All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 8, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:51
Episode 251 Scott Adams: North Korea, Climate Change, Guilty Until Innocent
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody!
I forgot you were there.
Come on in. It's time to get your coffee.
Some people call this delicious beverage coffee.
But I don't know where they grew up.
Where I grew up, it's coffee.
And it's delicious.
And it's time for all of us to enjoy a simultaneous sip of the beverage of our choice.
It doesn't have to be coffee, but coffee is the best.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, well, there was a prediction I didn't make that I should have.
And it goes like this, all right?
This is what I should have said the other day.
I was thinking of doing it.
And I thought, yeah, I'm not sure I want to do it.
And here's the prediction.
I was going to say that President Trump is having such a good week that the anti-Trump media is going to have to go back to their old bag of tricks.
And sure enough, climate change.
So this big headline on climate change.
If we do not totally reverse things by 2030, there will be grievous harm to the world.
Now, I guess this news was going to happen anyway because the IPPC issued a report, but it's kind of weird that the report comes out exactly at the time the Kavanaugh thing is done.
Have you noticed the consistency of the news?
You know, if there's a slow news time, there's always a story that just plops right in.
Yeah, we haven't heard much about Russia.
Do you remember Mueller? So...
I don't know whether we should worry about climate change this time or not.
I will tell you that the way it's presented, once again, is fraudulent.
So now I'm just talking about the way the news presents it.
So I'm not talking about the science.
So the basic science, I assume if you add CO2 to a closed system, the temperature will go up.
And I would imagine that that's certain enough that we could call that science and we could call that true.
But the projections, of course, are the hard part.
A lot of variables in play.
But here's the part that's completely illegitimate.
And every time I point it out, you should say to yourself, Oh my God, why wasn't that obvious one before you pointed it out?
And it goes like this. The world doesn't have one decision to make.
Climate change is not the one thing we have to figure out.
If you spend all of your money or some trillions of your money on climate change, you won't have money for the other stuff.
So when they say climate change could cause us to have X amount of, you know, a trillion dollars of problems, you have to weigh that against what else would you do with that trillion dollars?
Would you give everybody health care?
Would you win a war?
Would you make sure that a comet that was heading toward the Earth didn't get us?
Would you have more defense against a pandemic?
Would you build your borders so that you can protect there?
You've got other things to do with this money.
Somebody called it opportunity cost.
That is correct. So I call this a half-pinion.
If the only thing you've looked at is the cost of doing nothing, and in this case you may have looked at the benefits of doing something, but you're not looking at the opportunity costs.
The trillion plus dollars of things you should have been doing, could have been doing, would have been doing, and what would be better?
Would it be better to remediate?
To relocate people, to build more water facilities.
Let's say you took a trillion dollars and put it into deforesting the Sahara, which apparently we know how to do now.
Believe it or not, we know how to reforest deserts.
That's a real thing. Suppose we took our trillion and we just put it into reforesting the Sahara.
Well, I may have my science wrong, but here's the general idea about using your money for other stuff.
If you were to reforest, not deforest, if you were to reforest the Sahara, my understanding is that it would cool down that region And that region has a lot to do with the hurricanes that form in the Atlantic.
So if your problem from global warming is that too many hurricanes, and that's just one of the several gigantic problems that are predicted, what if you spent, you know, the same amount of money just getting rid of the source of the hurricanes?
What would happen? Well, I don't know.
But the point is that there are lots of ways to spend the money, and if we don't know all of those ways, and we're not at least keeping that in our mind, we're only looking at half of the situation.
So there's that. Let's talk about the Democrats' new...
So the Democrats are trying to do two things that look like they would be hard to do to me.
One is they're trying to paint themselves as the party of believing women.
Now believing women, specifically in the context of accusations about sexual assaults.
Now believing women is good, but it sounds a lot like guilty until proven innocent.
Or it can slide into that.
Now if you're trying to form a party, That is a coalition of women and minorities.
That seems to be sort of the, you know, the Democrats' brand is they're the group that's going to be good for women and minorities.
Let me ask you this.
Believing women, which gets very close to guilty until proven innocent, at least the way we think of it and treat it, is that good for African Americans?
Now it should be, right?
You could make an argument that it's just good for everybody.
But does it feel that way?
If you were black, and I'm not, so I don't, you know, it's dangerous for me to try to say, how would you think if you were something else when you're not?
But I'll just put it in the form of a question.
If you were black and your biggest issue is that the police are blaming you of stuff that maybe you think you didn't do, or that you didn't do, How is that compatible with changing the whole thrust of the Democratic Party into guilty until proven innocent?
If you're black, do you want to be in the guilty until proven innocent party?
That feels like exactly the opposite of Black Lives Matter, doesn't it?
Doesn't it? It feels like the Democrats have said that women are going to be the primary focus of their persuasion, but I don't know if all of these things are completely compatible.
If I were black and my biggest issue were police are pulling me over, accusing me of things I didn't do, beating me up, that feels exactly the opposite of their thrust right now.
So I don't know how they hold the black vote.
We'll see. I was amused watching the President's speech, his rally speech in Kansas, I guess.
And he tried to label the Democrats as the party of crime.
The party of crime.
Which is very clever.
Now you could certainly make an argument and they would.
Wait a minute. The Republicans are the party of crime.
They don't even believe us when we accuse them of committing crimes.
So you can make an argument the other way, but it is clever branding because immigration is about crime and being tough on crime is the Republican thing.
So you can imagine that it makes sense for the president to say that the Democrats are the party of crime.
I was saying that they were the party of hate.
You remember for several months I've said, yeah, Democrats are turning into the party of hate.
But that's probably not as good as the party of crime, and here's why.
Party of hate, if I told you, if you hadn't been paying attention, let's say for the past year, and all you knew was everything that's happened up until a year ago, and I said, hey, one of the parties is called the party of hate.
What would you say?
Which party would that be? You might say Republicans, because the Democrats would say, oh, the Republicans hate minorities.
So my framing of the Democrats as the party of hate isn't as immediately agreeable to people the way they're already primed.
The president went with party of crime.
The advantage of that is that you don't think of Republicans as being pro-crime.
You would never think of that because they're so follow the rules, they're strong on police, strong on military, strong on borders.
So clearly the Republicans are strong on crime, and if anything, the criticism should be they're too strong against it.
That would be the criticism from the left.
So calling the Democrats the party of crime is actually pretty effective.
We'll see if it sticks.
It looked like he was just throwing it out there to test it, see if it got picked up, and I didn't see it get picked up much.
So it probably wasn't as sticky as it could have been.
But here was my favorite part of his speech.
I've told you before that the President always likes to use visual language, and he likes to brand things, and he likes to say things in provocative or interesting ways because that makes it sticky, it makes it repeatable, turns it into a sound bite.
And one of my favorite things that I think was just spontaneous, but he was talking about the Democrats wanting to bring you socialism.
But if there's one thing I've taught you, it's that talking about a concept is not very powerful.
So if you were to say, socialism is bad, capitalism is good, people say, yeah, there's a concept, I don't know, one concept is better than the other, sure, whatever.
So comparing concepts is not good persuasion.
Even if people agree with it, even if they understand the concepts, it's just too abstract.
But visual stuff and things that really have an existing hook in your brain can be powerful.
So when the president says that the Democrats want to bring you socialism, he expanded to socialism, and he did it this way.
I'm going to give you an impression of the president saying the word socialism as he did in his speech.
I'm paraphrasing, but not the socialism part.
So President Trump goes, and the Democrats, they want to bring you socialism, Venezuela.
So he almost made socialism and Venezuela like a hyphenated new word.
They're trying to bring you socialism, Venezuela.
And he puts his hand out, Venezuela.
And I can't stop saying it.
And probably now you're hearing me say it, and especially if you heard him say it originally, how many of you are now saying it at home?
It is so frickin' sticky!
Alright? Say it with me.
And the Democrats are bringing you socialism, Venezuela.
You can't get that out of your head.
Socialism, Venezuela.
I had to say it five times just because it's so sticky.
So, those are the little things he does.
Consistently. He puts a visual on it.
He makes it sticky.
He makes it memorable. He makes it a little bit wrong sometimes so that you criticize him for it, but you're still thinking about it, etc.
So, that was interesting.
What else we got? So yesterday, I don't know if those of you saw my tweet, but Dr.
Drew went on my startup's app, the Interface by WenHub app, where anybody can contact an expert and get an immediate video call.
And the expert just sets their price and just says when they're available.
And if they're available and you want to pay that price, you're immediately connected to a video call.
Dr. Drew was taking calls yesterday and I tweeted that out.
I'll catch up with him on that experience.
I think that was his first call because he alerted me that he was going to be on there.
I actually had a call, a paid call.
With Dr. Drew, and I asked a number of questions that I would never ask my doctor.
And I realized that there was something I realized during the call.
And I'm going to ask you if you've ever had that experience.
Do you feel that your doctor is rushing you sometimes?
You know, they do a pretty good job Of most doctors, of trying to do the best they can, of not making you feel obviously like they're rushing you.
But because of the system that you're walking into, you know that the doctor is being paid by the call, not by the time he spends.
So you're always sort of conscious that the doctor wants to get on to the next one.
Not necessarily because of profit, but because there are other people waiting.
So your normal politeness, your sense of playing within the rules, playing within the system, makes you sort of want to be rushed.
You know, you're sort of okay with being rushed because there are people waiting.
And it's a business model.
You don't want your insurance to cost more.
So you'd like to be as efficient as possible as well.
So I always have this feeling of being a little bit rushed with a doctor.
It's not the biggest problem in the world, but I feel a little rushed.
But because of the interface by WinHub app, and because the doctor, any doctor who's on it, would be charging by the time that they spend, I wasn't rushed.
Because I don't think the doctor would care if I spent time with him, or he went to another patient, if he's being paid by the minute.
And so I found myself asking questions about things I'd always been curious about, but were not an immediate problem.
And I just got this amazing information from one of the most knowledgeable medical people on the planet for a very reasonable price.
It was incredible.
So here's some other things I would like to see on the app in terms of experts.
So we're having this big discussion about memory now.
And you're seeing a lot of articles in the press about memory and memory experts, etc.
Well, I have a friend, you might know, Carmen Simon, who wrote the book Impossible to Ignore.
It's a book about memory.
And I'll probably try to talk her into getting on the app at one point.
I'm not sure if she'll be interested, but the general point is the same.
Wouldn't it be great if you were an expert on memory, and you knew that the headlines were about memory, and you could just put yourself on the app Say I'm a memory expert, and then if you're writing an article about it, let's say you're a journalist, blogger, you're just writing an article about this Kavanaugh thing, about Dr. Ford's memory, and he'd like to talk to an expert.
Just pick up the app, oh, here's an expert on memory, boom, and you're having a live call with a world expert, like a published expert.
Recognized, you know, PhD expert in memory who is currently working in the field, right there.
It's just in your hand and it took you no time.
You just typed in memory and there was your expert.
So I think the way news is going to be covered could change because of stuff like this.
Every time there's an aviation problem, just think about this.
Every time there's a plane that has a problem, let's say a plane goes down, the press is always looking for an aviation expert and one who knows that particular plane.
Ideally a pilot who's flown that very plane.
Wouldn't it be great if no matter what they always just pick up the app and instead of googling somebody and trying to track them down and sending an email to a website that may or may not be read, that's the way the press does it now, Or unless they have them on their list already.
They could just go to the interface app and say, all right, let's see if anybody signed up because of the headline.
They might not be there ordinarily, but because of the headline, experts would just sign up in the app and say, okay, I'm an aviation expert.
I have flown this plane.
I've been a flight controller at this airport, etc.
Somebody said, how do I invest?
So we're not... Well, the quick answer is that the app is supported by tokens, a cryptocurrency that we created for the app that works within the app.
It's optional. You can just pay by cash and credit card.
But some people will pay by our own currency called the WEN. If you own the WEN, and the app does well, the WEN is likely to go up in value, but we don't call that an investment.
So cryptocurrency does not qualify as an investment, but it is nonetheless true that if you owned the WEN, which you could buy on a couple of exchanges now, or just go to Go to wenhub.com, you'll see links for buying it directly.
So if you go to wenhub.com, you'll see directions for buying the Wen cryptocurrency.
That if the app is successful, there'll be more demand for it as a token within the app.
And that should, because of demand and supply, cause its value to go up.
It's already trading on a couple of exchanges.
LA token. LA Token Exchange, for example.
And we'll be on some more exchanges, I think, soon.
It's both Apple and Android, yes, and it works across platform.
So if you have an Apple, you can call somebody who's on Android.
Alright, enough of that. Let me give you another example.
Remember yesterday I was talking about the idea?
Somebody had the idea that I liked, but I didn't know the...
No weather would work.
And the idea is this.
To increase the postage that China has to pay to mail a package to the United States.
And the idea is to take the extra money from that postage and use it to buy fentanyl detectors so that we can check all of the mail that's coming in from China and that it would be funded by increasing the postage on China because fentanyl from China from their illegal drug labs is probably killing 30,000 people a year including my stepson this latest week.
Now the part I didn't know Is that practical?
Could you increase postage?
Is it even something that we could talk about?
Or is there some treaty that we couldn't violate?
Is there some process that makes it hard?
Well, what I would have liked is that during this periscope, I would say, I'm going to ask an expert on how postage is set internationally.
There must be somebody in the country Who has worked in this field?
They've worked for the Postal Service.
They've negotiated international postage exchange rates, effectively, because what we pay to mail something internationally is based on that other country agreeing to handle it once it gets there.
So I'd like to have an expert And say, okay, is this idea practical or is it crazy?
Now I've been saying for a while now that we're entering a golden age.
And the way I've defined the golden age, this is sort of my own definition, is that most physical problems have been solved.
We now have mostly information problems which we're developing tools to solve quickly.
And this was a perfect example.
This whole postage thing to increase the tax so we can buy fentanyl screeners to stop China from sending their poison into this country is the sort of idea that's either really good or it's not.
But it would take an expert To answer that.
So I'm using that as the generic situation where probably information and the ability to quickly find the right kind of expert, which is what my company's app will provide, could make just a huge difference to society because its ability to plug that piece of missing information almost instantly.
Yeah, the Mexican cartels are a big part of the problem, but it turns out that China is the major, fentanyl China, as I call them.
Now, oh, and I didn't even tell you the best part about the idea.
I'm sorry. I completely forgot to tell you, speaking of memory, why the postage increase to buy fentanyl screeners to screen Chinese packages, why that's such a good idea.
The reason it's such a good idea is that it puts the spotlight on China for being such bad international citizens.
So it's not even about providing money, because it's entirely possible that somebody's going to say to me, you know, That fentanyl screening equipment doesn't cost that much, and the Chinese mail is coming through one source, we already have the funding for those screeners.
To which I say, missing the point entirely.
It's not really about how we fund the new equipment to screen the packages.
It's not about that. It's about having something that is ready-made for the media to say we're arguing with China and China doesn't want to do this, but we want to increase their postage to pay for the fentanyl screeners because they're killing 30,000 people a year.
That's why you do it.
You do it because it packages it as a story that shames China into doing more to make sure we will stop talking about their fentanyl war with the United States.
They want us to not talk about it.
China really, really wants us to not talk about how they're killing, how many tens of thousands of people they're killing every year in our country.
Because if we start talking about that What does that do to all of the other negotiations about trade?
I'll tell you what it does.
It stiffens the spine of the US citizens.
President Trump's ability to negotiate effectively with China depends on China understanding the mood of the US. I would say the mood of the US is that China is sort of a frenemy Meaning that they're mostly friends, and in most ways that countries interact, it's mostly good.
We're not at war with them.
We trade with them.
We both make money over each other.
We coordinate on North Korea.
So we're more friends than not.
But then there's all these areas of like intellectual property, South China Sea, you know, some interference with maybe some stuff we want to do.
Maybe they were a little bit lax with what they were doing with North Korea, playing both sides.
We don't know exactly the details of that story.
So China is sort of balancing between being our enemy and being our friend.
If China can keep their brand clean, as clean as they can get, if they can keep their brand clean in terms of how the United States population thinks about them, then the President is handicapped.
So President Trump would have far less negotiating power if the United States citizenry thought, you know, we like China.
Why are we messing with them?
Why should we push so hard on our friends?
You saw what happened when he was negotiating with Canada and with Mexico, right?
When we negotiated with Canada, what was your feeling?
Because he was going hard at probably our best international friend.
I don't know if that's true, but probably Canada is the United States' closest, best ally, friend, personal good feeling, just completely positive from top to bottom.
I mean, you know, we joke about Canada, but the fact is the Canadian-US feeling about each other is just very positive.
So it was harder for him to push on them.
Because the population was like, we don't really need to do that.
How much pain do we want to take in this country?
Because, of course, they would retaliate with their own tariffs, to push a friend.
But China is not quite Canada, are they?
China, you could easily imagine the US opinion of China flipping one way or the other.
If it flips negative, And people started thinking of fentanyl China, which they should.
It's our top priority, is the fentanyl, because of the number of people it kills.
Everything else is just money.
But the fentanyl is just frickin' killing people.
By the droves. I talked to somebody at my son's funeral, a 25-year-old, who has lost eight friends to overdose, opioid overdose, mostly fentanyl, I believe.
Eight. He's 25 years old, A normal guy living in a normal suburb, he's lost eight friends to overdose.
And most of it probably came from China.
We don't know for sure, but probably.
And then, you know, I lost my stepson this week, 18 years old.
And there was another friend his age who died the next day from, who knows, same batch maybe.
So this is why you open up the question of increasing the postage on China to pay for fentanyl sniffers or even to pay for drug rehab.
I mean, it doesn't have to be just for the fentanyl detectors at the port of entry for the mail.
It could be for drug rehab.
But branding China as the source of this problem and just making it their brand either forces them To negotiate better for the rest of our deals, because they know that the U.S. is solidly behind their president, because he's hard on China, wants to be friends and be professional with leadership, but he's very hard on them for negotiating.
And he needs the spine of the citizenry to say, push as hard as you need to.
We'll wait. We'll take the pain.
We'll take the risk. Push as hard as you need to.
This would be just a perfect branding for that.
Let's get off of that. What else is going on?
China would just transship.
So somebody said that China would just ship it through other countries and that it would come here.
And that's even more reason to increase their postage.
Because we have to check the port of entry from every country.
Because you're right. If the only things we're checking is mail from China, You're right, we wouldn't get it all because they would just ship it somewhere else to ship it here after that.
So we're going to have to charge China a lot for extra postage because of them, we're going to have to check all the other port of entries as well.
Although we might have done that anyway.
I don't know. Build the wall.
Yeah, I... I don't know how much difference the wall makes for fentanyl.
Because the problem with fentanyl is, you know, you could hold a bottle in your hand that would have enough fentanyl in it to, you know, wipe out a city.
Or a lot of people.
I don't know the exact math of it.
But it's such a small thing that Mexico doesn't even really need to...
I mean, they could literally walk up to the wall and say, Hey, are you over on the other side?
Here you go. Catch that.
So I don't know how a wall would necessarily stop that.
However, I did hear that there was recently a fentanyl dealer who was not a citizen.
I believe he was probably either Mexican or Central American citizenship, who because they could not get him because of the sanctuary city, So the Sanctuary City stuff is apparently protecting fentanyl dealers from below the border.
And I have to admit, I wasn't a maniac about the issue in general, because I can see it both ways.
So emotionally, socially, personally, I'm very bonded to the immigrants who have come from below the border, both legal and illegal.
If you live in California, you're surrounded by people of dubious citizenship all the time.
And you come to know them and love them and trust them and work with them.
So emotionally, personally, and on every non-rational level, I'm very Very pro that population.
And so I sort of stayed out of the sanctuary city conversation because it doesn't feel like a good system, but the alternative isn't great either because you got some downside both ways.
At least there's an argument for it, right?
At least there's an argument for going either way.
But now that I hear that it might be protecting fentanyl dealers, I'm starting to change my opinion.
Because that is far too big a risk.
If we actually can find fentanyl dealers, we need to start executing them.
And I'm absolutely pro-execution for the very big fentanyl dealers, not the local street people who are just doing some low-level damage.
I'm talking about the big dealers of fentanyl need to be executed.
That should be absolutely true.
Because if we had a...
You know, if we had somebody who used a gun to kill 100 people, you'd pretty much execute that person.
And fentanyl crosses a bunch of borders, so it seems like it would necessarily be a federal thing.
I think the federal government can just kill all of them.
And I think that China needs to start executing its own drug dealers a little bit more publicly 'cause that would help us a lot.
Scott wants to pull the lever.
I would pull the lever. If somebody gave me the option of pulling the lever to execute a fentanyl, like a major dealer, not somebody who just was a user and was selling to support their own habit or something like that, because those people just need help.
But a major dealer of fentanyl I could pull that handle so easily.
You know, you think to yourself, oh, would I feel bad forever because I took a life?
Nope. I wouldn't even feel a little bit bad.
I would have a good day being the person who actually killed a fentanyl dealer.
That would be a good day for me.
Which is probably why we shouldn't have the death penalty.
I think I accidentally gave you a really good argument for not having the death penalty.
Because the very fact that I'm being honest with you, for this specific crime of killing hundreds of people with your drug that you know is going to kill hundreds of people, for that specific crime, I could kill them with joy.
And that's a pretty good argument for not having a death penalty, frankly.
So I can see it from both sides.
What if he was later found innocent?
You know, it depends what you mean by innocent.
It seems unlikely that a major drug dealer would be found later not to have been a major drug dealer.
Usually when somebody's found innocent after the fact, it's because they did a specific crime at a specific time.
You know, they either murdered somebody or didn't.
A single act.
That's the sort of thing you could definitely have a mistaken identity.
But if you take down a major drug dealer and you've got a whole network of people reporting, yeah, this is the guy, the odds of having a mistaken identity with a major drug dealer?
Pretty low. Somebody's asking about Jordan Peterson.
I know why you're asking. So Jordan Peterson had floated the idea in a tweet.
What was he said?
He said, at least consider Judge Kavanaugh being sworn in to the Supreme Court and then voluntarily quitting.
To rehabilitate his reputation, this was Kavanaugh's reputation, and then bring credibility to the Supreme Court.
Now, people like me and other people who question that, it's like, what?
How does that work?
Because it seems to me the only way this judge can rehabilitate his reputation is by serving and doing a good job in ways in which people will recognize as fair.
So he has one path for redemption and he took it, which is getting sworn in, hunkering down, doing the work of the people, you know, and 10 years later we're going to look at his rulings and we're going to say, yeah, that was pretty fair.
And then, then you have something like rehabilitation or at least partial.
But quitting would certainly look guilty to people and to me that looked like a bad idea.
Now, To his credit, Jordan Peterson modified, clarified.
People would say, walked it back.
I hate that phrase, because sometimes you're just clarifying your thinking.
You're not really walking stuff back.
Walking it back just has the wrong connotation.
And he explained it in a follow-up tweet that it was more a mental experiment, a thought experiment, I guess.
And I thought to myself, I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with that.
You know, remember my rule, my 48 hour rule?
Yeah, somebody just said it here.
The 48 hour rule says that if somebody says something that's ambiguous or provocative and people are questioning it, you know, did you really mean to say that?
They give the person 48 hours to clarify what they did mean.
Instead of us trying to put our interpretation on it and then judging it at the same time, it's just a bad process.
You don't want to put your own interpretation on somebody's ambiguous statement and then blame them for your interpretation.
Because chances are they're going to clarify.
So he said something that I would say was provocative.
It was actually kind of interesting, and that's what a thought experiment does.
It made you think through, okay, would that work?
How would that work? How would that make people feel?
It made me think about a complicated thing, and that was good.
And then in the end, you could see him sort of softening his level of, I don't know, the credibility he was putting in his own thought.
And that seemed entirely appropriate, because he had thought about it a little more, he got a little more feedback, he clarified, well, I'm just putting that out there as a thought experiment, to which I say, clarification accepted.
So here's my standard.
If you were tempted to say, when you saw his first tweet or two on this topic, my God, Jordan Peterson, I thought he was so smart, but he seems to have lost it because this latest tweet I totally disagree with.
I don't see how this could work.
That's not really fair.
That's what the 48-hour rule does.
It allows the person who's the subject of it, in this case, Jordan Peterson, to clarify.
He had 48 hours to work out his thinking and put it out there in his clearest form.
And when he did, it was a lot more clear.
And then I said, oh, okay.
He was thinking out loud, sort of thinking in public.
Now, most people should not think in public.
It's probably a bad thing for most of you.
But he's sort of earned the right to do that.
Not everybody should be thinking in public.
It's just a bad look for most people.
But Jordan Peterson has very much earned a little bit of trust.
Certainly 48 hours of trust to say, alright, we didn't like what you said or how we interpreted it.
Give us a little more on that and then I can judge.
He delivered. I looked at it.
I said, that's reasonable. He put it out there.
We wrestled with it.
Let's move on. So that's how the 48-hour rule works.
All right. What else is happening now?
Somebody say he isn't really conservative politically.
Does it matter? I hate to try to summarize somebody else's brand, an individual, but I would say that Jordan Peterson is pro-science.
If you're saying he's liberal or he's conservative, I feel like you've missed the whole story.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Jordan Peterson's brand was what makes sense and what could be supported by the facts and what could be supported by the science.
Now, if that puts you on sometimes the right and sometimes on the left and you're arguing, oh, he's more lefty than you think or he's more conservative than you think, you've missed the entire point.
The entire point of Jordan Peterson is that he's neither of those things.
The moment he's left or the moment he's right, he's useless.
Jordan Peterson is like an international treasure.
Because he's willing to say the hard stuff, you can disagree with him or you can agree with him, but he does stick to the facts.
You can't say that about him.
You can't say he just ignores facts.
You can't say that he doesn't respond to a better argument because I think you just watched it in this very question.
In this very situation, you saw his thought patterns forming.
That is very encouraging to watch somebody change their mind or maybe more just refine their thinking in public.
Anybody who can do that is not a conservative, and they're not a liberal.
They're someone who's following the logic.
They're following the facts.
So it bothers me when I hear people say, ah, he's just revealing his secret liberal side or his secret conservative side.
It's true that everybody has bias, and it would be surprising if he was the one person who didn't.
But he is the one person who's Probably more committed than anybody I've ever seen, except maybe Dershowitz, that's a good example, for following the facts.
Yeah, Dershowitz and Jordan Peterson are two people I trust to be willing to disagree with whatever group you think they're associated with if the facts and the law and the logic take them somewhere else.
Yeah, Kanye's off Twitter, somebody says, sadly.
Keep in mind that when you're looking at Kanye, you have to think of the Trump model.
To understand him. Now I don't mean the Trump model and that he's going to be like Trump in all the important ways.
I don't mean that. But remember that when Trump did anything during the candidacy, it was the thing that other people weren't doing and it was the thing that all the smart people said he shouldn't do.
So Trump did all the things the smart people said he shouldn't do and he made it work because he was doing things that worked for Trump.
There were things that wouldn't have worked for Biden.
They wouldn't have worked for Hillary.
But when Trump did Trump, Trump could do Trump better than anybody's ever done Trump because he's Trump.
Kanye can do things that wouldn't work for anybody else.
So if you were going to advise someone who might have their sights set on the presidency someday, and you were to advise them how to go about it, you certainly wouldn't say, delete your Twitter, would you?
Like for the average person, because it would take a long time to build back the audience.
People wouldn't bother signing back on.
It's like, ah, he's just going to quit it again.
But with Kanye, he lives in a state of continuous creation.
And you can't create without destroying.
So he's a destroyer slash creator because those two things are really two sides of the same thing.
It's like this yin and yang thing.
Creation and destruction are inseparable.
So when Kanye destroys his social media, He's also creating.
You can't say that about other people.
If a regular politician destroyed his social media presence by just deleting all their accounts, that's all that would have happened.
They would have taken an asset that was useful and they would have destroyed it.
And you'd say, well, that's kind of dumb.
But Kanye is not other people.
When Kanye destroys his social media presence, his destruction is also his creation.
For him, they're tied, because he's a creator extraordinaire in the biggest world.
You probably saw the Saturday Night Live thing where, after the show was closing, they cut him off, but he was saying some pro-Trump stuff.
And then I forget the first name, but Davidson is the SNL actor who came on and did a skit mocking Kanye for being on the show.
Now, I have two comments about that.
First of all, and if anybody knows, is it Pete Davidson?
Okay, thank you.
So Pete Davidson, I didn't know a lot about him.
I guess he's dating Ariana Grande, so he's got something going for him.
But I didn't know much about him.
I don't watch too much Saturday Night Live.
But I have to say, even though the things he was saying I completely disagreed with, he's really funny.
You have to do a really good job in humor to make me laugh when the point of your humor is so completely objectionable to me.
He's really good!
So that's my first thing.
Pete Davidson is a really funny guy.
So he made me laugh when I shouldn't have.
And that was great. So credit him for extraordinary talent.
But one of the things he said Is what I call loser think.
Loser think is one word, loser think.
And it's the way that unsuccessful people think.
Now obviously, Pete Davidson is not unsuccessful.
He's closer to the definition of successful.
But that idea that he put forward was this, that Kanye should stick to music.
So what he said was that Kanye's a genius, But that he's a musical genius.
And that he should stay in his lane.
Would I be talking to you right now if I took that advice?
There are 2,000 people watching me on Periscope right now.
You've seen the influence that I have on things.
You've seen how it's changed you, many of you.
Every day somebody comes up to me and tells me how, this literally happens every day, that something I wrote that they read, either one of my books usually had to fail at everything or win bigly, And they'll say, it changed my life, I got a promotion, I got some huge success from you.
None of that would happen if I stayed in my lane.
President Trump would not be the president if he stayed in his lane.
Neither would he have been a golf course developer, neither would he have been a reality TV star.
Staying in your lane is just the worst advice you could ever give someone that you acknowledge to be a genius.
Now, it's one thing to say that Michael Jordan shouldn't play baseball because that's one of those situations where you can predict how that's going to go with enough certainty that you could say, well, you know, this probably won't work out.
And still, Keep in mind that Michael Jordan wasn't sure that he couldn't be a Major League Baseball player.
He didn't know. He thought he could be.
And he came pretty close, right?
So I'm still in favor of Michael Jordan having tried that move.
Because here's what you don't tell Michael Jordan.
Stay in your lane.
Even though most of us thought it wouldn't work out.
And it worked out pretty well.
It just didn't go all the way.
You just don't tell a genius in one thing to not try another thing, because whatever made somebody successful in one thing probably has some spillover.
So when you say somebody is a musical genius and the knock on Kanye is that he hasn't studied his history enough.
There's something to be said for that.
I'm not going to say that Kanye is a historian, and I'm not going to say that I'm a historian either.
But Kanye is approaching it from a creative place, and the creativity is something we haven't seen at a level that he could provide it.
Even Trump Trump will get out of any box you try to put him in, so he'll break every mold.
But he's not creative in the same way.
Trump is more creative in the sense that he brings a business, persuasion, selling tools to a place that didn't have them before, at least not to that extent.
Kanye just brings a whole new thing.
It's stuff you haven't seen before.
So Let me put this in a little context.
I have said, very unpopularly, I have said that I believed that Obama was a good fit as a president for the time he was president.
So he was a calm voice at a time when we needed calmness to keep the economy from falling over the edge.
Probably did the right stuff, or enough of the right stuff, To save the economy.
So I think Obama was a good choice.
It was also sort of time for a black president.
In my opinion, the country sort of as one said, yeah, it's just time to do this.
Let's check this off.
Because we'll feel incomplete until we've had at least a black president.
It feels like you just got to get past that.
So I think Obama was a really good fit for those times.
I think he would have been a bad fit if he could have done a 16 year term.
I think he would have been a bad fit For a rocking economy.
When things are going real well, you want somebody who will take a little extra risk because you can afford a little extra risk when things are going so screamingly well.
And that best fit is Trump.
So I think you can have a different president for each block of time and you get one that fits.
Now, let's say we get to the point where President Trump has the economy just screaming But yet, we can't solve stuff like healthcare and, you know, let's say opioids are still a big problem.
We still have these big problems, but we don't have a money problem.
Think about this.
Think about how big this thought is.
We're entering a point where the economy is so strong and we have so many billionaires who are willing to help that money isn't a problem for most of our big problems.
It isn't. Do you know what is the problem?
What's lacking? What is the thing we don't have to solve the biggest problems in this country?
What do we don't have? You might say, well, we don't have leadership, the Congress, or something like that.
Well, we don't have, you know, an effective Congress, as effective as it needs to be, but we also don't need Congress.
Because remember, I just told you, we have all the money we need.
There are enough billionaires who would gladly fund a good idea.
What we're missing is a good idea.
And I mean that in a general sense.
We need better ideas for drug addiction.
We need better ideas for training.
We need better ideas for a school.
We need better ideas for safety.
We need better ideas for the urban blight.
Once it's cleared out, what are you going to put there?
We need better ideas for how to be better to each other.
We need better ideas for reducing racism.
Which of those things does Congress do?
Does Congress come up with good ideas?
That's sort of not their job.
They're not the right ones.
So in the unique situation where your economy is screaming, but you still can't solve your problems, who do you need?
Who do you need? You need somebody like Kanye.
You need somebody who's going to say, we got the money.
That's great. And we couldn't do anything without it.
So thank you. President Obama for getting us away from the ledge and getting us a solid base.
Thank you, President Trump, for making this economy just scream and also getting rid of most of our external threats.
North Korea, you know, the other big external threats.
If we're in that situation at the end of Trump's presidency, where the economy's screaming and we don't have external threats like we used to, we just still have problems and we don't have ideas.
What kind of a president do you need?
Do you need an Obama?
No. You wouldn't be the right fit.
Do you need another Trump, like Trump too, whoever is the closest to Trump?
Probably not. Probably not.
If everything's going well, you might need somebody who can change the national mind.
Somebody who can add diversification to the way we're thinking.
So, before you dismiss Kanye for not being like other presidents are, or like people we expect to be president, Just consider that that's not what he's offering.
He's offering the thing we don't have and we need.
Nobody's offered that before.
Who's the other politician who's offered that level of creative destruction?
And remember, creation and destruction can't separate them if you do it right.
And Kanye does it right.
He brings the destruction along with the construction.
All right. Am I predicting President Kanye West?
Well the minimum requirement for predicting that would be how serious he gets.
It would be hard to bet against Kanye if he was just full-on, I'm going to make this happen.
There are just some people that are hard to bet against.
He's one of them. Rand Paul's reputation is sky-high with me right now.
So Rand Paul is on my good list by far.
I've talked about North Korea already.
Oh, have we? So the latest from North Korea is that apparently North Korea has agreed to work on the details of letting people come in and...
Well, I have to show you this.
So North Korea is working on the details...
Letting inspectors come in, which I don't think the critics ever thought we would get to that point.
But I want to show you a picture that I tweeted right before it was announced that good things are happening there.
And I don't know how well you'll be able to see this.
But here's a picture of Pompeo.
Darn it. It can only go the wrong way.
So apparently I've managed to get my phone in a mode where it can only go the wrong way.
Here we go. So see, look at the smiles on these two guys.
I think you can see it. Look at the way they're looking at each other.
Now ask yourself this.
Is this the way you look at each other when you haven't made decisions on the big stuff?
Would Pompeo have that expression If he was still negotiating hard on the important stuff.
Maybe. You know, maybe.
When you're reading body language and smiles and stuff like that, this is not hard science in the sense that we can just look at them and we're smart so we know what they're thinking.
But I'll tell you, when I saw that, I said to myself, It looks like the deal is done.
And I don't mean the details.
The details could take another three years to work out.
But the main thing, which is denuclearization and are we going to have inspectors to watch it happen, it looks to me, those two expressions...
I'll tell you what I thought.
When I saw those expressions, I said to myself, here are two people who can't wait to tell you a secret.
They have a really good news and they can't wait to tell you but they can't tell you yet because you have to work through the system.
Probably there'll be something announced of major import when Kim comes to the United States.
What could be a better time To announce something than Kim coming to the United States, standing in the White House, in the Oval Office, and making a deal.
Now, I believe That the thing that's going to break the logjam is an agreement to end the war.
Is it a war? I forget the technical word for it.
So there's this standing state of, at least in a legal sense, there's a standing state of war in the Korean Peninsula.
And North Korea has asked that we change that.
I'm not sure if that's the UN or that's the United States Congress, but either one is doable.
And I thought to myself, that is exactly the right thing for Kim to ask for.
Because he should at least make it a little bit difficult for a president to try to attack North Korea.
And one way to do that is for the countries involved to change their own laws to get out of a state of war.
Because if you're in a state of war, the president has all kinds of flexibility.
And if you're not in a state of war, the president's going to have to work pretty hard to get you into the state of war.
So it makes complete sense that North Korea is asking for a declaration of an end of hostilities.
And a completely reasonable thing to ask at this point.
And it's completely reasonable that we held off on that until we had some commitment to get the nuclear denuclearization.
All right. How is Kim going to unbrainwash his people?
Quite a project. He's already started.
So apparently the propaganda in the North has shifted from we need these nukes to be a great country to we used our nukes to end the war.
So Kim has the best, he just has a perfect setup for transitioning this from the worst case scenario to the best case scenario.
You've never seen a better setup because he can say, I built these nukes and that's why, that's why the United States came to the table.
I became a peer.
I became a peer with the United States.
I became a peer with South Korea and that was necessary in order to get negotiation on an even playing field so that we could all be adults and we could get this done.
As long as those other countries were treating us like children, we couldn't get it done.
But now that we're equals, we got a deal.
That story is, if I were a North Korean and I heard that story, I would say, that actually sounds pretty good.
We built our nukes, it got us the end of the war, it got us prosperity.
We don't need the nukes anymore.
They did what they needed to do.
That's a great story.
And indeed, I've said that Kim would deserve at least a share of a Nobel Peace Prize if he pulls this through.
And I would like to see him get that, actually.
Alright, that's all for now.
▲
Export Selection