybe you get more votes.
All right, another topic.
Have you noticed...
Oh, I was just watching an interview.
I tweeted this. Anderson Cooper interviewing Bob Woodward.
As you know, Bob Woodward was part of the reporting team years ago.
with Carl Bernstein who wrote about Watergate and broke that story.
Now, I have teased Carl Bernstein for being the one that they trot out to ask, is this worse than Watergate?
And it's sort of a running joke that whenever CNN needs a story, you know, there's not much happening.
They'll trot Carl Bernstein out to say that whatever Trump is doing this week or whatever he's accused of doing More to the point.
And Carl will say, it's worse than Watergate.
It's worse than Watergate.
And then we all laugh because he's the guy they bring out to say it's worse than Watergate.
So he wasn't on.
His partner from back in the day, Woodward, was on, who's got this new book, saying negative things about the president.
And Anderson Cooper is like, I know it's apples to oranges, but would you say that what's happening in the White House now is Worse than Watergate?
And Woodward, unlike Bernstein, who I think is losing...
I think Bernstein sort of lost his step.
Woodward does not take the bait.
It was the easiest thing to say for Woodward to just say, yeah, it's worse than Watergate in its own way.
But instead, Woodward, to his credit, stuck with the facts.
And he said, well...
Nixon was about an actual criminal act.
That was about actual crime.
But Woodward noted that no crime has been so far surfaced in anything about President Trump so that there are apples and oranges.
And so Woodward avoided the invitation to say that it was worse than Watergate, which to me was hilarious.
But it also Raise this following observation.
I'm noticing this on social media, but also in the news.
Have you noticed that the complaints about President Trump have turned into vague word salad, mind reading, something might go wrong in the future.
What if something happens?
What if we were to find out something?
Just vague word salad.
And here are some of the words to give you an example.
Unhinged. Sort of hard to define, isn't it?
One of those words that, you know, you could call anybody at any given moment.
Impulsive. Again, a little hard to define.
Impulsive meaning what?
And his impulsiveness caused us what problem?
The GDP went down how much because of his impulsiveness?
Sort of vague, right? I also hear that he's alienating our allies.
Alienating them to attack us?
Alienating them to give us better trade deals?
Alienating them to drop out of NATO? Oh no, they're just paying more to be in NATO. Again, a vague thing.
How about He's kowtowing to dictators.
Kowtowing to dictators by getting Kim Jong-un to stop testing nuclear weapons and talk to us about one of the biggest peace events that would ever happen.
Is that what you're talking about?
Going in the right direction?
Or working with Putin because there's no choice.
He has a nuclear arsenal and a lot of our interests are overlapping.
Was that the problem?
Or in this latest interview I was just talking about with Woodward and Anderson Cooper, apparently in the book, Woodward's book, he says that there's something like a nervous breakdown of, I don't know, authority or something in the White House.
What does that mean?
What is a nervous breakdown of authority?
What's that mean? And so, with all of this word salad...
I thought that I would show you.
I'm going to invite a special guest.
Dale? Dale?
Are you busy? Dale?
Can you come over here? I want to show the people how to prepare a word salad.
Could you show that for you?
I'll leave so you can come back.
Hello.
My name is Dale, and I do not like President Trump.
I'm here to show you how to make a word salad.
Are you ready? You start with two dashes of unhinged and a little impulsiveness for flavor.
You add in a little bit of alienating his allies, kowtowing to dictators, and a nervous breakdown of the management In the White House.
Now you mix them all together.
And then you eat them. So this is a delicious word salad in which it doesn't taste good.
But I have to eat it because I don't like the president.
It tastes so bad.
My word salad tastes so bad.
But I hate the president.
That's how I have to eat it. I haven't eaten.
Seed. Ugh.
That is some nasty word salad right there.
The things I do for you.
Don't say I don't go the extra mile.
Add a dash of Don Lemon.
Damn it! Damn it, I wish you'd said that before.
That would have been exactly the right line.
Now, what are the odds...
That we're not living in a simulation, and yet the biggest critic who is sour on the president is named Lemon.
Isn't he kind of sour on the president?
He is. His name is Lemon.
Just a coincidence. All right.
I think we've covered everything that needs to be covered.
And that's all for now.
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