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Sept. 3, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
50:10
Episode 206 Scott Adams: Music as a Drug, My Immortality, BLM’s Bad Strategy, PragerU, Monkeying Up
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Hey everybody!
Come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And do you know what that means?
I think you do.
It means you've all got to get in here, scramble to find your beverage, your cup, your mug, your vessel of liquids.
And it's time, when we hit a thousand users, for the simultaneous sip.
Watch that counter.
As soon as it hits a thousand, here it comes.
Oh, that was good.
so Simultaneous sippin'.
Okay, okay.
If you've been watching my Twitter feed this morning, I know what you want to talk about.
You want to talk about a tweet about music, which I retweeted this morning from Alexander J.A. Cortez, who said, this was Alexander's tweet, Music is mental programming.
Do not ever discount its power.
It changes your psyche on a deep level.
And then I retweeted that with my own comment, and I said, this is why I don't listen to music, literally.
Now, when I say I don't listen to music literally, the pedantic people said, well, literally, you don't listen to music?
I hear music, incidentally, because it's always in the environment, you know, other people are playing it, or it's on in the gym, whatever.
But I don't make a practice of injecting myself with music on a regular basis.
And the reason is, That music is designed to move you.
And the bad music probably doesn't.
But mostly the music you listen to is the stuff that made it to the top.
You know, the best people making the best music with the best production.
And it is designed to move you.
To move your brain.
To put it in a mode.
Now, if you use music medicinally, that's probably fine.
In other words, if you have a playlist that you use at the gym Or when you're exercising, and the playlist gets your energy up and that helps you exercise, I would say that's a medicinal use of music.
It's probably fine.
And especially if you're not paying attention to the lyrics too much.
But most music we listen to just because we like it.
And if you just like it, you're letting in all of the thoughts and the lyrics and the emotions of the author.
And they may not be linked up with what it is you need to get done, what you need to do.
How many people have you seen listening to music while trying to work?
Or kids listening to music while they're trying to do their homework?
Have you ever tried to talk a kid out of their headphones while they're doing homework?
This is more of a modern problem.
If your kids are already grown, you haven't had to deal with this.
But you can't talk a kid out of their headphones these days unless you would remove all of their technology.
You would almost have to physically beat a child to take music away from them in today's day and age because of the addiction.
Now, can you listen to music, which has lyrics and is moving your brain, and also concentrate and do a good job on your schoolwork or your job or whatever?
Plenty of people are going to tell you yes because they like doing it.
And I'm not arguing that people like it.
That's why they do it.
I'm arguing that it's a drug and people can go to work when they're drunk.
It happens all the time. People can do their job when they're drunk.
I just don't recommend it.
So, the trouble with music as programming is that you can't always control it.
There are certainly cases where you could use music medicinally to match the music to the mood you're trying to produce, and then you would be programming yourself to some productive place.
But if you're just listening to music, you're taking it like a drug.
You're taking it whether it's a good time to take it or not.
You're taking it whether this song matches your mood or not.
You're taking it whether the music takes you into an angry place when you shouldn't be angry.
That's the worst use of music, and it's the common way we listen to it.
We listen to just the songs we like, and they're randomly going to influence you.
So, that's my point on music.
In my Twitter feed today, you may have seen that I retweeted a story about a company that is already reproducing simulations of dead people.
They can take photographs of people, if they have enough photographs, and they mash it up, and they can create a 3D rotating object.
I'm sure you've also seen that, I think other companies, Can have a character, let's say a CGI character, speak in exactly the tone and voice of a real person.
And so now we have the voice and the look, and they're feeding off of information that's available on the internet about these dead people.
So when I tell you that my legitimate, honest, I'm not exaggerating one bit...
Plan for many years has been to live long enough and see the internet with enough of myself that I could be immortal, meaning that I will be recreated easily and I'll have something pretty close to a full personality because of the body of my work that's all public.
So if you were to look at all of the books I've written, the blogs I've written, the comics I've written, the periscopes I've done, and at some point some AI can just go out and scrape all that stuff and put it together, you would have a pretty good picture of who I was, at least on average.
Now the problem, of course, is that people are not the same people that they were.
So for example... I'm not the same as I was when I was 20, so I don't want that part to be immortal.
I want something closer to my 60-year-old mind to be the permanent one.
Because that's sort of when you've learned the most and pretty soon my mental processes predictably should decline, at least in my organic state.
So I'd like to sort of lock in whatever happens in the next few years for me.
Now, some people have said, hey, you can't reproduce consciousness, so even if you were reproduced, your consciousness wouldn't go with you, so therefore, you know, it's not really you.
Here's my argument to that.
Every part of my current physical body, my organic body, is different from the cells I was born with.
So if my body has already been 100% replaced with a different body, and that's just objectively true, right?
All of my cells have been replaced since birth.
But I still have the same consciousness, don't I? So it seems that the consciousness can change from one physical form to another because it already did.
Now other people say, oh, but that's organic to organic and it's all based on your DNA. So really that's a sort of a continuation of your consciousness.
That's not a new body.
Okay, some people say that a simulation cannot have consciousness.
Here's what I say.
Do you have consciousness right now?
Do you have consciousness? Here's my argument for why a simulation can have consciousness.
Because you are one.
Now, when I say you are one, do I mean that like with 100% certainty?
No, I do not. I mean it with 99.999999% certainty.
Why? It's the argument you've heard a number of times from me, which is if a simulation is possible, lots of them will be created.
So the odds of you being an original species versus one of the many simulations created by that species is vanishingly small.
So you don't have to ask yourself, can consciousness exist in the simulation?
Because it's you. In all likelihood, and I mean almost all likelihood, as in 99.99999%, you are a simulation.
Do you have consciousness?
Sure you do. It's the impression you have of yourself.
Could you create another simulation that believed and acted as though it had consciousness and had something like feelings and everything that we would call consciousness?
Absolutely. In my opinion, that won't even be hard.
It might take 20-30 years, but it's not the hard part of the deal.
So, the technology is coming together to execute my plan of living forever and bringing my consciousness over to the other device.
Now, somebody brought up the thought experiment of the Star Trek transporter.
Let's say the transporter effectively, if we can imagine inventing a transporter, not the actual Star Trek TV show one, but if you were to create a transporter, Would it destroy the person, the original, and then only create a copy?
And what would that feel like?
Because the person who was destroyed would end consciousness.
They would no longer feel anything.
And suddenly, at the other end of the transporter, ping!
Something that is a copy of you would wake up with full consciousness and all of your memories.
Would that creature, who would be really just another creature, would it still have consciousness and would it still be you?
I say yes.
Because, as I said, even the adult you is all new cells from the time you were born.
So if you could just speed up that process and create an all new you more instantly, it would be all new cells, Still you.
Still based on your DNA. Still has your memories.
Feels what you feel.
Remembers being in the transporter.
I say that's consciousness.
No problem. Let's talk about a few more things.
I hear that Japan...
has discontinued buying oil from Iran or they're in the process of doing that.
And Japan was apparently a pretty big customer.
Here's what's interesting about the Iranian situation.
Does it seem to you that our president is very quiet about Iran?
Let me check in with you.
Doesn't it feel as though President Trump is unusually quiet?
And is he ever unusually quiet?
Pretty unusual, right?
Here's why I think he's quiet.
Because everything's going his way.
I've never seen this before.
I don't think I've ever seen the variables line up the way they're lining up.
Now, I'm not saying that's all because of President Trump.
Some of it is timing and luck and you have to be in the right place at the right time.
But even if you're in the right place at the right time, you still have to do the right things or you're not going to get the right result.
And it seems to me that the President's approach here is all business.
Now what does it mean to have a business person being president?
And how is that different from, let's say, a politician being president?
Well, let me tell you how. Somebody just surfaced a 2013 tweet from Senator John McCain.
In which he was mocking Ahmadinejad for saying that Iran, or who was it, Rouhani?
He was mocking one of the Iranian leaders for saying they wanted to put an Iranian in space.
And McCain actually joked that we've already put a monkey in space.
I had to actually check to see if that was a real tweet.
Just think about that. So McCain, who was a politician, not a business person, trying to get some kind of a good result with Iran, right?
Because why would you want a bad result in terms of the United States interest?
You want a good result with all countries.
And he tweeted comparing the leader of Iran with an actual monkey.
This is one of our senior statespersons.
Now, in business, let's compare that to business.
The political model is that if you have problems with another country, you treat their leaders like they're despicable.
That's the typical political way to approach things.
If we have a problem with your country, your leaders are bad people.
And we hate you and we're going to let you know we hate you and we're going to make it worse by saying we hate you.
That's how politicians have always operated.
Now move to the business world.
Let's say IBM wants to do a deal with Facebook.
I'm just picking two random businesses.
If the leaders of one of those countries hate the leaders of the other company, how do they act?
Well, they don't act like McCain.
If IBM wants to do a deal with Facebook, IBM does not call Zuckerberg a monkey.
No. Business people don't act that way.
They can hate the other company, but if they need to do business with them, they're going to be polite.
Right? You're going to get the business done because that's the bigger issue than insulting somebody on the other side and then losing the deal.
Take President Trump's approach to North Korea.
He's being businessman tough on sanctions and all that stuff.
But he's saying, but personally, Kim Jong-un and I, we get along.
I like him personally.
I think he's a good leader.
But we need to get this business taken care of.
You know, it's good for business if we're on the same side, at least in terms of economics and defense stuff.
How productive is that compared to insulting him as it had been the normal political process?
What is President Trump's approach with Russia?
All business.
It's all business. Hey Putin, I like you.
Personally. I have no problem with Putin.
He seems like a strong leader.
I think we could do business with him.
But, you know, we're going to have to sanction you for some of these things you did.
But it's just business.
It's not personal.
So what is President Trump doing with Iran?
He's saying that the situation with Iran is destabilizing to the area.
They're supporting terrorists, etc.
And we'd like to be friends someday.
Is he insulting Iran?
No. And you don't see Netanyahu doing that either.
He's talking about the leaders need to change their act or perhaps the population needs to make a change in their leadership.
But it's not personal.
Not in the way it used to be anyway.
And you see how powerful that is.
So when I say, isn't it unusual that the president is not really weighing in on Iran?
And the reason is that business is taking care of it.
And if business is taking care of it, you don't need to get personal.
So when Japan says we're going to stop shipments from Iran, and the European countries say, well, even though we could make deals with Iran, it's a little risky because the United States is mucking up the business here.
And so it seems to me an insanely productive situation Smart approach to take all of the emotion out of the Iranian situation and say, look, it's just business.
If the Iranians want to do business, you've got to meet the minimum standard of people we can do business with.
But it's not about you personally.
It's not even about the leaders.
It's definitely not about the people.
The Iranian people, we love them.
We love the Iranian people.
Why would we have any problem with them at all?
And indeed, I think the Iranian people are far more pro-American, pro-Western, and just pro-people than the leadership is.
So, you're seeing an amazing, I think...
approach to Iran and the Middle East, an amazing approach, but it's all depersonalized.
And this is that negative space I tell you to look for.
Look for what is missing.
And what's missing is all the personal stuff.
You know, all the threats, all the emotional approach.
Iran is just business.
And it's going in exactly the right direction.
Now there's a story that You probably know that PragerU, an online site that has a number of videos on topics often or always, I'm not sure, but right-leaning, sort of a conservative channel.
And apparently it was dropped, their traffic got eliminated on Facebook, and it took them a while to figure out why, and when they got to the bottom of it, yeah, Prager University, when they got to the bottom of it, Facebook said, oops, it was a mistake, and it was a mistake by one person who made a judgment call, and that person was just wrong.
And so we're re-educating that person.
And in the meantime, they reinstalled the page.
Now, I'm always okay with people correcting errors.
And I've said this before, but if you're going to judge people, And judging people is risky business.
Some would say that's God's business.
It's not human's business to judge other people.
But I'll tell you the rule that I try to live by.
I try not to judge people by their mistakes.
I try to judge them by their response to the mistake.
Because if you judge people by their mistakes, you would just freaking hate everybody.
Because we're all making mistakes all the time.
So it's a terrible standard.
But the way people correct their mistakes, the way they address them, whether they apologize, whether they come up with a new plan, whether they try to make it right, whatever they do about it is a lot more Revealing about who they are.
And it's who I would like to support them to be, usually.
Assuming it's a productive thing.
So, Facebook has acknowledged the error.
They have apologized.
And they have done something specific to fix it.
So far, Facebook, thumbs up.
So, in my personal standard of how anyone should act...
Admitting the problem, apologizing, and then saying what you're doing about it.
That's it, 100%.
So I have no complaints about how it was handled.
But the question you have to ask yourself is this.
How often does it happen to left-leaning sites?
And I don't know, has it ever happened to any site that was just left-leaning but hadn't broken any rules but got shadow banned or banned?
Yeah, so that problem has to be addressed.
And I think the congressional testimonies coming up this week will probably get us a little closer to an understanding of that situation.
So I'm going to give Facebook an A-plus for how they handled it.
Everybody makes a mistake, but how they handled it, A+. But we still have that question.
Why does it seem to happen in one area more than others?
Or is that just our impression?
It's entirely possible.
It's just confirmation bias.
Maybe I just notice it more because of the media I follow or whatever.
Alright. Did I already talk about music?
Yeah, I did. Okay, forgetting.
Let's also talk about...
Oh, so Tim Pool tweeted today a copy of a book, an MIT book.
It's in something called The New Hacker's Dictionary.
And he actually found the phrase monkey up As one of the many phrases in this new hacker's dictionary from 1990 from MIT Press, I guess.
So he has demonstrated, for those who are wondering, is it a real saying to say monkey up?
Because a lot of people said, hey, why is DeSento saying monkey up?
That's not even a saying.
But apparently monkey up?
is the same and in the 90s it was already written down as legitimate enough and common enough that it was in a book.
Now when I heard monkey up I thought it was a mash-up of monkeying around with and mucking up.
So to me saying monkey up When you've got muck up and you've got monkeying around, it just sounds like you mashed them together and that anybody would know what you meant and it would be a perfectly acceptable mashup.
You know, just like sampling for music would be.
Just throw that in there to get you excited.
Alright, so that has been established.
I want to talk about Black Lives Matter's bad strategy.
I'm going to take you to the whiteboard.
You didn't know there was going to be a whiteboard topic.
Oh, yes, there is. We're going to talk about strategy.
Hold on for a second. All right.
This is life strategy.
I have simplified the world.
Just for the point of making a point.
Obviously, there are more people in the world than the ones I'm going to mention.
So if you're, you know, Asian or Hispanic, don't worry.
I'm not forgetting you exist.
I'm just simplifying to make the point easier to talk about.
And I'm going to be talking about a success strategy.
If you were to imagine the world as a lot of Republicans, right?
I know there are other people in the world, but just simplifying.
There are Republicans in the world, and everybody would agree that some people who identify as Republicans are definitely racists.
Like, definitely the bad kind of racists.
Nobody would argue that point.
Somebody would argue, what percentage?
So if you are a Republican, you'd probably say, well, it's really just a tiny percentage.
I don't even meet those.
You know, I've been a Republican forever, and I barely can ever even think of even meeting anybody who thought like that.
If you're black, you're probably thinking, well, maybe a small percentage actually wear the KKK robes, but really you're all sort of in the same game.
Or you're supporting people who, like President Trump, that you think is racist.
So it's all sort of the same big racist mess here.
Then you have the... I haven't gotten to my point yet, right?
We're just setting it up. And then you've got the black community of which some percentage of them are Black Lives Matter or support them.
Again, none of this is drawn to scale because the scale won't matter for the point I'm going to make.
So it doesn't matter what percentage these are.
I'm just saying they exist and we all agree that there's some percentage in each group.
Now here's the strategy part.
Let's say you're a young white kid, like I was, who grew up in modest means.
So I literally moved to California with a couple thousand dollars and two suitcases.
That was to start my whole life.
And an education, which was probably the more important part.
And when I tried to succeed, can anybody succeed without any help?
Is it possible to succeed in this world completely by yourself, like nobody helps you do anything?
Not really.
Success, this might be close to 100% true.
I think it's 100% true, right?
But it's close enough to 100% true, I'm going to act like it is, that you need other people to be part of your journey.
People to give you advice, people to hire you, people to recommend you, people to give you advice, etc.
Now let's say you're Black Lives Matter.
And you've decided to brand this side, who happen to have most of the power at the moment.
Let's say you've branded them as all racists.
And they know it.
Let's say they're aware of the fact that you as an individual have branded them all racists.
Are these people now available to you to help you on your journey?
I don't think so. I think you took them off the table.
These pieces are off the table.
So now, if you're black and you want to succeed in life, your pool of people that can help you is now limited to other people who think like you.
And that pool, the reason that there is such a thing as Black Lives Matter is because this pool doesn't have the power, doesn't have the connections, and doesn't yet have enough money to be as helpful as this larger group.
So you can be totally right about your opinion, or you could be totally wrong about it.
And that has nothing to do with my point, right?
So Black Lives Matter's opinion of this group could be totally right, Could be totally wrong.
Could be a correct version of it.
Doesn't matter. For my point today, none of that matters.
Because if you want to succeed, treating all of these people like racist assholes is the very worst thing you could do.
Now let me say it in an even more stark way.
Here was me, a little white boy back in...
1979, getting out of college.
I also had to deal with these same people.
They weren't just Republicans, but they were white people who had power, white people who had connections, white people who could help me.
How much did I love all of these white people?
Well, some of them I liked, but most of them I didn't like.
They weren't people who I agreed with.
They had views I found abhorrent.
They were jerks to me.
They were dismissive to me.
Because I was young and I didn't have any power, they treated me like I was dirt.
How often does a young white male get treated like garbage by the people in their own group who have already succeeded and already have money?
Pretty typical.
I'm not going to say it's comparable to racism because I could never understand what it would be like to be in this group trying to deal with this group.
It's got to be harder. But what I'm telling you is you suck up a lot of unpleasantness You don't get to success unless you eat a mile of shit from these people.
Because these people have what you need.
If you're not working these people, you're not trying.
You're not even trying.
So one of the reasons that I noticed that many of you were having the same reaction I was having To Hawk Newsome, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter and in New York.
And he was sort of changing his approach to paint the entire Republican Party, or at least the Trump supporters, more Trump supporters, as being at least racist or racist supporting, which would be similar enough to being a racist.
I think most of us had the same opinion.
We felt... Like our guts falling out of our stomachs.
Because many of us were quite serious about saying, if you come over here, we've got a lot of shit for you.
We've got stuff you need.
And we want to give it to you.
We want to help as hard as we can.
But Hawk took that off the table.
Honestly, it was heartbreaking.
I took it pretty hard.
Some of you noticed that I've been in an angry mood the last couple of days.
That angry mood is probably quite a bit because of this.
I saw such an opportunity that was lost.
Now who do you blame?
Who do you blame for this situation?
Do you blame Hawk?
I'm not quite there.
I'm not ready to blame him.
Because here's my thing.
Where does everybody's opinion come from?
Are people born with opinions?
They are not. We're not born with opinions.
Our opinions are a result of our environment and our situation, our history.
But more importantly, when it's talking about President Trump, most of us did not have a President Trump.
Well, none of us had a President Trump for most of our experience.
So we're getting pretty much everything we know is coming from the sources of news that are feeding us.
So it's your CNNs, your MSNBCs, your New York Times, your Washington Posts, and on and on and on, your NBCs, your ABCs, your CBS. Now these folks, the black community, they're not watching a lot of Fox News, right?
So it's fair to say that most of their, you know, these are generalizations, obviously.
Nothing I say here applies to every person.
I hope we're adult enough to know that.
So, this is who's feeding them.
Can you blame somebody here Who is absorbing this?
Can you blame them for saying, holy hell, these people are so bad, I don't even want to frickin' talk to them.
I don't even want to be in the same room with these people.
It's a perfectly natural reaction.
So who do I blame?
I don't blame Hawk.
I blame these guys.
Because their business model is based on, you know, getting people worked up.
And they have probably some agenda behind it, but their business model guarantees that they'll look for a conflict because that's where all the cliques are.
So we have this situation where the black community is completely locked out of the most fruitful path for success Which is to take advantage of the resources and the connections and the help that helps white people.
The reason white people have an easier time is because they're dealing with other white people even if they don't like them.
And those other white people are helping them in a variety of ways.
The black community has locked itself out Because these guys have told them to do it.
So this is the programming that is absolutely decimating the black community.
And these assholes are the problem.
Do I seem like I've got a little attitude about it?
Look at the damage.
And look at the frickin' damage that these guys are doing.
How hard would it be for the black community to say...
Hey, we've got a new president.
Let's keep an open mind.
We've got some policies.
These are some things we can get behind.
Hey, I'll give you some concrete examples.
There's a prison reform package.
Does the black community support the prison reform package or not support it?
This is one that the Trump administration is putting together.
I don't know. Do you?
Do you know the answer to that question?
I don't know. I don't even think they're talking to him.
If they did support a particular package, if the black community said, look, we don't like it the way it is, but if you would just add this element or tweak it this way, we're really going to be on board with that.
It might not get you the votes, but you'd be moving in the right direction to eventually maybe get a few votes.
Why not do that?
Why not work with the people who have the power, with the people who've got the authority?
Well, the reason they can't is because they can't even be in the same room with them.
Let me ask you this.
If the President of the United States invited a leader of Black Lives Matter, let's not talk about Hawk in particular, but just a leader of Black Lives Matter, to come to the White House and maybe listen to him and talk to him, what would happen to that leader?
Well, that leader would be excommunicated, I think, because these people have said, you can't even talk to those people.
They're so vile.
They're so racist.
You shouldn't even be in the same room with them.
And if you do, you're going to hear about it.
You saw that pushback with Kanye, just having a conversation with the president.
But imagine that, you know, multiplied by a million.
Kanye has the ability to float above it.
He's a rare personality in a rare situation.
But the average person can't float above that.
The average person is locked in this little prison over there thanks to their jailers.
Let's call these the jailers.
Now, I'm not saying that anybody is having a meeting.
They're not colluding.
They're not saying, hey, let's get together and make things bad for the black community.
Nothing like that. Because, in fact, many of these people are African American.
They're not trying to hurt themselves.
It's just the effect of it.
So the effect of people pursuing their own interests, the effect of their business model, the effect of some personal biases against the president has completely taken the black influence off the table.
And it bothers me.
It bothers me a lot.
So I just wanted to...
I just wanted to talk about that because I needed to get that off my chest.
Alright, what would happen if Trump invited Kaepernick to the White House?
Well, I think the same would happen to Kaepernick.
I think Kaepernick wouldn't be able to go because I think And I don't know that Kaepernick would be wrong about this, by the way.
So this is not a criticism of Kaepernick.
I think that he would lose credibility with the people he's trying to represent.
And so he might make a reasonable decision not to do it.
What's your personal reason?
I don't know what the personal reason is.
I didn't understand that question.
Let me add some positivity to Black Lives Matter.
So one of the things that Black Lives Matter What has gotten right in terms of persuasion is that that saying is very catchy.
And even if you disagree with it, let's say you...
I hope nobody is disagreeing that black lives matter, but some people disagree with it in the indirect way of saying, oh, all lives matter, all lives matter.
Why are you saying just black lives matter?
So that tends to be the trap that a lot of white people fall into and it just makes them look like racists.
So that also makes us clever because it creates kind of a trap.
But here's the cool thing.
Even when you're arguing against the motto, you're repeating the motto.
So no matter how many times you say, I think Black Lives Matter is unproductive, or whatever you're saying about the saying, because maybe you think all lives matter or whatever, or you prefer police lives or blue lives, whatever.
Even as you're arguing against it, you have to keep repeating it in your mind.
And the repeating of Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, even when you're arguing against it, what have I taught you?
Well, what I've taught you is it's convincing you that Black Lives Matter, which was very much a central theme.
So in terms of a message and changing the mood and the attitude of the country and raising awareness, etc., The Black Lives Matter motto, I'm not sure who came up with it, but it's really brilliant, persuasion-wise.
Even if you're disagreeing with the techniques and the methods and stuff, persuasion-wise is great.
I've said the same thing about Kaepernick and about kneeling for the flag.
My opinion is that I wouldn't respect the flag that people couldn't protest.
This is just me.
I'm not going to try to persuade you of this.
But the reason that I'm fairly positive about the protesters, the NFL protesters, mostly Kaepernick, the others are a little weaker forms of Kaepernick, is that the fact that it offended so many people and that it was a protest in what people thought was the wrong place, it doesn't belong in this football area, that's what made it work.
That's why we're talking about it.
So as a protest, it was really good.
And I think that they did, between Black Lives Matter and Kaepernick and the NFL kneelers, I think they took a backburner issue, police actions against unarmed people, especially black people, at least in their telling of it.
They raised the profile of that issue.
That's good protesting.
They don't have a result yet, but in terms of raising the issue, that's good news.
Somebody said, is burning the flag the same?
Yes. And again, I'm not going to try to convince you to adopt this point of view.
I'll just tell you my point of view.
I would not respect a flag that an American citizen can't burn for protest.
Because what is the flag except that flag?
I mean, its most central meaning is, you know, freedom.
Freedom of speech, freedom from the government.
Now, if you say, my God, burning the flag or disrespecting the flag hurts me personally.
It's disrespectful, it's hateful, I hate it.
Yes, it's all of those things.
That's what makes it an effective protest.
So it's supposed to do those things.
That's why people do it. That's the part that's working.
But would you respect a flag that would jail you or kill you for desecrating it in protest?
I would not respect that flag.
So the flag we have, the one that's burnable, as long as you're doing a legitimate protest, right?
I don't have any respect for somebody who's just disrespectful for no particular reason.
You know, if somebody wants to use it as a floor mat, but they're just being a jerk, like, I don't like that person.
There's no protest involved, right?
But if you're doing it in public, you're doing it to raise awareness, And it works.
That's the country I want to live in.
I want to live in the country where my flag is so durable that you can burn it.
If you could destroy a flag by burning it, it wouldn't be much of a flag.
I mean, it's a symbol, right?
It's not a piece of cloth.
You can't destroy the symbol.
You can burn as many as you want.
We'll just make more. All right.
What about the flag on the moon?
Alright, I was going to try to avoid that, but you've all seen the story of, I guess it's Ryan Gosling, who did a movie about the moon landing in which they omitted the part where the American flag was stuck in the ground.
And I have semi-mixed feelings about that.
As an American, it's offensive, of course, and it's not done in the form of a protest.
So had it been a protest, I would be more positive about it and say, oh, okay, that got my attention.
It was a good protest. Hold on.
But it's done in the context of art.
So a movie is art, right?
So once you're in the art realm, some of the rules are a little different.
Secondly, it's in the context of commerce.
They're trying to sell the movie, and they're trying to sell it in other countries.
Would other countries want to consume this movie as much if it had a big old flag in it?
And the answer is, maybe not.
Would it play as well overseas if a central moment was American patriotism?
Probably not. So I think Gosling made a, let's call it an adult choice, meaning that there was no right choice.
If they put the flag in, it offends people you think they shouldn't be offended, but that's not relevant to the fact that they would be.
That would make his commercial product less valuable.
Maybe. You know, we don't know.
But as an assumption, it was a reasonable one.
Now, had they gotten away with not showing the flag and nobody noticing and everybody thinking, oh, you know, that was just a minor detail.
They didn't show every moment.
He probably could have gotten away with it just by saying, well, we didn't show every minute of the moon landing.
We just showed some, you know, theatrically interesting parts.
But because we Americans think the flag was an emotionally important part, it's obvious and being missing.
So, here's the thing.
The people making the movie have a responsibility to the investors in the movie.
They have responsibility to the other actors.
It's a business. And they have a business responsibility.
So if they made a business decision to make it more commercially good, I don't feel comfortable with that.
But it is an adult decision.
It's an adult decision because there were two ways to do it wrong and you just had to pick one of them.
That's what adults do.
Two wrong choices, you gotta pick one of them.
Now, is Gosling American?
I forget. Is he Canadian or American?
Can somebody remind me?
Am I confusing him with somebody else?
He's not Canadian, is he?
He's American. I don't know why I don't know the answer to that question.
I'll wait for somebody to tell me here he's Canadian.
Yeah, if he's Canadian, then it makes a little more sense, right?
So people are telling me he's Canadian, but the director did it.
Well, the director did it, but when you're a star of his stature, you definitely have some sway on things.
So we'll see if their decision pans out.
Obviously, it's a movie about Americans going to space, so nobody watching the movie is going to be unaware that it's an American accomplishment.
So they made a business decision.
Americans think it was the wrong decision.
We're a pretty big market.
Not probably. It will definitely hurt how well it's received in this country, but it might make it received better in other countries.
I don't know. It was a tough choice, but it was an adult choice, and it was theirs to make.
Do I find it offensive as an American?
Of course. Of course.
If you're an American, you find it offensive that they took the flag out.
But that doesn't make it the wrong choice.
I think we'll have to see how their numbers do to figure out if it was the right choice.
Some people say, it's just plain wrong.
Well, that's not a reason.
It's plain wrong means it bothers you, and it bothers me as well, so I get that part.
Dilbert is on Amazon Video.
Do I get a cut if you watch it?
Nope, I do not.
I'd like you to watch it anyway, but long ago I got squeezed out of the revenue stream.
So I don't make a penny on any watching of Dilbert on video.
In theory I would, but the way Hollywood accounting is, they throw all their costs on it and it just makes my cut be zero.
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