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June 2, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:07
Episode 552 Scott Adams: The Trump Impeachment HOAX, Bitcoin
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Hello everybody!
It's a wonderful, wonderful morning and it's time for the best part of your morning.
The Launchpad To a great day.
It starts now, but only if you're ready.
If you're prepared.
If you have something like a cup or a glass or a mug.
Could be a chalice or a tankard or a stein.
Maybe a thermos.
Possibly a flask.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
Mmm. So good.
Better than usual. Now, we're doing a little bit of an experiment today.
Some of you may have noticed.
Although it might be a failed experiment because today is Sunday, so we'll see.
So I've been doing YouTube videos, which are just these videos I download, and then my assistant puts up on YouTube an hour or so later.
And so I have all these analytics, so I can see what types of videos get the most viewage and how long they stay, etc.
Excuse me. And one of the things I noticed, which I'm sort of testing today, is that my videos that have titles with words that sound like they'd be bad for Trump tend to get a lot of traffic.
So if you notice, my Periscope title today was Trump Impeachment Hoax.
Now, also, I got a lot of traffic when I talked about hoaxes or persuasion.
So, in theory, the algorithm should not be smart enough to know that I'm not necessarily talking about anything bad about Trump.
But it should see Trump and impeachment, and if it's like all of the other videos, it will have high usage.
Now, it could be. It's entirely possible that those words just attract people.
So there might not be anything about shadow banning.
There might not be anything about any kind of algorithm, manipulation, mischief, or anything like that.
It could be just people see that word and they say, oh, this will be good.
So we're going to do a little test.
I will talk about it just so that my title is not a lie.
So the hoax part of impeachment is that neither side wants it.
The impeachment is entirely about theater at this point.
Now, I'm not going to say there isn't somebody who would like it if they could get it.
Of course, those people exist.
But in terms of a reality, there's nobody on the left who wants impeachment because they know that that guarantees a loss.
And there's nobody on the right who wants it, even though it would help Trump's chances of winning, say all the experts.
So you have this weird situation where our government is so useless...
That we're arguing about something that neither side wants.
Think about that.
Is it possible for a government to be more useless than endlessly debating something that nobody wants?
They don't want it.
We don't want it. Nobody wants it.
Right, so that's the hoax part.
But let's talk about shadow betting some more.
I think I told you that over 1,600 people have reported that they've followed me on Twitter at one point, and then for reasons they don't understand, they got unfollowed.
Now, some number of them Some of them are probably due to technical this or that.
Some number of them are probably due to false memory, you thought you followed, you didn't, something like that.
But 1600, and that's just the people who saw this, think about all the people who unfollowed, and then once they got automatically unfollowed, they didn't see the poll.
So keep in mind, I got 1,600 people who said they followed me, they unfollowed me at some point, automatically, not their choice, and then they noticed, and then they re-followed me, and they also happened to notice that I did a poll.
So that's a pretty extreme filter.
What about all the people who simply thought they followed me, and then they got unfollowed?
They didn't see the poll.
So I got 1,600 people with the smallest filter you could put on it, which is the people who happened to notice.
They noticed that they got unfollowed and then they went back and re-followed.
How many people is that?
The people who didn't notice presumably are a much bigger population, because I wouldn't notice if I somehow got unfollowed from somebody.
But here's my caution.
So there are a number of ways to explain it.
Could be mass hysteria.
Totally possible.
Could be that there's nothing like anything like a shadow ban.
It's totally possible. You cannot rule out that it's just a psychological phenomenon.
And people imagine they got...
People could easily, very easily, imagine that they followed and it got unfollowed.
Totally simple thing for lots of people to imagine, even if it were not true.
Yeah, I was getting to the next point.
One of the commenters says it could have been 1,600 trolls.
So it's possible that trolls came in, somebody who wanted to sell the story that they're shadowbanning and pumped up that number.
But... Here's a slight argument against that, not a kill shot, but an argument against the troll hypothesis.
From the moment I put the poll up, it hit around 17% were saying that they had had this experience.
And it was up for days and days and days and days and days.
And at no point did that 17 or 18% get out of range.
If it had been some kind of organized human troll activity, as in somebody said, hey, at some website, hey, everybody, go vote here because this will be good for us.
If that had happened, you would have seen a smooth percentage with a big pop, and then maybe it would have stayed there and drifted down a little bit.
So the fact that it just stayed locked in at around 17% or 18% from the first minute to the end It means that either the hypothetical trolls were extremely disciplined, meaning that they were voting in 18% amounts all the way through.
They'd somehow organized so well that they could spread out their votes, which is totally possible.
That is not technically impossible, and it's not organizationally impossible, but I would rate it as unlikely.
So, You got that.
So, how do you know?
Is it a bug?
Is it shadow banning?
You don't know. So I'd like to suggest some ways that you can shadow ban.
Wouldn't you like to have the power to shadow ban other people?
If you could have the power to actually Shadow ban somebody who was on the other side, wouldn't you like that power?
You personally? Well, as luck would have it, you do have that power, because you can just block those people.
So, I've been running this experiment, and again, it is so good I'm completely blown away at how well it worked.
So several days ago, I told you I was going to start immediately blocking all unpleasant personalities.
And I thought it would be sort of this permanent flow.
I thought somehow I would have something like, whatever the percentage is, 10% horrible people coming through just all the time.
So I thought, okay, it's going to be a lot of work.
I'm going to have to be banning a lot of people.
Not banning, but blocking, blocking, blocking, blocking.
So the first few days, I was blocking, blocking, blocking.
And next day, I had fewer people blocking, blocking.
Each day, the number of people I blocked trailed off.
Until yesterday, maybe just a few, just a handful.
And we've actually gotten to the point where I've extinguished almost all of my trolls.
And I didn't think that was possible.
So it turns out that there must have been some people who were the large percentage of all my troll traffic.
I think I actually solved it.
Now obviously it'll float back up and I'll have to re-block again.
But you have to try this.
Now I am completely shut off from the worst voices.
So I have effectively...
Is this true or not?
Given that anybody who comments on my Twitter feed would get a lot of attention, especially if I interact with them.
So I've taken all that attention these trolls would have gotten on my feed, 317,000 followers, and I've eliminated it.
I have effectively shadow banned the trolls.
You could do it too. If all of you shadow ban the trolls, and I'm not talking about people who just disagree with you.
I do not ban people who disagree with me.
Disagreement can be painful, but it's also productive.
So I will accept productive discomfort Most of the time.
Yeah, most of the time I'll take that choice.
Certainly I would take it in conversational reasons.
So, try it.
If you would like to totally control shadow banning, at least you're a little part of the world, completely control it.
If anybody makes any analogy to Hitler, any analogy to concentration camps, any analogy like that, and it's just a troll analogy, Block.
Even if it's somebody who's trying to make a serious point.
Every now and then I'll get somebody who'll say, ah, you don't look like a troll, but why the heck are you making a Nazi analogy?
What is wrong with you?
So I block them too.
Because the Nazi analogy people can't be helped.
They can't be convinced.
They can't be reformed.
They can't be helped. So I block them.
So be very, let's say, aggressive in your blocking.
So enough about that.
So there was, of course, every time President Trump makes some new policy announcement, everybody goes crazy for a little while.
And that was true when the President said he was going to put tariffs on Mexico if they don't do something to stop their border crossing problem.
Several people have noted that the president starts to mention the cartels when he talks about border security now.
I think at least twice recently, somebody fact-checked me on that, he's put the word cartel Right in his tweet as part of the immigration problem.
And that feels newish.
I'm sure he's mentioned the cartels a number of times, but it feels like a slight shift in emphasis.
In fact, his last tweet talked about the cartels and the coyotes and stuff first, and then the illegal immigrants was literally the last thing he said.
So he seems to be changing the focus to this idea that To the idea that the cartels are running the border.
So he's using embarrassment a little bit to embarrass the Mexican government for not controlling their own border.
As many of you know, you've watched my periscopes, you know that the cartels literally control the border crossing areas where the illegals are coming.
The government of Mexico doesn't physically or militarily control those places.
They're actually controlled by armed cartel people who are charging people to get across the border.
So the president seems to be making that shift away from demonizing the people who are crossing illegally.
I have a terrible time getting angry at them.
I can't. I never have, really.
So, I can't demonize people who want a better life who are a lot like people who came here in the first place.
They have good intentions.
They just need to get out of a bad situation.
If I were a poor person in Guatemala or Mexico, Would I break the law to come to America?
Yes. Let me say that as clearly as possible.
If you plopped me in Mexico or Guatemala or one of the Central American countries and you put me in dire straits and there was no hope that I'd have a good life if I stayed there, I'd pack my briefcase, well not my briefcase, my backpack, And I would come and I would illegally cross the border of the United States.
I would do it for myself, I'd do it for my family, and I wouldn't look back.
So when other people are doing exactly what I would do, how do I get mad at people who are doing exactly what I would do?
Not even similar or approximately what I'd do, exactly what I would do.
Not one bit different.
I would do exactly what they're doing.
So, but still, you don't have a country unless you control your border.
So there are some things you have to do even if they're unpleasant.
And border security is one of them.
So, people said, hey, President Trump's making another big mistake.
He keeps using tariffs as a weapon.
And, my God, these tariffs are a terrible weapon because they just hurt the economy for us.
They hurt the economy for Mexico, blah, blah, blah.
But... The latest news is Mexico's president on Saturday hinted that his country could tighten migration controls to defuse Trump's threat to impose tariffs.
That's right. Mexico is getting more flexible.
That was the point.
Do you think that the president was saying to himself, yay, we'll collect some tariffs?
No. No, he doesn't want to collect any tariffs.
That's the last thing he wants.
Because it's bad for the economy.
It's bad for their economy.
It's bad for our economy. The last thing that Trump wants to do is collect tariffs.
Well, that's not true.
It's the second to the last thing he wants to do.
The last thing that the president wants to do is not change anything.
That's the last thing he wants to do.
Because the current situation is the worst.
Slightly better than that...
Is to degrade our economies a little bit and do something to stop the flow or at least twist the arms of the Mexican government to stop the flow.
But here's the problem. The president is about to unmask a really, really, really important point that the citizens of the United States have been prevented from understanding.
And that is...
The government of Mexico doesn't control their border.
The cartels do.
And I don't mean that in some kind of conceptual, generic way.
It's not an analogy.
It's not hyperbole.
Literally, physically, with people and guns, the cartels are in charge of the border at the places that the mass immigration is happening.
You know, there are places where the government's in charge, too.
Those would be more the legal border crossings, which have their own problems.
But the illegal human beings...
Are coming through cartel-controlled places.
Now, can the President of the United States say in direct language, our problem here is that Mexico doesn't control the border.
So we have a non-state military on our border, and that's our problem.
Can the President of the United States say that in direct language?
Well, you would normally think, no.
That would be so embarrassing to our ally, Mexico, that you literally couldn't say it out loud.
You could not embarrass Mexico by saying what I said in clear language.
You can't do it. But that's when you have a normal president.
This is exactly frickin' why People elected Trump.
I didn't vote, but those of you who did, this is why you wanted him.
There are some jobs that only Trump can do because he doesn't care about how other people are going to feel.
And that was his proposition.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but it seems to me that Trump's proposition was, I'm going to do some badass things that other people just wouldn't do, because those badass things need to get done.
There are some tough jobs that other people are just timid, they're afraid, it's too politically incorrect, it's something.
But those jobs still need to be done.
So I'm going to be the bad dad, and I'm going to come in and give you some truth.
And that truth is going to hurt.
I'm going to give you some tariffs.
Those tariffs are going to hurt. I'm going to cause some pain.
I'm going to do that intentionally to get to a better place.
Sort of like going to the dentist.
Nobody likes the dentist, but you've got to do it.
So it's a tough dad.
So it feels to me, and I'm getting ahead of my ability to predict here, but it feels to me that the president is starting to make an evolution and a change toward the political way of talking about Mexico, which is pretending their government was in charge, to slowly saying, you know, there is a cartel problem, without saying directly that the cartels actually control the border.
So he's now halfway to the truth.
Started with the old fiction that Mexico has something to do with immigration, because they don't.
They don't have anything to do with immigration.
The government isn't part of the, it's not even part of the equation.
They don't control the border.
He's now mentioning the cartel in the same voice as the illegal immigrants, who are both...
The illegal immigrants are both perpetrators of a crime and victims of a crime at the same time.
And it's unfair to talk about them as just perpetrators or even just victims.
They are both.
And if you don't talk about them as both perpetrators and victims simultaneously, because they're victims of the cartel, they're victims of whatever they're leaving, whether it's economic or danger.
So the real enemy is and has been The cartels.
But for historical, whatever, political, who knows what reasons, the President of the United States can't say what I just said.
It's too bad that the Mexican government doesn't control their own border.
There is an armed, non-state actor in control, and they're essentially terrorists, and they're shipping and drugs that are killing tens of thousands of Americans per year.
What would you do if you had a military power on your border that was sending death into your country?
You would attack them militarily every freaking time.
But you can't do it until you can name it.
You can't attack the enemy until you can put a name to it, until you can identify it.
Let me tell you, let me say this as clearly as I possibly can.
I support military action within Mexico's border, even if their government doesn't like it.
Of course their government wouldn't like it.
If it comes to that, I am 100% in favor of invading Mexico.
And there's no hyperbole.
Assuming that the facts are exactly the way I've described them, that what we would be attacking is something that on paper is Mexican territory, But in reality it's not.
It's owned by the cartels.
If the United States government attacked the cartels on Mexican territory, I favor that.
I favor it.
What's going to happen? Is Mexico going to send a nuke at us?
No. Well, what happened is that the government of Mexico, I'm just spitballing here because I'm no diplomat, so that I could be causing World War III here without knowing it.
So don't take me too seriously on this.
I'm just giving you the citizen's view of this.
As a citizen, I would be in favor of the U.S. military invading Mexico today.
I don't even need a better reason.
I'm not waiting for something to happen in the future.
Today, we have all the incentive we need.
We have absolute moral, and I would say legal, assuming that we get it approved through Congress or whatever.
I think we have complete legal, ethical, moral path for a military attack.
On the ground, on Mexican territory, aimed not at any Mexican military.
We definitely should not shoot at any Mexican citizens, if we can avoid it, or at any, at least, you know, ones who are innocent.
We should not shoot at any Mexican military or any Mexican police, unless the Mexican police are owned by the cartels, in which case they are just the cartel.
So, I don't believe it's necessarily, not necessarily, let me say it in a more clean statement.
I doubt this is a good idea.
I doubt it's a good idea to attack Mexico and the cartels.
But I don't know why not.
So let's make that, put a question mark on it.
If somebody can give me an argument why we should not do that, I'd like to hear it, because I can't imagine one.
But I also am open to the fact that I don't understand this area well enough to be able to see all the dark corners.
So there could be plenty of reasons.
Plenty of reasons why we don't attack the cartels.
But it seems to me we could weaponize even the immigrants coming across and say, hey, hey, hey, we'll let you into the country, but we need We need a little intel on the cartels.
So tell us what we need to know and we'll just blast a hole there.
So there's that.
Anyway, my point was that when people talk about the president and tariffs, they don't understand that the whole point of it is to cause a change.
He's shaking the box.
He says the variables that we have here are not sufficient.
So the way the variables are arranged is not getting anything done.
So I'm going to shake the box.
I'm going to threaten something that even I don't want to happen.
But because my name is President Trump, people expect I might do crazy stuff.
So if I threaten I'm going to do a crazy thing, such as tariffs that would be quite a burden on both Mexico and the United States, if I threaten to do this, you think I might do this.
Because you know what?
I might do this. So when he threatens to do something that sounds crazy, it's credible because he might actually do it.
Like, literally, he might actually do it.
And I'm not sure another president would have a credible threat.
If you imagine any other president, we wouldn't even be having the conversation.
So Mexico's president is there talking and sounds like he's a little more flexible.
We'll see. This is interesting.
YouTube, as I said before, speaking of shadow banning, going back to that topic, YouTube shows me an analytics page that shows me how many people have viewed my videos so far.
They also show a public number, so if you don't own the page so you can see the analytics, only the owner of the page can see the analytics.
But if you're the public, You would see a number of people who viewed the video.
That number on my videos is often half of what I know it is.
So you see what I'm saying?
If you're the public and you look at my video, it'll say 700 people have seen it so far.
But I look at my own stats that you can't see, and it says twice as many have seen it at the same time.
Now, I Googled to find out why that could be.
Why is it that the public number is half?
Now, I don't know if it's always half, but when I looked, it was half.
Now, somebody's saying it's a delay.
It's a delay. Perfectly reasonable, right?
They're different systems. One system is the analytics, and maybe that is more important to tell me soon, so maybe that one's the sped-up system.
But they're both owned by the same company.
The other one pretends it doesn't know what their own software knows.
Think about this.
So somebody said, oh, it's because there's a delay.
These are two pieces of software and two databases from the same company.
This one knows the number as soon as it happens.
This one is delayed, I don't know what, hours, days?
Are you telling me that Google can't do a database query of their own data?
Seriously? There's some good reason that somebody's going to tell me why Google can't query their own database?
Sure, there's a good reason for that.
I don't know what it is.
But here, let me tell you this.
If you go to a video and it has a small number of views, are you more or less likely to view it?
And are you more or less likely to share it?
You know the answer to that.
The number of views it has biases you a great deal toward watching it, watching the whole thing, and then sharing it.
If it's true that there's some delay between the numbers that they know are more accurate, which they feed to the creator, myself, so I get to see what I'm sure is the more accurate number, and they feed a delayed imitation estimate, I think they call it, to the public, can they not manipulate that number to make sure it doesn't go viral?
For example, if you got the most viral video in the world and you looked at it and you saw that only 100 people watched it after a day, just for example, if you saw that only 100 people looked at it and you said to yourself, man, this is really good, only 100 people liked it, would you forward it?
Sometimes, yes. But other times, you would be greatly influenced by that number.
So, here's my point.
I'm not claiming that Google slash YouTube is manipulating the public display of how many people have watched it.
I'm not saying they are.
I'm saying they could.
It would be completely invisible to anybody.
It would be simple.
They would not go to jail.
There would be no penalty.
And there would be a definite advantage to do it.
When you have those conditions, how often does mischief happen?
When there's a good upside, there's no penalty, and not really any risk of penalty, And lots of people are involved.
In other words, it's not just one person who can say yes or no.
Probably a number of people could make this happen in some way.
Under those conditions, you almost always, essentially 100%, you get mischief under those sets of conditions.
So, again, I can't claim that mischief is happening, but the lack of transparency is exactly why I understand the Trump administration has opened up a Some kind of a process to start looking at the question of Google and whether or not they have a monopoly that needs to get broken up.
And the lack of transparency on the social media metric, and that's just one of many examples.
The scary thing is the number of ways that the social media platforms could be influencing things.
If it were just one or two ways that they could do things, you might find a way to get some visibility on just those levers, and then you could say, okay, as long as we're watching these two variables, we don't need to watch everything, because everything else will take care of itself.
But it's not like that.
There might be something like 80 different variables that could be tweaked to bias things in one way or another, and there is no entity, no person...
Nobody we know of who could figure out what's happening if you've got 80 variables that can be tweaked.
It's just too complicated.
So any mischief could be completely concealed behind complexity, and even if you found out they were doing it, they could still explain it away.
Think about it. Suppose there was some government law and they dug into the algorithm and determined that one of the social media platforms was intentionally biasing things in some specific way.
Probably, almost certainly, they could make an argument that it was just to improve the public discussion.
They could say, yeah, yeah, whenever we saw this keyword, we knew this was a warning that the discussion would turn, I don't know, racist or sexist or something.
And so we quite reasonably down-throttled wherever we saw that word, because that's not the kind of language and conversation we want on our platform.
Would that be plausible?
Completely. Completely plausible.
As long as they have any argument that says, well, it's good for the health of the conversation.
That's good enough. And maybe it should be good enough.
Maybe that is good enough.
So it's a pretty tough nut to crack.
Let's talk about Bitcoin just because I put it in my title.
A lot of people ask me, Scott, Scott, Scott, what do you think is going to happen with cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin in general?
Now, I hasten to say that this is not financial advice.
Okay? It is not financial advice.
You should never get financial advice from cartoonists.
Period. Everything I say after this and everything I say for the rest of my life is not financial advice.
Somebody says, then don't give it.
I can give predictions.
So a prediction is not advice.
I'm going to tell you what I think will happen, and then I'll tell you that you should not rely on me to make decisions.
First of all, I own a goodly chunk of I own it.
I own it indirectly through just a fund because it was just easier.
So I own a fund that owns some Bitcoin.
At the moment, it's up from where I bought it and up sharply.
I've been tracking its movements, and it seems that when the market in general gets shaky, there's a tendency, not 100% of the time, but there's a tendency for Bitcoin to go up when the market seems to be in trouble.
And likewise, when the market's doing fine, people would rather have regular stocks than maybe a little extra risk with this Bitcoin, so it seems like this.
Now, it's not every time.
Every now and then, the market will go down and Bitcoin will go Every now and then the market will go up and Bitcoin will go up.
But mostly they have this relationship.
One's up, one's down.
One's up, one's down. Now, should that pattern become more pronounced over time, and it looks like it's self-reinforcing, because there are people like me, there are people like me who mention it.
And when people like me mention it, then other people start paying attention.
They say, well, is that true? And by the way, I'm not saying this to influence it, although I suppose it could.
There's always that risk.
I'm saying it as an observation.
The more people who observe this, and by the way, this is something that's been in the news, so what I'm saying now is not me making this up for the first time.
It's something I noticed on my own, but then I've also seen it on the news.
So there are two points of agreement, people in the news and me.
We both saw the same thing.
And that is that it's starting to work like a protective store of values, sort of like gold.
It used to be that if the market went up, then people preferred to have that versus owning actual gold, so that went down.
So gold in markets have typically moved in reverse.
When the market is going down, people say, oh, the market's going to lose all my money, I better put it in gold, and that starts going up.
So, as our psychology about Bitcoin...
Starts to, let's say, solidify around this concept that it is an alternate store of value, such as gold.
Then the value of Bitcoin goes from speculative, I think I want to own it because other people will, I hope more vendors will accept it, so therefore that would cause more demand.
So that used to be the whole reason that Bitcoin would move was psychology and expectations and speculations and really iffy kind of stuff.
And it was so iffy, that's why sometimes the value would be very high, sometimes it would dip.
But psychology can harden over time.
Bitcoin was new, but it's not new anymore.
And what we think about it is going to start to solidify, because it always does.
The way we think about things tends to harden over time and become more likely one thing, or if it's political, two things.
But in the case of Bitcoin, we're going to have some sense that a lot of things could go wrong in the world But you might need at least a few Bitcoin.
So what is likely to happen in the future is that people who are not Bitcoin investors, they're not really into Bitcoin, they don't want to be big crypto people, but they don't mind having 5% of their assets in a crypto.
And if you're going to have a crypto, maybe you spread it around, you get some Ether, you get some other Some other coins that are in the top five, but you're probably going to put some Bitcoin in there.
Probably there's going to be a little Bitcoin in there.
So when people start putting a little bit of it into their normal portfolios, just have a little bit of an edge, a little bit of a hedge, I mean, not an edge, against a worst-case scenario, it should make the value of Bitcoin very solid over time.
Again, for those of you joining, Do not get your advice from cartoonists.
The big risk with Bitcoin is that somebody comes up with a better crypto that gets, for whatever reason, more credibility.
Could happen. Very likely could happen.
The other risk is that there's just something about Bitcoin that could be exploited in a way that we don't know, and you thought it was safe, but it's not.
There could be lots of surprises in the future.
So don't bet on me.
But... If you do bet on this, make sure it's a small part of your portfolio, and make sure you're doing it just as a protective hedge, the same way you'd buy gold, the same way you'd buy anything that would move in opposition to the market.
So, that's my Bitcoin prediction.
Well, well, well.
Andrew Yang. On Twitter, Andrew Yang, as you know, running for president on the Democratic side.
And he says in his tweet, according to twin studies, between one-third and one-half of political alignment is linked to genetics.
That is, most of us are born somewhat wired to be liberal or conservative.
And then he says, if this is the case, we need to build bridges as much as possible.
It's not just information or culture.
Andrew Yang is this close to getting my vote.
He's a crazy nerd, and I'm saying that with affection.
Because I love crazy nerds.
If I could spend time with somebody, I'd pick crazy nerd every time, right?
Crazy nerds are great. Crazy nerds are probably among the most valuable citizens.
So I don't think Andrew Yang is quite ready.
He's not quite ready for the big show.
But when Trump is done, Whether it's, you know, whether it's sooner or later, Andrew Yang is still going to be young.
And his ideas are still pretty interesting.
Because a lot of his ideas are technical and, you know, they're modern, they understand science, they're just a little bit more informed about the way the real world works.
And this, I don't believe I've seen any major politician, national politician, correct me if I'm wrong, have you ever seen a national politician tell the truth at this level?
Because the truth is that we're not using logic and reason or information to make decisions.
Have you ever seen anybody just say it as directly?
It's like, no, it's just built in.
Half of it's just built in.
Now, he didn't make this up, of course.
It's part of science, and it's well-understood science, by the way.
I'm pretty sure this is the scientific consensus.
So... I love this.
I love that he's introduced this idea.
It won't go very far.
Just the other political nerds like us will pay attention to it.
But it does tell you that your approach to managing should take this into account.
Think about this.
He is...
I would say that Yang is the second politician I can think of Whoever thought that maybe we should run things based on the way things are, instead of imagining and pretending things are different, and then running the country based on this imaginary belief about people.
That's the way most politicians do it.
How many times have you seen politicians say, the American voters are too smart to fall for this, or I think voters are smart.
Isn't that the normal thing politicians say?
That's so dumb. Voters aren't smart.
Science knows for sure.
Science knows for sure that we don't use logic and facts to make decisions.
When Andrew Yang points out that as many as half of our political opinions could be just biological, has nothing to do with thinking or information or facts or anything.
This is baked into our genes and we were going to go that way Or not.
And then you add on top of that the social conditioning, and you don't really have anything like thinking that's going on.
Now, the only other politician who was smart enough to understand that was President Trump.
He doesn't use the same words, but when President Trump talks about hyperbole and persuasion, which he does talk about, the reason those things matter is It's exactly what Andrew Yang is saying.
Yang is just giving us the delightful nerd version of it, which is that science is shown, blah, blah, blah, we're irrational creatures and we're born that way.
Trump is simply showing us that that's true.
By acting as though failing the fact check 10,000 times doesn't matter.
Now, I keep harking back to this.
In 2015, I said publicly and often that candidate Trump would change more than politics.
I predicted he would win the election, but far more than that, he would change how we understood reality.
This is what I was talking about.
This specifically is exactly what I was talking about.
The most important thing people thought about reality is that we were rational creatures, We made rational decisions, and when people don't agree with us, they're not very smart.
They're uninformed or they're dumb.
We now understand that how smart you are doesn't seem to make that much difference.
We'd like it to, but it's obvious it doesn't, because there are smart people on both sides of every discussion.
We'd like to think that the facts matter, But just look at the Russia collusion situation.
Did the facts matter?
Nobody changed their mind when the facts came out.
Nobody! Everybody just said, well, told you.
The facts made no difference at all.
Did the facts matter with the fine people hoax?
No. No.
I've convinced exactly zero people With facts.
And the facts were as clear as they could possibly be, that the President never called the neo-Nazis fine people.
He said literally the opposite.
He condemned them at that same time.
So, facts do not change opinions.
President Trump knew it.
Andrew Yang is saying it directly.
And he's saying that you have to find a way to lead.
And he's clever about it, because what he said was, Andrew Yang said, if this is the case, meaning that if genetics is determining largely our opinions, he goes, if this is the case, we need to build bridges as much as possible.
It's not just information or culture.
So you know how the Congressman Steve says culture is important, a lot of...
Oh my God, this is more brilliant than I thought it was.
Because when Yang says it's not just information or culture, he's cleverly found two words to substitute for liberal and conservative.
And I just now realized that.
Conservatives are about culture.
The Democrats, the liberals, are about what they think is information.
In other words, the liberals live in an illusion that if they could just get better information over to the other side, the other side would change their mind, unless they're toothless morons.
Wouldn't you say that's the Republican view?
I'm sorry. Wouldn't you say that the left has the general view That information is what we should care about.
Science, information, data.
And if only they could somehow convey this information to the conservatives, the conservatives would just change their mind.
Unless they were toothless morons.
And so what do the people on the left declare when they fail to change anybody's minds with data and information?
What do they declare is the case?
Oh, it looks like we underestimated the number of toothless morons.
We thought there'd be a scattering of them on the right, but we're very disappointed to find out that 50% of the country are toothless morons and they can't see data.
Now, of course, they're living in an illusion.
The illusion is that data and information could change anybody's mind.
And part of the illusion is that new information would change their minds.
But it won't.
We see it all the time.
Do you think information will change the mind of anybody on the left?
It won't. But they believe they're in this illusion where information is the main thing.
On the right... I'm loving this Andrew Yang tweet more every moment that I spend with it, because it's really insightful, but you don't notice when you first read it.
When he says on the right about culture, that kind of is where the right is at.
Both sides would say that culture and information matter, but one side thinks information is king, the other side thinks culture is king.
And he says you need to build a bridge between these two irrationals.
So Andrew Yang, he's not saying it in the words that I just used, but he's very clearly saying you have the irrational information people who think information will change people's minds, and obviously it doesn't.
You've got the culture people who think culture is everything, and while it's important, It's maybe not as useful as it should be in a melting pot, multicultural world that is always changing.
You know, you can't lock down your culture in a changing world.
Things change. So you got two unworkable sides, two unworkable illusions.
And Andrew Yang, who apparently is not fooled by either illusion, Because he's sort of Trumpian.
He's sort of polite, but Trumpian.
He's telling us that you can't solve for that.
You can't solve that.
But you can build a bridge.
In other words, you could find a way to work with it, but you can't solve it.
This is so frickin' insightful.
And completely underappreciated.
Now, I don't think Andrew Yang has any chance of winning in 2020, but in 2024, if he's running, I'm going to look pretty hard at him.
And it wouldn't matter what party he ran for.
Sorry, if you don't want to hear that, that may be painful for you, because you don't want to hear that.
But if he's running, I'm going to take a hard look at him.
Likewise, if in 2024, Mark Cuban runs, I'm going to take a real hard look at that because I think both Mark Cuban and Andrew Yang are operating at a little higher level than our standard politicians because they're a little more compatible with science while also understanding we don't live in a rational world.
So there are people who love science and they think they're in a rational world and then they're incapable of dealing because we don't live in that world.
What about Kanye? I don't think Kanye's going to run.
Kanye has been delightfully honest about his mental health.
I think he refers to himself as bipolar.
Now, if we ever came into a situation in which science said, oh, we took care of this, I don't know if that's possible.
He'd be an interesting candidate.
But I don't think that's going to happen.
So I think Kanye...
Maybe his greatest value is not to get caught up in the BS of government.
I think he's above it.
I think Kanye has, sort of like his spouse, so Kim Kardashian West, they are so powerful individually that it feels like being president would slow him down a little bit.
Because they have things they can do that they're just uniquely suited for doing in terms of moving how we feel about things and our priorities and all that.
And I think they would be far more useful and productive as just powerful voices that we should listen to for our conscience.
In a way, I just realized this.
In a way, Kanye and Kim Kardashian West Have become sort of a conscience.
Don't you think? So if they were running for office, they'd be politicians.
If they were saying nothing, they would be entertainers.
If they were saying a lot, but it was stupid, they would still look like entertainers.
Because a lot of our entertainers say stuff that's not so useful, not so insightful, just doesn't help.
But what do you call somebody who are world's tops of entertainers, who are not politicians, but are saying things that talk directly to our conscience?
If you think about it, that's what Kardashian West and Kanye are doing.
They're talking directly to our conscience.
So, you know, Kanye is saying, hey, you know, you can be good to people you disagree with.
You shouldn't be bullying Trump supporters.
If you think about it, these are not policies.
It's not policy.
It's conscience. It's ethics.
It's morality.
It's love.
It's how you behave with each other.
Kim Kardashian West, fighting for the rights of the unjustly imprisoned, or let's say excessively imprisoned.
Conscience. That's about conscience.
That's about who you are.
That's about, you know, who do you want to be?
It's not even about who you are.
It's about who you want to become.
Do you want to become somebody who lives in this better version of the world that the two of them are presenting?
Yeah, I want to.
I want to live in that better world.
And they're showing you the way. So, Kanye West, in his role as I would say a representative, and probably the best one, of conscience is just way too valuable to waste as a politician.
I'd hate to waste it in that way.
And as I said, his history of mental illness, which he's very honest about, I think would prevent him from getting elected because people would have worries about the nuclear football.
But as a positive force in the world, Even the fact that he's so honest about his struggle with mental illness is a plus.
Because that resonates with us.
And a lot of people say, yeah, I got issues too.
But maybe I can be productive too, because you are.
So watching the two of them work that hard So in terms of hard work, good intentions, trying to make the world a better place, they're sort of becoming the country's conscience.
And I like that, because they do it well.
All right. I don't have much else to talk about, except that you should go to the YouTube channel if you want to watch this on replay.
It's at, just Google Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
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If you have some specific problem...
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Tweet it to me. Or if you see one of the WenHub tweets, put it in there.
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There isn't yet somebody on the app who has that expertise.
Let me know. Tweet at me and we'll see if we can round up an expert for you.
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