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May 1, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:05:59
4075 The Kanye West Controversy | Scott Adams and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everyone. Back by the good friend Scott Adams.
He is the creator of the wildly and widely popular Dilbert Comet strip that is published daily in thousands of newspapers, ask your parents, across the world.
He is the author of many best-selling books.
You've got to pick up these books. They're really fantastic, including How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, kind of the story of my life, and Win Bigly, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, something I'm still grappling with.
Adams is also a trained hypnotist, do not stare at his glasses, and an expert in the field of persuasion.
His blog is blog.dilbert.com and twitter.com forward slash Scott.
Adams says that Scott with two Ts.
Scott, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you. Did you say ask your parents what a newspaper is?
Yeah, just, you know, for some of the knee-high to a grasshopper members of the audience.
So, Scott, anything big happen in your life recently?
Anything going on that would be unusual and worthy of a conversation?
Something's on my mind. I just can't quite recall it.
Yeah. It's been quite a week.
Quite a week. I'm sure you're referring to Kanye West retweeting me nine times the other day.
It was nine separate clips from the same video that I did in which I was supporting what he was doing and supporting the Concept of free thought and free association and it's okay to like somebody you disagree with so Was not expecting that attention when I woke up in the morning and it sort of it It sparked a revolt of people who couldn't abide the fact that you that he would say anything that could even be construed as positive about me and so the The left-leaning media went after me hard and libeled and slandered me in many different ways.
And that's a wild thing, you know, because we all have a self-image, and the self-image is subject to growth and change.
And if you've ever been to one of those funhouse mirrors, you know, where you look at yourself and you've got this giant head and then this weird tiny little body, like if you look at yourself through the eyes of the media, if you're not one of their favorite offspring, it is a truly wild experience because you're reading this like, wow, that sounds like a horrible person.
I'm glad that person isn't in my life.
It's like, wait, no, that's me.
I am kind of in my life.
So what's that like for you when, I think this is one of the biggest ones that's happened in terms of pushback against you.
Yeah, well, it's maybe one of the biggest, but not the only one.
So the good news is I'm a certain age, have a certain level of experience.
It's not my first rodeo, so being the subject of massive, untrue criticism, sort of normal.
I hate to say that you can get used to it, but you still can.
So this time, I played it a little differently.
In the past, when I would have little blow-ups, I would I would fight every person and I'd leave comments and everything that said something wrong.
And then people would say, ah, he's being defensive.
And if I'd point out where they were wrong, they'd say, well, he's walking it back.
He's walking it back now. I'm like, no, no, I'm just clarifying the actual facts.
I'm fact checking. So fighting back directly is just a waste of time.
It just makes it all worse.
So this time I waited for everybody to empty the clip.
And then I wrote a blog post in which I fact-checked all of the inaccurate things.
Now forever, when they repurpose these same headlines, which is what they like to do, anybody who comes to the comments is going to be putting a link to my blog post to say, fake news, here's the link, read it for yourself.
The good news is, if you get accused of something that can't be demonstrated to be false, that's a problem.
But if you're so well documented as a certain kind of thinker and a certain set of opinions in lots of different places, it's pretty easy to document that it's fake news in my case.
It is a fascinating thing when the media targets you.
One of the things that becomes really illuminating, to me at least, is how little work these people actually do.
You know, like, oh, I've heard that Scott Adams is a this or a that or the other.
It's like, well, you could go and read the blog post that everyone's referring to.
You could go actually listen to the interview.
You could look up a couple of rebuttals.
You could listen to what Scott says.
But no. See, that would be typing.
That would be scrolling.
That would be reading. That would be processing.
And it is just astounding.
Like, I can see why a lot of these guys don't want to jump into the alternative media because, I mean, like you do, these periscopes daily, you're sharing thoughts.
I mean, it's a lot of work to come up with this stuff, to figure out a way to present it.
And it's a lot easier just repeat rumor, repeat rumor, repeat rumor.
Look, I'm a journalist! Like, how does that work?
So you've got that problem.
And then on top of that, there's one that the reading public doesn't recognize.
This is one that's invisible to the ordinary consumer of news.
That the person who writes the headline for the article is a different person.
That's usually an editor.
And so I've even seen an article.
There was one article... That described me accurately in the body, but the title was completely disconnected from the content of the article.
It was like, he's alt-right, you know, and the title, alt-right, and then later it describes me as not being that.
Like in the article, the very article, the title didn't match, and you get that because the editor has the title, not the author.
Right, and of course they just want people to click through and be shocked and appalled, and this outrage culture, I mean, I'll spend a few minutes on that because that is really...
Something. This outrage culture where people are just dancing on landmines and can't be happier if they seem to lose a leg or see some arm go spiraling through the air.
This outrage culture is really, really quite something.
I mean, I don't have touchy, volatile people in my life because I want a long, happy, peaceful life.
But man, oh man, there are tripwires everywhere that people move these days.
It's kind of paralyzed, I think, for a lot of people.
Yeah, and the worst part...
It's contagious, meaning that I was sort of horrified watching the responses to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Sure, it is true that the jokes were a little crueler than they were funny about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but The reaction on the right to, my God, my hair is on fire.
How can they say things? I'm so offended.
Is everything they've been complaining about the other side doing.
And the, I don't know, the lack of self-awareness about that was shocking and appalling me.
Because I always thought at least one side didn't get excited about that stuff.
But it turns out it's just something you complain about the other side doing while you're doing it.
I can't even think of anything less productive than complaining about the thing you're doing while you're doing it.
There's not even much time that elapses between the time you're complaining about it and the time you're demonstrating it in public that you're doing it too.
It's like it's not even trying at this point.
I agree with you as far as that goes.
I think some people have consciously articulated this as a strategy, Scott, which is to say, well, we're going to hold the left to their own standards.
If they've got outrage culture, we're going to have outrage culture.
If these jokes have been directed at Barack Obama, the left would go nuts, so we're going to go nuts.
Right or wrong, I think it is to some degree a strategy that people say, well, doing what your enemy does when they're winning may not be the worst idea.
Yeah. So here's questioning what a strategy means.
I hear the words, we're going to do it because they do it, but does that make sense?
Like, can you point to all the connective tissues about how they're doing it, so we're doing it, so therefore it's smart?
You can say they're doing it, so we're doing it, but the therefore it's smart, like I don't see the connecting tissue.
Why can't there be something other than that that's the smart thing to do?
I don't understand how it becomes a strategy.
It just feels like rationalizing something you want to do because it's easy and it feels like revenge.
It doesn't feel even slightly like there's really thought behind it.
It just feels like revenge repackaged as, oh, it's my strategy.
I'm fighting back. That's what it feels like.
Yeah, no, I think, though, this is a leftist strategy that they've talked about all the way back to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
Which says, well, we don't have any standards, but we know our enemies do.
So if we hold them to their standards, we'll cripple them.
And I think holding people to their own standards works if those people have standards.
But if a lot of them seem to openly claim, well, our goal is power, our goal is domination, our goal is victory, our goal is whatever, and we don't have any particular standards, we're nimble, we move, we dance, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
I think trying to hold them to their standards when they say they don't have standards is a bit of a tricky proposition.
It's like trying to plow a cloud rather than a field.
Well, let me suggest that moving to the high ground is always the winning position.
So the low ground is somebody said something they shouldn't have said, Staying in the low ground is, hey, stop saying that thing you weren't supposed to say.
And the high ground is Kanye.
It's like, I can still love you.
We'll be agreeing with you.
Let's take it up a level.
And maybe we can just not be bothered by the awfulness on the other side.
I think people would find that attractive.
Very much the way Kanye made a big dent by doing that very thing.
The public is sort of ready for it.
As much as we like the food fight, we like the team sports, that's never going to go away.
But there is a little bit of exhaustion there.
I think there's an audience for simply not being offended.
Well, I think it happens to some degree at a physical level, Scott.
I think people's adrenal glands burn out.
I think their cortisol levels spike.
And I think they're trembling all day and waiting for the next horrible thing to happen.
You know, it's sort of like you're camping in the woods and you keep hearing something rustling around your tent.
You know, you're just not going to get a lot of sleep.
And so I think people are kind of like, it's almost like we'd love to keep it up, but our bodies are failing us because we're demanding way too much fight or flight response from them for innocuous things.
Yeah, I might be asking too much of free will here.
But I do think you can learn to do it.
I think it's a learned behavior not to strike back.
Because as I said, I used to just fight back exactly that way, and that was my go-to strategy.
But when I learned that not doing that gave me a better result, it was easier to change.
It is a funny thing when you fight back against these kinds of things because my experience has been that people end up being divided into two camps.
People who like you anyway and people who will never listen to you anyway.
And so you're either preaching to the choir who's already with you, or you're, you know, surrendering your time and energy and concentration to people who are just never going to listen to you anyway.
So maybe there's a few people in the middle.
I mean, I'm sure there are. But that's one of the reasons why this, like, yeah, putting it all together and making a rebuttal makes sense.
But, you know, fighting every single ant, you know, just has you get buried.
Yeah, I always like to bring up my friend, Hogg Newsome.
He's leader of Black Lives Matter.
In the greater New York area.
And one of the things that he did when he visited a Trump-loving free speech group, they invited up on stage, is he immediately mirrored back their thoughts.
He told them what they were thinking accurately, and then he told them what things were their concerns, and he had everybody listening.
So in other words, he was bold enough To preach not to the choir.
So he preached to the unconverted, which is hard.
There's a reason people don't like to do it.
It's hard! But he showed that it could be done and got a very good result.
Kanye, same thing.
He's showing that you can talk to the other side and you don't blow up in flames.
Although I heard Snoop Dogg's cousin called for a hit on Kanye by the Crips.
I'm hoping that doesn't happen.
There may be a limit to the high ground, you know, just theoretically.
And I think when the crypts are invoked, your high ground avenues may be just a little bit over tangled and difficult to ascend.
So I agree with you.
Like, I mean, if you can meet people in the middle and you can change minds and so on, that's called civilization.
Civilization is the overlap of disagreements.
That we agree to resolve peacefully or at least linguistically.
So I'm with you that.
There is, of course, a very dark avenue of people who are going to take any concessions that you make and use it to gain power over you.
And I think it's important to differentiate between people who have the right intentions, they may have the wrong methodologies, versus people who just have really dark intentions and don't really care about methodologies.
Yeah, that's the reason.
To know if you can negotiate with somebody or they're just going to take what they can take and give nothing in the end.
That's our problem with Iran right now, right?
We don't know if we can make a deal with them because we don't know if they'll keep the deal.
So that's always the big challenge.
And where's your slice and dice?
Where's your fruit ninja about trying to divide people into people worth having a chat with?
You know, like John Legend shows up at Kanye West's house.
They have a civilized conversation, plays some beautiful piano.
Man, that's a lovely thing to see.
That is just like a little dew drop of civilization falling through a dark space.
And on the other hand, though, how do you find or differentiate between the people who are just like, you know, going to use every concession that you make in order to shaft you some horrible way further?
Well, my field of interest is persuasion.
So generally speaking, I'm going to be more effective persuading somebody in my case just because I've learned those tools.
So at least I have a chance of genuinely changing minds so that I could get a good result.
But can you always tell?
Well, you can't. You can't tell if somebody's lying to you.
But part of the tools of persuasion...
Are that you can identify deceit a little bit easier.
You can pick their tells.
Again, it's not 100%.
But if you have the right tools, sometimes you can persuade better and also detect when you're getting a fake yes.
It is hard to know.
I mean, a story popped into my mind that sort of many years ago I fell off a bike and I cracked my forearm.
And so I had to put it in a little sling and rest it and all that.
And I did that because, you know, you want to get better as quickly as possible.
I remember going back to see the doctor and there was a bunch of other people in the waiting room.
And one guy was complaining that his broken arm just wasn't getting better.
It was really weird, you know, like it wasn't getting better.
And the doctor said, well, have you done anything unusual with it lately?
I mean, I went skydiving, but I mean, is that not helping?
And I just remember the doctor's face.
It's like watching a sandcastle in the rain, you know, just kind of slowly melting away as he gives up hope that he's ever going to be able to help this person.
And I think it is important to know that people who are going to follow some reasonable directions are the other people who are going to go skydiving with a broken arm and then complain that they're not getting better.
Well, that's a case of irrational behavior and just ignoring common sense.
But in the world of persuasion, we don't see people as commonsensical people or rational people anyway.
So I could probably persuade that person better than someone who imagined that logic and data and reason are part of our reality in any meaningful way.
You've talked about the golden age.
Let's dip into that a bit.
There are times in human history where the number of preconceptions that get battered by reality becomes so great that a crack does open up.
In people's cognitive bias, in people's, you know, self-referential solipsisms.
I sort of think about, you know, like way back a couple of hundred years ago when they said, no, I really think that the sun is the center of the solar system.
And this is how and what it explains.
And people after a while, it's like, okay, well, this explains that and explains that.
We don't need this whole complicated Ptolemaic system and so on.
Same thing happened with the theory of relativity.
The speed of light is constant. People are like, well, that makes no sense.
But I guess we don't need ether.
And it explains this, explains that, and predicts that.
And I think we're kind of in one of those moments, and I think this is one of the things I was so enthusiastic about with Trump, Scott, which was that I just knew, right or wrong, his larger-than-life persona was going to come striding into the house of cards of people's perceptions and just take them down, not even consciously, not even wanting to, just being himself.
And I really see this happening now with people saying, well, this idiot, well, he may have helped solve the Korean War 70 years.
Well, you know, black unemployment is at an all-time low.
The economy is growing. Trade deals are getting better.
There's lots of stuff to criticize, but he's just this orange idiot who, you know, doesn't know anything and was just a TV star.
And it's like, boy, he seems to be pretty lucky.
For a blind golfer, he's getting a lot of hole-in-ones.
Like, at what point did the statistics just become, can't possibly be random?
Yeah, back in 2015, one of the things I blogged, and I think I said this several times so people wouldn't forget, I said that what you're seeing is more than different politics.
I said that candidate Trump was going to change how you viewed reality itself.
And certainly, now a few years later, how often do you see the words cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the facts don't matter, persuasion?
3D chess, 4D chess.
All of that was from, you know, well, I was framing it.
I don't know that it all came from me because these are common words.
But the way we saw reality absolutely changed in pretty much precisely the way I said it would in terms of facts not mattering.
Now, look at the view that people had of Trump the candidate.
It started out with, well, he's just a clown.
And then he was Hitler.
And then he was incompetent.
Then he was literally crazy.
And now he's on the brink of solving the most unsolvable problem in North Korea while the economy booms and ISIS is on the run.
And what are people starting to say already about that?
They're saying, man, was he in the right place at the right time?
Lucky. Right.
Because poor little North Korea was getting squeezed by President Xi, and President Trump just did some tweets, and he was sort of on the sidelines, and isn't that lucky that this all happened?
But I think you know.
You take that one variable out of the equation, which is, President Trump, we're not here.
We're just not here.
You could imagine a different president of China.
You can imagine, you know, other players being different and maybe still getting to the same result.
But you take out President Trump and you don't get here.
And watching people's mental gymnastics to jump from.
Crazy clown. Doesn't mean it.
He's in it for the money. He's a racist.
He's Hitler. He's crazy.
And then finally, too.
Well, he's just lucky.
For 70 years. There's a Canadian magazine put out an article.
It's on a 7-year luxury. Yeah, this Canadian magazine just put out an article where it said something like, regarding Korea, it was like, Donald Trump.
Is he just lucky or is he a crazy genius?
And it's like, how does basic competence get translated to insanity for people?
I mean, how incompetent would you have to be to look at somebody who can, you know, it's like, you know, there's those guys who can take the hammer and the nail and just boom, you know, they've done it so much boom, like for me, I'm like wobbling and trying not to take my thumb off and stuff.
These guys just like boom, they're like jackhammers.
It's like, wow, that guy's really lucky in the way he's hammering, or maybe it's a kind of mad genius.
It's like, no. No, he's just really good at hammering nails in.
Like, why is this so complicated?
This guy wrote the art of the deal.
This guy has been doing deals internationally and domestically his whole life.
Why should anyone... I'd be surprised if he was good at ballet.
That, to me, would be something.
You know, if he comes out in a tutu and starts trolling and does amazing plies, that would be...
But the fact that he's good at making deals when that's all he's been doing since he was, like, 18 years old...
I don't know. It's like, wow, Scott Adams is really good at drawing Dilbert.
That's random. Yeah.
It's mind-boggling.
And you're going to see heads explode when North Korea goes the right way, which I think it will.
And it might actually change how other people see reality as well.
Because one of the things that you kept hearing about North Korea is the people who know a lot.
The experts would say, oh, slow down, people.
Don't be so happy about this.
We've seen this before.
It happened this presidency.
It happened this presidency. It was Bush.
It was Clinton. They make these promises and then they don't do it.
History repeats. To which I say, remind me the history that we had a President Trump before.
Because... When he enters the room, history disappears.
He's not a victim of history.
He creates history. So you can't say that what happened before is going to inform too much.
I mean, you can't ignore the past, but it doesn't really inform what a President Trump will do in this situation.
So it's a new day.
And all of this, of course, is occurring at the same time as for any...
Mildly skeptical person, even if they're solidly entrenched on the left, the whole Russia collusion story has completely fallen apart.
Like so I think at the same time as there are these eruptions of competence that people think are just completely random, which are the result of a lifetime of preparation and planning.
There is at the same time this decay in this narrative that, you know, he and Russia colluded to illegally steal the election from the queen to be coronated Hillary Clinton.
And that's got to be pretty rough as well because the ripple effect of the fall of the Russia collusion narrative is huge because it involves the DNC, the Democrats, the media as a whole.
Like it's a whole rip in the Truman show.
So I was watching my local congressperson being interviewed, and he's very anti-Trump.
And the interviewer said, hey, you know, the whole collusion thing fell apart.
And what does he say?
He says, are you kidding?
Let me give you this example, this example, this example of all the collusion.
And one of the ones that just made me laugh out loud, and this was his best example.
So imagine the other ones are worse than this one.
He says, you know, there was Don Jr.
who met with that Russian lawyer, you know, clear collusion.
Now, I haven't spent much time colluding.
I'm not like an expert colluder, but I know a few things, all right, from life.
If somebody has, I'll use a visual aid, let's say this was a document and they wanted to give it to me.
Let's say they're Russia.
Let's say I'm Don Jr.
Here's how that works.
Hey, you want this document?
Yes, I do. Watch that.
That's colluding. You give somebody some information or whatever.
Instead, they called the meeting about a different topic and didn't talk about any colluding.
If that's colluding, they're doing it all wrong.
Colluding is, I'm trying to help you.
Here's some information. Maybe you give me something in return.
Something more like that instead of, let's have a meeting about the wrong thing.
And when you get there, you're so uninterested, you leave?
Yeah, like you, I'm not much of a colluder, but, you know, if I were to be a colluder, you know, the first thing I probably wouldn't do is invite the person to a meeting that would be registered in my company.
That to me is completely mental.
We've got to pass this off super secretly.
We're going to go to Times Square.
We're going to have spotlights trained upon us.
We're going to invite the media and I'm going to hand you something.
And that's how we're going to collude.
It would be some lackey who would get something that would be taped to the back of a toilet somewhere in Idaho.
It wouldn't be passed over or discussed in a meeting with other people there that everyone was going to find out about.
Let me give you a little more colluder 101.
If you have secret information for me that you don't want to get caught giving, and I want to receive it, I don't want to get caught giving it, do you know what I don't do?
Invite other people to the meeting.
Come on! What kind of colluder brings witnesses To a meeting that requires no witnesses.
It takes one person to get information.
Oh, I got a piece of paper.
Now later, you might say, I will share this or not share this with whoever I want.
But you don't bring, you don't say, let's fill the room.
Let's have a collusion party.
Let's have as many people listening to this who might testify against me as possible.
That's no way to collude.
And that was the best argument left of Of what collusion looks like is that example, which is hilarious.
And I think, you know, I've really been mulling over your arguments about facts.
Facts don't matter. And since I'm kind of in the business of facts, I'd like to thank you for torpedoing my entire business model.
That's been quite exciting for me.
I'm gonna ban pen and ink now.
But one of the things I think that's happening with the people whose reality is being cracked in this way, I think that we actually have a more benevolent relationship to reality, so to speak, than we think.
But I think it is the cost in our personal relationships that can occur, or our professional relationships that can occur.
And one of the things that I've kind of noticed is that the people who are able to speak up the most People like yourself, you know, independently wealthy, Kanye, independently wealthy, big platform and so on.
And you, of course, have taken a huge hit in terms of public speaking and bookings and all that, and you did face personal dangers during the election, which I don't want to minimize.
But I do think that for a lot of people, it's like, well, I have to say these syllables, otherwise they're going to bring the PC cheese grater up to my face and I'm going to be left like a big mess.
And I think it's more fear of horizontal attack than sort of contact with reality that is driving people's aversion to these basic facts.
Yeah, people don't really address arguments anymore.
They address their tribe.
You know, how is my spouse going to feel about this?
How are my friends going to feel about this?
So the people who, first of all, seem to not care about that stuff, Kanye recently, me before that, seem to acquire a kind of influence almost automatically by that thing alone because it's rare.
You know, things that are rare and valuable have extra value.
So, you know, I think we're in a world where if somebody like me can use Periscope, which is an awesome tool because I can do whatever I want to, so I can front run the news, so I can beat the major news publications, all of them, by being on within 10 minutes, framing something the way I think it should be framed, and then that has an influence on people later.
Let me give you an example.
If there's a new news story and I go on and I mock one of the ways that it could be viewed, I take it off the table before most people get to do it.
Now, if I hadn't done that, if I hadn't mocked it preemptively, then people might have said those things and then people would say to them that you have cover.
It's like, well, everybody's saying that.
But I pre-mock things and that actually makes it difficult for people to take the side that's already been mocked.
So I think people with immediacy and no risk, you know, they don't have a boss, they don't have an advertiser, and they've somehow dealt with their family and their friends' reactions, are going to have outsized influence.
And you see that already with me, for example.
Right? Now, the tribe.
So people addressing their tribe.
This is one of the things that's fascinating about Kanye West and you and the other people who are working to expand people's consciousness or at least open up the opportunity of new questions.
And I think people are kind of tired of the old answers.
It's not like people... You know, it's like people who are in abusive relationships, eventually they just get exhausted.
Like, they're just tired of it and just want to try something new.
It's not necessarily a moral elevation.
It's just a kind of blind alley that they just turn around from.
And I find that really, really fascinating that it is such a controversial statement, as Chance the Rapper put out in response to, I think, to what Kanye and you were doing, to say, you don't have to be a Democrat if you're black.
And that being a very radical statement is really wild, because I don't think people understand the monomania of political culture that goes on in other subcultures.
But look at the difference in impact.
So he put that out there, but then he had to retract it.
I mean, he basically had to apologize and explain and sort of pull it back.
Kanye put his stuff out there and said, deal with it.
And here's a picture of a MAGA hat.
Deal with that now. And by the way, now I'm going to tweet people on the far left.
I'm going to tweet Hawk Newsome and Emma Gonzalez.
Now deal with it all.
I mean, the way he's doing it is masterful.
Chance the Rapper put a toe in the water and realized his skill was music.
You know what I mean? Kanye has an insane skill stack that extends beyond music into the real world.
And if you don't have that, maybe you need to stay out of that water.
So let's talk about this talent stack, which you have described a number of times.
There's, to me, a very interesting overlap of the talent stack between you and Kanye, which I think is why this sort of meeting of the minds and expansion of the minds has occurred.
Where do you think the talent stacks that you share overlap to the point where they can be such a strong influence?
Well, it's weird just even talking about, you know, my talent stack and Kanye's having any overlap, but in some ways they do.
So first of all, I have no musical talent whatsoever, like zero.
But I know persuasion, I know communication, I know words, I know how to put them together.
And this is the thing I noticed with Kanye.
The first time I noticed it was back in 2008.
So 10 years ago, it was the first time I wrote about his linguistic genius based on a song he had done that was just crazy.
So in that way, we overlap.
We seem to have a similar appetite for risk, understanding of publicity and how that stuff works.
So in some ways we overlap.
But what is Similar is more analogous than the same, meaning that I have a stack of skills that works really well for what I do.
He has a different stack that works great for what he does.
The overlap is just the persuasion part, I think, the communication part and the risk, the risk profile.
We both have a high risk profile.
All right. Well, I mean, because I think it takes a certain amount of foresight to understand that avoiding risk is the greatest risk of all.
You know, this is the thing we see with kids these days, you know, the bubble-wrapped kids who are like, well, I just need to know where you are while you're on the couch playing video games, which means you're going to get heart disease when you're 40.
So, you know, the avoidance of risk is the greatest risk, but it takes a certain amount.
And it's interesting to me looking at the difference between, was it, time has become so weird to me, Scott, because everything happens so fast and so in such a circular manner.
But it wasn't that long ago that M&M seemed to me to be pointing at the past where it seems to me the Kenya is very much pointing at the future.
And that to me is really fascinating.
What a missed opportunity for M&M to be a cultural leader and to lead people to new pastures, to new ways of thinking.
Because it seemed to me he was just very much trying to drive by looking in the rear view and that's a good way to end up in a crash.
M&M was selling Selling records, selling music.
So he took the side of the people he thought were going to buy his music and basically took their side stronger than they were taking their side.
Kanye is just a whole different deal.
I mean, he took it to another level of, you know, it's okay to talk to your neighbor.
It's a positive message.
Look at the way Kanye frames things.
Even when he did his sort of instant song with John Legend, in which they're sort of doing a verbal duel over this latest news, even that was just genius because he took it to another level where it's not just about the details, it's about I can still have you over to my house and I can still wear this hat and I declare my thought freedom.
It's a big deal. It is a big deal, and one of the things I think it's going to occur, I talked about this at the Cernovich event, the Night for Freedom that was going on in New York, about how the question of love versus hate, you know, it is the old tattoos on the Blue Brothers, right? I mean, the love versus hate paradigm is really important.
We do need to find ways to build bridges.
We do need to find a way to inspire people with the positive vision rather than simply bludgeon them with a negative label and hostility.
And It's hard to avoid for me the basic reality that on the extreme left there has been a lot of violence, right?
The death threats and the warnings that you experienced that caused you to do that do-si-do with your endorsements in 2016.
The alarm pulling, the hitting people with bike locks, the bomb threats, all of the stuff that's coming from the left.
At some point if The non-leftists, and these labels are becoming increasingly useless, but let's just use them for now.
The non-leftists, I think, are going to have to talk about the positive value of loving the truth rather than the emotional rush of hating your enemies.
And I was really struck when Kanye, I think he had a tattoo he changed from F the world to love the world.
And that, to me, is a very, very big transition point because it does sound kind of corny.
I understand that. But we are only going to be able to maintain the good things we've inherited if we can find a way to love the truth rather than hate our enemies.
And I think that transition is occurring and it's always struck me emotionally, Scott, when you do your periscopes, there is a gentleness and a positivity and I dare say a love that goes on there that is hard sometimes to find in other venues.
Let me tweak one thing you said.
We talked about loving the truth.
I think Kanye is at a higher level than that.
I think he's about loving the people, right?
Because we're always going to disagree on the truth.
You can't get to the middle on the truth.
That's the impossible path.
He took the path that we can get to instantly.
And, you know, if you try, it would be impossible, which is to love the person, right?
You know, then once you've done that, Then you can communicate.
The first rule of communication is you have to trust that what the other person is saying, they really mean.
If you don't believe it, then what you're hearing is different words than they're speaking.
You're hearing, oh yeah, you say you're going to get rid of your nuclear program, but I know you're a liar, so you're really lying to me.
So if you can love the person and you can trust the person, then their message sounds different.
And then you can maybe have a chance of finding something that's This thought crime stuff, you really turned me on to this in a way, just realizing how much mind reading goes on or pseudo mind reading goes on in human communications.
You know what they call the dog whistle or the secret agenda or the hidden plan or you know what the okay sign really means and this kind of stuff, right?
It is really, it is impossible as you point out to have any communication with people when you think you know them better than they know themselves because you're doing an end run over what they genuinely believe and they're not then present.
In the conversation, and you can't find any way to meet them.
Because if they genuinely have these sort of puppet strings that only you can see and they can't see, you need to, I guess, talk to the puppet master or something rather than the puppet itself.
But this mind-reading stuff, the thought crimes, you're a racist, or you say, oh, you're a men's rights advocate.
It's like, well, you made one blog post mocking them.
It's like, it doesn't matter.
I know, even if you deny it.
And the fact that you deny it makes it even more true to me.
And it's just like, oh, Lord, we can't possibly have any communication here.
That's right. You know, somebody will call you a racist and then when you deny it, you're a racist and a liar.
It's like, what is the, where's the escape hatch?
You know, please, is there any way out of this once I've been accused?
Yeah, that's the prison we're in and maybe the one that Kanye can at least show us the way out of.
The label attaching as well, I think, this is your blog post.
We'll link to it below where you do rebut the media stuff.
That they will try to affix labels as a sort of, this guy's radioactive, don't go near him.
Don't listen to what he has to say.
He's got hypnotic powers.
Well, actually, with you, he does. But this idea that if they attach a particular label to you, then you are free to be, you know, the object of the two-minute or two-years hate, it sometimes seems like.
The attachment of labels rather than the analysis of arguments is...
Very immature and actually very dangerous because when it escalates out of control, you do end up with massive amounts of conflict in society that can't be resolved through words.
So how much do you think is because the party that's out of power has to operate differently?
So if you're pro-Trump, he's doing things right, North Korea economy, etc.
So you can talk about policies.
You can have a substantive conversation because you've got stuff to say.
But let's say you were against Trump's immigration plans, but you don't really have one of your own.
You don't really have one that says, okay, my plan is let's have a porous border, let's have 40% Mexican immigrant population in California by year 2040, or whatever, maybe we're already there. But where's the other plan?
If you don't have another plan, and it would be embarrassing to describe it, because how do you really describe the plan of opening your borders?
How do you even package that so it sounds right?
You have to go after the personalities because that's all that's left.
So how much of it, this question to you, do you think it would reverse if the power reversed?
If we get a Democrat for president, do the conservatives start going after personalities and ignoring policy?
You know, is that how you get birtherism?
I think if we get an open borders Democrat, which is generally to say a Democrat, I think that conservatives will start going for the visa office and trying to get passports to Argentina rather than because I think it may be like, OK, well, the demographics are going to overwhelmingly swamp the remnants of the American dream and we're going to need to find a lifeboat.
I think it would be bad. Serious for a lot of conservatives, but yeah, I think you're right in the absence of, well, I think that they do have an approach to immigration.
It's just that they don't really want to explicate it too clearly.
Like I think deep down it's like, yeah, well, we know that the Hispanics are going to overwhelmingly vote for the left.
So of course we want lots of Hispanics in the country because it's easier to import people who support you than try and convince people who don't agree with you.
And so I do think that they have an open borders agenda.
I do think that they do want to bring in as many people to prop up their political base, but they don't really want to say so very openly.
But let me ask you this.
So that is the most widespread presumption on the right, that this immigration is really about getting new voters.
I've never heard anybody on the left say that.
Have you? Like I actually say, ah, it's my strategy.
No, no, that's because they don't want to say, I would assume, that they'd...
Now, I recognize this is the mind-reading trap, because I know we're circling that drain, but go ahead.
Yeah, so I would say that's exactly the sort of assumption that we should start challenging, right?
It might be exactly true.
It might be. I don't know.
But I've never heard anybody say it.
So part of my BS filter...
If there's a statistic that says X is true, but in my real life I never see it happening, then I'm suspicious.
Likewise, if I see something happening in my real life over and over again, but they do the study and it's just the data doesn't show it, I go, well, I guess I was wrong.
So I look for my personal experience to at least match up what the assumed wisdom is.
The assumed wisdom is that the left is in it for votes.
I don't have, you know, I can't disprove that.
But why is it?
I've never heard anybody, either privately or any other way, say, yeah, yeah, it's about the votes.
I only hear people talking about, you know, human issues.
Do you think there's any chance we're just wrong about that?
Of course, there's always a chance.
Yeah, there's always a chance that you can be wrong.
Just in terms of, like, you could also be wrong back a couple of hundred years ago that...
The Earth was the center of the solar system, but the question is always to me, how much does it explain?
And if it explains a lot, then it's certainly a hypothesis or conjecture worth considering.
I mean, the governor of Puerto Rico has said that he wants to move Puerto Ricans into Florida to turn Florida to the Democrats.
So there's a very clear, you know, population displacement or population attenuation that's got a very specific political goal.
It explains why they want...
Sorry, go ahead. Well, I was going to say there might be a way to test it.
For example, if the Trump administration said, okay, let's work out some kind of a DACA deal that prevents them from voting, but gives them otherwise, you know, full...
Would the other side say, oh no, that's the bottom line, they've got to vote?
Or would they say, ah, we're getting 95% of what we want, okay, we'll take it.
I don't know. Yeah, that would be tough because, of course, there is always a second generation who would then vote being naturalized.
And, of course, they probably would say...
Okay, but you're counting on people to plan ahead that far, like a generational plan.
And, yeah, we do a little of that.
But on the day-to-day, I just don't see people thinking past next year.
The other reason why they might take that deal, of course, is because they would say, You can say they won't vote, but we'll find ways to get them to vote, you know, like California handing out these driver's licenses to people there illegally and so on.
But there are some things that it does explain.
So, for instance, you know, I've done some work recently on South Africa and there is a population of whites in South Africa, as you know, who are being attacked in these savage manners and the government is looking to displace them, destroy them, take their land without compensation.
It would be fair to say that that's kind of a humanitarian crisis and if you had concern for people being attacked by their own governments overseas you might want to extend some sort of refugee program for people who wanted to escape that But the reality is that they would probably vote Republican and that would be one explanation as to why the left doesn't want to or fights against the very idea of opening up any kind of refugee program to the Boers in South Africa.
So there is some indications where you can say it will explain certain particular maneuvers or perspectives or decisions.
Is it decisive? I don't know.
I mean, I doubt it because this is the kind of thing that wouldn't be written down.
I recognize, of course, that it's mind reading to some degree.
But if a particular pattern fits the data very well, it's worth considering.
Yeah, and I'm not saying it's not a consideration.
It's certainly a variable.
But it seems to me that the big play is how the current voters feel about what you do today, you know, and how you treat other people.
I think that's the play.
I think the whole voting thing may be overblown.
And what the importance of that is Is that if Republicans could be part of the solution instead of part of what people see as the problem, in other words, if they could be an active part of making sure that people who are already here and good citizens get a good deal, are those people all going to vote for Democrats?
Might, but at least you can make a play for them.
Right. Well, another thing, of course, that the Democrats say or the leftists say that they're very much into diversity, but they relentlessly don't hire non-leftists.
Sorry, that's a double negative. It's a little tough to thread that needle.
But I think a study just came out in the certain faculties in American colleges and universities.
it's like nine to one Democrats to Republicans, which means that they're not really that much into diversity of thought.
And so the question then becomes, okay, well, if you're not really into diversity of thought in that when you have the power, you only relentlessly hire people who are kind of photocopies of your own meme set.
If you're really into diversity, then why don't you push for more Republicans in college campuses?
So that says, okay, well, diversity is not really a big issue.
So then why would they be so focused on diversity if they don't push for it or enact it in areas where they actually have some significant control?
Well, keep in mind that discriminating against ideas is expressly allowed, if not encouraged.
So from your perspective, since you would like to see presumably more conservative thoughts, It seems to you like that's unfair that people are discriminating against ideas.
But indeed, it's all we do.
We discriminate against ideas in every realm all the time, and it's the one thing that we're probably better off for.
You don't hire somebody who's just, forget about politics, they just have bad ideas.
Certainly we judge our politicians by their bad ideas.
Let's take the extreme example.
I don't think we could do an entire one of these without me mentioning Nazis at least once.
So give me one Nazi mulligan.
I need it for this.
If there was an established Nazi party in whatever country, let's say some European country, and they applied for immigration to the United States and wanted to keep their thoughts, their Nazis, Would we let them in?
If they qualified on every other level, let's say they were educated, just hypothetically, they were educated, they could pay for themselves, they spoke English, they were otherwise good, would you want them to be let in the country if they literally wanted to kill the Jews?
I'm talking literal Nazis.
Would you say, hey, we need a little thought diversity?
Well, actually, that's a serious question.
How would you answer that?
Well, I mean, the whole question of immigration and government, I'm not a fan of Nazis, but I'm also a fan of free speech, so it's a tough and complicated issue.
I am a little bit more concerned, rather than with hypothetical Nazis, with real Marxists infesting the college campuses and infesting the faculty, because, you know, what is it, like 40% of American anthropologists are outright Marxists, so...
When it comes to objectionable, dangerous, horrible ideas that have caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, I will take your hypothetical Austrian Nazis and up you one massive infestation of Marxists in college campuses, which seems to be a little bit more immediate.
Now, Marxists should have the right to speak their ideas.
I don't believe in that kind of censorship because we want the ideas to be out there so they can be strongly and staunchly opposed and exposed for wrong and bad and so on.
So, but if we're going to discriminate against ideas based upon generalities, then sure, okay, then we can say that the leftists in the universities should never hire conservatives.
But then, of course, if you've got Americans saying, well, we oppose immigration from the third world because the vast majority of those immigrants are going to vote for the left and we think those ideas are very bad, then there should be no objection from the left because the right is simply doing what the left is doing but with a country rather than with a university.
But, of course, there is this massive...
Opposition to controls over immigration.
So I think we often think in terms of, you know, do we let these ideas in, yes or no?
But isn't it always a rate problem?
It's not a yes-no.
I believe 100% of the country would agree if our entire immigration from Muslim-dominant countries was one person per year.
If we say, for whatever reason, we've changed our immigration, it's just only one person gets in per year, it's going to be a Muslim.
Everybody, everybody, what do you think?
You would have 100% agreement.
They'd say, it's one person, why do we care?
It's not going to change the country.
I'm never going to meet this person.
Now you say, how about 10,000?
And people go, probably we could absorb 10,000, big country.
What about 100,000?
Now we've got some crime problems.
Well, what about a million? At some point you're changing the country.
You're not just letting somebody in.
So it's a different question based on the rate and the number of people.
So the leftist in college question I think is at least partly because there's so many already there.
So there's a little moat there.
But also I would say the right has to look at how they communicate their ideas.
If you can't get your ideas into college, Think about your ideas.
Think about communicating them.
Because the right has typically had this argument.
It's in the Bible.
It's in the Constitution.
Case closed. And then the left will say, I need a little more than that.
I need reasons.
What about people?
What about the human condition?
What about fairness?
What about all this?
I love people on the right.
Partly because their code is so well defined.
Look, if it's in the Bible, it's in the Constitution, I don't care what color you are, I don't care anything else.
You're okay with me if you're okay with those two documents.
That part I like, because they're consistent, they know what they're asking for, it's a coherent philosophy, but then the left is a little more freeform, but yet Yeah, I mean, of course, the left would never agree to one person a year.
And the right wouldn't either, because there's a lot of people, the Republican Party as a whole, you know, dominated by these big business interests that want the cheap labor flowing in from other countries, driving down wages, driving down worker demands, and so on.
But I do think that the question of immigration, of course, has a lot to do with Is it going to cost me?
Because, you know, people are very interested in their own lives, their own wallets, their own bank accounts, the future of their families, their children, what they can inherit, and so on.
And, of course, one of the big problems, people say, well, America is a nation of immigrants.
Well, to some degree, although there was a lot of breeding going on before birth control.
But America in the 19th century didn't have a big, giant, coercive, redistributionist welfare state.
And the big challenge, I think, for a lot of people is, I really don't care where people live, but if they kind of live in my bank account, I'm going to pay a little bit more attention.
And that problem of immigration, you know, a third of people who immigrated to America in the 19th century just kind of turned around and went back because they didn't like it, couldn't make it, it wasn't for them.
But when you get, you know, like in Europe, you get 10 times your salary that you would get in the Middle East just by making it to Germany.
Now we have a big problem that we're all in each other's business.
You know, like, I don't care what you have in your bath unless I have to take a bath after you in your bathwater that I'm suddenly concerned about, whether you're clipping your toenails near the drain or something.
And I think this is kind of in everybody else's business.
I'm sorry? That's the worst analogy.
I wouldn't say it's the worst.
I would certainly say it's one of the most vile that I've ever come up with.
But it certainly is vivid.
Let's put it that way. It's repulsive persuasion.
That would be a good name for a punk man.
But anyway, we'll talk about our musical collaboration later.
But I think because we've got this state where everybody's in everybody else's wallets and there's all this debt being borrowed against future earnings of children and so on, this is where people get a little...
I don't care who moves in on my street unless they have the right to borrow my car two days a week, in which case I kind of care whether they can drive or not.
And I think those issues are one of the reasons why it's tough to live and let live in that area.
Yeah, I wonder if it's largely boiling down to whose money you're spending.
If I don't have any money, I'm happy to have you pay for other people to come in and live in other places.
But if it's my money and they're living in my neighborhood, I'm going to have different factors to consider, yeah.
So let's touch on the golden age.
Oh, we're going to get the choir music here in post-production.
So the golden age, let's talk a little bit about what you see rolling down.
There are a lot of people staring in the future, like Indiana Jones with the big giant ball coming down there.
But you view things in a different way.
So what is the golden age and what do we have to look forward to?
So my definition of the golden age is when all the big stuff is heading in the right direction.
So North Korea is looking good, the economy is good, maybe we have some chance to do something in the Middle East now.
But beyond that, the extra special definition of it is that we realize that our biggest problems are psychological in nature.
It's the way we're thinking about things rather than a physical resource constraint.
If you have a plague with no cure, That's a physical problem.
If two countries want the same territory for, let's say, security reasons, defensive reasons, physical problem.
But North Korea, it turned out, was sort of a mental problem, which I saw a while ago.
I've been writing about how we did have a path to this exact solution, because I thought once we realized it, that would be enough.
In other words, just understanding That it wasn't a physical problem, it was just the way we think, presented a solution that when you have a President Trump who is perhaps the greatest psychology engineer we've seen, that he's the right fit for a psychological problem.
I think the Middle East is a psychological problem.
I think the economy clearly is a psychologically driven system.
If you feel optimistic, you invest and the economy goes up.
So we see time and again the president's persuasion skills are working on areas that are subject to psychological engineering.
Even the defeat of ISIS on the battlefield was President Trump approached it from a psychological perspective.
He said, we're not going to say when we're going to leave.
We're just sort of here forever.
So if you want to join this group, you're dead.
So it's got to have an impact on Their psychology, their recruiting, etc.
Probably also on the morale of our troops, because we gave them more field control over the decisions, which had to feel good.
So, time and again, the psychology that we haven't seen, that is fresh and new and different to each of these major fields, and they're responding to it.
Now, the test will be the Middle East.
Now, unfortunately, the Middle East is so many players with so many interests.
It's the ultimate, you know, impossible thing.
North Korea was relatively simple.
You know, you knew exactly who the decision makers were, exactly what the situation was.
Middle East, it'll be tougher.
If he can, if President Trump's psychological engineering can get us some kind of a good result there, I think that will just end all doubt about now.
Are we in the golden age?
But somebody with these skills is the right person to be in charge at that point.
Well, I mean, I think those things are all very interesting to track, and they are fascinating to watch unfold.
I know for a lot of people it's like, yeah, but...
Can we get a wall?
Can we get kind of justice for people who leak state secrets and lie under oath?
Can we get the rule of law back?
Can we get... Can Trump repeal an executive order without a massive court battle?
I mean, I think that there's a lot of people...
I agree with you. The golden age looking beyond the borders.
Like, yes, pretty good stuff.
But I think for a lot of people looking inside the borders, it's like...
It's great that things are better for North Korea and South Korea, but...
What's happening domestically.
And I think that's where all presidents want to do that stuff overseas because overseas there's no big judicial system and activism and riots and so on to impede what it is that they want to get done.
There's this great sucking sound as presidential energy goes overseas because like, well, I can move those chess pieces pretty easily, but the ones home are kind of glued and I can't get them moving.
And I think that's one of the great challenges.
And it is going to be wonderful to see him work on this kind of stuff.
But I wonder sometimes if it's not, I can do stuff over there, which I can't seem to get done here.
So that's good. We all want to be drawn towards where we can have the most effect, right?
Yeah, and to generalize that, you would see that everything that the president can personally influence is going well.
So he gets his, you know, Supreme Court picks, he cuts the regulations, he scares people, he tweets, you know, he solves North Korea.
So as you said, his commander-in-chief hijab is going great.
But as soon as Congress is a major partner, healthcare, DACA, we get crap.
Now, the problem is, I think people would be quick to say, oh, those politicians are not doing their job.
I think it's deeper than that.
I think that some kinds of problems, by their complexity, are just not suited for Congress as the right tool.
And healthcare is certainly one Where you probably just need, you know, either new thinking, new rules, you need something.
But you've got a bunch of 80-year-old congresspeople who don't use the internet trying to figure out this hugely complicated healthcare situation.
They end up voting for something they don't even know what it is.
Congress is just not the right tool.
So a solution for healthcare almost has to be a non-congressional committee that comes up with some ideas that the president can The nonpartisans say these six things are smart to do.
Let's just look at that.
So something like that, which is just a new way to think about it, a new way to get around Congress being the wrong tool, could get us to a result.
Now, I'm of the feeling that if we don't have something close to inexpensive universal access to health care in this country, that calling ourselves great It's a hard sell.
For me personally, my definition of great is that we can take care of each other in a way that I think reaches everybody's minimum requirement for taking care of people.
Healthcare is the minimum.
I can't feel we're great when other countries can do this and we can't get this done, even though other countries may have their own problems.
I think there's a technology way, a management way, a new way of thinking way, That we could get to something pretty amazing for healthcare?
Well, I mean, to me, the sort of free market would be a wonderful way to deal with healthcare.
Free market and charity. You know, for me, up here in Canada, socialized healthcare, man, I had to flee to the States just to survive the incompetence.
And, you know, like, I mean, it'll be exactly like the DMV, but with them holding your actual health in their hands.
So as long as the approach is more towards free market.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so when I talk about universal access to healthcare, I don't mean getting there in the Bernie way by raising somebody else's taxes.
I mean that, for example, we saw in the news that one of the Middle Eastern countries, I forget which one, had developed a pod that you sit in the pod and it scans you completely and basically finds out everything that's wrong with you.
So there are technologies coming online that will make your smartphone basically your doctor.
You know, my startup, WenHub, has an app called Interface, Interface by WenHub, in which you could talk to any kind of expert, but some of them are the monocle.
And so you might be able to cobble together a high-tech healthcare set of solutions that are new, better than what we have, and completely inexpensive because technology got there, as long as the law doesn't stop us from doing stuff.
You know, if we don't have stupid regulations to say, You can't test this.
And that's where President Trump is the ideal person, because if we have some regulations in the way, who's better at getting rid of regulations?
He would be the guy.
So here we go.
This is the one question I really desperately need to ask you.
It all boils down to this.
The inverted pyramid of the world's fascination with the brain of Scott Adams comes down to this.
Scott, Kanye calls.
He wants a meeting. Are you going?
So a lot of people ask me that question.
I'll answer it this way.
I don't think that's going to happen because he's kind of busy.
He's got some music dropping and all this business.
That said, if he were just a celebrity, maybe if I have nothing else to do.
But he's not just a celebrity.
He is changing the world.
And if I could help him, I would absolutely do it.
And so meeting with him would be how I'd find out if I could be helpful to that situation.
Anyway, so I would absolutely take the meeting.
Don't expect that to happen.
He's got a lot going on. Call him.
Kanye, call him.
I'm just using the back phone here.
Well, thanks a lot for your time.
It was a great pleasure chatting. Just wanted to remind people, the books are great.
And, you know, they will blow your mind and expand your consciousness in ways that...
May feel uncomfortable. Show me on your brain where Scott Adams' text touched you.
But the books are How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, kind of the story of my life, and Win Bigly, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, and a bunch of other books which are well worth looking at.
The blog is blog.dilbert.com, and Scott is on twitter.com forward slash Scott Adams says, and you want to check those out for the Periscope updates, which you can also find on YouTube.
A great pleasure as always.
Thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you for having me.
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