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Oct. 1, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:33
Episode 242 Scott Adams: Fentanyl, Flake, Canada and Other Stuff
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Hello James.
Hello Donna.
Hello Hello, Chris. Tyler and Flea.
Come on in here. Oh, I hope all of you are having a good day.
My day is not so good, but I'll tell you about that in a minute.
So, let's talk about fentanyl.
But before we do, please join me for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your cup, your mug, your beverage.
Bring it to your lips.
So you've heard of fentanyl.
It's a painkiller, a very powerful painkiller, but there's a very small margin between killing your pain and killing the person.
As a result, fentanyl is the number one drug overdose killer in the United States.
I think 72,000 people died of drug overdoses last year in the United States.
72,000 people.
72,000 people.
Died of a drug overdose in the United States last year.
Fentanyl, number one cause.
By far, fentanyl is the top cause.
I believe it was the cause of Prince's death.
I believe it was the cause of Michael Jackson's death.
And the interesting thing is that China is apparently the main source of the illegal flow.
Now that's what the United States says.
China says not so much, but you would sort of expect that.
Now, the president tweeted back in August that China was the major source of fentanyl.
And he called on China to do more.
Actually, I think he referred to it as almost a form of warfare, or some people have.
Now, if another country was shipping something to us that was killing, let's say, 30,000 people a year, doesn't that look like a war?
Because I believe Vietnam only took 50,000 American lives.
Many more were injured.
But I think the entire Vietnam War killed 50,000 Americans.
Fentanyl from China probably killed five times that many.
Eric Bolling's son, you say?
I wasn't aware that that's what killed Eric Bolling's son.
So, yesterday morning, I did my periscope.
I think many of you saw me.
And at the end of the periscope, right after that, I got a text message.
And the text message said that there was a 911 call on another line that's on my Verizon.
Yesterday I got a call right after the 911 alert.
And from my ex-wife who told me that my stepson, the little boy that I raised from the age of two, was dead. - He died last night, or maybe early in the morning yesterday, we're not sure, in his bed from what appears to be a fentanyl overdose.
The coroners found a fentanyl patch on his arm.
If you don't know what a fentanyl patch is, I didn't either.
It's a little patch. It's about this big, very small, about the size of a postage stamp.
And it's very popular now among addicts.
A little patch they put on their shoulder and it feeds a continuous flow of fentanyl.
Now that may not have been the actual thing that killed him.
It could be that he was also trying to get Xanax.
So we have some information that he was trying to score some Xanax.
Now, if you don't know this topic, you're lucky.
But Xanax is mostly counterfeit.
The Xanax that the kids are doing, the addicts are doing, is not really Xanax.
It's combinations of other drugs that people are passing off as Xanax.
And close to 100% of them are fake.
One of the prime ingredients that are in this fake Xanax are fentanyl.
So there's a fairly good likelihood that my stepson, Justin, now deceased, probably got two doses of fentanyl yesterday.
Now, we weren't...
I was surprised because it had been a long battle with addiction since he was 14.
He had a very bad head injury when he was 14 from a bicycle accident.
And he was wearing a helmet, but it was still a bad accident.
And his behavior changed after the accident.
He sort of lost He sort of lost his ability to make good decisions.
I'm not sure he ever made great decisions, but he lost his impulse control.
He lost his fear.
And in California, if you reach a certain size physically, if a teenager is a certain size, if you tell them to do something and they don't do it, You have certain recourse, but in California you don't have much.
So you can't physically restrain somebody, and you also can't keep them from getting drugs.
So somebody would really have to want to get better and he never wanted to get better.
From the time he started doing drugs, he wanted to do more drugs and that's all he wanted.
His quality of life he didn't think was good enough for a variety of reasons that didn't have anything to do with lifestyle.
So I got to watch My dead, blue, bloated son taken out on a stretcher in front of his mother and biological father.
And because of the law in California, there was actually nothing that we could do.
Now, in other states, I understand that you can actually commit somebody.
You can have them essentially locked up in some kind of rehab facility, and if they tried to walk out, they just couldn't.
But in California, if a kid wants to walk out the door, they just can.
And he would, and did.
And you know, we had a few, well.
So, if I don't see myself for a while, you'll know why.
So fentanyl, mostly from China, I understand, probably killed my son yesterday, my stepson.
So as we're negotiating with China, I hope we can do something about that problem, I understand China's doing a little bit in terms of controlling some of the instrumentation used to make these drugs, etc.
But here's my opinion.
At this level of problem, if we the United States know which Chinese executives are behind this, and I would bet we do by now, We probably know which specific pharmaceutical companies are making the drug because they're made by, I believe they're made by actual legitimate incorporated type companies in China.
But they of course know that there's big leakage and I'm sure that that's good for their profits.
But if we know who those Chinese executives are, I would like to call for their execution.
Now in China, If you mess up, if you're a Chinese executive of a company and let's say you do something where you steal some money or you cross the government in some way, they'll actually just take you out and kill you.
I'm not even sure they have due process in the usual way.
So I'd like to offer to China, to President Xi, who I do respect, that to give him first chance To take care of the problem himself.
If you don't, I think we can hold China responsible for perhaps 30,000 deaths per year in this country.
So in a very real way, we are at war with China in sort of an indirect way, not with the government per se.
But I would be in favor of our CIA or our dark intelligence people going after those executives directly.
Even at the price of substantial international problems.
So I'm calling for the death of the executives of those Chinese companies who we believe are not doing enough.
Now, I don't have all the details.
If it turns out that they are doing enough, our government probably can tell the difference.
They can probably tell the difference between trying and not trying.
But if they're not trying, I think President Xi should, for the benefit of international relations, for the benefit of being a legitimate international power, I think President Xi needs to start executing people in his own country.
If he does, I think that would be a great step.
And if he doesn't, I would be in favor of our country directly executing Chinese citizens.
Now, ideally we don't want to get caught, but I'm pretty sure we know how to kill people without getting caught.
So, those folks who may be directly or indirectly responsible for the death of my stepson, I'd like to see you die.
And I'll see what I can do to make that happen.
So, just a little bit more on this and then we'll talk about some other headlines because life does go on.
The The other observation is that, and I think Jordan Peterson says this, he talks about the complexity of life and how as life is getting harder to navigate, it's just more complicated, certain people in the society are being left behind.
They're being left behind.
And my stepson was one.
He was not well equipped to deal with the modern world.
But if you ever saw him with drugs in him, you knew that once he had the drugs in him, the drugs were his personality.
He didn't really have an independent personality and then he took drugs.
The drugs were him.
You know, he sort of became the drugs.
And he would be almost a monster.
He was 18.
And so if you don't have any personal experience with opioid addiction, it doesn't look like anything else you've ever seen.
It turns people into walking zombies who quite clearly are not in their own mind and are not in control of their actions.
Somebody says it's murder.
It's murder to kill Chinese executives of pharmaceutical companies just because they're killing 30,000 fucking people in this country a year.
30,000! 30,000 roughly.
It's, you know, maybe more than that.
Might be less than that. But do I want to kill somebody who might be responsible for 30,000 American deaths a year?
Yeah, I do. Yes, I do.
Legally or illegally, I do want them dead.
And so, I want the government to know you have my support.
If you kill them and you get caught, you have my support.
For what that's worth, which isn't much.
Alright. I've said enough about that topic.
I'm going to change topics.
California Just passed some kind of law that requires that public companies that are housed in California, that's their home base, can no longer have all-male boards.
Can't have all-male boards in California if you're a public company and your headquarters is in California.
And I had two reactions to that.
Reaction number one, It'd be good to have more gender diversity.
Sounds like a good idea.
Reaction number two, California is really the, I guess, the vanguard of the Democrat Party, wouldn't you say?
If you said, name one state that you think Democrat, it would be California.
So the Democrats have this branding evolution going on in which they try to be for all people, but the practical reality is that they're very female-focused.
So the Democratic Party, Democrats, are basically a party of women who also include other people.
And when you see a law passed in California that says, yeah, we're going to make sure by law that you diversify your boards by gender, which again, I think gender diversification is a very good thing.
Let's have some more of that.
But my question is this.
What do black men think when they hear this?
If you're a black male Democrat, We're a Hispanic male Democrat.
What do you think of the fact that the law just required women to be on boards, but not you?
There's no requirement for ethnic diversity.
Why not? Now, it might be just a practical problem.
It could be just, you know, it would just be too hard to do.
There are too many ethnicities.
How can you possibly do it?
Let's start somewhere. You know, maybe we want to get that, but you've got to start somewhere.
Those would all be good reasons, or at least rationalizations, for why the focus is on women.
But I'm not really talking about that.
My larger point about that is how can Democrats possibly win another national election?
When their priorities are so clearly woman-focused, and it appears to me completely ignoring a huge part of their base, which is black Americans, Hispanic Americans, etc.
So I see that as a real problem.
Then at the same time, Rosie O'Donnell, prominent Democrat, prominent anti-Trumper, Has made some gay slurs about Graham, Lindsey Graham.
So Rosie O'Donnell, I guess it was in a tweet, said some anti-gay slur.
Now, Rosie O'Donnell...
is a member of the LBGTQ community, so it's not the same if it comes from her, right?
So you can't say that if somebody that's in the community makes a slur about somebody in the community, it sounds the same as if somebody outside the community makes a slur.
So I won't make that case.
But it did make me think that I'm having trouble remembering the last time I saw a conservative make an anti-gay slur.
And maybe it could be just my filter is off, so I'll make this as more of a question than a statement.
Doesn't it seem to you that conservatives and Republicans and Trump supporters don't make anti-gay slurs?
Now, I don't mean that as an absolute.
So I'm talking about public discourse.
I'm not talking about what anybody says in private.
Obviously, people are anti-everything in private.
It made me think when Rosie O'Donnell was accused of making an anti-gay slur, which again I don't think is a big deal because she's part of the LGBTQ in crowd, so that's not the same kind of insult it would be if it came from the outside.
But it made me think, conservatives don't really give A rat's ass about the entire gender preference thing.
I don't think I've ever met a conservative who said anti-gay things in the past three, four years, something like that.
It feels like, as an issue, it just disappeared.
So, you know, when we're looking at all the bad news, consider the good news.
I understand that Gillum, so candidate Gillum, who's running for, what's he running for?
He's running for governor of Florida, right?
One of his staffers got fired for wearing a shirt about the assassination of President Trump.
Now, of course it makes sense that you're going to fire your staffer for wearing a shirt that advocates assassination of the president.
So this is no criticism of Gillum for having a staffer that thinks like a lot of other people and no criticism that he fired the staffer for going over the line.
The part of the story that is just jaw-dropping is that the staffer Wore that shirt in the first place.
Imagine being so deeply in your bubble that you think you can put a shirt on advocating the assassination of the President of the United States, wear it in public, and the people would say, yeah, that guy.
So it tells you how deeply diluted people are.
You know, people are diluted on both sides.
It's not limited to one side.
But when you see it like that, in such stark relief, it's astonishing.
I saw a headline that says that Steve Bannon was speculating about who might run against Trump in 2020.
And I didn't read the whole headline because the summary gave away the story.
But the summary is that Steve Bannon is predicting that Avenatti might be the one the Democrats run against Trump.
Now, I found that amusing.
Here's why. I don't think there's the smallest chance that Bannon thinks Avenatti is gonna run against Trump.
I don't think he actually thinks there's any chance that's gonna happen.
But the fact that Bannon put that out there, he sort of pushed Avenatti forward as the banner, the standard bearer for the Democrats.
It's kind of hilarious.
He was on Bill Maher.
It's kind of hilarious because to the degree that people believed him, believed that he was serious, it would raise Avenatti's profile.
And there's nothing that is less likely for the Democrats than to have another white male be their standard bearer.
There isn't the slightest chance That Avenatti could ever be the candidate for the Democrats, at least not in 2020.
Who knows what happens in 20 years?
But it was just hilarious and smart, and I gotta say, that was like one of the most clever moves to put Avenatti out there as the standard bearer for the other team.
Let's talk about Canada.
You saw the big news.
Canada has agreed to a deal.
So now we have a deal with Mexico on trade.
We have a deal with Canada on trade.
I believe I told you early on that the order of things is that we would do...
Once you've done Mexico and Canada, you've shown, you have demonstrated...
And it's no longer a one-off because now they've done it twice.
And I think they've also done South Korea.
So correct me if I'm wrong.
I think Japan is close.
Have we completed...
Somebody fact check me on here.
Has the Trump administration completed three or four trade deals?
So I'm thinking Mexico, Canada, South Korea, and then Japan.
I don't know where Japan is, if that's done or still working.
But what I predicted was that Trump would start lining up these deals.
He would do the easy ones first.
China, of course, is going to be the big one.
We would expect that one to be last.
But he will continue proving that Through example, then new deals can be made.
So the fact that Mexico, Canada, and South Korea have all made deals, and that the United States is characterizing them as better deals than before, and here's the weird part.
I believe the other countries are also characterizing them as better deals, because they have to.
Even if it's not a better deal for Mexico, even if it's not a better deal for Canada, even if it's not a better deal for South Korea, what are those governments going to tell their own people?
They're going to tell their own people, I did a good job for you, my own people.
I made a new deal with the United States and it's better for us.
Even if it isn't.
So the way this has to go is that every country is going to see that the countries that worked with us and came to a better deal are telling the world that working with us and coming to a better deal is better for them.
It's not just better for the United States, it's better for them.
Is it true? Too complicated to know.
It would be impossible for us to know and even if we read it in the news we wouldn't believe it.
It's just too complicated to know if any of these deals are good for any of the countries involved.
They're all sort of a wait and see.
But on the persuasion level Both sides are going to claim victory because that's what politicians do.
Now, if you've racked up a dozen trade deals in which every time we do it, both sides, the United States and whoever we're dealing with, does a public statement and says, man, I'm sure glad we did this new deal with the United States because it's better.
It's better for our people, too.
It's different, but it's better.
What's that do to the politics in China?
Now, China doesn't have to watch its politics in exactly the same way that a republic does or democracy does, but they still have to care because if their economy suffers and the people start believing that all you have to do is what these other countries did,
just make a deal. Because nobody in China is going to understand the complexity of the Chinese trade deals.
All they're going to know is, wait a minute, Mexico made a deal, and they say it's better.
Canada made a deal, they say it's better.
EU made a deal someday, they say it's better.
Great Britain made a deal, they say it's better.
What is wrong with our leadership when everybody else Can make a deal with the United States and proclaim it was an improvement?
Why can't China do that?
Now, of course, none of this is real because we don't know what an improvement looks like.
We really don't. We can hope it's better.
We can improve it in the margins, but we really don't know how any of this plays out.
But politically, China is in this sort of vice right now.
That's how the Trump administration has them in a vice.
And the vice is closing.
And unless I'm missing something major, I don't see anything that would make it easier for China going forward.
But I see a lot of stuff that's going to make it harder.
I mean, I see nothing but more pressure on China until we have a deal.
So I would say that Trump's strategy, which everybody called crazy, is certainly starting to pan out.
Now here's the criticism that I just saw on Twitter, and I'll read this tweet.
So here's a criticism on Twitter from random user Jav Durand.
It says, surreal watching Trump cult followers, that's all of you, you're the Trump cult followers, most of you anyway, trash Canada while swooning over Trump-Kim love affair.
So here's a criticism.
This is one of the best criticisms I've seen.
So keep in mind, this is one of the best.
They don't have anything better than this.
That's the point. It's their best criticism, and I'll read it again, that the Trump cult of followers, cult, C-U-L-T, are trashing Canada, our friend, while swooning over Trump and Kim and North Korea's, you know,
sort of a frenemy. Now, I tweeted back, as you might imagine I would, I tweeted back and said to Jav D, which approach gets you better trade deals in a denuclearized Korean peninsula?
Being too nice to Canada and too mean to Kim got us the opposite.
Figure out this puzzle and we'll let you in the cult.
After the hazing, obviously.
So, here's the thing that Trump understands.
That for some reason other people didn't understand.
And I think this has to be attributed to the difference between a government mentality and a diplomat mentality.
So Trump was hired in large part because he would bring a negotiating business person's perspective to the job as opposed to a diplomatic, politically correct perspective.
That was very clearly laid out.
That was his proposition.
I will not be politically correct.
I will not be the friendly diplomat you're used to.
I'm going to kick some ass.
I'm going to get some deals.
But wait, I'm not a bad guy because I'm pursuing a system which is better for everybody.
I'm not looking for a goal, which is to be happy or to have better trade deals per se.
I'm looking for a system.
A system is that we compete as hard as we can in a friendly competition.
And we say what we're doing.
We say, we're trying to get the best deal we can.
You, Canada, we expect you to negotiate like wounded animals.
We expect you to do the hardest negotiating you can, get the best deal you can, and to screw us as hard as you can.
That's what we expect of you.
And we're going to be doing the same.
And this system, where we both fight as hard as we can, honestly and above board, gets you to a better place.
Capitalism. Compare that to what this tweeter believed, which is that it was more important to stay friendly with our friends, Canada, than it was to have a better trade deal that both Canada and the United States thinks is better.
Or at least they say they think it's better.
What Trump knew is that negotiating hard with your friends, with your friends...
Doesn't break anything.
If you're honest, and you lay it out, and you're above board, and you're not a jerk about it, and you negotiate hard with your friends, you're fine.
What do you do with your enemies, the ones who have a nuke pointed at you?
Do you do what diplomats in the past have done?
Which is say, oh yeah, I dare you to shoot that nuke at us.
We got nukes, we're gonna nuke you too.
Well, of course, Trump did a little bit of that to frame things and make sure he had a credible threat.
But as soon as the credible threat was established, he quickly moved to the smarter approach, which is, why the heck would we be enemies with a country that has nuclear weapons?
Who wants to be an enemy with somebody who has nuclear weapons?
And by the way, we don't want anything out of North Korea.
We just want them to stop aiming their nuclear weapons at us.
That's it. So Trump made friends of our enemies and he negotiated hard with our friends.
That's what a business person does.
What does a diplomat do?
The opposite. A diplomat does the opposite.
What did the opposite get us?
Bad trade deals and a nuclear confrontation.
So, I'm fairly certain, at this point, I feel confident in saying this.
President Trump If he stopped today, let's say he gets another conservative on the court, whether it's Kavanaugh or someone else.
If after that, after the second Supreme Court nomination, if he left office today, if he just said, you know, I like golfing.
I'm just going to golf.
I'm going to leave and go golf.
He probably would be the most important president in the last hundred years.
If only because he brought a systems approach and sort of a business perspective to the job.
And once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.
In other words, every president who follows this president is going to have to answer to this.
Every president who doesn't negotiate hard with an ally country is going to have some explaining to do.
Because Trump just showed it works.
Every country that keeps being, let's say, belligerent to somebody who has nukes, Russia, China, North Korea, they've got some explaining to do.
Because now we saw Trump do it the other way, and it looks like the results are better.
So Trump did more than whatever you're watching in terms of the economy.
Those things are good.
He did more than the things he's doing with international relationships.
It's much more than that.
He brought a way of thinking, an approach, a different system, a business person's friendly competition frame to it.
Once you've seen it, You can never unsee it.
And it's never been there before.
We've never seen it before.
Now we've seen it.
It's permanent. Let me give you an example.
Until Nixon went to China, those of you who know your history know that Nixon was the most badass anti-communist president.
He was super hard on China.
But when he had an opening to go visit and maybe get things moving in the right direction, he was the perfect person to do it because he was so anti-China that it was credible when he said, hey, something's changed.
And now we can maybe have better relations.
So as soon as Nixon did that, You can't unsee it.
Everybody now understands that being the Nixon hard ass before you decide to get friendly is a model that works because now we've seen it.
Can't unsee it.
What did Trump do with North Korea?
He did the Richard Nixon play.
Why did he use the Richard Nixon play with North Korea?
You know, we're gonna be the toughest on you than anybody's ever been, unless you want to be friends.
Oh, let's be friends. Why did Trump know that would work?
Well, one reason is Nixon did it, because he already saw it.
Once you see it, it's part of the toolbox.
So Trump is adding tools to the toolbox the same way Nixon added a tool to the toolbox.
So even if Nixon went down in flames in terms of his reputation and other things, he was bad for the economy.
There were lots of bad things about Nixon, obviously.
But that one tool that he introduced to the system is permanent.
And Trump is doing the same with a set of tools.
Let's talk about Jeff Lake.
All of you know the Jeff Lake, and he has the most ironic, perfect name in the simulation.
It looked like he was going to vote for Kavanaugh, but at the last minute he sided with Chris Coons, his friend and Democrat, and sided with other Democrats to ask for a one-week investigation.
Now he was asked, I believe on 60 Minutes, if he could have done this Had he not been retiring?
And Flake said, no way.
He said all the incentives are against it.
If you want to keep your job, you actually can't do what you think is right.
He said that directly.
Clearly and unambiguously he said, no, I would not have done this except that I'm leaving the job.
Think about that.
The only person who made a difference was the guy who's leaving.
This whole battle over the nomination, in the end, it came down to the one person who was leaving, because that person was the only honest broker.
Now say what you will about Flake, and I know he's got his haters, but he was the only honest player in this whole saga.
And he said directly that even he wouldn't have been honest, except that he's already quit.
He has nothing to lose.
The only honest person.
What the hell does that tell you about our system?
There was one honest person.
But here's the good news.
There were several hundred liars who, it turns out, didn't have any power because they couldn't get their way.
There was only one person who mattered.
Just one person.
One person who didn't give a shit.
So thank you, Jeff Flake.
I am in favor of the one-week delay because I think that it's reasonable.
Now, I know a lot of people say, I know it's reasonable sounding, but they're going to delay the delay and it's really just a trick, just like Kim Jong-un is playing the president.
You suckers, don't you see this play?
It's just a trick. Well, yes, it is a trick and it is a delay.
But they also painted themselves in a corner by saying that a week is all you need.
They've been saying from the start, you just need a week, all you need is a week.
So the president gave them a week.
What did they say? They say, of course.
Of course, they say.
They say a week might not be long enough.
So they need some out to be able to say that the president narrowed, they say he narrowed, now they're saying he's narrowing the investigation.
To which I say, don't you have to narrow that investigation?
The day that you say it's only going to take a week, you've narrowed the investigation.
Because everybody knows you can't do anything in a week, except talk to the same people you talk to, ask a few extra questions.
So the Democrats, by pushing forward this completely ridiculous standard that something could be deeply investigated in a week, because they did it once before with Anita Hill, Trump just accepted their standard and said, all right, I'll take you a week.
Nothing's going to happen. Well, let me say, that's not a confident prediction because something could happen.
There are always surprises.
But I think that even if a new allegation came up, a new thing, that people would discount it as being too nakedly political.
So I think the president has a pretty good chance of just getting through the week and getting his nomination done.
We'll see. I'm seeing, and now of course the goalposts have moved, to the question of whether Kavanaugh lied in his testimony on the little stuff.
Because if he lied on the little stuff under oath, lying under oath is disqualifying.
But here's the thing.
Lying under oath about things that would simply embarrass other people for no good reason and are not central to the main point of the proceedings doesn't look disqualifying to me.
And I would say this if the parties were reversed and the judge was 35 years of exemplary, incredible judge, fair, lived a life that people would want to model.
If all that was true and the only thing you had to say about him Is that he lied on some trivial stuff like, let's say, the meaning of the yearbook statements or how much he drank.
If those are the only things he lied about, or maybe some trivial stuff like that, then it wouldn't matter what party he was.
It wouldn't matter what the situation was.
I'd say, meh. It just doesn't matter.
And indeed, it's true that if you lie under oath about immaterial parts, you don't really get the same treatment as if you lie about material things.
So I would say that the things that he's accused of lying about clearly are immaterial.
Somebody was just prompting me to say something about temperament.
So the word temperament is being used a lot.
It was used against President Trump, saying he had a bad temperament, and now it's being used against Kavanaugh because he got pretty worked up.
He got pretty worked up during his questioning.
And the question I ask is this.
Society has largely agreed, even if you don't agree, but society has sort of, the consensus is that the word hysterical, when applied to any woman, is sexist.
And I would agree with that.
That feels like a fair statement, if we also accept that some people don't know it, it's considered sexist.
So there are probably a lot of people who use the word hysterical, that are not thinking of it necessarily in a sexist way.
But they need to catch up, right?
It is one of those words that was based on hysterectomy, you know, it has to do with women.
So historically it's an insulting term for women and I would agree that that's true.
But what I'm asking is this.
When do we ever see women accused of having a bad temperament?
Have you ever seen that?
It feels like temperament is the word that people use against men.
Because you say, well, he's got a bad temperament, and he's big, he's a male, so he's a little bit dangerous.
I'd be afraid of that temperament.
So I would suggest that while hysterical is an insulting sexist word, and you probably shouldn't use it if any woman is the subject of that word.
But I would suggest the same thing about the word temperament for men.
If you're saying that Trump has a bad temperament, Kavanaugh has a bad temperament, do we ever see that applied to a woman?
And I can't remember any time I've seen that word applied to a woman.
Now, there may be worse words.
You might use the B word and other worse words that were sexist in their own way.
Well, let's have a fair standard.
Goodbye, troll.
Let's have a fair standard about use of words.
If some are sexist, maybe others are too.
Let's keep that in mind.
All right, here's my most controversial but least important point of the day.
I tweeted around a little graph that showed that the percentage of young people who are still living at home spiked around 2007-2008.
Now of course the cause of the initial spike is that the economy imploded and so it was harder, especially at the low end of the jobs market, to get jobs.
So it makes perfect sense that the number of people staying at home skyrocketed in 2008.
But it also coincidentally, 2007 is when the iPhone came out.
So the increase of people living at home, the start of it matches both the iPhone and the bad economy.
Now I think the bad economy was, of course, Of course, the main reason for the spike.
So nobody's questioning the main reason.
But even as the economy improved, and all Obama lovers will tell you that in the last four years of the Obama administration, things were going better.
Still, that doesn't mean that the people at the low end are getting jobs.
They may still not be getting jobs that are good enough to move out of the mom's house.
So I get it and I understand that the economy is the major variable causing the initial gigantic shift.
But here's my hypothesis.
And when I made the tweet, I had hoped that people would see it as a provocative question and not some sign that I'd made a conclusion about the one and only variable being iPhones.
But of course people over interpreted it and the trolls came after me.
So let me clarify.
Here's my hypothesis. And I'll just use this anecdote.
I realize anecdotes don't extend to the world, but just to paint the picture here.
So when I moved to California, and I had essentially no money, I rented a one room with no window, like literally a windowless room, and a bathroom that I shared with four other people, I think, or something, down the hall.
And that's all I could afford.
Because moving out of the house wasn't optional.
I was definitely moving out of the house.
And I worked very hard because I didn't like being in a windowless room.
And so my life improved through hard work and, you know, I took classes and I took training courses and I did everything that I could do to be able to afford slightly better places until I live in a very nice place now.
And I was asking myself, what was it that caused me to work through that tough situation to a better situation?
And part of it is the pain.
There's a degree of pain that being poor inflicts on you because you have no source of entertainment.
You don't have any connection.
You can't date. If you don't have money and you also don't have a smartphone, you don't have a social life.
If you don't have a car, a smartphone, or money, and you're young, you don't have anything.
It's painful, and you'll work as hard as you can, and you'll put up with a lot to get out of that situation and into a better one.
Now, compare that to, let's say, a 20-something who, because of the job prospects, Hasn't left the house yet.
And they've got their smartphone.
And their smartphone is importing to them, you know, a form of a cyber social life.
It's insanely stimulating.
It's designed to stimulate the same things as drugs.
And they're getting just a continuous flow of bam, bam, bam, this feels good while they're sitting at home.
They don't even have to shop.
Mom is making dinner.
So they go from their nice room in their house, probably with their own bathroom, play with their phone all day.
Mom makes dinner.
You can probably use mom's car or dad's car.
You can get around.
You can Uber. You can date on Tinder.
You don't need any money because a Tinder date is a couple drinks.
So suddenly the motivation For seeking pleasure and avoiding pain went from when I was a kid to really extreme motivation to a kid today is going to have to leave a worse situation to get to a better one.
Let me say this.
I said that exactly opposite.
A kid today with a smartphone living at home has a pretty good quality of life.
And if we know anything about human behavior, it's that friction causes people to do less of something and rewards cause people to do more of something.
Now, not every person exactly at the same time and in the same way, but it's true in general.
So my hypothesis is this, that even as the economy improves and even if the economy improves for the lower end, the people who couldn't leave the house, That we'll never get back to the level we were, because in the age of the smartphone, motivation is just sucked down to the young, because they're already getting so much reward without working.
So their incentive should be to milk it as much as possible.
So of course that will be different for every person in every situation, but as a general average, the incentive to leave home is far less than it ever was, and it should make a difference.
Alright. I believe that's all I want to talk about today.
If you didn't see Kanye, now named Ye, the little clip of him talking at the end of Saturday Night Live, you should.
I don't have much to say about that now, but I will...
I will go now because I'm looking at my incoming messages and I need to make some funeral plans for my stepson.
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