Episode 187 Scott Adams: Have We Reached Peak Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Date: 2018-08-19 | Duration: 40:11
Topics
Anti-Trumpers pushing back against the TDS of other anti-Trumpers Preet Bharara talking to Bill Maher Rachel Maddow talking to John Brennan Katy Tur talking to Michelle Goldberg Strategy and tips for how to not be embarrassed Ego is not who you are Use your ego as a tool you ramp up or down as needed President Trump does this extremely well Scott’s happiness hypothesis
Transcript
[0:11] Just because it’s Sunday, that doesn’t mean you don’t have time to come in here and enjoy coffee with Scott Adams. And if you’re an early bird and you get here by the time we reach the thousand-follower mark, which will be any moment, we’re going to have the simultaneous sip. Here it comes: one thousand followers. Oh, some of you got here in time. Good job for you. So, we’re going to check in on the state of Trump Derangement Syndrome today. But first, there was a headline that caught my eye. Kevin Spacey—who you all remember was accused of some “Me Too” behavior with some young man years ago—Kevin Spacey has a new movie out.
[1:11] Here’s the headline on CNN: “Kevin Spacey movie earns only a hundred and twenty-six dollars on day one.” You heard that right. Not a hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars. Kevin Spacey’s movie earned a hundred and twenty-six dollars on its first day. Ouch. So, there’s a weird little trend that I’ve just noticed in just the last few days. The trend goes like this: even the people who are critics of the President are trying to call back other critics, like, “Oh, you’re going too far.” This might be a sign that we’ve reached peak TDS—Peak Trump Derangement Syndrome. I’m going to give you three examples. Some of them you might be familiar with, but if you see them in context,
[2:12] they’re more powerful. One of them is on Bill Maher’s show, Real Time. One of the biggest critics of the President is Preet Bharara—I think I’m pronouncing it correctly. He was fired by the Trump administration and he admits he’s a critic of the President for a number of things. But I want you to watch him push back when Bill Maher accuses the President of being a traitor. So, we’ll see if we can see this. Come on. Oops, I’ve got a sound problem here. Well, maybe I don’t. I think the first part didn’t have sound. Bharara was fired; he was asked about President Trump’s lawyer, blah blah blah. We’ll get to the good part in a moment. Dammit, no sound.
[3:13] Anyway, what it was supposed to say was, when Bill Maher referred to the President as a traitor, Preet Bharara actually stopped him and said that it degrades the criticism when you take it too far. I don’t think the phone is on mute; let’s see if that was the problem. “But yes, so I saw you when I said ‘traitor,’ you looked like you were uncomfortable with the word. You can subject yourself to criticism if you are sort of overstating—and I’m not saying necessarily you are—but if you’re overstating what other people have done.” Say that. So, he’s an attorney, one of the top ones in the country, top prosecutors, and he refers to
[4:15] calling the President a traitor as “overstating.” And he did that with Bill Maher. All right, so that’s your first example of a Trump critic calling back another Trump critic saying, “Whoa, you went too far.” Let me give you a couple more examples; these are fresh ones. There’s a—I’ve tweeted—so even Rachel
[5:29] Maddow was calling out John Brennan on his BS. She wouldn’t let him weasel-word it. Of course, she wanted him to say “treason,” but she was sort of exposing him for being erratic. The irony is that he lost his security clearance for allegedly being erratic, and then he goes on Rachel Maddow, and Rachel Maddow can’t even believe what he’s saying. It seems to me he’s being a little erratic; that’s my opinion. But here’s the best one: I think it’s Katy Tur’s show on MSNBC, and Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for The New York Times. Michelle Goldberg suggests that the President wants to round up and kill people; he just hasn’t done it. Watch what happens when Katy Tur hears her
[6:31] guest, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, say this. Watch Katy Tur try to call her back. “No, he’s not.” This is Michelle, “Worst in the world in politics right now, and he is very vocal. I do agree with you that this does express a level of exasperation among his aides; they can’t have any control over Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
[7:58] columnist, who’s on television and says with total confidence that she knows what the President is thinking, and that he’s thinking he wants to round people up and kill them.” Now, that is so far beyond the realm of sane behavior. I don’t think she’s medically insane, but certainly, temporarily, she’s operating like she’s got Trump Derangement Syndrome there. So, there were three examples where you’re seeing the anti-Trumpers pulling back the others like, “Ah.” And let me put a frame on this: the people who are anti-Trumpers are starting to embarrass themselves. In other words, it’s starting to get embarrassing to be an anti-Trumper. Do you remember this?
[9:01] This was a prediction I got wrong, but probably only because of the timing. The prediction I made prematurely was that the anti-Trumpers would start to be embarrassed by their criticism of the President. I just showed you three examples that happened this week in which you saw for yourself three anti-Trumpers being a little bit embarrassed by their own team. I’m not going to claim that I got that prediction right because I missed it by about a year. But yeah, premature predictulation, exactly. The 48-hour rule. Yes, the 48-hour rule is in effect, but I didn’t see anything that any of these folks said that would necessarily be something they would change in 48 hours.
[10:01] But if they do, if anybody clarifies in the next 48 hours, I will abide by the 48-hour rule for clarification and I will say I accept the clarification. Do you know why? Because I don’t want to be Michelle Goldberg. She believes she can read minds, and she is so certain that she said it in public. Imagine going in public and saying with confidence you can read the mind of somebody else. “You are a shill.” Let’s block that guy. Yeah, how do you clarify? It would be a hard one to clarify. But hey, if somebody does clarify, I’m all in. “There’s another attack in Seattle, somebody wearing a MAGA hat.” I haven’t seen that yet.
[11:02] “Will you be embarrassed if you’re wrong?” I’m generally not embarrassed when I’m wrong about anything. I was going to do a Periscope about how to not be embarrassed and how to not feel shame. It’s the reaction to it. Yeah, I’ll probably give you a separate Periscope on how to avoid shame and embarrassment. I’ll give it to you right now. So, this is how to avoid shame and embarrassment. These are just a few tips. Number one: try to be good at something. It doesn’t matter what it is. You could just have a good character; you could be helpful. It doesn’t have to
[12:05] be a world-class skill, but you could be a good parent, you could be a good student. It’s not a very high bar, but try to be good at something. Because then if you fall on your face doing something else, you won’t say to yourself, “Oh my god, I’m a gigantic loser and everything I do is bad.” So, you need a few things in your arsenal that you can say, “Oh, okay, I’m bad at this or I messed up on this, but I’m clearly not a bad person because I can do other things well and I have good character,” or whatever it is. But be good at something; that gives you a little protection. The next thing is, it’s a learned ability. The ability to withstand shame and embarrassment is very learnable. And the way you do it is you put yourself in situations where you will absolutely feel a little bit embarrassed, but it won’t hurt you. I took the Dale
[13:06] Carnegie course somebody mentioned earlier here, and one of the exercises was you would do something embarrassing in front of the class. Now, even though it’s a small group and you get to know them pretty well, maybe 25 people, the advice you get is you do—here’s what we did, this was many years ago, I’m sure they don’t do the same exercise—but they make you talk like you’re at least—for the men, they would make the men talk like a weird hillbilly. For a woman—they didn’t use the word hillbilly—but you would have to go in front of the class and you’d say something like this. This is a bad example of it, but they’d say, “I am Scott, my name is Lug,” and you would just go way over the top in acting like somebody of a different gender. Yeah, so something that would be weird and
[14:06] uncomfortable, and there’s no way you could do it well. So, the exercise by its nature was something nobody was going to do in an elegant, respectful way. You just couldn’t do it. You were going to look like an idiot, and you were going to do it in front of the class, and everybody would do it. So, all 25 people would have to get up and embarrass themselves. And even though it’s a controlled, safe environment, you still feel it. You still feel embarrassed because we’re just wired that way. But you do it a few times and then the class simply doesn’t care. They just don’t care about you. They’re thinking about themselves; they’re thinking about what they had for breakfast. People don’t really care about you just embarrassing yourself. And once you go through the cycle enough times, you realize, “Hey, I’ve embarrassed myself 15 times this week and nothing’s different. My coffee tastes the same, I still have my job, my loved ones
[15:07] are exactly the same.” Look at all the ways I’ve embarrassed myself; nothing changed. Nothing physical changed; it was all in my mind. And it’s never enough simply to just tell somebody that, like I’m telling you. So, the fact that I’m just explaining it won’t help you a bit. You have to actually go and put yourself in positions where you are guaranteed to be embarrassed, but in safe ways, because you’ll still feel embarrassed and then you just get used to it after a while. Can you imagine the number of times I’ve been criticized in my 30 years of public life? Every single day, lots and lots of times. How many times have I sent a tweet with a typo or just a word spelled wrong? Yeah, I won’t even call it a typo because that’s letting me not be embarrassed. But sometimes I just spelled a word wrong in public. I’m a professional writer and
[16:10] it’ll spell a word wrong and then I tweet it out and a quarter of a million people will see it. Should I be embarrassed by that? Maybe some people would. It’s hard to block the right people here. Somebody says, “Never embarrassed equals a narcissist.” So, here’s another tip for avoiding embarrassment. If you’re hung up on who is or is not a narcissist, then you don’t understand ego. If you think ego is who a person is, then you’re also going to think that if they are not embarrassed, they might be a narcissist. But none of this is about who you are. If you do it right, your ego is just a tool and you can ramp it up and you can ramp it down. A good time to ramp up your ego is if you’re going in for a job interview or you’re in some kind of an athletic competition. It’s good to get
[17:12] your confidence as high as you can in those cases. But if you’re going into some other situation—let’s say you’re meeting the parents of your boyfriend, girlfriend, or fiance—you probably don’t want to go in looking like a narcissist. So, you want to dial it down. You see the President doing this all the time, by the way; he dials it up and dials it down. So, the tip is, if you’re asking the question, “Hey, is somebody who is not embarrassed a narcissist?”—if you’re even asking that question, then you’re seeing the world in an unproductive way. The real question is: if all of you accused me of being a narcissist, does that embarrass me? Nope. Because first of all, I happen to have a better insight about myself. And whether it’s
[18:14] true or not, I wouldn’t care because I can use my ego as a tool. If I crank it up and you say, “Hey, you’re a narcissist,” I don’t care because that’s what I need. Then I’ll crank it down, and then somebody will say, “Well, you’re a very humble person.” Neither of those will be true. I’m neither the humble person when I ramp it down, nor am I the narcissist when I ramp it up. I’m not those people. I’m a person who understands the ego is a tool, and I move it where it needs to be to get me the best result. Once you start thinking of it that way—and it’s not who you are, it’s just how you manage your confidence—that’s a more productive way to look at it. Another way to avoid or reduce your shame and embarrassment is to use the imagination and to imagine yourself on
[19:16] your deathbed. So, this is the deathbed imagination technique. You get embarrassed and you’re like—you know how sometimes you’re just red and you’re sweaty and you’re super embarrassed? Say to yourself, “Okay, imagine yourself decades in the future and you’re on your deathbed. Are you going to be thinking about that? Are you going to be thinking about that day that you were embarrassed?” You are not. In fact, ask yourself: how many of your past embarrassments are you thinking about right now? Personally, none. Zero. That’s how many past embarrassments I’m thinking about right now. One of the great things about the way humans are designed is that they forget a lot of stuff. However embarrassed you are at any moment, you should know with certainty that you get over it and you don’t
[20:17] have to do anything special to do it. There’s nothing you have to do to get over it; it just goes away. So, you just think yourself into the future and say, “Oh, if I do absolutely nothing special, this problem that I’m feeling just goes away.” And that will actually help diminish it in the near term because you know it’s not a problem. The way our brains work is that when we’re worrying about something at the moment—let’s say you’re feeling shame at the moment—what you’re really doing is worrying that that feeling is going to continue. When you tell yourself it never does, it allows you to minimize it at the moment, because you’re not really worried about the moment because the moment is already past. How long is a moment? So, if you say “I feel embarrassed at the moment,” that moment is gone. What you were really worried about was the next moment, and the
[21:19] next moment, and the next moment. And the one thing you could say about the next moments for sure is that you will be less embarrassed. So, the future looks good when you’re embarrassed. Actually, when you’re embarrassed, the future looks great because it’s going to be better than whatever you’re feeling right now. Guaranteed. Pretty much always does. So, those are a few tricks. The other thing is—here are a couple more tricks—I’ve talked about the simulation theory way too much. The idea that we’re not necessarily an original species, but we might be a computer simulation created by some other species. And the argument there—most of you have heard it by now—is that if there is ever a species that can create a simulation, they’ll probably create more than one. So, the odds that you’re the original and not one of the many copies of sim-you of both worlds is very low. Sometimes I tell myself, “What if I’m just a
[22:21] simulation? What if I’m just software? Is this feeling that I’m having—the feeling of embarrassment—is that me?” It’s not going to last. It’s not who I am; it’s not me. It’s just transient. And you can actually just think your way past it by saying, “I seem to be whole. There’s nothing wrong with me—my hands, my legs, my body. I can still eat. There’s just no impact from any of these thoughts I’m having.” So, you can sort of think yourself up to instead of being your ego—your ego just got beat up, but you’re not the thing that got beat up. You’re not that thing. Stop thinking of yourself as the thing that just got beat up. You are some kind of entity. Whether you’re a simulation or not, you’re something bigger than that event. That event was not terribly important in you.
[23:27] So, those are some techniques. Someone says, “I always get embarrassed.” Practice. If you always get embarrassed, run toward it. Don’t run away from embarrassment. If you feel embarrassed on a regular basis, run toward it. And here’s a little tip for those of you who feel embarrassed about stuff: every time you feel embarrassed, you become more protected because you go through the experience of being embarrassed and then, however long it takes—a few hours or a few days—you’re over it. You’re just over it. “What if you make an important mistake?” Well, I’m big on apologies and fixing things. In fact, one of the main ways that I define character is not by mistakes. I do not define character by
[24:30] what mistake you made. I define character partly by what you did about it. If I were to judge any of you by your mistakes, well, you’re all a terrible bunch of people because you’ve all done horrible things. You haven’t killed people necessarily, but you’ve all made mistakes. Probably most of you have lied; some of you have omitted information; you’ve done selfish things. We’ve all done some bad stuff. But if you make a mistake and then you atone for it—you apologize, you restate your mistake so people know you understand your mistake, and then you do whatever you can do. Every situation is different, but you do what you can do to
[25:30] fix the situation. You pay somebody back, you promise to fix something, you talk to somebody, you apologize, whatever it is in the situation. I definitely judge people by how they handle their mistakes, and that’s the way you should judge yourself. So, here’s another tip: you’re probably going to judge yourself by a standard that you would judge other people by. Why wouldn’t you, right? If your standard for judging character is the mistakes you made and the things you did that you should legitimately feel embarrassed by—if those are the things you judge who you are by, you’re probably judging other people that way, too. That’s not a good way to go through your life. Don’t judge people by their mistakes; judge them by what they do about them once it has been pointed out that there’s a mistake. I can think of situations in
[26:32] which I’ve done something, usually accidentally, that was just bad and I should be embarrassed about it. I find that my level of embarrassment goes way down when I go toward it. In other words, I go right to the person that I harmed accidentally, directly apologize, directly state what the problem was, and directly say what I’m going to do about it in the future. That’s the Steve Jobs “apology stack,” if you will. So, the apology stack is you restate it so people know what it is, you know you’re talking about the same thing and you’re not trying to weasel out of it. So, you state it in the clearest, starkest way. Then people go, “Okay, you get what went wrong here.” Step one. Step two: you apologize for it in a way that sounds sincere because don’t apologize if you don’t mean it. And then you say what you’re going to do
[27:34] about it to make it better in the future. Can’t fix the past. Can’t fix the past, but you can do something about the future. So, that’s the Steve Jobs apology stack. How to deal with an embarrassing problem. If you haven’t heard this story, I tell it a lot, but when Apple had the “Antennagate” problem—when you held your phone, if your finger was in a certain place, it blocked the antenna and the phone would drop its signal. What an embarrassing problem for a company that makes a phone you hold in your hand! It’s made to be held in your hand, and its specific flaw was that you couldn’t hold it in your hand. It’s the most embarrassing thing you could ever imagine. Well, I’m sure you could get something more embarrassing, but imagine how embarrassing that is as the person whose identity is identified with this object. Steve Jobs: “Hey, I made a handheld object, I bet my company on it,
[28:36] and the only time it doesn’t work is when you hold it in your hand.” How embarrassing would that be? Was Steve Jobs embarrassed? I’m not a mind-reader, but look at the way he handled it. He went on a conference call and he said some version of this, paraphrasing: “All smartphones have problems.” Which was brilliant. He changed the frame so you could put it in context. By the way, that’s good for you, too. If you’re feeling embarrassed, put it in context. You’re not the one person on Earth who was embarrassed today. You’re not the one person on Earth who was ever embarrassed. You’re living in a world where there’s just embarrassment all over the place, and most people don’t care about yours; they think about their own. And then he said, “We want to make it better for our customers,” and then he said what he was going to do about it. So, if you handle your embarrassment in a proper way, that
[29:40] also helps you get past it. Here’s another fact that just helps you put things in perspective, and some of you have heard this: research shows that the most loyal customer is not the one who had a good experience. The most loyal customer—and this is counterintuitive, but you’ll see how this fits in—the most loyal customer is the one who had a bad experience, complained, and then you fixed it. When you fix somebody’s bad experience, it bonds them to you. So, you should think: if you’re on the other side of that equation and you know that you’ve done something embarrassing and bad and you need to apologize for it, your apologizing makes you a better person than if nothing had happened in the first place. Who would you trust? Somebody
[30:41] who messed up, sincerely apologized, understood the problem, and said what they were going to do about it? Would you trust that person? I would. That’s a person I would trust a lot. In fact, my opinion of that person’s character would go way up, and I wouldn’t judge them by the original problem; I would judge them by how they handled it. So, those are a few techniques. “Trump never apologizes.” Yeah, in his case, he’s got a whole thing going on where he knows that if he starts apologizing, he’s never going to be done. “Priests don’t apologize.” Is that true? I don’t know; that may not be true. “Anything new with Blight Authority?” I still need to do—there are some interesting things brewing with the Blight Authority that I won’t tell you about, but there’s some very, very high-level activity, meaning that smart people are looking at it. That’s all I can tell you for now. “Can’t log into the forum.” I’ll look into that. So, you’re saying that BlightAuthority.com won’t let you log in? I’ll make sure that it’s working. If you tried it the other day, it was subject to a denial-of-service attack. So, if you tried to log into the platform a few days ago, it was down. Some hackers had attacked it, but it was back up. If it was a few days ago you had the problem, just try it again.
[32:56] What’s my new book going to be? New book is going to be on how to escape your mental prisons. Somebody asked about the URL. I believe that both the URLs work: blightauthority.com and also theblightauthority.com; I think it’ll send you to the other one. “Is the manuscript going to copyediting yet?” No, I’m only 20% done writing it. Yeah, so it’s brand new; I just started. “Am I happier now or before Trump?” Have you ever heard of the theory about baseline happiness? It’s the idea that it feels like your happiness is being determined by things happening in your life, but science has debunked that. It
[33:59] turns out that people are born with some kind of genetic, biological disposition to how happy they can be. They can have a bad day and still be happy, and other people can have a good day and never be happy. You don’t have a lot of movement from your baseline, and if you do, it’s usually temporary and then you’re back to your baseline. So, when you say “am I happier before or after Trump,” before Trump, if you went way back, maybe I had bigger problems and those made me unhappy. But I’d say the same. I’m happy in a different way. I’m happy when things are going well, less happy when they aren’t. “How do you determine your baseline?” Oh, you probably know just over the course of your life. Where do you spend most of your time? Are you mostly happy or are you mostly unhappy? That’s probably your baseline. “Is being happy the same as
[35:01] being positive?” No. But I have a very controversial hypothesis. Let’s call it a hypothesis that everybody gets angry when I state it. So, you know that when people are angry at your hypothesis, it either means you’re way off or you’re nailing it. And here’s the hypothesis—you’re going to hate this, by the way, and remember I’m calling it a hypothesis, so don’t take this out of context. Hypothesis means I am NOT certain this is true, nor am I thinking it’s most likely to be true; it’s just something interesting enough that it’s worth saying. When people are unhappy, or even—I won’t go as far as physical depression—but let’s just say they’re unhappy, they’re having
[36:02] a bad day. How often is it that they’re also low-energy? I think that people think that they’re low-energy because they’re in a bad mood, or they’re low-energy because they’re mildly depressed. In this context, I’m not talking about clinically depressed, where that’s a little different deal, but just your attitude is somewhat depressed. They’re almost always low-energy. My hypothesis is: if you took somebody who is normally miserably unhappy and you just gave them a shot of some drug that just kept them up, they would act happy. And if you asked them, “Are you happy?” they’d say, “Well, at the moment I am.” So, the hypothesis is that we mistake happiness and energy, because when we are happy, we’re also high-energy lots of times, like, “Hey, let’s party, I’m happy!” And when we’re unhappy, we’re often like, “I don’t even want to get off the couch.” The way we process that is that our attitude has affected our energy. My hypothesis is that we have it backwards and that if you could directly affect somebody’s energy, they would act and feel happy more often than not. Now, like I say, I’m not counting clinical medical depression and mental problems; that’s its own category. But within the normal zone of happy or not, I think it’s energy. If you want to test this, if you have children in your life and those children are unhappy and fighting and grumpy and crying and whatever, try feeding them. Just giving them some food. Now, when
[38:04] you eat, it gets your energy up a little bit. Sometimes you’re hungry and it just saps your energy. If you feed kids that are in a bad mood, watch how often they get in a good mood instantly. It’s almost phenomenal how well that works. Likewise, if your kids are fighting and angry and miserable about everything, ask yourself how much they slept the night before. You’ll find an almost perfect correlation with children between those two things: did they get enough sleep and have they eaten recently? Watch that correlation because those are the energy correlations. Now, also hydration, because if you’re poorly hydrated, you’ll actually feel tired, even though it’s a fake tired; it’s actually just dehydration. So, if they’re
[39:05] hydrated and they’ve eaten and they’ve gotten good sleep, watch how rarely children are miserable. So, that’s my hypothesis. Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’m going to try to come back later this afternoon and do something on Blight Authority. So, if you can log into BlightAuthority.com and you have some ideas about how to design a community, that would be a great help to the world. You can help the world—that’s not even an exaggeration. If you’ve got a good idea, you can go to the Blight Authority and put it on there. I guarantee you’ll see it, and probably lots of other people who are in the right space to make something happen. And your idea could change the world—that’s not even a little bit of an exaggeration. A couple of good ideas might be what we need to make a big difference in urban areas. All right, so I’m all positivity today and we’ll keep it
[40:05] that way. I will talk to you all later. Later.