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Feb. 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
34:18
Episode 426 Scott Adams: Talking About Stuff. I Can Think of No Reason You Would Want to Listen
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
You know you want to.
Because you know...
Then it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams.
Many of you are not.
And if you are prepared, you have your mug.
You have your cup, your glass, your chalice, your stein, perhaps a thermos.
I'd like to think you've filled it with your favorite beverage.
I like coffee.
Now join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, good stuff.
So let's talk about AOC.
AOC.
I want to not talk about her, but I can't.
I can't help it.
I don't know if it's just that other people talk about her, and so I just want to, you know, I'm being persuaded by the herd.
Or... Was my original analysis of her way back correct?
That she's a master persuader and she can hold our attention like nobody else.
Well, I'll tell you what the...
I'm having a fascinating time watching the reaction of mostly Trump supporters when I say that she's persuasive.
And people, they holler, they yell, And they're talking about her.
And of course, they talk about her some more.
So it seems that people have conflated the concepts of being persuasive with the concept of being right.
They're very different things.
I am completely convinced That AOC, who I call RPOS, for racist, not point of sale.
So she is racist, but she's also persuasive.
But is she right about, let's say her most recent statement is that although they chased Amazon.com away, why shouldn't the city use that money that they were going to give to Amazon in tax breaks?
Why couldn't they just use that money for New York City stuff?
You know, for lowering the taxes of low-income people, for investing in the city.
And other people said, AOC, you don't understand anything about economics.
But wait a minute. Let me see...
I want to look at her educational background.
Hold on, hold on.
Stop that.
It's so hard to do a search for her because her name is too long.
Cortez, give me a moment, there's a reason for this.
We're going to look at her educational background.
So she has a BA from Boston University.
What was her major? Let's see if I can find that.
Majored in International Relations and Economics at Boston University.
She had a double major.
International Relations and Economics.
So, do you think that someone with a double major in International Relations and Economics from Boston University And by the way, she graduated cum laude.
Cum laude? Cum laude?
Cum loudly. C-U-M space L-A-U-D-E. I think it's pronounced cum loudly.
No, wait, that's something else.
So, she could have been summa cum laude, but that's still pretty good for a double major.
Now, here's the question to you.
Do you believe...
That she doesn't understand that tax breaks for Amazon were really about them not paying as much taxes as they would ordinarily?
Or does she think that the city took some of its own city money and was going to give it to Amazon?
It's an interesting question.
Somebody says she minored in economics, and that might be true, but I'm looking at Wikipedia and it reads exactly this, that Ocasio-Cortez majored in international relations and economics.
So it says she majored in both, but it's possible that she minored, if Wikipedia is wrong.
But in either case, do you think she doesn't understand that?
And I'm asking the question without actually knowing myself.
I don't know. I don't know if she understands it or not.
But I'll tell you what I do know.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter a bit.
Because she's only talking to the people who want to believe that.
She's talking to people who want to believe that the city should have been nicer to its residents and less nice to the biggest corporation in the world.
Are they the biggest?
They're out there. And so her message is quite persuasive to the people she's talking to.
She's not talking to Republicans.
If she did, I imagine she would change her message to be more compatible with persuading Republicans.
We no longer live in a world where it makes sense to even bother trying to persuade the other team.
The best you can do is persuade your own side and maybe tip a few independents if you get lucky.
So here's the open question.
We don't know what she understood, but if she's a master persuader, chances are It didn't matter the details.
What probably mattered is that she told the simplest version of the story, which is that she's supporting the low-income people and not the big corporations.
I guarantee you that 95% of the public doesn't know what's wrong with that, doesn't know that CNN was going to produce money And then not pay all of it to the city.
That's different from the city taking its own money and giving some of it to Amazon.
Now that's not a completely accurate description of the situation, as AOC clarified herself in the tweet.
The part of the deal was they were actually going to give, I think, $500 million in capital improvements or whatever to Amazon.
So there was a chunk of that that was actually money from the city that was going to go directly to Amazon.
So that part is real. And she got that right.
But the tax breaks are not something that you can give to the citizens or give to the company because the tax breaks for Amazon were going to be tax breaks on income that they had not yet earned and had never been earned before in that city.
So it would have been a tax break on new money as opposed to taking the money they already have and giving it to Amazon.
Alright, I think that's clear enough.
Anyway, my point is the people who are...
Telling me that AOC is not persuasive, assuming that they understand the difference between being persuasive and being correct.
The people who say she's not persuasive are deeply cognitively blind on this topic.
Maybe not on other topics, but on this topic, they're cognitively blind.
It is objectively true That her persuasion is dominating our conversation.
I'm talking about it.
You're thinking about it.
We're tweeting about it.
She's in the news. Every Democratic candidate is essentially being compared to her.
They're all being asked about the Green New Deal.
And I have to admit, the Green New Deal, as crazy as it is in terms of being impractical, Has started to infect our thinking.
So that before we could have said, I don't even need to talk about that stuff, it's just crazy.
Now we're talking about it.
Now suddenly we're asking questions like, what is the best way to get to your universal cheap education?
Remember we were talking about that's impossible before?
And now we're talking about, but what's the best way to get there?
I saw Mark Cuban Tweeted recently.
He asked a little Twitter poll.
I think it was yesterday.
And I tweeted that around.
And he asked people's opinion on the idea of making people's most local state college free to them.
So his idea was that perhaps, at least floating it as a suggestion, that perhaps the only practical way to get to universal free college with people who want to pay more given that option.
They can pay more and go to a different college if they want to.
But universal free college would be making the, I assume, upgrading the most local college to you so that anybody who wants to go there can.
Now, When have you ever heard that suggestion?
Because that's sort of the capitalist's version of getting as close as you can to something like Free Universal College without going full socialist.
So when you see Mark Cuban, who is by no means a socialist, I don't think anybody would call him a socialist, When you see him seriously talking about not if you should have free college or if you should not, but saying, how?
What's the best way?
What's the most practical way?
Is there one? Is there even a practical way?
When you see that conversation happening, it is unambiguously true that AOC is moving the needle.
Now you could say, Bernie got things started, and I think that would be a very defensible position.
But you cannot say, That she's not moving the needle.
Because you're seeing it as clearly and as objectively and it's measurable.
You could do Google searches, Google trends.
On every possible dimension, it is unambiguously clear that she's changing how we're thinking about things.
I don't know that it's bad.
Now, I think it would be terrible if everything she suggested got adopted, just the way it's drawn out in its initial form.
But it is not terrible, and I'm going to say this as confidently as I possibly can.
It is not terrible The people with as much juice as Mark Cuban are publicly asking the question, how could we best get to free public education?
You see other people talking about online education as the way to get there.
I've suggested that as well.
And maybe it's some combination of online college plus a physical place.
I can tell you here in California, and I don't know how common this is, The local community colleges offer a pretty robust range of online classes.
So even if you're going to the local college here, a lot of those classes you're just doing on your computer.
And that's very common now.
It's not unusual. That's actually the common situation now.
So to see people like major capitalists, Asking about how to get there, and could we afford it, and is there a way it makes sense, is a real big deal.
And I think that she's part of that, even though that's not exactly what she's talking about, perhaps.
And likewise, you see people like me talking about, how do you get to free health care for everybody, or less expensive health care?
Those are questions that I think we spend more time on now, because there is such a thing as the extreme left.
Now, I forwarded around this morning on Twitter, there's another Twitter, a CNN clip in which Van Jones is once again the only reasonable person on the panel.
And he was reasonable in the sense that the conversation was, are MAGA people sort of all bad?
And one of the panelists actually Took a run at suggesting that maybe all MAGA people are actually kind of bad.
Right there on television, so right on CNN. The panelist did not say it explicitly, but her answer suggested that, well, maybe they are kind of all bad.
Fortunately, the voice of reason for CNN, Van Jones, was there to say, that's the most unproductive way to think of this.
I'm paraphrasing, but the idea was that you wouldn't want, you know, black people would not want anybody to say all black people are bad.
That's like literally the biggest problem.
So why would they do it against some other group when it's clearly not true that they're all bad?
It's the worst way to organize a society when you think that just belonging to a group makes you bad, because you're part of a group.
Now, that's true for the KKK, but it's not true for, you know, being part of a demographic group or being part of a political party.
All right.
I am looking at your comments here. - Sure.
Yeah, there's the story about an IRS agent leaked some tax information to Avenetti.
I can't think of a worse, disgusting thing than that.
But it's not much of a fun story.
So somebody's prompting me to talk about 6G. So apparently the president tweeted that we wanted to get to 5G, which would be the faster internet after 4G. The faster wireless internet.
And then he said, maybe even 6G. And then the fact checkers said, wait a minute, there's no such thing as 6G? What is this president talking to?
And I remember laughing and thinking to myself, there might not be a 6G, but don't you know what he's talking about?
Isn't this once again directionally accurate?
If it's true that there's a 4G, and of course there is, because we're all using it, and it's true that we're working on 5G, why would it not be true that sooner or later there's going to be something like a 6G? Now, if it's like all the other Gs, everybody will argue about whether that's real 6G or is it really 4G plus 2, or, you know, people are going to argue whether things are truly 6G or not.
But it is not wrong to say that if we're looking at going from 4 to 5, that maybe we should look past it to 6, even if we don't know what 6 is yet.
A perfectly reasonable thing to say that people attacked him for being irrational.
Thank you for the superhearts.
I appreciate that.
All right. So I've got a little bit of the flu.
So let me tell you about a conversation I had yesterday in this two movies and, you know, two movies on one screen world.
When I said I had the flu, I was talking to somebody who said there's no such thing as a stomach flu.
Have you ever heard that? That there's no such thing as a stomach flu.
That's a myth. And I said, of course there's such a thing as a stomach flu.
The kind of flu where you're vomiting.
And I don't have that one, luckily.
So we made a bet.
So the bet was, is there such a thing as a, quote, stomach flu?
So, of course, I do a Google search, and the Mayo Clinic comes up as one of the top search reviews.
And it says gastroenteritis, which is the official name, and then in parentheses, stomach flu.
So the source is the Mayo Clinic.
So that's my source, the Mayo Clinic.
The Mayo Clinic says the technical name is gastroenteritis, parentheses, stomach flu.
Who wins the bet?
Who wins the bet?
Does stomach flu exist?
Or does it not exist because it was put in parentheses?
Well, the person I was talking to claimed victory because there is only an official diagnosis called gastroenteritis.
That's what you would find in the medical books.
But in common usage, parenthetically, stomach flu.
Do you need to know how this concluded?
It concluded with both people thinking that they had won based on looking at the exact same information.
Exact same information.
Mayo Clinic, gastroenteritis, parenthetically, stomach flu.
And still, with this simple example, now most of you are, you know, you're watching this periscope, so you're biased in my favor, so you're saying I won.
Now it doesn't matter that I thought I won, and it doesn't matter that maybe you think I won.
What matters, and this is the point of my story, is you can't convince somebody else that you're right, even if you're looking at it.
There is no amount of evidence No amount of proof, no amount of seeing it with your own eyes that makes any difference to anyone.
People are completely unaffected by facts that they're looking at right in front of them.
It's quite amazing.
Now, I could also say that I'm really just describing what happened to me.
Because I think the other person would say, you saw it right in front of you, that it has a name, it's called gastroenteritis, and the medical name is not stomach flu.
That's just what people call it.
So I won. Everybody gets to win because everybody sees the world they want to see.
Alright. Was this another wealthy person?
No comment. Somebody says, I am a doctor, you are wrong.
So, from the doctor's perspective, whoever it was that said you're a doctor, please give me a detail.
So, is it true that there's a flu virus that can affect you in your stomach in the sense that it will make you vomit?
And the answer is apparently yes.
All right. Gastroenteritis can also refer to food poisoning.
Oh, that's interesting. So you can see reality changing right in front of you.
So a moment ago, didn't you think the Mayo Clinic was just being politically correct?
You lost. Look at the different comments, and you're watching what you thought was reality shifting right in front of you, because you're watching new people weigh in and saying, I'm a doctor, you're wrong, etc.
Somebody says, if you're left of Bernie, why are your followers right?
Well, that's a good question.
I'm left of Bernie...
But I also try to be objective about what works.
And I mostly started writing about persuasion, specifically the Donald Trump version of persuasion, which made me appear very pro-Trump.
And so people who were pro-Trump for their own reasons found common cause with me because I say good things about his persuasion and I say good things about his outcomes when they are good.
But I also say bad things when things are not working out.
For example, I disagree with him on statues, Confederate statues.
I disagree on health care.
So there's things like that.
Somebody's asking me about WEN tokens for donating.
So we added a donation button to the interface by WEN Hub app that's available now.
And so anybody can sign up to accept donations.
At the moment, it is not hooked up so that you can donate WEN tokens, but that's a future thing we'll do.
All right. Winning an argument doesn't mean you were right, someone says.
That is true. So people always ask me, what does it mean to be left of Bernie?
And I'll give you my answer. Here are some examples.
Conservatives are generally against abortion.
Liberals are generally okay with it under the right conditions.
And I'm left of that.
I'm sure Bernie is pro-abortion, under the right conditions, but I'm left to that in saying that men such as myself should voluntarily, keyword voluntarily, keyword voluntarily, keyword voluntarily, I say that three times because as soon as I say it, somebody's going to act like it wasn't voluntary, keyword voluntarily, should opt out of the discussion.
Meaning that women, collectively, if they come up with an opinion that's a consensus, As a man, that's what I'm going to back.
Because I don't think women as a group are going to come up with a much different answer than men would, but their decision is more credible because you have a life and death decision going on here.
And I'd rather have the most credible decision rather than the one that's my personal preference.
I said the magic word, should.
Well, should is okay in common language, but not as a substitute for a reason.
I gave my reason, which is credibility.
So when I said that men should without a reason is just a trick.
Should with a reason It would have been more helpful to have said the first time I made that comment about the word should, if you're lost in this conversation, I've said in the past that when you see the word should in an argument, somebody's trying to get away without using a reason.
Now that's if the reason isn't there.
But if somebody says you should do this because it will save money, the reason's there.
So that's the proper use of should.
But should without a reason makes you think that the reason's there without mentioning it.
Alright. Then, I'm also left of Bernie on religion.
So conservatives tend to believe in the Bible.
Liberals are a little bit more likely to be non-believers, although many of them are.
Probably most of them. And I'm left of that.
I think we're probably a simulation.
So there are a number of examples like that.
But none of that leftness Another example is...
I think we should have...
I think healthcare...
That's affordable and available to anyone, as well as education that's affordable and available to everyone, is a good standard to look for, but I don't think we can get there just by raising taxes.
We have to get there more cleverly.
Let's call it the Mark Cuban approach.
There's probably a capitalist-friendly way to get to the things that the socialists want but don't know how to get there.
Let me say this better.
I'll turn this into a quote so you can have a pithy quote.
Capitalism can get you what socialism wants faster than socialism can get it for you.
Dash. Scott Adams.
So that's the frame that I think is most useful.
Capitalism can get you what socialism wants better than socialism can get it for you.
So nobody wants people not to be able to go to college.
Nobody wants people to have big college loans.
Nobody wants people to not have access to affordable healthcare.
It's just how do you get there?
And the capitalists believe that you could get there better through capitalism, even if it takes a long time, even if it's ugly, even if there are bumps and setbacks.
But it's sort of the only path that we understand.
The pure socialist path to get to those things seem consistently bad.
Oh, let me talk about the most important thing in the world right now.
I feel as though there's always one most important question that people have.
One uncertainty, one bad framing of things that becomes the biggest problem in the world.
Let me tell you what I think that is.
Have you watched conservatives try to explain, let's say on television, let's say pundits, writers, have you watched conservatives try to explain why socialism is a bad idea?
Because I have. I've seen quite a few people try to explain it.
And every time I watch the explanation, understanding that I already agree with the point.
So I'm starting from a position of thinking that capitalism is better than socialism.
So I'm already on that team.
And then when I hear conservatives explain the advantages or the disadvantages of socialism, I think to myself, I don't know how those dots connect.
Because you hear things like, socialism always leads to dictators.
That might be true.
But I don't know what the connecting tissue is.
I don't see the cause and effect.
I don't see the clear path from that.
So it always rings as anti-persuasive.
In other words, the more I see a conservative trying to tell me that socialism is a bad idea, they do such a poor job of persuading that I end up thinking, well, maybe it's a better idea than I thought if somebody doesn't have a good reason against it.
I mean, I was already biased in favor of capitalism, and still, you can't give me an argument that sounds good to me, and I'm already on your side.
And so I ask you this, and maybe you can do this in the comments.
Have you... What is the argument against socialism in one sentence?
So here's a little test for you.
I'm guessing that the vast majority of you, probably at least 90% of you, are clearly on the socialism is bad train, because that's who I attract to this periscope.
It's against the will of the people, but every tax is against the will of the people.
Depends on altruism, not persuasive.
Lacks the protections, not persuasive.
Centralizes power, not persuasive.
Stay sanctioned, stealing, not persuasive.
It's anti-voluntary, not persuasive.
It's a failed system, not persuasive.
So, I have been given several points.
What have I taught you about arguments which have several problems?
It usually means people don't know.
Stop using the Marxist word, capitalism.
Just stop. It is capitalism.
You're ridiculous. It's ridiculous not to use that word.
That's a ridiculous comment.
It has to be centrally controlled.
Alright, so here's the problem.
When people talk about the problems of socialism, they give you seven different reasons.
But none of those reasons are like they feel right.
They just feel like you're trying too hard.
Let me put it this way. When people criticize President Trump, and most of you are pro-Trump, When they criticize the president, have you noticed that they're all over the board?
It's not one thing he does wrong.
It's like, oh, there's this, and this, and this, and he did this, and he said this, and he said this, and he did this, and he did this, and he did this.
So it's not this one problem we have with the president.
It's 15 of them.
Whenever I hear that, I know that people don't have clear thinking.
I have to go in a minute.
So if there were one, maybe two, Good criticisms of socialism, people would use those, and that would be the end of the story.
So they would say, socialism is bad, here's my reason.
By the way, there are seven other reasons, but the only one you need to know is this one reason.
Yeah, and I'm watching more reasons go by.
Inefficient, no upward movement, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, the anti-socialism argument needs to be fixed.
Because if the best you have is that you'll turn into Venezuela, and then the other side says, no, we'll turn into Europe, and Europe is fine, you don't have an argument.
So, let me say, in my estimation of things...
The only thing that creates progress is a sufficient amount of pain and selfishness.
And that if your system does not recognize people's selfishness and greed, you don't have a working system.
But I don't know if that's persuasive.
So let's work on a good argument of capitalism, or let's say, you know, capitalism with a little bit of socialism the way we have it now, versus a more pure form of socialism.
And let's see if you have an argument.
Yep.
Here's the terrible argument.
The worst argument is food shortages.
That's not a reason. That's not a reason.
That's a projected outcome, but where's the reason?
There is a reason, but you didn't list it.
Disincentive to work.
Do Europeans have a disincentive to work?
You would have to demonstrate that the people of Europe are disincentive to work.
Because what if somebody says, what if the lowest 20% of the lazy, unproductive workers don't work?
Are we better off or worse off?
I don't even know.
Alright, I gotta go.
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