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March 7, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
50:37
Episode 441 Scott Adams: Omar, Fine People, Vaccinations, Fathers, Food Equality, Ivanka, More
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey David, come on in here.
And the rest of you too.
It's time. Tyler, I see you.
Come on in here. Josiah, Shada, Miriam, Semper, Arlene, and Brad.
It's time for all of you to grab your beverage container.
I know it might be a mug, a cup, a glass.
It could be a stein, a chalice, some kind of container.
I like to fill mine with coffee.
Your mileage may vary.
But what might not vary is your love for the simultaneous sip.
And here it comes.
Oh, I hope you're ready for that.
Because that was a good one.
Oh yeah. There is so much to talk about, I almost don't know where to start.
Hey Norm. Hey Dorothy.
So let's start with, oh, let's start with vaccinations.
Vaccinations. The only thing I'm going to weigh in on vaccinations is that it's like so many other Topics we're seeing in the news where there's sort of a pretend debate where people are actually talking about different things, but we treat it like it's debating the same thing.
My understanding is that the anti-vaxxers, so-called anti-vaxxers, probably not a proper term, but they say things such as...
Yes, we've tested all the vaccinations individually, but we give them as a big group, and nobody has tested what happens if you give them as a big group.
That might be a good point.
Might be a good point.
I don't know. But it's different from saying you shouldn't vaccinate.
Those are not the same thing.
Maybe the way we're doing it should be spread out is a different statement than you should not vaccinate.
Then there's the Rand Paul objection, which is apparently maybe the only medical procedure where you don't need the parent's approval to treat the child.
And that's a tough one, because I think the medical case for vaccines is pretty strong, and therefore You know, you can't really let some people say no, because if some people say no, then everybody is more at risk.
So, I'm not sure people are always talking about the same thing.
Somebody says, false, false.
Now, I know some of you anti-vaxxers, and there probably are some of you here, think that the science doesn't make sense.
I would tell you that probably what's going on, if I put what I would call the persuasion filter on the vaccination question, if you're a parent and you have a kid who has some kind of medical issue and you have two if you're a parent and you have a kid who has some kind of medical issue and you have two choices, you can blame yourself, maybe your choice of a partner, your genetic makeup that created this kid, or you
In theory, if you took millions of people and put them in this position and say, okay, something bad happened with the health of your child, you've got two ways to go.
You can blame science and say science is bad and it damaged my child, or you can blame yourself.
You should predict that some, I don't know, 20% of that population, just to pick a number, Would say it's got to be science.
Because the way humans are wired, it's not easy to blame yourself for something horrible that happens to your own child.
My guess is that at least, I don't know, 80% of what drives the anti-vaxxers is that psychological phenomenon, that you can't blame yourself for something so bad happening to a child, even if really you shouldn't blame yourself either.
I mean, it's not like you intentionally passed along some gene that might have had an issue, or it's not like you intentionally raised your kid in a way that damaged them.
So that's my guess of where that vaccination stuff is all about.
All right. Let's talk about R. Kelly.
Did you all see the R. Kelly clip of talking to Gail?
Gail? Gail.
I forget what her last name is.
And R. Kelly is...
Put on quite an act of being innocent.
Now, here's the interesting thing.
So we're watching R. Kelly, and we're watching...
There's this special about Michael Jackson accusing him of pedophilia.
Gayle King, thank you.
Gayle King interviewed R. Kelly.
And here's the thing.
In any other time, if you had gone back, say, five years...
If you're going back five years, you probably would have seen the Michael Jackson thing and you would have said, that evidence is solid.
He's definitely guilty.
Five years ago, you would have looked at the R. Kelly thing and said, well, I saw the special.
I watched the documentary.
There is no way that they are anything but guilty.
No way they are anything but guilty.
But here's the thing.
It's not five years ago.
Now you have a better understanding that both the Michael Jackson thing and the R. Kelly thing could be complete bullshit.
Now, my personal belief is that they're not.
My personal belief is that the evidence is overwhelming and that I would be blown away.
If either of those documentaries about R. Kelly or about Michael Jackson are fundamentally wrong.
They might have some details wrong, but I would be amazed.
But here's the lesson of the day.
My certainty is not an indication of reality.
And that's a little lesson that you should take with you all the time.
The fact that I'm positive...
They're both guilty, is in no way evidence of their guilt.
And in fact, since I can look at even a very recent case, the Covington boys situation, where I was completely fooled by my own eyes, I thought, right?
I thought I saw something with my own eyes, and I was fooled.
So here's the cautionary lesson.
If you are positive that R. Kelly is guilty, and you're positive that Michael Jackson is guilty because you saw those documentaries, you haven't learned anything.
You haven't learned anything.
The odds of them being guilty are pretty darn high.
But if you're 100% positive, you haven't learned anything.
Because you could be fooled by either one of those situations.
I think that's very unlikely.
But you have to at least keep that open, keep that possibility open.
It keeps you safe for the next situation, where you can at least ask yourself, what is the other case?
Now, I told you that with the Michael Jackson case, there's a pretty persuasive evidence on the other side.
It's pretty persuasive.
I'll bet you that when R. Kelly is done presenting his defense, it will be persuasive to at least some people.
It might not persuade you, it might not persuade me, but I'll bet you the fact that he's pleading innocent suggests that his lawyer has an angle on this thing.
And the angle might be that, you know, there are so many witnesses that say it didn't happen.
So don't be surprised if you're feeling about how definitely these people are guilty starts to shift over time when the persuaders weigh in on the other side.
Don't be surprised. Let's talk about Ivanka and Jared's security clearance.
So, apparently the President has the authority to order somebody to get security clearance, even if they haven't been cleared.
He did something like that with both Jared and Ivanka, and everybody's upset about it.
Why? Why does anybody care about that?
Does anybody think that the President of the United States doesn't have a pretty good sense about his daughter?
And, you know, his son-in-law, who he's been close to for a long time.
I would think that he has a pretty good idea what those two are up to.
Now, and I guess there's some, you know, understanding that they both had international, you know, dealings.
So, that story is such a non-story.
There's so little to it.
That it's telling you something that that's a story.
The fact that it's even a story tells you that the Democrats are running out of ammunition.
And that's sort of the theme of what I'm going to talk about next.
Here's a rule I want you to test going forward.
So I think this is a predictive rule.
In fact, I'm quite certain this is a predictive rule.
So I'm going to make a prediction about the future.
Based on a rule, and then I want you to track it and see if this rule comes through.
So there's a question about the president's...
whether he violated campaign finance laws by making a payment through Cohen to Stormy Daniels.
And so the people who are critics of the president say he violated campaign law.
Now, there are lawyers who would agree.
There are lawyers who would say, yes, if these facts check out, that's a violation of campaign law.
But here's the thing.
There are other lawyers who went to law school, who passed the bar, who have practiced law for many years, who look at the same set of facts and they say, even if all the facts are true, it's not clear that there's any law violated.
Now, hold that thought, right?
So, with the Stormy Daniels payment, there are lawyers on both sides, not of whether he's guilty.
Here's the key point.
They're not arguing whether he's guilty.
They're arguing whether it's even a crime.
Now, let's go to the obstruction of justice claim.
There's a claim that the president may have acted in a way that obstructed the Mueller investigation.
And so some lawyers say if that happened and those facts can be demonstrated, he's committed a crime, obstruction of justice.
Other lawyers who also pass the bar, who also are practicing professional, capable lawyers, look at the same situation and they say, the Mueller investigation is not a criminal investigation.
It's an intelligence investigation.
And there's no such thing as a law against Mueller.
The boss having influence over an intelligence investigation.
And therefore, we're not talking about whether he's guilty or innocent.
We're talking about whether it's even a crime.
So here's my predictive variable.
If smart, intelligent, working, experienced lawyers are on both sides of the following question, is that even illegal?
Nobody's going to jail.
You can take that to the bank.
I think, now track this and see if I'm right.
In my opinion, and I'd like some lawyers to weigh in on this, given that these sort of things, you know, always end up in the Supreme Court if they have that capability, you know, if that track is available because it's a president and because the stakes are high and there's some ambiguity, you know, you end up in the Supreme Court.
In what world does somebody get convicted of a crime in which there's a universe of lawyers who went to law school, looked at the facts, everybody agrees on the facts, and they say, there's no crime.
This is not even illegal.
We don't have to ask ourselves if he committed a crime, because there's no crime described.
There's no illegality to be had, no matter what he did, because there's no crime here.
In my opinion, you can make a prediction that there is essentially no chance that the president has legal...
Any kind of significant legal risk for either the stormy payments or for obstructing an investigation because there are smart lawyers who say, we don't even know if this is a crime.
So I'm going to say that that's predictive, and you could bank on that.
You don't even have to worry about those two things anymore.
There might be other things.
There might be related other things, but those two things I have zero worry about, and that's why.
All right. I saw that there was at least one advisor.
I can't remember his name. Advisor to the Trump campaign at one point who got the document request.
He was one of the 81 people and entities that Congress asked for documents.
And I believe he said he wasn't going to do it.
And he said it because it would just be a crushing financial burden for all the lawyers and that it's a witch hunt and he's just not going to do it.
Caputo. Yeah, I think that was his name.
And Michael Caputo. To which I say, Michael Caputo is now my hero.
He's my hero.
I assume that this is a risky play.
I assume it's risky to say, I know you're asking for these, I know you have a legal right, and I'm still not going to give it to you.
I really respect that.
And I would respect it even more if the other 80 entities said the same damn thing.
Because I think this one's worth fighting over.
Everybody talks about the slippery slope, and I always say there's no such thing as a slippery slope, because at some point, resistance appears.
Maybe this is it.
Maybe Caputo's stand is what gives other people a little backbone, because if all 81 of them say, all right, I wanted to swear there, but I pulled myself back.
I hope you appreciate that.
I'll say, what if all 81 say, screw it.
Let's take it all the way.
I'm not even going to hire a lawyer.
You know, what if all 81 said, I'm not even going to spend a penny.
I'm just going to ignore this, put it in a drawer.
Well, what happened? I don't know.
I mean, because Congress does have oversight about But they don't have the right to ruin the country for political reasons.
And if it becomes obvious that they're trying to destroy the government for political reasons, a perjury trap, as somebody is saying in the comments, if it's sort of obvious that that's what's going on, does anybody have a responsibility to comply?
Let me put it this way.
You're a citizen of the United States.
You're a patriot.
And you're a patriot first, let's say, just a mental experiment.
You're a patriot first.
That's who you are. That's your identity.
And you get this subpoena, and you know that complying with it will make the country worse off.
Resisting will put you at risk, but if everybody else resisted, maybe the country's better off because it stops the witch hunt, at least this part of the witch hunt.
I would go with the patriots.
I would say that Michael Caputo is a patriot, and I support his choice if he decides to not give them any documents.
I very much support it.
I support it for his benefit, I support it for the benefit of his family, because there's a financial implication, and I support it for the country.
So, there's that.
Let's talk about the humanitarian crisis at the border.
So, Brandon Darby, who I've had on my periscopes, who is an expert on all things border, on the southern border, I look to him for the reasonable opinions on all things border.
So whenever everybody gets a little crazy, every now and then you need to reorient yourself towards somebody who actually knows what they're talking about, has lived and breathed that atmosphere for a long time as an expert on it, and is reasonable.
And that's Brandon Darby, writes for Breitbart.
And he tweeted something that I retweeted, and this is really important.
So this is from the White House.
So it's not from the President, but it's from the White House.
So, same family.
And the White House tweeted, Human cargo?
All right, just catch the drift here, right?
Human cargo, sexual assault, filthy stash houses, debt bondage, all horrors that would have no place to hide in a modern, safe, and secure immigration system.
The truth is that the crisis at our border hurts U.S. citizens and migrants alike.
And then there's a graphic that one out of three women are sexually abused on the journey to the border.
So in other words, the White House has started to frame this as a humanitarian crisis.
I'll read it again. So instead of saying criminals are coming across the border and they're going to murder Americans, that was the old thing, or maybe the president still says that, we don't know.
But the White House, the official thing, concentrated on the human...
The humanitarian element of it.
That the migrants themselves are suffering greatly because of the situation.
Brandon retweets that and he says, imagine if you folks, talking about the White House, imagine if you folks had presented this humanitarian argument for border security from the get-go.
Yeah, imagine that. How much better that would have been.
We'd have the needed barrier built by now.
I hope you continue with this focus.
And I would like to amplify that thought, same one that I've been saying, largely, you know, in a sense, taking his lead.
So, what I've been saying for a while, and some of you, I always...
Morning allergies.
Morning allergies. I always like to remind you that I do criticize the president's choices sometimes because people say, hey, you're so in the bag for him.
All you say is good things. We can't trust you.
But here's one. Here's a situation in which I criticize the president's approach.
I think his talking about crime was a great thing to get elected.
But once he's got to govern the whole country, I think talking about the humanitarian crisis is a stronger way to go because it's less susceptible to the racism charge.
So at this point, I think that...
I do have a neti pot for my allergies.
It's great, but I use it after I do these things.
That's the next thing I'm going to do.
So... So my point being that if the president takes the lead That maybe is just being tested down by the White House Twitter account.
I think sometimes, you know, the president does a little A-B testing coming from other accounts.
So if he sees something from the White House and the White House says, let's focus, you know, let's look at this humanitarian element, if that gets a good response, you should expect that the president might want to adopt that, you know, based on how it works out.
So I hope he does, because that would be the most healing thing that could happen, is if the president just focused on the humanitarian element and probably would get us to the same place.
I saw there's some potential contractor for building the wall who offered to do it for a much cheaper price than what the budget looks like right now.
So that's an element that's kind of interesting too.
Now let's talk about a little more racism.
Somebody says, cannabis is good for your allergies.
Yes, it is.
If anybody doesn't know that, if you have bad allergies, by the way, if you smoke a little weed, In my case, I can't speak for other people, and I certainly would not give you medical advice.
So don't take any medical advice from cartoonists.
But I'll tell you my experience is that it stops an allergy cold.
It stops it immediately, and it's just over.
Just no more allergies.
It's just gone as soon as you smoke.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about.
I want to talk about Representative Omar.
Now this is interesting.
So as you know, Representative Omar has said a number of comments about Israel and about the Benjamins, so to speak, meaning money, and about the Israel lobby running Congress and buying them off and such.
And of course the critics are saying, you anti-Semite, these are anti-Semitic secret dog whistles.
So, it seems the secret dog whistle is in the other mouth now, doesn't it?
Does it sound familiar?
Yes, it does sound familiar.
So, the President tweeted...
Let's see, do I have his tweet?
Yes. So, then there's a bill that's being considered in the House...
To condemn anti-Semitism.
And Nancy Pelosi sort of got cornered by this, and now she has to condemn anti-Semitism.
But the bill got shot down.
Now, from a political perspective, is there anything more entertaining than watching the Charlottesville fine people hoax being put on the other foot?
Because the Democrats now have to either condemn their up-and-coming stars, because if you condemn Omar, you're sort of condemning anybody who supported her, such as AOC. They either have to do that and have this big split where they're fighting with each other, but if they don't condemn him, they have to explain why they're not willing to condemn anti-Semitism.
It's just like this perfect political set-up.
You know, it feels like the Democrats have been herded into this, you know, this small ravine.
And then, you know, the shooting's going to start.
I shouldn't say anything with shooting in it when I'm talking about politics.
So, remove the shooting.
That was a bad analogy. So, the president weighs into this.
And he says in his tweet, he goes, it is shameful that House Democrats won't take a stronger stand against anti-Semitism in their conference.
Anti-Semitism has fueled atrocities from history and it's inconceivable they will not act to condemn it.
So the president sees this opening, and he walks in, and it's perfect.
So I just criticized the president for his handling of the border stuff, how he frames the border problem.
But this, he nailed it.
And I usually don't, you know, do the gotcha sports.
You know, I don't like it when somebody says, ah, you hypocrite, you did this, and now we're doing this.
But this is so clever, and so perfectly symmetrical, meaning that it's a perfect...
You know, structured, just like the attacks against the president for the past three years, that it's too delicious not to talk about.
So the Democrats have formed this circular firing squad, and the president is sort of like the narrator.
You know, just imagine this.
So they've got this circular firing squad, the Democrats do, and the president's like...
And they've lined up in the circular firing squad.
He's like the narrator. And it looks like they're loading their weapons.
Well, I shouldn't use weapons again.
Let me take guns out of all my analogies.
I've got some kind of a gun analogy problem this morning, but imagine I didn't say anything about any of that.
So the president's having a little bit of fun with this, you have to assume.
And the people who bought into the fine people hoax from Charlottesville, you know the hoax where CNN and MSNBC and the anti-Trumpers reported the fake news.
That the president had called the marching anti-Semitic white nationalists, the fake news was that he called them fine people, when in fact he was talking about people who were on both sides of the Confederate statue issue.
He wasn't talking about the racists in particular.
So that hoax...
It's still out there.
And if you believe that hoax, as probably 80% of the country did, if you fell for the fine people hoax that CNN and the others were serving up, how do you explain that he's now tweeting against anti-Semitism?
How do you explain that Israel loves him?
How do you explain that his grandchildren are Jewish?
How do you explain anything?
So the president is continuing to add You know, add another...
I don't know.
Let's see, what would I say?
It's more like Jenga. It's more like he's taking another block out of their fake news hallucination that he ever called the racists fine people.
Just one by one, he's like, did I call the anti-Semites in Charlottesville fine people?
Did you know my daughter is Jewish?
Takes in a Jenga block.
Not enough. Did you know my son-in-law?
Did you know my grandkids are Jewish?
Did you hear that Israel loves me and I moved our embassy to Jerusalem?
Still not good enough.
Not good enough. How about I condemn anti-Semites in Congress and force them to change their ways?
How about that? That one out.
Still there? Getting a little wobbly.
A little wobbly. And then, you may have seen Joel Pollack tweeted today, it's day nine, since he called out in Breitbart in his article, called out the fake news about these, quote, fine people, that hoax, and he's waiting for CNN to run a correction.
But of course, they won't.
Not only will they not correct, they will not address it.
It's this big, long, cricket fest.
Chirp, chirp, chirp.
It's like it didn't even happen.
So he and I and others are calling the fine people thing a hoax, And there's no pushback.
Because there can't be. As soon as they push back, it'll all fall apart.
Because pushing back will draw attention to it.
And if you put any attention to it at all, it just falls apart.
Alright, so that's interesting.
I had to look up the word allegiance, because wasn't that Omar's complaint that there were members of Congress who were showing, quote, allegiance to Israel?
And I actually had to look up the word, because I wasn't sure I knew exactly what that meant.
So here's the definition.
Allegiance, this is the first definition.
Is loyalty or obligation of loyalty as to a nation?
Sovereign or blah, blah, blah.
And so I said, okay, allegiance is loyalty to a nation, for example, which would be the case.
Would it be true that American congresspeople have a loyalty to Israel?
And I thought, I'd better look up loyalty, just to make sure, right?
So you look up loyalty, and the definition is a feeling or attitude of devoted attachment and affection.
Would it be true that American congresspeople have a feeling towards Israel that could be described as a feeling or attitude of devoted attachment and affection?
I would say yes, wouldn't you?
I would say that we have that feeling against all of our allies, not against.
We have that feeling about England, Great Britain.
We have that feeling about Japan.
We have that feeling about South Korea.
We have that feeling about France.
We have that feeling about Germany.
We have close attachments.
We have attitudes of devoted attachment and affection.
And affection for all of our close allies.
Is Israel a close ally?
Yeah, sure.
So why wouldn't we have affection for Israel?
But there is another definition of allegiance, and the other definition is where you treat them as your boss, basically.
So, one definition of allegiance is essentially affection, which I would say is fair.
Another definition is sort of fealty to or obeying.
And that would be the second definition.
And that one doesn't seem to apply in this case.
So, do we have affection for the Saudis?
Not as much. I think that would be fair to say.
Not as much. All right.
Now, Kamala Harris had a quote about this.
And she said that, here's the quote from Kamala Harris.
She said, I am concerned that the spotlight being put on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk.
The spotlight on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk.
True or false?
I'd say true.
What did Kamala Harris say about President Trump?
She quoted the fine people hoax and put me at risk.
Me personally.
I am personally at risk because of what Kamala Harris says in public.
In which he spreads the fine people hoax.
Because since I say good things about President Trump on a regular basis, I criticize as well, as you saw in this periscope already, but mostly I say good things about his skill level because he has a good skill level.
It puts me at risk.
As a supporter, when she goes on television and says that the president called racists fine people, which simply didn't happen.
It's fake news. So, Kamala, I agree with your point.
Kamala Harris has a really, really good point that putting the emphasis on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk, at physical risk.
It's a good point. She put me at risk.
She being Kamala Harris, not Omar.
Kamala Harris put me at physical risk.
She's one of the reasons that I don't do public events.
And she continues that hoax.
And it's one of the most dangerous things in the country.
So I take her point that it does put Omar at risk.
Now, nobody wants anybody to be physically touched, certainly, but Omar certainly has a political risk.
All right. Now...
You may have seen some teasers on the internet for a new show on the internet with Candace Owens.
So Candace Owens has her own show.
I don't have the details of it, but if you Google Candace Owens' show, I'm sure it'll come up.
And I saw a teaser that she's going to be talking to Hawk Newsome.
You could not...
There's nothing you could do to stop me from watching that.
Oh, somebody says it's on PragerU.
I think that's right. Oh my God, I so want to watch that.
But they had a little teaser, and I want to talk about that for a moment.
So in the teaser, and it was edited so you don't know if you got the whole context, but Candice was talking about the importance of fathers.
And I assume the context was inner cities, you know, the The African-American situation, and it looked like Candace was saying something that would be a typical conservative Republican thing to say, which is we need to put more emphasis on fathers because that will help things.
Hawk, it looked like he was pushing back, and here we don't have the full context, so let me not, you know, I hope I'm not misrepresenting either of them, but I think this was in, that Hawk's comment was, In relationship to the same conversation.
And he talked about his importance or his priority was food equality.
Meaning that if African-American kids, specifically, I think is the idea, if they had the same nourishment, their performance and their behavior and everything would be different to the point where that would be the biggest lever that you could play with.
So you've got Hoag Moosen saying, fix food equality.
And you've got Candace saying we need more fathers.
Fathers need to stay around.
These single mom families have a problem.
And For those of you who don't know my history, I had been working with Hawke, trying to get a constructive conversation going for months and months.
But he sort of made a strategic pivot toward being a little more anti-white, if I could just say it that way.
So when he was trying to push for equality, I was all in, and I wanted to help as much as I could.
But when it became sort of anti-white, I said, sorry, Hawk, we have to park ways.
You know, that's the end of the road for us.
Now, I can't read Hawk's mind, and I won't try to.
I will point out that he may have to act strategically in terms of things he does to satisfy his base.
Those are his decisions.
I don't have an opinion on it right now.
I just couldn't work with him.
So it's not personal. It's just he and I could not have a continued conversation once he became overtly anti-white in the way he was framing things.
So I don't know what he's thinking.
I won't say he has personal thoughts like that, but politically he was framing it that way.
So I was out. Candice, just so you have a full sense of my bias before I make my point.
Candice, I'm a big fan of.
I met her in person when I did Fox& Friends a few months ago.
She introduced herself, gave me a big hug.
She makes the best first impression you've ever seen in a human being.
You know, big smile, comes over, gives me a hug.
We exchange some compliments.
So I have a really positive feeling about her, and I got a bit of an attitude about Hawk because he went in a direction that I can't support.
But... On this point, the one point about fathers, the value of fathers, and then the other view, which is not contrary, but it's another view, Hawke's view, that food equality might be the bigger lever, I might be leaning toward Hawke.
I might be leaning toward Hawk.
And let me run through this for you so you can see.
Now, I will accept that a good father and a good mother is sort of an ideal situation for kids.
So I think that's just a given.
But, let me say this.
Historically, you pretty much had to have two parents, and one of them needed to be a dad to survive and do okay because women couldn't earn as much money.
They weren't safe if a man wasn't around.
I'm talking about historically.
But time goes by, right?
And now women can earn as much as men, and you can hire a housekeeper, and you can use DoorDash to feed your kid, and maybe the grandparents are watching the kid.
So today, I would ask you this question.
In a generic sense, if you had to choose between these two choices, and this is all you knew, You could have a kid who has one good parent, and I'll define good as somebody who has a good income, loves the kid, and doesn't have any abuse problems or addictions or anything like that.
So that's a good parent. They love the kid, they do what they can, they make a good income, the kid is taken care of.
Maybe the grandparents are part of that too.
Compare that, that's a single parent situation, with an average two-parent situation.
And the key word and the trick word is an average two-parent situation.
Which is better? The good one parent who has a good income and means well and doesn't have any problems, or an average two parents?
Because if you take the average of any two parents, one of them is probably going to be bad.
One of them is going to be a jerk.
On average, one of those two parents isn't going to know how to be a parent.
On average, one of them might not have a job and bring down the income of the whole deal.
On average, one might have an addiction.
On average, one might be cheating on the other one.
On average, one of them might be an abuser.
So on average, one of them might be really dumb and not be able to teach the kid good lessons.
So I would argue that historically, and really historically all the way through maybe the 80s, it was unambiguously true that a two-parent situation is just going to beat a one-parent situation.
Not 100% of the time.
But you could depend on it to be a pretty good rule of thumb, and so it would be worth shooting for that as a standard in the past.
But today, I would argue that one good parent, if you knew one was going to be good, Is a better situation than two average parents.
Because the average is one of them is going to be bad.
And that's a terrible situation to grow up in.
One bad parent is a big, big problem that affects everybody.
So I would say...
And let me extend this a little bit.
Because it's 2019.
Two women, let's say two women who are married...
Could they raise a kid as well as two average men-women combinations?
Probably in most cases, you get a great outcome.
So I would think that the old rules of you need a dad in this situation was definitely true from something like the 80s all the way back to the beginning of time.
It was as true as anything could be true.
But in 2019...
You can be a single parent if you're a good one, and you're going to get a pretty good result.
Now, I would add to this conversation that over in Great Britain, they have a situation where the kid reaches a certain age and they send him off to boarding school.
Now, the boarding school has neither a mother or a father.
Just a boarding school. Now, I haven't seen the statistics, but I have to think that that situation does pretty well in raising a kid.
I mean, they still have parents, but they don't have much contact with them when they're at school.
They're at boarding school.
And so I would say that we do have evidence that you have to have a dad in the family can be a real advantage.
And maybe even more often than not.
But I don't think it's the golden bullet it used to be.
So I'm going to give you this summary of that.
Having a good mother and a good father, or two good mothers or two good fathers, great situation.
The kid, I think, will thrive.
As long as the two of them are good, two is better than one.
For income, for caring, for all kinds of reasons, two is better than one.
I agree with that as a general rule.
But there are probably lots of cases where one good parent is way better than one good one and one bad one, better than two bad ones, better than two average ones.
So there are a growing number of situations where the one parent situation...
Unfortunately, you know, nobody would prefer this maybe, but unfortunately there are plenty of situations where that's the case.
Now let's talk about, so I'm going to agree in general with Candace's view that having a good dad and a good mother or any two, all extended, this is my own, I don't know what Candace would say, but I think any two parents, depending, doesn't matter the gender, would do a great job.
Now let's talk about Hawke's idea, which you don't often see, which is if you fix nutrition, you get a lot of big benefits.
I think he's right on that.
But here's the better part.
It's testable.
So Hawke has proposed a testable hypothesis that I think has enough scientific backing that is worth trying.
So I would love to see some philanthropists say, okay, Hawke, let's just test this.
We'll pick a group of people, we'll have a control group, and we'll give I, the billionaire, we'll make sure that this group of kids, this family, let's say, they get good nutrition.
I'll just send them the food and they'll have good nutrition.
And then you just check their grades, you check their performance, you check their, let's say, legal issues, what they have, and you just track it.
You could probably track it for, I'm no scientist, but five years.
In five years, would you have a pretty good idea if nutrition changed outcomes?
Now, whether that works or doesn't work, I think Hawk has presented a testable hypothesis that has logic behind it, it has, you know, experience, suggests it's a smarter thing to do, and it also suggests that it's testable.
So, I gotta say, I give an A+. To Hawke's proposal, it doesn't solve every problem, but it's not meant to, as a testable, high-leverage, potentially high-leverage thing that is very accessible.
We could test that.
It's very, very testable.
And so to me it seems almost...
Irresponsible if we don't.
If there's nobody testing that hypothesis, I would find that irresponsible, and I would backhawk 100% on that proposal, which is not to say that a great dad wouldn't be an advantage to.
Yeah, there's plenty of evidence that...
Plenty of evidence that good nutrition changes outcomes.
Plenty of evidence of that.
Alright. Hawk has a legal background.
Somebody asked what was his background.
He's a lawyer. Alright.
I think we've covered all our I'll give you one little tease.
After I talked to Dr.
Shiva on the topic of climate, and I asked the question, is there any kind of gold standard, any one testable part of climate change, where both the skeptics and the climate scientists who say we have a big problem, is there any one thing we could all look at where we would say, okay, if this happens...
Then climate change is real, and if it doesn't happen, climate change is definitely not a problem.
Is there one easily tested hypothesis?
Because no matter what you look at, there's always something else.
If you say, hey, we tested the ice cores, somebody's going to say, those ice cores are wrong.
And then you say, well, we checked the thermometers, and somebody will say, those thermometers are wrong.
So it's kind of this whack-a-mole thing.
But is there any one thing...
And I will tease this to say that Dr.
Shiva called me yesterday and said he had an idea for that one thing.
And I'm not going to tell you what it is yet because he's going to summarize that for me and then I'll invite him on and we'll present it to you maybe.
I'm not sure if he needs to be on for that because it could be just one sentence.
But we'll see what he comes up with.
But what we talked about did in fact sound to me Like a totally testable hypothesis.
That if it's not true, and we could observe it, if it's not true, climate change is not a problem.
And if it is true, climate change is definitely a problem.
And wait till you see it.
And so, you know, you'll have your chance to weigh in as to whether it's a good idea or not.
But I was surprised, I have to admit I was surprised to find out That there might be something objectively testable that everybody would agree with.
There might actually be that thing, and so we'll find out soon.
All right. Somebody said, how could there be one thing we could test?
See, that's the trick. I'm teasing it, but I don't want to tell you the answer.
There is a pretty good answer, and it will surprise you, because it surprised me.
It's not going to be as obvious as just measuring the temperature.
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