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Nov. 28, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:21
Episode 319 Scott Adams: False Memories, Chinese Re-Education Camps, Facebook Racists
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Bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum.
Hey, everybody.
Hello. Aaron and Jack and Sharona and Tyler and the rest of you.
Come on in here.
We've got lots to talk about.
And I think you know what time it is.
You do know.
You know. It's time for...
Coffee with Scott Adams.
Join me now.
Grab your stein, your beverage, your cup, your mug, your stein, your chalice, and have the simultaneous sip right now.
All right, I got a bunch of stories.
Let me start with some things I tweeted.
There was a student group, college students who had been working for years to try to develop a inexpensive $20,000 house.
And they showed a picture of the $20,000 house that they say they can build.
And I applaud the effort.
So I'm a big fan of the process of trying to create a design, having some particular things you're trying to accomplish, working on it over time to improve it.
But I would say the headline, $20,000 home, is a little bit misleading.
As many people have suggested, the land would cost much more than that.
The process of getting something approved in any locale would cost more than $20,000.
In my town, it would cost you more than $20,000 just to get a permit.
Not a permit specifically, but all of the approvals and everything else.
You should not believe any story about a $20,000 house for poor people.
And I have a few criticisms, although I love the process, the thought, I love the attitude of it.
One is that the house itself is just god-awful ugly.
And I just can't believe that has to be the case.
I don't believe that design necessarily has to cost more.
So that's the first problem. It appears to be built not from a living perspective, but from a what's it cost to build it perspective.
So I would say on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is learning how to build a good livable home for people who don't have much money, this $20,000 house is closer to a 2 and a 10.
Meaning that we're not even close to what we could get to.
But I love the fact that they took it from zero to two.
It's the right direction.
So directionally it's good.
I will be joining Bill Pulte of the Blight Authority.
You've heard about that a lot.
On Fox and Friends on Friday morning, unless the weather gets in the way, I'll be shipping out a little bit to head to New York.
And we'll tell you some suggestions for what to do with that blight cleared land in the inner cities.
And one of the main things that is important, and other people have pointed this out, is that it doesn't really work To take a nice house, no matter what it costs.
It doesn't really work to take a nice house and just plop it into a bad place and then fill it with people who don't really have the training to know how to manage their finances, manage the home, etc.
So you have to approach it as sort of a system problem.
You might have to build a community.
That allows the people who are in it to come in and experience their own little world within the community, and then maybe you have a chance.
But there's a lot more you have to do, a lot more, than just get the cost of construction down.
So the first is that. Next there's the Pompeo.
Secretary of State Pompeo has an article in the Wall Street Journal in which he defends Working with Saudi Arabia.
And he outlines all the things that we have, that we work with Saudi Arabia to accomplish.
Everything from trying to figure out what's going on with Yemen, trying to curb Iran, trying to get something going with an Israeli peace, something about oil prices, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And I thought it was a good article that laid out the case.
Now, as I watch people make reasonable arguments about things, I've noticed that the, what I'll call the, I hate to use this phrase, but it just works.
The liberal approach to arguing, if you haven't noticed, is to use sarcasm instead of reasons.
Have you noticed this?
To use sarcasm as if it's a reason.
And it works like this.
I'll have to ask Dale to come in.
So let's say I make a claim that two plus two equals four.
And let's say I do a tweet and I say two plus two equals four.
Now you know that whoever is on the other side of the political divide has to disagree with it.
But sometimes there are things that are hard to disagree with.
And so instead, the critic will come in and they'll say something like this.
Oh! Cartoon Boy says, 2 plus 2 equals 4.
Hey, look everybody! 2 plus 2 equals 4!
2 plus 2 equals 4!
Can you believe it? Have you seen this?
Have you seen this guy?
Check this out. This is just like all the mistakes he's ever made in the past.
It's all put into this one new mistake.
2 plus 2 equals 4!
And scene. So, we're seeing a lot of that with the...
With the Saudi Arabia situation, because it's one of those deals where pretty much everybody in that same situation would act the same way.
In other words, if they really wanted to help the country, they would probably work with Saudi Arabia, given all of the variables that are in place.
But since we have to take sides, you have people taking sides against something that they would do.
You're seeing the same thing with the so-called gassing of women and children at the border.
Nobody is blind to the fact That this is a normal procedure that apparently Obama did many times on the border.
And the reason that you use the, what is it, the spice gas?
Whatever it's being called.
The reason you use it is that it's the least bad thing you can do out of all the alternatives.
So who is it?
Who would pick a pepper sprayer?
Who is it who supports doing the most dangerous thing?
Well, nobody, right?
Everybody agrees, if they were in the same situation, they would do whatever's the safest thing to do.
It turns out that lobbing a few pepper spray canisters onto the other side kind of is the safest thing you can do.
So how do you argue against Doing the safest thing you can do, given the situation.
Well, I'll tell you how.
Oh, so now we just shoot projectiles at children and women.
So you've got to argue it like that, because I don't know how else you could argue.
Now keep in mind that anybody watching this will now say, cartoonist favors gassing women and children.
No, I know how to play this game.
So let me say as clearly as possible, no children in cages and no gassing women and children.
So I'm just going to do what all of the children in the argument say, which is just forget about the big picture and just talk about the little picture.
So that's what I'm doing because people seem to like that.
Now the hilarious story of the day is that there's an African-American ex-Facebook employee Who is going after Facebook for not having enough black people on the staff.
And so Facebook, he says, is a much-used platform by the African American community, but the employees within Facebook are only 4% black.
And he's saying that there needs to be something done about that.
Now here's the interesting thing.
People have suggested that this would be the case, that the liberal entities would start eating themselves.
But I'm looking at Facebook, and I'm looking at all the tech companies who are almost 100%, not 100%, but they're overwhelmingly left-leaning.
The employees in Silicon Valley, the employees in Facebook, etc.
And I think to myself, How is it that the whitest or at least the least diverse group of people in the world have become the standard bearers for diversity?
How is it?
How is it that it never made sense to us that the group of people that is the least diverse Are the champions of diversity.
In other words, it's their biggest issue is racial equality, inclusivity, gender equality.
Those are their biggest issues.
But am I wrong to say they're the worst offenders?
So are the biggest complainers also the worst offenders?
I usually don't do the hypocrisy things like, oh, you said this, but you're doing this.
I always think the hypocrisy claim is ridiculous.
This is more like a puzzling situation.
I'm not calling them hypocrites.
I'm just saying, how do you reconcile it?
How do you reconcile being clearly and factually the worst offenders At the same time, you're the biggest proponents and you're the most aggressive proponents of not doing what you're doing.
It's an interesting situation.
Alright, let's talk about Jack Posavik's tweet this morning in which he talked about David Corsi, sometimes called an associate of Roger Stone.
That's if you don't like President Trump.
If you do like President Trump, he's called a New York Times bestseller Harvard graduate.
Oh, Jerome Corsi, right?
Sorry. And...
But anyway, the topic is Dr.
Corsi and being interviewed by, apparently, the Mueller team.
And there was the report.
Now, let me clarify that I have no way to know what did or did not happen in a room that I wasn't in.
So there's nothing that I'm going to say that should validate the facts of the story, because I don't know the facts.
But the facts that are reported are that...
I'll just read it. Over the next few hours, Zelensky and Ray, they must have been the interviewers on the Mueller team, would use any number of techniques to push me, meaning Dr.
Corsi, would push me to remember a source.
Finally, Zelensky said, quote, Dr.
Corsi, many people find they have to put themselves back in time to a particular date and place to remember precisely what happened.
Zelensky suggested that I should go back to my trip to Italy, putting myself mentally back to July and August 2016.
I put my hand up to my forehead, closed my eyes, and tried to engage seriously in the regression exercise.
I think I see someone telling me about Assange, I finally said, trying hard to imagine myself in Italy.
Was it a man or a woman?
Ray asked. With obvious enthusiasm that the prosecutors may finally be breaking through a mental block they presumed I had.
I think it was a man, I responded.
Then I realized how ridiculous this was as I was beginning to invent people and make things up just to answer their persistent questions.
But it really struck me as preposterous that a serious US The Department of Justice prosecutor like Zelensky would ask me to use this type of regression technique used by hacks promising to unlock for gullible clients past lives embellishments to enrich otherwise troubled present existences.
So the claim here, or the topic I guess, is whether or not an investigator Can plant false memories in somebody they're interviewing?
And the answer is yes.
Yes. So unambiguously, yes.
If these facts happen the way they're reported, and that's the part I can't confirm or deny.
I wasn't there. Keep in mind that everybody involved in the Mueller investigation is unreliable.
There are no reliable characters in any of this drama.
So even the people who mean to be right are sometimes getting things wrong.
So nothing's reliable.
But if it's true that questions were asked in this nature, is this the type of approach, just systems-wise and process-wise, that could implant a false memory?
And the answer is yes.
I also retweeted this morning a YouTube video of a researcher who shows it being done.
So if you don't believe that you can implant a memory with this technique, Watch the video and you can watch actual people believe they remembered committing crimes that they did not believe.
Now, out of the people that the researcher tested, what percentage of them do you think had a false memory that the researcher implanted?
Would you say 10%?
Would you say 10% of the people got a false memory because it was sort of suggested to them?
No, it's higher. It's higher than 10%.
Would you say 25?
No, no.
It's 70. It's 70%.
70% of the people with minimal effort generated a false memory of committing a crime when they were younger.
Now, I don't think that, you know, given this was one study, I would not say the 70% is necessarily something that you could reproduce.
So I wouldn't put too much, you know, faith in the 70% part.
But what you should put faith in is that it can easily be done.
Whether that's 30% or 25% or 70% or 90% is a little less important than the fact that it is a real phenomenon.
So, let me just put that out there that a lot of what we think is reality is not.
Now, another topic.
I see a lot of people are coming after me on Twitter lately, and they're noticing that, for example, farmers are having a tough time and GM is laying off people.
And they say to me something like, Oh, Scott, I couldn't wait to come over to your Twitter feed and rub it in your face.
Because as you can see, just like everybody smart knows, a tariff war, a trade war, never works for anybody.
It's bad for the people who do it.
Whoever starts a trade war, they always lose.
Just look at the facts, look at the history, look at the data, look at the studies.
If you start a trade war, it always turns bad.
Let me address that.
Number one, what did these people think a trade war was, if not something that hurts both sides?
So the fact that a trade war is hurting your own side, in some ways, in the short term, is not proof that it's a bad idea.
It's simply a description of what it is.
A trade war is both parties hurting each other until somebody wins or something changes.
So you can't claim credit for what everybody knew was going to happen because that's exactly what it was.
It's a trade war.
Now the question about whether you can never win a trade war, and therefore you should never get into one, doesn't that sort of depend on what situation you're starting with?
Because, for example, if you had a deal that was kind of close to even, but you started a trade war, it would probably be bad for everybody.
Because the best you could come up with is probably something else that's close to even.
But, if you start with a trade that is uneven, You can take a lot of pain and it's still worthwhile in the long run to even it up.
So if you're telling me that historically it's always better to back down in negotiations, I would say, I would really like to be in a negotiation with you.
Because the people who think the best strategy for negotiating is to give in, because otherwise the other side will do something bad to you, you might be the dumbest people in the world.
I mean, I don't know how you'd measure who's the dumbest person in the world.
But the general concept that if you're in a negotiation, your best strategy is always to surrender.
Because that's what not having a trade war is.
It's simply accepting what the other side is giving you.
In what world is surrendering 100% of the time better than not surrendering in a negotiation?
My experience is it's kind of the opposite.
Let me give you my best negotiating tip you're ever going to hear.
It's slightly off point, but it's a good learning experience.
So back when I was offered a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist, I had never been a cartoonist.
And getting a syndication contract, and the syndication sells your comic to all the big newspapers.
So the big break for a cartoonist is to become syndicated.
So when somebody offers you a contract to be a syndicated cartoonist, That is the biggest deal in your life.
It's a totally transforming experience.
And so the syndicate gave me a contract that was sort of like China negotiating with the United States, right?
Their initial contract said, we want everything and you will have nothing.
I'm exaggerating, but it was a very uneven contract, which is normal.
The normal situation is the first offer is sort of an aggressive offer and they don't expect you to accept all of it.
Now, normally in that situation you'd say, oh no, the big syndication company has all the power because if they don't pick me, they'll just pick somebody else.
And so there's nothing I can do because I have no negotiating leverage.
Fortunately, my background was not in art.
My background was in, as it turns out, negotiating.
So I literally negotiated contracts for a living during my corporate life.
That wasn't my entire corporate life, but it was a big part of it.
And I had an MBA and an economics degree, and I'd seen enough of the world from the corporate side to know the following fact.
Here's a fact that I knew that made me a fortune.
And the fact goes like this.
If a big company, let's say a syndication company, makes you an offer and then enters into a negotiation, because it's a lengthy process to negotiate this sort of thing.
If they enter into it, they have also put skin in the game.
And they don't want to change their mind.
They don't want to be wrong in their offer, and they wouldn't make an offer to you unless they thought you were rare.
So in other words, it wasn't true that they could just easily go to the next cartoonist.
I mean, certainly there were thousands in line, but it's very unusual to find a new cartoonist that you think has potential.
So the very fact that they had offered me the contract in the first place Tipped their hand.
They tipped their hand that they needed me a lot because their entire business model depended on finding rare people.
So I, with my lawyer, and of course having a good lawyer helps a lot, pushed back hard.
So, at the end of the process, and successfully we got a contract, the syndicate said some version of, I hope we never have to deal with your lawyer again, because that guy, that guy's just, he's like the toughest lawyer we've ever dealt with.
Now, why was my lawyer the toughest lawyer they've ever dealt with?
Two reasons. Number one, he was a very good lawyer and very experienced.
So, that's good.
Number two, He had the best client in the world because I wasn't willing to take BS for an answer.
If something was a reasonable thing to ask for, I held out for it until I got it.
So here's your tip for the day in negotiating.
If somebody is willing to enter a negotiation with you, they have a bigger opinion of your qualities than maybe you do.
And people rarely just walk away from a negotiation and don't come back.
So you can say no as long as you're productively saying no.
It's a bad idea to just say, no, I can't deal with you.
Your first offer is so ridiculous, I walk away.
That's just dumb. Maybe that could work in a car dealership situation.
That's a special situation.
But if it's a big complicated contract, You want to get them a little bit pregnant.
You want to get their lawyers involved.
You want to make sure that they've had meetings in which they said, yeah, we've got this going.
It looks good. Because nobody wants to go back to their boss and say, yeah, I negotiated with this guy for a month and I couldn't close the deal because it makes you look weak and stupid.
So I allow the other side to get a little bit pregnant.
And then they will take a lot of pushing once they're a little bit pregnant.
Because they can't unpregnant themselves.
Well, I won't get into that.
Alright, let's talk about China and their persecution of the Uyghur, if I'm pronouncing that right, minority, the Muslim minority in China.
Apparently they're sending them to re-education camps.
Now, we don't know exactly what's going on over there, but so one of their diplomats, I think it was the Chinese diplomat in the United States, said that they send them to these re-education camps until, and here's the fun part, until they can make them normal.
Normal. What?
Yeah, they're sending them to re-education camps to make them normal.
Wow. Now, remember that what I told you is that the Chinese model is that Islam, they're treating it like a mental illness.
Now, without saying...
I'm going to try to enter this part of the topic without giving you an opinion.
So I'm going to describe it without...
So don't take this out of context and say, Scott says this or that.
Their approach...
Whether it's right or wrong might be less important than whether it works or whether it doesn't.
Because from China's perspective, keeping order is a question of life and death because there are just so many people and it's so hard to keep order with all these different people in a vast country.
So the level of challenge for the Chinese leadership is much higher than it is for a lot of different places, just because of the scope of the thing they're trying to manage.
So for them, they probably can't tolerate as much dissension as maybe a smaller country, you know, in a different situation.
Now, that doesn't make it right, so I'm not defending anything China does.
As you know, China is on my bad list for Christmas because of their fentanyl practices.
But it is instructive to look at how they're looking at religion as a mental problem that can spread by association.
And I wonder if there's any analog to that.
You know, not that analogies are persuasive, but is there any other situation where a way of thinking is considered a mental, an actual mental problem?
And while we see it with Trump derangement syndrome, that's joking aside, it's an actual medical problem.
People are seeing therapists and reporting mental problems because of it.
But I've not seen anything in which a way of thinking is considered so dangerous that it has to be quarantined.
But imagine if you would...
Anyway, I'm not going to say much.
Oh, it's somebody saying it's similar to trying to convert gay folks.
No, it is opposite of that.
It is opposite of that.
The folks who are treating homosexuality as a mental illness We're missing the biological and medical fact that people are born with a certain orientation and there's nothing they can do about it.
That's very different from someone who is born as an open slate and then a religion is introduced to their mind.
So it's not a how you're born situation, it's how you were socialized situation.
So those are not comparable.
Some of you are saying gender dysphoria is a mental illness.
I try not to get into conversations that are definition conversations.
It's always illegitimate to try to win a debate by owning the definition.
So just because you can say, oh, your gender orientation is a mental problem, just the fact that you can put words on it doesn't change what it is.
It doesn't change how you should deal with it.
It's just trying to win an argument by putting a definition on it.
It is what it is. And you don't need to define it in order to figure out what to do about it or how to be kind.
I happen to be...
Far more open to the flexible definitions of gender than most of you, because the simplistic version that your genitalia determines your sex is a convenience for society, but that's all it is.
It's just a convenience that happened to be very inconvenient for a segment of the world.
So if your goal is convenience, then maybe you stick with your external genitalia, which is very bad for some people who are somewhere along the continuum, not where you are.
So... Yeah, I can see all the ways that I will be taken into context with.
Somebody says, what if it is partially a choice?
Well, I don't believe in free will, so the question isn't valid.
It doesn't mean anything.
That if your chemistry and your situation and your life have brought all of the particles in your existence to a certain point, the next thing they do is going to be the next thing they do.
It's not like your soul is changing what you're going to decide.
So the whole what if you chose it is just word thinking because you can't choose it.
you're going to do what you're going to do.
Why don't you believe in free will?
I won't get into that because I've said it too many times, but basically the basic argument against free will is that the rules of physics do not change once it's inside your skull.
Your brain is part of the world.
The world is based on rules of physics.
You can't think anything different than what you're going to think.
You don't have an option.
It's just going to be what it's going to be.
You have an impression of free will, but that's all it is.
What about fakers?
It's such a small problem, I wouldn't worry about it.
Go back to my China point.
Oh, so, yeah, thank you.
So I had a China point, which was So apparently the Chinese are using sophisticated digital means to control their Uyghur population.
And this reminded me of the caravan.
Did you see the news that apparently Homeland Security is reporting there are 600 known criminals in the caravan?
Have you asked yourself how they could possibly know that?
How could Homeland Security know there are approximately 600 known criminals in the caravan?
Did they interview them?
Did they ask them?
Probably not.
Did they photograph them and use facial recognition?
Well, the technology is here.
So they certainly have the technology to fly a drone over the crowd, take pictures of all their faces, run it against the database, and find out how many of them are criminals.
And probably that's what happened.
Just guessing. Because I can't imagine any other way it would happen unless they literally just made up the number, which you can't rule that out.
So that's some scary stuff.
Took a sample size and expanded it.
And are you saying that the sample size, maybe the sample size was based on facial recognition, but maybe they could have interviewed people too?
I doubt it.
So we talked about Jerome Corsi.
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