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Nov. 7, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:56
Episode 291 Scott Adams: Why You Can’t Tell Good News From Bad
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
So much to talk about.
Things are happening.
Things have happened.
And we have to talk about them.
Once you get in here, and I see you're doing a good job of getting in here.
Hello Sharona. Hello Russell.
Troy. Hey Alfonso.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And if you have your container, your mug, your glass, your stein, raise it.
Filled with a favorite liquid, the liquid of your choice, I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh yeah.
So we got a lot to talk about last night.
From the midterm elections.
Let's start with my predictions.
I had the following predictions.
I do this so that you can track how accurately I predict.
Because, as I've told you many times, it's easy to fit your view of the world to the past.
But that doesn't tell you anything, because everybody can do that.
You can make anything look like the past makes sense.
But predicting the future is much harder.
So if you can predict the future better than other people, you might have a better filter on it.
So here's my predictions. Back in January, I was asked to predict the midterm result, and I said that the GOP will do better than people think back then.
In other words, people thought it was going to be a gigantic tidal wave back in January, and I said it will be closer than that.
True? I would say true.
I would say it was, you know, not a giant...
Blue wave, but it was a good, solid win.
So the Republicans did do better than people said.
I claim victory.
For fun, I had been saying that it would be a tie in the House.
What I meant by a tie was that we would not have a result that night on Election Day.
Do you know what time CNN called the winner?
Did anybody notice the exact time?
The exact time to the minute the CNN called the House going to the Democrats was midnight.
Exactly midnight.
I predicted it would be a tie.
Somebody says it's not true.
Was it 11? But anyway, I was looking at the clock at midnight and It was 8 p.m.
here, so it had to be four hours after Fox.
Okay, so Fox called it earlier.
Anyway, my point being that it was close right until the end.
That was my fun prediction, and I think you could go either way as to say whether that was accurate or not.
Now, I did have one other prediction that I didn't tell you about.
Which is that I placed an actual financial bet on the outcome of the House.
And I won money.
So I bet, several weeks ago, I bet that the Democrats would keep the House.
I didn't want to tell you that because I didn't want to ruin your fun.
But I did make money on it.
So there's that.
Another bit of good news that you probably don't know about is that one of my Twitter followers who also read my book, Win Bigley, ran for mayor.
Did he win?
Do you think that somebody with no political experience who runs for mayor in his town could win based on reading my book about how to persuade?
The answer is...
Yes, yes he is.
So the new mayor is David Springer.
David Springer, congratulations.
You did the work, put in the legwork apparently, worked hard, read exactly the right book, and you got the result you wanted.
So congratulations. Let's talk about the riots.
I don't know about you, but I see angry mobs of Republicans outside my door.
Looks like they've got a huge protest on the streets.
They're all wearing their penis hats.
And they're chanting, death to something.
Oh wait, that's not happening.
There are no riots outside my door.
I don't even see anybody in my street.
Wait, I was sure the country would be torn apart by this.
But instead, what we got was a tweet from President Trump, and President Trump tweeted the following.
In all fairness, Nancy Pelosi deserves to be chosen Speaker of the House by the Democrats.
If they give her a hard time, perhaps we'll add some Republican votes.
She has earned this great honor.
I also congratulate the Democrats.
They fought hard.
They put together a good strategy.
Apparently they chose good candidates.
They won. Personally I like living in a country that has a robust system.
Did our system work?
Yes, it did. Our system was totally out of balance.
You could tell that it was out of balance by the reaction of the public.
Total Trump derangement syndrome.
They were crazed.
Like, actually crazy.
Mental health crazy.
Not political crazy, not crazy used as an exaggeration.
I mean, go to the therapist, get some heavy medication, crazy.
A huge mental health problem in the country that just decreased by half.
So the total mental health of the country just went from DEFCON 10, whatever is the highest DEFCON, it's probably not 10, 4, But it went from maximum alert to, okay, let's wait and see how this works.
We won a little bit.
One of the things that I've tried to teach you, and I believe I say that in Winn-Bigley, is that human psychology is far more influenced by direction of things than where things are.
And the example I give is if you're a street person and somebody gives you a nice fresh sandwich, it's like the best day ever because you went from a terrible situation to, hey, sandwich.
You're going in the right direction.
But if you were a billionaire and you lost $100 million in the deal, you would be sad because you're going in the wrong direction, even though you're still 90% of a billionaire.
So direction of things is what influences our psychology.
From the point of view of Democrats who were having mental problems, literally, I mean that with empathy, I mean that, were having great distress, were scared to death about the direction of the country.
What did they experience last night?
What they experienced was a change of direction.
Things were sort of going all Trump all the time.
And that, my friends, as much as you might like it, scary, scary, scary to the people who are not on the train.
Real scary. To the bone scary.
And again, I'm not talking about political scary where you wish your team won but it didn't.
I'm talking about fear of jail.
Fear of nuclear war.
I'm talking real serious fear that just was largely extinguished last night.
Not completely. But the direction went from all Trump all the time.
Oh my God, I'm not on that train.
The people on that train have all the power.
I'm not in power.
They don't like me. They don't love me.
I'm in trouble. To balance.
Boom. Congratulations to the founders of this country for developing a system that self-balances, that self-corrects.
We had to wait a couple of years to the next election, but we have found balance, or something a lot closer to it.
You see that there are no protests today.
The Democrats are not protesting.
The Republicans are not protesting.
When I tweeted last night, I tweeted it as a question.
Would a Democratic victory in the House bring down the temperature in the country?
It already happened.
You don't have to wonder.
You just watched it.
This is the day after a major election.
There's nobody in the street.
Nobody. There are just hopeful Democrats who have gained something and they feel like they're moving in the right direction.
There are Republicans who Did not get exactly what they wanted.
But they're not protesting.
They're not in the streets.
They're trying to figure out how to make it work.
Why? Because they're Republicans.
What do Republicans do when things don't go their way?
They figure it out.
I'm not saying that other people don't do that.
But as a brand, what do Republicans do when they don't get their way?
They get on with it.
Right? They put their head down and they say, well, got to try harder, got to make it work, got to figure this out.
And so they are.
So I started off this Periscope with the title that it's hard to tell the difference between good news and bad.
Mark Twain was the first to say that.
He said that we humans can't tell the difference between good news and bad.
I'm here to tell you that last night was some of the best news you're ever going to see.
That is different from saying that you're going to get everything you want.
But keep in mind, you weren't going to get everything you wanted the other way either.
We don't live in a world where everybody gets everything they want.
That's not an option.
We do live in a world where sometimes, if the system is working, you can crawl forward and figure stuff out.
And we are now in that situation.
So the President has signaled that he's willing to work with Nancy Pelosi.
We have at least one moderate Democrat who has said publicly, Conor Lamb is his name, That the Democrats should do less investigating and more legislating.
All of the things that are on the table that haven't gotten done in the first two years of the Trump administration also probably couldn't have gotten done with a narrow majority.
So if the Republicans had held both houses by a narrow majority, they probably couldn't have done anything.
They just would have been the party that's under attack all the time.
Now the Democrats have a little bit of power, and what comes with it is a little bit of responsibility.
Let me double back.
Somebody is talking about the President's Trump and saying that he's being sarcastic.
I'm not going to disagree with you.
Let's read it again and dig into that a little bit.
So the president tweeted, in all fairness, Nancy Pelosi deserves to be chosen Speaker of the House by the Democrats.
If they give her a hard time, perhaps we'll add some Republican votes.
So he is playing a little bit, meaning that whether she's the Speaker or not, they have a problem to work out on their side.
So he's definitely playing a little bit.
But he's also not going hard at them.
So he's winning both ways.
He's playing with them a little bit, but he's also being reasonable.
In other words, he's not going at Nancy Pelosi because she might be the person he has to deal with.
Now, what has Pelosi said about pursuing impeachment?
Pelosi says...
No. No on impeachment.
Weren't you worried about that?
You were worried that the Democrats would pursue impeachment?
Not a chance.
Not a chance.
It's the sort of thing you say when you're not in power.
Once you have a little power, which they have now, they will immediately abandon their most extreme position, and impeachment was the most extreme.
So, Then other people say, oh wait, what about other investigations?
What about investigating Trump's taxes?
Good luck with that.
Let me tell you what that looks like.
Hey, show us your taxes.
Lawyers say, no.
Any questions? That's the whole thing.
That's the thing you're most worried about.
Hey, show us your taxes.
No. Now, There's a lot more lawyering in that story than I'm letting on.
That's kind of what's going to happen.
They're going to ask for them.
He will not provide them.
That's it. That's the whole story.
And also the president has warned of, I believe one of his tweets was warning them about mutually assured investigations, as I like to call it.
I don't see it here, but...
Where is it?
The President tweeted this morning, if the Democrats think they are going to waste taxpayer money investigating us at the House level, then we will likewise be forced to consider investigating them for all the leaks.
In other words, pretty much everybody can be investigated.
So, if the Democrats want to employ mutually assured investigations, they can, but it wouldn't be in their self-interest, would it?
So those of you who are worried that everything will go to hell because Democrats never negotiate, they never compromise, they're impossible to deal with, I think you have to rely on their self-interest to be intact.
So as long as they're reasonably smart, collectively, I'm not talking about any individual, but if the Democrats are reasonably smart, and they just won an election, so I think you could have to say that they're reasonably smart, They figured out how to win an election.
And they have self-interest because they're human beings.
Human beings have self-interest.
If they pursue their self-interest, it's not investigations.
And they are realizing that as they wake up.
There will still be some people on the left who want to do that, etc.
But here's a general statement.
On day one, when you hear there's a problem coming, you probably think it's this big.
But it's usually this big.
So most things that people talk about, it's like, oh, it's the end of the world.
I've heard every version of why it's the end of the world on Twitter this morning.
None of them are close to true.
You may have noticed that the stock market, let me just check that, make sure.
Stock market is up.
Here's the stock market.
That's the S&P 500 for the week.
Notice that big up?
That's the stock market recognizing that a split government is good.
In the past, stock markets have gone up when the House and the Senate are in different hands.
This would be another one of those times.
So the people who have the most money, and the people who literally are betting with their money, these are the people who have skin in the game, are saying, this isn't so bad.
It's not so bad.
So you shouldn't think it's so bad either, because the people with the big money, the people who run the world, just said, hmm, we could work with this.
Not so bad. The other thing that's fun, and I was saying this ahead of the actual result, is that President Trump is completely unique in that he is, some people are calling him the transactional president or transactional Trump.
In other words, he's about the deal, not about the dogma.
If you're about the deal and not the dogma, and you've got a mixed Congress, You are in the best situation you could possibly be.
Who else was about the deal and not the dogma?
President Bill Clifton.
How did he do?
Pretty well, right?
Maybe he wasn't your cup of tea, but as a president he was quite successful in working with a mixed congress.
So what you should expect is that the things that are still on the table that have not been done from infrastructure to prison reform to maybe drug policy to health care to immigration I would expect to see more progress on those things with our current setup than we would have seen otherwise.
So I think that we've moved closer to the golden age, but it looks scary to the people who are hoping for a different outcome.
I think we're way ahead.
We also elected, I guess, our first Openly gay governor.
The first openly gay governor we've ever had.
I didn't even know that was true.
I never really thought about it, but I guess I had assumed we'd already had at least one gay governor that was out of the closet, so to speak.
But I guess we got our first one, so congratulations.
I think that's a step forward.
I saw also that there were a number of gains for women and women of color.
I don't like using that That phrase, I'm copying somebody on the left who used it on Twitter, women of color.
At what point do we stop saying that?
Is it my imagination, or is society sort of locked into a bad area every time we call out somebody's ethnicity when they succeed?
Tell me if this is bothering you.
Like, you'll see, for example, let's say an Asian-American guy becomes the first senator of some state.
The news is going to report that as first Asian-American becomes governor of this state.
To which I say, was that really the story?
Like, when do we just stop saying that?
Why can't we just say, this guy got elected?
It feels like it makes it worse, right?
You know, there was a time when it was so unusual for somebody to get ahead in the white male patriarchy.
It was so unusual that absolutely it was worth mentioning.
First black president?
Yeah, you gotta mention that, right?
But at some point, everybody's doing okay enough Then maybe we're better off if we just stop talking like that.
Stop calling it out like it's special because that seems to be more dividing than uniting.
Imagine a world like this where we elected the first, let's say, lesbian president of the United States.
Imagine a world where we elect the first lesbian president of the United States and nobody mentions it.
Nobody mentions it. They just say, hey, the Democrat won.
Or, hey, the Republican won.
When can we get to that?
Why do we have to care about that?
I don't know. The other things I want to talk about today.
The youth vote versus the old vote.
So, I... My prediction was that the old people would show up, and the old people apparently did break records.
So I don't know if we have the final numbers, but I think it's breaking records.
So it looks like the GOP turnout was very high for midterm.
It looks like the senior citizen turnout was extra high.
But here's the fun part.
The youth turnout...
No different. So youth did not turn out in big numbers, and that probably is the difference between the small wave and the big wave, is that the youth didn't turn out.
Now you might ask yourself, How can the Republicans and the Democrats work together on these various mostly domestic issues?
I have an answer to that.
If you have a normal Republican and a normal Democrat trying to make a deal, you kind of can't get there.
Because if they stick with what their team wants them to do, you just can't get there.
But President Trump is not normal.
It's not normal in any of the ways that people are normal, and you only need one of the people to be not normal.
In this case, I mean not normal in a good way.
Let me give you some examples of domestic policy.
How could you reach an agreement on immigration?
Let's say the wall.
We'll just pick one thing. How can you make a deal on the wall if one side says, yeah, we want all kinds of wall.
Let's wall up that whole thing.
And the other side says, absolutely no wall, no way.
How can you reach a middle ground?
Well, you could reach it the same way every business does.
You could say, let's try some wall.
We'll approve enough wall budget to see if it makes a difference.
And they'll pick a place and they'll say, all right, we're going to build a wall here, small budget.
And at the end of the build, we'll see if people are coming over it or going to other places.
We'll just see if it changes anything.
See what we learn, and then we'll make a second decision after we've seen how the first part of the wall worked.
Now you could even do better.
You could say we're going to build a little wall here.
We're going to build some, say, electronic surveillance here and a different process over here.
You could try three different things, see how they work.
So for everything that is a big decision, there is a way to find out how to test it so that both sides can claim a victory.
If Pelosi only approved, let's say, $2 billion of wall funding, And it was enough to build some of the wall.
She could say, we did not approve the wall.
All we did was approve some fixing up of some places that we were going to fix up anyway.
And President Trump could claim, yes, we got the wall.
Of course, we're funding the first part first, and then when that goes well, we'll fund the rest.
So you do have a way for both sides to claim a victory if you do the same process every time, which is test it small, and then make a second decision about expanding it once you know more from the test.
How could you do that with health care?
I don't know the answer to that, but I have a question.
The United States is a big country, and it's so big that if you were to take a quarter of the United States, it would still be a big country.
It would be bigger than a lot of European countries.
Why do we have to choose between single payer and, let's say, the free market or something like it that we're experiencing now?
Why do we have to choose? What would stop us from From saying you can either sign up for the free market one, which means do nothing, or you can sign up for the single payer.
But if you sign up for the single payer, the only people who will ever be on the hook for that bill are other people who signed up for single payer.
In other words, just have two systems.
Let everybody have exactly what they want.
If half the country said we want single payer, we want the government to do it, Let them.
Except that they would also have to accept that the entire bill for that forever could never be paid by the people who did not choose it.
So the people who stayed in the free market area, either because they didn't trust the other one or because they wanted to pay more to get better service, whatever reason, they would never be on the hook unless they decide to go over.
Is there any reason that we need One system for the whole country when the country largely would like to have their own system.
I don't see anything that would stop half the country from saying, here's my social security number, I want to be in the one-payer system, and I will be in the class of people who are the only people who have to pay the bill.
Your taxes will go up, but let's say you join a company that has health care.
Perhaps that company that has healthcare can now take you off the roll because you're in the single payer.
It seems to me you could do both.
Let's take another example.
Let's take prison reform.
Prison reform is the perfect situation for something that can be tried in one state, in one area.
You don't have to make a deal.
Nobody has to agree.
If you have two different ways you want to do prison reform, let's say there's a Democratic version, a Republican version, Do both.
Just find a state that wants to try it.
Put one in one state, one in the other.
Try it. Run it for two years.
You can't tell me anybody's going to disagree with that because that's the high ground.
All right. Let's take another thing.
I don't know. Let's say...
I think marijuana reform, that's coming.
I think that'll happen easily.
So that's good news.
Let's take... What else we got?
Immigration. I think there'll be some kind of middle ground on immigration.
What's the biggest complaint that people had about Trump's handling of the border?
Kids in cages.
Right? If you're trying to be logical and rational and look at everything, the kids in cages thing wasn't as real as people want to make it sound.
There were kids in cages, if you want to call them that.
So that part was real.
But it was also a continuation of what Obama was doing.
It got worse under the Trump administration.
I would call that a mistake.
It was a mistake that was called out and corrected.
And what does it take to correct a mistake like that?
Funding. That's it.
It requires money. If you have enough money and resources, you could make sure things are taken care of.
You might also need to change some laws.
So, for everything that remains, That, I think everything, that the Democrats and Republicans want to work on, there's probably a way to test it small, which means there's a way forward.
Because nobody has to make a decision if you can test it.
That looks like the...
That looks like the situation we're in.
Now, I've said before that I think because President Trump has a stronger control on the Senate, he's still going to get his Supreme Court picks.
He's still going to have the flexibility he needs to deal internationally with treaties and whatnot.
He'll have the flexibility he needs for trade negotiations.
And now he's got possibly a partner in the Senate, or I'm sorry, the partner in the House that he can work with, either with Pelosi or whoever replaces her.
So here's my, for those of you just joining, my take on last night is that it's one of the best things that has ever happened to the country.
And I don't think you're going to see it for a while.
Meaning that at the moment, Republicans are sort of shell-shocked and disappointed and stuff.
And you imagine that the Democrats will act in the future exactly the way they have acted before.
A number of people have tweeted at me and said, Scott, you are so naive.
Don't you understand?
That the way they act is the way they'll always act.
Just because they have some power doesn't mean they'll act differently.
They will be all about destroying the president no matter what all the time.
To which I say, let's see.
I predict the opposite.
I predict that when the dog is chasing the car, the dog barks and barks and barks while he's chasing.
But once the dog catches the car, which is what just happened with the election, the dog acts differently.
He catches the car and he's like, I wasn't expecting this.
I guess the barking is over.
Now I got myself a car.
I guess I'm happy. So what I would expect is that Democrats will have to adjust to having power They're going to have to adjust to having responsibility.
They're going to start looking at 2020 and saying, if we don't do something useful, There's no way in hell we're going to have a good 2020.
So I would think you're going to see a lot of cooperation.
You're going to see people on the right and the left mad at both Pelosi and Trump and Schumer, I suppose.
But you're going to have a perfect setup for President Trump.
A deal maker who can make a deal.
Alright, so... Honestly, this is the best case scenario.
And I feel bad if you can't see it.
Now, I'm not saying that the future is so clear that I can predict it with some degree of crazy accuracy.
But the setup, the way the chessboard has set itself through nobody's special effort, it just ended up here, This is the best it's ever been.
This, right now, is the best setup the country has ever had for a good result.
Will we get a good result?
Fingers crossed.
Let's hope people do what we elected them to do.
I say congratulations to the Democrats.
Congratulations on a great fight.
You put in the effort.
You had the right strategy.
You picked the right people. We got an openly gay governor.
I think that's great. We got more women of color in positions.
That has to be good because we're a country that needs to recognize everybody.
So I think we came out Way, way ahead last night.
It just doesn't look like it to everybody yet.
So let's see what happens.
I'm going to leave you on that positive thought.
I want all of you to have a great week.
And it was tremendous fun.
Thanks for sharing it with me.
The election was just so entertaining.
And to me it was exhilarating to watch the system self-correct.
So don't expect riots in the street.
I think we cured that last night.
So good job to the founders of the country.
You built a system that worked all the way through 2018, at least.
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