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Nov. 5, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:52
Episode 287 Scott Adams: What the NYT Got Wrong About #JobsNotMobs, Polls, Midterms
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That's my special, almost midterm election day, theme.
Sounds a lot like my regular theme, I know, but it's slightly different.
Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And if you have been prepared, or if you just got lucky, you might be sitting near your beverage.
It might be in some kind of a cup, a mug, a stein, a glass, a container of some sort.
But whatever it is, if you love it, and you love me, or even if you don't, let's have the simultaneous sip.
Ready? Go.
Good stuff. Well, it seems we have lots of things to talk about today.
I hope you're tweeting your flags, your American flags, today and tomorrow morning, based on the science that says exposure to the American flag, actually just seeing the American flag biases people.
To vote Republican. So if you'd like to support President Trump, tweet a flag.
I see a lot of you are already doing that.
And we'll never know if it worked.
But science says it should.
Now, those of you who have been watching my Periscopes know that my startup has an app.
It's called Interface by WinHub.
And on that app, you can sign up to be either an expert or somebody who wants to talk to an expert.
And the experts can set their own price for an immediate video call.
I'm saying this because At polling time tomorrow, if any of you are at a polling place where something interesting is happening, get on the app as an expert and just put in polling or reporter, some kind of keyword about election, polling, reporter. And I will find you and I will contact you while you're in line at your polling place, but only get on if there's something happening there.
So if there's an altercation, there's an extra long line, if somebody dressed certain ways, if there's some confusion, if there's some kind of voter suppression, anything like that.
So if there's anything interesting, I'll be in and on, off and on, Periscope all day tomorrow.
So tomorrow I'll have multiple Periscopes and I might build them around anybody who's seeing something interesting at a polling place.
So just go on, put in the keywords, polling or reporter or election, I'll find you.
And we'll go live to you like you're a reporter on site.
Okay? So now that we have this app, Interface by WenHub, it's free.
You can download it for free.
And you can set your price as an expert anywhere from zero.
You don't have to charge anything.
Or if there's something really, really interesting happening, and you happen to be there with a camera, wouldn't you like CNN to have to pay for it?
So you can put a price and say, hey, anybody who wants to contact me, It's going to cost X dollars and I will help give you some attention Through my Periscopes.
And most of the big media companies watch my Periscopes.
Alright, let's talk about the New York Times story that dropped yesterday.
I tweeted it. And they took up the story that Politico reported on about the birth of the Jobs Not Mobs meme.
And what the New York Times did was fascinating, and you should go see it.
You won't be able to see this clearly, but I'm just going to give you a rough representation of what they did.
They did, if you can see it, some kind of a histogram, a historical thing where they show the meme growing.
And as those orange, orange shows how much red attention it got, blue is how much Twitter.
And You can see that it grew and grew and grew, and then it went boom, and all of these bubbles here are how many people on social media are talking about it.
Now the interesting part is that it went from a trickle, a trickle, so small you won't even be able to see it, but a trickle of mentions, mostly about mobs, and then the New York Times reports that Right here, where things started getting interesting, and there were lots of Jobs Not Mobs mentioned, the New York Times calls out, and this is how they describe it.
It says, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert cartoon strip, of the Dilbert cartoon strip, quickly endorsed Jobs Not Mobs as a potential slogan.
And then here's the fun part.
Because of the cartoonist's popularity among the pro-Trump crowd online, this was a key moment.
Then it said, a screenshot of Mr.
Adams' tweet was posted to Reddit, followed by a meme with a phrase laid over an image of factory workers on the top and violent protests at the bottom.
And that was by Brian Vision.
And they showed his meme.
And then it talks about Brian, of Brian Vision, who goes by Brian Machiavelli on Twitter.
And they say, the creator of the meme, of the meme, talking about Brian, and when they say the creator of the meme, they're talking about the visual presentation, who goes by the pen name Brian Machiavelli, told the New York Times that he charges $200 an hour for his memetic warfare consulting services.
Now, first of all, I don't know if that's true.
So, that might be true.
But it might be true, but it might also be something that Brian just told the New York Times because it was funny.
I don't know.
And if it was true, he should certainly raise his prices.
So Brian, if you're watching this, $200 an hour?
Way too cheap. It's time to raise your price.
But I'm not sure he meant it, so that's the funny part.
But there's another interesting angle on this.
I have said before, That if you're a person who is talked about in the news often, as I am, so I'm the subject of the news literally thousands of times.
In the past year, you've seen how many times I'm the subject of a news report.
Probably in the last year, hundreds, I'm not sure.
In the last however many decades I've been doing this, Tens of thousands.
So I've been the subject of just lots and lots of news reports.
And my point is that if you're the subject of the report, you're in a unique position Somebody's asking if Brian of Machiavelli is on the Interface by WinHub app.
I don't know if he's tried it, but if somebody wants some consulting, Brian, you should get on there.
So what I was saying is that if you're the subject of lots of news reports, you're in a unique vantage point because you can read the report and you're the only person in the world who knows for sure whether it's true.
Nobody else really knows if the report is true or false.
The only people who really know are the subject of the report.
So I've seen the news about me being wrong a billion times.
So when I look at news about other people, I think, well, it might be true, but it's been wrong about me so many times.
I have to assume it could be out of context.
You know, there's something missing about it.
And I want to demonstrate that effect with this New York Times story, all right?
So let me read the story again and see if you think this is accurate reporting.
This is just the only mention of me, right?
New York Times talking about the Jobs Not Mobs meme, and they say, yesterday, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, so far so good, all accurate, quickly endorsed Jobs Not Mobs as a potential slogan, so far completely accurate.
Now it says, because of the cartoonist popularity among the pro-Trump crowd online, this was a key moment, meaning that it got a lot of attention because I have a lot of followers.
Is that true or false?
Is this fake news or real news?
I'll read just that one sentence again, and you tell me, is this fake news or real news?
Because of the cartoonist's popularity among the pro-Trump crowd online, this was a key moment.
And in the context they're talking about, it's when the traffic picked up.
True? It's true-ish.
It's true-ish, meaning that it's completely true, but there's some context left out, right?
Here is the way I would have reported it, in the way that I would have considered it to be completely true.
I would say that it was a key moment, partly because I have a big audience.
So I've got pushing 300,000...
I hope by the end of the year I'll probably have 300,000 followers on Twitter.
So that's a pretty big audience.
So that part's true.
But here's the other thing that's true.
I wrote a book on how to do this.
Win Bigley is a book about how to persuade.
So I'm literally an expert If people who write books are experts, you could debate that.
But I'm certainly someone who spends a lot of professional time in the context of persuasion, and specifically for the past two years, persuading in politics.
It's literally what I'm doing most of the time for the last few years.
The other part of the context is I was one of the few people who predicted the outcome of the election based on persuasion.
In other words, I used my persuasion skills To predict what was going to happen.
So what they missed, the context was, that when I saw this slogan, which I did not invent, I wish I had because it's great, but I didn't invent the word jobs not mobs.
But when I identified it, I said this was pure brain glue.
So of all the things out there, all the things people were saying, of all the many slogans that were floating around at the time, there was exactly one that I said was special.
Think how many things you saw, how many memes went by, how many slogans, clever jokes.
How many did you see?
I only picked out one as being the one.
Now, and then it became the one.
So the story should have been, not that because of the cartoonist's popularity, that should have been half of it, because if I didn't have an audience, nobody would have seen it, right?
So it's important, it's necessary that people saw it, so the size of the audience matters.
But that wasn't the key thing.
The key thing, tell me if I'm wrong, The reason that it took off when I endorsed it is because I had a track record and credibility with a big group of people who thought that if I identified it as powerful that it probably had a better chance of going forward than if I hadn't.
Certainly that's what the people at Reddit were thinking.
And the second part of the story is that Reddit picked it up and Reddit went with it.
Secondly, Brian is one of my followers and we interact a lot on Twitter.
That was kind of important.
The fact that Brian, the creator of the meme, and I interact all the time on Twitter.
I mean, it feels like that's important context.
So, in summary, the news that the New York Times reported is completely accurate, meaning they got no facts wrong.
But the story is completely misleading at the same time that it's accurate.
Am I wrong? Because if the reporting is the only reason that the meme took off is because I'm popular, they've missed the best part of the story.
It wasn't that I'm popular.
It's that I'm popular for picking things like this that are going to make a difference in the future.
I'm popular for being able to predict what matters.
That's the story.
They left out the good part of the story.
Okay. So enough on that.
But it was great to see that.
I said, I think the other day, I said that the midterm election might come down to the weather.
And I wasn't kidding.
Because my point is that the election might be so close in some of the important places that the weather might be the variable.
And right after that, I turned on the news, and CNN, I think it was, was giving a national forecast for what the weather is likely to be on Tuesday.
And apparently there are parts of the country where it's going to be super bad.
There's a prediction.
It may have changed since then, but the prediction, I think yesterday or the day before, was that the weather would be really, really bad in some key areas.
Now, if we don't live in a simulation, I don't know how to explain this.
Because the one thing that could make Tuesday more exciting...
Can you think of anything?
If this were a movie...
And I feel like it will be.
This is Trump, you know, Trump 2.
Because this is sort of like, the election to 2016 has to become a movie.
Alright, the election of Trump has to become a movie.
There's no way it won't be a movie.
I don't know how long it'll take.
I don't know how many there will be.
But it's going to be a movie.
And the good one will involve me as the moderator.
Or the, what do you call it, the person?
The narrator. So those political movies are good when they have a narrator who just comes in once in a while.
I'm the perfect narrator for that because my vantage point of watching it was special.
But the midterms are like movie two and the only thing that could make movie two more interesting in the final scene would be to have a huge big-ass storm.
Imagine the movie. Put yourself in the movie.
You're showing different sets of voters.
The Democrats getting ready to vote, and they're all angry, and the Republicans getting ready to vote, except they're planning for a party.
And then the storm starts.
And it's a movie, so it's like a super storm.
There's like telephone poles coming over, and there's dogs flying in the wind, and there's minor flooding.
It's not a hurricane, but...
And you see the people, where's my umbrella?
Where's my umbrella? And they can't get the car started, and they're trying to vote.
And people are just, you know, and it's storming, and they're getting out there.
Are you seeing it?
Yeah, lightning. You see it, right?
Best movie ending ever.
And all of these people, here's what makes it a good movie.
Every one of these people Is fighting, fighting nature for democracy, for the country, as they see it, right?
People have different views of what's good for the country, but every one of those people who are braving the storm in the movie that's coming tomorrow, they're all fighting for the country.
They have a different version of what a good result looks like, but they're all fighting for America.
It's a great movie!
It's a great movie!
I hope it plays. Anyway, there's some thought that the young people won't go out if the weather's bad.
I'm not sure that's the case, especially in this one.
But if it's true that young people don't go out when the weather's bad, you're going to see the old people determine the election and the old people skew toward the Republicans.
So the weather could be the final predictor.
I will reiterate my predictions.
Back in January, I made the following prediction.
Do you remember in January it looked like the Democrats were up here and the Republicans were here?
And my prediction was this, that the Republicans will do far better than whatever is being predicted in January.
Current predictions are like this.
So if the results turn out to be close, I am going to claim another accurate prediction.
So it doesn't matter which one wins, because I don't have a prediction on that.
I'm predicting that, well, I have a half a prediction.
I'll give you that in a minute. But I had a prediction that the gap would narrow.
So, accurate so far.
And I predicted that it would narrow for a very specific reason.
I predicted it would narrow based on results.
In other words, that the Trump administration would do well And that would be the reason that the gap would narrow.
And sure enough, at least to a lot of people, that seems to be the case.
Now here's my actual prediction.
Because everything seems to go the way a movie goes, what would be the most movie-like outcome tomorrow?
The most movie-like outcome is a tie.
Now, you might say to yourself, well, that's not even possible.
You can't have a tie, but you sort of can have a tie, and the way you would do it is you only need a couple of races, maybe three, and To be in question on Election Day.
In other words, there was something suspicious that happened in a few of them.
There's a vote count that's so close it's being challenged.
You have to have a recount.
Something goes to the courts because the recount wasn't going to happen or it was inconclusive.
So my prediction is that we won't know who won tomorrow.
Alright? So by the end of Election Day, whenever the votes are essentially counted for the night, I'll say midnight.
I'll say midnight on Election Day, we won't know the result.
Now keep in mind that the odds of this kind of a prediction being accurate are really small, right?
Which is why it's fun.
It's fun because it's so unlikely.
Now I'm going to admit to you that this is an unlikely prediction.
This one's just for fun.
It's not really based on persuasion.
The persuasion predictions I'm going to stick with.
Those are the ones that I'll say, yeah, I'm going to live or die on this one.
This one's just for fun, and it's not based on the persuasion model.
It's based on the movie model and the simulation model.
If we're living in something like a simulation that continues to operate like a movie, the final scene is going to be a nail-biter.
Now, in the end, it has to go one way or the other.
And I'm going to keep open which way that goes.
Because I think a good movie could go either way.
Good movie could go either way.
But you need it to be close right to the end.
So that's my prediction. Now, here's some things I saw about the polls today that don't make any sense to me.
All right, so this doesn't make any sense to me.
Oh, let me give you a conditional.
I'll give you a conditional prediction that I will stick with.
If the weather is bad, like really bad, in some of the key states, I'll predict the Republicans will win.
So I will make a weather-dependent prediction.
If the weather is good, Democrats have an advantage.
But if the weather is terrible in key states, I'm gonna say Republicans pull it out.
Now I saw online today that 62% of women prefer Democrats.
So by ratio of 62% to 35% Let me say this clearly.
Women are preferring Democrats by 62%.
62%!
Only 35% prefer Republicans.
Now, as I've been saying, the Democrats are basically a party of women at this point.
That's not too much to say, right?
If 62% of women vote Democrat, that's enough for them to essentially control the party.
So if you are black or Latino, for example, and you want to have power in your party, you might have come to the wrong party.
Because women are going to get what women want, period.
If what black voters and Latino voters want happens to be the same thing that women want, that's great.
But they're not gonna get a vote.
Their vote doesn't count as Democrats because the women are such a big block that they essentially control the party.
But here's the part I didn't understand.
See if you can explain this to me.
And this is a real question.
This is a genuine question.
There's no trick here. I don't understand what I'm going to tell you right now.
So the same article said that women are 62-35% likely to vote Democrat.
That's a gigantic difference in women.
But men are roughly even.
That they're the same amount of men who will vote Democrat as Republican.
And yet... The polls are not close.
How do you explain that?
How could it be possible that women are overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats, men are even, and yet the election is going to be close?
In what universe and with what kind of math, with what kind of math Can the women be overwhelmingly for one team, the men be evenly divided, and that the total outcome is unknown?
How can that possibly be true?
I don't understand it.
Here's something else that I thought was funny.
I read a seething editorial in CNN by Jen Psaki, in which the entire article was just dripping with Trump hatred.
He's a racist.
He's a blah, blah, blah, blah. That's all the usual laundry list stuff.
And then I see on the same CNN poll that Latinos are 66% likely to vote Democrat.
Now 66% is a lot, right?
It's two and a three. But how does that explain that one-third of Latinos have not noticed anything wrong with the Republicans and in fact are going to vote with them?
If you're one of the two-thirds of Latinos, Who is looking at, let's say, the CNN view of the world, which is that the Republicans are just flat out racists.
And the Democrats' message is that the Republicans are racist against Latinos, specifically.
How do the two out of three Latinos explain the fact that one out of three Latinos don't see it?
It's invisible to them.
Because one out of three Latinos are not voting for racists who are racist against them.
That's not happening, is it?
This is a serious question.
If you're in the two out of three Latinos, and you're talking to each other, everything makes sense.
Because two out of three, vote Democrat, they have a reason.
They agree with each other. So if they're talking to each other, it all makes sense.
But what happens when the one and a three, and one-third is a big percentage, right?
One-third of anything is a lot.
What happens then when the one-third walks into the room and they say, well, hey, obviously you're not going to vote for the people who are racist against you, right?
And that one guy says, I don't see it.
I think you're just hallucinating.
I don't see anything. I'm totally going to vote for him because I like taxes, my taxes low, and I like a good economy.
What did the two out of three, how did they respond to that?
How did they respond to the fact that one third of Latinos can't see the world that they imagine they're seeing?
Now, Analogies are never persuasive, so I'm going to use this one for comedic effect.
Nah, can't use it for comedic effect because the topic is not funny.
What's a better way to frame this?
Let me just put it in these terms.
Not for comedic effect because there's nothing funny about it.
But you can imagine that during the Well, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe somebody can correct me on this.
But I imagine that during the Holocaust, were there any Jews who were saying, well, sure, there's a little bit of rounding up, but, you know, one-third of us, we're still okay with this Nazi thing.
I don't think so.
I would bet if you could do a poll in Nazi Germany that the number of Jewish residents who were pro-Hitler, probably really small.
Probably close to zero.
I mean, there's always going to be somebody, but probably close to zero, right?
How do you explain one-third of Latinos have not noticed your scary Trump derangement syndrome bubble that you're living in?
That's a serious question.
I just don't know how you would internalize it.
How would your brain hold these things to be true?
That it's obvious that Trump is a giant racist monster who hates Latinos, that it's obvious, that everyone can see it.
At the same time, you have to hold in your head that one-third of the people just like you, at least in this narrow sense, just like you, don't see it.
And they're looking at the same stuff.
And have I ever taught you, who is hallucinating if two people are in the same room, one sees an elephant, and the other is in the same room at the same time and says, I do not see an elephant.
Who is hallucinating?
It's always the one who sees the elephant.
Because hallucinations are positive things.
Hallucinations never subtract something that's in their room.
Nobody ever had a hallucination of walking into a room and seeing no furniture when it was actually full of furniture.
But people have walked into a room and seen something that didn't exist.
A hallucination is a positive thing.
It's never subtracting something in the environment.
So if one-third of the world is looking at exactly what you're looking at and they don't see it, it's actually just not there to them.
The one-third is right, not the two-thirds.
You can bet on that, by the way.
You can always bet on that.
I saw another CNN headline that had interesting wording.
It said that, you know, blah, blah, blah.
In the polling, it said that in the polling, Democrats were, quote, still up.
Did they still need to say still?
Do you notice the doubt that has crept in?
I think that a month ago, the headline would have said, Democrats are up in the polls.
Democrats are up.
It's a brand new story. Democrats are up by X points.
But CNN's headline are, Democrats are still up.
Still? Doesn't that tell you it's not going to last?
Isn't that sort of a tell?
In their minds, it went from a gimme to, oh shoot, it's definitely going to change.
But for now, for now it's still up.
For now it's still up.
All right, so here's my other message for tomorrow.
So voting is sort of a special thing.
Voting is in any democracy important, but in the United States it has almost a religious, spiritual kind of a feel to it.
Voting is important to the humans in this country.
And so tomorrow it could be fun for half the country.
It will be a disaster.
For half of the country.
And we don't quite know which half is going to be which.
But I would advise you this.
If you're on the losing team, take it with grace.
If the Democrats pull this out, and they have a good midterm, the proper response should be, well fought.
Nice job.
Good job. You put the extra effort into it, you got the extra result.
It should be.
Good job.
If you have any other reaction to it, I would ask you to check yourself.
Because election days are special.
And it's one time when the country is trying to fight for democracy.
Somebody has a different version of what that looks like than you.
And if it doesn't go your way, good job.
Good job, other team.
That's my recommendation.
Now, if it goes your way, and you win, it will be a, and most of you, I think, are Trump supporters if you're watching this periscope, if it goes your way, hold down the gloating.
You know, just try to keep some perspective.
Because the people who are on the losing side are also on your side, meaning they're Americans.
So don't be too happy.
Don't be too happy.
If it turns out that the unexpected happens and Republicans pull out the House as well as the Senate, don't rub it in.
All right. Now I know I can't really tell you not to enjoy yourself, because you're going to enjoy yourself if that happens, and you're going to enjoy yourself a lot.
But just keep in mind that the people who lost are also part of your country.
Just keep it in perspective.
Secondly, or thirdly, if there's some violence against your side, Because the other side flips out, which would be a likely outcome.
If Democrats lose and Republicans hold everything, or even make gains, it's very likely that they're going to take to the streets.
It's very likely that somebody's going to get hurt on the Republican side.
Don't go anywhere near any kind of action like that.
Don't address anybody in the street.
Don't yell at them.
Don't mock them. Don't go chest to chest.
Don't wear your red hat outdoors for a day.
I think that would be just asking for trouble.
Of course you have a right to wear your MAGA hat, anywhere you want, but if things go your way, I wouldn't wear it the day after election, that's for sure.
So, take it with grace.
I would like to give a compliment to the Trump supporters who for the past two years have held their fire, if you know what I mean.
And I think that that's a great credit for It's a great credit to the Americans who were on the winning side of that.
Of course, there are some crazies.
There are crazies, and we should do what we can to discourage them.
But in general, As just a large, looking at the overview, the Trump supporters are the most well-armed citizens in the history of civilization, probably.
I don't know if that's true, but let's say it's true enough, it's directionally true, that the people, the Republicans, who have been sort of on the receiving side of a lot of negative everything, Have for the most part just kept their heads down, done their work, did their jobs, took care of their families, and just took it.
And it's very much something to be proud of.
That you did not take the bait.
Because there was this much bait and the only people who took it and the other people who rose to any kind of violent or negative action was a couple of crazies.
Way too many crazies.
But the general population of Trump supporters were very well behaved.
So my advice, win or lose tomorrow.
Win or lose.
Be cool. Because elections are special.
Alright. Somebody says, you see this as a game.
Others see it as a fight for survival.
No, I don't think that's quite...
That is not quite correct.
The whole reason I'm telling you to be cool is that I don't see this as a game.
I see this as life and death.
An election with this much energy in it is a life and death, civilization risking situation.
It is very high risk if people decided to go nuts.
So I'm encouraging people to stay not nuts because the history, well not the history, but the future of the country Will really depend on how people act in the next week.
It's gonna matter.
Alright, I saw something that North Korea's doing a little saber-rattling lately talking about starting up their nuclear program because they're not getting what they want as quickly as they want.
You should expect that the North Korea situation will continuously take steps back before it takes steps forward.
So it's a very long-term You know, process to get from where they were to something, you know, that's better.
And they've already gone a long ways.
You've seen that there have been lots of, you know, back steps before two forward steps.
You're going to see more of that.
I wouldn't worry about a little bit of negativity coming out of that process.
You should just expect that's normal.
Alright. Democrats will ethnically replace me, somebody says.
Yeah, that's probably true.
I mean, just mathematically.
But I expect I'll be dead by then.
You know, I saw a video.
Some of you aren't going to like this, but somebody showed me a video online made by some Republican Trump supporter type that was trying to gin up fear about immigration From the south.
And it showed an animated map where for, I don't know, 100 years or so, most of the immigration was coming from Europe.
So you can see the little animated indication that Europe was the biggest source of immigration.
Then as time goes by, it showed that there was more immigration coming from south of the border.
And it was presented as a threat.
Like, oh no, the world is ending because there's far more coming from south of the border than there is coming from Europe.
But at the same time, the United States in 2018 is the strongest the United States has ever been and more dominant over other countries, I would argue, than we have ever been.
So if your feeling about immigration from south of the border is that it's ruining the country, your own argument works against you.
Because we've had massively more immigration from south of the border for how many decades?
And the results so far is the strongest country we've ever had.
Now you could argue, well, it would have been even better But there's no evidence of that.
So if you're going to make an evidence-based argument against having greater immigration coming from the South than coming from Europe, you better provide some evidence.
Because so far, that immigration has been a component of what is the strongest United States we've ever seen.
Now there's also, I'm saying the argument about whether diversity is good or bad.
Have you seen that lately?
The discussion of whether more diversity is good or bad?
And it's a fake conversation.
It's a fake choice.
Because diversity just is.
It's not something that's good or bad.
It's like air. Well, it's a bad analogy.
Diversity just is.
There is no option where you don't have it.
If you're talking about the United States...
That boat sailed a long time ago.
And here's what I'll tell you about people.
This is a hypothesis.
And just follow the reasoning.
People are discrimination machines.
Meaning that discrimination is the primary way that our brains are wired.
And not about people, but discrimination in all things.
If you look at a bush and you're hunting and gathering, and some fruit looks like it's overripe and some is underripe, you are going to discriminate in favor of the fruit that looks good.
So your brain is always sorting and ranking things automatically.
You can't turn that off.
We rank things automatically.
And the second part is that we're wired to prefer things that are the most like us.
So the thing that is most like yourself is yourself.
So you prefer that above all things.
The thing that is next closest to yourself is your family.
And then people who are, you know, close to them.
So your most basic wiring is to prefer people who are the most like you.
You can't turn that off.
You can create laws and training and education, greater awareness, you know, systems, etc.
so that our higher level thinking Can override our lower-level thinking, which is just automatic discrimination all the time.
So our reflex is all discrimination all the time.
If we don't have good reasons, we'll default to our bias, because we don't have good reasons for most of our choices.
Most of the things we do, we don't have all the information we need.
We're just kind of operating on bias.
Well, it worked last time.
Last time I watched football and had a beer, it was a good time.
I think I'll watch football and have a beer again.
We don't use logic.
We just discriminate based on our experience.
So here's my point.
If I could snap my fingers and everybody became the same race, let's say we all became Elbonians.
So I snap my fingers and I'm magic and every human in the world stops being whatever ethnicity they used to be and they all become Elbonians.
They all look the same.
Would that end discrimination?
And the answer is, not a chance.
Not a chance. We are discrimination machines.
We can't turn it off.
All we would do is discriminate on something else.
So if the moment everybody became, you know, Elbonian and there was nothing but Elbonians, we were all ethnic, DNA, culturally Elbonians.
We would find some damn reason to decide that some of the Elbonians were worse than some of the other Elbonians.
You would have left-handed Elbonians we would be executing.
You'd have bald Elbonians that we would be shunning.
Fat Elbonians, skinny Elbonians, tall Elbonians, short Elbonians.
We would find a hundred frickin' reasons to discriminate against each other even if we were all Elbonians.
So my point is, humans can't turn off discrimination.
We can't. We can only learn how to operate within its challenges, which we've done very well in this country.
I would say the United States has solved for systems and practices and culture To deal with more diversity than maybe any culture ever has and we should be pretty happy about that.
Now let's get to the point of whether diversity is good or bad.
So the first thing you need to know is that you can't turn it off.
If you thought you turned it off you would just change your discrimination to other factors and it would happen instantly because that's who we are.
We're discriminators by nature.
My take is that if you live in a diverse society, and there's no changing that, right?
There's no changing that we live in a diverse society, even if we were all the same, magically, same ethnicity, we would just be diverse in other ways and we'd still discriminate against each other.
Under that scenario, I would say it is a positive to have people in the process who come from different cultures, different backgrounds.
Because you want as many windows into the world as you can.
And everybody's looking at things coming from a different direction.
So wouldn't it be good to not have to guess To not have to guess what, let's say, Latinos want in this country.
We don't have to guess because they're part of the process.
They'll tell us. We don't have to guess what black Americans want because they're part of the process.
So it absolutely helps the process to have more diversity.
We should absolutely have more diversity in Congress in every way.
We should have more diversity of thought, more diversity of culture, of gender.
We should have all more diversity.
So in that sense, if you are a diverse country, having diverse representation is absolutely a positive.
No doubt about it.
People who argue against diversity are arguing for magical thinking.
And like, well, what if everybody was the same?
And what if people stopped having minds like people?
And then everything would be great, right?
It's just magical thinking.
Now, here's a little...
I'm just changing the topic for a moment.
Here's something that I noticed about the folks on the left, the Democrats, that make some sort of science deniers.
And it goes like this.
If you've been watching President Obama, ex-President Obama, do you still call him President when they're ex?
I'm not sure of the protocol there.
So are the ex-Presidents just called President, or do we call them ex-President?
Anyway, somebody will tell me.
But ex-President Obama has been giving a lot of speeches, and the parts that the news keeps pulling out are about the lies.
And the President, President Obama, Ex-president, former president, says, we can't have a culture, we can't stay together with all this lying.
You can't have a system where the politician is lying.
Lying will destroy the country.
Lying makes everything worse.
You can't have anything work if everybody's lying.
So that's what former President Obama is saying.
Do those statements Pass the scientific fact-checking.
They do not.
So Obama is being absolutely science-denying when he claims that our culture can't go forward unless the leaders are honest.
Because all of the information suggests the opposite.
We're in literally the strongest situation we've ever been in at the same time that the president has violated the fact checkers more than has ever happened before.
If you were going to be scientific about it, you would say, well, depends how you do it.
If the way you're lying is random, in other words, you just make stuff up for no reason, that would be a very bad world to live in.
Wouldn't it? But if everything that you say is directionally accurate or directionally desirable, you end up with a better country than you would have had if everybody just told the truth.
Do you know who told the truth?
Do you remember the president who always told the truth?
What was his name?
Oh, that's right.
We've never had one.
We've never had a president who told us the truth.
All the time? We've had presidents that tell us the truth some of the time.
What is the optimal percentage of truth that is best for the country?
Because we've never had 100%.
Have we had 80%?
I don't know if we've ever had 80%.
Some people are saying Carter, which is, you know, sort of plays to my point, right?
If your most honest president was Jimmy Carter, who is also widely considered our worst president.
Great guy.
You know, character-wise, he's the best.
But as a president, that honesty maybe wasn't exactly the right approach.
So I would suggest that the Democrats are being deeply unscientific in terms of the social sciences.
When they say that lying doesn't work, because right in front of your eyes, you can see that if your hyperbole is in the right direction, if it's done correctly, you get a better result.
Let me give you a suggestion.
Do you think that dealing with North Korea as honestly as we could would get you a better result than scaring the pants off them?
All right, the answer's in the question, right?
You know that dealing with other countries It's not honesty that gets you the good result.
When we're dealing with our tariff deals, are we dealing with them as honestly as we can?
When we go into those deals, are we saying to China, you know, we really don't want you to ask for this, because if you do, we'll just give it to you.
We're not even going to ask.
We might pretend we're going to negotiate hard, but we don't even believe it.
You can't negotiate on the basis of complete honesty.
That's not even what negotiation is.
You would have to have no understanding of what negotiating is to say that that would be a good idea.
Take the economy, the example I use all the time.
If your president said, you know, I'm going to be honest with you.
We've got some good things happening.
But look at all these bad things happening.
We've got a lot of bad stuff happening in the economy.
Yeah, there's some good stuff, but a lot of bad stuff.
If that was the message from your president, it would be perfectly accurate, totally honest, and would destroy the economy.
Because it would take all the optimism out of it, and the optimism is what keeps it afloat.
So again, former President Obama is being anti-science, When he suggests that honesty is the glue that keeps society together, when every example that we can think of, it's clearly the opposite.
All of the evidence suggests the opposite.
He's anti-science.
So there you are.
Uh...
*laughs* Now, I would also suggest, I don't want to talk about climate change, but you could make the same argument there that the Democrats are the anti-science group.
Well, I'm going to go there for a minute.
The Democrats would say that Republicans are the anti-science group because they're not taking the recommendation of climate scientists who collectively, by majority, a strong majority, say there's a big problem and we have to act on it.
But here's the thing. Only the Democrats are looking at the question scientifically.
I'm sorry, only the Republicans are looking at climate science scientifically.
The Democrats are looking at it half scientifically.
The Democrats are saying, well, the chemistry, the physics, they tell you something, and it's all bad.
That part's good.
Republicans say the same thing.
It's like, yes, the chemistry is the chemistry, the physics is the physics.
If there were no other factors, that would be important.
But then the Republicans add the other factors, which are how many people are saved, how many lives are saved by good economies?
So the trade-off with climate science is do you stall the economy to aggressively deal with the climate, or do you let the economy do everything it can While hoping that we find out more, build better technology, etc. Which of those two approaches saves the most lives and gets you to the best place?
Well, the Democrats are only looking at half of the equation, which is the sciency part.
The Republicans are looking at all that science, plus they've added more science.
And the more science, in this case, is social science and economics, but, you know, a different flavor.
But if you don't include the fact that a growing economy is good for life expectancy, is good for medical healthcare, is good for even being able to recover from a disaster, if you don't include that in your calculations, you can't claim any kind of rational thinking.
Now, we are still kind of guessing that waiting or acting is the best deal.
It's still more art than science because we can't get down to the, you know, we can't know what the variables are telling us.
But I can tell you that it's only half scientific thinking if all you've done is look at the science.
If you haven't considered the economics and how many lives are changed and improved by good economics, you can't claim scientific thinking.
That's the opposite.
Looking at some of the variables is not science in anybody's definition.
Somebody said, check out Bjorn Lomberg's arguments on this topic.
Well, I just gave you Lomberg's argument on the topic.
So he is one of my influences.
I don't remember if he influenced me first or I just noticed I agreed with his argument.
It could have gone either way.
It's been a while since the first time I saw his argument.
The multiple genders thing.
So somebody's talking about the Democrats and their multiple genders thing.
I'm more sympathetic to that than most of you.
From a practical, legal, social point of view, it's problematic to have, you know, it causes lots of problems if you have too many genders because there's extra paperwork and special laws and what do you do with bathrooms and it becomes confusing.
So on a practical level, It's easier just to say there are two.
So from society's big picture, it's just easier for society.
But it's also terrible.
It's terrible for some of the people who are in the gray areas.
And my empathy is that society should not be crushing people for the way they were born.
If we can avoid it.
And so, I have far more empathy than I think most of you do for anybody who's in any kind of a gray area, gender-wise.
If you were in that situation, I think you would want society to understand it a little bit better and help you deal with it.
Because it's just your situation.
People are just born into it, right?
And I think there's very much something to men being born in women's bodies, etc.
Let me tell you my view of sexuality and it goes like this.
It's always simplified to say you have this genitalia so you're this thing.
Because if you were to look at a continuum of let's say the most male behavior over here and the most whatever you call female behavior and again We're going to talk general because there's lots of overlap in individuals.
But from the extremes of the most male you could be to the most female you could be, I would argue that there are plenty of Plenty of humans with female genitalia who are closer to the male end of the spectrum in terms of how they feel, act, how they see themselves, how the world sees them, etc.
And there are plenty of people with male genitalia who are farther to the female Maybe in terms of chemistry, in terms of how their brain is wired, in terms of how they see themselves.
So for me, gender is a continuum from the most male-like, whatever you want to call that, to the most female-like, but that men and women are all over the map on this.
That there's a huge overlap between men and women in terms of whether they're more male or more female.
And But as a society, we have to do what works.
You don't get to do what's perfect, because perfect isn't one of our options.
You have to do the thing that causes the least problem for the smallest number of people, and that might be just keeping it to two genders.
I don't know. But I have great empathy For anybody who's on the continuum and not in the majority.
I think that's a very uncomfortable place to be.
I don't think people choose to be that way.
I think they're born into it, and therefore I have great empathy for their situation.
And I think we should put some effort into figuring out what that means and how we deal with that and how we can be kind and not be jerks.
But it might be there's nothing you can do because it's just too hard to figure out all the permutations.
What about a transgender eight-year-old?
That gets more into who makes the decision.
I think a lot of these questions come down to whose decision is it.
And when you're talking about children, you've got the complication that the child might actually be right, because who knows more than the child who they are, right?
Even the parent doesn't know who the child is.
But because an eight-year-old can easily, let's say, be confused or may turn into something else, if you've ever seen an eight-year-old boy Dress up in his sister's dress, and you think to yourself, oh, I think this boy is, you know, maybe he's gay.
But by the time he's 10, he's just as hetero as you could possibly be.
So an eight-year-old doesn't even have anything like a settled gender preference yet.
You know, they're leaning in one direction, usually heavily, but...
Yeah, I think that's a who makes the decision question, not a science question.
My kid thought he was a car.
A personal preference.
No, I'm not saying that an eight-year-old gets to have their way.
I'm saying that an eight-year-old is going to have to follow the decisions of the parent, but the parent might not be right.
We just have to deal with the fact that it's the parent's decision either way.
Alright, that's enough for now.
I will talk to you a lot tomorrow.
I'll be on and off. Use the Interface by OneHub app if you're at a polling place that something interesting is happening, and I will call you.
I'll call you while you're at the polling place.
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