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Oct. 9, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:28
Episode 252 Scott Adams: Israeli Bots, Ye, North Korea, #FentanylChina, Colbert
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Time Text
Hey Jay, hey Jay.
Hey Tyler. Tyler you're always fast.
Get on in here.
Hey Unix.
Rab. Hey Bo.
Hey Julia. Hey Reverend Dan.
Come on in here. And of course Zia Erica.
Good to see you again. Michelle.
Tom, so grab your beverage.
We've got a lot to talk about.
But before we talk, you know what's coming.
It's the simultaneous sip.
It's the best part of the day so far.
Join me, please.
Grab your cup, your mug, your chalice, your glass, your container.
Fill it with your favorite beverage.
Coffee's the best. And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, have I become the Bob Ross of Periscope?
Pretty sure I have.
Wasn't my plan.
Kind of worked out that way.
We will begin by talking about the writer for The Colbert Show, who wrote a tweet that got people jumping.
And in the tweet, the key part was that the writer said, well, you know, we didn't get what we wanted there with the Supreme Court, but at least we ruined Kavanaugh's life.
At least we ruined Kavanaugh's life.
Now people said, my God, did you really say that?
Did you really say at least we ruined Kavanaugh's life?
And so people said, you're horrible, you're horrible, you writer for Colbert, you liberal lefty enemy.
And what you all want to know is, what is my ruling?
And why am I qualified to make a ruling on this at all?
Well, I am a professional humorist.
And her excuse, her explanation I should say, excuse is biasing the jury, her explanation, her clarification, Was that it was sarcasm and that the real meaning of at least we ruined Kavanaugh's life is that obviously we had not.
Meaning that he would go on to actually an excellent life being on the Supreme Court, a dream job, a better life than 99.9% of the world.
So that was her explanation of what it meant.
But when people read it, they said, At least we ruined Kavanaugh's life.
My God, his family and everything.
So, what is the ruling?
Was it a joke that was just poorly written?
Or was it a serious thing that she's lying about now and trying to get away with her bad taste comment?
I give you now my ruling.
She satisfied the 48-hour rule for clarification.
That is correct. This is my invention, but I suggest it as a great social, a new social norm.
She said something that was provocative and ambiguous, according to some people.
Within 48 hours, she clarified it in a way that I, as a professional humorist, say is plausible.
Plausible. Now, the only reason I would dismiss a 48-hour clarification is if it was just ridiculous.
You know, just something that just was impossible to believe, which is rare.
Instead, in 48 hours, she gave an explanation, which when I look at it, I go, oh, okay.
If you were predisposed to thinking that Kavanaugh had not been injured and was going on to a very good life, this would be sarcasm.
And she is a professional, humorous, sarcasm, joke writer.
And she clarified it in a way that is satisfying to me.
I rule. Free pass.
Free pass. And if you disagree with that...
I would just, you know, it's fine to disagree, but I would ask you to check your thinking and ask yourself if you too would like the benefit of the 48-hour rule should this come your way someday.
Remember, every time you give somebody the courtesy of a 48 hours to clarify and you don't try to read their mind, don't try to read into their soul, just let them say what their opinion is.
Other people get to tell you their opinion.
You don't get to read their mind and tell them their opinion.
That's not a good way to run society.
Because if we're blaming people for what we imagine are their opinions, we're in really bad territory.
But if we give everybody 48 hours just to be clear what they think, we're all better off.
That's my ruling.
As you know, Kanye is going to the White House, going to meet with Jared Kushner and the President.
And apparently one of the issues is, there might be more than one issue, but one of them is training for, or at least getting jobs, for ex-cons.
A very good issue.
I think it works very well for Kanye's portfolio, if you will.
I would say it went from a problem that was easier to ignore, To one that's now vital, because the economy is working so hard that if we don't have a better pool of workers on every level for everything, we're going to be short. So we have the added economic advantage on top of what was already a social good.
You could argue about whether Do we owe anything to these people?
But certainly they were a drag on society if they did not have help.
And the Kanye approach seems productive.
I am going to be very amused watching Kanye and watching Kim Kardashian continue to do things which are useful while other people are criticizing them.
You're just a celebrity.
You don't know about the details.
But just watch what happens.
So I would say there's a good chance you're going to be surprised.
Because there are just things that Kanye can do that ordinary people just can't do.
Now partly because it is Kanye, you know, and he's got the fame and the brand and the recognition and all the power of persuasion that comes with that...
But I'd say keep an open mind and watch what happens.
Let me put this in context.
I've said that we're entering a golden age.
And the way I've defined it, this is my own definition of a golden age, is when you reach a point where your restraints or your constraints are not so much physical anymore.
It's not that you don't have money.
It's not that you...
Don't have the know-how.
The thing that's missing is the creativity.
And this will surprise most of you, but smart people tell me this is true.
We don't lack money for solving these problems.
We don't lack money for training convicts.
We don't lack money for fixing urban areas.
We don't really lack money For even fixing the blighted areas within the cities.
And we don't really lack money for even handling some of the opioid things.
It's good that money has been passed by Congress recently.
The President was talking about that, and I think that's a huge good step.
But most of our obstacles are not money.
Because there are enough billionaires, the government is big enough, that if you have the right idea, It will get funded.
I used to do budgets in my corporate days.
So I would be in charge of the budget.
And department heads would come to me and they'd say, I need more money for X or Y. And I'd say, well, just put it in the form of a business case explaining what the benefit is and what you want to spend it for.
And I'll bring it to the boss.
And if it's a good idea, you'll get some more money.
And They had a hard time believing that money wasn't the problem.
That if they had a good explanation of why they needed it, I could make it happen.
That we didn't have a budget top in any meaningful way.
We simply had a lack of good ideas.
We actually had more money.
I was working for the phone company at the time.
We were awash with capital at the time.
And we actually had more money than we had good ideas.
Now, that's not a usual situation for a corporation, but it is becoming a normal situation in the country that we have more money than good ideas for how to solve the problems with that money.
What does Kanye bring to this situation?
Think about it.
Name somebody who is more creative, more creative in more ways So he's not just creative, he's creative across fields.
In other words, he's mastered creating, which is almost a separate skill from music, a separate skill from design, a separate skill from making sneakers, a separate skill from designing homes.
He knows how to create.
And if you're entering the golden age, Where you have people who really know how to do stuff, things that are the things you do to run society, people who have the money, the biggest gap we are having, and this will increase over time, so the value of somebody like Kanye starts pretty big right now, but is actually even going to get bigger.
Because, you know, you need ideas.
And he's an idea person.
You need to shake the box.
Who shakes the box better than Kanye?
Well, one person, President Trump.
You can only think of one person in the world right now, I think.
Can you think of anybody else who would be like a candidate for number two?
The top box shaker in the world is President Trump, right?
Nikki Haley resigned, somebody's saying here.
That's interesting. We'll follow that story, but I don't have the details.
Anyway, so Kanye is actually the right person at exactly the right time having a meeting with the two most right people in the world.
Because Jared and the President are exactly the right people in the whole frickin' world that are the perfect people for Kanye, who is the perfect creator You know, he has the right intentions, he has our attention, he has the skill set.
That's a really good team!
So, I'm pretty optimistic about at least the possibilities, what they could come up with together.
Let's talk about North Korea.
There's an expert who says it might take 10 years to fully work out the details of denuclearizing North Korea.
Let's say he's right. But what do you think about the timing of when the North Korean summit in the United States will happen?
And I'm going to make my guess.
Here's a prediction.
Full disclosure.
Yesterday I went to predict it and I placed a bet.
So what I'm going to say now is consistent with a bet I've placed.
So, full disclosure, right?
I have money riding on this bet.
Not a lot of money.
It's a small bet. But my bet is that the meeting with Kim will happen this year.
Before the end of this year.
Even though it's going to take a long time to work out the details.
Here's why. See if you follow this.
My best predictions are the ones that have a persuasion cover on them.
There's something about the persuasion element that is predictive.
I would not be good at, say, predicting the outcome of the house race in the midterm, and that's why I've avoided it, because there are too many other variables about who's an incumbent, what's the, you know, how are they districted, and, you know, just all kinds of stuff that you can't see.
I don't have visibility on that stuff.
But in the questions that are sort of a one-off, you know, do you have a summit?
Yes or no? And with North Korea, and then when do you do it?
I feel like I have a little bit more visibility.
Now the common thinking is that these things take a long time, so there's no way that it would happen before the end of the year.
Here's my take on it, and this is a persuasion-influenced prediction.
The President of the United States really, really understands the news cycle and the importance of dominating it.
What happens in December of every year?
Well, I'll tell you.
In December of every year, very much like August of every year, are two months when the news It stops happening.
You know, we can always be surprised, but as a general pattern, the news stops happening in December.
So if you know that the news is just going to slow down around Christmas, what would you do if you're President Trump and you're the best manager of persuasion and brand We've ever seen.
You would make sure that you got Kim in in December.
Because if you bring North Korea into the headlines in December, and you guess something good, and I imagine that what would come out of it would be something like A formal end of hostilities.
There are no hostilities at the moment, but a formal end of the legal declaration of war, whatever the actual terms for that.
You know what I'm talking about.
So we're still technically at a state of war with North Korea, and it might take 10 years to work out all the details of denuclearization.
And December is a slow news month.
And North Korea and the United States have already said as soon as possible about meeting with Kim and Trump in the United States.
That looks like December to me.
Because December would just dominate the news coverage because there just wouldn't be enough competing news.
And it's just a big win for North Korea.
It's a big win for the world.
It's a big win for the president.
And I think a formal declaration of the end of hostilities with some kind of a declaration that, yeah, we've already agreed to let inspectors in and, you know, we're working on the details, but denuclearization is going ahead.
You know, it'll take a long time to get that done, but we can start in December.
So I've placed my bet.
Let me say this as carefully as possible.
Don't ever bet based on my predictions.
It just doesn't make me feel comfortable.
I've personally talked to and met a number of people who won huge amounts of money betting on President Trump's election because of what I said.
I had no idea that was going on, by the way.
And I would have tried to stop it if I'd known.
But there are people who bet $100,000?
$50,000?
There are people who made huge profits betting on Trump because I made the prediction.
I don't like you doing that.
I don't like you doing that.
But I'll tell you, I placed a bet on December, or at least by the end of the year, Kim and Trump meeting.
Let's talk about something else.
On Twitter...
I was pointed to a story about apparently the government, it must be Jeff Sessions, etc., have identified two Chinese citizens, people who live in China, Who are at the head of some drug labs that have been sending drugs over here, fentanyl, and one known person is dead, at least from a batch of that drug.
So we're asking for them to be, I don't know, indicted or whatever happens when somebody's overseas and you name them.
I don't know how the process works with China.
But I've called for China, assuming that the charges check out, right?
I don't want anybody punished if they're not actually guilty.
But assuming that China is satisfied that these two people are culpable, I've called for China to execute them or to deal with it as harshly as they like to.
And the names and their families of those people should be well known within China.
I'd like to see China execute them.
If they don't, or if they resist, I don't know what the other option is.
Is there any chance that China would ever give up their citizens for American justice?
I don't even know if that's a thing.
I don't know the details. If they don't cooperate, whatever that looks like in this case, I don't think we should do a trade deal with them.
I think it's important enough.
The president said that 50,000 people a year are ODing from opioids, and we know that China is the major source.
Other sources being India and Mexico.
But if it's true that, say, 30,000 people a year are dying because of Chinese fentanyl, I think that's a big enough issue to hold off on a trade deal until we can get some justice.
Now I've seen some people on Twitter, who are pushing back on my suggestion that China kill their drug dealers on our behalf to improve their reputation and no longer be called Fentanyl China, which by the way is the top hashtag.
I'm very proud of the fact that if you search for Fentanyl on Twitter, the first suggestion that comes up is Fentanyl China.
That was me. So I've created that hashtag and many of you have been Kind enough to amplify it.
If you search for fentanyl, fentanyl China is the first search term.
Remember, China doesn't like a bad face.
They don't like a bad reputation.
And they are fentanyl China, unless they do something about it.
Now, on Twitter, people have, and I'll say quite fairly, said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you can't blame the supplier.
And it's not a case of blaming them.
It's a case of putting friction on it.
And people have said, but what about...
Abolition. Abolition didn't work in the United States when we tried to make it illegal to have alcohol because it just became an illegal trade and people had all the alcohol they wanted.
I say that friction almost always works.
And I'll give you a counter example.
It is difficult to get a fully automatic rifle in the United States.
Why? Because it's illegal.
And there's a lot of friction to it.
I don't know that we've seen a mass shooting with a fully automatic weapon.
I can't remember one.
In 10, 20 years?
You know, I'm sure maybe there has been one, but I can't think of one.
And the semi-automatics are deadly, of course, and the handguns are deadly, of course, but It's clear that semi-automatic weapons in a crowd or a fully automatic weapon in any kind of a crowd situation would be the ultimate killing machine and people can't get them very easily.
So it's somebody says it's not illegal you're correct let me let me modify that it's been by law it is very difficult to get one you can only get one that's made before 1986 or something but you got to do some paperwork you get a pop-up on I assume you're going to pop up on the government's radar just because it's changed hands,
etc. So there is friction on fully automatics and we note that they're much less used in the kinds of crimes where you would expect to use that very tool.
So I think friction does work.
It's the reason we have laws about anything.
The reason we have laws about anything is because friction works.
You get less of it when you make it illegal.
But at the same time, people are saying, wouldn't it be better to make fentanyl and opioids legal so that people who are using them anyway, because you can't really stop an addict from getting them, somebody's going to make it.
If you close down all the labs in China, there would just be new labs in Pakistan or some other damn place, right?
And that point is fair, that the fentanyl labs, because there's money to be made, would just pop up somewhere else.
But I think you work both ways.
You could certainly test, and here's the key point I'm going to make.
You don't have to say to yourself, let's either make drugs legal or let's execute Chinese drug dealers or at least go after them hard.
You don't have to choose.
You can clearly do both of those things.
And within the case of testing a legal source of these same drugs while you're trying to treat people...
It's a big Trump announcement about Haley in three minutes.
Oh my God!
Does she have a new job?
There might be something happening here that's really interesting.
We'll get back to that. But my point is you could test the concept of free opioids in a city.
You could test it locally and you could get a pretty good idea of what's happening after maybe a year.
So Yeah, I'm not sure if fentanyl, and here's my question that only an expert could ask.
I am aware that, let's say, Portugal and places have made it easier to get safe and legal needles and heroin, and it's actually been a plus.
So we know that it's been tested and it worked out well for heroin.
I don't know if that's the same for fentanyl, because one of the problems is that You've got different sized margins between dying on a drug and having a good time.
And with fentanyl, it's a very narrow band.
So if you gave somebody two legal fentanyl pills and they were dumb enough to take both of them, they'd still die.
Right? So I'm not sure you've entirely...
You can't make a good analogy between heroin and And fentanyl and say that what worked with heroin also makes sense with fentanyl.
Because fentanyl is like a nuclear bomb compared to a hand grenade.
So you wouldn't say, well, the way you handle a hand grenade should be the same as the way you handle a nuclear bomb.
There's such a difference in the lethalness of this that I would want to see some experts weigh in on whether, in this special case, making a legal safe supply is even a thing.
I don't even know if it's a thing.
Alright, let's keep going.
You're going to want to watch the Nikki Haley thing.
I'll tell you what I'll do. I'm going to turn on I'm going to turn on my streaming service here, and I'll keep an eye on it.
I think there's a lot to be told about what's going on here, and maybe there's already an announcement of a replacement.
All right, so we'll just keep watching this, keep an eye on it, and when the news goes live to the president, I'll break in, okay?
Here's a question for you.
The folks on the left are very concerned about the court and about it being too conservative, and especially about Kavanaugh.
I'll turn on CNN in a moment, so I'm watching it now, and until the president goes live, I'll keep it off.
But Kavanaugh is a special kind of judge, right?
Because he's very strong on precedent.
And we're also in a very special time of history in which it seems to me that pretty much all of the social issues have been settled.
Am I wrong? If you said to me 50 years ago, let's have a conservative court who is very serious about precedent.
Well, then you wouldn't get any of the changes that we mostly find are popular.
For example, if 50 years ago you'd said, let's stick with the Constitution and never get creative with it, you wouldn't have gay marriage, which I believe is quite popular, right?
Popular in terms of public support.
I believe there would be lots of things that you wouldn't have.
Now, I'm not going to argue whether these things are good or bad.
That's not the conversation today.
Personally, I think most things have moved in the right direction.
But that's not the argument.
The argument is this.
If you like what has happened so far, if you like where society has brought us to, this moment, and I think it's pretty likable.
In terms of social justice, if I can use that word not in a negative way for once, in terms of how we treat each other, in terms of fairness, in terms of trying to identify and eliminate little pockets of abuse and unfairness, we've really come a long way.
And so today, if you get constitutionalists and people who like precedent, they're sort of going to lock that in.
So it seems like there's a point at which it actually makes sense to switch from creative judges who might be, let's say, more liberal, and they say, well, the Constitution, I'm going to leave the exact Constitution and do what I think is right.
It might be that that was a good thing until roughly now.
Roughly now in our history, we may have enough social justice built into our system through precedent that the Supreme Court has already decided on, that if you were to sort of lock that in and stay with precedent, I'm not sure that anything's going to change.
Now here's the other thing I want you to look for.
The people who are telling you that the whole Kavanaugh situation is about Roe vs.
Wade, There's something missing.
There's another dog that isn't barking problem with this.
Because if the top court threw out Roe v.
Wade, and this is Jeffrey Toobin's estimate, there would be 12 states, roughly, because of the polling in those states, about 12 states would very quickly make it illegal in their states.
I'd like to check that assumption, and I'm wondering why you haven't seen any reporting About the states.
Where are the people on the left who have said, okay, we didn't get what we wanted for the Supreme Court.
Let's take the fight to where it makes the most difference, which is these 12 states.
Because California is not going to make abortion illegal.
New York State isn't.
None of the blue states are going to do it.
It's really a question of the 12-ish states.
So why haven't they moved all of their fundraising, all of their efforts, why haven't they moved that to the states?
Let me tell you why.
Because it's probably not about abortion.
I think it might be the biggest fake because we've ever seen.
I think the people might even be internalizing it that way and saying, ah, this is a fight for abortion.
But it's really sort of a continuation of the 2016 election.
It feels to me that abortion is starting to feel more like what I call the fake because.
A fake because is the reason you give, and you might have even talked yourself into it that that's the reason, but it's not the real reason.
The real reason is probably tribalism, it's probably revenge, it's probably just wanting to win, it's about power, etc.
Now for me to be wrong about that, And that it really is about Roe vs.
Wade? All you'd have to do is show me, look, they've moved their attention from the Supreme Court where you're not going to be able to change that.
That's kind of locked in. They should have moved their attention to the states.
And we should be seeing stories about the states.
We should be seeing stories about the governor, about some of the legislators in the states.
We should see interviews with them and have them say, yeah, tomorrow I'm totally voting.
We should see polls of those politicians to know actually that those 12 would actually vote.
Make it illegal. Then we should see stories about what would happen.
What would happen if a state made it illegally?
What are the names of the major corporations in those states?
Would those major corporations continue operating in those states?
Would Apple Computer, for example, given that it's, would Google, for example, two good examples, would any of the tech companies Have a headquarters or a major presence in a state that they found that objectionable by their standards?
I don't know that they would.
So there are smart people, and I won't tell you where this came from, but somebody who really knows the Supreme Court once said that changing it at the federal level would have no impact at the state level.
And here's why, and I've said this before on Periscope, that the moment a state made it illegal, that state would become a pariah with the other states and the other major corporations.
It would lose tourism.
It would lose manufacturing.
It would lose investment.
It would be enormously expensive.
And Here's the next part.
After all that sacrifice that one of these hypothetical states would make to make it illegal, the people in that state could still get an abortion because you know that the women who care about this issue will organize.
If there's anything we know, they're going to organize.
And they will organize to make sure that the people who need the abortion in that state where it's illegal have the means, the funding.
It's going to be a GoFundMe situation to simply take an Uber across the border.
Now, it might be with somebody who can guide them.
There may be caveats to it.
But you know there's going to be an underground railroad, right?
Because states are not so big that you can't drive to the other one.
If it's just a drive, if it's a half a day drive to get over the state border, abortion's legal everywhere, even if your state doesn't like it.
You know, the citizens just drive across the border.
So you would have changed nothing in your state except to greatly handicap it financially.
But there would still be the abortions.
So is any state going to be so dumb As to be the one who says, well, for religious, for personal, for moral reasons, we're going to make it illegal in my state.
But the only net effect of that will be to be very bad for the citizens of the state economically, because nobody wants to deal with you, or there'll be enough people who don't want to deal with you that it's a big hit.
And those people will still get abortions.
They'll just get in a car.
And they'll drive four hours.
All you did is make it less safe.
That's all you did. So how much of that's going to happen?
I'm guessing not a lot.
So that's how you know the whole conversation about the Supreme Court is illegitimate.
Because if they're not talking intensely about these individual states where the decision will pop down to if it gets overturned at the top court, we're not really serious about the issue.
We're just using it as a fake because.
All right, we're still awaiting remarks from the president.
While we're waiting for that remarks, I want to mention a couple things about my startup interface by WenHub.
For those of you know, it's an app.
It's already out. It's on both app stores.
And you can immediately talk to an expert.
I'll give you more information about that at another time.
But if you're an expert in Mandarin, The language, Mandarin, or Pinyin, which I didn't even know was a thing.
P-I-N-Y-I-N. I guess that's a Chinese dialect, maybe.
There's someone on the app right now who is looking for an expert to teach them the language.
So if there's somebody who can teach Mandarin or teach Pinyin, Sign up as an expert.
It's free, and you can make money for the time that you do it.
So you would be connected by a video call should a customer and an expert be on at the same time and want to talk to each other.
And if you don't connect on the first time, just signing up and having a keyword for opinion, P-I-N-Y-I-N, or a keyword Mandarin, Would send out an alert to the person looking for you to tell you next time you're online.
So it should be good for learning a language.
By the way, I'm learning drums online and it really works.
I didn't know that learning drums online with a teacher who's on a video call with you, I wasn't sure that would work.
But it turns out it works really well because I have a lot of questions every time.
So every two weeks or so we have a call.
And I ask a bunch of questions and then I can just practice on my own because I don't really want the teacher looking at me while I'm practicing.
So I just like to...
Hear the techniques, get the nuance, figure out what thing I didn't know, make sure I'm clear on things, hear him play a few notes, or hear him play a bit so that I can try to match it, a whole bunch of stuff like that.
So it actually works pretty well.
Let me ask you a question.
We're waiting for Nikki Haley, or we're waiting for the President to say something about it.
I'm considering doing this.
Opinion is a way to take Chinese characters into Romanized letters.
Okay, so correction. Opinion is not a dialect.
It is something about the technique of translating Chinese characters into letters that we in the West would recognize.
I'm thinking about doing a special periscope in which I would teach you persuasion It would be an extended periscope on one topic in which I would teach you persuasion, but it would be wrapped in the context of persuading you to use my startup's app.
Now, here's why I'm asking your opinion of it.
As I've taught you over time, even if you understand the technique of persuasion, even if you understand the technique, it still works.
So if I do this, I would warn people that I'm trying to persuade them, but I'm also teaching them persuasion.
So I would use the technique, then I would pause and say, here's the technique I just used on you.
And I would explain it, and then I would use another technique, but it would be in the context of talking about my company's app, and I would be trying to persuade you at the same time I'm teaching you how to pitch something like that.
I'm seeing lots of yeses, so I'm going to schedule that, and that'll come soon.
Great. I wasn't sure people would like this idea.
This is a much better idea. This is a much better response than I was expecting.
Alright, it looks like we don't know how long we're going to be waiting for the President's remarks, so I don't want to keep you waiting here much longer.
Does anybody have a...
I've got the sound off.
I don't know how long it's going to take.
I don't want you to just wait here while I do that.
Let me check my notes.
Oh, yeah, we didn't even talk about Rick Gates and the Israeli bots.
Let's talk about that while we're waiting for the President.
So, the story in the New York Times, I guess, that a senior campaign aide, I think it was Gates, had some meetings with some Israeli companies that offered to make fake social media accounts and try to influence the election.
The net of it is that the Trump campaign said, no thank you, and walked away.
So, it's not really a crime, because they listened to the pitch and they said, no, that's not for us, and they walked away.
But I saw some tweets in which, let's see, Adam Schiff, I think, started off saying, isn't it a coincidence that the Trump campaign asked the Israelis about a deal that they turned down And then the Russians coincidentally provided those same services with the Russian bots to try to influence the election.
Isn't that a coincidence?
And I thought to myself, on a persuasion level, that's actually pretty good.
If you're not trying to deal with the facts or logic or anything, but if you're just trying to persuade, it was pretty clever to tie that Israeli story, which does have some meat to it.
There was an actual meeting But nothing happened.
But it has a little bit of meat because at least the conversation happened.
The Russian story so far has no meat on it at all.
So what Schiff did was he took two zeros.
The Russian collusion thing is just a zero.
It has no stickiness whatsoever.
It's a zero. And then he added it to the Israeli story That, you know, the campaign listened to and rejected, so that's a zero.
So he took two zeros and he added the zeros and he said, look what I got.
It's a one. I added two zeros and I got a one.
Now, persuasion-wise, that's exactly what he did.
In terms of how it feels to people, he's mostly talking to his base, right?
He's not really trying to persuade Republicans with something like that.
He's trying to persuade his base that they still have something to worry about with this president.
So he literally took two zeros, added them together in public, and came out with a one.
And I gotta say, it totally worked!
For his limited purpose, which was to keep his base feeling like there's something to be suspicious of.
0 plus 0 equals 1.
Schiff actually pulled that off!
So, I'm trying to be consistent with separating my admiration for technique From whether something is moral or ethically good, I trust you all to make your own moral and ethical decisions.
And they're probably not going to be substantially different from my own, right?
But technique-wise, you can learn something from that.
He added zero and zero and got a one.
It wasn't bad at all.
I'm going to give him credit for that.
Oh, here's another interesting thing while we're waiting for the president to talk.
You saw that the IPPC Came up with new warnings about climate change, that the whole world was going to go to hell in 10 years or 20 years or whatever, and that there's nothing we can do.
We're already probably past the tipping point and blah, blah, blah.
But I think it was Steven Pinker who first pointed this out, that in all the stories about this, nobody mentions nuclear power.
Think about that.
It's a story about the world is going to end.
I'm exaggerating, but the world will have horrible, horrible problems and hurricanes and flooding and people dying from drought and everything.
So it's like cataclysmic worst problem in literally, actually literally, the worst problem in the world according to the people who are accepting these projections.
And if it really is the worst problem in the world, and we know the most effective solution, which is to relax your fear about nuclear power plants, And just build more of them.
Because one nuclear power plant melting down, as horrible as that is, is not even close.
It's not even close to being as bad as climate change.
So the climate change people, if they were honest, and if they meant anything they were saying, they would say in practically the same paragraph, The world is going to go to hell because of climate change.
The only solution is nuclear power.
Because it's true. Now we should certainly be working as fast as we can on the solar and all the other things, but I don't believe there's any expert anywhere who believes that we can get those things ramped up in time.
So even if you prefer solar and wind power, even if you prefer them, If you believe climate change is as dire as the IPPC or TU says, if you believe it,
and you also believe every expert who says that no matter what you do, you're not going to get there fast enough with solar and green power, then you should be saying in the same sentence, you need nuclear power and you need a lot of it and you need it fast.
Because otherwise you're not talking about risk.
You're not talking about risk if you're only talking about half of the equation.
You've got to throw in the solution and say, is the solution better or worse than the risk?
And there's only one solution on the table, as far as I know.
There are a million things you might want to do, but there's only one thing that'll make a difference.
The only thing that could make a difference fast enough is probably nuclear.
Now, the fast enough part assumes that it doesn't take 20 years to approve it.
So you need to speed up the approval.
You might need to build different kinds of plants that are safer.
And the same week that this happens, there's a news report.
I hope you all saw this. This was great.
That they've discovered a nuclear waste-eating bacteria.
Think about that.
What's the biggest problem with nuclear power?
It produces waste.
Nuclear waste. Or it might spill and then the nuclear stuff gets all over.
If this is true, and of course you have to have a little skepticism or a lot of it for stories like this, but if we've actually discovered, we, society, a nuclear waste-eating bacteria, suddenly the risk of power plants, nuclear power plants, may have gone from On a scale of 1 to 10, it might have been an 8.
I don't know how you'd measure that.
Maybe it's a 10. But it may have gone down to a 2 or a 3.
So you can't have the same conversation because it's possible that the risk of nuclear power has gone from pretty high to not much.
I'm not sure that's the case, but we might be on the verge of that being true.
All right, I think I've run out of topics.
So, I guess that's all I got today.
Okay.
And what does the bacteria mutate to, somebody asks.
Yeah, maybe we do need to worry about bacteria that becomes nuclear.
Nuclear bacteria.
I assume that that bacteria would have spider powers.
Yes.
What else could you assume?
Oh, the Taylor Swift thing.
Thank you. So you saw the president...
I think he was on his way to his helicopter or something.
I forget where he was. But they asked him about Taylor Swift's comments.
I don't even know what the comment was about.
It doesn't matter. We definitely have the funniest president.
So the president looks at the camera and he says with that twinkle in his eye, because Taylor Swift said something that was anti-administration in some way.
I forget what the topic was.
But he goes, now I like Taylor's music 25% less.
Okay. If he'd said, I like your music less, it wouldn't be funny.
If he had said, well, she's entitled to her opinion, that wouldn't be funny.
If he said he disagreed with her vigorously, that wouldn't be funny.
If he said that substantially lowers my appreciation of her music, that wouldn't be funny.
But when he looked at the camera and he said with a twinkle in his eye that he enjoyed her music 25% less now, That is some funny stuff.
That is funny. Because what's funny about it is the wrongness of the specificity.
The specificity of it registers as so immediately ridiculous that it's just funny.
And it makes you think about it more than you would normally think about it because of the ridiculousness of it.
But he also said, but he allowed that she was still 75% talented.
So he is sort of...
You've heard the term nagging, where you sort of insult somebody.
It's used in the pickup artist world.
You sort of insult a woman, but you give her a chance to work her way back into your good opinion.
So he sort of just gave her a little ding, but he sort of left room.
Well, you're only 25% less enjoyable now, but hey, maybe in the future you can work your way back.
So that was one of the funniest things that's happened all week.
Check me if I'm wrong.
Check me if I'm wrong on this.
Well, let me put this in a different context.
We have watched President Trump be the dark horse, come-from-behind candidate.
He's the ultimate come-from-behind guy.
He's been literally bankrupt, and he came back.
His show on, you know, his Apprentice show probably was under some pressure.
I think it might have been close to being canceled or something.
And then he leaves and he turns that into a presidential run that looks like he's going to lose, and then it comes back.
And then he gets elected, and everybody says, well, you got elected, but you're definitely going to be a bad president.
And so he comes back, and now everything's good.
So we've watched the president go through this phase where we've seen him be a come-from-behind sort of personality.
And that's how we know him.
We know him as sort of a come-from-behind personality.
He's always been kind of in that mode.
He's always been under attack.
But lately, he's had such a good week.
And as we come toward the end of the year, you're going to hear all of the year-end summaries, and they're going to sound really good for this president.
When they do the end-of-the-year December summary stuff where they say, well, let's look at how the president did over the past year, and then they're going to say the past two years, it's going to look really good, okay?
What we have never seen, but we're just seeing now, is President Trump as a front-runner.
We've never seen that before.
He's a front-runner.
He's a front-runner for his re-election, and he's totally in a good place in terms of managing the country right now.
Things are going his way. And it feels like his more fun personality is emerging, because all of these rallies All of these rallies are really just stand-up humor and he's just having a really good time.
It's obvious when you see him, he's just enjoying himself on stage.
And when he said that comment about Taylor Swift, and you could see the twinkle in his eye, he looked really relaxed.
Like he knows he's in charge and things are going well now.
So it feels as though the come-from-behind president is now becoming the front-runner president, you know, kind of the man on top, and you're going to see a slightly different version of him.
Because he gets to modify, right?
He modifies his personality for every situation.
That's one of his strengths.
And you're going to see the front-runner Trump, which is going to be hilarious.
I think it's going to be hilarious in a positive way.
It'll just be funny.
Waiting remarks from President Trump.
I wonder what...
I'm very curious about Nikki Haley's resignation.
I wonder if there's something specific behind it.
I don't see any speculation on it.
Nikki Haley wrote the op-ed.
Somebody's saying, I don't think so.
Alright, I think it's going to be too long that we're going to wait, so I'm going to let you watch it on your own.
If there's something about it that's world-breaking news, I might come back on, but I'm going to let you get back to it right now.
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