Episode 128 - Why Trump Derangement Syndrome is so Strong

Well, good morning, everybody. Some of you are sleeping in, because here in the United States of America, you know what day it is? It's the Fourth of freaking July. That's right. It's the anniversary. The birth of our independence, or at least the declaration of it, whatever that is. And it's time for coffee. I've gone to the big mug, the mug that's almost as big as my head. You could go smaller. That would be okay. But join me, if you will, for the simultaneous sip. That is some good patriotic simultaneous sipping right there. Whoa. So, happy birthday, America. I would like to once again thank the founders of this country for creating a system that works really well. I'm not sure there's not a better way to do things, but what they created hundreds of years ago, pretty darn robust. Why do I say that? Well, let me give you an example. Let's say you had a problem where your government was doing something the people didn't like, for example, putting children in cages temporarily when they're separated from their parents at the border. What would we expect to happen in that situation? Well, if we had a bad system and a dictator, that dictator might say, children in cages. I don't care. Let's just leave them there. We'll put more children in cages. If you had a dictator and you had a bad system, but we don't have that. What we have is a system that works like this. The press puts a spotlight on this problem and says, hey, children in cages. Yes, there were children in cages in the prior administration as well, but the number of people who came is much larger now because this whole bring your children with you thing works. And so there were more of them now. And so the press says, this problem used to be small and now it's big. We care. Do something about it. And then the public looked at it, and the public spoke out as one. Be they Democrats, be they Republicans, be they Independents, they pretty much all said the same thing. Children in cages, separated from their parents. Not ideal. That is not ideal. We must change that. And so the public spoke as one. And the government wanting to be reelected, wanting to have a good midterm election, wanting to have a good reputation, said, okay, people, it's not going to be easy, but we're going to sign a executive order and get on. It won't happen right away because things don't happen right away. There are real world constraints in the real world. And so what we saw with the whole immigration border thing is a system built hundreds of years ago, pre Internet, pre Digital, everything. This still works. Still works. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. Now you can say the people in this story didn't do everything they were supposed to do. You could say there are weasels in the media. You can say there are weasels on the other side, whichever side you're on. You could say there are people who should have been on this before. You could say there are a hundred ways this should have been better and not have happened. But today we're talking about the system. The system worked. It worked perfectly Hundreds of years ago, the system was created and it reached through time and it worked. So let's celebrate that. Let's celebrate the system that once again works. Now let's talk about Trump derangement syndrome a little bit. I saw there was a new poll saying something like, I don't know, half the people in the United States think the president is a racist. Now, I tweeted my blog post that explains the two movies side by side. So you can see that with each of these pieces of, quote, evidence that he's a racist, you can see that the other movie doesn't see it because there's an alternate explanation which is far more ordinary. And you can see the ordinary explanation next to the hysteria explanation. And here's the funny thing and the reason I wanted to talk about it. So I got pushback from people who said, oh, sure, Scott, maybe you can explain a few of those things that make the president look like a racist. But how in the world are you going to explain all of them? Are you telling me that they're all a coincidence? Sure, if it was one or two things, maybe you could change my mind that we saw those wrong. But so many things, could it be possible? What is the other explanation for why there are so many things? Yes, somebody's already added me confirmation bias. But it's not confirmation bias alone in this case. Confirmation bias by itself absolutely would not get you to where we are. What you need is also an enemy press. You need a coordinated press who simultaneously say, what's the worst thing we can say about this president to make him look like a racist? Then whenever an opportunity comes up, they gather around it and they make it. They make it the story. Now, here's the interesting part. Probably every person who came at me on the Internet today and other days says the same thing. They say, you people on the right are completely hypnotized by your Fox News and your Breitbarts and your and your Drudge reports. You, half of the country are in a Dream world created by your media. But how lucky we are that we have a media that serves us up exactly what we want. But it's all objective. How lucky. How lucky it was that half of the world is serving up complete bullshit that is hypnotizing its watchers. But half of the world is not. I'm so lucky, I'm in the good half. Yay. Do you know who else thinks they're in the good half? Everybody. Everybody thinks they're in the good half. Now, I've said before that the winning team tends to be a little less delusional than the losing team because the losing team has to explain not only the facts, but why they thought they were so smart. But everything's going wrong on their end, right? So that's a whole trigger that they need to get past. The people who are winning started thinking, hey, my candidate's good. And then their candidate won. Their world is still intact. Then they say, I think my good candidate will make the economy go well. And then the economy is going well. And so the people on the right say, well, that makes sense. That's exactly what I expected. And on and on. On the left, they have to explain why everything they predict goes wrong. How can you be wrong about everything? About the economy, about North Korea, about, you name it, they're wronger than anybody's ever been wrong, probably ever. It might be a historical wrongness. I don't know how you measure that sort of thing, but it feels like there are more people wrong about what they expect to happen next and then can clearly see that it didn't happen than maybe ever in the history of the world. It's possible. No way to measure that, but it's possible. And so when people say to me, how can it be true that there are so many of these examples? It's easy. The simplest explanation is that half of the. Half of the country is seeing bullshit all the time. All the time. Relentless, continuous, non stop bullshit from half the country all the time. And you know what's happening in the other half of the country? Well, still a lot of bullshit. Quite a bit of bullshit, but not as bad. Now, if suddenly a Democrat came to office, let's say you project into the future, and I know you don't even want to think about this, but suddenly it's President Kamala Harris, whatever year you want to think into the future, at that point the people on the right are just going to flip out and they're going to be the ones suffering the hysteria. It's just not happening. Right now. Right now, the right is, you know, they've got their own little bubble stuff going on, but it's a very small bubble compared to what's happening on the left. Should the left take power, the bubbles will flip. All right? So at the moment, those of you who are Trump supporters, I don't believe you're in the bubble because your side is winning. So you don't have a trigger to make you crazy. You're seeing the world just the way you expected it. The other side is not. All right, bubble flip. Yes. How do we reduce tds? Well, the only way to reduce it is to keep violating it. So there have to be enough examples to violate TDS that you could make the case that. Look, it's obvious. Now, look at all these examples that don't go with your interpretation of the world. There are a few of those now, but not nearly enough. It would have to be something big. Now, I'm watching with great interest, I guess, the administration's recent ruling that they were going to reverse some Obama instructions about how to deal with college college admissions. And the idea is that Asians and whites are being, what would you call, discriminated against in favor of other candidates because of racial, I don't know, quotas or rules or priorities or something. So there's no question that the old rule was racist because it was actually designed to be. Nobody was hiding the fact that the rule was meant to be racist in terms of college admission. But the argument, if we're being fair, the argument is that a little bit of racism in college administration can get you to a better, less racist, more fair world. I'm not taking a side on that. I'm just saying that that was the argument. And so the president has decided to go the other way and just say no to racism. Now, like most things, and for those of you who stayed with me, I'll get to my good point. Have you noticed that the world will treat this latest decision about how to treat college admissions in terms of race? They'll treat it as a binary. They're going to say, that's a good idea or that's a terrible idea and you're a big old racist. Right. There's no doubt that that's how it's going to be treated. It's either right and fair or you're a big old racist. There's no such thing as gray areas in between. In this case, I would like to put the following frame on this, if I may, that in this great arc of racism where we have let's say, let me do it in the right direction where you're starting with maximum racism back in. Let's say that the days of the pre Civil War and the Civil War where you had actual slavery, maximum racism. And then civil war is over, you don't have slavery, but things are still really bad. And then you've got the civil rights movement and that helps a lot. And things are getting better and better and it's approaching fair, right? It starts way up here. Let's do this. Racism, big problem, civil war, civil rights movement, people getting more awake, more aware. Obama is president. It's getting smaller. At some point in that path from horrible to fair. Somewhere around here, your best strategy is to get rid of the artificial rules. You don't want to wait until things are equal because if you've waited until there actually is something like equality and at the same time you've got rules favoring one over the other, that's actually worse for the people who are favored. Why? How would you like to be black? Get a college education? Get your college education, you graduate and then everybody who sees your, your college degree thinks probably not quite qualified, might have, might have got a little help there. How the hell would you like that? You wouldn't like that a bit. So my point is that the right time to get rid of these artificial, artificial, what would you call them? Rules about racism is not when you've achieved equality, that's too late. If you're being smart and you want to do what's best for both sides or all sides in this case, you want to get rid of the artificial constraints just short of fairness, just before you're fair. Because that's how you get the last part. You need to get rid of the artificial constraints so that the people who were helped by them can close that last gap just by effort and hard work. Because you want to get to the finish line equal. You don't want to get to the finish line equal with an asterisk, alright? You don't want an asterisk on your equality. So at some point you've got to get rid of the artificial rules, get rid of the asterisks, let people just compete on quality and whether the outcomes come out exactly the same or not, they probably won't just because, you know, nothing is ever completely equal. But so the question should be. So getting back to the college race requirement rules, getting back to that, the question should not be should we take these rules, the Obama rules off or should we keep them? It's the wrong Question. Here's the right question. Is it the right time to take the rules off? Because there is a time to take the rules off, to just say, look, race doesn't count anymore. You know, we got close enough. Not equal, not equal, but close enough. So it's just smarter to let to take the asterisks off because there are a whole bunch of completely qualified minorities getting into college on total skill, hard work, doing all the right things, and those poor bastards are graduating with an asterisk. That's not good because there's always going to be that little doubt. Yeah, that's a Harvard degree, but did they get a little help getting into Harvard? That's an asterisk on your degree. You don't want that. So here's the point. I don't know and I don't know that anybody is smart enough to know when is the exact right time to take the asterisks off. It's before you get completely even. It's somewhere here. And we might be there, we might not be. But that's what we should be arguing. We should be debating whether or not it's time to take the rules off, not whether rules should be taken off. Yes or no, right? It's not a yes, no, it's a now or wait. That's all it is. As soon as you think of it in terms of yes, no, you've missed the entire argument. You're completely missing the whole conversation. It is a path and at some point the asterisk needs to come off and for everybody, we might not be there. And that would be an argument I would certainly listen to. Or we might be close enough that, you know, doing it now is going to get you to where you want to be. But, you know, let's not be giving black people degrees with asterisks on them forever. Right? There was a time when it made perfect sense. I'd have to say. And by the way, let me give you some background on my own experience. A number of you have read this in my book, etc. Back in the. Where was it? Late 80s and early 90s. I was working for a bank and I was picked to be a higher management person. I was identified as somebody who was going to work their way up the ranks. I had the right education, et cetera. And. And my boss called me into her office one day and told me that the company was getting a lot of pressure because they didn't have any diversity in upper management. They didn't have enough women. I think there was one Woman in upper management and zero minorities. And so the press noticed that put some pressure on the company, which was a big bank, Crocker bank at the time. And my boss called me in her office and said, look, let me get rid of the racist here and said, I have to be honest with you. The order came down. We can't promote any white males. And some people don't believe that. They told me this directly, but I promise you, they told me that directly. We can't promote you because you're white and male. And there's nothing we can do about it because the order has come down that we need to have some diversity in senior management. So I quit because it wasn't my job to make the world a better place. It was my job in a capitalist world to maximize my own situation. And it wasn't going to happen there. And by the way, I always appreciated that they told me that directly. Imagine if they hadn't told me that. Imagine if I had to. Just like imagine, you know, maybe I'm not working hard enough. Why is my career not going right? I thought I'd be promoted by now. So I always appreciated the honesty. So I quit. And then I went to work for the phone company, Pacific Bell at the time, the local phone company. And I got on the management track. And as soon as I got on the management track, I was like, yeah, I'm going to get promoted to the big time. I was finishing my MBA in the evenings at Berkeley. So I had a Berkeley mba. I had some decent job experience by then. I was an up and comer. I said the right things, I wore the right clothes and I was on the track. They put me on the management fast track. And then my boss called me into my office and said exactly the same thing the bank told me. Well, we just got busted by the press who have just noticed that we have no diversity in senior management. And until further notice, which could be God knows how many years, we can't promote you because you're a white male. And again, and I promise you, this was said to me directly, white male, you can't get promoted. And we don't know when this will ever change. So what did I do? I started a comic strip on the side and that became Dilbert Now. So that worked out for me. Now for most people, things aren't going to work out as well as they did for me. But here's my larger point of this. When I tell this story and you know, for years I couldn't even tell the story. Can you Imagine this. If those of you who are younger can't put your head. You can't really put your head in those times. If you're younger, you had to be there. But imagine that I couldn't even tell you that story for 15 or 20 years because even telling the story would have made me look like a racist. You're hearing this right. If I had told the story of how I had been racially discriminated against and lost two promising careers, I would have been called a racist for being racially discriminated against. That's what it was like in those times. It's not like that today. So today I can tell you the story as I just did. But let me put. Let me put my spin on it. Spin, I guess, is the wrong word. During these times when I lost two careers to racism, you know, sort of an industrial racism that was intentional. I didn't feel as bad as you might imagine because it was true that we didn't have any diversity, and it is a better world if we have some. So I do buy into the. I mean, I completely buy into the. The goal, which is to have a diverse, successful society in which we just stop talking about all that stuff. You know, it just stops mattering. Like, I want to live in a world where we just don't even have the freaking conversation. And the only way to get there in the beginning was with something closer to brute force, right? So what happened to me was I was on the other end of the brute force. They had to really force some rule changes to, you know, allow some people in the door that were having trouble getting in, you know, promoting people up, supporting them, etc. And now there's a ton more diversity in all of those companies today if it happened. You know, if I were working in a corporation and somebody called me into their office today, said, we can't promote you because you're a white male today. That's a lawsuit. I would walk out of the office with my phone in my hand, calling my lawyer if it happened in 2018, because it's a lot easier for people to get a good grip in a corporate world and work their way up. And I think there are a lot more people who are really trying to coach and mentor and do the right thing for minorities and for women and everything else. So it's a different world today. My point being that when things were terrible, there were literally no minorities represented in senior management in these two companies. When things were that bad, you did sort of need a big, blunt instrument, you know, the, the way to fight a fire sometimes is with a fire. The way that they dealt with racism was with more racism. It was just sort of a. You could call it a productive racism, if you will. In other words, they discriminated hard against white people temporarily in, in the long arc of history. It was temporary, seemed like forever if you were living it, but they were trying to write something. And when it got a little closer to right where it is now, it's nowhere near, you know, any kind of equal representation. But I would say at this point, if you were, if you were black or female and you wanted a job in corporate America, it would be a fairly easy thing if you had the qualifications. So I think it's a different world. So my point being that the tools you use have to adjust for how big the problem is. If you've got slavery, you need a big tool like a civil war. Oh, my God, that's, that's like, you know, extreme. And then when you've got still a big problem, but it's civil rights, maybe you need to march. Some people are going to get hurt. Social disobedience, it's a big tool, but it's not as big as a civil war. And now when civil rights have been successful at least, and directionally successful, you've got a smaller difference. And Obama said, well, I'm going to deal with the smaller difference by telling colleges, hey, colleges, you can take race into account in some special ways and maybe that'll help get you a little closer to equality. And then President Trump says, all right, in his opinion, we're close enough, not equal. Everybody doesn't have equal stuff, but we're close enough that it's time to take the asterisks off. The degrees of the people who earned real degrees by doing all the right stuff. They don't get an asterisk anymore. That's, that's not helping. Alright, so that's, that's sort of your final step is to take the asterisks off and that's where we are, or at least that's where the argument should be. The argument should be, are we at the take the asterisk step off or not? That's a fair discussion. But if we're treating this as a yes or no about these college rules, it's the wrong discussion. All right? I don't like that you discount my degree because of my color. Well, I'm telling you that we want to be in a world where that's not even a question. And right now we're in a world where there is a question, and that doesn't seem fair to me. So if you're saying that I'm discounting it, you're missing the point. It's not about me. I'm saying that the world wants to look at your degree and say, oh, yeah, a degree is a degree. Nobody wants to feel the invisible asterisks. Degrees are overrated. Somebody says, I agree. I agree about that. Hey, here's an idea I've been thinking about. I've been thinking about this for years, but I think finally the technology has reached the point where it works. I'm thinking about creating my own college course. You know, maybe I'd call it the. The Scott Adams College Course. And it would be a collection of books you should read or classes you should take to have. To have what I would call a great education that would make you a powerful citizen who could go in a lot of directions. And yeah, it would be. All of it would be free or low cost, meaning the price of a book. So I could say, for example, if you've read all of these books and you've taken these online classes, all of this stuff being low cost, that I give you the Scott Adams degree. Now, at the moment, the Scott Adams. Excuse me, the Scott Adams degree would not be a great brand, right? So my brand is not strong enough to make this idea work. But now imagine it's Warren Buffett or it's Bill Gates or it's Elon Musk. So imagine now that instead of me, and I don't have that kind of credibility, that somebody seriously credible says, let's take Warren Buffett. He's my favorite example. Let's say Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos, for example, someone who is unambiguously successful and knows a lot. And they say, all right, here's the Warren Buffett class. You got to read these 50 books. It's a lot of. It's going to be a lot of books, right? It's not going to be six books, but you got to read these 50 books, and you got to take these online classes. And when you're done, I. Warren Buffett would totally hire you in a heartbeat if you've done all those things. So that would be. Do you say Jordan Peterson is working on this? That would be interesting. Now, it might be that people like me or Jordan Peterson or anybody else who's interested could start putting together their own curriculum, if you will. And in the short run, it's just something that people say, oh, that's. That's good information about what to read. In the long run, maybe it's worth something. So in the long run, maybe we can make our brands worth something. Tim Ferriss would be a perfect example of someone who has credibility and could have a curriculum. Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson are working on this. Like actually working together or working separately. You should post your 50 books. I'm not sure I have 50 books. You know, it's the sort of thing, if I were going to do this, I wouldn't do it casually. I would do. I'd have to read the books first and then make sure there were the right 50 books. All right, Focusing on the humanities. Just reading your comments. More like a trade product. Yeah. Taleb's books. Cialdini. Yeah. A lot of us have brands that are not general. So if you wanted, let's say, a business degree, then you'd want something like a Warren Buffett business degree. So his recommendations would be around things that are specifically good for business. You could imagine Jordan Peterson doing something specifically around the humanities. And you could imagine me doing something specifically around persuasion and success and stuff like that. All right, get Tom Sowell involved. I downloaded some of Thomas Sowell's books when I was traveling and I didn't get to them, but he's. I think he's next on my list of stuff to read after I read Greg Guffel's new book, Value Investing. Yeah. Carmen Simon. Yes. She could write a. She could have a curriculum as well. Yeah. Naval Ravikant. He would. He could come up with a curriculum. All right, so that's all for now, and I hope that you're going to go off and have an absolutely terrific Fourth of July. For those of you in other countries, I guess you just have a day of work today. I feel sorry for you because we'll be having a good time watching fireworks and drinking too much today. And bye for now.