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Oct. 22, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
35:07
Episode 701 Scott Adams: Loserthink in the News Today, From Turkey to Impeachment
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Good stuff. I'm going to give you some examples of LoserThink today.
LoserThink, no coincidence, the name of my new book that people are just loving already.
And that's just the people who have the advanced copies.
You can order yours right now.
And it will be there in a few weeks.
Alright. And please do.
I would appreciate it if you did.
So here's some examples of loser think.
And this is the laundry list persuasion example.
So... The Democrats are wondering about the best approach to impeach the president.
And they have two basic paths.
One path is to take their best case, something about the phone call with the Ukrainian president, and just take what they have for that one limited situation.
The second path is that they just keep investigating every little thing until they have a whole laundry list of things that are not necessarily related to the Ukrainian phone call, but a whole bunch of things that they think individually would be impeachable, but together they're more powerful.
So if they go with get everything, it's going to take them a while, but they'll have more evidence.
If they go for the clean shot, you know, the head shot, where you just basically take your best situation, well, it might be faster, but maybe it's not as persuasive.
Here's what you do, and I recommend in my book, Loser Think, if somebody brings you the laundry list of reasons.
You ask them, hey, you know, In the interest of time, we can't talk about everything on your laundry list, but why don't you agree to this?
Give me your best reason on the list.
Just give me your best one.
If you have time, you could do two or three, but give me your best one.
And would you agree that if I can debunk your best reason...
That you'll rethink your other reasons.
So that's the technique.
Because often you can debunk the first one, and it's their strongest reason.
And then you say, well, if I just debunked your best reason, do I really need to see the other ones?
All right? So here's what you can infer from the fact that the Democrats are considering this question.
Do we go with what we already have, or do we keep getting evidence of unrelated, obstructing justice and abusing his power until we've got this big package?
Do you know what that tells you?
It tells you they don't have anything.
If they had something with their best case, absolutely that's the way to go.
You don't need to dig into the weeds if you've got a good case.
Why complicate things?
Why wait?
Just take your best case, present it to the public, bam, impeach that guy.
They can't.
Because their best case, obviously, is not persuasive.
If it were persuasive, I think we'd agree.
They'd say, well, this is persuasive.
We can look at the other stuff, but we don't need to.
Let's just go right to the impeachment vote.
They don't have anything.
Their best case is obviously not sufficient.
You'll see this over and over again, that the best argument by itself is not sufficient.
And what would you make of the fact that they might have lots of arguments for impeachment, any one of the arguments is not sufficient?
What's that tell you about each of the arguments?
It tells you that you're multiplying zero times a lot.
Well, this one's not impeachable.
But it feels like it sort of reminds me of something that would be in the neighborhood of impeachment.
All right, so by itself it's not persuasive.
But let's look at the 20 other things that also, by themselves, are not impeachable.
It doesn't matter how many of those you have.
They're all unimpeachable things.
So that's your first bit of loser think is imagining that a laundry list should be more persuasive than whatever's the best thing on the list.
Here's another one.
Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson, who you might know as two Very aged news people from the past.
I don't know what their ages are.
80s, maybe?
80ish. But CNN brings them on, together in this case.
And they say that, so this is Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson, say that President Trump is dangerous for the country because Trump is only interested in protecting himself.
This is an example of the mind reader illusion.
Do you think that Sam Donaldson and Dan Rather can look into the mind of the president and see something that you and I can't see?
No. Because they're not mind readers.
Do you think anybody can look into a stranger's brain and say they're only interested in protecting themselves?
Let's take that to the next level.
What would be an example of something a president could do that was only good for the president and not good for the country?
Nothing. Because assuming that everything is discoverable and transparent.
And when you're president, everything's pretty discoverable and transparent.
You couldn't hide anything if you wanted to.
We've seen that a million times.
So... If the president tried to do something that was literally only good for him, and let's say it was bad for the country, we'd know it in a heartbeat, and therefore it could not be good for him.
So it's an illogical assumption that a president who's so fully transparent, whether he wants to be or not, pretty much everything is discovered, will be discovered, could be discovered.
That president...
He can only help himself by helping the country because everybody's watching.
So if the president does something to help employment, is that so he can get re-elected?
Is it only about the president or is it also coincidentally good for the country?
Well, of course it's good for the country.
So when you see Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson brought on, it's because they've run out of argument and And they just need a couple of very old people to imagine they can read minds.
So that's what that's all about.
Here's another one. The fairness argument.
Do you know why you can't have an argument about what is fair?
Because nobody agrees.
You can't get two people to agree what is fair in any situation.
Let me give you the best example.
Transgender athletes.
There's another story about a transgender athlete who came in first place in some bicycle race.
And everybody's mad because the transgender athlete has some testosterone advantage.
So why do they say that this is wrong?
They say it's wrong because it's not fair.
It's not fair.
Who gets to decide what's fair?
Because in my opinion, if this transgender athlete could not compete, then that athlete could not win the gold medal.
How is that fair? Now, some of you are just coming out of your brains right now.
You're saying, don't you understand, Scott?
They're physically different.
Physically different, Scott.
Do you not understand that a transgender athlete has testosterone and muscle development?
They are not the same, Scott!
Don't you understand?
Yeah, I understand.
It just doesn't matter. Because I can't play in the NBA, no matter how hard I try.
Is that fair?
No. It's not fair that I can't play in the NBA. I will never be able to compete For like a Super Bowl ring or the NBA. So what do I think is fair?
I think what's fair is that the transgender athlete got to win a medal and otherwise did not have any way to win a medal.
Did that cause one woman to not win a medal who otherwise would have?
Yeah, it did.
It did. So somebody got something, somebody didn't get something.
If you reverse it, somebody got something and somebody didn't get something.
It's exactly the same.
Any way you do it, somebody's going to complain it's unfair.
Now, the fact that you and I disagree about what's fair...
Is my point.
Alright? Here's how I'm going to win the debate for all of you who are disagreeing with me in your mind right now.
You're saying, argh, Scott!
It's not fair!
It's not fair!
To which I say, you are entitled to that opinion.
But I'm also entitled to mine, right?
It is my legitimate opinion, I'm not being argumentative, it's an actual opinion, that it would be fair to have one winner and one loser, no matter who they were.
I don't care who it is.
Could be a woman, could be a transgender athlete who is a woman.
I don't care. Now, whose sense of fairness should win?
Should yours win?
Or should mine win? Because they're different.
You're a reasonable person, right?
You're a smart, educated, reasonable person who has a good sense of the world.
You have looked at this situation and decided, this is fair, and this is unfair.
I've looked at the same situation.
I'm educated. I've seen the world.
I've been around. I'm looking at exactly the same facts.
And I say, no, my sense of fairness is different.
They're both fair. Either way is fair.
That's my only point.
My point is not that I want to convince you to change your opinion of what's fair to my opinion.
I don't want to do that.
I simply want you to acknowledge that I'm a reasonable adult with a functional brain, and I have a different opinion of what constitutes fair.
Do you agree with just that?
Let's forget about the question of sports and athletes for a moment.
Just agree with this minor point that I'm a reasonable person with a real opinion.
I'm not making it up for a fact.
I'm not doing it just to, you know, troll the internet or anything.
That's my actual opinion.
Would you agree that I have an opinion that's different from yours and that both of our opinions Are based on the concept of fairness.
My only point is that you can't use fairness as a standard.
Because I won't agree with you what's fair.
And I never will. And if you put a hundred people in a situation and said, alright, everybody tell us what's fair, they would have different opinions.
So here's my opinion on transgender athletes.
If your entire thing comes down to what is fair, you don't have an argument.
That's not an argument. Because fairness is not an objective standard.
You can't argue that and still say that you're being a rational human.
You can certainly say what you think is fair, as I did and as all of you did.
But if we disagree, it's just not a standard you can use.
That's my point. Alright, so that's the only point on that.
Here's another interesting case of loserthink.
There's an article about California trying to deal with the, quote, homelessness problem, which, as you probably know, is not really a homeless problem.
It's only something that people who are in a bubble believe is a homeless problem.
It is primarily a drug problem, drug addiction problem, and a mental health problem.
If you take away the people who are addicted to drugs or have mental health problems, if you take them out of the equation, Everybody else can find a place to live.
It turns out if you subtract those two problems, people can find a place to live.
They can get a roommate, they can move, they can find a place to live.
So California is of course working on the wrong problem because they're locked in.
They're in this little bubble right here.
They're in a little bubble where they don't have access apparently to information that would tell them they're working on the wrong problem.
But here's a little bit from this article that I want to call out as Loser Think.
So the writer of this article, doesn't matter who, said, if rent control helps reduce homelessness, why is the problem so prevalent in the very cities that already have it?
So this person is saying, wait a minute, there is rent control in the very cities that don't have adequate housing.
So how is San Francisco going to help their problem by rent control?
Because the places that have rent control still have the problem.
So it's pretty obvious that rent control does not solve the problem.
What's wrong with that thinking?
What is wrong with that thinking?
It's the same problem with the people who say that, and you're not going to like this, it's the people who say that there's a lot of gun control in Chicago, and yet Chicago has one of the highest murder rates.
So people say, well, gun control obviously doesn't work, because you've got all this gun control in Chicago, but you have tons of murder, so it doesn't work.
What's wrong with that?
Same thing that's wrong with the homeless thing.
Here's the problem.
The reason that Chicago has strict gun laws is because they had a lot of murder.
If you have a lot of murder, you gotta try something.
So they tried a bunch of strict gun laws.
You should expect that wherever there's a problem, somebody's gonna try a solution.
So, of course, the places with the greatest murder should have the most gun control.
You couldn't imagine it any other way.
Because, hey, we got a lot of murders here, we better do something.
How about gun control?
Now, is gun control working?
You don't know. You have no way to know.
Because you don't have a Chicago with no gun control.
You only have one that has gun control.
Would the murder rate be higher if they didn't have gun control?
Well, I don't know. Neither do you.
Because there's no comparison.
There is no Chicago that doesn't have gun control compared to the Chicago that does in 2019.
You could probably find historical ones, but they don't count.
So, getting back to the homeless example, why is it that there's rent control Where there's also a lot of homelessness?
Well, because if you have a lot of homelessness, you do what California did.
You say, we've got to do something.
We don't have any good ideas.
Let's try rent control.
So, of course, wherever there's a problem, it will be paired with what somebody thinks is a solution.
That doesn't mean it didn't work.
It only means that they are often paired together.
Now, rent control...
It's a little different than the gun example in the sense that economic theory would tell you it doesn't work.
Like there's an actual cause and effect, there's some history to it, and you can see that this always leads to this.
So in that case, the housing situation is a little different because you probably can tell it's a bad idea to have rent control.
But it is not legitimate to say That rent control doesn't work because there's lots of homelessness wherever they have it.
That's not the right cause and effect, because it's probably the opposite.
Probably there's lots of homeless, so we need some rent control, even if it's a bad idea.
You're going to do it anyway, probably.
All right. New York Times did some kind of a puff piece on Hillary Clinton.
In which the reporter, Lisa Lehrer, questions whether Clinton was trolling us.
So Clinton speaking recently about Tulsi Gabbard and saying lots of things about President Trump, of course, at the same time that she's doing a new book tour.
So Hillary has a new book with Chelsea, I believe.
And so the Times is saying, we wonder if she's just trolling us.
Would you like the answer to that question?
Yes. Yes.
Hillary is trolling us and doing a really good job, I would say.
Does Hillary believe everything she says lately about Russian assets and Trump and all that?
Well, I don't know. It doesn't matter.
She's going to say it anyway because it's trollingly perfect.
Do you think that she got more attention for her book by saying that Tulsi Gabbard might be a Russian asset?
Of course she did.
Is it flat-out crazy?
No. It's not flat-out crazy.
It's just hyperbole.
And here's the hyperbole of it.
To say that Tulsi is a Russian asset is an, let's say, there's no evidence to support that.
But there certainly is evidence that Russia may have preferences now and then for certain candidates.
And if Tulsi ran for the third party, it would have some effect on the outcome.
So... In a sense, in more of a generic way, it's true that Russia might at some point say, hey, how about Tulsi?
She might ruin the situation in America.
That might be true. But that's very different from grooming her.
It's different from having meetings and saying, all right, Tulsi, we'll do this, you do this, and we'll destroy the United States together.
Nothing like that's happening. So Clinton uses a little hyperbole to put intention on Tulsi in a way that no intention is in evidence.
It gets her a lot of attention.
It totally works.
Do I think that Hillary Clinton has suddenly lost her mind and sees Russian assets everywhere?
Probably not.
It looks like just productive trolling to me.
That's all I see.
But interestingly, those people who do not have a sense of humor, the same one-third of the country who have been scared to death of Trump, and every time Trump says something that's non-standard, which is most of the time, the people with no sense of humor say, my God, he's lost it.
How can he say that?
That's not hyperbole.
He really means that. So the same people who don't understand anything that Trump does, because they don't know he's doing it tongue-in-cheek, he's doing it for effect, it's intentional hyperbole, the people who don't understand any of that have to deal with the fact that Hillary just started acting the same way, with the hyperbole and going a little bit too far.
So what do they say? Do they say, well, when Trump does it, he's crazy, but when Hillary does it, she's just having fun?
I don't know. I think at least a third of the country, the ones who don't have a sense of humor, are looking at Hillary and saying, I have no other explanation other than she must be crazy now.
But there is another explanation, which is she's just trolling and she's selling a book and she's doing a good job of it.
Let's talk about the whistleblower situation.
So the whistleblower situation, what I find interesting about that is that it's getting too boring and complicated and there's no face to it.
Now, there are people who have been asked to testify who do have faces, but there's sort of obscure characters that we don't care about.
You know, the ex-diplomat for Ukraine.
I don't know. What's he look like?
I don't know. So if you have a story that has lots of moving parts, it's complicated, and you can't put a face to it, like an actual personality that everybody knows, like Trump, for example, you don't have much.
So it seems to me that this whole whistleblower thing is just sort of falling apart.
It's falling apart for lack of interest.
I feel like the public doesn't care at all about any of this.
And it has no star power.
So it seems like it's just sort of dying.
We'll see if anything comes out of that.
But at the moment, I would say the Democrats are losing the public opinion war, even though surprisingly the polls say that there's a lot of support for impeachment.
I don't think that's the support you think it is.
I think a lot of Republicans are supporting impeachment just to give the Republicans a subpoena power so that they can rip the Democrats apart.
I'm not sure that they're really in favor of impeaching the president so much as they're in favor of a cage match, which is fair.
All right. There's a great article.
I think it's based on a book, maybe, called War on the Rocks.
And then there's a website of the same name, War on the Rocks, by Aaron Stein.
And he's got... He's got an article there that I think is just sort of perfect.
And it's another example of loser think that he's pointing out.
So in this case, Aaron Stein is not falling for loser think.
Rather, he's pointing it out in other people.
And I will do the same.
So it goes like this. That no one should have been surprised, certainly not the military, certainly not the Kurds, when President Trump said, you know, let's get out of that safe zone and pull back and let Turkey and Kurds work it out.
And the reason that nobody should be surprised is that the president has been saying some version of this consistently for three years and has been asking for plans to make it happen in the best way.
Now, do you think that President Trump was receiving plans from his underlings that were good plans for how we could, you know, safely and smartly phase ourselves out of the serious situation while making sure that our interests were maintained, you know, keep ISIS and protect the Kurds and protect the oil wells, etc.?
Do you think that anybody gave the president that plan?
I doubt it. Now, do you think the president asked for it?
Yes. Do you think he asked for it repeatedly?
I'm guessing yes.
Since it was a major campaign promise, and he's been making noise about it consistently, I would guess he's asked his people for a plan.
Probably lots of times.
Do you think that his people ever delivered a plan to get out of there in a right way?
Nope. I'll bet they did not.
And if you have experience in the corporate world, you've seen this a million times.
How many times have you had a boss who asked you for something that you knew was a terrible idea, but you couldn't overrule your boss?
So instead of saying, hey boss, you're being real dumb.
I'm not even going to work on that.
It's a complete waste of time.
You say, sure, I'll work on that.
And then you get busy.
And then you don't work on it.
And then when your boss says, where's that plan?
You say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got a phone call in.
I'm talking to Bob.
We're going to have a meeting tomorrow.
Yeah, I'm going to get right on that.
Then a few more weeks get by, and your boss says, well, where's my plan?
You say, you know... Joe never got back to me.
I've got a few vendors I want to talk to.
I'm working on this, but I have these other priorities.
I'm working on those too. I'm going to get this plan to you.
And what you do is effectively you take the decision away from your boss because your boss can't do the work he's asking you to do, which is the detail work.
He just doesn't have that option because he's got to do his boss job.
And if you won't do it, Or worse yet, you say you will do it and then you just continue not to.
You can actually just time him out.
You can just make him run out of time.
You can make him, you know, something else comes up and it's a bigger priority and he just forgets for a while.
So it's very common for your subordinates to try to manage you simply by not doing the things you want to be done.
What do you do if you're a bad leader and you're a weak leader?
And you can't get past all these people.
Well, maybe you could fire one or two.
Do you think that would make a difference?
I don't. Because I don't think there was anybody who thought it was a good idea to get out.
At least anybody in the military.
So I don't think he could have even fired people and changed the result.
So what did this president do after three years of not getting a plan to leave?
He just tweeted, we're out of here.
We're out of here. And he just said, alright, you don't have a plan?
Do it anyway. Figure it out.
Now, that is leadership.
And you saw the President say directly, I think it was yesterday in a press event, he said directly that if he had not shaken the box, those are my words, but if he had not done what he did and it did not lead to people getting killed, nothing would have ever happened.
Does that sound credible and reasonable?
Does it pass the sniff test For you, that if he hadn't done this and caused immediate mortal danger to the players, and actually probably some people got killed, we don't know the details yet.
If he had not done that, do you think anything would have happened?
I don't think so.
That totally passes the sniff test for me, with not even a slight bit of hesitation.
I don't believe his team was on his side.
I believe he made a promise to the voters.
The voters voted him in.
And I think he just said, F it at some point.
And said, we're getting out.
Now you're going to have to figure it out.
I gave you time to figure it out the easy way, and that didn't work.
Now figure it out the hard way while the billets are flying.
It'll maybe focus you for a little bit.
That's like a super adult decision.
The president always gets accused of being impulsive as if he doesn't think these things through, which is clearly the opposite of what's happening.
In this case, he's been working on this for three years, so there's no impulsiveness there.
But I think he finally just said, alright, I've tried all the ways to make the children coordinate.
There's no way to make the children do what the children need to do, or at least what I'm asking them to do.
So I'm just going to make an adult decision.
Some people are going to get killed now.
I'm going to make that decision, and people will die, and we'll get to a better state of things if this works out.
So here's the loser think angle there.
If you did not have experience in a big organization where you saw people managing their boss and sort of denying the boss the things that the boss asked for because they don't want to directly say, no, that's a bad idea.
They just don't want it to happen.
So if you've not experienced that, you would have a blind spot.
And you would say to yourself, I don't understand why the president acted impulsively when he could just ask his staff to come up with a reasonable plan, and then he could look at the reasonable plan and socialize it and get all our allies on board.
Why didn't he do that?
Is he a dope? Because it's so obvious to me that he should just ask his people to make a plan and then sell it to the Allies and then sell it to Turkey and sell it to the Kurds and it's all good.
Why did somebody have to get killed?
Well, if you're thinking like that, you have no experience in any big organization.
In all likelihood.
He tried that. It didn't work.
It wasn't ever going to work.
And so he just grabbed the box and he said, all right, watch this.
Shook the box and now people are talking peace.
I hate to say genius, but it might be.
We'll see. Nobody knows how these things work out until years later.
So US engineers have developed a 3D printer that's so big and so fast that It says they can print an object the size of an adult human in just a couple of hours.
Now, I don't think they're actually printing adult humans, but something that big in a couple hours.
So what does that tell you about the future of home construction?
If you had a big, big old 3D printer, maybe you don't own it, maybe it just gets shipped in to build your house, and a big old vat Of whatever the materials are for the printer.
And you just started printing, you know, snapped together pieces.
I feel like you could build your own home with snapped together pieces.
I don't like the idea of the 3D printer making the entire home with permanent walls.
I like the idea of making bricks that are like Legos that can snap together.
And you've got different Legos for, you know, say corners and special ones if you want to put in a window or a door or run some cable or something.
But it should be dead simple.
You should be able to have an app that you follow the directions one step at a time on your app to build your own home.
And it should be able to meet all building codes, etc.
I believe that's all coming.
Yeah, they've already built a printed house, but I don't think that's going to be the future.
I don't think those fully printed 3D houses are good enough.
It's a good start. It's a good experiment.
But I think they need to get to the point where they can make bricks that you can just put together any way you want.
There's an invisibility cloak story on Drudge, somebody says.
Interesting. Alright, that's all I got for now.
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