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July 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:47
Episode 605 Scott Adams: Talking About the R-Word That Gets me Demonetized by YouTube, Iran
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- Hey everybody, come on in here, because it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams It's like I'm an auctioneer and now I'm talking like an auctioneer for no reason.
I just started talking this way and I don't know why.
Sold to you for $10.
Yes, you know what time it is.
It's the best time.
I've been hearing from people that they're using this time for their exercise.
I call that a good system.
The way the system works is that you make sure you've got this recorded or you're doing your exercise live.
I'm talking to you, all of you people who are exercising right now.
Good job. You've got a good system.
You're rewarding yourself with the excellent entertainment value that is this Periscope or YouTube, depending on when you're listening to it.
And that's a good system, because you can train yourself like a dog.
Train yourself like a dog to get a treat when you do the right stuff.
And those of you who read my book kind of failed almost everything and still went big, or if you heard me talking about it on Periscope, you know that if you give yourself a little downtime after you exercise, maybe have a protein shake if you like that sort of thing, cup of coffee, whatever, Maybe if you listen to something you really enjoy, whether it be music or podcasts or whatever, you can turn your exercise into a wonderful thing.
Isn't that right, Pablo?
And a lot of people are discovering that right now.
Now, I think you need the simultaneous sip.
Those of you exercising may need to take a sip of your water bottles, but it's all the same.
It's all wonderful. And how do you do the simultaneous sip?
That's why you're asking. It's easy.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a stein, a chalice, a tankard.
Could be a thermos, maybe a flask, possibly a canteen if you are...
serving your country.
Or camping, I suppose.
Could be a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
The simultaneous sip. Here it goes.
Ho, ho, ho, ho!
So good. Alright, my favorite laugh of the day came from a Jack Basabek tweet.
And of course you have to be following the news to understand the reference, but if you do know the reference, this is pretty funny.
So Jack said, Jack Basabek said this morning in a tweet, Good morning to everyone except people who spread race hoaxes justify abusing supermarket express lanes.
It probably reads better when you're reading it than it does when you hear it out loud.
Humor works like that.
There are some things that are funny when they're said out loud, and there are some things that are funny when you read them.
Some of it has to do with timing, because you can read faster than you can listen.
You know, people talk slower than you can read.
I think this one is funnier when you read it, because it catches you off guard.
Anyway, the story, you've all seen the story by now, right?
There was an African American, or there is an African American lawmaker in Georgia, in other words, a state politician, who claimed that a person behind her in line was a Trump supporter, a white guy, and told her to go back where she came from, or something worse to that effect.
So she was giving a press conference on this topic, and the alleged white Trump supporter showed up.
And, oops, he's not a Trump supporter.
He's a Democrat anti-Trumper.
And he's Cuban.
So he doesn't refer to himself as white either.
And he never said the things or anything like it.
That the Georgia lawmaker accused him of.
What he did do, however, I would call not exactly polite behavior either.
So his story is that the Georgia lawmaker took 15 items or so into the line that was the express line of the supermarket of 10 items or less.
Now he claimed That there were two other lines open with no lines.
And yet he stood behind her in line while there were two other lines with nobody there.
He stood behind her anyway, and then after he stood in line for the incredible inconvenience of five extra items being scanned while he had to wait, he left the store, thought about it, got so mad he wanted to come back in the store and berate the woman for rudely bringing fifteen items into the line that should have been ten or more.
Somebody's saying, she had at least 20 items.
Okay, maybe he had to wait this much longer.
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
Are you happy? Are we all on the same page now?
He had to wait a terribly long time for all of that scanning.
So, was she wrong to be in that line?
Well, probably. Have I ever been in that line accidentally with too many items?
Yeah. Yeah.
I've been in that line with too many items.
Have I ever done it intentionally?
No. I've never done it intentionally.
But I've been in that line with too many items.
It's happened. And what did they do?
They scanned you anyway because it's too hard to send you to another line and why would they, right?
But here's the thing. The guy who complained about her said there were two lines that he could use with nobody waiting.
Why was he complaining when there were two open checkout things?
Either one of them could have used them.
I mean, I get it that she slightly broke a law.
Not a law, but a rule.
Slightly. Yeah.
It wasn't exactly the crime of the century, and certainly not one that I'm going to come back and complain about.
So here's my final judgment on this.
There are no winners.
It's just a terrible, sad state of affairs for this country.
But my ruling is this is a taint.
It's a taint. I probably need to explain that.
My ruling on the supermarket situation is taint.
And by that I mean that one of the participants was an asshole and the other one was a dick.
And since it was sort of a tie between the asshole and the dick, I'm going to call it a taint.
That's my judgment. Alright, let's talk about a study that I would not take as necessarily the most reliable study of all time.
But there is evidence from a study that racism, specifically anti-black prejudice, has sharply declined under the Trump administration.
And that there were not sharp declines under the Obama administration.
Sort of the opposite of what some people imagined would happen.
What do you think about that?
It matches my expectations and it matches my observation as well.
You've heard me say publicly a number of times that my guess is that if you turned off the television and you didn't watch what all the talking heads were saying and you just lived your life, you would say to yourself, huh, I've been living my life not watching TV and it seems to me that racism is just less every year.
And that these past few years are no exceptions.
There's just less of it everywhere.
That's what I see. That's my actual observation.
But you can't trust a single person's observation.
And so now we have at least one survey to suggest that racism sharply declined under Trump.
Why is that?
Why is that?
Well, first of all, keep in mind they were asking mostly white people what they thought about black people.
They weren't asking about racism in every direction and in every way.
I would guess that racism of black people against white people is probably sharply up.
Wouldn't you? Now, I understand the political correctness of what I just said is out of whack, meaning that there's a popular feeling that you cannot be a racist.
If you're a black person, you can't be a racist against white people in the United States.
That doesn't work by definition.
I get the argument.
You don't need to correct me on it.
But I'm going to say that as long as there's a bad feeling of any ethnicity against another, what you want to call it is fine with me.
I'm going to call it racism.
But you can call it something else, and I'm not going to argue with you about it.
It's just our personal use of words.
And I would imagine that there's a completely obvious reason.
When there's an African-American president...
White people probably feel a little bit threatened and maybe react as such.
When you replace that African-American president with a President Trump, It wouldn't surprise me if white voters say, oh, okay, well, things are, in their view, not looking like there's any problem now, like it feels like they're back to normal in some way, whatever they think normal is.
And so they worry less, and it might just ramp down their bad feelings.
So I would not be surprised that you would see this pattern every time you had the presidency either change gender I would, for example, imagine that if a woman becomes president, let's say after Trump, I would imagine that misogyny, or you might expect more misogyny, not less, because men would feel somehow put upon because there was a woman in office.
Not all men, of course, but, you know, enough to maybe see it in a survey.
So, while I believe that racism is declining, if you define it as how white people are thinking about black people, that probably has to do with just the ethnicity of the presidency, and probably you're seeing the roles reversed.
There's probably a little more bad feeling from blacks against whites, and ironically, substantially, if this survey is correct, a substantially improved feeling about how white people feel about black people.
Now, why would that be true?
Well, here are a few reasons.
What if, and I'm just going to put this out here, what if Trump supporters believe what Trump says?
I'm just going to put that out there.
What if people who support Trump believe him when he says, essentially, I love everybody in this country, I love African Americans.
I love, you know, Hispanics.
I love women. I love everybody.
What if Trump supporters actually buy it?
And they say, oh, our leader loves everybody who's in this country.
But he's telling us that our threat, if you will, is people who are not legal citizens.
So we accept that, that the issue here is immigration.
It's not ethnicity.
The most common thing you will hear from Trump supporters is, our president says it's not about race, and we believe him.
What if Trump supporters believe what he says?
Because remember, the folks on the left, the anti-Trumpers, were already non-racist in their view, and probably would answer surveys in a way that would suggest they are non-racist.
So they're not really part of whatever the change is.
Whatever change happened, almost certainly, was within Trump supporters.
Because they're the ones you imagine could have been the group that has the most racist as a percentage.
It's still a small percentage, but they might have the most.
So, that's my take on this.
I think we're in the best place we've ever been as a country in terms of race and getting along and gender in every way, in every single way.
I think in the real world things got better.
I really think so.
And you wouldn't know that from reading the headlines.
All right, let's talk about Iran. I've been telling you, I've said this before and I said it about North Korea, That being on the brink of war looks exactly like being on the brink of peace.
And there's a reason for that.
They should look exactly the same.
Because whether you're getting ready to go to war or you're simply ramping up your negotiating leverage by looking tougher and doing provocative things that you can later give up, those two things should look very similar.
Brink of war looks like brink of peace.
And you saw that in North Korea.
The fire and fury stuff happened right before we started talking.
And I've said that the small provocations that we're seeing in the Gulf look far more like they're setting the table for negotiating, meaning that they're creating a problem.
That they're saying, hey, if you negotiate with us and we get some stuff we want, we Iran might be able to give up on this problem causing.
So they've created an asset to give up.
But here's an interesting story that says that apparently the New York Times was interviewing former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
And this is what Ahmadinejad said.
And this is new.
He just recently said this.
He said, Mr. Trump is a man of action.
That's not an insult, right?
That's a compliment. He's a man of action.
Where's this going? And then Ahmadinejad said in a lengthy telephone interview with the New York Times, quote, he is a businessman, and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits And making a decision.
Key words there.
I'm going to get back to that. We say to him, let's calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be short-sighted.
Who does he sound like?
Who's the person, let's say a person in the public realm, who Ahmadinejad sounds most like I'm looking at your comments.
Yeah, me. Now, some of you are saying Trump, and some of you are saying me, and it's the same answer.
Same answer, right?
What I like about Trump, and I say it all the time, is he has a uniquely, I'd say gifted, ability to assess the risk management situation.
The reason he's president when everybody else thought he would be self-immolating one time after another, it's like, oh, that tweet will kill you.
Well, okay, that worked out. Oh, don't do that policy.
That's going to... Okay, that worked out.
Don't say that thing in public.
Okay, that worked out too.
How many times do you need to see the president do exactly what all the experts say he should not do, and it works out?
He can see a risk management situation.
I call it free money.
If he sees free money sitting on the table, he says, hey, is that some free money there?
Anybody want this? Nobody?
Nobody? Okay, I'll take it.
So he's so good at risk management that he can pick up free money that other people thought was expensive.
It was free. And when you hear Ahmadinejad talk in completely non-religious terms, there's no religion in these statements.
None. He's talking about cost-benefit analysis.
He's talking about Trump being a man of action.
He's complimenting The president's cost-benefit analysis, and he's saying that they should do the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be short-sighted.
Now, of course, you have to be careful.
Is Ahmadinejad still in the inner circle?
You know, when he talks, can you say, well, that probably represents a lot of opinions in Iran?
Don't know. Don't know.
It's hard to tell from here. But given that he's an ex-president, and that he said this to the New York Times, apparently without fear, if Ahmadinejad had said something to the New York Times this public, and he thought the Ayatollah would disagree with it, that'd be pretty risky, right?
And given that Ahmadinejad is literally talking about risk management, right?
I don't really think that he's got bad risk management himself.
In other words, he probably wouldn't be saying this in public if he thought the Ayatollah was going to slap him down for it.
So he may not have permission per se, but I would guess that in his own calculation, it's at least compatible enough or close enough to compatible with what the Ayatollah is thinking that he's not going to go to prison for it.
You know, there's not going to be a penalty.
This is the kind of talk you hear from this kind of leader, in other words, somebody who's not currently in control but has some moral authority in terms of the country's culture and opinion.
Hearing him talk in these terms, cost-benefit, risk management, businessman, man of action, that's everything you want.
That is 100% Of where you want their heads to be.
It's also 100% where I want our heads to be.
That's the middle ground.
The middle ground is risk management.
That's the non-religious middle ground.
If we keep talking about who should be in Israel and whose God is right and blah, blah, blah, you can't really get there because we have such different opinions on the philosophical stuff.
But Ahmadinejad is saying pretty clearly, let's just take it out of that conversation.
Let's have a conversation about cost-benefits.
If you're having that conversation, you're heading toward peace.
The real kind.
Not the crazy kind, not the temporary kind, but the real kind.
And when I hear somebody as prominent as Ahmadinejad, even though he's out of office, Say something so clear and so productive and so sort of different than what we've been hearing up to this point.
You hear more provocative stuff.
A hundred percent of what we're seeing out of Iran tells me that they want peace and they really want it.
And we know we want it.
So you have two countries that want the same thing.
Now remember when I told you that we were thinking small When we're talking about how to solve our immediate problems, our immediate problem is something like, maybe we can get inspections on the nuclear program.
That's thinking small. That's a goal way of thinking.
The big picture, the system, is that you create a long-term strategy to become allies.
It is thinking too small to simply avoid war.
Iran is a very capable country, and it's filled with people who are somewhat poised to like America, even though the leadership is obviously very anti-America.
The population, the urban population, the young people, is a very young country, and the young people lean in our direction.
A lot of them, you know, I would say I think the majority are leaning Western.
So it is small thinking to say, how do we avoid nuclear war?
It's a good thing to avoid, of course.
But in terms of how to frame the conversation, Ahmadinejad just did it for you.
Ahmadinejad just framed it the right way.
The right frame is that you should be looking, in his own words, let's calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be short-sighted.
The long-term benefit is that you try to get on the same side.
Might be five years from now.
Could be ten years from now.
Maybe it's twenty years from now.
It could take a long time for the United States and Iran to see each other as not just people who stopped fighting, But flat-out allies.
Why is that not the goal?
Why would we ever have a weak goal of, let's just not have a nuclear war?
Too small. That is not Trump-like thinking.
Trump does not think small.
He thinks, tell me what's the most you could even imagine, and I'm gonna ask for that.
I might have to back it up if I can't get everything I asked for, but why on day one would I ask for something less than the most I could imagine?
And the most I could imagine is that someday Iran and the United States are solid allies.
Solid allies like Japan.
Solid allies like Germany.
You know, the one thing that Iran can see is that the United States is perfectly capable of turning the most violent enemies into the best friends.
And that when they do that, really good stuff happens.
Really good stuff happens.
So, I would say if you read the tea leaves, we are on the brink of peace.
I said that about North Korea, and of course we have a long way to go, but North Korea is a situation of how and when and what do we talk about instead of where are we going to launch our nuclear weapons.
I mean, that's a pretty, pretty big difference.
So if we could get Iran into the productive conversation frame, and at least some important leaders are saying, let's get there.
Somebody says, what about Yemen?
I think that's all part of the conversation.
You know, I think you have to talk about all the proxy wars, you have to talk about the whole thing, and you gotta get on the other side of that to have a real peace.
Alright, what else we got going on here?
So, Geraldo has been...
I feel sorry for Geraldo, I really do, because he's a...
in just this one way, he's obviously had a tremendous life, so I don't feel sorry for him in general.
Geraldo's hugely successful and has an amazing life.
And he's sort of a role model for me, I must say.
Geraldo's kind of a role model for anybody who's my age or older for how to still kill it, you know, every day.
Here's what Geraldo tweeted.
So he's dealing with the fact that the president had this obnoxious tweet about the squad should go back home and fix everything before coming back.
And, of course, it was widely interpreted as being offensive or racist, depending on who you are.
And Geraldo being, is Hispanic the right word for Geraldo?
I don't know what he self-labels, but let's go with that for now.
So it's got to be a tough situation.
He's a personal friend with the president.
But he's got real issues with the way the president frames things and communicates in provocative ways.
So it looks like he's been thinking about it for a little bit, and he came up with this very lawyerly way to parse this.
So this is Rolo's quote from, I guess, in the last day.
Telling a racial or ethnic minority person to hashtag go back where they came from May not always be de facto racist.
So here Geraldo's acknowledging that even though the comment may sound provocative, that doesn't necessarily mean it's coming from a racist place.
So he says it may not always be de facto racist, but it is presumed racist.
True. And as such, it is manifestly obnoxious regardless.
True. Those are all true statements.
So I agree completely with what Geraldo is saying, which is that you can't tell if somebody's racist just because they said something provocative that some other people say is racist.
But because you sort of should have seen it coming, it is manifestly obnoxious.
You didn't really need the manifestly part.
You could just say it was offensive.
And so, if I were to simplify his lawyer talk, he uses some bigger words than he needs to.
It wasn't necessarily racist, but it was certainly offensive, and is that productive, basically.
I mean, the essence of the tweet, this is my own interpretation, not Geraldo's words, but the essence of it, I interpret as, how is this helpful?
It may not have been the worst thing you think it is.
It may not be racist.
It may just be the way he communicates.
But how is that helpful? It's not helpful.
Okay? Here's my response.
I retweeted with a comment, Geraldo's comment, which I agree with, by the way.
So everything he said, I would say those are good, true comments.
Useful ways to look at this.
But I asked this. I said, is, quote, manifestly obnoxious a feature or a bug?
Trump made a campaign promise to not be politically correct.
At least that's what I heard. I heard essentially Trump say he wasn't going to do it.
That looked like a campaign promise to me.
So I said Trump made a campaign promise to not be politically correct and we just watched him rebrand the Democratic Party into absurdity with a few offensive tweets that cost him nothing.
That's that risk management thing again.
Now, when I say it cost him nothing, you're going to argue with that, but I'll get back to that in a moment.
But I think most people on both sides have now agreed that the president has branded the Democrats with the squad's opinions, and that's going to take a long time for them to figure out how to navigate that.
He just threw the entire competition into turmoil and just urinated all over the entire bunch of them.
And may have won the election.
You know, there will never be a way to know for sure.
But I would argue it's possible that with those three offensive tweets, which were, as Geraldo says, manifestly obnoxious, true, they were manifestly obnoxious, but he may have actually ended the election right there.
Because it puts such a stain on the Democrats that it's going to make anybody who is the candidate have to explain the squad forever.
They either have to agree with them or say they don't agree with them and both of them are losing paths.
So, now I also said in my comment that it cost him nothing.
Do you agree with that?
Do you agree that it cost him nothing?
Because you probably don't, right?
You probably said, no, no.
He's just making it worse.
He is leading to the racial blah, blah, blah, etc.
Well, here's the calculation.
Do you think that CNN... Do you think they were on the verge of saying he's not a racist?
And then these tweets came out and they said, whoa, it's a good thing we didn't go with our new theory that he's never been a racist and we've just been lying for three years.
We were just going to change our opinion and say, no, no, we've just been saying that.
I swear to God, he's not a racist.
All that's off. No, that wasn't going to happen.
Because the competition, let's say the Democrats, Had been DEFCON 10 from day one, meaning there's no place you can go from he's already Hiller.
That's their starting point.
Their starting point was he's Hiller.
Do you think that these new tweets, provocative though they are, made people hate him more?
No. It was literally free money.
Because they had given themselves no room for improvement, there was also no expense.
If you don't get that, you're not good at risk management.
Oh, I have the DEFCONs backwards, right?
DEFCON 1 might be the bad one.
It was whatever the bad DEFCON is.
But because the President's critics were so locked in at full Hitler, it was free.
Had they been locked in at, well, he's not full Hitler, but he's 99% as bad as Hitler, well, then maybe he would have lost 1% there by giving them something that they could use as confirmation bias.
But given that they were locked in at 100%, no difference.
It did, however, create yet another example of how when he talks about, you know, you should love America, He doesn't really aim at any specific ethnicity, etc.
Oh, you're asking for it, people.
All the people who are saying that we lost the sound.
You can't hear me now, but if any of you can hear me, you don't want to complain about the sound on this periscope.
Alright, well, you're all complaining.
Now, this will probably work fine in playback on YouTube, so we can listen to it on YouTube and find out.
But, yeah, you don't want to complain about the sound.
Alright. If some of you can hear, then that's all I care about.
Wow. I'm thinking about doing, let me run this idea by you, at least any of you can still hear you, hear me.
I'm thinking about doing an additional number of these podcasts, video podcasts anyway.
I'm thinking of doing an interview series where I can just offline do an interview with a split screen and then I'll just run them later on YouTube.
I just want to put that out there, if anybody is interested.
It's kind of difficult to do a split screen on Periscope.
You can see that we're having audio issues here, etc.
But if I do it offline, I can record a really clean interview.
And I'm thinking about starting to do that, so I'll keep doing these Periscopes.
But then on top of that, I might do some interviews separately.
All right. There's apparently no problem with the sound at the moment.
That was all I wanted to talk about, and I don't have anything else.
So, I don't know how much you missed in my discussion of this, but...
All right, one of you has a really sick sense of humor, but it's still funny.
How many of you think that the sound problem is being specifically a problem on my end and not a general problem?
Because I did a quick check online and Periscope was having a general audio problem that had nothing to do with me.
And I assume that they may still be having a glitch now and then.
Okay.
Some people want to hear the interview series.
So I think I will do that.
I've got some interesting folks lined up.
I was wondering about...
Let me ask you this.
How many of the Democrat candidates do you think I could get on my interview series?
Because I think, actually...
The number of viewers that I get regularly is somewhere in the 50,000 range.
So for a normal Periscope, if I get 20-some thousand watching it when it's live, I'll get another 20,000 or so watching it on YouTube and then however many Washington podcasts.
I don't have numbers for that.
But something like 50,000 people watch my ordinary shows here.
So probably if I had a Democrat candidate, if it were one of the top ten or so, I could probably get at least 100,000 people to tune in.
I wonder if that would be enough to get any of the top Democrats on here.
So I might try that.
We'll see. I have a question for you.
Is there anybody here who is high up?
in a title company in the United States.
I'm looking for somebody who already likes what I do who is an executive At a major title company, like Chicago Title, for example.
If you are, DM me or just connect with me on LinkedIn because I have a business question for you.
Not a retail question, but a larger business issue.
So please contact me if you have anything like that.
It has to do with WenHub.
There's some products that would be of great interest to a title company.
And you would want to know about it first.
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