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June 18, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:05:38
Episode 96 - All the Fun News While Sipping Coffee in Wrong Time Zone
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Time Text
Hey everybody. I know there won't be many of you here.
I'm coming to you from totally the wrong time zone.
But, some of you, let's say on the east coast of the United States, waking up early.
Those of you in Europe, whoa, I'm getting some regulars here.
Do you people ever sleep?
You do not. So I'm not in Singapore.
No, that would be fun.
I'm in Amsterdam. I'm in the Netherlands.
I'll let you look out the window here in a minute if you like.
But I thought I could take a few days off from periscoping and from simultaneously sipping, but I can't.
I can't. It's time for the simultaneous sip because the news is too good, too much fun, you're too happy, and you're ready for your coffee.
Let's have it. That's some good Dutch coffee right there.
All right, so where to begin?
It's all fun stuff.
Let's see, let's start with President Trump saying that he would be ready to back some legislation, bipartisan legislation, which is important, to get the federal government out of the criminalization of weed business.
Now, why is this important?
Well, it's important for a number of reasons.
Number one, it's good for people, good for the country.
I've referred to this as a layup, meaning that this is the easiest win a Republican president could ever have.
What is more Republican than letting the states work it out?
What is more Republican than waiting for some small trials to give you evidence?
And then you say, okay, based on the small trial, we could go bigger.
And certainly enough states have experimented at this point that you have enough evidence to make a decision.
And so that's important.
But there's another part of this.
Do you know how much I like winning?
Have I ever mentioned that to you?
Some people think I'll get exhausted by all the winning.
But I'm not tired yet.
You know why I'm not tired of winning?
Coffee. Yeah, if you drink enough coffee, you won't get tired of winning.
That's my secret. A lot of people will just get exhausted from all the winning and they'll be like, Oh, what do I do?
I can't take another win.
And then I say, You can take a few more wins.
You can do it.
Just have to drink your coffee.
So, here's what I'm talking about.
I have been getting shat upon for approximately, I don't know, seven years for something I did back then.
Just shat upon.
And let me tell you what I did back then.
It was in the day when Mitt Romney was running against already President Obama for his second term.
And I ended up endorsing, not essentially, but in an indirect way, endorsing Romney.
Now, when you hear that, you say to yourself, oh, that makes sense.
You seem to like President Trump.
Why wouldn't you like Romney?
Makes sense, right? But not for the reasons that you think.
The reason was that President Obama when he was running for his first term said that he would leave the states alone when it came to medical marijuana dispensaries.
But sometime, I think it was maybe toward the end of his first term, he changed course and started at least making noise that he was going to go hard at dispensaries.
And there was a specific Californian gentleman who was obeying the laws of California.
He was trusting that Obama meant it when he said he would leave his hands off of this business.
And he was now being charged with crimes that could have put him in prison for 10 years.
10 years of prison for somebody in my state because, wait for it, because the President of the United States, who was Barack Obama at the time, lied.
That's it. Because if Obama had kept his word and kept away from the dispensaries, this gentleman obeying all the laws in California, providing a service for medical marijuana users, doing a public good and making money too, you know, what's more American than that?
He would have been fine.
But here's the real problem.
If President Obama had changed his mind on the policy and then given his new reasons, even if I didn't agree with the reasons, I would have said, well, people changed their minds.
And I would have said, I might not even agree with his reasons, but those are reasons.
He showed his work.
And I'm willing to say that even though I disagree with the reasons, And maybe strenuously disagree with him.
The system is still credible.
Because he explained why he did it.
He changed his mind.
People changed their minds.
I'd be okay with that. At least in terms of the system being credible.
But he did not do that.
President Obama simply changed his mind and I think people asked, and I don't believe he ever gave a reason.
Now when you change your mind on something that will cause somebody to go to prison, and maybe lots of people, and you don't give a reason, that's cause for firing.
That's a firing offense.
And in the context of the presidency, that means either impeachment or don't re-elect him.
So on that one point, I endorsed Romney, and I said this.
I didn't even care about his other policies.
What I said was that there was only one legitimate candidate left.
So even if you didn't like Romney's policies, and even if you loved Obama's policies, this one obvious point of distrust, in my opinion, eliminated Obama as being a credible candidate for a second term.
And all he had to do was explain why he changed his opinion, and I would have changed my mind on that, even if I disagreed with him.
But I went further and I said, And here's the fun part.
Remember, this is about seven years ago, okay?
Right? No.
It would be, yeah, six or seven years ago.
Here's the fun part.
I said that I was endorsing Romney because I believed, wait for it, that a moderate Republican Could get what Obama couldn't get, which is let the states decide on marijuana.
Do you know how much people shat on me for that prediction?
The prediction that a moderate Republican could get something done on medical marijuana, or even recreational, simply by leaving it to the states, and Republicans would say, I don't like that.
Oh, you're leaving it to the states.
All right. Okay.
So Republicans could sell it internally, whereas Democrats might fear that it would make them weaker in the next election because it would just be handing a weapon to the other side.
So of course the conservatives, whenever it was handy, would say, ah, you're legalizing drugs, you know, we're against that.
And it might cost them some votes.
But if a Republican does it, Republicans go, why are you doing it?
And the answer is, I'm being consistent with Republican policy, giving it to the states.
And so here we have a moderate, in my opinion, moderate Republican, President Trump, who is doing what I said could be done six or seven years ago and got a shat on for it.
Now, we don't know if he'll follow through with it, but it looks positive.
Legislation is real. He said in public that he'll endorse it.
It's a layup.
I don't know what took so long.
Maybe the only thing that took so long is that he was waiting for some legislation where he could talk about it in concrete terms.
But it's the perfect time to do it.
So I'm very happy that my Romney prediction from years ago, which everybody laughed at me, laughed at me, I say.
Oh, how they laughed at me.
Who's laughing now? And drinking the tears of my critics.
Will you join me for a quick sip of coffee or beverage that I will call the tears of my critics?
That's good tears.
Alright, now we have the story about Dennis Rodman, who apparently has gotten funded from PopCoin and somewhere else.
So his trip to Singapore has been financed.
He'll be over there. And I had speculated that he would be In a very non-traditional way, he would be additive to the process.
Let me tell you why. There's the obvious reason that he knows both people.
He was the first person who sort of broke the seal of, can we even talk to them?
He's the first person who said publicly, hey, these two guys could probably get along.
He's the one who gave Trump's book, Art of the Deal, to him.
Probably the beginning of Kim Jong-un's travel to figuring out who this President Trump was.
So all credit, all credit to Rodman.
Say what you will, and I'm not saying that his efforts alone make this happen, but hey, somebody's got to go first.
He put skin in the game, he took a tremendous risk, reputationally, physically, and every other way, and I think he did it for the right reason.
I believe that when Rodman accepted the very first invitation, that his thought process was probably lots of variables, like, well, this might be interesting, and I think I'll enjoy it as well.
But I think he thought to himself, this could actually make a difference.
And sure enough...
It probably did, at least in the way Kim Jong-un thinks.
The two arguments for why he should be part of a process in any way, or not part of the process, comes down to this.
The process is very serious, and so serious people like to keep serious topics in serious mode.
But you may have observed at the G7 meeting that President Trump was not keeping things in serious mode.
He was literally joking in public with Justin Trudeau.
He joked that Justin's decided to get rid of all their tariffs, which wasn't true.
It was just funny. And apparently he's been joking around at that meeting with other people who he had an otherwise tense situation with.
So the first thing you need to know is that we don't have a stiff president.
We have a president who's known for joking, and so that changes your equation about what's appropriate.
Because chances are both the president and Kim Jong-un will be joking in their own way during the process of this meet.
Now, the thing I talk about is how bringing a context to a negotiation is sort of the pre-suasion.
It's part of getting people's minds prepped.
Putting you in the right state of mind.
Taking you to the...
To the friends mode instead of the war mode.
If your mind is in war mode and you're trying to talk peace, you might be in the wrong mode.
But you bring Dennis Rodman in, and he is the most visible, and it helps that he's visible.
He's actually a physical object, a human being, who we all can see in our minds.
So visual things have a greater impact.
So he's not only visual in the most spectacular way, but he's also representative of friends with both of these people.
So if you bring in that kind of a background feeling, You put that kind of a frame on it.
Simply the fact that he's in Singapore changes what's possible.
So from a persuasion perspective, having Rodman's name come up as much as possible, and it helps that he's going to be physically there, it makes him a story.
When the negotiations happen, the negotiators won't be able to talk about it.
They'll be sort of in meetings and stuff.
But where will Dennis Rodman be?
I'll tell you where Dennis Rodman will be.
On camera.
All over the place.
Dennis Rodman is going to be probably more prominent than any of the other players because they're actually busy and they can't really talk about the negotiations until they have something done.
But if the atmosphere is being filled with Rodman goodness, People are just going to absorb that.
He is the most visible, unforgettable sign of friendship between the United States and North Korea, and specifically the two leaders, that he's the ideal, ideal thought to put in everybody's mind.
Somebody asked about Michael Malice.
I am scheduled for Michael Malice interview.
It's coming up when I get back to the mainland, back to the States.
And I'll tweet that out so you don't miss it.
So, good for Rodman for all the right reasons.
All the right reasons.
I think his head's in the right place.
His intentions are in the right place.
Skin in the game.
All good. Now let's talk about the kneeling NFL protesters.
I'm in Amsterdam right now if people are wondering.
You all saw the story by now that President Trump has offered that the NFL protesters can come meet him in the White House, and if they have suggested people who are the subject of unfair treatment by the police or the justice system, more by the justice system in this case than the police, that he will consider pardoning them.
Probably one of the smartest, most clever things you've ever seen in your life.
So first of all, Trump has set up this pattern by pardoning a number of high-profile people.
And lately, the people he's been pardoning and even talking about pardoning, because he's talking about Muhammad Ali now, tend to be brown or black.
And he just invited, now that he's established that pattern, that he's the guy who is pardoning brown and black people that our last president would not pardon, For whatever reasons.
Now he's set up that pattern.
And now he can say, with complete credibility, that if you guys come in and meet with me, and you've got serious suggestions about who to pardon, that there's a real good chance some of them will get pardoned.
Obviously not all, because not every situation is equal.
But that's real now.
There's no NFL protester who could see that offer and think he's not going to do it.
Now they have to bring in legitimate cases.
You know, somebody who really was overcharged or has served more than somebody ordinarily would.
You need real cases of injustice.
But here's the cleverness of it.
The protesters weren't exactly protesting jail time.
It's part of the larger package of discrimination that they perceive and feel and experience every day.
So it's part of the package.
But by making this offer, the president has somewhat reframed it from police brutality, which, here's the thing, that one's hard to fix.
Because the police brutality thing is hard to fix politically because, first of all, the statistics don't bear out the complaint.
So right there you have a dead end.
You can't do a major policy about something where the statistics just don't back it up.
But you also can't be the strong against crime, strong in favor of the police, and come out with a policy that clearly is not good for the police or the police are not behind.
So it's a tricky place to navigate for this president.
But he found this weird back door that I think just presented itself by circumstance and a little bit of luck.
But it's not luck that he recognized the door.
Other people would have said, well, there's a door that just appeared.
I guess I'll leave it closed.
But he watched the door appear through this pardoning process.
And he saw the door appear and he thought, I'm just going to open that damn door.
Watch this. He just opened the door.
Now, by so doing, he did what he always does, which he sucks all the attention from the thing it was on to something nearby.
And now he will have changed the conversation from is he a racist to look at all these black and brown people he's pardoning for entirely legitimate reasons who were the subject of a little bit of, or a lot, of unfairness in their sentencing or something about the process was unfair.
It's hard for the kneelers and the rest of the country to watch this anecdote after anecdote.
Because remember, every time he does one, it's a new story, and it's a new person, and it's a new visual.
And you saw the pictures of the grandmother, the Kim Kardashian woman.
A recommended woman, the grandmother who was greeting her family.
You see her get out of the car and she just like runs over and embraces them and it's like, it's just great TV. Even President Trump's critics They can't not film that.
So all of these stories are visual, visual, visual, as somebody just said here.
They are happy stories, and they absolutely kick the old filter in the face.
The old filter was, well, he's a darn racist, and he's sending all these secret racist dog whistles to his base.
If you're part of some racist organization right now, if you're in the KKK, if you're a white supremacist and you're watching this, Pardons a black person.
Pardons a black person.
Pardons a brown person.
Pardons a black person. Pardons a black person.
Pardons a black person. Guess what?
The last president wasn't doing this.
Pardons a black person. Pardons a black person.
And does it for the right reasons.
The very reasons that, you know, generically, the NFL protesters were hoping could get fixed.
And they see him making real difference in real people's lives.
Visual, on camera, look how happy they are when they're out of jail.
Who can look at that and say, ah, it's all part of a trick.
It's all part of a trick.
The racists know that this part of the whistle isn't real.
They'll listen to the other part of the whistle, but not this part of the whistle, because they know he secretly whistled in advance that he was going to do a fake whistle.
It just gets harder and harder to hold your Your old view that all of his actions are designed to inspire this tiny little bit of his supporters who are also gross racists.
So that's fun.
You also saw the story about I think at least two separate technologies were being surfaced in the news for directly taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere and turning it into a usable fuel.
Now, I tweeted which climate model had that in the model.
Now, if these new technologies work, and here's the thing, the new technologies don't have to be free or cheap.
Because if you assume that the worst case scenario of climate change, according to the proponents of that view, the worst case change is That it might cost us multiple trillions and kill X number of people.
Now, I don't believe those predictions, but if somebody comes up with some scrubbing technology that only costs one or two trillion dollars, It's going to look cheap.
So it only has to be better than the alternative in order for it to start making a difference.
And then you just say, how does technology usually move?
Once a lot of people and a lot of money are in this atmosphere scrubbing business, and they're at least Two to three completely separate technologies for doing it, they'll reach economies of scale, they'll attract more testing, smarter people, they'll get better, cheaper the whole time.
So the cost of cleaning the air should take the same curve as the cost of computers, the cost of most things that technology has driven down.
All right, so since the beginning I've been saying that long-term prediction models of anything, whether it's finance or something about the population or something about the environment, it doesn't even matter what the category is, they're all worthless.
Beyond one or two years.
Because there are so many big black swan types of unexpected changes that happen in the atmosphere, or the environment, I mean, that you...
Isn't it 4 a.m.?
Not where I am.
So predictions are worthless because the unexpected is what determines the future.
The future is never a straight-line prediction, and that's always what's been wrong with the climate models, in addition to other problems.
But that's one of the big problems.
Now, I've been saying this for a long time.
I think most of you saw me predict in the past year or two that there would be technological breakthroughs that would break the curve, and even if humans are heating up the atmosphere, we would figure out how to fix that.
What is that called?
Does anybody remember what I call it?
When you have lots of time to fix a problem that everybody sees coming?
What's the name for the law This says, yeah, that's it.
It's the Adam's Law of Slow-Moving Disasters.
The Adam's Law of Slow-Moving Disasters says that when everybody can see it coming, even though there are lots of skeptics, the main scientific community believes this is coming and they're all putting their minds to fixing it, That it's very predictable.
We didn't run out of money.
We didn't run out of fuel.
We didn't run out of money. The year 2000 thing didn't cause a problem.
Do you remember when the Gulf of Mexico was completely destroyed?
Or so we thought. Turns out it wasn't as bad as we thought because humans were pretty good at cleaning it up.
the nature was better than we thought at cleaning it up, etc.
So, yeah.
So for most of these things that we have, yeah, that we have lots of warning about, our ability to remediate is really, really good.
Now, oh, you know, Let's talk about healthcare.
I tweet whenever I can any kind of good news about innovations in healthcare.
I think the Trump administration has not succeeded in healthcare reform.
They've made some good decisions.
Some things that have happened are good.
But it's more in the realm of reducing regulations, that sort of thing.
Reducing mandates.
And those are good for the free market.
But I think a lot more could be done just with spotlights and just with persuasion.
And those are the two things that this president does better than any president.
He can make you think about and focus on whatever he wants.
And I think if we thought about and focused on Doing small trials of new healthcare processes and systems, not just technologies, but the whole system.
I think we could get to far better, lower cost healthcare pretty quickly.
He got burned on healthcare.
Yeah, so he did not succeed in that.
So, yeah, and there was a story also about, you know, President Trump signed the right to try election.
Bill. And then there was a story about a woman who had only three months to live.
She had a cancer that had not responded to any normal cancer treatments, and so she was allowed to do something experimental.
And I can't believe this hasn't already been done, because it sounds so simple, given current technology, that I wonder why this wasn't already a thing that's been tested and approved.
But the thing they did, which apparently Set her on her way to a cure, is they took some of her white blood cells out, and then they cloned them until there were just billions of them.
Because I guess it turns out it's hard to have too many white blood cells.
It's one of the few things, you know, I'm no scientist, but it sounds like it's one of the few things you can just put a lot of them into your body and you just get healthier.
That seems to be the only...
Yeah, Charles Krauthammer, he'd be a perfect candidate for that.
It's sad to hear that he's only got a few weeks left apparently.
So what they did was they made billions of her own white blood cells pumped back into her and they just did their thing.
Sometimes people just need more of that.
So that's the sort of thing that could be really making a difference.
Now, there's something else that I've been saying for a few weeks, and I want to check back with you on it to fact-check me.
So you're all fact-checkers right now.
Most of you on this Periscope are people who watch the news and pay attention, especially things that President Trump does.
Tell me if this is true or not true.
And by the way, we should all understand that confirmation bias is weighing on us quite heavily in this next question.
So I only need your opinion Let's mentally adjust our combined opinions to say we could all be under confirmation bias.
So with that caveat, here are my questions.
Number one, I told you that for the past month, and now it's been more like six weeks, President Trump has been unusually nice.
True or false?
The moment that people thought he wasn't is when he made that animal comment, which really was about MS-13, and nobody's asking him to be nice about that.
True or false? Somebody says false?
Look at the number of trues going by.
Yeah, for about six weeks, it's the most underreported story in the world.
That although he's being tough with people he's negotiating with, he's also being friendly.
He's being firm with North Korea in terms of we need to get denuclearization or the sanctions don't come off.
But both he and Pompeo are talking in almost clinical, just economic terms.
And you noted that the one time that somebody in the administration departed from that, when Rudy Giuliani made the I don't even know how to describe this mistake.
But, you know, and I don't even want to repeat it, actually.
You know what he said. So you know what he said about North Korea.
Now, frankly, I'm not even going to repeat it, because you all saw the news.
And instead of the administration rallying around him and saying, well, you know, he didn't mean it that way, or, you know, that's just the way Rudy speaks or anything, Pompeo said, no, was it Pompeo?
Or I think it was a spokesperson for the administration said, He doesn't speak for the administration on North Korea.
They just totally dismissed him.
Now, I think, you know, I don't know what benefits Giuliani is bringing that we don't see.
You know, what's happening under the hood, what he says in closed meetings, which is valuable, probably a lot.
But I don't think I'd let them talk in public anymore.
Certainly not about topics that are outside of the legal context.
So if you look at the Summer of Love, as I've called it, You're seeing also...
Now, let me see if you agree with the second point.
All right, so first of all, we got agreement that President Trump, for around six weeks or so, has been unusually nice.
It looks like a change.
And it seems to be very effective.
And keep in mind that if he can maintain this through the midterm elections, oh my God.
He always had this secret weapon.
The secret weapon was just stop insulting people.
You would never think of that as a secret weapon, but it was something easy to do that he could pull out any times he wanted and just wait for people to notice.
So the funny part about this is This is now the second time or third time I've mentioned this on Periscope.
And you know by now that enough of the media watches my Periscopes that this message is starting to percolate on both sides.
And nobody's touched it yet.
I don't think anybody in the general media has made any observation like the one I've made now, which is that he seems to have pivoted toward a kinder, nicer, you know, what can I do for you kind of thing.
Now that would also make sense because he's starting to deal, you know, he was always fighting from behind.
If you look at the entire election cycle, He was the scrappy fighter who was making progress by being the toughest, meanest one in the fight.
He was the junkyard dog.
And when he was in junkyard dog mode, it was very effective when he's in a junkyard fight.
He was just the best junkyard dog in a junkyard fight.
And as a new president, he was also being criticized about everything and assumed that he would fail tomorrow and it was nothing but criticism.
He was still in junkyard dog mode.
He had to fight back hard to just sort of maintain his place in the junkyard.
But now...
He's getting some stuff done.
Now it's getting harder to avoid seeing that the economy is strong.
He's got some pardons that are really working against the idea that he's some crazy racist.
He's moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
Israel loves him, makes it harder to hold in your mind that he's a crazy racist.
Two of the most powerful...
How do I say this without sounding like a sexist but still making the point?
Let me say it in reverse.
So he's got women in the jobs of CIA director and homeland security.
Those are two jobs which are older...
sexist models of the world would have imagined being jobs that the men would traditionally have.
I'm not saying they should or that ever made sense.
I'm just saying that traditionally our sexist pattern recognition would have had a problem with that.
Or at least be surprised with it.
Not a problem necessarily.
But these are the sort of things that That fight so hard against the notion that he has a problem with women, that he has a problem with other races, that he has a problem with Jewish folks, because the facts just continually refute it.
And you probably have noticed the persuasion that I've been doing relentlessly on the left.
Has anybody noticed my calling out their mind reading?
How many of you are starting to see when the critics of the president are in mind reader mode?
So check me on this.
Have I been effective in getting you to see things from that mode?
There are things that really have happened, and then there are things which we imagine he's thinking.
And their criticism has moved almost entirely to the imaginary world where they can see his thoughts.
Yeah. Once you see it the first few times, you see it everywhere.
And look at all the yeses.
So you see how many people are now picking up that filter.
It's a really useful filter.
Now let me ask you a second question.
I'll wait for you to be done answering this one.
There's a little time lag here.
So you can stop answering the first question.
I want to move you to a second question.
Have you also noticed that the critics of the president are almost stuck entirely in that mode?
That the mind-reading mode is sort of all they have left.
So the amount of their criticism is the same, but they've moved off policy and they're on to, hey, in his mind, this or that.
Now, the other thing that they do to criticize them is what I call word thinking.
So if you haven't heard me talk about word thinking, it's where you try to win an argument by just saying, no, my definition of this word means it's something else.
That's not thinking.
That's just talking about the definition of words.
It has nothing to do with what's happening in the world.
You don't change the world by changing what word you use about it.
I mean, you could in the terms of persuasion, but not in terms of understanding the world.
And so one of the ways that you see this word thinking from his critics is when he talks about that he's already started building the wall.
Now when he says we've got 1.6 billion and we've already started the wall, what do his critics say?
They say, no, you haven't started the wall.
All you're doing is upgrading parts of the border security that already existed.
What is he upgrading them to?
The wall.
Do any of you remember my prediction?
Probably... I don't know.
Maybe a year ago.
It was a while ago. I don't remember.
And I'll look for confirmation that there's at least somebody here who remembers me saying it.
Do you remember me saying that they would need a wall solution in which Trump could honestly claim he's building the wall and his critics at the same time could look at the same set of facts and say he wasn't?
And what did I say would be the way to do that?
I said the way to do that is that you fix the important parts of the border that have inadequate fencing or whatever that was there before.
Why does it make sense to do those first?
Because you've already proven there are problems there.
If there were an existing fence that was keeping everybody from getting through, you wouldn't need to build a wall there.
But he's picking the very places that are the most important to put the wall.
And by the way, in all of these discussions of the wall, I often say so many positive things about the president's technique that you could often assume that I agree with all the direction of things.
The wall is a good example of something where I'm not sure I know.
What's the best thing to do?
How much wall you need?
How much is enough?
How tall it needs to be?
How easily somebody could get over it?
I don't know. But here's what I do know.
It definitely makes sense to build a little bit of wall, the wall, and see how it goes.
So that's one thing I can say with certainty.
Now if you do, let's say you do a 10-mile stretch, which all you've done is you've upgraded an old fence or a smaller wall or a wall that was easier to climb over, and you replace it with one that's hard to climb over, see what happens.
If it doesn't change anything and people just drive around to the weak part, well, At least you knew they didn't get over the easy part.
So in other words, you've at least found out that somebody's going to drive 10 miles because they can't get over this part, or at least not easily enough that it's worth even trying.
So then you've got an argument for building some more wall.
But suppose you build 10 miles of wall and people are going over it just as easily as they were going over the fence.
It could happen. All it would take is one low-tech method to get over, whether it's throwing a rope over or whatever it is.
It would only take one low-tech method to prove that the wall doesn't make sense.
But where would you test the wall first?
There's only one right place to test it.
There's only one right way to do this.
If it's like every other project that any corporation would do, you go first to where it makes the most difference, which is where you already have wall.
It just isn't a good enough wall because people are getting over it.
And you build a better wall, and then you see what happened.
That's how you would do this project.
So the Trump administration is doing...
Forget about whether you want a wall or don't want a wall.
Either way, They're doing the right thing.
Because you have to upgrade the parts that are falling apart.
Even the Democrats voted for that.
So there's no Democrat who wants, at least in Congress, who seems to be supporting no border.
You know, they're just saying, well, we don't need a wall, per se.
But even they would have to agree, if you just do 10 miles, With your upgrades, these are the same places that are important and the ones you are going to fix anyway in some fashion.
And then you know. Then you have a second decision.
Do you do more?
So, the wall, I would say that President Trump has a 100% credible argument that he is building the wall.
Because he's doing it the one and only way that any sensible project manager would tell you to do it.
Build it where there's already a wall and there's already a problem because people are climbing over.
Then see what happens.
Do a little bit of it. Get funding more if you need it later.
All right, so that's happening.
So you're seeing in so many cases that the criticisms...
of Trump right now have moved from factual policy things to, alright, well I guess a lot of stuff is working, but we call that a different thing.
We have a different name for it.
We call it not the wall.
Or we imagine something in your head that you're not talking about.
Let's talk about Anthony Bourdain.
I was not going to talk about this.
Because I try to follow a rule, and I'm sure I violated this, but it's my intention to let tragedies sort of, what's the best word?
I don't like to be early talking about a tragedy.
Because the first days after something like the Anthony Bourdain or the Kate Spade suicide, the first days, in my opinion, are for the benefit of the friends and family.
And that's it. It's not for us to second guess.
It's not for us to jump in.
It's not for us to have an opinion.
It's not for us to connect it to the larger world.
But I'm going to make an exception in this case.
And here's why. As we talk about school shooters and how there are lots more of them, we should also talk about apparently the suicide rate in the United States has skyrocketed.
It's up something like 30% since 1999 or whatever the statistic is.
It's up a lot. And so people ask, you know, what are the causes for that?
And are we learning anything here?
Well, here's what I'm learning.
When Robin Williams killed himself by hanging himself on a doorknob, I said to myself, is that a good way to do it?
You know, I wasn't planning to do it myself, but I had to say I was curious.
And so, you know, I looked into it a little bit.
I mean, again, not for my own purposes.
Now, when Kate Spade hung herself, Do you think she was influenced by the fact that Robin Williams did it and it worked?
And it did not leave a messy corpse that a family member would find.
You know, if you blow off your head, you're damaging your family.
If you hang yourself, it's still terrible, but you're leaving an intact corpse.
So there's some kind of weird consideration in that.
So I think the odds that the media, here's the important part, the media reported how Robin Williams did it probably made it closer to the top of mind for Kay Spade and for a lot of other people.
The fact that Kay Spade just did it is almost guaranteed To be one of the variables, not the only variable of course, but one of the variables that caused Anthony Bourdain to say, looks like that works.
And the same with the school shooting.
Now imagine if you would this alternate explanation.
Suppose whenever there's a celebrity, especially a celebrity suicide, suppose the news followed the following process.
Suppose they would report in one place The method.
Because the method it's done, I think that's a legitimate piece of news.
So you don't want to lose the fact that there are some things that are just legitimate news.
But suppose you said, we're going to publish this in one place, in just ordinary terms, in descriptive terms.
It was done by a strangulation, self-strangulation method or something, just generically.
And then anybody who wrote about it could not mention the method, but could link to that antiseptic message.
So I'll say that again.
So imagine a law, or even just a standard, probably doesn't need to be a law, it could just be a news media self-imposed standard, that says they'll report that there was a suicide and they'll report who it was, but when they talk about the method, it will never be in the body of their report.
But it will, at the end, have a link that takes somebody to a very antiseptic, the least active description.
And you would get somebody like a cognitive scientist to say, okay, if you describe it this way, people are not going to say that's a good idea.
If you describe it this other way, if you just let people use whatever language they want to describe it, they might describe it in an attractive way.
So this whole pre-suasion idea that the context you see information changes your opinion about whether it's a good idea or whether it's actionable.
You get the experts to take the dangerous information And you have them put it in the least dangerous form.
You just have one of it and you let people link to it.
So that you don't put any responsibility on the writer of the article to describe it in the least active form.
So I would suggest that.
I would suggest that we have experts translate it to an inactive form so you don't lose the news value, but you do lose the accidental persuasive value.
Now, I have one other comment about Anthony Bourdain.
And I feel that this is unfair, but it might be useful.
So this is, it's irresponsible for me to say what I'm going to say, but it's also really useful in a positive way.
So I think this is more of a plus than a negative, or else I wouldn't say it.
But be careful with this.
If you do a Google image search on Anthony Bourdain, you're going to see something in his face that the lying experts call out all the time.
Look at pictures where he's smiling.
You may notice that there's a disconnect between his eyes and his mouth.
Alright? Now let me do an impression.
A genuine smile, the eyes and the mouth are both smiling.
Like that. A fake smile, the eyes can stay sad.
While the mouth looks happy.
If you look at Anthony Bourdain's, you know, just a selection of images, just do a Google search on him, and look at the ones where he's smiling.
There are some in which it looks like his eyes and his mouth are in coordination.
It looks like maybe he just laughed at a joke or something.
But more often, you see dead eyes that look like pain and depression, even though the mouth is...
Happy. He was quite open about his past drug use.
I've seen no evidence that he's currently taking drugs, except that his body suggests drug use.
So I don't want to start any rumors that are unfair, but because he was very open, you know, he never tried to hide how much drug use he had in his past, from cocaine to heroin to who knows what.
It would be hard to believe he wasn't on drugs at the end.
But maybe. But he certainly looked like it.
So while it is inappropriate for us to act like doctors and think we can identify depression in somebody, if you see somebody whose eyes and smile are not lining up, At least consider asking some more questions.
You don't have to point it out and say, hey, your eyes and your mouth ran a lion.
What the hell's going on there? Are you going to kill yourself?
You don't need to do that.
But if you see this in somebody you know well, it's easier with somebody you know well because you know what their face is supposed to look like.
If the eyes never smile, they may need some help.
Now, the bigger question is, why are so many people killing themselves?
Why is it an epidemic? And I say to myself, when I see a news report that says, hey, why is this suicide an epidemic?
I say to myself, why isn't it?
There's every possible reason for this to be an epidemic.
It's not one thing.
It's almost everything.
So, we started by talking about how it becomes top of mind that other people are doing it.
So, of course, the news coverage is a big deal.
Secondly, people are less religious than ever.
I think that's true.
People are less religious, which is one more reason to think there's no meaning in life if you haven't found your purpose and you don't believe in a god.
And you also wouldn't be worried about the afterlife.
So there's that.
I would also say that the nature of modern civilization has removed meaning and connection from our lives.
So if you go back a few hundred thousand years, it was a tribal life and people were, we had evolved to be optimized for this tribal, social, cultural life.
And then when we realize, hey, if we do mass production and get our economy going, we can all live in our private little condos.
And then you don't have interactions with people anymore.
So I would say that people went from social creatures to something that's not.
And that even depressed people were part of his social structure, which probably did a great deal to keep them from wanting to off themselves.
So... Yeah, and there are studies that say that even a lot of drug addictions are actually psychological, meaning it's not really the drug.
There's just something about the way you see yourself and your connection to the world.
And if you fix those things in your life, getting off drugs turns out to be almost easy, even bad drugs.
So yes, I would say that our world, and then you add to all those things how busy we are, how little sleep we get, how we're jet-lagged, how we're obsessed with devices and looking at screens.
How we have easy access to implements of death from guns to pills to now information on how to do it from these three famous suicides.
So if you put all those things together, it would be more remarkable to me if suicides were not up by 30%.
So I think we're seeing exactly what we should be seeing given the variables that have changed.
When Let me do a tie back to something I periscoped before.
Some of you probably saw my periscope with Bill Pulte, who's doing the project where he's clearing urban blight, so in Detroit and Pontiac, Michigan.
His non-profit came in and bulldozed down to, you know, bare field, places that had been run-down buildings with, you know, prostitution and drugs and stuff and crime.
And now we're starting to think, okay, how would you rebuild in these properties?
What's the most productive thing you could put back?
And I think the biggest mistake would be just to build homes the way we build homes.
Building homes the way you normally build a home, or even a cheap version of building a home the way you normally build a home, it feels like not good enough.
It feels like you have to start first with what will give people social connections in this piece of real estate.
What will force them to interact in ways that they actually like?
And I'll give you simple examples of that.
You could, for example, say that these homes are built primarily around people with children and that there's sort of a central park just for the community and that they all ring the little park and it's a safe place with lights and video cameras and the kids can go out there and play sports and stuff.
Doing that alone causes the parents to become friends with each other because you end up pairing up to, hey, can you watch the kids while we do a thing?
I'll watch your kids next time.
Are you going to the school thing?
Can we carpool?
That sort of thing. So there are a number of ways that you can simply create a housing area where you've intentionally created situations for people to interact without forcing it.
The bad version of that, this is the worst version ever, is you say, hey, we'll have a social director and we'll have a bingo night and everybody will get together or we'll have an Easter egg hunt and everybody gets together.
That doesn't work because those are artificial ways to force people together and they don't like it, not many show up, it doesn't have any lasting value.
I talk about the fact that my best living situation was in my worst physical room, which was a dorm room in a college when I was 18 through 20, I guess, 21.
And the reason was that the dorm gave me access to all kinds of people my age that I was interested in, exactly the people I want to hang out with, etc.
And it sort of made it unimportant what the physical room looked like.
So if you imagine that your communities could be built around common interests, If you just build them around a common interest, whether it's raising kids, or it's being single, or it's even people who work at home, people who have startups, just a common interest.
It could be sports, whatever.
People have a natural reason to interact.
And if you give people natural reasons to interact instead of, bingo night at 3 o'clock, everybody come and make friends, they will do it themselves, and then that works.
So you have to get that right if you want to take care of suicide, if you want to take care of education, if you want to take care of anything.
You've got to get the social element of the physical buildings and how they're structured and what they can do.
Lifestyle first, furniture second, and then you build as cheaply as you can around that, and then you've got something.
The normal way that homes are built is opposite of that.
So here's the normal way building happens.
A builder will get a good piece of property that's in the right part of the world and they'll build homes that look good and that people think, oh, I would like to spend time in that home.
It feels good. Everything looks good.
But then they get in their home and they realize that they've lived there for five years and they've never met the neighbor.
Because the person who builds a home and sells it to them isn't really about that.
They're not about your social interactions.
They're about selling you a house.
So if you start first from how do we get good social interactions and then figure out what you have to build to get that.
Now you probably heard from me, if not somewhere else, that Bill Gates is, I don't know how far along he is, but he's working on the idea of building sort of a city from scratch.
And I don't know what that means to Bill Gates, but I'm assuming it's oriented toward low-income people because this would be consistent with his charitable work in recent years.
You also saw that Kanye West has already started hiring architects to design what will be his future ideas about architecture and building.
And the first design that came out of that, to my surprise actually, was for low income, easy to build, and yet very attractive housing with good light and easy to clean and maintain.
I think there's probably still a lot more work to do to get it to lifestyle.
But you see two of the most creative, smartest, richest people who are very into this idea of building good and emphasis on good housing that also just happens to be perfect for people who don't have a lot of money.
And it might be the one and only way you can solve the problem That people are too expensive now.
If all you're doing is trying to pay for people's health care and housing through raising taxes, you've got a demographic problem.
There will be too many old people, too many poor people, too many people whose skills did not keep up with the robots to just tax the people who are left.
You need to figure out how people can have a great life, not just okay, But a great life by a community that is designed more rationally.
And so when you see Bill Gates is working on it, I know Elon Musk is building those free bricks, and he's got at least one other project where we're building inexpensively as part of it, with robots in particular.
You see Kanye working on it.
You see me working on it.
You see Bill Pulte working on it.
So you're seeing Well, here's the thing.
Not one of the people I mentioned needs to be doing this.
What's the one thing we all have in common, all the people I just mentioned?
We don't need to be doing this.
Because we can all afford to live in a pretty good house.
Everybody I mentioned already has their own house.
We're literally doing it.
I think I could speak, at least in this limited way, I think I could speak for everybody I just mentioned.
This looks like one of the biggest problems in the world is how to get our lives more meaningful by putting us back in contact with other human beings and being able to afford to live into our old age.
Those look like the world's biggest problems because a lot of the other stuff is getting solved, right?
And it's not an accident that you see the people who live in the future, at least in their minds.
You know, Kanye lives in the future.
Bill Gates lives in the future, and in fact has been one of the best predictors of the future of all time.
Elon Musk, you know, he's already on Mars.
This guy lives in the future, right?
Bill Pulte lives in the future.
So when you see all these people who live in the future start focusing on the same problem, that means something.
We're all seeing the same thing.
I'll take myself out of the group just for this following statement.
These are people who are good at predicting the future.
So if you see them all seeing the same future, that means something.
Yeah. Glenn Beck has a design based on Walt Disney concepts.
You know, I'd be interested in that.
Because the Walt Disney concepts, I assume you mean for the theme parks, are probably well thought out in terms of human interaction.
I'm going to take you outside to my balcony.
You want to come outside? Because I want to give you a great example.
I've had to build a good place.
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