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April 20, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
38:42
Episode 500 Scott Adams: The End of Reliable History Books
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
It's time for a more sleepy than usual simultaneous sip.
I'd love to tell you I got enough sleep last night, but I didn't.
I'm a little tired this morning.
And I would like to invite you now to join me for the simultaneous sip.
You could grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your thermos, your stein, your tanker, your flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah. So, apparently Joe Biden is planning to go to Charlottesville to announce his candidacy.
I think there's two places he's going, but Charlottesville is one of them.
And it makes you wonder, is that a coincidence?
Is it a coincidence that Joe Biden is going to Charlottesville?
Well, maybe.
Could be. But far more likely, given the fame that Charlottesville's had, he's going there to launch his campaign on a hoax.
That's right. Joe Biden...
Is so completely useless that he might actually be going from the Russia hoax directly back to the Charlottesville hoax because he can't tell the difference.
He can't tell the difference.
He doesn't know what's even real.
If you have a potential president who thought the Russia investigation was real, and also thought that the reporting on Charlottesville was real, that the president actually called the Nazis fine people, he actually believes that happened.
And it looks like he's going to base his campaign, or at least launch it on the back, of the second biggest hoax that the country has ever seen.
And this makes me ask the following question.
What will history report about the last several years, maybe the next several?
Didn't you always think that history books, sure, they might have been biased in the sense that they would leave things out.
You know, maybe there were things that one country would de-emphasize.
You know, maybe the country had a history of doing bad things, so it de-emphasizes that.
Maybe it emphasizes the things that they did right, or maybe it credits somebody for winning a war that maybe they didn't They weren't the main reason the war was won.
So there must be a lot of that.
You know that history was written by the winners for the purpose of brainwashing the youth.
Now, if you don't know that that's what history is for, you're probably living a confused life.
History, in terms of the history books and the history of lessons, is not designed to tell you what happened.
It doesn't have that purpose.
You're taught that it has that purpose.
When you go to school, you think you're learning history for the purpose of becoming educated and becoming a citizen who knows how to function, etc.
That's not the purpose.
That's not even the intention.
It is expressly for brainwashing.
Now, I'm not complaining about that, because brainwashing children is what you need to do to children.
If you didn't brainwash children to be good citizens, they would not be as good as citizens.
You actually do have to train children, because they have no critical reasoning.
And if you don't train them like animals with a treat, hey, you know, do this, do this, you get a treat.
If you don't do that, you get bad citizens.
So it's not like there's much choice at the moment.
But imagine who writes the history books of this period.
Who's going to write the history of this presidency?
And if they write it, is it going to say that Charlottesville was real?
Or are they going to say it was a hoax Perpetrated by the media to imagine that the president said that the Nazis were fine people.
If you're new to this conversation, the same time he said that there were fine people in Charlottesville, he very quickly and without prompting said, I'm not talking about the Nazis, they should be condemned totally.
So he is, as clearly as you could possibly say it, he condemned the racists.
But it's reported as the opposite.
Now, what about the Russia collusion story?
You're watching with your own eyes that the world split into two movies.
When there was uncertainty, and this feels like quantum physics or something, when nobody could observe the truth of the Mueller report, when you didn't really know what was going to be in it, The world was sort of on the same side.
Some people suspected it would be bad, some people thought it wouldn't be, but we're still sort of in the same world in that we didn't know and we were waiting for an answer.
But once the answer came, instead of people saying, ah, a common answer, let's all circle around this and have the same interpretation, that didn't happen.
As I told you it would happen, the world split into two movies in which there are two completely opposite truths That are operating simultaneously.
One truth is that there were some, you know, indications that people lied in a political context, and some people lied about their contact with Russians, but none of it amounted to anything.
So, in other words, on one side, it was a witch hunt.
There was nothing important at the bottom of it, just some people behaving badly with some lying and stuff.
But half of the country, or something like it, actually believes that that report was so damning that it is, quote, a roadmap to impeachment.
So if you're the history historian, and you're the historian who needs to write this story, which version of reality do you pick?
Do you pick the reality in which he was not found technically guilty enough to be indicted, but that there was plenty of evidence of collusion?
Because you're being told that by, let's say, Clapper and Brennan and those guys, they're selling a version of history that is invisible to the country that just doesn't see it at all.
Only one of them will be the history.
So how about the history of whether or not the president mocked Serge Kowalewski, the reporter who had a congenital problem with an arm, so he had a bad arm.
You've all seen the videos of the president making a mocking gesture that looks like he's mocking that guy.
So if you saw that and you thought, well, that's reality, well, that's your history.
Except... If you see all of the other videos in which he's mocking people with the same motion, you see that he just does it to mock dumb opinions.
He made the same motion when he mocked Ted Cruz an entirely different time.
And he's made the same motion when he's mocked other people.
So which truth will be in the history book?
Will someday students learn that there was a president who was so bad he mocked people with disabilities in public?
Or will they learn it didn't happen and the media framed them?
Those are not the same.
Only one of those could be true.
Will they learn that the president was good for the economy?
Or will they learn that he was lucky and he inherited a strong economy from Obama?
Well, somebody gets to write the history books, which way are they going to write it?
Did the things that he did, you know, were Trump's actions important to get us to where we are?
Or were they unimportant?
Will the history books say that we had a racist in office?
Or will they say that we had a media which was out of control?
Those, there's not the same.
You know, I mean, you can imagine there'd be some overlap.
But those are very different histories.
All right. Now, I'm very amused by the fact that the media doesn't quite know which horse to back for the Democrats.
I think it makes sense for them to give as much attention as they can to candidates who are interesting.
So, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is interesting.
And I would expect he'll get a lot of attention if he keeps saying interesting things.
I don't think he has any chance of winning the presidency.
And so, at some point, if CNN realizes that he couldn't win, well, they're going to have a problem because he would be perfect for them.
I'm sure they would love to cover him.
He's got something interesting going on because he's married to a man, so that makes the whole story more interesting.
And he's clever and he's got lots of things going for him.
But if he can't win...
Will they back him?
Yeah, so I've been predicting for, I don't know, at least eight months or so, I've been predicting that Kamala Harris, as boring as she is, might be the only one who could survive the primary process.
It seems to me that Biden will go into a gaffe spiral, Do any of you think that Joe Biden can get through 10 minutes of being a candidate without just totally screwing the pooch?
It just feels like he's like the gaff man waiting to gaff.
And it's going to be embarrassing because the main thing that Democrats are going to have against President Trump Is sort of stuff about his competence and his age, his competence, all that stuff.
And Biden looks worse on all of that stuff.
So he's a bad matchup.
Bernie, I don't know if anybody thinks he can win because of the socialism stuff.
But I don't know if Biden can get nominated because of all the socialist stuff.
What happens? Well, let me ask you this question.
So apparently the White House is working on their own health care plan.
What happens if it's good?
There's one thing that nobody sees coming.
I don't think there's anybody on the left or the right who sees the possibility that the White House will come up with a health care plan that when people see it, they go, huh, that's actually pretty good.
Do you think that's even possible?
Let me ask you, how many of you think the White House is going to come up with a health care plan that's pretty good?
You know, something that you look at and you go, huh, I would actually want to know more about that.
That's certainly in the right direction.
How many of you have any faith that that could happen?
Because I would think that the Republicans, the Trump supporters, may be a little bit, I don't know, A little bit too often disappointed on that point.
It's been so long since the Republicans performed on that topic.
You just don't imagine that maybe they can.
Maybe they can't.
Maybe this is just beyond their ability.
But they do have smart people working on it.
And if the Republicans...
Come up with some kind of health care plan that at the very least you can argue is a good deal.
Something that smart people can look at and say, I don't know, maybe I wouldn't have gone this way, but it certainly makes sense.
Does it, you know, is it a free market thing?
Is it simple? You know, you'd be looking for some basic stuff.
So, I'm going to make you a prediction.
Are you ready? I'm going to predict that the White House's health care plan will surprise you that it's better than you think.
So I think that they will surprise it in a positive way.
So that's my prediction.
In part because they've been kind of quiet about it.
And so that makes me think they're doing the work.
So we'll see. That's my prediction.
I'm going to stick with it.
The Democrats will call it worse than the Holocaust.
Yes, they will. All right.
Now, does anybody have any questions?
As I said, I overslept.
Okay. What do you think about the CNN Obama slam article?
You know, I saw that headline and I didn't see who wrote it.
I was assuming that if it's on CNN and it slams Obama, so Mueller report looks bad for Obama is the headline.
I just want to see who wrote it.
Scott Jennings. Oh, so Scott Jennings is a pro-Trumper, right?
Yeah. So, if we're being fair, and sometimes I like to be fair, if we're being fair, CNN does have, you know, guest opinion pieces on their website that are from pro-Trumpers.
So they do occasionally have, you know, Steve Cortez and Every once in a while, we'll have somebody who's a pro-Trumper do an article.
So you've got to give them credit for that.
They do give a platform.
But the truth, in terms of communication, the truth that people hear has a lot to do with frequency and context.
So if you only have one pro-Trumper and you have 100 anti-Trumpers on your network, You can't really say you gave them a fair platform because the volume of one kind of opinion is always going to be more important than the fact that you allowed another opinion.
Just the fact that it was allowed, if it's dwarfed by all the other opinions, you're still sending the message that one of them is true and the other one is an outlier.
Uh... So let us take stock of the number of things that people assumed about this presidency that didn't work out.
They assumed the economy would crash.
Wrong. They assumed we would be getting into more wars, not fewer.
Wrong. A lot of people assumed that the president would not be tough on Russia.
Wrong. I mean, I think maybe somebody would argue about that, but I'm pretty sure that the United States administration is tougher on Putin than we've ever been.
One of the things that people always say is, how come President Trump isn't doing more to stop Russia from interfering?
What's wrong with that opinion?
When people say, hey, the Trump administration, they should be doing more to stop Russia from interfering again.
What's wrong with that opinion is, how in the world would we know what they're doing?
Should we know what they're doing?
Would you want to know what they're doing?
Because it seems to me that we usually respond in kind.
So, in other words, if another country does something to us, we'd probably respond with something that's a similar level or a similar situation.
Wouldn't it make sense that our cyber experts are so far up Putin's ass right now that they can look at his eyes?
Don't you think that the president and the administration has sent a message to Putin that if they see a trace of this again, they're going to take him out?
Take him out, meaning that their cyber operations would get pretty serious.
Sort of a mutually assured destruction.
Because you can imagine that our cyber forces could do any manner of damage over in Russia.
And now having warned them as clearly as possible, About what would happen if they do it again, and knowing that we could probably detect it, would they do it again?
And what more could the president say that would be more effective than whatever we've already said?
Let me ask you this.
Do you think Putin is sitting over there in Russia and saying to himself, I've got a free pass.
This next election, I'm going to go interfere again because the blowback wasn't that big.
I think there were some sanctions, right?
Do we still have some sanctions on them because of their involvement in the election last time?
I don't think so.
Do you think Putin is saying it's totally worth it, I'm going to do it again?
Probably not. You know, that doesn't mean he wouldn't consider things that he thought he could get away with, because if he thought he could get away with it, of course he'd do it.
But does it look like they can get away with cyber stuff anymore?
We're all going to be looking for it.
We're going to see Russian involvement even where there is no Russian involvement.
We're going to see nothing but Russian involvement everywhere.
Everybody's going to be looking for it.
So, if...
It feels to me that Trump, or the administration, is probably doing as much as they possibly could in terms of making sure Russia has a very clear message, don't do this again, and also probably making it clear that they know exactly what their future looks like if they do it again.
And it's probably not pleasant for Russia.
I wish someone would publish what exactly they posted.
I don't know what that means. All right.
Here's my idea for North Korea.
You want to hear my new peace plan for North Korea?
So we've got this little impasse where apparently we're all afraid of who goes first.
So, not afraid of, but nobody wants to go first.
So Kim doesn't want to give up his nukes, all of his nukes, first.
Before the U.S. does whatever he wants us to do to deescalate, get rid of the sanctions and be less militarily aggressive, I suppose, in whatever way they're talking about.
Now... Because we can't get past that, the U.S. is never going to go first, and Kim really can't go first.
Even if he wants to get to the end, nobody knows how to go first.
So here's a suggestion.
I'm just going to throw this out.
What if the United States decided to not only declare an end to the Korean War, which would be symbolic, wouldn't really have any impact on the ground, but suppose we suggested to North Korea That we would work with them for their mutual defense against Russia.
I'll let that sink in a little bit.
Suppose we made a deal with North Korea to partner with them militarily to protect them from Russia.
Now the first thing you might say is, they don't need any protection from Russia.
Russia is their ally.
They've been working well with Russia since the beginning.
But here's the thing.
Here's the thing. Don't you think North Korea is afraid of Russia?
Don't you think that North Korea worries that Russia is trying to control them?
Because I'm sure they are.
Why wouldn't they? Now, your first reaction is, this is a terrible idea.
And I get that. So let's just talk through it.
The mental thing that happens if you say, hey, North Korea, it looks like we have a common enemy.
So why don't we join forces, not militarily.
I'm not talking about doing joint military action.
I'm not talking about arming North Korea with any kind of weapons that would be any kind of a threat to the South or to us.
I'm talking about some kind of a military support agreement, Something that wouldn't bind us too much, but would show that we're sort of on their side defending against Russia.
What makes this interesting is it redefines the whole situation and it gives Kim something to show as success.
Not only did we end a war with the United States and with South Korea, which would be a big accomplishment, we've actually joined forces At least in some minor military way.
And it could be more symbolic than actual to protect against Russia.
Now, I doubt they would take that deal.
But here's the bigger thinking about it.
How do you get past...
The problem that nobody will go first.
And the answer is you have to shake the box again.
You have to change the variables in play.
If what you're thinking is you give us something and then we give you something and then we can have some kind of a peace deal, apparently that's not enough variables.
Because if it were, we would already have a deal.
And keep in mind that both sides want to get to the same place.
It's not like there's an actual disagreement.
There's only a disagreement on the path There's not a disagreement on the endpoint.
The endpoint is North Korea would like to be secure, and we would like to not be threatened.
You know, there's economics involved with that, but basically that's it.
And since we don't have any kind of an issue with North Korea not being threatened, I mean, we have no national interest in threatening them, and we don't have any, you know, and likewise...
We have no reason to want the other not to get what they want.
So we should be able to make a deal, but we need to introduce some variables.
So one of the variables might be that whatever agreement we make doesn't look like a simple agreement between North Korea and South Korea and the North to end nuclear war.
Maybe you have to We're good to go.
And then they could transfer their nuclear expertise.
It's about 75% useful for peaceful nuclear technology.
So you could transfer your resources that you built up, and the public would say, hey, this is great.
We got something valuable.
We got peace out of our nuclear program, and we got energy, and we got an economic way forward.
This is all good. So it could be that you have to introduce something like, you know, a nuclear-related positive energy thing or something to do with an international agreement that would protect them in ways that are not already protected.
So thinking broader is probably the way past it.
That's my suggestion.
China doesn't like the birth of American ally next door.
Well, you know, we take that as a given.
But is there anything we couldn't put in South Korea that wouldn't be just as threatening?
Because I don't see a world where we would ever amass troops in North Korea.
So I don't see any world in which we would put military assets or boots on the ground in North Korea.
And South Korea is close enough to China that if we wanted to put nukes there, there would be, and I'm not even sure we need to be nearby.
Are we ever, would we ever contemplate a world in which we physically attack mainland China?
Is China actually worried that the United States would ever be part of an actual invasion?
I don't see them worrying about that for one minute.
Is the United States worried that China will try to physically invade the United States, like pull a bunch of boats up and get out of the boats and start running toward our shores?
I don't think so.
I think we have zero worry about that.
Because we have things called airplanes and missiles and stuff.
If we ever got into a war with China, it's not going to happen with boats.
And if it does, it's going to be a skirmish, not a war.
So I would test the assumption that China has a big problem with North Korea being okay with the United States.
I just don't think it makes that much difference as long as there's no change in military assets.
And indeed, it might lead to fewer military assets in South Korea.
So it could be that if the North gets friendly with the United States, it would reduce the amount of military assets in the neighborhood of China because we just wouldn't need it.
All right.
I'll get rid of this troll.
All right.
Goodbye troll. What does Gordon Chang say?
Lately, whenever I hear Gordon Chang, who is probably one of the most knowledgeable people about that area, He usually is talking about China shafting the United States and how we must be a lot tougher.
And I'm sure he's right about that.
All right.
Yeah.
Simulation today.
You have questions about the simulation?
Where is Justice Bader?
When was the last time we saw her?
Chang does not think Kim is winning.
Uh, You know, somebody asked me, somebody's asking here, what does Dershowitz think of the Mueller report?
And I haven't seen him, which is weird.
You would think he would be one of the primary people you'd see.
But I have not seen anything from Dershowitz, so if anybody's seen it, tweet it at me.
Trump approval is down to 37%, somebody says.
I haven't seen any. I have not seen that, but if that's true, it would be a headline on CNN. We'll see if they have anything like that.
I don't see it. It might depend which survey you're looking at.
Oh, Dershowitz had an article on the Hill.
Okay. My book, Loser Think, which I am happy to say, was accepted yesterday.
So my publisher accepted my manuscript.
Now, it was, you know, I knew it would be accepted eventually because we have a long history and I know how to do these things, writing books, that is.
But it is always a big, big day for an author to be done with a book.
Now remember, I have a day job plus this.
So adding an entire book on top of what you were already doing, your full-time job that you already had, is a really hard thing to do.
I don't know if you can quite understand how hard it is to hold the material of a book in your head.
Because for months and months, you have to hold in your head all of the chapters.
You have to keep reconfiguring them in your mind.
You have to learn which ones are stronger and weaker and how they all tie together.
You have to figure out sort of a story arc, even though it's non-fiction.
You have to figure out a beginning and a middle and the end.
So the engineering complexity...
Of writing a book, at least the books that I write, just the complexity of the actual engineering of the writing is insane.
It is so brain-draining that it's hard to explain.
When you think about writing, you're typically, if you're imagining being a writer, you say to yourself, okay, I can imagine what that would be.
You're sitting in front of your keyboard And you know what you're going to write about.
You've either researched it or something, you know.
And you're writing sentences.
So your imagination of what it's like to be a writer, if you're not one, is probably about writing sentences that fit well together.
But it's actually layer on top of layer on top of layer of how simple it is, who's your audience, Have you connected your thoughts?
How many thoughts are there?
How long is it? How do you engineer them together?
How do you manage people's feelings?
How do you talk to the audience and still tell them something new?
How do you add layers of humor?
Is there a visual element?
Do you add a visual element? How do you tie this all to the headlines?
How do you tie it to the zeitgeist, something people are already thinking about?
How do you make sure that people see it as something new?
Because there are so many books in the world.
How do you prevent somebody saying, oh, I think there are so many books like this already?
How do you do all those things?
You have something like a 25-dimension problem.
And every time you sit down to write a sentence, you have to imagine all 25 dimensions So that your one sentence you're writing, and there will be many sentences in your book, that every sentence makes sense with about 25 dimensions.
So that's what it's like to write a book.
And if you can imagine how absorbing that is and how much it takes of your gray matter, I mean, I barely have enough left over to drive a car.
It's so completely absorbing.
Now, not everybody...
Not everybody writes books with the same method I do.
So I know from experience that a lot of you have curiosity about the mental process or the business process of writing a book.
And I understand because I had the same curiosity before I was doing it.
I usually work in layers.
Meaning that I start laying down a layer, and I'll go back to that layer, and I'll rework it lots and lots of times.
But until I've got a layer that I like, I don't add the next layer.
So for example, one layer might be an outline of the general topics I want to include in the book.
So I'll make sure I've got the topics, and they're roughly in the order that I want them.
That's one layer. But then I've got to tie them all together.
I've got to make sure that they make sense as a whole.
That's another layer. I've got to add a style of writing, which could be different depending on who the audience is.
So my style might be simple, or it might be more academic, or it might be more lighthearted, or it might be something else.
At some point, I add humor.
So I might actually write an entire book and then go through and then change some of the sentences to funnier versions of the sentence.
So that's a whole other layer.
So, yeah, and then organization-wise, somebody asked the question, how do you organize a book?
And the answer is there's some things that you need to have in some places.
So typically your first chapter or two, you want to be really, really strong And you want it to be the one that makes you curious for the rest of the book.
So your first two chapters are really a marketing job for the rest of the book.
So marketing is another layer.
You're actually marketing the book within the book.
Because if somebody reads the first few pages, That does not mean they're going to read the rest of the book.
A lot of people bail out.
So your first few pages are really a marketing plan to get somebody to read the rest of the book.
Then the last chapter, you want to leave people with something that they take value from and ideally something they feel.
So if you get to the last page of a book and you don't feel a sensation, Then you haven't done it right.
Or at least you haven't done it as well as you could.
You want somebody to feel, at the end of the book, one of these things.
It could be any of these things, but you want them to feel one of these things.
One, I've got to talk to somebody about this right away.
If at the end of a book, somebody is saying, I need to talk to somebody about this.
This is so interesting.
I just got to go talk to my friend about this.
That's a good book. If they feel, oh my God, I just got to chill right That's a good book.
If their body, if they're crying, if they feel inspired, that's a good book.
If you can get somebody at the end of the book and they say to themselves, I'm definitely going to read this book again.
That one I love.
If the last word somebody reads of your book, they read that last word, and the next thing they think is, damn, I've got to read this book again.
Not today, but I want to read it again.
So those are just some of the things that you want people to feel at the end of the book.
The middle of the book...
It tends to be a lot of the, let's say, the bread and butter, the meat and potatoes, the information that may not be fascinating, but is still the meat of the book.
You know, the real, important, factual, good points, you know, solid thinking, etc.
So the middle of the book can sometimes be less interesting, at the same time it's more useful.
So it could be the useful part of the book in the middle, but as an author, you know that because it's factually thick, it's going to be hard to make it interesting at the same time.
So if you've got a lot of stuff you're trying to convey, you don't have as much wiggle room for adding the art and the feel and the, you know, guiding the reader through.
So those are your basics.
You want a big opening that's really the marketing to tell people, yeah, I really do want to read the rest of this book.
So that's your good stuff. The middle might be less fascinating but more useful.
So the first part is more getting you interested and getting you excited.
The middle part might be less exciting but But really the useful part of the book.
And then at the end, you want to leave them with a feeling.
It's like a gift.
What gift did you give them at the end of the book?
So that's for nonfiction.
For fiction, you've got a whole story arc.
That's a different deal. All right.
That's more than most of you want here.
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