Scott Adams joins Jemele to talk about the " simultaneous hip" and coffee drinking problem, dyslexia, and a problem with calendars. Plus, a lesson in anger management, and the first time I accidentally used the word "dyslexia."
00:01:14.460So, here's a little lesson in anger management.
00:01:25.280I aborted my first couple attempts there.
00:01:30.640Well, actually, the second attempt because my anger overwhelmed me.
00:01:37.920Now, what I was angry at, you have no idea because it wouldn't be obvious from what you were watching.
00:01:44.600So, I wasn't angry that my technology wasn't working because I had a guest on.
00:01:51.940I was angry at myself because I have this problem with calendars.
00:01:59.160And when I say I have a problem with calendars, I mean it's one of the biggest problems in my life, literally.
00:02:05.120And I would love to know if there's anybody else in the world who has this problem.
00:02:09.880And in general, I have a problem with time.
00:02:13.780If you give me your phone number out loud and you say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I can hear the numbers, but I don't have a sense of what order they came in, if you say it quickly.
00:02:23.620So, I've always had sort of an audio, let's say, issue with time.
00:02:33.760And likewise, when I read, somebody noticed once that I don't read sentences necessarily from left to right, which is true.
00:02:42.880So, I kind of look at them left to right, right to left, middle, that word, because things arrive and then I just reorganize them into what should have been the order they should have been.
00:02:57.380So, if that sounds like dyslexia, that's what I call it sometimes.
00:03:01.240But it applies to all things calendars.
00:03:08.260And I've got this weird thing where I can look at a calendar for my day, and it'll be just a square box for the day, and there'll be nothing written in there, no appointments whatsoever.
00:03:19.600And I'll say, ah, I've got nothing on my calendar.
00:03:22.940And then somebody will say, like today, hey, what about this appointment?
00:06:09.100But yet, it's such a big deal that the briefers never thought to mention it to the president.
00:06:17.160Apparently, the claim is that it's in the briefings.
00:06:20.600So, what exactly is going on that we think this is a really big story, but the people who briefed the president didn't think to mention it out loud, knowing that he doesn't read the detailed reports.
00:06:46.340He would depend on them, he would depend on them, to tell him what's important.
00:06:57.940Now, could it be that the reason it didn't rise to that level of importance with the people who actually understand how the world works, the people briefing the president, could it be that this is fairly routine?
00:07:17.280How unordinary is it for some country to be paying the bad guys in some other group to kill the people that you want to influence in this group?
00:07:30.740Because it might be just so routine and so ever-present, it's entirely possible that the people briefing the president, it just didn't seem like it was a top-ten concern.
00:07:44.500Because it doesn't matter why somebody's trying to kill you, if you're in Afghanistan and you're in the military, you're kind of looking for people to try to kill you all the time anyway.
00:07:57.640Does anybody think, who thinks that you have to be bribed, if you're an Afghan, you know, fighter, who thinks you have to be bribed to kill Americans?
00:08:11.660Well, I wasn't thinking of killing Americans, but now that you've given me all these excellent Russian rupels, or whatever they are, now I'm thinking of it suddenly.
00:13:04.200I mean, George Washington, you know, you may love your George Washington and you want to keep your dollar bills and your quarters and your Washington, D.C. and all that.
00:13:24.320So, you know, I can criticize a lot of things, but I can't really criticize someone who doesn't want to be surrounded by your reminders of slavery.
00:13:36.640It's not the most unreasonable thing, even though it's terribly impractical to change things and it makes people upset.
00:13:44.800At the same time, you know, there are not many, there aren't that many cases where you can so easily see the other side.
00:13:52.480You know, this is one where you can say to yourself, oh, I totally get why people say that's too far.
00:14:29.920So I think that's just a question of power.
00:14:32.400You know, wherever the power is exerted, it will determine the outcome.
00:14:38.640Now, speaking of power, let's talk about the thing that everybody's thinking, but you don't want to say it out loud and, you know, get banned from all platforms, I guess, which is what are the odds this turns into an actual shooting revolution?
00:14:56.620Because the interesting thing is that the protesters are quite brilliantly avoiding gunfire, except at each other.
00:15:08.380So the only people being shot by protesters are other protesters, apparently.
00:15:14.800Now, that is surprisingly good discipline, don't you think?
00:15:19.220I mean, it's sort of scary how good the discipline is.
00:15:22.600And the reason makes sense, because as long as they have numbers, but they don't use guns, the other side is going to have trouble using guns against them, because it would just increase their numbers.
00:15:34.440So they have sort of this checkmate kind of thing, where if it's just lots of humans with maybe some clubs now and then, and, you know, some dirty tricks, but no guns, it's just going to be hard to control them if your only tool is guns, because shooting them would make them stronger.
00:15:56.940It would, you know, boost their argument.
00:15:59.120But on the other hand, it has always been true, and probably always will be true, that the government is whoever uses the most force.
00:16:11.700So if the government in name, you know, the one that you think of as the government now, is unwilling or unable to use the most force, then whoever is willing to use the most force becomes the government.
00:16:28.800So right now, the way they use crowds against smaller numbers of armed people who won't use their weapons, what would stop them?
00:16:41.360What would be the thing that stops them?
00:17:13.040So things, you know, I always say there's no such thing as a slippery slope, because it can't slip forever.
00:17:18.080And, you know, if we rethought how we treated George Washington, and that ended up being, you know, sort of where the line got drawn, in retrospect, you look at it and say, well, you know, something stopped it.
00:17:33.780But the only thing that's going to stop it that I can imagine, because they're not looking for concessions, right?
00:17:40.140If the protesters were looking for something that they could get, you know, an actual specific deliverable, and then you could give it to them, you'd say, oh, well, it's like a strike by a union.
00:17:55.700As soon as they get what they want, or the best that they can get, then they go back to work.
00:18:01.740But these protesters are not like a union strike.
00:18:04.700There's not really a specific thing they want, except more.
00:18:10.120And more is not something you can satisfy, you know, because you can't just give more if the response is more and more.
00:18:20.680So there's no way to negotiate an end to something that isn't a negotiation, and can't be by its nature.
00:18:33.300And the only thing that will stop it is violence.
00:18:36.480So if there is none, and again, I'm not suggesting there should be, but it will just sweep through the country and become the law of the land, would obviously destroy the country.
00:18:47.400Because the main difference between the left and the right is an understanding of incentives and how to build a system.
00:19:00.380You know, Republicans are good at building systems that are a little bit cruel by objective standards, which is, is capitalism cruel?
00:19:10.060Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, it leaves people behind.
00:19:13.420But it works better than other systems.
00:19:15.840That's the only, the only thing you can say about it, is that compared to the alternatives, it's way better.
00:19:29.280Anyway, so that's the big difference is that there isn't any way that the, the left's view of how the world should run could actually work.
00:19:38.480And that's one of the reasons that I, I am non-jokingly in favor of letting the, the chop occupied zone and let it run out a little bit.
00:20:19.940If there's no way to get them out without force, then leaving them there and having them basically discover that they would like a better system
00:20:29.680might be the least, the least damaging way to, to game this out in the long run for the least loss of life.
00:20:38.740So it might be that they just need to, um, have enough of a bad experience, which would include death.
00:20:46.520And, but it's not, it's not even the number of people getting shot or killed that would make the big difference.
00:20:53.300Imagine living in this zone where you see people walking by open carry, you know, they've, they've actually got guns.
00:21:01.080You know that there was a shooting the other night and you know that you've kicked out the police and you live there.
00:21:08.600So what if you're, especially if you're a woman, you know, you've got a little extra risk if you're a woman.
00:21:16.820What are the women in CHOP thinking when they see that it has become, uh, you know, the, the law of whoever has a gun or whoever decides to be the most violent?
00:21:29.620So it seems to me that letting it run a little bit may, if you were to fast forward into the future and say to yourself,
00:21:39.280how's this going to look, you know, two years from now when we're looking back at the moment, Republicans are saying some version of president Trump is not showing enough, uh, force, not showing enough, I don't know, leadership.
00:21:58.960You know, he, he's sort of standing back and letting the, the mayors, you know, handle things that may turn out to look, uh,
00:22:11.040Now somebody says, I have a blind spot about this.
00:22:13.780I think it's about the, the Marxist plan to take over the world.
00:22:18.400So I don't have a blind spot about that.
00:22:20.640In fact, everything I've said is compatible with that, but I think that's what you're talking about.
00:22:25.400Um, so, and, and, and you also have to factor in, uh, the odds that there's a foreign influence over the protesters.
00:22:37.140Now the odds that there's attempted foreign influence is a hundred percent, uh, the odds that it is successful and that it's a variable that matters.
00:22:47.700Let's say that Russia or China or anybody else, Great Britain, you know, that, uh, you know, is it possible and could they do it easily?
00:22:57.120And the answer is, yeah, it's possible.
00:22:59.740They can do it easily and they have, they have motivation to destabilize, at least in the case of Russia and China.
00:23:07.340So, uh, I laid a little trap on Twitter that finally, uh, sprung.
00:23:17.480Um, and it goes like this, I made three claims in a, in a conversation in which a lot of Hollywood artists were involved.
00:23:27.040Now, as you know, artists are my natural enemies.
00:23:30.220So whenever I say anything on Twitter that gets the attention of other writers, authors, artists, musicians, they, they all attack, but they're, they're always hilarious in their attacks because they can't even really follow the point usually.
00:23:46.100And their attacks are just completely irrational, which is completely different from when a lawyer or an engineer usually comes after me.
00:23:54.520You know, those are, those are more rational attacks.
00:24:00.420But when the artists come after me, it's just, it's just sort of crazy nonsense and it's more fun to, uh, to do that.
00:24:07.300But anyway, I, I used a technique that I've written about, uh, in which I said three things, two of them are easily checked.
00:24:20.640And I don't think, you know, I wouldn't get as much pushback from, but the third one set people's hair on fire because it's a little ambiguous.
00:24:30.820Now, when I say it's a little ambiguous, I mean, reasonable people who could look at the same information and say to themselves, I totally disagree with how you're interpreting that.
00:24:41.600Now, when you can create a situation like that, where there's a difference in how people interpret the same data and it's something that matters, that's a good fight.
00:24:52.480So if you're trying to draw attention to something, have I taught you that doing something that's a little bit wrong, but it's close to something that's right, is where you get all the attention.
00:25:06.200Simply making a claim that's true or false doesn't get the same attention as something that's just a little bit wrong and darn it, you know, you should have known it.
00:25:17.480How can I fix this? Can't I correct this for you? You fool. How could you have made this mistake?
00:25:24.200So here are the claims I made. Uh, it was in a thread about some discrimination against African Americans in Hollywood, which I'm sure exists.
00:25:32.880Of course, I wouldn't doubt that, uh, because it exists everywhere.
00:25:38.400So, so I just added context. Now, where do you see the breadth of this play here?
00:25:46.480You might appreciate the complexity of it.
00:25:50.820All right. Um, so I said that, uh, I lost, uh, two jobs in corporate America for being a white male.
00:26:00.600You've heard those stories. And those are true because they told me directly to my face.
00:26:05.140You cannot be promoted because you're white male.
00:26:09.340So I left both of those positions eventually because I had to, I couldn't be promoted.
00:26:14.400Um, but then I made a third claim that's a little sketchier.
00:26:22.000Now here's the part that's the fun part. Of course, I know it's sketchy.