Episode 822 Scott Adams: Was Live! (Here's the Replay)

Oh, it's time. It's time, everybody. Come on in here. Yeah, you're on time. Good work. Those of you who planned accordingly. We're getting ready to jump in here and get it while it's fresh. Got to get it while it's fresh. Ask DJ Dr. Funk. Choose. He'll tell you gotta get it when it's fresh or you can do it on replay. And it's also good then. But if you'd like to enjoy it now with optimal, optimal experience, you're gonna want to do the simultaneous hip. And to be prepared for that, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or jealous or stein, A canteen. Junger flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine, the day, the thing that makes everything better. The simultaneous sip. Go. Ah. It's almost like this coffee is so good that hearts are just coming out of it. See what I'm doing? It's an illusion. All right, let's talk about the only thing that the news cares about this week. Bloomberg. So it turns out we found a candidate who, in his own way, might be as interesting as Trump. Now, of course, he's only interesting because of his matchup with Trump, so it's really all about Trump still. But Mike Bloomberg is making a run here. Now, all of the. We'll talk about Mike Bloomberg's persuasion game in a minute. But there's something interesting that anti Trumpers have to hold in their head as true in order for them to figure out why they need to replace Trump. And this is it. You're going to laugh when you hear this, because I swear I'm not making anything up. Everything I'm going to say I think you would verify is an accurate description of the world. In order to be a Democrat who is anti Trump and thinks that he really needs to be removed for all of his evil, all of his incredible evil and incompetence. In order to believe that, you would also have to believe that it's a special kind of evil and incompetence that doesn't kick in for four years. See where I'm coming from? Apparently, in order to think that everything they believe about Trump is. Is true and has always been true. The only way you can explain it based on what we're observing, is that it's a special kind of evil with a four year fuse. So really, the first four years, not much happened that seemed bad news. Things look like, they went pretty well for four years, objectively speaking. Sure, you can pick out things you wish were better, but the last four years certainly weren't anywhere near what people predicted would happen. So in order to hold that illusion, you've got to paper over it. As you observe things which disconfirm your belief, you have to quickly paper them over. Oh, paper that over. And by election day 2020, what they're going to have to paper over is why they believe that Trump has a special kind of evil and incompetence that waits four years before it shows its head. Now, of course, they would say, we've been seeing it all along, look at this. Or that he did. But it's hard to point to anything you could actually measure that would be evidence of that. The counter example to that would be the national debt, but I think everybody's unhappy about that in the same amount. And probably whoever was president would have done the same thing. But think about the mental gymnastics you have to go through to say it's a special evil that waits four years before it kicks in. I saw an interview, I'm not sure who it was, was interviewing Joe Biden and was challenging him about the Obama administration putting kids in cages. And, oh, it was kind of sad trying to watch Joe Biden escape the trap, because Joe Biden is no President Trump. Trump can escape traps. You famously remember the only Rosie o' Donnell escape, one of the greatest. One of the greatest Houdini escapes from a trick question you've ever seen in your life or a trap question. It wasn't a trick, but Biden just. He just didn't get it done. So Biden's got a kid in cages problem, because even the question is damaging independent of what he answers. Now that people are willing to ask the question, it's the question that's the problem, because nobody really believes the answers anyway when they come from politicians. All right, let's talk about Bloomberg. There's a report that Bloomberg hired an expert on narcissism and a comedy writer. So he hired two people. One is an expert on narcissism, and the other knows how to write humor. And I'm thinking to myself, I guess he doesn't have the budget to hire me because I can do both of those jobs. Oh, I wouldn't call myself an expert on narcissism, but I have lived with myself for quite a few years and I've observed myself. And so while I'm not technically an expert on narcissism, I think I know what it Feels like from the inside out. And I write humor for a living. So $1 billion is my price. Mike Bloomberg, if you're listening, it's kind of a bargain for $1 billion. I will consult with you, Mike Bloomberg. That price will go up every month until election Day. So next month it'll be 1.1 billion. I made this offer to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and she didn't take it. Now, do you think it would have been worth a billion? Oh, and here's the catch. I know Mike Bloomberg, you like to negotiate. You're a business guy. So here's the deal. I won't take a penny if you lose. If you lose the election, I won't take a penny. Free consulting, you just keep it all. But if I win, in other words, if you get elected, because of my excellent consulting, my expertise on narcissism, and my humor writing, I will take 1.1 billion next month. If you get in early, you can get the discount and save $100 million. Who doesn't want to save $100 million? I mean, seriously, I'm looking at the comments saying, would you actually work for him? Do you think he's going to give me a billion dollars? So those of you who are not not too good at determining what is serious and what is not can maybe talk among yourselves to the others. All right, we will talk about Hillary. All right, let's talk about Hillary. So I guess it was Drudge Report broke this story that is the biggest non story in the world. It was all the headlines, it was all the chatter yesterday, and it was literally nothing. And the story was that the Bloomberg campaign is considering asking Hillary Clinton to be the vice president. It's like all over the news now. What's wrong with that story? Let me tell you. Do you know which other candidates running for president on the Democrat side, do you know which other candidates also considered asking Hillary Clinton to be their vice president? The answer is all of them. All of them. They all considered it. If they didn't, they're idiots. Because it's on the plate is one of the things that they all should have considered. Now, that doesn't mean that they would like to do it. It doesn't mean they considered it and said yes, or that they considered it and said no or that they've even decided because it would be too early to decide one way or the other. It is simply true that all of them considered it. So what is the breaking news yesterday that Bloomberg considered it? That's not news. What's the Opposite of news. Let me give you some more breaking highlights from yesterday. Mike Bloomberg breathed oxygen yesterday. Yeah. So Mike Bloomberg ate lunch yesterday. Yeah. And is there more to this story? Because it's lacking a little bit of punch, doesn't have that dog. Doesn't have that man bites dog quality to it. So ignore all of that. Apparently the detail of the story is that they had some internal polling showing that a combination of Hillary and Bloomberg would win against Trump. Okay, sure. Because a combination of Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton, there would be no targets there, would there? President Trump would have a tough time attacking that duo, wouldn't he? Are you freaking kidding me? Would you pair the woman who protected Bill Clinton against all manner of accusations? True. And probably some of them false, but most of them true, I assume. Would you pair him with the guy who's being accused of exactly the same stuff at this moment? Probably not. Would Hillary Clinton ever allow herself to go from. Keep this in mind. Her current status is someone who claims that she sort of kind of won the presidency because she got the popular vote. Oh, yeah, yeah. We all understand that that doesn't mean she's President, but that's her current claim. What if she runs as vice president? That's not really a step forward, is it? Do you think Hillary Clinton wants what might be the last move of her political career to be losing to Trump a second time, except this time as vice president? I don't think so. Can you imagine Hillary's ego taking the number two spot because the number one guy is really, really rich? There isn't any. There's no scenario in the whole world, except one, where I can imagine that happening. Are you ready? Here's the one scenario. If Mike Bloomberg plans in advance to step down after he gets elected. So that would make Hillary the winner without her having to actually do much to run for president. In fact, that would be a diabolically clever approach. I'm not saying he's going to do this, but just play it through in your mind. Imagine if Bloomberg said, here's the deal, I'm going to run for president. Hillary will be my vp, so he's got some good connections, and I'll have all the right people who know where all the keys are kept. And she could step in any moment if something happened because I'm older. So you can imagine him saying that. But what people are really thinking is, whoa, you're really just electing Hillary Clinton. She wouldn't even have to campaign. She wouldn't even have to leave what she was doing. She would Just stay on her book tour. She could just stay home and take questions. Because everybody knows who Hillary Clinton is. She doesn't need to tell people her qualifications. She doesn't even need to explain why Mike Bloomberg would be a good president. She could simply just go on with her life, be named as vice president. And then when Bloomberg is elected, he could just say, ha, Trick, I quit. Hillary's your president. So I don't think that's the plan he's playing. So I don't think there's any chance that Hillary would join as a real vice president who plans to be the number two job and retire in that role, I guess. All right. It feels like, it feels like if you were to start from nothing and try to build a candidate who would be the worst matchup for Trump, wouldn't it be Mike Bloomberg? I mean, you could argue that it would be Bernie because socialism against capitalism is sort of dead on arrival. So, you know, Bernie is a sure, a sure thing to lose because of his policies because I can't see him even getting enough Democrats to vote for that, that he could get it over the top. But if you were to design a more standard politician, someone who's not trying to sell you the full socialist package and you were trying to design him as poorly as possible, wouldn't it be Bloomberg? Because if you think about it, everything that you dislike about Trump, if you're an anti Trumper, you can find at least a little bit of it in Bloomberg. So Bloomberg has a history of sexual related accusations. Sound familiar? And let's be serious, any billionaire that age, male or female, has got some sexual stories they need to explain. It's just universally true. Don't tell me there's, you know, don't give me the story about the billionaire who, you know, who never wandered. That's just not a thing. All right, so he's got that, then Biden or I'm sorry, then Bloomberg also has that problem with stop and frisk. So he's got a problem with women, he's got a problem with minorities. He's way too old. White guy from New York, billionaire with entanglements with a major country with which we are an adversary. Now in Bloomberg's case, he's got a China situation that he would need to explain and then throw on there that he's boring, he has no charisma, he had to hire a joke writer. Do you think Trump hired a joke writer? No. No, he did not. Nope. Well, I mean, I could be surprised. I suppose anything is possible. But when you read Trump's funny tweets and the funny stuff he says in his speeches, none of them look prepared. None of it looks like it went through a consultant or some expert. It really looks like it's his voice. So I don't know how Bloomberg could possibly win against us now. If you haven't read up on there's some kind of a compilation of Mike Bloomberg offensive things he said that is making the rounds. I guess it makes the rounds. Every time he's run for office, somebody brings up the fact that within the Bloomberg organization, some person or people compiled a list of all of his sort of provocative and naughty quotes. And there is one topic that comes up over and over again. And I don't want to say the topic, I don't want to say the topic. But if you read what he is accused of frequently referring to, it's a two word thing. The first word starts with B and the second word starts with J. And apparently he can make a BJ an elegy or reference in just about any topic. The only thing that would cause me to suddenly back Bloomberg for president is if he was willing to take that kind of talk into the presidency. If you could give me a president who whenever he's talking to a foreign leader, he throws in a BJ analogy, which apparently Bloomberg did on the regular when he was just the CEO of Bloomberg. But to put it in context, I don't believe that's been happening in recent years because, you know, sensibilities have certainly, let's say, evolved. So even he would know not to do that today, I'm sure. But he's got a lot of explaining to do now. There are a few accusations of things he is supposed to have said in the past that I'm going to say I don't quite believe. All right, so here's one of the accusations is that Bloomberg allegedly, with a big question mark on allegedly here. For me, there was some employee who said she was pregnant and Bloomberg allegedly said some version of Are you going to kill it? Now, I wasn't there and I can't read minds. But on its surface, if you don't know anything else about the story, does that sound like something that happened? I'm going to say no. Now, if you told me he did ask the question about whether she wanted to take it to term or not, I would believe that. I mean, that would be a deeply offensive question. But I could certainly believe he might have asked. But do you think he actually used these words? Are you going to kill it? You Know, you can't rule it out, right? Because sort of anything's possible. People can surprise you. You know, people have a public face, but maybe they have a darker side. I'm going to say no. I'm going to say no. I think that if you want to find reasons to dislike Bloomberg, you need to look beyond that one, because that doesn't even. That's not even a little bit credible. Let me give you some context on this. As a famous person myself, I am often the subject of accusations, some true, some false, and some of the false ones are so ridiculous that people should be able to say on the surface, okay, just on the surface, I don't even need to hear your side of it, Scott. I don't even need to hear the context because on the surface, it's obviously baloney. So if you heard a rumor that I was in favor of eating babies, so let's say tomorrow there's a headline that says, dilbert cartoonist comes out in favor of cannibalism, but only babies because they're tender. What should be your first thought about that? Your first thought should be, no, he didn't say that. He didn't say that. Whatever he said may have sounded to somebody like that, but on the surface, he didn't say that. So this quote about Bloomberg, you know, are you going to kill your baby? On the surface, you know, maybe, maybe. But I'm going to go with didn't happen. Then he's got another quote that somebody was having trouble finding a nanny for their baby. And then Bloomberg is alleged, again, with a big question mark on alleged, to say something like this, that she could find, quote, a black to watch it. And the person doesn't even need to speak English because it's just a baby. You just have to make sure you get the baby out if the building's on fire. So I'm paraphrasing, but the offensive part was he's alleged to say, you just have to find a black to watch it. Does that sound like something he said? Because it doesn't really sound like a sentence, like, who would say that sentence? So I've got a question mark on that. All right, but again, maybe anything's possible, but I would say those are the two that are least likely. All right, so in response to these accusations of things that Bloomberg allegedly said in the past, this is what his campaign said. And I want to. I want to pull this part because there's a lot of persuasion in here, or lack thereof. All right, so in response to terrible things, Bloomberg is alleged to have said in his past, the campaign issues this statement. Virtually all of this has been reported over the past two decades. So does that mean he did it? He didn't do it? Does he feel bad about it? Does he run away from those comments? We don't know. The first sentence is that it's been reported before. Okay, and they go on. In any large organization, there are going to be complaints. What? But Mike simply does not tolerate any kind of discrimination or harassment. And he's created cultures that are all about equality and inclusion. So they, so they give some context. In any large organization, there are going to be complaints. This is a bad misuse of the Steve Jobs technique. Now, I hope they didn't get this from me because I've written about this and in fact, my comments on this made it into the. I think it was it the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs called Jobs. And it tells that story of where, when Steve Jobs had the problem with the antenna gate, when the iPhone would cut off if your finger touched the wrong part of the phone. Most embarrassing problem you could have if you're making a handheld device. Well, it's a handheld device, but it won't work if you hold it in your hand. And Steve Jobs, when he finally commented on this, said a more brilliant version of this. But he said, we want to make our customers happy. All cell phone companies have problems. This is what we're going to do. Now, in his case, it made a lot of sense to broaden the question. Instead of saying, does Apple have a special problem? He said, all smartphones have problems. And suddenly the news started looking at other cell phones and they said, oh, yeah, that's true. They all have problems. It's a new technology. And he just put it in a whole new context. But that doesn't work with sexual harassment complaints. You can't use that technique with sexual harassment. You can use it with a technical bug on your phone, but you can't say, you can't wipe that away by saying, in any large organization, there are going to be complaints. And I'm thinking that didn't make it better. Now, in any large technological situation, you're going to have bugs. And people go, well, that's reasonable. You know, we wish it didn't happen. But yeah, any new technology, you're going to have some bugs. So people get that. But would you ever accept, yeah, a person, let's not call it Bloomberg, but a person was sexual harassing in the past. But you know, in any large organization, you're going to get a Lot of sexual harassment. So put it in context. Totally the wrong persuasion to use in this situation because there's no explaining away that behavior based on the fact that other people are complaining in large organizations. But they tried and then it brought it to the present, which. That part was good. And they say, he doesn't tolerate any of this behavior at the moment. I'm adding the at the moment part. So I think what they're trying to do is just say it wasn't that important. Let's focus on the present. And I think maybe their instinct was wrong, but I'm not sure that that message was the best. Here's my persuasion rule. People like a reformed sinner more than they like a liar. So the candidate who can say, yeah, you know, you got me. Not only do you got me, I did more of that, too. I did the things I was accused of doing, and, man, do I see how wrong that is now. At the time, I don't know what I was thinking. You know, I apologize to anybody who was hurt, but I'm not that person anymore. And I would fight hard to make sure that there are no people like that around me. Now, that would be an example of a reformed sinner. Here's the alternative. I didn't do that. They're all liars. They're all liars. Which one do you like more? Well, it depends if you believe them. If you believe that the accusations are false, then the person who's lying about it wins. But I think most of us sort of suspect there's something there. When there are accusations, it's unfair, but we're sort of biased toward thinking that the accused are guilty, even when many times they're not. But we're biased to think that. I don't know, I think that. I think Bloomberg would be stronger if he said, you know, we were less enlightened back then. And if there are any of you who are still, if any of you today are like I was in the 80s, let me help you. Let me help you grow out of that. Because I wish I had never gone through it. I wish I had never been that way. But at least I understand now what the cost was, what I did wrong, and I understand that world and I'll help you grow out of it too now. Something like that. I would say, oh, that guy was bad before, but he's not so bad now. Not so bad now, but he was bad before and he just owned it. So keep that in mind. A reformed sinner, if you do it right, you have to do it right. The execution matters. But a reformed sinner can be more popular than somebody, you say, well, I think maybe they did it. They're just lying about it. All right. I was watching, hilariously, scientist Richard Dawkins get in trouble online, and an alert reader noted that the people who were mad at this famous scientist were not themselves scientists. You know why I'm saying this? My book, Loser Think, talks about how people who have experience in different domains are more qualified to think productively because you learn to think differently in different domains. And so famous scientists and famous atheists, which doesn't matter to this story, but that's why he's famous. Richard Dawkins. I think he. What would be his field of science? Biology or more I'm not sure exactly his scientific resume, but evolutionary biology is certainly a big part of it, plus other. Plus other things, I'm sure. So he's talking about eugenics, the idea of breeding humans to have some improved qualities according to somebody's subjective opinion. And this is what Richard Dawkins says on the topic of that. Now, keep in mind, he knows it's full of landmines. This is a really touchy topic. So he's going to go careful. He's going to be very clear about what he says so he doesn't get into any trouble. So watch the clarity of this statement. It's one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It's quite another to conclude that it wouldn't work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs and roses. Why on earth wouldn't it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology. So his very first sentence is, it's a different, different topic if you're talking about the moral, ethical, political, ideological, stuff. So he's telling you that what follows has nothing to do with that. Do you think that the people who read his tweet took him exactly the way he said it, which is from a mechanical, factual perspective. Of course it would work. You could breed people to have different characteristics, because you can do it with roses. You can do it animals, of course you could do it with people. It would just have issues on political, moral, ideological grounds. So here's the fun part. I'm going to read you some of the pushback and then we're going to see if you can guess what kind of job they have the person pushing back. So a scientist clearly says it would work. Here's some pushback from a guy named Scott Lynch. He says, you absolute pinheaded simpleton. It doesn't work in practice because too many of the goals turn out to be arbitrary fantasies, and too many of those fantasies are the pet projects of abusive bigots who eff up any civilization and they get their hands on. Are you new here? And then he uses another bad word. Okay, so he clearly didn't understand the point that the scientist was just saying, scientifically it works. You can make up your own mind about the ethics and the practicality of it. What's his job? Author. Author. Okay, so that's what the author says. Here's another comment. See if you can guess the job. This is from Dan Hicks. He says this is racist trash. Richard, the analogy you draw here between the ideology of eugenics and the domestication of cows or horses is false, dangerous, and historically illiterate. Okay, so here's somebody who didn't understand the point at all. What kind of job does Dan Hicks have? Looks like college professor of. He studies art. He's an art anthropologist. His field is art and anthropology. Okay, here's another one. Here's another guy who just says, it's time to delete this one, buddy. In other words, he doesn't even have to give the reasons. It's just so obvious. There's still time to delete this one, buddy. What job did the person who tweeted that have? Let's check. Musician. All right, so people are now noticing the correlation. None of the people who criticized Dawkins understood it. Nobody understood him to say, this is the stuff I'm not talking about, so let's not talk about it. Here's what I am talking about. If you'd like to talk about that, I'll talk about that. You know, does it work? But I'm not talking about this other stuff. And then three of his critics jump in because artists can't separate. Artists conflate engineers and scientists separate. So if somebody is, let's say, a lawyer, economist, business person, scientist, if they've gone through one of those fields, they tend to isolate variables and say, okay, this one doesn't affect this one. Let's look at them individually. Artists, musicians, and authors say, everything affects everything else. It's all one big ball. You can't claim it doesn't matter that it's associated with this other thing. So you'll see that pretty. Pretty commonly. All right, I believe that's just about all I had to talk about. Anything else going on today? Somebody said, I understood it and it was really vile. What was. What was really vile? That you understood. Did you? Was the vile part the part you agree with? Because if you're saying that Richard Dawkins comment is vile. What part? Because he didn't make a comment on whether it was good or bad or practical or political or anything. He didn't make a comment. He just said it works. Do you disagree with the fact, or do you think it's going to lead to the end of the world or something? All right. The truth is sometimes vile, people say. Yep. All right, so that's all I have for today. Yeah, we're all talking about President Trump doing a lap at the Daytona 500 in the Beast, the presidential car. I guess if that's. If that's what we're talking about, it's a good time. If that's what we're talking about. Somebody asked if Yang is a possible VP pick. I would say no, because you want your VP to be somebody who knows where all the keys and the locks are in government. Yang would be not as able as someone else to walk into the top job as quickly. All right, that's all I got for now. I will talk to you tomorrow.