Episode 128 - Why Trump Derangement Syndrome is so Strong

Date: 2018-07-04 | Duration: 34:32

Topics

The enemy press Delusions of the winning team vs. the losing team College admission race requirement rules The Scott Adams college course curriculum

Transcript

[0:04]

But it fit—pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum pum. Well, good morning everybody. Some of you are sleeping in because here in the United States of America, it’s the Fourth of freaking July. That’s right, it’s the anniversary of the birth of our independence, or at least the Declaration of it, or 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. So happy birthday, America.

[1:06]

I always 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 is 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 that 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. Well, we don’t have that. What we have is

[2:09]

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 is 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, “People, it’s not

[3:10]

going to be easy, but we’re going to sign an executive order and get on it.” 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, that 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.

[4:10]

The system 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. There was a new poll saying something like 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 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. You can see the ordinary explanation next to the hysteria explanation. And here’s the funny

[5:11]

thing, and the reason I wanted to talk about it. 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

[6:13]

simultaneously say, “What’s the worst thing we can say about this President to make him look like a racist?” And then whenever an opportunity comes up, they gather around it and 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 Drudge Reports. You half of the country are in a dream world created by your media. But how lucky we are that we have the 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

[7:13]

hypnosis to its watchers, but half of the world is not? “Oh god, I’m so lucky I’m in the good half.” Do you know who else thinks they are 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. So that’s a whole trigger that they need to get past. The people who are winning started thinking, “Hey, my candidate is 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.

[8:13]

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. That’s possible. No way to be sure of 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 what half of the country is seeing all the time.

[9:16]

Seeing all the time, relentless, continuous, non-stop 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 it, 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 has 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

[10:16]

will flip. To 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. Bubble flip, yes. How do we reduce TDS? Well, the only way to reduce it is to keep violating it. 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 fit 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 the administration’s recent

[11:16]

ruling that they were going to reverse some Obama instructions about how to deal with college and college admissions. The idea is that Asians and whites are being discriminated against in favor of other candidates because of racial quotas or rules or priorities or something. 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, is that a little bit of racism in college administration can get you to a better or less racist, fairer world. I’m not

[12:19]

taking a side on that; I’m just saying 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, have you noticed that the world will treat this latest decision about how to treat college admissions in terms of race 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. 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 or in-between. In this case, I would like to put the following frame on this: in this great arc of racism where we have starting with maximum racism back in the days

[13:20]

of the pre-Civil War and the Civil War, where you had actual slavery—maximum racism—and then the 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. It starts way up here: racism as a big problem, Civil War, Civil Rights Movement, people getting more awake, more aware. Obama’s president—it’s getting smaller. At some point in that path from horrible to fair, 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

[14:21]

actually worse for the people who are favored. Why? How would you like to be Black, get a college education, graduate, and then everybody who sees your college degree thinks, “Probably not quite qualified, 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 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.

[15:24]

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. 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 asterisk, and let people just compete on quality. Whether the outcomes come out exactly the same or not—they probably won’t just because nothing is ever completely equal—the question should be on the college race requirement rules.

[16:25]

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. We got close enough.” Not equal, but close enough. So it’s just smarter to take the asterisk 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

[17:27]

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’s smart enough to know, when is the exact right time to take the asterisk 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. 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 for everybody. We might not

[18:30]

be there, and that would be an argument I would certainly listen to. Or we might be close enough that doing it now is going to get you to where you want to be. But let’s not be giving Black people degrees with asterisks on them forever. There was a time when it made perfect sense. And by the way, let me give you some background on my own experience. A number of you have read this in my book. Back in the 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. 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

[19:31]

enough women. I think there was one woman in upper management and zero minorities. And so the press noticed that and put some pressure on the company, which was a big bank—Crocker Bank at the time. My boss called me into her office and said, “I have to be honest with you. The order came down. We can’t promote any white males.” 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

[20:31]

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 wonder, “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. I quit and then I went to work for the phone company, Pacific Bell at the time, and I got on the management track. 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 management fast track. Then my boss called me

[21:33]

into my office and said exactly the same thing the bank told me: “Well, we just got busted by the press who had 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, I promise you this was said to me directly: “White male, you can’t get promoted, and we don’t know when this will change.” So what did I do? I started a comic strip on the side, and that became Dilbert. 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. When I tell this story—for years I couldn’t even tell the story. Can you imagine this? For those of you who are younger, you can’t really put your head in those times. You had to be there.

[22:33]

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. Today I can tell you the story as I just did. But let me put my spin on it. During these times when I lost two careers to racism—sort of an industrial racism that was intentional—I didn’t feel as bad as you might imagine

[23:36]

because it was true that we didn’t have any diversity, and it is a better world if we have some. So I completely buy into the goal, which is to have a diverse, successful society in which we just stop talking about all that stuff. 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. What happened to me was I was on the other end of the brute force. They had to really force some rule changes to allow some people in the door that were having trouble getting in, promoting people up, supporting them, etc. And now there’s a ton more diversity in all of those companies today. If it

[24:37]

happened—if I were working in a corporation and somebody called me into their office today and 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 grip in a corporate world and work their way up. 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 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 extreme.

[26:41]

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 is a big tool, but it’s not as big as a Civil War. And now, when Civil Rights have been directionally successful, you’ve got a smaller difference. Obama said, “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, 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 asterisk off the degrees of the people who earned real degrees by doing all the right stuff. They don’t get an asterisk anymore.

[27:42]

That’s not helping. So that sort of final step is to take the asterisk 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 off’ step 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. “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, “A degree is a degree.” Nobody wants to feel the

[28:45]

invisible asterisk. Degrees are overrated, somebody says. I agree about that. Hey, here’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for years, but I think finally the technology has reached the point where it works. I’m thinking about creating my own college course. Maybe I’d call it the Scott Adams College Course. It would be a collection of books you should read or classes you should take to have what I would call a great education that would make you a powerful citizen who could go in a lot of directions. 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

[29:45]

all of these books and you’ve taken these online classes—all of this stuff being low-cost—I give you the Scott Adams degree. Now, at the moment, the Scott Adams degree would not be a great brand. 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. Imagine someone who is unambiguously successful and knows a lot, and they say, “Here’s the Warren Buffett

[30:46]

class. You’ve got to read these 50 books.” It’s going to be a lot of books, not six books. “But you’ve got to read these 50 books and you’ve 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.” You say Jordan Peterson was 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. In the short run, it’s just something that people say, “Oh, that’s good information about what to read.” In the long run, maybe it’s worth something. 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.

[31:51]

Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson are working on this? Are they working together or working separately? “You should post your 50 books.” I’m not sure I have 50 books. If I were going to do this, I wouldn’t do it casually. I’d have to read the books first and then make sure they were the right 50 books. Focusing on the humanities… I’m reading your comments. Taleb’s books, Cialdini… a lot of us have brands that are not general. So if you wanted a business degree, you’d want something like a Warren Buffett business

[32:53]

degree. His recommendations would be around things that are specifically good for business. You can 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. Get Thomas Sowell involved. I downloaded some of Thomas Sowell’s books when I was traveling and I didn’t get to them, but he’s next on my list of stuff to read after I read Greg Gutfeld’s new book. Value investing… Carmen Simon, yes, she could have a curriculum as well.

[33:58]

Naval Ravikant, he could come up with a curriculum. So that’s all for now. I hope that you 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. Bye for now.