Episode 167 Scott Adams: Q, Racism, LeBron and Slow News August
Date: 2018-08-05 | Duration: 35:57
Topics
Is Q real? Do most black people believe most Republicans are racist? Are most BLM members racist, in the opinion of most Republicans? “I like Mike”, President Trump calls Lemon and LeBron stupid Is it good strategy to brand everyone on the right as racist? Has Sarah Jeong clarified and issued a statement on her tweets? Venezuela drone attack on their President
Transcript
[0:08]
Bum bum bum, oh bum bum bum bum. Hey everybody, come on in here. Yesterday I was so excited to tell you about my visit with the President that I forgot to do the simultaneous sip. Did anybody notice? I’ll bet you did, but I’m not going to forget today. Today I’m on the ball despite not having enough coffee yet. You’ve been begging me to talk about Q, and so I will. Shall we drink to the simultaneous sip? Join me.
There will be another—you’re going to get a second bite at the simultaneous sip. That’s a bad analogy; nobody bites a sip, but it’s early. They get better as the day goes on. Let’s talk about Q.
[1:09]
I was looking at a CNN story in which they were interviewing members of the—I guess you call them people who believed Q, the anonymous source on the internet that purports to have secret knowledge of what’s going to happen next. A lot of people believe that this is real and that it has real secrets. Of course, the folks who are anti-Trump have painted those people as fringe nutcases. Let me tell you my opinion. First part of the opinion: Q is not real. Let me say that as clearly as I can. Q is not real. It’s not even slightly real. It’s not potentially real.
[2:12]
It’s not maybe in a distant, small way it could be real. There isn’t really any chance it’s real. If you’ve watched me for a while, I think you know that I like to talk in percentages, not yes or no, because most things are not completely true or completely false. Most things are spawned so there’s a little bit of truth with a little bit of false. Q is 100% not true. If you put a gun to my head—let’s say you said to me, “I’ll give you 100. I hope I haven’t overstated this: Q is not real. But I’ll tell you what it does do.
[3:14]
First of all, it’s entertaining, like horoscopes and stuff. So if somebody wants to consume it for entertainment, why not? However, I’m watching these Q devotees attending Trump rallies and let me ask you this: who do you think the media is going to interview if 30,000 Trump supporters go to a rally and 20 of them have signs that say Q? Who is the media going to interview? Will they interview the 29,000 blah-blah-blah people who are not Q? Probably not. They’re going to talk to the people with the signs. When they’re done, what will they have successfully done? They will have successfully made all Trump supporters look like nuts.
[4:14]
If you want to believe in Q and it’s fun and you like consuming it, I’m not going to tell you not to. It’s your life; you can find entertainment in any legal way you would like. But if you want to make Trump supporters look like a bunch of idiots, put on your Q shirt and go to the rally. If you want to hurt your candidate—the person you support—that’s a great way to do it. Just saying, if you want to do the worst possible thing for your own candidate, put on your frickin’ Q suit, go to the rally, and make sure you talk to CNN so they can make sure that all Trump supporters look like freaking idiots. So that’s happened. I’m trying to control my opinion on this a little bit because let me say this in a more personal way.
[5:16]
The Q people make me look like an idiot just because I say good things about the President and that, in most people’s minds, puts me on the same team as the Q people. I don’t like that. I don’t like being on the Q team. Do what you want to do, guys, go wild, but maybe do it a little quieter because it’s not helping the brand. The brand is definitely taking a hit with the Q stuff.
Let’s talk about your favorite topic that gets people to leave all the time. Some of you saw I talked to my buddy Hawk Newsome, who’s doing a love march right now—not a Black Lives Matter march, but a march for love, the Agape March. I talked to him yesterday afternoon on Periscope. He said a couple of provocative things which require some comment.
[6:17]
He said the following: number one, he said that there are a large number of racists who are Republican Trump supporters. Many people pushed back and said, “No, don’t call us racists.” Well, I think you have to look at exactly what he said. Exactly what he said is that there are a large number of them, not a large percentage. He didn’t say that. He said there are a large number of them. Is that false? What would you call it? What would you call a large number of racists? If there are 63 million Republican voters, would you say that a million might be adequately called racist? I would. If you took 63 million Americans, no matter how you sliced it, you could pick them randomly—they could be Democrats, they could be Republicans—but wouldn’t it be true that if you pick 63 million Americans, you’d get a million racists, wouldn’t you?
[7:20]
I can’t imagine not. In fact, if you picked any group—it could be even an ethnic group, Asians, Blacks, Hispanics—and you had enough of them, wouldn’t there be a large number of racists in the group? That’s just a law of large numbers. If you’ve got a million racists, that’s way too many. I’m just making that number up for example. So if you are African American and you say that 63 million people has a large number of racists, “large” is sort of an opinion about what is large. If you happen to be on the receiving side of the racism, that’s a large number. If you happen to be in that group and you’re not a racist, you want people to say that’s not a large number. So it’s not really a fact that I think you can doubt that there are a large number.
[8:20]
I think the valid criticism of that statement is that it sort of leaves in the air that maybe it’s most of them. When he was asked to clarify on Twitter, some people who watched that Periscope asked him to clarify, and then he said the following—but listen to the exact words. He said that people talking about Black people sort of as the general group believe that most Republicans are racists. Is that true? Remember, that’s not a claim of fact about what people are; it’s a claim of fact about what people believe. I would say that’s also probably true. I would say the majority of Black Lives Matter think that most Republicans are racist.
[9:21]
But it is also fair in fact-checking this, wouldn’t you say that a hundred percent of Republicans, or something like it, believe that everybody in Black Lives Matter is a racist? At least just the African American group? Fact-check me on this. Would Republicans say that nearly a hundred percent of Black Lives Matter are racists? I’m not saying they are, because I don’t want to fall into the same category as Hawk just did. The problem that Hawk has and that you have is the same frickin’ problem: you’re pretty sure the other side is almost completely racist. Keep in mind that my domain is persuasion and psychology. I don’t deal in the fact-based world. The reason I don’t deal exclusively in the fact-based world—
[10:23]
—everybody does to some extent, but not exclusively—is that we don’t make our decisions based on that. So when I talk to Hawk and he says there’s a belief, that’s not a claim of fact. There’s a belief that most Republicans are racist; that’s just true, they do believe that. It’s not a claim of fact about what the Republicans are; it’s a statement about the believers. Keep your perspective. When they say, “We’re a bunch of believers who believe Republicans are racists,” it’s just Q. What’s the difference? Q is a bunch of people who believe something that isn’t true. Do I hate Q? I do not. I just think they’re making a branding mistake. They’re people having some fun with something that’s not terribly important. Whether you believe Q or not, it’s not terribly important. Likewise, what is Black Lives Matter’s biggest problem?
[11:28]
Their biggest problem is that they have somehow convinced a hundred percent of Republicans—and I think it is a hundred percent—that Black Lives Matter themselves are a hundred percent racist. Again, not a claim of fact, because I can’t read people’s minds. I don’t know what anybody in Black Lives Matter is thinking. I’m just giving you my impression of the world. There you have two groups who are pretty sure that the other group is mostly racists. If you can’t get past that, then you can’t do anything. When you say, “Hawk hates us,” I don’t believe that’s true. If you hear Hawk say, “I believe most Republicans are racists,” that would be news, because I haven’t heard him say that. I’ve heard him say it of a group as sort of a group opinion, and I think it’s probably accurate.
[12:29]
So I think you need to at least deal on a little bit more level of accuracy. If people believe the other is racist, you have to deal with the belief. You can’t just say they’re wrong and move on. It doesn’t get anywhere.
The other observation I had, I talked about on that Periscope how I’ve lost three careers to racism. Who was it who was a racist against me? That’s my story. I lost my career in banking because I was a white male and they said, “We’re not going to promote any white males.” They said that directly to me, my bosses did.
[13:31]
My bosses called me in the office and said, “We can’t promote any more white males because we don’t have enough diversity in senior management, and we’ll never get there if we keep promoting white males.” So I quit. I lost that career to racism. I went to the phone company, got on the management track, looked like I was going somewhere, and my boss called me—again in a repeat of the first situation—and said, “We got caught having not enough diversity in senior management. We can never promote you because you’re white and you’re male.”
I became the Dilbert guy. I did fine; Dilbert worked out. I started the Dilbert TV show on the UPN network. In our second season, which would have been critical for growing or going away, UPN decided to become the African American Network and to create programming that was largely African American actors targeting that segment of the community. I’m all in favor of every community having any kind of entertainment they want,
[14:32]
but since I happened to be on that network already, I no longer fit. So I lost a TV career to racism. I’ve been discriminated against in three separate careers that were ruined, absolutely ruined, by racism. Who was it who discriminated against me? Here’s your trick question. You just heard my story. I swear to God every word of that is true. Who discriminated against me? Rich white guys. It wasn’t even women; it was rich white men.
Men discriminated against me. Why did they do that? To make their own asses safer. So when Hawk or anybody else says, “A bunch of white men are discriminating,” I say to myself, “Hell yeah, they discriminated against me.”
[15:33]
People who are more successful higher up in the chain could effectively discriminate against me, but it was all white men who did it. Now, I don’t hate white men because I happen to be one; I think we’re pretty cool as a group. But I certainly had three separate promising careers—and by the way, all three of these careers had a lot of potential. Being a senior vice president of a bank is an amazing job. Likewise for the phone company; they were really high-paying jobs and the management was getting super rich. So discrimination is everywhere. I just had this weird revelation—revelation, not “relevation”—revelation that rich white men have discriminated against me seriously in three different careers.
[16:34]
Did all of you see the tweet from President Trump saying that Don Lemon was—he didn’t know if LeBron James or Don Lemon were the dumbest people, or Don Lemon was the dumbest person on TV. Anyway, his tweet called LeBron James and Don Lemon dumb. Now, you would say to yourself this is the worst thing that a President could ever say who is already being accused of racism, because by coincidence both Don Lemon and LeBron James are African American. The President closed his tweet by saying, “I like Mike,” a reference to Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan, as you might know, is also African American. So in his tweet, he said two African Americans were dumb—and that’s an opinion a lot of you would probably agree with regarding those particular individuals—but Michael Jordan is not. He likes Mike.
[17:36]
That was an interesting way to defend against the claim that because the two characters were African American, therefore it’s racist. Did that stop anybody? Did the fact that he added Michael Jordan stop anybody from claiming it was racist? Of course not. It did not. But if anybody is new to why it is that Republicans like President Trump, part of it is because he’s willing to say that, which is—I think people love the fact that he’s willing to call anybody stupid. Now, have you ever heard President Trump call white people stupid? I’m pretty sure you have. Is it rare? No, it’s not rare. Does it happen every frickin’ day? Yes, practically.
[18:40]
He doesn’t say the same words, but he calls pretty much all of his critics stupid in one way or another. So is it a step forward that the President can call—let me put it in the most optimistic way you could possibly put it—is it a step forward that the President of the United States can call two very rich, very successful African American men stupid because they’re his critics? I kind of like it. I kind of like the fact that we’ve reached a place where he can say that in public. I do like the fact he added “I like Mike,” because that does show his intention. If his intention had been to be racist or to do a racist dog whistle, you don’t throw in the “I like Michael Jordan” part. That wouldn’t make any sense. How would that make sense? So that is a clear signal that he is treating—wait for it, wait for it—
[19:43]
—including the Michael Jordan in the quote, it’s a crystal clear signal that he is treating LeBron James and Don Lemon the same as he treats everybody else, which is harshly if they are critics. Then, of course, I saw that Melania has said some good things about LeBron because LeBron is doing some good things with some schools, funding and promoting some—I forget the details, but it’s something that pretty much everybody agrees is good work. We’re happy about that and Melania said that. So how does the enemy press report it? They say that Melania is taking sides against her husband. That’s not what happened.
[20:43]
That’s not what happened. Because if you asked President Trump—this is an educated guess, I can’t read his mind—but if you asked President Trump, “Do you think that LeBron is doing good work with the school that he’s funding?” I feel confident in saying he would say, “Yeah, I like that, that’s good. That part is great.” That’s what Melania said. So here you have Melania agreeing with her husband, in all likelihood. As far as we know, they would agree. And it’s reported as she doesn’t agree because she just didn’t take the bait to talk about the tweet. That’s your fake news for you. Very fake news.
[21:53]
I’m just going to talk about LeBron. Compare LeBron to Michael Jordan. You supported LeBron and I get that; I could certainly see why that would be a reasonable thing to do. But wouldn’t you say, just being fair, wouldn’t you say Michael Jordan is very, very smart? All the evidence suggests it, in business and on the court. Wouldn’t you say Michael Jordan is very smart? I would. All evidence suggests that. Would you say the same about LeBron? I don’t know. I’m not so sure I would, because the way he’s handling this presidential thing could be so much better. I don’t know every element of his life. I don’t know how LeBron would do on the SATs if he ever took them.
[22:54]
I only know what he does in public. In public, the way he’s handling the Trump thing is not smart, in my opinion. It doesn’t help his brand; in fact, it hurts it quite a bit and it doesn’t move the ball forward. It’s not strategically clever. You can respect him for his success, you can respect him for his hard work—which apparently is legendary, and I do respect him a lot for that—you can respect LeBron on all kinds of levels. But in this particular domain, it doesn’t look like his best move. It could have been a lot more productive, and still could be. Maybe he will be. I’m going to hold out hope that LeBron finds some way to turn this positive. I don’t know what the odds of that are.
[24:05]
Summing up where we are, I would say that the odds—let me put it this way. If you’re talking about people who are concerned about racism, say people on the left who would make it their biggest issue, probably their strategy right now is to call the people on the right racists and to brand them all as racists. Is that a good strategy? It doesn’t feel like a good strategy to me. It might have been a good strategy when things were more objectively wrong. If the law is objectively discriminating, well, then you’ve got to go hard. But I think we’ve reached a point where some nuance and maybe some more attention on the details makes sense. By the way, I remembered after talking to Hawk—I cut him off and I forgot to circle back—he was making some specific suggestions about police that I think are actually just good suggestions.
[25:05]
One of them was that if somebody needs medical care, they get it if they’re in custody. You probably have to work out the details, but I think it’s something you could test in a few markets to see if it works. That’s just a completely reasonable, practical thing that you could try; it either works or it doesn’t. The other thing he suggested was that if a police officer falsifies a police report, specifically in the context of some violence that happened during somebody being in custody, that’s a crime and they could be prosecuted for it. Now, whatever the law is now, somebody says—do I think the issue is that they don’t get prosecuted or that the penalty for that is not very high?
[26:07]
Could it be that we just need to make sure that law that’s already in the books is followed, or are there some markets where the laws are weaker or do they need to be boosted? In all of those cases, there’s a factual thing that can be investigated and maybe something works. Maybe you find everything’s the way it can be or it should be, it just needs more attention. But these are factual, practical things that you could investigate. Let’s talk about the New York Times and the racist that they hired. Now, I forget her name—Jeong is the last name. She does seem to be sort of a classic, unrepentant, no doubt about it racist. She’s had 48 hours to recant or apologize or clarify, and I don’t believe she has.
[27:08]
I saw that the New York Times wrote a clarification for her, but has she made a statement? Give me some fact-checking. Is her name Sarah? Sarah Jeong. I don’t believe she has made a statement, right? Did she make a statement though, or did she only make it to the New York Times who then made it to us? Because I haven’t seen her statement. I apply my 48-hour rule. If in 48 hours she had said something like this, I would give her a pass: “Yes, I said those things. It was in jest or it was parody. I don’t believe those things. That’s not my position. I’m sorry if somebody took it that way.” Had she said anything like that, I would
[28:08]
say to myself, well, even if she did think it, I’m going to let her go with the clarification, because that’s my rule. My rule is not to try to second-guess what somebody is thinking. My rule is that you take them at their word, because only the person gets to say what they’re thinking. That should be the standard. It’s not me guessing what you’re thinking; you got to tell me. But if you don’t say it in 48 hours, I think it’s fair that you come up with your own opinion. Someone says she did do that, but I haven’t seen that. Someone said that to me on Twitter. “Do pedophiles next.” What about pedophiles? Oh, you think I’m going to support them? You’d be wrong.
[29:12]
She said the same thing for a year in speeches. She would not be very credible in a change of that opinion, that’s fair. But I think people should get to change their opinions. She qualified the tweets; she said it was sarcasm. Saying it’s sarcasm is different from saying you don’t believe it. I think she tried to have it both ways. It sounds like she tried to say it was satire, and whether it was or is not is different from what her actual opinion is. Her opinion she did not retract; all she did was clarify that what she said was in the form of satire. All satire has a point. Satire is not satire, sarcasm is not sarcasm, unless there’s a
[30:15]
serious point to it. If the serious point was that white people are racist or problematic in some way, then that’s the point. Keep in mind, as a professional satirist, as a professional user of sarcasm, those things don’t exist unless they have a base point to them. So if she didn’t retract the point and all she did was say, “I delivered it in the form of satire or sarcasm,” that’s not a clarification. That’s just a statement. Base point: she said she was attacked for old comments.
[31:15]
Did you see in Venezuela that there was an alleged drone attack against the President of Venezuela while he was in public? There’s a video of it going off and I was wondering why the drone didn’t get closer. Why did it fail? I heard there were two of them, but maybe one got shot down by a sniper. I’m not going to fall for the Jeong Derangement Syndrome. I don’t know where that drone blew up; I didn’t see it on the video, so it wasn’t that close to the President. But it seems to me that when drones have their own guidance, it’s game over.
[32:18]
The problem with current drones is you have to be within controlling distance. Your controller has to be able to see it and have a signal. The drones that I’m worried about will be the fully autonomous ones. The drone you need to worry about is where they put the GPS coordinates in and they just send it, and it’s not controlled after that. Those drones are going to be a big problem. Every other kind of drone you could probably block, right? Because the way that they bring drones down now is they block the controlling signal. If you get rid of the controlling signal and just give it GPS guidance—somebody’s working on this. I don’t know if those drones exist commercially. Can a regular consumer buy one of those?
[33:19]
“Your drone can do that.” Oh my god, I didn’t know that. Can those drones be brought down by drone guns? It looks like I need to learn a bit more about drone defense and drones. But my guess is that those drones were probably controlled by a consumer—there’s an FAA exclusion for consumer use. When people say that you can jam them, what would you be jamming exactly? You could jam the GPS signal, I suppose, but then if the drone already knew where it was going—couldn’t the drone also tell where it was going by looking at the map?
[34:20]
If your GPS drone was using the satellite to figure out where it was and then they block the transmission from satellite to drone, but the drone also had a Google satellite map in its memory, couldn’t it match the terrain to the Google map and still find its way? Does that exist? Because again, if it doesn’t, it will. Everything is done by GPS now. Some said it can check terrain. Whether it can or not, certainly it will. It feels like a certainty that it could look at the roads and compare it to a map and know exactly where it was. That assumes a lot of AI. I don’t think you need much artificial intelligence; all you’re doing is matching patterns.
[35:21]
Basically, yeah, somebody was saying facial recognition. If you took facial recognition software and were looking at the ground instead of a face, couldn’t you figure out where you’re at just by comparing it to a map? I think you could. I’m boring you. I’m going to go now. It’s a slow-news August, so you may notice that the news is all stuff like psychological problems, like racism, or at least how we think about racism. The problem is real, of course. Starbucks is going to accept Bitcoin; didn’t know about that. That’s a big deal. I’ll talk to all of you later.