Episode 2158 Scott Adams: Let's Chat About Headlines While You Sip Your Coffee & Pet Your Dog Or Cat
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Content:
Coffee sipping and pet petting
Politics, President Biden's Unacknowledged Grandchild, Affirmative Action Poll, President Trump Successes, France Riots, Surveillance State, Trump Successes, Climate Change, Diversity Doctors, DEI Decline, American Success Plan, Success Strategy, Scott Adams
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization, possibly robot civilization, but it's too early to know.
Today will be a barn burner.
There will be a whiteboard.
A whiteboard, yes.
And single-sided, but still thrilling, I think you would agree.
Now, would you like to take your experience up to levels that nobody's ever seen in ever?
Um, yes, you would.
And all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, shells, 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.
At the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, it's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Go.
Ah.
All right.
Well, I think you all, all you Americans know what tomorrow is.
That's right.
Tomorrow would be the anniversary of the death of John Adams, President John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Little known fact, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams would have been great.
They had been nemeses, but then they became friends in later life and allegedly Was it when Jefferson was dying he said Adams is still alive?
Or was it the other way around?
Which way did it go?
When Adams died he said Jefferson's still alive?
It was Jefferson said Adams, oh Jefferson still lived.
And they died same day.
Yeah, amazing.
Well anyway, let's talk about stuff.
Do you want to make me see if I can make a billion dollars sound like a small amount of money?
Watch this.
Here's the power of contrast.
Normally, if I said to you, hey, I'd like to give you a billion dollars, wouldn't you think that was a lot of money?
You would, right?
Because you'd be contrasting that to what you already have.
I'm going to make a billion dollars sound like not a lot of money now.
You ready for this?
It has nothing to do with Ukraine.
There's some estimates that the cage match between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, if it happened, could charge $100 per person for pay-per-view, and it would bring in over a billion dollars.
Just one billion.
Alright, between the two of them, they're like worth $300 billion.
Has there ever been a situation where somebody who was worth a combined $300 billion fought for $1 billion that goes to charity?
It makes a billion dollars sound like a small amount.
Wait, are you telling me that Elon Musk is going to do a cage fight for only a billion dollars?
And it doesn't even go to him?
Alright, well, I just thought it was interesting.
So, you know, I always tell you that the summer stories in politics are the really stretching it to make a story out of nothing.
In order for a good summer story, it has to be a story where there's no new facts.
Because the reporters are on vacation.
So you want a story you could talk about endlessly, but not have any facts.
So both sides are going to do it, right?
Democrats are going to talk about Trump's documents that they don't know what they are.
We still don't know what they are, but if.
If it was about this, it's bad.
The if.
So the Republicans have their own version of that.
And so their version of the summer story is that Joe Biden won't recognize his own granddaughter, the child of the stripper, which is a real messed up thing to say.
I hate that that came out of my mouth.
I hate that I accepted the frame.
Can I chastise myself for a moment?
I just called somebody's mother a stripper.
How fucked up is that?
I mean, that might accurately describe her profession at some point.
I doubt she's doing it now, but I don't know.
So, yeah, that's pretty messed up.
That's pretty messed up.
I don't like when the news does it.
It's descriptive.
It's accurate.
It's just fucked up.
It's somebody's mother.
I mean, if you're talking about her in the context of being somebody's mother, It's just wrong.
Anyway, so I fell into the same trap, so I apologize.
Let me finish the story.
The story is that the Bidens, Joe Biden and Jill, don't recognize the, can we say illegitimate, the unmarried daughter of, you know, one night of fun between Hunter and a woman who may have had stripping in her past.
So, and the story is that the staffers at the White House have all been informed to say that Joe Biden has six grandchildren and she would have been the seventh.
So the story is that he's ignoring the grandchildren.
How could he not want to hug her and include her and all that stuff?
Now, here's my question to you.
Knowing in advance that all stories about public figures are fake.
All of them.
They're all fake.
I know you don't believe that.
But when I say fake, I don't mean that the details that are reported are untrue.
I mean that they're often reported with a frame or a framing or some context left out.
There's always something important left out.
Don't you think there's something important left out of this story?
I don't know what it is.
But there's something important Being left out.
Now it could be, if you had to speculate, maybe there's something about the mom that if they mix it, it just becomes terrible.
But that doesn't really explain why you deny the existence of the child.
You could simply not invite them to official things.
So wouldn't you say there's something terribly missing in the story?
Because as written, it doesn't make any sense.
If you tell me that Jill Biden doesn't want to recognize her own granddaughter, I don't think there's any chance of that.
I'm sure she does.
So there's something going on.
I'm just going to leave it here.
I'm going to leave it with there's some fact about this that's just not true or not being reported.
And it could be that there's a reason that the Bidens don't want to tell us about it.
It might be something that's private or sensitive or creepy.
There could be 50 reasons that they don't want to talk about it.
So that makes them vulnerable so anybody else can frame it the way they want because they're not talking about it.
Anyway, it's just a summer story and I don't believe it's true.
That's the nature of all summer stories.
They're not true.
Or at least they're framed in a weird way.
Alright, ending affirmative action according to polls was pretty popular.
Here's the breakdown according to one poll.
75% of Republicans are in favor of it.
Doesn't that seem low?
That only 75% of Republicans are in favor of ending affirmative action?
Only 75%?
How could you actually be a Republican and be in favor of it?
It's almost like a, it's like a definitional problem of some kind.
Anyway, but 75% of Republicans.
Independents are at 58% support it.
98% support it, and even a solid 26% of Democrats approve of it.
So that's a winner.
Now let me ask you this.
I'm no expert on Supreme Courts and Supreme Court history and stuff, but can you answer this question for me?
Would the affirmative action ruling have happened the way it did, overturning it, if Trump had never been president?
If Trump had lost in 2016?
Are you sure it's no?
Because if he lost, the conservative judges would have been liberal judges, and they would have kept it.
So why is nobody calling this a Trump win?
Why is the news not framing this as one of the most popular things Trump ever did?
This is, oh, Jack Posapicus.
So doesn't that seem like an obvious oversight by the news?
I remind you of my best prediction.
My best predictions are the ones that are most contrarian.
So this is a super... Well, I think it was contrarian.
Actually, maybe it's not.
Maybe this is not contrarian because you might agree with me.
When Trump lost the election in 2020, I predicted that Trump would be seen as a better president the longer time goes by.
That the longer you waited, the better he would look.
Right?
Now look at the things that, now that we've waited, you know that I had an experience with affirmative action.
It took me out at least four of my career attempts.
You know, the four in a row, I think.
And I was very happy that Trump did it.
I mean, you're confirming what I thought, that Trump was the agent of that change.
That's huge.
In my mind and in my life, it's really big.
It's a really, really big deal.
And it's so big that unless Trump had started a war, I would be happy if he only did that.
If that's the only thing he did, I'd say he's one of our best presidents.
So there's that.
But what else did Trump get right?
Let's look at how correct Trump looks right now.
I'm going to give you one word, and then you tell me if Trump looks smart and prescient.
Alright, one word.
France.
Alright?
Am I right?
Trump warned us.
He warned us about France.
He tried to stop it here.
And he may have.
He may have actually stopped it.
Because I don't actually know what the current situation is with immigration, but we must be doing something right in this country, even under Biden.
What happened to Islamic terrorism?
What happened to it?
Where did it go?
How in the world did it just stop in America, in the homeland?
Now I, my speculation is that this, the, what do you call it, the, what do you call it when the security state is spying on everybody?
The, what do you call it, state?
What's the word I'm looking for?
It's like not the investigation, the, you know what it is.
Alright.
So the fact that everybody is being analyzed, surveillance.
The surveillance state I figure is the reason we're not getting a huge terrorism problem.
I think that the government actually is sort of listening to everything and probably using AI.
So it's not people listening to us, but I'm sure AI is listening to all of our traffic.
Are you?
Wouldn't you assume that to be true by now?
The AI is listening to all of the traffic everywhere.
It's just picking out the key words and looking for terrorists.
But it must be good at it.
It must be good at it.
And I would imagine there's a reason it's good at it.
Because AI is built on pattern recognition.
Specifically language pattern recognition.
But you don't think that language pattern recognition could identify a terrorist pretty quickly?
I'll bet that's one of the easiest things it can do.
There's no way that a terrorist talks like everybody else.
They would almost certainly have a pattern to the way they approach things.
So yeah.
And, you know, was Trump behind that?
Well, that would be a top, top, top, top, top, top secret thing.
But I assume so.
I assume so, when he was in office.
And I would assume that Biden's behind it, too.
And whatever they're doing, that's working because we're not France.
So, I don't know.
So I assume that France's, you know, wide open immigration is what causes them all the problems.
All right, I'm going to give you one more word and you tell me if Trump gets the win for a problem that you wouldn't have caused.
Ukraine.
Ukraine.
Right?
We don't know for sure.
We don't know.
But there's a reasonable argument he could stop as soon and it wouldn't have happened.
There's a reasonable argument.
I'm not saying you could know that for sure.
This one's weird.
Is it my imagination or has the hysteria about climate change Seems to be tamped down.
Seems to be dampened lately because the events in the world are not supporting the data or the data is not supporting the hypothesis as smoothly as maybe it did in the past.
Now that doesn't mean it's not true.
I'm not telling you the data is right or wrong.
I'm just saying that the zeitgeist or the way we're feeling about it Is that I feel like, this is just my sense of where the society is at, that we're just not as worried about climate change as we used to be.
For maybe a variety of reasons.
Maybe it's big improvements in energy production.
Might be that.
Might be that we're in a period where it doesn't seem to be getting hotter at the moment.
And of course, we're all driven by anecdote.
So, I mean, you should know that we could go 20 years without any warming, and global warming could still be totally valid.
You understand that, right?
That over any 20-year period, it might not be getting any warmer, but after that period, maybe it gets extra warm because there was some other... Might have been some, you know, counterbalancing thing that was going on for 20 years, But as soon as the counterbalance is gone, then all the CO2 kicks in.
So it doesn't mean much that there's a 20-year warming or a 20-year cooling.
Either one.
Because that's too short a period.
However, common sense tells you that if you add 20 years of increasing CO2, and the temperature didn't go up, I'm not saying that happened.
I'm just saying that as we observe it, we're anecdotally driven.
Humans are anecdotal.
If you see one example of something, hey, it snowed today.
I guess there can't be any global change or climate change.
So it seems to me that the anecdotes have become unfriendly to the climate change hysteria.
Is that true or not?
Are you feeling that the anecdotes are not and the data is not supporting it like it used to?
A little more sketchy scientific situation?
Now that would work toward Trump's favor, right?
If we were in a serious frenzy about climate change, there's no way Trump could win.
No way.
But in a world where everything that the scientists and experts have told us seems to be wrong, how does climate change look now?
If we had never had the pandemic, Wouldn't climate change look more secure as a theory?
It would.
Because we'd be believing all those experts, wouldn't we?
Well, the experts said so.
Experts said so.
I guess the experts say so, so what are we going to do?
We're just unwashed citizens.
Those experts.
But now that we basically don't trust experts, the entire climate change argument lives on one thing.
One thing.
Experts.
That's it.
Because you and I can't penetrate climate change.
Did you do your own analysis?
Do you have your own climate change model?
No, we have no access to it.
We only have access to the experts telling us stuff.
So in a world in which all experts have been discredited, 2023, Doesn't Trump look better than he's ever looked on the topic of climate change?
And not because he's right.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying that where the energy is moving, it's very moving in this direction.
There's no way around that.
It's moving in this direction.
How about this one?
I think I gave you this statistic the other day, which I don't remember.
What percentage of the general public thinks the 2024 election has a good chance of being rigged?
It turns out it's pretty high, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent.
It's pretty high, right?
Now, does that hurt Trump or help him?
It helps him, right?
Because Trump is the experts have lied to you guy.
That's who he is.
He's the experts are lying to you.
Let's figure out what to do about it.
So, in a world in which all of us are becoming convinced that the experts are flawed, way more than we understood, the guy who's been saying it for years is looking pretty smart.
So, if you put that all together, France, affirmative action, Ukraine war, climate change, And then trust in the elections.
And then you throw in energy policy, where Trump dominates.
You throw in, you know, Biden's embarrassment.
Do you remember when we used to say that we'd be embarrassed if Trump went overseas and represented the country?
Doesn't that seem funny now?
We would be embarrassed, we were told.
Embarrassed.
As citizens, we'd be embarrassed if Trump was the person who represented us overseas.
How's that feel now?
It's 2023.
We're sending Joe Biden's decomposed bag of bones to represent us.
You feeling good about that?
Oh yeah, America's back.
We're back.
We got Joe Biden over there tearing it up overseas.
Man, do they respect that guy.
Oh, they respect him so much.
Not like Trump.
Oh no, no.
No, they were just laughing at Trump behind his back.
I'm sure they've never laughed about Joe Biden behind his back.
No?
Do you think Joe Biden has ever done anything that would cause an overseas leader to like chuckle a little bit when they're Drinking their tea with their pinky out, do you think?
Just ever?
I think so.
So you could pretty much go down, right down the line of everything that Trump was, you know, pillared, pillared for.
Is that a word I've never used before?
I've never used that word.
Pillared?
I've read it.
I think it fits.
Does that fit here?
He was pillared, right?
Like put in a pillar?
Pilloried?
I don't know where that comes from.
But he was pilloried.
Let's say he was pilloried.
A very good word.
If you're at home and you're listening to this, go with your impulse.
Because right now you desperately want to say pilloried out loud.
If there's nobody around but your pet, which is the way you should consume this, you can consume it with a pet while jogging on the beach or even boxing with your brother.
Any one of those things is fine.
But Say pillory.
All right, you know you want to.
All right, here's the funniest tweet of the week.
I'm giving credit to Ricky Schlott, who I think is a real woman.
R-I-K-K-I, Ricky.
But there's also a big story about, remember I told you a story about a woman, I wasn't sure she was real, but then she apologized, so I thought she was.
Now people are saying it was always a bot.
It's pretty disturbing.
Anyway.
But this is a different story.
So the New York Times reported this.
So here's a tweet from the New York Times.
So that's what the New York Times tweeted.
the medical school at UC Davis, ranks applicants by the disadvantages they have faced.
The disadvantage scale helped turn UC Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the U.S.
Can it work nationally?
So that's what the New York Times tweeted.
And then Ricky Schlott tweeted this, because everyone wants their brain surgeon to be as disadvantaged as possible.
If I had a microphone now, I would drop it.
I'm going to use my spare lavalier plug-in.
Drop.
That's right.
Yeah, when I pick a brain surgeon, I'd like to know that they had a really tough life.
Maybe still have an attitude about it.
Now, When I talk about reality and parody, merging, here's your perfect example.
Because what makes this funny is that she didn't make anything up.
That's why it's funny.
It's funny because you can simply describe it in accurate terms and it'll make you laugh.
You can describe it in neutral, accurate terms and it will still make you laugh.
That's absurdity and reality merging.
See, if it were just an absurdity that you needed to make up some fun stuff about it to make fun of it, that would not be reality and parody merging.
That's just parody.
But when you can just simply describe it with ordinary words and it's hilarious, that's a problem.
That's too far.
That's too far.
But I look forward to a time five years from now when a highly qualified black doctor will be judged to be one of the best doctors, because otherwise how could you get through that whole system?
And honestly, I feel like black Americans got a huge promotion.
I don't think they feel that way.
I understand it, because something is taken away from them in the short term, and it definitely is.
So they're losing something in the short term, but what they're getting back is respect.
You only get one, and you made the right choice.
You know what's weird?
I want to see if I can get agreement on this.
It's a weird observation.
So white people have had this interesting time lately with the affirmative action ruling where we get to sort of hide in the crack and we get to say well you know this is sort of between you Asian Americans and you black Americans and we're just watching.
Yeah, leave us out of this.
You guys duke it out.
We'll just call the plays as we see them.
But this is not about us.
Keep us out of this.
You guys go wild.
Hey, you guys, work it out, work it out.
We'll just go with whatever you decide.
Hey, whatever you guys decide, that's okay with us.
We're not part of this.
But here's the thing I realized the other day.
Yeah, I was in a conversation recently about some class that had exactly one or two Asian-Americans in the whole class, and one of them was valedictorian.
And we both laughed.
We just both laughed, because it's sort of stereotypical.
Now, here's the thing.
100% I'm going to make an exaggerated claim, but I want to see if you agree with it or not.
100% of white people are completely aware that Asian Americans kill us in academics.
Would you say that's true?
That 100% of white Americans are completely aware that we're being lapped in academics by Asian Americans.
Alright?
We agree.
Now here's the trick question.
You ready for this?
Have you ever heard a single white American say something negative about that?
Ever.
You have.
Negative.
You've heard somebody say negative about that.
Seriously?
What the fuck state do you live in?
In what state is somebody complaining about Asian Americans doing really well in school?
I don't believe that.
I don't believe you've ever heard that.
No, and here's the thing.
White Americans are just saying, I don't know why.
Maybe it's cultural.
Maybe it's something else.
I don't know why.
It's just a fact.
And the only thing I feel about it, here's my only feeling about it.
I'm sure glad they're in my country.
I'm sure glad they're inventing things for Americans.
I'm sure glad they're my doctors.
Right?
If I see my optometrist and it's Asian American, I think, okay, you did it the hard way.
That's what I want.
You studied.
I want you.
But isn't it weird that we don't, and I'm making a universal statement that's clearly not universal, but white people don't have a problem with that.
And you would think that they would.
You would think that at least behind closed doors or in private conversations, people would say bad things about that, but it just doesn't happen.
It just doesn't happen.
I don't even know if that's important to anything, but I've never heard anybody point it out that when white people talk about Asian Americans' success, we talk about it with respect.
The one word that is universally there is just respect.
Okay, you did it the way it's supposed to be done.
Boom.
I'm going to show you a whiteboard that's associated with that in a few minutes, but a few other things.
I've decided that what would be fun would be, well, let me start with some background.
Those of you who have been in relationships, let's say you've been married a long time, I think you would agree with this.
No matter, we'll get rid of Theron, who doesn't know that you're getting hidden on this channel for all caps.
You've been in the experience where you love your spouse, and you love spending time with your spouse.
But, true or not, if your spouse had to do a business trip and be away for a day, you'd kind of really enjoy that day alone, wouldn't you?
Am I wrong?
Even if you love your spouse.
Love spending time with them.
But, you know, every now and then, you get that day alone and it feels great.
Now, the only reason it feels great is because you still have a spouse.
It wouldn't feel great if you were single, necessarily, because you'd be like, oh, I'm lonely.
But as long as you've got that person there, even if they're on a trip, you're like, oh, I got the data, do what I want.
So I thought, I wonder if you could create an AI girlfriend who you take to be your girlfriend, but she's always on a business trip.
She's just always on a trip.
Oh, you're definitely married.
But every day she'll call in a couple times on Zoom, say, hey, you know, just got out of my meetings.
Want to check in with you?
What are you doing today?
And I wonder if the feeling that you're, you know, you'd be pretending, of course, but the feeling that you do have a spouse, they're just on a business trip, checking in with you.
I wonder if it would make you feel better.
I don't know.
It's just a funny thought.
I wouldn't take it too seriously.
All right.
Ukraine's big counter-offensive.
It's racking up the gains, let's see, according to CNN.
They've gotten... Oh, listen to this.
They've lost tremendous casualties and lots of military equipment, but they do have something to show for it.
Ukraine has taken back nine square kilometers.
Nine square kilometers?
They're having a whole war to reclaim territory.
And the amount that they've reclaimed, I could walk.
I could walk from one end to the other of the entire territory they've reclaimed.
After how many losses?
What, 50,000 dead people?
And they got back like a nice baseball field sized area.
I mean, it's bigger than that.
All right, that's not good.
You probably saw this story.
I don't know what to say about it, but it's just ridiculous.
So this will be another one of those.
I'm going to just describe something with just ordinary language.
And watch how absurd it is.
I won't add anything.
This is just what actually happened.
Do you know Jemele Hill?
She's a woman who's very active in saying things usually about black Americans, and she thinks everybody's racist.
That's sort of the summary.
So she accused, so Jemele Hill accused Asians of quote, carrying the water for white supremacy, for backing affirmative action decisions.
Asian Americans carrying the water of white supremacy.
The reason I didn't talk about it, Even though it's been in the news for a few days, is that there's nothing to add to it.
I like to add the absurdities to the story, but it's already there.
Like, what the hell am I going to do with that story?
There's nothing you can do with that.
It's complete.
So I'll just tell you about it and let it go.
There was a Trump rally in a town of Pickens.
Was it South Carolina?
There were only 3,400 residents, but you got 50,000 people to show up for the rally.
3,400 people in the town, 50,000 went to the rally.
Now, some are saying that the energy is starting to favor Trump.
It's starting to look like that, isn't it?
It's starting to look very much like that.
Now, too early to make a prediction, and if you're joining me now, I'm a single-issue voter, so I'm backing Ramaswamy, because he's tough on Fentanyl, so is Trump.
Both of them are tough on Fentanyl, in terms of the Mexican cartels.
But if it's a tie, I'd go with the younger man.
There's some reporting that the Trump veteran staff members are saying that when Trump was allegedly holding up an Iran attack secret document that we heard about on an audio recording, that he really was not holding up that document because it doesn't really exist and he was just bullshitting with the reporters.
I don't believe any of that.
That doesn't sound true.
I don't know what was true, and maybe we never will.
Goodbye, Don, for overcapitalizing.
Don, it was nice having you here, but you're gone now.
All right, so who knows about that story?
Who knows?
There's still talk of a third-party spoiler for the election.
Do you think there'll be a serious third-party candidate?
I think Cornel West is a third party, but not a big one.
And then the experts are saying if there's a third party candidate that would try to be a centrist, apparently.
They're a centrist group.
What are they called?
They have a name.
No labels.
A centrist group.
I couldn't think of their name.
I couldn't figure out their name because they didn't have good branding.
And the name of their group is No Labels.
It's like, maybe you should get a label.
You know what would work really good in this case, when people can't remember the name of your organization?
A label.
Get yourself a label.
That would work really well.
Alright.
So here's the funniest part of that, the story.
The experts, who probably are right, they say that if this no-label centrist thing got going, it would take more from the left than the right, and it would guarantee that Trump won.
I don't know if that's true.
I suppose it would depend who that centrist candidate was.
But I love the fact that everybody assumes the Democrats are too dumb to know that.
That's just assumed.
That the Democrats, presumably the last thing they'd want would be a President Trump.
So if they went ahead and voted for this non-Biden third party, they would effectively just be electing Trump.
Now people are acting like that's just going to happen.
And it might.
I'm not saying it won't.
But isn't it funny?
That the only way it can happen is if Democrats are so dumb they don't know that they're voting against their own interests.
In the most obvious way you could ever vote against your own interests.
It'll be all over the news.
I mean, long before you actually cast your vote, the news would tell you, people!
People, listen to us on CNN.
If you vote for that third party, you're electing Trump.
Your worst nightmare.
Don't do this.
Don't push that ballot.
See this finger?
No.
Don't do this finger thing with that ballot.
That will make your worst nightmare happen.
And everybody assumes they're going to do it anyway.
I don't have much to say about that, but it's just funny that no matter how self-destructive a thing is, you can count on 25% of the public doing it.
Right?
Yeah, it's a terrible idea.
Well, let's sign up 25% of the public.
They'll do it.
How would you like to go to the Titanic in an under-tested submarine?
25% of the public.
Sign me up.
All right, DEI is declining.
You can see the signs everywhere.
DEI is diversity, equity, and inclusion.
So it's forced on a lot of companies through social and other forces.
But I guess DeSantis is banning DEI in Florida.
And that means only in universities?
Because he doesn't have control of the corporations, right?
Am I right about that?
He's only banning it in universities and schools.
Just universities, right?
Correct, yeah, he can't control the private companies.
Then I saw Wall Street Journal was saying that the staffs of DEI departments are being cut because if you hire less, I guess the hiring is decreasing, if you hire fewer people you don't need as much DEI because they're trying to get their diversity or something.
But that sounds like an excuse to cut the DEI staff that isn't giving you any profits.
Then we're seeing, who said this?
This is also the Wall Street Journal.
Laura Agarkar, Nasdaq's global head of diversity and equity and culture.
She said that they're seeing a dip in the interest of DEI.
So she's saying that the energy around DEI is conspicuously down.
Is that good or bad for Trump?
Well, it suggests that the zeitgeist is moving in his direction.
If it were moving toward DEI, that would be a bad sign for Trump.
If it's moving away from DEI and away from affirmative action, that feels like the public is shifting a little in a Trumpian way, even if they don't know it.
So I would say that all of the forces in the world seem to be lining up to make Trump your next president.
Now, I promise you a whiteboard.
Whiteboard begins now.
So I'm going to show you my take on the affirmative action ruling and the, let's say, the context of all of that.
So here's how I see the world.
And I would like, as my gift to black America, to solve all your problems right here.
All right.
So, the American success plan is usually the same.
If you want to succeed, you first have to get rid of your obstacles, right?
If you have an obstacle to success, logically, how many of you would agree?
If you have an obstacle to success, and you want to succeed, do you not need to remove your obstacle first?
Yes or no?
Oh, somebody says no.
Interesting.
Interesting.
It's because you're way ahead of me, isn't it?
Some of you say yes.
We'll get to that.
All right.
So let's say you've got obstacles you've got to get rid of.
And let's say one of your obstacles is systemic racism.
And systemic racism could be connected to a bunch of other problems you've got, from poverty to maybe poor nutrition, you're in a crime neighborhood, too many drugs, et cetera.
The et cetera on this is doing a lot of work.
But you also, if you could handle your obstacles, you can find a way around them, then you'd also have a strategy.
And your strategy might be study continuously, build a talent stack, you know, learn things all the time.
That's always good for success.
You'd want to stay off drugs and obey the law.
And here again, the etc.
is doing a lot of work, right?
You'd wanna network, you'd wanna, you know, there's a whole bunch of things you'd dress right.
So there's a whole bunch of things that we could all name that would be your strategies for success.
Now, in my opinion, and here's where I'm gonna get in trouble.
It's great to have free speech.
If you ever get a chance to have free speech like I have, that most of you don't, it's really awesome.
It's a great feeling to be able to say whatever you think is true and helpful.
Now, I try to use my free speech just to be helpful, and this would be an example.
If you're an Asian American, do you have any systemic racism?
I'd say yes.
Historically, most people would agree yes.
And do any Asian Americans come over here with any problems of poverty and bad nutrition?
Probably.
There are plenty of poor people of all types, etc.
But in my opinion, what I see is that the Asian American community works on their strategies for success.
And you know what that does?
What happens if you work on your strategies and you ignore your obstacles?
It removes all your obstacles.
It removes your obstacles.
Because if you've got a really good skill set, nothing's going to stop you.
Nothing.
If you're not doing drugs, you stay down in jail, and you develop useful skills that the world wants, nothing's going to stop you.
Soon we'll fix your own nutrition, your poverty will be fixed, your systemic racism might still be there, but you wouldn't even notice it.
You'd slice through it like it didn't exist.
So I believe that the black American strategy for success is accidentally backwards.
Accidentally.
It's accidentally backwards.
And I believe that we're being, we all of us, are being sold an idea that if you don't remove the obstacles to success, systemic racism being at the top, if you don't remove these, Black Americans are going to be depressed and suppressed because they won't have the same level of success.
Asian Americans do it the other way around.
They get themselves right, they fix themselves, and then all this becomes irrelevant.
So this is the biggest thing that black Americans probably need to imitate.
Success is mostly imitation.
Imitation, there's no crime to be imitators.
I learned to be a cartoonist by imitating other cartoonists.
So imitation is the way to succeed.
You look at other people.
What did they do?
And then you try to do that thing.
And what works for every person, black, Asian-American, anything else, Hispanic-American, you name it.
What works for everybody is this part.
You do this part first.
You don't ignore the obstacles.
You know, if there are people who want to be working on those directly, that's great.
But if everybody did this, you wouldn't even talk about that.
It would just disappear in time.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my contribution to black America.
I believe that if every black American took the free assets that are available, and I'm a perfect example, I could give you advice on how to do this right.
I really could.
A lot of people could.
I write books on it, so you can buy my books.
How to fail at almost everything and still win big.
Tells you exactly, in a pretty easy way, how to do the strategies right to succeed.
Black America, because I have freedom of speech, I got it the hard way.
But let me tell you, if you do this, work on the strategy first, The other stuff is going to disappear in importance in a fairly quick period of time.
But if you work on focusing on the obstacles and you tell yourself, well, there's no point in working on myself because I got all these obstacles, you will be guaranteed to fail.
And honestly, it's going to be hard to care.
It's going to be hard for other people to care about you.
Do you know why Asian-Americans never had Asian-American Lives Matter?
Because nobody questioned it.
It wasn't a question.
Nobody even thought about it.
Of course they do.
The reason that black Americans wanted to make sure that black lives matter is that it felt like they didn't.
It just felt like they didn't.
But if you want to make black lives matter, stop working on this side.
That's not how you get there.
This is a false path.
These are all real things.
There really is systemic racism.
You know, I'm a big believer in it.
But you need to ignore it if you want to personally succeed.
If you want to personally succeed, work on strategies, the rest of it will become irrelevant pretty quickly.
Pretty quickly.
Now you might say to me, Scott, you're being simplistic.
Because the reason you can't work on those personal strategies is you're in such a bad situation.
To which I say that is a loser's strategy.
Or a loser's philosophy.
If you believe you can't because you have obstacles, well then you can't.
Somebody smart said that once.
If you believe you can't, you're right.
If you believe you can, you're probably right.
So, this is my contribution.
I do it at, obviously, great personal risk, but I'm in a position where I could do that, and so I thought it was useful.
And I only do it because it's useful.
It probably looks like I'm trying to get clicks, but not this.
This is only because I think it's useful.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes our presentation for today.