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May 29, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:53
Episode 547 Scott Adams: How to Win on Social Media for 2020
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Hey everybody, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams and the Simultaneous Sip.
Why is this so important, you ask yourself?
Well, let me explain. Have you ever noticed that when you're in a bad mood, everything seems to go bad that day?
But if you're in a good mood, it seems like everything goes well that day.
Have you ever noticed that? Not every single thing.
But it seems like when you're in a good mood, you have more good things happen.
When you're in a bad mood, it looks like the universe is conspiring against you.
I know you've noticed that.
It's probably not a coincidence.
It could be because reality is subjective and you're actually creating reality as you go.
We don't know if that's true.
We don't know if you're creating reality.
We don't know if maybe it just seems that way.
But I can tell you one thing. If you start your day in a good mood, chances are the rest of your day is going to be a lot better.
And one of the ways to do that is to join me for the simultaneous sip, an unparalleled pleasure.
Probably the best way to start the morning of all time.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a chalice, a stein, a tankard, possibly a thermos, maybe a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah.
And if you haven't learned to do the ah part, you should really get on that, because it really makes a difference.
Alright, well, I'm full of good news today.
I'm probably going to do more good news than bad news from now on.
I'm going to become your source of dopamine, that chemical that makes you feel good all day.
So, the first thing we should know is that we're coming into the summer news cycle.
What is different about the summer news cycle?
There's not much news.
So we're going to be entering a period where the news sort of freezes.
There won't be necessarily, I mean there could be, but chances are there's not a lot happening over the summer.
Last summer was so slow by August, the news was so dead by August, that the President of the United States invited me in to have a chat.
I'm not even making that up.
Last August, the news was so slow.
Congress was off doing their summer vacations or whatever, that literally the President of the United States said, let's call in that Dilbert guy and we'll chat for a little while.
Now, he was talking to a lot of people that summer.
I think he was just using the time to shore up his base, which was very smart.
But summer is coming and there isn't a lot of bad news for this president.
Indeed, the only news that's sort of brewing looks like it's maybe more good news than bad news.
And so the Democrats are probably just having, you know, a cow right now.
Is that a saying? Can you have a cow?
That doesn't make sense.
How do you have a cow? Is that like giving birth to a cow?
It makes no sense. I think it's a saying.
Anyway, they're going to desperately need some bad news to give them something to talk about for the summer, and it doesn't look like it's going to be served up.
If you look at the Middle East peace plan that Jared is looking into, there are two possibilities.
One, Nothing good will come of it, which would be largely what everybody would expect.
So that's not really bad news.
That would be, well, we tried.
Again, nothing happened.
But there is something different about the Middle East right now that we've never seen before.
We have never seen a time in history when the Middle East was as well-situated Some kind of a comprehensive peace in which the Palestinians and the Israelis and the Iranians at minimum make some kind of a deal.
And what I mean by that is that everybody is flexible in a way they've never been before.
So you have the most flexible group of countries, more flexible than they've ever been for different reasons.
I'll talk about that.
At the same time, you probably have the strongest...
The most flexible leaders, the people who have the most strength and flexibility at the same time, which is really, really something you don't want to lose.
I mean, the fact that Jared Kushner is trying to make something happen, I think he knows that there may never be a better time.
Here's why. Saudi Arabia, with all of the issues that we know about with Chichoke and everything else, has still maintained a good relationship with the United States at great political cost to President Trump.
President Trump invested a lot of political capital in keeping Saudi Arabia in our friend circle, even if maybe they haven't earned it.
That's an asset.
The President created an asset out of nothing.
This is what he does better than anything.
He creates something out of nothing.
Because that something now in Saudi Arabia really, really needs to redeem itself in the Middle East, redeem itself with the world.
What could be a better way?
What could be a better way than some kind of comprehensive peace plan?
Meanwhile, other big player, the Iranians.
Now, if Iran is forced into some kind of a deal, that means that their proxies also have pressure to make a deal.
So if you get Iran, you probably make a lot of progress with all the proxies, maybe with the Palestinians as well.
And it looks to me like Iran.
The way they're talking and the way they're acting is that they realize they're going to have to do something different to get a different result than what they have right now.
And what they have right now is a bad situation.
Their economy is getting strangled.
In a way, it's never been strangled before.
We've never had this level of economic pressure on them.
And to the point where it could bring down the regime in a year or two if they don't do anything.
If they don't make a big change They're probably going to fail in a year or two.
So time is not on their side and that makes them flexible.
Now they tried flexing their military muscle a little bit just to see if they could change the variables and President Trump quickly shut that down by sailing much of our naval assets into the area just to say maybe you should not do this.
And it looks like the Iranians decided Maybe we shouldn't do this.
So I would say Iran is more flexible than they've ever been, because there's more pressure than there's ever been, and they're getting close to the total failure point.
Saudi Arabia's got money, influence, etc.
Other countries in the region have worked with us before.
They've got money.
They're probably getting flexible too.
And then you've got Israel.
Israel is coming from a point of strength right now, and if Netanyahu continues being their leader, he's got a great relationship with the president, and he's made at least peace gestures toward the people of Iran, and he seems to be the right person, the right set of skills, the right badass personality to make a deal.
Because it helps that you're a hardliner, If you're trying to make peace, because then the threat of war is still credible and everybody knows you're doing it for the right reasons.
It's not because you're weak.
So, I'm not going to go so far as to predict that there will be Middle East peace.
I think you'd have to be foolish to make that prediction after, you know, a zillion years of no peace.
But, I will say unambiguously, we've never had this set of variables.
Where everybody's flexible at the same time for different reasons.
And we have really strong leaders in all of those countries.
So even the Ayatollah, no matter what you think of him, he's a strong leader, and he can make something happen if he needs to.
And maybe he will not be the leader of the year, so things could change.
All right. So there's that.
Then, of course, there's the whole situation with Bill Barr looking into the...
Looking into what was the origins of the Russia investigation, certainly there will be no good news coming out of that for Democrats.
We don't know what will come at it, but it's not going to be good news for Democrats.
So they've got a tough, tough summer coming up.
It looks like it's going to be a summer of unparalleled economic success.
Maybe something positive looking in the Middle East.
Kim Jong Un remains friends with President Trump, apparently.
And by the way, people have joked about this, but it's not really a joke.
When Kim Jong Un started insulting John Bolton, He was pacing most of the electorate in the United States.
It was one of those weird situations in which everybody came together, but we didn't see it coming.
When Kim Jong-un said that, what did he call Bolton?
He called...
So North Korea's government called National Security Advisor John Bolton, quote, a warmonger and, quote, a defective human product.
And most of the people in the United States saw that and they said, yeah, that's not too far off.
You know, I'm not going to put up a counter to that argument at the moment.
He's... John Bolton is somebody that...
Largely, the people on both the right and the left are pretty wary of him.
I will go even further and say, if we did not have a President Trump to make sure that Bolton's instincts have some kind of a counter, and it's a superior counter, if we didn't have that, I don't know if I would talk about anything else except getting rid of him.
Nothing would be more important to the well-being of the world and the country than removing John Bolton from office if If you didn't have a President Trump, who I think is a reliable counter to his impulses, you put them together and they're actually a really strong team.
This has been said many times, but it has to be said again.
Bolton is the bad cop and he does create a useful asset that the president has skillfully used to say, well, you know, it'd be good to be friends with me.
Because I can make good things happen.
I can help your economy.
I can avoid war. I can do everything you want.
I have everything you want, and I'm willing to help you with it.
But if that doesn't work out, have you met John Bolton?
Because he's got some ideas that you might not like so much.
So they're a great team.
But when Kim Jong-un insults Bolton, most of the United States says, well, finally, we're on the same page with this.
Now, Bolton does have his supporters, so I don't want to exaggerate that.
But it is humorous.
That the worst thing happening with North Korea right now, think about it, the worst thing happening with North Korea in the United States is that President Trump is having fun with it.
You know, he's joking about Joe Biden.
People in the United States are saying, well, if Kim Jong-un is just insulting John Bolton, Kim Jong-un is, he's not dumb.
At least he thinks like we do on some things.
So that's pretty funny. All right.
I talked about...
I did a special Periscope yesterday, in case you noticed, about Trump's hilarious tweet, in which he said, I was actually sticking up for sleepy Joe Biden while on foreign soil.
Kim Jong-un called him a, quote, low-IQ idiot, and many other things, whereas I related the quote of Chairman Kim as a much softer, quote, low-IQ individual.
Who could possibly be upset with that?
Now, do you remember, I don't know, a couple years ago when people were saying, it was popular for people to say, I hope this behavior doesn't become normalized.
Don't normalize this behavior.
This president cannot be normalized.
Whatever you do, don't normalize him.
And I look at this quote and I think, aren't you glad this got normalized?
I mean, seriously. Can you tell me you're not happy that this got normalized?
This is funny.
It's fun. It doesn't hurt anybody.
It's just good, clean fun.
And the fact that President Trump brought in his buddy Kim Jong-un as part of the joke just makes it funnier.
And you know Kim Jong-un probably saw this and said, okay, that's pretty funny.
Don't you think Kim Jong-un saw this and said, okay, well, there's two things we agree on.
John Bolton's kind of a wild card, and Joe Biden's kind of a low-Q individual.
So, it's probably the healthiest...
Maybe the healthiest sign you could ever see is that Trump and Kim Jong are sort of joking about Joe Biden.
There's no way that's bad.
You could try to turn that into something bad, but it is not.
It is whatever the opposite of war.
If you were to make a continuum where, you know, there's good stuff on this side and all the way to war on this side, we're as far away from war as you can get.
When you're making jokes.
Jokes are a good place to be.
Alright. There was a huge thing that happened recently that the news will not recognize as anything.
It will be completely, it will never be news, it'll never be a headline, and might possibly be, and I feel this strongly by the way, One of the most important things happening in the world right now, and I might be biased because some of you remember, I guess a few years ago, I had teased on social media that I had an idea that could change the world.
And I was willing to sell that idea.
I did it as an experiment to see if anybody would fund a company based on an idea.
And I actually got a company to say yes, and they sent me a contract and said, yeah, that idea is so good that we will actually give you a percentage of the company just for the idea.
And some internal changes happened at the company, and they ended up not being able to complete the contract, which was independent of whether it was a good idea.
So I had an idea that I thought would change the world, a company was willing to fund it, and I didn't even have to do anything, which was very unusual, because that's not a normal situation.
People don't pay for ideas.
That just doesn't happen.
Nobody pays for an idea, unless it's such a good idea.
Here's the idea. Y Combinator, which is probably the most prestigious startup incubator in the country, maybe the world, announced that one of their companies raised monies.
It's called Outschooler, O-U-T, Schooler, one word.
Outschooler. And they got investments.
And what they are, they describe themselves as, quote, The Netflix of education online.
The Netflix of online education.
What that means is exactly the idea that I tried to sell unsuccessfully to this company.
And that idea is to have a marketplace where anybody can create a class.
Just like Netflix is a marketplace where anybody can create a movie, and if they make a good movie, Netflix will consider putting that on their platform.
If you make a good TV show, Netflix will put it on their platform.
And so they have done the thing that is...
Somebody's saying Udemy does that.
I'm making a stark...
Difference between classes that a company puts on a platform versus a platform that lets anybody put content there if they meet certain requirements.
Now, I'm not an expert on the other companies doing that, so there may be some other companies who are already in the business, which would be all good news.
So the point is that the education field had never been subject to competitive To competition, to free market competition.
If you have a platform that you own it, that you control who the instructors are, etc., that's not exactly a free market enough situation.
But if you have something that's really a Netflix for education, then even I, I mean literally me, I could make a class.
So I can say to myself, you know what?
You know what? Kids who are 14 through 18 need to learn?
Well, they need to learn about maybe systems over goals.
Maybe they need to learn about persuasion.
Maybe they need to learn how to write.
I could make a class, and then I could put it on there.
And if people like my class, I could make money.
Somebody's saying WebIQ is this.
So I'm not going to necessarily say that...
Yeah, and YouTube could do this as well.
But as the free market allows people to compete for online, here's the big thing.
Here's the big idea for all of this.
Online training has the potential to be so inexpensive, it's effectively free.
We're very close to the point where online education will become good enough that people will prefer it over going in person.
We're not there yet.
Right now, going in person is still up here.
Doing it online is still down here.
There are exceptions. Certainly, there are bad exceptions.
Bad in-person teachers and there are good online things that might be better.
But in general, on average, in-person is still better than online.
But these free market classes will allow people to compete just like movies do.
And the quality of the online is just going to keep going up.
The quality of in-person education is not going to get much better.
It's sort of as good as it's going to be.
But online will keep getting better because of these free market forces.
The moment it crosses over, the only thing missing...
It's the certifications, the credibility, the part where you say, I got a degree and it means something.
That is almost certainly going to change in the next five to ten years, maybe sooner.
And all it requires is people with enough credibility.
I always use Bill Gates as my example because he works for lots of examples.
If Bill Gates ever says publicly, here's the deal.
If you take these specific classes online, I will award you the Gates Foundation Bachelor's of Education, or whatever it is, whatever the class is.
The moment he does that, people are going to say, well, that's a thing.
That's a thing. Bill Gates looked into it.
He's credible. If he says this is a college degree...
That's a college degree. If Warren Buffett says, if you take these classes online, you have a degree, in my opinion, I will give you the Warren Buffett college degree certification.
That means something.
Now, not everybody could do that, but people who have enough of a credibility could certainly do that.
Could President Trump do that?
Yes, he could. President Trump, through the administration, not him personally.
Yeah, let's not call it Trump University.
I guess that's a problem.
So forget what I said about President Trump.
Let's make it a government certification.
The government could say, we're going to certify college degrees online as collections of classes if they meet certain criteria.
And the government could say, here are the criteria.
And anybody who meets it can say, I got the government four-year degree, whatever that is.
All right. Somebody said, America first university.
Maybe. But the larger point here is that, you know, when I say that I've left at Bernie, which I often say, I say because I want all the things he wants.
Except, as you can see, it is often the case, that capitalism can get you, it can deliver, what socialism promises.
So socialism promises you free education, but it doesn't know how to get it.
Capitalism doesn't promise you anything, but it might give you free education.
In fact, I will upgrade my might to it will.
At this point, there's absolutely nothing that will stop this from happening, because the free market will give you increased quality of online education.
It will cross over in-person education, and it won't take long.
Three years, maybe?
I'd say three to five years, and online education will be functionally completely superior to in-person.
But it may not have the credibility until people start blessing certain sets of classes.
But we're going to get there.
So free education is going to happen.
Free college is going to happen.
Nothing could stop it.
Bertie doesn't even have to do a darn thing.
He doesn't have to promise anything.
He doesn't have to get out of bed in the morning.
Bertie is going to get free college.
He just has to wait three to five years.
All right. So that's the other good news.
Apparently Netflix is rethinking, speaking of Netflix, two Netflix related stories in one day.
The real Netflix is thinking about They're thinking about rethinking their investment in Georgia under the condition that these so-called heartbeat bills about abortion get passed.
Now, they didn't say they'd pull out.
They said they'd rethink their investment.
But what I predicted was that these states that make abortion impossible through whatever legislation or other means...
Those states will be so economically damaged that it will limit how many states are willing to do this.
So I do think some states will become no-abortion states.
That seems likely. But they will suffer economically because companies will decide not to go there.
And probably, this is my other prediction from long ago, it seems to me that apps will form, sort of like the GoFundMe apps, in which somebody can finance travel to another state to get an abortion.
So, if several southern states make abortion impossible or the clinics move away because it's too hard to operate, there will be an app.
I guarantee it.
I don't know who's going to make it, but I guarantee this will happen.
There will be an app.
This says, I need an abortion and I'm in the wrong state, what do I do?
And you're going to find all the resources for somebody to give you a ride, you'll find somebody to stay with, somebody to make sure that you're okay when you're in this other state, and a ride back home.
They might even help you fund it.
It's possible. Alright, so some apps will, somebody mentioned my startups app, WenHub, and I wasn't thinking about that when I mentioned this, but WenHub allows you to talk to any expert about anything?
And one of those things you could do is connect to somebody who could solve this problem for you.
I'm not recommending it.
That's not what the app was made for.
But it's a general purpose app in which any expert can talk to any person for a fee or for free.
They don't have to have a fee.
All right. Let me...
Let me talk about the Washington Post.
So somebody associated with the Washington Post, one of their central players, recently tweeted that although President Trump is talking about Biden's 1994 crime bill, And President Trump cleverly said that Democrats can't vote for somebody who supported that.
I love the way he put it.
He didn't say that's going to be a problem or that works against you or whatever.
He actually said in direct language that African Americans can't vote for somebody who was involved with that crime bill.
Now, of course they can, but let me frame it this way.
Many of you remember that maybe a year ago or so, I was having conversations with Black Lives Matter leader, Hawk Newsom.
And one of the things I was telling him is that as long as Democrats have all of the votes, as long as they have all of the votes of the black population, they don't have to deliver anything.
And I also said that if Republicans could deliver anything, Just anything for the black population that you would have developed a competitive situation for the first time.
Now, let me give incredible credit to Candace Owens.
Candace Owens, And, you know, I think I'll point, you know, more than a lot of other people, lots of people were involved in this, but she seems to be the most effective voice for letting people understand there's an option to vote Republican if they are so inclined.
So she's done the best job of making that competitive situation.
And because the president was successful with prison reform, he now has something specific to talk about that says, look, Democrats couldn't give you this, I gave you this.
Now there are some other things he can talk about with unemployment and such, but they seem a little less direct.
Unemployment seems like, well, that's something you did for white people, just happened to be good for black people too.
You know, if you were inclined to think of things In racist ways, it would be easy to imagine that that wasn't an accomplishment.
It was just something that happened.
But the prison reform thing looks like a direct act.
It looks like something that was done that has a disproportionate benefit for the African-American community, and nobody had to do it.
I think he would agree that President Trump could have not done prison reform, and his supporters probably wouldn't care one way or the other.
Would you agree? That's largely the case.
It wasn't something he did for the base.
It was something he did for the country.
Because it made sense, and because he could.
That was it. It made sense, and he could.
He could do it. So he did it.
Exactly what you would like to see any of your government.
It made sense, so they did it.
But that has created now a competitive situation.
For the first time, it is obvious to the African American community, and I think really for the first time, it's obvious that they can completely control this election.
That's a big statement, but let me say it again because it's true.
The black community, African Americans in the United States, citizens, They will determine, or at least they could determine, it's up to them, who the next president is.
That's not too strong a statement, is it?
Because you know it's going to be close-ish no matter what.
You know that. If enough of the black vote goes Republican to maintain this competitive situation where the Democrats really have to offer something, they haven't offered anything.
Republicans have.
Let's get some competition.
Let's see the Democrats offer something that's so good that even the Republicans have to agree.
Let's see the Republicans offer something that's so good that even the Democrats have to agree.
So, congratulations, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, all the folks who have worked with the President, who have tried to create this exact situation.
This situation is As perfectly crafted as you ever would want it to be.
You want people to, yeah, and Kanye.
Kanye and, yeah, so Kanye and Kim Kardashian, you have to give them, Kim Kardashian West, you have to give them all kinds of credit.
Because they created a competitive situation.
Now, I don't think that every black person should vote Republican by any means.
What I think is that they should vote for whoever is going to help them the most, in their opinion, wherever that takes them.
But think about this situation.
However, how many years ago was it when slavery was the law of the land, or at least popular in the South?
How many years ago was that?
A few hundred years ago?
And here we are in 2019, we're coming off, you know, we came off eight years of an African-American president, and 160 people are giving me different numbers, so it was a while ago.
But, correct me if I'm wrong, the black voters in this country are going to decide the next president.
Is that wrong? Is it wrong to say that the black voters actually have control of the country right now?
If they want it. If they don't want it, they don't have it.
And, you know, certainly when black voters decided, hey, this Barack Obama guy looks kind of good.
We'd like to have a president who looks like us.
Did they not decide who was the president?
Could you not say conclusively that Barack Obama was elected because black citizens wanted him to be elected?
Of course, other people did too.
But I think that was the deciding part.
And likewise, with this upcoming election, if black voters decided that they just couldn't vote for Trump, he would have a lot of trouble getting re-elected.
If they decide that some of them want to vote for him, he'll probably get elected.
So I would say it's kind of down to the black vote.
And they've created this perfect competitive situation.
And I hate to be the one who's got all the good news, but this is the golden age.
This is the point where the black population figured out how to get stuff.
Now, one of the things that Hoag Newsom said that I can never get out of my mind, it's just so smart in terms of how to frame things.
He said that if this country does something that's good for the black community, it always helps the country.
And when you first hear that, you think, well, that can't be true in every case, right?
But it's hard to find an exception.
If you do things that are good for the black population in this country, you do end up doing things that are good for everybody.
Unless you limit it somehow by race, which we would not do.
Alright, so let's get to the fun part.
I made you wait. I wanted to tell you, because people have been asking me, if social media is going to put their finger on the scale, And social media is powerful enough that they can essentially decide who will get elected president.
They would even have more power than African Americans because everybody's subject to the same persuasion, right?
So social media could persuade black voters one way or the other, and they would have a lot of influence over that.
But what can you do about that?
So I want to talk about that.
So don't leave, because I'm going to tell you what to do if you're worried that social media is going to determine the election.
You might like this, and you might not.
Here's my suggestion for all of you.
This is what you can do.
Not the government.
I'm not talking about what Trump does or his administration.
I'm telling you what you can do.
All right? Here's what you can do.
Don't get kicked off of social media.
That's number one. Don't get kicked off of social media.
You know what you're doing when you're doing something edgy.
You know when you've gone too far.
You know when you're pushing the boundaries.
Don't. There's no law that says you have to push the boundary.
Think about any tweet that got anybody kicked off of social media.
Think about it. Any tweet...
That ever got somebody kicked off of social media or even put in jail on social media?
Was that tweet important to the person's life?
Never. Never.
The tweets that get people kicked off of social media are never important.
They're never important.
They're just something that was over a line, so you got kicked off.
So don't do that.
If you get temporarily kicked off because you've got a bad tweet or a bad post, and all you have to do is remove it, remove it.
Remove it right away.
Don't take your own power away.
All right? Next, grow your followers.
Figure out how to grow your following because then you'll have more voice.
The more people who follow you, the more influence you have.
So do what you can to learn how to grow your user base and how to participate effectively.
You should follow each other to boost your signal.
If you're following a number of voices on the right and you would like even more people on the right to have more power, follow some extra people.
Figure out who you think is influential and then boost their signals by...
Let's get rid of this guy.
All right. And then next, learn persuasion.
If you haven't read my book, Win Bigly, you should do it.
Because social media can have a big influence in terms of decisions they make about what you see.
But you can also have a big influence by simply learning how to be more persuasive.
So read my book, Win Bigly.
Follow my periscopes and try out some of the techniques.
Be visual. Don't be obscene because the cleaner stuff gets more virality.
Over the next year, I will teach you more tips about how to be persuasive, and that helps.
But here's the big one. So this is the one to remember.
I'm going to be modeling this going forward.
On social media, when Trump was first running for election, it felt like those who were supporting him were pirates.
It was like he was the head pirate, and he had a band of pirates doing things that were edgy and dangerous and sometimes could get kicked off of social media, things that were maybe on the border of ethical behavior, some of it well beyond that.
It was a pirate situation.
And then he won. Is it appropriate to take your pirate mentality to re-election when this president is successful on all the normal ways that you want success?
It's not.
So here's the suggestion.
Become nice.
It's really powerful.
If people who support the president simply block everybody who makes a personal comment and never sees that person again, you can live, first of all, a life of far less stress, but you will also take it to a higher level.
You can be a level of maturity that will be hard to fight against.
It's time to raise your game.
It's time to bring the way you talk about things.
It's time to take your persona online, your maturity.
It's time to take it up a level and recognize that you won.
You won. You got your president.
For those of you who are Trump supporters, you won.
Act like a winner. You don't need to act like a pirate anymore.
You don't need to argue with every troll.
I'm watching online.
There's one particular troll who's been bothering all the people in my timeline because they keep doing this loop where you prove them wrong and then they go back to the original point that you proved wrong before.
Yeah, her name is Emily.
I blocked her, but I didn't block all the people who are still interacting with her, so I keep seeing their end of it.
Please block her. I mean, if any of you who are dealing with this Emily troll, she's not a real citizen having a real conversation.
She's not. She is a troll.
She's in it for whatever reaction she's getting.
Don't give it to her.
So from now on, I'm going to completely reverse my pattern online.
I used to take a personal insult and then insult them back, and it was fun.
Mostly it was fun.
I did it to practice.
I did it because people would laugh at my replies, et cetera.
But I'm going to stop doing that as of today.
I'm going to start giving people no second chance.
So if somebody comes in with their stupid laundry list, oh, but your president is a big old racist, and here's the ten things that I hallucinated he did.
Block. Because that person is not a real voice.
That person is a person who's got an act.
They came to bother you.
And they came to boost their own signal.
Because if you interact with the trolls, you're giving them more visibility.
And you're making their day.
You're giving them exactly what they want.
Don't give them what they want.
Just shut them down. You can completely shut down the effectiveness of the other side by blocking them on the first offense.
So from now on, first offense.
If it's personal, so here are the rules.
I don't block anybody for disagreeing with what I said.
I don't block anybody for saying, oh, here's a link, you didn't consider this.
Disagreement, completely, completely acceptable.
And if I ever violate that line, I know that you'll keep me honest.
But the moment it's personal, Don't wait for the second thing.
Don't answer, and don't wait for a second insult.
Remove them, just like that.
Now, the other people I remove are the people who, they try to read my mind in public.
So, there are quite a few people who will tweet, and they'll include me in the tweet, and they'll say something like, well, Scott will block you for having a, people like to say this, Scott will block you for proving him wrong online.
Okay, if you say that, I will block you.
Because I don't do that.
So anybody who tries to read my mind and say in public what they think I'm thinking, you're always wrong.
So I'm going to block you instantly.
Because somebody like that doesn't ever go away.
If you interact with them, if you let them go, they'll just keep saying more of this stuff.
So get rid of it. Alright.
Now, at the same time, if you are successfully acting nice online, eventually that's going to become a story.
Because social media is doing something for you that looks terrible, but might not work out as terrible as you think.
What the social media platforms are doing are ahead of the 2020 election, and maybe just because it's ordinary business, they're getting rid of the most provocative voices on social media.
They are doing both sides.
You could argue that it's not equal, and I'm sure that's an argument worth having.
But the Krassensteins have been banned.
Who was it...
Who was the other guy who got banned recently?
Anyway, the point is, there are bans on both sides.
I wouldn't worry too much about the fact that there are more conservatives being banned.
Because if the people being banned...
Farrakhan, yes. So Farrakhan got banned.
So what's happening is the voices on the right that are the ones that would ruin your reputation...
Now, Woods is a special case because he's not really banned.
All he has to do is get rid of one tweet that has no importance.
Don't put James Woods into the category of real people who say things and get banned.
He's a different situation.
He could be back the moment he gets rid of one tweet that has no importance.
So that's a choice.
And likewise, if you find yourself in the James Woods situation, Where he, in his opinion, since the thing he got banned for was a famous quote, and it was not really a call to violence, he's resting on principle, apparently. I don't want to read his mind, but it looks like he's making a principled stand that free speech is free speech.
And it doesn't matter that somebody else reinterpreted it wrong.
That's not the point.
So I understand that point.
I accept it. It's credible.
It's, you know, it's real.
But if you want to be effective, I don't think that's working.
So it's a principled stand that I don't think works.
Do you know what would work?
Staying on social media and saying things that are healthy and good and persuasive.
That would help. What did James Woods do for you?
When he's online, he's a powerful voice that has, we hope, a productive outcome.
When he allows himself to be banned over a tweet that has no importance to anybody in the world, is he helping you?
He's not. He's not helping you.
He's not changing anything.
He's not helping himself. He's just got a little vacation from social media.
So don't be James Woods.
You know, I say again, I'll respect a principled stand, and he seems to be taking that.
So I do respect that. I'm just saying that it doesn't help anything, because it's not effective.
It's not effective at all.
All right. So, be nice on social media.
Block the trolls immediately.
Do not interact with them.
Don't let them put words in your mouth.
So the other people I will delete is if I get into a conversation online and they say something along the lines of, you know, you keep saying this and this is why you're wrong.
If they put words in my mouth, you can't fix that.
The people who say, but what you're really thinking, you can't fix that.
All right. Here's a little lesson on persuasion that I'd like to try out because you might need to use this one.
I started now on this point and I'm circling back to it.
So the Washington Post, I guess there might have been their Washington bureau chief, doesn't matter who it was.
He tweeted that the president...
is going to have problems criticizing Biden for his 1994 crime bill because the president, quote, has his own problems with the Central Park Five situation, which was also a long time ago.
Now, here's the thing.
The Central Park 5 thing, President Trump did a full-page ad in which he was complaining about crime and said maybe we should have the death penalty for these horrible crimes.
He did not mention race, although there was obviously the context was that the five African-American gentlemen who had been arrested and later were acquitted were released, I forget what, but they were found not guilty.
He believed they were guilty.
But their race was never part of the conversation.
Trump never mentioned race.
He mentioned crime.
We have seen quite clearly that he talks about crime as crime.
And when it came to, for example, the prison reform bill, President Trump did not say, oh, we can't do that because it's good for black people.
He went ahead and did it because it's good for people.
So, when the Washington Post said he's got this problem because of this Central Park Five situation decades ago, here's the right response, and it's the one that I gave.
I said that the Washington Post has equated crime and black people, and they need to explain that.
Because that's what happened.
I'm not making that up.
President Trump talked about crime.
That's it. He talked about crime and the death penalty.
If other people say that's about race, you can't make that argument unless you are introducing into the conversation that crime and black people are equated.
That is racist.
Criticizing the president for making a stand about crime without mentioning race and then going in and saying, hey, This is some kind of racist anti-black people.
The only way you can make that criticism is if you yourself are a racist who has decided that crime and black people are somehow paired.
The president didn't do that.
He never did that.
He never has done that, and I'm pretty sure he never will.
Because there's no evidence that he thinks that way.
He does hate crime.
That is as clear as possible.
There's no doubt in anybody's mind that he's anti-crime, like seriously, seriously anti-crime.
And he can still do a crime bill because it made sense and it was good for the country.
Somebody's saying, I don't agree with you on all issues talking to me, but this point is the reason I follow you.
Thank you. So, if you're in this situation, and I know you will be between now and 2020, somebody's going to bring up the Central Park Five.
Your response to it should be, Trump never mentioned race.
That's it. That's all you should say about Trump.
The rest of what you should say is about the frickin' jerk...
Who's trying to equate black people in crime, which bothers me, honestly.
Like, I'm not saying this as some clever little thing, you know, persuasion-wise.
It is persuasion, and I am teaching you how to do that.
But it frickin' bothers me.
It bothers me that the racists are accusing somebody who hasn't acted that way.
Of being a racist. It's like extra bothering that there's some form of projection going on there.
I hate using that word projection because I'm not a psychologist, so I withdraw that word.
I actually mock that word in my upcoming book.
All right. That's all I got today.
So... So I hope this little dose of dopamine was good.
I'm going to...
Keep working on the dopamine angle for these periscopes.
And by the way, if you did not know, these periscopes get downloaded in an hour or so.
They will be available on YouTube.
To find them, you would just search for the phrase, Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
Remember the real part.
Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
And then you can have the YouTube experience if you prefer that.
The live ones will be on Periscope if you want to get it fresh.
But... Let us end with a second simultaneous sip, in case you missed the first one, because it's so good.
So good. Raise your mug with me and join me now.
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