Episode 1255 Scott Adams: I Just Woke Up, So Even I Don't Know the Topic Today
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Innocent till proven guilty and election integrity
Personal robot with facial recognition
Nonchalant evil talk: Punishing Trump and supporters
Denial of commerce for Trump family and supporters
Josh Hawley book cancelled by Simon & Schuster
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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It's time. It's time for a coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day.
Every single time, just when you think the streak is going to be broken, and you think to yourself, well, maybe today is the day.
There's something else during the day that will be even better than the simultaneous sip, and then midnight comes, and you say, nope.
Once again, best part of the day.
So let's do it right.
You know what you need? Yeah.
You need a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day.
I think it makes everything better except the transition of power.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now. Go. Ah.
You know, sometimes you can't sum things up with just one word, but sometimes you can.
Sublime. Well, it's so nice to have all of you here.
And I would like to begin with a story that happened some years ago.
I was doing a book tour back when...
Do you remember when people could travel and talk to other people and stuff?
Anybody remember those times?
I'm old enough to remember when you could take a trip.
Mingle with other people, didn't have to wear a mask and stuff.
It's a long time ago. This happened maybe over 20 years ago.
And what happened was I was doing a book tour and that usually requires you to travel all over the country.
You go from big bookstore to big bookstore and you sit there and you sign a bunch of things.
There's a big line and people buy your book and that's how it works.
So I get to this big bookstore in Denver.
I think it's whatever is the biggest bookstore in Denver.
Really, really big operation.
And I walk in and it's just one of the stops on the way.
And the manager of the bookstore says, The people are really excited that you're here.
I thought, great. Could be a good line to get a signed book.
And she says, yeah, they've been here for over an hour.
They're all waiting in the big room over there.
And I started to wonder, what were they waiting for exactly?
Were they waiting for me to sign books?
Because that's why I thought I was there.
And then the manager told me, no, they were waiting for my speech.
And I said, what? And apparently, a large number of people had gathered with the impression that I was going to give a speech.
Well, it was the first time I heard about it, five minutes before the speech.
So here was my situation.
A large room full of people, Expecting a speech.
Me, not knowing I was going to give a speech in five minutes to a room full of people who kind of expected more than some thank yous and how you doing.
So, does that sound like the scariest thing you've ever heard in your life?
So I said, alright.
I walk into this room with no preparation whatsoever and there's this giant sea of people.
Far more people than I would have expected.
And I walk up to the lectern, and I guess I'm giving a speech.
Now, here's the interesting part of the story.
How would you feel in that situation?
Just imagine it.
Room full of people, and you have nothing prepared.
Absolutely nothing.
And you've got to entertain them now for, I don't know, 45 minutes or something.
Well, luckily, my talent stack included the Dale Carnegie training.
Now, the Dale Carnegie course teaches you how to be comfortable in exactly this situation.
And I mean exactly. Being told to say something in front of a bunch of people and you hadn't prepared.
And so, unlike maybe anybody else in that room, I was literally the only person trained to do that.
I actually was trained for that special Exact situation.
And the training is easy.
They tell you to have a story prepared that you can tell any time, and then that gets you going.
And then you just talk about yourself, assuming that's why you were asked to be there, right?
Maybe if you were there for another purpose, you would have some expertise that you talk about there.
But to get going, they say always have a story that you can just break out at any minute.
Do you know what my story is that I break out at any minute if I'm not prepared?
It's this one. I tell this story when I'm not prepared.
Last night, I don't use an alarm clock, I just wake up whenever I wake up.
Often I wake up at 3 in the morning and I just start work.
More likely, between 3 and 5 I wake up naturally and I just start work.
Today I woke up closer to midnight.
And that's a little too early for me to start work.
You know, having two hours of sleep.
So I tried desperately to go back to sleep, and I hate sleep.
I just hate sleep. But you know if you stay up too long and you go back to sleep?
Well, that's a long way of saying I woke up just about five minutes before I was ready to go live.
A little more than five minutes, but totally unprepared.
The point is, always have a story.
It's the Dale Carnegie training.
Always have a story. And then also practice embarrassing yourself so that when you get put in that situation, you say, eh, it's one of these.
You just get used to it.
I have embarrassed myself in public so many times, so many times, that I actually don't even feel it anymore.
This would be one of those cases.
So I did make a few notes to talk about.
Here's a question for you.
You know, every once in a while there are things that you just take for granted.
As an assumption. And it's useful once in a while to go back and say, hey, are my basic assumptions even right?
Just the most basic assumptions.
Here's a basic assumption.
That you're innocent until proven guilty.
Now, doesn't that feel like a pretty good rule?
It's served us well for, lo, these hundreds of years.
I wouldn't want to change it, right?
In a legal system, That's a really good standard.
It really serves us well.
But does that standard apply to all situations?
I feel as if there is one situation where that should maybe be reversed, and it's election integrity.
Election integrity is the one situation where maybe you need to prove it was fair.
See where I'm going?
Because putting the burden on anybody who's got a problem with the outcome to say, okay, you got a complaint, prove it.
Well, how the hell am I going to prove anything about the election?
I have a suspicion.
Well, you know, let's say I hypothetically, not me personally.
I as just a hypothetical person.
Let's say I had a suspicion.
How would I check on it?
You couldn't. One of the things we know for sure is that the election is not sufficiently transparent that if somebody has a problem with it, they can just flick the switch and say, well, take a look for yourself.
If you have any doubts about the integrity of it, click.
Here, just take a look. Anybody want to look?
Here's the code. Take a look, anybody?
Anybody? We'll give you all the data.
You can have it yourself.
You can have all the data we have.
If we have data, we'll give it to you.
Because I think the votes are anonymized, right?
So even the public wouldn't know who voted for who.
Is that right? I did a fact check on that.
So we don't have the ability to do that at the moment.
But I think we're thinking about it upside down.
If this were a regular legal claim, then yes, the person who's got the claim better bring the evidence.
You don't want somebody to say to you, hey, I'm accusing you of murder.
I don't have any evidence.
You better bring evidence if you're accusing somebody of murder, right?
The system can't work any other way.
It's not up to you to defend yourself against maybe you murdered somebody.
Why don't you wake up every day and prove you didn't murder anybody, right?
That can't work. But in this one rare, special, not like any other situation, the election integrity, maybe we should work toward having a button you can flick and everybody can just look at it.
Because short of that, how will we ever trust it?
Why won't we Are we not just reproducing the problem we had this year, and we'll just have it next year, next year, or next election?
So I would just put that out there, that we should question the assumption that for the election, they should have the same standard as a legal case.
I think you should be upside down.
Now, we don't have the technology to do it, so we should work toward the place where we could.
Have you noticed that Trump is once again basically the only story that anybody cares about?
There's what Trump did that could get reversed.
There's what he's going to pardon.
There's his role in the capital attack.
It's all Trump.
What the hell are they going to talk about in a week?
Suppose he actually went away for a while, just took some time off.
Nobody would begrudge him some time off.
What are they going to talk about?
I'm not joking.
It's an actual business model question.
If you were going to sell stock in CNN, that's not a thing, but if you could, I don't know how CNN goes forward.
I don't even know how they could possibly imagine they would be profitable in the future.
I feel like they're four weeks away of running out of Trump stories.
And then what do you do? I feel as if it's going to become this ghost entity like CNN and MSNBC. They'll become zombie news entities where all they can talk about is what if Trump had been president.
It's going to be an entire imaginary news network.
At least two of them.
It'll be, you know, a year from now it'll be, but imagine if Trump had been in this situation, the civil war he would have created.
But imagine if Trump had tried to negotiate this deal, he would have just given away the country.
And imagine if Trump had done this.
It's all going to be that.
It's going to be nothing but imagine if Trump had been here.
Right? And then there will be a whole bunch of problems which the news will imagine Trump is the cause of, because they have the power to assign blame, even if they're the ones who caused the problem, and they usually do.
The fake news causes most of our problems.
Imagine a world in which the fake news was real news.
The fake news, instead of being fake, would say, let's say they're real news, they'd say, hey, here's the biggest problem in the country.
And because we trusted them, the left and the right would say, huh, We hadn't seen it that way, but that does look like that's true and credible.
You said it in the news. It looks like you do your work and you're not trying to be biased.
So maybe we'll work on this big problem altogether.
The news says it's a problem.
Who are we to argue?
Just imagine a world where the news didn't lie to you about everything, at least politically everything.
It would be a better world, right?
You'd be working on the top priorities instead of arguing about what they were.
So it's going to be a weird world without Trump.
I saw a little piece on the internet, a little video clip of a personal robot that has facial recognition and it can walk.
So you've seen these robots.
You've seen all the video clips of it.
Who is it? You know the company who's always doing the strange-looking robot dogs and walking robots and stuff.
So the things that robots can do now that they couldn't do before is they can walk upright really, really well.
So that's creepy.
So you never have to have a robot that's on wheels.
It's going to walk just like a person.
So it can navigate all the same spaces that a person can.
Secondly, they've now figured out hands.
So they can put hands on a robot with real fingers, so it can manipulate all the same physical objects as a person.
Watch all the small parts coming together, because that's, you know, even though you've seen video of it, it's never quite been there where the hands are really going to work just quite like hands.
But I think they're close. Then the thing they've added recently is facial recognition.
Now we're getting creepy.
Because your robot can actually walk up to you, recognize you, and then deal with you as an individual different from the other individuals in the house.
Getting a little creepy?
That's all stuff we can do today.
Now add the next thing, which is probably the single biggest part.
If you see these robots in the little videos, they usually have some big I think it's a battery pack on their back because if they didn't have a gigantic battery, they couldn't go very long and do much because of the battery limitation.
You don't want a robot that's got to be plugged into the outlet, right?
But you may or may not be aware that the technology for battery storage is improving pretty much continuously such that you would expect that there will be electric airplanes, aircraft, Routinely, someday. At the moment, you can't get enough energy into a battery to make a proper aircraft.
There are prototypes and stuff, so it does happen, but it's not good enough that the whole industry is going to become electric overnight.
The point is, it will, though.
The inevitable direction of battery storage Appears to be it just keeps getting better.
Now, it's not like, you know, other laws like Moore's Law, but it does just keep getting better.
So there will be a time where your robot can hold personally enough battery power to do a proper robot job for several hours, I would imagine.
That's probably pretty close.
And then recharge itself and give you a new few hours, which would probably be fine, because you could tell your robot to You know, do the dishes and then recharge itself and, you know, mow the lawn and then recharge itself.
So that would probably work fine.
But just think about this world.
Now here's the whole point.
When I saw the robot, they made a robot that looked, had human form, but it had a robot face.
And it recognizes you by sight.
I don't want that in my house.
I don't know about you, but once the robot can recognize me by sight, I don't want that thing in my house.
Because it's connected to the internet, it's got eyes, it's got cameras.
That's a little bit too intrusive, because if my robot's watching me, let's say, do my bathroom stuff, then maybe the whole world is, because that robot's connected to the internet.
So that's a little bit intrusive.
But how about this?
Suppose they change the robot to look like an attractive human being.
Now they're going to have to get it really, really close to human because of the uncanny valley effect.
If you get it close to human but not, it looks like a zombie and it's just scary.
So it's got to be really, really spot on to looking like a human being.
But guess what?
We can do that too.
If you've seen the, you know, the real expensive sex dolls, they can make something that looks pretty darn human.
And if you've seen them, you know, Hollywood, what Hollywood can do with robots, etc., they can make the facial structures move just like human.
We're really close, really, really close to a robot that looks like an attractive woman and lives in your house.
And I feel as if that might be the dividing line between wanting a robot and not.
As if you could make it look like an attractive human that he knows a robot, so you'll keep your hands off it.
So you don't want any sexual harassment of robots, but you know it's coming.
There will be sexual harassment of robots, no doubt about it.
All right, so that's coming.
And that's all in your lifetime, by the way.
Probably, except for those of you who are unusually old or have comorbidities, most of you are going to be in a world where at least rich people have honest-to-God, walking, talking robots that interact with you.
That will happen in your lifetime.
Amazing. Most of the news that I'm watching and most of the stories on social media have taken a Singular form.
And that form is different ways that Democrats can punish Trump and punish his supporters.
It turns out that that's most of the news now.
Most of the news is about Trump, but the flavor of it is how to punish Trump supporters and Trump.
Now, Nobody would be too surprised that people say things, there's hyperbole.
I'm sure people on the right have said something similar at some points about the left.
But I'll tell you the thing that's starting to get to me.
There is a nonchalantness to the way the left is talking about this that is chilling.
And I don't know how often a nonchalantness About punishing an entire class of people has ever happened before, except you know what I'm going to say, right?
You hate to use the Nazi analogy, because if you do, you've given up on being a credible person, I think.
Anybody who makes a Nazi analogy.
But I will just say this one thing.
The nonchalantness is absolutely the same vibe as Nazi Germany.
Now, I'm not going to make the analogy, it's just the same as the Holocaust, because nothing's like the Holocaust.
But the nonchalantness, when you see it, is the scariest frickin' thing in the world.
It's how I imagine slaves were talked about during the height of slavery.
Don't you imagine that the slave owners would talk about the slaves as in just literally property.
That's how Republicans are being spoken about by Democrats.
They're being talked about like property.
As in, we'll just punish these guys and none of them will get jobs.
We'll put them on a list.
And it's gone beyond even anger.
It doesn't feel like anger, does it?
It's gone from anger, which I understood, because Trump is very, you know, he's a provocative character, so you get anger.
I get response.
I get, you know, cause and effect.
I get all that. But nonchalant evil, where you're not mad anymore, it's just routine.
Routine evil is a whole different level I get people acting out, getting mad, saying things they shouldn't have said, things that you'll get you cancelled from Twitter, but you're in the moment.
You had something to beef about.
But once it gets past that and you won, see, here's the problem.
The Democrats won.
If you won and you're still looking to punish the other side nonchalantly, like it's no big deal, It's time to start worrying about that.
But we'll see how far that goes.
A lot of interesting things about this attack on the Capitol.
One of them is that so-called media personality...
Baked Alaska. Have you heard of Baked Alaska?
You've heard of him since the 2016 election.
He's a right-leaning character.
He's a media personality, I guess.
So he gets to the news a lot.
And he's one of the people who was live-streaming and taking pictures of himself in the Capitol.
So he was part of the Capitol assault.
But he didn't have a mask.
And he was broadcasting himself.
What do you think about somebody who is part of an insurrection slash coup who isn't wearing a mask and is live streaming so that everybody knows you're there?
What is he thinking?
Was he thinking, well, this is a proper coup and looks like we took over the country so I guess we own the country now so I don't need my mask.
I'll just show this on live stream.
Was it live stream or just...
I don't know if it was live stream, but anyway, he was taking pictures of himself that made it clear he was there.
So, do you think he was thinking that he had done a major crime?
Is the way he acted suggestive of somebody who knew they did something that could be a major jailable offense?
It doesn't feel like it, does it?
It feels like whatever he was thinking was...
That it was more like a free speech protest that had gone a little too far.
I don't feel like you turn the camera on yourself and say, here I am in the middle of the Capitol, unless the way you thought of it at the moment was as a protest.
The evidence just does not suggest he was there to overthrow the country.
But he'll probably go to jail.
Because, as I mentioned, there's a nonchalantness About punishing Trump supporters.
This does really get to the question of who influenced these people and where did their own responsibilities stop?
Because here's somebody who literally seems to have been tricked, or maybe not intentionally, but he was fooled into being part of what looks like an insurrection or a coup attempt, and clearly he didn't think he was part of it.
It's obvious that he was not thinking he was part of a coup.
What was he thinking?
Well, he was probably thinking he didn't like the result of the election.
All right, there's stories about Trump allies selling access to Trump to get pardons.
Now, that's pretty...
Ugly business. But the problem with this pardoning, and of course now the left is saying that all the pardons should be overturned, etc.
But the problem with the presidential pardon is it's either absolute or it doesn't exist.
So I could see getting rid of presidential pardons completely.
Yeah, I could see you could make the argument.
I don't think I would go there.
But I can see you can make the argument.
But there is no way you can make a reasonable argument that Trump is the only one who can't do pardons.
You've got to be consistent.
Because the pardons are always about a guilty person.
Pretty much. It's just always about guilty people.
So you can't say that pardons should not apply to somebody who is lobbying for it, because that's how it happens.
Somebody is lobbying for all the pardons.
There's no exception to that.
The president doesn't have his own list.
It's people lobbying him.
So if you don't like the fact that people are lobbying and buying excess and doing all this bad stuff, and that maybe bad people and president's friends get pardoned, if you don't like all of that stuff, the only way to get rid of it is to get rid of the whole thing that presidents can't pardon.
And unfortunately, I don't think that's a good idea.
I kind of like Having that last control, just in case.
Apparently, according to, I think Jack Posobiec was tweeting this, there's an Antifa supporter, Daniel Baker, who was arrested for plotting an attack on Trump supporters on Inauguration Day.
So apparently he's got weapons and he was doing something to plot an attack on Trump supporters.
So, who would you blame for that?
If an attack on Trump supporters happened during the inauguration, would that be Trump's fault?
Or would it be, say, Nancy Pelosi's fault, Biden's fault, Kamala Harris's fault?
Because they would be the ones who would be, you know, sort of getting people excited about hating Trump supporters.
So would they not be inciting this guy?
Why is it that Trump is inciting the people who did things on the right But there's nobody inciting this guy.
He incited himself.
You have to make up your mind.
Either people incite themselves, or they are incited by other people.
That's it. You've got to make up your mind.
But, of course, we won't be consistent about that.
Apple says that Parler, which they banned from their app store, If they moderated better, they could go back in the store.
So they're not banned forever, they just have to moderate better.
In other words, there are too many Nazis on there, so they have to moderate them.
What would happen if Parler started moderating well enough that Apple said they could be on their App Store?
Well, you know what would happen.
They'd have to turn it to Twitter.
This was always going to happen.
Twitter plays by the rules that Apple sets up.
Just like everybody else plays by the rules.
If there's anybody who doesn't play by those same rules, they either can't be in the game, or they have to turn into the ones that are.
Parler would have to turn into Twitter, basically, to stay an app.
Now when I say turn into Twitter, I mean aggressively get rid of the violent talk and aggressively get rid of the worst elements.
And if they do that, they're going to walk right up to that line that Twitter was at, And then if they want advertisers and they want a business model that works, they're going to end up pushing that line, just like YouTube, just like Twitter.
It's just commerce that makes that happen.
And anything that is subject to commerce, let's say advertisers, if you're subject to advertising dollars, you're going to end up in the same place.
Nobody's figured out how not to, because the advertisers get to say who they associate with.
So we'll see how that works out.
In my area of the woods, Northern California, just down the road in Union City, Union officials in Northern California, they removed a, I guess it was a sign that said, White Lives Matter, a banner.
And it was posted on city property, and it was declared racist, and a despicable act of vandalism.
Now, usually when I think of vandalism, I think of breaking something.
But the story says that a banner was held, was hung up.
Do you usually consider hanging up a banner on public property vandalism?
I mean, I can see the argument, especially if something got damaged in the act.
But vandalism wouldn't be the word I'd use.
Now, would you say that that is...
Would you agree with the officials that hanging a sign that says white lives matter is a...
Horrible racist act.
It's sort of interesting that that claim can be made.
How? What was the tone of the claim?
It's almost nonchalant.
It's almost as if no argument needs to be made.
It's just routine.
That if there are some white people out there who feel that...
who feel that they have some grievance, that those people should be punished.
Nonchalantly. Like, there's no discussion, right?
If there are white people with grievances, you don't say to yourself, well, what are your grievances?
We don't do that.
If white people have grievances sufficient to put up a banner, which is going pretty far, they put up a banner I tell you, there's very, very little difference between hanging a banner and starting an insurrection.
It's a banner. Now, what was the mental state of the people who hung that banner?
Were they thinking to themselves, ha ha ha ha, this is a good racist thing?
I don't know. Do you know?
Do you know what the people were thinking when they hung up the banner?
Were they thinking, black people are going to hate this.
I'm really going to stick it to them.
I'm going to really make people mad.
Well, that would be pretty racist.
I would agree. If the intention was to make other people feel bad, And those other people are not your same ethnic group?
Yeah, that's pretty racist.
That's pretty racist. I'd agree with that.
If that was the intention.
But aren't we making a pretty big assumption here?
We don't even know who put up the banner.
How do you know what their intention was?
Could there be not an intention that would be legitimate?
Now, I know what most of America says when I say that.
They say, Scott...
There's no such thing as a legitimate white person complaint in America.
To which I say, suppose I don't argue that case.
Think what you will on that topic.
I will just say that that would make whoever the white person is who put that up would put them in a category of citizens who don't have the ability to express themselves If they were doing it about their grievance, and it wasn't racial.
Because I can tell you from living in and among white people, I've met a lot of them.
I am one, you may have noticed.
If you talk to enough white people, you'll find out that the whole Black Lives Matter thing feels like sort of a trap, you know, like a trick question, like, you know, did you stop beating your spouse sort of thing.
And so they feel that it's abusive, and so they just feel, hey, I've got a grievance, let me just express my grievance this way.
And it doesn't come across as racist when I hear people talk about it in person.
They're just talking about, hey, why can't we all have a grievance?
If I can acknowledge your grievance as real, and I do, why couldn't you acknowledge somebody else's grievance as real?
Why can't we both say, you're mad at something, maybe I don't agree with you, but...
It's America. You can have a grievance.
You can talk about it. But no, there is a class of people who literally can't talk about their grievances.
So much so that they would be called racists and despicable vandals if they stated their opinion even anonymously in public, which is what they did.
Without hurting anything, apparently, they just put up a banner.
So could those people have been just racists?
I would say yes, could have been.
They could have been exactly what the officials thought, a bunch of racists.
I don't know. But I also don't know if they are the other person who just has a grievance and feels that they need a right to talk about it.
If you don't know that, I think you don't know enough.
More about punishing Trump supporters or anybody who even indirectly supports them.
Steve Schmidt of the Project Lincoln or the Lincoln Project, whatever the hell that thing is.
So some of the ones who were not accused of sexual improprieties...
are saying that anybody who deals with Trump supporters basically should be punished in a sense.
So they're going after VRBO for apparently not canceling people who are known to be part of the protests at the Capitol.
So there's pressure on VRBO to cancel contracts for people who are legal citizens of this country Who had a legal contract and were, I think he's including the ones who were just protesting, and were not arrested for anything.
Does that seem fair to you?
Do you want to live in a world in which companies won't do business with you because your political enemies told them not to?
That's the world they're trying to create.
Where you can't do commerce if your political opponents are strong enough to make companies stop dealing with you.
That's happening right now, in this world right now.
Now, you know where that ends, right?
So you know there's a logical end to that.
I would say that the obvious path to this would be massive bloodshed, which I don't want.
So I'd like...
Let me put this in a positive way instead of a negative way, okay?
Sometimes you can predict where things are going if they keep going in that direction, and so it's worthwhile to warn that maybe you shouldn't go in that direction if it's obvious that there's a big problem over in that direction.
So let me put this in the most Positive terms.
If you would like the country to avoid civil war and bloodshed and live in harmony with unity, there's a way to do it.
And that way to do it would be to try to figure out how to work with Trump supporters, how to deal with the QAnon disinformation stuff in a productive way.
And then maybe there's, at least in small ways, ways we can work together and move forward on stuff.
That would be a positive way to do it.
A way that would largely guarantee massive casualties, which I do not want to happen.
I hope nobody is involved in anything like that.
I don't encourage it.
I discourage it.
I disavow it, okay?
As strongly as possible.
But there's an obvious, very predictable end to it.
If Trump supporters are closed out of commerce, Or even just their leaders, you know, like Josh Hawley is being closed out of commerce, Ted Cruz is being closed out of commerce, meaning that they can't even rent a hotel to do an event now.
And Cruz and Hawley broke no laws.
They simply did what they thought their supporters wanted them to do, which is to question things within the boundaries of the rules, which they did.
And without leaving the boundaries of the rules...
They're being denied commerce.
Can you think of any other group in history who were denied all of the, let's say, the opportunities of commerce within the country they lived and were citizens?
Can you think of any?
Well, I can think of the Uyghurs in China.
The Uyghurs can't Do any kind of job they want.
In fact, they're rounded up and put into concentration camps, basically.
What's the other historical example of that?
Some identifiable group of people who could live in the country.
They were allowed to live there, at least temporarily.
But they couldn't do the same jobs.
Or they couldn't make the same contracts.
They couldn't do commerce the way other people living in the country who are also citizens couldn't do.
Oh, yeah. Japanese-Americans, when they were rounded up in World War II and put in concentration camps.
So these were American citizens who were put in concentration camps, Japanese-Americans, literally rounded up and put in frickin' concentration camps.
Could they do commerce?
No. They were accused of no crimes.
No crimes whatsoever.
And yet, they couldn't do commerce.
They couldn't make a contract because they were in a concentration camp, just like the Uyghurs.
Who would...
I feel as if there's some other group.
I'm forgetting. Historically?
Oh, women. Women.
Yeah, historically women...
Could not do every kind of job.
And it wasn't that long ago that if you were a woman and you came in and applied for certain kinds of jobs that were dominated by men, that you wouldn't even be able to get the job.
It wouldn't be the law.
They'd just say, uh, we're holding these jobs for men.
So that's pretty bad.
Aren't we glad that, you know, a woman or anybody can get a job now?
But there's some other group I'm Is it, oh, yeah, the LGBTQ community.
There's another case where discrimination historically has been so bad that they're denied certain kinds of occupations, say military.
You know, if you were gay in certain times, you couldn't be in the military.
So that's a denial of commerce in a sense, the military's special case, but they do pay them.
But there's some other group, I don't know, it's not coming to me, But I feel as if there's some historical precedent of denying economic opportunities to a defined group that leads to something bad, but I can't think of what it is.
If you can think of it, if you can think of it, remind me, okay?
Yeah, it's the fucking Holocaust is what it is, if you're slow on this.
So that's where we're headed, meaning that I'm not predicting that'll happen, by the way.
I'm saying that the actions of the left predictably would get to that point if they keep it up.
Now, I'm not sure that they're going to keep it up because we're still in the Trump era and the ugliest part of the Trump era because people still are obsessed with him and talking about him.
So the moment that Trump fades from the headlines, will the Democrats have enough energy to chase down and punish their supporters?
I think the energy will probably drain out of this thing naturally if Trump gets out of the headlines.
But if it doesn't, if Trump leaves the headlines and there's still a daily drumbeat to punish anybody who had ever supported him in the past, well, then you end up in the worst place that a country could be, which is denying some group economic opportunity.
Yeah, so Josh Hawley, he lost a deal with my publisher.
So the publisher that owns the imprint that you see my books behind me, this is the same publishing house that canceled Josh Hawley for his role for challenging the election.
How do you like that? Do you know that publishers...
Somebody says, here, get a new publisher.
So at the moment, I'm not on contract for a book, meaning that I don't have a new book in the works.
But I would have to think pretty hard about doing another book with this company.
Now I have a long history with them, and I like the people that I worked with, so it would be really hard to make any kind of a change.
But if I did not have such a strong 20-plus year relationship with the individuals who worked there, and it was just a company, so I'm loyal to the people, not the company, if you know what I mean.
Like, there are just people there I've worked with for a long time, and I wouldn't want to ruin that.
But if it were just a company, I would drop them in a heartbeat for that.
But I don't even know if that's a good thing.
I don't know if that's a good thing.
So let me voice my objections publicly.
So this is the company that owns the imprint for my publisher.
This disgusts me.
I'm disgusted by the fact that they would drop a book for somebody who broke no laws and was doing what his supporters asked him to do fully within the bounds of the law.
This is, and I'll tell you why this bothers me the most, is that book publishing is sort of the last bastion of freedom.
There are things that you can still put in a book that you can't say on TV and in social media because people have a choice of buying a book, so it's a different standard.
If you're broadcasting something, you try to be nice to everybody because they turn on the TV and they don't know what they're going to see.
So you try to be not a jerk to anybody who might turn on the TV. But a book is a choice by each individual.
So you can say stuff in a book that is a lot more freedom of speech than you would say, you know, broadcast network.
So if publishers have decided to become censors, and it looks like a censor in the sense of punishing somebody for their political action completely within the grounds of the law, This is a new level of censorship that I never would have seen coming, frankly. I never would have seen this coming.
This is way beyond acceptable.
Wouldn't you agree? So the publisher is Simon& Schuster.
Way beyond acceptable.
So as an author who's been working in that industry, Under that brand for a long time, I'm disgusted by this.
I'm actually disgusted by it.
And I've lost all respect for the company, let me say that.
But I do love the people that I've worked with and would work with them in a heartbeat in a minute, in the future.
All right. The other, the subtext, of course, is that going after Hawley and Cruz is really about the next presidential election.
You get that, right? Both Cruz and Hawley would be in the top...
I don't know. They'd be in the top five or six people that you would think could run for president and win.
So the Democrats are sort of preemptively taking them out with this.
I think that's mostly what you're seeing.
But it's scary how many people are agreeing with it.
All right. You may know that I've been moving a lot of my content to the Locals Network.
It has... These live streams I put up there are on Locals as well.
So it's Locals.com is where you would go to find me.
It's a subscription service.
But I wanted to tell you what's on there.
I'm just going to read you a list of the micro lessons I've put there.
And you can see how long the list is.
It's pages after pages.
I'll just read you some of them so you don't have to hear them all.
Page after page. So the micro lessons are this.
It's a two or three minute lesson.
That gives you something useful that you could use, like right away, that you could completely master in two or three minutes.
And I just put them in little videos and in some cases a blog post.
But here are the types of things I put there.
How to beat writer's block.
That was the new one. How to stop procrastinating, getting rid of unwanted thoughts.
So most of these either are based on something in my books or based on my background in persuasion and hypnosis.
So that's the background in most of these.
Let's see. Hoax creation.
How to create a hoax. Triggers and frames.
Confidence. How to increase your confidence.
How to take a mental vacation.
Persuasion. Lots of things on persuasion.
Programming your own brain.
Spotting persuasion.
Motivating employees.
How to say no. Success secrets of the Beatles.
The fake because.
Changing what people want.
Managing your energy, not your time.
The meaning of life.
How to do good design.
Blah, blah, blah, blah. All right.
So you get a sense of it.
It's about tips for success and persuasion and being more effective.
So the bigger picture, besides the fact that I'm obviously embedding a commercial in this live stream, is that I think there's something in this model that's important.
I've told you before that the way you can find out if something works is if you put something out there and then other people who see it take it and modify it.
That's always a good sign that there's something good if somebody takes it and then they extend it or modify it or work with it and copy it or whatever.
And when I started publishing these micro-lessons, I saw that at least one of my followers on Locals started publishing his own.
So he would take my larger videos and take out a little clip And he'd say, hey, here's a micro lesson that even I hadn't contemplated.
And then he's posting it with the micro lesson hashtag.
So that is a perfect example of when I tell you that you know you have something special that people will care about when you see them act with their physical body.
To go do something.
So here's somebody who's spending considerable time to edit my videos down to a little minute or whatever and then post them.
And he's not being paid for it or anything.
It's just something he thought was useful to do.
Now, that usually signals that there's something important there.
But the larger piece of importance is the mechanism.
I have this hypothesis that Because our attention spans have shrunk because of tweets and technology, etc., so we can no longer sit down and read a book as easily as we could.
Now we can read a tweet and then move on to something else.
So what if you take learning, the ability to be an effective person, that's usually what I talk about, just how to be effective in life, how to be persuasive, how to program your own mind, how to know how to operate in the world.
If you took those and took them down to a really easily digestible two minutes-ish, how many things could you learn in a year if every one of those things you learned was only two minutes?
And what I do is I don't take something that's useful but fits in two minutes.
I take the biggest, most important things you could ever learn in your life.
Things that would change the whole course of your life.
And by the way, people tell me that all the time, especially the people who've read these books.
They talk about how it's completely changed the course of their life in a variety of ways.
So if you could take something that has that much importance, potentially, shrink it down to two minutes so that anybody can consume it without pain, that may be a thing.
I feel like micro-lessons, and jokingly, I would call that a turd university.
I've said this before.
You may have heard me joke about this.
If you could create a college course that would be two-minute lessons and nothing more, and you could have them run every time you use the bathroom, so you just put a little screen in your bathroom, and every time you go in there, it gives you a two-minute lesson, no more. And you can listen to it or not listen to it.
But I feel like all you would do is use the bathroom for a year and you'd come away with a degree.
Two minutes at a time.
And the importance of this is I think we have to rethink learning in the current world about where we get it.
You know, do you go to a physical place like a classroom?
Or is it being fed to you continuously through all of your screens?
And I would argue that Turd University is an example of bringing the knowledge to you that maybe you didn't even know you needed.
Maybe you didn't sign up for a course on how to program your own brain, but since it was only two minutes, you listened to it.
And then you learned how to program your brain.
Two minutes. Pretty good stuff.
Yeah, PragerU, actually, I'm not inventing anything here except maybe coining the phrase micro-lesson, but PragerU does this brilliantly.
Their videos are very tight little things on one point.
Now, their case is usually in the world of politics and social issues, but I try to go for effectiveness, things that will make you immediately a more effective person.
So, that is your Coffee with Scott Adams for today.
If you're watching the clock, you'll note that I went 57 minutes without, with basically five minutes of preparation, which is just cutting and pasting a few things I saw on Twitter into my account, or into a piece of paper that I read.
So, I started by telling you that the Dale Carnegie course gives you some valuable skills in your skill set.
And then I modeled them.
So this was 57 minutes of effectively unplanned.
I had, you know, 10 minutes to pull some thoughts together, but effectively unplanned.
And if you thought it worked, then you should say to yourself, what's this Dale Carnegie thing?
If I could do that...
53 minutes, somebody says.
If you could do what I just did, what would that do to your life?
Just think about that.
Just think of this one skill that is learnable.
You know, it's not a natural thing.
I wasn't born being able to do this.
I learned it, and I practiced it until I could do it well enough.
But imagine what would happen at work if you could stand up and give a coherent speech At the drop of a hat with not even worrying about it, what would that do to you?
Your whole life would be different if you could stand in front of a group and confidently say whatever you want at the drop of a hat.
That's just one of probably 50 different things that you could learn on Locals that would make you more effective.
That's all I have for today. And I'll talk to you tomorrow.
And by the way, somebody just suggested overcoming fear.