Nov. 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:40
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey everybody! | |
| Wake up! | |
| Wake up! And get on in here. | |
| Hello, Shara. | |
| Hello, UnixRab. | |
| Hello, Polly and Conrad. | |
| Come on in here. It's Sunday morning and it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. | |
| And it's almost time. | |
| Yes, I think it's just about time for the simultaneous sip. | |
| We do that when the users reach a thousand. | |
| As they have. | |
| So grab your mug, your chalice, your cup, your stein, your container filled with a beverage of your choice. | |
| I like coffee. | |
| And join me for the simultaneous sip. | |
| Don't you love it when your coffee tastes just right? | |
| I know you do. | |
| Well, we've got things to talk about today. | |
| I have been requested, or it has been requested of me. | |
| What's the right way to say that? | |
| People have requested that I talk about the idea of a nickname for Joe Biden. | |
| And apparently somebody in the Trump administration is floating the idea of nicknaming him Creepy Joe, Creepy Joe. | |
| So I have mixed feelings about this. | |
| Number one, you don't really want to bring any of the Me Too stuff into it. | |
| Because if you bring the Me Too... | |
| Mindset into the conversation, that is definitely going to favor Democrats. | |
| It's going to activate women. | |
| But on the other hand, it's a devastatingly effective nickname. | |
| So it's not as clean as some things because a perfect nickname... | |
| Would apply to the person you're applying it to. | |
| Let's say if you're trying to create a political linguistic kill shot. | |
| Your ideal nickname is something that can't be flipped against you, doesn't have any larger feeling outside of the person themselves. | |
| Something that's really just identified with the person. | |
| But unfortunately the whole Me Too movement has made this more of a societal interest. | |
| So that makes it a little less predictable. | |
| If it were not for the Me Too thing, and if it were not for the grab them by the comment that the President famously made on video, then I would say Creepy Joe would be a home run. | |
| But it's a little bit polluted by these other things we're thinking about at the same time when we think about that. | |
| And I'm not totally comfortable with With that being the main approach. | |
| It would be one thing if Joe Biden was going after Trump for similar types of charges, and then it would make sense to flip it against him. | |
| But if the president's having a little bit of hesitation on that one, I think that would be smart hesitation. | |
| It's devastating, but there's going to be some blowback with that one. | |
| Alright, let's talk about, there's an article I tweeted about Facebook influencing elections by putting a little Vote Today button on there. | |
| So if they put a little button on the page that says to vote, and if you press it, it'll show you where your voting place is and how to vote, they've shown that it does move the dial. | |
| They're simply including a button That says vote and tells you how moves things, I don't know, 1% or something less than 1%. | |
| But that less than 1% is far more people than it takes to win a lot of these close elections. | |
| So it's actually the difference between winning and losing a major election. | |
| And the controversy is that now that they know this putting that button does move the vote, Why doesn't everyone see it? | |
| You see the problem? | |
| Apparently not everyone got that button. | |
| How did they decide? | |
| How did they decide who sees a vote button? | |
| Well, if the way they decided was politically, then they influenced the election in a way that should be illegal. | |
| If the way they decided was just the algorithm, in other words, let's say there's just some algorithm and it's a big complicated thing and they just said, okay, under these conditions, which may not have even been political, could have been people who have shown an interest in politics, could have been simply something like that. | |
| But what happens is, if the people don't know why Let's say it a different way. | |
| If people are programming an algorithm, but they don't know what the impact of that will be, in other words, they don't know what's going to come out the other end, who is it who decided the election? | |
| Was it the person who programmed it, but didn't really know how any of these changes would influence the election? | |
| Or was it the algorithm that essentially, in a way, did the thinking? | |
| And essentially made the decision because it's the thing that influenced the election. | |
| So we've got some really big decisions coming and the reason that these things are important is not exactly just because Facebook is doing it and they can influence things. | |
| Here's what's changed. | |
| We've learned how to measure The impact of various signals. | |
| So if somebody runs an ad, they can measure exactly whether it works. | |
| If they change a headline a little bit, they can tell if more people clicked on it. | |
| If they change the background color of the position on the page, all of these things can and are, as a routine matter, they're all measured. | |
| And what that does is it gives the big social media companies, and that would include the news media because they have a page that they can manipulate as well. | |
| It gives those companies immense power over assigning our opinions. | |
| Now, I've said this before, and I love saying this because people get really quiet when I say it, which means that it's true and people don't want to argue against it. | |
| But nobody likes it, and here it is. | |
| For the most part, your opinions are assigned to you by your preferred media sources. | |
| Nobody wants to hear that. | |
| Your model of the world before you met me probably was something along the lines of, I do my own research, I try to look at all the information, and then I make a decision. | |
| But it's quite easy to prove at this point that that's just not the case. | |
| Therefore, by and large, and this is by, I would say, at least 80% of the public, they are assigned to their opinions. | |
| Their opinions come to them from the news. | |
| It comes to them from social media. | |
| People don't come up with opinions. | |
| If you're still thinking that, you're lost in 2015. | |
| You're a few years behind the times if you think people look at the data and come up with their own opinions. | |
| That's not a thing anymore. | |
| We know that's not a thing. | |
| It can be proven beyond any doubt. | |
| Science proves it. | |
| So if you believe that people come up with their own opinions, You are anti-science, because we know that people get their opinions from their media sources. | |
| Somebody said, I like you, but you are arrogant. | |
| I'm arrogant when I'm right. | |
| Is that not allowed? | |
| What's the ruling on that? | |
| I'm not going to deny my arrogance. | |
| Because that would be sort of denying the obvious. | |
| But I try to limit my arrogance to situations where there's no real doubt that I'm right. | |
| If you see me arrogant on something where nobody should be positive, you know, a sort of situation where, let's say if I was absolutely positive how the midterm elections would come out. | |
| Well, I could be right by guessing, but nobody really knew that. | |
| You know, not in any detail. | |
| So arrogance in that situation would be very bad. | |
| But suppose I'm telling you something that I know beyond any doubt, and it's backed by science, and you can observe it yourself, and there's no question about it. | |
| Can you be arrogant, and also 100% right, in ways that everybody can validate or write? | |
| What's that mean? | |
| What does it mean to be arrogant if you're also right? | |
| That's your question for today. | |
| Now, watching, you probably saw some on Twitter, That Kirsten Powers, a pundit on CNN, has claimed and said this as clearly as she could say it. | |
| So she was making sure everybody understood this is really what she was saying. | |
| She said that, just to be clear, anyone who voted for President Trump is a racist. | |
| And her argument is that since the president's policies are racist, if you support racist policies, Therefore, you're a racist. | |
| So that would include all of the black people who voted for President Trump. | |
| I realize there weren't a lot as a percentage, but there were a lot of people. | |
| There were a large number of people. | |
| That would include every minority. | |
| And so the question I asked was, Can we extend this principle to if you watch batshit crazy people on CNN, does it make you batshit crazy? | |
| How much does this association property work? | |
| Do you pick up all the associations of anybody you've supported in any way? | |
| If you hire a plumber and the plumber's a racist, are you a racist? | |
| Because you're supporting that plumber by hiring him. | |
| But the diabolical part is that the Kirsten Powers frame makes you think past the sale. | |
| So if you're thinking, hey, does that make you a racist just because you voted for one? | |
| You've already thought past the sale. | |
| The sale is, are the president's policies racist? | |
| Now here's the problem. | |
| If you're talking about immigration, Let's say, I think immigration was the primary thing that she's pointing to as a racist policy. | |
| What would be an example of an immigration policy that is not racist? | |
| Can you make one? | |
| Would it be possible to have an immigration policy that is not racist? | |
| Nope. It's not. | |
| There's no such thing as a non-racist immigration policy. | |
| There are certainly policies that would affect some groups more than others, but any policy that you come up with, whether it's pro this or anti that, or pro this or anti that, even if it has nothing to do with race, the functional outcome of it is that some races will be favored over others. | |
| Let's say, for example, we had the fairest immigration policy you could have. | |
| And let's say it, well, fair is subjective, so let me get rid of that word. | |
| Let's say you had a policy that let in skills-based people. | |
| What would happen? Well, you would get a higher percentage of Asian immigrants, wouldn't you? | |
| If it's skills-based, you'd probably get a lot of Asians and a lot of white people. | |
| A lot of Jews. | |
| Isn't that racist? | |
| How can you have a skill-based policy that doesn't skew toward one type of race or another? | |
| You can't do that. That's not a thing. | |
| So, having a skill-based policy would be racist in outcome. | |
| Let's say you just do nothing, and you just let first come, first serve. | |
| So, if you can make it here, you're on the front of the line. | |
| Let's say that's the policy. | |
| If you can get here in a caravan, climb over a wall, whatever, however you get here, you get your first in line. | |
| What would be the impact of that? | |
| Racist, right? | |
| Because that too would guarantee that you had a certain composition of people coming into the country, which would limit your ability to bring in other people. | |
| So you might say, oh, we've got so many people coming in over the border, we can't let anybody else in. | |
| And suddenly you're not letting in Chinese immigrants, Vietnamese immigrants. | |
| What about them? | |
| So I think the only way that you could have a non-racist immigration policy is if you had no immigration policy. | |
| But even that would end up being racist, because in the normal course of things, more of something would come in, more of one race than another, just by chance and geography and economics and other reasons. | |
| So there's no such thing as a non-racist immigration policy, including the policy of not having a policy. | |
| All of them have a racist outcome, or a racial outcome. | |
| And if we're allowed to say, it doesn't matter what your intentions were, if we don't care about what people's intentions were, we just say the outcome is either racist or not, you're just looking at the facts, it's like, oh, we got more Elbonians this way and less Elbonians this way, that's racist. It doesn't matter what you were thinking. | |
| It matters what the outcome is. | |
| So if that's the standard, I'm not saying that it should be the standard, I'm saying if it's the standard, and I'm interpreting this from Kirsten Powers' idea, you're basically racist all the time. | |
| So in other words, everybody in the world is a racist because everybody has some kind of idea of what to do on immigration, and no matter what your idea is, it's going to have a racial outcome. | |
| So it's all racist. Now, what is implied here, but not said directly, is that it might have something to do with people's intentions. | |
| Now, Kirsten didn't say that, so I won't put that thought into her and then argue it like she said it. | |
| But plenty of people have this feeling that the reason that the president's immigration policies are racist is not because of the outcome. | |
| But because of the intention, So in other words, there's a mind-reading element in which you can see things which have never been spoken. | |
| The person denies are true, but you can see them in their mind. | |
| I can tell in your secret thoughts you have racist feelings in there. | |
| So if you're deciding that somebody's a racist, not because of what they're doing, because every immigration policy is racist in outcome, there's no way to make it balanced, but If it's not the outcome that you're judging, what are you judging? If it's not what people say, and it's not what they do, what's left? | |
| It is your personal opinion of what those people are thinking. | |
| So in other words, it's a fairly common phenomenon that people are being judged as racist not because of what they're saying or doing. | |
| But rather what strangers believe they're thinking. | |
| That's the world we live in. | |
| Mind reading is not a thing. | |
| It's not a thing. | |
| And if it ever became a thing, we'd probably have to have a law against it so it'd stop being a thing. | |
| Let's talk about our favorite punching bags. | |
| Swalwell and AOC, Alexandra Octavio Cortez. | |
| Now, some of you are watching in horror, as I am, as both of these people, Eric Swalwell and AOC, are using Trump's own persuasion techniques completely successfully. | |
| Now, I have been blamed for three years of agreeing with everything the president says simply because I do note that his persuasion technique is very powerful. | |
| So if you talk about somebody's persuasion technique, people think, well, you must love everything about them or else you could not be supporting them by saying their technique is good. | |
| Let's grow up a little bit. | |
| And understand that we can say somebody's technique is good without endorsing all of their other qualities and opinions. | |
| We can do that, right? | |
| I think we can do that. | |
| So, the thing that President Trump did when he started tiptoeing into, well, not tiptoeing, when he jumped into the election was he said things so provocative and so impractical That you couldn't take your eyes off him. | |
| And he made all the other competitors vanish. | |
| Now what he did was he said we're going to deport 14 million people. | |
| There were enough people who believed that to be true and then enough people who believed it to be terrible and racist that it's all we could talk about. | |
| And I told you from the very start, from the very start, I told you often and clearly and publicly and consistently that will never happen. | |
| There is no scenario in which 14 million people will be dragged out of their homes at gunpoint and deported. | |
| I said it's not practical. | |
| Nobody thinks this can happen. | |
| It's just politics and persuasion. | |
| And the important part is that in the first part of the process, when it's not a general election, you're only trying to persuade your own team of crazies. | |
| You're trying to get the people who will believe anything to get on your team. | |
| And I don't mean to be unkind, but if you ever believed that Trump was really going to deport 14 million people, you're kind of on the crazy team. | |
| You know, you're on the other side on a crazy team, but it's the crazy team. | |
| That was never real. | |
| Likewise, when Swalwell says he wants people to give up their guns, and he was talking about a buyback and that sort of thing, he was not talking about knocking on doors and taking guns away, but simply noted that That the government has the power to do that. | |
| They do have the power. | |
| It would be a mess, and it would be the worst idea in the world. | |
| But when you look at Swalwell, what are you saying? | |
| That's crazy! | |
| That's crazy, right? | |
| If you're looking at Swalwell, His incredibly aggressive ask on firearms. | |
| If you're looking at that and saying, he's crazy, let's talk about Swalwell some more, like I am right now, right? | |
| Let's talk about him some more and how crazy he is. | |
| You are playing right into his trap. | |
| You are making him the most notable person on this topic. | |
| You're making him the leader on his side. | |
| And his side is probably saying something like, hey, finally somebody's saying what we're thinking. | |
| So Swalwell, whose opinions I do not agree with, just let me put this out here as clearly as possible, I'm pro-Second Amendment. | |
| I'm no expert on what the best details are, but I do think you could try things in different states or different locales and just see what works without violating the Constitution. | |
| I think you could test something small. | |
| However, So if you don't like Swalwell's opinions on things, I get it. | |
| I'm not even arguing anything about his policies. | |
| But his technique is doing to the Republicans exactly what Trump was doing to Democrats at this stage. | |
| Making them crazy because they believe he means what he's saying. | |
| Likewise with AOC, she is making sure that she is the most provocative voice out there. | |
| And she was recently... | |
| I almost cancelled somebody there, but I won't do that. | |
| So, the point is, if you keep falling for the same trick that Trump made the other side fall into, don't say you're not warned. | |
| What you're doing is making these two people the most important people in their own party by giving them attention. | |
| Now, should you do that? | |
| Doesn't matter. You can't help it. | |
| That's why it works. It works because you can't help yourself. | |
| Look at me. I'm talking about them. | |
| I tweeted about them. | |
| I tweeted both of them like three times in the last week. | |
| Do I want to? | |
| Well, I mean, sort of what I do. | |
| I talk about this stuff. | |
| But it's kind of irresistible. | |
| And so, do not confuse technique for being actually crazy. | |
| Because the president had lots of technique, and now we can see that his actual governing is pretty much normal. | |
| If you don't like his tweets, that's one thing. | |
| But in terms of the policies and the judges he picks and everything, it's pretty normal stuff. | |
| All right. And I... Notice, will you, that Kamala Harris has now escaped... | |
| Two traps. Traps might be the wrong word, but remember when Kamala Harris was grilling Kavanaugh and she said some things that the people on the right said, my God, how terrible of you. | |
| But she's still around, right? | |
| Then she asked the KKK question. | |
| To the potential, what is he, homeland guy? | |
| I forget who she was talking to. | |
| But, and now we're saying, Kamala, how dare you compare the KKK to ICE? Now, of course, if you listen to the full context of her question, it was very specific, which was, do you understand that people feel She didn't talk about reason. | |
| She didn't talk about logic. | |
| She said, you understand that people feel that ICE is sort of like a KKK, just in the very limited sense that it makes them feel like they're racially targeted. | |
| Now, it's a bad question. | |
| It's a political question. | |
| It's a grandstanding question. | |
| It's a persuasion question. | |
| And people on the right roundly criticized her. | |
| Do you think that will take her out of contention for the presidency? | |
| Nope. You know, in the same way that... | |
| Let's compare it. | |
| Compare Spartacus... | |
| To what Kamala Harris is doing. | |
| The Spartacus comment made Cory Booker look so ridiculous that that might actually take him out of contention for the presidency. | |
| But Kamala Harris has found two pretty serious sort of public brand problems. | |
| And I would argue that the only people who care about them so far Are the people who weren't going to vote for her anyway. | |
| So my guess is that Kamala has a little bit of the Teflon about her. | |
| Now I'm hearing a lot of people online accusing her of sleeping her way to power. | |
| Meaning that I guess Willie Brown was her boyfriend for a while or something like that. | |
| Now That accusation strikes me as a trap. | |
| So I don't make that accusation. | |
| Because here's the thing. You don't know why anybody did what they did. | |
| Isn't it entirely possible that those two people just liked each other? | |
| And that it also helped her? | |
| I mean, they could have just liked each other. | |
| You can't rule that out. | |
| I say that because, you know, my own situation, very few people look at Christina and me and say, oh, they actually like each other. | |
| That's actually the last thing that people suspect, which happens to be the truth. | |
| The truth is For whatever reason, we're just very compatible on a lot of levels. | |
| So, did his wife like her? | |
| Yeah, you could certainly do your judging about her moral character in her personal life, but who does that remind you of? | |
| Doesn't that remind you of the President of the United States? | |
| Don't you think the world is ready To give people a pass for that kind of thing. | |
| It seems to me that Kamala's personal life is just not going to stop her. | |
| Whatever little dirty stuff is back there. | |
| Because most of us... | |
| Most of us have a little bit of something we wish we hadn't done somewhere in our past. | |
| So there's a bit of a Teflon coating that's forming around Kamala Harris. | |
| So this is what you should look for. | |
| The ones who can make it out of the pack are not the ones who have no mistakes. | |
| They are the ones who are saying Spartacus and they're the ones who are claiming Native American ancestry with not much evidence to prove it. | |
| And those people are just looking foolish. | |
| And there's evidence that maybe they were weakened by these things. | |
| But Kamala Harris, I would argue, has not been weakened by any of these attacks about the Willie Brown thing. | |
| I don't think it makes any difference. | |
| The comparing to KKK thing, it's going to be very popular on her side. | |
| Her team is going to like it, and that's all that's going to matter. | |
| And the Kavanaugh questioning, very popular on her team. | |
| That's all that matters. | |
| So she's got a little bit of a Teflon thing going on, meaning that the things she does that cause trouble, they have a different nature than the things that cause trouble for other people. | |
| The Spartacus thing trivializes the person who said it. | |
| It just turns him into something. | |
| The KKK stuff just seems like hardball politics. | |
| It doesn't seem weak. | |
| It doesn't seem silly. You just hate it because, unfortunately, it's kind of effective. | |
| Her attacks are racist and her team likes it. | |
| I think that's a fair characterization. | |
| Yeah, I think the Democrats will go full racist. | |
| I feel like they've signaled that, right? | |
| Haven't the Democrats pretty much said that they will be the racist party? | |
| I mean, I think they're saying it directly now. | |
| Now obviously, in this context, racist means managing according to race. | |
| Now, in their view, they're just trying to make an unfair world more fair, get more representation, adjust for things that have not been fair in the past. | |
| So their frame on it is different. | |
| But I don't think you'd question the basic premise that race will be a primary thrust. | |
| And once again, it will not be the primary thrust of the Republicans. | |
| Are they wanting to shame everyone into voting solely on race? | |
| Well I never agree with solely in any question. | |
| I suppose sometimes it could be true but generally there's no solely. | |
| People do things for a lot of reasons. | |
| Biden-Harris. | |
| Joe Biden will not be your next president. | |
| I feel confident about that. | |
| The reason Joe Biden won't be your next president is because he's like a weak version of Trump. | |
| So even though they have different policies, people aren't as policy-driven as they should be. | |
| They're going to look at the people. | |
| And Biden is sort of the boring, weak, gaff-prone, shoulder-rubbing, too-much version of Trump. | |
| So if you're going to run against Trump, you either need somebody who's so completely different from Trump. | |
| Kamala Harris would be an example. | |
| AOC would be an example. | |
| They're just the anti-Trump. | |
| Or you have to have somebody who's like Trump, but a better version. | |
| Could you find a better version of Trump? | |
| Maybe. It's possible. | |
| Bloomberg's too boring. | |
| Too short, too boring, too white. | |
| He would not... | |
| Yeah, Bernie, Avenatti, no, none of them. | |
| So, correct me if I'm wrong, are we... | |
| How many people have taken themselves out of the competition? | |
| So Avenatti is kind of out of it. | |
| I think Spartacus is out of it. | |
| I think Pocahontas is out of it. | |
| Is it everybody who's gotten a nickname is out of it? | |
| Spartacus, Pocahontas, and creepy porn lawyer? | |
| Everybody who's got a bad nickname is already out of it. | |
| What is Kamala Harris's nickname? | |
| He doesn't have one, right? | |
| Kamala Harris doesn't have a nickname. | |
| That actually means something. | |
| It shouldn't mean anything, right? In the old days, that wouldn't mean anything. | |
| But it actually means something now. | |
| It totally means something. | |
| Crazy Kamala? | |
| No. Kamala does not register as crazy. | |
| She registers as smart. | |
| And that's the problem. | |
| Whenever you watch her talking, No matter what you think of her politics, no matter what you think of her morality, her ethics, you know, those are all the normal things everybody complains about. | |
| But one of the things you don't think when Kamala Harris is talking is that she's dumb. | |
| You don't really think that. | |
| Because she comes across as smart no matter what. | |
| So, I would watch out for her. | |
| Somebody said she has a great voice. | |
| I think that's right. She does have a good public voice. | |
| That's actually true. And that's a bigger deal than you think it is. | |
| Because if the actual sound of somebody's voice is grating on people, that's a big deal. | |
| It's a big deal. | |
| And I would agree with that comment, that her voice is right in the pocket. | |
| It doesn't offend in any way. | |
| I also have a theory that having a non-standard name gives you an advantage. | |
| So if your name is Beto, you have an advantage. | |
| If your name is Barak, you have an advantage. | |
| If your name is Kamala, you have an advantage. | |
| And the advantage is that when you try to deal with Tulsi Gabbard, that's another advantage. | |
| When you're trying to wrestle with a non-standard name, anything that's not Bob or Donald, that it sticks in your head, and it makes that person come up above the noise just because the name sticks in your head. | |
| Somebody is saying... | |
| I'm seeing a lot of people suggest that people stick the KKK name to Kamala Harris. | |
| Literally the worst idea you could ever have. | |
| If you're trying to make a nickname for Kamala Harris by sticking KKK to it because there's a K there and because she mentioned the KKK, keep in mind the KKK references work for her, not against her. | |
| Because if you're looking at a black woman running for president and you're thinking about the KKK, that helps her. | |
| Because nobody's going to say, oh, I think there's a black supporter of the KKK. Nobody thinks that. | |
| But they're going to think, oh, there's a big problem in the country. | |
| Maybe this is a solution. | |
| So... Tulsi Gabbard is 100% running. | |
| Well, that could be interesting. | |
| Newt. Yeah, there's another one. | |
| Newt Gingrich. | |
| His first name, Newt, absolutely makes him stand out. | |
| You remember him. What's in my coffee this morning? | |
| Goodness. Alright, that's all for now. | |
| From the guy who can't even remember Octavio, you are correct. | |
| So AOC, as I call her, Alexandra Octavio Cortez, is a perfect example where the difficulty of remembering and pronouncing her name correctly helps her brand. | |
| Because it makes you think about it. | |
| Whenever there's a mistake that you're focusing on, you're being persuaded. | |
| There's a good book on that, which I'll recommend another time. | |
| And I think that's all I have to say. | |
| I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's all for now. |
Export Selection