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June 17, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
59:46
Episode 107 - The Holocaust Movie Half the Country is Experiencing
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I'm going to say your name if you come on early.
The The Riot Christie, Jeremy Myers, Silverback, Black Holes Matter, Peter Whelan, Alright, I'm done saying your names, but you get that for coming on early.
And you know what else you get for coming onto my Periscope early?
I think you do.
I think you do. It involves a mug, a beverage, preferably a beverage in the mug, and get ready for the simultaneous sip.
Here it comes. Happy Father's Day to all of you fathers out there.
I was going to make a joke that has the initials MF, but I'm not going to.
That would be inappropriate.
Alright, I hope all of you saw today's funniest tweet from our tweeter-in-chief, President Trump.
This is one of my favorites.
I think it's the best one of the summer so far.
So this is President Trump this morning, I guess.
He goes, Washington Post employees want to go on strike because Bezos isn't paying them enough.
I think a really long strike would be a great idea.
Employees would get more money and we would get rid of fake news for an extended period of time.
Is Washington Post a registered lobbyist?
I think a really long strike would be a great idea.
Employees would get more money and we would get rid of fake news.
Alright. Our next president after this president is going to be so boring.
So boring. In fact, our next president after President Trump will be so boring...
That I already feel sorry for Nikki Haley.
Alright, I'll just let that hang there for a while.
Now, my other favorite tweet is General Michael Hayden.
Now, you might know General Michael Hayden.
You see him on TV a lot. He is, let's see, he describes himself as a former director of CIA and NSA. Also an author, husband, and father.
Happy Father's Day to General Michael Hayden.
But he makes this tweet.
Let's see if we can make this big.
In which he shows a picture of, I believe it's Auschwitz.
It's a death camp in any event.
He shows Auschwitz in his Twitter feed.
Stop his stupid iPhone.
Oh my God.
And my iPhone just went to some mode where it only goes sideways no matter which way I put it.
So he shows Auschwitz and he goes, other governments have separated mothers and children.
Referring, of course, to the children being separated from their parents at the border.
So it's a picture of Auschwitz, I think, or a death camp, whichever one it is.
And other governments have separated mothers and children.
So I retweeted that and said I would have picked schools as my example.
Now, of course, I'm mocking the overwrought analogy because people came into my Twitter feed and said, how can you compare a school to a death camp?
Like, you're not really getting the point here.
Or how can you compare kids in detention camps to school?
And I say, well, you're getting warm.
You're getting close to the point here.
Analogies? Is there anything analogies can do except make things worse?
I don't know how many times I have to point it out to you that whenever anybody uses an analogy in a persuasive context, it just totally blows up.
It doesn't do anything good.
But I will say that because Hayden was NSA and CIA, he did do something very smart.
What did General Hayden do that's very smart in his tweet showing the picture of Auschwitz and with the bad analogy comparing it to the kids being taken from their parents at the border?
Yeah, the visual. So by adding the visual The analogy is just sort of a carrier.
The analogy isn't the important part.
The important part was the visual.
And you put that visual in your head and then you have this automatic association.
So what the good general is doing is top-rate CIA quality persuasion disguised as a bad analogy.
Because the analogy is ridiculous.
But the picture, oh my god, the picture is gold.
So as evil as this is, and it is quite evil, it's also very effective.
So being consistent, I try to call out the tools.
You can make your own decisions on the ethics of it.
In this case, the ethics are horrible in my opinion.
But that's separate from the tools.
Alright, let's talk about the ongoing question of the children who are being ripped from their parents at the border.
Let me start this conversation the only way anybody should start it.
Nobody likes taking children from parents.
I don't like it.
You don't like it. Nobody likes it.
All things being equal, and all things are not equal, but if they were, Nobody would want children and parents separated.
Not me, not President Trump, not Republicans, not ICE, not the parents, not the kids.
Nobody. Everybody's on the same page.
Nobody wants parents taken away from kids.
So that's our starting point.
Now, having partially inoculated myself by saying that, here's the part where I get in trouble.
Are you ready? You like it when I get in trouble.
Admit it. You like the danger because it's not you.
Here's some questions that I would like to see as part of the discussion.
Number one, the number one thing that we assume when we watch this situation of children separated from parents at the border is that the situation the children are going into, these detainment centers, are worse Then whatever they came from.
Are you with me? The starting assumption is that being in a detainment center in which you're fed and clothed, you're kept warm, you're kept safe, you're educated.
I guess they go to school for six hours a day or something.
And they're with people their age who they have a lot in common with.
So the base assumption Is that that situation, which is by no means ideal, I don't want to pretend that that's a good situation, but the base assumption is that it's worse than whatever they just came from.
Does that seem true to you?
I don't know if it's true.
But I'm asking, it seems like that would be, wouldn't that be the most key point in all of this?
So let me give an example of what I'm talking about.
I currently live in a very nice large house in a lifestyle which anybody would envy unless they already had it.
But the best lifestyle I ever had, in terms of an upgrade from where I was, was college, in which I shared a little cinder block room, you know, just packed with stuff with a roommate and there were always people in it because we had people over all the time.
So my normal life Was five guys in a little teeny room, usually smoking weed, in a cinderblock room, separated from parents, because guess what?
Parents don't get to go to college with their kids.
I was separated from them.
Now, of course, I was 18 at the time.
A little different. But that's not the point.
So I'm not making an analogy to the kids' situation.
What I'm saying is that because my ordinary life where I grew up in my small town was far worse than college...
Even though college objectively was putting me in a tiny little room and separated from the world, and you could say things that made it sound bad, but my experience was just purely an upgrade, and it was a very big one.
I went from a really crappy childhood to, hey, college, in this tiny little room, and I'm working hard and working three jobs at the same time as I'm Going to school.
Analogies are great for making a point.
They're not good for persuasion.
I know what you're saying here.
So the point is that what matters is what you're used to and what you're going to.
So your happiness So here's where the analogy is going.
I'm not relying on the analogy.
I'm using the analogy to make the following point.
The point I'm going to make and say right now is the persuasive part or not, not the analogy.
The analogy just got me to this point.
The point is your happiness is always context-based.
It depends what you came from.
If you came from something terrible, And you go to something substantially less terrible, how do you feel?
Good, usually.
You feel pretty good.
Now my question is, what was it about life in Mexico That these people were so desperate to escape that they took legal risks, physical risks, risks of violence, risk of being victimized on the path, leaving all of their other friends and family behind.
How horrible were things that they would take this risk to get across the border?
I'm thinking pretty bad.
How bad was the trip itself?
I'm thinking pretty bad.
Now put them in these detention centers.
Do any of us want to be in a detention center?
Hell no! Because most of us would be coming from a great situation or a better situation to something far less good.
But if you're coming from a situation so horrible you're risking your life to get away from it, you're leaving your family, you're leaving everything behind except your kids, you're probably coming from something horrible to something that's, I hate to say it, But I'm gonna. A little bit better.
So, are the kids suffering by going from a terrible situation to one that's a little bit better?
Now, if they believe they would never be reunited with their parents, that would be awful.
But I'm pretty sure the kids are told very clearly, and I imagine very frequently.
Yes, you'll get back together.
It's just a process.
Takes about six weeks. Second thing I want to say is, don't those kids have a way to contact their parents during this process?
Are they not in contact with them?
Because if they're not, if they're not in contact, it seems fixable.
All you have to do is provide some iPads, let's say half a dozen iPads for each facility, and tell the parents, hey, here's the phone number for these iPads, and we'll figure out a schedule or something, and you can call in and you can see your kid every day.
You can have an hour-long phone call with your kid every day if you want to.
And there won't be much to say.
But it seems to me that the separation problem is mostly a psychological one, because no one is arguing that the children are in physical, well, no one except General Hayden of the CIA. is arguing that they're in any kind of physical danger.
They're actually well taken care of.
They're just in a very limited detainment center, suboptimal situation.
But probably it's better than what they came from immediately.
So it probably feels like an upgrade.
There are no cages.
That's fake news.
And it's probably true That psychologically being separated from the parents, not knowing where things are going, that sort of thing, is the problem.
You could probably go a long way to fixing that by making sure the kids and the parents can talk every day.
And I would say every day would be the standard.
Every other day just doesn't feel frequent enough for a parent and a young child.
It would be enough for a teenager, but not for a young child.
So, that's my first point.
The next point is what I call the half-pinion.
A regular opinion is when you say, I prefer this situation over this situation.
So that's an opinion.
A full opinion is, I've looked at all the alternatives.
We could go this way, we could go this way.
I prefer this one.
Over this one. That's an opinion.
You could be right.
You could be wrong. I could agree with you or disagree with you.
But certainly what I just described is an opinion.
A half opinion is when you say half of that.
I don't like this.
And. And.
If there's no comparison, it's not an opinion.
So many of you are finding yourself in a conversation in which you have an opinion, I like this more than I like this, and I like it more than this and this and this perhaps, compared to someone who says, wait, wait for it, wait for it.
Separating children from their parents is bad.
That's my half opinion, and I'm sticking to it.
I agree with you, Dale.
It's very bad to separate children from parents.
We should not do that. What are you comparing that to?
I'm comparing it to not separating children from parents.
Duh! Okay, I'm going to need a little more than that, Dale.
Should you just open the fence and just push the whole family back on the other side?
Is that what you're saying?
No. Stupid.
I'm not saying that. Are you saying you should put them in some kind of a family jail where the adults and the children are mingling while they're being detained?
No. No! Stupid!
That would be so stupid!
Because you don't put parents and children in detainment centers.
Are you saying we should just let them go and if they want to come back when it's time for the hearing, we just trust that they will, knowing that there's a large percentage of them that won't?
No, that would be dumb too.
Okay, Dale, you're dismissed.
Now, if there's a good alternative to whatever's happening around the border, I haven't heard it.
Because keep in mind, the reason that they're doing what they're doing now is because the one alternative they had had some flaws.
And the flaw was people don't come in for their hearing.
I believe that's the flaw.
But in any case, the people who say don't separate children from parents are just agreeing with you.
They're not disagreeing with you.
100% of the world is on the same page.
But we're not on the same page with General Hayden, who believes this is step one to the Holocaust.
Here's my next point.
How would you like to be a survivor of the Holocaust and see somebody comparing what you went through to these kids six weeks in detainment centers that are better than what they came from and 100% will be released?
I don't think you'd love it.
I don't think you'd love it having your situation diminish like that.
The next thing is, how big of a problem is it to separate children from parents temporarily?
The temporary part is the important part.
Anybody who separated children and parents permanently, they're going to have to have a pretty good reason, because everybody's going to be against that.
Do any of you have teenagers?
Let's say anything 13 and over, 12 and over will probably get you there.
And they've got a smartphone, and they put in their earbuds, and the next time you'll talk to that kid is when they're graduating college.
Yeah, the reality is that we are separated, you know, parents are separated from their children by smartphones.
And if you can get your kid to take their earbuds out when they're in the same room with an adult, good frickin' luck with that.
Do they like it?
Does an American teenager Love it, being together with their children?
Let me give you this thought process, or a thought experiment.
If you said to a typical teen, I'll give you two choices.
You can come stay at a luxury resort with your parents.
That's choice one.
A luxury resort with your parents.
Or you could stay in a small facility in which four or five of you will be in the same room.
You'll have food.
You'll be able to talk, hang out.
You'll get some school done because you need to anyway.
Which do you choose?
I don't know. Some people would choose the luxury resort with their parents, but I'm not sure most would.
Obviously, the younger the kid is, that changes.
But a lot of the kids in the detention center are teenage, or they're at least teenage.
And those kids are not dying to spend more time with their parents.
I'm sure they love their parents.
I'm sure they wouldn't want to be kept away from them.
Somebody says you're sickening.
You're sickening.
So let me, by the way, whoever just said you're sickening, here's something I guarantee you.
I guarantee you that you agree with me on every point I just made.
I guarantee it.
I'll bet there isn't one thing I just said that you don't agree with.
What you don't like is that I put it in a different context.
And the context I put it in is not wrong.
It's not one you disagree with.
So keep in mind that while you're sickened by my opinion, you don't disagree with it.
And by the way, this is something I've been wanting to say for a while.
I didn't have a situation where I could fit it in.
But has anybody noticed that on my Twitter feed, the number of people who get angry at me, they rarely, to the point of almost never, maybe, let's say 95% of the time this is true, They don't disagree with me.
So the people who are fighting with me on Twitter almost always have to change what I said to a different thing to argue it.
If you've seen any Twitter exchange I have, it goes like this.
You say the abominable snowman is real.
You idiot! And I say, no, I didn't say the abominable snowman is real.
I said some people believe it's real.
And then they say, well, well, maybe, but you say the abominable snowman doesn't have hair.
How would you know that? And I go, I didn't say anything like that, etc., repeated.
But the other thing you'll see is that people will swear at me, curse at me, and have a low opinion of me while not disagreeing with anything.
Nothing. Just not even one point.
There's no disagreement about how I process the situation and no disagreement about the facts.
And people will still tell me I'm a miserable person for talking about it.
You'll see that all the time.
It's fairly common. Alright, you just saw it now.
The other thing I'm watching is the blame game where the Republicans are saying, hey, Democrats can fix this anytime they want.
Just change the law. Help us change the law.
And the Democrats are saying, my God, we don't have any control over the ICE procedures.
That's the administration.
You can change it anytime.
You change it this way, you can change it back.
And here's the thing.
I'm watching this and I'm thinking, doesn't it require both sides to be where we are?
How am I wrong about that?
Don't both the Democrats and the Republicans have to prefer this fucking situation?
Let me just say it as clearly as I possibly can.
If both sides did not prefer this situation, it wouldn't be happening.
Here I'm not giving a pass to Republicans, because I know a lot of you are saying, hey, you're just supporting everything the President says.
Nope. Nope.
Nobody likes kids being separated from parents.
I don't like it.
You don't like it. Who's to blame?
Republicans? Absolutely.
Absolutely they're to blame.
And, and, and freaking Democrats.
Both. Because either one of them could solve this, and neither of them wants to.
So if you want to know who I blame, both sides.
100%. Nobody gets to parse this like, oh, you're 75% to blame, but I'm only 25% to blame.
Fuck you. Fuck you.
You're both 100% to blame.
100% to blame.
If the government doesn't work and you're split 50-50, all it takes is a few people to change votes, you can do any fucking thing you want.
You both don't want to solve this problem.
You both want it to be an issue.
You're both fucking up.
So don't look for me to absolve the Trump administration.
This is a huge fuck-up.
It is. Let's face it.
They could fix it.
I mean, they could do a better job of presenting it.
They could fix it.
But you know who else could fix this?
Fucking Democrats. They can fix it.
They can fix it in about an afternoon.
They can fix it anytime they want.
Both sides, absolutely worthless in this case.
So if you want me to support the Trump administration on this, not going to do it.
Not going to do it.
But I'm certainly not going to say they're worse than the other side.
You have complete governmental fuck-up.
Top to bottom. There's nothing right about this situation.
And by the way, I also don't think it's the Holocaust.
You can say that the situation is bad.
You can blame everybody involved and still not say it's as bad as the Holocaust.
Because it isn't.
So both sides can take their half opinions.
And I would say that's probably true of both sides.
I think the Republicans are doing a terrible job of laying out what the options were.
They just say, hey, we have to do this.
What is Trump saying?
We have to do this because it was some Democrat law or something?
Now, I think, you know, obviously that doesn't pass the fact-checking, but there is clearly a precedent.
There's a, I'd say, 100% agreement that you don't incarcerate or detain adults and children in the same facility for safety reasons and other reasons, practicality.
So, yeah.
But the trouble with the arguments, I hear somebody say that, you know, all criminals get separated.
The trouble with the argument that, I've heard people also say, you know, it's sort of like British boarding school.
You know, separating children and kids is sort of a normal thing.
People do it willingly all the time.
It's fairly common.
Kids go to camp for two weeks.
Now, of course, you're saying to yourself, my God, that's not the analogy because those are voluntary.
Those are voluntary.
Well, it's not that voluntary for the kid, is it?
If somebody says you're going to camp, your parent does, or if your parent says you're going to boarding school, is that voluntary for the kid?
Not so much. Now it is voluntary for the adult in most of these cases.
But let's say your parents have two jobs and you've got to work all day and you don't get to see your kids.
Is that voluntary?
A little bit. I mean, you could always be poorer, I suppose.
But our normal situation is children and adults being separated for all kinds of reasons, usually voluntary.
This one is involuntary, but there are also involuntary reasons that children and kids are separated.
They're not all the Holocaust.
And to treat it as such is just ignoring the situation.
Trump wants sexual new federal law, right?
So, You're separated from reality.
Yeah, so that kind of comment, when people say, you're separated from reality, again, whoever's criticizing me that way, You don't disagree with anything I've said.
If you did, you could mention it.
Did I get a fact wrong?
Did I say something that is a different opinion than you have?
You could just mention it. You know, there's nothing stopping you from making a comment and I would read it.
I'd read it out loud. Yeah, there are a lot of people...
I've often gone further and said, well, I'm not going to mess up the topics here.
All right, let's see what else I had in my little notes here.
Yeah, so both sides can help in this situation.
Neither side is. The Democrats are using it as an issue.
The Republicans are using it as an issue.
If you care about those children being separated...
Number one, come up with an alternative.
And number two, blame both sides.
This is a 100% breakdown both sides.
Nobody gets a pass.
Alright. You have your facts wrong.
These refugees are not illegals.
Oh my God. Okay.
I know that the refugees are not the same status as somebody who robbed a house or committed a regular crime.
I know that we have different words and different levels of how we treat things.
It is, however...
Not legal to come into the country just because you want to.
Now you could say to me, well, you know, these people are trying to get asylum and this is a different situation.
Fine. You can put different words on it, but it doesn't change the situation.
I will agree with everything you want me to say about what word you want to use.
Would you like to call it a situation?
Okay, let's call it a situation.
It doesn't change a damn thing.
It is what it is.
We can't let people just come in anytime they want and go anywhere they want.
So, your point, I agree with.
It doesn't change anything.
Okay. I saw somebody suggest that for every illegal person who comes in, we would subtract from the quota of legal people coming in.
To which I say, how is that fair?
The people who want to come into the country legally and are following the process?
Are you freaking kidding me?
Those are the people you want to suffer?
The people who followed the rules, who want to become Americans?
Come on! Those are the people we want.
I want more of them.
The people who follow rules and want to be on the team?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah, you don't let people cut in line.
Now I would prefer something more merit-based, but even with assistance we have, you don't penalize the people who do follow the rules for the benefit of the people who don't.
Let's talk about the IG report.
Is there anything left to talk about?
So as far as I can tell, the IG report It just told us what we already know, right?
Is there anything that came out of that?
It felt like it was complicated and somewhat irrelevant because everybody just found reinforcement for the thing they already believed.
Military families are separated.
Yeah, there's another example.
Now, in all of our examples, of course, there's an element, except for prison, there's an element of choice, where the people at the border, you could say they don't have a choice, but you could also say they had a choice about crossing the border, so it's pretty close to a choice.
There's three versions of the IG report.
Well, I agree with people who want to see the unedited original version of the OIG report.
It might be interesting. But I wouldn't put your hopes and dreams on that being different enough that it changes anything.
Did I forget about Huber?
Apparently I did.
I don't know who Hoover is.
So remember my prediction that I made not long ago on
I said that President Trump's success with the economy and North Korea, at least so far, have Would cause people to go crazy in a way we haven't seen before.
And this situation turned out to be sort of the trigger for that.
You know, people need to go crazy for a reason, or it's a fake reason, it's a fake because, but they needed a cause.
And it turns out that this children being ripped from their mother's breasts at the border turned out to be just perfectly timed.
You know, it was exactly the right thing at the right time.
So the anti-Trumper needed this.
They needed this like they need food and water.
They were sort of out in the desert, starving and thirsty because they didn't have anything to protect their egos.
And because their egos were all wrapped around the notion that they knew Trump was a disaster and it was going to happen any moment.
That disaster's coming.
Yeah, that disaster's coming.
So it seems to me that on some level, doesn't it feel like the anti-Trumpers are happy about this situation?
In a weird way, they're just happy.
It's like the weirdest kind of happy.
It's like, well, I don't like bad things happening to children, but I love that I was right about it.
I sure was right about it.
I love that part.
Remember Eliane Gonzalez and Clinton?
And yeah, that was pretty similar, wasn't it?
They're using it like a cudgel.
Yeah.
Well, I'll have to say it's working really well, wouldn't you?
If you were going to evaluate the quality of the persuasion, and again, I'll try to be as objective as possible, the quality of the persuasion, I would say that this is really good.
This is along the level of when Clinton started saying dark during the campaign, that everything Trump did was dark and dark and dark.
But this border children thing, because in our culture we sort of fetishize the importance of children.
In our world Which, by the way, is completely upside down from what it was a few hundred years ago.
A few hundred years ago, having a child was just creating an asset to do some work for you.
It was almost an economic thing.
You know, people didn't care about children the way they do now.
So we've sort of put children above adults in our calculations.
That's reverse of what it was a few hundred years ago, probably reverse of what it has been throughout human history.
And that also distorts our political conversation, because the notion that the children are the most important thing in the world makes this story, which otherwise would look like a non-story, it makes it literally the most important story in the country.
Let me mention something that a critic of mine mentioned and they'll dovetail this into a larger point.
So on Twitter every now and then somebody will pop up and say, Adams has made terrible predictions.
Now often they'll conflate something I said I wish happened with something I said would happen and they'll treat them as the same.
And I want to mention one That I can't tell if I'm wrong about or I just expressed a preference, but maybe some of you can help me out with the fact checking.
So somebody on Twitter pointed out that I had talked about red team, blue teams, and having the debate about climate change.
In the EPA. And that conversation did come up, but now it's been, you know, 500 plus days.
And the idea of a red team, blue team has just, I think, disappeared.
Right? So, the first question I have for you is, those of you who have been following my stuff for the entire period, can you help me remember Did I predict it would happen, or did I describe that it would be a good idea, which would be completely different?
Does anybody remember?
Because I don't remember predicting it would happen.
Yeah, so everybody here who seems to remember says that I was just saying it was a good idea.
That's my memory of it, but my critic was saying you predicted it would happen.
Now, I'm going to give the critic this much credit, which is there's a fine line between saying it's a good idea and...
If I say it's a good idea and it's the sort of thing Trump would or should do or you could expect to happen, that's pretty close to a prediction.
But I don't think I actually predicted it.
That said, let's revisit that.
Where the hell is that?
Right? Where is the red team, blue team?
Now, when my critic pointed that out, I thought to myself, well, I definitely didn't expect that the topic would just disappear.
Now, is it my imagination, or has climate change as a topic gone from a 10 and a 10 to a 4?
Is that what you see? Do me a little, you know, four out of ten.
And what changed?
What made climate change go from the most important topic in the world, ten out of ten, to a four?
Now, I'm not saying that the problem is less.
I'm saying that how the public is processing that topic went from most important to Does anybody have a theory about why that happened?
I'm seeing a few good ideas.
Somebody said climate change is boring.
That actually might be part of the answer because the topic is boring and long term and it's not affecting me today.
It doesn't touch my taxes.
It doesn't affect the speed limit.
So it just doesn't feel as cool and important and interesting as everything that's in the top of the news.
Other people are saying It got colder or the temperature dropped.
I'm not going to agree with that, and here's why.
I know that those of you who are saying the temperature dropped are looked at stories that say that.
You saw graphs, you saw statistics, you saw some measurement.
But I can almost guarantee you that the people on the other side of this issue Have different data.
That's been the problem all along, right?
The fact that you think temperatures went down probably is unrelated to the fact that half the country or more thinks temperatures went up again.
And probably you both have data that looks pretty credible, telling completely two different stories.
Now I'm just guessing that's the case, because that would be the normal case.
Yeah, the Paris Accords blowing up didn't change the world.
Here's some other things that you haven't seen.
You haven't seen other countries commit, like seriously commit, like, oh my God, America backed out.
We're going to have to try ten times harder to compensate, like you would if it was an actual disaster.
If it were an actual disaster, wouldn't people treat it like an actual disaster?
Now, of course, you're also seeing the two movies on one screen with things like the amount of ice.
I get more conservative tweets because I talk about Trump than I get tweets on the left.
So what I see is all kinds of stories where people are saying the ice has actually increased, not decreased.
Right? That's what you see.
How many of you have seen stories in the last month or so saying that the amount of ice has increased, not decreased?
How many of you have seen that story in Twitter or somewhere?
I just want to see how many.
Both. I have somebody saying, you block people on the left.
Yes, yes, yes. So you've seen that.
Don't confuse the fact that you've seen all those stories about there being more ice and not less ice.
Don't confuse that with how much ice there is.
Those are unrelated.
Because at the very least, if you believe that your news is correct, you have to believe that the people getting the opposite news must be incorrect.
So somewhere in the world, either on the side you already agree with or on the other side, there's a lot of fake news.
How do you know it's your side versus the other side?
The only thing you know for sure is that smart people are being duped by fake graphs, fake measurements, fake scientists, and, you know, BS. Somebody said, pretty easy to fact check.
Nope. If you think it's easy to fact check climate science, I've taught you nothing.
It's impossible to fact check it.
You're not a scientist.
You didn't stand there next to the measuring devices.
You haven't compared those measuring devices to every other measuring device.
It's impossible to fact check it.
You can't fact check climate change.
You just can't fact check it.
So, it's possible that at the very least there's enough counter evidence coming out about climate change that the proponents just don't feel like making this case as much anymore.
They just would rather talk about something else.
Now, maybe this will change in the fall when hurricane season starts cranking up again.
That might give more reasons to talk about climate change.
But it seems like the red team, blue team thing stopped being important.
Because it doesn't look...
Like climate change matters to people anymore, like it used to.
I mean, it matters 4 out of 10 instead of 10 out of 10.
And then also I've tweeted around a few stories recently in which there's some technology that looks promising to be able to adjust the amount of CO2 in the air.
There are technologies that suck it out of the air and turn it into concrete, a special kind of hardened concrete.
There are technologies that suck it out of the air and turn it into energy.
And the estimates for how much it would cost To use the technology that's already invented.
Forget about what we'll invent, what we'll have in five years.
But what we already have, if you cost it out, I think they say one or two trillion dollars to fix the whole planet.
To which I say to myself, one or two trillion dollars, that's too much.
Until you realize our national debt is 15 trillion and compared to what climate change would cost if it's real, a couple of trillion actually is way less problem than we thought.
So in other words, if climate change went from a destroy the world problem, 10 out of 10, and technology has taken that down to a, well, it's going to cost you $2 trillion, but you could totally suck that CO2 out of the air.
Here are the devices.
We've already tested them.
They cost about...
1 to 2 trillion.
Somebody saying 21 trillion, that would be the cost of climate change going unchecked, right?
Something like that. Isn't 15 trillion the national debt?
Do I have that wrong? I'm just going by memory.
Yeah, not the deficit.
that's the debt, not the deficit.
What if you're wrong is not better than if it saves a single life.
Not sure your point there.
Oh, 21 trillion is the national debt.
Okay. Went from 15 to 20 plus pretty quickly.
All right. So.
I'm going to say, so people have challenged me to say, hey, you're cherry picking all the good things about the Trump administration.
And I'm going to add to my criticisms.
So I'm criticizing the way the Trump administration is handling the children at the border topic.
Now, I'm not sure that there's a better way to do things, but there's certainly a better way to present it to the public.
There's a better way to defend it.
There's a better way to say, you know, we have a plan for fixing it.
There's just a better way to do it.
So I can say that the Trump administration did not succeed on this topic, and definitely the anti-Trumpers are getting the best of them, for sure.
But they're both guilty, in my opinion.
But I'm going to add to that, taking the cue from my critic, that the EPA never did a red team, blue team.
And I think that that surely must still be important, if only to get the public on the same side as much as possible.
So to me, that's a huge failing.
I would say having gone this far without anything that looks like a red team, blue team, or any version of that, you know, it doesn't have to be red team, blue team, but something in which the arguments are publicly presented in a credible way, pro and con, From as objective a source as possible, something that we can all weigh in on.
The experts can say, okay, you forgot this.
Maybe it doesn't have a time limit so that whatever they come up with can evolve over time, that sort of thing.
I think that's just a mistake.
To have a topic This controversial, and to sort of just let it hang out there without informing the public in a way that wouldn't be that hard, to me that's just a mistake.
Now, the mistake beyond that might be that climate change is a gigantic problem we should be doing more about right now.
I don't know if that's the case, because I haven't seen the red team, blue team, and therefore, that's a Trump administration error, in my opinion, or a shortcoming.
All right. Manafort in jail for doing things blah, blah, blah.
Let's talk also about my larger observation, that when you look at the complaints from the anti-Trumpers, they're all missing the, and?
Let me give you an example of that.
A typical anti-Trumper will say, the president has lied 3,600 times since he came into office.
And? And that killed people?
And it hurt the economy?
And? They always leave out the and.
Or, he's a con man, he's a con man.
And? Somebody died?
Because of the con man? And North Korea didn't get solved?
Because of that?
Or they'll say, he's going to destroy the world in the future in ways that we can't quite identify, and there's no direct line, but in ambiguous ways we feel bad, something bad will happen because of the president.
You need a little bit more meat on your criticisms.
Here's what a criticism would look like.
The economy is bad.
Unemployment is bad. North Korea is going to kill us.
ISIS is growing. If any of those things were true, that would be bad.
Those would be actual criticisms.
Here's a criticism that's not a real one.
The president is stupid and impulsive.
And?
And?
That hurt us.
How? Or here's another one.
The president is angering our allies.
And?
And, because of that, they're going to nuke us?
Because of that, Great Britain will stop talking to us?
So? So, when you see this, the complaints, here are the things to look for.
Look for the half-pinion.
Like, we must, you know, we have to, well, they have half opinions about everything.
Everything from climate science to border to everything else.
They want us to stop doing what we're doing without being able to describe what we should do instead.
So look for the half opinion.
Then look for the complaints that don't have the second part of the complaint.
Like, he's a con man.
And where's the second part?
And because of that, he lied 3,500 times.
And because of that.
So the other, I think there's a hidden assumption in all of the missing and parts.
The assumption is that because this president has such a low regard for the facts, That pretty soon everybody will have a low regard for the facts and society will fall apart.
Here's why I'm not worried about that.
Is there anybody who's taking their lead from this president?
I don't know anybody who's acting like the president.
Well, the one exception is people like Lindsey Graham seem to be using more coarse language.
But that's true of the other side as well.
I think everybody's using more coarse language.
But here's what I say about the coarse language.
And... They're all using coarse language that hurts the world.
Because? Why?
Right? You're still missing the second half.
It's true. Lindsey Graham swore on TV. Maybe he wouldn't have done that in the pre-Trump era.
But did anybody die?
Because he used the bad word on TV? I don't think so.
So look for half-pinions, look for complaints that don't have any, and there's no second part.
And look for people to be in a completely different movie where they're seeing things that just aren't happening in your movie.
Somebody said, what would we do without you?
Well, you'd be in bad shape.
Will we get bocce today?
Probably not. I use my bocce balls to weigh something down in the backyard, so not right away.
Elon Musk's tweets.
Oh yeah, what has Elon Musk been tweeting lately?
I think Elon Musk has been attacked by the anti-Trumpers.
And it looks like he's about this close to being pro-Trump.
Why was Trudeau wearing fake eyebrows?
That's all been debunked as fake news, by the way.
Trudeau does not have fake eyebrows.
That was just a trick of lighting.
He does have weird eyebrows, but the way the lighting changed, it just made him look fake.
Overuse of bad words makes them ineffective.
Well, I don't think anybody's overusing them.
we're not even close to that just looking at your comments A good persuasion book on Audible.
If you want books on persuasion, Google the phrase, persuasion reading list.
Most of them are available as audiobooks.
Persuasion reading list.
They attacked you too.
Yes, I get attacked on a pretty regular basis.
Somebody said, how come I don't get any effect with weed?
If you're smoking weed and you're not getting any effect, you should talk to your dealer because your dealer sold you oregano several times in a row, apparently.
Thank you. If you haven't heard my conversation with Michael Malice, a lot of people are saying they enjoyed it.
So I think if you Google my name and Michael Malice podcast, that should pop up pretty easily.
Bill Maher falling apart.
You know...
I hate to say it, but it does look like Bill Maher has lost it in sort of the Robert De Niro way.
And I can't tell in his case if it's because he was so committed to a position that's now been so falsified.
Because it's pretty obvious that some good things are happening in the country.
And it's hard to be that certain and that wrong for so long and have it so unambiguously put in your face that you're wrong.
That the only way you can weasel out of it is through half-pinions and complaints that don't have it.
And part two of them.
He's a huge climate changer.
Well, here's my thing on climate change.
If it's true, It might be a giant problem.
So let's have that red team, blue team.
To me, that is a legitimate complaint against the Trump administration.
It may not be a legitimate complaint that climate change is the problem that the alarmists say it is.
That may or may not be true.
I actually don't know. I'm not a scientist.
But I'll tell you what is true.
The failure of our government to have some kind of a forum where the people can get some sense of the real size of the problem or not, that's missing.
And it's not so hard to do that you can explain it as, well, there's a good reason it's missing.
There just isn't. All right.
I think I'm done for now.
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